?d never cared much for the old stories. He was a man who lived in the day, and his great passion was anything with wheels. His company built wagons and carriages that were the finest in the country. President Madison even ordered one from him. (My father laughed because he’d had to make the seats higher so that when people saw him they’d think the tiny man was taller.)
“May I have the Heartwishes Stone to remember Grandpa by?” I asked and he mumbled something that could have been yes. I had learned that if I asked my father something while he was under duress, he’d say yes just to get rid of me. On the other hand, my mother had a keen eye and ear, and she always knew what I was up to, so I didn’t mention the Stone to her. It was my hope that my father would fail to mention it to my mother. I wasn’t so fortunate as to achieve that goal. She saw that it was missing and knew that I had taken it. She took it from me, and it wasn’t until I was an adult that I found the little lead case in the bottom of her bureau. (The lead kept its magic contained. Let it out and the Stone started blinking as it did its work.) The second time, I didn’t ask permission of anyone but took the Stone, held it in my hand, and wished with all my might that Robert Allandale would love me.
I guess the wish wasn’t from my heart because Robert still betrayed me. He found a woman whose father had died and left her with three houses. When my parents died, I was to inherit a tidy sum, but until then I was at the mercy of their generosity, and Robert knew that.
The legend about the Stone was that it granted only one request to each Frazier, and if the one about Robert had failed, that meant I was still owed a wish. With that in mind, I hid the Stone in a portmanteau I was taking to England. When my mother saw that the Stone was missing she knew I was the one who took it. My brother was as uninterested in it as my father was. May the Lord forgive me, but I swore to her that I had not removed it and didn’t know who had. Since that was the day Robert was getting married, I figured the Lord might overlook my blatant lie.
I took that Heartwishes Stone to England with me, meaning to use it so that I would return with a man on my arm. But it was Winnie who needed the Heartwishes, not me.
She and the beautiful Julian fell deeply in love and wanted to marry. But his stepmother, that snobbish woman who hated all her husband’s American relatives, couldn’t bear the idea of Julian inheriting. She so very much wanted her fat, ugly son, Clive, to have everything.
I never told Winnie, but I saw Julian’s stepmother watching them out the window. He and Winnie were laughing together. Even though they weren’t touching or doing anything untoward, it was easy to tell that they were in love. I was the only one who knew that they were planning to elope the next day. Something about the way the woman looked at them frightened me. That night I took the Heartwishes Stone out of its lead case and wished with all my might that Julian and Winnie could be together forever.
I had no idea that when I made that wish, Julian was already dead.
The next day, when Winnie was told that Julian’s body had been found, she was stoic. She didn’t cry. Only those of us who loved her knew the pain that was inside her.
The tears were all shed by his stepmother. I never believed that Julian’s fall from the roof was an accident. When his odious stepmother cried so hard she had to be helped into the church at the funeral, I sneered at her tears. I told Aunt Cay that I thought the woman had murdered Julian.
Aunt Cay said nothing to that but I think she agreed with me. We left England soon after that, and on the voyage home, Winnie found out that she was carrying Julian’s child. That was when her tears came—tears of joy and happiness.
To me, Winnie’s news was proof of the truth of the Heartwishes Stone. It had done its best to fulfill the wish, but I have always wondered if Julian would have lived if only I’d made my wish sooner.
I didn’t tell Winnie of the wish, for she would have scoffed at it and told me how babies were made. Besides, I didn’t want to take away from her happiness.
She wanted to run and tell Aunt Cay and Uncle Alex right away. As we ran through the ship to their cabin, I was afraid of the wrath of the older folks, but there was none. There were no lectures about the sin of fornication. In fact, they looked at each other with twinkling eyes, as though they knew about youthful passion.
Still, I worried about Winnie’s parents’ reaction. She agreed to let Uncle Alex talk to them first. Whatever he said worked because there was only happiness surrounding Winnie’s news. Her parents arranged that the church records would say the boy, named Patrick Julian Aldredge, was born to her brother and his wife. Legitimacy would keep the child from being ridiculed.
Winnie used her inheritance from her grandparents to build a lovely little house out of town beside a lake, and there she raised her child. She was never officially certified as a doctor, but she learned enough from her father and grandfather that she had a thriving practice.
Young Patrick grew up to be as handsome as his father and became the town’s doctor.
As for Winnie, she never got over her loss of the man she loved; she never married. Aunt Cay carved a little portrait of Julian and put it above the fireplace in the house that Winnie built for herself and Julian’s son. Uncle Alex figured out an ingenious way to make a code to open the picture. Behind it we hid the Heartwishes Stone, and I hope its secret is never found out. As it turned out, I did not need any magical wishes to find a man who would love me and who I could love in return. My life has been good. However, I do not mean to be maudlin, but even after all these many years, I miss Winnie every day of my life.