Bertie never let George see where she was working but met him at a table in Sullivan’s Tavern, where she handed him the latest dresses to deliver to Catherine’s friends.
“Does her father know she’s doing this?” she asked him one day in mid-February.
“No, but he’s in Atlanta most of the time now, so it’s not hard for her. All her friends want your dresses,” George told her. “Here’s the money.”
Bertie counted it out and separated it into three piles. “A third for me, a third for you, and a third to invest back into the business for buying supplies.”
He slid his pile back to her. “You keep it. I don’t need it.”
She shook her head, returning it to him. “Partners, remember?” she insisted. “Have you heard from Mr. Freemont?”
“No. I went by his office yesterday, but he told me that he still hasn’t found anything,” George reported.
As they left Sullivan’s Tavern, Bertie heard a bell clanging in the distance and thought of Finn, who had worked on just such a fire truck. The fire truck’s blare grew closer, and soon the truck rounded a corner toward George and Bertie. People began to run down the street, passing them by.
One of the running people was Maria. When she spotted Bertie, she came to a complete stop and stared, as though she wasn’t sure Bertie was really there. In the next minute, though, she threw her arms around her. “Bertie!” she cried. “Why didn’t you tell me you were back?”
“I looked for you but couldn’t find you,” Bertie told her.
“I moved and changed jobs. I thought you were still in Atlanta.”
“Where is everyone going?”
“There’s a big fire at Stiltchen’s Fabrics.”
“Where?”
“It’s Ray’s new shop. Haven’t you heard about it? Of course you haven’t. You’ve been out of town.”
“Ray’s shop?” Bertie questioned. “But you said it was called Stiltchen’s.”
“Rudolph Stiltchen—Ray opened the store using that name a few months ago. Apparently it’s his real name,” Maria informed her.
“Rudolph Stiltchen,” Bertie repeated. “And he’s opened a shop you say?”
“Well, you may never get to see it. It’s on fire, I hear. I was on my way to see what was happening. They say everyone’s trapped inside.”
“Eileen!” Bertie cried, reeling with the sudden realization that her sister might be trapped in the fire.
By the time Bertie, George, and Maria raced to the corner of Rivington Street, the blaze had reached the sky. Smoke choked the area with gray soot.
“Stay back, miss,” a firefighter warned, holding out his arm to stop Bertie as she ran toward the building.
“I have to get in there! My baby sister might be in there!”
But he would not let her pass. Bertie paced like a caged tiger, nearly insane with the need to know if Eileen was inside the shop.
A half hour later, the efforts of the fire department brought the flames to an end. An ambulance arrived to collect the stretchers of customers who had passed out from the smoke. Fortunately, none had been burned.
As the smoke began to clear, a corner shop with a smashed plate window and charred insides appeared. A man covered in soot stumbled out, carefully stepping over the shattered glass left on the window frame.
Bertie ran to him and grabbed his shoulders violently. “Where is she? Where is she? What have you done with Eileen? Tell me or I’ll kill you! I swear I will!”
Gripping her arms, Ray held her away from his body. “Hold on! She’s fine. She’s safe. I’ve been looking for you.”
“You? Looking for me?” What was he talking about?
“You’ve caught me at sort of a bad moment, I’m afraid,” he said, gesturing around him. “But I’ll bring you to Eileen.”
At a modest, well-kept apartment building two blocks away, Ray, now once again known by his real name, rapped on a first floor door. “Mrs. Kleinbaum, it’s Rudolph Stiltchen,” he called.
A short, plump, middle-aged woman opened the door and smiled at him. “Oh, you are not burned. Thank God! I was so worried when I heard about your shop! Come. Sit! I’ll get you a washrag.”
He turned to Maria, George, and Bertie behind him. “I’ve brought some friends. Is that all right?”
“Welcome! Come in. Come in,” Mrs. Kleinbaum greeted them.
Bertie’s eyes darted around the apartment as she entered the living room. It was clean and spacious with handsome, if old-fashioned, furniture.
The sound of children laughing rang out.
A boy of about five ran from the dining room around the bend into the living room. Four other children chased him, giggling gleefully.
One of them was Eileen.
She froze when she saw Bertie, her eyes wide with happiness. “Bridgy!” she cried.
Bertie ran to her and, stooping down, wrapped her in a hug as tears of joy ran down her face. “Oh, Eileen, my girl, my sweet, sweet girl!” she sobbed.
George and Maria said good-bye and left together. While Rudy washed in Mrs. Kleinbaum’s bathroom, Bertie sat with Eileen on her lap and listened to the woman who had been taking care of Eileen. “Mr. Stiltchen leaves Eileen with me while he runs the shop in the day and picks her up in the evening on his way home,” she said. “She’s such a good little girl, aren’t you, sweetie?”
Eileen smiled at Mrs. Kleinbaum but kept her head resting on Bertie’s shoulder.
Rudy came out and asked Mrs. Kleinbaum if he could speak to Bertie privately. The woman lifted Eileen from Bertie’s lap and carried her into the other room.
“What happened?” they asked each other at the same time.
