To Dream Again

by Laura Lee Guhrke

  "That's not a problem," Michael interjected. "Only two of the walls along this corridor are bearing walls. We can take the rest of them out."

  "If we move assembly down here, we'll have completed trains on the ground floor already," Nathaniel added. "It makes it so much easier. We can take them through the door at the end of this corridor straight into the warehouse without having to carry them down the stairs from the mezzanine."

  Mara nodded, knowing it made sense. But she couldn't help asking, "How shall we pay for all the additional remodeling?"

  She looked at Nathaniel, watching as he straightened away from the table and removed his spectacles. "Michael," he said, placing the spectacles on the table, "would you go and talk with Mr. Boggs? I believe he is on the first floor putting in a door for the fire escape." Nathaniel folded the diagram and handed it to the other man. "Have him give you an estimate."

  Michael took the diagram and departed, leaving them alone. Mara felt his gaze on her and reluctantly lifted her head to look at him. "It'll be so costly," she said.

  "Mara, you know we shall have to obtain that loan from the bank."

  She sighed and turned away. "You know how I feel about borrowing money."

  "Yes." He stepped forward to stand beside her. "There are other ways to raise capital, but a loan makes the most sense."

  Mara felt the panic rising in her. "If it doesn't work, if the trains don't sell and we can't pay back the loan, I would lose all that I have."

  There was a long pause. His hand came up to touch her shoulder, and she felt him turn her to face him. "Are you planning to renege on our wager?" he asked, his voice low.

  There was a hint of accusation in it, and she stiffened. "No. We had an agreement, and I will abide by it." But she ducked her head and the confession slipped from her. “This terrifies me."

  His hand tightened on her shoulder. "We will succeed. The trains will sell."

  "How can you be so certain?"

  "I won't let it be any other way," he said simply.

  Mara looked into his eyes, and she believed him.

  ***

  That afternoon, while Nathaniel was at a meeting with Whiteley's Department Stores, his things arrived from America. Mara was upstairs, still putting her new office in order, when Percy came up to tell her.

  "What should we do with them?" he asked.

  "Tell the workmen to take them to his flat at Mrs. O'Brien's, of course." Mara turned to put another ledger in the bookshelf behind her, but turned around again when Percy spoke.

  "I'm not certain that will work," the secretary told her.

  "Why not?"

  "Well, he has quite a bit. Seven carts full behind the warehouse."

  "Seven!" Mara followed Percy downstairs and through the warehouse to find seven wagons piled high with furniture and crates lined up, completely filling the narrow alley. "Heavens, all that will never fit in his flat."

  She sighed. "We'll have to put his things here in the warehouse for now. We certainly can't leave them in the alley, and there's no room anywhere else. But when we start making trains, they'll be in the way."

  "We could find a storage facility for lease."

  Mara thought about that for a moment, then nodded. "Very well. But it will be at Mr. Chase's personal expense, not the company's, since it's his furniture."

  Percy departed to find storage space for lease. Mara beckoned the workmen to begin unloading. At her direction, they started bringing in crates and furnishings in a steady stream. How did one man manage to accumulate so much? she wondered in amazement, watching two men carry a pair of burgundy leather armchairs past her. A rosewood bureau and cabinet came next, followed by an armoire and two matching tables, and a huge bathtub with a mahogany surround. And a bed.

  It was a massive thing, truly decadent, with a carved headboard and footboard of mahogany, and a horsehair mattress thicker than any she'd ever seen. She stared at the pieces of the bed as they were marched past. His words about his mistresses came back to her, and the idea of him in that bed with some fancy woman sent a bolt of violent jealousy through her, a feeling beyond all logic and reason. His mistresses were his own business, she told herself, and she had no right to be jealous. But she was, and it angered her.

  She whirled around and stalked out of the warehouse, but visions of him in that bed with a beautiful mistress haunted her for the rest of the day, making her cranky and irritable.

