He grew quiet and I chanced a glance at him from my periphery. His head tilted back and he studied the Brick House with such intention, I actually felt as though he’d taken my confession seriously. “What would you do with it? Live there?”
The question, so innocently asked, prodded my hopes into words. “And perhaps…”
He didn’t respond, so I continued. “Open a bookshop?”
His hearty laugh pulled my full attention his way. “That’s an excellent idea, Sadie.” He dipped his head with a grin. “I…I mean, of course, Miss Blackwell. What a wonderful bookshop it would make too.”
Sadie. He’d called me Sadie, as if a chasm of social expectations didn’t stand between us. I nearly dropped the package of books. And I wanted to hear him say it again.
“It’s clear you have a gift for books and matching them with people.” His grin crooked as he kept studying the Brick House. “Yes, I can see it now. Books in the windows. A sign displaying the name. Happy readers pouring from the doorway, their giddy laughter peeling down the streets at their literary discoveries.”
“Portable adventures,” I whispered, allowing his words to resurrect the pictures in my mind.
“Yes, so true.”
We stood quietly, side by side, the wind tossing a cool breeze against my cheeks. The air bit with the taste of coming rain and I still had a long ride ahead of me back to the estate house. Speaking my dream aloud made it come alive in a different way. A…possible way. “Your suggestion of Wilde’s The Canterville Ghost was just the medicine I needed after Moreau,” Oliver stated, turning toward me. “See, you have a gift.”
I glanced back at the Brick House and away from his blue eyes, so similar to his little sister’s, yet so different in the way they looked at me.
“And, though not as happy an ending as I’d hoped, The Lost World was much more hopeful than Dr. Moreau as well. Though, I prefer happy endings. They make the world less gray, don’t you think?”
I tugged the package to my chest, myriad memories pressing in upon me of hungry nights and hopeful mercy. “I like happy endings, but the world is filled with gray and light. One helps us measure the other, to find gratitude for the light when compared with the gray.”
I felt his stare on my profile and attempted to lighten my much-too-philosophical admission. “But I love books of all sorts. If it is bound, I will read it.”
“Any sort of book?”
“Most of them. I try to avoid ones that keep me from being able to fall asleep because I’m envisioning terrifying things in my head, but otherwise, I just enjoy the journey. The ability to be other people and see other places that I’ll never have opportunity to be or visit.”
“What makes you think you’ll never travel?” He spread his palm forward as if spanning the street. “See the world?”
My smile tempted to release. “How many of your servants travel the world with you, Mr. Camden?”
“I do wish you’d call me Oliver, or at the very least TBG.”
At this, I turned my full attention on him. “TBG?”
He lowered his voice and winked. “The Book Goblin.”
I raised a brow. “All pretense has fled, I see.”
He shrugged a shoulder, his ready grin emerging with such gleam mine responded without reservation. “Actually, I’m rather horrible at pretense anyway. My mother continually scolds me on the subject.”
“Your mother?” There had been no mention of a Mrs. Camden; I’d come to the conclusion she’d passed away.
“She is not fond of travel, but felt it a social devastation to keep Father from visiting the Vanderbilts at their invitation.” He shook his head slowly. “I’m afraid my mother is quite wrapped in the webs of expectation and high demands. Unhappily so.” He pushed his hands into his pockets and looked back at Brick House. “Most of my childhood friends were village children or servants, which, thankfully, my mother didn’t know about and my father didn’t care about. My older brother took many of the ‘proper’ expectations with him. It was quite liberating.”
A gentleman’s son who befriended village children and servants?
His knowing gaze fell back on my face. “It’s important to be seen as a person instead of a position, isn’t it?”
I shifted my attention away, but his words still lingered between us, as if spoken directly from my head. My family had been involved in service for as long as I could remember. Being seen for who I was? Truly? Beneath the apron and the cap? Like a real heroine in a story? I squeezed the books closer to my chest.
“It makes one feel more confident in following dreams and truly living life for all the reasons and gifts God has given to us, don’t you think? Those pesky class boundaries are so limiting, not only in aspirations but also in”—he tipped his head in my direction—“friendships.”
I really wasn’t certain what to think. His words pierced me, resonated with my soul. It was like being a child lost in the woods and suddenly hearing a mother’s call nearby.
Hope. Awareness. Some inextricable link to another human.
The sense that, in all my internal conversations with the Almighty, someone else understood. Could Oliver Camden truly “see” me, when I’d spent most of my life, even as a child, being taught to be “unseen”? “You don’t speak like an upper-class English gentleman, Mr. Camden.”
“Is that unfortunate? That class creates such limitations on excellent friendship possibilities.” His smile reemerged with an added twinkle in his eyes. “If we let it, that is.”
My face warmed at his direct stare and I lowered my eyes as I should have been doing all along, but he kept making it so difficult. He annihilated the usual distance between my class and his with the ease of a kind word and a smile.
“But I suppose you are right. The only servant of mine who travels with me is my valet.” He sighed. “I haven’t considered how
