“Do you have any boyfriends?”
“No.” She was glad he couldn’t see her blushing. “We see boys at social events, but it’s all very stiff and artificial. I’ve never talked with any of them the way I’m talking with you. And not even my best friend understands how I feel about losing my father. But then how could she, since her father is still alive? It’s so nice to know that you understand.”
“Miss Lucy?” She recognized the butler’s voice and turned to see him standing near the back door. “It’s chilly out here. I think you’d better come inside.”
“I’ll be right there, Robert.”
Danny slid off the wall again. “I’ll come back another time if you want, and we can talk some more. Which room is yours?” He tilted his head toward the rear of her mansion. “I’ll throw some pebbles at your window to get your attention, next time. I don’t think your servants like me very much.”
“It’s that window,” she said, pointing. “The second one from the left.”
“Well, I’d better get going. My day starts pretty early.”
“Please keep this,” Lucy said, pushing the little boxcar back into his hands. His skin felt as rough as an emery board. “I think it means much more to you than to me.”
He looked surprised. “Thanks. Have a good evening, Miss Garner—I mean, Lucy. Until next time . . . ?”
“Yes. Good night, Daniel.”
Four months later, Lucy sat near her bedroom window on a warm July night, waiting for Daniel’s now-familiar signal. As soon as she heard the tap of a pebble against the glass, she hurried down the back staircase, then carefully closed the outside door behind her, hoping that none of the servants had heard her leaving the house. She stood on the back step for a moment as her eyes adjusted to the darkness, then saw Daniel standing in the shadows near the carriage house. She ran to him and let him pull her into his arms. Lucy felt at home there, comfortable with his embrace, his touch.
“I’ve told myself a dozen times to stop coming to see you,” he murmured, “but I can’t make myself stop.”
“I don’t want you to stop.”
“Come on, let’s find a better place to talk,” he said, taking her hand. “There’s a full moon tonight, and I don’t want your servants to see us.” He led her further into the garden, stopping when he found a bench beneath the rose trellis, where they could hide from view. The summer night was warm, the moon very bright, and she could see his beloved face clearly by the light of the moon. Something was bothering him.
“Why would you want to stop coming?” she asked. “We always have so much to talk about, don’t we?”
“Yes. But I’ve been wondering where this can possibly lead.”
“I-I don’t know what you mean.” She traced her fingers along his jaw, feeling the rough stubble of his whiskers. She had grown to love the roughness of his skin, the coarseness of his work clothes, the hardness of his muscles. Everything in her world was soft and refined, and she loved the novelty of him.
“Come on, Lucy. I think you know that we’ve become much more than friends. I think you know that I’m falling in love with you.”
They had never talked about love before, and it made Lucy’s heart speed up. She had wondered during the past few weeks if this was what love felt like: wanting to be with Daniel all the time; counting the minutes and seconds until night fell and she would hear the pebble strike her window; wishing the time they spent together could last twice as long as the time they spent apart. She had read about love in romance novels, of course, but books couldn’t begin to describe the happy, breathless way she felt whenever she was with him.
I’m falling in love with you. No one had ever said those words to Lucy before, and she felt like whirling in giddy circles the way she had as a child with her brand-new petticoats. Danny Carver loved her! And she loved him, too, she was certain of it. So why had he turned so serious? Why was he talking about not coming anymore? She couldn’t bear the thought of never seeing him again.
“Is that such a bad thing?” she asked. “That we’ve become more than friends?”
Danny released her hand and stood up. “No, of course it isn’t a bad thing. But . . . but that river down there isn’t a bad thing, either, when it’s flowing along nicely. But when it goes beyond its banks, when it goes into places it shouldn’t . . . that’s when trouble happens.”
“I don’t understand.” She watched him pace in front of her, a frown on his face, and she was afraid that he was angry with her.
“I don’t belong up here on the ridge, in your world. And I know for sure that you don’t belong down in mine. I’ve overstepped my bounds, Lucy, and it can’t end well. For either of us.”
“But I don’t want it to end.”
“I know.” His frown melted into a look of sadness. “Me, either. But I don’t see how . . .” He paused, clearing his throat as if to rid it of the emotion that thickened his voice. “The first time I came here, I told you that I didn’t dare to gaze into my future and start hoping for things to change, because my future was always going to look like my present. That’s the way things are in my world. And I was fine with that—until I met you. Now when I look into the future, I want you there beside me. But I don’t see any way that we can possibly be together—and I’m not fine with that.”
“But there has to be a way, Daniel. What if I asked my family to give you a job at the tannery? I know how hard you work, how honest and good-hearted you are.”
“They will never allow it,” he said, continuing to pace in front of her. “They would say I’m only after your money.”
“But that isn’t true. I know it isn’t.”
“They would point out that I never finished school. That I can barely read and write.”
“But you’re not stupid, Daniel. You could easily get an education if someone gave you a chance. You could be anything you wanted to be.”
He stopped and looked at her. “But that’s just it. I wouldn’t even know what to wish for.” He sank down beside her on the bench again. “Everything I own fits into a room in a boardinghouse that I share with three other men. You’re used to . . . to all of this.” He made a sweeping gesture with his arm.
