“What brings you to Cincinnati?” Silas asked.
“Sent by my daddy to find work,” she said. “Not that there’s anything that suits me. Ironing and such.”
“Let me introduce my fiancée, Miss Givens.” Bella gave me a nod and a tight little smile, but barely looked at me. “Tell me, little Bella, how goes it at the farm?”
“With your tarnal brother? Done let my daddy go a year now, and with a sorry excuse for a reason. I swan his darkies will be addled if that man don’t get his house in order. But you know Mr. Eugene.”
“And what mischief is he up to lately?”
She tried to look coy rather than eager. “Why, you cain’t trust rumors.”
“And what rumors are being spread?”
Little Bella spoke in a conspiratorial whisper. “That he up and gambled this year’s hemp crop, for one. Broke as a skunk, and Mrs. Bethany don’t know a thing, now that she’s got a baby and all.”
A moment passed before Silas spoke. “Hadn’t gotten word of any baby.”
Little Bella met his stare. “Well, it was quite an anemic pregnancy she done have. One day she takes to her bed, and next thing you know, voilà!”
I had to stifle a laugh. Ever since the visit of the Marquis de Lafayette, Kentuckians had taken to spouting little bits of French.
“You don’t say?” said Silas.
After we extracted ourselves and walked some distance, I said, “Well, she was full of information.”
But Silas had a look on his face as if his thoughts were far away.
* * *
The Devil arrived on a warm September day. The steamship Sylph pulled up to dock, disgorging a stricken passenger before pressing on to Louisville. Soon thereafter, a colored woman went “queer all over” and collapsed in the street.
In less than forty-eight hours, thirty people succumbed. The tenants at the boardinghouse gathered in stunned silence as the news trickled in. No one dared go to the market or wander down to the landing. By the third day, businesses were shuttered, and nary a horse hoof was heard on the road.
It was dusk when Silas called on us.
“Good God,” said I. “Are you sick?”
“May I?” He signaled toward the parlor, where he slumped into a chair.
Brimming with questions, I sat across from him. Was it true that there were corpses piled by the river? Had the plague been spread through the sins of the poor?
“They die in front of my eyes. Nothing works.”
He had tried everything he could think of—bleeding, cupping, tincture of calomel, strongly brewed tea. “You must leave,” Silas said.
We could wait it out, I told him. I could assist.
“Assist?” He looked at me as if I was demented. “People are dropping like flies, Miss Givens.”
“All the more reason to help.”
“Have you no fear of death?”
“Only if I end up on your table,” I said, and wickedly, too, for it seemed poor timing for a joke.
He laughed, for the moment lighter. Then seriously: “You must heed my words. Get your family out of here.”
* * *
Of course he was right. We should have fled to the hilltop home of James and Hatsepha. While our neighbors were sprinkling their yards with lime and burning tar, lorries were pulling past. The worst horror was the children, many of whom had been playing in their cribs one morning only to be carted off in tiny coffins the following day.
The quiet was broken only by church bells.
By week’s end, most of the ministers had fled, and it was left to Erasmus to convene the grieving in an abandoned meetinghouse. In spite of my irreverence, I joined them. What else was one to do?
“The grass withereth, the flower fadeth, but the Word of our God shall stand forever,” intoned a subdued and weary Erasmus.
“Amen,” said the gathered.
Silently, we left the church.
October arrived, particularly blue and clear. Cooler nights followed the warmer days of Indian summer. By the second week, the cholera had abated, resulting in much praising of the Lord until the third week of that month when the disease returned with a vengeance.
I awoke one morning to hear moaning from the adjacent room. I arose and grabbed my shawl, but just as I opened my door and stepped into the hall, another door swung open. Julia, clinging to the jamb, staggered to the banister, called out for Erasmus, and vomited on the floor.
I nearly swooned, so awful was the stench. Calling for Katy, I instructed her to fetch the doctor and hurry, too, for she was slower than the Second Coming.
