A Family For Carter Jones. Ana Seymour
hid his chagrin at the coldness of her tone. With his tall good looks and practiced charm, Carter had been able to soften the hearts of the haughtiest of debutantes in Boston society. But he had a feeling that Jennie Sheridan was regarding him with no more interest than she had in the black ant that was crossing the wooden stoop at their feet.
“I guess you’d put this in the category of inconvenient,” he admitted, giving the papers in his hand a shake.
“It’s the court ruling, isn’t it?”
Carter met her eyes and nodded. She held her head stiffly, her delicate chin up, as if she were waiting for a blow. “They’ve turned down your petition. You’re not allowed to have a business in this part of town,” Carter said gently.
Jennie closed her eyes for just a moment, but when she opened them, they held anger, not resignation. “Three renters. That’s all it is. Three people to fill out the bedrooms in this big place.” She gestured to the house behind her. “Why, it should be a crime not to let the rooms out, with the silver boom in town. People need places to stay.”
Carter ruffled through the papers in his hand. “You have an employee, it says…” he began.
“Barnaby?” Jennie gasped in disbelief. “He’s twelve years old. And he had nowhere else to go—”
“That boy is the employee?” Carter interrupted.
Instead of answering the question, Jennie backed down the stairs to the wooden walkway and pointed up the street. “You see all those fancy houses, Mr. Jones? There’s not a one of them that doesn’t have a servant of some kind. Gardener, maid, livery man. We have Barnaby. One boy and two women. We run this place. We muck the horses and grow the food. When the pump broke out back, I was the one who fixed it. When the roof leaked this June, I was the one on a ladder patching it up.”
She seemed to gather steam as she continued to talk, her features becoming more animated. Carter was so entranced that he found himself losing track of what she was saying. When she paused, evidently expecting a reply, he could only manage to say, “It does seem a bit unreasonable to classify that boy as a business employee.”
“Well then, tell that to your precious courts, Mr. Jones.” She marched up the stairs past him, her basket nearly knocking the papers out of his hand. “And tell them that if they want to force two orphan sisters, one of whom is ill, to leave their home, they’ll have to come in here with the sheriff and a passel of deputies and carry us out.”
As Carter tried to formulate an answer, she wrenched open the door, stalked inside and slammed it in his face.
“Well, what was he like?” Kate asked.
“Who?” Jennie was kneading bread dough. Lord, it seemed as if she spent half her time kneading bread these days. She couldn’t understand how just three men and a boy could go through so many loaves each week. Goodness knows, she and Kate hardly touched the stuff. Jennie was always too busy or too tired to eat, and Kate had had no appetite since she’d started getting sick early in her pregnancy. Her face had grown gaunt and, except for her now obviously protruding stomach, she was alarmingly thin. Jennie had pleaded, alternating tears and threats, but Kate still refused to be seen by Dr. Millard, which was not only dangerous to her health, but pointless, since by now everyone in town knew that she was with child.
“The new district attorney,” Kate said with slight exasperation. “What’s he like?”
“I don’t know…he’s…he’s just a man. Who cares?”
Kate sighed. “Just because he’s a man doesn’t eliminate him from consideration as a human being, Jen dear. There are good men in the world. Not all of them disappear leaving…problems in their wake.”
“Not all of them are like Sean Flaherty, you mean.”
As usual, her sister’s eyes chilled at the mention of her erstwhile lover’s name. Jennie hated that look.
“Think of Papa,” Kate said after a moment. “He was a good man.”
“He left us, too,” Jennie said under her breath, slapping the bread as if it were Carter Jones’s handsome face. The new district attorney had been handsome, she would admit that much to herself, if not to Kate. But then, Sean Flaherty had been handsome, too, and look where that had led her poor sister.
“Jennie! How can you say such a thing? Papa didn’t leave us—he died.”
Jennie stopped pummeling. Her shoulders sagged, and she gave the ball of mixed dough an apologetic pat. “Yes, he died. It wasn’t his fault, but he’s gone, nevertheless.”
“Well, maybe it’s not Mr. Jones’s fault either that they gave him those papers to bring here. If you’d been a bit nicer to him, we might even have gotten him on our side.”
Jennie used the edge of her hand to chop the mass of dough into loaf-size chunks. “Oh, I’m sure the fancy Haah-vard man would take the side of a couple of unimportant, disgraced, utterly poor women against the whole rest of the town.”
Kate looked gloomy. “I’m the one who’s disgraced, not you. It’s not fair that you should pay for my sins.”
Jennie smiled at her. “My sister, the sinner.”
“I am. I did.”
“You were in love, Kate, and falling in love’s not a sin.” She dropped the last loaf into its pan with a satisfying plop, then added, “It’s just stupidity.”
Kate shook her head. “I’m afraid I’ve soured you on men for good.”
“‘Twas Sean Flaherty soured me on men, not you. Not that I ever had much time for them in the first place.”
“Because you never met the right one.”
Carter Jones’s smile flashed through Jennie’s mind. She’d been thoroughly irritated by his smile, but beyond the irritation, she’d felt another sensation. Equally disagreeable, she decided, kind of like the prickling of a heat rash. “There is no right one for me, Katie dear,” she said breezily. “I intend to grow old as a happy and peaceful old maid.”
Jennie finished wiping her hands on the dish towel and hung it on the rack, then turned to look around at their tidy kitchen. “And what’s more, I don’t care how many Mr. Joneses they send after us—I intend to do it right here in my very own house.”
“So what are we going to do about the papers?”
“They can go to the devil with their papers. I’m not leaving here. And since we can’t afford to stay here without the money from our boarders, they’re not leaving here, either.”
Kate slid awkwardly off the stool where she’d perched to watch her sister’s labors. Jennie refused to let her help much with the cooking anymore. The heaviest job Jennie would allow her was wiping the dishes after dinner. And even then, Jennie herself took over when it came time to put away the heavy pans. For weeks Kate had been too sick to argue with her sister’s proclamations and now, though she was feeling better, she seemed to have adapted to the unusual circumstance of allowing her sister to take care of her. “Are we going to tell them about it?” she asked.
“Tell the silverheels?” The silverheels was Jennie’s nickname for the three miners who had taken rooms at Sheridan House while they hired on at the Longley mine up the canyon. She’d called them that from the first day the three young men had arrived, joking that they hoped they wouldn’t track too much silver dust onto her mother’s prized Persian rug in the parlor. Jennie had laughed and welcomed their business and had never let on to them that a bit of silver dust would be a godsend in the Sheridan sisters’ lives at the moment
“Well, they’ll probably find out about it Especially if Mr. Jones takes you up on your invitation and comes trooping back here with the sheriff to shut us down.”
Jennie felt