Louisa and the Crystal Gazer (24 page)

“You will come,” Sylvia said with great confidence. “Because I will plead with you until you agree.”

And that, of course, was true. “Lizzie won’t come,” I said. “Remember, she fled Walpole simply to avoid an afternoon dancing party.”

“I have it all figured out,” Sylvia answered, cutting the last sesame bun in half so that we might share it. “I will promise
her anything she wants to eat. Lobsters, ice cream, pink cake. Anything. And music by candlelight, a pianist and violinist, but no dancing. She may simply sit and listen. And the music hour will suit Albert, as well.”

“Is Constable Cobban a lover of music?” I asked, surprised.

“No.” Sylvia grinned. “But it will mean an hour when he won’t have to answer Mother’s questions. He may nap, if he wishes.”

The great throng that had gathered in the little tea shop for an eleven o’clock cup and bun had begun to thin; mothers with wailing children made their way out the double doors, and young girls gathered up the boxes and bags of their errands and straightened their hats before putting on their coats to return to their households and the afternoon’s labor of French tutors or dancing classes or fancy sewing. The women of Boston returned to their schedule of activities, and Sylvia and I drained our teacups and also rose. Our chore for the afternoon was not as pleasant as conjugating verbs or embroidering shirts.

“Does Albert—Mr. Cobban—know the purpose of this little dinner party?” I asked Sylvia as we fetched our hats and coats from the rack near the door. Sylvia’s coat was new, I noticed, and stylishly short, burgundy velvet trimmed with brown fur, stopping just at the hourglass indent of the waist so that the fullness of her skirt wasn’t crushed. There was a new muffler to match. I admit to a thrill of pleasure, imagining the afternoons we might spend selecting Sylvia’s trousseau, should this business with young Cobban transpire according to her plan. A love of fashion and handsome clothing
may point to a certain lack of seriousness, but it was a harmless flaw in both Sylvia and myself that, as young women, we delighted in silk and lace and bright colors.

“Albert begins to suspect,” Sylvia answered my question. “He is a little slow, though.”

“Just as long as he doesn’t think you are a little fast! You’ve known him such a short time.”

“A year now. Almost. You still don’t have gloves, Louy? You’ll get chilblains. Here, take these. I have an extra pair of gloves in my muffler. Don’t worry. They’re old.” She, with great nonchalance, reached into the fur-and-velvet muffler and brought out a pair of gloves of brown kidskin, lined with wool and finished with four buttons at the wrist.

“Sylvia, these are brand-new,” I said.

“Are they? How forgetful I am. Well, consider them an early Christmas gift. Have you your package for Auntie Bond? You didn’t leave it at the table? Yes? Then let’s be on our way. But you owe me a favor, Louy.”

“For the beautiful new gloves, Sylvia? Thank you.”

“No, because I am coming with you this afternoon. I will spend an hour or two with you in the cemetery if you will spend an hour or two at Mother’s table and in our music room after the New Year, when Albert comes.”

“Agreed,” I said. “You’ve won the match.”

We crossed the Common, past the display of snowmen and snow angels; past the play area where mothers watched calmly or fearfully, according to temperament, as great snowball skirmishes took place; past the smokers’ circle where men in greatcoats and tall hats paced and chatted, drawing on cigarettes or cigars; past the ice-skating pond and the new
mansions of Boylston Street, barely visible over our left shoulders. Boston, my beloved Boston, but never so beloved as that sweet little town of Concord, for what place can ever be as sweet as the place where we dream our childhood dreams?

There was a cold wind off the Atlantic that afternoon, cold enough to make our teeth chatter and to tug and pull at our skirts, making the walk up Beacon Hill a difficult one.

The cemetery, the second-oldest one in Boston, was a forlorn place, filled with bare-branched winter trees, crypts and stone angels, and other, smaller monuments that had leaned and sunk with great age, their lettering no more than a suggestion of what once had been so meaningfully carved on the worn, lichen-covered stone.

The air smelled of pine and salt, of cold, of solitude, of mourning. The sky was leaden and overcast, burdened with a great weight of quickly moving clouds that could not shed their encumbrance of snow because it was too cold. The wind cut through us to the bone and howled through bare branches, rattling the few browned and withered leaves still clinging to them. We were in a small city of the dead, surrounded by bustling Boston.

“Creepy,” said Sylvia, shivering. “What are we looking for, Louy?”

