Chapter Eleven
She didn’t have to make the decision to search out her friends. As they camped in the lee of some trees in the shadow of the Rockies, Cherokee came riding out to meet them. He had Todd Shaw with him.
A sentry started to fit an arrow to his bow, but Iron Knife held up a hand and cried out, “Stop! These are friends! They warned me of the attack on Sand Creek!”
The other Cheyenne looked the white men over, but no one challenged them as they rode down through the tipis and reined in before Iron Knife’s lodge. Curious children ran through the crusty snow to gather around, and mongrel dogs barked at the strangers.
Iron Knife beckoned. “Get down, friends, we will smoke and talk.”
“It is good to see you,” Cherokee said. The men shook hands solemnly, went into Iron Knife’s lodge, and sat down cross-legged before the fire.
Todd looked around at the wide-eyed little boys, Storm and Lance. “Where’s Summer?”
Iron Knife shooed the little boys outside. “Go find your mother; she’s over at Pretty Flower Woman’s lodge. Tell her we have company.”
Todd offered tobacco, and Iron Knife took it with a nod of thanks. “Are you here to council? My people have not forgotten that you both tried to warn us about Sand Creek.”
He filled the pipe, lit it, then passed it around.
Todd said, “I suppose we should have seen that coming sooner. The people of Denver were angry about all the outbreaks. Across the frontier, the newspapers say many whites have been killed.”
“And did they also tell how many Indians have died?” Iron Knife asked wryly.
“Good question,” Cherokee agreed.
Todd shook his head. “The singing wires have brought news of the attack on Julesburg. Stagecoaches even stopped running for a while again.”
“Good,” Iron Knife grunted with satisfaction, “perhaps if whites think the great buffalo plains are too dangerous, they will not come out West.”
Cherokee smoked and considered. “I wish it was that simple, friend, but you know it isn’t. The war between the states will end any time now. That fight between the white men is all that has slowed immigration temporarily. Soon there will be a flood of whites looking for opportunity they can’t find in Europe or the slums of the eastern cities.”
“Yes,” Todd said, “and the end of the war will make lots of soldiers available to fight Indians.”
“I know all this, my friends,” Iron Knife sighed. “Remember I spent time living among whites as a youth. The tribes only buy ourselves a little extra time.”
Cherokee pushed his western hat back. “It happened to my people before it did yours,” he reminded them. “Eventually, your people will be herded to reservations as the Cherokee were when they were forced to walk that bloody path called the Trail of Tears to Indian Territory. All native people will finally be forced onto reservations.”
Iron Knife smoked in silence for a long moment. “Will they not be satisfied until they have all the land, then?”
“I’m afraid not,” Todd answered, “although I do what little I can at the newspaper. I think your way of life will not last your lifetime.”
Iron Knife sighed. “Then perhaps I should be glad that my medicine tells me I will not live to be an old man.” He thought of Summer Sky. He was both angry with her and in love with her. He did not fear death, but he did not want to leave her behind in a hostile world where she would be afraid and alone.
Todd cleared his throat. “We came with a purpose, my friend.”
Iron Knife held up his hand to keep him from speaking further. “Let us eat and visit awhile before you tell it. It must be important for you to risk death riding through this cold, hostile country to find us.”
Summer came in just then, her baby in a cradleboard, Lance peeking more shyly at the visitors from behind her skirt. Storm Gathering strode in boldly and sat down cross-legged next to his father, a miniature copy of a brave warrior. Iron Knife smiled at the little son’s serious demeanor as if sitting down in a tribal council.
Summer held out both hands. “Todd! Cherokee! I’m so glad to see you!”
She was glad, Iron Knife thought—too glad.
“You’re looking well, Summer,” Todd said as both visitors scrambled to their feet.
She was abruptly keenly aware of the differences in civilization. Indian men did not hop up like jumping frogs when a woman came into their presence. She realized with self-conscious awkwardness how she must look to Todd; hair braided, no corset, dressed in beaded buckskin and moccasins with a baby in a cradleboard like any squaw that white men saw near trading posts and sneered at. She was aware of his keen stare and a trifle disconcerted. “I—I will get food for you. I roasted a buffalo hump this morning.”
