by Kelsey Gietl
“Tena, I’m sorry.”
With a turn of her heel, she stumbled up the stairs to her room, unable to speak and unable to escape quickly enough.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Reuben stared at the white plastered ceiling above his bed and listened to the dresser clock tick. He pictured Tena with Matthew Troughton’s hands on her in the library and simultaneously wanted to take a cold bath and light the man’s room on fire. It was an extremely confusing emotion.
At least it wasn’t Halverson, he thought. Thank God she wasn’t as misguided as her sister.
Reuben, on the other hand, was a bloomin’ idiot. He should have told Tena that Hazel broke things off before they left for England.
“You’re not coming back, are ya?” Hazel had asked while they sat in her parents’ kitchen eating apple cream tarts that last Sunday afternoon.
“What do you mean?” he said. “Of course I am.”
“But not to me. Why else would you move out so suddenly after Christmas? It was because I told ya I loved you.”
Reuben clasped her hands across the little table and traced the distressed lines of her face with his eyes. “No. It was because I couldn’t say it back.”
He had tried. After Christmas, he tried to make it work with Hazel. He wanted to do as Tena asked when she gave him Charles’s ring. Hazel was uncomplicated, and he had hoped he could find it in his heart to deepen his feelings towards her. Then through Abigail he once again came face to face with his poor decisions and life became messy. He had a daughter, and he had no idea how she fit into his life or how he could keep a secret like that from Hazel until the end of time.
Tena figured it out. Of course, she would have. How did he ever think they could hide something so monumental from her when she knew him and Maggie so well? He hadn’t really. In more ways than not, it was a relief that she finally knew. He only wished his blind jealousy of Mr. Troughton hadn’t been the catalyst by which she discovered it.
He rolled onto his stomach and hugged the pillow into his chin. Tena smiled beneath his closed eyelids, moonlight glinting off her amazing evening gown as she entered Mr. Troughton’s room.
Reuben swung out of bed and threw his pillow across the room.
“You need to go back to your life,” Charles told him when he was stuck in his dream limbo on the Höllenfeuer. After falling into thirty-degree water, Reuben’s body lay broken in the ship’s hospital and his mind hovered somewhere between life and death. He considered staying peacefully deceased rather than return to a life of turmoil. It was Charles who insisted he leave. “You must go back, because I cannot. I know that is selfish, but I am not sorry for asking it.”
Reuben spun Charles’s ring over his knuckle and set it on the side table. He reversed the previous image of Tena in his head. This time it was his door she opened.
He wanted to steal the life Charles left behind, the one where Reuben became the husband who smoldered Tena with his stare and any other part of him he chose. She would mother his children, and he never need hide his true identity from them. He would love her, and fifty years from now, he wouldn’t regret it, not even once, not even a little bit.
In his dream limbo, Charles had handed Reuben those years, offered them freely, one best mate—one brother—to another. Reuben had three hundred and sixty-five days since to take action and when he finally had the perfect opportunity tonight, he froze.
Why in the name of everything did he say Tena was like a sister when she was the farthest person from?
Because it wasn’t Reuben she meant to kiss at the Grand Basin and it wasn’t Reuben’s ring she still wore. The life he envisioned with her was the one she still wanted with Charles. She could have trusted Charles to not repeatedly withhold the truth from her, especially when Abigail wasn’t the only secret Reuben had been keeping.
But what did the rest of it matter now when he had already lost her trust?
“Self-loathing looks quite terrible on you,” Mira would say. “Why did you bother saving Tena from the basin if you’re going to let her go now?”
“I’m not letting her go.”
Reuben would win her back—if not her affection, then at the least her friendship. What they had between them when Charles was alive, they could have again. If she chose Matthew Troughton, he would be as supportive of her decision as she had been when he picked Hazel.
He returned Charles’s ring to his right hand. Unrequited love could be stifled. After all, he had already done it once before.
