“No fear of that. No fear of that at all.”
“Is that the way of it then?”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean, Mrs. Flynn.”
“And I’m just as sure you do. Nobody much remembers to count the months after a few years have gone by.”
“Mick says he thinks the transfer will happen soon.”
“That’s all to the good then. You don’t want to cut it too close. You don’t want them upstairs to find out.”
“I’m not even sure myself, to tell the truth.”
“The longer you can keep it that way the better, I say. You never know how a man will take that kind of news.”
“I know my Mick.”
“I hope you do, child. I hope you do.”
*
When Ellen asked permission to go to Saint Anselm’s for late Saturday afternoon confession, Mrs. Flynn shooed the girl out of the house with a wave of her hand and the admonition to hurry back. It was on the tip of her tongue to warn her to watch out for Mr. Joseph, but at the last minute she decided to say nothing. Mr. Joseph was an odd one, but so was every other member of the Nolan family.
They all thought they kept their secrets to themselves, which just went to prove how new their money was. Old society families knew that nothing could be hidden from household staff. The difference was they didn’t try because they didn’t care what servants thought.
Miss Alice stayed up until all hours of the night praying her novenas, wanting to become a nun and pestering her father to give his permission when the man was dead set against it. You couldn’t look at her thin body and doleful face without feeling sorry for her because you knew she’d never get the only thing she wanted in life.
Mrs. Nolan thought her flirtation with laudanum went unremarked. It didn’t. She lost track of the little brown bottles, left them where the maids were bound to come across one as they dusted. Being Irish herself, the housekeeper knew that Lillian Nolan’s social ambitions were doomed to failure. It would take more than one generation to forget the family’s origins, and nothing could erase the stigma of being Catholic.
Mr. Nolan was cold, so tightly wound you’d swear you could hear him tick. A cruel man. He found fault with everything Mr. Joseph did, mocked Miss Alice’s desperate devotions, and had never forgiven his wife Lillian for her uncertain womb. Everyone knew he’d started life as a butcher, wallowing in the blood and guts of the slaughterhouses. There was something about a man whose profession was killing that set your teeth to chattering when he looked at you a certain way. No matter how well he washed, he was still bathed in blood.
Mr. Joseph was the prince of oddness, cocooned inside a flinty shell where no one could reach him. He carried on his father’s business, rarely spoke to the sister to whom he had once been close, and scorned the woman who had given birth to him. There were times when his eyes flashed rebellion, but eventually, in the housekeeper’s opinion, he would have to give in to the pressure to marry. That would be the saving of him. Domesticity would wear him down. He’d grow a paunch and find a mistress. So far he’d ignored the maids, but Mrs. Flynn was careful to keep them away from him. You never knew when a gentleman would start demanding what he felt was his due.
The young master probably wouldn’t recognize Ellen if he saw her at Saint Anselm’s. Maids were supposed to be invisible creatures; Mrs. Flynn didn’t think Ellen had done anything to attract Mr. Joseph’s attention.
“You ask me, that Ellen’s going to confession more than she should need to.” Sadie Curran, who had cooked for the Nolans since they’d moved onto Fifth Avenue, stood in the kitchen doorway, hands on her ample hips, watching the young maid walk briskly down the street. “I hope she’s not in trouble, Moira.”
“Mick’s a good man,” Mrs. Flynn said. “He’ll do right by her. Now let’s finish our tea before it gets cold.”
*
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It’s been two weeks since my last confession.”
A young voice. Female. Trembling with either fear or embarrassment. Probably both. Which meant she was about to confess to having committed sins of the flesh. That’s the way it was always phrased. Acts of impurity. Sins of the flesh. The men tended to use more descriptive words. Not the women. They whispered and sometimes they wept.
“Miseratur tui omnipotens Deus, et dimissis peccatis tuis, per-ducat te ad vitam aeternam. Amen.” Father Brennan took care not to slur the Latin syllables, not to rush through the formula, though he was certain the tearful young woman he could glimpse through the cloth covered wooden screen understood not a word of what he was saying. The sound of the Latin was enough to comfort and reassure her. May almighty God have mercy on you, forgive you your sins, and lead you to life everlasting. Amen.