“A grave marker for Mrs. Emily Phips. Mrs. Percy visited her here. Maybe over there?” I pointed at a little bluff where the stones were still polished, where the granite angels had not yet lost their noses or the fingers with which they pointed to heaven.

We trudged through crusted snow that crackled underfoot,
our eyes filled with the whiteness of winter and the gray stones of death, our faces red and chapped from the wind. I heard a twig snap behind me and turned in alarm, feeling the gooseflesh rise on my arms under the thick, heavy wool of my coat.

Suddenly I had the distinct sensation that we were not alone, that someone watched us. I turned in a circle and saw only desolate pine trees, stark oaks, and gray stone.

“What’s wrong, Louy? Or perhaps I should ask what is right. I do not like this place.” She huddled close at my side.

“Why, Sylvia.” I forced lightness into my voice. “Dear friend, you started this business by insisting we attend Mrs. Percy’s séance, and now you are afraid of a perfectly charming old cemetery?”

“A séance in a new and well-furnished parlor is one thing. This is quite another,” she insisted. “I’m cold and I’m quite certain the air is bad here. I shall get malaria.”

“Not in winter, you won’t,” I tried to reassure her.

Another twig snapped. Or was it other footsteps crunching in the snow? I took a deep breath, remembering the terrible fear I had felt when locked into that small room in Mrs. Percy’s cellar. At least here I was in the open, in the cold air with the sky above me and all the room I could desire. Here, no walls closed in.

“Come,” I said. “Let’s get this done so we can go home to our warm hearths. You take that row, Sylvia. I’ll start here.”

We were in the newer section by then, where the memorials were larger, more ornate than those preferred by our forefathers and foremothers, whose graves were marked with simple stones. Some of the memorials in this section, with
their weeping seated angels and aboveground chapels, were so large that for minutes at a time I lost sight of Sylvia in her new burgundy coat as we made our way down our assigned white and gray rows, reading epithets aloud to fill the cold silence: “‘The hand of the Lord was upon me, and carried me out in the spirit of the Lord.’” “‘Can these bones live? O Lord God, thou knowest.’” “‘Beloved Mother.’” “‘Here lies a daughter sorely missed.’” “‘To an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled that fadeth not away.’” “‘Behold a man raised up by Christ!’” On one grave I found one of Father’s favorite passages from
Pilgrim’s Progress
: “‘The Pilgrim they laid in a large upper chamber, whose window opened towards the Sun rising; the name of the chamber was Peace.’”

“Ugh!” I heard Sylvia exclaim at one point.

“What is it?” I shouted in alarm.

“An empty grave. They must have dug it in the autumn, before the ground froze, and never filled it in. I wonder why?” she yelled.

“Let’s hope it is a fortuitous sign,” I answered. “The gravely ill patient recovered from his illness.”

“Is this really a place for humor?” she shouted back in a peeved voice.

“Keep looking, Sylvia.”

We finished that row and began another, leaving our footprints in the virgin snow as we moved past tombstone after tombstone. The wind howled even more fiercely and I shivered, more grateful than I could tell for the new warm gloves from Sylvia. My nose and forehead had grown numb from the cold. And still I had that sensation of being watched, yet when I looked up I saw no one except the flicker of Sylvia’s
vibrant coat as she moved down her row in a line parallel to my own.

An hour of this gruesome labor passed. The winter sun was slipping down the gray afternoon sky, casting vague shadows on the white snow, when I stopped before one modest grave site, marked by a simple stone flanked by two columns.

BELOVED WIFE
, the epitaph read.
MRS. WILLIAM PHIPS, NÉE EMILY SIDNEY GRAYLING. MERCY, MERCY, SAVE, FORGIVE. OH, WHO SHALL LOOK ON THEE AND LIVE? BORN APRIL 6, 1807, DIED JANUARY 14, 1853.

“Over here!” I called to Sylvia. “I’ve found it.”

“She was not aged when she passed over,” said Sylvia, after we had said a prayer over the grave.

“In her prime,” I agreed, “and still much missed, it would seem. There are footsteps, masculine, I’d say, and newly made.” The snow about the monument had been trampled. “Her husband still misses her and comes to pray here.” Reader, it was wrong of me to make an assumption of that magnitude, I would soon learn.

We stood quietly before that grave, reflecting on life and death.

