Band of Sisters

by Cathy Gohlke

  Maureen sobered.

  “What is it, child? What did they say?”

  Maureen drew a deep breath and spun a lie. “The comin’ home in such weather was fully my fault. I told them I was stoppin’ nearby.”

  Mrs. Melkford opened her mouth to speak, but Maureen rushed on.

  “I didn’t want to seem a burden the first time I met them. I wanted them to understand that I can manage on my own, with just a little help.”

  Mrs. Melkford’s eyes softened and she took Maureen’s hand. “But you can’t manage alone, my dear.”

  “As soon as I’ve begun a proper position, everythin’ will be fine.”

  “They offered you a place, then? In service? In their home?”

  Maureen shook her head. “I told you I don’t want to go in service—never again.”

  “But that’s the occupation you gave for the ship’s manifest. It’s one of the best paying, most secure jobs a single woman in New York can take. Your lodging, your meals are provided, and the pay is—”

  “No. No, I won’t do it.” Maureen could not keep her voice from rising. “I must provide a home for Katie Rose. I can’t do that if I’m housed in the servants’ quarters of some great house. And I was given an address—an address for a position.”

  “Oh, that’s something, at least.” Mrs. Melkford poured them each a cup of tea. “What is the position? Where are they recommending?”

  Maureen opened her purse and offered the paper Jaime Flynn had given her. Mrs. Melkford squinted at the paper. “‘Darcy’s, 34th Street, Manhattan.’” She frowned.

  Maureen held her breath, hoping Mrs. Melkford would confirm the safety of the area.

  “Darcy’s Department Store,” she said, tapping the paper. “That’s just off the old mile-long shopping district.” She stirred her tea, took a sip, and placed her cup in its saucer. Then she brightened. “I suppose that’s all right!”

  “Department store?” Maureen didn’t know the term.

  “Yes—oh, it’s like a group of shops, but all in one very large store. Ladies’ hats and gloves and shoes and day wear and undergarments. Jewelry and linens, children’s clothing, even some things for men—all under one roof.”

  “I’ve always wanted to work in a shop.” Maureen could not believe her fortune. Perhaps Jaime Flynn was a good man, as good as his word, after all.

  “It’s hard work, mind you,” Mrs. Melkford cautioned. “On your feet ten, twelve hours a day, running to and fro and waiting on customers—not really good for a woman’s health. And with the Christmas season upon us, the work will be ferocious.”

  But it seemed wonderful to Maureen. “I’ve worked as a lady’s maid, and in service before that, I was on call day and night, with only a half day off on Sundays.”

  “The pay is not much, and they’ll expect you to dress well—respectably and somewhat fashionably—to represent the store.”

  Maureen’s heart fell. “I’ve only these things I came in.”

  “Did you tell the Wakefields that?”

  “No, I couldn’t.” Maureen drew in but honestly said, “I couldn’t bear to say such a thing.”

  “A little pride is understandable, my dear, but it well may be your undoing.” She stood and brushed off the crumbs from their late supper. “Well, at least we can do something about that. The Missionary Aid Society has charity bundles—cast-off shoes and clothing and the like from society matrons. They’re not very practical, but we’ll likely find something suitable among them.” She eyed Maureen’s figure critically. “You’re a tall one, but there’s not much meat. We can make do.”

  Maureen sighed. It was more, by far, than she’d expected.

  “I suppose Monday’s soon enough to apply. That gives us a day or two to fit you out.” She placed the dishes in the sink. “Are they expecting you tomorrow?”

  “The shop?”

  “The Wakefields. Are they expecting you to move in with them tomorrow?”

  Maureen hesitated.

  “They are expecting you to live with them, aren’t they? At Morningside? Gramercy Park is fourteen or so blocks from Darcy’s, but you’re young; you’ll have no trouble with that. You’ll not make enough to live on your own, let alone to support your sister, you know.”

  “No, no of course not.”

  “Sunday? Monday?”

