Speak Through the Wind (34 page)

“I didn’t want to say anything until after the baby was born,” Mrs. Hartmann said, “knowing what happened to the first one. I didn’t want to get our hopes up too high, just to be disappointed.”

She spoke in that fast, almost manic way she sometimes did—as if terrified of the interruption that would send her hopelessly off track. The rapidity of her speech made it difficult for Kassandra’s muddled head to make sense of all of it, but one phrase stood out.
Our
hopes.

“Maybe I was afraid you’d run away before I even had a chance to explain things. You have a history of that, you know, my dear. Running away. Of course, I don’t know where you would have run to, exactly …”

“You aren’t making any sense,” Kassandra said, her tongue thick behind her teeth.

“Joseph and I, you see, will never have children.”

“You and Reverend Joseph?” Kassandra tried to attach meaning to the abrupt change in focus. “He loves children.”

“I know he does, but we’ll never have children of
our own.”

“You have been married only a few years,” Kassandra said. “It takes time … sometimes.”

“It’s not a matter of time.” She still held Kassandra’s hand, and now she worked her thumb underneath Kassandra’s clenched fingers and gently pried them open, until there was a flat, open palm to cover with her own. “Dr. Hilton has assured me that it would be quite impossible for me ever to carry a child. I haven’t told Joseph. I’d been praying for the right words, the right time … then you showed up. It was like an answer to prayer.”

Kassandra withdrew her hand and laid it protectively on her empty stomach. “That is why you decided to let me stay. My child—my daughter and I—in the carriage house?”

“Not exactly,” Mrs. Hartmann said, looking down at her empty hands.

Kassandra clutched at the bedclothes and closed her eyes, wishing she could make Mrs. Hartmann disappear as quickly as her baby apparently had. “You cannot mean …”

“We would give her everything, you know.” Mrs. Hartmann was fidgeting now, looking around the room, perhaps remembering how wonderful it was to grow up with everything. “We could provide for her in ways you never could.”

“I know what Reverend Joseph wants.” Kassandra hoped the slowness of her speech would make her meaning more clear, both to herself and to Mrs. Hartmann. “He wants all of us together—”

“That will never work.”

Mrs. Hartmann stood and walked over to the window. It was getting dark again, and Kassandra wondered if more than one day had passed since that first birthing pain. Mrs. Hartmann busied herself lighting the lamp at Kassandra’s bedside as she talked.

“It’s no way to raise a child. She’ll never really know her place. If we provide for her, is she ours? If she calls you ‘mother,’ is she yours? Children are either raised by their parents, or they are adopted outright. That place in the middle … well, you know better than anyone how unbearable that is, don’t you?”

How well she did. It was being in that place in the middle that drove her into Ben’s arms. That need to belong somewhere—to have a place—that allowed her to find contentment in the most wretched of circumstances. But now she did belong to somebody. She belonged to her child; they belonged to each other.

Kassandra scrutinized the profile of Mrs. Hartmann’s fussy face, grotesquely illuminated as she adjusted the lamp’s flame. This was not a woman who appreciated God’s gifts. Why light a lamp when the full gray moon could bathe the room in nearly as much light? No, any minute now she would make some disdainful remark about the maddening monotony of the crashing waves. How could such a woman ever truly love a child? Especially one conceived in such blatant sin.

“I cannot,” Kassandra said at last. She wasn’t begging; she wouldn’t plead. “Will you bring her back to me now?”

“I’m not some kind of goblin, you know, stealing babies away.”

“I know that,” Kassandra said, feeling the tendrils of compassion snake through the dissipating fog in her head. She tried once again to stand, but felt the shadows of a weakness she didn’t want Mrs. Hartmann to witness. Softening her tone, speaking calmly as if to a madwoman, she said, “Please, please bring her to me.”

“If that’s really what you want, of course.”

Kassandra heard her quick little footsteps disappearing down the hall. She reached for the glass of water on the table beside her bed, took one cautionary sip before quenching her dry sore throat with its coolness. She ran her fingers through her matted hair, drawing it behind her head and plaiting it loosely, leaving it unfastened at her back. Soon she heard the little footsteps again, this time much slower and measured, and when Mrs. Hartmann bent low to deposit the bundle into Kassandra’s waiting arms, there was the briefest moment when she wasn’t sure if the other woman would let go.

