The Glorious Guinness Girls

by Emily Hourican

Genres: Coming of Age; Friendship; Historical Fiction

Synopsis

From London to Ireland during the 1920s, this glorious, gripping, and richly textured story takes us to the heart of the remarkable real-life story of the Guinness Girls—perfect for fans of Downton Abbey and Julian Fellowes' Belgravia.Descendants of the founder of the Guinness beer empire, they were the toast of 1920s high society, darlings of the press, with not a care in the world. But Felicity knows better. Sent to live with them as a child because her mother could no longer care for her, she grows up as the sisters’ companion. Both an outsider and a part of the family, she witnesses the complex lives upstairs and downstairs, sees the compromises and sacrifices beneath the glamorous surface. Then, at a party one summer’s evening, something happens that sends shock waves through the entire household.Inspired by a remarkable true story and fascinating real events, The Glorious Guinness Girls is an unforgettable novel about the haves and have-nots, one that will make you ask if where you find yourself is where you truly belong. 

Release date: May 4, 2021

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 400

Sample

Port of Southampton, 1924

There is a dull thump of flashbulbs exploding, and light bursts behind us, breaking the soft late November afternoon. The newspaper men are here. A thin drizzle, a city drizzle, descends, gathering on the canopy of Gunnie’s umbrella and running down the ribs in small rivers. Delicate, less wet than a country rain but dirtier, dragging dust and smoke from the air with it so that my gloves are spotted already. Gunnie’s arm is tucked through mine, held tight against the excitement I can feel like a tremor through her.

We have been standing nearly an hour by the chiming of the church spire clock somewhere behind us, staring into the gray sea indistinguishable from the gray sky so that now, when Fantome II appears at last, she is like a ghost ship looming up out of fog, the lanterns at her sides bobbing drunkenly in the wind.

The sails are down, giving her a thin, spidery look; all those extraordinary triangles and rectangles of canvas tucked away. When out and full with wind, they stand in neat formation like pieces of the tangram puzzle Ernest brought back from Flanders. He made me count them once, the sails. I said I saw sixteen, but he said I had missed some and told me then how the moving and arranging of these sails sent the yacht forward and at what speed. He said they were a code that only the wind and sailors understood. It’s when he tells me things like this that I remember he is a man with no sons, who must therefore speak to daughters.

The dock is empty but for us and the knot of newspapermen, who have waited even longer than we have. We wait, all of us, for the same reason, although Gunnie and I would never say it. We wait because out there in the gloom, onboard Fantome, is a brightness that lights all our lives.

Forty thousand miles, Gunnie said. Although I can’t even imagine what that is. They have seen Panama, the Suez Canal, Fiji, Yokohama harbor. Gunnie showed me on the globe and I looked and nodded but the names meant nothing to me and even when I had all their letters, pitiful few for so many months, still they meant nothing.

Closer to, Fantome looks gay enough, though not as gay as the bright morning they set off, when I waved to them, my handkerchief fluttering long, long after I knew they no longer looked.

“This way, Mr. Ernest, sir; over here, sir!” The voice behind me becomes excited as the first figures step down the gangplank. I feel Gunnie twitch, her arm still in mine though I know she will pull away from me at any moment. To be ready for them.

“Over here, please, Mr. Ernest!” the newspaperman calls again, followed by another of them, like dogs at a door begging to be let out. Or in. And then, voices mounting in excitement as first Cloé, then her daughters appear, slender wraiths in that treacherous air, “Look here, Miss Maureen, to me, if you will.” “This way, Miss Aileen, how was your trip?”

Gunnie lets go my arm and steps forward as the newspapermen move around and ahead of me. I stay where I am and know that the light from their flashing bulbs must obscure me so they cannot yet see me. I watch as Maureen turns one way, then the other, smiling. This is her element, just as surely as the trout at home inhabit the fast-running stream by the back of the stables. Beside her, Aileen is sterner, perhaps cross. She will not do what the newspapermen tell her. Oonagh, they ignore. Just fourteen, hidden by her father, I watch as she peeps out from behind his elbow, and see the laughing look she gives Maureen, turning this way and that for the cameras, and how she is so quick to take it all in. The rain, the gray mist, the empty dock, the flash of camera bulbs.

