Chapter 4 Abby

4

ABBY

W hen Abby arrived at the Bethany Home a few days later, her husband, Junius, in tow to begin the process of winterizing the gardens, the front door flew open before she’d had time to reach the knob. The matron stood there, panting.

“Mrs. Mendenhall, you’d better come in. There’s trouble.”

Abby rocked back on her heels. She was holding a bunch of hothouse blooms, the last roses of October, for the foyer vase. “What’s the matter? Is anyone hurt?”

Miss Rhoades’s mouth twitched impatiently. “Well, no, not exactly.”

“May I assist?” Junius asked.

Abby turned to her husband, a slight, narrow-faced man, who waited beside her with his spade in one hand and walking stick in the other. Dressed entirely in plain black, just as she was. “No, thank thee, dear man. Thou can find the rest of the tools in the gardener’s shed. He arrives at nine, and he and the custodian can help thee.”

She watched the back of her husband’s gray head as he walked round the side lawn and toward the shed. It would pain her to see him reduced to such simple domestic tasks—he hadn’t worked in banking since the Panic of 1873—if she didn’t know what satisfaction he derived from gardening. His health benefited, too, from the fresh air and a turn in the sun.

The matron had the side of her thumbnail in her mouth. An ungodly habit. “You look worried, Miss Rhoades.” Abby tugged the woman’s hand down, then made sure to offer a reassuring pat on the shoulder, a smile. “There you are.”

Abby was used to switching from plain speech to vernacular, depending on whom she was talking to and whether they were Friends. She could be one person with Junius and another with Miss Rhoades. With her husband, who suffered from sciatica, rheumatism, chronic bronchitis, she could move slowly, hushed and humbled by their accumulated decades. She knew the language and rhythms of frailty, having been sickly in childhood.

With everyone affiliated with the Bethany Home, she became someone else. A woman who knew the back entrances to saloons.

She raised her silvery head half an inch taller. “Now show me this trouble you speak of.”

—

The foyer, Abby was surprised to see, bustled with life. Normally, all the inmates would be at breakfast now, and the babies and children would be with their nursemaids, but here a cluster of young women stood whispering, a group who’d arrived together from Ida Dorsey’s brothel; one of them was absently rocking her infant. Another pair of inmates looked up guiltily at Abby; they were sharing a piece of cold chicken, a drumstick, between them, eating right there in the open with greasy fingers. A boy stood on the stairs and reached down through the railing for one of the wilted calla lilies on the calling-card table. Abby went to him and stopped his hand.

“Miss Rhoades,” she called to the matron, holding firm to the boy’s wrist. Everyone in the room stopped what they were doing. “What is the meaning of all this?”

Miss Rhoades tapped one of the whisperers on the shoulder, signaling them to move on. She snatched the chicken bone and used it to point down toward the cellar. “You’d better come and see.”

“There wasn’t any breakfast!” the boy screeched when Abby let go of him.

On the way down to the kitchen, Abby could once again hear Cook shouting at someone, but this time, the sun shone brightly through the basement windows. There was no dark figure in a puddle on the floor, but the plump form and flushed face of a girl who’d given herself the name Dolly, her cheeks streaked with tears as she took the brunt of Cook’s tirade. May, Pearl, Leigh, and Faith were nowhere to be seen.

“Seventy biscuits,” Cook raged at Dolly from under the massive black hood of the cast-iron stove. “How one girl ruins seventy biscuits meant for an entire household, I’ll never know.”

Dolly trembled visibly. She’d arrived at the home only a few months ago and had yet to deliver her child, though the event had to be imminent. Her face had a bee-stung look to it, lips and cheeks pink and engorged. Under her skirts, her boots were untied, giving her a slovenly appearance. Swollen ankles, most likely; Abby wasn’t always clear on these matters, having no children of her own. Still, it troubled her to see someone behaving so harshly to an expectant mother. “Mrs. O’Rourke,” she said, silencing Cook, “kindly explain yourself.”

“She ate everything! Woke up with me this morning, as usual, helped me bake today’s biscuits. No sooner I turn me back than she’s eaten the entire lot of them! Breakfast was meant to be biscuits, butter, and jam, Mrs. Mendenhall. What am I to serve now, jam alone?”

