The sprinkle of freckles on her face had darkened. He should have remembered to pin her veil back on, but if he moved one inch either up or down the hill, he would influence her decision. She searched his face, her blue eyes reflecting the clouds scudding along on the wind. She fingered the medal instead of the pearl buttons of her dress. Then she climbed to her feet and shot up the hill, her skirts bunched in her hands, her shoes and stockings forgotten in the dune grass. William climbed to his feet, gathered her things, and started after her up the sandy path. Here and there grasses were uprooted where Emma had grabbed for a handhold. At each twist and turn, he expected to find her slumped on the sand, but as he slipped and fought his way up the unforgiving verge, her footsteps grew more fleet. He found her perched on the precipice of the headland, her legs dangling over the cliff edge.
Thoreau had once said of this very place, A man may stand there and put all America behind him.
Well, a girl could, too.
The brilliant light dazzled. The wide beach stretched to the north and south. Beyond the long sandy bar, the sea sparkled in the sunlight.
William sat down next to Emma. She was winded and breathing hard, but her cheeks were dappled with sun and exertion and pride. The medal glinted in the sun.
They were the only people for miles.
They could see forever.
“We could count the waves,” Emma said.
And so they began.
Chapter Forty
After William rode away with Emma, Elizabeth and Amelia abandoned Claire’s schooling for a morning constitutional along the beach. There was an ebb tide, and low waves were breaking in a soothing, gentle rhythm. Claire found a piece of driftwood and began to poke at the bubbling clam holes dotting the sand. She wore a pair of rubber boots they’d purchased for her in a shop on Commercial Street, and they peeked out from underneath her dress when she leaned over to inspect the effect of her labors. A light breeze smelled of brine and sea foam.
Out of the corner of her eye, Amelia studied Elizabeth. The sea air and daily practice had done them all good, but Elizabeth was not herself. She had freckled some in the sun, despite their wide hats, and she was attentive to the girls, but she lacked luster.
“You’re sounding wonderful on your instrument, Lizzie,” Amelia said. And she was. The whole town was enthralled. Her practices had transformed into impromptu concerts, and townspeople found reason to abandon dinner preparations and chores to be seated outside the veranda when she played.
“The violin goes out of tune so quickly in the sea air.”
“Well, I can’t tell. I think you may sound even better than when you left Paris.” They walked on, following Claire, who was chasing a seagull. Amelia said, “I’ve held off asking you, Lizzie, but can you tell me now why you wanted to leave Paris?”
“The girls,” Elizabeth said, her answer swift.
“But you were unhappy before. You were on the verge of quitting before we left. I could tell.”
Elizabeth’s mouth set in rueful embarrassment. “You think I play well because you love me, Grandmama, but I don’t. And they knew it at the school. Monsieur Girard—he made me understand that. He told me every day that I might as well not even be there, since I was taking the place of someone far more talented.”
A wave of fury washed over Amelia. She recalled the man’s cool good looks, the arrogant cant to his shoulders, his ingratiating bonhomie. “He said what?”
Elizabeth held up her hand. “Don’t make me tell you any more. It’s humiliating.”
“Every day?”
Tears formed in Elizabeth’s eyes, and she looked away, tight-lipped. “He said I have no talent. That I am not technically versatile. That if I ever dared try to join an orchestra, I would garner no success. He advised me to go home. To give up. And then Emma and Claire—died.” They both watched Claire skipping along the beach, flicking at the wet sand with her stick, sending ribbons of seaweed flying into the sky. “Monsieur Girard was relentless with his criticism, and punishing. And cruel.”
“Cruel? Did he hurt you?” Amelia said, instantly alert.
“No. No,” Elizabeth shook her head. “It’s nothing like that.”
Amelia exhaled. She would never forgive herself if Elizabeth, too, had been harmed the way the girls had been. “He had no right.”
“Charles Girard is the preeminent violinist of France. I think he knew what he was talking about.”
“Listen to me. He had his own reasons to discourage you. The director himself told me that you might soon surpass him in skill. No doubt that small man feared your ascendance. And you, a girl. He must have been humiliated.”
