Darlin' Nellie

By Beth Nelson

Baby Darlin Nellie Donagal is miraculously spared in 1922, when an inebriated ex-gambling partner of her fathers murders him in an attempt to retrieve a gambling debt. She is rescued by Thomas Endicott, a banker from England who had paid her father, Sean Donagal, fifty dollars to take him to Sedalia, Misouri where Sean was planning to live with his father, Patrick Donagal. Endicott delivers Nellie to her Irish grandfather, a store owner and a new Christian who has started a church in Sedaila. Nellies lovely mother died after giving birth to the baby she had prayed for and longed for.

Darlin Nellie is the story of a little girl who is raised with great love and joy by her grandfather. However, always in the back of her heart is the passion to know who and where her mothers family is. Would she ever find them?

Along the way she has many adventures and misadventuresespecially with her close friend, Aaron Blessing, who gets her into scrapes, but also helps her get out of some.

God has given Nellie a big voice which she uses for Himat first in church, then in the New York area where her mentor provides voice lessons and opens the path to a career in music. She hears the beloved Marian Anderson sing and is encouraged by her to continue the path to fame with her voice. Now she has another question: shall she devote her life to the path of fame or shall she have a home and familyor can she have both? Can she know Gods leading and find His will for her life?

These questions are answered in this beguiling story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Dec 7, 2005
• ISBN: 9781468501575

Book preview

Darlin’ Nellie

by

Beth Nelson

Title_Page_Logo.ai

© 2005 Beth Nelson. All Rights Reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or

transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 11/30/05

ISBN: 1-4208-9045-X (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4685-0157-5 (ebk)

Printed in the United States of America

Bloomington, Indiana

Contents

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter 10

Epilogue

About the Author

Dedication

This book is dedicated to my mother, Helen Spink Parker, who sought to show Jesus’ love to everyone.

She obeyed the Great Commission found in Mark 16:15

Acknowledgements

With appreciation and love to my daughter-in-laws and daughter:

Darcy, for editing

Angie, for computer assistance

Beth, Wendy and Ruth for praying

And to my son, Tim, for the cover design

Chapter One

1921

Emma Caroline Wakefield stood very still outside her father’s study, continuing to hold her hand poised to knock at the door. She had been about to go in to plead with her father to change his mind about the ultimatum he had given her and Sean Donagal the night before. But Calvin Wakefield’s fiery voice came clearly through the hand-carved, oak-paneled door. She knew that, ‘eavesdripping,’ as their new house-girl called it, was wrong, but when she heard her mother say, Calvin, we need to talk about Sean and Emma, she had become motionless, her curly red-golden head cocked to one side, her thick-lashed eyes anxious and her taut young body poised to burst in angrily—or for flight.

Amelia, I have never known you to oppose me. I will never allow a daughter of mine to marry that upstart Irish Catholic. Emma could imagine the cold disdain in her father’s blue eyes, which usually beamed approvingly at her—or did not see her at all if they were buried in some financial tome. His voice held suppressed fury. Emma’s heart sank.

Her mother’s sweet tones held a firmness Emma had never heard. I have never had to oppose you, Calvin. We are usually in agreement and I also wish that the handsome charming Sean Donagal had never come into contact with our Emma. But he did, and if we do not give our blessing we will never see her again. We may not anyway. There was a sob in her mother’s words. After a moment she began again, He is going west. And, take my word for it—she will go with him with or without our blessing. Have you forgotten what it was like when we fell in love and how your parents did not want us to marry because I wasn’t from Beacon Hill? There was a bemused tenderness in her mother’s voice now, then a passionate fury. Don’t let her go, Calvin, without our blessing! She’s all we have—and we’re all she has.

There was a prolonged silence now and Emma imagined her slim, lovely mother crossing the floor, her red-gold head to one side, and her brown eyes angry, yet pleading. Emma had often heard her father say, Amelia can bewitch a tightwad out of a $100 donation. But could she bewitch Calvin Wakefield, the stern Calvinist banker, out of his antagonism to Sean Donagal?

Emma had prayed many sawdust prayers—that’s what she called them, because that’s what they were like—ground from a dry branch, cut from a dead tree. Words she repeated because they had been taught by a long-faced, long-nosed preacher in what she thought were dry as dust sermons. She had prayed more willingly for her loving mother and doting father, but she felt no connection to the God with the seeing eye who sent people to Hell. She had vivid recollections of the Reverend Thomas reading Jonathan Edwards’ Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. It had given her nightmares. But now she prayed a heartfelt prayer. Please help Father to listen to Mother, because she is right—I will run away with Sean anyway.

