A Shelter of Hope (25 page)

“OH, SIMONE, I wish you could come with us to the picnic,” Una said, and the genuineness of her concern and desire was evident for all to hear.

“I’ll be fine,” Simone replied. “Rachel has me all settled here on the sofa, and Henri has supplied me with huge quantities of freshly iced lemonade.”

Jeffery O’Donnell watched the scene with intent interest. He’d not yet told Simone of his plan to remain with her while the others went to the festivities. The house would be nearly empty, with the exception of the few Harvey Girls who had volunteered to stay behind and help with the evening meal’s preparation. In Rachel’s private parlor for “her girls,” Jeffery intended to talk to Simone about her past … and perhaps even about her future.

“Your new dress looks so pretty,” another of the girls added. “I’ve never seen anything quite so nice.”

Simone nodded. “It is lovely, but I have to admit Una did most of the work. I’m still learning how to operate that newfangled sewing machine.”

Laughter filled the room as the conversation turned to tales about one mishap after another that some of the girls had experienced with Mr. Singer’s machine. Jeffery bided his time patiently until Rachel appeared, bonnet in hand, with the announcement that their transportation had arrived.

As the ladies filed out in animated whispers and giggles, Jeffery watched Simone for any sign of regret. But like a stone statuette, Simone kept all emotions from her face. She had been very quiet and withdrawn since her ordeal, and Jeffery could only hope that it was simply an aftermath of the illness.

“So do you wish you were going along?” he asked casually, coming across the room to where Simone sat.

“No, not really. I had looked forward to the picnic and seeing the boat races,” she admitted, “but I’m just as content to stay behind.”

Jeffery took a seat opposite her and stretched out his long legs before him. He wondered what she’d think of his actions but didn’t have to contemplate it for long.

“Won’t you be late?” Simone questioned.

“No,” he said, smiling. “I’m not going.”

“What?”

He let his smile broaden. “Why would I go along with that passel of giggling geese when I can remain here with the loveliest girl of all?”

Simone blushed and Jeffery knew she was genuinely embarrassed by the flattery. He’d known many a young woman who could blush on command, but with this woman, he knew it was a natural response.

“You should go along with the others,” she murmured uncomfortably.

“But I want to be here with you,” Jeffery countered, crossing his arms against his chest. “And since I’m in a position to do as I please, while you, my dear Simone, are stuck here recuperating from your illness, I win.”

“I could leave and go upstairs,” she said defiantly, lifting her chin.

Jeffery studied her face for a moment. Her appearance was like a fine china doll. Her skin, so flawlessly white and smooth, made him long to touch her. Her eyes, dark in their midnight shade of blue, caused him to yearn to know what secrets lay behind their intense gaze. And her lips … He shook his head to keep from concentrating too long on the area of her mouth, lest he make a fool of himself by saying the wrong thing.

“Did you hear what I said?” Simone questioned.

Jeffery shrugged and tried to appear nonchalant about the entire matter. “If you think that’s best, then I won’t stand in your way. However, my fondest wish is that you would stay and allow me the privilege of sharing your company.”

Simone rolled her eyes. “My company is hardly something to classify as a privileged event.”

“That, my dear Simone, is entirely a matter of perspective.”

She stared at him curiously for a moment before smoothing out the folds of her skirt. “Why do you keep calling me that?”

“Calling you what?” Jeffery questioned, genuinely confused.

“My dear. You keep saying ‘My dear Simone.”’

“I suppose because I’ve come to feel that you are dear to me.”

She shook her head. “There’s no call for that. I’m nobody to you.”

“Ah … but that, my dear, is where you are wrong.” He grinned ever so slowly and watched her discomfort grow.

“I think we should talk about something else. Rachel has rules about getting too familiar with men,” Simone offered weakly. “And Mr. Harvey has rules about Harvey employees fraternizing.”

“Rachel knows all about my staying here. I’m sure she’ll understand my choice of conversation. As for Mr. Harvey, well, I think he’d understand my actions, as well.” He watched her look away and toy with her long black braid. Taking pity on her, he added, “But if it makes you feel any better, I’ll change the subject.”

