Promise Me This (29 page)

Annie closed her eyes, too tired to endure Connie’s teasing. She waited until she heard Connie’s footsteps on the stairs before she opened them. Annie glanced at the envelope. She saw his name and recognized Michael’s handwriting from the letter she had returned last year.

She wondered why Michael had written again, after all this time.
Could it be that something has happened to Aunt Maggie? Oh, God, no! That would be too much!

Ten minutes ticked by before Annie reached for the envelope. The letter felt truly thicker, by far, than the one she’d returned. Annie’s curiosity, mingled with fear for Aunt Maggie’s health, gave her the necessary strength to break the seal, to pull and lift the letter’s pages.

Dear Miss Annie,

Aunt Maggie told me of the burning of your garden, and that your great sadness has stolen your reason for living.

Annie felt her cheeks warm at such presumption, but she continued reading.

Long ago I lost my parents and my little sister, the person most dear in my life. I could not help that my mam and da died of the fever. But I should have—could have—saved Megan Marie, if only I’d not let go of her hand. I failed her, and I cannot take it back.

I do not mean that you are responsible for the death of your gardens, Miss Annie, or that you could have seen such a thing on the horizon. What I mean to say is that, after Megan Marie was stolen away, I begged for a name, a way to find her, but to no avail. And when all hope was gone, for the longest time I knew no reason to go on either. I cradled no hope in my chest and no belief that there could be any good in the world—until I met your brother, Owen.

Owen opened to me a way of living beyond my ken. I’ve no way of knowing if I was the only stowaway aboard
Titanic
, but I do know this: I deserved no grace, no seat in a lifeboat that fateful night. And none would have been given me, not that night nor for all my life to come, had it not been for the gift of Owen Allen.

I wish I’d saved your brother. But I did not save him, could not see how to do it. Yet he saved me. And again, when I thought that dying was the only ending of the pain of his loss, Aunt Maggie and Daniel McKenica pushed wide that door to the possibility of a greater life.

I know your gardens meant more than soil and flowers and roses, Miss Annie. Your losing them was like losing Owen again, like my losing my sister—Megan Marie was all in all for me. Both end in despair. But there is a place beyond despair. Owen showed me—he showed me by how he lived and the way he worked to bring life to all around him.

Come to America, Miss Annie. I’ve no promises for a grand, high life here. It is hard work, from the first birdsong to the rising of the moon, but there is love and joy and life in this home of Aunt Maggie’s. One person lives for the others, and we are not alone.

By next summer I will have earned enough for your passage and for a year’s schooling for you, beyond the needs of Aunt Maggie and Daniel.

I’m saving you the last of Owen’s original seeds—the ones he packaged with his own hands. You can plant them yourself in this New Jersey soil, just as Owen would have planted them.

There is something you should know—something about Owen that no one else knows: About a year after
Titanic
foundered, I read a story in a newspaper—a paper that came as packing in a shipment of seedlings. The story was written about a man named Colonel Gracie, a survivor of
Titanic
, and his accounting of all that happened that night. I’m tucking the part I saved in this letter for you to hold and to keep. It is the only thing of value that I own, and now it is yours.

Read it now, before you read more of this letter.

Annie picked up the yellowed and crudely torn paper that had fallen from the envelope onto her coverlet. Part of the story was circled in pencil. The writer of the story reported Colonel Gracie as having said, “A man swam alongside of our overturned Collapsible B and wanted to get on. We were already overloaded and in danger of foundering. Someone near his end cried out, ‘Don’t climb on; you’ll swamp us.’ And the man, a strong swimmer, pulled away, saying, ‘It’s all right, boys. Good luck and God bless you.’”

Annie’s heart beat faster. She turned the paper over, but there was no more. She picked up Michael’s letter.

Some believed the man was Captain Smith, the master of
Titanic
. But I know better. It was just the sort of thing Owen would have said. He said it to me time and again, and to Lucy Snape, the lady he loved and hoped to marry. He said it to the woman he urged to rescue me in the lifeboat. He lived that same generosity each moment I knew him and surely in his last.

Don’t you see, Miss Annie? Owen not only prepared a life for us—for you in America—he went ahead to make a place for you and for me. He saved my doomed and wretched life and sent me to a home and a family. He showed us how to live a bigger story than our own, to keep going, keep living and encouraging others to live until our last breath.

Whenever you doubt that, whenever you despair of life, hold this paper in your hands, read Owen’s last message to you and me, to the men in the midst of the sea, and know that he wishes us luck and life and the blessings of the Sweet Jesus.

I am waiting for you, Miss Annie. I promised Owen that I would do all I could to bring you to America, to bring you to this Allen home—your home. It is a vow I live to keep. Please get well. Please come home.

Michael Dunnagan

Annie held the newspaper clipping—a sign and message from Owen himself—close to her heart. The tears that had dried over a month ago came again, only this time softly—a healing summer rain.

She folded the clipping and letter, returned them to their envelope, and slid the envelope beneath her pillow. How odd, she thought, that such a gift—the clipping, the friendship, the real hope and promise of a future—should come from the one she’d so wanted to blame for losing Owen.

“God, forgive me,” she whispered. “Thank You, Father. . . . Thank you, Michael.”

For the first time since the burning, Annie slept peacefully, through the afternoon and all the long night. No one disturbed her.

When morning light swept the room, she placed her feet on the floor, stood, and washed her face. Even before the maid brought tea to her room, Annie had penned her first letter to Michael.

