Sweeter than Birdsong

by Rosslyn Elliott

  She must have misheard. They were not going to dismiss her?

  “However, we cannot simply ignore the requirements of Otterbein College,” Professor Hayworth said. “And so we wish to give you more time, Miss Winter. After the new year—in eight month’s time—you must be able to deliver an oration to the entire class. Until then, you may present your assigned recitation to me, in the company of the ladies’ chaperone.”

  “Do you wish to continue under these conditions?” President Lawrence asked.

  Kate murmured, “Yes, sir.”

  “Very good.” The president sat back in his chair as if released from a string. Professor Hayworth looked relieved, though his bushy brown beard made it hard to tell for certain.

  “Thank you, President Lawrence.” Her mother rose to her feet, a silvery beaded handbag dangling from her wrist against the lilac silk of her dress. She had dressed as if to meet in the Oval Office with President Pierce himself, not with the president of a small college. The gentlemen rose with her and Kate followed suit, stepping forward to allow her skirt its room.

  “Kate, you will wish to thank them as well, I am sure.” Kate’s mother flashed her a steel-blue look, then assumed a milder aspect to the men.

  Kate lifted her head. “I am grateful to you, sirs.” Her answer was too soft, she knew—they would hardly hear her, and her mother would take her to task for it later. Her words slipped out, artificial, manufactured by her mother’s will, not her own. Perhaps they thought they were kind, but a summer and a semester would make no difference. She had done her best to speak, but her body had refused her will. The faculty’s stipulation would not change her weakness. It was simply a stay of execution.

  “You have great promise, Miss Winter,” said Professor Hayworth. “We wish you to fulfill it.”

  Her mother clutched her silver handbag in one tight fist. “Thank you, Professor. Good day, gentlemen.” She inclined her head and swept out the door in a puff of powdery lavender scent.

  Kate followed her down the hall. The tightness of her dressed hair pulled into a dull ache at her temples. She could not bear to go back through their iron-gated yard into the Winter residence, but she had no other place to live.

  As soon as their maid Tessie let them in the front door, Kate’s mother sailed across the foyer and threw an order over her lilac shoulder. “Come to the parlor.”

  Kate avoided Tessie’s sympathetic look as she trailed in her mother’s wake through the double doors. She had never liked the parlor’s blue-and-white formality, punctuated by spiny-legged chairs and hard upholstery.

  Her mother rounded on her, and Kate suppressed a start.

  “I suppose we must count our blessings that President Lawrence is so magnanimous.” Dry, papery-fine skin pulled into deep grooves around her tight mouth.

  “Yes, Mother.” If Kate did not argue, it would end sooner.

  Her mother peered at her. “Clearly, you have a brain somewhere in your head. You do well enough in your studies. So why do you stumble over a simple declamation?”

  “I don’t know.” Resentment pricked deep beneath her meek response like a burr under a saddle.

  “And you won’t speak to the few eligible suitors I have brought to you.”

  “It is not deliberate, Mother. I am not gifted in social discourse.”

  “You are too intelligent to be incapable of conversation. Something in you wishes to defy me, Kate.”

  “I don’t intend to displease you.” But that hidden spikiness within her belied her polite response. Her mother was so determined to be dissatisfied.

  Her mother picked up her embroidery frame from a lace-topped side table, but then set it down again. Her lips drew into a taut smile. “Young Mr. Hanby is directing a musicale for the college, I hear. Is he not holding auditions soon? Mrs. Bogler told me so. I believe this performance would be a perfect opportunity to overcome your flaw. You must audition.”

  “Mother, I have proven I cannot speak in public settings.” Kate stared at the parquet below the full hem of her sea-green dress. This did not seem just, to be controlled by the dictates of so many others, never given a choice. She must be very calm, though beneath it all her will thrashed like an animal in a trap. She pressed her hands together and counted in Greek.

  “What did you say? I can’t abide this half-audible murmuring of yours.” Her mother walked away a few steps to pretend to examine the clock above the fireplace. “President Lawrence’s daughter will appear in this musicale. And why is that? Because her parents know their daughter must be poised and articulate if she is to make an enterprising match, beyond this small town.”

