by Anna Maclean
“Does Albert—Mr. Cobban—know the purpose of this little dinner party?” I asked Sylvia as we fetched our hats and coats from the rack near the door. Sylvia’s coat was new, I noticed, and stylishly short, burgundy velvet trimmed with brown fur, stopping just at the hourglass indent of the waist so that the fullness of her skirt wasn’t crushed. There was a new muffler to match. I admit to a thrill of pleasure, imagining the afternoons we might spend selecting Sylvia’s trousseau, should this business with young Cobban transpire according to her plan. A love of fashion and handsome clothing may point to a certain lack of seriousness, but it was a harmless flaw in both Sylvia and myself that, as young women, we delighted in silk and lace and bright colors.
“Albert begins to suspect,” Sylvia answered my question. “He is a little slow, though.”
“Just as long as he doesn’t think you are a little fast! You’ve known him such a short time.”
“A year now. Almost. You still don’t have gloves, Louy? You’ll get chilblains. Here, take these. I have an extra pair of gloves in my muffler. Don’t worry. They’re old.” She, with great nonchalance, reached into the fur-and-velvet muffler and brought out a pair of gloves of brown kidskin, lined with wool and finished with four buttons at the wrist.
“Sylvia, these are brand-new,” I said.
“Are they? How forgetful I am. Well, consider them an early Christmas gift. Have you your package for Auntie Bond? You didn’t leave it at the table? Yes? Then let’s be on our way. But you owe me a favor, Louy.”
“For the beautiful new gloves, Sylvia? Thank you.”
“No, because I am coming with you this afternoon. I will spend an hour or two with you in the cemetery if you will spend an hour or two at Mother’s table and in our music room after the New Year, when Albert comes.”
“Agreed,” I said. “You’ve won the match.”
We crossed the Common, past the display of snowmen and snow angels; past the play area where mothers watched calmly or fearfully, according to temperament, as great snowball skirmishes took place; past the smokers’ circle where men in greatcoats and tall hats paced and chatted, drawing on cigarettes or cigars; past the ice-skating pond and the new mansions of Boylston Street, barely visible over our left shoulders. Boston, my beloved Boston, but never so beloved as that sweet little town of Concord, for what place can ever be as sweet as the place where we dream our childhood dreams?
There was a cold wind off the Atlantic that afternoon, cold enough to make our teeth chatter and to tug and pull at our skirts, making the walk up Beacon Hill a difficult one.
The cemetery, the second-oldest one in Boston, was a forlorn place, filled with bare-branched winter trees, crypts and stone angels, and other, smaller monuments that had leaned and sunk with great age, their lettering no more than a suggestion of what once had been so meaningfully carved on the worn, lichen-covered stone.
The air smelled of pine and salt, of cold, of solitude, of mourning. The sky was leaden and overcast, burdened with a great weight of quickly moving clouds that could not shed their encumbrance of snow because it was too cold. The wind cut through us to the bone and howled through bare branches, rattling the few browned and withered leaves still clinging to them. We were in a small city of the dead, surrounded by bustling Boston.
“Creepy,” said Sylvia, shivering. “What are we looking for, Louy?”
“A grave marker for Mrs. Emily Phips. Mrs. Percy visited her here. Maybe over there?” I pointed at a little bluff where the stones were still polished, where the granite angels had not yet lost their noses or the fingers with which they pointed to heaven.
We trudged through crusted snow that crackled underfoot, our eyes filled with the whiteness of winter and the gray stones of death, our faces red and chapped from the wind. I heard a twig snap behind me and turned in alarm, feeling the gooseflesh rise on my arms under the thick, heavy wool of my coat.
Suddenly I had the distinct sensation that we were not alone, that someone watched us. I turned in a circle and saw only desolate pine trees, stark oaks, and gray stone.
“What’s wrong, Louy? Or perhaps I should ask what is right. I do not like this place.” She huddled close at my side.
“Why, Sylvia.” I forced lightness into my voice. “Dear friend, you started this business by insisting we attend Mrs. Percy’s séance, and now you are afraid of a perfectly charming old cemetery?”