“Grandmama—”
“Do you know that your Aunt Mary had the same difficulty? No one wanted her to be a physician. The Albany Medical School rejected her out of hand. To get what she wanted, she had to go to war. And even then she had to fight everyone—Dorothea Dix, even William. Yes,” she said, to Elizabeth’s incredulous look. “Obviously William came around, but my point is that it wasn’t easy for her. Darling, you can’t just let one man undermine your life.”
“But he’s the one who would know—”
“I’ll grant you that Monsieur Girard is a great violinist. But that does not render him free of prejudice or jealousy or even malevolence.”
Elizabeth stopped abruptly.
“Paris is not the only conservatory in the world,” Amelia said. “There is Boston. You could audition while we are here.”
“I can’t. I won’t leave the girls.”
“It’s just one day, darling. Write, why don’t you? Take the train over, or we’ll even hire a boat. It’s a day trip. I’ll go with you. And if the conservatory doesn’t accept you, then in turn I’ll accept your assessment of your own playing, but not until then. Because I know that some men don’t like to be usurped. And I also know that when you play, darling, it’s the most beautiful sound in the world.”
Elizabeth shook her head and closed her eyes. “But how could he have said those things, Grandmama?”
“Envy and fear make people unkind. I wish I’d known what was happening to you in Paris. Write Boston today, Elizabeth, when we get back to the hotel. Will you?”
Elizabeth nodded, and they turned and walked across the beach to where Claire had scampered to the ocean edge and was letting wavelets lap over the tips of her boots.
“And what of Jakob?” Elizabeth said quietly, so that Claire would not overhear her question. “Why has he betrayed us?”
“Perhaps he has no choice.”
“Of course he has a choice. Who could defend such a man as Mr. Harley? How can Jakob look at Emma and Claire and then make an argument in his favor? I will never understand.”
“Lizzie, in the last few months, you’ve lost a lot—Bonnie, for a while Emma and Claire, the conservatory—but what I think you’ve really lost is your heart.”
Elizabeth turned. “But I can’t love the girls and Jakob at the same time.”
“Maybe you can,” Amelia said. “Maybe you already do.”
—
A few days later, Elizabeth stood in the studio of Julius Eichberg, the director and founder of the Boston Conservatory. A German violinist, he had granted Elizabeth an audition by immediate return letter. His nascent conservatory could not have differed more from the bustling Paris Conservatoire and its marble, colonnaded home on the rue Bergère. The Boston Conservatory, operating now for only twenty-two years, did not have its own building. It rented rooms on the second and third floors in the Mason & Hamlin Organ Company’s factory. Its marble dolomite facade fronted the Boston Common, but one gained admission to the school by a back door off an alley and up a wooden stairwell open to the workshop floor, from which emanated a great deal of hammering and sawing.
Upstairs, Eichberg’s drafty studio had been arranged like a parlor, with a br
ocade settee, mahogany tables, and rich tapestry hangings on the walls. Overlapping Turkish rugs in hues of red and blue carpeted the entire floor, buffering any sound from the factory below. A jury made up of the three members of the core violin faculty occupied three ladder-back chairs arranged in a semicircle. They each rose when she entered and offered her their hands in greeting. Julius Eichberg had a kindly face, not unlike the director of the Paris conservatory, but there was something far less challenging in his expression.
“Begin when you are ready,” he said.
His genial greeting to both Amelia and Elizabeth had put Elizabeth at ease, and as she lifted her bow, she strove to banish M. Girard’s voice from her mind.
She had chosen to play Viotti’s Violin Concerto no. 17 again, the piece that had earned her entrance to Paris, for despite its brevity—just over ten minutes—no other music in her repertoire demonstrated a player’s dexterity and phrasing in as little time. Noble, gripping, but deceptively light and bright, the solo alluded to the darker orchestral underpinning that the jurists would not hear, for there was no orchestra to mask the tones of her instrument. And she would be handicapped by the fact that this new violin was not nearly as expressive or sensuous as her instrument at home. But therein lay the challenge. If Emma could summit a cliff, then Elizabeth could coax eloquence from lesser wood.