“Father, I’ve committed a sin of the flesh.”
“How many times, my child? More than once?”
“Yes, Father. More than once.”
“With yourself or with someone else?”
“With a man, Father.” She sounded shocked that he would even ask.
“Is either of you married?”
“No, Father.”
He caught a flash of white as the penitent wiped her eyes and her nose with a handkerchief. She folded her hands on the ledge beneath the window with its sliding wooden screen and sighed. He knew what she was thinking. The worst was over. She’d gotten the words out and now all she needed was the penance and absolution.
“Say a rosary to Our Blessed Mother, Queen of Virgins, and come to early Mass tomorrow morning to receive Communion. Can you do that?”
“Yes, Father. They’re all Catholic at the house, even the family, so there’s never any trouble getting to Sunday Mass.”
A maid then, probably in one of the mansions along Fifth Avenue. He wondered if she’d been caught in an empty room by the son of the house. She’d have hopes and expectations; they always did, before they were tossed aside. None of them ever learned.
“Ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis, in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.” He made the sign of the cross as carefully as he pronounced the words of absolution. Father Brennan was not a priest who hurried through the sacred rituals of his calling.
As he leaned forward to close the sliding wood panel he caught a glimpse of glorious Irish red hair peeping out beneath the scarf the young woman had knotted over her head. She’d whispered her confession to disguise her voice, but everything else about her was familiar.
He knew who she was.
*
Ellen sensed Joseph Nolan’s presence in the church the moment she stepped from the confessional booth and turned toward the main altar. She always knew where he was; it was like the warning buzz of an angry bee just before it sank its stinger into you. Something about him made her uneasy. He smelled of a cologne not unlike the incense that made her dizzy at High Mass when the servers swung their censors too vigorously and clouds of perfumed smoke billowed out into the church.
She’d never dared say it to anyone, but Ellen thought Mr. Joseph looked like one of the warrior angels who had fought against Saint Michael the Archangel and lost. The bad angels were sent down into the depths of hell; they grew horns and tails and tended the fires where souls who died in a state of mortal sin burned for all eternity. That’s what he looked like, one of those bad angels who became a devil, the one about to battle Saint Michael in the church’s largest stained glass window. Too handsome for his own good, tall and muscular, hair as black as night, eyes as blue as the sky, skin that glowed golden in the summer and was as pale and perfect as new-fallen snow in the winter.
Mr. Joseph had never been accused of being too familiar with the maids, but Ellen didn’t trust him nonetheless. He might go to daily Mass and keep a rosary in his trouser pocket, but there was something about him that made her skin quiver and rise up in goose bumps. The whole Nolan family was strange.
What struck her when she first began maiding for them was how little they had to say to one ano
ther, how devoid of laughter or tenderness their speech was when they did talk. A master and mistress shouldn’t sleep in separate bedrooms, their linens never showing signs of the kind of intimacy it had been impossible to conceal in the tiny cottage where the entire Tierney family shared two rooms.
All of the Nolans left food on their plates at every meal, and sometimes Miss Alice ate nothing at all. She moved meat and vegetables around so it looked as though they’d been tasted, but very little made it to her mouth. Ellen still stole the tastiest morsels before the scullery maid scraped the family’s leftovers into the garbage pail.
The Nolans reminded her of the stone statues in her parish church back home, standing in silent judgment on poor petitioners who laid candle stubs and wildflowers at their feet. She’d been afraid of the statues when she was young enough to believe they could step down from their pedestals to chastise her, and she was afraid of Mr. Joseph for much the same reason. He didn’t seem wholly human and what he might do next was unpredictable.
She’d be glad to trade her tiny attic room in the big house for whatever Mick could provide for them. The sooner the better, she thought, wondering if today, when she made her confession, she ought to have whispered her suspicion of what might be growing inside her.