“A séance in a new and well-furnished parlor is one thing. This is quite another,” she insisted. “I’m cold and I’m quite certain the air is bad here. I shall get malaria.”
“Not in winter, you won’t,” I tried to reassure her.
Another twig snapped. Or was it other footsteps crunching in the snow? I took a deep breath, remembering the terrible fear I had felt when locked into that small room in Mrs. Percy’s cellar. At least here I was in the open, in the cold air with the sky above me and all the room I could desire. Here, no walls closed in.
“Come,” I said. “Let’s get this done so we can go home to our warm hearths. You take that row, Sylvia. I’ll start here.”
We were in the newer section by then, where the memorials were larger, more ornate than those preferred by our forefathers and foremothers, whose graves were marked with simple stones. Some of the memorials in this section, with their weeping seated angels and aboveground chapels, were so large that for minutes at a time I lost sight of Sylvia in her new burgundy coat as we made our way down our assigned white and gray rows, reading epithets aloud to fill the cold silence: “‘The hand of the Lord was upon me, and carried me out in the spirit of the Lord.’” “‘Can these bones live? O Lord God, thou knowest.’” “‘Beloved Mother.’” “‘Here lies a daughter sorely missed.’” “‘To an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled that fadeth not away.’” “‘Behold a man raised up by Christ!’” On one grave I found one of Father’s favorite passages from Pilgrim’s Progress: “‘The Pilgrim they laid in a large upper chamber, whose window opened towards the Sun rising; the name of the chamber was Peace.’”
“Ugh!” I heard Sylvia exclaim at one point.
“What is it?” I shouted in alarm.
“An empty grave. They must have dug it in the autumn, before the ground froze, and never filled it in. I wonder why?” she yelled.
“Let’s hope it is a fortuitous sign,” I answered. “The gravely ill patient recovered from his illness.”
“Is this really a place for humor?” she shouted back in a peeved voice.
“Keep looking, Sylvia.”
We finished that row and began another, leaving our footprints in the virgin snow as we moved past tombstone after tombstone. The wind howled even more fiercely and I shivered, more grateful than I could tell for the new warm gloves from Sylvia. My nose and forehead had grown numb from the cold. And still I had that sensation of being watched, yet when I looked up I saw no one except the flicker of Sylvia’s vibrant coat as she moved down her row in a line parallel to my own.
An hour of this gruesome labor passed. The winter sun was slipping down the gray afternoon sky, casting vague shadows on the white snow, when I stopped before one modest grave site, marked by a simple stone flanked by two columns.
BELOVED WIFE, the epitaph read. MRS. WILLIAM PHIPS, NÉE EMILY SIDNEY GRAYLING. MERCY, MERCY, SAVE, FORGIVE. OH, WHO SHALL LOOK ON THEE AND LIVE? BORN APRIL 6, 1807, DIED JANUARY 14, 1853.
“Over here!” I called to Sylvia. “I’ve found it.”
“She was not aged when she passed over,” said Sylvia, after we had said a prayer over the grave.
“In her prime,” I agreed, “and still much missed, it would seem. There are footsteps, masculine, I’d say, and newly made.” The snow about the monument had been trampled. “Her husband still misses her and comes to pray here.” Reader, it was wrong of me to make an assumption of that magnitude, I would soon learn.
We stood quietly before that grave, reflecting on life and death.
“It is two thirty, Louy,” said S
ylvia after a while, quietly, for the cemetery had sombered her. She replaced her timepiece into her reticule and gave me a meaningful glance.
“The lottery! We must hurry!” And like that, the mysteries of the grave were put aside so that I might attend to the living—to the drawing for the three lessons with Signor Massimo.
We arrived back at Mr. Crowell’s shop at a quarter to three, out of breath and laughing, since we had run almost all the way from Beacon Hill, but that mad race had been mostly downhill, and Sylvia had fallen right before the Common and bent her skirt hoop so that she now had a lopsided tilt to her costume.
Mr. Crowell, who had known both our families for many years, looked at us with affection, and this time did pat my head, though I was a grown woman.