Simone nodded. “I think that would be a good idea.”

“What shall we talk about, then?”

Simone leaned back against the cushioning of pillows Rachel had provided for her comfort and grew thoughtful. “Well, you could tell me about Chicago.”

“A harmless enough topic,” Jeffery agreed. But before very long he realized that even this subject led him back to better familiarizing himself with Simone, and in turn, making her more familiar with him.

“My family is what you would call ‘well-to-do.’ I grew up on a monstrous lakeside estate where there were servants for every possible need. We had the best of everything, for my mother was quite concerned that she not be outdone by her neighbors. We entertained regularly, having a dance or dinner party at least once a week—sometimes more. And always, my mother invited unthinkable numbers of people. She had a special dining room table that you could extend to serve up to one hundred people at a time.”

“I can’t imagine,” Simone replied. “There’s so much that I have no knowledge of. We lived very far removed from anything of society or big cities.”

Jeffery found her sudden openness a hopeful sign, but he hesitated to ask her to continue. From experience, if Simone thought you were focusing on her past, she would clam up. With that in mind, Jeffery shrugged. “Big cities have their merits. You certainly can’t give the excuse that you can’t find what you’re looking for,” he offered with a grin. “But on the other hand, there’s never any place where you can find true solace or silence.”

“I loved the quiet of our mountain. I never realized that until I moved away,” Simone said, her expression growing distant. “When I was all alone, it seemed the very best world. When even so much as one other person came to join me, it suddenly felt rather crowded.”

Jeffery laughed. “Now I’m the one who can’t imagine. A crowd of one? I suppose the cities can feel very intimidating to you. Topeka isn’t as bad as Chicago, however. In fact, it is quite lovely. There’s plenty of nice places to find some solitude and quiet. Maybe not as quiet as your mountain, but nevertheless, better than a busy rail yard. Maybe one of these days you will permit me to take you for a carriage ride to one of those places.”

Simone’s brows knit together as if she were thinking very hard on the possibility of such a thing. “I don’t think that would meet with anyone’s approval. As I mentioned earlier, you know about the rules regarding Harvey employees.”

“I know that you aren’t to date any of the staff working in this house, if that’s what you mean,” Jeffery said, watching her closely. “However, I’m not employed by this house and my circumstance is rather unique, even if that were a matter to be considered. I’m under Mr. Harvey’s employ, but I’m certainly not a Harvey House staff member.”

The silence fell hard between them, and Jeffery, unwilling to lose the closeness Simone had briefly allowed him, quickly continued. “My mother is quite the great lady of Chicago. She’s involved in a dozen or more charities and considers herself a matriarch of the city. She has strange ideas for the town, as well as for her son.”

“How so?” Simone asked, surprising Jeffery.

“In regards to the city or myself?”

Simone actually looked as though she might smile. “Whichever.”

“Well, for the city, Mother sees it as the absolute center of all culture and creation. She chides her friends who insist on making sojourns to New York City and Paris, carefully reminding them that Chicago needs their devotion and allegiance in order to surpass those other places. As for her son … well, suffice to say, she has goals and ambitions for me that aren’t necessarily in keeping with my own thoughts.”

“Such as?”

Jeffery shifted a bit in the seat and stretched his arms casually up before joining his hands together behind his head. “She has plans for me to take my rightful position in society. She believes firmly, however, that in order to do so in a proper manner, I must take a socially acceptable wife. A woman of such high standing and inner grace that she would never for a minute question my mother’s guidance or direction.”

“A follower of the pack,” Simone commented.

“Exactly. Someone who will follow very willingly and not concern herself with the reasonings behind why something was being done a certain way. In other words, someone my mother could boss around.”

At this, Simone did smile. “I’ve known folks like that.”

He laughed. “Yes, I suppose we all have. My mother is apparently their queen. You’ve never seen a more determined woman when it comes to planning out her son’s social future. However, I’ve already fallen well behind her schedule. I’m afraid I’ve been rather hardheaded about her plans.”

“What about the rest of your family?”