The next few days her steps were tentative, her naps long, and her cheeks pale. But Annie Allen had risen from the grave and determined, at last, to walk free, out of the dungeon of despair.

Michael built and sold his twelve gazebos in New Jersey—two a month—by working into the wee hours of each morning after long days in the fields.

Far away in London, Annie worked each day to regain her strength.

Letters flowed back and forth across the Atlantic with the regularity of the changing tides. Understanding and respect grew between the two young people whose early lives had been so different, but who were bound in their love for Owen and in the growing of the gardens they loved. If something besides friendship grew alongside, ever so tenderly and tentatively, neither owned, neither wrote, neither spoke of it.

By spring Annie knew she would accept Michael’s offer to travel to America, though she told only the Spragues. But she determined not to arrive on the Allens’ New Jersey doorstep poor or a burden to that hardworking family. She would finish her schooling and wait for her eighteenth birthday, at which time she would inherit Owen’s legacy, then travel with enough money to arrive safely in good weather. She would have the resources to pay the mortgage and help build the business that Owen had dreamed of and for which Aunt Maggie, Daniel McKenica, and Michael had all loved and labored. When she turned twenty-one, Mr. Sprague would deposit and forward her inheritance held in trust. The plan, she was certain, would have pleased Owen. It pleased her.

Annie’s waking thoughts were bound and bent to New Jersey. She chose not to write Michael or Aunt Maggie of her coming inheritance; she wanted that gift to be a surprise. But she did write that she would be ready to sail as soon after her eighteenth birthday as possible—just over a year away.

Even Mr. and Mrs. Sprague blessed her plan once they saw the bloom the letters from America brought to Annie’s cheek. Connie admitted she would miss her but vowed her heart beat glad hopes for her friend.

In the meantime, Connie schemed to convince her father to take them all to Europe for Annie’s seventeenth birthday. “We absolutely must get her out of London, Father. We do not want her reminded of last year! It must be something stupendous, a trip she will love and never forget!”

Mr. Sprague was not swayed by his only daughter’s dramatic gestures or by her insistence that nothing less than a holiday in Europe could possibly distract Annie from last year’s sorrow. He was confident of Annie’s full recovery. But he had long planned to conduct his own daughter on a tour of the Continent before she wed—had, in fact, begun planning it. He believed Annie’s companionship for Constance would make a nice addition to their group. And Eleanor Hargrave, though not his favorite client, had asked him to personally oversee the transfer of substantial funds to a distant relative in Germany—an annual transaction he usually relegated to a junior partner. Perhaps he could accomplish both purposes in one trip.

He considered a week in Paris, a week in the south of France, perhaps a week or two in Italy—certainly Rome—then a week in Berlin and another along the German coast—perhaps even take in Denmark before they returned. Six or seven weeks—he would certainly need to return to his firm’s offices by then. July and August would be the best time to travel, he believed; in addition to the prospects of pleasant weather, they could celebrate Annie’s birthday and take advantage of the bank holiday.

Mr. Sprague took note of a minor newspaper article published at the end of June concerning the assassination of the archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, in Sarajevo. It didn’t trouble him unduly; he considered the Balkan states a continual tempest in a teapot that had little to do with the empire, no matter their close political connections.

“Still,” he mused to himself, “it may be the better part of wisdom to spend our holiday before that web of related European monarchs stir their simmering pot of resentments.”

Annie and the Spragues sailed from Dover on 14 July. Annie penned a letter to Michael, feeling a bit selfish to write of such an extravagant trip when they were working so very hard, partly for her benefit, but she felt her New Jersey family would be glad for her.

Michael always had a way of cheering her on, though Annie thought he was rather more protective than his place allowed. Still, there was something in his concern she enjoyed—from a distance.
He isn’t Owen, after all, to think he has any say about my life. He’s not my brother by any means,
she thought, and something about that thought pleased her.

She wrote:

The North Sea is lovely and lay fairly calm our day of sailing. I confess to having been afraid. I have tried very hard not to show it, for the kindness of Mr. and Mrs. Sprague in inviting me. Still, I could not help but think of all that you and Owen and those hundreds of poor souls faced out on the Atlantic two years ago. But this was a journey made in daylight and good weather; for that I am thankful. I do hope this experience will help me grow braver before sailing to America. Mr. Sprague says that travel broadens the mind and fortifies the soul. I hope to prove him true.

We sailed up the mouth of the Elbe River until we landed in Hamburg. Such lovely painted window boxes bursting with flowers—everywhere! How the Germans love color—in their flowers, certainly, but even in the painting of their houses. Each garden is meticulous—not a weed to be seen! I do believe you could sift their soil between your fingers and watch it fly away. Such beauty makes me long for Owen and Father’s gardens at Hargrave House—and mine.

Truly, I must push those memories from my brain or I am consumed with bitterness toward Aunt Eleanor. I must not allow memories of her meanness to spoil this opportunity. She has spoiled so much already.

We took tea on land the second afternoon—only they call it “coffee”—the first coffee I have ever tasted. It is rather more bitter than tea. But perhaps you know that. I hear they fancy coffee in America.

In Germany there is no such thing as crumpets or Banbury cakes. They prefer gigantic cakes with mounds of whipping cream and syrupy fruit tarts and flans. Their noon meal is rich in sausages and hearty black and brown breads—more root vegetables and not so many greens as we grow in England. I do not think I could sustain such a diet for long, but eating is quite as much an adventure for the tongue as touring is for the soul!