Chapter Twenty-One
Joseph hadn’t been this nervous when he was courting his late wife. Their match had been something of a foregone conclusion, so there had been very little pressure and no real possibility of failure. With Katie he felt an overwhelming amount of both.
She’d been friendlier of late, smiling at him, blushing, seeming to enjoy the brief moments when he’d held her hand or touched her face. He’d vowed to respect her choice if she was truly set on Tavish, but her attitude toward him seemed to indicate that a decision was still somewhat up in the air.
Five days had passed since she’d appeared like a vision from heaven in his darkened barn as he undertook his business with the Irish. He simultaneously enjoyed and hated payment days. Business, though it was not his first love, was in his blood, and he was good at it. To see those skills help an entire valley of people was satisfying, fulfilling. But taking money from people who had so little only brought to mind all the reasons he’d disliked the cold heartlessness of finance.
The men of Hope Springs had been trickling in for nearly a week. He’d spent every evening going over accounts, helping the illiterate understand the state of their finances while trying hard not to sound condescending. He worried that, in his eagerness to help them make sense of sometimes complicated things, he’d make them feel unintelligent or small or unimportant. Equally frustrating were those who, at every payment day, felt the need to argue over every little detail. Thankfully, his father had taught him to keep meticulous records and to always put business arrangements in writing.
After nearly a week of dealing with high emotions and tempers made sharp with worry, he needed a break. The promise of Katie’s company beckoned to him like a lighthouse in a thick fog. So he put the girls to bed a little early, informed Mrs. Smith he would be out for some time, and, taking with him a few special packages from town, walked up the Irish Road. Mrs. Claire’s was the second house on the right and an easy distance from the bridge.
He held the packages under his arm as he knocked at the door.
Katie opened it. “Why, Joseph. Have you decided to come by at long last?”
He nodded. A joking response was likely called for, probably even expected, but he was too nervous for anything else.
I’m like a schoolboy again in the throes of first love.
“I haven’t had an evening to myself since the harvest run ended,” he explained. “Except for Sunday, but the girls were feeling rather desperate for some attention.”
Katie held her hand out to him. He took it gladly and allowed her to lead him inside. For a woman who’d been so standoffish when she first arrived at his home, she was very affectionate of late. He wasn’t complaining, only trying to keep himself realistic.
“You look tired, Joseph.”
“I would say the same to you, but I learned long ago it isn’t wise to tell a woman when she is looking less than her best—not if you wish to remain on good terms with her.”
Katie clearly took no offense. If anything, she seemed to warm to the topic. “But a woman who wishes to be lied to doesn’t seem the kind worth being on good terms with.”
He had missed Katie’s conversations. She could debate a topic with him, matching him point for point, but without growing petty or angry as too many did. She challenged him and impressed him at every turn. A man could spend the rest of his days in conversation with such a woman and never grow bored.
“I wasn’t arguing in favor of constant untruths,” Joseph said. “I was making a case for discretion and tact.”
Katie’s mouth twisted to one side, then the other. “So if ever I see you about town and you don’t tell me that I’m looking fine as feathers, am I to assume that I look rather horrid and you’re simply being tactful?”
“Only if you are hoping to be offended on a regular basis.”
“Am I looking horrid ‘on a regular basis,’ then?”
Joseph set his packages on the table. “Twisting words, Katie?” He’d long ago begun scolding her in jest for that.
Her shrug was coy to say the least. The gesture pulled at him. His collar, though it wasn’t buttoned all the way to his neck, felt tight, overly warm. He managed to keep himself from tugging at it.
“Where is Mrs. Claire?” He hadn’t noticed until then that she wasn’t in her usual spot at the front window.
“She is just down the street visiting with Ciara Fulton.”
He hadn’t intended to visit while Katie was alone. Such a thing would have been considered inappropriate in the extreme amongst society in Baltimore. The first time he’d been truly alone with Vivian before they were married was the five minutes they were granted in her parents’ rose garden so that he could propose. For just a moment he wondered if things might not have turned out differently had he been permitted a closer acquaintance before they’d wed. There’d been a great deal about her he hadn’t known. She likely would have said the same of him.
“Can I make you a cup of coffee?” Katie asked.
Though she made the best coffee he’d had in a long time, and certainly better than anything he’d had since she left his home, he didn’t want to spend their time together with her working in the kitchen. “Thank you, but no.”
Her eyes darted to the packages and back. “What have you brought with you?”
“Some things I picked up while I was at the train depot.”
Katie leaned over the table. She held her hands behind her back as if keeping herself from touching the packages. “There is quite a bit of lettering on them. Were they mailed, then?”
They had come a long way, in fact. “One is from Baltimore. The other came from Belfast.”
That brought her head around, eyes wide. “Belfast? What did you have mailed from there?”
