by Lisa Plumley
She folded her hands atop her lap with an air of absolute expectancy, and cocked her head. Graham balked.
“No.”
“All right, then….” Her gaze traveled over him, finally coming to rest on the sheaf of folded paper sticking partway from his duster coat pocket. “Tell me about Frankie. I’ve helped you read two of her letters now. I’m curious.”
Automatically, he put his hand on the latest letter. It rested against his heart, as always, and would join the others he’d saved in his saddlebags as soon as he returned to his boardinghouse room. Carrying Frankie’s letters was like carrying a smile in his pocket. They were always there for him.
“There’s not much to tell,” he said, at a loss to describe his friend of more than twenty years. “Frankie is…Frankie. A lady, like you.”
“Named Frankie? She must be unconventional, to be sure.”
“She is.” Graham smiled in remembrance. “Francesca Maria Bailoni is unlike anyone else. She was the skinniest, stubbornest, luckiest girl to ever come to the Sisters of Mercy home.”
Julia gawked. “Lucky? How could she be, when she grew up in such a…such a…” Belatedly, she seemed to remember what Graham had revealed of his childhood. “Place?”
“Frankie’s family came for her,” he said simply. “In the end, her relatives found her, and took her away from Boston to live. That was the kind of luck we all wished for.”
“Oh.” Compassionately, Julia covered his hand with hers and gave a little squeeze. “You must have been happy for her.”
“I was.” And miserable, for myself. “After she left, she always wrote me. But by then I’d started working at the wharves, and didn’t have the time—” or the strength, as a boy of eight years doing a man’s full day of work “—to learn to properly write her back. I started paying to have her letters read to me, and to have someone write the replies I sent. And it’s been that way, ever since.”
“That’s why you never learned to read,” Julia said. “You were working.” Her expression was sympathetic. “Well, we simply must begin your handwriting lessons right away. Think how wonderful it will be to write a letter to Frankie yourself!”
Her eyes shined with anticipation. Graham didn’t have the heart to remind her of the truth—that he’d likely be gone from Avalanche, having played his part as her “fiancé,” long before such a thing came to pass.
Julia leaned nearer. “I think you must love her a little bit, your Frankie,” she said. “Your eyes turn all wistful when you speak of her, and you lose that grouchy expression of yours.”
Graham grunted. “I’m not a man given to love. ’Tis the foolishness of poets. And drummers wanting to sell perfume.”
“Oh, Mr. Corley.” Julia sighed. “You have a solitary soul, I’m afraid.”
Her pronouncement made him feel twice as alone. And her next words didn’t help matters any.
“Haven’t you ever wanted to fall in love?” Julia asked. “To have a wife and children and a family of your own?”
He saw the way she held her breath to await an answer. The way she watched, unblinking, as he hesitated. And knew that he would disappoint her again, when he told her the truth.
“I have no desire for those things,” Graham said gruffly. “As I am, I’m bound to no one. I like it that way.”
Or at least, he always had.
“But—”
“Enough talk.” He rose, unaccountably uneasy, and extended his hand to her. “There’s something I want to show you.”
Chapter Thirteen
Holding her manuscript paper and pencil against her chest, Julia hurried down the Main Street boardwalk after Mr. Corley. She had to take twice the steps to keep up with his lengthy strides, and before long her breath was coming in rapid pants.
Dratted stays! Julia wouldn’t have dreamed of appearing in public without being properly corseted—what true lady would? But the blasted garment definitely had a way of restricting a person’s movement. By the time she and Graham were midway down the street, she was nearly ready to join with the dress reformers and become truly radical.
But then they walked farther, and she realized where he was headed, and all thoughts of fashion became unimportant.
“The livery stable?” Swallowing a gasp, Julia pulled at Mr. Corley’s coat. “I can’t go back to the livery stable! You saw what happened last time. Of course, the men only wanted to make it clear that Tom’s stables are the usual province of the men in town, and it’s my own fault for forgetting how downright surly they can become when they’re disturbed, but—”
“No one will bother you this time.”
