I've a good friend who's a prolific romance writer (more than 80 published) and she offered to coach me for the Golden Heart (Romance Writer's of America annual contest.) The deadline looms near (December 2) The chances of my completing the novel to my expectations are looking slim, my actual winning even skinnier. Never-the-less, I'm posting my first chapter for your enjoyment. Feedback welcome.
Stealing Mercy
New York, New YorkDecember, 1888
New York City’s night noises seeped through the wall chinks and window: the horses’ jingling harnesses, the laughter and chatter of the opera patrons spilling from the concert hall, the town crier ringing his bell announcing the midnight hour and that all was well. But not all was well, because one noise, a noise that didn't belong, jarred Mercy awake.
A creak on the stairs that led to her apartment. The third from the top, five steps past Mr. Bidwell’s door. Only those wishing to reach her door crossed that step. She never entertained visitors in her tiny attic apartment; she wasn’t expecting company.
Lying in her bed, she held her breath while the unexpected guest paused outside her door. The walls were thin, the door as substantial as paper, the lock inconsequential. Her thoughts raced and her body shook while she thought. A shock of cold hit when she slipped from the bedding. The wooden floor felt like ice beneath her feet and she missed the hot water bottle she kept in her bed. The embers in the grate had burnt to a smolder and her shivering had as much to do with cold as with fear.
Mercy padded through the doorway to the sitting room. The dying coals in the potbelly stove cast an orange glow and the shadows from the furniture loomed large. She grabbed a fire poker from the hearth and waited for a knock on the door. She tried to think of an innocent reason for a neighbor to call, an emergency or crisis where she could assist. But, when the knock didn’t come, she crept behind the pie safe stocked with the previous day’s unsold pies and pastries. While she waited, she watched the stars wink through the window and wondered if their pale light could penetrate her chiffon shift. She felt naked, alone, friendless.
She could call out. Let the visitor know she was awake, alert and fire poker armed. Perhaps someone on the street below would hear, but would they come to her aid? Her only neighbor, Mr. Bidwell, as old as Satan and twice as mean, would never rouse from his bed for her aid. As she so often did, Mercy missed her father and longed for family.
The splintering wood shattered the air as the lock gave way.
Across the room, a mirror, tarnished and misty, gave a wavy reflection of the door cracking open. Mercy slid a fraction lower behind the pie safe. The odors of the pies mingled with her own smell of fear. She could feel the panic spilling out of her like a cloud that blurred her vision. In the mirror she saw first a boot and then a thigh. Mr. Steele, his face a study of lust and cruelty, stood in the semi-darkness. The moonlight glistened on the six inch blade of a knife dangling from his gloved hand. Mercy choked on a sour tasting sob. Suitors don’t carry knives.
Mr. Steele pushed the door open more, inviting in a breeze that circulated through the room. She knew why she’d been attracted to him. He looked and moved like royalty. His dark hair curled away from his forehead and his lean muscles rippled beneath his breeches. She thought of his laughter, the lilt of his voice when he asked if he could call, the gleam in his eye when she’d accepted his gift. Mercy fingered the gold charm, a four leaf clover that he’d given her. She’d tied it with a ribbon and wore it around her neck. Why hadn’t she taken it off when she’d denied his suit? When had she become suspicious of his flattery? Why was she not surprised to find him in her room at midnight wielding a knife?
Of course, he’d been angry and insulted that a mere shop girl would reject his favors. Impoverished girls without families and connections should fawn over a handsome, wealthy and prominent man such as Steele, but Mercy wasn’t typical, and she wasn’t as impoverished one might suppose. And when Mr. Steele had invited her on a voyage to South America without proposing marriage, she’d turned him down.
Rumors whispered that Mr. Steele had also invited Belle on such a voyage, and then Belle had disappeared.
Mercy held her breath as Steele passed the pie safe, and then stopped, as if thinking. Mustering strength from the muscles that spent long hours kneading bread and beating eggs, gathering courage grown from burying first her mother and then her father, Mercy shoved the pie safe and it gave way with a creak and shudder. The safe caught Mr. Steele on the shoulder and he stumbled under the assault of the swinging doors and sailing pies. Apple, cherries, peaches, the sweet cinnamony odors of Faye’s wares pelted Mr. Steele. He danced in the pastry goop and landed hard on his knee. In a different circumstance, she’d have laughed at his abandoned dignity and awkward bobbling, but that night she joined him in the fallen pastries with her mouth in a stern line, her anger as hot as fire.
One blow from the poker sent him to the floor. A second blow brought his arms over his head. With the third he shuddered, fell face first to the floor and then went still. She stopped beating, her arms were shaking and her breath ragged,. Blood oozed from behind his ear. His body sprawled in the spilt pies, his face pressed against the floorboards. She nudged him with the poker and he didn’t stir. For a long moment she stood above him, waiting for a sign of life.