“Sounds good!” Cherokee said, but Todd looked a little queasy. Buffalo hump wasn’t usually on the menu back in Boston, she thought, retreating in confusion. Todd Shaw had known her when she was the belle of the debutante’s ball, a wealthy, privileged girl moving in the highest social circles. She wished she had know he was coming so that she could have made herself more presentable.
Summer dished up the food for the men and left them to eat alone as was the custom. However, she hovered near the lodge, knowing the two must have come on some errand of importance or they would not have risked such a dangerous trip through snow and hostile Indian lands.
Finally, Iron Knife called her in to join them by the fire. His face was grave. Something was terribly wrong. “They have come to bring you a message.”
“Me?” She touched her chest in surprise. “What is it?”
Todd cleared his throat again. “Summer, I’ve gotten a telegram from your father. He sent it to me on the off chance I might know how to track you down, and Cherokee helped me get here.”
“My brother!” She breathed in sharply. “My brother David’s been killed in the war, and—”
“No, no one’s dead,” Todd put in hastily, “at least not yet.” He held out the wire.
She read it, then read it again, her brain refusing to comprehend what her eyes told her. “Your mother dying. Stop. She begs to see you and your children. Stop. Please come. Stop. Father.”
Priscilla. She saw her in her mind’s eye the pretty, bitter woman who had made the wrong choices in life and now lived on liquor and laudanum rather than deal with the painful realities of it all. But she was Summer’s mother, and she loved her. “How—how old is this telegram?”
“I got it a few days ago,” Todd said. “The minute it came, I dropped everything and set out to find you.”
How could she not go? Yet she shrugged in helpless embarrassment. “I—I have no money for travel.”
“Your father told me to advance it to you,” Todd said, “and he’d reimburse me.”
She looked down at her deerskin shift. How could she walk into the big Boston train station in a deerskin shift and moccasins? She pictured entering her father’s grand mansion with her children. While her deerskin was the softest and most heavily beaded among the Cheyenne, denoting her man’s prestige and wealth in many ponies, her father and friends would pity her or scorn her.
Cherokee said, “I know you don’t have time to have clothes made, but Silver is about your size and said she will lend you anything you need.”
Summer looked at Iron Knife. He sat there, his face grave and impassive, saying nothing. Before she had found out about Gray Dove, she wouldn’t even have considered the trip; after all, her mother might already be dead by now, and she was on strained terms with her father. However, now she looked forward to getting away for a while to sort things out in her own mind. Perhaps Iron Knife needed time alone, too. She fumbled with the little gold locket that hung around her neck. “What do you think?”
He hesitated. “This is not my decision to make. Always do what your heart tells you to do, Little One.”
Her mother had said something like that to her once, Summer remembered. When you find a once in a lifetime love, run after him, don’t look back and damn the consequences! Maybe that hadn’t been such good advice after all, or maybe the big half-breed wasn’t really her true love. “I think I should go,” she said, “someone needs to be there.”
“Then go,” Iron Knife said without expression, so she couldn’t tell what he was feeling. “I will escort you to the stagecoach myself so that you need not fear any attacks. It will take you to where you can link up with the train.”
Mother. She blinked back tears and clasped the little gold locket in her hand. Inside was a delicate miniature of Priscilla in her younger days. Even though Priscilla did not seem to want to live, she was a fairly young woman, and Summer could not believe she was really dying. “Is there any chance this is a trick of my father’s to get me home?”
Todd ran his hand through his hair. “I don’t think so because I also heard from my mother, who urged that I find you, because your mother wanted to see you one last time.”
One last time. When people die, Summer thought dully, we usually don’t get a chance to say goodbye, that one last opportunity to say those little things we always meant to say and somehow never did. Then one day, the person is gone like a candle flame in the wind, and it’s too late; forever too late.
“I will go,” she said.
Iron Knife watched her, listened to her words and managed to keep his face impassive. His woman. His children. If he let them go far away, would they return? If you love something, set it free. If it loves you, it will return to you. A butterfly can be crushed by holding on to it too tightly. Was his love enough to bring her back to him, especially with the strain between them?
How—how long will you be gone?” he asked.
It seemed like an eternity before she answered. “I have no way of knowing.” Her face was a mask that gave no hint of her true feelings. Was she thinking that once she got to Boston, she might never return?
The two men had been waiting silently. “Do you want me to wait and escort you?”
Summer Sky shook her head. “Iron Knife will bring me to Cherokee’s, and then I’ll come to Denver, Todd. Maybe by then you’ll have more news.”