  When the factory closed down for the day, she had a meeting with Michael. He asked her when she would be finished with the train budget, saying Nathaniel needed it to get the loan from the bank, and she nearly bit his head off with her defensive answer. Michael beat a hasty retreat and went home for the day, leaving her feeling ashamed, bereft, and out of control.

  Mara marched upstairs, turned on the gaslights, and sharpened her pencil. They might have to obtain a loan, but she decided it was up to her to make sure it was the smallest possible amount. She began working on a budget for the production of trains.

  A loud wail followed by the sound of impatient scratching interrupted her work, and she glanced over her shoulder at the door to the fire escape. Algernon wanted in and was obviously unhappy with the closed door.

  "All right, all right," she grumbled and tossed down her pencil. She shoved back her chair and went to open the door. The kitten was sitting on the fire escape.

  "I don't see how Nathaniel thinks you'll be able to catch mice in the factory if you're always out," she told the animal as he sauntered past her into the room.

  Algernon responded to her criticism of his mouse-catching abilities with an uninterested yawn and began to meander around the room. Mara closed the door and sat back down. The moment she was seated, he walked beneath the desk and burrowed under the hem of her skirt.

  Mara felt him curl into a ball around her feet. He was a smart cat, that was certain. It hadn't taken him more than a day to figure out the fire escape led right to the door of her office, although she still couldn't understand why the silly thing had such a fondness for her. She bent her head and resumed her work.

  "Mara? Are you up here?"

  She heard Nathaniel's voice calling her name and rose to look over the partition as he descended the stairs from the roof. "Hullo," she greeted him in surprise as she watched him cross the room and enter the office. "I didn't know you were back yet. How did the meeting go?"

  "Whiteley's has agreed to purchase three hundred trains for Christmas."

  "Three?" Mara did some quick arithmetic. "Harrod's has ordered five. That's eight hundred."

  "No, actually we're at twelve hundred. I have orders from several of the smaller stores, too."

  She started to ask which ones, but he gave an impatient shake of his head and beckoned to her with one hand. "Let's talk about that later. Come up on the roof. You have to see this."

  She didn't move. "See what?"

  He grinned at her. "Why do you always have to question everything? Just trust me and come along. It's marvelous."

  She had to disentangle the cat from her feet before she could follow him. A few weeks ago she would have insisted that he explain what he was about before she went anywhere with him, but experience had taught her that with Nathaniel Chase, it was usually a waste of breath.

  "Your things arrived, and we put them in the warehouse," she said, following him across the laboratory. "We didn't know where else to put them."

  "Yes, I know," he answered and grabbed her hand, pulling her toward the roof. "C'mon."

  When they reached the top of the stairs, she emerged to find herself engulfed in blackness. Below, gaslights flickered on street corners, enabling her barely to detect the shadowy form of his telescope set up at one end of the flat roof. "I don't know what you expect me to see. It's pitch-black out here."

  He stepped up behind her. "Look up."

  "Up?" Mara tilted her head back. Thousands of stars glittered in the night sky. "I don't see anything."

  "Just watch."


  "I don't—" She paused as a flash of light directly above caught her attention. "I saw a falling star," she said doubtfully.

  He leaned closer and shook his head. A tendril of his hair caught the breeze and brushed her upturned cheek. "Not a star. It's a meteor shower."

  His arm came over her shoulder as he pointed. "Look, there goes another one. Isn't it amazing?"

  He stepped back and grabbed her hand. "You can see it much better through the telescope. Come over here."

  She allowed him to lead her over to the piece of machinery as tall as herself. He showed her what to do, and she leaned forward, closing one eye as she peered into the lens with the other. She saw nothing at first, but suddenly there was a flash that reminded her of the fireworks she'd once seen in Hong Kong, and she watched in fascination as three meteors seemed to fall from a central point and left their trails of light behind them in the shape of a three-branched star. "Oh, my," she breathed. "It's lovely!"

