The deceased was a young girl, who till her fatal acquaintance with the prisoner, was virtuous and modest. . . .
—William Coleman, Report of the Trial of Levi Weeks
New York City
December 22, 1799
The shadows were gathering in the back of the house in Greenwich Street.
It had been one of those clear, bright winter days, when the sun shone pitiless as the Last Judgment, all light without warmth, but the early winter dusk was finally falling. Elma welcomed it, even if it did make it hard to see her reflection in the scrap of mirror Caty had allowed was permissible to make Elma neat and tidy.
Elma draped a kerchief across her bodice, studying the effect of the fichu. Whatever she did, her calico gown and dimity petticoat looked decidedly provincial. There was only so much one could do with old patterns, cheap fabrics, and a Quaker cousin with an eye for propriety.
Soon. Soon she’d have dresses of fine muslin and gauze, embroidered all about with this season’s whimsies; she’d have clocked stockings of sheerest silk, and shawls so fine one could draw them through a ring. Oh, and she’d have the rings too, starting with one tonight. He’d not shown it to her; he wouldn’t. Let it be a surprise, he’d said, a surprise for their wedding night. Surely he should be allowed some surprises.
She’d surprises of her own, Elma had countered, trying to sound like the lady of the world she meant to become, not the poor cousin from Cornwall, New York, everyone’s drudge and morality tale.
She’d taken his hand in hers and kissed each finger, one by one, her eyes on his all the while.
He’d liked it well enough, she could tell, because his breath had quickened, and he’d nodded and said a quick, “Tonight,” before a step on the stair behind them signaled—
“Elma?”
The kerchief slipped from Elma’s grasp at the sound of Caty’s voice, so rudely intruding into her own private place.
Elma took her time retrieving the kerchief. “Did you want me?”
“No. . . . That is . . .” Caty hovered at the threshold, neither in nor out. Caty was never still: always up and down the stairs, in and out, seeing what needed doing; seeing who wasn’t doing what they were meant to be doing.
Watching. Always watching. Pretending concern. Oh, Elma, thee will take a chill. Let me give thee a kerchief. Stuffing thick fabric into the neckline of her dress, muffling her in shawls. She’d like to muffle Elma out of existence, Elma had no doubt. The family embarrassment.
Somewhere, far to the south, in Charleston, Elma’s father lived with his other family. Elma used to dream he would come and sweep her away, dress her in silks and laces, put her at his right hand. My daughter, he’d call her.
For all she knew he had other daughters. He’d had another family already, that’s what Elma’s uncle David said. A sinner leading Elma’s mother like a brand to the burning. Twenty-three years Elma’s mother had been burning, acknowledging and acknowledging and acknowledging her sin, but never any closer to salvation.
Elma’s mother had been sixteen when she’d fallen from grace with a soldier
in the Continental Army. Six years younger than Elma was now.
Elma was older and she knew better. If Elma were to burn, she’d made up her mind to do it in grand style.
“Which do you like?” Elma held up two handkerchiefs, alternating them against her bodice to show the effect. “This one? Or that one?”
A furrow appeared between Caty’s pale brows. “The second kerchief—is that Peggy’s?”
Elma shrugged. “Peggy will never mind. Besides, I don’t mean to mop my nose with it. She’ll have it back none the worse for wear.”
By then Elma would have finery of her own, a doting husband to shower her with the niceties of life, not clothe her in calico and set her to drudge like Caty: minding the children, boiling the linens, feeding the boarders, trimming hats in the millinery that supplemented the income of the boardinghouse.
Caty hesitated, and Elma could see her struggling with the desire to read Elma a lecture on coveting thy neighbor’s kerchief. Easy enough to divide between mine and thine when one had something of one’s own. Elma’s entire life had been pieced together like a quilt from scraps begged from others. If there was one thing she’d learned, it was that it was better to take than to beg.
“Thy fichu is crooked,” said Caty at long last, and Elma knew she’d won. Caty crossed the narrow room, beneath the slope of the gambrel roof, and with sure fingers tugged the fichu into place, tucking it into Elma’s bodice, higher than Elma liked. “Thee are determined to go out tonight?”
