Words Spoken True: A Novel

by Ann H. Gabhart

  When she glanced back at Blake, he was ready for her, and he grabbed her eyes before she could turn away. Caught by surprise, she met his look fully, hiding nothing, and something like an earthquake tore through Blake’s heart and mind, rearranging everything about his life.

  By the time she lowered her eyes an instant later, Blake’s thoughts were no longer scrambled but crystal clear. He knew exactly what he was going to do. He just didn’t know how he was going to do it.

  8

  With the coming of the warmer days of April and May, everyone in Louisville who was anyone threw open their windows and doors to let in the fragrance of spring and to hold some sort of social to welcome the season. The snows and cold of winter were forgotten as blooming trees, bushes, and flowers transformed the residential streets, but in spite of the fragrant lilacs and the fresh white beauty of the abundant dogwoods, there was no spring in Adriane’s heart.

  She went to the unending parties with Stanley. She smiled until her face hurt and admired countless gardens, but inside she felt cold and untouched by it all as the relentless passing of the days moved her ever closer to her wedding day.

  Sometimes in the shop helping Beck put together the day’s issue, she could almost forget that anything had changed. There was still the news to gather as always and the need to beat the Herald to the headlines as the two papers fought for readers.

  While no more Irish girls were murdered, a tragic explosion sank the steamship Independence Day, and the Tribune won the day when Duff rounded up an eyewitness. A few days later a storm blew the roofs off several houses on the outskirts of town, but both papers got out similar reports the same day. Helena Poteet, a renowned singer from New York, came to Louisville, and the Tribune ran stories about her, the concert, and the exorbitant price of the much sought after tickets. However, the Herald printed a personal interview with the diva that people talked about for days.

  So in her next Sally Sees column, Adriane hinted of a possible relationship between the handsome Herald editor and the beautiful singer. Adriane rarely mentioned herself and Stanley in the column as if, by pushing the whole affair out of her mind, she could forget that each day brought September nearer. But then Lucilla would insist on taking her on a shopping expedition or she’d have to stand like a statue while Nora fitted her for a dress. Worst of all and what made her impending marriage hardest to forget, Stanley would put his arm around her and caress her shoulder on their carriage rides to this or that party.

  There had also been kisses in spite of Adriane’s every attempt to avoid them, but as Stanley was wont to remind her, they were betrothed to be married. That certainly gave him a few rights of intimacy. At such times he’d look at her in that new way she so detested, and Adriane would pull her wrap tighter around her in an attempt to escape his eyes.

  That wasn’t all she wanted to escape. The thought of marrying Stanley, of actually having to submit to a marital relationship with him, was haunting her sleep at night. The heart-pounding dreams of Henrietta shoving her in a dark closet had given way to nightmares of her wedding night. She could not bear the thought of lying down beside Stanley, allowing him the intimate touches that would be his right once they were married.

  When one of those dreams jerked her from sleep, she would stare up at the dark air and whisper the Lord’s Prayer out loud. That’s what Beck had taught her to do years before whenever she was scared about something.

  She had never been sure if Beck knew about the dark closets of Henrietta’s punishments. She hadn’t told him. Talking about it seemed to add to the shame. Her father wouldn’t talk about it either. Even to Adriane. He would simply let her out of the closet, roughly wipe away her tears, and tell her to stop doing whatever it was she kept doing to upset Henrietta. At last, he must have realized there was no way she could ever please Henrietta, and he began letting her tag along with him to the Tribune offices.

  Her life changed there when Beck took her under his wing, introducing her to the newspaper business with gruff kindness. By that time, he was a confirmed bachelor and already seemed old to Adriane. He told her he’d been married once a long time before, but his wife had died in one of the cholera epidemics that swept through Louisville. He didn’t have any children. The Tribune was his life, perhaps even more so than her father’s. Not the gathering of the news, but the printing of it. He took pride in filling the galley trays and then seeing the words pressed out on the newsprint.

  Adriane and Beck had taken to one another right away. A lonesome old man and a forlorn child who both needed love in their lives. But Beck had given her even more than that. After the papers went out and while he waited for her father to bring in the next day’s news, Beck liked to sit next to the window and read his Bible. She would sit on the floor beside him in the sunshine filtering through the grimy window and write stories on scraps of newsprint paper. Then when she finished her stories, they’d switch. Beck would read what she wrote while she would read some story he pointed out in the Bible.

  She went to church with her father and Henrietta. She sat on the hard pew and tried to swallow her yawns while the preacher went on and on, but nobody had ever shown her how the Bible told stories sort of the same as newspapers. Not until Beck.

  “You just keep it in mind, Addie, that the good Lord is with us everywhere. In the morning when we get up. And at night when we lay our heads down on a pillow to sleep. Daylight or dark, he’s there. So if you ever feel scared, you just whisper a prayer and reach right out and feel the good Lord holding your hand.”

  “What if I don’t pray the right way?” Adriane had said. Henrietta was always telling her the Lord wouldn’t listen to her because she was so bad. She didn’t want to tell Beck that. She didn’t want Beck to know how bad she was.