  “They’ll not be expectin’ me before Monday.” Maureen checked her clothes to see if they were dry. She couldn’t bear to look into Mrs. Melkford’s eyes and lie outright. And after all, I only said they’re not expectin’ me before then. I didn’t actually say they’re expectin’ me at all.

  “Well, I’m just as glad to have you here for a few days more.” She patted Maureen’s hand. “Henry and I never had children of our own, and I do enjoy you girls.” She straightened to the business at hand. “The Society’s running on light duty through the weekend, thanks to the Thanksgiving food donations from churches and donors. I’ll not be needed there before Monday. We can outfit you, and you can rest up a bit before your big day. That will surely give the Wakefields time to contact Darcy’s owners and clear your way—unless they gave you a letter of reference to present directly.” Mrs. Melkford tipped her head. “Did they?”

  “Did they?” Maureen repeated.

  “Did they give you a letter to present to Darcy’s?” Mrs. Melkford repeated patiently.

  “No, but—I suspect you’re right. They’ll send word round.”

  “Hmm. Yes, I suppose that is how they’d manage things. Though it would be nice to have something in hand when you go.” Mrs. Melkford smiled tentatively. “Well, I imagine they know best.”

  Maureen sighed in relief. She knew she should feel shame and remorse for misleading Mrs. Melkford. She knew she should be worried about Katie Rose and all that lay ahead. But for now, she could rest and sleep, knowing no harm would come to her while under Mrs. Melkford’s watchful eye.

  “Yes,” she breathed. “Oh yes, I’m sure they do.”

  It was a small matter for Maureen to wait until the clock bonged twelve and until she was assured of Mrs. Melkford’s even breathing, of her deep sleep. Maureen rose from her place on the settee and crept on bare feet to Mrs. Melkford’s desk, turned up the lamp, and twisted the small brass key, left trustingly in the desk lock. Inside the drawer she found the impressive Missionary Aid Society letterhead—letterhead entrusted to Mrs. Melkford’s care and for her use on behalf of the society.

  In her best hand, the hand tutored by Lady Catherine herself, Maureen wrote a fine letter of recommendation for the recently immigrated Maureen O’Reilly—not glowing, but credible and substantial, detailing her excellent character and past service to Lady Catherine Orthbridge of County Meath, Ireland. She signed the letter with a modest flourish, Mrs. Florence Melkford.

  The downstairs clock struck twelve, then one and two. Olivia punched her pillow twice, adjusted her comforter, and turned to her other side, but it did no good. Each time she closed her eyes, the stricken face of the O’Reilly woman rose up before her. She saw again the light fall from luminous green eyes—as though a sharp wind extinguished a brightly flaming candle.

  And then she thought of Drake—red-faced and obstinate—never giving the explanation she’d demanded, saying only that the woman was a temptress, trying to wheedle an inheritance to which she was not entitled.

  Olivia acknowledged that Curtis Morrow and Dorothy had tried valiantly to keep the conversation going, but she’d been too furious to participate. The moment Olivia begged excuses, the party ended, to the apparent relief of every member.

  But Olivia had not retired to her room. After closing the front door upon her guests, she’d stepped immediately into the drawing room and searched the fireplace grate for some remnant of the woman’s destroyed letter—a letter that she’d dared hope was from her father. To see his words on paper this day would mean the world, a reason for thanksgiving, no matter the outcome.

  Stirring the ashes of the still-smoldering fire
, she’d found nothing. Disappointed, she’d just replaced the poker when from the corner of her eye she caught the edge of a page, scorched but unburned, beneath the back end of the grate. She’d grabbed tongs from tools stored inside the screen and gingerly, hoping it would not crumble, pulled the stray piece to the far side and across the hearth.

  There was little writing unscathed by the fire. Even the legible bit was browned, as though a pot of Earl Grey had been spilled across its surface. She’d blown ashes from the page and carried the scrap to the lamp, holding it close.

  Olivia had squinted, trying to read. No sentence was complete—only word fragments remained. But the script was even, the penmanship nearly perfect, except for a backward cut in the tail of the letter f—a telltale sign of her father’s fine hand and the cause of the catch in her breath. She’d smiled, holding the paper near her heart, and, biting her lip, turned out the lamp.