Like the good Quaker she was, Caty minded her thees and thous.
“It’s a fair, fine night.” Elma deliberately misunderstood her.
Caty’s fingers hesitated on the linen. “After thy illness. Should thee take a chill . . .”
“Why, you would nurse me back to health. As you did before.” Elma looked hard at the top of Caty’s bent head, daring her to look up and meet her eyes. “Just as you did before.”
“Tonight . . .” Caty took a step back, her work-reddened hands clasping and unclasping, unaccustomed to emptiness. “Hope told me. She told me thee mean to be married.”
“It’s a fine thing when one’s family won’t keep a confidence.” Elma felt a curious sense of elation. She’d known Hope would never be able to resist telling Caty; Hope would be bursting with it, all self-righteous good intentions. And jealousy. Mostly jealousy, made worse by having to cloak it in virtue.
“You—thee—ought to have told me.”
Oh ho, Caty was flustered if she was falling into secular ways, saying you instead of thee.
“Why? So you could
make me my bridal clothes?”
“Thy family—” began Caty, and faltered.
The steps outside creaked and they both jerked toward the door. It was a heavy tread, not Hope’s light step or Peg’s cheerful bounce. Elma retreated behind the curtain of the bed.
“Where’s Elma?” It was Levi’s voice, a deep, cheerful baritone. Elma felt her breath release, raising a faint cloud in the cold air.
“She is hid behind the bed.” There was no need for Caty to sound so prim about it.
Elma stepped out from behind the curtain. Levi smiled in relief at the sight of her, and she was struck, as always, by the vitality of his presence, the simple, uncomplicated joy. She loved him and hated him for it.
He limped forward, favoring the leg he’d bruised at his brother’s timber yard that morning. Elma had plastered it herself, sponging the blood and giving him a good scolding. “Don’t mind me. I want you to tie my hair.”
“Couldn’t your apprentice do that?” Elma took the black ribbon he held out to her, as he turned his back, bending his knees to make himself shorter. His light brown hair was loose around his shoulders, untouched by powder. She gathered it into a queue.
“And have me in knots? You’ve a gentler touch.” He cast a glance over his shoulder at her, inadvertently pulling his own hair. “Ouch.”
“Stay still and you won’t hurt yourself.” Elma could see Caty’s eyes going from one to the other of them. Elma hastily tied the ribbon, giving Levi a light push. “There. You’re fit for company. Now go away and leave us be.”
He looked at Caty, and then at Elma. Elma gave him a slight shake of her head. He took it in good grace. Levi took everything in good grace. He’d never been out of grace, couldn’t imagine what it was like. “As you command.”
His steps creaked away, up the stairs, to his own room on the third floor.
When Caty was away in September, Elma had stayed in the big room in the front on the second floor, right below Levi’s.
But that had been in the last blazing of the summer heat, when the sun burned off the sidewalks, and those who could afford it fled the yellow fever, piling into boats and wagons, off along the Hudson. The world had felt overripe, everything set to burst; one had to grab while one could, while one was alive, while the fruit hung heavy on the trees, abandoned in the half-empty city. What was one to do but pick what one could?
But that was September. The yellow fever had gone; the wagons with their coffins rattling to the graveyard had been replaced with the sound of carriages bringing home the lucky ones who had escaped to the country. The acrid scent of the gunpowder from the cannons fired to drive off the sickness had faded, the tang of the sea blowing again through her window with the cooler air, with just a hint of the stench of the glue
manufactory when the wind was in the wrong direction. There were knockers put back on doors, businesses reopened, and life went back to the way it was. Caty, Hope, and the children came home from Cornwall. And Elma retreated to this dark chamber in the back of the house where the shadows fell early and the small windows caught no light.
There were times Elma could scarcely remember the girl she’d been in September, the dreams she’d dreamed in that big front room. When the trees blazed red and gold, one last burst of wonder before the fall.
Now all was gray and sharp with frost. What she did tonight wasn’t for passion, but for cold, hard sense. She’d learned her mother’s lesson and her own.
Caty looked meaningfully at Elma. “Levi seems in good spirits.”