“You don’t know them,” Julia disagreed. “Naturally, the men in town are perfectly cordial to me when we pass on the street, or if we meet while paying a call. But at the livery stable…well, I only went there in the first place because I was interested in tracking you down.”
“Tracking me down?” He raised an eyebrow. “Why, Miss Bennett. I didn’t know you cared.”
The teasing tone to his voice only served to put her dander up. “No caring in the world would be sufficient to convince me to make an appearance at the livery stables again.” Julia stopped on the boardwalk and raised her chin. “Please, let’s go pay some calls, instead. Several of my acquaintances are interested in meeting you, and—”
“I want you to see this.” Graham grasped her hands in his. Gently, he pulled her toward him. His face was shadowed by his hat, his smile a white slash within the darkness. “Please.”
“But I—” Hesitating, Julia bit her lip. She didn’t want to return to the stables. But she also didn’t want to disappoint Mr. Corley. Not when he smiled at her, and gazed at her with such palpable hopefulness. “Very well.”
“Thank you,” he said, and tugged her down the street. “Don’t worry. You can trust me.”
Julia only hoped he was right. For wasn’t that what she had done, all along?
At the livery stables, Julia’s worries multiplied. But to her relief, she and Mr. Corley didn’t go within. Instead, they approached the building from the side, Graham gesturing for her to follow his lead as he stopped beside an open window.
“Stand here,” he said, “and listen.”
Julia did, cocking her head to one side. At first, she heard mostly the sounds of stabled horses shifting in their stalls, and then the scrape of the stable boy’s shovel as he cleaned up. Finally, the sound of a voice speaking could be heard—faintly at first, and strangely halting.
Curious, she held on to the bounty hunter’s shoulder for balance and raised herself on tiptoes to peer inside the window. The sight that greeted her was amazing.
At least twelve men gathered around the stables’ potbellied stove. Some stood. Some sat on overturned barrels or bales of hay. And one man stood in front of them all, his hands filled with an open book. Julia recognized him as Wilson Richards, a lawyer who kept his offices next door to the mercantile.
“The judge and the widow went to law to get the court to take me away from him and let one of them be my guardian,” Wilson read from the book he held, “but it was a new judge that had just come, and he didn’t know the old man; so he said courts mustn’t interfere and separate families if they could help it.”
She looked at Graham. “Huckleberry Finn,” she whispered in surprise. “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain. I recognize it!”
“—said he’d druther not take a child away from its father,” Wilson went on as the assembled men listened carefully. “So Judge Thatcher and the widow had to quit on the business.”
As Wilson continued to read, Julia lowered herself again. Still holding on to Graham’s shoulder, she urged him downward until they were face-to-face. “I can’t believe it!” she said, keeping her voice low. “So this is what the men in town come here to do?”
“Some of the time.”
“And this is their big secret, that they don’t want the women to find out about?”
“More’n
likely,” the bounty hunter agreed. He tipped up a finger and closed her doubtlessly gaping jaw. “If they keep the ladies away all the time, then they’ll never be around during the reading hour.”
“Very clever.” With reluctant admiration, Julia shook her head. “I’d never have guessed it. But why don’t they simply read at home?”
Graham shrugged. “Books are expensive. Most of those men are farmers and small-town merchants. I doubt many of them could afford a copy of that book on their own.”
Julia frowned. Books were one of the great pleasures of her life. She couldn’t imagine what it would be like not to have access to them.
“By doing it this way—” Mr. Corley nodded toward Wilson Richards, whose voice could be heard as he continued reading to the group “—they can share a single book.”
“At Mr. Richards’s leisure,” she pointed out, nettled by the unfairness of it. “Knowing him, I presume he’s reading aloud so that no one else will touch his property!”
