The Abandoned Heart

by Laura Benedict

  Guests arriving at the front of Bliss House were directed to the garden, where the tall stairs built against the house led straight up to the theater. Terrance nodded to Lucy and Carrie, whom Lucy’s mother had required her to take calling with her for the day. (Lucy worried, at first, that her mother suspected where she was planning to go, but, no, she was irritated with Carrie over some small matter and wanted her out of the house.)

  Terrance’s eyes were half-closed against the June sunshine as though he were unused to being outside. But as he gave her a hand to ascend the first step, he spoke. “Good afternoon, Miss Searle. Mister Bliss has been expecting you. He has asked if you would take a seat in the back row, near the aisle.”

  The request made her stomach flutter. So he really had been thinking of her. She nodded to Terrance.

  “Thank you. I will.”

  The brilliance of the day and the lively air of the small groups of men and women ascending the stairs were a contrast to the Walpurgisnacht ball. Bliss House sat calm and stately in the sunshine, and row after row of luscious white roses bloomed in the garden, soaking the air in perfect fragrance. She and Carrie were climbing up, up toward the clear blue sky as if she were on a staircase to heaven. The joy she felt swept away any disturbing memories she had of her adventures with Josiah in the nursery. Her nerves had been in such a high state that she supposed that she might even have imagined the animals and dolls flying about the room. Perhaps they had simply fallen from the very old shelves. Randolph had told her that though he knew it might seem odd, he wished to keep the nursery as a sort of memorial to his daughter, Tamora. It seemed right to her, given that she had seen mother and daughter standing right outside its door. Bliss House did not like change. Is that why the ghosts had noticed her? They knew something that she did not. Or at least wasn’t ready to fully admit to herself: that she would do just about anything to be with Randolph in Bliss House.

  “Carrie, you’ll sit somewhere else, please.”

  “Are you sure?” Carrie gave her a questioning look, her green eyes wide. She was a pretty woman, with her red hair and neat, if ample, figure. Though she was a decent enough housemaid, Lucy imagined that she would make an excellent nanny.

  Now why does that come to mind?

  Lucy had told Carrie about coming to Bliss House with Faye, but when Carrie asked her about ghosts, she had lied, and said that the house was impressive, but decidedly unhaunted.

  “Yes, if you would. I’m sure you’ll find someone you know. Half the town is here.”

  Inside the theater door at the top of the staircase, a teenage girl in a drab brown dress handed them printed programs. A line drawing of Hannah Tanner’s face encircled with a laurel wreath addressed the top. The face was youthful, with a dignified profile and strong nose. The phrase “United for Christ and Justice” curved over the top of the wreath. Lucy took the program, thanking the girl.

  “We serve The Word and Justice.” The girl spoke with such vehemence that Lucy couldn’t help but look at her face. Her dark eyes burned with ferocious passion of a kind that Lucy would have imagined was impossible in someone so young. Would that she herself could feel so strongly about something important. Already she felt inadequate to the afternoon.

  A masculine version of the girl at the door was busy seating guests in the front rows, and Lucy prompted Carrie to sit. Several of the faces in the theater belonged to familiar members of her father’s church. Edward Searle was a harsh spiritual leader and was unlikely to be forgiving of their transgression if he learned they had been there. By their shy smiles, she knew that her secret was safe with them, if she would return the favor.

  Slipping around the small line of people, Lucy took a seat in the back row. No one followed her or attempted to sit anywhere near her, as though there were an invisible wall around her, protecting her. At once she felt special, yet isolated, like some rare object that could be seen, but not touched.

  Randolph approached the podium. He welcomed his guests with what Lucy saw was genuine warmth.

  “I know you all have many other things to do today, and I thank you for coming. Miss Tanner has many important things to say about justice in our state, and in our time. So I will happily cede the floor to her, and ask only that you listen with your hearts. Her words could not have a lovelier, more urgent messenger. Please welcome Miss Hannah Tanner.”