Todd seemed to notice Iron Knife’s expression. “She may be gone for weeks, friend, especially with the war winding down. Who knows how crowded trains will be or what the weather will be like in the north. If you will contact me every few weeks, I will let you know if there has been any news.”
Summer brightened. “That’s right; we can used Todd to pass messages and letters back and forth.”
Iron Knife breathed a sigh of relief. “You will write me, then, Little One?”
“Yes, and you let me know how things go here.”
Cherokee smiled. “It’s settled, then.”
Summer chewed her lip a moment.
“What is it?” Iron Knife said.
“Cherokee, didn’t I hear you say one time that you knew Shawn O’Bannion?”
“Why, yes. He’s an old friend and I served under Colonel O’Bannion in the Army of the Confederacy.” He took off his hat and scratched his head, looking puzzled.
“It has to be the same one,” she murmured as if to herself, “it just has to be. Cherokee, could you contact him for me?”
“I reckon so, but I don’t see—”
“He’s an old . . . friend of my mother’s,” she said. “They haven’t seen each other for a very long time. It’s important that they get a chance to see each other one more time.”
“You realize,” Cherokee said, “that Shawn may be dead in the war? I haven’t seen him since that night at Shiloh when I was captured.”
“Well,” Summer said, and her eyes beseeched him, “all we can do is try. Tell him a woman named Priscilla Blackledge Van Schuyler in Boston may be dying. Ask if a song, “The Last Rose of Summer,” means anything at all to him. His answers will tell me whether I’ve got the wrong Shawn.”
Todd’s handsome face frowned. “Remember, with the war still going on,” he cautioned, “a letter may not get through, or even a wire, but I’ll help in any way I can.”
Was she doing something foolish and romantic? If this were the same Shawn, it would make her father furious to have her mother’s old sweetheart come to the house. Would an old love still care enough to come all that way to see Priscilla one last time? Summer reached up to touch the little locket hanging around her neck with the miniature of her mother inside. Was Priscilla dying of some disease or did she just not want to live any longer?
Cherokee and Todd rode out with an escort of warriors sent by Iron Knife to make sure they got back safely. Summer went about getting things together. Garnet was too young to realize what was happening, but little Lance and Storm ran about telling the other boys, “We ride the Iron Horse to the white man’s many lodges place!”
Her children were beautiful and smart, Summer thought as she hugged them, and any man, even Silas Van Schuyler, should be proud to call them his grandchildren—but would he? She couldn’t worry about that now. It was sad telling everyone goodbye, as if she were seeing some of them for the very last time. It was dark now, and they would leave at dawn. She put her children to bed. They were asleep when she settled herself next to Iron Knife, who stared morosely into the fire. “I am sorry about your mother.”
“I don’t think she really cares about living anymore. If I had been there. . . .”
He waited a long moment. “You feel guilty because you are here?”
“No . . . yes, I suppose I do.” She folded her arms across her knees, laid her chin on them and stared into the fire. “Mother and my little sister never got along, and my brother, David, has been away, Todd says, helping with the wounded in the war.”
“What about your father?”
She sighed and shook her head. “There is nothing between them.”
He watched the firelight play on her golden hair. Almost like us, he thought, and felt a terrible need to slip his arm around her shoulders, but afraid of rejection, leaned on it instead. “Was there ever?”
“A bad bargain all around,” Summer said. “Silas Van Schuyler had money, and her blue-blooded family had lost everything. She was in love with another man.”
“The one called Shawn?”
Summer nodded. “She made a bad choice and has lived to regret it.”
He wanted to ask, “Like you?” But he dared not. He was afraid he would hear a truth that he did not want to face. He wanted to ask her not to leave or to beg that if she must, would she give her promise to return? He couldn’t hold her with words. If she didn’t love him anymore and love wouldn’t bring her back, then empty words wouldn’t either. Like the butterfly, he thought, love is like a butterfly; you can’t hold on to it by force without crushing it. “It is late,” he said, “and we’ve a long way to go tomorrow.”
“Yes, we’d better get some sleep.” She went automatically to her blankets on the other side of the fire; he went to his.
