Heresy

by Melissa Lenhardt

  “Most likely because they’re so much better at it than the men,” said the president of the group, Dr. Alida Avery. Everyone laughed and nodded. “Women should have equal rights in everything, including the ability to do wrong.”

  “And be punished equally for it?” I asked.

  “Oh no,” Patricia Perkins said. “I’m sure if this hypothetical gang exists, they have a pure motivation for it.”

  “For breaking the law?” said Kaye Hunter, the wife of a state legislator whose support of suffrage extended only to letting his wife attend meetings. “If we want equality, we have to be treated equally under the law.”

  “So, what? Are you advocating for hanging women who kill drunken, abusive husbands?”

  “Of course not. But these are women who are stealing from hardworking men.”

  “They haven’t injured anyone,” I said.

  The women looked at me. “Are you implying this gang is real?” Alida asked.

  “That would be disastrous to our cause,” Kaye Hunter said.

  “Why?”

  “Because it would give our opponents another arrow in their quiver of arguments against us.”

  “We are trying to convince them we would be a morally upright, balancing effect on voting. If there are a bunch of women running around the country acting like men, it would give them the opportunity to say that we bring nothing to the voting booth.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” I said. “It makes no sense.”

  “Which is precisely why it will work brilliantly against us,” Alida said.

  The secretary came up and told Alida they needed to start the meeting, and the small group dispersed. Alida touched my arm to signal me to stay. “Are these women real?”

  I nodded.

  Alida inhaled. “Tell them to keep quiet until after the election. They very well may be the difference between us winning or losing.”

  Wednesday, August 8, 1877

  Dorcas came to see me today. Thank God Hattie and Garet weren’t here. She was in a rage and accused me of protecting Garet. I asked her what she was talking about, and she relayed Garet’s meeting with Callum Connolly the day before.

  “She came in and confessed! To a crime we didn’t realize she committed!”

  I asked her to explain, and she said that the clerk who had been pistol-whipped didn’t remember the event. He remembered locking the door to the bank, but everything after that was a blur. I cursed inwardly. Goddamn Garet and her arrogance. If she would have just listened to me.

  “Did she confess to the other robberies?”

  “No. But I know it was her. Are you working with them?”

  I was taken aback at how clever Dorcas was, how she had not only pegged Garet as the culprit with little to no evidence, but had also surmised I could fall under her spell. My shocked expression served me well as I lied in my own defense and put the blame back on Dorcas.

  “If Margaret Parker is the leader of the gang, I do not know it. The name the woman gave me was Sally Steele. If you had bothered to tell me of your suspicion of this Margaret Parker I would have approached my time with them differently. Asked different questions, probed in different ways. If they fooled me, you have only yourself to blame.”

  Dorcas’s nostrils flared, a mannerism I realized happened when she was challenged or angry. “I will prove it myself, then.”

  “How?”

  “Callum invited Margaret to visit her ranch this weekend. Of course I am going as well. We leave for the business survey from there. By the time we leave, I will have outed Margaret Parker for the thief and murderer she is.”

  “Murderer?”

  “There was a man, a newspaperman, killed nearby in the moments before the bank robbery. It was suspected that the thieves did it as a distraction.”

  “Oh, I …” I clamped my mouth shut, lest I say I didn’t believe Garet would do that. “The women I was with weren’t violent in the least. It was one of their firm tenets to not hurt anyone.”

  “She played you very well. But that’s no surprise. She is a manipulative, selfish woman. You can salvage your case.”

  “How?”

  “Come to the train station tomorrow. I will point her out and we will know once and for all if Margaret Parker is the fiend who has been terrorizing our company.”

  “Of course,” I said. “I would be happy to.”

  Dorcas left, and I collapsed into this chair. Garet a killer? I didn’t believe it. Hattie I would believe it of. And Stella, of course. But would Garet take another person’s life, and as a distraction? No. Impossible.

  Dorcas is the biggest threat to Garet’s being able to live out the rest of her days in peace. She’s a threat to Hattie and Jehu and Stella and Joan’s freedom, and I am the only one who realizes.

