Head Over Wheels

Book 2: The Whitford Crew

by Irene Davis

Genres: American Romance; Gilded Age Romance; Victorian Romance

Synopsis

THRASHED BY A LADY CYCLIST

The first time Regina Prince met Walter Ellis, the incident was written up in the papers.

The second time Regina and Walter meet, the drunken lout who once tried to steal her bicycle turns out to be a New York financier—and the only one willing to invest in her father’s bicycle motor company.

Like it or lump it, if Regina wants to keep her family from bankruptcy, she’s going to have to work with him…

Release date: March 10, 2020

Publisher: Skookum Creek Publishing

Content advisory: traumatic brain injury, emotional abuse by a parent, and off-page death of a mother and infant in childbirth

Sample

Wednesday, April 29, 1897
Worcester, MA

Reggie dismounted and pushed her bicycle over the cobblestones. As she rounded the corner, she was surprised to see a figure waiting at the door of her family’s home. A figure in a suit, not a laborer or a delivery boy. He rocked back on his heels, straightened his cuffs, then pulled out a gleaming pocket watch and consulted the time before knocking. The door opened, and she caught a glimpse of the housekeeper, Mrs. Aiken, ushering him inside.

Reggie didn’t have a watch, but obviously she was late. She pushed her bike through the alleyway behind the house and into the former carriage house that served as her father’s workshop. She should have been there to greet the man who held her family’s future in his hands.

She leaned her bicycle against the wall beside several wheel-less frames and quickly smoothed her hands over her hair. It didn’t feel too unruly. She was already in the habit of pinning it down fiercely before she went out for her morning rides, otherwise it ended up a blowsy mass of curls that took far too long to comb out.

There wasn’t time to change into skirts or wipe the sweat from her skin. Her cycling outfit would have to do. At least there didn’t seem to be any large grease or mud stains on her knickers. The spring weather had been clear and fine this week; the roads were dry.

Outside the carriage house, she heard her father’s familiar tones alternating in conversation with another male voice. He’d be explaining his inventions already. She swiped her clammy hands on her knickers as the back door opened.

The man who followed her father ducked instinctively as he came into the shadowed workshop. She hadn’t noted his height when he’d been at the door. Reggie sighed inwardly and made herself as tall as she could, which was not very. She was the sort of person who was inevitably described as “a slip of girl,” no matter what she did.

“Ah, Reggie,” her father said. “There you are.”

“I just came in,” Reggie said. “Sadie and I took an extra loop.” She should have come straight home, but the opportunity to spend a few more minutes on her wheel with her friend had proven impossible to resist, even on this important day. The warm breath of spring all around her, April leaves in a symphony of green and gold, and Sadie making her giggle with tales of the customers who stopped by the night lunchwagon she ran with her brothers—if every day could start that way, she’d be happy with whatever else came. But she ought to have been back earlier. Hopefully, her father hadn’t made a hash of things yet.

“This is Willis,” her father said, and Reggie bit the inside of her cheek in agitation. That wasn’t right, but he never could keep names straight. “He got your letters. He’s come to see the motors.”

“Walter Ellis,” the man said. He didn’t look offended by her father’s slip, but it wasn’t a good start. All the energy Reggie thought she’d used up climbing hills came back to twist through her belly. She couldn’t afford any missteps with this man. There was so very little she could afford right now.

Mr. Ellis came forward and doffed his hat. His hair was almost as curly as hers, but oiled and combed back into smooth ripples streaked with gold.
Something about him was familiar. Reggie tried to look him over through downcast lashes as she held out her hand. Walter Ellis, of Ellis, Ellis & Grieskamp. A financier from New York, with the potential to ensure the continued existence of the Prince Velomotor Company—and keep food on the Prince family’s table. Worcester was half a day’s train journey from New York—she couldn’t have met him before, and yet he made her skin prickle. It was just nerves, surely, and anticipation of every possibility he represented for her future.

Confusion flickered in his deep-set blue eyes as he looked down at her hand. It was a beat too long before he took it.

“You are”—another hesitation—“Reggie Prince?”

He was realizing, in that moment, that he’d been corresponding with a woman. Understanding that “Reggie” was “Regina,” not “Reginald.” It was a small subterfuge, one that she’d resorted to when the letters to financiers from “Regina” had gone unanswered and her family’s debts had continued to grow.

“Yes,” her father said, oblivious to both Reggie’s nerves and Mr. Ellis’s reluctance to acknowledge her. “This is my Regina.”

“It’s a pleasure, Mr. Ellis,” Reggie said. 

Walter Ellis had the grace to blush and release his hold. It hadn’t exactly been a handshake, but at least he hadn’t tried to kiss her hand. Reggie ought to smile at him, but she couldn’t make her lips curve. They had already failed. She was sure of it. It was there in that pause before he’d taken her hand, his judgment of her and of Prince Velomotors. The assumption that a woman knew nothing of business. The certainty that she was weak because she was small, and he was not; because she was the supplicant, and he held the purse strings.

