The Legacy

Leaving

1902

I will remain steadfast, Caroline reminded herself firmly, as she watched her aunt Bathilda covertly through lowered eyelashes. The older woman cleared her plate with methodical efficiency before speaking again.

“I fear you are making a grave mistake, my dear.” But there was a glint in her aunt’s eye that did not look fearful at all. More righteous, in fact, more self-satisfied, as if she, in spite of all protestations to the contrary, felt victorious. Caroline studied her own plate, where the fat had risen from the gravy and congealed into an unappetizing crust.

“So you have said before, Aunt Bathilda.” She kept her voice low and respectful, but still her aunt glared at her.

“I repeat myself, child, because you do not appear to hear me,” she snapped.

Heat flared in Caroline’s cheeks. She nudged her cutlery into a neater position, felt the smooth weight of the silver beneath her fingers. She shifted her spine slightly. It was laced into a strict serpentine, and it ached.

“And don’t fidget,” Bathilda added.

The dining room at La Fiorentina was excessively bright, closed in behind windows that had steamed opaque with the vapors of hot food and exhalation. Yellow light glanced and spiked from glass and jewelry and polished metal. The winter had been long and hard, and now, just as spring had seemed poised to flourish with a tantalizing week of bird song, crocuses and a green haze on the park trees, a long spell of cold rain had settled over New York City.

Caroline caught her reflection in several mirrors relayed around the room, her every move amplified. Unsettled by such scrutiny, she blushed more deeply. “I do listen to you, Aunt. I have always listened to you.”

“You listened to me in the past because you had to, as I understand it. Now, as soon as you perceive yourself old enough, you disregard me entirely. In the most important decision you will ever make, at this most crucial juncture, you ignore me. Well, I am only glad my poor dear brother is not alive to see how I have failed his only child.” Bathilda heaved a martyr’s sigh.

“You have not failed, Aunt,” Caroline murmured, reluctantly.

A waiter cleared their empty plates, brought them sweet white wine, to replace the red, and the pastry trolley. Bathilda sipped, her lips leaving a greasy smudge on the gilt rim of the glass, and then chose a cream-filled éclair, cut a large piece and widened her mouth to accommodate it. The floury flesh of her chin folded over her lace collar. Caroline watched her with distaste and felt her throat constrict.

“You have never made me feel dear to you,” Caroline murmured, so softly that the words were lost beneath the throng of voices and eating, drinking, chewing, swallowing. Smells of roast meat and curried soup clung to the air.

“Don’t mumble, Caroline.” Bathilda finished the éclair and dabbed cream from the corners of her mouth. Not long. Not much longer, Caroline told herself. Her aunt was a fortress, she thought, angrily. Balustrades of manners and wealth around a space inside-a space most commonly filled with rich food and sherry. Certainly there was no heart there, no love, no warmth. Caroline felt a flare of defiance.

“Mr. Massey is a good man, his family is respectable-” she began to say, adopting a tone of calm reason.

“The man’s morals are irrelevant. Corin Massey will make you a common drudge. He will not make you happy,” Bathilda interrupted. “How could he? He is beneath you. He is far beneath you, in fortune and in manners-in every station of life.”

“You’ve barely even met him!” Caroline cried. Bathilda shot her a censorious look.

“May I remind you that you, also, have barely even met him? You may be eighteen now, you may be independent from me, but have I earned no respect in raising you? In keeping you and teaching you-”

“You have kept me with the money my parents left. You have done your duty,” Caroline said, a touch bitterly.

“Don’t interrupt me, Caroline. Our name is a good one and would have stood you in good stead here in New York. And yet you choose to wed a… farmer. And move away from everything and everyone you know to live in the middle of nowhere. I have indeed failed, that much is clear. I have failed to instill respect and good sense and propriety in you, in spite of all my efforts.”