THIRTY-EIGHT
“Miss Margaret, finally. Where have you been?” Hugo paused in his arrangement of the four poster’s top coverlet into a makeshift bed on the floor of their shared suite. He searched her face. “I worried.”
Maggie closed the bedroom door behind her. “You shouldn’t have. I was only wandering the gardens.” Also, trying not to think and failing.
“Are you wanting Abigail? I can retrieve her from the nursery.” Hugo stretched for his dressing gown.
“That won’t be necessary. I nursed her before coming in.” She crossed to the window and drew back the curtain. Directly below a motorcar pulled around the circular drive to collect a male and a female passenger, most likely the McCoys, although it was too dark to say for certain. The engine’s purr faded as it trailed away, two headlights fading into the darkness until they disappeared. She wrapped her arms around her middle, still sheathed in the glamorous gown, and shivered.
“Something is the matter,” said Hugo. Not a question.
“No.”
“Something is the matter,” he repeated. “Is it that man at dinner? Mr. Halverson?”
“What did he say after I left?” She had been so desperate to escape, she didn’t consider what further damage Lloyd could actually cause.
“Beats me. I left the room about a minute after you did and came up here when I couldn’t find you anywhere.” He paused too long before asking, “Dare I ask, could he be Abigail’s father?”
Maggie let the curtain drop back into place. “No,” she replied icily. “He couldn’t.” Hugo’s questions invited the potential for conflict, an area he rarely administered to well. Nor would she in the present situation. “It doesn’t make a difference who it is.”
Stealing a pillow from the bed, Hugo smashed it between his hands, then dropped it onto the coverlet. “Maybe, but I think I should decide that for myself.”
Maggie’s heart plummeted. It slammed against her feet then leapt back to rattle inside her ribcage. She had spent so long dreading this conversation with Tena and Reuben that she never stopped to consider how to respond when Hugo asked. Maybe a large part of her always assumed he never would. He loved Abigail, so why should it matter where she came from? It was all water under the bridge now, wasn’t it?
“Oi.” She hated that word. It was awful, like spewing dirt from between her teeth. Except there were no other words to use. Every syllable in the English language failed her. The true father of her child was the same man Hugo worked with at the newspaper, the same man he now traveled with. Reuben slept three rooms away from them, and pacifist or not, coward or not, Maggie didn’t want to start an unexpected reaction in Hugo that couldn’t be tamped down.
Finally, she managed to squeeze out six syllables. “Don’t make me lie to you.”
All color drained from his face. “My word, it’s–it’s–no. It can’t be. It’s Radford, isn’t it?” He didn’t bother waiting for her answer. His words tangled, falling over each other in one long stream of consciousness while his fingers never left his hair. They strained against his scalp, tugging upwards then smoothing back in place. Traces of brilliantine forced it out at all angles. “I assumed Reuben was sweet on your sister, but now you tell me he was with you? Could that even work? How could that work? I understand Mr. Halverson. I mean, he’s a complete nincompoop, so I don’t mind hating him, but Reuben? Apple pie, I actually liked him before, and now I can’t stop picturing you together. I can only see ... that doesn’t mat
ter though. No, it doesn’t. Fish and chips, no wonder he’s avoided me since I brought Abbie to the paper. How could I not see it? She looks exactly like him.”
Hugo lowered himself onto his makeshift bed, tossed the blanket over his knees, and dropped his face into his palms. “I’m sorry. The wine at dinner must have affected me more than I thought.”
“You only had one glass.” Maggie turned away from the window and sank onto the dressing table chair, watching the reflection of a young debutante turned elderly matron right before her eyes. She removed Bianca’s earrings and necklace then the hairpins and delicate headpiece, piling them all on the table top. Dark curls unfolded down her back. She wanted to slice them all to ribbons.