“That doesn’t matter. My mother came from a very poor family, too, but my father loved her and married her anyway, and she came here to live. I would gladly share everything I have with you.”
“I don’t know if I could ever get used to a place like this. Besides, I saw the way your grandmother looked at me the first day we talked in Garner Park. You saw it, too, I know you did. She would never accept me.”
“She looks only at the outside of people.” Lucy swallowed the bitter taste of guilt, knowing she had done the same thing before she met Daniel. “If people only knew you the way I do—”
“Don’t give me hope, Lucy. You’ll only break both of our hearts in the end.”
“But it can’t end! Please don’t stop coming to see me. Give me a chance to figure out how to make this work. There has to be a way that we can be together.”
He took her face in his hands and kissed her. Afterward, they clung to each other.
“I’ll keep coming as long as you want me to, Lucy. When the night comes that you don’t answer my signal”—he nodded toward her bedroom window—“then I’ll know that it’s over.”
Lucy stayed awake for most of the night, trying to figure out a way that she and Daniel could be together. She considered eloping, coming home a married woman and forcing her family to accept him, but she was too afraid to leave home on her own. She had never ventured anywhere without a chaperone or with friends or family.
Her thoughts kept returning to her mother and how she had come from humble beginnings to live in this house, eventually adjusting to this life. Bebe still wasn’t afraid to “fraternize with the riffraff,” as Grandmother Garner called it. Lucy realized that the only solution was to get her mother on her side. She had to talk Bebe into helping her and Danny so they could be toge
ther. After a short, restless night of sleep, Lucy began a conversation with her mother at the breakfast table the following morning.
“I wish there weren’t barriers between rich people and poor people,” she said as she pushed scrambled eggs around on her plate.
“Education is the key,” Bebe said. “If we can help poor children get an education, we’ll give them a better chance in life. That’s one of our Temperance Union’s goals.”
Lucy resisted rolling her eyes. For her mother, the Union was always foremost in her mind. She tried a different approach. “Did you marry Daddy for his money?”
Bebe finished stirring milk into her tea and laid down her spoon. “Maybe I did, in a way. I worked so hard during the war, doing my brothers’ chores on the farm, that I think I liked the idea of having servants. It overwhelmed me to think that such a wealthy, sophisticated man as your father wanted to marry me. But I truly loved him, Lucy. Most of all, I married for love.”
Lucy twisted her napkin nervously. “And what advice would you give someone who wanted to do the same thing—marry for love, I mean—in spite of other differences?”
“I would say . . . that they should think twice. It took me years and years to adjust to our differences, and in many ways I still haven’t adjusted, as you well know. I embarrass you at times. I’m not like all of your friends’ mothers, am I?”
Lucy didn’t know what to say. She remembered how small and plain and out of place her mother looked at the graduation reception a few months ago. As Lucy fumbled for what to say next, her mother suddenly reached for her hand and took it in both of hers. “I know about him, Lucy. I know all about Daniel Carver. That’s who you’re really talking about, isn’t it?”
“How . . . how do you know?” she asked in a whisper.
“The servants told me. They’ve known for some time that you’ve been sneaking out at night to see him.”
Lucy pulled her hand free. “How dare they spy on us!”
“They did it because they love you, Lucy. Robert and Herta and Peter have known you since the day you were born. They would never let you come to harm or allow a stranger to take advantage of you.”
Lucy imagined them peeking at her and Daniel through the curtains, seeing all their private moments together, and her anger threatened to boil over. “If you knew all about Danny, I’m surprised you didn’t lock me in my room and forbid me to see him!”
“I considered it,” Bebe said calmly. “But then I recalled the night that Horatio asked my father for permission to marry me.
And I remembered that it wouldn’t have mattered if my father had refused—I would have defied him. I didn’t want you to make a mistake out of anger or defiance, Lucy. Marriage is one of the biggest decisions you’ll ever make. . . . And you’re so young.”
“I’m older than you were.”
“Not by much. And that’s why I’m glad you’re asking me for advice.”
“But I’m not asking for advice—I’m asking you to help us. You can give Danny a decent-paying job in the tannery. You can let him move in here, like you did.”
“What about your friends? What advice do they have for you?”
“They’re so shallow and superficial. I can’t talk to any of them the way I talk to Danny. And never about important things.”
“So you haven’t told your friends about Danny?”
“They wouldn’t understand. But Danny lost his father, too. He shares the grief I’ve felt all these years.”
“I share it, too, Lucy. I lost your father, too. And I found comfort in God, not in another person. He knows what it’s like to lose someone dear to Him.”
“Why do you keep changing the subject? Are you going to help me or not?”
“I am trying to help you. You need to think everything through so you can make a mature, informed decision.”
Lucy exhaled, forcing herself to be calm so her mother would take her side. “I’m sorry. Go on.”
“Can you picture Danny at all your social events? Or are you going to give up your social life?”
“He could learn to fit in. He’s very smart, Mother. And the rules of etiquette aren’t that hard to learn.”
