Collision of The Heart (5 page)

“Please do. Report anything you learn to me. I’m Ayden Goswell.”

They reached First Church, and Ayden spent the next hour helping to distribute luggage while inquiring after the lost child’s people. Too little baggage had survived the wreck and fire, and many people turned away from the piles of bags with stricken faces.

Ayden departed with his own disappointment to have learned nothing about the little boy. He trudged home carrying Mia’s rather battered portmanteau and entered the house to find nearly everyone assembled in the parlor reading, playing a board game, or dozing by the fire.

“You are late,” Mom said.

“Whose luggage is that?” Rosalie leaped to her feet. “Did you go out to the wreck?”

“No, I got this at First Church.” Ayden set the case in the front hall. “It’s Mi—Euphemia’s.”

The woman from the train, whose name Ayden still did not know, glanced his way, then toward the toddler, who was squeezing a lumpy stuffed dog on the carpet. “Did you learn anything about him?” Her voice was whispery, and she did not meet his eyes.

He shook his head. “It’s like someone simply dropped the child onto the train and forgot about him. No one noticed him or anyone with him.”

“Did you ask about the woman with the injured leg?” Mia spoke from behind him, her voice low, like cool, soothing fingers on a fevered brow.

A thrill ran up his spine. His shoulders stiffened. He must not respond to her this way. She had betrayed him before. She was perfectly clear now that she was only in Hillsdale on a temporary assignment. If he didn’t look at her, he wouldn’t care that she stood in his home.

But everyone was looking at him, including the children in the middle of the floor.

He turned and took in her appearance in a glance. She had always looked delicate. Now she looked fragile, as though a medium breeze would knock her over. The multitude of petticoats belling out her soft wool skirt emphasized how thin she was, far thinner than she had been when Ma had been feeding her five out of seven nights a week.

“Don’t they feed you in Boston?” he asked.

Pa chuckled. Ma and Rosalie gasped.

“You’re so rude,” Rosalie scolded. “She’s as beautiful as ever.”

Mia smiled and cradled her left wrist with her other hand. “I work hard and don’t have cooking as fine as Mrs. Goswell’s to sustain me.” She glanced at Rosalie. “And I’ll be wary of younger sisters bearing gifts of food and tea in the future.”

Ayden glared at his sister. “You didn’t ask her about the laudanum?”

“I, um,”—Rosalie bit her lip—“well, I said it was just a drop or two.”

“Rosalie, that’s—”

“She meant well.” Mia glided forward, her skirts rustling, her head high, though her neck seemed too thin to support so much hair. “I’m sure I needed the rest, but I would have liked to have gone looking for the boy’s mother.”

“He doesn’t even have a name,” the little girl said. “We just call him Boy.”

“The quality of his clothes is fine,” Ma said. “I sent them out with the laundry. They were filthy.”

“Did they have any initials in them?” Ayden asked.

At the same time, Mia asked, “Were they monogrammed?”

They looked at one another. Their eyes met in a flash of remembered camaraderie, for they had often spoken the same thoughts.

Ayden jerked back a step. “I’m going to Charmaine’s. They’re expecting me for dinner.”

“You should stay home.” Pa levered himself from his chair with the stiffness he had shown since his accident two years earlier. “We have that young man you invited to stay here coming.” He started to stoop to add more logs to the fire.

Ayden strode over and crouched before the blaze to do the task instead. “I’ll chop some more wood before I go.”

He needed the exercise and the immediate escape from the faint whiff of lemon verbena—Mia’s scent.

“The Taggart boy chopped plenty today.” Pa returned to his chair and lowered himself into it with a slowness that made Ayden’s back hurt to watch. “You run off if you must tonight, but tomorrow, I think you should help Mia hunt for that boy’s people.”

“He need not,” Mia protested.

“I really should be making lesson plans up on the hill.” Ayden referred to the college, his retreat, his escape, his lame excuse for not helping Mia. With his family giving him accusing glares, he turned away. “I should be going.”

“Running off.” Rosalie’s taunting voice rang after Ayden all the way down the street to the Finney house.

So what if he was. A prudent man ran away from trouble. And being near Mia was trouble.