She lay there listening to him turn over, knew he was not asleep. Things had changed between them since that night he had come in drunk, insisting she pleasure him. While she was gone, would he take that captured Crow girl or another into his lodge as a second wife? Summer had thought she had known him so well, and the foundations of her trust had been shaken; she wasn’t certain she knew him at all anymore. Now she had new worries with her mother. What Summer yearned to do was crawl over into Iron Knife’s blankets, try to work this out; but she had as much pride as he did, and she was also afraid that perhaps he didn’t care anymore. She lay there sleepless a long time before she finally dropped off into a troubled sleep.
Iron Knife lay awake and listened to Summer moving restlessly. He had an urge to reach out, pull her into his bed, and make love to her; but he was a proud man, and he had been rejected as much as he could take lately. He knew she had once been engaged to Todd Shaw’s older brother. Had Austin Shaw ever married or would he be waiting in Boston, hoping to take up where he had left off with Summer? Austin had seemed like a kind, decent man. He might even want to adopt and raise the three children. At that thought, Iron Knife was tortured. No, she wouldn’t do that—stay in Boston, let another man raise Iron Knife’s sons as his own—would she? He was tempted not to allow her to take the children, but the dying mother wanted to see them. No, he could not deny Summer this one last request. Finally he, too, dropped off to a troubled sleep.
The next day, they made the trip. Silver dressed Summer Sky in some of her clothes, and Todd had bought some children’s clothes in the stores in Denver. Iron Knife escorted Summer and the children to the stage stop. He was glad that Todd and Cherokee had come along because the driver and the man at the station looked at him with hostility. He didn’t care; he only cared about telling his woman goodbye. “You have everything you need?”
She nodded and laid the sleeping baby on the stagecoach seat, and Iron Knife lifted her aboard. “We’ll be fine; don’t worry about us.”
In the moment that his hands encircled her slim waist, he almost pulled her to him and kissed her, but he wasn’t sure how she would react if he did. Besides, he was a very private person, and there were people watching the stage that was about to depart. With all the Indian trouble, many whites were afraid to take the stage, but this one would be safe. War drums had carried the message across many miles that Iron Knife’s family was aboard and to let it pass in peace.
Lance bounced on the opposite seat and punched Storm, who promptly took his older brother to the floor and pummeled him. Iron Knife laughed as Summer rushed to stop the sibling tug of war. “I’m not sure Boston is ready for that pair. You’ll have a hard time traveling with them.”
“Oh, I’ll manage somehow.”
The waiting was awkward. There was so much to say and yet so little to say as they waited for the guard to climb up on the stage. Iron Knife slammed the door, and Summer leaned on the window ledge, looking out.
Iron Knife said, “Well, I suppose this is goodbye.”
“Yes, I suppose it is. Tell Pretty Flower I’ll be fine.”
“I’ll do that. Lance and Storm, you take care of your mother.”
The little boys nodded, too excited to do anything but hang out the stage window.
The driver cracked his whip, and the stage lurched and pulled away, harness jingling. Summer waved and he merely nodded; waving was not dignified for a warrior. He wanted to run after her, kiss her one last time, but he was shy about displays of affection in front of others; it was not seemly. He watched as the stage began to pick up speed. “Ne-mehotatse, ” he whispered in Cheyenne. I love you.
Summer looked back and watched him until he was only a lonely, small figure on the cold, sparse prairie behind her. She had waited for him to hold her or ask her not to go, tell her he loved her, anything besides putting her on the stage as he would some stranger. Maybe that was what they had grown to be. The gentle rocking of the coach soon put the exhausted children to sleep. On this long trip to Boston, she would work on teaching them English.
Summer leaned back and closed her eyes, listening to the stage creak and the cold wind blow. Winter, 1865. She hoped she wasn’t coming down with something; she didn’t feel very well, but she’d been afraid that Iron Knife would keep her from leaving if she told him. Every winter, people died of grippe, pneumonia, smallpox, diphtheria and a host of other maladies. If she were about to get sick, she hoped it wasn’t anything contagious that the children might catch.
She wondered if her mother was still alive. She wanted to see her one more time, tell her how much she loved her, that her life hadn’t been a total waste when she had produced children who cared about her. Tears came to her eyes, and Summer blinked them away, remembering that New Year’s Eve, 1858, when after the costume ball where Summer had announced her engagement to Austin Shaw, her mother had asked her to come to her bedroom to talk. It had been only weeks after Summer’s return from the Cheyenne.