  “I do not have any poise, Mother. I am certain to—”

  “Speak up, I tell you!”

  “Ruth, you leave that girl ’lone.” Her father’s slurred voice came from his study, at the other end of the parlor behind her mother’s back. Sickly sweet fumes drifted to Kate, as if the bourbon on his breath spread throughout the house.

  Her mother turned her head a fraction, like a duchess in her stiff-bodiced gown. “Stay out of it, Isaiah. You’re hardly in a position to judge social niceties. She will do as I bid her and go to the audition.”

  Her father’s figure loomed in the doorway, his beard rumpled, a dark, wet stain on his lapel. His reddened eyes fixed on her mother as she fell back a step. “You’ll let her do as she wishes.”

  “It is all right, Father. I will go.” Fair or not, it did not matter. She must bring this interview to a close before her parents flew into one of their battles. Her scalp tingled and she took a deep breath. “But I would like to sing instead of read.”

  Her mother raised her thin-plucked brows. “Singing is less abhorrent to you?”

  “Yes.” If she sang, she might arrange to sing with others and blend into the group. She could avoid a solo performance.

  “Ruth, tell her she may sing. Don’t be so hard-hearted.” Her father’s voice was always too big for the room. Liquor must affect one’s hearing.

  Her mother stared back at him with cold dislike. “Very well.”

  Kate bowed her head. She must not show the struggle inside. “May I go to my room?”

  Her mother did not answer, but only jerked her head, as if she had pricked herself with the embroidery needle. Her eyes were shadowed, her still-beautiful cheeks looked pinched.

  Kate’s father lumbered back to his den without comment. A glass clinked. She hurried away from the sound—she loathed it now.

  At the top of the stairs, her sister’s door was closed. Kate did not want to be alone just yet—even Leah might provide some company. Kate tapped on her door, turned the handle, and stepped in.

  Leah swiveled away from her vanity with a start, and her ivory brush tangled in her long dark hair. Her wide eyes gave her the look of a little girl still in the pinafore and pantalets Kate remembered from their nursery days.

  “In the future, please knock.” Leah’s attempt at a worldly expression did not sit well on her girlish features.

  Kate shut the door behind her. “I must leave. I will not live here anymore.”

  “You have no choice. Neither of us does.” Leah extricated her hair from the brush and began to style it again as she gazed in the mirror. “I’ll be married as soon as I turn eighteen, and if you had any sense, you’d already have done the same. You could have been out of this house a year ago.” She curled one lock with fastidious attention, then pinned it up.

  “I won’t go from one prison to another. I will find some other way to sustain myself. One doesn’t always have to marry.”

  “But the alternatives are hardly respectable. Will you choose one of them nonetheless?” Leah shot a look of disdain over her shoulder but continued arranging her hair.

  A burn started at Kate’s collar. “I will find a decent way. You will see.” She withdrew from the room and disciplined herself to close the door with a gentle turn of the knob.

  When would she learn? She did not have a family like other fam
ilies. Leah’s character had altered in a peculiar way in response to the harshness of their parents. But her superficial hardness was not of her own making—Kate would not blame her for it. In happier days, Leah had been quick to giggle or offer a sisterly embrace.

  Kate’s own room was hardly a haven, with its black mahogany armoire looming over her and a heavy four-postered bed dominating the floor. Still, it was such respite as she could get, and she closed the door and fled to her reading corner. Here was her solace. Her bookshelf, her chair turned to the wall, so she could look only at the books and out her window. She sank down into the welcome embrace of the chair.

  She would not think of the oration anymore, or her shame, or how she would face the students again in the classroom. She leaned forward and plucked a book at random from the shelf. Rasselas, by Samuel Johnson. She had already read the prologue about the prince who finds a secret tunnel out of his isolated valley kingdom and ventures into the real world to find the meaning of happiness.

