His hand rubbed her back in wide circles. “But?”
She leaned more heavily against him. “What if I go and spend what I have to buy his land back, even find a job to eventually get Eimear a headstone? What if I do all that, and he still hates me? What if it’s not enough? I will have given up everything I have here for nothing.”
His hand stilled. “Given it up? But you’d come back, love. Surely you’d come back.”
She wiped at a tear. “I’d have nothing left. Every penny would be gone.”
“Begorra, Katie.” She felt him take a tense breath. “I knew you’d come here planning to leave, but I thought that had changed in the past months. I thought you’d come to think of this as home. I never imagined you’d even think of leaving us for good.”
She pulled back a little, enough to look up into his face.
His brow pulled in tight. “You would truly leave for good? How could you do that? How could you even think it?”
He wasn’t yelling, hadn’t even raised his voice. But Katie heard disappointment in his tone. You full disappoint me. ’Twas her father’s words she heard in her head but in Tavish’s voice. She’d done it again. She’d failed in the eyes of someone she loved.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m sorry.”
Katie pulled away and moved swiftly back toward the house, only just keeping herself from running. Why couldn’t life continue on a sure and certain path? And why must that path be filled with such deep and constant pain?
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Joseph opted to give Katie space. He remembered very well the feelings of loss and pain when he’d heard of his father’s passing. Katie had walked around the house in the two days since her mother’s letter arrived, with tears constantly brimming in her eyes. The cheerful, determined Katie had disappeared.
He knew there was little he could do to ease her pain, but he wanted to help in any way he could.
He hung back after lunch when he would usually have returned to the fields. Katie had her basket filled with loaves and ready for delivery.
“I’d like to help you make your deliveries, Katie, if you don’t mind.”
Her smile was heartbreakingly shaky. “I would appreciate that. Biddy was supposed to help but couldn’t spare the time. Are you sure you can spare it? I know you’ve a crop to tend.”
“Finbarr is capable of seeing to things for an hour or two.” He took up her basket and walked with her out the door. The buggy was hitched up and waiting.
“I can see you were pretty confident I’d agree to your offer of help.”
“Because I know you’re smart.” He set her basket in the backseat of the buggy.
At his offered hand up into the buggy, she shook her head but not in refusal. “Do you know no one ever handed me up or down before I came here?” She let him hand her up. “I was always just a servant. And servants don’t matter.”
He stepped up and grabbed the reins. “Well, you have certainly mattered here.”
“Have. I think you’ve heard I may be leaving.”
He had. “You apparently told Biddy, and she told Ian. Ian told me.”
Her shoulders drooped. “Likely all of the Irish Road has heard by now.” Her brow creased. Her mouth turned down. “Do you think they’ll be disappointed in me if I choose to go?”
He set the buggy in motion. “They’ll be sad to see you leave, Katie, but I don’t think they’ll be ‘disappointed’ in you.”
She looked away from him. Something in the set of her shoulders told him she was fighting her own emotions. Poor Katie. News of her father was a blow. But to add to that the weight of half a town’s dependence on her would crush anyone.
They pulled around the house and rolled toward the road.
“I think you must have scared off my wardens,” Katie said in a small voice. “The Red Road’s watchers are usually here this time of day.”
“I know.”
That brought her eyes to him again. “You knew it all along? I’d not mentioned they’d become constant.”
“They may have been keeping an eye on you, but I was keeping an eye on them.” Had one of them so much as set a single foot off that road, they would have had him to deal with, no matter what it did to his neutral stance. Both roads knew his home and land were off limits to their feud.
“Well, I’m glad you sent them off.”
“I didn’t, actually,” he said.
Her gaze returned to the fork in the road. “Then where do you suppose they went?”
“I believe word has reached the Red Road that there is a high likelihood you are leaving. They don’t feel the need to intimidate you any longer.”
Katie hung her head a little, her gaze on her wringing hands. “The Red Road feels they’ve won?”
He couldn’t think how to answer that without inflicting more pain. The Red Road absolutely felt victorious. Katie was the first real threat to their control over the Irish’s economic standing. Even Seamus Kelly, despite having the only smithy in town and the Red Road’s need for it, didn’t have a business that benefited only the Irish, that depended only on their patronage, that took income away from the mercantile. She was the first to dare to live off the Irish Road. Were she to leave, no matter the reason, the Red Road would claim the victory.
They didn’t say much through Katie’s deliveries. He could see her mind was heavy and didn’t know what he could possibly say to help ease her mind. At every stop, the Irish held Katie back, talking at great length, and she came back looking more burdened than she’d been before.
Mrs. Claire didn’t keep Katie as long as the others. Still, Katie looked even more upset after that quick delivery.
“How does Mrs. Claire feel about you contemplating leaving Hope Springs rather than moving in with her?” he asked as he set the horses in motion again.
“She only told me I had to choose the right path for me.” She spoke in little more than a whisper. “Everyone else is so . . . disappointed.”
“Your departure would be a blow, but they have survived worse.” He could see that was not a helpful answer.
