Carpenter's Inheritance

by Laurie Alice Eakes

  “No, I—” But of course she was. The way she clung to his hands as he assisted her to her feet told her so. The way she wanted to lean against him and have his arms close around her told her so. “I need someone to fix my lock.”

  “And?” He gave her a half smile.

  She ducked her head. “Not to be alone even in the daylight.”

  “Ah.” He nudged her chin up with his fingertips. “Otherwise you’d have gone straight to the constable.”

  “I do need my door fixed.” There, she’d found her voice.

  “And you know I’ll fix it for you.” He caressed her cheek. “Lucie, I’ve missed you. I want to talk to you.”

  Vaguely, Lucinda registered that she was alone with Matt. Gertie had taken the omelet and left the kitchen. Lucinda should leave, too, avoid this dialogue.

  “You know where to find me and haven’t looked.” She made her voice crisp.

  His lips tightened at the corners. “I can’t come to your office, Lucie—you know that. Not now. I tried to see you after church, but you left like you were being chased by a swarm of bees. Avoiding me, I presume.”

  “I’m not going to give up my calling so you can be comfortable not having money or a family name.”

  “I never asked you to.” He smoothed a strand of her hair behind her ear. “I wouldn’t ask you to.”

  “But you wouldn’t consider letting me know how you feel about me until you thought I’d help you make your claim.”

  “As if you didn’t already know how I feel about you.”

  “And yourself. Matt.” She touched his cheek, smooth shaven and still cold, then stepped out of arm’s reach. “God doesn’t care who you are or what you do. It’s where your heart lies that matters.”

  “I always believed that.” He sighed. “Or at least told myself that. Jesus accepts me as I am, so what else matters? But it clashes with your calling, doesn’t it?”

  “Even if it didn’t, Matt, your claim could drag through the courts for years. Would you make me wait for you that long? I’m nearly twenty-five, you know, quite, quite old to be single.”

  “If only I thought there was a speck of truth in my claim—”

  Gertie pushed through the door, nodded at them, then grabbed up the coffeepot and left.

  “You need a detective. I’m sure you can find one in Boston,” Lucinda said. “A lawyer can find one for you. If you need help finding one. . .”

  “I’ve already done so. I took the train up a week ago Thursday.”

  Stupid of her to feel a twist of jealousy that she hadn’t known. She had sent him away.

  “What did he say?” she asked.

  Matt smiled. “She said the papers look authentic and she’ll take care of it.”

  “She?” Lucinda laughed. “You went to a lady lawyer?”

  “There are a surprising number of lady lawyers in Massa-chusetts. I thought I’d honor you that way.”

  “Oh, Matt.” She loved him all over again. Her heart beat against her ribs as though trying to break out and reach him.

  He smiled at her. “And speaking of lady lawyers, why would someone break into the office of one in broad daylight?”

  “Because I’m always there at night and they want something.”

  “What?”

  “I can’t say.”

  John Paul’s papers, of course. Nothing else in her office would interest anyone in town enough for them to take the risk of being caught. And with the Stagpole house the only one with a view of her back door, she could guess who had sent the perpetrator.

  “Did they get anything?” Matt asked.

  Lucinda shook her head. “They’ve been hidden somewhere since Roger Stagpole—” She pressed her fingers to her lips.

  Matt pulled them away. “What did he want that day?”

  “I can’t—”

  “Don’t tell me you can’t say. It had to be serious enough for you to hide some of your work.”

  “It’s work he doesn’t want me to do. That’s all I can say.”

  “Lucinda.” Matt curved his hands around her shoulders. “Did he threaten you in any way?”

  “Not. . .exactly.”

  “Then you’re not going back there.”

  “I have to. It’s my livelihood.”

  “Then you’ll have someone with you at all times and you’ll not go back at night.”

  “So where do I go?”

  “Here, of course.” Gertie had apparently returned without their notice. “I was going to tell you that the minute you told me you had a break-in in broad daylight.”

  “But who can stay with me during the day?” Lucinda drew away from Matt and crossed her arms. “I can’t afford to pay—”

  “You can’t afford not to pay for someone,” Matt broke in.

