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“You travel more than any islander I know,” he said as the boat bobbed gently on the waves and Amherst Island became no more than a green smudge in the distance. “I don’t know why you don’t just stay put, Ellen Copley.”
“You think me an islander?” Ellen asked, half-teasingly, and Captain Jonah gave her a considering look from under his bushy brows.
“Aye, I suppose I do, at that,” he admitted gruffly.
Ellen smiled. “There’s no higher compliment than that, Captain Jonah.”
He grinned at her. “You’re right there.”
At Kingston Ellen boarded the Pullman Palace Car to Chicago, half-expecting a conductor to tell her she was in the wrong place. The elegant seats in the parlor car, with their crimson velvet upholstery, felt far too fine for her. Yet no one looked twice at her, in her new dress of pale rose silk trimmed with three inches of lace, and a hat in the latest style swathed in lace netting to keep the worst of the travel dust from her. She felt elegant and grown-up and yet exceedingly self-conscious as well, so she took out her sketchbook and began to draw w
hat she saw, surely the best way to calm her nerves.
After half an hour, as the city was left behind for rolling meadows, she felt someone’s gaze upon her and self-conscious again, she looked up. The parlor car was nearly empty; besides a dozing businessman and a stuffy-looking matron swathed in bombazine, the only other customer was a natty-looking gentleman at the end of the car. His hair and eyes were both black, the ends of his mustache slicked with pomade, and he was looking right at her.
Ellen felt herself flush under the scrutiny of his stare; surely no gentleman would look at an unaccompanied lady thus. Yet he looked like a gentleman, in his fancy clothes, and after a second’s pause when he realized she had caught him staring, he shot her a wry smile and bowed his head in apologetic acknowledgement before looking away.
Still flushing, Ellen turned back to her sketches, but she did not draw anything more.
As the sun began to set and the train headed towards Buffalo, Ellen went to the dining car for her dinner. The dining car was every bit as elegant as the parlor one; tables bedecked with white linen and fine silver graced the narrow car, velvet curtains at the windows and chandeliers overhead. The tuxedoed waiter ushered her to a private table, and as she walked through the car she passed the gentleman she’d seen in the parlor car. He was staring at her again, and he smiled as she passed. Ellen held her head high and swept past him without any acknowledgement.
A few minutes later, as she perused the menu, the waiter approached her. “Excuse me, miss, but the gentleman at the far table inquires if you would care to dine with him.”
Ellen looked up, startled and amazed. She had never heard of a man being so forward. “I should think not,” she said crisply, and the waiter bowed his head.
“Very good, miss.”
She kept her gaze on the menu as the waiter walked to the other end of the car, and her face flamed as she heard him murmur to the man. She could not make out the words, but it hardly mattered. She could quite easily guess their nature. Doubt suddenly assailed her. She had little experience of the larger world; perhaps such an invitation was commonplace. Perhaps she was the rude one.
“Miss?”
She looked up at the waiter once more. “Yes?”
“The gentleman apologizes for unsettling you, and kindly asks if you would accept his card.”
“I don’t...” Ellen bit her lip. Doubt and astonishment gave way to a shy curiosity. Surely there could be no harm in taking the man’s card. “Very well. You may thank him.” She accepted the card and glanced down at it: Henry McAvoy, Board of Governors, Glasgow School of Art.
She felt her stomach drop away as she stared at the card in wordless shock. Glasgow? Art school? Had he recognized her accent, or seen her sketches, or was it simply all the most amazing coincidence, and all he’d seen was a young lady in need of a companion?
Swallowing, Ellen tucked the card in her reticule and turned to the menu once more. No matter who this Henry McAvoy was, she was not about to approach him in the middle of the dining car.
That night she retired to a private sleeping car for ladies, and listened to the matron in bombazine snore as her mind went round and round wondering why Mr. McAvoy had been so bold... and if tomorrow would present an opportunity for her to speak with him.
She did not see him at breakfast, and the train pulled into Chicago’s Union Station soon after. A porter fetched Ellen’s valise, and with a flicker of regret that she had not seen Mr. McAvoy again she exited the train for the busy platform, overwhelmed by the sheer size of the elegant station, never mind the city that lay beyond.
Although she’d arranged by telegram to stay at a boarding house nearby, she realized she had not considered transport to that establishment, or just how big the city of Chicago actually was. It had been no more than a small, black dot on a wide stretch of empty map, yet now it sprang around her, a city fully grown, more of a city than anything she’d seen since that first frightening day in New York.
People bustled by her in a continuous, indifferent stream; a few jostled her shoulder with muttered oaths. She took a step backwards, willing herself away from the noise, the crowd. She hadn’t felt like this since she and Da had stepped off the boat into the seething reaches of Manhattan six years ago, excited, overwhelmed, and a little bit afraid.
A porter carrying two heavy valises jostled her elbow, and someone else pushed by on her other side. Before Ellen could stop herself she found herself falling hard onto her knees, her hands flat out in front of her.
“Oh!” The breath had been knocked from her, and as people continued to stream by with indifferent ease she knelt there, her knees aching, her hands scraped.
“Can I help?” She heard a kind voice, vaguely familiar somehow, at her side, and then someone was helping her from her inelegant position on the pavement. “Are you quite all right?”
Ellen turned and to her astonishment saw Mr. McAvoy from the train. “That was quite a fall. Please, let me take your bag and bring you somewhere more comfortable.”
“I don’t...”