“Am I to assume, then, you also don’t think I should go?”
“Have many people lectured you about leaving?” While he could understand everyone’s wish for her to stay, he had seen her pain every day since the letter came. He knew what she was living with.
“Not lectured so much as pleaded.” She sighed, slumping down on the buggy bench. “I’ve been happy here, and I don’t truly want to give that up. But if I don’t go, I’ll never see my father again. And, yet, the Irish are convinced their whole world will fall apart if I leave.”
He pulled the buggy to a stop at Ian and Biddy’s place. Katie’s hinted-at question was best left unanswered. She carried enough guilt as it was.
The delivery was quickly made, no doubt due to whatever obligation had kept Biddy from making deliveries with Katie. Joseph thought he’d avoided her question, but she took it up just as soon as she returned to the buggy.
“What would my going back to Ireland to do them all, Joseph? Would everything fall apart?”
He wanted her to feel free to make whatever choice she needed to, but he refused to lie to her. “Whenever the Red Road comes out victorious in these battles, they make things that much worse for their Irish neighbors.”
“Like higher prices at the mercantile?”
He nodded. “Or not allowing them to buy things they need most. Or letting animals out of barns. Or keeping the Irish from going into town for church or, after harvest, keeping the Irish children away from the schoolhouse.”
She stayed quiet as the buggy rolled down the road. Lines of worry creased her face. “I thought those were things they did during a battle, not afterward.”
“They often choose a means of revenge in order to remind the Irish ‘where they belong,’ as Reverend Ford summed up so nicely your first Sunday here.”
Katie rubbed at her forehead. “They’ll be mistreated be
cause of me. No wonder they’re so disappointed. But if I don’t go back, my mother’ll be disappointed.”
There was that word again. Katie obviously worried about letting people down. But did she ever think of what was best for her?
“I think, Katie, regardless of which path you choose, there will be disappointments. You simply have to choose the regrets you can best endure.”
Katie’s expression only grew more burdened. “I don’t know that there is anything truly simple about that choice.”
“Believe me, I am painfully aware of that.” Regrets had been part of his life for years.
“Do you have a great many regrets, then, Joseph?”
He flicked the reins. Did he have regrets? Here was a woman he’d come to care about more than he’d thought possible. He’d kept his affections a secret, waiting for the day she didn’t live under his roof. He hadn’t planned on that day being the one on which she left the town and the country all together.
“More regrets all the time,” he answered quietly.
In time the basket was empty, and the buggy was turned back toward home. The afternoon had clearly been hard on Katie. Joseph didn’t want to add to that, but he needed to talk to her.
“I have to make a confession.”
She looked equal parts intrigued and wary.
“When Tavish didn’t return to the house after going looking for you the night the letter came, I went out looking myself. I wanted to be certain you were all right.”
He could see she was alarmed.
“I know I should have left once I realized you were fine, especially after realizing you were having a private conversation, but I stayed and listened.” He shouldn’t have. He’d told himself as much, even as he’d stood out of sight but within hearing.
Katie kept her eyes trained on the passing fields. She was probably upset, offended. He couldn’t blame her.
“I have wondered so much about you since you first came,” he admitted, not looking at her as he drove back toward home. “You always seemed to be holding back, keeping part of yourself locked away. I couldn’t understand why you so adamantly pushed the girls away or why such obvious pain lurked in your eyes. All of that made more sense after hearing what you said.”
She folded her arms across her chest, her gaze straight ahead. “You had no right to listen in on my confessions, Joseph Archer.”
“I know, and I’m sorry.”
Katie’s mouth pulled in a taut line. “And I suppose you rather despise me now, knowing the kind of person I am.”
He’d heard that soul-crushing guilt in her voice out by the river. She did not see herself clearly enough. “Oh, I knew before the kind of person you are. Knowing more about your past only helped explain what brought you to the place where you are now.”
He slowed the buggy but didn’t stop. He wanted a chance to talk to her, but they were quickly approaching the bridge leading off the Irish Road.
“I have heard many of our Irish neighbors talk about going back to Ireland but only ever in the vaguest of terms, the way one dreams of something far-fetched. You are the only one who spoke of it as a settled thing, as an inevitable destination. As near as I could tell, every decision you’d made in life pointed to that end. For the life of me, I couldn’t understand what would give a person that much motivation.”
“Guilt,” Katie whispered.
“More regret than guilt, I would say.” She was plagued by heartache over mistakes she made before she was even truly old enough to understand such things.
“What if I go back and do all these things and my father still won’t forgive me? What if, even on his deathbed, he won’t love me again?”
Joseph could not even imagine turning his back on his daughters at any point in his life, let alone in his last moments. Yet, there was a history of neglect between Katie and her father. She said he stopped talking to her after her sister’s death. He had never written to her in all the years they’d been apart.
“His pardon is his to give, Katie. You cannot control that.”
She turned a little on the bench, facing him. “I do worry about that. I might go all the way there, and he’ll not see me. Or he will, but he won’t forgive me.”
“You can’t really know without trying.”