After never-ending moments, her father answered, All right, Amelia, I will agree to their marriage, but I will NEVER give them my blessing. His voice sounded gravelly like he wanted to cough or shout, which he seldom did. I’m sure he is a heathen—maybe doesn’t even believe in God, much less know Him personally.

Elated, Emma scurried back up the stairs to her room, her heart beating with delight and the excitement that she had never known until she had met Sean at a sedate dinner party at the Caswells three months before. It had ceased being a sedate dinner party the minute she had lifted her shy blue gaze to meet his laughing, bold, dark admiring stare. The crisp, dark hair that fell onto his forehead and curled about his prominent ears and the cockeyed smile caused her heart to race in a way it never had before. Her cheeks flushed and she lowered her eyes.

Y’look like an English rose, his words were a delightful brogue that tickled her fancy.

Emma had suddenly become bold. And how would you know, fighting them as you have been? She laughed into his eyes, not knowing what to expect. The bespectacled Timothys and Stephens she had known had all been somber young men earnestly pursuing their studies and careers—worthwhile fellows all, approved by mother and father. But she had never felt this excitement, this urgency with them.

Y’re a bonnie one as my friend Scott Mc Duff says. I’m not fightin’ thim anymore. I almost got kilt or put in prison. That’s why I’m here. I’m goin’ west. Me Da’s in Missouri.

Missouri is not west, Emma teased. Colorado is west—California is west.

Missouri is west o’ Boston—o’ course, Boston is the hub o’ the universe to y, he grinned.

All evening they had engaged in repartee, unaware of anyone else. At the end of the evening, he had urgently said, "When can I see you again?’

And she, considering the possibilities—church, no—at her house, highly unlikely—in the ordinary course of the day, ditto—said sadly, I don’t know.

But he, the enterprising Irishman, had managed to see her a couple times a week each week. He was very creative and managed to keep her from thinking they were being underhanded. He met her on Wednesdays when she walked in the Common with her friend, Lydia.

Lydia and she had lived on Beacon Hill all their lives. Lydia was a demure wren of a girl with taffy colored hair smoothly combed back into a knot and downcast matching eyes. But Emma smiled as she recalled the flush on Lydia’s face when Sean had walked boldly towards them that first sun-washed Wednesday. Top o’ the mornin’ to yon bonnie lassies. His eyes gleamed with humor and admiration; the sun gleamed on his black hair.

Lydia turned around to see if he was speaking to some other, bonnie lassies. But Emma replied boldly, Aren’t you the bold one? and didn’t know where the words and the coy manner had come from. They were certainly not like the old Emma Caroline Wakefield.

Lydia was bewildered. Emma, she hissed, do you know this brazen man?

Emma couldn’t resist laughing, though she knew she should be standing with her own eyes downcast and protesting the young man’s familiarity. I do, she replied, looking from her friend to this new acquaintance who made her heart behave so erratically. I met him at the Caswells at dinner last week.

Lydia’s flush grew deeper as she remembered that she could have been at that dinner herself, but she had pleaded a headache so she could stay home with Hattie the housekeeper and read Booth Tarkington’s new book. She looked questioningly at Emma as though to say, And you didn’t tell me?

Emma dropped her own eyes. She and Lydia had always shared their secrets—their favorite foods, their hatreds—mostly Tom Banning, who was so superior, yet pulled their hair when they were girls—and their crushes, which were always from afar as they had attended exclusive girls’ schools. Emma had kept Sean Donagal to herself because he was so heart stopping, so difficult to explain, so fearful to explain. Every waking moment she thought of him. Her dreams were full of him. But she could not explain to her friend.

And now here he was again, twice as vivid as any dream could have made him.

Ah, she wanted to keep me to herself, his deep voice rumbled. Somehow he got between them and put an arm through each of theirs.

Lydia looked about frantically and tried to pull away. Emma just laughed, her eyes so like her mother’s, raised to his. Emma, someone will come along.

We’ll just say that I’m your cousin from Ireland and I hive’nt seen y’ fer years an’ ye’re showin’ me the city.

We will, said Emma, and that was the last thing she remembered clearly. "They had walked around the Common laughing and talking, though Emma wasn’t sure but what she was floating. The only thing she remembered Lydia telling him was how she and Emma had pricked their fingers together one day when they were about five to see if their blood was blue. They had heard the Wakefield maid talking about the Beacon Hill blue blood. The three had had tea at a small cozy place the girls had never heard of and never ran into anyone they knew. It was time to go home all too soon.

The meetings had continued for several weeks until one day they had met Mrs. Thomas Banning, bluest of the blue bloods, mother of the despicable Tom Banning. She had looked down her supercilious nose and hurried home to tell Mrs. Calvin Wakefield that her only daughter was cavorting with, a strange Irish heathen.

