Chapter Two

      The home where Colin took Annabel was a lean-to shack in a New York City freight yard. Twilight was falling when they got there. Annabel plodded along in her heavy boots, grateful for the evening cool that eased the sultry August heat.

      A stray dog growled at them from behind a pile of empty packing crates and then scurried away again. Unfamiliar smells floated in the air—rotting vegetables, engine grease, acrid chemical odors, all against the backdrop of coal smoke.

      Colin pulled the door to the shack open without knocking. “Hi, Liza,” he called out. “Brought you a visitor. A lady.”

      Caution in her step, Annabel followed Colin inside. He’d not said much about his sister, except that she was sixteen and worked in a tavern because her full figure no longer allowed her to masquerade as a shoeshine boy.

      While they’d been waiting for the train, Colin had dozed off, and once they’d boarded the express service to New York City, he’d introduced Annabel to the conductor as his apprentice, and they’d become too busy for conversation.

      Normally reserved, Annabel had found a new boldness in the anonymity of her disguise as a street urchin. It seemed as if the social constraints that applied to gently bred young ladies had suddenly ceased to apply.

      In the first-class car, Colin had demonstrated how to tout for business by quietly moving up and down the corridor and offering his services. Shouting was not allowed. When they got a customer, Annabel knelt between the benches. After spreading polish on the shoes or boots, she used a pair of stiff boar brushes, one in each hand, to buff the leather into a mirror shine while Colin supervised.

      By the time they reached New York City, her hands, already tender from the fall, were stained with polish, and her arms ached from the effort of wielding the brushes, but she had earned her first dollar as a shoeshine boy.

      There were no windows in the shack, but the low evening sunshine filtered in between the planks that formed the walls. In the muted light, Annabel saw a tall, shapely girl bent over a pot simmering on an ancient metal stove.

      The girl turned around. “Pleased to make your acquaintance.”

      She moved forward, one hand held out. Annabel took it. The palm was work roughened and the girl’s blue gown was a mended hand-me-down, but her fair hair was arranged in a neat upsweep and her clothing freshly laundered.

      “The pleasure is all mine,” Annabel replied.

      She released the girl’s hand and surveyed the cabin. Everything was painstakingly clean and tidy. A sleeping platform, decorated with a few embroidered cushions, took up half the space. On the other side, a packing crate with a cloth spread over it served as a table, with two smaller packing crates as seats.

      “Is it true, what Colin said?” the girl asked. “Are you a lady?”

      “Yes.” Annabel felt oddly ill at ease.

      “You are welcome to share everything we have, as long as you like, but I have one condition. You must correct my speech and manner. I want to learn how to behave like a lady.”

      “Why should that be important?” Annabel said gently. “Is it not more important to be a good person? And it is clear to me that both you and your brother are.”

      The girl’s gray eyes met hers with a disquietingly direct gaze. “You’d be surprised. Some people...some men...believe that if you sound like a streetwalker, then you must be one.”

      Compassion brought the sting of tears to Annabel’s eyes. Her sisters worried about her sentimental nature, but sometimes emotions simply welled up inside her. And now, the understanding of how she had taken for granted her privileged life, how someone might so fervently aspire to what she had received as a birthright, tore at her tender heart.

      “Of course,” she replied. “I’ll teach you all I can.”

      Liza smiled. “In return, I’ll teach you how to look like a boy.”

      * * *

      “Shoeshine! Shoeshine!”

      Annabel made her way down the corridor in the second-class car on the train along the Southern Pacific Railroad. Her hair was pinned out of sight beneath a bowler hat. A touch of boot black shadowed her cheeks and her upper lip. She walked with a swagger, shoulders hunched, chin thrust forward. She did not smile.

      As she strode along, she studied the clothing and the footwear of the passengers, to identify the most likely customers. When she spotted a man in a neatly pressed broadcloth suit with dust on his boots, she halted at the end of the row.

      “Sir,” she said, holding up her wooden box. “Polish your boots for two bits.”

      The man, around forty, clean-shaven, contemplated her for a moment, then glanced down at his boots. Looking up again, he nodded at her and shuffled his feet forward. Annabel knelt in front of him. Swiftly, she applied a coat of polish and wielded the brushes. A final buff with a linen cloth added to the shine.

      She got to her feet and put out her hand. The man dropped a quarter in her palm. Annabel studied the coin, then leveled her gaze at the client. “If a gentleman is pleased with the result, he usually gives me four bits.”

      The man’s eyebrows went up, but he dug in his pocket again and passed her another quarter. Annabel thanked him and hurried off on her way. Bitter experience had taught her not to ask for the extra money until the initial payment was safely in her hand.

      “Shoeshine. Shoeshine.”

      For two weeks, she had stayed with Colin and Liza in their freight yard shack, becoming skilled in her new trade. It had been a revelation to learn that if she boarded a train and introduced herself to the conductor—Andrew Fairfield, was her name—they allowed her to travel without a ticket, as long as she obeyed their rules and offered to polish their shoes for free.

      By the end of the second week, she had earned enough money to buy her own brushes and polishes, and had taken an emotional farewell from Liza and Colin. One day, she hoped to reward them for their kindness, but she did not wish to raise any false hopes by telling them that she came from wealth.

      “Shoeshine! Shoeshine!”

      The train was slowing for a stop. Annabel used the lack of speed to cross over the coupling to the next car. Sometimes men had their boots polished just to break the tedium of the journey, but she enjoyed the traveling, even the endless monotony of the prairie they had left behind two days ago. As the scenery changed, it pleased Annabel to think that not long ago her sisters had looked upon the same grass-covered plateau, the same rolling hills, the same high-peaked mountains.

      “Shoeshine. Shoe—”

      The word died on her lips as her gaze fell on a suntanned man in his early thirties. Dressed like a dandy, he had a lean, muscled body.