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The Carpenter's Inheritance

By Laurie Alice Eakes

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Loveland, Massachusetts

October 1893

Miss Trudy Perry, Attorney at Law, would not, after all, be joining Miss Lucinda Bell, Attorney at Law, in practice in Loveland, Massachusetts. She had decided to follow her brother to San Francisco and practice law out on the West Coast.

"Follow her brother indeed." Lucinda folded the flimsy yellow telegram and glanced around her office. "Follow her heart is more like it."

And who could blame her? California was friendlier to lady lawyers than Trudy's home state of South Carolina.

"Just like Virginia." Lucinda stuffed Trudy's telegram into a folder marked Personal Correspondences, where it joined another wired message that had shattered her hopes of practicing law alongside her father, as he had practiced alongside his, and his father had done before that…

We lost Stop Supreme Court says Virginia can prevent women from practicing law Stop

That telegram from Belva Lockwood had sent Lucinda, freshly graduated from the University of Michigan Law School, hundreds of miles from the Virginia mountains she loved to an unfamiliar and, thus far, unfriendly town in Massachusetts, where becoming a lawyer as a female wasn't considered wrong. At least the state bar didn't consider it wrong. She had yet to learn about the citizenry.

She glanced around the second-floor office she'd acquired with the help of one of her father's numerous friends and colleagues in the law. His son had started there in the small town on the Connecticut border. He had long since moved back to Boston but said the county was in need of another lawyer. He gave her suggestions, advice, and names of people to befriend.

He hadn't told her the law office had become a storage room for the saddle and harness shop on the first floor in the year the premises had been empty. All shelving had been removed, apparent from the brackets left behind without their boards, and hooks installed. Massive hooks so high on the wall, Lucinda couldn't so much as fling her hat atop one. All that remained of any use was the desk. Though scarred, it was solid oak, wide and deep, with lots of drawers.

"I need a carpenter." She supposed she spoke to the spiders likely hiding in the corners. Talking aloud was better than the silence. "Where do I find a carpenter?"

"Ask Gertie," Daddy's friend had advised her when talking about the town. "That woman knows everyone."

Lucinda hadn't met her yet. She had walked into the office thirty minutes earlier, found Trudy's telegram waiting for her, and simply sat staring at it the whole time.

Useless where she sat, Lucinda rose, found her hat hanging from a bent bookshelf bracket, and perched it on her head at a more or less reasonable angle. Gertie could be found at the cafe across Main Street, and down two blocks. The Love Knot Cafe, not the Loveland Cafe. That belonged to Selma Dickerson, who didn't approve of ladies doing anything but entering her premises for tea and scones, if they weren't home being wives and mothers. Or so Lu-cinda had been warned.

She exited her office and paused on the landing to jiggle the key in the lock until she heard the tumblers fall home. The telegrams were the only thing in the office to steal, but a good habit was a good habit. Once she had client files in there, she must keep matters secure.

The steps led down the outside of the building. Still, the smell of leather and mink oil turned her stomach before she reached the pavement. As soon as she could manage it, she would have to move her office somewhere more appealing to female clientele. At least Lucinda hoped she would draw female clientele. She wouldn't turn down men, of course, but the ladies' plights appealed to her, from collecting pensions long denied them, to helping them make out their own wills, to…whatever anyone needed. She wasn't about to be choosy at this stage of the game, though she preferred not to handle criminal matters.

Once away from the harness shop, the sharp sweetness of dried leaves crunching underfoot freshened the crisp autumn air. Overhead, those still clinging to their branches blazed red on the maples and golden on the oaks lining the streets. A few wood fires burned in the distance, perfuming the air with fragrant smoke, masking the less pleasant aromas of the oil or coal stoves. In the middle of the afternoon, few pedestrians strolled the business area of town. A handful of ladies in frothy taffeta gowns and befeathered hats entered the Loveland Cafe, a block from Lucin-da's office. Each woman gave her a bold glance from her black felt hat with its one feather to her black serge skirt and her jacket over a white blouse trimmed with only a narrow band of lace. She wasn't unfashionably dressed, just looked more like she attended to business than wore her finery for tea with friends. She smiled at the ladies. Only one returned her smile, a woman about Lucinda's age with coppery curls bouncing beneath her leghorn straw hat. The other ladies either did not or pretended not to see Lucinda, as they turned their backs on her and entered the tea shop. She suspected the latter. It wasn't the first time in the three days she'd been in town that ladies had pretended the female lawyer didn't exist.

