He pressed his eyes shut.Dear Father, please help Rosalind to understand what I’m about to do.
Then he opened his mouth and started talking.
4
San Francisco; Four Days Later
He was a failure. There was no other word for it.
TheAlliancerocked gently beneath Yuri’s feet as it crept through Golden Gate, the strait that separated the peninsula to their north from the bustling city of San Francisco to their south. It was a narrow strip of water, only maybe a mile and a half wide, but it protected both San Pablo Bay and San Francisco Bay from the rough waters of the Pacific Ocean.
Not that the ocean was rough today. It was calm as glass, with a brilliant blue sky and gulls circling above.
If only he could force his mood to match the cheerful weather. But how could he when he still felt as though he’d betrayed Rosalind?
If a brother or sister be naked, and destitute of daily food, and one of you say unto them, Depart in peace, be ye warmed and filled; notwithstanding ye give them not those things which are needful to the body; what doth it profit?
God had led him to that passage from the second chapter of James three years ago. Rosalind had asked him to sendand receive a single letter for her every month, a charitable contribution she hadn’t wanted her father to know about. The Sunday after she made her request, the priest at St. Michael’s had delivered a sermon on helping those in need.
So Yuri agreed to help Rosalind donate to a charity every month, and eventually the number of charities she supported grew to six. Each month, Yuri would send six donation letters from Rosalind, and the organizations would send six letters back to him acknowledging the donations. Occasionally, she’d made a one-time donation elsewhere, but for the past year, her list of charities had been the same.
The Bible was full of verses about helping the needy and delivering them from affliction. James 2:15–16 wasn’t the only one. Matthew 25:35–36 and 40 said,For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me... Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.
And Psalm 82:3–4 said,Defend the poor and fatherless: do justice to the afflicted and needy. Deliver the poor and needy: rid them out of the hand of the wicked.
Yuri had taken those verses to heart and spent the last three years trying to be a living example of them. And the entire time he was sending Rosalind’s letters, he couldn’t help thinking of Alexei. He’d done the very thing these verses spoke of after their father and stepmother died at sea eleven years earlier. Alexei had been in San Francisco, a year away from completing his studies in naval architecture, and had dropped everything to come home. His fiancée, Clarise, left him a few months later, choosing to move back to Washington, DC, with all its refinements rather than stay in Sitka with Alexei. And still, Alexei had stood by their family, never wavering once.
So for the past three years, Yuri had been happy to help Rosalind and show the love of Christ to others. But at some point, he’d also wondered if maybe Rosalind needed help. She wasn’t poor or hungry—there was no question about that. But some of those verses talked about helping the needy and afflicted, and people could still be needy if they had money, couldn’t they? It certainly seemed that way when it came to Rosalind. Of course, it would make more sense if he knew exactly what Rosalind needed.
He didn’t, but at times he had an almost overwhelming conviction that simply being her friend and sending the letters for her was helping her in ways she couldn’t quite express.
So that’s exactly what he’d done, and from time to time, he asked her if she wanted help leaving Sitka.
She didn’t seem to care that he wanted to be her friend and had answered with a hard no any time he’d brought up the possibility of her leaving her home. He was succeeding in only one of the things he was trying to do, and even that had changed three nights ago when Bryony had accidentally opened one of Rosalind’s letters.
The memory still caused a sour ball to form in his stomach.
Another thing he’d never done was ask Rosalind where her donation money came from. At the beginning, he’d assumed she was giving a bit of her own money and that the donations were tiny enough they wouldn’t make much difference in the day-to-day operations of the first charity she’d supported, the orphanage in New York City.
Now Rosalind was supporting multiple institutions, and he’d long had a suspicion that the donations were for more than just a dollar or two. But he hadn’t known for certain until he’d read the letter Bryony had opened. It had thanked Rosalind for her contributions throughout the year, totaling twelve hundred dollars. Since Yuri knew that Rosalind sent that organization aletter every month, it wasn’t hard to deduce that each donation was a hundred dollars.
One hundred dollars.
That was four to five months’ worth of wages for the average man.
Where had Rosalind gotten that much money?
Her father’s bank account, like Alexei and the rest of his brothers suspected?
That was the most obvious answer, but if Preston Caldwell knew what his daughter was doing with his money, there would be no need for her to hide her correspondence.
Now Alexei was worried about would happen if Caldwell discovered a member of the Amos family had been secretly helping Rosalind send his money off to various charities, and he was probably right to be concerned.
Yuri rubbed the back of his neck. Could Caldwell legally accuse him of theft or money laundering or some other Finnancial crime? The powerful businessman had had no trouble having both Sacha and Mikhail charged with crimes they hadn’t committed.
The captain shouted down from the deck, ordering his crew to prepare to dock. The men around Yuri flew into action, lowering the sails and removing the deck boards that covered the gangway stored underneath.
More shouting sounded from the shore, where men had gathered near an open slip on the wharf to help moor the ship. The helmsman pointed the nose of theAlliancedirectly at the opening, and the ship crawled forward with all but one sail furled.