  In person, Hannah Tanner was a delicate beauty not more than five feet tall. Coming to the podium to enthusiastic applause, she inclined her head to Randolph, smiling, and offered him her hand, which he took. When Lucy saw their hands meet, she felt a twinge of jealousy. But when they parted, Hannah Tanner approached the lectern, and Randolph caught Lucy’s eye and made his way to the seat beside her. As he got closer, she nervously clasped one gloved hand in the other.

  She smiled up at him, noticing how clean-shaven he was and how the summer sun had lightened sections of his thick brown hair and slightly bronzed his skin. This was not a man who confined himself to stuffy rooms and stale talk. Like her, he was alive. In addition, he had a sensitive heart.

  I think my parents simply refuse to know him. I will help them know him better, or I will live without their affection.

  There it was. Madness, but truth. She would be with Randolph no matter what. She felt it as a kind of fever.

  As Hannah Tanner thanked Randolph from the lectern, Lucy moved over one chair, and he sat down beside her. He whispered in her ear, his breath warm on her earlobe, and she imagined him kissing it ever so gently. “I very much wanted you to come, but I dared not hope.”

  Her answering smile was radiant.

  “There is nothing on this earth that belongs to you!” Hannah Tanner’s polite words about feeling welcomed at Bliss House and by the crowd were gone as if she’d never spoken them, replaced by her angry admonition.

  Lucy was startled from her pleasant reverie with Randolph. They both looked forward.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, we are killing our fellow man. Fellow women. Our children! Our greed and desire for fine things is paid for with the blood of innocents who work until their fingers bleed, or their limbs are crushed in the machinery that produces the useless detritus with which you stuff your drawing rooms and great grand houses and decorate your ridiculous hats. Christ will not stand for it!” She looked around the room as though daring someone to contradict her, but there was only stunned silence. “Would you have Him, who was hanged on the tree, excuse the wanton way we dispose of the weakest among us? Remember Matthew 19:14. ‘But Jesus said, Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.’ Did you imagine that he meant for you to send him their broken bodies? Picture the degraded body of one of their shambling mothers. A woman who only sees her children for a few hours a week, if and only if some foreman allows her to leave the factory after she has worked for twelve hours and then spent a quick ten minutes on her back for his pleasure. That she would be allowed to leave at all is by no means certain.”

  Lucy was riveted. Ahead of her, a significant sample of the people of Old Gate shifted in their seats. Uncomfortable. Who would dare talk to these people so boldly and with such accusation?

  “Who will stop that foreman? His master? Who will tell this woman that what she is being forced to do is wrong? That it is inhuman to demand from her the only thing that is hers to give: her dignity. Even that dignity is a gift from the Lord above, but she does without it because that is the only way she can keep her body and soul in one place. How can she mind her own soul if her child is in a factory half a mile away, working the same tortured hours that she does?”

  As Hannah Tanner told the story of a boy named James and his sister, Polly, who were employed in a Richmond cotton mill (not even in faraway New York or Boston, but in their own Richmond!), Lucy felt tears gathering in her eyes. The pair arrived at work one day together, their dinner pails nearly empty but for a chunk of bread and fatback, all their ailing mother could find for them, but onl
y Polly came home that night. James had been hurrying across the workroom floor with a sample of dye for a foreman to inspect. He’d been told that if he didn’t hurry they would find some other boy to do his job, and he would be on the street. “Can you imagine such a threat, to a boy of eleven? A boy whose own mother had been worked nearly to death herself, and now could hardly leave her bed?”

  Lucy could imagine such a threat. She could see the boy and his pretty sister hurrying through the dark Richmond streets so they wouldn’t be shut out of the mill’s tall, clanging gates.

  “Thirty feet that boy fell. Because he was hurrying to do his job.” Hannah Tanner’s voice quieted and she was silent so they could all imagine the boy, broken. Dead.

  A woman near the front of the room sobbed.

  “Yes, cry for James. But, my friend, spare some tears for his older sister, Polly.” Hannah Tanner shook her head. “Polly didn’t learn until the end of the day that her brother had died because workers weren’t allowed to speak to one another in that awful place. She had to walk home through the streets, in the dark, to tell her mother the news.”

