Not a day had Lavelle not thought of Ellen. Not a night passed had he not wondered again why she had left them and where had she gone. Patrick, he knew, had no doubt that she was still alive. The boy was tired of always ‘waiting’ for her. Had decided to ‘go on an adventure’ himself and departed for New Orleans with his friend Oxy Moran. Lavelle was at least pleased about that. Oxy was a steady lad, would steer Patrick straight. Keep him out of scrapes.
‘Hard to kill a bad thing!’ was Patrick’s response, the last time Lavelle had drawn down the subject of Ellen’s disappearance. Lavelle, ignoring the barb, was not so sure. He felt that if she were still alive she would have made some contact, sent some sign. Relented her self-banishment.
But, of her, from her, there was no whisper.
He pored through her books for any clue as to where she might have gone: Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads; Blake’s Songs of Innocence; Whittier’s Legends of New England in Prose and Verse.
The latter he had given her one Christmas to wean her away from the English poets. But there was no quill mark, no stubbed page anywhere to give any indication of where she might have bound herself. Only then did he notice that the book of Donne’s poems was missing. Donne was her very favourite – she must have taken it.
He was at his wits’ end, his mind inletting every nook and cranny of their lives together. How he missed the vibrancy of her. With her it was always life at full tilt, he the more passive. It had never bothered him. Resilience, that’s what she had, resilience by the bucketful. Up and at things, getting the business going, taking on the Brahmins of Beacon Hill in their own back yard. Then, ferrying Louisa around, to this expert and that, trying to break down the walls that stopped the child from speaking. Then reading, reading, reading, all the time trying to ‘up’ herself. Reading herself into America, its land and its laws. What had made her give up all of that – banish herself from their lives? It was so unlike her. Unless, with the burden of everything sliding from under them, that her resilience had run out. Seeped away from her without them ever noticing it.
Later that night as he lay awake, the words of one of her songs came back to him.
No more I’ll see
You walk the meadows green …
It could now be his song for her, he realised.
All joy is gone that we once knew,
All sorrow newly found,
Soon you’ll in California be,
Or Colorado bound.
He stopped … California! They had often talked of California. And, even after the business failed, of him going west. California was another America – a different country. Such a place would spawn a curiosity in her.
Lavelle resolved to go to California. Work his way there. Build the railroads to build America.
The following day he went to the Convent of St Mary Magdalen. No permission would be given, he knew, to see either Mary or Louisa. Instead, he left word for them with the older nun who answered the door … and headed west.