He hadn’t wanted to make a fuss about it in case she was disappointed. It seemed the fuss was unavoidable now. “It’s something for you.”
He hadn’t thought her eyes could get wider, but they did. “For me? From Ireland?”
“It isn’t anything so amazing or fine as I’m afraid you’re imagining.”
“But it is for me. I’ve so seldom been given anything. ’Tis a treat no matter what it might be.”
She’d seldom been given anything? Didn’t Tavish bring her little tokens of affection? What kind of courtship was the man undertaking? Joseph shook off the uncharitable thought. Tavish had probably brought her wildflowers. Or given her berries from his bushes. Tavish was not a wealthy man. It likely was all he could afford to give. Just so long as he was doing something. A woman ought to be important enough to a man for him to make an effort to show her he thought of her often.
“May I open it?” Katie asked.
He forced his thoughts back into the moment. “The top package is the one from Belfast.”
Katie pulled out the chair nearest the packages and sat. Joseph braced himself against her coming disappointment. She took the package in her hand and gave it a squeeze, apparently surprised to find it wasn’t rigid.
“I’m full dying of curiosity now.” She tore back the brown paper. One at a time, she pulled out three pair of thick woolen stockings.
“I told you it wasn’t anything particularly exciting.”
She rubbed the last pair against her cheek, then held it to her nose, closing her eyes as she inhaled. “This is Irish wool, Joseph. I’d know it anywhere.”
“And it’s the thickest you’ll find, I’m told.”
“I don’t understand. There must be hundreds upon hundreds of places to buy stockings that are closer than Belfast. That is such a vast deal of trouble to go to.”
How could he explain himself without looking like a fool?
“Wyoming winters can be brutally cold,” he said. “I haven’t been able to get out of my head the thought of you being so cold that your toes were taken by frostbite.” He didn’t look at her as he explained. Never had he felt so unsure of himself. “I thought if your feet could at least be warm during your winters here, you would be less miserable. And I’ve heard Ian and Biddy both talk of how soft and warm they remember the wool in Ireland being. I wanted you to have a little bit of that with you.”
He hazarded a glance in her direction. She was smelling the wool with such a look of longing. Had they really kept a scent of home during the long journey to Wyoming, or was her memory filling in the empty spaces?
“You must have sent for these weeks and weeks ago.”
He pulled out the chair next to hers and lowered himself into it. “I first had the idea that night you told me about your feet. I sent the order with Johnson’s oldest boy on his very next trip to the train depot. It takes a very long time to ship things from Ireland, even with the telegram speeding up the process.”
He’d sent another telegram to Belfast not long after Katie had received word of her father’s illness. He had hoped to find an answer waiting at the telegraph office when he was there selling his crop, but nothing had come yet. He didn’t intend to tell Katie about it until he received an answer. If he received an answer.
“You must have felt like you’d wasted the effort when I decided to go back to Ireland. The stockings would have come, but I would have already been gone.”
When Katie had told him of her intention to leave Hope Springs for good, the very last thing on his mind had been those stockings.
“Thank you,” she said, rubbing them against her cheek again. “I’d worried a great deal about the coming winter, having heard so much of how cold it’ll be. But if I can have warm feet, I can endure anything.”
She’d accepted the gift with grace. Seeing her so happy over something so small spurred him on.
“The other package is for you as well. A token of my gratitude for all the work you did while you lived at our house and for watching the girls while I was away.”
“They were a delight. You needn’t offer me gifts for doing something I enjoy.”
“I want to.” He had sent for that particular package just before she left to live on the Irish Road, unsure how he would convince her to keep it. Her birthday wasn’t until after the New Year. Christmas was still some time off. A gift for no particular occasion would have been a difficult thing to explain.
Katie lifted the package up. “It’s heavy.”
Joseph all but held his breath. He had no idea what she would think of his gift. If only she would love it the way he hoped she would.
She tore back the paper. “A book?” She was clearly confused.
“This is no ordinary book,” he said. “A Frenchman invented a machine a few years ago called a phonautograph. It creates patterns, pictures from sound waves.”
Katie gave the tiniest shake of her head. “I don’t know what sound waves are.”
“I would be willing to wager you do but you just haven’t heard them called that.”
She looked more intrigued by the moment.
“When you speak or sing, you feel a vibration in your throat or perhaps in your chest. And when you play your violin, it vibrates inside.”
“Aye.”
“That vibrating you feel is sound waves.”
“I didn’t know there was a word for it.” She looked back at the still-closed book. “This man from France—how does his machine make pictures from sound waves?”
Joseph flipped the book open to a drawing of the phonautograph. “The person speaks or sings or plays an instrument into this part here.” He tapped the sketch, indicating the cone-shaped piece of the phonautograph. “And the vibrating makes this part here shake exactly the same way the sound itself is shaking.”