When they set off, the Daily Express wrote that “Maureen and her two sisters, Oonagh and Aileen, vivacious young daughters of Ernest Guinness,” had left “Socialist Britain.” Why must they say “Socialist”? I wondered then. Now, I wonder how different this must all look to eyes that have seen tropical islands and the sun setting over strange lands; surely dawn coming up just as Mr. Kipling described it, “like thunder outer China crost the bay”?

They look so different. Maureen is quite grown up, I see. Under the cloche hat pulled down at a clever angle, her hair is bobbed and shining, just like Aileen’s, and she stands, languid, laughing, completely sure of her new self, just as she was of the old self.

Only Oonagh is the same. That mass of curly hair still, straw boater set back on her head so she can see clearly around her. Those blue eyes that are sometimes silver, sometimes turquoise, too large and bright, until you look into other eyes and find them small and mean. The same eyes on all three girls, the effect so different.

“It’s good to be back,” Ernest is telling the newspapermen, who listen with pens poised to write down his words.

“We hear you had many adventures, sir,” one of them says. “A storm, was it? In Japan?”

“Earthquake,” Ernest replies. “Destroyed the harbor. Not us, though.” He speaks with satisfaction. I know how he enjoys a test of courage, particularly when combined with skill, but only against machines. He has no time for horses, likes only what can be made to move, tell the time or predict the weather at the touch of a button.

“Glad to be back, Miss Maureen?” one of the men calls out and I think, How quickly they see that she is the one to speak to.

“Jolly glad,” Maureen says, stepping forward a little into the line of flashbulbs. “You can’t imagine how tiring it is, being somewhere different every day.”

There is laughter then and good-natured encouragement to “tell us more,” but Ernest says, “Better get on. Thank you all for this fine welcome.”

Gunnie has moved forward now and is greeting the family. She’s careful not to cry as she embraces Cloé. “How happy this makes me, cousin,” she says, and Cloé submits to the embrace and says, “Dear Gunnie,” before relinquishing her to the girls, who put their arms around her and begin to tell her of their adventures in a rush. I watch and try again to see how they are different. More—how they are the same. And then, “Look, it’s Fliss!” Oonagh, of course, always the sharpest and quickest. She darts forward, grabs hold of my hand and puts it to her face, then throws her arms tight around me.

The motorcars are waiting and we get in, Oonagh, Maureen, Aileen and me in one, Ernest, Cloé and Gunnie in the second and larger. The luggage will follow.

With the doors shut and the rain outside, rugs over our knees and a flask of chocolate, together, across from each other, it is easier. More like teatime at home in Glenmaroon.

“You look so grown up,” I say to Maureen. “I feel quite shy of you.” I am only a year younger, less than a year, but I do not, now, look it.

“Oh, we had such fun in Paris,” she says. “Mamma insisted, even though Papa didn’t want to stop for so long at all. Monsieur Antoine himself did my hair.” She puts a hand up to those cropped golden curls and pats them. “Do you think Harrods will be able to keep up?” She folds her gloves in her lap, smoothing the kid over and over with pleased fingers.

“I don’t know,” I say. I don’t know. My hair is done by Gunnie, who is clever at brushing and pinning but cannot cut, so I still wear my red-brown curls in the style of Gunnie’s youth—Cloé’s youth—not this bobbed marvel that is the new fashion.

“But how was it?” I say. “How was it, really?”

“Fun.” Maureen shrugs. “You know…”

“Filthy food,” Aileen says.

“Too hot.”

“Too cold,” says Oonagh and shudders. “Remember Spitzberg?”

“Too awful,” Maureen concurs. Then, “I suppose we’ll be in the newspapers tomorrow. Papa will be furious.”

“And you’ll find it all very thrilling,” Aileen says. “Goodness, Maureen, you are vulgar.”

“You like it all just as much as me only you won’t say so.”

I look out. The evening is raw and wet, the rain dragged sideways by a rough wind. Behind us, the lights of Southampton dwindle, like a pale hand raised in limp farewell.

“I’ll have my coming out next year,” Maureen says after a while. “Mamma promised.”

“As long as she doesn’t have to do anything and Gunnie does it all,” Aileen says. “And it’s my coming out too, don’t forget. I’ve already delayed, because of this trip.”

“Well, it’s going to be the biggest party London has ever seen,” says Maureen.

“It’s going to be an utter bore—they always are,” Aileen contradicts her. “All that fuss.”