  A wild idea struck her, and she stood up and gazed out the window, the book folded over the back of her hand.

  Otterbein was not her only path to freedom. She did not have to endure the humiliating, inevitable failures her mother pressed upon her. There might be another way to secure a living, if she could find the right woman to teach her an honest trade. Her mind raced as if she had taken three cups of tea. She must not continue to think of teaching as her only route to independence and college as the only way to attain it. Teaching required public presentation, and thus would be unpleasant and perhaps impossible, even to an audience of young ladies.

  It would not be so hard to leave. No one would know her plan, no one would stop her. She imagined herself far beyond the trees that surrounded the house, and her mood lifted like white smoke from a watch fire, liberated from ground to air.

  But Prince Rasselas had not found happiness.

  Still, he had made his own choice. She would risk anything for the chance at a choice. She would be a quick study at a trade— perhaps even millinery. She had always liked hats, and as a girl she had drawn them in many styles according to her fancy. A city milliner might be willing to apprentice her in exchange for room and board.

  The future rose up in her imagination, so light and open and full of promise, nothing like the cramped dimness of her life here. What a joy to escape! Even the thread of fear and the “what-ifs” could not weigh down her buoyant heart. She tucked her book close to her bodice and smiled.

  She could leave and make her own way. It was not as foolhardy as it sounded. She might escape this sad house after all, and sooner than she had thought—but first she must think of how and when to do it.

  Four

  NEITHER THE NOTES NOR THE WORDS WOULD ANSWER his call tonight. Ben dipped his pen in the ink and wrote another line: Poor Nelly never saw her man again. No, that wouldn’t do. He drew a precise line through it, to match the ten previous phrases already struck through on this page.

  The oil lamp guttered and a shadow wavered across the page to climb the walls of the parlor. The clock ticked, steady as a metronome, the only sound at two in the morning. Still, the presence of his sleeping family filled the house, the warmth of their breathing steady and strong for his parents, quick and light for his three smallest brothers and sisters. A house full of sleepers did not feel empty.

  A floorboard creaked in his parents’ bedroom. He turned from the piano bench to see his mother tying the peach ribbons of her housecoat as she walked into the parlor.

  “I thought I heard someone out here.” The faint lines of middle age on Ann Hanby’s forehead deepened into concern.

  “It’s all right, Mother. I’m finishing some work.”

  “In the wee hours of the morning?” She padded up behind him and looked over his shoulder, the ruffle of her cap framing her still-pretty face. “Oh, Ben—the Nelly song again. If it robs you of sleep, lay it aside. You’ve written so many fine songs.” She seated herself in the nearest padded armchair, graceful and petite even after eight children.

  “I can’t. Not until I’ve written this song as it should be.”

  “You only torment yourself by writing it over and over. I’ve heard scraps of it before—it’s quite good. Just finish it.” She laid her hands in her lap and tucked her feet up under herself in the chair, like a girl.

  “Are you cold?” Ben rose and retrieved the crocheted blanket from the top of the piano, then brought it to her.

  “Thank you, son.” She settled it over her knees. “Now if only I could persuade you to care for yourself as well.” She gave him a smile full of memory of a boyhood of scraped knees and snow-frozen limbs.

  “A few hours’ missed sleep won’t harm me. Especially in a good cause.” He kneaded the tense spot in the middle of his forehead.

  “But I worry for you with this song. You mustn’t gnaw at yourself about Joseph—you were too young to see such things. I told your father so at the time.”

  Joseph—an image flashed in his mind—the brown skin of the sick man turning gray, the last rattle of breath through his chest, the pain and hope in his eyes turning to an empty hole in his pupils. Even after so many years, a bitter aftertaste of his boyish horror remained.

  “I was nine years old, Mother. Father couldn’t shield me from the fugitives forever.”

  “But had you not been so young, it wouldn’t haunt you now.”

  “Perhaps there’s a reason for it, something I’m called to do.”

  She sighed. “You are so like your father, which is why I love both of you so.” She bunched the lap robe in her arms and stood. “You cannot free every imprisoned soul in our country—you can only do the best that one young man may do. And I admire you for it.”