“And it makes a picture of the shaking?” She was already putting it together, though he’d not told her enough for the concept to be entirely clear.
“Around this cylinder is a long sheet of paper covered in lampblack. The moving part has something very much like a needle at the end, and that needle scratches a pattern into the blacking.”
Her eyes moved about as she studied the drawing. He could almost see the thoughts as they swirled through her mind. “Those patterns, then, are—” Her forehead creased and her eyes narrowed. She tipped her head to one side, still examining the drawing. “Those patterns are what sound looks like? If we could see music, it would look like the patterns this machine makes?” She tapped the drawing.
“Yes, exactly.”
She slowly turned her head in his direction. Awe filled her face. “They are like photographs of music. Not people playing music, but the music itself.”
“Yes. Music and spoken words and general sounds. Any noise at all makes a pattern in the air.”
She clasped her hands together and pressed her fingertips to her lips, leaning back in her chair. It was exactly the posture of a woman in a state of full amazement. After a moment, she said, “Can I see the . . . the pictures? I don’t the know proper name for them.”
“They are phonautograms. And of course you can look at them.” Joseph flipped through the first few pages, past the explanation of how the machine was invented and the principles on which it worked, until he found the first phonautogram print.
“These wavy lines, here?” Katie spoke before he had a chance to. “Are these the pho—phon—”
“Phonautograms. Yes.”
She stared, hardly blinking. She said simply, “They’re beautiful.”
He’d known she would think that. He’d known it. She who loved music so deeply couldn’t help but be moved by the sight of its physical form.
She traced her finger along the up-and-down pattern of the line that stretched the length of the entire page. “Does it say what sound this is?”
Joseph read the inscription. “It says this is a man’s voice singing ‘Au Claire de Lune.’”
“This is music, then.” She shook her head in amazement. “I have often closed my eyes while playing my fiddle and imagined the music as swirls of color and light. But I never knew it had a shape, an actual shape. If we could see it floating in the air around us, it would have a shape.”
“This shape, in fact,” Joseph said, a smile around the edge of his mouth.
They turned page after page, Katie watching in wonder, asking countless questions. Joseph read the inscription under each image so she would know exactly what she was seeing. How quickly she grasped a concept based in physics and mathematics having never studied either one. Here was one of many reasons he’d come to love her as he did. She had an intellect not only open to new ideas but eager for them and more than capable of learning anything she put her mind to.
“This is really for me to keep all for myself?” she asked before they had even reached the end of the book.
“Yes, it is. I wanted you to have something that you would love but not necessarily need.”
“I don’t understand.”
He didn’t entirely himself. “I just wanted to give you something that would make you happy.”
“It has, Joseph. It’s like holding a bit of magic.” She closed the book, running her hand lovingly over its cover.
Something about that set his heart pounding again. Perhaps because she’d liked his gift so much. Perhaps it was the sparkle of excitement and joy in her eyes. Maybe the grace of even her smallest movements.
He slowly, carefully, slid his hand over hers where it rested on the book.
“Thank you, Joseph. I will treasure this.”
He wrapped his fingers around her hand and pulled it to his lips. He pressed a quick kiss to her fingers. His heart nearly jumped out of his chest.
Katie sat very still, watching him. He couldn’t quite decide what expression she wore. Confusion. Enjoyment. Uncertainty. Pleasure. It was a mixture of all of those things. He waited for her to pull away or speak or let him know if the gesture was welcome.
She did nothing but sit frozen on the spot, her gaze never leaving him.
“Katie, I—”
A knock interrupted the words he’d not yet decided upon. Katie hesitated a moment.
“I should answer that.” Her voice was small, unsteady. Her eyes remained firmly locked with his.
Joseph nodded and released her hand.
Katie crossed to the door. Joseph hoped whoever it was would keep their conversation short so he could have more time with her.
But the moment she opened the door, he knew his time was over. A quick intake of breath preceded her happy cry of “Tavish!”
Tavish scooped her up, spinning her about. “Did you miss me, lass?”
For just a moment Joseph had forgotten that he had a rival for Katie’s affections, a rival with a prior claim. He rose as Tavish came in, nodding in what he hoped appeared to be unconcerned friendliness.
“Joseph.” Tavish held out his hand and Joseph shook it.
“Were your deliveries successful?” Joseph asked.
Tavish said they were. He didn’t seem overly worried about finding another man spending an evening with the woman he was courting. Either Tavish didn’t care as deeply as Joseph thought—something he doubted very much—or Tavish was confident in the strength of Katie’s regard.
Joseph bid them both good night. He received a sincere, if awkward, thank you from Katie. He nodded his acceptance as he slipped out the door.
He’d made progress that night and had some reason for optimism. But the end was far from decided.
Though failure was a very real possibility, he didn’t intend to lose without a fight.