  “My cousin will come while her children are in school,” Gertie said. “She’ll feel like she’s earning her fees that way. Then you’ll come back here and if you want to earn your pay, you can help me with the breakfast crowd in the morning.”

  “But—” Lucinda bowed her head in surrender.

  She couldn’t fight them. They would win in the end because they were right. She shouldn’t be alone even during the day if Roger Stagpole was so determined to break the law in favor of his client.

  She could report him, but he hadn’t done anything she could prove.

  “All right,” she said. “Let me get my things.”

  “I’ll send someone for Parthina,” Gertie said. “You go sit in the dining room and have some coffee while Matt fixes your lock.” She nodded to her own door. “My new door can wait.”

  So that was why Gertie had known Matt was about to arrive—she’d planned for him to work on her door.

  A glance showed it had too much of a gap at the top hinge, as though it had warped from the heat inside the kitchen.

  Matt agreed, picked up his gloves, and left on a blast of cold air. Gertie took Lucinda’s arm and guided her into the café, nearly empty now in midmorning. And Lucinda sat like an obedient child, her life taken over by others.

  “I’m not serving You this way, Lord.” She rested her elbows on the table in a wholly unladylike fashion and propped her chin in her hands. “Or maybe I wish I weren’t.”

  That stung, the possibility that she no longer felt certain she was serving God in her work. Or perhaps she never had. She’d determined to be a lawyer from childhood because Daddy didn’t have a son to follow in his footsteps. Yet the opposition had always been there, not from him, but from her having to go nearly a thousand miles to attend school, and then hundreds more to practice. She looked at those as challenges to overcome like those faced by women who wanted to be doctors or ship captains or journalists. She never looked at it as the Lord trying to tell her to go elsewhere. She wanted this, but did He want this for her? She never questioned it until Matt came along and she found her heart torn between her love of the law and her love for a man. She never took into account her love for the Lord and wanting to serve Him.

  Show me what to do, she prayed in silence. I suddenly don’t feel so certain I’m on the right path.

  She received no immediate answers. Parthina Carr arrived, brushing snow from her threadbare coat and with Lucinda’s scarf wound around her head and neck. Guilt stabbed her to see the older woman so poorly dressed for the weather. But Mrs. Carr smiled cheerfully.

  “So happy to be of use, my dear. Makes me feel like I’m not abusing your kindness.”

  “But you never were. I think—”

  Lucinda remembered the letter from the Commonwealth and pulled it from her bag. It could have something to do with Mrs. Carr’s case.

  But it didn’t. It had to do with John Paul’s. It was a hearing date set for two weeks’ time, the Tuesday after the Christmas festival.

  A good excuse not to go. She would need to prepare then travel up to Boston.

  Stomach a little queasy in anticipation of her first court appearance as a member of the bar, she slipped the pa
pers back into her bag, apologized for reading them in front of Mrs. Carr, and rose to don her own coat and hat.

  Outside, the snow was beginning to pile up thick enough not to be slippery. It deadened sound as though they walked on pavement made of spun sugar. Carriages passed like ghostly shadows, their wheels and the clop of hooves muffled.

  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Mrs. Carr said.

  “It’s cold.” Lucinda hugged herself for warmth. “But yes, it is beautiful. Rather makes the world clean.”

  As she wished to make her heart clean from going her own way if it was not the Lord’s way, too. “ ‘Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean: wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow,’ ” she quoted from the Fifty-First Psalm.

  “Indeed. That’s what snow reminds me of.” Mrs. Carr took Lucinda’s arm, and they strode in companionable silence through the pristine snow.

  The sound of hammering broke the stillness. Lucinda entered her front door, and the banging grew louder. Matt at work on her rear door. She couldn’t avoid him. She needed her luggage from the storage room and a box to give Mrs. Carr what food she had left in the icebox. When she stepped into the room, nearly as cold as the outside, he smiled at her, and she wondered why she would want to avoid him. She could not, must not, let her work come between them. Except now she was in too deep to quit. She had a hearing scheduled and others pending. She had clients depending on her assistance, even if her fees would come in the form of eggs and roasted chickens.