The confrontation with her parents the next night was the most painful and devastating of her twenty-one years. They were sitting at the long gleaming oak table, Father at the head in his captain’s chair, Mother at the foot and she feeling dwarfed in the middle. The flames on the blue candles in the silver candlesticks flickered over the immaculately appointed table as usual. The blue of the candles matched the blue velvet curtains at the tall narrow windows. Emma had always thought of the room as beautiful and restful. And she had always associated blue with those two adjectives.

But not that night. The blue of her Father’s eyes was icy and unapproachable. Her mother’s lovely face was pale and her usually smiling eyes were sad and darkly shadowed.

So you have been having clandestine meetings with some Irish immigrant. I never would have thought it of you, Emma Caroline. We have always trusted you. How could you do this to us? Her father’s face was apoplectic. She remembered hearing someone tell about a man at a bar who’s face got very red while he was drinking and he died right there of a massive stroke. She wondered if something like that could happen to her father although he never drank spirits. This fear tempered her words a bit, but not her feelings.

She felt like stamping her foot, but she only pushed her chair back, stood her very straightest and looked him directly in the eyes. Clandestine. There was nothing clandestine about their meetings. Anyone could have seen them, and obviously someone had. She and Lydia were doing nothing but walking on Boston Common as they had done for years. Of course they had hoped no one they knew would see them, because although Sean Donagal was a handsome and charming man, she had instinctively known that her parents would not approve of him, although she was not exactly sure why. Of course, he was a Catholic and from Ireland, but why was that so terrible? Mother wasn’t like some of the other Beacon Hill biddies, as she and Lydia called them. She was lovely to the Irish maids and other foreign commoners. She always treated everyone the same.

We were not having clandestine meetings, Father. We met Sean at dinner at the Caswells. You and mother were there also. You saw me talking to him. We met him when we were walking in the Common. We took tea with him once or twice. Lydia was always with us, but, she turned to include her mother in her fiery gaze, you won’t stop me from seeing him. I love him, and as she spoke the words she knew they were true. She had not allowed herself to identify the all-consuming joy and wonder she experienced when she saw him—the excited anticipation when she knew she would, the ever-present joy and anticipation— remembering his eyes, his smile, his challenging wit.

And does he love you, sweetheart? Her mother’s words had a breathy choked quality Emma had never heard.

Emma Caroline Wakefield became very still. He was brash and gay and handsome. He treated her irreverently and yet as though she were a lovely figurine. Did he love her? The words burned into her heart. I don’t know, mother, she responded bravely. He fancies me, I know. She had read those words in some book.

At those words, her father’s tones became a shout. Father never shouted. Fancies! Fancies a Wakefield and the Wakefield fortune! Fancies! He was speechless and Emma thought he might have a stroke and die. She took a step towards him. What could she do to help him other than saying she would never see Sean again—and she knew she couldn’t do that.

Then let us invite him to dinner and discover what his intentions are, her mother said as quietly as fear for her daughter’s future and her husband’s health would allow her.

You’d do that, Mother? Father, would you let him come? I promise that if he doesn’t love me, I will never see him again.

No, I will not. I will not allow that ungodly man to see you again, Father had thundered. I will cut you off without a cent and you will leave this house never to return if you see him again. My grandchildren will not be brought up as Papists. His eyes were cold and unyielding. Tears stood in her mother’s eyes.

He had barely spoken to Emma since that Victorian Episode, as she called it in her mind. Emma felt a great ache in her heart to have her father estranged and her mother suffering, but her feelings toward Sean were so new and all consuming. He must be her one and only true love that all the books told about. He had to be. He would come to know the Lord later, surely. And now there was a glimmer of hope. Thank you, God, and thank you, Mother, she said softly. She did not wonder what prayers her parents were making.

In her room she looked in the old mirror over her vanity with a little sigh. Why couldn’t she have been the beauty her mother was with her red-gold wavy hair and silvery blue eyes? Instead she had this mass of unruly dark hair, brown eyes and ordinary features. But she did have a cleft in her chin that Sean said gave her an elfin look and made her, a winner when she smiled. Again, Sean’s admiring statement with his finger tracing that part of her anatomy gave her shivers. Could he possibly love her?

But they had made the invitation and Sean had come to dinner a week later on a rainy inauspicious evening. It was one of the most uncomfortable dinners that had been served in that house for fifty years. The table and service was impeccable as always and the filet mignon delicious, but the conversation was stilted—even Sean’s was a bit subdued. But he smiled at both her parents and complimented them on the meal. His manners, she noted, were as impeccable as her parents. All were dreading the coming confrontation, which took place in the stately living room in front of the fire.

