13
ALL THE NEWSPAPERS carried the bank story, though only the Rocky Mountain News found it spectacular enough for the front page, if only at the lowest corner well under the fold. The fact that it had been a girl who attempted the caper brought in some sensationalism, but because it was described as a “prank”—the very word Mr. Hawkins had used—rather than an attempted robbery, the newspapers treated it as such.
No doubt if Jane had been successful, if they’d never learned the vial she’d waved in the air had only contained water and she’d run off with a sackful of money, or if she’d blown up the bank and half the employees with it, the story would have garnered headlines in every paper in Denver and beyond.
Dessa sat at the kitchen table reading the accounts from the two newspapers she’d gone out to purchase early that morning. She wanted to show them to Jane when she rose, though Dessa wondered if the girl would welcome or bristle at the notoriety.
Sipping her morning coffee, Dessa settled back in her chair, undeniably satisfied to be sheltering her first client. From what little she knew of Jane, she was certainly in need. Sixteen years old, brought West by parents who were after the same thing everyone else came to find: a new life. Rocky Mountain fever had taken her mother within months of their arrival, and her father had been killed in a factory accident a few weeks ago. Jane did have a job until recently, but she had been let go from the textile factory after she’d been sick a day, then fainted at her sewing table on the day she’d returned.
Dessa thought it was a wonder the girl had any strength at all once she learned how long she’d gone without much to eat. The ten-hour-a-day job hadn’t earned enough to pay the rent, let alone many visits to the grocer. Jane said the only way she had the stamina to plan what she’d done at the bank had been by stealing from the open fruit bins at Birks Cornforth over on Fifteenth.
Jane’s desperate action had seemed her last and only option, unless she wanted to go to the poorhouse. Or worse.
Ever since yesterday’s fiasco at the bank, Dessa hadn’t stopped thanking God that their paths had crossed.
She had to admit the entire episode left her with some confusing thoughts about Mr. Hawkins, though. Before yesterday, she’d grown used to thinking ill of him. It surprised her that she was so pleased to learn he had a heart after all, instead of only those coins rattling about in his chest as Mariadela once claimed.
“Good morning.”
Dessa set aside her coffee with a smile at Jane’s greeting. She rose from her chair to offer Jane the one opposite, then went to the coffeepot. Jane was fully dressed in a walking skirt topped by a somewhat outdated but nonetheless fine-quality basque from the donation box upstairs. They’d gone together to reclaim the pitiable amount of possessions at the tenement house Jane had been about to be evicted from, but the clothing she hadn’t sold or bartered away consisted of only two tattered dresses and a pair of shoes without laces. When Jane had seen the donations Dessa had to offer, she’d readily agreed to toss her old dresses in the waste bin where they belonged.
“Coffee?” Dessa asked.
“I don’t know. I’ve never tasted it.” She took a seat. “My mother said it wasn’t good for me, and Father said we had better things to spend our money on. Luxuries like food, for example.”
Dessa smiled anew. “Well, we don’t have many luxuries here, as you can see, but we have plenty of food, a solid roof over our heads, soft pillows to sleep on. God provides all our needs.”
Instead of coffee, Dessa poured Jane a glass of milk. Then she set about frying some eggs and bacon.
“I recently circulated invitations to Pierson House at most of the factories,” Dessa said, “trying to reach girls just like you before they got to such desperate straits. Did you ever see one?”
Jane looked away, an unmistakable look of discomfort on her face.
“You did, didn’t you, Jane? Do you mind if I ask why you didn’t come here, instead of doing what you did at the bank?”
Jane pushed away a stray strand of hair—long, richly vibrant brown hair that had been necessarily hidden inside that cap. One look at it and her gender would have been immediately clear. “I thought I could get by on my own.”
By stealing? The words were on the tip of Dessa’s tongue, but the one thing Sophie Pierson had drilled into her was that judgment had no place under the roof of a refuge.
