by Mary Volmer
“Whot’s this, then?” she squawked. Light seeped through a narrow window, eye level with the ground outside, but the savory smell raised my spirits considerably. A carcass simmered over a shiny black range; three loaves of bread and an apple pie cooled on the sideboard. I’d have pie for supper, thank you, or apples. I’d eat my weight in apples.
The cook stood up. “No, now. Got no time for no mo’ of this help.” A freckled girl with frizzed red hair, paring apples at the far end of the table, gave the cook a disgusted look. “I’m supposed to be running a kitchen not some kind of wayward home for . . .” She peered closer. “What’s the matter with this one? She dumb?”
“I’m not dumb!” The assumption stung more than usual. “And I’m no servant, either.”
“Good thing, by the look of you,” said the redhead. Violet smirked.
“Alby,” said Cook, but was staring hard at me as if expecting I was hiding something under the ugliness that would volunteer itself to her alone. I squared myself, but managed only to glare at her feet. Cook shook her head, gave a little laughing grunt.
“But you’re hungry, I guess, and you’ll say yes ma’am, no ma’am to the hand that feeds and clothes you. Just like this one.” She angled her wattle at Violet. “Huh, but you ain’t a servant.”
She spun to the oven, pulled out another pie. “Out the way.” I stepped aside and she placed the pie on the sideboard next to the other one. It smelled so good, I was ready to call myself a servant or a toad for a bite. Cook shut the oven door with her boot heel, stirred the pot, and turned around shaking her f inger at the room at large. “Not a help then you’re a hindrance, what I was taught. Be of use in the world, my ma tells me, and play the part the good lord writ for you to play, and I don’t complain, do I?”
The redhead looked up, down, bit her lip.
“I carry on. I carry on saying not a word about it, though if I was to say, I would tell that woman, that it’d be kind. It’d be Christian to tell me when I got another mouth I got to feed. Missus got no idea how hard it is to—”
“She’s not for Miss Rose, Mrs. Nettle,” said Violet curtly. “She’s to attend the master.”
The cook’s little mouth closed over whatever it was she was going to say. The redhead’s eyes widened with alarm. I glanced between them, then back at Violet whose satisf ied expression did nothing to comfort me.
“What’s wrong with the master?”
“Well, now,” said Mrs. Nettle, with some hesitance.
“It’s haunts,” said the redhead, leaning forward as though haunts might now be listening. “It’s the haunts what visit him.”
A bell in a row of bells rang in the hallway. “Violet!” I heard dimly through the floorboards. Violet jerked at the sound and hurried away, more than happy, I’m sure, to leave me in the clutches of this revelation.
“Not a servant, huh,” said Mrs. Nettle, watching Violet go, then bade me sit. The redhead scooted closer. Cook frowned but didn’t stop her.
“Spirits what told Old Master how to build, where to build this place.” She looked about her.
Dot was for spirits, but I was never sure what I believed for myself and what I believed for Dot. Contemplating it at all brought unwelcome thoughts of the dead girl in the river. “I’m not sure I believe in . . .”
“Don’t matter, do it?” said Mrs. Nettle. She set a plate of stew before me. “What is, is, whether you believe or not. You, get back to it,” she told Alby.
“Well, who are they then?” I asked, my mouth full, “the spirits?”
In my experience, spirits weren’t meant to haunt any old stranger for no reason. The redhead sat rigid straight. I stopped chewing, half expected to turn and f ind a spirit hovering there behind me. But it was only the housekeeper, Mrs. Hardrow, arms crossed, in the doorway. Alby bent to her task with new industry.
“Alby,” said Mrs. Hardrow.
“Missus?”
“Alby, I know you have been smoking. If I catch you, you will be dismissed without a reference.”
“Yes, Missus.”
14
“Call yourself what you wish,” said Mrs. Hardrow leading me up the narrow servants’ staircase, past the f irst landing, the keys and bangles she wore on a chain around her waist jangling softly. “So long as you do what you are told and keep your own business. I will not tolerate a wastrel.” She paused, glancing back in the darkness, her voice clipped and flat. “Or a thief.”