By the time Silas arrived, Julia had nearly drowned in a torrent of sick and sweat. Wasting no time, Silas reached into his kit and took out a flask. When he pressed the medicine to Julia’s lips, she shook her head and turned away.
“Mrs. Givens, you have to take this.”
“I am dying,” she said.
She drank and retched. Her bowels convulsed, sending a plume of diarrhea across the sheet.
Again, Silas administered the medicine. Again, Julia heaved.
“Why are her lips like that?” I asked.
None of us could bear to breathe the word “cholera,” but all the signs were there. The diarrhea like rice water; the vomiting; the desiccation and blueness of her skin.
Dear God, I thought—and with no small discomfort. Dear God, you know I am no believer. I am worse than Thomas. But please, please save her.
“Save her,” I said aloud with such vehemence that Orpheus looked alarmed.
Out came the blade.
I knelt by her bed and held her hand that was as dry as an autumn leaf. She looked so small amid those awful sheets. As Silas cut, and Julia bled, I beseeched in burning silence.
“Thirsty,” Julia said. Her eyes were wild and hollow. “Where’s Erasmus?”
But every time she drank, the result was catastrophic. Her breathing slowed to an unsteady rasp. I couldn’t bear it. Where was Erasmus—my brother, this husband whom Julia worshipped? Whatever occupied him, I cared not—only that he would arrive in time to comfort his wife.
Morning found the house as quiet as a crypt. I awoke in a chair, knotted and aching. Silas was in the other chair, his collar loose, his mouth ajar. One of his shoes had come off.
First his fingers came alive, then his eyebrows. He smacked his lips. Open now, his eyes drifted about the room. When they settled on me, he came to himself and sat up. “Olivia,” he said. It was the first time he had ever addressed me by my Christian name.
Then William appeared. We had forgotten all about him. My heart lurched when I saw his pale face peer around the door, his gaze drifting from me to his pallid mother, where it fixed. I jerked out of the chair.
“No, Willy. No,” I said, reaching for him.
But he was already upon her, crying out, and I knew whatever Divinity I had prayed to the prior night had turned His back.
Chapter 14
1833–1834
James and Hatsepha’s Key’s Hill manse was a firmly planted house—columns like sentries, fruit trees espaliering over trellises like fingers, the rooms lit by mirrored shades and crystal diffusers and flickering wicks and gaslight, the smell of lemon oil that glistened on chairs and sideboards, the murmur of servants’ German and butchered English, and all the while Hatsepha, her coiffure painstakingly constructed by her maid, alternately musing on how to improve her poor relatives or make us go away.
Humphries, of course, evicted us. Since no mortician would touch the body, Silas had attended to Julia with James paying for the casket. When Erasmus broke down at the graveside, James wrenched his Bible away.
You as good as killed her, James said to Erasmus, who, upon hearing this, announced he was too tormented to linger in Cincinnati. I bundled up the boy, and together we left that Hades of a boardinghouse with its black-draped windows, wreaths, and smoke pots to be absorbed like ink stains into James and Hatsepha’s life.
William had gripped my hand whe
n we first entered this palace and did not cry, even when James told him that he would have a room of his own. There now, Willy, I had whispered to the boy, who had always slept with his mother. I shan’t be far.
With Erasmus disappearing after the funeral, the boy was essentially an orphan. Little matter that he had his aunts and uncle to look after him. He was so young, and his mother gone in a day. No wonder it took months before he spoke again.
A year passed. During that time, Silas became an infrequent visitor, usually sending notes. On those rare occasions when he made his way up the hill, I would catch him staring at me, yet when I met his eyes, they shifted to the spine of a book or a painting on the wall. I consoled myself in regard to his melancholy by blaming the cholera. He was used to death, he was used to illness—but never at such a scale of devastation.
’Tis up to you, Olivia, Erasmus had said before he departed. I shall write, but the only letter had come months earlier when he wrote to inform us that he had rediscovered the preacher Sam Mutton in an encampment outside of New Richmond, Ohio.
Each night, James would hold forth at dinner about the application of gaslight. Distribution is the thing, he said. You cannot expand a market without the means to get there.
