Free Forgiven by Janet Fox

balm, or poppies, maybe. The hills rolled away and away into the deeper blue of the sky.
    I recognized that ring. I stepped close to the portrait, picking myself up on my tiptoes.
    It took me only a moment to place it. The painter had executed it with great detail; it was almost as if he was sending a message. Mrs. Gale wore that ring. I knew it without a doubt. It was one of the very same rings that had landed in Pa’s hands for a time before he returned it to its rightful owner.
    When I’d last seen it up close at Mrs. Gale’s, it had seemed too heavy for a lady’s fingers, and here was proof that the ring had once belonged to a man. Could this boy have been Mrs. Gale’s husband?
    I tilted my head to look closer. The golden dragon raised off the surface of that painted ring in such dimension that it looked ready to pounce.
    I turned my attention to the rolled-up paper in his other hand. At the top of the paper was a seal or emblem, that same dragon only larger, its head turned to the left as on the ring and a long tongue of flame emerging from its open mouth and spikes running down its back to the tip of its coiled tail. Below the dragon the paper was a rolled-up tube with words written across it, but the young man held that paper pointing heavenward so that it was too far above my eyes to read.
    And then another thought crossed my mind. Mrs. Gale and Miss Everts were sisters-in-law. But how? Why did they not share last names? If this man was indeed Mrs. Gale’s husband, then he must also be Phillipa Everts’s brother. I had never thought to ask Mrs. Gale, but now curiosity pricked at me. Miss Everts felt she’d been slighted; why, she fairly despised sweet Hannah Gale. All odd little pieces scattered about a game board, and that made no sense.
    One thing for sure: Miss Everts put me in this room on purpose.
    I heard a soft knock—Mei Lien.
    “I show you Miss Everts’s room.”
    Time for me to start slaving away for the peculiar Phillipa Everts. I followed Mei Lien down to Miss Everts’s suite on the second floor. Hers was an elegant bedroom with fine furniture of dark wood and a canopied bed and a private bathroom and water closet. Mei Lien opened the wardrobe. Silk and velvet, and delicate embroidered shawls, and polished leather shoes.
    My job was to straighten and tidy the room and take out the clothes that needed cleaning. “Chinese laundry,” Mei Lien said with a smile. “They pick up.”
    In about an hour I had the rooms as neat as a pin. I opened the drapes to let in the light and the long hinged windows to let in the air, noting with a sigh the grime on those windows that it was now my duty to wash.
    A noise on the street caught my ear.
    A smart carriage pulled up in front, and two men emerged, one gray-haired and the other much younger, slender, blond. As I leaned over the sill to watch them approach the house, and my damp braid fell over my shoulder, the younger man stopped short. He raised his face and our eyes met.
    He was handsome, so handsome he took my breath away. And as he stared at me he let a smile cross his face, one that grew like a sweet ripple of spring breeze across water.
    But my eyes had been drawn to something else just past the young man, something on the coach behind his head, something on the door of that coach. An emblem. A seal. Something so familiar it made me suck in air.
    A golden dragon with a long tongue of flame.

Chapter TWELVE
    March 28, 1906
    “In China the five clawed dragon is the
emblem of royalty. Usually it is pictured
as rising from the sea and clutching at the sun . . .”
    —“The Chinese Dragon,” Detroit Free Press, August 12, 1900
     
     
     
     
    THE YOUNG MAN GAZED UP AT ME WHILE I LEANED OUT the window and my braid swung long and free below the sill. He called up, “Rapunzel! Rapunzel! Let down your hair!” And he grinned.
    The older man, striding up the walkway, lifted his chin and scowled at me and then turned his face and his ire on the younger