Valley of Dreams (Longing for Home #6) - Sarah M. Eden
Chapter One
Winnipeg, Canada, 1874
Patrick O’Connor learned three things on the battlefields of the American Civil War: death isn’t usually clean or simple, loving someone isn’t enough to save him, and music keeps the demons at bay. As he stood in a small shop in Winnipeg, negotiating a price for the fiddle he’d carried through years of battles and a decade of wandering the white north, he knew the demons had won.
“It’s in rough condition,” the shop owner said, turning the instrument over in his hands. “Battered and gashed and worse for the wear.”
“Are we talking about the fiddle or its owner?”
The man eyed him sidelong. “Both.”
“How much?” He wasn’t enjoying the undertaking; he’d no intention of prolonging the thing.
“Why’re you selling it?”
Blast the man. Could he not just name his price? “Why I’m selling doesn’t make no nevermind.”
“It does if your reason is that the instrument can’t keep a tune.”
With a grumble of frustration, Patrick snatched the fiddle. He made a few quick pulls of the bow and adjustments to the strings. He played a quick rendition of “Irish Washerwoman,” and he played it well, if he did say so. Music had been his refuge through thirteen years of hell.
He forced himself to put the fiddle in the man’s hands once more. “How much?”
“I’ll give you twenty dollars.”
Ten dollars was a fortune to him in the moment, but ’twas a devastating prospect losing his fiddle. He’d played it before battles. He’d played it after battles. He’d played it while grieving his brother. But now he was selling it, and not for anything noble.
“I’ll take the twenty.”
The exchange was made. For just a moment, Patrick couldn’t get his feet to move from the spot. He was leaving behind a piece of himself there in that shop. He was giving up the last thread of happiness tied to his years in battle and the last days he’d spent with his brother. But he needed the money. He needed it because he needed what it would give him: escape.
Like the worthless heap he was, Patrick dragged himself from that shop to the saloon. He made straight to the barkeep.
“O’Connor.” The barman eyed him suspiciously. “I ain’t in the business of handouts.”
“I have money,” he mumbled.
“I’ll believe it when I see it.”
Patrick slapped four dollars on the counter.
“That’s more than a glass’s worth.”
“Four bottles,” he said. “Whiskey, not beer.”
The usually hard expression the man wore turned to something like worry. “You’ve been drinking too much lately, paddy. Four bottles’ll do you in.”
“I’ll make ’em last.” For a while, at least.
“You’ve a problem.”
He was in no mood for lectures. He knew full well he had a problem. He had more problems than anyone realized. “Are you taking my money or not?”
The man’s mouth pulled in a tight line. He set bottles on the counter, one after the other. “Make sure this does last. I won’t sell you any more.”
“This’ll do.” He’d move on, go to the next town, start again, manage what he could before he burned more bridges.
He tucked the bottles into the thick canvas bag he’d carried his fiddle in and slumped his way out of the saloon. His trek back to the single room he rented took him past the post office.
The postmaster stopped him. “You have a letter.” He held out a beaten and crumpled envelope.
Patrick snatched it with his free hand. It would be from Maura, his sister-in-law. She was the only one who ever wrote him, though heaven knew why she did. He’d cost her her husband, had walked out on her hospitality, and he almost never wrote back. What could he write, “Dear Maura, I’m drinking m’self into the grave, so I’m not likely to receive your next letter. Best regards, Patrick”?
He stuffed the letter into his pocket and kept walking. The weather was never truly warm in Winnipeg. It certainly wasn’t that day. The bite of air was helpful, though. It kept him moving even in his lowest moments and gave him a ready excuse for drinking. He could lie to himself and say he was only trying to keep warm.
He knew the truth.
His landlady eyed him with warranted suspicion as he came inside the house and climbed the stairs to his room. He’d been thrown out of enough boarding houses to know it would happen again soon enough. Losing the roof over his head hardly bothered him any longer. Like most things in life, he’d grown numb to it.