“And did her name begin with E?” I interrupted.
“No, it didn’t. Her name was Lucille. Her parents were enslaved and Lucille’s mother was the cook at the Vanderhorsts’ Magnolia Ridge Plantation. In 1847 Lucille was brought from Magnolia to work as the cook in the Tradd Street house, and John Vanderhorst manumitted Lucille and her parents a year later. I can’t find a birth date for Lucille, but from what I can gather with very sparse information, she would have been around eighteen or nineteen when she moved to Charleston.”
I bit back my impatience. “So who was E?”
“I’m getting to that.” She cleared her throat. “Lucille apparently had a husband at Magnolia.”
“And his name started with an E?”
“No. It didn’t. But when Lucille was brought to Charleston, her husband was left at Magnolia.”
“That’s terrible.”
“Agreed. But that’s not all.” She didn’t continue, and I imagined her holding her breath again, eyes sparkling as she tortured me, waiting for me to prompt her.
“And why is that, Yvonne?”
“Well, records for nonfamily members are scarce, but I did a little more digging into the Vanderhorst family archives, and you’ll never believe what I found! I think I was very clever to think of—”
“Yvonne,” I said, not caring if she could tell I was speaking through gritted teeth.
“Yes, sorry. It’s just so exciting when I find that elusive morsel! So, I knew I wouldn’t find anything in the genealogy records, so I did the next best thing and looked for the household records. It’s always amazing what one can find in old grocery lists and haberdashery invoices—”
“And what did you find?” I asked, cutting her off, my patience long gone.
“Invoices for baby supplies. A carriage, a cradle, feeding bottles—that sort of thing.”
“Well, that makes sense. John had a son, William.”
“Very good, Melanie! But William wasn’t born until 1860. These invoices dated from 1847—a good thirteen years earlier. Even more revealing is what I found on an invoice for a draper’s shop on Market Street.”
I sighed heavily into the phone, feeling too tired to guess. “And what was that, Yvonne?”
“Two yards of pink muslin and two strands of pale pink silk ribbon.”
I thought of Rebecca. “So someone liked to wear pink.”
“One would think—until you remember the styles of the period and how two yards of fabric wouldn’t make a complete dress for an adult woman.”
I sat up, flipping through the details in the filing drawer I called my brain. “So there was a baby girl born sometime in 1847?”
“Exactly! And not a Vanderhorst baby or she’d appear in the family tree. Not to mention how the family already owned an heirloom cradle and wouldn’t need a new one. Plus the items weren’t purchased at the most fashionable shops, nor were they of the best quality.”
“So Lucille may have been pregnant when she left her husband at Magnolia and came to work as the cook at Tradd Street?”
“Yes!” Yvonne shouted in triumph.
“And she had a baby girl with a name beginning with the letter E!”
“I was wondering when you were going to get there,” Yvonne said with reproach. “Guess how I found out the name.”
“Can you just tell me the name and save the story for later?”
Ignoring me, she said, “There was a small invoice that I almost missed—from a haberdashery shop. It was for an embroidered name to be put on a pink muslin blanket. Apparently, the person ordering the embroidery must not have been of the class of young women who were taught how to embroider practically from the cradle.”
I stretched my legs out in the closet and tilted my head back so that I could stare at the ceiling. “Fascinating,” I said, my voice flat. “So what was the baby’s name?”
After a dramatic pause, Yvonne said, “Evangeline. Which, coincidentally or not, is the name of the famous Longfellow poem published the same year.”
I frowned, flipping through my brain file again. “Doesn’t sound like the sort of name an uneducated enslaved person would be familiar with to name her daughter.”
“No, it doesn’t. Sadly, that’s the last I could find of her. I’ll keep looking, though. But if that was her original grave site, then your guess that she died in the fire of 1861 instead of during the earthquake of 1886 would mean she would have been a young woman of around fourteen when she died.”
“The right age for someone who would have a charm string,” I said.
I startled at the sound of a door opening in the outside hallway. Whispering into my phone, I said, “Yvonne—I have to go. I need to check on the children.”
“Yes, dear. You give those sweet babies a kiss for me. And Jack, too.”
I pressed end, then stood, hearing my knees crack, and waited for the rest of my body to adjust to being forced to stand. General Lee snored gently on his back in the middle of the bed, his paws in the air in surrender. After glancing at the children on the monitor, sleeping peacefully in their cribs, I tiptoed toward my bedroom door and pressed my ear against the cool wood surface. Holding my breath, I listened.
It took me a moment to identify that I was hearing the slap of bare feet running down the hallway, accompanied by the slower gait of another person—another person with the tap of heels and the clang of jewelry. The hair rose on the back of my neck, but I wasn’t afraid. Slowly, I opened my bedroom door and peered out into the night-light-lit hallway.