“They are safe. You can believe it,” said Alice. “Truly, you can. Now, tell us what transpired. They were so sure they could nab him.”
“I know. There was some commotion on the dock, some planks falling, and it attracted attention. That man must have recognized one of the plainclothes. Must have seen him before somehow. And he bolted. They went after him, all three, but he was too fast, and he had a fair lead, I suppose. Or knew all the alleys. Or . . . I don’t know. Pulgrum says they will leave me alone. It’s their pattern, he says. But I’m terrified. Pulgrum is putting an extra guard on the house immediately, Twenty-four hours for the next week, at least.” She refused to sit down, gripping their hands as she spoke. “Now, what has disturbed you two so? And you’re sure about the girls?”
Both nodded their heads and looked again at one another. As Constance waited, they both began to speak at once.
“We was in the backyard . . .”
“We had the girls out back . . .”
“We was both blindfolded . . .”
“Playing blindman’s bluff . . .”
“Delia screamed, then stopped . . .”
“Then she was screaming again and running to Alice. We’s jerking off blindfolds.”
“Yes, running to me and I’m holding her, looking to see if she’s cut . . .”
“Or fell down . . .”
“Wait! Stop!” Constance intervened. “Now, stop. Alice, is Delia injured?”
“No. She is not. Not at all, Constance. I promise. Just terribly frightened.” Alice looked at Analee.
For reassurance to continue, Constance thought. What is so terrible?
“There was a man, Miss Constance. I don’t know. Didn’t get a good look for the bushes and the time, but . . .”
“We believe it was that same man, Constance, the one with the strange mustache. I only had a glimpse as he ran. But I would swear it was him.”
“Oh God!” Constance did sit down at this. “He ran straight here. No one could have guessed!” She gripped their hands again. “What did he do? Why did she scream? Where was the guard?”
“He grabbed her arm, Constance. And covered her mouth—the space between the screams. He whispered in her ear to tell her mama he’d be back. And he let her go and ran.”
“She must be terrified. I have to go to her.”
Alice and Analee jointly constrained her, advising her not to go now, assuring her that Delia was calm and the girls were playing, insisting that Constance herself must be calm, so as not to alarm them again. Constance nodded, but tears sprang from her eyes. Alice half sat on the arm of the chair, and Constance felt strong arms holding her, steadying her. Analee stood before her, holding her limp hands. As Analee reached out to wipe away the tears, Constance laid her cheek in that warm, familiar hand. All her grief and fear poured out in tears.
CHAPTER 30
Alice and Analee, one on each side, enfolded Constance as her anguish subsided. A calm settled into her. She was steadied by their presence. Alice knew this grief, or something like it. Grief of any kind was always grief. She had so far survived her own: her infant son’s death, her husband’s abandonment, her frantic search for a man who ultimately did not exist and never had. But she had not felt this debilitating fear that overwhelmed Constance.
Alice slipped from the arm of the chair as Constance calmed and stabilized herself. She knelt on the floor beside Analee, who had dropped Constance’s hands into her lap and was smoothing back her hair.
“You say Pulgrum will have the guard here soon? Will we see him?” Alice said, shifting her weight on the floor.
“Yes. And no. Within an hour and in disguise. He says we may not even notice him. No more than the first one.”
“Then we must organize ourselves. Dorothea Richard is due to call in an hour to go over the design for the gown.”
Constance seemed to have forgotten. “I can’t do this. No. I can’t do any more!” Alice and Analee heard her voice rise an octave as she protested.
“Yes we can,” Alice said, now on her feet beside Constance.
She took Constance by the hand, led her up the stairs, Analee following, past the playroom, where she paused half a second so Constance could see and hear the girls at play, and on down the hall to the sewing room. Across the tables lay the various major pieces Alice had cut and begun to organize into something that could become a whole. Alice stepped into the room, looking back to study Constance’s reactions to the morning’s work, the reenvisioning and assembling of what promised to be an exquisite design. She waited in silence as Constance took a deep breath and walked between the tables, her fingers touching the fabric here and there.
When Constance stopped, Alice spoke. “Can you begin to see it?”
“Yes. Not entirely, but yes. How have you done this?”
How indeed? Alice asked herself. “I’ve spent a lifetime—well, a short one, to be sure—using scraps of things to create something new. My mother taught me how to see new things in the old.”
“How did she do that? How can anyone do that?”
“First, with only simple shapes, for crazy quilts. From scraps of fabric and old clothing we cut apart. Sometimes we had to work around a rip or a tear. But we’d get what could be salvaged, cut it in every imaginable shape, and play with them. Like working a jigsaw puzzle. When the design made our eyes happy, we would quilt it, then do fancy embroidered borders at every seam. Later she showed me how to design flowers and leaves in the middle of various shapes with satin stitch, fishbone, and French knots. They were beautiful, those quilts. And warm for the prairie winter nights.” Alice thought of her mother’s hands, those beautiful designs created by flickering firelight at the hearth. She had a sudden nostalgia for home, an unexpected wishing that she had brought more than one of those quilts with her to Chicago, from Chicago here. She felt how long had been this unforeseen journey, its arduous demands, its debilitating sorrow.
Alice bent to the woven basket where she had stored the various trims she imagined useful to Constance’s proposed design. When she felt she might do so with composure, she lifted the basket to the free end of one of the tables and began to draw a few small treasures from its depth: some strips of satin bias she could cord and work into the various lines, should they find themselves short on pearls; fragments of wide and narrow grosgrain that might prove advantageous for the wings of the dove or could be rolled into a cone for its beak; a rectangle of denser fabric, contrasting in weight and texture to the gown, from which the Gothic tower of the bridge might be constructed at the center of the train. Finally, three scraps of a shiny fabric, almost silvered, which to her eye simply begged to be converted into fish.
As she laid out these bits, Alice knew that, as vividly as Constance had translated the image of the Brooklyn Bridge and the symbols of Semiramis into a vision of the overall design, she would not know how to transform these bits of scrap into that idea. The realization struck her that the two of them had converged these ideas, playing off one another’s imagination. The developing elegance and simplicity of this gown could be attributed to neither of them individually. She felt her body lighten as she sensed the gift they were to each other. We can do this, she thought. Not I, but we can do this.