“You first,” Bertie said.
“I came down to help organize the strike with the Amalgamated Society of Tailors,” he said. “When I learned it was Wellington Industries we were dealing with, I went to find you, but they said you weren’t with the company anymore.”
She shook her head. “I was fired.”
“Good,” he said. “I’m glad to hear it. You’re better off.”
“I know.”
“I was speaking at that tavern when the police came in and tried to break up our meeting. Everyone fled, and when they were gone, there was Eileen standing on a table. Imagine my shock at finding her there. I went over to the Wellington estate and asked for you there, but they said you had gone. The housekeeper told me you were sick and down on your luck. She seemed almost pleased about it.”
Bertie nodded. “Yes.”
“I thought that you maybe needed to leave Eileen with me, that you had seen me there and left her behind for me to find.”
“So you took her.”
“So I took her,” he confirmed.
“I fainted just around the corner from the front door,” she told him.
He laughed grimly. “I went out the back way with her in order to avoid being arrested. I looked around Atlanta for a day but had no luck. So I came back here, thinking you might return to your apartment, but when I got there it was rented to a new family.”
Tears rolled down her cheeks. “And here I thought you had stolen her from me. That you were collecting your debt, she being like my firstborn.”
“Why would I do that?”
Her tears came faster and heavier. “Because I wronged you by taking your work and claiming it for my own.”
“I offered it to you,” he reminded her. “You didn’t steal it.”
“I should have been truthful about it,” she disagreed. “You always said you would collect a price, that we would negotiate my debt.”
“And you thought Eileen was my price?” he asked incredulously.
Looking down, she nodded.
He offered her a handkerchief. “All I wanted was your love,” he said. “I thought you knew that. When I lost hope of ever collecting that, I spoke in anger. I never expected you to believe I actually meant it. Once you made me see that it was hopeless between us, I needed to get away, to f
orget all about you. I went to Boston for a while and then Chicago. I got involved with the tailor’s union and began to make better money, enough to open the fabric store—the one you just witnessed burning to the ground.”
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “Now you’ve lost everything and must start from scratch.”
“Not quite everything. Through the union I bought something called insurance. It will pay the money I need to start again.”
“Thank heavens,” she said. “And can we also start again?”
He put his arm around her and drew her near. In her heart she knew—finally—that he was her dearest friend; he had always been on her side, from the first moment they’d met. His intensity had frightened her, but she understood him now, saw him at last as he really was: a true prince of the spirit.
“I’ll always be at your side,” he promised.
As she looked into his eyes, she realized that at his side was where she wanted to be, as friends—and much more than friends. She loved him. She suddenly realized that she had loved him for a long time, though her mind had been denying what her heart had always known.
“Now that we’ve found each other again,” he began, “do you think it would be possible that— that—you could—”
He stopped, seeming unsure if he should continue.
“That I could love you?” she supplied.
He nodded. “I have loved you from the start. I think you know that.”
“I have been such a fool,” she said.
“How?” he asked.
“Not to realize that I always felt the same toward you,” she admitted. “Yes, I could love you, I love you already.”
A soft smile crossed his face as he pulled her toward him and they kissed. Secure in his arms, Bertie realized that after so much traveling, she had found her real home, the place where she had always belonged.
EPILOGUE
So there it is ... this faerie’s tale of two princesses who lost each other for a while but were happily reunited. It is also the story of a prince from another kingdom altogether, but descended from an equally noble line. They had come to the grand new land to find their fortunes, and find fortune they did.
Paddy and the boys worked their way to California, where they remained with the railroad until 1897. That was the year that Liam and Seamus, young men by then, heard of gold being found in the Klondike River and went up to Canada to find some for themselves. They found enough to make all of them rich.
Bertie’s dress business was a sensation. She and George did so handsomely that Bertie soon moved out of the basement workspace into a spacious, light-filled new shop. They hired a team of seamstresses at union wages and paid them generous bonuses if the company’s “profit margin” was good that year.
George finally gave up on Catherine Wellington. This was easier for him to do once he met Maria on that day as they all rushed to the fire. In fact, in 1883 he and Maria married. It was the same year that Maria opened her restaurant, Maria’s, on Mulberry Street.
The insurance paid Rudy back for most of what he lost—enough, at least, to start again. This time, instead of fabric, he invested in what he knew and loved—tailoring and dressmaking. Eventually the two companies—the one owned by Bertie and George and the one owned by Rudy—merged. They did so well that they surpassed Wellington Industries, which went out of business in 1884, due in large part to disastrous mismanagement by James Wellington Jr.
Bertie changed her name yet again. For the rest of her life she was known as Bertie Stiltchen. Bertie and Rudy married a year after they were reunited and declared their love.
For the rest of her life, Rudy treated Bertie like the princess that his keen intuition had always told him she was. I marked it in my Book of Faerie, as is always done when noble members of different kingdoms wed.
They raised Eileen as their own child, in addition to the three sons they had together. She grew into a healthy, spirited young woman. Years later, when she was twenty-four, Eileen went to live with Finn and his eight children in Hollywood because she wanted to be a movie star in silent films. This was a dream she achieved, using the screen name of Laura Miller.