Her heart still raced as she considered her options. The police? Would they believe her cry of self defense?
Taking another glance at the handsome face, her heart picked up speed. He lay motionless in a mess of stewed fruit and crust. A cherry clung to an eyebrow. And then she noticed papers protruding from his jacket pocket. With a hammering heart she considered. It looked like passage fare.
Squatting beside him, she gently drew the papers loose. A silver key slipped out of the packet and to the floor and landed with a ping. The skeleton key had a curlicue top with embossed leaves swirling around the words Lucky Island. The papers were first class passage way to Seattle. It seemed Mr. Steele had been undeterred from the voyage he’d proposed. The boat left at first light.
Seattle.
She couldn’t.
She had an aunt in Seattle.
She mustn’t.
Silly Tilly, her father had called his sister. Mercy hadn’t met her aunt, but since Silly Tilly always remembered Mercy’s birthday with a sent dress or shawl, why not? Mercy turned her head away from the tiny sitting room and looked out the window to the river while her hastily drawn plans cemented in her mind. Perhaps Lucky Island was in the Puget Sound. It sounded more fortuitous than Faye’s Bakery off Elm. Would her aunt take her in? She’d written her aunt of her father’s death, but hadn’t, as yet, heard a reply. Perhaps an invitation was already in the mail.
Mercy went to the wardrobe and began tossing through her dresses, nothing seemed practical. What did one wear for flight? She caught hold of her father’s chest and nursed an idea.
The pants, well worn and loose, she tucked into her boots. She rolled up the sleeves of the cotton shirt and shrugged into the boiled wool coat. It felt odd and freeing to be moving without the cumbrance of skirts and petticoats. She tugged at the belt holding up her father’s breaches and took a deep breath in an effort to restore the calm she’d lost the moment she heard the boot on the stairs. The jacket made her warm and the faint smell of leather and shoeshine that she had always associated with her father gave her courage. She kept one eye on Mr. Steele as she finished packing the knapsack: her father’s watch, her mother’s bible, a bag of gold coins, a loaf of barley bread.
Sitting at the table where she’d taken her solitary meals, she struggled to control her shaking hands. One pinned the paper and the other grasped the quill. Her handwriting looked spidery, the ink blotchy. A splash of ink stained her father’s denim work shirt, but Mercy didn’t care.
To whom it may concern, I, Mercy Faye, have taken my life on the night of December 15, 1888, she wrote, but she mentally added, to Seattle. She left the note on her unmade bed.
She snuck a glance at the blood seeping from the man’s temple and fought the bile rising in her throat as she squatted beside the bed and pulled out a locked trunk. Her fingers shook when she tried to work the key. Quickly, she rifled through her mother’s things which smelled of must, neglect and a lingering hint of lavender. Forgive me, Mama, she thought, as her fingers made contact with the velvet bag containing the Bren jewels.
Not trusting the sapphires in the knapsack, she tucked the bag in her chemise next to her heart, beneath the ink-stained denim shirt. Then she went to her safe where she kept the shop’s proceeds. Perhaps someone, most likely her landlord, would wonder about the shop’s nearly empty till, but no one, other than herself, knew the shop’s profits. Who would question the scant means she left behind? The coins jingled heavily in her pockets.
There had been times since her father’s death when she’d contemplated selling the jewels, but the bakery had sustained a rapidly burgeoning popularity. Mercy took a deep breath, inhaling the warm pastry smells that permeated her life. She would miss the shop. It would only be a few hours until her costumers would miss her. In her mind she could see Mr. Lester, impatient for his muffin and coffee, Mrs. Nicole, eager for her biscuits. The costumers would wonder away, wondering what had happened to their supply of baked goods, and eventually her landlord would bang on the door, demanding rent, fair compensation. Would he find Mr. Steele?
Two hats hung on the hook by the door, a simple straw affair and summer bonnet that she wore walking. Mercy tucked bonnet beneath her arm and shouldered the knapsack. Then she bade a silent goodbye to her home.
And then she felt it. A shift in the air. She stopped and listened and then heard movement. Mr. Steele flinched.
Every noise seemed amplified as she wrenched open the door she raced down the squeaky steps. Outside, she sucked in the cold night air and let it fill her lungs. She crept through the alley, relying on memory and moonlight to guide her through the towering rows of dark shops. When she reached the avenue, the light from the street lamps twinkled on the dew covered sidewalk, her riding boots didn’t make a sound on the cobblestone street. An alley cat kept watch on a window sill, a rat scurried beneath a trash bin. Mercy lowered her father’s felt cap and hunched her chin into his scarf when she passed a pair of street walkers. The ladies, bruised and blue with cold called out to her, but she pulled down her cap and hunched her chin into her scarf when she fled down the avenue to where the Brooklyn Bridge crossed the East River.
