Longing for Home (22 page)

Mr. Archer came around the corner from the direction of the barn, apparently on his way to the porch. What had brought him there? Generally during the day she saw her employer only at lunch time.

He didn’t come up the steps but stopped just on the other side of the porch railing. ’Twas to Biddy he spoke. “Finbarr has finished his work for the day. I’ll take you both back in the wagon, if you’re ready to go. It would save you the walk.”

“I thank you, Joseph. My sister-in-law is watching my little ones so I could have a good gab with Katie, here. But I’d best go relieve her.”

Mr. Archer nodded and turned to walk back the way he’d come. Biddy stopped him.

“Have you a moment, Joseph, to think on a problem?”

“Of course.”

Of course?
Was this the standoffish, grumpy Joseph Archer Katie had come to know?

“You may have heard that our Katie, here, has found herself with only half the pay she’d come to Wyoming expecting.”

“Biddy,” Katie said urgently under her breath. Her friend didn’t so much as pause.

“She’s needing to find work after her heartless employer tosses her out to make way for her replacement.”

“Biddy.”

“She’s to be thrown into the hedgerow, you know. Had you heard anything like that, Joseph?”

Something very much like laughter shone in the back of Mr. Archer’s eyes. Katie found she couldn’t look away from the sight. ’Twas an unexpected change in him, one she liked very much indeed. He seemed a regular, approachable sort of man in that moment.

“I had heard that, actually,” he said. “Katie still spends her afternoons here, so I’d guess she hasn’t found secondary work.”

“Alas, no.” Biddy shook her head, her lips turned down in an expression of utmost sorrow. Her antics were enough to nearly bring a smile to Katie’s face. If not for Joseph Archer’s presence and her uncertainty about his opinions, Katie might even have laughed. “But she does have an idea,” Biddy added.

He was looking at her now. “Do you really?”

“Just the beginnings of one,” Katie replied. “I’m sure you’ve more important things to spend your time on, though.”

He didn’t take the excuse she handed him. “What is your idea?” He leaned against the railing.

“I thought of starting a business.” The idea sounded ridiculous spoken out loud to someone who actually knew about such things. “It’s likely a foolish idea.”

“What kind of business?”

“Baking bread and such.” She quickly added a bit of explanation. “Not a fancy bakery with its own building, just me and a stove.”

“How much would you charge for your goods?”

Katie couldn’t believe he was taking her idea seriously. “I never learned to do proper ciphering. I don’t have the first idea how to figure prices.”

“But I do.” Mr. Archer smiled at her then. Truly, fully smiled.

Katie felt a rush of heat steal over her face, something she hadn’t anticipated in the least. He stood too close to have missed the rising color in her cheeks. She couldn’t account for it and had no idea what he would make of it.

“There now,” Biddy said. “I knew Joseph could help. If anyone hereabout would know how to get a business off and running, Joseph would.”

Katie hadn’t entirely shaken off the impact of his smile. She did manage to give him what she hoped was a grateful look.

“Running a business takes a lot of investment, in time and money,” he warned. “Do you have savings you could tap into to purchase supplies?”

She did, indeed. An old biscuit tin tucked under her bed held several rolls of pounds and dollars saved over eighteen years. She could not, however, spend it all. “I do have some.”

He nodded. His expression had turned contemplative. That he hadn’t dismissed her idea offhand was comforting and encouraging. But she missed his smile, brief as it had been.

“I had planned to go into town on Monday,” Mr. Archer said. “I can check the cost of the goods you’ll need. We can use that to determine your prices.”

“Thank you for that, Mr. Archer.”

Something of his earlier smile reappeared, though not quite as bright as it had been. Why didn’t he smile more often, she wondered.

Mr. Archer turned toward the yard and called out to his daughters playing there. “Climb in the wagon, girls. We’re taking Finbarr and Mrs. O’Connor home.”

As the Archers made their way out of sight, Biddy paused beside Katie. She squeezed her hand. “I knew just as soon as I met you that we’d be friends, Katie. With this bakery, you’ll not have to run off looking for work elsewhere.”

“Don’t get your hopes too high yet,” Katie answered. “I can’t say any of my plans have worked out too well over the years.”

Biddy pulled her into an embrace. Katie froze. She’d not been hugged in years.

“I’ll be optimistic for the both of us, Katie. As the saying goes, ‘Hope springs eternal.’”

Chapter Twenty

Joseph sat at the kitchen table on Friday finishing his lunch. His thoughts were firmly on Katie. More often than they should have been, his eyes were on her, too. She sometimes wore a painfully heavy look on her face while she worked. He could see her thoughts were thousands of miles away and that those thoughts weighed on her. She’d worn much the same look the night before.

She’d excused herself just as soon as she cleared the table, insisting she had something important to see to. Joseph sat on the back porch and listened to the sound of violin music floating over the river. He knew Katie was the musician. Her talent was awe inspiring. He wanted to ask her where she’d learned, how long she’d played, why it meant so much to her that she would skip meals in order to play. He’d thought of her plan to sell bread and thought it a shame she couldn’t make her living playing music. Her talent was absolutely wasted in a town like Hope Springs.

Katie Macauley was a puzzle. She had a fiercely independent nature yet at times seemed painfully unhappy in her self-imposed seclusion.

He set his plate and fork on the worktop beside the sink as he’d taken to doing after his midday meal. Though Katie didn’t always talk to him while she washed the dishes, she did sometimes. He liked spending those moments in conversation with her. He looked forward to it all morning, if he were being honest.

“Did you ever have anything to eat last night, Katie?” It was, perhaps, not the most sophisticated beginning to a conversation.

