The Secret Admirer Romance Collection

by Barratt, Amanda; Beatty, Lorraine; Bull, Molly Noble

  Fourfold pain was the catalyst that brought Emilia to her knees. “He didn’t want me. He didn’t want to come back.” And she cried, for that was all she could do. Just like her father, just like Johnny, just like Asa, Josiah was gone.

  Chapter 12

  Snow filled the air as angry clouds piled overhead. The storm swallowed up the sky in one massive gulp. All the while, Emilia sat in a stupor on the porch in front of her now truly empty store, buried in grief. The townspeople had dispersed hours ago, all except for Cyrus. He kept his distance but sat close enough that if she spoke he would hear it.

  At last he broke down and said, “Say the word, and I’ll go after him. I’ll bring him back.” Not until she heard the desperation in his voice did she realize how deeply he had bonded with Josiah.

  “He didn’t want to come back.” The wind began whipping hair across her face, and she did nothing to restrain it. Let it come, let it sting. “He didn’t want me.” Snow began to pour as if all the cottonwoods of Downy Lane shook overhead; shook in anger, shook in pain.

  “He can speak, Emilia!” Cyrus said. “I’ll bring him back. We’ll learn to communicate with him. Hear him say it for himself that he wants to go off with those people.”

  The wind created maddening designs in the blustering snow. The cold; it was cruel, but the crystalline patterns forming within it were beautiful. In contrast, this aloneness she felt was cold, it was cruel, but she could see nothing in it that was beautiful. Her life was starker now than it had ever been.

  “You didn’t see the look on his face,” she mumbled, staring at the white air. “When he saw a boy his age, a boy he could understand, a boy he could befriend. You saw how fast he jumped into that wagon.” Her voice gained momentum with the wind. “You heard him speak for the first time! You heard him shouting in German! I don’t speak German, Cyrus. He might as well have been deaf all these months. He couldn’t understand a word I said.”

  And then it came down to it. “He didn’t even try to speak to me. Not one syllable. But he laughed and chattered on with that boy like, like, like I don’t know what, but it wasn’t like me! He never ate well, and now I know it’s because I didn’t know how to cook his kind of food.” Snowflakes hit her in the eyes; the cold burned, but not more than the tears. “But the way he clung to me, the feeling of my arms around him, it made him feel like, like…” Her voice trailed off, and she dropped her head onto her knees.

  “Like a son.”

  “I was a fool. Poor Josiah. He clung to me because I was the first person to speak kindly to him.” She laughed over yet another irony, “Mrs. Vandemark was right. He deserves a father, and that was something I could never give him.” She looked down the street but could only see white, as if nature was erasing him from her life. “I should have realized it months ago when you said he didn’t look a thing like me or Asa.”

  And that was the moment it hit, hit with a blast in the face that did not come from the storm. Snowflakes melted on her lashes and she blinked fast, but not against the cold. As realization sank in, she stood, and she turned and stared at Cyrus. Her lips parted, but only hot breath passed over them for a full minute before comprehension broke the shock into words. “Asa. That night, the night of the scarlet letter…you said—you said he didn’t look a thing like Asa.”

  Slowly, Cyrus rose to his feet. Clouds of breath formed in front of his mouth as his chest began to heave. As he stepped toward her, she stumbled back, gasping, “How—how could you know?” She gulped frozen air. “How could you know what Asa looked like?”

  “Emilia, I can explain. I came to Canandaigua that day to find you…to tell you…to give you something.”

  “The saddlebag. It was Asa’s, wasn’t it!” she blurted. His silence was the confirmation. She stumbled back across the porch. “How could you have his saddlebag unless—Unless you—you were the one who shot him!”

  “What?” He looked as if he had just been shot. “No!”

  “You not only saw him at Cold Harbor, you shot him!” Like a mindless dance, every step she took back, he took toward her.

  “The cold is affecting you. I’ll tell you everything, but please go inside, Emilia.”

  “Don’t call me that! I’m Miss Davis to you!”