  "It'll probably last an hour or two," he told her, "but

  most of the meteors will fall during the next few minutes."

  She straightened when she felt him step up behind her. He lifted his arms on either side of her to tip the telescope slightly higher, and she tensed, feeling the warmth of him behind her. Her breath caught as she waited for him to step back, but he didn't move. Instead, his arms remained where they were, encircling her without touching her, and she felt a sudden desire to lean back against him, feel the strength of him.

  She didn't. Instead, she remained perfectly still, afraid to move closer, yet unwilling to move away. Seconds went by, days, lifetimes, before he lowered his arms and stepped back.

  She peered into the telescope again and tried to focus on what was happening in the skies above, but her senses seemed aware of nothing but him. She knew the exact moment when he moved away, she felt it, regretted it.

  After a few moments of pretending vast interest in the telescope, she turned away from it and scanned the roof, looking for Nathaniel. Accustomed to the darkness now, she found him almost immediately, and the unexpected sight of him lying stretched out on the roof staring up at the sky brought a smile to her lips. He really was the most eccentric man.

  He turned his head slightly at her approach. "The telescope is good, but this is the best way to watch," he told her.

  She was certain that lying on a roof, looking at stars with a man beside her was most improper. But she didn't care. She sank down to the slate surface, and stretched out next to him. They watched the meteors in silence for quite some time, and Mara wondered if Nathaniel was thinking about the phenomenon happening over their heads.

  Nathaniel was not thinking about meteors. He was thinking about raven hair and reluctant smiles and the scent of lilac soap. He could smell it now, that fragrance, drifting to him on the breeze. He thought about small scarred hands and bitter gray eyes, about shadows of fear and the dark side of rainbows. She was so close. He could touch her. He wished he could heal her.

  "Why did you tell Michael you wouldn't speak to the employees?"

  Her soft question was like a physical blow. It sent him reeling, stumbling back through time, to agonizing childhood days at Harrow. "I don't like giving speeches," he answered shortly, hoping that was the end of it.

  "Why? Does it bother you?"

  Bother him? Did that describe it? He closed his eyes, shutting out the shower of light above him, the lilac scent of the woman beside him, seeing nothing but a boy standing in front of his schoolmates, stumbling his way through the tongue-twisting agony of Milton. A boy who knew, despite the laughter, that Paradise Lost was not a comedy. "I just don't like it."

  He sat up. "The meteor shower is over," he said and rose to his feet. "I'd better walk you home."

  He held out his hand to help her up. As they went inside, Mara paused to glance back up at the night sky and saw another meteor fall.

  ***

  Billy Styles lay on his back in the alley, trying to catch his breath. He could hear the footsteps of the other boys as they ran away. He sat up, then tried to stand, but his short legs felt like two licorice whips and his head was spinning. He fell back down on the cobblestones and sat there for a few minutes until the dizziness passed. He sniffed and wiped one puny fist beneath his nose. By the light of the street lamp at the end of the alley, he saw the sticky dark smear of blood on his hand.

  He didn't have a handkerchief, so he settled for his sleeve, pressing the back of his wrist to his nose until the bleeding stopped.

  It wasn't fair, he thought, tears of frustration and shame stinging his eyes. It just wasn't fair. He hated Jimmy Parks, the big bully, and his friends, too. He could still hear their taunts ringing in his ears, and he could still feel Jimmy's fist slamming into his stomach.

  He tried again to stand, but when he did, the dizziness came back, and he doubled over, tossing up the apples he'd stolen from a coster's cart an hour before. He retched until his belly was empty and the spasms stopped.

  Then he dragged himself home to the tiny room he shared with his father on Old Castle Street, holding a hand to his bleeding nose and blinking back the babyish tears that still threatened to fall. His head hurt, his ribs hurt, everything hurt.

  If Billy's father had been home, he would have given his son a hard whack and told him to stop crying and not to be such a baby, to be a man and learn how to fight.