Graham gave a wry chuckle. “You’ve pegged him. Nobody’s allowed to touch that book.” He took her arm. Together, they walked from the livery stables, headed in the direction of the Emporium. “And here I am, nearly ready to read parts of it myself for the first time.”
This last was said in an undertone, nearly too low for Julia to make out. Having heard it, though, she glanced at the bounty hunter. “You’re becoming an excellent reader,” she assured him. “I have no doubt you could read much of Huckleberry Finn by now.”
He tugged his hat lower, and said nothing.
“In fact, you must have had at least some schooling,” she went on, enjoying the solid feel of his muscular arm beneath her hand as he guided her onto the boardwalk. “You already knew the alphabet and some of the letter sounds when we started. That’s probably why you’ve made such speedy progress.”
“’Twas my tutor.” His grin warmed her, all the way to her toes. “She has a knack for inspiring me.”
Julia couldn’t help but grin back at him. At the private moment they shared, a giddy feeling enveloped her.
“Thank you, kind sir,” she said, inclining her head toward Mr. Corley. “I’m most indebted to you for your generosity. However…what of your schooling at the sisters’ home in Boston?”
He made a face, and gazed at the ice man’s ornately painted wagon as it passed by them.
“I was not the most cooperative student,” Graham allowed, grudgingly. “Particularly on the days when we had visitors to the home—people looking for a child to add to their family. What little I mastered was done mostly in the corner, by myself, while being punished for one thing or another.”
Julia paused, stricken by the notion of a small and vulnerable Graham as a boy…alone. Alone like her, and with no one else to turn to. The thought was enough to break her heart, and she struggled for something to say that might ease the hurt he surely still carried, somewhere deep inside.
As though confused by her stopping, Mr. Corley looked down. Instantly, comprehension swept over his rugged features.
“’Twas not so bad as all that,” he said, setting her into motion again. “Frankie helped me some. I got by. So save your long faces for someone who needs them, Miss Mush-Hearted Bennett. I’m fine.”
Fiercely, she hugged his arm close to her. In obvious surprise—probably at her utterly improper show of emotion—Graham looked down.
If she could have, Julia vowed, she would have gathered his whole big body close, right there on the street, and squeezed all the love she could into him. Then, he’d have some warmth to keep close on those lonely trails he loved so well…and she would have the memory of having cared for him.
“And that’s not what I brought you out here to talk about, either,” Graham continued. Determinedly, he frowned. “I wanted you to see the way things are, so you would understand.”
“Understand what?”
He cleared his throat, as though he were about to say something difficult. “Understand what I want to do. Before leaving Avalanche.”
They reached the Emporium, and passed beneath its bright show globe, which swung in the breeze to designate the pharmacy inside. Julia smiled up at the ornate, multi-chambered fixture. Her mother had selected the show globe years earlier, when she and Asa Bennett had begun their business. And her father was rightly proud of his expertise in using his apothecary chemicals to mix up exactly the correct shade of colored water for it.
It was a brilliant deep blue. Precisely the color, her papa always said, of her mother’s wedding dress.
Shaking off the nostalgia that threatened, Julia concentrated her attention on her conversation with Graham. She didn’t like to think about the day when the bounty hunter would leave Avalanche, but now he’d forced her to.
“Before you leave?” she asked. “What is it you’d like to do?”
Buy one of those fancy cigars at Thompson’s mercantile, she expected him to say. Or, see the showgirls perform at Cole Morgan’s saloon. Men typically loved the wilder things in life, she’d learned. Why should a wandering man like Graham Corley prove any different?
But instead of expressing a long-felt yearning for imported cigarillos and scantily dressed hussies, he only looked at her squarely and said something completely unexpected:
“I want to open a public lending library.”
Julia gawped at him. “But there won’t be any cigars or loose women at a lending library!”
He grinned, some of the discomfort leaving his expression.
“No?” Graham’s eyebrows rose in mock surprise. “Blast it! Somebody should have told me about that before I went making plans.”