Rudy and Bertie, Maria and George, lived happily in New York City for the rest of their long lives, watching their company’s sign flash in the orange setting sun: RUMPOLE-STILTCHEN: SPINNING GOLD OUT OF STRAW SINCE 1882.
And so ends my faerie’s tale of an American Dream.
DON’T MISS THIS MAGICAL TITLE
IN THE ONCE UPON A TIME SERIES!
Water Song
SUZANNE WEYN
PROLOGUE
Belgium, April 1915
“What a fool I was!” Emma Winthrop muttered, furious at herself as she stared down at Lloyd Pennington’s handsome face in the photo in her opened locket. She sat on a stone wall outside her family’s estate with the two halves of the locket open in her hand. When the locket lay open like it did now, it resembled an orange that had been cut in two with its halves side by side. When closed, it was a perfect golden ball worn on a slender gold chain.
She had taken this photograph of him herself and placed it inside her locket. At the time, it had seemed wildly sophisticated to carry a picture of a good-looking boyfriend—one she’d often sneaked out to meet after dark. Back at the Hampshire Girls’ Boarding School she used to kiss the photo of Lloyd each night before shutting off her lamp in the dormitory room she shared with four other girls.
The locket had originally belonged to her great-great-grandmother and had been handed down to her great-grandmother and then to her grandmother and to her mother, who had given it to her. Sometimes it annoyed her when she slept, its round surface digging into her chest, but not even that could compel her to remove it. Back then she’d wanted Lloyd’s picture beside her heart at every moment.
How she’d missed him! Dreamed of the day they would be together again. All these months the thought of him had been her only consolation.
And then, yesterday, she’d received a letter from him. A farmer friend of Claudine, the housekeeper, had brought it by. Mail was so rare these days. Hardly any got through enemy lines. She hadn’t received word from anyone back in London for nearly five months.
Trembling, nearly weeping tears of joy, she’d ripped the letter open.
But his words slowly filled her with stunned coldness. He’d said that rumors were spreading that her mother had run away from her father, had gone home to her family estate, taking Emma along with her. It was causing quite the scandal in their social circle. No one expected this shocking news from such a socially prominent and respectable family. As a result, his own parents had strongly expressed their wishes that he break off his relationship with Emma. While this pained him, he understood their point. He had to think of his parents and their place in society. He had to consider his future law career and his possible political future, as well.
Finally, he got to his point: It was perhaps better if they didn’t see each other anymore.
He apologized for telling her this in a letter. He’d have preferred to tell her in person, but since she was now right on the Western Front of the Great War he hadn’t any idea when she planned on returning.
In conclusion, he hoped Emma would understand. It was regrettable, but one had to be realistic and deal with society on its own terms. It was the way of the world, after all.
She remembered his words as she continued gazing down at his photo. How she’d adored him! Now she couldn’t stand to see Lloyd smirking at her for one more second! The smile she’d once found so irresistibly attractive now seemed merely smug and self-satisfied.
She swore under her breath in French, a habit she’d picked up in the girls’ dormitory at the Hampshire School. “You imbecile!” she snarled at his picture. “My mother hasn’t run away. She hasn’t returned home because she’s dead!”
Snapping the two halves of the golden ball shut, Emma hopped from the wall and strode purposefully to the old stone well several yards away. “To h
ell with you, Lloyd Pennington, you lying two-face!” she shouted as she hurled the locket. She’d always had a strong throwing arm and acute aim. As intended, the locket sailed into the well.
CHAPTER ONE
The Glowing Green Sky
Emma looked up sharply when the German plane appeared. The sunset of pink and gold filtering into the room had drawn her to the high, arched window. The brilliant quality of the light, so vibrant and yet still, poised between day and night, filled her with a quiet sadness.
But the unexpected appearance of the plane jolted her from her melancholy, diverting her into a state of hyperattentiveness.
Sometimes a lone plane like this was only spying on the Allied troops, reporting back their numbers and position in the field. At least that was what she’d read in the newspapers. In minutes, though, another plane appeared over the rolling fields below, first as a dot in the sky and then slowly coming into clearer focus. She could just barely make out the high whine of the planes’ propellers.
Two planes was not a good sign. It meant they were bombers, not reconnaissance planes. These fighter planes always showed up first, and the strategy seemed to be to bomb from above before attacking with ground troops.
Emma sighed bitterly. It was amazing how much she’d learned about war these last few months. Back at the Hampshire School when she had studied art, music, mathematics, English literature, German, French, and Latin, she’d never have suspected that months later she would become a student of war.
Nothing was more important than war now. In fact, everything else seemed almost ridiculously irrelevant. Back in London she’d pored over the papers, which were full of the war—troop locations; whether they were winning or losing; what nations had joined the fight.
In Belgium she’d learned about war firsthand, seen much more than she’d ever expected or wanted to know. She’d seen things she longed to forget.
The Crimson Thread (Once Upon a Time) Page 15