“I’m ready,” she said. “Lead on.”
He positioned her arms at his waist, and then slowly, bit by bit, they inched upward. Her foot slipped, and he caught her. Branches whipped her face. She endured. Her sleeve tore. She ignored it. Soon she’d be home with the man she loved.
Before long, the ground leveled out, and Gabriel stopped.
“Why—?” she began, but he hushed her.
In the still, moonless night, she heard it, low at first but then louder—a crackling, rustling sound punctuated by the heavy fall of footsteps. Someone was coming. They hadn’t made it to safety. She pressed close to Gabriel. It must be DeWalt. Maybe their pursuer wouldn’t be able to see them in the dark. Then she spotted a wildly bouncing beam of light headed straight toward them.
“Dear God,” she breathed.
“This way,” Gabriel whispered.
He led her away from the oncoming person, but she couldn’t keep up his pace. One hand slipped off his waist and then the other. Meanwhile, the bobbing light was drawing closer. They were going to get caught.
She yelped when the top of her foot caught a log and sent her tumbling. The impact shivered up her arms to her elbows, but worse than the jolt was losing Gabriel.
She cried out for him, and his strong hands lifted her to her feet. “Are you hurt?”
“N-no,” she admitted.
But it was too late.
The bobbing light rounded a corner and shone directly in her eyes. They were caught.
“Felicity. Thank heavens,” said a familiar voice, gasping and panting.
“Daddy?”
The flashlight dropped to the ground, and she could see his haggard face. “Little one. I…your mother…I’m just so glad to see you.” He blew his nose and wiped his fogged spectacles. “We were so worried.” His strong shoulders sagged, all vigor gone.
“Daddy,” she whispered, her heart aching for the man who’d raised her. He’d worked a little too much perhaps, but he loved her. She knew it as surely as the sun would rise in the morning.
“I love you, too, Daddy.”
As soon as Felicity went to her father, Gabriel missed her touch, but they had a bigger problem to address. Felicity was shivering.
“Let’s get out of here,” he barked, breaking up the father-daughter reunion. Felicity needed time with her father, but not now and not under these circumstances.
Kensington looked at him sharply. The man clearly wasn’t used to taking orders.
“She needs to get warmed up,” Gabriel said.
That kind of reasoning Kensington understood. He picked up the flashlight and headed Felicity back toward the park. That left Gabriel to bring up the rear. Neither Felicity nor her father had much fortitude left, and with every step the pace slowed. At this rate, Blevins would catch up to them before they reached town.
“Let’s go to the parsonage,” Gabriel suggested. “It’s closer.”
Felicity shivered, and Kensington altered direction. Gabriel took the lead. He’d get Felicity into the warmth of the kitchen, where Mariah would revive her with hot tea and a thick blanket.
“Where’s your dog, son?” Kensington huffed as Gabriel forced the pace.
“With the criminals,” Gabriel said tersely.
“What criminals?”
Gabriel tensed. How could the man pretend he didn’t know what was going on tonight? “The bootleggers.”
Felicity sighed. “Robert turned out bad, Daddy.”
Kensington chuckled. “I could have told you he wasn’t the man for you.”
“That’s not what she meant,” Gabriel said stiffly. “Mr. Blevins is part of a gang smuggling liquor into town.”
“He tried to shoot me, Daddy.”
Kensington waved off Felicity’s comment. “Nonsense. He wouldn’t shoot you. He’s in on everything.”
“So we found out.” Gabriel boiled. Of course, Blevins was in on everything, the same as Kensington was in on everything. What father would jeopardize his daughter’s life for money? Gabriel could not keep down the bile. “Blevins and his gang were storing the liquor in the old Warren root cellar until they were discovered. Apparently they’ve shifted to a spot upriver, but then you know that, don’t you?”
“What?” Kensington halted just outside the parsonage fence.
Gabriel had made a mistake, a bad mistake. This was not the time or the place to confront Kensington, not in front of Felicity.
“What do you mean, Gabriel?” Her plaintive voice tore through him.