  “If you pack your things up,” Matt greeted her, “I’ll haul them down in my wagon.”

  “Thank you.” She glanced around. “I need a box. Ah.” She snatched up the box with her ball gowns inside. She didn’t need to take those to Gertie’s.

  She went into the living room and laid the gowns on the sofa, two treasures from another life. One was green velvet with falls of creamy lace, and the other a deep red satin. She’d felt so pretty wearing those, a far cry from her usual serge or linen, depending on the season. Ah, well, another time would come.

  She hastened to pack up clothes for a few days plus her files and the food in the icebox. She would take her files back to Gertie’s with her and leave the rest for Matt.

  When she descended the steps, Mrs. Carr behind her, she caught sight of someone standing at the bottom of the steps. He darted out of sight before she was halfway down. Watching her or thinking of coming to see her? She hoped the former. She feared the latter.

  But she’d be safe at Gertie’s. Even she admitted that she liked the idea of being in rooms with other people near.

  Matt came by for lunch, and Gertie seated them in a corner. “Talk to her, Matthew.”

  “You told her?”

  “I told her I said everything wrong.” Matt took her hand beneath the table. “Lucie, I didn’t court you so you’d help me. I had the courage to court you because of those papers, but I didn’t have the courage to ask for your help until I knew you better. Please believe me. I know how it looked, and it just wasn’t so.”

  She didn’t want it to be so. She let her silence on the matter serve as acquiescence, then let him change the subject to another book. The time passed too quickly, and he rose to go.

  He rested his hand on her hair for a moment. “Take care of yourself.”

  She didn’t need to. Gertie took care of her, feeding her far too much, making sure her room was warm, concluding with, “I’m praying for you, child. You look so troubled.”

  “I’m confused.” Lucinda blinked away a sudden rush of tears. “I’m torn between my heart and my work.”

  “You shouldn’t be. He can either take you as you are or not at all.”

  “He needs to take himself as he is.”

  Gertie sighed and nodded. “He never cared much about his background until he formed an attachment to Samantha Howard. I warned him, but you can’t tell a young man not to fall in love with the prettiest girl in town.”

  “Especially when she returns that interest.” Lucinda hesitated a moment, then asked, “Do you think she cares for him still?”

  “Cares for, yes, but not as you’re thinking. Never you worry yourself about that. You’ve enough else on your plate.” Bidding Lucinda good night, Gertie left.

  Too much on her plate indeed. Lucinda went to sleep counting everything that had gone, was going, and could go wrong, rather than counting sheep.

  She woke to the smell of wood smoke and sweat and the feel of someone’s hand over her mouth. “Where are the papers?” a voice rasped near her ear.

  fifteen

  Matt woke to the low rumble of Growler’s voice. He dropped his hand over the side of the bed to rest on the mongrel’s head. “What is it, boy?”

  Beside his head on the pillow, Purrcilla stirred, and he raised his other hand to calm the feline, as the click of a gun being cocked ricocheted off the walls of the room like a thunderclap in the snowy silence.

  “Don’t you or your animals move,” a voice rasped from the doorway, “ ’cause I’ll shoot one of them first.”

  Matt said nothing. He listened for sounds to give away whether or not this man was alone. He let his eyes adjust to the light filtering through the curtains from moonlit snow, and tried to locate the intruder’s exact whereabouts. He kept his hands on his animals, though both struggled beneath his hold.

  “Good.” A floorboard creaked and a shadow moved across the room. “Just tell me where the papers are, and I’ll go peaceably on my way.”

  “The. . .papers?” Matt stared at the tall, still shadow. “What papers?”

  Surely not his documents? But of course they were. The mayor and his wife had found them missing and guessed he’d found them.

  “Don’t play stupid, Templin. I know you have them ’cause the lady lawyer doesn’t have ’em.”

  The lady lawyer. They thought he’d take them to Lucinda, of course.

  Matt’s insides turned to a mass of twisted icicles. “How do you know?”