“But I don’t know anybody here, Aunt. Not really. I know only you,” Caroline said, sadly. “And Corin is not a farmer. He’s a cattle rancher, a most successful one. His business-”

“His business? His business should have stayed in the wilderness and not found its way here to prey upon impressionable young girls.”

“I have money enough.” Caroline tipped her chin defiantly. “We will not be poor.”

“Not yet, you don’t. Not for another two years. We’ll see how well you like living on a farmer’s income until then. And we’ll see how long your wealth lasts once he has his hands upon it and finds his way to the gaming tables!”

“Don’t say such things. He is a good man. And he loves me, and… and I love him,” Caroline declared, adamantly. He loved her. She let this thought pour through her and could not keep from smiling.

When Corin had proposed to Caroline, he had said that he’d loved her from the first moment of their meeting, which was at a ball a month previously-the Montgomery’s ball to mark the beginning of Lent. Since her debut, Caroline had envied the enjoyment that other girls seemed to derive from such functions. They danced and they laughed and they chatted with ease. Caroline, when forced to enter the room with Bathilda, found herself always at a disadvantage, always afraid to speak in case she caused her aunt to correct her, or to scold. Corin had changed all that.

Caroline chose her fawn silk gown and her mother’s emeralds for the Montgomery’s ball. The necklace was cool and heavy around her neck. It covered the slender expanse of her décolletage with a glow of gold and a deep glitter that sparked light in her gray eyes.

“You look like an empress, miss,” Sara said admiringly, as she brushed out Caroline’s fair hair, pinned it into a high chignon on her crown and braced one foot on the stool to pull up the laces of her corset. Caroline’s waist was a source of envy to her peers, and Sara always took careful pains to pull it in as far as she could. “No man in the room will be able to resist you.”

“Do you think so?” Caroline asked, breathlessly. Sara, with her dark hair and her ready smile, was the closest thing Caroline had to a true friend. “I fear that they will be able to resist my aunt, however,” she sighed. Bathilda had seen off more than one cautious suitor; young men she deemed unworthy.

“Your aunt has high hopes for you, miss, that’s all. Of course she cares a great deal who you will marry,” Sara soothed her.

“At this rate, I will marry nobody at all, and will stay forever here listening to her disappointment in me!”

“Nonsense! The right one will come along and he will win your aunt over, if that is what he must do to have you. Just look at you, miss! You will bedazzle them, I know it,” Sara smiled. Caroline met Sara’s eye in the mirror. She reached over her shoulder and grasped the girl’s fingers, squeezing them for courage. “There now. All will be well,” Sara assured her, crossing to the dresser for face powder and rouge.

Caroline, every scant inch the demure, immaculate society girl, descended the wide staircase into the incandescence of the Montgomery’s ballroom. The room was alight with precious stones and laughter; ripe with the fragrance of wine and perfumed hair pomade. Gossip and smiles rippled around the room, passing like Chinese whispers; alternately friendly, amused, and vicious. Caroline saw her dress appraised, her aunt derided, her jewels admired, frank glances cast over her, and comments passed in low voices behind delicate fingers and tortoiseshell cigarette holders. She spoke little, just enough to be polite, and this at least was a trait her aunt had always approved of. She smiled and applauded with the rest when Harold Montgomery performed his party piece: the messy cascading of a champagne magnum into a pyramid of glasses. It always splashed and overflowed, wetting the stems which then stained the ladies’ gloves.

The room was stuffy and hot. Caroline stood up straight, sipping sour wine that lightened her head and feeling sweat prickle beneath her arms. Fires blazed in every grate and light poured from hundreds of electric candles in the chandeliers, so bright that she could see red pigment from Bathilda’s lips seeping into the creases around her mouth. But then Corin appeared in front of them and she barely heard Charlie Montgomery’s introduction because she was captured by the newcomer’s frank gaze and the warmth of him; and when she blushed he did too, and he fumbled his first words to her, saying, “Hello, how are you?” as though they were two odd fellows meeting over a game of whist. He grasped her hand in its embroidered glove as if to shake it, realized his mistake and dropped it abruptly, letting it fall limply into her skirts. At this she blushed more, and dared not look at Bathilda, who was giving the young man a most severe look. “Sorry, miss… I, uh… won’t you excuse me?” he mumbled, inclining his head to them and disappearing into the crowd.