The tiny girl was wrapped in a soft yellow blanket, swaddled tightly with just one tiny fist escaping from the confines of the fabric. Kassandra caught that fist between her finger and thumb and brought it up to her lips, delivering a series of kisses on the baby’s red, wrinkled knuckles. The child was fast asleep, pale eyelashes flush against soft, blotchy cheeks, but Kassandra didn’t need to see her eyes to know who had fathered this little girl. On the top of her head, hair the color of glazed carrots lay in soft, wispy strands. She let go of the little fist and ran her fingers across the scalp, remembering the tuft of her son’s hair tucked into her Bible and lost to the fire. This hair she would live to see grow. She lifted the baby to plant a soft kiss on top of its head.

“Isn’t she a precious lamb?” Mrs. Hartmann said, speaking just over Kassandra’s shoulder.

“She is,” Kassandra said, pulling the blanket away to lay her palm against the infant’s strong, beating heart.

“However will you be able to care for her alone? Especially back in that horrible neighborhood. By the Bowery, wasn’t it?”

Kassandra felt her blood turn cold. “I … I do not want to go back there.”

“Well, darling,” Mrs. Hartmann said, moving from behind Kassandra to sit in the chair at the bedside. “We don’t always get what we want in life, now do we?”

“I thought I might stay with you—”

“I already told you that would be impossible.”

“Not forever. Just until I have a chance to get back on my feet.”

“Now, now, darling. When have you ever
been
on your feet?”

Kassandra felt as if she’d been thumped between the eyes. “I just meant until I can find a job.”

“And who would be so quick to hire a young woman who came along with her illegitimate child?”

“You cannot make me go back there.”

“No, I can’t,” Mrs. Hartmann said. “I can only try to speak to you as one woman to another. Can’t you see how hard it would be to have you there—living with us—a constant reminder of what I am unable to give my husband?”

“Does Reverend Joseph know about all of this?”

“He is completely blind when it comes to you.” Her words revealed a vulnerability that reached far beyond her inability to have a child. “He’s never forgiven himself for letting you get away the first time. Given the choice,” she laughed nervously, “I believe he’d have me out on the street and you and the baby cozied up by the fire.”

“Surely not.”

“I abhor gambling, Kassandra. I won’t take that risk.”

Just then there was a soft knock on the door before it opened to allow Mariah, carrying a tray, to enter the room.

“Doctor says you shouldn’t eat just yet,” she said, setting the tray on the bureau top. “Said that medicine he give you to help you sleep might make you sick if you eat too soon. But I brought some tea—oh, there’s the precious one.”

“Not now, Mariah,” Mrs. Hartmann said. “Kassandra and I are speaking.”

“Is that so?” Mariah stood just behind Mrs. Hartmann’s shoulder, hands on her hips, staring right into Kassandra’s eyes. “Is there anything else I can get you?”

“Could you open the curtains? And the window? I would like to look outside,” Kassandra said.

“All right.” When Mariah was finished, she turned and said, “If there’s anything else, I’ll be just downstairs.”

The two women sat in silence for several minutes after Mariah left.

With just a bit of a stretch, Kassandra could see the now full moon over the ocean. The sand was iridescent in its glow, and she thought back to those early hours of her labor, staring at the same beach, under the same moon, so full of hope and life. She wished she could take the baby now, straight down to the beach, and walk along the shore, holding the child in her arms as carefully as she’d held it in her womb.

“Couldn’t we just stay here?” Kassandra asked, the idea forming even as she said the words.

“What do you mean? Here?”

“Here. At this house. Leyna and I—”

“Leyna?”

“I thought if I had a girl, I would name her Leyna,” Kassandra said, almost shyly. “I used to think it was my mother’s name.”

“My mother’s name was Charlotte,” Mrs. Hartmann said, her tone distracted.

“That is lovely,” Kassandra said, tearing her eyes away from the view to find a connection to this strand of the conversation.

“This house was hers—actually in her name. It’s been in her family for generations. When my uncles inherited all the ships from our family’s shipping business—not to mention the millions of dollars that went with it—she got this house. And she left it to me. What makes you think I would hand it over to you?”

“I would never claim it as my own,” Kassandra said, choosing her words carefully. “I simply thought we might stay here. Help with the upkeep.”

“Why?”

