After William’s kiss, I’d felt as tall as an oak, but this turn had shrunk me to a spiny shrub beside Miss Rose in the hansom. It was dark inside, the curtains drawn against the cold, and her scent, lavender and rosewater, no less than her layered skirts, f illed the cabin. With each bump in the road, I thought I might be sick again. Thought maybe I should be sick again.
How much of my scrapbook had she picked through? How much had Violet seen? How much could they know? Each trinket in that collection of odds and ends had a story to tell me, but I wouldn’t have thought they’d mean much to anyone else. Besides some silly poems and those letters to William, I had written down very little. Even so, a quick survey of the pages would reveal two glaring secrets: my infatuation with William, of course, but worse, Mama’s and my true relation to each other.
What was Miss Rose going to do? Expose us? Why? Because I’d seen her without her wig? Mama would blame me. Would Mr. Dryfus cast her out? And what about Little John? And how could Violet—!
Doing poorly was she? Snuck upstairs, is what she did, picked through my things and stole my scrapbook. Vile, vile Vi-oh-let. Satisfying fantasies of violence bolstered me only until the hansom jerked to a halt before the print shop.
“Miss Rose, I won’t. I’m not going to say anything about your . . . about . . .”
“About what?” The muscular authority of her voice shaking the curtain.
Your lumpy bald head! I almost said. Your old, ugly, lumpy, bald head! But said nothing, for she was, with Cyrus’s help, climbing down. I sat there in the hansom, unsure. While it’s true that part of me wanted nothing more than for Mama to stand accountable for our lies, another, larger part was frantically concocting some explanation.
I climbed down after Miss Rose. Inside, no one was minding the counter. The high, pained bleat of Little John’s cries, surging from the kitchen, was our only greeting apart from the scent of coffee and sauerkraut permeating the place. The Washington Press was thump, thump, thumping, which meant Hanley was in the composition room. Maybe, I thought, maybe Mr. Dryfus was out? But Miss Rose, knocking and opening his off ice door in the same motion, proved this hope false.
“I may be some time,” she said, cool as you please, and, stepping into the other room, closed the door on me.
My heart beat a dozen times for every shuddering thump of the press. Then I heard the kitchen door open, Mama’s voice and Little John’s cries soften, and the thin thread holding me back snapped. I burst into the off ice to f ind Miss Rose staring down on Mr. Dryfus, behind his desk.
“Mr. Dryfus,” I blurted, having little notion what I would say until I heard myself saying: “It’s my fault, Mr. Dryfus. My—”
“Madelyn!” said Miss Rose.
“Fault?” said Mr. Dryfus.
“It was Madelyn’s idea,” Miss Rose cut in, which left Dryfus and me both fairly baffled. “To approach you f irst about the printed matter for our Nativity play. Wasn’t it, Madelyn?” Her painted eyebrows arched and flattened. “You were right,” she said. “Mr. Dryfus is not one to be deterred by Mr. Stockwell’s silly petition against my theater, are you, Mr. Dryfus? Not with the prof it he shall make.” She paused. “And the service which we shall render the community, of course. A glorious beginning to a glorious new season in the arts!”
Mr. Dryfus, looking resigned and weary, made no sign of having endured any greater revelation than this.
“Now,” said Miss Rose, turning forcefully my direction. “Go visit your sister, Madelyn. While Mr. Dryfus and I discuss terms.”
As I closed the off ice door, the numb relief I felt passed to confusion and then to a kind of impotent and resentful gratitude, which marks so many of my memories of Miss Rose. Why would she bring me, if not to tell? Why make me think she would tell? I was all tangled up, and Mama coming down the hall with a gnashing, crying Little John didn’t straighten me any. Her eyes found mine. She stopped short, holding Little John so close that my heart became an empty open hand within me. A kind word, Mama. Please. Any tenderness at all would do. I gladly would have rushed over, laid claim, and hugged tight the both of them, but the invitation flickering across her face vanished.
“Well,” she said instead, “if it ain’t the educated lady.” The hurt in her voice as much as the venom stung me.
“What’s wrong with him?” I didn’t know what else to say. In the dim hallway light, Mama looked haggard and disheveled in a way I’d never seen. Her face bony, her eyes weary, her hair unkempt. The shop was a mess, too, I realized, dust and paper everywhere, the coal scuttle empty. Little John whimpered, hushed.
“You care?” Mama scoffed. “Don’t care a lick about us when you’re up there in the manor, do you? Don’t visit. Don’t even think of me and all the work you left behind, do you? No sense pretending you care now.”
She might have said more, but the study door opened to the swish of Miss Rose’s skirts. I stood for a long, harrowing moment, caught between them, until Miss Rose broke the rasping silence.
“Good day to you, Mrs. Dryfus.”
