What the Dead Want(14)

Once Esther had gone downstairs Gretchen went out into the hall and looked at the mirror again. The surface was smoky and mottled and it distorted her reflection. It seemed to have a magnetic pull. Not like an actual magnet, but the way cool water feels on a hot day, draws you to it. The wasps buzzed from inside the vase but she wasn’t afraid of them. She reached out again to the mirror and watched the reflected hand reach toward her. Then, again as if it were rising from water—she saw her own face, distorted by the mottled surface, her eyes looking like they were trying to tell her something she couldn’t yet understand. Her skin broke out in goose bumps and she tore herself away from the mirror’s pull.

This awful thing, Gretchen thought, will be the first to go up on eBay. She went back into the library and shut the door.

Gretchen didn’t bother to unpack but sat on the creaky bed and looked around. There were boxes and boxes of photographs and letters. The bookshelves were stuffed with cracked leather-bound books. Shelves full of classics, and also academic books, historical tomes, great novels. This was one of the last places her mother had been; she was surrounded by the things Mona had amassed to study and could almost feel her presence. The Axtons had once filled this mansion, generation after generation. Now there was just her and Esther. The idea of going through the library for clues to something she barely understood was daunting. But it was as close as she’d ever come to any lead on her mother. She flopped back on the bed and stared up at the ceiling.

The afternoon sunlight shifted as the curtain blew in the breeze and something on top of one of the tall glass-front bookcases caught her eye. It looked like a hatbox, and she realized that probably all the clothes people had worn were also still in the house. She had always been fascinated with vintage clothes. She walked over and stood on tiptoe to take it down, and when she opened it, she found a very well-preserved hat. It had a double black-lace-scalloped border and a shiny black bow in the back. She opened the door to the musty closet and indeed there were hangers full of dresses, and more boxes on the floor. She touched a gauzy pink skirt topped with a narrow bodice and it nearly came apart in her hand, delicate and brittle and worn through from age and neglect.

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.