“You’re teasing me.”
“I’m not.” He put his hand, faintly scarred and strong, over his heart. “I want to start a library in this town. So the men at the livery stables can get a book whenever they want one. So a drifter like me, passing through, can have a place to go that’s quiet, where nobody will look at him funny for wanting a book.”
“Oh, Mr. Corley.” At his generous idea, Julia couldn’t help but feel impressed. “That’s very noble of you. But libraries cost money, and book collections take time, and I’m very afraid that in your case, neither are—”
He held up a palm. “Just say you believe I can do it.”
Helplessly, Julia gazed up at him. Emporium shoppers milled around them, and signs for various patent remedies and tonics glared their messages from the walls in vibrant ink. The fizz of the soda fountain levers being worked to produce yet another cherry soda punctuated the conversations surrounding them…but the only sound that seemed to matter to the bounty hunter was the answer he waited to hear.
She didn’t want to mislead him. His was a serious undertaking, requiring a commitment that a drifter like him shouldn’t have been able to muster. Even a modest lending library would need funding, and workers to shelve the volumes, and a place to house them to begin with. So far as she knew, Graham didn’t have any of those things.
But then she took in his determined stance, and the steadiness in his expression, and knew that she would have to tell him what was in her heart. In this, she had no other choice.
Julia raised her hand, heedless of the people moving past them. She cradled his cheek in her gloved palm, and nodded.
“I believe in you,” she said.
“That’s all I need to know,” Graham replied, and when he captured her hand in his and squeezed, a pact was born between them.
It only took three visits for Graham to decide that paying social calls was torturous. The chairs were too small, the chatter was too loud, and the entire endeavor felt false to him. Formally paying calls, on friends? He’d asked Julia why the women didn’t just agree to meet in a particular place—Bennett’s Apothecary and Soda Fountain Emporium, for instance—and avoid all this house-to-house nonsense. But her only reply had been a smiling shake of her head that verified just one thing: he would never truly understand women.
Now, a day after revealing his
library plans to her, he stood with Julia on the front porch of yet another household, waiting for the maid to tell them if her mistress was “at home.”
“I don’t see how she can’t know already, if your friend is at home,” Graham grumbled, tugging at his shirt collar. He’d put on a suit furnished by the chimney-sweep-turned-tailor, and although Julia had assured him he looked “remarkably handsome,” he felt like an idiot. “They live in the same house, don’t they? Spend all their time within fifty feet of—”
“Really, Mr. Corley,” Julia said. “This is the way it’s done. A person would think you’re advocating raw honesty!” She gave him a half-teasing, mock-horrorstricken look. “If that were true, I would be required to tell you how absolutely delicious you look in your new suit.”
He felt his jaw drop open. She tipped it shut with a gloved fingertip, and smiled coquettishly. “I declare, a person would think you’d never been told what a wickedly appealing man you are.”
Wickedly appealing—huh? Frowning, Graham stared down at her. In her pink-sprigged gown, wide, flower-trimmed hat, and ruffled parasol, Julia seemed the same as ever. But the sparkle in her eyes was new…and befuddling…and the sultry edge to her voice set his senses reeling. Could this truly be Miss Julia Bennett, the hoity-toity etiquette instructress he’d come to know?
She raised herself on tiptoes and did something to his hair, rearranging it at his collar to suit her. The fragrance of oranges wafted toward him, and her bosom faintly brushed against his jacket front. Instantly, Graham felt his blood stir.
Her body was warm and intimate, and Julia almost seemed to offer herself to him with her closeness. Her dress delivered a surprising glimpse of gently curved bosom, and her smile, when she glanced up after having settled his hair to her satisfaction, promised things he had hardly dared to hope for.
I believe in you.
Confused, but nonetheless willing to play along with her game, Graham put his arm around her. Julia jumped at the contact. He splayed his fingers at the small of her back, enjoying the suppleness of her body beneath his hand, and tried out some teasing of his own.