Hatsepha would touch her hand to her head and complain about her maid.
Loath though I was to admit it, I was growing attached to William. When he finally regained his voice, he was a soft-spoken boy—shy, but with a gift for observation and prone to intelligent questions. Many of his queries began with “why?” or “how does?” He kept me on my toes, paging through the books of James’s library for the answers to how a snake might slither, how crystals cast rainbows, how bees kept track of their hive. In the woods of Key’s Hill, we found arrowheads and stones with the outlines of fish and other creatures too fantastic to name. And when Silas did visit, we would present our specimens.
When did it live? William would ask.
Before Noah, Silas would answer with a quick smile. Before Man came into Eden.
Sitting in a clearing overlooking the city, we would watch the smoke of kilns and tanneries spewing forth from distant stacks. We made little games of pebbles and acorns. I taught William his letters in the dirt.
It seems you are suited to motherhood, Silas once said as we watched William from the veranda.
Not I, I said, shrugging, but in truth, I took proud note of the boy’s sharp eye for finding arrowheads and bits of bone, a butterfly wing, a geode the size of a robin’s egg.
He shall become a heathen, Livvie, Hatsepha proclaimed. I shan’t have a little heathen boy in my house. But even she grew besotted, her own pregnancies having withered on the vine.
And when James and Hatsepha spoke of adopting William, it seemed it would be for the best.
Summer came and went. September arrived, and still there was no word from Erasmus. I was not altogether sorry, for the cholera had drained our filial ties the way it drained the body. As far as we knew, Erasmus had vanished into the wilderness.
It was in October that James announced he had made a plan with his lawyer. He confided in me that, though years ago he’d reconciled at not having Julia, at least he’d have the boy.
Together James and I watched as William pushed a stone tattooed by a worm fossil across the conservatory floor. “William?” I said. The boy looked up without speaking, but when I motioned to him, he came over.
“You’re a quick boy,” James said, producing from his pocket a gold coin with a half-eagle imprint. “Look here. You needn’t be playing with stones. You can spend this if you want. But better you should tuck it away.” He stroked William’s chestnut curls as if they were his mother’s. “Think of it as an advance.”
* * *
That spring, we greeted the thaw with bated breath, vigilant for signs of resurgence. But no pestilence came. The buds of spring burst forth with the zeal of the converted, and everyone seemed giddy.
When a letter came for me, I hoped to finally hear from Erasmus, but instead it was from Silas, who wrote:
Dearest Olivia—
I must return to Kentucky to tend to some business. Please tell James that it is my hope to return with my fortune. That you and I may resume our life as man and wife is my strong desire, for I remain—
In fondnesss,
Silas
I read the note several times—“man and wife,” “fortune,” “desire”—before slipping it into a drawer.
* * *
In August, Silas Orpheus returned from Kentucky with Tilly, the colored girl. She barely resembled the young woman I remembered. This Tilly was hollow-eyed, downcast and slow, not to mention very thin.
As I sat on the veranda Silas told me of how his brother, Eugene, was still cash-strapped, and so had offered up the girl as Silas’s assistant until he was once again flush. They have taken her child, he told me.
Listening, I found it difficult to breathe. There would be no fortune. No man and wife.
“That is not what I’m saying,” said Silas.
“Then what?”
“There are poorer men than I, Olivia. I hope you will reconsider.”
* * *
“Call off your engagement,” said Hatsepha, “until the whole mess is resolved.”
“And how would you resolve it, sister?” said I, pulling taut a strand of crewelwork as we sat together in the drawing room.
“Tell him to send the girl away, of course,” said Hatsepha. “There’s a perfectly good country for their kind in Africa. James and I have contributed through a society at our church.”
I coughed as delicately as I could. I had read William Lloyd Garrison on the topic. Earlier that year, our very own Lane Seminary had hosted debates on the merits of abolition versus the recolonization of the slaves. I could see little difference between the colonized freemen shipped off against their will to deepest Africa and the manacled wretches sent down the river to a fate unknown. But Hatsepha, as a member of the Colonial Society, was delighted with the plan. Free the slaves and be rid of them, as if anything could be so tidily put back in a box.
