Lyddie mustn’t worry. Summer was here. The weather was warm. Rachel would be over it soon. They’d take July off. Go back to the farm, the two of them. But it was a vain dream, Lyddie knew. There would be nothing to eat there. The cow was gone and no crops planted.

Triphena. She would send Rachel to Triphena. But Triphena meant Mistress Cutler as well as that lonely, airless attic. How could she do to Rachel at eight what her mother had done to her at thirteen? It had been hard even then. And so very lonely. She hadn’t realized how lonely until now—now that she was no longer alone.

Then one evening in late June—she had just read Rachel to sleep—Tim knocked on the door. “A visitor for you, Lyddie,” he said. “In the parlor.”

18

Charlie at Last

She hardly knew him. He was not so much taller, but bigger somehow, foreign. He wore homespun, but it was well tailored to his body. His brown hair was combed neatly against his head, and a carpetbag hung from his right hand.

“Sister,” he said quietly, and the voice was one she had never heard before and would not have known for his.

“Sister,” he repeated, his voice cracking on the words, “it’s me, Charles.”

“Yes,” she said. “Charles. So—you come.”

He smiled then. She looked in vain for the funny, serious little boy she knew. He wasn’t thirteen yet. How could he have discarded that little child so quickly?

He glanced around the crowded room. All the staring faces quickly dived back into their sewing or knitting or conversation. “I took the railroad car,” he said in quiet pride. “The stage into New Hampshire, to Concord, and then all the rest of the way by train.” Then he grinned like a child, but not the child she remembered. Not quite.

She didn’t know what to say. She cared nothing for railroads, those dangerous, dirty things. It was the farm she ached to know about. “Well,” she said at last, “you must be tired, ey?”

She cast about the parlor for two free chairs. At her glance, three girls rose and abandoned theirs in the far corner of the room beyond the dining tables. She thanked them and led him over. It was she who felt the need to sit.

“Well,” she said, arranging her apron on her lap. “Well, then?” It was as much of a question as she could manage.

“I got good news, Lyddie,” he said, a little of the boy she knew creeping into his voice. Her heart rose.

“The Phinneys have taken me on as full apprentice.”

“Ey?”

“More than that, truly. They treat me like their own. They don’t have no child but me.”

“You got a family,” she said faintly.