  The shadow chuckled. “Been through her office. Been to Gert—”

  Matt sprang up, releasing Purrcilla and Growler. “Did you hurt her? If you’ve hurt her—”

  “Stay put.” Light flared. The gun exploded. With a thud and shower of plaster dust and fragments, the bullet hit the ceiling. “Next one goes into that dog.”

  Growler, poor cowardly mutt, lay flat on his belly half under the bed. Purrcilla had disappeared.

  Matt swung his legs over the side of the bed. His feet touched braided rug, then furry dog. He stood, nudging the latter all the way under the bed. “If you’ve hurt her, you’d better shoot me, not a helpless animal, or you won’t be safe anywhere.”

  “I don’t need your heroics. I need those papers.”

  “I don’t have any papers.” Matt made himself smile. “Unless you mean the ones I left with a lawyer and detective in Boston.”

  The man said something foul, then growled, “You’re lying. You gave them to your lady friend, you—” Moonlight flashed on the gun barrel.

  Matt dove for the floor. The gun reported. Glass shattered. Cold air swirled into the room. Matt slid from the bed, grabbed a book, and flung it at the gun just as it exploded again. The book struck the weapon. More plaster fell.

  Matt grabbed more books, flung them hard and fast. The gunman’s shadow moved, darted to one side. Books thudded to the floor. The gun flashed, exploded, again, again.

  One more book. Matt followed the muzzle flashes and aimed with care. A thud, a grunt. A yowl.

  Purrcilla streaked past Matt in one direction, the intruder in another. Something crashed in the kitchen; then the back door slammed.

  “You can come out now, Growler.” Matt found a lamp surprisingly undamaged and lit the wick. By the light, he surveyed the mess of his bedroom as he found street clothes and yanked them on. The window was broken, curtains billowing into the chamber. Books lay everywhere, one or two sadly damaged. And Growler only poked his nose from beneath the bed.

  Matt drew him ou
t. “Come on, boy, it’s safe now.” He carried the dog out of the room and closed the door. Repairs could wait.

  In the kitchen, he found his settee beside the stove overturned and with a leg broken. One of his first projects from years ago and not well made at all. He shoved the piece aside and studied the door. The lock was intact. The man hadn’t entered that way.

  A stream of cold air flowing from the parlor showed Matt an open window he’d neglected to lock. He didn’t know he needed to there outside of town.

  He closed and locked it now, not that it mattered with the bedroom open to the elements. He would have to get more glass. But a little snow on his floor concerned him little then. He needed to get to town, to Lucinda.

  He couldn’t take the horse. It wasn’t trained for riding, and the wagon would never plow through the snow. He could walk just as fast or faster. Still too slow tramping through the fluffy whiteness. Too far from his lady. He normally walked to town in forty-five minutes. It took him the better part of two hours. Snow-caked and freezing, he tramped through the pristine streets of Loveland with its mayor who was anything but pure, and began to pound on Gertie’s back door. It opened immediately to reveal Gertie behind a shotgun.

  “It’s you.” She lowered the muzzle. “What’re you doing here?”

  “Is Lucie all right?”

  “Of course she is. She just looks like a nor’easter would blow her away.” Gertie stepped back. “But how’d you know to come?”

  “I got a visitor.” Matt stamped snow from his boots and stepped into the kitchen. Warmth surrounded him like a blanket, and the sight of Lucinda perched on a stool at the counter with her hands wrapped around a cup of coffee dissolved the ice in his middle.

  “Are you all right?” He shed his wet coat and wrapped his arms around her.

  She tucked her head against his shoulder and trembled. “I will be. It was hours ago, but I’m still shaking.”

  “What happened?” Matt released her and perched on another stool. “Can you tell me what happened?”

  Gertie handed him a cup of coffee. He took it with one hand and covered Lucinda’s hand with the other.

  She stared at their entwined fingers. “I woke up with his hand over my mouth and him demanding papers. I thought he meant the ones for J—” She pressed her other hand to her lips for a moment, then continued, “For someone else. But if he came to you, too—” She turned her big blue eyes upon him. “Matt, your claim just might be true.”