“I’m afraid it slipped my mind,” she said.

He didn’t like the idea of her missing meals. Though he knew better than to say as much, she’d been too thin when she arrived, her face showing clear signs of having gone too long without regular, filling meals. That hint of gauntness hadn’t left her yet.

“Katie.”

“No need scolding me. I have had two meals already today.”

He’d learned within the first few days that she took offense easily. Joseph wasn’t sure if that came from past hurts or simple mulishness. His curiosity about that had only grown.

“Is there a reason you are so opposed to the idea of eating with us?” he asked. If she would only sit down to meals with them, as their last housekeeper always had, he would know she was getting the nourishment she needed. “I assure you the girls are well behaved at the table, and I generally refrain from scraping my teeth with the tines of my fork.”

“Servants do not take their meals with the family they serve.” She spoke with utmost finality.

“Our last housekeeper took every meal with us.” He had fully expected his new housekeeper to do the same.

“I’ve heard the girls talk of your last housekeeper.” Katie gave him a look of exasperation. “They rather thought of her as a grandmother, I’d say. She was family to them. I am a stranger who arrived at the doorstep not two weeks ago. The situations are hardly the same.”

Joseph had never been one to be so easily distracted, though, especially from such an enormous mystery as she was. He’d more than once spied a deep-seated pain in her eyes. Yet her determination and fire spoke of an inner strength he couldn’t help admiring.

“You are accustomed to large households, where the servants far outnumber those they work for and the two worlds never intersect and seldom collide.” Joseph himself had grown up in just such a household. “Life isn’t like that in Wyoming. Towns and houses are too small to be divided up that way.”

“You’re telling me Hope Springs hasn’t divided itself along very real lines, are you?” The disbelief in her tone couldn’t have been more apparent.

He leaned against the worktop, warming to his topic. Here was the reason he enjoyed her company. Her conversation was intelligent. She had the confidence to state her opinions even if those positions differed from his own. It was a far sight better than trying to keep up a conversation with a quiet sixteen-year-old.

“In a place as large as Baltimore or Boston or New York,” he said, “the Irish and those who fervently dislike them can be entirely at odds, and yet the city doesn’t come to a halt over it. For the most part the two sides keep to themselves and don’t interact any more than necessary. That cannot happen here. We are too near and too few to avoid being part of each other’s lives.”

“You’ll forgive me, sir, but being part of anyone’s life is not on the short list of things I mean to accomplish.” She washed the plate from his noon meal, her movements quick and expert. “I told you I didn’t come here to make friends.”

“You seem to be Biddy O’Connor’s friend.”

The tiniest hint of a smile briefly touched her lips. What a difference it made in her countenance. She looked younger, lighter, happier. He very much liked seeing the change.

“Biddy didn’t give me a choice,” she said. “She is my friend, no matter how I might feel about it.”

That most certainly sounded like an O’Connor. They had to be the most determined people Joseph had ever met. Fortunately for the Red Road, the O’Connors hadn’t taken up the feud in earnest. If they ever decided to jump into the fray, there would be no stopping them.

“You asked me a few days ago what brought me west,” he said, still standing nearby as she washed dishes. “I’ve been meaning to ask you the same thing.”

“I came here for a job.”

She crossed a continent for something that was plentiful back East? “Were there not enough jobs in Baltimore?”

“For someone of my age and nationality, there were none that paid near as much as this one was supposed to.” She set herself to drying the dishes, going so far as to all but turn her back on him.

He felt a twinge of guilt at that. She had lost half her expected salary. He couldn’t say what else he might have done, though.

“To leave behind the life you had there and the people you knew, to pull up your roots. That is drastic in the extreme.”

“I had no roots in Baltimore.” She spoke very matter-of-factly, but the declaration was an odd one.

“Your telegram said you had been working there for two years.” Surely she’d put down some roots in two years.

“’Twas just a place I worked.” Katie dried her hands on the dish towel and walked away.

His curiosity propelled him forward. “If this job hadn’t come to your attention, you’d be working there still. Surely you meant to eventually make it your home.”

“Baltimore would never have been my home any more than Belfast or Derry was.” Her voice rose with each word, her tone growing more crisp. “There’s only one place that will ever be home to me, and it was certainly not Baltimore.”

She didn’t even look at him. He could see her take each deep, difficult breath. His wish for an invigorating conversation had taken them down paths difficult for her to travel.

“Where is home, Katie?” he asked gently, knowing that was what pricked at her.

The briefest of moments passed in silence. She stood perfectly still as though too pained to even breathe.

“Home is a tiny place few people have ever heard of.” Her own voice lost a bit of its edge. He even heard emotion there, something he’d found she tried very hard to hide. “I haven’t been there since I was eight years old.”

“Surely in that time you’ve earned enough to pay for a return journey.” She had left Ireland only two years earlier. In the more than a decade between leaving her little town and leaving her homeland altogether, she could easily have amassed what she needed to go back. Ireland was not that large.

She pushed a strand of loose hair out of her eyes. Sadness filled her bearing. “I have some debts to pay before I’d be welcomed back.”

“Debts? But you were only eight years old. How can an eight-year-old become so indebted she can’t earn the price in nearly twenty years?”

He couldn’t comprehend such a thing.

“The Famine was a desperate time, Joseph,” she said quietly. “People did things they weren’t proud of in order to survive.”

He could easily picture her as a tiny, overly thin child trying to stay alive during the horrors that had gripped Ireland. But what could a child have possibly done to render her unwelcome in her own home?

“You don’t think your family and neighbors would welcome you back after two decades? Whatever you did, they must realize you were only a child.” And they likely missed her as much as she obviously missed them.