But Silas Orpheus would no more consider liberating Tilly than giving a horse away for free.
“I told him to hire her out,” I said to Hatsepha. “If Silas won’t free her, at least the girl might buy herself.”
“‘Hire her out?’” said Hatsepha. “For what?”
I punctured the canvas. “Silas says she’s very talented.” Hatsepha raised an eyebrow. “Oh, stop gaping at me. For midwifery, of course. And evidently, for dressing hair.”
“She shan’t be doing my hair,” said Hatsepha. “I’d fear for my neck.”
I eyed Hatsepha’s rather stout neck that was overly laden with pearls. It seemed to be growing fatter along with the rest of her. I wore a simple cameo, the only piece of my mother’s jewelry that hadn’t been stolen or sold.
I cleared my throat. “I know a number of ladies, myself included, who wouldn’t mind their hair done if the cost is right.”
“Well, I say you’re awfully generous to that fiancé of yours. Goodness knows. But one thing’s for certain,” Hatsepha added, peeking at me across the length of table. “At least my German girl won’t murder me in my bed.”
* * *
Holding up my parasol against the sun, I knocked on the lacquered door. It took some minutes before it cracked open enough for Tilly to peer out at me.
“The doctor’s out.”
“May I come in?”
It had been nearly five years since William’s birth. Tilly had grown lovely in a darkish way. Not so bad with her hair tied back. She wouldn’t meet my eyes.
“Do you know who I am?” I waited. “You birthed my nephew. That night of the riots?” An almost imperceptible nod. “And do you know who I am to Dr. Orpheus?” Silence. “Well, evidently I am his fiancée, though we are never entirely in agreement.” Indeed, our engagement was repeatedly postponed—first by Silas’s finances, then by the cholera, and now this complicatio
n of having accepted Tilly in lieu of funds. “Tell me, is it true you do hair?”
* * *
I sent the carriage for her the following day, along with a missive explaining my plan to Silas. If the girl had an income, it might ease our way with James, the implication being that, by having failed to retrieve his fortune, Silas was ceding the solution to me.
I was careful to schedule the visit while Hatsepha was out for tea. When Tilly arrived, I was waiting in my room.
“I’ll say one thing,” said I, “you’re not shy with your gaze.”
“You said your hair needs fixing, ma’am.”
“So how does Dr. Orpheus feel about my plan?” I flinched at my tone; my ruined engagement—if that’s what it was—was no fault of Tilly’s.
“I’d say he felt it was a right good plan seeing’s he had no need of me today.”
“You help him with his . . . research?” I tapped my foot. “Did he tell you that the summer before last we found a tumorous pancreas?”
She tucked her chin. I had the feeling she might have been embarrassed for me. “I do what he says.”
Recalling my composure, I touched my hair. “Well then, perhaps you can help me with this mess?”
* * *
Two more times she came before Hatsepha got wind of our visits. After our first session, Tilly arrived with a kit and accompanied by Silas: who paced downstairs while she brushed out my hair.
“Mercy,” I said. “That man is so nervous, you’d think we were delivering a baby.” I adjusted the mirror to reflect Tilly’s face and couldn’t miss the smile. She was fair for a Negro. And those eyes. In certain light, they were green as moss.
“Tilly,” I said, dropping the mirror to my lap and twisting around, “how would you like to move to Liberia? You’re barely twenty. You could start your own life.” When she did not reply, I said, “Oh, come now. Surely you have a tongue.”
Tilly made a face. “And where was you born? I reckon not here with that accent. But me—I was born in Kentucky.”
“You are right. Forgive me.”
She placed her hand on my head. Her fingers felt like butterflies. “This is fine, fine hair,” she said. “But not so fine as Missus Bethany’s.” She picked up the hairbrush. Her thrusts were vigorous, but the sensation was not unpleasant.
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