From This Moment (28 page)

Then they went back to kissing. At one point, she ended up on Romulus’s lap as he tried to properly assess her weight by jostling her on his knee. At any moment, someone could enter the stacks and she’d have to spring up and scurry to the other side of the table, but for now, this interlude was too idyllic to worry about such things.

“Will you go for a ride on the swan boats with me next week?” Romulus asked. “I think I’ve verified your weight will not sink the boat.”

“What are the swan boats?” she asked, still perched on his knee. She’d heard of the swan boats but couldn’t quite remember where.

“They are paddle-wheeled boats on the lagoon at the Public Garden. They’ve got oversized swans carved onto their figurehead. The tourists love them. I see them as a perfect excuse to sit too close to a fetching lady while someone else paddles us around the pond.”

Now she remembered where she’d heard of the swan boats. It was one of the first times she’d visited Romulus at
Scientific World
, and a woman had run sobbing from his office. Daisy—that was her name. Romulus had said she’d made far too much
of their jaunt on the swan boats and now she wouldn’t stop pestering him.

She rose from his lap and went to turn another page of
Birds of America
. “Is that where you take all your casual dalliances?”

“It’s where a nice afternoon can be had,” he said, a hint of tightness in his voice. “A simple day in the sunshine, entirely free of hysterics.”

Hysterics. The word set her teeth on edge. “Don’t think I’m ignorant of the origin of that word,” she said. “It’s from the Greek word for womb and is used by male physicians who wish to dismiss or belittle female emotions.”

“I asked you for a boat ride,” he said tensely as he replaced the oversized Audubon book in its place on the shelf. “That’s all, just a boat ride. I’ve been very frank about my disinterest in a lasting romantic relationship because it’s best to avoid setting up false expectations. The world is filled with attractive women, and I have no desire to be shackled to just one. Not yet.”

And she had no desire to prolong this conversation.

“Fine,” she said tightly. She brushed past him to head into the main room of the archives, where their stacks of paperwork were still scattered across the table.

Romulus adjusted his cuff links and refused to meet her eyes. “I trust we will be able to return to our respective roles and put this incident behind us?”

“Incident?” An incident was a mishap, like a glass of spilled milk. It wasn’t a glorious hour of perfect delight with the other half of your soul.

“Now don’t look at me like that,” Romulus said. “You’ve always known how I felt about delving into any serious romantic rapport with any woman. Not before I’m forty—”

“If I hear the word
forty
one more time, I’ll strangle you with your own cravat.”

He rolled his eyes. “You remind me of our accountant, Millicent O’Grady. How often did I warn her? And still she’s set her sights on me. It is embarrassing and awkward for us both.”

“Is that what I am to you? Embarrassing and awkward?” She didn’t bother to lower her voice, and Ernest sent a disapproving look at her from behind the front counter.

“Not unless you continue pestering me over things I’ve been very clear about. And forget about that boat ride. It was clearly a catastrophically bad suggestion.”

Heat smoldered inside her, but the worst thing was, everything he said was right. From the day they’d met, he had laughingly asserted his desire to live as a carefree bachelor, and she’d ignored it. Somehow she’d thought the rules didn’t apply to her because of this overwhelming, unwieldy, and glorious attraction. And he felt it too, she knew he did, but for some reason he shied away from it like a bat afraid of the sunlight.

“You’re inherently shallow,” she accused. It was childish, but she didn’t care.

“I’m honest.” He started gathering up the notes they had taken. Notes that
she
had taken. He’d done nothing but stare into space while she toiled away on his behalf. Even now, he was aimlessly paging through the stacks of notes and making a mess of things. He didn’t know which papers belonged in which file.

She sighed in exasperation and pushed him away. “I’ll do it,” she muttered. She had too much respect for Ernest Palmer to return a pile of disorganized files to him.

“I’m not a complete idiot,” Romulus said, and she handed him her page of handwritten notes.

“Here,” she said. “This is a list of the case law the labor unions used to overturn the city’s ruling six years ago. You can give it to your lawyer.”

Romulus said nothing as he tucked her notes into the pocket
in his suit jacket. She didn’t know if any of the work she’d done would yield results, but she needed to get out of here. She wasn’t going to become a pest like Millicent O’Grady, and she’d neglected her own affairs too long on his behalf.