With the first note of the allegretto, Elizabeth slipped into the concerto’s strains. She did not hear the music as much as she saw it, shimmering and changing with each stroke of her bow. Once, she had tried to explain this to her early instructors, but no one understood what she meant, and so she stopped explaining it to anyone. But this was how she remembered music. She saw it. And this piece of music—in D Minor—looked like the colors of hope. She shut her eyes, giving in to the luster and brilliance of the melody emanating from her instrument. Playing was effortless. She forgot Monsieur Girard, forgot Paris, forgot her fear. There was only music and joy. When she finished the piece, she came back to herself slowly, the last note lingering in the air as the colors dissolved.
She was still catching her breath when Mr. Eichberg, glancing first at the other faculty, who each nodded, said, “Miss Fall, I don’t know how the Conservatoire ever parted with you. But I will happily take their loss as my gain.”
Book Three
Chapter Forty-One
On Monday June 16, the first day of the Court of Sessions, the city’s working classes awoke at dawn conscious of the immensity of the moment and decided en masse to flock to City Hall. From first light, they elbowed for position in front of the white-pillared cake box of a building, spilling onto Eagle Street and down the slope of Maiden Lane, in hopes of either being admitted to the courtroom or catching a glimpse of Emma O’Donnell, who they were now calling “the sullied girl.” Since Emma and Claire’s miraculous resurrection, the mystery of their whereabouts had become a question of sport, debated with passion in every tavern, prayer circle, factory, horsecar, railroad depot, restaurant, brewery, shop, and home, because despite the newspaper report that the Stipps were housing them, there hadn’t been a single sighting. Patients reported that William Stipp was “unavailable,” while Doctor Mary Stipp deflected even the most timorous inquiry. A cobbler’s claim of an order for shoes sized by penciled outlines created a frenzy but was dismissed as implausible when he could not produce a bill of sale. A porter of the Boston and Albany Railroad claimed that he had seen them depart one May night, but his superiors, fearful of a mob, immediately discounted him. A tantalizing rumor of the female doctor Stipp taking a holiday in Manhattan City emerged to some acclaim; however, this, too, was quashed. The only place civility reigned was among Emma and Claire’s classmates, who would answer no one’s questions, a decorum modeled for them by their teacher, who was still mortified by her role in the sisters’ disappearance and who, upon hearing of their reappearance, had wept for a day. The family of the former principal, hobbled by a dual amputation for frostbite and since confined to a wheelchair, was gauging her laudanum consumption carefully and had since the blizzard, for she had threatened to end her life over her disastrous decision that had imperiled Emma and Claire O’Donnell.
As the crowd waited to see the sisters for themselves, a general camaraderie prevailed, along with the consensus that the Hero of the Flood was still a hero. It was not clear whether or not Emma would testify. That prospect, too, had been bandied about in the newspapers, as if she were an injured prize thoroughbred slated to race in the Travers Stakes at Saratoga. There had been hints of a subpoena, soundly denied by the prosecutor’s office. But the longer people shivered in the cool of the early morning, speculation was stoked into avid fervor. By seven o’clock, the night watchman, who usually slept in the doldrums of the early dawn hours tucked into a comfortable corner of the mayor’s office, was roused by the noise and went to unlock the great iron doors. But before he did, he perceived the enormity of the waiting crowd and instead telephoned the exchange, a step he had never once taken in his sleepy five-year incumbency as nocturnal protector of one of the prettiest buildings in Albany. He implored the operators to call the City Building at Hamilton and Pearl to send as many policemen as they could, because the citizens of Albany had declared themselves newly besotted with justice, and he was afraid for his life.
Within half an hour, mounted policemen circled the throng and herded the restive crowd onto the grounds of the Albany Academy, pinning them there with billy clubs and shields while grand jurors and prospective trial jurors and witnesses and court officials slipped inside unobserved and undetected via the lowly back door normally used only for the transfer of prisoners to and from the jail next door. Officer Farrell drove to the Stipps’ house and escorted them to the courthouse via a circuitous route and snuck them inside by the same method.