“And so you will,” she said instead, turning back to the frying breakfast. “Maybe you can get your job back at the factory now that you’ll be eating properly, or find another job. Or perhaps you’d like to go to school? At least you know you’ll have a place to stay with no fear of being tossed onto the street until you settle on something suitable. You’ll find you do have options, Jane, and I’m here to help as long as you need me.”
As Jane accepted the full plate of food, she glanced up at Dessa, brows raised. “Do you mean I get all of this? For myself?”
“Of course. I’ve already eaten.”
“Oh my! I haven’t eaten so much since . . . ever!” She laughed. “A girl could lose her figure around here, if she had one.”
Dessa returned to the coffeepot to refill her mug. “Eating three healthy meals a day will be good for you, inside and out.” She took her seat again. “Which reminds me. I’ll be posting a sign outside in just a few days, about beauty lessons I’m offering each week. Would you care to help me with my lessons?”
Jane laughed. “Me? I think there’s a reason I fooled everyone at that bank into thinking I was a boy, Miss Caldwell. I’m not exactly what you’d call pretty, or even feminine. I’m too tall, too skinny, and my face . . . well, I’m not pretty. I know that.”
Dessa studied her. Though on Jane the secondhand gown sagged at various unfilled curves, it already lent some appeal because of her tiny waist. It was true that the loveliest thing about Jane was her hair, but there was nothing wrong with her face—nothing that a bit of confidence wouldn’t improve. Her brows were perhaps a bit too thick, but that could easily be fixed if she had the desire. And she had a distinctive look to her short nose, one that could be called delightful. Besides, she was too young to determine whether or not her face would mature into beauty.
“Beauty starts on the inside, Jane. That’s the kind I mean to teach.”
“Oh. You’re talking about God again, aren’t you?”
“You don’t believe in God?”
She shrugged, still eating. “I don’t know much about Him. My mother took me to church, but after she died, my father never went back. And to tell you the truth, God must not have missed me much because He sure didn’t help when I needed Him.”
“Oh, Jane,” Dessa whispered, “don’t you know? It was God’s foot that tripped you in the bank yesterday. He’s the One who made sure you dropped that vial. He did it to send you here.”
“Yoo-hoo! Dessa! Are you here?”
Dessa and Jane were upstairs, going through a crate of material Dessa had stored with the charity clothes in one of the empty bedrooms. Jane had assured Dessa that even though she’d been sacked by the textile company, she could indeed sew. They’d been about to gather material for a new set of pillowcases when Dessa heard Mariadela’s call from downstairs.
“We’re here! But don’t come up; we’re coming down.”
They found Mariadela at the base of the stairs, where Dessa made the introductions.
“I read about the excitement at the bank in the newspaper this morning,” Mariadela said, waving a copy at Dessa. “You couldn’t come by the mercantile to warn me not to miss the story? It says your name right here, that you’d taken in the—” She suddenly stopped herself and glanced at Jane, then held up the paper again. “It calls you a prankster. No name.”
Dessa laughed, leading them all to the dining room, which she’d long envisioned doubling as a sewing room. The table was just right, and the lighting was fine, particularly in the afternoons when the sun filtered through the front bay window.
“Isn’t it wonderful they mentioned we’d taken her in at Pierson House? We can certainly use the free publicity!” Dessa settled the material on the table. “I was going to bring Jane to meet you this afternoon. I know you’re busy in the mornings. As I’ve been.” She smiled, adding, “With a client, for once.”
“I don’t think either of us is too busy for you to tell me that my closest friend’s life has been in danger.” Then she spared another glance at Jane. “I’m sorry. I know you didn’t mean—”
“It’s okay. I was worse than a prankster, and it wasn’t just a dumb thing to do. It was cruel to everyone who was there. I didn’t think of that ahead of time.”
“It was Mr. Hawkins who suffered the most, I think,” Dessa said as she unrolled the material they would cut and sew. “But he never panicked, not for a moment.”
Jane nodded and smiled along. “He was so kind the whole time, even before he knew there was only water in that vial. I’ve done nothing but regret trying to make him a victim.”
“Kind? Henry Hawkins?”
