“So, you’re saying passengers will pay to cross on the ferry just so they can look up at the bridge?” their mother asked.
“It’s a possibility. Touring is all the rage. I even had an Irishman from New York on my boat the other day and he agreed. I explained my thoughts to Brock on Christmas Day, and…”
A cold shiver crept up Samantha’s spine. Her parents would be terribly disappointed if she broke off the engagement.
“…he pooh-poohed the idea, of course, but I still think…”
She didn’t hear most of the rest. Perhaps her mother and father wouldn’t be so disappointed after all. But Brock should be the first to know. When next they met, she would tell him to his face, and return the sapphire ring.
She tucked into the oatmeal, feeling better now that she’d come to a decision. She might end up an old maid but, somehow, that didn’t loom as terrible a fate as being married to Brock.
* * *
As he expected, Parker tracked down his uncle at the grandstand. Judson was inspecting the seats and railings in his usual nitpicking way, pointing out to the workmen a nail head sticking out here, a piece of rough wood there. Parker would have thought he’d be more concerned about the bridge.
“Must make sure all is well,” his uncle said when he caught sight of him.
“And the bridge?” Parker asked, still unaccountably bothered about the voice in the fog. “Everything set?”
“Nothing to worry about there, dear boy. I’ve built bridges before, you know.”
“But this one is the longest, and people say the wind coming up the Bristol Channel…”
Judson scowled. “And do these people have experience in the design and construction of bridges?”
Parker felt like a naughty schoolboy. “Well, no.”
Judson nodded to the passenger train waiting in the small station a hundred yards away, the engine already hissing and belching steam as if impatient to be underway. “The engineers have gone over every inch of the locomotive with a fine-tooth comb.”
His uncle had made sure all was in order. Parker’s sense of impending disaster was clearly unfounded, but there was still the matter of the grandstand. “I’m afraid I won’t be able to sit with the dignitaries today, Uncle. I’m sorry but something has come up at the station.”
“No matter,” Judson replied.
“You’ve a lot on your mind,” Parker replied, not sure whether to be relieved or slighted. “I’m sure all will go well.”
“Of course it will,” his uncle replied as he turned away to speak to a workman.
Bristling at the dismissal, yet feeling guilty at the lie he’d told, Parker made his way down the steps from the grandstand. He noticed a well-dressed man loitering in the roadway, looking up at the wooden structure. “You’re early if you plan to attend the opening,” he said by way of a polite greeting when the fellow tipped his top hat.
“The early bird catches the worm, don’t you know?” the man replied in an accent Parker recognized instantly.
“Ireland?” he asked.
The man laughed heartily. “New York, though my roots are in Derry.”
“You’re a long way from home,” Parker replied. “Here to see the opening?”
“I wouldn’t miss it for the world, boyo.”
Another tip of the hat and the fellow walked on, leaving Parker with a distinctly uneasy feeling in his gut that had little to do with the man’s poor choice of cologne that smelled like rotten apples. He considered himself a good judge of character, and something malicious lurked in the American’s eyes—but then most Yanks he’d met tended to lord it over Englishmen. “Boyo, indeed. Patronizing sod.”
As a man of Irish descent, he’d come across more than one American who assumed every Paddy living in England burned to sacrifice himself on the altar of Home Rule for Ireland. Parker had heard enough of that from his drunken father.
He increased his pace, worried he might be too late to catch the ferry, but the appearance of a fog bank stopped him in his tracks. Gooseflesh marched up his spine. Perhaps the agonizing months spent in the hospital after he’d been stabbed had affected his mind. He was sure of it when a voice whispered close to his ear, “Rotten to the core.”
THE FERRY
Samantha gripped the white railing on the deck of her father’s ferryboat, scanning the long line of people waiting to board.