“The young should amuse themselves,” he said, helping to brush snow off Sylvia. “Old age comes soon enough, and the sadness.”
“Hush, Mr. Crowell,” said his wife, who had come out of her small office to help attend to the festivities. “This is no time to be talking of sadness. You’ll bring bad luck on them.” She looked at him with great tenderness even as she scolded, and I felt a sudden pang of homesickness for Marmee and Father.
Punch and tea cakes had been set out on a table in the middle of the little shop, and a handful of people had already gathered there, talking amongst themselves and eyeing the rows of music scores and books about the lives of the great composers.
“Where are you coming from in such a rush, Miss Alcott?” Mrs. Crowell asked, giving me a cup of ruby-colored punch.
“The old Beacon Hill cemetery. I went to see the grave of Emily Phips.”
A shadow passed over Mrs. Crowell’s face.
“Did you know her?” I asked.
“I did.” Mrs. Crowell slowly, with an air of preoccupation, rearranged the biscuits on the platter. “A very unhappy woman. She purchased a parlor organ through us…oh, years ago, perhaps twenty or more. And then she came in once a month to buy music. Until she died, year before. Death was a kindness for her, I thought. She had no will to live.”
“She played church hymns mostly,” said Mr. Crowell. “And some Bach, of course. You have to respect a lady who takes the time to play Bach.”
“She were a very sad woman,” repeated Mrs. Crowell.
“Here now,” said Mr. Crowell. “Don’t go gossiping.”
By unspoken arrangement Sylvia and Mrs. Crowell and I stood silent until the doorbells chimed again and the husband went to greet the next set of customers.
“Why sad?” I asked when we three had privacy.
“It is gossip; Mr. Crowell is correct,” said the wife. “But since you visited her grave and did her that favor, I will tell you this much. There was gossip that her husband was unfaithful. Ach, men.” She heaved a sigh of disapproval. “And it weren’t a happy marriage to begin with, I fear. She still missed that first one, the boy she was engaged to when she were a girl. Can’t think of his name. He weren’t from round about these ways.”
“Was there gossip about who the other woman was?” I asked.
“You might ask her brother, if it matters. He still has the old town house on Charles Street. Near the corner of Chestnut. Dilapidated old house, but he’ll not move from it. Never married himself. He preferred Beethoven, as I recall. Ah! Miss Young is here! I must go see to her, Miss Alcott. Excuse me, please.”
After Mrs. Crowell left us, Sylvia and I stood quietly for a moment, thinking. “Funny, isn’t it?” she finally said. “You see an old gent with a soft smile and gray whiskers and you think, ‘What a jovial fellow he looks!’ But you never know what he gets up to behind closed doors. Do you think Albert will be faithless, Louy?”
“No,” I said automatically, though I hadn’t really considered this topic yet. A final customer came, jangling the doorbell, and I saw that everyone had gathered around the little table where Mr. Crowell had placed the punch, cakes, and a glass jar with our names on folded papers inside. I went to join them.
With silent prayers rising from me like heat rises from a cake just out of the oven, I watched as Mr. Crowell picked up the jar and gave it a sturdy shaking. Twelve little pieces of folded paper rattled up and down, back and forth, and then came to rest on the bottom of the jar.
“We need to do this fair and square. Jim!” He called to his assistant, a gangly lad in a striped wool shirt and trousers who looked like many awkward youths of fifteen but played like an angel, like a genius, when sitting before a piano. Jim played the pieces for those customers who could not read music well enough to play for themselves.
“Close your eyes and select a piece of paper,” his employer told him.
Jim tugged at his brown hair, grinned, then put one long-fingered, slightly grimy hand over his eyes, and with the other felt for the opened jar, with its little bits of paper resting on the bottom.
We held our breaths and watched.
Please, I prayed to that beneficent being who watched over my family. And other families, I reminded myself. Other people want this as much as you, probably deserve it even more. Please, I said again. For sweet Lizzie. I had been dancing with joy a moment before. Now, watching Jim’s hand flail in the jar, reaching, I felt heavy as lead, as if pressed to earth by an invisible hand.