“What an extraordinary young man!” Bathilda exclaimed, scathingly. “Where on earth did you find him, Charlie?” Charlie Montgomery’s black hair was as slick as oilskin, flashing light as he turned his head.

“Oh, don’t mind Corin. He’s a bit out of practice at all this, that’s all. He’s a far off cousin of mine. His people are here in New York but he’s lived out west for years now, in Oklahoma Territory. He’s back in town for his father’s funeral,” Charlie said.

“How extraordinary,” Bathilda said again. “I never thought that one should have to practice one’s manners.” At this Charlie smiled vaguely. Caroline glanced at her aunt and saw that she had no idea how disliked she was.

“What happened to his father?” she asked Charlie, surprising herself.

“He was on one of the trains that collided in the Park Avenue Tunnel last month. It was a right old mess,” Charlie said, pulling a face. “Seventeen dead, it’s now reported, and nigh on forty injured.”

“How dreadful!” Caroline breathed. Charlie nodded in agreement.

“They must run the trains with electricity. Automate the signals and remove the opportunity for sleepy-headed drivers to cause such tragedies,” he declared.

“But how could a signal work with nobody to operate it?” Caroline asked, but Bathilda heaved a gentle sigh, as if bored, so Charlie Montgomery excused himself and moved away.

Caroline searched the crowd for the stranger’s bronze-colored hair, and found herself sorry for him-for his bereavement, and for his fumbling of her hand in front of Bathilda’s flat, unforgiving eye. The shocking pain of losing close family was something she could sympathize with. She sipped absently at her wine, which had gone warm in her hand and was making her throat sore. And she felt the emeralds press into her chest, felt the watery fabric of her gown on her thighs, as if her skin suddenly longed to be touched. When Corin appeared at her side a minute later and asked her for a dance, she accepted mutely, with a startled nod, her heart too high in her throat to speak. Bathilda glared at him, but he did not even look up at her to notice, giving her cause to exclaim: “Well, really!”

They danced a slow waltz, and Caroline, who had wondered why Corin had chosen a dance so slow, and so late in the evening, guessed the reason in his unsure steps, and the tentative way in which he held her. She smiled uncertainly at him, and they did not speak at first. Then he said:

“You must please excuse me, Miss Fitzpatrick. For before, and for… I fear I am not an accomplished dancer. It has been some time since I was lucky enough to attend such a function as this, or to dance with someone so… uh…” He hesitated, and she smiled, lowering her gaze as she had been taught. But she could not look away for long. She could feel the heat of his hand in the small of her back, as if there was nothing at all between her skin and his. She felt naked suddenly; wildly disconcerted, but thrilled as well. His face was deeply tanned, and the sun had lingered in the hair of his brows and moustache, tinting them with warm color. His hair was combed but not brilliantined, and a stray lock now fell forward onto his brow, so that she almost reached out to brush it back. He watched her with light brown eyes, and she thought she saw a startled kind of happiness there.

As the dance ended and he took her hand to escort her from the floor, her glove snagged against the roughened skin of his palm. On impulse, she turned his hand over in her own and studied it, pushing her thumb into the callous at the root of each finger, comparing the width of it to her own. Her hand looked like a child’s in his, and she drew breath and parted her lips to say this before realizing how inappropriate it would be. She felt childlike indeed, and she noticed that he was breathing deeply.

“Are you quite well, Mr. Massey?” she asked.

“Yes… I’m fine, thank you. It’s a little confined in here, isn’t it?”

“Come over to the window, you will find the air fresher,” she said, taking his arm to steer him through the crowd. The air was indeed close, heavy with sweat and breathing, thick with smoke and music and voices.