  Thursday, August 9, 1877

  I’m shaking as I write this, which explains my crooked, jittery writing. I ball my hands into fists to stop the trembling, with little success. I have done something I never imagined I would do, but I had no choice. I had to protect them, even when it means I—

  Friday, August 10, 1877

  Garet left today, and I immediately started worrying. Dorcas was out of the way, but there was no way to know if she’d worked on her nephew, told him of her suspicions, laid out her very clear and accurate case. Save the murder. I will not believe that. I have done what I can, but I fear my choice of silence will come back to haunt me.

  I went to see Dorcas, as well. Not knowing how delirious she might be from the blow to her head, I knew that if she was of sound mind, she would expect me to come, she would wonder where I was. The nurse wouldn’t allow me to see her, so I wrote a note, telling Dorcas I was at the train station and that the woman with her nephew was not Sally Steele.

  I am relieved, but I fear … there is something that I’m missing.

  Sunday, August 12, 1877

  Centennial Women’s Boarding House

  Denver, Colorado

  This morning I changed boardinghouses in case Dorcas recovers and comes looking for me.

  Hattie received a note from Garet that she was going to travel with Callum Connolly as his secretary, to visit his holdings. She expects to be gone three weeks, until September second. How am I going to survive with Hattie for three weeks? She is suspicious of me, and I suspect she’s following me wherever I go.

  Wednesday, August 15, 1877

  Colorado Springs Hotel

  Colorado Springs, Colorado

  I need to establish myself as a member of the suffrage community to keep abreast of the plans for the march the day before the election. On a personal level separate from this case, it is a cause that is close to my heart. I want it to succeed, and I want to do what I can to help.

  “Negro women going to get the vote, too?” Hattie asked.

  “Of course. Negro men received it with the Fourteenth Amendment. Negro women shall be enfranchised, as well.”

  “Humph. I won’t believe it until I drop a ballot in a box.”

  We had this conversation on the train to Colorado Springs. I’d felt jittery in Denver, afraid that Dorcas wouldn’t believe my lie and would come searching for me. I had switched boardinghouses as a precaution, telling Hattie the cost was better (it was worse; my funds were dwindling), but I knew enough of Dorcas’s intelligence and her determination to know I wasn’t safe. When I heard of a suffrage talk in Colorado Springs, I told Hattie we should go, establish her as a member of the movement. I explained to her that I’d given a fake name when I attended, so that there would be no connection with Grace Trumbull, the woman kidnapped by outlaws, and I suggested she use a different name, as well.

  “What name did you use?”

  “Claire Hamilton.”

  “Claire. It suits you.”

  I blushed at the compliment and the pleasure of hearing my name at long last.

  “Thank you. What name will you use?”

  “Henrietta.”

  “It’s beautiful, and close enough to
your name it won’t be too confusing.”

  “It is my name. But of course you think I’m not smart enough to use an alias.”

  “No, I didn’t mean it that way.”

  “Sure sounded like it.”

  “You’re determined to think the worst of me, aren’t you?”

  “Haven’t done anything to ease my mind yet.”

  I huffed and looked out the train window at the flat landscape sliding by. If she only knew what I’d done to protect them. We were silent for the remainder of the ride.

  When we arrived and checked into the hotel, Hattie requested her own room. I was relieved; I was still smarting from her insult. This would give me a chance to pay a visit to Sally Dove without needing to evade Hattie.

  19

  WPA Slave Narrative Collection

  Interview with Henrietta Lee

  Thursday, September 10, 1936 cont

  You should have seen the relief on Grace’s face when Garet came back from Callum Connolly’s office, and the fear when she heard of Garet’s plan to visit the Poudre River Ranch with him and Dorcas. She and I both tried to talk Garet out of it, for different reasons. Finally Grace gave up and left. I asked Garet if I could kill her now and she laughed and said no. ‘Keep doing what you’re doing. You’ll know when you should kill her.’