Jim’s fingers found one of the little papers. He grasped it between thumb and forefinger and brought his large hand out of that little jar.
“Do the honors, Jim,” said Mr. Crowell, who looked as tense as I felt.
Jim, still grinning, unfolded the paper. His eyes moved back and forth. It seemed to take him forever to read the name.
“Miss Elizabeth Alcott,” he finally announced.
Reader, I know we all wish to present a dignified, serious aspect of ourselves to a world that often judges harshly what it deems frivolous; but there are moments in life when one must jump for joy without further thought to reputation or judgment from others. I jumped for joy. So did elderly Mr. Crowell.
“I myself will write to Signor Massimo and ask for the first appointment time,” said that fine man, after waltzing me about his store a bit. “Before Christmas or after, Miss Alcott? And don’t be surprised if he serves a lunch for Lizzie. Noodles. I’ve had them myself. Not as hearty as a roast beef and slippery on the fork, but tasty, tasty.”
“Ask for the lessons to begin immediately!” I said.
Congratulations were offered by the other eleven, at least most of them, although some skulked out without a word, irked to have lost those coveted lessons with Signor Massimo.
Sylvia hugged me over and over, for she loved Lizzie almost as much as I did and that sad hour we had spent in the cemetery made us both thankful for the riches we shared in life: the love of those close to us.
“Are you going to tell Lizzie today, or wait?” Sylvia asked.
“She must wait awhile, yet,” I said. “I have another errand, one more, and need your company for another hour.”
“Where to this time, Louy? Is there a present you forgot to pick up?”
“No gift. But a visit. To a brother.”
“I don’t understand. How can Mrs. Phips’s brother be involved with Mrs. Percy’s death? It is still her death that interests you, is it not?”
“Of course. More than ever. Someday, Sylvia, I will tell you Mr. Emerson’s theory of the universal mind. For now, let me say that there is an invisible connection between all beings, and sometimes those connections become visible. Mrs. Crowell gave us the next step in this investigation, without even intending to.”
“What if he won’t receive us?” asked Sylvia. “Then what?”
We bumped, literally, into Amelia Snodgrass coming down Charles Street. Her arms were full of bags and boxes and she was in very good spirits. She wore a bright blue day gown with a red cape over it, and a red-and-white-striped bow on her hat.
“Miss Alcott! Miss Shattuck!” she exclaimed joyfully. “How good to see you!”
She seemed to be quite a different person.
&n
bsp; “She’s awfully pleased about something,” Sylvia whispered to me.
“I’m happy to see you in such high spirits,” I said, a question in my voice.
“Ah. You wonder why. This terrible business with Mrs. Percy is just about over, don’t you think? His accomplice is in jail and soon he himself will stand trial.” There was a cruel gleam of satisfaction in her eye.
“You refer to Suzie Dear,” I guessed.
“Yes, of course. And to that snake Eddie Nichols. Constable Cobban says he has been seen in Worcester and will be arrested by the Cleveland men any minute. Will he hang, do you think?” she asked eagerly.
I was, as you may guess, shocked by this extreme change in her feelings for the man; though he was a cad, she had once felt tenderly for him, I was certain.
“Let us be honest with each other,” I began.
“Let us, Miss Alcott,” she agreed, no longer smiling, “since if you spread any ill report of me, I’ll have your father barred from every decent parlor in Boston.”
“You don’t have that power,” I said, uncertain. Perhaps she did. “Even so, I would like to know this: Were you and Mr. Nichols more than friendly acquaintances? Did he steal the pearl necklace?”
“Yes. And yes. I was badly used by Mrs. Percy and her stepbrother. He betrayed me, and now he will pay. Louisa—may I call you Louisa?—Wilmot and I have decided not to wait the full year of mourning. We are to be married after the New Year. And then we shall go to Venice.”
“My congratulations,” I said.
“I will send you a card from Italy, since you are never likely to see the place yourself. Seamstresses can hardly afford to travel abroad.”
That stung.
“Good day, Louisa. Sylvia.” Miss Snodgrass, bearing her Christmas boxes, made her way down the sidewalk.