“Thank you,” Corin said. The long casement windows were shut against the dead cold of the February night, but that cold radiated from the glass nevertheless, providing an area of cool where the overexerted could find relief. “I’m not used to seeing so many people under one roof all at once. It’s funny, how quickly and completely a person can become unaccustomed to such things.” He hitched one shoulder in a shrug too casual for his evening coat.

“I have never left New York,” Caroline blurted out. “That is, only for my family’s summer house, on the coast… I mean to say…” but she wasn’t sure what she meant to say. That he seemed foreign to her, a figure from myth almost-to have gone so far from civilization, to have chosen life in an untamed land.

“Would you not like to travel, Miss Fitzpatrick?” he asked, and she began to understand that something had started between them. A negotiation of some kind; a sounding out.

“There you are, my dear.” Bathilda bore down on them. She could spot such a negotiation from quite a distance, it seemed. “Do come along, I want to introduce you to Lady Clemence.” Caroline had no choice but to be led away but she glanced back over her shoulder and raised her hand in slight salute.

“Don’t be ridiculous, girl!” Bathilda broke into her thoughts and returned her to the present, and the lunch table at La Fiorentina. “You are acting like a lovesick schoolgirl! I, too, have read Mr. Wister’s novel, and it has clearly filled your head with romantic notions. I can think of no other reason why you would choose to marry a cowboy. But you will learn that The Virginian is a work of fiction and bears little relation to the reality of it. Did you not also read of the dangers, and the emptiness, and the hardships of the frontier land?”

“It’s not like that any more. Corin has told me all about it. He says the land is so beautiful you can see God’s hand in every blade of grass…” At this Bathilda snorted, inelegantly. “And Mr. Wister himself acknowledges that the wild era he described is no more. Woodward is a thriving town, Corin says-”

“Woodward? Who has heard of Woodward? What state is it in?”

“I… do not know,” Caroline confessed, pressing her lips together resentfully.

“It is in no state at all, that’s why you do not know. No state of the Union. It is uncharted land, full of savages and uncouth men of all kinds. Why, I heard there are no ladies to be found west of Dodge City at all-only women of the worst kind. No ladies! Can’t you imagine how godless a place it must be?” Bathilda’s chest swelled within the confines of her burgundy gown. A flush mottled her face all the way to her hairline, where her steel-colored hair was gathered into a soft bouffant. She was moved, Caroline realized, incredulously. Bathilda was actually moved.

“Of course there are ladies! I’m sure such accounts are exaggerated,” said Caroline.

“I don’t see how you can be so sure when you know nothing. How can you know anything, Caroline? You’re just a child! He would tell you anything to get such a fine and wealthy wife. And you believe every word! You will leave your home and your family and all your prospects here. To live where you will have no name, no society and no comfort.”

“I will have comfort,” Caroline insisted.

A week after the ball, Corin had taken Caroline to the skating pond in Central Park, along with Charlie Montgomery and his sister Diana, who gave them a tactfully wide berth. It was late in February and the sky was an odd yellowy-white against which the spiralling snowflakes at first looked black, then turned pale against the bare trees before they reached the ground.

“As a boy I was always half afraid to skate here. I kept waiting to fall through the ice,” Corin smiled, taking small, cautious steps more akin to walking than skating.

“You needn’t have worried, Mr. Massey. They drain most of the water out at the beginning of the winter, to be sure that it freezes right through,” Caroline smiled. The cold was biting. It reddened their cheeks and hung their breath in ragged white clouds around them. Caroline tucked her gloved hands into her coat pockets and skated a large, smooth circle around Corin.

“You’re very good at this, Miss Fitzpatrick. Much better than I!”

“My mother used to bring me here all the time. When I was a little girl. I haven’t skated in a while, though. Bathilda does not care for it.”

“Where is your mother now?” Corin asked, circling his arms clumsily to keep his balance. Snow had gathered on the brim of his hat, giving him a festive look.