  “I was plumb tired of Grace Trumbull, and that’s a fact. I was either with her or following her. I knew that woman almost as well as Jehu by the time it was all over. I found myself wishing she would make a wrong move so I could kill her and put myself out of my misery. But after that first meeting with Dorcas, she never met her again.

  “I’d received a letter from Jehu, which was a surprise. He wasn’t much of a letter writer. It wasn’t a love letter. It was full of news of the weather, the progress on breaking the fresh mustangs, talk of the cowboys we’d hired to help him, news of Stella and Joan. He mentioned that Joan was becoming a woman, with womanly thoughts, and wished I was there to be a settling presence on Stella, who looked about ready to murder any man who tipped his hat at Joan.

  “Joan, that girl. I think she was doing it on purpose to irritate her sister. She’d always gone along with Stella’s overprotectiveness, but she’d had her fill. Stella hated all men, which made Joan love them. It was a disaster waiting to happen with Spooner sniffing around. It’s easy to say that now, with decades of hindsight. I figured Spooner would have her and leave her and she’d grow up a little. Learn a lesson. Wish I would have taken Jehu’s concerns more seriously.

  “But reading Jehu’s letter made me miss him something fierce. I hated sleeping alone, and more and more I was coming around to the idea of hanging up our outlaw hats and settling down. I was feeling my age, and I was just past thirty at the time. Hard to believe I’ve lived more life in the sixty years since. Back then, I thought my life was almost over.

  “I missed Jehu, and I was worried about Garet. A day or two after she’d left she dropped a short note telling us she was going on Connolly’s annual tour of his businesses as his temporary secretary since Dorcas had fallen ill. But goddamn was Garet lucky. She’d gone to case the ranch and ended up being handed the opportunity to case every one of Connolly’s businesses. We could hit more than one, go out with not a bang, but an explosion. I kept telling Garet we needed to move on from the Connollys, but she would not listen. Lots of heartache and lives would have been saved if she’d listened to me. But this was her last hurrah, and all I could do was to make sure me and mine didn’t die, and that I could kill Grace if she betrayed us.

  “I kept expecting the sheriff or Pinkertons to bust through the door for me, to get a cable that Garet had been taken into custody, but it never happened. None of it. Grace and I disguised ourselves and watched the bank, made false plans about how we were going to rob it, sewed suffragist sashes for the march we were never going to attend. Grace seemed to give her all to our cause. We were rarely apart, but when we were, I followed her.

  “Even though I knew her for a traitor, damn if Grace wasn’t growing on me, and I think I was growing on her. It was a gut feeling. You ever have one of those? I do, and usually I’m right. I had one about you. I knew you would treat my story with respect, not dismiss me. I know you are, child. It feels good to get this all out, you see. It’s been bottled up way too long. You know, I can see now why Garet wanted Grace to tell our story.

  “Grace was distracted and fidgety. Couldn’t sit still. I think she felt the walls closing in on her. Or maybe her conscience was getting to her. When she said she was going to Colorado Springs for a suffrage meeting, I said I was going along. She didn’t like that one bit, but she could hardly stop me. My money spent as well as hers, and Colorado didn’t have the Jim Crow laws. Jehu and I couldn’t marry; that was illegal. But otherwise Negroes were supposed to be afforded the same rights. So I went with her. We were almost to Colorado Springs when she told me that she’d used a different name for the suffragists. Claire Hamilton. She suggested I do the same, so there wouldn’t be any tie between us and the gang, if word finally got out about what we’d done.

  “When we got to the hotel, I got my own room. Grace was surprised, and a little suspicious, since I was always going on about money and our lack of it. Told her I didn’t like to share a bed with anyone but Jehu. Our rooms were next door, and we said we were going to rest a bit, then go to dinner. The meeting wasn’t until the morning. I had no intention of resting, and neither did Grace. I changed clothes, and when she left about a quarter hour later, I followed.