With her staying in his parents’ house, he couldn’t run away from trouble in the form of coming face-to-face with Euphemia Roper. What had he been thinking to invite her to stay there? He should have known his heart would suffer. Yet he thought he had been healed of that pain, believed offering her accommodations far more comfortable than the boardinghouse was the right thing to do. And Pa had insisted. He was courting Charmaine Finney, and if he didn’t love her with the same devotion he had given Mia, that was the safer course for his future. Charmaine did not possess the power to wound his heart as Mia had.

Though he thought he could escape the house early to avoid taking Mia to hunt for the lost child’s people, she was up early with Ma. He rose from building up the dining room fire, turned toward the doorway, and Mia stood there before him, one arm balancing a tray laden with silverware and cups.

The sun hadn’t yet risen, but firelight limned her face, making her skin glow and drawing red highlights from her chestnut hair. She wore that hair braided and wound around her head, a severe style that emphasized her delicate bones and the dark shadows beneath her green eyes.

“You should be resting.” He removed the tray from her hand, his glance dropping to her bandaged wrist. “No portfolio this morning?”

She looked past his shoulder. “I don’t usually eat with it.”

“That’s not what I recall.”

A stab of pain struck him the instant he read hurt on her face.

They’d fought about that once. He wanted her full attention during a picnic, and she wanted to write down her impressions of some incident she had witnessed in town before she forgot them. He could not understand how the sight of a policeman and a shopkeeper chasing a ragged boy with a basket of strawberries was more important than paying attention to him. Mia had given him a scathing glance, murmured something about how he had never wanted for anything, and continued to write, much as he had found her the night of the train wreck.

He should have known during that picnic that their future together was doomed.

He should have known better now than to bring up the subject. He should apologize. Instead, he turned toward the table. “Has all that writing not paid off well enough for you to now be famous?”

She did not respond, for which he did not blame her. The query did not deserve an answer. It was mean, born of a hurt he thought he no longer felt.

“I am sorry,” he said.

When he still received no response, Ayden turned to see Mia had left the dining room. He sighed. He deserved her silent abandonment. Without her presence, the room felt colder.

Seeking nothing more than warmth and food, he followed Mia into the kitchen. Heat, the scent of fresh ground pepper on the potatoes, and female voices swirled around him. “So what do you plan to do today?” Ma was asking.

“Work.” Mia lifted slices of fried ham from the skillet and slid them onto a platter. “Rosalie should be down any minute. I’m not sure about the lady with the children and that little boy I took off the train. Should I go up and wake them?”

“Let them sleep,” Ayden said at the same time as his mother.

“I can keep food warm for them in the oven,” Ma added. She pulled open the oven door and lifted out a sheet of biscuits. “Once we’re done cooking here. Ayden, take this platter into the dining room.”

Ayden took the platter of fried potatoes from Ma. “I’d rather fix a plate for myself and eat in here. It’s warmer.”

“The dining room will be warm soon enough, and there’s not enough room in here.” Ma pointed her spatula at the table only large enough for two. “Now take that platter in and come back for Mia’s plate.”

“I can manage.” Mia lifted the platter with one hand, but it tilted far enough for a slice of meat to slide onto the worktable. She set the platter down again as her face flooded with hot color. “I’m sorry. My wrist should be better in a day or two, the doctor told me.”

“I’ll get it.” Ayden took her platter in his other hand. “With the way you hang on to that portfolio of yours, you would think you would have hurt your other wrist.”

“Ayden.” Ma rapped his knuckles with her spatula as though he were a small boy stealing sweets. “That was unkind.”

Mia fingered her wrist but looked Ayden in the eye. “I probably wouldn’t have hurt my wrist if I’d been holding on to my portfolio.”

“Likely you’d have bumped your head instead, which might have—” He stopped.

The days of gentle teasing were over. After his rather unkind remark about her holding on to her portfolio, a remark about a blow on her head knocking sense into her, a remark too easily taken wrong, was not the right conversational gambit.

“I’m glad nothing’s broken.” He swung around and marched into the dining room in time to hear a giggle and a whisper and the patter of small feet on the steps.

“Come on in here,” he called to the children.