“My parents died. Eight years ago,” Caroline said, skating to a halt in front of Corin, who also fell still. “There was an explosion at a factory, as they were travelling home one evening. A wall collapsed and… their carriage was trapped beneath it,” she told him, quietly. Corin put his hands out as if to hold her, but then let them fall again.

“What a tragic misfortune. I’m so sorry,” he said.

“Charlie told me about your father, and I’m sorry, too,” Caroline said, wondering if he noticed the similarity, as she had, in the nightmarish, claustrophobic way in which they had both lost family. She looked down at her skates. Inside them, her toes were going numb. “Come, Mr. Massey; let’s move on before we cleave to the ice!” she suggested, holding out her hand to him. He took it, smiling, then grimaced as she towed him along, wobbling like a toddler.

They drank hot chocolate in the pavilion, once the ice had become so crowded with skaters that steady progress was nigh on impossible. From their table by the window they watched young boys darting recklessly between the adults. Caroline realized that she hadn’t been feeling the winter weather as she normally did. Perhaps being close to Corin was enough to warm her-it seemed to make her blood run more quickly than ever before.

“You have the most extraordinary eyes, Miss Fitzpatrick,” Corin told her, smiling bashfully. “Why, they shine like silver dollars against the snow out there!” he exclaimed.

Caroline had no idea how to reply to him. She was not used to compliments, and so she looked down into her cup, embarrassed.

“Bathilda says that I have cold eyes. She laments that I did not inherit my father’s shade of blue,” she said, stirring her chocolate slowly.

But Corin reached out a finger and lifted her chin, and she felt his touch like an electric charge. “Your aunt is quite wrong,” he declared.

His proposal came a scant three weeks later, as the ice began to melt in the parks and the washed-out sky took on a deeper hue. He called upon her on a Tuesday afternoon, knowing he would find her alone, it being her aunt’s custom to play bridge with Lady Atwell on that day. As Sara ushered him into the room, color poured into Caroline’s face and her throat went dry, and when she rose to greet him her legs were soft and uncooperative. A potent cocktail of joy and terror seemed to undo her whenever she saw him, and it grew stronger every time. Words vanished from Caroline’s mind, and as Sara closed the door she smiled a tight, excited smile at her mistress.

“How kind of you to call,” Caroline managed at last, her voice trembling like her hands. “I trust you are well?”

Instead of replying, Corin turned his hat around in his hands, began to speak but faltered, hooked a finger into his collar and tugged as if to loosen it. Caroline clasped her hands together to still them, and waited, watching him in astonishment. “Won’t… won’t you sit down?” she offered at length. Corin glanced at her and seemed to find some resolve at last.

“No, I won’t sit down,” he declared, startling Caroline with the gruffness of his tone. They faced each other for a long moment, at an impasse, then Corin crossed the room in two large strides, took Caroline’s face in his hands and kissed her. The press of his mouth was so shocking that Caroline made no move to stop him, or to move away as she knew she ought. She was struck by the unexpected softness of his lips, and the heat of him. She could not breathe, and dizziness confounded her even as a peculiar warm ache began in her stomach.

“Mr… Mr. Massey…” she stammered when he pulled away, still holding her face in his hands and studying her with quiet urgency.

“Caroline… come away with me. Marry me,” he said. Caroline could scarcely find the words to answer him.

“Do you… do you love me, then?” she asked at last. Her pulse jumped up in panic as she waited for his answer, for the words she so longed to hear.

“Do you not know? Can’t you tell?” he asked, incredulously. “I have loved you since the first moment I met you. The very first moment,” he murmured. Caroline shut her eyes, overwhelmed with relief. “You’re smiling,” Corin said, brushing his finger over her cheek. “Does that mean you will marry me, or that you’re laughing at me?” He smiled anxiously, and Caroline took his hand in hers, pressed it to her face.

“It means I will marry you, Mr. Massey. It means that… I want nothing more than to marry you,” she breathed.

“I will make you so happy,” he promised, kissing her again.