“It is two thirty, Louy,” said Sylvia after a while, quietly, for the cemetery had sombered her. She replaced her timepiece into her reticule and gave me a meaningful glance.

“The lottery! We must hurry!” And like that, the mysteries of the grave were put aside so that I might attend to the living—to the drawing for the three lessons with Signor Massimo.

We arrived back at Mr. Crowell’s shop at a quarter to
three, out of breath and laughing, since we had run almost all the way from Beacon Hill, but that mad race had been mostly downhill, and Sylvia had fallen right before the Common and bent her skirt hoop so that she now had a lopsided tilt to her costume.

Mr. Crowell, who had known both our families for many years, looked at us with affection, and this time did pat my head, though I was a grown woman.

“The young should amuse themselves,” he said, helping to brush snow off Sylvia. “Old age comes soon enough, and the sadness.”

“Hush, Mr. Crowell,” said his wife, who had come out of her small office to help attend to the festivities. “This is no time to be talking of sadness. You’ll bring bad luck on them.” She looked at him with great tenderness even as she scolded, and I felt a sudden pang of homesickness for Marmee and Father.

Punch and tea cakes had been set out on a table in the middle of the little shop, and a handful of people had already gathered there, talking amongst themselves and eyeing the rows of music scores and books about the lives of the great composers.

“Where are you coming from in such a rush, Miss Alcott?” Mrs. Crowell asked, giving me a cup of ruby-colored punch.

“The old Beacon Hill cemetery. I went to see the grave of Emily Phips.”

A shadow passed over Mrs. Crowell’s face.

“Did you know her?” I asked.

“I did.” Mrs. Crowell slowly, with an air of preoccupation,
rearranged the biscuits on the platter. “A very unhappy woman. She purchased a parlor organ through us…oh, years ago, perhaps twenty or more. And then she came in once a month to buy music. Until she died, year before. Death was a kindness for her, I thought. She had no will to live.”

“She played church hymns mostly,” said Mr. Crowell. “And some Bach, of course. You have to respect a lady who takes the time to play Bach.”

“She were a very sad woman,” repeated Mrs. Crowell.

“Here now,” said Mr. Crowell. “Don’t go gossiping.”

By unspoken arrangement Sylvia and Mrs. Crowell and I stood silent until the doorbells chimed again and the husband went to greet the next set of customers.

“Why sad?” I asked when we three had privacy.

“It is gossip; Mr. Crowell is correct,” said the wife. “But since you visited her grave and did her that favor, I will tell you this much. There was gossip that her husband was unfaithful. Ach, men.” She heaved a sigh of disapproval. “And it weren’t a happy marriage to begin with, I fear. She still missed that first one, the boy she was engaged to when she were a girl. Can’t think of his name. He weren’t from round about these ways.”

“Was there gossip about who the other woman was?” I asked.

“You might ask her brother, if it matters. He still has the old town house on Charles Street. Near the corner of Chestnut. Dilapidated old house, but he’ll not move from it. Never married himself. He preferred Beethoven, as I recall. Ah! Miss Young is here! I must go see to her, Miss Alcott. Excuse me, please.”

After Mrs. Crowell left us, Sylvia and I stood quietly for a moment, thinking. “Funny, isn’t it?” she finally said. “You see an old gent with a soft smile and gray whiskers and you think, ‘What a jovial fellow he looks!’ But you never know what he gets up to behind closed doors. Do you think Albert will be faithless, Louy?”

“No,” I said automatically, though I hadn’t really considered this topic yet. A final customer came, jangling the doorbell, and I saw that everyone had gathered around the little table where Mr. Crowell had placed the punch, cakes, and a glass jar with our names on folded papers inside. I went to join them.

With silent prayers rising from me like heat rises from a cake just out of the oven, I watched as Mr. Crowell picked up the jar and gave it a sturdy shaking. Twelve little pieces of folded paper rattled up and down, back and forth, and then came to rest on the bottom of the jar.

“We need to do this fair and square. Jim!” He called to his assistant, a gangly lad in a striped wool shirt and trousers who looked like many awkward youths of fifteen but played like an angel, like a genius, when sitting before a piano. Jim played the pieces for those customers who could not read music well enough to play for themselves.

“Close your eyes and select a piece of paper,” his employer told him.

Jim tugged at his brown hair, grinned, then put one long-fingered, slightly grimy hand over his eyes, and with the other felt for the opened jar, with its little bits of paper resting on the bottom.