She let out a tense breath. Her emotions seemed close to the surface. “You think I should go, then?”
Joseph kept his eyes on the road as he guided his horse. If he looked at her, she would see the truth of his feelings in his eyes. “I only want you to be happy, Katie. Whether that means staying here or returning to Ireland, I want you to do what you need to do. I don’t want you to spend the rest of your life with so much weight on your heart.”
“You are the first person I’ve spoken to about this who has said anything other than that I shouldn’t go.” Her smile was fleeting and half-formed. “Perhaps you’re simply hoping to be rid of me so you won’t have to pay my salary any longer.”
“If you do stay, you’ll be at Mrs. Claire’s as it is and not on my payroll any longer.” She had no idea how grateful he would be to have her down the road. “I will miss not having you in the house. Knowing you aren’t even in the country would be far worse.”
Her smile turned more genuine. “I would miss you too, Joseph. Knowing you has restored my faith in people likely more than you realize.”
He kept his eyes focused ahead. “That feeling is mutual,” he said quietly. “And, for the record, I don’t want you to go. I truly don’t. I’m only acknowledging that leaving may be what you need to do.”
A stiff breeze blew across the road, rustling Joseph’s jacket and Katie’s skirts. The chill it brought reached deep into him. He would let her go if she needed to leave. He would even help her in any way he could. But a weight settled in his chest at the thought of losing her.
“’Tis a dilemma I have, Joseph Archer. If I go, the Irish’ll see it as a defeat, and they’ll be punished for it. If I don’t go, I won’t get to see my father before he dies.”
Joseph nodded. She had a hard choice ahead of her.
“You look like you understand that well.”
“Sometimes the dilemma is between what is best for someone else and what is easiest for oneself. Not unlike that song you told me about, the one in which the man is in love with a lady but doesn’t tell anyone, not even her, because their circumstances would keep them apart regardless. It would be best for her if he keeps silent, but doing so is torturous for him.”
“Aye. Choosing between hard things it is.”
He turned the buggy down the path toward the barn. “How does the song end?” he asked. “Does the man’s patience ever pay off? Do they find a way to be together?”
“No, they don’t.”
He had expected as much. “Life is hard sometimes, Katie.”
She nodded. “Aye. It is that.”
They pulled up in front of the barn. Joseph hopped down, wrapping the horse’s reins around the hitching post as he made his way to Katie’s side of the buggy. He moved quickly enough to reach her side before she’d climbed down herself.
He reached up and gently lowered her to ground.
“I thank you for helping me with my deliveries,” she said. “And for helping me sort out my difficulties.”
He knew his smile was a little sad. “You’re welcome.” He made for the barn, needing a moment to himself to let her go for good.
“And, Joseph?”
“Yes?” He spoke without looking at her.
“Thank you for giving me my job back all those months ago.”
He glanced back. “That was one of the better decisions I have made in my life,” he said. “And one of the reasons we’ll miss you regardless of how far away you go.”
Chapter Forty
Katie hardly recognized her own reflection in the Archers’ front windows. As she cleaned the glass, her gaze continually drifted back to the dark circles clearly visible beneath her eyes, to the weary downturn of her l
ips, to the sag in her posture. Life had, once again, dealt her a hard blow.
In the background of her own reflection she could see a small gathering of people off a pace down the road leading to town. She glanced back over her shoulder, heart hammering a bit at the possibility of the small group proving to be Reds with unfriendly intentions.
She recognized Mr. and Mrs. O’Donaghue quite quickly and felt immediate relief. A moment more and she knew the others, as well. Irish, every last one of them.
Their arms gestured sharp and broad as their voices rose. Katie couldn’t make out their words, but she could see the tension in their faces. She set her wash rags aside and stepped from the porch.
Two wagons sat still in the road beside each other, the drivers standing about on the road. Thomas Dempsey rode his horse over the bridge in the next moment. Katie could see in his face the moment he noticed the discussion ahead.
“What’s this?” he asked when they met up at the fork in the road.
Katie held her hands up in a show of uncertainty. “Something’s worked them all up.”
She walked closer but quickly fell behind Thomas’s horse. By the time she reached the small crowd—the O’Donaghues, Callaghans, and Kirkpatricks, she realized—he’d already dismounted.
“Twice the price,” Mr. O’Donaghue was saying. “We can’t pay twice the price no matter how much the children need shoes.”
Mrs. O’Donaghue wrung her hands. A deep furrow creased her brow. “Winter’s comin’ soon enough. The two littlest have worn holes clear through their shoes. The oldest can’t hardly squeeze into his.”
Winter with no shoes. Katie could feel the terrible pain of bitter cold. She could clearly see the icy countryside, the pitiful wrappings around her bloodied feet.
“The mercantile raised the price of the children’s shoes.” She didn’t need to pose it as a question. She knew it was true.
Mr. Callaghan nodded. “And he just now hinted at a higher Irish price for wool as well.”
The distress in Mrs. O’Donaghue’s expression grew with each word. “How are we to make coats without wool?”
Longing for Home: A Proper Romance Page 35