A boy and girl peeked around the edge of the dining room door. He hadn’t paid much attention to them before. They looked near three years apart in age, but their relationship to one another was apparent in their big brown eyes and wild black curls.

“Hungry?” Ayden asked.

They nodded.

“Is your mother coming?” he pressed.

They nodded again, then the girl whispered, “She’s bringing that boy without a momma.”

“How did he lose his momma?” the boy asked.

“I don’t know, but I’m going to keep looking for his momma today.” Ayden pulled out a chair and bowed to the little girl. “We all need breakfast first. Will you sit here, Miss—?” He raised an eyebrow.

“Herring,” the girl said. “Ellie Herring, and this is my brother, Roy.”

“Well, then, Miss and Mr. Herring, come join us.” Ayden pulled out another chair. “Do you like milk?”

Ma bustled into the room, carrying a tray filled with a milk jug, glasses, and a coffeepot. “Did you children wash your hands?”

They nodded and held up tiny hands.

“Good. We’ll get you some help until your momma gets down.” Ma cast Ayden a questioning glance.

“They tell me she’s helping that lost child get ready.”

Chattering away like a squirrel protecting his walnut tree, Rosalie entered the dining room, towing Mrs. Herring behind her. She carried the child Mia had rescued after the wreck, the one without a mother. Either without or, worse, abandoned by his mother. The child was too young to say one way or another. But he did not seem distraught to be surrounded by strangers. When Mrs. Herring took the chair between her own children, the little boy sat on her lap, his head resting against her shoulder, his thumb poked between puckered lips.

Mia entered with a basket of biscuits, and Ma motioned for Ayden to help her bring in the rest of the food. Pa and Gerrett Divine arrived in the middle of the serving, and for several minutes, organized chaos reigned. Once all the food rested on the table, everyone was seated, and the blessing was spoken, Ayden found Mia across the breakfast table from him.

For months before their engagement crashed to a conclusion, he had imagined this moment of having Mia across from him in the morning. The two of them would share a pot of coffee, deliberately brush fingers as they handed one another butter or jelly. They would talk about what the newspapers had printed and what they needed to read, study, or otherwise accomplish that day . . . In his dream, they would be alone, however, and her hair would be loose on her shoulders. She would smile at him with sleepy joy.

Seeing her with her hair wound tight, her face drawn, not joyful, and the crowd of strangers around them, his heart felt bruised all over again. She hadn’t even spoken to him since their last exchange in the kitchen.

No, not exchange. His last comment to her.

No longer hungry, he drained his coffee and pushed back his chair. “If I may please be excused, I’d like to get going on looking for that baby’s mother.”

“I need to be doing the same.” Mia looked at him then and pushed back her own chair. She set her napkin beside a plate with little food spooned onto it and barely any of it touched.

Ma frowned, looking from one to the other. “Neither of you has eaten enough for going into the cold.”

“I don’t need much breakfast.” Mia flashed her quick, warm smile at Ma.

Pa chuckled. “Or lunch or dinner, by the look of you, young lady.”

Her smile flashed for Pa this time. “I can’t take the time to eat. I have already lost a day. Right now, I need to work.”

“When don’t you need to work?” The words slipped out from Ayden’s lips before he could stop himself. Against the background of the children’s chatter and the smell of rich food and wood smoke, that remark sounded bitter.

Mia met his gaze straight on and smiled at him, this time without the warmth. “I need to work as often as you do, Professor Goswell.”

Which was why their dreams of marital bliss had been doomed from the start.

He took a deep breath to ease the tightness in his chest. “Then go get yourself some warm clothes, and we’ll be off.”

“You don’t need to escort me,” Mia insisted. “I travel all over the East Coast without an escort.”

“But you shouldn’t.” Ma’s chin took on its stubborn set. “I’d say you’d be all right here, but with all these extra people in town, I’ll feel more comfortable having you in Ayden’s company.”

“Yes, ma’am.” A flash in Mia’s eyes belied the humility of her response. Head bowed, she slipped from the room and vanished up the steps.

Ayden sighed. “Ma, please don’t try to matchmake us. I am all but engaged to Miss Finney.”

“Or to that position at the college,” Rosalie murmured.