Without a word, Mama turned and walked back into the kitchen, taking with her a part of my heart, not to mention any sacrif icial impulse I suffered on her behalf. Not knowing what else to do, I followed Miss Rose out the door and into the hansom. I turned my back to her, stared hard at the bright fragments of town passing through cracks in the curtain, determined to think nothing, to feel nothing, to rise out of myself and look down until I appeared from above as small as I felt. And I would not cry, I would not.
“Madelyn.”
“It wasn’t my fault,” I said. “It wasn’t my idea to come here, or to lie or—”
“It wasn’t her fault, either. Madelyn, listen.”
“No!”
No one said “no” to Miss Rose. She sat upright, straight and still. Be sorry, I thought, but I wasn’t and couldn’t bring myself to say so.
“Why’d you bring me with you if you weren’t going to tell?”
“What options did your mother have, Madelyn? What?” And then she paused as if choosing a word from a shelf. “Assets?”
“Assets?”
“Skills, Madelyn. Skills rendered for a price. What assets beyond her beauty, her sexual labor. Her maternal labor?”
“Don’t talk about Mama like that.”
“Like . . . ?”
“Like that! Like you know. What do you know? You don’t know anything! Rich lady like you with your big house and your dresses and your”—I took a mighty breath—“your wigs! You don’t know!”
And before I knew it, I was telling her everything: about Landis Wilcox and the big white house, about the day I was born, and the day Mama returned. About Dot, the garden, the goats, and the backroom men. About John and his wife and the ad in the Matrimonial Times. By the time I was done, we’d crested the manor drive and jostled to halt beside the fountain; I was gutted, breathless, horrif ied. The horse, a piebald gelding, whinnied hello to the barn; blackbirds trilled from the hedges. The carriage gave as Cyrus jumped down. He opened the door and Miss Rose, silent for the longest stretch I’d known, pulled it closed again.
“And the baby?” she said. “He looks nothing like his father.”
“Yes he does,” I said, though I’m pretty sure she suspected this.
Briefly, ever so briefly, I felt the weight of my past lift as far as the low cabin ceiling, only to settle again heavier. What was I thinking, telling her all this? Now, in the aftermath of this traitorous lapse, I saw all of us—me, Mama, Little John, even Mr. Dryfus, who loved Little John as his own son—huddled small as mice in the palm of Miss Rose’s hand. And the secret I held in exchange (one old, bald head) seemed awfully wet powder by comparison.
After an agonizing silence, she spoke again, low, almost a whisper.
“And do you think, do you really think, your mother would have chosen that life for herself ? For you? You think she had a choice? Oh, that poor brave girl.”
Through a crack in the curtain, I could see Robert, the butler, standing nervously by the carriage to see what the matter could be.
“Miss Rose. You can’t—”
“Oh, I could, Madelyn.” She stood ablaze in the glare of the open door looking down at me. “We’ve already established how easily I could. But would I? Why would I tell? Think, Madelyn.” She tapped her temple. “What purpose would that serve?”
“Miss?” said the butler. “Mrs. Wiltshire from the Lady’s Auxiliary is waiting. She says . . .”
“Fine, yes.” She waved him away. “It seems to me, Madelyn.” Digging in her satchel, she handed me my scrapbook. “It seems to me we both hold secrets the other would rather keep secret.”
I was shattered, shaking, though I didn’t know it until Miss Rose disappeared into the manor and I climbed from the hansom to f ind my knees wobbling. Cyrus hovered close, but I have never been the fainting kind. Instead, the day’s emotions chattered like a room full of people, louder and louder, making no sense at all.
Until one sound rose over the mangle. Laughter.
My eyes adjusted to the winter glare. Violet, feeling ever so much better, stood on the porch, near the conservatory, next to William and Mr. Clemens, laughing. At me? At something Clemens had said? I didn’t much care. Vile Violet was laughing, turning this way and that before the men, so that her skirt billowed prettily.
Make no mistake. I knew exactly what I was doing as I placed my scrapbook beside the fountain, dried my eyes, and marched around the porch steps. Without so much as acknowledging William or Clemens, I grabbed a great chunk of Violet’s pretty hair and yanked, tumbling us off the porch, into the flowerbed. Oh, we rolled and kicked and scratched and bit, shredding Cyrus’s winter bulbs and crushing the latticework, until icy water stole the breath from me and left us both heaving on hands and knees at Mrs. Hardrow’s feet.
Miss Rose stared down at us from the porch with an open-mouthed William and flabbergasted senator, who had postponed his departure until Sunday. Only Mr. Clemens and perhaps Lizzette, whose head poked over the second-floor balcony, seemed amused. Miss Rose, furious, stomped down the steps but kept a distance from our bloody, mud-stained persons.
“Explain yourselves!”
“She!” We levied our accusations in the same overlapping breath. “Attacked—stole—me—my scrapbook!”
“No, she did not,” said Miss Rose.
Violet and I, unsure who had been exonerated, glanced at each other.
“Mrs. Hardrow took your scrapbook. At my request. Now . . .” she said, but looked back and forth between us, clearly at a loss. “Out of my sight. Both of you.”