  “Ain’t no right and wrong ways, child. The Lord hears our very groans and knows our every tear. He’ll hear you. But there is a prayer he told us to pray.” He leafed through his Bible, making the pages whisper softly, until he found the verses of the Lord’s Prayer. “You learn this and then ever’ time you don’t know what prayer words to say but you’re needing some help, you can say this.”

  She read the verses he pointed out to him. When she finished, he echoed the amen she read before he told her to read it all over again. This time he said the words along with her. Then he pointed to the last verse.

  “You take a good look at those last words the good Lord give us there,” he told her. “It’s plain as the ink on my fingers that he must have known we’d be facing some hard times. That’s why he has us asking to be delivered from evil. He takes care of us. You can count on that.”

  She must have looked doubtful, because Beck had put his big hand softly on her head and said, “Trust me on this one, Addie. He’s always took care of me, and if he’ll help an old geezer like me, I’m knowing for sure he’ll be helping a sweet, innocent little girl like you. Just remember to say the prayer if something scares you.”

  The prayer had helped on the days when she had to stay home with Henrietta. But now whispering it in the night as she looked toward her future as Mrs. Stanley Jimson, the words just rang in her ears and didn’t soothe her heart. Deliver us from evil. Stanley wasn’t evil. It was simply that she didn’t love him. That she would never love him. That she couldn’t even bear to think of his lips touching her cheek, much less embracing him as a wife was required to do.

  Worse was the feeling that she wasn’t going to be delivered from having to marry Stanley. There was no escape. She’d faced that fact the day their engagement had been announced. She kept telling herself Stan would make a wonderful husband and that she was truly fond of him. She thought that given a few more months she might even be able to convince herself it was true.

  But every morning she went down to the pressroom and threw herself into getting together another issue of the Tribune the way a condemned person might attempt to absorb each new sunrise as the day of his execution drew nearer. At night she dutifully knelt by her bed
to say her prayers, but the words seemed to mock her. That innocent faith she’d known sitting beside Beck while he read his Bible had been eroded by doubts. She had no hope of a reprieve. No right to ask one.

  Honor thy father and thy mother. How many times had Henrietta screamed those words at her as she locked Adriane in the closet under the stairs?

  “The Lord can’t bear the sight of bad little girls,” Henrietta told her over and over as she shut the door and closed out the light. “Bad little girls who won’t obey their parents. Bad little girls like you.”

  She could shrug off Henrietta’s words these years later. They hadn’t been true. She hadn’t been a disobedient child. She couldn’t be a disobedient child now. Honor thy father. Her father wanted her to marry Stanley Jimson. More even than that, her father’s future with the Tribune depended on her marrying Stanley Jimson. A good daughter obeyed her father.

  And she would. That didn’t mean she had to think about what the end of summer would bring. In the shop as they worked on the paper, she and Beck never talked of the wedding. She didn’t even write in her journal about all the plans being made. Instead she wrote of the changing weather, the new steamboat Duff had smuggled her aboard, and the old black dog that now slept in a spot of sunshine out in the back and listened for her footsteps.

  When her father caught her petting the dog one morning, he shouted and clapped his hands at the dog to chase it off. He minced no words telling her that showing affection for the stray mongrel was not something a lady would ever do. His frown grew darker when she claimed to not care about being a lady.

  “I won’t abide such talk from you. You are a lady and you will behave like a lady. Lucilla would take the vapors if an animal like that got within three feet of her.”

  “I’m not Lucilla, Father. I will never be like Lucilla,” Adriane said quietly. She didn’t bother to add that she didn’t want to be like Lucilla. She’d already upset him enough saying she didn’t care about being a lady.

  His eyes narrowed on her. “Perhaps not, but that doesn’t mean you have to behave like some street vagrant with no breeding.” His voice softened a bit as he touched her arm. “You are going to be a Jimson. This is a wonderful opportunity for you.”

  When she simply stared at him without saying anything, his face hardened again. “I will not let you squander this opportunity, Adriane. I will expect you to act like a proper lady. And you can be sure if I see that mongrel around again, I’ll have Beck shoot it. Do you understand?” He didn’t expect an answer and she didn’t give one as he went back in the house, slamming the door behind him.

  Adriane waited until she heard him go out the front door, slamming that door too. Then she looked down the alley to see if she could spot the old dog. Beck wouldn’t shoot the dog. She had no worries there. And her father rarely came out in the back alley. He’d forget about the dog. As long as she kept playing her part as Stanley Jimson’s intended.

  After she caught sight of the dog peeking out at her from the side of a wooden box behind the house next door, she went back in the kitchen to get another biscuit out of the warming oven. The old dog was there waiting when she stepped back outside.

  Honor thy father. The words whispered through her head as she let the dog take the biscuit out of her hand. But what possible harm could it do for her to scratch the old dog behind the ears and talk to him while he looked at her as if he understood her every word?

  “I need somebody to understand,” she whispered to the old dog. “You know that, don’t you, old boy? You can’t change anything for me, but at least you can listen.”

  The dog stared up at her. He cocked his head as if trying to hear her better.

