Hello, you lovely people. I know I’ve been neglecting this space rather cruelly, but I finally, finally found the time to experiment again. The following is an attempt – really, just that – at historical fiction. I have no idea where it’s going, so bear with me. This is the first part, there is more to come, and I hope it’s at least mildly entertaining. Merci for reading!
j.d.
Pacific Northwest, 1885
It was a Friday afternoon in late fall. Iris Moore gingerly stepped out onto the planks of Riverton station’s platform and found herself in the middle of a hurrying crowd. The steam of the enormous black engine rose high, billowing above the busy bustle around her: families reuniting, men of business hurrying along, loggers shouldering their travelling sacks, filing out in groups of twos and threes; students returning from their term, wearing fine suits and carrying valises, greeted enthusiastically by younger siblings and hugged warmly by their mothers. One, no, two had their fathers to meet them with a warm handshake and a proud slap on their young backs.
The station itself was far larger than expected, with runners in brass-buttoned blue uniforms. There was a waiting hall that was slowly emptying, while more and more people boarded the train. Iris thanked the boy who had taken her trunk and rolled it to one side of the wide station’s platform. She tipped him a little more than usual, she knew the thing was heavy. 
The bustle around her continued unimpeded – the talk of the people, the din of the street, the hiss and billow of steam from the engine, all formed to a noisy whole that left Iris feeling a little lost.
From what she had seen of Riverton before the giant pistons came to a screeching halt, the town was not what she had thought, a small cluster of houses with maybe a main street and a few side lanes. No, Riverton was a large town on the verge of blooming into a new city. On the last few miles to the station, Iris had seen construction sites and busy roads, large mansions higher up in the hills, and the jumble of innumerable roofs and chimneys down in the valley. She had expected to be in the middle of nowhere, only to see that Riverton was very much somewhere, busy with people coming home or leaving for new destinations. Everyone seemed to have someone waiting for them or a place to go, all except Iris, who stood next to her large travelling trunk, wondering yet again if her clever plan had been all that wise after all.
*
It had been a matter of quiet desperation. Iris could no longer stay in the city she had known as her home all her life. With her mother dead, and hardly any skills except a little education, housekeeping, and nursing to call her own, Iris had had no choice than to search for a means to provide for herself. To work at a hospital would have required a more thorough training, and she did not have the means to attend a nursing school. The Moores had never been a wealthy household, though the monthly sum her father used to send from the various ports of the world had always been a steady income, guaranteeing a simple yet wholesome life. At the age of seven, however, a month before he was to take leave, Captain Isa Moore drowned in a storm out at sea, and Iris and her mother were left to themselves in the small house on Maple Street. Since she knew her father mostly out of letters her mother read to her and trinkets he sent from faraway places, it was not difficult for Iris to continue as she was, telling herself that her father had reached a port that was too far away to send letters from, but otherwise lived and prospered.
To her mother this was not so, nor did it change after the first year of mourning. As a consequence, Iris grew up in a house of ever-present melancholy, though Mrs. Moore had many well-meaning neighbours and friends.
They lived a quiet life, what with the widow’s pension and Mrs. Moore’s position as a teacher in the local school, making their staple supplies always affordable, and a few small luxuries very delightful. Life in Maple Street was not extravagant, yet to Iris it was complete. She accomplished her schooling in St. James School for Young Ladies by the help of a small inheritance from a spritey grand-aunt who thought a young woman should be well educated. To this grand-aunt, whom Iris had never met, St. James was a perfect place for her niece’s daughter, since it was a school lead by nuns and thus could hardly be a place of the blight of the land known as ‘modern vices’. (What those were Iris did not know exactly, but she wasn’t one to ask).
Iris lived with the other seventy girls of St. James on the premises during the week and returned home on the weekends. By the time she finished school, she was considered a right young lady with excellent manners, a sturdy education, and the kind of credentials which would find her a place as a school teacher in hardly any time at all. With the help of Principle Majors who headed the elementary school her own mother taught in, Iris became a private tutor to the two Whitney girls, young spoilt daughters of a wealthy salesmen. The two girls could be very unruly when they wanted to be, but due to their mother’s good sense they thankfully had a knowledge of discipline far enough to allow Iris to teach them how to read, write, add sums, play the piano, and sing a few songs that pleased their father greatly. Iris had been in the choir when at school and was considered to have a good strong voice, though she would never be a soprano, her alto was too deep. It did not matter much to Iris as long as she could stand in the lines and sing with the others. To her that was the most heart-felt prayer she could think of. 