For weeks, he’d dreaded how Felicity would feel when she learned the truth, but he’d never imagined he’d be the one to reveal it. “I, uh.” Nothing could explain away his words.
The dim, yellow glow of the flashlight made her look pale and weary. “Tell me what you mean. How would Daddy know anything about Robert’s bootlegging?”
Gabriel stood mute.
She did not. “Are you accusing my father of being involved with Robert and those criminals?”
Gabriel could think of no way out. If he told the truth, he’d lose her. If he lied, he’d lose his soul. He swallowed hard, searching for help.
That help came from a most unlikely source. Kensington shook his head. “Robert’s not a criminal. He’s a Prohibition agent working with the sheriff to stop the bootleg liquor coming into town. Unfortunately, the pastor and I broke up the sheriff’s stakeout at the root cellar. Hopefully he caught the bootleggers at the river.”
Gabriel’s heart sank. He’d been wrong? Had everything he’d believed been wrong? As he put together the pieces, his shame grew. Not only had he insulted an agent of the law, he’d also accused Felicity’s father in front of her.
He tried to apologize, but her dismay stopped the words in his throat.
Tears clotted her voice as she rebuked him. “How could you?” She sagged against her father.
“Let’s get you home, little one,” said Kensington. “It can all be sorted out in the morning.”
Morning alone could not cure the pain Gabriel had wrought. He watched Kensington lead his daughter along the outside of the parsonage fence to his car. Moments later, they drove away, the car’s headlights finally disappearing up the hill.
At that moment, Slinky trotted up, leash dragging behind him. He wove around Gabriel’s feet, whining.
“I know.” Gabriel picked up the leash. “You don’t have to rub it in.”
He’d lost her. This time for good.
Chapter Eighteen
Though a bath and clean clothes helped Felicity feel almost like her old self, she couldn’t sleep. Her parents had promised to answer her questions. In fact, she could hear Daddy prowling the hallway, his steps uncharacteristically nervous. She towel-dried her hair but didn’t bother to comb it out.
Daddy stopped pacing the moment she opened her bedroom door. With expectant concern, he asked, “Are you ready?”
She nodded and took his arm, like a bride being escorted up the aisle. There’d be no wedding this summer—maybe not ever. Robert wasn’t what he pretended to be, and Gabriel… How could he accuse her father of being a criminal? She thought he was a man who cared for people and thought the best of them. How cruelly wrong she’d been.
Daddy squeezed her hand. “I love you, little one.”
Felicity shoved the sting of Gabriel’s betrayal to the back of her mind. Now was not the time to lament lost romance. Tonight she needed to know who she was.
The hall and parlor lights blazed even as the clock struck midnight. Mother paced below, her pallid face untouched by rouge and her hair mussed. Felicity had never before seen her at less than her best, even when sick.
“Felicity.” Mother’s lips quivered, and her eyes were puffy. “You worried me sick.” She wrung a handkerchief, made an aborted attempt at an embrace and retreated to the parlor.
Oh, why couldn’t Felicity have a normal mother, one who kissed away bruises and shared tears? How she longed to really talk with her, to share fears and hopes. I
nstead, there’d always been a distance between them. When she was little, she didn’t understand why. Now she knew. She wasn’t her child.
They walked into the parlor, where the heavy velvet drapes had been drawn shut. Pearlman would not see what transpired in the Kensington house that night.
“Sis.” Her brother unfolded his long legs and stood up from the sofa.
“Blake? What are you doing here?”
“Dad asked me to come over,” he explained, offering her the seat beside him.
Instead, she chose the love seat and left enough room for Mother to join her. Her mother poured two cups of steaming liquid from the silver coffee service while Daddy took his position at the folding whist table where he’d assembled a stack of very official-looking papers.
He cleared his throat. “I wanted everyone to hear this at the same time.”
Mother handed her one of the cups. “Hot chocolate. It’ll make you feel better.” But instead of sitting beside Felicity, she hung nervously at arm’s length.
Felicity dutifully took a sip, though her stomach couldn’t handle food until she knew the truth. “Tell me everything.”
