The River Jewel, page 1
Also by Kathleen Shoop
Historical Fiction
The Donora Story Collection:
After the Fog—Book One
The Strongman and the Mermaid—Book Two
The Letter Series:
The Last Letter—Book One
The Road Home—Book Two
The Kitchen Mistress—Book Three
The Thief’s Heart—Book Four
The River Jewel—A Letter Series Novella
Tiny Historical Stories:
Melonhead—Story One
Johnstown—Story Two
Romance
Endless Love Series:
Home Again—Book One
Return to Love—Book Two
Tending Her Heart—Book Three
Women’s Fiction
Love and Other Subjects
Bridal Shop Series:
Puff of Silk—Book One
Copyright © Kathleen Shoop
All rights reserved.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
shoop@kshoop.com
Kshoop.com
Cover Design: Jenny Toney Quinlan—Historical Editorial http://historicalfictionbookcovers.com
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 1
Landon
Come closer. Closer. Let the honeysuckle draw you down the hidden, woodsy path where the songbirds announce your arrival and the sound of summer crickets echoes inside your chest. One more step. Ah, that’s good, no more. Don’t slip into the river, not where the current hurries sneaky but silent, strong as a magnet ripping metal out of your hand. Away, away you’d go. So careful stepping. Stay on the cove side of the land and listen in...
Once upon a time in that quiet cove, obscured from boating traffic by a high, thin slice of land, a love story was born. This one, different from all the others because this fairy tale’s braided with the oddest sense of happy and sad, a murky condition like where river mussels start and end their lives. Did you know there were such things—muddy, happy, sad senses of being, places to live, and endings that’re really beginnings? The river mussels know. You must have felt it before, that state of bluesy joy.
Well maybe you’ve only experienced bliss, and for you, this story might not feel right. But for the rest who wend their way through good and bad, lost and found and lost again, this story will feel familiar... but new. Because this story got lost in all the rest of the perfectly, pristine happy ending tales. But now here it is... lean in tight and listen to the whispered story of the secret jewel-filled river cove.
It happened one summer, around 1875 on the outskirts of Des Moines, Iowa. Deep in a hidden river cove, Landon, the wealthy, youngest son of the Lockwoods—yes, those Lockwoods—set off to earn his parents’ love by way of proving he could be the type of son who deserved it.
The task was simple. To get them to love him, he needed to make a lot of money—more capital than any one person needed, more cash than anyone could imagine. Anyone but his parents—their minds never stopped envisioning the next enormous amount—hundreds of thousands, millions, even billions. Oh, yes. No amount was too big to dream. That was the only way with the Lockwoods, even the mother. Especially the mother. And that was the only way Landon understood love.
So there he was, edging along a crooked finger of land. It curved with the Des Moines River to its left and a serene, lily-scented cove of crystal water to its right. He steadied his feet on the mossy rock, pulled his map from his pocket and studied the drawing. He squinted into the sun, toward the calm cove waters then back at the rushing river. Seven great oak trees marched around the perimeter of the inlet, leafy hand, in leafy hand.
He poked at the map. The man who sold it to him had made a notation that Landon would smell the cove before he saw it. Landon had mistakenly thought that meant the water would bear a horrible smell, like factory waters back east. A stench was the only thing he could imagine having such an impact. Not even his beach cottage property in Newport smelled as glorious as this cove did. It was these specific botanic fragrances curling off the trees and flowers, mixing with the scent of fresh water, bearing a sense of purity, that made him sure he’d found it. He’d never be able to describe the smell for anyone. But, this was it. He tapped the map again. It was exactly as he’d been told.
Chapter 2
Tilly
As Landon Lockwood compared his map against what, until that moment, he’d been convinced was a drunkard’s fantasy, Tilly Rabel, daughter of a mussel-woman and fisherman, left her cottage. She hummed and flounced along, tossing seed to her bluebirds, stopping to scratch the bunny mama under the chin before tucking her shucking knife into her canvas harvesting bag. She stripped down to her shimmy and bloomers and inhaled the steamy hydrangea-scented August air as she tied the rope of the bag around her waist.
The Rabel’s cove sat inside an embrace of crescent-shaped land. An underground rivulet fed it from one side and the Des Moines River filled it from the other. A hidden button of land and water, it created the perfect spot for fishing and harvesting mussels. This was Tilly’s legacy, her everything.
Distracted by the thought of her best friend marrying and leaving for California, Tilly waded into the cove, the water icing her ankles and raising bumps on her skin. She double-checked the knotted rope that held the bag tight to her waist and splashed in further before diving into the deep center waters. She squeezed her legs together, whipping them like she’d sprouted a mermaid tail, rotating onto her back then belly then back, then diving under, descending where the sunbeams could only hope to reach.
Get a move on. Time to work.