With every passing hour, the racket in the streets mounted and invaded even the stately chambers of the courtroom on the third floor, giving the impression of impending revolution.
Nonetheless, by ten in the morning an efficient grand jury handed down a swift indictment of James Harley, and by noon the task of choosing trial jurors had turned out to be an expedient and surprisingly harmonious march through the available jury pool. At noon, the judge called for recess, and it wasn’t until one o’clock that an army of guards opened the doors to the public. The mayor was tagged with the onerous duty of choosing who was to be admitted, a job he accomplished on the basis of elevated stature in the community, a prejudice not unmarked by the unruly crowd, who jeered as police barred the doors behind the final candidate.
At one thirty, William Stipp and Elizabeth entered the courtroom, having spent the morning with Mary and Emma in a holding room across the echoing mezzanine. A hush fell over the overflow crowd that packed the pews and jostled for position two deep along every wall. The wide wings of Elizabeth’s bonnet served as blinders, but William saw every curious stare following them up the aisle. The presence of the Cornings and Ten Eycks and Schuylers surprised him. Madame Hubbard waved a handkerchief at them, oblivious that her plumed hat was causing a great deal of trouble for the spectators seated behind her. Horace Young caught William’s gaze and dutifully recorded something in his notebook. But Gerritt and Viola Van der Veer, curiously, were not among the crowd. William steered Elizabeth into the pew directly behind the prosecutor’s table. He was glad that as witnesses, Emma and Mary were excluded from the courtroom, and that Amelia had stayed behind to take care of Claire, who hardly even knew that the trial was taking place.
The district attorney and Jakob were already in their seats, studying sheaves of documents and notes, feigning oblivion to the gallery. James Harley met no one’s gaze. He sat slumped in his seat beside Jakob. His time in jail had wizened him, and his beard had gone completely white, though he wore a new linen frock coat and thin vest that unfortunately had already wrinkled in the heat.
A door opened behind the bench and the jury filed in. The smattering of laborers—sto
necutters and masons and the like—drew sharp scrutiny from the gallery, but it was the presence of Harmon Pumpelly that was greeted with a collective inhalation of astonishment. As president of the Albany Gas Lighting Company, Albany Savings Bank, and Albany Insurance, Pumpelly was known to everyone. The rest of the jury threw self-conscious glances at the crowd, but Pumpelly, chosen as foreman, nodded to the assembled as if he were the judge himself, lending a further air of gravity to the trial.
“All rise.” At the bailiff’s reedy cry, Judge Julius Thayer, attired in a voluminous robe and powdered wig, marched into the courtroom and with an impatient wave commanded everyone back into their seats. Throughout Albany, Thayer’s adherence to the law had achieved legendary status. At nearly fifty, the big man was stone-faced and glum, his visage cemented in impassivity. A bulbous nose, thick jowls undisguised by a thatch of beard, and a heavy forehead gave an impression of rigorous authority that his tired gaze did nothing to dispel. His wife, Alice, had died six weeks ago during childbirth, but not before producing a fifth daughter. The wet nurse was rumored to be unreliable in her milk, and neighbors reported that the child frequently cried all night. Now Thayer’s exhausted gaze raked courtroom and spectators alike before calling the courtroom to order with a sharp rap of his gavel.
“I want to take a moment to make clear that this court is fully cognizant of the infamy of this case.” Thayer’s was a rumbling growl of a voice, thick with catarrh but loud enough to rise above the din outside. “If there is any misbehavior on the part of the gallery, I will not hesitate to clear this courtroom. During this trial, there will be revelations that will prove shocking to some, particularly any ladies who have been foolish enough to attend, though presumably that is why many of you are here. I find your interest especially to be suspect.” He glowered at them, and the women ducked their heads, embarrassed to be singled out. “Nevertheless, here you all are. I warn each one of you to hold your tongues. I care nothing for your standing in the community or any privilege you may feel you possess. This is my courtroom and I will kick out the lot of you if you even so much as peep.”
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