“Yes,” said Elma, not trusting herself to say more.
“I had thought, with his leg, he might not be fit to go out tonight.”
“It was only a scratch, hardly worth the fuss.” Any elation she might have felt was gone. It was no fun taunting Caty. Not now. Elma just wanted to be left alone. Tonight, she’d leave this room, leave it for good. Down the stairs, out the door, to the meeting place in Lispenard’s Meadow. She was making the right decision, she was.
But the game of teasing Caty had lost its savor.
From downstairs came the wail of a child, Caty’s youngest, one and a half years old. Caty looked distractedly toward the stairs, clearly torn. “Thee promise to keep warm?”
“Oh, we shall.” It was too easy to make Caty blush, even after four children.
Caty took refuge in the petty details in which she delighted. “Thy hands—those mittens will scarce keep thee warm. Thee ought to have a muff, to keep off the chill. Elizabeth next door . . . I might borrow it for thee.”
“There’s no need to fuss,” said Elma.
“Catherine! Where are thee?” A masculine voice bellowed up the stairs, in tune with the baby’s wail: Caty’s husband, Elias, home from Sunday services.
“Back from meeting already?” Elma could see Caty’s mind revolving like the clock in Mr. Baker’s Museum, all wheels and gears, checking all the tasks done and undone, tea to be got, children to be minded, boarders to be fed, her husband to mollify, her unwanted cousin to be speeded on her elopement—but with warm hands, a sop to Caty’s conscience.
“Catherine!” Elias’s voice was high-pitched, querulous. Elma could hear the stomp of booted feet on the stairs, as the sound of the baby’s howling grew louder. “The baby wants fixing!”
“Presently!” Caty called. She turned back to Elma. “Thy cheeks—they have turned so pale. If thee be frightened . . . He’s a good man, Levi.
I shouldn’t think . . .”
“I’m not frightened. I’m just cold.” Elma moved quickly to the door. “You’re right. I’ll get the muff from Beth.”
Caty trailed after her, a furrow beneath the plain white line of her cap. “Thou will remember to return it? The muff?”
“If I don’t, I have no doubt you’ll remind me.”
Caty was good at that. She was good at reminding Elma that this wasn’t her house, these weren’t her things; everything she had, she had on sufferance.
It didn’t matter now, Elma told herself. It didn’t matter. None of it mattered.
Caty could keep her dull house and her dull husband and her runny-nosed children. Elma would be a great lady, like Mrs. Church. Her lover had promised that she’d sweep through town in a coach and four, with plumes in her hair and jewels on her heels. No Quaker meetinghouse for her. She’d attend church at Trinity, in a pelisse tailored in Paris and her head modestly bent over a calfskin hymnbook.
Perhaps she’d come back from time to time, and let the children marvel at her, at her soft, scented skin and her soft, scented silks, at the rustle of her petticoats and the curve of her curls.
Yes, Elma rather liked the thought of that.
Let them know the brand from the burning might be a phoenix in disguise, ready to blaze far above them.
Averting her face, avoiding Elias and the howling child, Elma hurried down the stairs, through the sounds of the boardinghouse—the children shouting, the baby fretting, Caty bustling, journeymen laughing—letting herself out into the crisp, smoky December air. The street was busy with people paying Sunday calls, ironmongers and tobacconists, builders and grocers, bundled against the chill, dodging out of the way of the sleighs that jangled down the center of the street.
She wouldn’t miss it, any of it, Elma told herself.
To the south, above the close-crowded wooden houses, Elma could see the spire of Trinity Church on Broadway, where the houses were of brick, not wood; where the women wore silk from the ships whose masts pocked the sky; where she would have a home of her own where the beds weren’t rented out by the week.
Or perhaps they’d board one of those ships out there in the harbor and sail away to a real city, to London. What was New York, after all? Just a jumble of houses carved out of mud and meadow, filled with the refuse of the world.
Like her.
“Elma!” The ironmonger’s sixteen-year-old daughter, Fanny, waved wildly at her from the neighboring stoop.
Pretending not to hear, Elma turned sharply to her left, toward Beth Osborn’s house, to borrow a muff to wear to her wedding. ...
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