She dolphin-kicked up for breath, a smattering of sunrays mottling the surface water through the leafy canopy. She paddled toward the muddy beds, closer to the shoreline, toward the mussels, to where the pink and blue heelsplitters live.
She was taking a final stroke before diving under when a foreign sound grabbed her, stilling her like the thick afternoon air. A scraping sound came. She closed her eyes and cocked her ear. Where had the noise come from?
There it was again.
From the river side of the cove.
She whipped to her left.
A man.
Her mouth fell open and she dropped under the surface to her chin, the steady drip of water from her nose mimicking her heartbeat. Her skin tingled. Not because a strange man invaded her territory, but because he was in fact the third strange man to happen upon her cove in a month.
This one was different. Back to her, he stood tall and broad and was dressed in what she could only describe as elegant clothing. The first two men had come in ripped pants and stained, shredded shirts, rough-worn hats and stooped posture. This man was starched upright. He shifted. His shoes. They made the scraping sound she’d heard. Sunlight exploded off the tips of those glistening shoes.
He turned, head bowed, reading, the light breeze carrying the sound of him unfolding and refolding a paper. Tilly reached for her bag, feeling the outline of the knife inside. She loosened the neck of the sack with her good hand and grasped its pearl handle inside, her fingers finding the grooves her mother had worn into the knife’s handle.
“Hey!” she yelled.
His head jerked up but he was looking out into the open water, not into the cove.
“You.”
He turned toward her.
“Pull foot outta here.”
He stared at her, making Tilly wonder if he didn’t speak English.
She wrapped her hand tight around the knife handle and pulled it out of the sack. “Go on. You’re trespassing.”
His expression went from surprised to amused.
“Go on,” she said through clenched teeth, holding the knife higher to be sure he could see it.
He cocked his head and stepped to turn fully toward her. The heel of his fancy shoe caught the moss. His eyes widened, arms wind-milled, his paper went flying, and he stumbled back.
“Whoa, whoa, no, oh shit,” he said.
The splash that came next told Tilly he’d completed his fall.
She took this chance to sprint to shore and scramble onto land. Without looking down, her feet avoided the slippery rocks, her toes finding clean, dry ones as she ascended the bank. At its crest, gripping the knife hard, still holding it up to show him he would have to take her seriously, she saw him struggling to swim.
His lunky shoes, layered, wool clothing, and the strong current were making it hard for him to get back to shore. Yeah, well, all the better if the current tired him out some. She scoffed and relaxed, hand on hip. But when a look of fear washed over the man, his shocked expression registering as he wordles
“Sweet heavens and Mary, jeeze you dummy,” she said to herself.
Tilly jammed her knife back into the sack, working down the rest of the bank, and diving into the water. Kicking hard, she took a dozen strokes into the current before grabbing the fancy man’s hand. She turned onto her side, yanked him onto her hip and towed him perpendicular, out of the current before turning back to shore, navigating around the current in just the right way, the way only someone who was born there would know to do. His heaving breaths matched each of her whip-kicks.
She lugged him onto shore, collapsing, river rocks digging in. She wiggled out from under him seeing he wasn’t conscious. She smacked his face to be sure he was alive. She didn’t have time to bury a body that day.
He sputtered and spit and rolled to his side.
Thunk, thunk, thunk. She cuffed his back, making him choke.
He sucked for air.
On her knees, from behind him, she roped one arm across his chest while punching him between the shoulder blades again.
Slowly, with shallow breaths, he got his air back, rising to all fours. She backed away. He lifted his gaze, staring, angry.
She winced.
Angry, of all things. She was offended. “Serves you right for trespassing.”
He narrowed his eyes.
She didn’t have time for tourists taking their leisure out on her. “Oh sure, Mr. Fancy Pants. Think you can go anywhere just because you got showy clothes and such? Next time go ’round my property. County fair’s that way.”
He stared, struck dumb. Or maybe he’d always been just so.
That prospect made her feel sorry for him, thinking he might have drowned. But he was too well dressed to be that stupid. Purposeful interloper. That’s what he was. “Lucky you didn’t... What are you doing here, Mr. Rococo?”
The question sparked something in him because he scrambled to his feet and bolted up the bank. She followed, irritated he wasn’t explaining himself.
“Hey.” She tossed a rock at his feet startling him as though he’d forgotten she was there. “A person saves your life, you should at least...”
“Yeah, yeah.” He was gathering his bag and the paper that was tumbling away in a sudden wind gust. “Thanks. Thanks so much. I’ve got to go.”
“You’re welcome,” she said in an accusatory way while he ran, half stumbling, polished shoes slipping on the rocks.
“I’m not going in for you again,” she shouted at his back.
He disappeared into the trees, a yelp telling her he wasn’t much better on land than in water.
“Son of a gun, Fancy Pants, thinking he can waltz on over for sightseeing and a rescue? Son. Of. A. Gun.”
