"Rumors" - читать интересную книгу автора (Godbersen Anna)

Seventeen

THEY’D WOKEN UP IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE — well, in an oil field, which looked on the face of it very much like nowhere — but by late afternoon Elizabeth and Will were moving steadily northward to San Francisco in a first-class car. There had been several delays at the station in San Pedro, and for a time Elizabeth had given up hope of her pulse returning to a normal rate. The first-class car had been Will’s idea. It was an extravagance she wasn’t sure if they could afford — how deep could his savings run, anyway? But he’d insisted that this was the way to celebrate the imminent change in their lives. Elizabeth might have protested more strongly, except that her worries lay elsewhere.

“Where do you think we’ll be by tomorrow?” Will asked, taking her hand, as their car hurtled through the middle of California.

“I don’t know.” Outside, the sun was going down. Elizabeth pushed her head back into the red velvet cushion of the car and shifted her gaze from the rapidly changing landscape in the window to Will. The names on their door read elizabeth and will keller, and they were keeping up the ruse of being a married couple so that they could share a berth without suspicion. He had apologized to her, once they’d taken their seats, and promised that he wouldn’t make her lie about something that important much longer.

“I slept all the way cross-country last time,” Will said. She winced to think what must have been on his mind during that trip, even though his tone was a happy one. He was worried about her, she could see that — his light blue eyes were wide and observant against his sun-darkened skin. “I plan to take in more of the view this time.”

Elizabeth pressed her palm into his and tried to smile. They were both wearing their coats for the first time since they’d left New York — this despite the heat of the railway cars — because she believed it made them look more put together. She felt a little ashamed to be tawny and dirty, so simply dressed, amidst all these trappings of travel gentility, but at least she could believe that her fellow travelers were merely rich and not yet distinguished by taste or class. Still, Elizabeth would have done anything to cover the yellowing her seersucker dress had taken on. In Will’s case, however, the black smears on his serge trousers seemed to garner as much murmured admiration as his fitted brown coat.

Three chandeliers illuminated their car, and a carpet ran down its center. They were on their way to New York, and the air around them was all warm and perfumed, but still, Elizabeth’s mind was restless.

“We’ll be with them soon enough,” Will told her gently, as if reading her thoughts.

Elizabeth nodded and rested her head against his shoulder. What Will said was true, but it did little to comfort her, because the question that had interrupted her sleep the night before was not how soon she could be with her family, but what she could do for them once she arrived.

Will believed that they were sitting on vast wealth, and she believed him, but she knew it would take time and effort to turn that into cash. Her family needed money now, or preferably yesterday. But Elizabeth owned something that could be turned into cash, though she could hardly think of it without a sheen of sweat collecting on her brow. That thing was Henry Schoonmaker’s engagement ring, a Tiffany diamond set in gold.

The ring was in her pocket, wrapped once in tissue paper and then in newspaper and then finally in a piece of canvas. She hadn’t yet told Will that she had brought it with her from New York. It was such a talisman of her past betrayals, she didn’t even like to think of it. But she reminded herself that it might do her family a world of good — it might hire the necessary doctor, or put Diana in the right dress — and she had already been selfish enough. She would feel better, she told herself, once it was out of her hands and she had its worth in bills.

She had a plan for that, too — she knew that the train was to stop in Oakland for several hours, to pick up new passengers and cargo. There were places near the station where things could be pawned, as Denny had told her once. She would slip out on some excuse and would be done with it quickly.

“If you don’t stop making that distraught face,” Will said, interrupting her agitated planning, “I think I might start to cry.”

She leaned into his shoulder and told him she would try. Her eyelids were heavy, and in a moment they fell closed. She let the train’s northward movement rock her, and Will, too, and in a little while she did manage — however briefly — to let her family’s troubles fade from her mind. As she fell into sleep, she told herself that she was capable of executing her plan. It was would be easy, and then she would be able to repay her family for all the distress she had caused.