"But I am a lawyer," Lucinda murmured to herself. "I am a member of the bar."

And without having to go awfully far from home, though she was farther north than she wanted to be. She likely would wish she had taken Trudy's path and gone to California instead, regardless of the distance from Virginia.

Lucinda turned her back on the Loveland Cafe then trotted past the bank, a dress emporium, and a jewelry store. Across the street from the library, a free public library at that, the Love Knot Cafe rested, its blue-and-white-striped awning cheerful, the gaslights inside bright even on this sunny autumn day. Encouraged, she opened the door. Warmth, light, and the aromas of hearty, wholesome food like apple pie and roasting chicken surrounded her. So did silence. The instant the bell above the door chimed her arrival, everyone in the oak-paneled room ceased talking, ceased eating, seemingly ceased breathing. They didn't cease moving, at least not their heads and eyes. Every head that needed to swiveled in her direction. Every pair of eyes fastened on her.

They all belonged to men. Not the soft-handed, suited kind of men with whom Lucinda usually associated. Men in rugged flannel shirts, denim pants, and boots; men with bronzed hands, whose faces needed the attention of a razor.

As if those eyes were darts, Lucinda slammed back against the glass window in the door. Its coolness penetrated through her jacket and shirt. The rest of her heated as though she slaved over the stove, cooking the delicious food scenting the air. Her face flamed like one of the gas jets on the wall. Mouth dry, she tried to think of something to say, how to ask the men for Gertie, or simply how to flee with grace and a smidgen of her dignity left.

She groped behind her for the door handle. If she got the door open, she could spin on her heel and rush away, let the men think she'd simply stumbled into the cafe instead of—of the hardware store next door. Her fingers felt cold metal, grasped it.

And it turned. The whole door moved, flying outward. So did Lucinda. One minute the support of the portal lay behind her; the next she fell back against something else, something solid, with a thud hard enough to drive the wind from her lungs. In front of her, the room erupted in laughter. Behind her, two hands grasped her waist, steadying her. A man exclaimed, "I am so sorry, miss, wasn't paying attention. Are you all right?"

All right? With his hands nearly spanning her waist and his chest still against her back? All right with that cafe full of men—well, half a dozen or so of them—laughing at her?

No, not at her. With her breathing and balance restored, she caught their remarks.

"Dreaming of Samantha Howard again?"

"I was dreaming of Gertie's beef stew." The gentleman released Lucinda. "Were you coming or going, miss?"

"Going." Lucinda turned toward the street.

A mistake. It brought her nearly face to chest with the man. Because she wanted to drop her gaze to the pavement and scuttle away, but she needed practice looking men in the eye, she raised her gaze to his face. A young face, not much older than hers. A clean-shaven face surrounded by unruly waves the gloss and color of polished mahogany. Eyes the rich golden brown of amber smiled down at her.

"I believe the ladies' aid society is meeting at the other cafe," he said.

"I'm not a member. That is—" Lucinda licked her parchment lips and sought for the right answer.

Her downfall as a lawyer. She got nervous when speaking aloud to strangers.

She tried again, though speaking too quickly: "I came to see Gertie about finding me a carpenter."

The cafe erupted in laughter again. "Looks like you got yourself one, miss."

If the man hadn't blocked her way still, Lucinda would have fled down the street, possibly all the way to the train station. Surely being a lawyer in her own right wasn't worth this kind of humiliation.

"Ignore them." The man they'd called Matt tucked one big hand beneath her elbow and guided her inside the cafe. "We'll see what's keeping Gertie from helping protect you from these oafs."

"We're the oafs?" a man shouted. "You're the one nearly knocked her down."

"And got to hold her up," another man pointed out. "Always did have the luck with the—"

For the second time in the past ten minutes, the room fell silent as though a door had slammed on everyone's mouth. A woman, with a massive bosom heaving above a miniscule waist, swept through a swinging door in the back, brandishing a coffeepot in one hand and a basket of rolls in the other, like...

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