Mercy stopped on the bridge, the same bridge from which Mrs. Claris Steele had thrown herself in a fit of melancholy a little more than a year ago. Mercy felt the wind pull at her clothes and tease tendrils of hair from the cap and sent Claris Steele a silent prayer of gratitude for the inspiration. With a glance over her shoulder, Mercy tossed the feathered bonnet into the swirling dark water and watched it disappear.
Just as she must now do.
Chapter 1
Seattle, Washington
June 1889
Despite her unfortunate fling with courtship and Mr. Steele, Mercy believed in love. She’d grown up in the warmth of her parents tender regard, gentle teasing and fond concern for her and each other and knew that love didn’t require gold or even proximity. She’d learned it was possible to love even after love had gone. After her mother’s accidental death, her father had still loved his wife and had talked of her fondly, as if she were in the back room, or down the street, or running an errand and would return shortly. Perhaps he knew, or suspected, that he’d soon join her. Perhaps his sudden, fatal attack of pneumonia hadn’t surprised him as much as it had stunned Mercy.
Her parents had met at a Coney Island pie eating contest. Her father joked he’d fallen first for the pie, second for the baker. He hadn’t won the contest, but he had won the cook. Mercy knew she couldn’t pass out pies hoping to attract the love of a man such as her father, but she also suspected she couldn’t stand on the sidewalk and pick the love of her life out of the crowd.
Love, like everything else, needed key ingredients. Then it needed to be stirred, mixed and heated to the right temperature. But, first the ingredients, and in this case, the man, had to be carefully selected. In Seattle, the selection seemed boundless.
“Isn’t it glorious?” Eloise squeezed Mercy’s arm as they strolled down First Avenue. “They say that there’s about a hundred men to every woman.” Eloise, an elfish brunette with violet eyes, looked younger than her years. In Chicago at age twenty-two she would be considered long in the tooth, but in Seattle she reigned queen. Mercy, who’d met Eloise at a church social, considered herself lucky to have been granted favor in Eloise’s court.
Eloise exhaled a happy sigh and pointed her dark curly head at the stream of men disembarking from the US Maypole. “Tall ones, short ones, fat ones, skinny ones…why did I ever hesitate?”
The ship unloaded a flow of men onto the gangplank while gulls wheeled overhead. The sun smiled on the crowd and the air held a circus quality- so many people, mostly male, coming and going, jostling in the excitement of a new place filled with new opportunities. Mercy watched the man parade and smiled at the expressions of welcome and come hither fleeting across her friend’s face.
“Maybe because in Chicago you had a lovely home and people who loved you.”
“But there are so many more to love here.” Eloise scanned the crowded pier. Not all of the male specimens could meet Eloise’s approval. Some looked positively green and unsteady as they tried to navigate the crowded boardwalks on their newly acquired land legs.
Mercy remembered her own disembarkation only three months ago. She’d looked like a scarecrow in her father’s clothes. The clothes had been baggy in New York, but after weeks of poor food, she’d arrived in Seattle skeletal. She’d spent most of the trip from New York around the cape hungry. Fortunately, her Aunt Tilly, an extremely generous woman who loved company and food, had a fabulous cook and was an excellent seamstress. Even though Tilly hadn’t even known Mercy, she’d extended love, a mushrooming wardrobe and warm meals.
Mercy hugged the parcel of linens and buttons to her chest and let her gaze follow Eloise’s. Tall ones, skinny ones, rich ones, poor ones… Mercy knew that Eloise would meet and entertain the handsomest of them with her flashing dimples. “Come on,” Mercy said, slipping her arm around Eloise’s waist. “You can pick out your favorite at the Seafarer’s Ball.”
Eloise shuffled her feet, obviously reluctant to leave the man smorgasbord. Eloise sometimes reminded Mercy of the tiny Pekinese that lived across the street: riotous hair, sharp features, a perky bounce and a dislike for being led. “But these ones are fresh. They probably don’t even know about the ball.”
“Then you can meet them when they come into the Penny Store.”
Eloise stopped and cocked her head. “I pick that one.”
Mercy took in the scene: legions of men teeming the sidewalks, heading in all directions, gulls calling and wheeling above the ships tied to the gray and weathered docks, horses, carriages and wagons splattering through the muddy streets. And then her gaze caught Eloise’s latest choice. She knew that Eloise flirted, fell passionately in love, and then moved on in an endless circle of romantic conquests. In the few months that Mercy had known her, Eloise had loved and then tossed no less than ten lovelorn men. Mercy felt sorry for the heartsick heroes, who seemed unable to withstand Eloise’s charm. Mercy wondered if Eloise intended to conquer them all before her first gray hair.
Eloise’s choice wove through the crowd, his head and shoulders above the others. Mercy’s heart accelerated.
The raven hair, the arctic blue eyes. Tight tan breeches, tall leather boots, white shirt undone at the collar, he looked as handsome in Seattle as he had in New York.
And just as dangerous.
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