**
Tilly exhaled deeply and shook her head. She was behind now, unused to interruptions. She shuffled down the bank on the cove-side and slipped into the water. She should have started harvesting right that second, to make back any lost moments she could, but instead, she turned on her back and floated, her hands skulling along the surface, sun speckling her cheeks, the weight of her bag anchoring her, pulling tight against her waist.
Hovering there like that, she couldn’t quite shake Fancy Pants off of her. His emerald-green eyes, black hair, fine clothes... the scent of water mixed with clean skin, his odor like spring air, stayed with her. Most men didn’t smell like that.
It made her think of Alice who always perfumed and dressed exquisitely. She was the reason Tilly needed one last, perfect shell. She was making a jewelry box for Alice’s wedding present and a tie box for the husband to be. There was no time to think of the strange man and his inability to swim his way out of a river current. He had no business near her cove and next time a debonair man showed up—heart-stopping handsome or not—if he was so clumsy to fall into the river, she’d let him save himself.
Next time? She mocked herself and got upright, treading water. She must be catching wedding fever from Alice thinking a handsome man might happen by for a second time.
She dipped into her sack and pulled out the knife. It sat in her hand perfectly for shucking. Her fingers on that side—her bad hand as far as appearances went—looked melted, misshapen from years of mussel harvesting, but it was her good hand as far as work was concerned. Without thinking, she hid it below the surface as though someone might see. The pearl handle on the knife glistened under the water, drawing her gaze to its beauty.
She held her breath and dove under, feeling along the beds, fingertips brushing over barnacled shells. She greeted her pets, her babies as she thought of them, like a gardener might consider her plants. The sun shifted to just the right angle, shooting light exactly where she needed it. She stroked one mussel, nearly as big as a shoe. Not that one. She came up for air and then selected another shell, a plain pocketbook it was called, several, the size of potatoes. Perfect.
Against the bluish-white splendor she knew was hidden under the muck and inside the shell, the appearance of her ill-shapened hand fell from consciousness. Tilly’s gift was raising and harvesting the most beautiful material in the world. Mother-of-pearl. The appearance of her hand was simply the cost of her work. Alice would love the jewelry box. She understood that Tilly’s hand produced precious things that most people only dreamed of owning and for that appreciation, Tilly was endlessly grateful.
Chapter 3
Landon
After the rescue from the Des Moines River, Landon finally recovered his balance. He located the path he’d marked and followed it to where he’d tied his horse, Thunder. Mounted and out of the woods, Landon pressed hard to make it to his meeting. He tapped his boots against Thunder’s sides encouraging him to stretch his legs, managing to extract his pocket watch and note his near lateness. Well, he could only presume since the watch must have broken when he’d fallen in the water. No time to stop at the hotel to change his soaked clothing. Big-thinking, wealthy men—even adventurous investors like Mr. Abbott—didn’t wait for anyone, especially not disappointing sons of wealthy friends.
When Landon reached the stable outside the lumber mill, he waved to the young groom, Jasper. Landon dismounted with a flourish and looped the reins around the post. He dug into his pocket for a few coins to offer the boy. Nothing. He must have lost them when he tumbled into the river. This made the image of the woman who pulled him from the current come to mind. Her blue eyes, the color of sapphire sky just before first light chases deep night away, her red hair glinting under the sun, roped in wet tangles down her back. What was she doing in her underthings in the middle of the day? She certainly hadn’t been penciled into the map he’d bought from the man near Lansing.
“Mr. Lockwood?” the groom said.
Landon’s gaze snapped to Jasper. Embarrassment that he was for the moment, penniless, swept through him. He thought of his father, the way the man’s lip would curl in disgust if he’d been witness to such a circumstance. “I’m late. I...” Landon lifted his hands and looked down at his clothing which was drying crispy on his body. “My coins fell out when I spilled into...”
Jasper glanced at the log-sided office building beyond the gate that led to the lumber yard.
“Get on your way. Pay me later.”
Landon nodded. “I’ll make it worth your kindness. I swear.”
“Mr. Lockwood?” Jasper said.
Landon turned back, but kept moving.
“Saddle blanket’s a mess. Muddy, torn...”
Landon recalled his rough ride to the cove, snaking through brambles until the path to the water appeared out of nowhere, just when he was about to give up.
“I could sell you a new one?” Jasper shrugged.
Landon added the cost. He had plenty of money stowed in his hotel room and at the bank, but should be frugal until he was sure what amount he’d need to build his business. “Patch it for now, please,” Landon said. “Check the tack, too. Can’t afford for Thunder to be uncomfortable.”
Landon entered the Abbott Lumber Company office. A man sauntered from behind the desk. Dressed in blue denim, a work shirt and leather vest, Landon was confused. The man stuck his hand out. “Max Abbott.” His hair was deeply parted to the left and his bushy mustache curved down the sides of his mouth, covering his lips so that when he spoke with a gravelly grumble, his mouth didn’t seem to move at all.