  It was enough. It didn’t matter in that moment that she could not read the letter, did not know its intent. This small scrap was a much-needed gift.

  “Thank you, Miss O’Reilly,” she had whispered into the darkening room. “Whoever you are, whyever you came, you are my angel this day.”

  But now, as the clock struck three, Olivia threw back the comforter and sat up in bed, still as wide awake as she’d been at ten. She swung her feet over the bed’s edge and pushed cold hands through tangled ropes of hair. She wished for the hundredth time that she knew Miss O’Reilly’s first name, how she came by her father’s letter, and what it meant to her.

  She was so distraught, so hopeful of finding Father. Olivia slipped her feet into her bedroom shoes. What did she want from him?

  The burned scrap of paper bore bits of phrases that she’d been able at last to decipher: firstborn and passage and new life. But she had no idea what those words meant, what her father intended, who he could have been writing about or to. Did she say it was “Da’s letter”? Did she mean her father’s letter? Or that the letter came from my father? She surely doesn’t think we have the same father! Olivia shook her head. How can I know what she meant?

  That the woman was desperate, Olivia had no doubt. But Drake’s implication that the pitiful Miss O’Reilly was a fraud and a swindler seemed absurd.

  She knew from surety of the letter’s handwriting that it must have been written some years before, when her father was a younger, stronger man. The very fact that Miss O’Reilly had referred to her father as “Colonel Wakefield” was telling—he’d not gone by his military title in all the years of Olivia’s memory. She could not have known him then. She looked younger than I. What made her come now?

  Drake was right; she sounded “just off the boat” with her thick brogue. And her clothes . . . Olivia raised her brows in the dark. That heavy woolen skirt and shawl—she’s not been in New York long.

  “O’Reilly” niggled at the back of her brain. Where have I heard that name?

  She could almost hear her father saying the name aloud, almost see him form the O with his mouth and playfully imitate an Irish brogue, but not for years and years. She held some vague recollection of sitting on his knee—she could not have been more than four or five—and rummaging through his desk drawer, playing with a wooden box she’d found there. A box that smelled of Christmas, and inside it a leather pouch. She remembered turning, seeing her father make the O—but she could not remember the story that accompanied it.

  Olivia closed her eyes, trying to recapture that long-ago picture. She opened them suddenly. “His war buttons,” she whispered to the moon. “His Civil War buttons.”

  She wrapped her dressing gown round her shoulders and padded down the hallway to her father’s cold study.

  White moonlight poured through the arched window behind his desk, illuminating stacks of books, the literary busts, the Persian carpet spread across the floor. Olivia turned the brass switch of the desk lamp, turned the small brass key in the drawer, and pulled. She smiled, feeling the mission and delight of a snooping child.

  There, in the back of the center drawer, was the small cedar box. The moment she lifted the lid, her nostrils appreciatively drew in the memory of Christmases past, of happy days spent in this room. She pulled the leather pouch from its home and poured its contents onto the blotter. She could still see her father polishing those buttons as he mulled things over in his mind—a habit she’d come to love. More than a year had passed since they’d felt the soft cloth. Some were a bit faded, not quite tarnished, yet when she moved them, they winked at her in the lamplight.

  Before dawn, Olivia, fingering the buttons as her father had done before her, had recaptured from her memory bits of the story—something about an Irishman who’d taken a bullet in her father’s place.

  She remembered another occasion when her father had mentioned an O’Reilly. She’d been paging through the family photograph album and had asked him why beautiful Aunt Lillian had never married. He’d not answered directly but had muttered, “I should have been the brother to Morgan O’Reilly that he was to me. Lillian deserved that and more.”

  Morgan O’Reilly. But that was all Olivia could remember, and she’d no idea what he’d meant or if the two O’Reillys were connected.

  There’s a way to find out.

  She opened the glass doors of the second bookcase by the fireplace and ran her fingers over the Moroccan leather volumes, tracing the gold leaf inscriptions on their bindings. Neither she nor Dorothy had been privileged to read their father’s journals. He’d not forbidden his daughters; privacy was simply understood. After his death they had agreed to leave them in his study, intact.