Father and Mother sat in their customary overstuffed chairs at either end of the glowing flames. Emma drew up the old green chair that had her crocheted doilies on it. She hoped that somehow its familiarity would help her get through this ordeal. Sean was installed in a horsehair stuffed black leather chair and did not look like his jolly, charming self at all. But would anyone, when her father’s eyes were glowering at him and even her mother looked as though she could burst into tears at any time? And mother never cried—ever.

Father cleared his throat and said between clenched teeth, We have brought you here to discover your intentions towards our daughter.

Sean’s face flushed. He stood up. Intentions, Sir? I canna have intentions yet. I am workin’ my way out to me Da’ in Missouri.

Emma’s heart sank. He did not love her. He was not going to ask her to marry him. She tried to hold her head high. She averted her eyes from his angry face.

But if I could have intentions I would take her away from the likes o’ you in a minute. I do love her. She is a bonnie girl.

Emma felt like her heart was borne upon wings of glory. She stepped towards Sean and said, I will go with you wherever you go. Her eyes blazed and her cheeks were flushed. I love you too, Sean.

A wide smile creased Sean’s handsome face. Emma could not see her parents’ expressions, she only saw the bold admiring gaze of her beloved.

There was a long silence in which Mr. Wakefield glared first at Sean and Emma and then at his wife. Mrs. Wakefield’s eyes were wet, pleading with her husband not to make any rash statements.

At last, Calvin Wakefield said grimly, Well, we will see. If you both feel this way in six months time, we’ll see.

**********

And now the six months were over. Emma and Sean had constantly discussed whether the Wakefields would actually allow them to marry. Sean had always insisted, Sure and he’ll find some way t’ stop us. His accent always became broader under stress or anger.

She always replied more bravely than she felt, My father has never lied to me. He feels lying is a serious sin. She knew that to be true, but she too, worried that he would find some way to circumvent the implied promise. And perhaps he would have if it had not been for her mother.

Sean was coming that night and they would discuss the plans she and Sean had made. They had decided to be married before a Justice of the Peace so that everything would be as simple as possible. Sean had saved $300, which seemed a huge amount to her but would seem a paltry amount to her parents, she knew. He had also traded something for a Model T that mother and father had already looked askance at.

Emma hurried into her room, every inch of her being yearning to be Mrs. Sean Donagal. She had to get things ready. Sean wanted to be married by next week so they could be off before the weather was colder. She opened the door of her closet. She wouldn’t be able to take much. Her eyes rested only briefly on the row of silky low-hipped dresses. She would take the cotton and serge with only one or two silk for church. Surely they would go to church, she thought with only a niggle of anxiety. Cotton underwear and stockings with a couple silk sets—how many toiletries could they afford to take? She would have to ask Sean.

Books. Books were the hardest things to leave—her room was full of them. Of course her Bible, then Jane Austin, Louisa May Alcott, Pilgrim’s Progress, Booth Tarkington, Mark Twain—she wished she could take them all.

Then she decided she would bathe and make herself as attractive as possible. She would wear one of the dresses she would not be taking—the beige silk one with rust and yellow flowers that clung becomingly to her slim body, and she would wear a silk flower in her hair.

She soaked a long time in water filled with fragrant bath salts and prepared herself carefully to join mother and father in waiting for Sean. But by the time she went down the three of them were gathered once more around the fireplace. She looked around the room as if it were the last time. Every piece of furniture gleamed with the patina of loving care and history. Some pieces had come with her grandparents from England, Emma knew. The candelabra leant a warm glow to the overstuffed blue velvet sofa and chairs, as did the shimmering flames. It was a restful room, a family room. There was only a brief pang of the possibility of missing it, which she firmly pushed into abeyance.

Father looked grim and mother was smiling her politest guest-she-wished-would-leave smile. Sean’s shoulders were squared and his eyes narrowed. He seemed ready for a battle.

No one noticed as she silently crossed the floor to join them until her mother turned to glance her way. Sean has been telling us of your plans to get married before a Justice of the Peace. There was a slight tremble in her low tones. Your father and I would like to have the Reverend Thomas come here and marry you. She cleared her throat, clasping her hands together tightly before her.

Emma wanted to refuse. Not the dry as dust Reverend Thomas, who looked right through you, and acted as though a smile would crack his face. Then a thought came to her— The Reverend Marston—the missionary to Africa. He’s going to be in town for another week or so. We’d like to have him marry us.

Sean raised his dark brows at her as if to say, We would?

Mrs. Wakefield spoke quickly before her husband could voice his disapproval.