She slipped around Alex and put herself in front of him to stare up at Mr. Grady with wide eyes. “I’m Charles Albert Yates,” she said as she held her shoulders back and her chest out. “This is my brother, and I’m his translator.”
Alex realized that, yet again, he’d fallen back into his heavy accent and Grady hadn’t been able to understand him.
“What my brother said was that he was appreciative of the compliment from Mr. Connor, and that he’d do his best to live up to expectations.”
“Did he now?” Mr. Grady said, smiling down at Cay in merriment. “He said all that in just those few words?”
“He did,” Cay said, not seeming to realize that Mr. Grady was teasing her. “He can speak English, but he’s not very good at it.”
“And why is it that your brother has such a heavy accent, but you have none?”
“Och, but Ah dae when Ah lit myself,” she said, her eyes showing her delight.
Mr. Grady laughed. “Well, boy, I can see that you’ll be a fine addition to our little team. You can—”
“He?
?s not going,” Alex said loudly in American English.
“Oh, excuse me,” Mr. Grady said. “I thought he would be going with us.”
“He has to stay here and wait for his brother—our brother—to come and get him.”
“A fine, healthy lad like this one can’t travel around our great country on his own? How old are you, boy?”
Cay started to say she was twenty, but Alex pushed her with his elbow so that she almost fell. While she was trying to regain her balance, Alex said, “Sixteen.”
Mr. Grady looked at Cay righting herself and said, “He looks older.” He was looking at her as though he was trying to remember something, so Alex stepped between them.
“I’ll take care of the horses and do the hunting and whatever else you need,” Alex said.
“What I need is someone who can draw and paint the wonders that we’ll see.” Mr. Grady started walking back to the wharf, Alex beside him, with Cay coming up behind them. She was half the size of either of the men and she had trouble getting around them. Every time she tried to go around Alex, he reached out an arm and stopped her. After two attempts, she ran around the side of Mr. Grady to walk beside him.
“If I’d known about T.C.’s accident, I could have brought someone from home. There’s a boy there who can draw a bit. He’s not as good as T.C., but few are. Now I’m here, ready to go, but I have no one to record what we see. Have you ever been into the depths of Florida, Mr. Yates?”
Alex glanced across him at Cay and saw that she was wide-eyed as she looked up at Mr. Grady in fascination. Before anything else was done, he had to get her back to the boardinghouse.
“By the way, I’m just one generation away from the heather,” Mr. Grady said into the silence. “My father came from Scotland when he was just a lad, no older than young Charlie here, and—”
“Cay,” she said, and when he looked down at her, she said louder, “I’m called that for my initials.”
“Cay, is it?” For a moment Mr. Grady blinked at her before turning back to Alex. “You two came down from Charleston?”
“We did.”
“What is this I heard about an escaped murderer? A cousin of mine lives there, and his letters were full of nothing else. Your name of Alex reminded me of it. Seems the black’ard killed his wife on their wedding night.”
Alex opened his mouth to say something, but no sounds came out.
“It was terrible,” Cay said quickly, “but there were rumors that the man was innocent, that he was the victim of a plot so evil that they couldn’t even write about it in the newspapers.”
“Is that so?” Mr. Grady said. “My cousin must not have known about that because he certainly didn’t write about it in his letters.”
“It was Uncle T.C. who told us all about it.”
“Uncle, is it?”
“Yes, sir,” Cay said. “He’s my godfather.”