Mrs. Flynn had hinted at it, but so far Ellen hadn’t been foolish or desperate enough to confide in her. Maids who got themselves in the family way were out the door in the wink of an eye, no matter how motherly the housekeeper seemed to be.
In the way of the world, it was always the woman who got blamed.
CHAPTER 11
Now that she was no longer in a state of mortal sin, Ellen Tierney drank an extra cup of late evening tea and planned out her Sunday. She would go to early morning Mass at Saint Anselm’s, light the candle for her mother, receive Communion, and be back before the missus and the young miss rang their bells. Every Sunday the Nolans went up to 50th Street for High Mass at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, the ten-year-old gothic wonder said to rival anything Europe had ever built. The house was quiet while they were out praying with the rest of New York City’s socially prominent Catholics.
Once the family dinner had been served and cleared, she’d be free to spend the afternoon in Central Park with Colleen. Mick was on patrol, and maybe it was just as well. Ellen had been neglecting her friend lately. There’d been a time when there were no secrets between them and no thought of hiding anything. Lately though, she’d been reluctant to take Colleen into her confidence. She was in love with Mick and on the verge of starting a new life with him; it might be a breach of trust to share with a girlfriend what she was feeling. Oh, but she yearned to tell Colleen everything, to see her eyes widen and blink with disbelief and shock. There was so much Colleen didn’t know that Ellen could describe and relive in the telling. Was it a sin to talk about it? Never mind. She’d say a rosary and hope for the best.
She’d felt guilty suggesting to Colleen that an afternoon in Central Park would do her a world of good, but Mrs. Flynn had encouraged her.
“Sure and hasn’t she had a terrible time of it the past two weeks, with that Nora Kenny being murdered the way she was,” the housekeeper had said. “Cook heard from the MacKenzie cook that the Kenny girl was supposed to share Colleen’s room the night it happened. They’d gotten to be good friends over the last few years. Every time Nora and her mother came from Staten Island, Nora stayed with Colleen. Cook says Mrs. Hearne thought she was a sweet girl. And about to get married. Such a shame.”
“You don’t think Colleen would feel we were desecrating Nora’s memory?”
“You knew her too, didn’t you?”
“Not nearly as well as Colleen. Nora came out with us once when she was working at Miss Prudence’s and it was our half day.”
“The Church tells us not to mourn too long for someone we’ve lost. Nora is in heaven now, where we all hope to be some day. Colleen has lost one friend; she needs you more than she may realize.”
So it had been decided. They’d go out to Central Park together, stroll the pathways, watch the children at play, maybe go as far as the Carousel. Both girls loved the rise and fall of the brightly painted horses and the sound of the music blaring out from the spinning platform. It was shut down on really cold winter days, but it might be open and running tomorrow. They’d take a chance and walk that way.
Ellen finished her last cup of tea for the day and slipped her hand beneath her white apron into the pocket of her black uniform dress.
Her rosary wasn’t there.
It was always there, always with her every minute of the day and night, since the moment her mother pressed it into the palm of her hand before she’d left home to catch the boat to America. Frantic, she scrabbled her fingers around the empty pocket, feeling for the beads and the small silver crucifix, searching for a hole through which the rosary might have dropped to the floor. Nothing.
With a murmured excuse, she pushed her chair back from the table and ran up the back staircase to her small attic bedroom. She slept with the rosary curled beneath her pillow, so perhaps it was still there. Maybe she’d been thinking so hard about Mick when she got up this morning that she’d forgotten to put it into her pocket where it belonged. Nothing. The sheet beneath the pillow was cool and flat, and even though she tore the covers from the narrow bed and looked under the mattress and beneath the rag rug she found nothing.
“I’ve lost my rosary,” she announced when she came back downstairs, panic and tears nearly choking her.
