The Appearance of Annie van Sinderen

I’m alone.

I retreat into the shadows, concealing myself behind a disused hall stand, my shawl tight over my shoulders. I flatten into the wall as if I could disappear into the burls of the woodwork.

I close my eyes, and behind my eyelids I conjure a picture of the old-fashioned spindle that I saw stamped into the sealing wax on the letter Wes found in the library. I hold the image perfectly in my mind’s eye, as though I were looking at the letter again in my hands, examining every tiny detail.

And then I think about Herschel. I think about his soft brown eyes, with black lashes heavy like silk fringe. I think about the way that his eyes shine when he looks at me. I imagine that I can feel the cameo on my finger. As these thoughts pass through my mind, a cool breath of air brushes over my cheeks, and the curls over my ears stir in its eddies.

Yes. I focus more closely. The grooves of the wax, stamped into the shape of a spindle. A spindle like the ones the English Luddites smashed ten years ago.

Luddites.

A secret society of anarchists.

They’re right. They’re right, about my father. My father the slavemonger, building an empire on the backs of people he pretends to want to free. He’s a liar. The Luddites know that the canal will line the pockets of the rich and hurt people it pretends to help. Even people far away from New-York. The future will grind them up like grist in the mill.

But I don’t know what the Luddites are planning at the Grand Aquatic Display.

I have to talk to them.

My eyes still closed, I stretch a hand forward, groping to where I would expect to find the hall stand.

My hand touches nothing.

A huge smile breaks across my face.

Eyes squinted shut, I take one step forward, away from the wall, and stretch out both arms on either side of myself. I stand, poised over an abyss, touching nothing, my head thrown back, feeling the air move about my body, my fingers stretching as if they could reach into the void.

I draw the deepest of breaths, hovering, and then I let myself fall backward. But instead of falling against the wall, or tumbling over the railing and plunging down the stairwell of my aunt’s house, I sink into a soft cloud of nothing. I float, arms and legs splayed, nightdress billowing around my ankles. My shawl unwinds from me and slips away. I’m floating, drifting like a leaf in some in-between space. But it’s a soft drifting, comfortable. I can swim into different orientations, drawing my knees up to my chest and then coiling around to drift on my belly, my curls hanging down over my ears. I reach my arms forward, as I used to do when breast-stroking in the Hudson with Herschel, but this time there’s no weightiness of water in my clothes dragging me down.

I can move.

My guess was right.

I’ve figured out how to get where I need to go.

Now, I have to find out what happened on that barge.





CHAPTER 9


We stop short on the stoop outside the no-name pizzeria, and Tyler looks at me with surprise. Its windows are open to catch any passing breeze, not that there is any to catch. A couple of kids, their mouths full of cheesy pizza deliciousness, pause their chewing long enough to stare at us. The pizza of curiosity.

“What’re we doing here?” he asks.

“This was her house,” I explain. “That’s why she showed up here first. She lived here.”

“Get out,” he says, staring up at the redbrick town house. “For real?”

“Yeah,” I say.

“The whole thing was her house? You’re kidding.”

“Well, there weren’t as many people here then. They probably had more room,” I say.

“Don’t kid yourself,” Tyler says with a roll of his eyes.