“Not fuss, fun,” says Maureen with the sullen sound her voice takes on when someone disagrees with her. I can see she is ready to say more cutting things to Aileen, who will say almost as cutting things back. That dynamic is still there, then—Maureen pretending to be more sophisticated than is even possible, in case anyone suspects her of being young, or inexperienced, perhaps even a little awed; Aileen determined to deny her, because they are sisters and neither can accept that for one to have doesn’t mean the other must lose out.

Oonagh must see the row coming too because she leans forward and asks, “So, Fliss, what have you been doing? Do tell.”

But I can’t. What would I tell? That I returned home, and found that it wasn’t home anymore? That I counted the days until their letters, then the days until their return so that when Gunnie wrote to Mummie and suggested I join her on the trip to Southampton to meet them, I said, “Oh, please may I?” too loud and too quick, and saw Mummie’s face turn hard and her mouth sharp even as she said, “Very well.”

“Oh, you know,” I say, “the usual things. I’m glad you’re back.”

“Me too,” says Oonagh, sinking against the upholstery and taking my arm so that the fur of her collar tickles my nose.

Not one of us says Hughie’s name, but he is there, beside us, in the car, so close that I think I can smell the Russian cigarettes he smoked and the hair oil from the collar of his jacket, just as it was that last summer at Glenmaroon.

Glenmaroon, Dublin, 1978

From the first curve of the driveway I see that the house is not loved anymore. It’s slack around the edges; tired, I think, of being too much to too many.

A group of women are walking the gravel path that borders the lawn, down toward the river. Bundled into ugly clothes, they have the clumsy shuffle of boundaried living. They stay close together but do not talk much. Behind them, brisk in contrast, are two elderly nuns in unyielding black and white like border collie dogs. This is a care home now, where the Daughters of Charity order the lives of people who are not trusted to order their own.

“Will I come in with you?” he says, stopping the car.

“No. Stay here. I’ll come back and get you should I need you.” He takes his hand from the steering wheel and grips my wrist for a moment. The thick blue cords of his veins stand out from the pale skin tinged with gray. Skimmed milk on the turn. The fingers are stiff as they close around my arm, but even so they are more vital than the brittle bones they encircle; the two thin frames of my wrist bones with a hammock of skin dipping between them. How have we got so old?

“Very well,” he says. “I’ll wait.”

The nun who guides me upstairs is younger than the two herding their charges about the lawn, younger than I am, but she’s fat and breathes more heavily even than me as we ascend, first the main staircase, then the landing and the back stairs. I’ve been this way before, the first time I came to this house, sixty years ago. Then, it glowed with the colors of a rich rainbow. The wood of the stairs a deep, pleased gold, scattered with floating patches of pink and yellow light from the stained glass of the large window.

There are so many houses like this now. Big and old and pitiful, like the knuckles on an aged hand, I think.

Up in the attic room, a trunk has been pulled out into the middle of the floor and the lid prised open. One of the hinges is broken so the lid hangs at an angle.

I know this room. I remember it, from my first night here. It looks even worse than it did. Then, it was bare and grubby with patches of mold. Now, the patches have run together so that the walls are entirely mildewed, and it is crammed full of broken, forgotten things: furniture, china, rotting books, piled up around the edges. Only the bit in the middle is empty; an abandoned battlefield watched over by many ghosts. Beside the trunk, a chair has been left so that I might sit and dip into the contents.

“I’ll leave you to it,” the nun says and half pulls the door behind her.

Inside the trunk are yellowing papers, many embossed with the golden harp that tells me they are Ernest’s work affairs. The estate agent was right. These are “Guinness things.” But they don’t look of much consequence to me, and I can’t understand why first Oonagh, then Maureen were so keen to recover them. Or rather, have me recover them. Even though I know how the newspaper men will turn anything at all about the family into some kind of story.

“Fliss, we must get them back,” Maureen had said, peremptory, on the phone from London. “You live in Dublin. You won’t mind, I’m sure.”

The assumption irritated me—why should I not mind? So much so that even when Oonagh rang, from the South of France, and said, “Please go, Fliss? I can’t bear Papa and Mamma’s things to be pawed over by the press,” I professed not to understand the urgency.

It was only when Cousin Mildred rang, as I knew she would—and almost to the hour, too—that I began to understand how serious they were.