Pouring water into the wash basin, she scrubbed at her makeup, trying to rid herself of the mask she had been forced into. Glitz and glamour, high society, fancy parties in extravagant gowns. That was what her mother groomed her for, but she didn’t recognize herself within it anymore. Now she was a photographer’s wife, an unskilled mother with her bare hands in the soil while barges sailed down the Mississippi River behind her and the children ran circles in the garden. Correction, the yard. In America, they called it a yard.
She patted her face dry and lowered her hands to her lap. In the mirror, Hugo remained hunched over on the floor, fingertips pressed to his forehead. She did this to him, she thought miserably. She had done this to them all.
“Forgive me, Hugo.”
After another moment, he lifted his face. His troubled eyes met hers in the mirror. “There’s something I need to ask you.”
Before she could reply, a quick rap interrupted at the door.
“Enter,” Maggie called. “And be quick about it.”
Rella, Bianca’s lady’s maid, stepped in with a quick nod. “Shall I assist you for bed, Mrs. Frye?” Her eyes swiveled to Hugo’s improvised bed on the floor. Her brow twitched up, but she knew her place not to ask. They certainly wouldn’t be the first or even the thirtieth married couple who maintained separate sleeping arrangements.
“No thank you, Rella. I can manage myself tonight. You may retrieve your lady’s gown on the morrow.”
“Very good, ma’am.” With another quick nod, she backed from the room.
Maggie swiveled to face Hugo, but he had already laid down and arranged the blanket over himself. “What did you need to ask me?”
“It isn’t important.” He turned onto his side. “Goodnight. I hope your dreams are pleasant for once.”
She jumped at the comment, latching onto anything that would keep him talking. Forget her earlier concerns. He had already cracked the door; they may as well kick it wide open. “For once?” she asked. “Do I talk while I sleep?”
“Only sometimes.”
“What do I say?” She could only imagine what sort of things she muttered in the night.
Hugo didn’t respond. His chest rose and fell far too quickly for normal sleep and his eyelids were clenched together with the strain of the devil. She threw her shoe at his still form where it bounced off his thigh and clattered onto the hardwood. He barely shifted.
“Mr. Frye, are you avoiding another potentially damaging conversation?”
“Yes.”
Blast that Rella arriving at the worst possible moment. For a second, Hugo opened up and now he was shying away again. But she had too much she needed to say.
She kicked off her other shoe. “This contract we have ... are you content with the way things are?”
He flipped onto his back and folded his right arm over his eyes. “I’m following the rules and so are you, so sleep in peace.”
Maggie swept her hair over her left shoulder as she moved to kneel beside him. “That’s the problem. Why am I following the rules? Inviting five men into my bed in less than a year’s time and rejecting my parents’ every societal fiber is not the definition of devout conformity. I should have broken every word of our agreement by now.”
“I beg you don’t do this tonight.”
“If not tonight, when? You’ll ward me off until you die.” She hauled his arm back and pinned it to the floor. “I told you a little about my past, but you don’t know the whole of it. I betrayed Reuben in the worst way. I broke his heart through a disgusting deal with Lloyd Halverson to find out a few measly pieces of information I didn’t even deserve to know. I was the most selfish being alive, everyone else be forgotten.”
Hugo lifted himself from the pillow and with a gentle push against her shoulder, scooted out of reach. “Miss Margaret, please don’t.”
She shook her head. It was important that he know this. “I think it was better to not fully consider the consequences, better to forget how cruel life could be. I knew there would be no coming back from it, but I think I was simply too broken inside to see another way.” Her breath hitched and she pressed a hand to her stomach. “Except when I’m with you I don’t feel so damaged anymore, and I wish I knew why.”
Every one of Hugo’s muscles visibly uncoiled as his lips eased gently upward. “You’re not damaged, Miss Margaret. Far from it.”
There could be no logical reason for the tender smile he afforded her now nor the intimate understanding reflected in his gaze. It made her feel things she didn’t want to feel. A hot burn that coursed through her limbs and stabbed her behind the eyes.
“Please don’t look at me like that,” she whispered.
Hugo scuffed through his goatee. “Would you like to know what you say in your dreams?”