“Of course, Mariadela!” Dessa said. “He didn’t press charges, did he?”
“That’s what the newspaper said. I thought it was because the prankster was a girl.”
“Oh no, that wasn’t the reason at all,” Dessa said.
“He was going to let me go even before he knew I was a girl,” Jane added.
“Hmm. Well, if I didn’t know better, I’d say Mr. Henry Hawkins just restored his place as one of Denver’s most eligible bachelors.”
“What?” Dessa knew she shouldn’t be so shocked. He was, after all, a fine-looking man, one of considerable means. And not all that old.
“Every girl and her mother were after him for years,” Mariadela said. “But eventually everyone accepted that he’s the living representation of Mr. Dickens’s Scrooge, before any of the spirits came to haunt him back to humanity. He wants to be left alone, and so that’s what we do. No one talks about him anymore, except for two things: banking matters and those dinner parties he holds to keep and impress investors.”
Then she sighed. “But that may change now. Everyone coming into the store this morning couldn’t stop talking about how heroic he was to save the bank, and then make sure the—well, you, Jane—didn’t go to jail. It’s made him human again.”
For some reason the notion of every young woman in Denver, not to mention their matchmaking mothers, being after Mr. Hawkins made the hairs on the back of Dessa’s neck stand up.
“No, Mr. Sprott. None of them. Not a single one.”
“But, sir, this woman has refused to leave for the past hour. I believe she’s stubborn enough to wait until you exit your office at the end of the day and waylay you then.”
Henry sighed. He was beginning to think he’d have been better off if Jane’s vial had contained nitroglycerin after all. Invitations, telephone calls, and notes had been arriving all day. Some were disguised as gratitude from bank shareholders, but he knew the invitations to dinner parties were schemes to introduce to him one young woman or another. He’d seen it all before, escapades that he hadn’t missed in the least during his years of isolation.
“Very well. Send her in. But—” he called after Mr. Sprott—“you are to return to my office in precisely three minutes and tell the woman I have a pressing engagement. I’ll not tolerate her company a moment longer than that.”
“Yes, sir.”
Mr. Sprott left, only to return with a stout woman in a cream-colored gown and the tallest, most ridiculously feathered hat Henry had ever had the misfortune to see. She waddled toward him, both hands outstretched.
“Thank you for seeing me, Mr. Hawkins! You do recall inviting my husband, Samuel Hamilton, and me to your lovely home this past winter? My husband has been trying to get you to join the Denver Club—it’s attracting all the best men of the city, I assure you. And I represent the Women’s Anti-Saloon League. Both organizations would be happy if you would visit—”
Though Henry had politely risen to his feet upon her arrival and accepted one of her extended hands in a brief greeting, he now took his seat again, despite the fact that she had not yet done so herself. If she were as meticulous as he guessed, she would see it as the slight he meant it to be.
“I’m terribly sorry, Mrs. . . .”
“Hamilton. Mrs. Samuel Hamilton. Esther, if you like.”
“Yes, well, Mrs. Hamilton, I’m very sorry but my responsibilities here at the bank leave me little time outside the office. You understand, of course.”
“Oh, but you must eat, mustn’t you, Mr. Hawkins? I’d be—that is, my husband and I would be ever so pleased to have you to dinner. We’d love for you to meet our daughter! A true beauty, so says everyone who meets her. Can we plan for you to come, then? Saturday evening? Or perhaps Sunday afternoon? Surely you don’t work every day of the week! Even someone as dedicated as yourself must take time for rest. It’s not good for the soul to work all the—”
“Mrs. Hamilton,” Henry said, in a tone so firm he was pleased to see her mouth clamp closed, “if your daughter has recently become of marriageable age, then I am far too old for her. If she has been of marriageable age for some time, then I shall be blunt and tell you she is far too old for me. In any case, I am not in the market for a wife. Good day, Mrs. Hamilton.”
“But I don’t understand, Mr. Hawkins. What would be the right age?”
Thankfully, Mr. Sprott came through the door just as she finished her question, sparing Henry the need to extend an impolite answer.