Bathilda refused to announce the engagement between her niece and Corin Massey. She refused to help her assemble her trousseau, buy clothes for travelling, or pack her leather trunks for the journey. Instead, she watched her niece neatly folding away new tailoreds, gored skirts and embroidered shirtwaists.

“I suppose you consider yourself emancipated, to act so disastrously. Quite the Gibson Girl, I’m sure,” she remarked. Caroline made no reply, although the barb stuck because it was near to the mark. She rolled her jewelry into a blue velvet fold and tucked it into her vanity case. Later, she sought Bathilda out in their spacious house in Gramercy Park, finding her seated in a ray of spring sunshine, so startlingly bright it stripped years from the woman. Caroline asked again for her engagement to be announced. She wanted it to be done properly, officially, as it ought to be; but her request fell on deaf ears.

“It’s hardly to be celebrated,” Bathilda snapped. “I’m only glad I shan’t be here to have to answer questions about it. I will be returning to London, to stay with a cousin of my dear late husband’s, a lady with whom I have always shared great affection and regard. There is nothing to tie me here in New York, now.”

“You’re going back to London? But… when?” Caroline asked, more meekly. Unhappily, she realized that in spite of the rift between them, her Aunt Bathilda represented her only family, her only home.

“Next month, when the weather is more clement.”

“I see,” Caroline breathed. She linked her hands in front of her, wound the fingers tightly together and squeezed. Bathilda looked up at her from the book she was ostensibly reading, her gaze tempered with something almost aggressive. “Then we shall not see each other much from now on, I suppose,” Caroline murmured.

“Indeed not, my dear. But that would have been the case even if I had remained in New York. You will be far beyond the distance I could comfortably have travelled. I will give you my address in London, and of course you must write to me. And I dare say you will find company enough on the farm. There will be other farm wives in the vicinity, I am sure,” she said, smiling faintly as she returned to her book. Caroline’s lace collar seemed to choke her. She felt a jolt of fear and did not know whether to run to or from Bathilda.

“You have never shown me love,” she whispered, her voice fearful and tight. “I do not know why you should be so surprised that I run after it when it is offered to me.” And she left the room before Bathilda could scorn this sentiment.

So Caroline married with nobody to give her away and no family to represent her. She chose a gown of diaphanous white muslin, with a wide yoke of lace ruffles across the bust and crisp frills at the neck and cuffs. Her hair was piled high on her head and held with ivory combs, and pearl drop earrings were her only jewels. She wore no make-up, and her countenance, as she took a last look in the glass, was somewhat pale. Although the weather was not warm, she carried her mother’s silk fan on her wrist, fingering it nervously as she travelled to a small church on the Upper East Side, close to where Corin had lived as a boy. Sara the maid sat alone on the bride’s side; and as she entered the building, Caroline longed to see her parents there. Corin wore a borrowed suit and tie, his hair combed neatly back and his cheeks freshly shaven, the skin soft and slightly raw. He fidgeted with his collar as she began her approach along the aisle, but then he met her anxious gaze, and he smiled and fell still as though naught else mattered. His mother and two elder brothers were in attendance, solemn as the couple made their vows before the minister. Mrs. Massey still wore her mourning dress, and although she welcomed her new daughter-in-law, her grief was too fresh for her to feel truly glad. It was another wet day, and the church was quiet and dark, smelling of damp brick dust and candle wax. Caroline did not mind. Her world had contracted to include nothing but the man in front of her, the man taking her hand, the man who looked at her so possessively and spoke with such conviction as he made his promises. With their hands joined before God, Caroline felt such an irresistible surge of elation that she could not contain it, and it spilled from her in a storm of happy tears that Corin gathered on his fingertips and kissed away. With him she would start her real life at last.

But to his new wife’s dismay, Corin packed and made ready to leave New York the following day.

“We will have our wedding night in our home, in the house that I have built for us; not here in a place still sorrowing for my father. I came for a funeral, and I didn’t bank on finding a wife,” he smiled, kissing her hands. “I’ve got to sort a few things out, get the house ready for your arrival. I want it to be perfect.”

