Dim late afternoon sunlight touched the bluebird, deepening the shade of its turquoise wings and red bib.
Rose watched from where she knelt by the pond as it fluttered overhead and landed on a lily pad. Beyond it, the gold-tinted sunset shafted itself over every bit of summer landscape—branches and leaves and grass and dying dandelions. The pond's surface was eerily calm, reflecting out like a blackened mirror.
If she'd had an artist's eye, Rose thought she would have been quite absorbed sketching the scene in front of her.
Wait.
The bluebird turned its head and watched her with one beady black eye as she rummaged in her handbag. She had a slip of paper and a nub of pencil in there, which she had used to write a note she had intended to thread under the door of Cal's study.
But she could write another note.
Rose spread the paper over her knee. In her mind's eye she saw part of Jack's face watching her over the top of his sketchpad, a lock of hair falling into his eye. She tried to remember how his hands had moved over the page, gliding pencil lines into each other…
She drew the curve of the bird's head and the point of its beak. A sudden breeze whipped across the pond then, disturbing the water, and the bird flapped its wings and shot up into the orange sky.
Rose stared at the drawing in her hand—could she even call it a drawing? A crescent and a triangle, both of them too boldly drawn. How had Jack's sketch lines looked so soft and subtle and real?
She crumpled the paper in her hand and threw it into the pond.
*****
Any mail that arrived at the Hockley mansion was by default filtered through Cal. Rose's maid, a girl about her own age who rarely spoke beyond what was necessary, whom Rose had thought of up until then as pious and stupid, had slipped her the letter covertly.
"I found this in the sitting room," she said. "I don't think Mr. Hockley has had a chance to check the mail yet today."
Rose made a mental note to speak a little more kindly to the girl next time she was helping her dress.
The letter was from Molly Brown. Molly had heard news that ownership of Hockley Steel had been signed over to Nathan Hockley's only son Caledon after the terms of the contract had been fulfilled, which included a quick marriage to young debutante Rose DeWitt Bukater, who was mistakenly thought to have perished during the sinking of the RMS Titanic several months earlier.
Molly had been with her husband visiting relatives in the south. They'd be in Philadelphia overnight. Join me for tea if you want to get out of the house for a day, she said. She gave the name of the hotel she and her husband would be staying in.
There was no way that Cal would allow Rose to travel to Philadelphia to meet up with Molly Brown, a woman who rubbed his upper class sensibilities in all the wrong ways.
So Rose slipped a note under his study door to let him know where she'd gone, when she would be back, and why she felt the need to take off without any forewarning.
And she hurried to leave before he got back from the mill.
Until later, Cal.
*****
"I couldn't believe it when I saw your name written up in the paper. It was like seeing a ghost!"
Rose sipped her tea in silence. She didn't know how to explain her situation, didn't want to sound burdensome or whiny, but she had found Molly to be a comforting presence on board the Titanic and now, something to bring her out for a moment from her cold, hushed existence.
Molly reached for the basket of scones. "So I'm guessing you must have gotten into a lifeboat later on? Last I saw your mother and Cal in New York, they were still looking for you. Your name didn't turn up on the list of survivors."
"I…was one of the six people they pulled from the water. After the ship went down." She paused. "I'm lucky to be alive."
Molly shook her head. "I'll say so, darlin'."
Rose tried to smile.
"Something tells me there's more to this than you're letting on," said Molly, studying her across the table.
"Well…" said Rose.
"To be honest, and pardon me if I'm out of line for saying so, but I was real surprised to see your name next to Hockley's—I don't know everything that went down during those few days, but I got the idea that—"
Polite society would have considered Molly very rude, prying into personal business that didn't concern her in the slightest, but Rose felt an overwhelming temptation to confide in her. So many things had been growing inside her for weeks, pressing up within her, trying to burst free, and she had shoved them back down because she trusted no one, least of all herself. She couldn't unload her feelings on the people in her life; she had no real friends, and anyone who might have understood was separated from her by professional and societal boundaries.
"You know you can talk to me if you need to get anything off your chest," Molly said, sensing Rose's internal struggle.
There was a long pause.
"I hid in steerage on the Carpathia and gave a different name when they asked," said Rose at last. "I never planned to go back with Mother and Cal. I wanted to bury my old life and start over on a clean slate."
Molly nodded again. "But…?"
"Well, I stayed in New York for a month and a half after the Carpathia docked. I had enough money to help me get by, but I was homeless and I couldn't find work…"
"So you were just knocking around the city all that time by yourself?"
"Yes. And then I…"
When the ship docks, I'm getting off with you.
This is crazy!
I know. It doesn't make any sense. That's why I trust it.
Rose swallowed. "And then I had to come back. I had to reveal myself to Cal and ask for his help…"
She put a hand against her stomach. Her body hadn't changed much yet, and laced up in her corset she looked absolutely no different than she ever had, but the meaning of the gesture wasn't lost on Molly.
"It isn't Cal's," she went on, no longer thinking, just speaking. "It's—"
"The steerage boy—?" At Rose's silence, she said, "Oh, Rose. I'm so sorry, honey."
"Jack…Jack didn't make it," said Rose, her voice cracking. "He gave up his life to save mine."
Promise me, Rose…
She didn't want to tell Molly the details of their last moments together. She would take those with her to the grave. Some things were too painful, too private, too intimate to share with others.
*****
In the morning, before Rose boarded the train back to Pittsburgh, Molly handed her a piece of paper with her home address written on it. "If you ever need anything," she said, "you write to me. I mean it. Anything at all."
Rose tried to smile and promised that she would keep in touch.
She arrived home at mid-afternoon, during a time when Cal would likely still be out. Her maid, the one who'd slipped her Molly's letter, met her at the door, her expression fearful. "Miss Rose—" she began, but she was cut off.
"I see Rose has decided to join us."
Cal stood behind the maid in the doorway and smiled at Rose venomously. "Accompany her to the sitting room, Elizabeth," he said, addressing the maid but looking at Rose. "Her mother is quite anxious to know where she's been."