Abby noted that it smelled, tantalizingly, of bacon in the kitchen as well, though that was surely meant only for the staff, for any board members who happened upon the home this morning, and for Cook herself. In years past, they’d been able to serve bacon to the inmates, but tightened finances had put an end to that luxury.

“I didn’t mean to,” Dolly burbled, between tears. “I don’t know what came over me.”

“Really, Cook, seventy biscuits?” Miss Rhoades said, before Abby could ask any more questions of her own. “How is that possible?”

Cook reached behind her for one of the two baking pans and thrust it before the women’s eyes. Thirty-five or so biscuits, all bitten and half eaten, or shredded to crumbs. “See for yourself. The little thief made sure to take a bite of every last one.”

Miss Rhoades’s face paled. Dolly looked horrified.

“What I can’t figure is how she expected to get away with it,” Cook said, slamming the pan back onto the range. “I came back in and there she was, stuffing herself.”

Something was amiss here, but Abby couldn’t quite put her finger on it. “Well, Dolly?” she said. “What do you have to say for yourself??”

Dolly sniffed. Her eyes were huge, red-streaked. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Mendenhall, Cook. I don’t know why I did it. You were gone, and—and it was only myself and the new girl here. And the biscuits smelled so good. I can’t say what came over me.”

“You were gone for how long?” Miss Rhoades interjected, one eyebrow raised at Cook.

Cook’s cheeks reddened. “Can’t say exactly. Not more than twenty, thirty minutes.”

“While you did what?”

Cook’s eyes rolled toward her ruffled cap. “All right, whilst I took a short nap, Miss Rhoades. I let the girls do it, too. You try rousing your bones at four in the morning, before the fires are lit, all to make sure everyone gets a warm biscuit for breakfast, only to have a greedy little—”

Abby interrupted her. “The new girl. Was this Faith Johnson?”

Dolly nodded. “Yes, she’s been working with us in the kitchen.”

A knot formed in Abby’s stomach. She’d hoped that, with a bath, some clean clothes, and a fair share of the chores, Faith would be able to blend in with the others, that her dramatic arrival wouldn’t be followed by further upheaval. “Mrs. O’Rourke,” she asked Cook, “how has Faith been getting along?”

“Quiet one, she is,” said Cook. “But, aye, she’s been finishing her work as well as any other.”

“This morning, though,” Dolly said, tapping her fingertips together thoughtfully, “after Cook left, Pearl and Leigh went out to take a walk before the sun came up, and May headed upstairs to rest. There were only Faith and me in here.” She pointed to a footed bronze timer on a shelf beside the stove. “We waited till Cook’s timer rang; then we took the biscuits from the oven. And then…”

She made the other women wait, holding their breath, as she tapped those fingers together. Dolly was concocting a story. Abby watched it happen behind the girl’s eyes. A story she already half believed herself. She’d be repeating the story for all who would listen, for days and weeks to come.

This, not the nibbled biscuits. This tale would be the trouble.

“Faith was just gazing at the biscuits, her nose a few inches from them. She started doing something strange with her hands, lifting the scent toward her nose, and when I came closer to see what she was doing, to tell her to stop fooling around, she started waving her hands toward me.” Dolly’s fingers rippled in front of Abby’s eyes, each one a charmed snake undulating to its own rhythm. “Then she smiled at me. And before I knew it, I was eating.”

Cook thumped her hand to her chest. “Christ in heaven. And today’s Hallowe’en.”

The other women, save Abby, gasped. Her gaze wandered to the high cellar window. Thick clouds had gathered, blocking the morning’s sun, and were moving quickly eastward. Blades of grass, already dormant and blond, scratched at the glass like fingernails.

Abby exhaled forcefully. “Where is Faith now?”

“Upstairs, changing her apron,” Dolly said. “Thank goodness.” She locked eyes with Cook. The tears on her face had dried. “I am sorry, Cook. But she cast some sort of spell on me. She made me do it. With her mind.”

—

By the time Abby sat down in her office with May Lombard, as the matron closed the rolling doors with a decisive snick, Dolly’s story had spread. Abby could feel it crackle, as though the girls themselves were dry kindling: those working with the seamstress in the airy sewing room, the girls changing cot sheets in the nursery, those working with the laundress and Cook, who most likely was engaged in a breathless rendition of the tale herself, right now, in the basement.