  Joseph’s voice hoarse with fever still echoed in his ears, “Nelly . . . Nelly.” It vibrated through his bones, a low groan of dismay, both Joseph’s and his own. Ben blinked, picked up the pen, and dipped it in the ink again.

  His mother laid the blanket back on the piano, crossed behind him, and laid her hands on his shoulders. “Go to bed, son.” Her kiss fell on the top of his hair and she laughed softly. “I can’t do that anymore now you’re so tall. Good night . . . or good morning.”

  “Good night, Mother.”

  She rustled away and left him alone in the shadows again.

  He scratched a few more words on the page, stared at them, counted the meter. His choices were never good enough for this song. The ideal lay always out of reach, goading him, irritating in its abstract perfection. He rubbed his eyebrows and stood. It would not come tonight—he muttered a few impatient and self-accusing words as he turned away from the piano.

  Wait. What about that relic Joseph had left with them so long ago? Ben walked to the curio cabinet, opened the glass door, and groped behind the little oval portrait of his mother’s mother, long passed away. His fingertips brushed latticework. There it was—he pulled it out. He had not opened it in years.

  The basket was so tiny and neat, with its hinged lid, that one of his sisters would have taken it as a plaything long ago had not Ben and his father protected it. He lifted the lid. Inside was a single lock of hair, black and shiny, in a spiral curl against the woven reeds. His heart twinged—here was proof of Nelly’s existence, her sad state, the real woman who would suffer when the man she loved and trusted never returned for her.

  Was it all that was left of Nelly? Or might she be still waiting, somewhere, in her enslavement, for her bridegroom who would never return?

  He did not have to sit like a nine-year-old boy and wonder. He knew many conductors on the Underground Railroad. One of them might be able to trace the whereabouts of Joseph’s Nelly.

  Perhaps it wasn’t the unwritten song keeping him sleepless all these years. Maybe a different task lay ahead.

  Because if he could find Nelly, he could steal her away to freedom.

  Five

  THE THOROUGHBRED GATHERED HER LEGS UNDER HER and cannoned out into the fallow field.
Kate’s hat would have blown off but for its chin strap, which tightened in the sudden gust of wind.

  She clenched her knee on the horn of the sidesaddle as the fence rushed toward them, larger with every stride. Her breath shortened and her vision narrowed to only the top of the fence. Four strides. Three. Two. One. Garnet’s weight shifted back. Kate leaned forward and pushed the reins up her neck. The mare’s front legs left the ground and she soared upward.

  Kate flew, weightless over her horse’s back, time suspended. The mare’s feet thudded hard on the ground and Kate sat up, correcting the balance as they surged forward. Pounding hooves echoed the wild thump of her heart as she let Garnet canter on at a good clip. Finally, Kate slowed her to a trot. On the slope ahead, a grassy checkerboard of fields lay in patches of spring green outlined by white fences. She would like to ride on and on, over every fence, far from her parents and their misery.

  But that would not do. Not yet, anyway. She could not leave town without money or a bag packed. It was difficult enough to get permission to ride alone, even to a nearby neighbor’s fields. A valise slung over her mare’s haunches would not pass her mother’s inspection. But Kate would find her opportunity.

  She reined Garnet along the fence and passed a clump of white birches in full, bright green leaf at the corner of the field.

  Oh no. Two gentlemen, there, on horseback. She had not seen them through the trees, but they must have seen her wild ride. Then she must avoid them—it was not ladylike to gallop pell-mell across fields like a steeplechaser. Her mother must not hear of it, or she would be forbidden even this small freedom. She turned Garnet’s head to cut across the field to the gate on the far end.

  The first man urged his mount along the fence at a brisk walk, then a trot. He appeared to be moving to intercept her.

  The three horses converged on the gate. She could not elude them—she slowed Garnet to a walk for the last few yards. The man on the black horse halted at the gatepost, and his companion pulled up beside him on his white mount.