Silence raged as she completed sorting the rest of the documents into their proper files. She carried them to Ernest, who regarded her with serious eyes. For once, he didn’t want to jabber about typeface or printing techniques, for which she was grateful. He had probably overheard every word of her embarrassing exchange with Romulus, but at least she wouldn’t go to her grave wondering if Romulus might have proven to be the love of her life. She’d taken a peek beneath his glamorous exterior and found only an immature man incapable of growing up.

The carriage ride home was long and uncomfortable. She remained as far to one side of the padded seat as possible, her body snug against the carriage wall. He stared ahead, his expression like stone. Each time the carriage bumped or jostled, she clung to the armrest to avoid any possible contact.

It was a relief when the carriage drew to a halt before Evelyn’s townhouse.

Before she could tell him not to bother, Romulus sprang down and offered her a hand. “Take care, Miss West,” he said formally.

He’d probably used a similar phrase dozens of times over the years to extract himself from difficult situations.

“Thank you, Romulus. You are surely the glibbest man in all of Boston.” Why was she acting like this? She hadn’t behaved this childishly since, well . . . since she’d been a child. She just didn’t know what to do with these bewildering emotions swirling inside. She couldn’t be the only one feeling them, could she?

Romulus walked her to the front door. She needed to make it clear she’d have nothing more to do with
Scientific World
, to tell him she’d neglected her own responsibilities for too long.
Did he even care that she’d ignored her hunt for A.G. because of him?

“I’m going home to my parents,” she said. “They may have insight into Gwendolyn’s final months and should be healed enough to speak about it by now. I’ve neglected that shamefully in the past week.”

“Give your parents my regards,” he said politely.

She fumbled in her reticule for the door key. “After that, perhaps I’ll go back to London. A new publishing house is set to open on Fleet Street.”
Please ask me to stay. Please don’t be so indifferent that you won’t care if I get on a ship and sail three thousand miles away
.

But he said nothing, just dipped his head in a little bow and returned to the carriage.

She ought to go to London just to prove how little he meant to her. But why stop at London? She could go on to Rome. Or to Moscow. She’d heard Japan was becoming interested in lithography.

But in her heart, all she wanted to do was race home to the tiny village of Hudson, New York, with its village green and Sunday picnics and her mother’s legendary lamb stew. She wanted to sit at her father’s rolltop desk with all its hidey-holes and tiny drawers where he used to stash candy for her and Gwendolyn to find. She wanted to curl up in the turret bedroom she had once shared with Gwendolyn and dreamed of knights in shining armor and faraway lands. Her life had been perfect in Hudson, and she couldn’t wait to get back to it.

Romulus White was nothing in comparison. He was fickle. Erratic. He was exactly what his long-ago love had accused him of being. An impossible man who couldn’t commit to anything.

And yet Stella loved him anyway.

14

S
tella had grown up in a rambling Queen Anne home with a wide front porch, spindle columns, and a turret that rose two stories tall. She and Gwendolyn had shared a bedroom in the upstairs turret. From one window, they could see all the way to Hudson’s quaint main street, and to the right was her mother’s two-acre rose and herb garden. On summer nights, they watched fireflies glimmer in the garden, and in the autumn they could open the window and smell apples brewing in the cider mill down the road.

Her father used the front two rooms of the house for his medical practice, but there were no patients here today. “I’ve sent everyone to Dr. Willis during your visit,” her father said warmly as he pulled the carriage to a halt. “My beautiful daughter is home, and the proverbial fatted calf shall be slain. We shall have a feast, and her path shall be sprinkled with rose petals.”

“Rose petals in April?” She laughed.

The front door opened, and her mother came bounding out the door, her smile blinding as she shrieked and tugged Stella into her warm, vanilla-scented embrace. Tears pricked
the corners of Stella’s eyes as she hugged her mother, for it had been years since she’d seen Eloise look so vibrant.

The instant she stepped inside her childhood home, the scent of lamb stew and peach cobbler enveloped her. The first few minutes back home were filled with laughter and good cheer, and Stella kept glancing over at her mother. Eloise looked healthy, with a bit of color in her cheeks and no longer so gaunt. She’d taken time to carefully style her fading blond hair into a neat coil on the back of her head, a welcome change from the scraggly braid her mother was too dispirited to comb while at the asylum.

