MINA DUNMORE WONDERED IF IT MIGHT BE TIME TO give up her widow’s black. She had long ago ceased to mourn, if indeed she ever had, and her outfit made her look too much like a Shaker sister. Someone might notice the resemblance before it was time. The hat was especially troubling. It was an old, black, bonnet-shaped thing her mother had worn after her husband, Mina’s father, had packed his bags and abandoned them. Her mother had worn widow’s weeds until her death.
Mina, who was only seven at the time, had been forbidden to tell anyone that her father had left. She was to say he had died in a train wreck. Being a quick and imaginative child, Mina embellished the story each time she told it, filling in details she picked up from peeking in the lending library’s more lurid novels, until she nearly believed it herself. The accident, she would tell her entranced schoolmates, had happened on an icy winter night in the mountains of Pennsylvania. Snow clogged the tracks and ferocious winds buffeted the cars. Her father was on his way to a very important meeting with the governor, that’s why he had to travel during such dreadful weather. Sometimes she’d say he was racing to an emergency meeting with the President of the United States, or perhaps His Holiness the Pope, depending on the gullibility of her audience. Just at the stroke of midnight, the train derailed and tumbled down the mountainside, killing everyone on board. If you found the right mountain and were foolhardy enough to be there at midnight, you could still hear the screams and the crack of metal against rock.
By the age of eight, Mina had become an accomplished liar.
She sighed with exasperation as she tried to get a view of herself in the small, cloudy mirror hanging from some pegs in her room. These Shakers might have given more thought to appropriate furnishings before they’d opened up their hostel. Maybe the sisters didn’t want to see themselves, but Mina did. And she couldn’t afford to just go out and buy a mirror. Not yet, anyway. The reminder of her lifelong poverty fired the smoldering resentment in Mina’s heart. She took several moments to compose herself. It was essential, for now, that she not draw attention to herself, and losing her temper would set her apart.
The hat must go, she decided. Though she had just turned forty, her hair was still a thick, rich brown, and she had cut it herself to just below her ears. If she waved it, she’d look more like a modern woman of the world. She was still fairly slim—just a shade thick around the waist, but the black dress helped hide that, so perhaps she could pretend to be younger. She glanced at the small clock the Shakers had placed on her bedside table. There was just enough time to dampen her hair and crimp it with some pins before dinner.
Mina smiled into the mirror. She now felt almost peaceful. Soon it would be her turn. Very soon.
What a stroke of luck! Saul Halvardson straightened his bow tie so that it was perfectly centered between the lapels of his dinner jacket. He leaned toward his shaving mirror and straightened the part in his dark hair, noting with approval the silver streaks. He’d always been successful at his job, even throughout this pesky Depression, but business had improved markedly since he started going gray. He believed it made him look boyish and distinguished at the same time. Ladies were far more inclined to buy silk stockings and toiletries from a handsome man than from a plain one.
He’d had especially good luck with the ladies recently. There were two staying at the hostel now; he might just give them a try. They were old enough to be flattered. They didn’t look particularly wealthy, but in Saul’s experience, a woman could usually be induced to retrieve a dollar or two from the flour canister for a pair of stockings or a small vial of eau de toilette. Besides, it was a diversion. Then there was that young thing with the red-brown curls, Gennie something or other. She’d been quiet at meals. Saul had noticed her engagement ring, and he had the impression she was a friend of the Shakers. He’d keep his distance from her, pretty though she was.
The real luck had been finding out about the Shakers opening this hostel in one of their old buildings. He’d been staying here since it opened, just a couple days earlier. He saw an opportunity, and he jumped on it. Just in time, too; the place had filled up fast. He considered this his smartest move in a lifetime of smart moves—starting at age twelve, when he had run off to live with his colorful grandfather, rather than stay with his Bible-thumping, belt-wielding father. It was his grandfather who’d taught Saul to use flattering words and a smile to sell anything to anybody. Granddad was something—he could sell snake oil to a quack, and he’d taught Saul all his tricks. Granddad had warned him he was too cocksure, and, yeah, he’d had a few troubles lately. Nothing that couldn’t be cured with a bit of clever effort. No better place to do it than here, either.
He’d even managed to get the room that most perfectly suited his needs. That quiet woman, Miss Prescott, had wanted a more secluded view and asked to trade her room at the top of the stairs for his at the west end of the building. Just another example of his incredible luck.
It was still a while till dinner, so he relaxed in his rocking chair and gazed with appreciation around his room. The North Homage Shakers might be just scraping by, but they had a wealth of finely made furniture. The desk was pine, of simple design but sanded to a satiny smoothness. They’d left a maple box, oval with swallowtail joints and a snug-fitting lid, lying on the desk. He supposed it was to hold his loose change, his pocket watch, and so forth. He’d take it along when he left. It would impress future customers. Yep, he thought, call something Shaker and folks will figure it’s got to be quality.
Saul loved possibilities, and North Homage was teeming with them. Meanwhile, the weekly rent was cheap, the food was good, and with attentiveness and his usual luck, he could turn near disaster into a windfall.
