Half Moon Street - Anne Perry [37]
“And did you remain in New York?” Caroline enquired.
“Oh no,” Samuel replied with a wide smile. “When I was twenty, I decided to journey westward, just to go and see it, you understand?”
“And leave your poor mother?” Mariah said with some sarcasm. It gave her a ghost of pleasure to think of Alys by herself again. It served her right.
“Oh, believe me, ma’am, my mother was well able to care for herself by then,” he assured her, leaning back more comfortably in his chair. “She had a nice little business going in dressmaking, and employed several girls. She had made friends and knew a great many people. She missed me, I hope, but she did not mind when I packed up and went west, first to Pittsburgh, then up to Illinois.”
He continued with marvelous descriptions of the great plains that stretched for a thousand miles westwards to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.
Mariah began to relax. He was merely entertaining, after all. Like most men, he loved to be the center of attention. Unlike most, he had a great gift for anecdote and a very ready sense of humor. Caroline’s face was quite flushed, and she had barely taken her eyes off him since he began.
Tea was brought, poured and passed. This was not so bad after all.
“But you returned to New York,” Caroline asked.
“I came back east when my mother was taken ill,” Samuel answered her.
“Of course.” She nodded. “Of course. You would naturally want to take care of her. She never married again?”
A curious expression crossed Samuel’s face, a mixture of pity and something which could have been anger.
Mariah felt the chill of warning shiver through her. It was not over. She wanted to say something to cut off Caroline’s intrusive enquiries, but for once she could think of nothing which would not simply make it worse.
“I hope she recovered,” Caroline said earnestly. “She must still have been quite young.”
“Oh, yes,” Samuel responded with a smile. “It proved to be no more than a passing thing, thank heaven.”
“You must have been close,” Caroline said gently. “Having endured so much together.”
His face softened, and there was a great tenderness in his eyes. “We were. Much as I wished to find my English family as well, I don’t think I would ever have left America while she was alive. I never knew a person, man or woman, with more courage and strength of will to follow her own mind and be her own person, whatever it cost.”
Caroline smiled; there was a sweetness in her, almost a glow, as if the words held great value for her.
“It does cost,” she agreed, looking intently at Samuel. “One can be so uncertain, so filled with doubts and loneliness, and the way cannot always be retraced. Sometimes it is too late before you even realize what you have paid.”
Samuel looked at her with quite open appreciation, as though she had offered him a profound compliment.
“I see you understand very well, Mrs. Fielding. I believe you would have liked her, and she you. You seem to be of one mind.”
Mariah stiffened. What was he talking about? The woman had left her husband and run off to America. He was speaking as if it were some kind of a virtue. How much did he know? Surely she would never have—could never . . . no woman would! The coldness hardened inside her like ice. Old memories of pain returned, things forgotten years ago, pushed into the oblivion at the edges of her mind.
She must do something, now, before it was too late.
“I suppose you were there during that miserable war?” she said abruptly. “It must have been most disagreeable.”
“That hardly begins to describe it, Mrs. Ellison,” Samuel said gravely. “Any war is dreadful, but one among people of one nation who are even known to each other, perhaps brothers,