  “You’re right. Beck would listen too, but it would make him too sad. And maybe too mad at Father. That wouldn’t be good. Not for either of them. I just have to do what I have to do. What Father wants. Well, except for not petting you.” She ruffled the dog’s ears and gave his head another pat. He didn’t smell good and he probably did have fleas, but she didn’t care.

  The dog wagged his tail back and forth once.

  “You’re a smart dog. You just stay out of sight when he’s around and everything will be all right. You can do that, can’t you?”

  He looked up and bared his teeth at her in a dog grin. She had to laugh. “I knew he was wrong about you. You come back tonight and I’ll give you another biscuit.”

  She went inside and washed her hands before she headed to the pressroom to help Beck. Her father was wrong about the dog. It didn’t hurt a thing for her to feed him a few biscuits. He was wrong about Stanley too, but she had about as much chance of convincing him of that as convincing him to let the old dog come in and sleep in the kitchen at night.

  9

  The first week in June, Adriane received the note she’d been dreading from her friend Grace Compton inviting her to lunch. Grace had been away in Philadelphia working for the abolitionists for the last three months, and though they had exchanged letters, Adriane had carefully avoided mentioning anything about her engagement and upcoming wedding to Stanley. Grace was not going to approve.

  Adriane had been nearly sixteen when her father decided he might have neglected her proper education and so sent her to Grace Compton’s newly opened girls’ academy. The school only lasted a few months, because while the parents wanted their daughters taught music and the proper social graces, Grace loved teaching history and the appreciation of literature and art far beyond what was considered proper for a young lady to know. Worse, she sometimes mentioned the need for social or political reforms.

  One by one, the girls were withdrawn from the academy until only Adriane was left. Their student-teacher relationship quickly developed into a fast friendship. Grace was almost twice as old as Adriane, but age didn’t matter. Grace was a big sister, a mother figure, a teacher and friend all rolled into one.

  So when Adriane’s father decided there was no longer money for the lessons, Grace insisted that Adriane keep coming. That she still had much to learn. She claimed the joy of teaching was more than pay enough and she could always manage to eke out a living by making a few hats. Each of Grace’s hats was a unique design and quite in demand by the ladies in the social set who considered owning a Grace Compton hat something of a status symbol. Grace might have lived comfortably, except she hated making hats and only did so when her cupboards were nearly bare.

  Now as Adriane hurried toward Grace’s house, she shut out the sound of the carriages and wagons passing on the street and practiced a smile as she tried to figure out how she was going to explain her upcoming marriage to her friend.

  Adriane sometimes felt as if her face might break if she had to push one more smile onto it. She would promise herself she wouldn’t smile for a week, but then there would be another round of socials. So she kept smiling and pretending to be happy and excited by this wondrous miracle of the Jimsons allowing her to become part of their family.

  Of course Stan’s mother only thinly disguised her displeasure with Stan’s choice. Sometimes when they were at a tea or social together, Adriane would note Meta Jimson’s eyes resting longingly on this or that more appropriate candidate for the position of her daughter-in-law. Adriane’s eyes would follow hers and have to agree with the woman each and every time.

  Coleman Jimson, on the other hand, boomed his approval of the match to anyone who would listen and had taken to hugging Adriane with much affection since she was already so very nearly part of the family. The embraces did not seem in the least fatherly, but then Adriane and her father had not shared any sort of embrace since she was a small child. Perhaps she didn’t know what a fatherly embrace was like. Her father never showed any sign of disapproval when the man engulfed her in his arms. Of course, he seemed to approve of anything and everything the Jimsons did.

  Her father and Coleman were becoming very close as they not only celebrated the betrothal of their children but were working together on a campaign to assure Coleman Jimson’s e
lection to the state senate in August. Their constant meetings produced an unending stream of rhetoric.

  Adriane’s eyes fell on an old campaign notice from the city elections in April still tacked to a signpost on the street. With the fervent support of the Tribune, the Know Nothing party had swept the elections from mayor to alderman. For weeks before the vote, the Tribune had carried little else but political speeches, letters, and editorials. Adriane usually liked elections, but this year it had seemed all the candidates’ speeches sounded alike. Their readers must have agreed as the Tribune’s circulation dropped.

  Blake Garrett, on the other hand, had kept the Herald cautiously neutral in the April elections almost as if he feared taking sides, something that surprised Adriane and heightened her interest in the man’s motives.

  Not that she allowed her curiosity to make her do anything foolish. If they turned up at the same social, she did her best to avoid him completely. It wasn’t hard. Stanley hovered around her, and Blake was continually surrounded by a gaggle of hopeful young belles. Even so, somehow he always knew if she allowed her eyes to stray toward him and was ready with that piercing look that seemed to sear the air between them and demand some sort of response from her. A response she could not give.

  Adriane shook her head a little to dismiss all thoughts of Blake Garrett. She looked across the street toward where Grace’s small house was nestled two blocks away. As memories of the many times she’d hurried along these streets to spend a few pleasant hours with Grace flooded her mind, she no longer worried about what Grace might say about the engagement. She couldn’t wait to see her again and hear firsthand about her work in the North. Perhaps they would have no need to talk about Stanley at all.