Mother handed the other cup to Daddy. “Where do we begin, Branford?” Her voice quavered, and at that moment Felicity caught a glimpse into her soul. She was terrified, so afraid of rejection that she couldn’t even reach out to her children.
Daddy leaned back and tugged on the sash of his smoking jacket. “You were a baby, Felicity, when I first saw you. What was she, Eugenia, six weeks old?”
Felicity shook her head. That wasn’t what she wanted to know. “Start at the beginning. When did you decide to adopt? Was I sent here on a train? What happened to my parents? Where did they live?” She choked out the hardest question of all. “In the tenements?”
“No,” Mother exclaimed, glancing at Blake, “certainly not. We’d never take in a filthy street urchin.”
Felicity cringed.
As usual, Mother failed to notice Felicity’s discomfort and the prejudice in her words.
“You were to be Blake’s sister, after all.” She smiled at her son.
Blake’s sister. Even now she couldn’t be valued for herself.
“Then where was I born?” Felicity asked before she lost nerve.
Daddy exchanged a glance with Mother.
“I need to know who my real parents are,” she insisted. “I need to know who I am.”
“We are your parents,” Mother insisted, but she wouldn’t look at Felicity.
Daddy rose. “Let me handle this, Eugenia.” He pulled a paper from the stack and gave it to Felicity. “Here’s your adoption certificate.”
Felicity took it gingerly and scanned the document for any indication of her origin. “It gives my name as Felicity Anne Kensington and lists you but no birth parents.”
“We named you at once. You didn’t have a name.”
Not even a name. What couple doesn’t name their baby? A couple that doesn’t want a child. “Then I was abandoned?”
Daddy shook his head. “You were orphaned. Your parents died from typhoid soon after your birth.”
Typhoid fever. A horrible sadness swept through her for the parents she’d never known—to hold a newborn baby, dreaming of the wonderful life you’d have together and then to have it snatched away. The little fingers, the tiny toes… how they must have hoped for their future, but then disease took it all away.
Daddy stroked his mustache. “Let me back up. You wanted to know when we decided to adopt. It was after your mother lost a baby girl—stillborn.”
Felicity had never heard this before. She looked to her mother, who’d gone ashen, eyes downcast. Twenty-one years later, the loss still hurt. No wonder she was afraid to become too attached.
“Doc Stevens said your mother couldn’t have another child, so I decided we’d adopt, quickly and without fuss. I went to an orphanage in Detroit and saw you. You looked so much like Blake that I knew you were the one.”
Felicity let every word and action sink in. Mother’s hands knotted around that handkerchief. Daddy was in control as always. “Then I’m from Detroit?” she whispered.
Mother and Daddy glanced at each other before he answered. “The agents said your parents died aboard ship.”
“Aboard ship.” Felicity knew what that meant. “Then I’m an immigrant, a foreigner.” Just like Luke. Just like Mrs. Grattan said.
“You’re an American,” Mother said sharply.
“But I wasn’t born here. Where did my parents come from?”
Again Mother and Daddy exchanged glances. Again Daddy spoke. “The agency wasn’t certain. Either Hungary or Romania, they think.”
“Hungarian?” Felicity’s ears hummed. How the Highbury girls had ridiculed Eastern Europeans, calling them Gypsies. She waited for Blake to make a joke, but he stayed mercifully quiet.
“You might be royalty,” Mother suggested.
Blake snorted.
“It’s possible,” Mother insisted.
“No, it isn’t,” Felicity said. “Royalty doesn’t emigrate to America anonymously and pennilessly. Admit it, Mother. I’m common stock.” Somehow saying the words felt good, even liberating.
“Don’t say such a thing,” Mother said. “A lady is always confident and secure, no matter her circumstances. Grace and manners cover a multitude of sins.”
Felicity felt her cheeks heat. “Being born common and foreign isn’t a sin.”
Mother gasped. “I didn’t mean it that way. I meant the circumstances of your birth don’t matter.”
“Exactly,” Daddy stated emphatically. “You’re our daughter, and that’s all that’s important. Birth is nothing. It’s what you do in life that matters.”