Violet, I thought.
Miss Rose and Mrs. French, she said, carrying on, occupied adjacent rooms on the second floor. Violet kept quarters next to Miss Rose. Most of the servants slept in the carriage house, except for the driver, Cyrus, and his boy, who slept in a loft over the barn and cared for the horses and the garden. Mrs. Nettle, the cook, and Mr. Roberts, the butler, kept rooms a respectable distance apart in the basement. Mrs. Hardrow’s quarters were on the third floor, where the old master was kept under the care of Nurse Lipman, with whom I would share the room adjacent the Master’s. My days would be divided, though not equally, Hardrow said, between the sickroom and my studies, with reasonable time set aside for exercise and leisure. The balance would be determined by the old man’s health and disposition, did I understand?
She pushed through a service door to the third landing. White light poured through the glassed cupola. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust, and when they did, I saw a grim and shabby sister of the other two floors. Three rugs, blanched pea-soup green, overlapped the scuffed wood floor. No sculptures. No portraits or draperies. All manner of sounds rippled up the spiral staircase, which when I ventured to look, seemed to coil forever down, down and down again.
Still, it was not the great distance to the gallery below but a labored moan from the door opposite that stopped my feet. To this door Mrs. Hardrow strode and stood waiting for me. “Go on,” she said. “Open it.”
I opened that door to the stink of piss, and shit, the sharp scent of liniment—but no haunts that I could see, though I couldn’t see much. One sputtering lamp on the last of its wick was the only light. Felt curtains shrouded the windows, and a number of paintings slumbered darkly on the walls. In the center of the room, a great canopy bed was moored like a ship, and in its center, I saw the turtlehead of a skeletal old man asleep on the pillow. A powerfully built woman with a broad, sweaty face snored by his side in an armchair. Mrs. Hardrow motioned me to close the door, and without having said a word, she closed the door on talk of spirits.
The room I was to share with Nurse Lipman had but one rumpled bed, one dresser, no window. It was oddly shaped to f it the space with f ive walls and three doors—one to the hall, one to the closet, one to the master’s chamber, which squeaked open. The nurse’s head poked through the door.
“Missus?” Upholstery-patterned sleep lines crisscrossed her cheeks.
“The door, Nurse Lipman,” said Hardrow. Lipman stepped in, closed the door, but the sickroom stink lingered, as did her anxious expression. Hardrow acknowledged neither.
“Missus,” said Lipman, “I was up all last night with him, or I swear I never would have fallen asleep.”
“Very well,” said Hardrow, turning to go.
“Missus, I wonder if I might . . .” Lipman motioned that she wished to speak to Hardrow in private, on the landing. Hardrow wouldn’t have it.
“What, Nancy?”
“It’s just that . . .” Lipman looked over at me, back to Hardrow. “I’m sorry, Missus. I know you said, but can you say it again?”
This time Hardrow yielded. Not only yielded but placed both hands on the nurse’s broad shoulders, waited until Lipman met her eyes. “You are not being replaced, Nancy. You have done a f ine job.” Her sharp nod was the period at the end of her sentence.
Minutes later, Mrs. Hardrow left me to wait outside the parlor where Miss Rose and company were concluding their visit over cof
fee. Nerves made a f ine jumble of my guts, but at least I’d meet her here. Better than in that dreadful off ice full of mirrors. When I had managed to sleep the night before, I’d dreamed I’d been trapped inside that room—bad enough until the walls began to shrink close. Then there’d been nowhere I could turn without seeing myself.
The door swung open.
Miss Rose, in purple taffeta, walked out arm in arm with a compact little man, eyes darting, birdlike behind wire spectacles. Mrs. French, in a shapeless worsted dress, followed.