  Snow melted on her cheeks. He must have thought she was crying for he reached inside his pocket and pulled out a handkerchief, a stub of a pencil falling out with it. The pencil rolled toward Emilia before stopping on a miniature snowdrift between two boards. She stared at it. There was something significant about that pencil. He’d had it when she’d arrived here months ago. She frequently saw him writing at his desk, but he always used a fountain pen. He never used this pencil, yet he carried it with him.

  Fingers pressed against pounding temples as the truth fell into place. “That pencil,” she gasped. “You had to sign an invoice with it.” He didn’t answer, just studied her face, trying to read it through the wind and white. “The lead marks—heavier on the down strokes!” she blurted, yelling on the wind even though he was only a few feet away. He started to reply, and then he understood: she had pieced together the truth.

  “Asa’s last letter,” she charged, “written in pencil. The handwriting was different. Heavier on the down strokes! It wasn’t his handwriting. It was yours! You did know him. You shot him and wrote that last letter!”

  “Yes!” Cyrus shouted, his voice fierce, but not from anger. “No! Emilia, I didn’t shoot Asa! He was my friend. He was shot by a Confederate—not me! I fought off two soldiers trying to save Asa!”

  “So you were there? You knew him?”

  Cyrus heaved a long breath. “Yes. I was with him when he died.”

  Involuntary pants chilled her lungs, her chest, her heart. A coldness poured through her veins as she paced, her hands suspended beside her head as if trying to physically grasp the thought.

  “Emilia, go inside, get out of the cold.”

  “Miss Davis!”

  “Emilia!” he shouted back, all his pain breaking loose. “All I ever knew you as was Emilia.”

  “You never knew me, Mr. Holden! We never met before that day at the post office.”

  “I did know you. Asa…” His voice trailed off as he winced against the pain. “You were all Asa talked about.” His voice dropped into his chest, and she could barely make out the words. “He told me all about you, read all your letters to me, until I felt I—I knew you. And I came to”—he chewed on that scar on his lip before finishing—“to respect you above any woman I have ever known. My mother was a hard woman, my father harder. I was on my own by the time I was twelve. All I wanted was…a home. I worked on farms, on the canal, at a general store. I met a lot of people. But it wasn’t until I went to war that I found the one person I admired above all others.”

  He looked back over his shoulder—at what? Was he ashamed? Afraid she’d see the deception on his face? But when he looked back he matched her gaze. “Asa told me about his promise to write you every week until the last day of the war.” This took her aback. How could he know that unless he was telling the truth? He continued: “At Cold Harbor he was shot in the abdomen. He was bleeding out, and we both knew he only had minutes to live. That’s when he made me swear to write you his last letter. I had to honor his dying wish.” He threw his head to shake off the wet tendrils falling into his eyes. Once more, in a sudden jerk, Cyrus looked back.

  “You knew Asa. All this time you didn’t even tell me! His letter—you wrote it, you signed his name. It was a lie, all of it!”

  “What was I supposed to do? Lie to you or lie to a dying man? But I didn’t lie, Emilia, not in what I wrote. It was all true. But to keep my promise, I signed Asa’s name. What would you have had me do?” Were those tracks of melting snow or tears running down his face? “Lie to Asa or pretend to you?” His chest heaved. “What, Emilia? Tell me, what should I have written?”

  They stared at each other, Emilia incredulous, Cyrus unnerved. He wiped his wet face with his wet
hand. “I came to Canandaigua that day to tell you how your fiancé died—valiant—and to confess that I had written that last letter.”

  Emilia was stunned beyond words. Cyrus looked back a third time, straining against the wind.

  “I can’t—I can’t do this anymore,” Emilia stuttered. “I can’t take this anymore. Any of it! Everything’s gone,” she shouted on the wind. “Now even Josiah’s gone! Asa’s dream to come out here, to buy a store, it was all a lie. I never wanted to buy a store, Cyrus! I did it for Asa, and now you tell me that he didn’t even want it!”

  He put his hand up to her face. “Emilia, stop!”

  “Don’t tell me to stop! You’re the one who’s lied to me.”

  He shook her arms and shouted, “Listen!”

  “No! I’ve heard enough. Preston Langley has proposed, and I’m going to accept. I’m leaving—!”

  “Emilia!” He shook her again. “Listen! Stop talking and listen!”

