Crouching, she opened a few of the boxes to find shoes in a size that seemed impossibly small. In a taller square box with a plain white card affixed to the top she uncovered something else: a pile of leather-bound books, all tied together with a black ribbon with a round locket at the end of it. She opened the locket. Inside there was what appeared to be a small clump of lint, but no, that wasn’t it. It was hair that looked like it had come from two different heads, tied in a bow. On the inside of the locket someone had written R & C in a beautiful calligraphic hand. She snapped it shut.
The books beneath the ribbon turned out to be journals. Pages and pages all written in that same elegant handwriting she had read over as a girl, some of the pages dark with mold, the pages completely illegible; others were perfectly preserved. It was remarkable. Her mother had given her Fidelia’s journal from when she was in her early teens, and here Gretchen was, nearly grown herself, discovering the rest of them. The years that chronicled Fidelia’s days of cooking and sewing and caring for children. She cracked another one open. And breathed in the smell of decaying paper and fading ink—and her heart raced.
February 17, 1860
Last night James returned with a young man—or perhaps not a man yet, still a child. He wore coarse fabric over his head like a hood to cover himself, and he had taken off his shirt to cover an old woman. She was so small that at first I thought he was holding only a checkered cloth in his arms. I said to follow me, but he indicated that he could not, another was still to come, and soon she ran from the trees in a dress too long for her. Perhaps five years of age, with bright eyes as if a candle had been lit behind them. I had no time to ask her name, only to tell her to hurry after me. I felt shame and rage that anyone could treat a person as she’d been treated. George told me this morning that these three belong to a Mr. Grant, of Baltimore, who offers one hundred dollars of reward for the return of the boy and the girl together. Or fifty dollars each. The old woman he no longer needs.
She stood for a moment, stunned to be holding this kind of artifact in her hands. Esther wasn’t just making things up. Gretchen thought about her ancestors—how good they were, or maybe simply so guilty they couldn’t bear to watch any more pain. She looked up again at the portrait of Fidelia and for the first time felt a connection to her roots, or maybe to the roots of all women fighting for something they believed in.
Gretchen checked her phone, dying to talk to Simon, and—at last!—there was full reception in this room.
She took a picture with her phone of the wall of books and portraits, the rosebush just visible out the window and tattered curtains blowing in the breeze, and sent it to Simon with the understated message I’m here. Three seconds later he replied, OMFG insane!
“You don’t know the half of it,” she whispered, then headed downstairs.
Dear James,
How are your studies? I was happy to hear you received the mittens! I bought so much wool from Elias’s farm that I have been knitting up a storm. It’s good to have something to do with my hands as I find myself quite restless. Reading the papers you send is a joy, though it makes me even more eager to be by your side. To be engaged in meaningful work.
I’m wondering if it would not be too presumptuous of me to ask you to send me some books. You know too well that the quality and variety of books here in Mayville leaves something to be desired and I fear becoming a sheltered country mouse! My father has even forbidden me a subscription to the NEW YORK EVENING POST. Were it not for our friendship, James, or the conversations with the ladies who tend the sheep at Elias’s, I would be even more badly informed.
Yours,
Fidelia
NINE
“MAYBE SHE DIDN’T TELL YOU ABOUT WHAT WAS GOING on here because you were too young,” Esther said, answering Gretchen’s question and swirling her drink with a bony finger as she settled into a chair that had long since lost its original form.
Gretchen shook her head. She was a city girl. She’d seen more strange things just riding the subway with her parents before she was five than most people see in a lifetime. And her mother told her all kinds of things when she was very young; about ghosts and psychics and what the Chelsea Piers were like in the seventies. It wasn’t like her mother kept things from her. She wanted Gretchen to be strong and able to take care of herself, to think for herself. There had to be a better reason her mother had been silent on nearly everything Axton-related.
She took the tiniest sip of the gin fizz Aunt Esther had made her. This liquor tasted flammable or like it would make her blind. Gretchen thought maybe another reason this tough, smart white-haired old lady never made it out of upstate New York all these years was because she was an alcoholic.
Esther held up her glass in a toast and Gretchen took her picture.
“Okay. So tell me about it,” Gretchen said. “All of it. Did you ever visit when my mother was a kid living here?”