Songs of the Shenandoah Read Free

merely paid your proper tea levies, we would have laid this grand wire decades ago.”
    She tried to hold back her laughter, but she was unsuccessful. This time it was the bald telegrapher himself who gave her a crooked expression. Clare waved her hand in apology.
    For fear she would not be able to contain herself if she looked her husband in the face, she closed her eyes. But her lips sought out his ear. “I love you, Andrew Royce.”
    He gave her a firm embrace, then she heard his voice turning soft and sincere. “Even if . . . ?”
    â€œEspecially because.”
    Andrew suffered with the knowledge he was struggling to keep the Daily at the financial strength it heralded when his father was running it. But since Charles Royce had passed, they both learned unsavory details of how the old man had reaped such success.
    Andrew’s main shortcoming was not being able to clean up the business dealings of the paper without simultaneously washing away its profits. It pained Clare to come to this conclusion, but it was becoming clear they couldn’t blame all of the Daily ’s suffering on her husband’s ethics alone. He just wasn’t as gifted a proprietor as his father was.
    â€œYou miss it, don’t you?” Andrew’s expression was one of a sudden discovery. “That’s why we’re here, isn’t it?”
    She was about to protest. To tell him it was because of her fascination with the miracles of science. Or due to her journalistic curiosity. These were true, but Andrew always knew deep inside her heart, in places she was uncomfortable visiting herself.
    â€œIt was . . . a more simple life.” Her thoughts drifted to her days on the Hanley farm in Ireland; of living in tight quarters; of feeding from their soil and cutting turf from bogs for fires; and sweet dances of celebration with the entire village, all of whom were both lovingly flawed and part of an extended family.
    But this was a sheltered memory, one that would frame perfectly as a painting. For Clare’s last experience of her homeland more than ten years ago was one of crop failure, starvation, and death. And even on their scarcest of days in America, there wasn’t the remotest of comparisons to the poverty she had once endured.
    No. This land of opportunity had been their savior. Not only for herself, but for her brothers and sister, who had made new lives for themselves; lives not so dependent on the whims of nature or the cruel provision of fate.
    And although her brothers Seamus and Davin had scattered to the far ends of this country, in gold-rich California, she was comforted by knowing she had assisted in their arrival to these nurturing shores, to a place where their bowls would never be empty and through effort and innovation, their dreams were always in reach.
    America was a place of blessing where someone like herself, her siblings, and her children could rise above their given standing and declare their own destiny.
    Yet something troubled Clare, for she knew in her heart that they left something behind in the ship taking them all from Cork Harbour to the promised land. A memory forgotten. A voice that was silenced.
    â€œWhat’s wrong?” Andrew placed his hand on her arm and looked into her eyes with a yearning to heal.
    Clare shook her head. She regretted wearing her concerns so obviously. This was not the time for such a discussion. “I was just thinking of home.”
    Andrew was about to speak but then paused and turned toward the telegraph as gasps came out of several people, and those who had nodded off to sleep were given heavy tugs on their arms.
    All attention was focused in silence on the brass head of the telegraph machine, which now danced with tapping rhythms of change.

Chapter 1
    Christmas in Manhattan
    Manhattan, New York
    December 1860

    Clare had been anticipating this moment for more than a decade.
    It was to be the most glorious Christmas dinner of her