  “So you can lie to me again?”

  To her complete surprise, he whirled her around, pinned her against his chest, and said in her ear, “Emilia, just listen.”

  How dare he grab her! She should be furious; she should stomp on his feet, but she couldn’t move. The way he held her…the feeling of his hands, warm around her wrists…What did he want her to listen to? He didn’t say anything. All she could hear was the blood and wind rushing through her ears…And then something else…in the distance…

  “Did you hear that?” he half shouted. “A whistle?”

  Whistle? Now she clung to his arms as she held her breath until it hurt. There, three times in a row and then nothing. “A whistle. I heard a whistle!”

  Cyrus whirled her back around, hope and fear burning through his face. “Josiah’s whistle!”

  “It can’t be!” She trembled, first with anticipation, then denial, and then terror. How long could a boy last in this blizzard? How soon until his limbs and mouth went numb, and then they’d never find him in time?

  Cyrus bolted and ran for the stable, Emilia close on his heels. Once inside the livery, Cyrus shouted, “Stay here! I’ll find him!”

  “No! He’s my boy! I’m going, too!”

  Cyrus looked helpless in the face of maternal ferocity, as if he’d rather face the entire Southern armies alone than go against this one woman. He reached down and pulled her up onto the horse behind him. He snatched his officer’s coat off a hook and threw it around her shoulders. She hardly had time to shove her arms into the sleeves before the horse galloped out of the stable.

  “Josiah!” they both shouted as they came upon the thicket at the end of the street. The horse stamped against the cold. Emilia held on to Cyrus’s waist as they alternately cried out and listened for the boy. She burrowed her face into Cyrus’s back as she sobbed out a prayer. Soon thereafter, they heard it: one long, dying whistle.

  Cyrus charged the horse in the direction of the sound. “Josiah!” his deep voice boomed as he reined the horse to a stop. Nothing. “Josiah!”

  Emilia drew her deepest breath with her deepest prayer, and she cried out as only a mother can cry to heaven, “Josiah!”

  “Come on, come on,” Cyrus urged under his breath, “one more whistle.”

  But instead there came a faint cry, “Mama! Mama!”

  Emilia flung herself off the horse and into the snow, Cyrus a mere breath behind her. They ran through the trees in the direction of the small voice, where they found Josiah curled up between a rock and a tree.

  “Josiah!” Emilia cried with both voice and tears. She threw off the coat and wrapped it around the boy as Cyrus lifted him up. “He’s shivering, violently!” she exclaimed, shouting against the wind just to be heard two feet away.

  “It’s a good sign,” Cyrus called back. “It means his body is still fighting the cold!” But no amount of reassurance would give Emilia the strength she needed as her own limbs were becoming stiff and numb. Every cloud of breath she panted was a plea for divine help, and to her amazement her legs plowed through the wind with greater speed than she alone possessed. Cyrus put the boy in her arms and lifted them both up onto the horse. Springing up, he mounted behind them, trying to shelter them with his body as he spurred the horse into a charge.

  Back at the mercantile, Cyrus helped Josiah into dry clothes. He wrapped the shivering boy in the one blanket from the bed, started a fire in the stove, and laid the exhausted boy down beside it. Frozen to the bone herself, Emilia sat behind Josiah, allowing him the full measure of the fire’s warmth, and placed his head on her lap. She stroked his wet blond hair in the hope of reassuring him after his harrowing ordeal.

  But instead of closing his eyes, he opened his mouth. Chattering, he tried to talk. “So–ree,” he said.

  Emilia leaned down. Had she heard right? It was one thing to shout for help in a storm, another to try for the first time to converse. “Josiah?”

  “So–ree,” he chattered again.

  “Sorry?” Cyrus prompted.

  “Ja,” he mumbled through a quivering jaw. “Yees.”

  Now Emilia’s lip quivered. “Josiah, why would you be sorry? I’m the one who let you go. I’m the one who’s sorry. I’m so sorry!”

  “Me,” he pointed to himself with the one finger visible above the quilt. “Me run to vagon.” His accent was thick, but she could understand him. “I no vant go away. I vant play, talk to boy.”