“It will be perfect, Corin,” she assured him, still unused to addressing any man by his first name alone. His kisses burned into her skin, made it hard to breathe. “Please let me come with you now.”

“Give me a month, that’s all, my sweetheart. Follow after me four weeks from today and I will have everything ready. You’ll have time to say goodbye to all your friends, and I’ll have time to boast to all of mine that I have married the most beautiful girl in the whole of America,” he said; and so she agreed even though his departure felt like the sky growing dark.

She called upon some of her old classmates to bid them farewell, but generally found them either occupied or not at home. Eventually, she understood herself persona non grata, so she spent the four weeks at home, suffering the uncomfortable silence between herself and her aunt, packing and repacking her luggage, writing letter after letter to Corin, and gazing out of the window at a view now dominated by the newly constructed Fuller Building-a wedge-shaped behemoth that towered nearly three hundred feet into the sky. Caroline had never imagined that man could build so high. She gazed at it, felt diminished by it, and the first doubts crept into her mind. With Corin gone, it almost seemed as though he had never been there at all, that she had dreamed the whole event. She turned the wedding ring on her finger and frowned, fighting to keep such thoughts at bay. But what could have been so terrible that he could not have taken her with him straight away? What had he to hide-regret for his hasty marriage to her? Sara sensed that she was troubled.

“It won’t be long now, miss,” she said, as she brought her tea.

“Sara… will you stay a moment?”

“Of course, miss.”

“Do you think… do you think it will be all right? In Oklahoma Territory?” Caroline asked, quietly.

“Of course, miss! That is… I do not rightly know, never having gone there. But… Mr. Massey will take good care of you, I do know that. He would not take you anywhere you would not wish to go, I am sure,” Sara assured her.

“Bathilda says I will have to work. Until I come into my money, that is… I will be a farmer’s wife,” she said.

“That you will, miss, but hardly the common sort of one.”

“Is the work so very hard? Keeping house and all? You do it so well, Sara-is it so very hard?” she asked, trying to keep her anxiety from sounding. Sara gazed at her with an odd mingling of amusement, pity and resentment.

“It can be hard enough, miss,” she said, somewhat flatly. “But you will be mistress of the house! You will be free to do things as you see fit, and I am sure you will have help. Oh, do not fret, miss! It may take you some while to grow accustomed to such a different kind of life to the one you have had, but you’ll be happy, I am sure of it.”

“Yes. I will be, won’t I?” Caroline smiled.

“Mr. Massey loves you. And you love him-how could you not be happy?”

“I do love him,” Caroline said, taking a deep breath and holding Sara’s hand tightly. “I do love him.”

“And I’m so happy for you, miss,” Sara said, her voice tightening, tears springing in her eyes.

“Oh, please don’t, Sara! How I wish you were coming with me!” Caroline cried.

“I wish it too, miss,” Sara said quietly, wiping her eyes with the hem of her apron.

When a letter from Corin did finally arrive, speaking words of love and encouragement, urging her to be patient for a little while longer, Caroline read and reread it twenty times a day, until she knew the words by heart and felt galvanized by them. When the four weeks were up, she kissed Bathilda’s florid cheek and tried to see some mark of regret in her aunt’s demeanor. But only Sara went with her to the station, sobbing inconsolably beside her young mistress as the bay horses trotted smartly along busy streets and avenues.

“I don’t know how it will be without you, miss. I don’t know that I’ll care for London!” the girl wept; and Caroline took her hand, winding their fingers tightly together, too full of clamoring feelings to speak. Only when confronted with the locomotive, which spat steam and soot with great vigor and filled her nose with the tang of hot iron and cinders, did she finally feel that she had found some other thing in the world as glad as she was to be making the journey. She shut her eyes as the train eased forward, and with its loud, solemn cough of steam, her old life ended and her new one began.