“They don’t know what’s in the trunk,” Mildred explained, voice cutting crisply across all those transatlantic miles. “But the nuns say they will give it to a local historical society, and if indeed that happens, reporters will get hold of it, and God knows what will come out.”

“Well, what could come out?” I asked.

“What would I know?” She laughed, and I heard the snap of her cigarette lighter. She breathed in, exhaled. I imagined I could smell the smoke, drifting out through the heavy Bakelite receiver in my hand. “You’re gonna have a much better idea than me.” She sounded so American. I suppose she is American. I mean, she always was, but not as much as now.

“There’s nothing to come out,” I said. “That’s just Maureen being dramatic and tiresome and Oonagh being feeble.” But really, what did I know? Perhaps there was something to come out. “Very well, I’ll go,” I said.

“Bring someone with you,” she said. “In case you have to carry stuff away.” Stuff. I imagined Cloé’s face, nose wrinkled in distaste, at the word. At the notion that anyone would apply it to items that had belonged to her. I wondered had Mildred chosen it deliberately. A small, late revenge? Although, surely she had had all the revenge she needed long ago? Because Mildred, the poor relation, went off and made a success of her life—first as a nurse in the war, running a field hospital, then as an interior designer, quite a celebrated one, working in London and New York.

“I will,” I said. I already knew whom I would bring. The only person I could bring, because he was the only person who would come.

I bend now and pull the pages about. More golden harps. More dull-looking typed documents. But buried deeper in the tattered nests are pages of handwriting—letters, lists—and scrapbooks, the kind we kept in those days, into which we pasted pictures and sentimental rhymes, postcards, should we ever be sent such things.

I take one out. On the cover are fleshy red flowers, somewhere between poppy and rose, nowhere seen in nature, I am sure. The pages are damp and clotted together, and the clear glue, like varnish, that we used has seeped around and through pictures, covering everything with a cracked yellow sheen. There is a smell of sad old things so I cover my nose and mouth for a moment, but the smell gets in anyway. Breathing it, I can almost see Gunnie’s hand, dipping the thick brush into the clear glass pot, spreading the glue busily and pasting pictures.

“Isn’t that pretty now,” she might have said, surveying her handiwork with pride. Oonagh, beside her, would barely have looked around. These scrapbooks were yet another of the occupations that Gunnie so carefully cultivated for the girls. “Maureen’s stamp collection,” “Oonagh’s embroidery,” “Aileen’s crochet.” All, in reality, done by Gunnie or a governess, and displayed as the kind of quiet suitable accomplishment these girls should have; the kind for which they cared not at all.

Some creature, a worm that burrows through old books, has left a series of squiggly holes like trenches dug in the colored pages.

I turn over the leaves, prising apart those that need it. Sometimes they are clumped together and tear under my thickened fingers. A postcard showing a curly-haired small boy in striped trunks pouring water from a bucket sits beside the program for a pantomime: “Tom Thumb at the Gaiety Theatre.”

There is a photograph of Ernest in his war uniform, another of Cloé in her court dress. Each stares at the camera blankly, and I remember the agony of the wait, the strange suspended length of time for a photograph to be taken then.

The windows of the attic room are loose—the wind shakes them in their rotten frames—and through the gaps I can hear sounds from the gardens below. There is singing, something about Queen of the May. The nuns returning from the river walk with their charges.

I turn more pages. I do not know what I am looking for. All I see are sentimental recollections of childhood, and even at a distance of sixty years, I can catch the smell of that time. Dullness and emptiness, endless waiting, stuck between the schoolroom and the nursery, at ease nowhere. Beating at time with our fists to make it go faster.

Loose among the pages, in some places stuck to them by the leaky glue, are cuttings from newspapers. These must have been added later, I think, because we would not have included them. I pick out one or two. “Hon. Lois Sturt Fills Role Of Britain’s New Queen Of Beauty” trumpets one. I skim the faded type. Somewhere around the fourth paragraph I find Maureen’s name, alongside that of Baby and Zita Jungman, and Elizabeth Ponsonby.

The London years of the girls’ coming out; the parties and balls, the absurd treasure hunts and scavenger races. “… The Bright Young People assembled at 2.30 a.m. at some fashionable West End residence…” I read, then stop. Enough to live through it once, without reviewing it now from this dank attic.