Miss Rhoades had tried to insist that Abby speak with Faith herself, but Abby didn’t see where a one-sided conversation would get her. “Bring May Lombard to me,” she told the matron with an air of finality, and Miss Rhoades had done as she was commanded.

Why shouldn’t Abby turn to May? The girl had a good head on her shoulders. As they sat facing each other, Abby had the sense they were the only two in this house who weren’t currently aflame with the story. It felt as though they sat together, bewildered, in a kind of smoking crater.

“They’re saying she’s a Mesmerist,” May blurted out. “Some of the girls have met her before. They’ve watched her do…whatever a Mesmerist does.”

“Before.” Abby let the word linger. May would understand what she meant. “Before” didn’t matter here—that was the gift the home bestowed on its inhabitants, the reason for their pseudonyms. Many arrived with sensational or traumatic stories, far more scandalous than Faith Johnson with her bag of gold bullion. Abby could easily have sold the details to gossip columnists or authors of penny dreadfuls, but she wouldn’t dream of it. She liked to think of herself trimming these histories from her girls with invisible shears of righteousness.

Faith’s “Before,” however, felt relevant in a way other girls’ hadn’t. Abby would have to find out where the money had come from before she could decide what to do with it.

“They say she was called Marguerite the Magnificent,” said May in wonder.

“Marguerite the Magnificent.” The name sent a cold rush down the back of Abby’s neck. She took a pen and a square of paper from her desk and wrote it down, then dropped the pen into its holder. “What do you think, May?”

May leaned closer. Her light-brown hair, parted in the middle, shone cleanly. She had the kind of face Abby liked best: even, small features, nothing in excess, beautiful in its plainness. “It’s nonsense. Dolly and those biscuits, too. Besides, Faith isn’t even a true mute. She spoke to me on the night she arrived.”

“Oh?” This Abby hadn’t expected to hear, and it troubled her. Maybe Miss Rhoades had been right: she should have brought Faith in here. “What did she say?”

May stared at the scrimshaw tooth Abby kept on the desk, carved with an image of the whaling ship Morgan . “I can’t remember. But— Oh, there were bruises around her neck. The worst of it here.” May gripped herself around the throat with her thumbs in the middle, pressing her own trachea. Abby’s stomach dropped.

“Bruises. We’ve seen those. Part of the abuse inherent in the sale of human bodies. Men purchase a body and believe that entitles them to do what they will with it.” Abby had gotten out of breath, a bit passionate; she touched the back of her hand to her forehead.

May, too, had turned bright red. “It’s an awful business,” she said quietly. “Do you know for certain she was engaged in it?”

“She arrived with more money than I’ve ever seen in one set of hands. But don’t tell anyone that. I wouldn’t want any of the girls to be tempted.” Abby gestured toward the drawer of the desk, where she’d stowed the money. “I’ve a task for you. We laundered the dress Faith wore when she arrived. I’d like you to return it to its dressmaker. Find out who originally purchased the garment, then tell me. Only me.”

“Yes, ma’am,” May replied reluctantly; she looked as though she’d rather keep at least ten feet between herself and that dress.

After Abby sent May away, she sat by herself and thought. Bruises, for heaven’s sake.

She rested in silence for a time, holding Faith in the Light.

On her way out of the parlor, she was nearly toppled by a boy and a girl, between the ages of three and five both, a boy with brown skin, the girl with red hair, pale-faced. The boy was running, mouth open wide with glee and mock horror, as the girl chased him with outstretched arms and waggling fingers, shrieking like a ghoul. “Easy, now, children,” Abby said as she caught the girl by the arm. The boy tripped on the corner of a rug and went sprawling, and finally a nurse ran in, out of breath, a guilty expression painting her face.

“Winter will arrive too soon,” Abby reminded her. “These children should be outside.” She handed the girl to the nurse, who murmured a fervent apology. As Abby went round to tell Miss Rhoades she meant to collect Junius and go home, she heard the boy telling the nurse it wasn’t his fault they’d been running in the hallways. The girl, he claimed, had mesmerized him.