Perhaps to Daddy, but Mother talked of nothing but status. “Then bloodlines—”
“Mean nothing,” Daddy finished for her. “We loved you the moment we saw you. You’re my little girl and always will be.”
“Oh, Daddy.” Felicity thought she could never cry again, but back came the tears. No matter what, she could count on her father.
He took her hand. “Besides, despite what your mother would have you believe, neither one of us has the purest blood.”
“Branford,” Mother hissed.
“It’s true, Eugenia, and our children deserve to know it. Your mother’s family made its money in meatpacking, and I’m a self-made man. My parents sharecropped. There’s not one drop of blue blood.”
Mother wailed into her handkerchief, but Blake burst out laughing. “You don’t say. That’s a relief.”
Felicity stared, openmouthed. That’s why she had never met her grandparents, only heard stories that were apparently complete fabrications. All of Mother’s pretensions had been based on nothing. “Why didn’t you just tell me? I would have understood.”
Daddy glanced at Mother. He didn’t need to say a thing for Felicity to understand. The facade all centered on Mother.
“I understand,” Felicity said quietly, “but you could have at least told me I was adopted.”
Daddy shook his head. “We wanted everyone in Pearlman to treat you as our biological child.”
“But Dr. Stevens knew,” Felicity pointed out. “And so did Mrs. Grattan. How did she find out? Or am I the only one in Pearlman who didn’t know?” Eloise and Sally surely knew, and Gabriel didn’t look the least bit surprised when Mrs. Grattan announced the truth. Stricken, yes, but not surprised.
Daddy looked at Mother. “Sophie Grattan was the attending nurse at the stillbirth.”
Felicity had forgotten that Mrs. Grattan was once a nurse.
“We swore her to secrecy.” Daddy’s face grew dark. “Apparently her word meant nothing.”
“She always held that over me,” Mother wailed. “Every society meeting. Everything I tried to do, she’d always bring it up. I lived in terror.”
“Then you should have told me.” Felicity didn’t want her parents to descend into bickering again when they’d finally opene
d up their hearts. “If you’d told me the truth, none of this would have happened.”
Mother stiffened. “We didn’t want you to suffer any stigma for being…”
“A foreigner?” Felicity recalled the epithets hurled against Luke.
“Don’t ever say that again,” snapped Mother. “You’re a Kensington.”
But no amount of pretending would rub away the truth. “You’re ashamed of me.”
“No, dearest,” Mother cried, “I only wanted what was best for you—the best schools, the best husband, the best marriage.”
“It was the same for me,” Blake chimed in. “You know how Mother has to orchestrate everything.”
“B-but all I ever really wanted was to be loved for who I am,” Felicity whispered. The words sank like a balloon filled with cold air.
Mother’s face twisted up again. “I did my best. I thought you knew how I felt.”
As Felicity watched her mother weep, she realized that she would have to initiate any change in their relationship. Mother was too afraid to reach out, even when told that love would be reciprocated. Hesitant, she looked to Daddy for encouragement. He nodded, his walrus mustache shaking, and wiped his face with his handkerchief.
Mother had collapsed into a sobbing heap, head on her knees, shoulders heaving. Everything Eugenia Kensington valued had been stripped away: wealth, status and control. For the first time in Felicity’s life, she wasn’t afraid of her mother. She pitied her.
“It’s all right, Mother.” Though it took every ounce of will, she went to the woman who’d tried so hard in all the wrong ways. Kneeling, Felicity embraced her. Mother’s bony shoulders shook, but she didn’t pull away. Then came the most difficult words of all, those of forgiveness.
“I love you,” Felicity whispered.
Mother lifted her head, face mottled. “You do? I—I never knew for certain.” She bit her lip, looking for once vulnerable. “I love you so.” She battled a sob. “Daughter.”
Felicity threw her arms around her mother and wept as Mother stroked her damp and tangled hair for the very first time.
No matter how close Gabriel sat to the kitchen stove, he couldn’t get warm. The events of the night tumbled through his mind over and over, always coming out badly. Every time he made the fatal accusation, every time she asked what he meant, every time she walked away.
The Matrimony Plan Page 22