  “He can speak, he can speak!” she mouthed to Cyrus, struck by the realization as if for the first time. Josiah was speaking to her! After all these months of believing he couldn’t speak, yet talking to him anyway, she had been teaching him English and hadn’t even known it.

  Cyrus’s lips trembled, and his hand slid into Emilia’s hair as he fought back rising emotion. Their eyes met before he withdrew his hand.

  “Woman hold me.” The boy crossed his arms over his chest as if unsure his words were clear. “Woman hold mooth.” He tugged at the blanket to loosen his arm enough to reach up and put his hand up over his mouth. Emilia’s blood ran cold as she realized that not only had Josiah not wanted to leave her, but she had allowed another woman to haul him away.

  “Far over”—his brows knit as he searched for the right word—“away. Boy push, make me free. Me jump. Run. Run. They look. I hide. Scar–red.” Scared!

  Reeling from this realization, Emilia began rocking Josiah in her arms. As she held him tighter, she noticed that he had stopped shivering. “Josiah, I swear I will never let anyone take you from me ever again. Understand? You’re my boy, you’re my boy. I love you,” she whispered. He craned his head around to smile up at her, blinking through still-wet lashes. But the effect of the extremities of the day sapped what strength he had left, and he closed his eyes and fell into a peaceful sleep.

  “He’s going to be all right,” Cyrus said, leaning in toward Emilia, “but you’ve got to get out of those wet clothes.”

  Only then did she realize that she was shivering uncontrollably from the cold that sailed through every crack in every board, but she didn’t care. Truth had numbed her mind—the truth of her own failing. Why had she not insisted Josiah be taken out of the wagon, to see his face when he was asked to choose? Why had she not acted? Never again, she vowed. With a new sense of daring to face the truth full-on, Emilia looked over at Cyrus. The firelight flickered in his eyes as he looked back, matching her gaze. The truth had been revealed about Josiah, the mystery of his silence solved. But what was the truth about this man sitting next to her? “Just tell me,” she said at last. “Cyrus, tell me what is in the saddlebag?”

  A white wind beat against the storefront window as he leaned away, as if ashamed. “Your letters to Asa,” he said at last. He took a deep breath. “Emilia—Miss Davis—there are no words to express my condolences for the loss of your fiancé. I’m sorry—”

  She put up a tired hand. “It’s too late for that. Asa is far behind me now. That schoolgirl I was when he left is long gone.” She looked out through the window a
t the raging darkness beyond, shivering painfully despite the warming stove. “I don’t know what’s real anymore. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to feel. I don’t know what to believe.”

  After a long moment of silence, Cyrus got up and left the store, the little bell over the door chiming good-bye. Well, his job was done; the lawman had saved the boy and seen them safely home, and the soldier had confessed to writing the last letter. There was apparently nothing left for him to do or say.

  As she sat alone in the mercantile with Josiah, another puzzle piece fell into place. That night in the church in New York, Cyrus had shaken his head no to Mr. Goodnow. For the first time it occurred to her that he wasn’t telling the founder to refuse her the store. It was Cyrus who had written the last letter, and so it was and always had been Cyrus’s dream to buy this store. He said it himself, that he had made a claim here before he even left for the war. No, Cyrus had been shaking his head to indicate he wouldn’t buy the store after all, giving it up for Emilia.

  There was no question. She would have to relinquish the store to Cyrus. The next question was where would she and Josiah live? Perhaps that boardinghouse overlooking Canandaigua Lake would look better with Josiah in it?

  It was true that Preston represented the life she had lost, with the comforts and finery she loved, and that from the moment she stepped into this store and saw piles of dirt and empty shelves, she had longed for home. When she saw the beleaguered and sunbaked faces of the passing homesteaders, she hated this harsh land. But now as she sat alone in the mercantile, Cyrus’s withdrawal stung more than she’d have anticipated. Now she couldn’t bear the thought of leaving Kansas, and it was because she didn’t want to leave Cyrus.

  But perhaps more painful than leaving him was living so near him but never being with him. Of the many things she had learned, the most profound was that there were several, if not many ways to love a man. And when that love wasn’t returned, there were as many ways to feel pain.