Daisy Prescott twisted her honey-blond hair into a bun and secured it with pins at the nape of her neck. She studied her image in the large mirror she had propped up on the plain desk in her room. It didn’t provide the elegance she preferred, but it would have to serve as a dressing table. She leaned forward and tilted her head this way and that as she examined every inch of her face and hair. Nothing seemed out of place, yet somehow . . . By her right hand was a large rosewood box with leaves carved into its sides. Daisy smoothed the tips of her fingers over the lid, lightly tracing the ivory inlays that pieced together into the shape of a rose. She opened the lid and selected a pair of wire spectacles. Spinster secretary was the look she was aiming for, and she was certain that squinting all day at the tiny words emerging from a typewriter would have her wearing spectacles in no time. Such a foolish pursuit, reading. Not only did it ruin one’s eyes, it distracted one’s mind from more lucrative activities.
She examined her makeup critically, then wiped off a layer of rouge. Pale was better. Easier to overlook. Granted she had an exquisite figure, tall yet small-boned and willowy, but she must take more care to disguise it. Her face and her body were valuable assets in her work; she knew how to use them, and when. Now was not the time.
Daisy thickened her painted eyebrows by a fraction of an inch, then smiled shyly at her reflection. She tried gazing up through her pale lashes. Yes, much better. She gathered up her toiletries and her rosewood box and put them, with a number of other objects, inside the cupboard built into the wall of her room. There was no lock on the cupboard door, which was unfortunate, but adding one herself would draw too much attention. At least there was a solid, new lock on the door to her room. She pushed the items far to the back of the cupboard and stacked some folded lingerie in front until nothing showed. It would have to do. The room and its furnishings were so carefully constructed, she had yet to find so much as a loose floorboard under which she could hide anything.
Gennie Malone rocked slowly and stared out the window of her second-floor room in the new North Homage Shaker Hostel. Supper would be soon, but for once she had no appetite. All she wanted was to rock and stare and think what to do about her engagement to Grady O’Neal. She had grown up in North Homage, under the loving care of the sisters, and it was here that she was drawn when she was troubled. Grady had given her a blue roadster as an engagement gift, and she’d used it to travel the eight miles from her boardinghouse in Languor to North Homage. She felt a little guilty using the car, under the circumstances, but she’d have felt worse about asking Grady for a ride. At least she had some savings from her job in the Languor Flower Shop, enough so she could pay for about three weeks in the Shaker Hostel. That was important. She needed to feel she wasn’t depending on Grady.
Gennie had been seventeen, sheltered and unworldly, when Grady came into her life. Seven years older and from a well-to-do family, he now served as Languor County sheriff. She had fallen madly, deeply in love. She was still in love, if it came to that. But now she was a woman of twenty. She had lived in the world, held a job, even traveled all the way to Massachusetts with Sister Rose. She had found in herself a love of adventure and an independent mind. Sister Rose, her friend and North Homage’s eldress, and the other sisters had taught her about devotion, compassion, and the equality of all people. Gennie had been shocked to find that as a wife she would be expected to grant her husband the final say in nearly all matters. Growing up in North Homage, she had been taught to obey the sisters and brothers, naturally. Rose and Sister Charlotte, who taught and cared for the orphans being raised by the Shakers, had been strict with her. And she had always followed their instructions—well, nearly always. She was a child, and they were her parents. Marriage, though, that was supposed to be different, wasn’t it?
In so many ways, Grady’s childhood had been the opposite of hers. He’d been a privileged child, the only son in a wealthy, tobacco-growing family. Though surrounded by poverty, he had never known hunger, never lost a parent. On the other hand, he had learned compassion, and he served as a low-paid county sheriff because he felt a duty to protect those less fortunate. Gennie loved him for that. Yet that sense of duty . . . well, it just didn’t seem the same as the deep compassion she had witnessed in Rose and the other Shakers. Grady’s people, their friends, even Grady himself, they were good folks, but they all put themselves a bit higher than the hardscrabble farmers around them. It rankled when Grady treated her the same way, as if she couldn’t survive without his guidance and protection.
Gennie squirmed and inched her rocker closer to the window so she could get a view of parts of the kitchen and medic gardens and, beyond them to the north, the herb fields, where oregano, thyme, and other perennials were unfolding their first tender spring leaves. By leaning, Gennie could just see the corner of the white clapboard Herb House. After she’d finished Shaker school at fourteen, she had spent much of her time working with Rose on the herb industry. Her mood perked up a bit at her memories of busy, happy days spent harvesting, drying, and packaging herbs for sale to the world. She closed her eyes and could still smell the burst of flowery sweetness as she stripped dried lavender buds from their stalks and pressed them into round tins. Her mouth watered at the remembered scent of pickles when she brushed against long bunches of dill weed hanging from the rafters in the second-floor drying room.
Shaker brothers and sisters began to emerge from buildings and walk toward the Center Family Dwelling House, and Gennie realized the bell must have rung for the evening meal. It was unusually cool for April, and she’d had her window closed. Next time she’d open it, even if it meant wrapping up in a blanket. She loved to hear the bell again. The hostel had no bell. Everyone was expected to gather at five-thirty or they missed supper. According to her clock, she had just enough time to clean up. Suddenly she was very hungry. It happened every time she remembered the smell of herbs.