How she wished that, just once, she was the one who held the power. That instead of being the one who must always ask, someone might look to her and want something only she could give.
But that was not the way of the world, and Mr. Ellis was still looking at her oddly, as if she were a zoo specimen. The New Woman—a bicycle-riding, knicker-clad, business-interested oddity. She turned away from his gaze, but there was still the velomotor to show him. That was the reason for this whole farce. Her father’s invention would speak for itself, no matter what Mr. Ellis thought of her.

“Let us show you the velomotor,” she said. “Do you want me to help you get out anything, Papa?” She went to the cabinets where the prototype motors were. Anything to move away from the man. Her heart was in her throat, pumping as if she’d been sprinting. More than sprinting—like a vicious dog had leapt to chase her as she pedaled away as fast as she could.

She glanced back at Walter Ellis. He looked mildly puzzled, but not particularly dangerous. She was letting her nerves get the better of her. He was so much taller than she was. It was natural to be worried about someone who could lean an elbow on your head and barely have to shift his shoulders to do so.

“Yes, the latest one,” her father was saying. “I’ll set it up with your old wheel and you can demonstrate it for Mr. Willis.”

Reggie lifted the motor out of the cabinet, the brass casing cool beneath her fingers. It took two hands, but only because of its unwieldy shape. The main weight was the kerosene reservoir, which would be filled once the velomotor had been affixed to the frame of the bicycle.

She carried it to her father, who had unrolled the stained cloth pouch that held his tools: wrenches and ratchets, snips and screwdrivers. Mr. Ellis came close to watch her father’s process and Reggie moved away again.

He bent to run a long finger along the frame of the bicycle, and suddenly she knew him.

It wasn’t the sensation of fleeing from a dog that had come over her: it was the memory of sprinting away from a man, the bicycle frame shifting left-right-left in counterbalance to the push of her legs.

Reggie stared at Walter Ellis as she sorted through the memory from the previous fall. An early morning ride, a pair of drunks near the lake, one of them lunging and trying to take her bike from her.

She had hit him. In the face. And here he was, as neat as you please, in her father’s workshop.

Her father was whistling, the same low tune that always accompanied his work. He had three of the four brackets attached already. Another minute and he would be finished and Mr. Ellis would look up at her again. Reggie wanted to push him out of the carriage house and never see him again, but she was still frozen by the realization of who he was. He was that drunken lout—but he was also the only one from the long list of financiers to whom she’d written who was here, in her father’s workshop, looking at the velomotor with every evidence of interest.

Reggie bit the inside of her lower lip, trying not to make a face. Had Ellis recognized her in the moment he shook her hand? He might have been blushing with shame. Or perhaps he was a creature without shame. Perhaps he’d been too drunk on the occasion of their first meeting to remember it.

She closed her eyes and took three deep breaths. In her mind, she conjured up the image of a bicycle wheel. Here was the hub at the center, calm and barely moving, while the spokes rotated outward to the felloes and the rim. Every piece spinning. A calm and organized movement. It didn’t matter where, just so long as it was forward.

When she opened her eyes, her father was setting the brackets against the bicycle’s frame. Mr. Ellis was watching intently. Perhaps she was mistaken. Perhaps it hadn’t been him. The figure in her memory was blurry, just an impression of panic. She’d cajoled Sadie into being her companion for morning rides after that.

Perhaps she was mistaken. Perhaps it hadn’t been him. The figure in her memory was blurry, just an impression of panic. She’d cajoled Sadie into being her companion for morning rides after that.

The longer she looked at him, however, the more certain she was. It wasn’t her memory that was blurry; it was that he’d been bleary with drink. Leaning on his companion and then stumbling toward her.

He was sober now. Serious-faced, clean-shaven, standing upright with excellent posture that emphasized his height. Intent as he was on her father’s adjustments to the velomotor, she could look at his profile: he had a strong line to his chin and a straight nose—she hadn’t broken it, nor had anyone else. He might be handsome, in some context where her worries about the past and the future weren’t tangled in an uncomfortable knot in her belly.

Walter Ellis was a potential way forward. Her father’s former business partner had refused to cosign on a bank loan for Prince Velomotors, and the family had no collateral to get a loan on their own. Reggie earned a few dollars a month giving lessons at the Bicycle Academy to women who preferred a female instructor to the young men who had most of the students, but it wasn’t enough to support the family or cover the costs of her father’s materials. Her little sisters might get a place gluing together lace and paper among Mr. Whitney’s Valentine girls, but it was far more likely they’d end up among the children who worked in Worcester’s many factories. She didn’t want her sisters to become like those thin, work-roughened children gray with exhaustion.

Very well. She would demonstrate the motor; Mr. Ellis would see that it worked. Whether he didn’t recognize her or was pretending not to didn’t matter—he would give them the necessary funds, and she would get the finances in order for the Prince Velomotor Company and the Prince family household. She had bested him before; she could do it again.