Hands fluttered in the sign of the cross; all of the servants in the Nolan household were Catholic. Tired at the end of the day, they were drinking a final cup of tea or hot chocolate in the servants’ hall before going up to bed. Their days began hours before the family awoke and didn’t end until they were certain the bells wouldn’t ring again. It was nearly eleven o’clock. The younger maids and menservants were nodding in their chairs, their elders postponing the moment they would have to haul their aching bones up four flights of stairs to their attic rooms.
“Did you have it when you got back from going to church this afternoon?” Mrs. Flynn understood Ellen’s fears; she too had a rosary given her long ago in Ireland by a mother she’d never seen again after the boat sailed. “Did you have it in your hand when you went to confession?”
“Yes. No. I’m not sure. I think so.” Ellen couldn’t remember much of what happened in Saint Anselm’s after she’d seen Mr. Joseph Nolan there. She thought she recalled the feel of the beads slipping through her fingers as she counted off the Hail Marys of her penance before the main altar.
But had she put the rosary back into her pocket when she finished? All she could remember was seeing Mr. Joseph and feeling his gaze linger on her as she stood up from the altar rail and turned around. She could picture herself making a quick sign of the cross and a sketchy genuflection, but she could not glimpse the rosary beads. Her hand looked empty in her mind’s memory. So if the beads weren’t in her pocket, she’d definitely dropped them at the altar rail.
“That’s all right, then, Ellen. If you dropped them in the church, someone’s likely to find them and put them in the Lost and Found basket in the vestibule. They’ll be there in the morning when you go to Mass, you’ll see.” Mrs. Flynn touched the maid’s arm lightly as she made her way toward the stairs. “Off to bed with you now. You can say your prayers on your fingers. Our Lady won’t mind.”
The last one to leave the basement was Mr. Tynan, the butler. He’d locked the doors on the main floor; now he shot the bolt on the kitchen door and checked the catches on the windows. He left one gas light burning low in the hallway at the foot of the stairs, looked around to be sure nothing and no one had been overlooked, then began the long climb to his bed. Half an hour later he was deeply asleep, confident that everyone under his charge would make it safely through the night.
Ellen waited until she could hear the steady bass rumble of snoring from the men’s end of the corridor, the higher pitched noises
made by the exhausted women in the rooms on either side of her. She’d lain down on her bed fully dressed except for her outdoor boots, which she carried in one hand as she crept stealthily down the four flights of uncarpeted stairs to the basement kitchen and servants’ hall. The house was dark and silent. Here and there was the faint flicker of a damped gas light, but Ellen was too determined to be afraid. She knew every room in the Nolan house as well as she knew the lines in the palm of her hand; hadn’t she cleaned and dusted and polished those rooms often enough? The bolt on the kitchen door shot open without so much as a squeak. She relocked the areaway door from the outside and put the key in her pocket, tapping it three times for good luck and to make sure it was there for when she came back.
Shawl wrapped tightly around her upper body, she walked quickly down the street toward Saint Anselm’s. The large main doors of the church were locked at night, but one of the small side doors was left unsecured. God’s House must always welcome the sinner or the saint. If you were Catholic, you knew there’d be a way left open for you to reach the altar. It wouldn’t take more than a couple of minutes to dart inside and check the Lost and Found basket. Then she could spend the rest of the night tucked up in her own bed with the precious rosary safe in her hand. For once she wouldn’t slide it under the pillow.
She should have put on a coat as well as grabbing the shawl from her hook in the boot room. It was cold tonight, though thank God there wasn’t a wind. The sky was black and clear, with stars twinkling in its depths. Perhaps the Star of Bethlehem had risen far off to the east somewhere, ready to lead the Three Kings across deserts to the Christ Child. It was lovely to think about Christmas coming and the Holy Baby. She touched a tentative hand to her belly, wondering if it could be true that an infant was beginning to grow in there. It would be a boy, she thought, with Mick’s black hair and blue eyes, to grow up strong and tall like his father. She wanted her rosary. She had prayers to say. A girl needed her mother when she got in the family way; holding the beads in her fingers was like clasping her mother’s hand.
Lies That Comfort and Betray Page 11