“There will be little risk, I assure you, Captain,” said Miss Rose, her voice as deep and embracing as the smile she gave him. “You need only deliver the articles to the city. Mr. Limb has agreed to handle the orders abroad. William Stark will convey the articles from the city. You remember his famous mother, I’m sure. And I will see to the rest. Fitting, don’t you think, that the methods my father employed in the cause of freedom will now also be employed in this case?”
The man paused at this, peered at her through his spectacles. “Surely you do not equate—”
Mrs. French opened her mouth as if to intercede, but was too late.
“Oh, but we do, Captain!” said Miss Rose. “What else but a slave would you call a man with no right to represent his own wishes, to develop his God-given abilities, or to support himself by his own merit? What do you call a man with no right to govern the functions of his own body? I have described, Captain, the American Woman. We are pursuing reasonable goals by reasonable means. And when a government makes reasonable acts criminal . . .”
“‘Then reasonable people commit criminal acts.’ Herbert French, yes, yes.” He pulled on his gloves. “I have read the work.”
Miss Rose looked at Mrs. French, who shook her head to the silent communication between them. “And?” said Miss Rose.
“This case differs,” he said. “Surely you can see that. Your father had much to lose by endeavoring to free his fellow man from the bonds of slavery. Much to lose and very little but moral capital to gain. Surely you see that in this case, unlike the f irst, prof it might easily be”—the captain paused and chose his next word carefully—“misconstrued to be the motivating factor. Someone might say you wish to make a mockery of his sacrif ice for your own prof it.”
Miss Rose put one gloved hand to her mouth as if suppressing a sneeze, pulled it away to a burst of laughter.
“Oh, Captain!” she said. “I did not know you for a humorous man.”
The Captain wasn’t laughing and did not look the humorous sort. Their talk turned to pleasantries. I paid no more attention and might not have paid attention to anything they said, except for the mention of William. I couldn’t imagine that Miss Rose’s larger affairs would ever have anything to do with me.
Mrs. Hardrow showed me into the parlor. Violet sat with her back to me at the piano playing three notes up, three notes down, again and again, until we heard the shake of a halter and wheels on gravel as the carriage pulled away. Miss Rose returned, laughter gone, her face much altered from the pleasant expression it had held. “A humorous man, Captain Latimer. The nerve to suggest . . .”
“Rose,” said Mrs. French trailing her back into the room.
“To suggest that I . . . And what if I do prof it? Why should prof it nullify the intent? I tell you, if it were prof itable to f ight injustice, then injustice would become as scarce as gold.”
“But he did not say—”
“I’m talking about what he implied, Lorena. Why are you defending him? This venture was your idea in the f irst place.”
“The idea, yes, but the venture—”
“And just how many women do you think an idea would benef it? Mrs. French?”
Miss Rose lowered herself into one of three green divans arranged in a semicircle but didn’t appear any more comfortable. Whalebone kept her straight as an exclamation point, taffeta rustled around her legs, and as the feathers in her hair settled, her face changed again, this time to a despair that seemed to overtake her only after a moment’s consideration.
“Does your Mrs. Livermore make a prof it from her endeavors, Lorena? Quite a prof it, I think. And yet, because my convictions, though they are widely held in secret, are publicly disfavored, they are . . .”
“Suspected, overlooked,” Mrs. French supplied, staring out the window, her back to the room. “Disregarded, trivialized.”
“Tri-vi-al-ized!” Miss Rose declared, as if she’d pulled the word from the air. “I will not be trivialized. Violet!”
Violet, poised at the piano, rushed to Miss Rose’s side. “Play,” said Miss Rose. Violet rushed back to the piano to play the song that accompanied those three notes she had been repeating. All the time, I had been standing near the entryway beside a fluted vase as tall as I, transf ixed and more than a little embarrassed by the performance. I was not used to such displays of emotion by a grown woman. She spotted me by the vase.
“You. Girl. Come here.”
