I simply wish He would help me find my employer’s carriage.”
“Ask for Dr. Edmunds in the passengers’ office. And know I’ll be prayin’ for you.” Mrs. O’Rourke hoisted her bag and melted into the crowd, her rust-red cloak soon swallowed up by all the bodies.
Snatching up her carpetbag, Rachel elbowed a path toward the passenger area and the waiting lines of wagons and carriages. She wished she still believed she could say a prayer that might calm her fears. Rachel pulled in a breath, sucking in the stench of sweating bodies and rotting fish, rather than courage. I will be strong, Mother.
For what else had she left?
“Now then, are you in need of lodgin’, miss?”
The man’s voice at her side startled her. “What?”
Dressed in a worn frock coat, the original shade of which was long lost to the jumble of fantastically colored bits of cloth sewn on elbows and cuffs and pockets, the man was squat, smelly, and leaning far too close. “I asked if you are needin’ a lodgin’. Off the steamer from Ireland, are you?” he asked, his soft Irish lilt tugging at her already homesick heart as much as the sight of his caubeen tilted sideways on his head.
“Yes, but someone is meeting me here.”
“You’re certain, now? ’Tis a good lodgin’ house, so it is. For the lasses, no more than six to a room.” He gripped her sleeve. “And there’s none of the fever or the cholera in me house. Not like the other places.”
Cholera? “I am most certain I do not require lodging. Please, now, let go of my arm.”
“Might be no other offers, you know. Lodgin’ hard to come by.”
“Let go. Now.” She jerked her arm free of his grasp.
“Think you’re too good, do you?” He muttered a curse and turned to another woman standing nearby. She must have come off the boat, too, though Rachel didn’t recognize her. She looked barely past eighteen, yet she had two children with her, one clinging to her threadbare shift, the other cradled in her arms.
“Now, ma’am, you look in need of lodgin’, you do,” the man declared.
“That I am,” the woman said, her voice barely audible above the noise on the wharf. Her face carried the marks of hard work and poverty, lines and freckles and dirt drawing a map of her desperation.
Rachel knew she should move away. This woman and her children were none of her concern. Then the smallest child coughed, her tattered woven blanket falling away from her head. Dark eyes peered out of a tiny face, glossy and fever-bright. Eyes so like Mary Ferguson’s . . .
Rachel lurched as the pain and the anger and the guilt hit her again. She stumbled into the crowd, pushed her way through, her carpetbag banging into people, drawing shouts of “Watch where you’re going!” and “Lousy Irish.” She didn’t care.
At last she broke through the stifling worst of it and reached the passenger arrival area. She found a spot in the queue and shuffled along with the rest until she reached a counter and a harried clerk.
His glance was brisk and disparaging. “Arriving or departing?”
“Arriving. Has Dr. Edmunds checked on the arrival of Miss Dunne off the Somerville?”
“No. Next!”
The man behind her attempted to muscle forward, trodding on Rachel’s boot. “Then how am I to find him? There are hundreds of people out there.”
The clerk frowned through his spectacles. “Next!”
Dejected, Rachel marched back outside the office and looked around. Not twenty yards off, a lad with a tattered cap peered down from a gig, the vehicle’s wheels painted an eye-catching vermilion. His gaze danced over her face then scanned the dockside again. She wasn’t who he sought.
Setting down the carpetbag, she waited. Carriages, carts pulled up, wheeled off. The crowds thinned, leaving Rachel quite conspicuously alone. Had Dr. Edmunds been confused as to the date of her arrival? Was she going to have to take lodging with that horrid man still plying the wharf?
As if he could read her thoughts, the lodging fellow looked her way, his thick eyebrows waggling, an open invitation to take him up on his offer. She glared back. She would rather sleep on the docks than go with him. Though how stupid and dangerous would that be, Rachel Dunne? Such a course of action wouldn’t be wise even in Carlow.
Rachel turned her back to him and searched her surroundings again. The lad and the carriage were gone, his passenger collected, she assumed. To make matters worse, another boat had come