“Danny Carver could hire the finest tailor,” Bebe said quietly, “and get every detail of your social world letter-perfect, and he still wouldn’t be accepted. Believe me, I know. Besides, have you asked him if he wants to be part of all that? I know I never did. I hated it. What if Danny hates it, too?”
Lucy saw him in her mind, seated at her grandmother’s elegant dinner table, hiding behind his careless half shrug and his laugh-at-the world grin, and knew that he would hate every minute of it—especially Grandmother Garner’s cold, undisguised disdain.
Lucy let her mother’s question go unanswered.
“So the real question is,” Bebe continued, “are you willing to change for him? That’s what you must decide. Don’t expect him to change. You’re the one who must change. Do you love him that much? Could you give up your way of life and live in his world for his sake? Or are you expecting him to fit into yours?”
“It doesn’t matter where we live. I love him, Mother. I know you’re going to say that I’m too young and that I don’t know what love really is, but it’s true—I love Daniel Carver!”
“I believe you. But even when people love each other, it doesn’t always mean that they should get married.”
“Are you talking about Daddy? Are you sorry that you married him?”
“No. I’m talking about someone else.” Her mother looked away, sighing softly. “After your father died, someone else asked me to marry him.”
Lucy’s jaw dropped in shock. “Who?”
“It doesn’t matter, dear. I loved him but I didn’t marry him because . . . because I knew it would hurt you and Grandmother Garner. You would have felt that I was betraying your father. I can tell that I’ve shocked you now, even though your father has been gone for more than a decade.”
Lucy struggled to digest this news as her mother continued. “Grandmother Garner will feel even more shocked and angry and betrayed than you do right now if you marry Danny. It will break her heart. You’re all she has. That’s why you need to carefully consider if you really want to do this to her.”
Lucy recalled how her grandmother had yanked her away from Danny on the day the memorial stone was dedicated. But she also knew that her grandmother had never denied her anything she’d wanted. “Grandmother always lets me have what I want. She won’t stand in the way of my happiness.”
“You might be surprised, Lucy. She would have gladly had my marriage annulled even though she knew I made Horatio happy. . . . Listen, there is one more question you need to consider, and it’s an important one. What about Danny’s faith? My mother tried to advise me to make sure your father and I had a common faith in God. No marriage can get along without Him at the center.”
Lucy had no idea what Danny believed. They had never talked about God or religion. “What difference does it make what church he goes to?” she asked.
“I didn’t ask about his church—I asked about his faith. There is a huge difference.”
Bebe’s questions frustrated Lucy. She wanted answers, not questions. “So, will you help Danny and me or not?”
Bebe wrapped her hands around her teacup, staring down at it as if deep in thought. “I want you to make a well-informed decision, not one you’ll long regret,” she finally replied. “If you promise to agree to my conditions first, then I’ll agree to help you.”
Hope and suspicion battled inside Lucy. “What do you want me to do?”
“Tell Danny you can’t see him for two weeks.”
“Mother, no!”
“True love can certainly endure a separation of two weeks. You both could use some time apart to get some perspective on your relationship. That’s my first condition—and the servants will be sure to let me know if you try to cheat. During that time, I want you to come with me to get a firsthand look at the world t
hat Daniel comes from. It’s important that you understand him and why he thinks the way he does. You’ve never been to New Town, have you?”
“Danny and I aren’t going to be living there, so I don’t see the point. But I’ll go, if you insist. Is that all?”
“No. I know that you’ve been invited to the Midsummer Ball at the Opera House later this month. Grandmother Garner is looking forward to showing you off to the town’s royalty. I want you to go with her and enter into the festivities with the same enthusiasm you would have shown if Daniel Carver wasn’t in the picture. Those three things are all I’m asking you to do.”
Lucy knew that her mother was trying to shock her by taking her to New Town, but she made up her mind not to be shocked. As for Grandmother Garner and the ball, Lucy didn’t see how it would hurt to go. She could get on her grandmother’s good side by being cooperative, and maybe then she could talk to Grandmama about Daniel. The hardest condition would be spending two weeks away from him, but that was a small price to pay for a lifetime together.
“I’ll agree to all three conditions,” she told her mother, “so start counting off the two weeks. I’ll tell Danny tonight.”
Two days later, Lucy accompanied her mother to New Town. “A woman who attends my church just had a baby,” Bebe told her. “Our ladies’ group always brings a meal to new mothers, along with some clothes and things. I told the other ladies that we would deliver everything.”
The working-class neighborhood was just as Lucy had expected it to be: overcrowded, smelly, and disgusting, but she worked hard to hide her shock from her mother. She thought of her beloved Daniel growing up in such a sad environment, and she was all the more determined to lift him out of this way of life.
So many ragged children played in the street that Lucy feared the horses would trample one of them as the carriage waded through the melee. The driver halted in front of a dilapidated two-story building with several of its windows boarded up. It looked as though it already was falling apart, even though the neighborhood had been built only eleven years ago, after the flood. Lucy hooked the basket of food over her arm, steeling herself to go inside and get this “lesson” over with. But before she could take a single step, dozens of children mobbed her, thrusting their filthy hands in her face and shouting, “Please, miss! Please! You have a penny for me?”