As for her piano lessons, she enjoyed Mozart and a little Schubert, and played them to the delight of her mother and their friends. In her private hours, when no one but her mother was at home, she would play etudes, vales, and nocturnes from that young Frenchman whose name she always forgot, dramatic, melancholy strains that tore at your heartstrings and made Iris think of the poems her teachers had called ‘unsuitable for young ladies’.
*
All went well until Mrs. Moore fell ill one winter, not long after Iris turned twenty. What had started as a small cough turned out to be near-fatal pneumonia, which almost robbed Iris of her only parent, yet Mrs. Moore saw it through, though she remained very weak from the long sickness and never regained her strength again. Iris spent the following three years tutoring the Whitney girls and tending to her mother, who was finally too ill to teach a large gaggle of children and so had to stay home. The cut in their income was not so sorely felt at first, since both had lived frugally and laid aside enough for the first months to be as usual. Yet Mrs. Moore’s sickness became worse when the heat of the summer covered the city like an impenetrable dome, and doctor’s appointments and medicines rapidly diminished their savings.
Mrs. Moore had asked Iris to stop trying. If this continued, Iris would have nothing left to live on when she finally died, (Mrs. Moore spoke of her death with such chilling certainty that in turns it made Iris angry or want to cry), and so she maintained that it was best to simply let her pass away in peace, she could not bear the thought of leaving Iris penniless. Iris assured her repeatedly that as a teacher she could hardly be that, and so continued tutoring in the mornings and tending to her mother for the rest of the day, deeply grateful for their neighbour Mrs. Rose who came in the forenoon to make sure all was well.
Yet it was all to no avail. On a Sunday morning in the spring of the third year after that long winter of pneumonia, Jane Ellen Moore passed away and Iris was left all to herself. She had no siblings, she did not know any of her father’s family, and her mother had no one else save an elder brother who left the house at sixteen and never wrote nor returned again.
Thus, Iris was on her own, and living in a large city with hardly any means and no real possibilities to earn a living in a respectable way, Iris soon found herself in a predicament. By the time Mrs. Moore passed away, they had had to sell the small house on Maple Street in order to pay the doctor’s bills, and moved into a small apartment in a busy part of town, where carriages and streetcars rolled by noisily, and it was never wise to leave the windows open if you wanted to have some peace. The Whitney’s had moved to New York by then, since Mr. Whitney’s business had grown so large as to ‘warrant a more fortuitous homestead’, and Iris was surprised and dismayed to see that there was no other school or place for tutorship that wished for her skills. Few families wanted their young boys taught by a young lady who ‘would not know what young chaps needed to learn’, and the other families did not think it necessary to teach their daughters more than the elementaries of reading, writing, and arithmetic, which their governesses could teach them as well.
Added to this unpleasant turn, Iris more often than not found herself faced with proposals for marriage than earnest propositions for a place of teaching. It seemed that everyone expected her to find a husband. As long as her mother lived, a widow who had no other means to support herself and her daughter than to be a schoolmarm, it was well and good for Iris to be a tutor and support her mother who was fortunate to have such a loving and helpful child. Yet now, as a young solitary woman, Iris realized that many thought it suspiciously independent of her that she would not join Mrs. Rose’s tea-parties, where Mrs. Rose’s lady friends talked favourably of their own sons and nephews or those sons and nephews of their acquaintance. Soon Iris found it better not to visit Mrs. Rose for tea so as not to be confronted by the quiet indignation of her lady friends, 
who thought it rather proud of a young penniless girl to not consider marriage to their well-off sons. With one thing and the other, Iris found herself fairly alone not even ten weeks after her mother’s funeral.
She lived as frugally a possible, yet all her saving could not keep the day away when no more money would be left and she would have to leave the small room she rented after moving out of the apartment she had shared with her mother, since the funeral had required most of what savings she still had left. There she was, living in one of the busiest, noisiest parts of town, working for a pittance as a shop assistant to Mr. Emerson, who already had a shop assistant, Carter. Then there was the fact that Mr. Emerson thought it unwise for a young lady to waste her time behind counters when she could much better become a wife and use her skills for her own household and children. Mr. Emerson said that if he gave her too much pay she would become too used to working, which was not very well for a respectable young lady, and thus the low income would eventually force her to be wise and find a husband.
‘You’re a pretty young lady, Miss Moore,’ he would say, ‘why are you trying to spoil your good looks with working? Mrs. Emerson knows a few fine young men who would be more than happy to meet you,’ he would add, which Iris was always quick to gainsay, explaining she was still in mourning for her mother and could not think of such things as marriage yet.
*
© 2016 threegoodwords
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