A seed of hope took root. If her parents had managed to pull themselves out of the fog of despondency, perhaps she could begin asking the kinds of questions that had been impossible in the devastating weeks following Gwendolyn’s death.

They moved through the front rooms toward the family’s parlor, dining room, and kitchen. She let her eyes drink in the cherished, familiar sights. The grand old rolltop desk where she and Gwendolyn used to play, her father’s collection of antique clocks lined up on the mantelpiece, her mother’s potted herbs growing on the windowsill, and the steady pulse of the grandfather clock ticking in the corner. All of it brought a rush of comforting memories.

But something was wrong. Beside the grandfather clock was a stack of boxes that didn’t belong.

“What are those?” she asked as her mother pressed a glass of sweet tea into her hands.

Some of the pleasure faded from her father’s face at the question, but Eloise seemed unusually bright. “Oh, that’s my little project,” she said. “No need to worry about it today. I’ll show it to you tomorrow.”

Her gaze drifted back to the boxes. One of Gwendolyn’s old dolls was propped up against the boxes, and it was an odd
sight. That doll had been consigned to the attic twenty years ago—what did her mother want with it now?

“Your mother has been sorting through Gwendolyn’s old things again,” her father said. “It’s harmless.”

But he didn’t sound very convinced.

Eloise went to the kitchen to spoon the stew into bowls. It had been a four-hour train ride from Boston, and Stella had craved her mother’s slow-simmered lamb stew the entire time. Eloise always simmered it so long the carrots and potatoes almost blended in with the gravy, which used to be the only way she could coax Stella to eat her vegetables. To this day, it was the perfect meal to Stella. These overcooked vegetables and savory lamb stew signified home and comfort and every warm childhood memory.

They made small talk while Stella ate. Eloise chatted about their upcoming trip to Boulder Point, where they’d spent their honeymoon and would now spend four days at the finest suite in the resort hotel. Stella asked her father for his insight into sudden hearing loss. He couldn’t give her much more information than Clyde’s doctor at the hospital, but he promised to send an inquiry to a hearing specialist in New York. The inner ear was a mystery that was hard to study, and science had made very little progress in treating hearing loss.

At last the meal was finished, the plates cleared away, and her gaze strayed back to the tower of boxes. Her mother brightened when she saw Stella’s curiosity.

“I’ve been organizing Gwendolyn’s old things,” she said as she lifted the lid from the top box. Inside were stacks of old childhood drawings and schoolwork in childish printing. Her mother had always saved anything her precious daughters produced, and now Stella suspected she tortured herself by endlessly sorting through them and reliving the memories in each faded piece of paper.

Eloise lifted out the top drawing, a wild splash of pastel colors on an oversized piece of paper. Stella remembered that painting, done during a summer they’d spent at her grandparents’ farm in upstate New York because her father wanted to teach them about the natural world. On days when rain kept them trapped inside, she and Gwendolyn had opened a huge box of pastels to draw with.

Even as children, their distinct personalities were apparent in their artwork. While Stella captured the exact details of things like the fine threads of a bird’s feather, Gwendolyn drew idealized images of castles and knights. Even as a child, Gwendolyn had dreamed of a perfect world.

Stella set down Gwendolyn’s exuberant drawing of a castle. She pawed through the other papers in the box, finding only more artwork. “Are there letters from Gwendolyn in any of these boxes? From after she moved to Boston?”

“Oh my, no,” her mother said. “Gwendolyn called us on the telephone once a week, but she never wrote.”

Her spirit sagged, but only for a moment. “During those telephone calls, did she ever mention meeting with someone outside of work?”

“Like a beau?” her mother asked.

“Maybe. Or someone she was working with on a project. A mission.” She hesitated to say Gwendolyn had been engaged in some sort of clandestine intrigue. It would only upset her parents, and they would hound her for more information. She didn’t even know how to characterize the nature of Gwendolyn’s relationship with the mysterious A.G. It seemed to have been a combination of hero-worship, romantic longing, and a crusading partnership all wrapped up into one puzzling liaison.