I turn pages faster, keen now to be gone. There is nothing here, I am sure of it. Nothing that might cause a scandal, but nothing, too, that might not be burned or discarded. Nothing I wish to remember. It’s time for me to leave, to go back down the stairs and out the front door, under the crumbling stone portico and allow him to drive me away and know that I will not ever be back.

I close the scrapbook but the activity has been too much for the damp and swollen spine and it pulls apart, pages landing in clumps on my knees and the floor around my feet. I bend with difficulty to gather them, that I might stow it all away and shut the lid of the trunk as best I can, and tell the estate agent to do as he wishes. But in the first bundle of pages I pull up, a news clipping catches at me like a fish-hook. A photo, in the sooty black-and-white of the time. Maureen is in the middle, face turned full toward the camera with that oblique and charming smile. Beside her, Aileen is aloof or looks to be, while Oonagh, still a child, peeks out, grinning, from behind Maureen’s elbow. Behind them, I can make out the shape of Fantome, the spindly masts stretching up into the dark gray sky, and I know that on either side of the girls stand Ernest and Cloé, although they have been excluded by the photographer. “Glorious Guinness Girls Return To Britain,” I read.

Suddenly, I can sense the choking fog of that day and taste the salt that came in with the sea spray that dashed our faces as we waited.

I remember the joy of their return, the certainty of purpose they brought me. And how long it took me to understand that my life was as real as theirs. By the time I did understand—a very long time after Mummie first tried to tell me on the day I left Ballytibbert—it was nearly too late.

I remember all of it.

Ballytibbert House, Wexford, 1918

The sound of her skirt was like dry sticks rubbing together. The material was so stiff I thought it might wear holes in itself simply by chafing as she walked toward me. She was tall, so far above me that I dared not look up and so stared at the ground even though Mummie’s voice was in my head—“Stand up straight and smile”—running down my back, an invisible thread, twitching at my shoulders.

“Wouldn’t you like to come and do lessons with my girls?” My girls.

Her name was Cloé and everyone spoke it with a special voice, even Mummie, who had no special voices for any but her dogs.

“Wouldn’t you like that?” she asked, but it wasn’t a question.

I knew her girls. They were three, and they dazzled. Blue eyes and blonde hair. The same but not the same. They had each other’s face but with small variations so that looking at all of them together was to see a single treasure hoard split three ways. A store of rubies here, sapphires there, spun gold that together added up to three faces, three stares that were not curious or kindly but almost a dare.

There was Aileen, who was older, almost grown, and Maureen, in the middle, who was my age, or thereabouts—I was then ten, so she was eleven—and Oonagh, the baby at eight.

“Well, that’s settled, then,” Cloé said. I hadn’t said a thing. She looked at Mummie and Mummie nodded. I didn’t know what her nod meant. Was it yes, that is settled, or was it the nod she gave to people when she didn’t want to answer their questions? The nod she had been giving so often since the news of Papa’s death, brought in a stiff envelope so small you would not have thought it could carry so much?

I watched as Mummie handed a plate of scones to Cloé.

“No, thank you.” Cloé waved the plate away. “But perhaps Felicity would like one?” She smiled.

I knew Mummie wanted me to say no, thank you but I didn’t.

I took a scone and ate it with jam and thick cream, slowly so that I could tell Hughie later about every mouthful. So intent was I that I didn’t listen to what else Cloé and Mummie said, until Cloé stood, the scratching of her dress loud again, and said, “Gunnie will meet her from the train.”

Who was Gunnie? What train?

I watched from the nursery window as the motorcar moved down the driveway, leaving deep ruts in the gravel that John Hegarty would have to rake over. I wondered if Mummie would come to the nursery, or send Mary to fetch me, and tell me what must happen next, but she didn’t.

When Papa died, Mummie said there would need to be changes but she didn’t say what, and after a while Hughie went back to school and the changes didn’t come, except to Mummie herself, who was sad all the time even when she pretended not to be. The house stopped being careful and quiet and was mostly itself again, and nothing seemed very different except that Papa was gone and the bustle and hurry that always came with him were gone too. Uncle Alex was at the house more, and he and Mummie must have had so much to talk about because they were so often in Papa’s study with the door always closed, although I could hear their voices.

“Don’t be listening at doors,” Mary said, and I replied that I wasn’t. I wouldn’t. And indeed, I would not. Except that if I did hear something that told me what would now happen, well, that would not be my fault and at least then I would know.