She and her mother had never been close, so she had wondered what it was that Mother wanted as she went down the hall to Mother’s room.
The light shone from under the door. Summer rapped softly, then opened it.
Mother’s large room was done in faded pinks and burgundies with big cabbage roses on the yellowing walls and fabrics; immensely dark Victorian furniture stood here and there. It looked like the sanctuary of a woman who did not care about the present, had no hope for the future, and preferred to live in the past.
“Come in,” Priscilla said from where she stood before the fire. She wore a dressing gown of pale pink velvet, and Summer looked at her and knew she was seeing almost the ghost of a great beauty.
There was an open crystal box of potpourri on the table, and Summer took a deep breath of the scent of old rose petals saved from her mother’s garden. It hadn’t occurred to her before, but the whole house seemed to have that faint scent, that ghost of dead roses, about it.
“You wanted to see me?”
“I thought, just once,” Mother said uncertainly, moving to stare out the window, “I thought we might try to carry on a conversation.”
Summer bit her lip, deciding not to make a bitter comment about how impossible it was to communicate with someone who was in an eternal narcotic haze. Incredibly, Mother seemed sober at the moment.
Mother stood staring out at the rose garden that lay below her window. “I hate winter,” she whispered so low that Summer strained to hear her. “It’s very dreary and lonely and my roses die. Summer is my favorite season, that time that roses bloom and warmth and love flourish.”
She wasn’t sure if Priscilla expected a reply. Mother seemed to have forgotten anyone else was in the room and was talking to herself.
The music box sat on the table where it had always been since Summer could remember. She ran a finger over it, really looking at it for the first time. It was a cheap, small music box, and Summer wondered idly about it as she opened the lid. Father’s pride would never have allowed him to give such an inexpensive gift.
As she opened the lid, the music tinkled out: ’Tis the last rose of summer left blooming alone . . . all her lovely companions are faded and gone. . . .
“Don’t touch that!” Priscilla said so sharply as she whirled around that Summer snapped the lid down with a startled motion. Now the only sound was the crackle of the fire and her mother’s sigh as she turned to stare into the flames. “You’re really going to marry Austin Shaw?”
“Yes, in late June.”
Priscilla whirled and laughed, but her eyes didn’t laugh. “That should make Silas very happy; he always hoped to use you to connect his fortune to the Shaws’. But then, Silas has bought everything he ever wanted with his damned money, including me! Although those who make a bargain with the devil shouldn’t be bitter when their note is called!”
Summer stared at her, startled at the rare show of energy and courage from a woman she had come to regard as a rather pathetic, helpless dove. Once, she thought, her mother had had all the passion and spirit of Summer. Was she seeing herself as she would be twenty years from now?
The thought was disconcerting and troublesome. “You’re behaving very strangely tonight, Mother. Are you telling me you do not approve of my marrying Austin?”
Priscilla looked her directly in the eyes. “Do you love him?”
Uneasily, Summer avoided the direct look and question. “After all these years, it’s interesting that you are suddenly terribly worried about my future.”
“New Year’s Eve has a way of making people reflect on their past and future, making old ghosts come back to haunt them. I know I haven’t done right by any of my children, and I’m attempting now to rectify my mistakes by stopping you from going down the path I took.”
There was so much Summer wanted to ask, yet dared not.
In the silence, the old house creaked and groaned in the cold wind.
Mother said, “I keep seeing something in your eyes that tells me you are in love with another man, someone your father wouldn’t approve of.”
The scarred, bronzed face of Iron Knife came to her mind. “You’re right, of course.”
“Then I want you to go back to that man.” Priscilla came over to Summer. “I have a little money hidden, not much, but certainly enough for a train ticket one way.”
Tears came to Summer’s eyes. “How could you guess about the other man? And why tonight, are you deciding to go up against Father?”
Mother paused almost wistfully. “Because tonight, as you announced your engagement to a rich man, I saw myself as I was twenty years ago, and I don’t want you to make the same mistake I did. Not every woman gets a chance at a once in a lifetime love, and if you’re lucky enough to find it, run after him, damn the consequences and don’t look back! Do you hear me? Don’t look back!”
The realization dawned slowly on Summer. “Who was he, Mother?”