  Lucy felt a tear fall onto her cheek, and she hurriedly dabbed at it with her handkerchief. When she put her hand back to her lap, Randolph gently covered it with his. She glanced down and then turned her eyes to him. He won her in that moment. Such understanding in his eyes, the way his brow was knitted together. Concern for her. Concern for the two tragic children.

  “Like the good daughter that she was, Polly stayed home with her mother until they buried her brother. Did the local church help? No. James was buried on credit. Buried in a churchyard for the grand sum of thirty dollars. Thirty dollars that the family didn’t have. And because Polly did not return to work the next day, or the day of her brother’s funeral, they gave her job to another girl.” Hannah Tanner pointed to a woman in the front row. “Do you know what poor Polly was forced to do?”

  Lucy held her breath.

  Hannah Tanner spoke slowly, her voice lowered as though she were sharing a confidence. “She was forced to sell her body to feed herself and her mother.”

  “Shame!” Someone near the front called out, but Lucy couldn’t see who it was.

  “It is a shame to see that happen here, in a Christian nation. God’s own children. Neglected by their fellow countrymen. Unhelped by the so-called faithful of Richmond or Philadelphia or Atlanta or Boston. Ignored by the hypocrites in the pulpits whose kingly robes or fine suits—”

  Lucy had been too focused on Hannah Tanner to notice the tall man standing in the hallway entry to the theater, his body framed in the opening of the huge pocket doors. But now he strode forward into the room, his face pink with agitation above his white clerical collar and somber black frock coat. She slid reflexively down in her chair an inch, wanting to disappear. Her father didn’t speak, but stood surveying the crowd. When his eyes lighted on Lucy, she felt the sting of his anger from twenty feet away.

  “Would you care to take a seat, brother?” Hannah Tanner addressed him from the lectern, her voice calm. Smooth.

  “No. I most certainly would not like to take a seat. Thank you.”

  She looked away and continued speaking, but much of the crowd turned in their chairs to watch Edward Searle seek out his daughter, who happened to be sitting beside their host. Lucy no longer heard Hannah Tanner’s words. Summer sunlight poured through the theater’s tall windows, but it might as well have been pitch black outside, because she felt as though she were living in a nightmare.

  Beside her, Randolph rose, extending his hand. He whispered.

  “Edward.”

  “You’ll be kind enough to step out of my way, Randolph. I’ve come to fetch my daughter home.”

  Her father had never been a cruel man. Opinionated and sometimes bigoted against people of a different political stripe, but never cruel. How had he known she would be here? He was supposed to be in Lynchburg until evening, meeting with his bishop.

  “Let’s go downstairs and have a sherry. I know you’re not a fan of female preaching.”

  “Lucy. We’re leaving.”

  Lucy knew she was supposed to meekly rise and follow him, but he was treating her like a child, and a stupid child at that. If she did not, he would be furious with her, not just because of her disobedience, but because she had embarrassed him in front of several parishioners.

  “Please sit down, Father. People are staring.”

  “Yes, Edward. You’re welcome to my seat.”

  Edward Searle towered over Randolph by a full six inches and, to Lucy, seemed to be growing taller. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Terrance make his way around the edge of the room. He stood near the wall, a dozen feet behind Randolph. Waiting.

  Her father gave a wry smile. “Will you have your bastard throw me out, Randolph?”

  “Father!” Now other heads turned. Hannah Tanner stopped speaking.

  “Lucy, you’re breaking your mother’s heart. Come home with me now. We don’t belong in this godforsaken place.”

  Realizing that everyone was staring at them now, Lucy looked back at him with hate in her heart.

  “I will not.”

  He stared at her a moment as though she were a stranger who had slapped him. She held his gaze, even though she felt her face grow warm, felt the eyes of the entire room on them.

  Randolph addressed Hannah Tanner in a loud, direct voice. “Pray continue, Miss Tanner.”