I had been the only unacknowledged member of Miss Rose’s audience and would have preferred to keep it that way. Now the novelty of my presence in that house swept fresh upon me; she raised her hand sharply to her head, and my attention to her curls, her feather, her lavender scent, and I could not look away.
“You are what, again? How old?
“Thirteen. But small, Miss.”
“Thirteen but small,” she repeated as if what I’d said was of great and lasting import. “And you have no other dresses? Mrs. Hardrow?”
Hardrow made a note of it in a little book that hung from her key chain. She also, no doubt, noted my carpetbag, which I still held behind me. I’d seen the way Nurse Lipman looked at me even after Hardrow’s reassurance, and I wasn’t about to leave it just anywhere for her thick f ingers to pick through.
“And you have met my father?” said Miss Rose.
“Seen him,” I said.
“Have seen. I have seen him.”
“What I said.”
“You have not,” Miss Rose said. “You have not seen him. You will never see him. What you saw was the aged shell of a man. My father founded this town. Did you know that? Founded and named,” Miss Rose said, giving me no chance to answer. “He will be remembered for this, and that memory, too, will be a shined up shell of who he was.”
She held my gaze, a terse half smile on her lips. Violet left the piano to stand by Miss Rose’s side but was paid no notice.
“Do you know why he called this town Reliance? Do you?”
I looked at Violet, at Hardrow. No help. “The spirits told him to?”
“The spirits!” Amusement lifted her face. She might have held me on a platter. “She’s been here a day, not even a day, and already she—Who has f illed your head with spirits?”
Hardrow caught my eye, gave a short shake of the head. Violet said nothing. I gulped.
“No one, Miss.” Miss Rose adjusted her hat. The blue vein on her temple pulsed.
“The spirits told you then! Fabulous. And what”—she sat back, crossed both arms before her—“What have the spirits told you about me?”
I had heard nothing in particular, but sensed “nothing” might not be the right answer.
“Don’t.” I caught myself. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know, or won’t say?”
“Don’t know, Miss.” I stood, squirming, as she watched me, one f inger tapping the side of her exquisite nose. William spoke about different kinds of seeing, different kinds of looks, but I couldn’t place this one. I couldn’t imagine what it was she was seeing in me. A Janus face, whatever that was?
The butler, at the door, cleared his throat. “Mrs. Milfred Drabney, Miss Rose. Of the Wayward Home.”
But Miss Rose’s countenance again altered, quickly this time, with no apparent deliberation. The color left her face, her eyes glazed, she folded or rather fell
onto the settee, one hand to her temple. “Miss!” said Violet. Miss Rose batted Violet’s hand away. Mrs. French crossed the room and sat close without touching her.
“Rose,” she said. “Maybe you should . . .”
“Nonsense. Richard.” She motioned to the butler, and with him, a moment later, a frowsy little woman in Quaker gray waddled through the door. Miss Rose put her hand on my shoulder and helped herself up, weighing much less than I imagined, as if she, too, were made of cloth and ribbon. Her skirt sprang into shape around her. She reached for Violet, who hovered behind, then linked our hands, and pushed the two of us—her ornament and her oddity—out of the parlor.
“Mrs. Drabney!” Miss Rose’s voice rang out in greeting. “A delight to see you. How can I help?”
15
The instant we were out the door, Violet wrenched herself free and swiped her hands down her pinafore. “I don’t know what you think you are doing. Miss Rose has a girl. Me.”
“I’m not,” I said, “I wasn’t doing anything.” And then out of bafflement as much as ire, I gave her what I considered the teeny-tiniest of shoves.
Violet collapsed across the polished marble, flailing and crying as if I’d slugged her. It was such a wrought performance, I just stood there, watching.
“Madelyn!” said Mrs. Hardrow stepping out of the parlor.
I looked down at gasping, sobbing Violet and back to Mrs. Hardrow, all but helpless in the face of such a display. I wished I had slugged her. “But I didn’t! I wasn’t doing anything. She’s just . . . She’s not even bleeding!”