  “She’d changed clothes, too, into a plain dress and drab gloves. She walked aimlessly, peeking into store windows, taking her time, and I started to think she was just out for a stroll. Then she made a turn into the tenderloin district. She went down an alley and knocked on the back door of one of the houses. A whore opened the door, and with a casual, knowing smile, and a very friendly caress, let her in.

  “I found the nearest saloon and went in for a drink. Was dressed like a man, but kept to myself in the corner just in case. Grace’s attachment to Garet took on a whole new tenor, let me tell you. I remembered Garet saying Grace had a crush on her. I hadn’t seen any harm in Garet fostering it and had liked watching Grace go all moony over Garet, had laughed at her, truth be told. I never laughed with Garet, though. I wondered then if Garet hadn’t been working on making Grace fall in love with her. It made me angry. No one deserved to be led along the garden path like that, and I found myself feeling protective about a woman who I’d never trusted, and still didn’t one hundred percent.

  “Grace never said a thing about her meeting, though I knew she wouldn’t. I never mentioned it, either, even later on when we were on the same side. I didn’t want people messing with my private life, I sure wasn’t about to mess with hers.

  “That was a silent ride back to Denver, let me tell you. Grace had something on her mind and kept rubbing her hands together. She wore gloves all the time, have I mentioned that? Covering up scars on the back of her hands. She rubbed on her hand like she wanted to clear them away, to be free of them. I understood the feeling well enough. I was lucky that it took an effort on my part to see my physical scars. Oh, I feel them all the time, even now. There’s a tightness to the skin that has never gone away, but I’m used to it now. It’s part of me, just like those scars were part of Grace Trumbull. Maybe seeing them all the time, being reminded of the why, haunted Grace. No, I don’t know how or why she got them. I never asked, and I’m not going to speculate out loud. Like I said before, some things are best kept private, and it’s not my place to go gossiping about it.

  “When we got back to Denver, we were met by a man who said Garet sent him. Don’t remember his name, but I remember what he said. Garet was in Black Hawk on her deathbed, and a doctor was about to operate on her to try to save her. If we wanted to say our goodbyes, we best be ready to leave first thing in the morning.”

  20

  Claire Hamilton’s Case Notes

  Tuesday, August 21,
1877

  Centennial Women’s Boarding House

  Denver, Colorado

  A man named Frank Chambers just arrived, saying he was here on Garet’s behalf. She is at his boardinghouse in Black Hawk, beaten to hell and in excruciating pain. A doctor was to operate on her after Chambers left to remove the tumor, which the doctor expected was giving her so much pain. Chambers said he would take us to Black Hawk first thing in the morning.

  There are so many questions! How did Garet get to Black Hawk? Who beat her up? When did she leave Callum? Was a posse after her? I was eager to talk everything over with Hattie, to hash out what could have possibly happened, but Hattie didn’t seem eager to talk. She went to her room, and I went to mine.

  Maybe tomorrow, though there may be no point. Garet could be dead by now.

  Wednesday, August 22, 1877

  Denver, Colorado

  A quick note before we leave for Black Hawk. Hattie was given a letter from Rebecca Reynolds when she left the Black Hawk forwarding address at the front desk. Things are not good in Timberline. Spooner has taken over the ranch, and he apparently had no intention of following through with the bet. He just wanted to get Garet out of town.

  Thursday, August 23, 1877

  Chambers Lodge

  Black Hawk, Colorado

  I was stunned to discover Alida Avery was the doctor taking care of Garet. She had been traveling with Susan B. Anthony and they were boarding at Frank Chambers’s lodge when Garet arrived, delirious and near death. Being in residence, Alida took charge of Garet’s care. We had just missed Miss Anthony; there was a schedule to keep and she was due to be in Golden that afternoon. Alida stayed behind to take care of her patient.

  By the time we arrived in Black Hawk yesterday, Dr. Avery’d removed a five-pound tumor and Garet’s left ovary and had dressed her cuts and scrapes and wrapped her broken ribs. Alida told us the cancer has spread to Garet’s other organs, which explains the heightened pain she’s been having. Lana said the doctor doesn’t expect Garet to ever leave the bed, or wake up.