  But Billy's father wasn't home. The tiny flat was empty. When his mum was alive, she'd been there to hug him and wipe away the blood and tell him that it didn't matter when the other boys made fun of the mark on his face because she loved him no matter what. When she'd been there, when he could bury his head against her breast and hug her tight, it hadn't been so bad that the other boys made fun of him and called him names and beat him up.

  But now there was no one there to wipe the smudges of blood from his nose. There was no one to mend the tears in his shirt. There was no one to comfort the frightened, lonely eight-year-old boy. His father was in the pub, and his mother was dead. Billy Styles crawled into his cot and pulled the dirty wool blanket up over his head. He tried to tell himself not to be a baby. He didn't cry, but he hugged his pillow very, very tight, wishing it were his mum.

  Chapter Thirteen

  It would have been so easy. Mara paused on the corner and bought a Cornish pasty from the coster. Preoccupied with her thoughts, she didn't even grumble at the high price. Gloves on, she nibbled the meat pie as she walked down Whitechapel High Street, heading back toward Elliot's. Her thoughts returned again to that night on the roof a week before.

  Yes, it would have been easy to lean back against Nathaniel, easy and tempting. Even the memory of it brought a blush to her cheeks. He had done nothing improper, but she had wanted him to. She had wanted him to hold her. She had wanted to lean back against him, feel his strength. She wanted to rely on him, trust him, and that was the most frightening thing of all.

  Mara could not recall a time in her life when she'd had that luxury. She'd never had another person to depend upon. It seemed to be her role in life that others should depend upon her. She had never minded that before, preferring to be in control of things. But that night had been different. That night, she'd imagined for a brief moment that she could give him what he kept asking for. Her trust. Just imagining it had brought an incredible rush of relief. She wasn't alone anymore. She had a partner. For the first time, she was beginning to see the advantages in that, but it still frightened her.

  Mara popped the last bite of her lunch into her mouth, brushed the crumbs from her gloves, and turned down her street. Her meeting with Halston Tin had gone well. When she had researched suppliers, their bid had been the lowest, lower even than Chesterfield's, and this morning they had promised her that they'd be able to supply all the tin she and Nathaniel required. They had assured her that thirty-day credit terms were not a problem, and the deal had been made.

  As she opened the front door of the factory, she realized she didn't hear the roar
of operating machinery. She entered the production floor and saw Michael up on a table, surrounded by men. Glancing up, she noticed the women leaning against the rail, looking down on the scene and listening to Michael talk. She could see Nathaniel's tall form quite close to the table.

  Mara came to a halt at the edge of the crowd. Michael was telling the employees their plans to build trains and explaining some of the assembly-line changes they had discussed the week before.

  He finished his explanations, thanked everyone, declared the meeting over, and jumped down from the table. She watched as Nathaniel clapped him on the back with a pleased nod, before they were engulfed by the men around them. Suddenly, a roar of laughter ran through the crowd, and Mara saw Nathaniel being lifted by several of the men.

  Michael tried to stop them, but to no avail. The men clearly wanted their new boss to speak. She could see Nathaniel struggling in protest, but the men refused to let him go, and he was forced up onto the table. He rose to his feet and said something under his breath. She couldn't catch what it was, but those standing closest to him erupted again into laughter.

  She moved through the crowd, drawing closer. She watched as Nathaniel looked around him, and she listened as the room grew silent. He drew a deep breath and raked a hand through his unruly hair. He opened his mouth to speak, closed it again, and glanced around with an almost desperate air.

  Mara came to an abrupt halt several feet away, staring up at him, sensing the apprehension emanating from him. He'd said he didn't like giving speeches, but this was more than dislike. This was fear. She could hardly believe it, and yet, there was no mistaking his sudden panic. It was as if all his brash confidence had chosen this moment to desert him. He looked suddenly and completely vulnerable.