  The woman nodded, and resumed at a somewhat less impassioned volume, and the heads that had turned to stare at them returned to watching the diminutive woman at the front of the room.

  Randolph got closer to her father and said something that no one but her father could hear.

  The color drained from her father’s face, turning it a ghastly white, and Lucy feared he might faint. He opened his mouth to speak, but closed it again. Lucy pitied him in that moment and almost got up from her chair.

  Even though she could only see his back, Lucy saw that Randolph was facing him with the calm defiance that she wished that she herself had been able to manage. In this case, she would let him defend her. It was one of the hardest decisions she had ever made, and she prayed it was the correct one.

  Edward Searle looked past Randolph and into Lucy’s eyes. It was his eyes that held pity. Then he turned without another word and walked out the way he came. Terrance followed a few yards behind.

  When Randolph sat back down beside her, she saw that his usually clear forehead was beaded with perspiration, and his nose and cheeks were reddened with heat.

  She couldn’t help herself. “What did you say? How did you get him to leave?” she whispered.

  Randolph dabbed at his forehead with his handkerchief. At the front of the room, Hannah Tanner had become impassioned again. He put the handkerchief away and beckoned for Lucy to lean closer.

  “Only the truth, my dear. That you were no longer his little girl, but a woman.”

  Chapter 9

  LUCY

  June 1899

  “You’re like some Brontë character, darling. They’re always so spunky right up until they have some setback in love, and then they take to their bed with consumption. What did you expect your father to do?” Faye picked up the pink rose the cook had put on Lucy’s lunch tray and held it to her nose. It was the color of the interior of a seashell, transparent as French porcelain. “I don’t think you’re sick at all. I think you’re just pouting.”

  Lucy’s younger sister, sixteen-year-old Juliet, had been reading Wuthering Heights to Lucy all morning, and the book lay on the chair where Faye was about to settle herself.

  In truth, Lucy did feel ill. As soon as she had walked out of Bliss House the previous week, her head had begun to pound and the strength left her body. Her mother had made a dreadful scene when she arrived home. Her father sat at his desk, silently staring at her, his hands tented in front of him. But Lucy could barely attend to her mother’s words because of the pain in her head.

 
; If her malaise had come from being in Bliss House, why did she feel so certain that, if she could only return there, she would feel much better?

  Faye dropped the rose back on the tray. “You do look awful, though. And it’s beastly hot in here. Are they trying to sweat it out of you? These windows should be open.” She went to the closest window and pushed it ajar. June wasn’t much for breezes, but the air that flowed in smelled of grass and horse manure that hadn’t yet been cleared from the road.

  “Am I a scandal? Mother says I’m a scandal.”

  “I think she rather wishes you were a scandal, but no one is really talking about it because they’re all too considerate of your father. But there’s one thing I wanted to ask you: Did he really try to drag you out of there by your hair?”

  Lucy’s smile was effortful. “Of course not, silly. Who told you that?”

  “Josiah says that Randolph is furious. That he’s going to stop giving money to the church and give up his pew. What kind of spell have you put on him, you little witch?”

  Lucy closed her eyes, feeling a small bit of satisfaction that Randolph had defended her. Her father had been ridiculous and deserved to lose Randolph’s patronage. Both he and her mother were treating her like a child. She was twenty years old, and her father’s religious politics didn’t have to be hers. The lecture from her mother had included mention of the inappropriateness of women like Hannah Tanner: immodest and presumptuous bleeding hearts who had no business inserting themselves into polite society. Blackmailing good Christians by using Christ’s name for political ends. She called Hannah Tanner a perversion, and said that by forcing, forcing her father to come and rescue her from such a scandalous event, Lucy had put the entire family’s reputation at risk.

  Faye leaned over Lucy’s couch and touched her forehead. “They should have a doctor for you. I don’t know what’s wrong with your parents.”

  Before Faye could move away, Lucy grabbed her wrist.

  “I have to leave here. I feel like if I stay here, I might die.”