The afternoon came on to rain, which drummed on the windows and, after a time, began to run down the length of twine Mary had fastened to the wet spots on the ceiling so that drops may twist and chase each other into the chipped white pot below.

I turned the pages of my book and wondered what lessons Cloé’s “girls” did. I could not think.

In the evening I went downstairs to the drawing room and Uncle Alex was there, with Mummie. There was a better fire than in the nursery and I sat on the rug before it with the dogs, who lay stretched out and turned their pink stomachs to the heat.

“How did you like your visitor?” Uncle Alex asked me.

“Well enough,” I said, even though it wasn’t what I meant and she wasn’t my visitor. “Why did she say would I like to do lessons with her girls?” I asked after a moment, even though Mummie didn’t like me to ask questions, and the drawing room was a place to sit quietly and do a puzzle or read my book while the grown-ups talked.

“Her daughters are close to you in age. She would like them to have a friend. And your mother thinks it is time you had more companionship,” he said.

“I have Hughie.”

“Soon Hughie will go away to school.”

“He is already at school.”

“But soon he will be away for longer periods. Not just for weeks but for many months.”

I didn’t know that. I wished it wasn’t true. Even with Hughie, four years older, home just for two days of every week, there was so little time to do the things we loved, like putting our ponies, Bramble and Dumpling, over fences and going out with the hunt, even though we were only allowed half days.

I would not go to school, I knew that, because I had asked Hughie.

“Girls don’t,” he said. Then, “Lucky you. I wish I didn’t.”

“I have Mary,” I said now.

“Mary is a servant,” Mummie said. “Not a companion.” In the firelight, her face was tired and her voice full of the effort of speaking.

It was true that there was no one to talk to me much. When Hughie was there, the rules were different. John Hegarty talked to him, about horses and our ponies, and answered Hughie’s questions with a laugh. The men on the farm talked to him too, and the fishermen when we stayed with Aunt Agatha by the sea in Waterford. They all knew that Hughie would rather talk to them than anyone else, except for me, and so they talked back, losing the mumbling stiffness that came on them when it was Uncle Alex or Mummie, even Papa, who spoke to them.

“Sometimes it is dull,” I said, carefully, because of never wanting to sound as if I was complaining. But it was the right thing after all because Mummie’s face looked less tired and Uncle Alex said, “Very well, then,” and even I could see the relief.

“Time for you to go upstairs now, Felicity,” Mummie said. I knew Mary would be waiting with my cocoa. She would talk to me. I could tell her stories, and she would say, “Where do you get your queer ideas, Miss Felicity?” And I wouldn’t tell her that I got them from the people around me, from watching them and seeing what they did and wondering, always, why.

Glenmaroon, Dublin, 1918

The train was noisy and dirty and I didn’t like the movement of it, feeling sick and frightened by turns.

I wished Hughie were with me. He would have loved it. All the way to the station in the trap, with John Hegarty driving, I wished for Hughie and his questions. He would have known what to say to John Hegarty, asking how to tie things and catch things, about the war where Papa went and did not come back alive, and the horses that went with him and were still over there, and whether they might one day return.

I thought how stupid it was that Hughie, whose letters told me he hated school, must go away and learn things he had no interest in, while I, who would have liked to know more about India and Flanders and arithmetic, must not.

The hard, red velvet of the train carriage seats scratched and scraped at the backs of my legs so that they were soon raw and sore. I wanted to sit on my hands, to protect my legs, but I knew Mummie would not like it.

The guard on the train gave me good warning when we came toward Dublin, though he need not have bothered. The change in the air told me, the way it lost its sparkle and was dragged down with the weight of the houses. So many houses, all with their backs to the train as though it had offended them.

I had been to Dublin before, of course. To the pantomime with Hughie and Papa, and once to the Gresham Hotel, where the curtains were as thick as shadows. But never like this, alone. And even though I knew I would be met, by the lady called Gunnie, still I was afraid. How would she find me? How would I find her? What if I could not tell her who I was and she swept out of the station without me, to tell Cloé that I had not come after all? The train was late, I knew because the guard had said it; what if she had left already, tired of waiting for me?

The train stopped, a screech of brakes that said it did not wish to stop. I didn’t know where my trunk was. The guard had said he would “stow” it for m. . .