Jack tried to imagine a third woman there as well, some well-bred lady in Sunday finery, blue or pink or yellow, with flounces and lace and ruffles and a bustle like a giant melon. To put a hand on that woman’s waist would be to grasp something inanimate and inflexible and cold. Nothing like Anna at all. He had given up trying to put the idea of touching Anna out of his mind—mostly, he could admit to himself, because he didn’t want to and saw no reason for it, not after their discussion the evening before. There was a hollow feeling in his gut when he thought of her, unfamiliar nerves sparking to life the closer she was.
They were traveling north on Lexington, leaving paving stones behind for a well-traveled dirt road at Fiftieth Street. A block to the west mansions were springing up along Fifth, their broad cold faces turned to the vast expanse of Central Park.
“So many different greens,” he heard Sister Mary Augustin say. “A world of greens.”
Anna said, “The park in spring always makes me think about my aunt Quinlan. She’s an artist, or she was until arthritis put an end to it. When she was still working she spent every morning in her studio; at noon she’d come downstairs and scrub her hands at the kitchen sink, and she’d talk to me about the colors she was washing away. The names for all the kinds of green and yellow made sense to me. Jade. Celadon. Verdigris, Malachite. Moss and myrtle and chartreuse, aureolin and jasmine.”
Jack glanced at her over his shoulder and she ducked her head, as if he had overheard an embarrassing revelation.
They passed an abandoned shanty, fields dotted with sheep and new lambs and dairy cows. At an intersection signs were nailed to a post: milk and eggs for sale, yearling colts, pigs, a plow. Small clusters of houses sprang up, some of them close to collapse, but others with whitewashed fences and bright clean window glass. The city was pushing north, as unstoppable as the tide.
Sister Mary Augustin was very far away in her thoughts, all her attention on the countryside. A man mending a fence, a young woman at work in a garden with a shallow basket balanced between hip and an extended arm, a grove of apple trees where children sat in the branches and pelted each other with hard green fruit no bigger than walnuts.
Anna asked Mary Augustin a question Jack would not have thought to ask of a nun. “I think you must have grown up on a farm.”
“What makes you say that?”
Anna shrugged. “Just the way you’re watching things. Do you miss it?”
“I didn’t think I would, when I first left home, but I suppose I do. The smell of newly turned earth in the spring air makes me homesick. The new lambs and foals were always my favorite thing.”
After a few moments of silence she went on. “I have six brothers. They were always falling out of trees and cutting themselves and dropping spades on their feet or beating each other bloody. I had a talent for patching them up. Mama wanted me to be a nun, and I wanted to be a nurse.”
“I’m surprised she could let you go at all with so many children to look after.”
Mary Augustin smiled. “She’s got two sisters, and neither of them ever married. The three of them keep the house while my father runs the farm with the boys.”
“And they sent you off to the convent.”
“It wasn’t meant to be a punishment. Mama said she wanted a quieter life for me. The Sisters of Charity are a nursing order, so we were both satisfied. But.” She paused and looked at Anna. “It didn’t even occur to me that they might send me into the city. I’m learning a great deal and it’s sometimes very exciting, but I thought I’d be at the Foundling out here in the countryside.”
“Maybe you can be transferred to the Foundling one day soon.”
Mary Augustin gave a brief shake of the head. “I’ve been assigned other duties. It’s unlikely now.”
“Other duties—” Anna prompted.
“Sister Perpetua is retiring, and they are training me to take her place.”
Jack heard the deep unhappiness in this simple statement. Anna seemed to hear it too because her tone changed.
She said, “I haven’t said anything to you about the work you did in my class.”
He sensed rather than saw the girl leaning forward, an eagerness there that had been missing.
“Your assignment was first-rate,” Anna said. “You are very observant, very methodological. No hasty conclusions, but thoughtful questions and suggestions. You have a natural talent.”
Jack raised one brow in a way that asked the question, What exactly are you up to? She ignored him, as he thought she would, her attention fixed on a problem that needed solving.
? ? ?
ANNA CONSIDERED MARY Augustin, who had turned away to watch the scenery or, she thought more likely, to hide her expression. A hundred questions were going through her mind but she would limit herself to one.
“Are you being punished for something? Is that why you’re not nursing anymore?”
The small face came around quickly, color rising to flood her cheeks.
“No,” she said. “Not at all. Mother Superior says that the order encourages talent and potential where they find it.”
“And they need to take you out of nursing to do that? You have nothing to say about it?”
“Cheerful obedience is a daily struggle,” Mary Augustin said, her tone less steady now.