The question stunned her. Who wouldn’t want to stay here? Who, if given the choice whether or not to rise and sleep to the sound of the ocean, would ever willingly walk away?

“I just … I am just so happy here. So much at peace. I love it.”

“You think this will give the child a family?”

“I will be her family. And Mariah.”

“Servants are not family.”

“I would be a servant, too.”

“People here will know exactly who you are. What you are. This is a small town, Kassandra. A little shipping village. Your child will grow up victimized by gossip.” Mrs. Hartmann’s voice grew almost frantic as she spoke. “We have standards here. We don’t forgive.”

“I have done nothing to require your forgiveness,” Kassandra said. “God has forgiven my sins. I need nothing else.”

“Perhaps you don’t. But what about your daughter?”

“I will take care of her.”

“There’s nothing in your life that has prepared you to raise a child, Kassandra. You simply don’t have the wherewithal to do it properly.” For the first time, Mrs. Hartmann’s voice rose in accusation.

“You have no right to take my child from me,” Kassandra said, matching Mrs. Hartmann’s volume. But one look down showed the little one to be wincing against the noise, and she lowered her voice to a whisper. “She is mine. I will raise her.”

“Kassandra, please. Can’t you try to think beyond your own selfishness?”

“When … when have I ever been selfish?”

“Think about it. You had a good home, and you left it. Why? Because something better came along. Something a little more exciting.”

“That’s not why—”

“And not a word. Not a single letter to the man who raised you, gave you everything. You can’t imagine the heartache and guilt he carries with him because of you.”

“You do not understand—”

“How do we know there won’t be some other man who’ll come along and you’ll go running off with him?”

“I would never do that.”

“You simply aren’t stable, constantly roaming from one life to another. Now you’ve come traipsing back here—for the second time, I’m told—”

“I didn’t stay the first time because of
you.
I did not think I would be welcome.”

“You probably wouldn’t have been.” Mrs. Hartmann shrugged her shoulders, as if she were as disappointed at this as Kassandra was. “And now, well, you’d be more like an obligation. A chance at his redemption.”

“You are lying.” Kassandra’s whole body was shaking now, and she clutched the child closer to her until she could be still. “Reverend Joseph does not feel that way.”

“He’d never say so, of course. He might not even realize it. But really, what other explanation is there?”

“I cannot go back to the Points.”

A hint of victory crept into Mrs. Hartmann’s eyes. “I know Joseph would hate that for you, too.”

“But perhaps,” she gulped and felt her pride fall to her feet, colliding with the rising shame, “I could stay here. Alone.”

Mrs. Hartmann shook her head slowly. “No, my dear. Next summer I’ll insist Joseph come for the season. This will be our home, too, for part of the year.”

Kassandra’s mind entertained first one vision and then another. A little redheaded girl rushing into Reverend Joseph’s arms; a little redheaded girl dirty in the alley behind Canal Street. Her child’s eyes watching the full moon dance on the water, hearing the waves lap on the shore; her child’s eyes looking up through a haze of soot and smoke as she tries to see the sky; this bundled baby nestled in Mrs. Hartmann’s arms, sitting in the cozy back parlor by a roaring fire on a cold winter night; this bundled baby in her own arms, huddled in a doorway, hoping not to freeze before finding shelter. “Well then,” she asked, “where would I go?”

Mrs. Hartmann burst into a smile. “I have given this some thought,” she said. “San Francisco. It’s just perfect for you. It’s a brand-new world for your brand-new life. Just full of promise. Everybody there is starting over, building a new country. Nothing but gold and opportunity—”

Kassandra laughed out loud. “How in the world would I get to San Francisco?”

“My Uncle Hiram. He’s run a clipper ship round the Horn to San Francisco several times already. He says he can have you there by the end of October. Just about three months from now.”

“You seem to have given this
a lot
of thought,” Kassandra said.

“I simply wanted you to know your options.” Mrs. Hartmann reached over to stroke the sleeping child’s head.

Kassandra looked down at the face of her sleeping daughter. All at once, her tiny mouth opened for a face-scrunching yawn, though her sleep remained undisturbed. “If I did this,” she said, speaking to the child rather than to Mrs. Hartmann, “I do not know if I could ever live with myself. This is exactly what my mother did to me, you see? She just walked away. I have never really forgiven her for that.”