She nodded. Her fingers slid absently over the iridescent blue fabric of her gown. The folds shimmered like ocean waves, like the Höllenfeuer and a night she couldn’t forget.
“Sometimes you scream,” Hugo said quietly. “You ask why he’s doing this to you. I never know who he is, but you beg him for all sorts of things. I lay there listening to you sob, and sometimes I’m unable to bear the sound.” He shifted closer until their knees sat only an inch apart. His hands rested on his thighs. “So, more often than not, I reach for your hand and sometimes—” He swallowed “—then you dream about me instead.”
Maggie’s palm rose to her chest, unable to cool the blaze across her cheeks. She couldn’t manage to look anywhere except his nail beds, perpetually stained from photography chemicals. She could barely ask the words for fear of the answer. “How do you know?”
Hugo exhaled a long shuddering breath. “Because you love me. Don’t you?”
She looked up, startled by the intensity of his tone. “You know that’s not a term of our contract, Mr. Frye.”
“Can the contract. Answer the question.”
“I can’t.”
Hugo leapt up and dug his handkerchief from the pocket of his trousers. Throwing the pants back over the armchair, he rummaged through her handbag until he found a stick of rouge. He held both out to her. “Write your answer on this. You don’t have to say it.”
She stared at the items in his hands. She should run. A year ago she would have found Derby—or some other ill-suited man—and allowed him to do all sorts of things to her until the wee hours of the morning. There would be no remorse and no tears to cry over his inevitable rejection. She loathed that part of her, yet even now there was a frightened girl inside that dragged her kicking and screaming towards her former self. Lloyd would open his door if she but knocked. Without commitment and without expectation.
She should run.
Why then did she find herself accepting the handkerchief from Hugo? Why was a word appearing on the fabric made by her hand?
Her heart raced. It skipped. It spun. Could she do this? Say yes to this man? It defied logic. He never said what happened when he went to Utah to look for Emma. What if she gave her heart away and he broke it into a thousand pieces later?
Business partners, nothing more. They agreed on it, made their marriage vows on it, on the mutual understanding that nothing was worse than being too close with another person. But that was before she came to know him like her own skin. Before he laughed
beside her every morning and delighted when he returned home in the evening. Before battling the daily chaos. Before her smile matched his.
When had it happened, this longing for her husband? The day Abigail was born? When Molly was sick? The time he chased Henry around the garden as she watched from the window? While he mourned over his divorce papers? What about every night she lay alone in bed, her stomach growing rounder by the day, unable to sleep from the insomnia and kicking in her loins? She had watched him asleep in the trundle bed below her, breath falling through his chest, arms flung above him and mouth open a little as he snored ever so slightly. Perhaps it was then that she first felt it. Or could it even be the day she spied him at the Kischs’ with his camera, never uttering too many words and still saying everything? Was it then that she first noticed he loved her?
Of that, she was now certain. He loved her. He may have traveled to Utah for Emma, but it was Maggie he returned to. The way he held her on Christmas Eve breached their contract. How his fingers slid through her hair and traveled her spine—how she didn’t push him away—transformed their agreement. She wept, and he never once insisted she remain strong.
He broke the rules by loving her. She broke the rules by wanting him to.
“Maggie.”
That was all he said then. One word. One simple word. Her name and nothing else. But how that word swam in her ears. Not Mrs. Frye. Not Miss Margaret. But Maggie. Her given name said in a whisper, in a plea, as tender as a prayer.
“Maggie,” he said again. Quickly, quietly, as though speaking the word too loudly might make it break. He sank onto the blanket before her, his hands removing the handkerchief from hers. He balled it into his fist and pressed his fingers to his lips.
“Are you not going to read my answer, Mr. Frye?”
“I don’t need to. I know who my wife is.”
His lips embraced hers then, and even as they molded around each other like the missing chink in a chain, the entire time he held that handkerchief. He clutched her answer as though dropping it would end the world.