A very soft, gentle look came over her mother’s face as she remembered. “His name was Shawn O’Bannion, and he was very poor and Irish Catholic. He had very black wavy hair and eyes green as shamrocks. Shawn was strong and sensitive and had a way with the soil. You should have seen the roses he grew. That’s my only link to him now, my roses.”
She tried to imagine her mother wrapped passionately in a man’s arms as Priscilla stared regretfully into the past. It occurred to Summer that she had never seen her parents in a loving embrace, not even once.
“Did Shawn not want to marry you, Mother?”
“He did. But I was already engaged to Silas Van Schuyler, and my parents were pressuring me to marry Silas. Shawn and I had only that one summer, and then with winter, I had to make a decision, a choice.”
“And you chose Silas Van Schuyler instead?”
Priscilla tried to laugh, and her voice became a ragged sob. “I know you can’t understand that, can you? Now that I look back, neither can I! But you have to understand Shawn was so poor and all I could think of was how terrible it would be to have no money and how Boston society would laugh when they heard about it. I couldn’t see any other way out since my parents had lost their fortune.”
“Was Shawn so terribly unsuitable?”
The deep silence was broken only by the crackling of the fireplace logs. Summer heard the big grandfather clock downstairs chiming as she waited.
“Shawn was my father’s gardener,” Priscilla said finally. She went back to the window and stared out at the falling snow as Summer regarded her in stunned silence.
“It was snowing that night, too,” Priscilla said as if speaking to herself. “I was supposed to meet Shawn under the street lamp across from my parents’ home and we would run away together. I remember standing at the upstairs window with my luggage, looking down on him as he waited patiently for me.”
Summer stared in horror at her. “You—you didn’t go?”
Priscilla shook her head as she stared unseeing into the night, and her shoulders trembled slightly. “No, I let the man I loved turn and walk out of my life because I was afraid and weak. Now, with each long, lonely night, I think of what might have been and would give anything to change the past.”
Tears came to Summer’s eyes. “Do you not know where this Shawn O’Bannion is? Have you never heard from him?”
“No. Does that surprise you? Can you imagine how he must have felt that night as he walked away through the snow?” Priscilla’s voice was tinged with regret and bitterness. “I let Silas purchase me like a fine-blooded brood mare, and so, I’ve cheated him, too, you see. I wanted luxury and money; he wanted a beautiful, blue-blooded wife. Now we have nothing to share but bitterness and regrets.”
“Oh, Mother. . . .” Summer choked back her tears.
Priscilla went to her desk and tried to press money into Summer’s hand, but at that time, Summer thought Iron Knife was dead. “So now you understand why I’m going to marry Austin Shaw next June.”
“I don’t blame you, then.” Mother poured herself a glass of sherry, then gulped it. “I don’t blame anyone for trying to escape from this house, from the wreckage your father and I have made of our lives.”
Priscilla lifted the lid of the music box. As the sad little tune tinkled out, she took her drink and went back over to stare out the window at the falling snow. “I hate winter,” she said in a whisper. “Summer is the time for roses and love, and the cold brings only sad memories and regrets. . . .”
Summer watched her mother drain her goblet and stare out the window at the snow, as if forgetting her daughter was even in the room. Then, very quietly, Summer walked out and her mother never turned around. Even with the door closed behind her, she could hear the faint music from Shawn’s little music box. She lay sleepless and weeping on her bed the rest of that night, listening to the chimes of the grandfather clock echoing through the big, gloomy house as the hours passed.
However, that spring, in 1859, before she and Austin could wed, Summer and Austin had been sent to Colorado to track down his younger brother, Todd, and she had found Iron Knife again. He wasn’t dead after all. At that moment, faced with a choice between the two, Summer had heeded her mother’s advice and had turned her back on everything she knew to run away with the Cheyenne dog soldier.
The stagecoach jolted her awake, and Summer blinked, looking around at her sleeping children. Where was she? Oh, yes, almost six years had passed since she had chosen between the two men, and now she wasn’t quite sure she had made the right choice after all. Now she knew that while she’d been in Boston, Iron Knife had slept with Gray Dove and had never told Summer.
So now her mother was dying and Summer was headed back to Boston to be at Priscilla’s bedside. She could only hope she got there in time. And Shawn O’Bannion? If the one Cherokee knew was the right man, Summer prayed that he cared enough to come and arrived before her mother died. Father would be furious, but Priscilla deserved one last chance to see the man she had loved so long!