  But that was before Miss O’Reilly. Were Father alive, he would honor any obligation—even an old one. As his heirs, Dorothy and I are bound to honor that as well.

  Though the moon still cast its halo round the busts of the literary trio, Olivia returned to her room and washed and dressed in the pale lamplight. She freshly braided her hair, leaving it in a long rope over her shoulder, slipped back down the hallway, locked the door of her father’s study, and took down the first volume.

  By Sunday morning Olivia had read through her father’s teen years and into his early twenties. She found his first mention of Morgan O’Reilly two months before South Carolina fired on Fort Sumter.

  February 15, 1861

  What now? Our fool groomsman, that strapping Morgan O’Reilly of County Meath, Ireland, has professed himself in love with Lillian, has dared ask Father for her hand in marriage. Of course, Father refused and sent the leech out. He’ll be replaced as soon as we find a suitable groom. But Lillian is beside herself with grief. The notion of her marrying an Irish off the boat is absurd. And yet what is more absurd is that she’s come begging me to intercede with Father and Mother on their behalf, insisting she truly loves this man. She begged me to make Father relent—as if such a thing were possible! They’re both mad.

  Olivia winced, finding her father’s words uncharacteristically harsh. Then she gasped when almost immediately she read of her aunt’s diagnosis from the family doctor: “consumptive and failing.”

  In little over a month Lillian was moved to a sanatorium, but not before renewing her plea that her brother intervene with their parents.

  March 25, 1861

  She claims she’s told Morgan everything and that he still wants to marry her, that she wants to marry him. I can well imagine he does—with visions of inheritance dancing over her deathbed! I hate to break her heart, but I can’t in good conscience encourage this travesty.

  Before Lillian had forgiven her brother’s refusal enough to write him, President Lincoln called for seventy-five thousand Union troops. Neither Douglas Wakefield, the strongest member of a long-standing abolitionist family, nor Morgan O’Reilly, who even her father admitted had embraced the freedom America offered him, waited for the draft.

  Olivia turned the pages of another year and then another, shaking her head. If her father had imagined that soldiering would relieve him of his sister�
��s iron will or her pleas, he was sadly mistaken.

  May 21, 1863

  Lillian’s letter came today, begging me again to watch out for her Morgan, telling me that she’s asked the same of him—to treat me like the brother she hopes I’ll be to him one day. I wish to God the man had been assigned to another regiment. It puts me in a tight situation. I received a letter from Father last week, saying that Mother is beside herself with Lillian’s decline in health, exacerbated, they’re certain, by her pining for O’Reilly. Father suggested, in thinly veiled jest, that I put the man in the line of fire—let Lillian mourn her fallen hero and be done.

  July 1, 1863

  I am ashamed to write this. For obedience to Father, who’d written again, and love of Lillian—misguided though it was—I nearly sent O’Reilly to the front lines yesterday in a plan that would have put David’s conspired murder of Uriah to shame. But for the onslaught of paperwork suddenly demanded of me, I might have done.

  This morning, just after dawn, the Confederates surprised us, first with snipers, then rousing us with their bloodcurdling Rebel yell. Before we could muster troops, they were upon us. An explosion near my tent knocked me senseless. I was just gaining my feet when O’Reilly plowed into me, covering my body with his, taking a minié ball in the leg and a grazing in his chest, both surely meant for me. Even now, he lies in the surgeon’s tent. I’ve pleaded for the saving of his leg, but it will be a feeble leg at best. God forgive me!

  July 9, 1863

  A week has passed since O’Reilly’s surgery. He’s barely conscious, in and out, and weak—not a good sign. He’s lost much blood, and the infection has spread. The doctor does not believe he’ll rally.

  I’ve misjudged the man. We’ve spoken twice during his conscious hours, and his only thought, his every hope, is for Lillian’s good. If Morgan lives, I pledge upon my life that this man is my brother. I will do all in my power to persuade Father to give him Lillian’s hand.