“My father is too busy making money to worry about how my mother spends it or who she controls in the process. My older brother, Darius O’Donnell the Third, lives back East, and that’s the sum total of the O’Donnell children.”

Simone seemed quite interested in his line of conversation, so Jeffery continued. “My brother’s wife died a year ago, leaving him without children. My mother is rather desperate to see one of us produce an heir to the O’Donnell lineage.”

“Why?” Simone asked curiously.

“Prestige, mostly. But I also think it’s a matter of pride. She can have most anything money can buy and flaunts it in the faces of her friends at every opportunity, but she has no grandchildren and can’t buy herself one, either. She’s pressing me quite hard to marry and reminds Darius in weekly missives that a year of mourning for a young, childless man is more than enough time.”

“So why haven’t you married?” Simone questioned, glancing away as if realizing how personal her inquiry had become.

Jeffery lowered his arms and thoughtfully stared at his hands. “I suppose because for all the women my mother has paraded past me for my consideration, I’ve never found one that interested me half so much as you.”

He looked up in time to watch the color drain from her face. He’d not intended to simply blurt out his interest, but there it was.

“I think you should listen to your mother’s ideas of what’s proper for you,” Simone finally remarked. “She probably knows better what you need than you know yourself.”

“Is that how you felt about your mother? Did she always know your needs better than anyone else?”

Simone’s head snapped up and her eyes narrowed angrily. “My mother certainly didn’t consider my needs. She was a selfish woman who thought only of herself.”

Jeffery hadn’t expected the angry retort, and for a moment he did nothing but stare with what he hoped was an open expression of sympathy. But even though words along the same line came to his mind, Jeffery held back from saying anything. Simone despised pity and seemed not to know what to do with sympathy. Better to remain silent and let her set the stage than to plow ahead and undo any newly gained territory.

“I’m sure, Mr. O’Donnell, that your mother has your best inter-ests in mind. She probably knows all about what kind of wife would do you proud.”

“How can you be so sure when you don’t feel the same quality existed in your own mother?” he asked softly.

Simone looked down at her hands. “I’m only coming to realize just how little I know about the world around me. My mother tried to educate me, but she was a very young woman herself. Still, she knew something of the world and the things that a young person might need to understand in order to get along. However, she left me when I was ten and in her departure failed to leave me with all the elements necessary to take me to adulthood. I could speak and read and write in English and French. I knew how to better conduct myself and my tongue than most folks on the mountain only because my mother had been born a lady. But there was so much more that I didn’t know.”

“Such as?” Jeffery dared to ask. He could only pray she’d continue to tell him about herself.

“Such as what the rest of the world did while I was asleep at night, or how things were done in other areas of the country. She never bothered to tell me much about anything that wasn’t related to our mountain home. Of course, she taught me to speak politely, conduct myself in a proper manner. She came from good breeding, she would tell me, though she scarcely said anything else about her youth or parents. I remember she used to set the table in a very pretty way and then told me how to conduct myself when at a formal dinner. I don’t know why she thought I needed that kind of information when she never bothered to teach me how to …” Suddenly Simone seemed to realize that she was saying too much.

“How to what?” Jeffery asked casually, hoping against hope that she’d relax and continue. But it wasn’t to be.

“Never mind. Regardless of her efforts, I still feel quite the illmannered oaf when standing next to some of the girls. They have such different backgrounds and know so much more of the world. A world that goes beyond conducting yourself properly at a dinner party.”

“Well, sometime I’ll have to take you out to a nice dinner and you can prove to me how good you are with those skills you’ve learned.”

“No,” Simone replied. “That wouldn’t be appropriate.”

“Why not?”

She shook her head. “Because we are clearly from two different worlds. You cannot possibly understand what it is to be from my world, and I can’t understand what it is to be from yours.”

“But by exposure you would come to better understand,” Jeffery suggested.

“No.”

At this, Jeffery got up and walked to the window. He didn’t want Simone to see the look of frustration that was sure to be on his face. Why couldn’t he make her see that he wanted to know her better? That he wasn’t ashamed of her social background or her lack of financial status? Deciding it would be his only chance to reach her, Jeffery thought to try honesty.