“Now, Nell,” called someone from the other side of the room. “Don’t be telling tales. Your old dad always shows up by two bells.”
She laughed. “Me dad can’t hear the bells. But,” she admitted, Jack thought with some affection, “he shouldn’t be too long now.”
? ? ?
MR. MALONE DID appear in fairly short order, with wisps of hay in his sparse gray hair. Shouting, they managed well enough to rent a horse and trap, but by that time it was already half past two, and they still didn’t know exactly where they were going.
“We’ll have to go someplace else to ask directions,” Jack said.
But Anna had other ideas. She produced a pencil and a piece of paper and put them on the counter in front of the old man. On it she printed in clear letters: Please draw a map to Mount Loretto.
You would have thought she had handed him a hundred-dollar bill, he was so pleased to be able to help. In five minutes they had a decent map, with roads marked. Anna gave the man a fifty-cent piece, and he winked at her.
“I was starting to think this whole undertaking was doomed,” Anna said, once they set off.
Jack bumped her with his shoulder. “Got to have more faith than that, Savard.”
For a few minutes the chestnut—young and up to tricks in the fine weather—demanded his full attention, and by the time he could look at Anna, she was focused on the view. He wondered what he had missed, because it seemed, just then, that she was holding back something she could not quite bring herself to say. But he wouldn’t press, not on such a fine afternoon. They passed a small farmstead surrounded by dogwood and mountain laurel in trembling first blossom. Geese were busy looking for worms and slugs in a newly turned garden plot, stark white against the dark soil.
Jack pointed out a stand of shrubby persimmon trees covered in waxy white blossoms, Pinxterbloom azaleas, violas and violets.
“I couldn’t name more than three of the hundreds of plants I’m seeing,” Anna said. “But to you they all have personalities.”
“I suppose that’s true,” Jack said. “My mother talks about plants that way, as if they had minds of their own.”
“Do you think she’ll approve of me?” She asked the question lightly, but she was anxious. As Jack knew he would be anxious if her father were alive and unknown to him.
“Yes,” he said. “I really think she will.”
“Even if I’m the cause of your sisters going home?”
“She’ll love you all the more for that,” Jack said. “She’d like to have them home.”
Anna hummed. He looked at her and saw an expression that was doubtful and suspicious both.
“What if your sisters don’t want to go back to Greenwood?”
He said, “Unmarried young women do not live alone. It’s an unwritten but sacrosanct law in Italian families. If something should happen to one of them, it’s the men in the family who are seen as having failed.”
After a long and almost tense pause she said, “We would have room for them in the new house.”
He heard himself draw in a sharp breath. “You’re not serious.”
“No,” Anna admitted. “But the possibility should be discussed, at least.”
“They will make you crazy.”
“Maybe,” Anna conceded. “But I am at work all day, and I don’t have time to cook and clean. If they are willing to keep the house—”
“I don’t want to share you with my sisters,” Jack said. “And we can afford a housekeeper.”
They had had a frank discussion about money: earnings and savings and property. In return for surrendering his interest in the family farm Jack had a share in the commercial end of the business in the city, which bolstered the modest salary he drew as a detective sergeant. Anna’s father had liquidated his property in New Orleans long before the war; the estate had gone to her brother, and then it had come to her. If not for the 1873 panic and the depression that followed they would be moderately wealthy; as it was, they were far better off than most of their generation. They wouldn’t be building mansions on Fifth Avenue, but that would be true if they had as much money as the Astor and Vanderbilt families combined. They could afford a housekeeper, and they would need one, of that there was no question.
She nodded in reluctant agreement. “The thing is, if they are forced back to Greenwood because of me, I’ll never have a chance to win them over. What?” she said. “You look surprised.”
“I didn’t think you ever worried about things like that. What people think of you.”
“Of course I do,” Anna said. And then, when he held her gaze for a moment: “Well, all right. I might not worry about what a store clerk thinks about my boots or what the district attorney thinks about my education, but this is your family we’re talking about. Your mother, above all. I would like her to be happy for you. Which reminds me—”
Jack tensed.
“—You must have had some pressure to marry before this point. Did they pick you out a wife?”
“As a matter of fact,” Jack said, and it was Anna’s turn to tense.