A ground-floor sitting room was provided for the purpose of social intercourse. Moreover, though at twenty-two Mollie was the youngest of the residents, not even the eldest, a seventy-year-old who had been a governess, was permitted to entertain a gentleman caller without Miss Hamilton acting as chaperone. That was true when the former governess’s elderly brother came to see her, and definitely true on the two occasions when Joshua Turner, having cornered Mollie in her workroom and more or less invited himself, showed up for Sunday afternoon tea.
On the occasion of the second visit Josh put up with Edith Hamilton’s restrictive oversight for no more than ten minutes, then stood up, crossed to Mollie—Miss Hamilton had arranged them in two chairs with the tea table between—and took her hand. “It is far too nice an afternoon to be cooped up in here, Miss Popandropolos. We are going for a walk.” With that he pulled her up, nodded toward the chaperone, and practically pushed himself and Mollie out the front door.
He made straight for Madison Square Park across the street, and steered them toward the Twenty-Sixth Street end, though he stopped as soon as they were well inside the leafy fastness. “The old biddy won’t see us here, even if she’s peeking through the lace curtains. Now,” gesturing at two benches with his stick, “sun or shade?”
“Sun,” Mollie said, choosing the bench bathed in the soft light of the waning April afternoon. “Or we can stroll if you prefer.” Then, her glance dropping to his peg leg, “I mean because you said . . .”
“I know what you meant. Don’t fuss. I never take offense. Anyway, I promise I can stride along at a fairly fast clip if I’ve a mind to. But just now I suggested a walk to get us out from under the harridan’s beady gaze. I want to talk, Mollie. I love talking to you. Why don’t you want to talk to me?”
“But I do, Josh. Why would you think otherwise?”
“Stop it,” he said. “Stop playacting. It’s the very thing I liked about you from the first. That you’re genuine, at least mostly. But ever since we went coaching you’ve treated me like something with a bad smell you don’t want too close. Please tell me why that is, and what I have to do to get back to where we were. Where I thought we were,” he amended.
A crossroads and Mollie recognized it as such. “What did you mean . . . mostly genuine?”
“Popandropolos,” he said immediately, “is poppycock. A made-up name if ever I heard one. You’re Irish, though I have no idea why you prefer not to say so. I know the Irish aren’t held in high regard, but no one’s likely to mistake you for a Five Points doxy, Mollie Whoever. So why the masquerade? And, more important, why have you decided not to like me?”
“I do like you. I think you are charming and fun to be with. And very, very courageous.”
“Then why—Good Lord . . . Mollie, are you married after all? To some blighter who’s gone off and left you to fend for yourself? Someone named Popandropolos, perhaps?”
“No, nothing like that. I am not married, Josh. I give you my solemn word I’m not.”
“Fair enough. I accept it. But that still leaves the question of why you’ve been holding me at arm’s length for a month.”
Across from them a small girl with pink ribbons in her hair was rolling a hoop along the grass, and an even smaller boy was toddling into his father’s open arms. “Because,” Mollie said, “I am twenty-two and grown accustomed to being a spinster, and I don’t wish my peace to be disturbed by dreams that can’t come true.”
The sheer brutal honesty of it left him without a response for several long seconds. Then, finally, recognizing that he was wading into waters much deeper than he’d first intended to brave, “Why can’t your dreams come true, Mollie? How can you make that assumption without giving them a chance?”
She shook her head. “Some things have to be concluded on the body of evidence.”
“Spoken like a lawyer,” he said. “Was your father a lawyer, Mollie Whoever?”
“I don’t believe so.”
Josh cocked his head and studied her. “But you don’t know for sure. I think I begin to see some shape to this story. Are you a little bastard, sweet Mollie? Or should I say bastardess? Is that the big secret, the shame consigning you to spinsterhood?” And when she didn’t answer, “If so, you should know I’m exactly that. A bastard.”
“You’re not! Your father is the famous Dr. Nicholas Turner, and your mother was Carolina Devrey of the shipping Devreys.”
“Ah! I see you like me well enough to have done some investigating. I’m delighted. And it’s all true as far as it goes. But apparently you did not probe far enough into the dark and dreadful past. My mother and father weren’t married when I was born. And I was a six-year-old page at their wedding, that’s how brazen they were about it.”
Mollie waved his words away. “It’s an old story, Josh. No one cares about it anymore.”
“True enough. No one does. And whatever your story may be, no one—or at least no one named Joshua Turner—cares about it, either.”
The sun was beginning to disappear behind a row of stately linden trees and the air was quickly cooling. Above their heads a number of small birds flitted among the wooden houses erected for them when the park was established in 1847, each labeled in now-fading lettering as Custom House or Exchange. There was even one called Macy’s—because some wit had commented, in New York even the birds had to be occupied with business.
A breeze ruffled Mollie’s hair and Josh realized he hadn’t given her an opportunity to take a wrap when he dragged her out of the house. He put his arm along the bench behind her shoulders. “Are you too cold to stay here a short time longer?”
“No.”
“Good, because I want to tell you another story. One that’s far more to my discredit than my parents’ romantic disregard for social custom.”
“Josh, there’s no need—”
“Yes,” he interrupted. “There is. If we’re to even consider going forward together a bit, seeing where it takes us, there’s every need in the world. I’m not the war hero you think me to be, Mollie. I did not lose my leg in some stirring battle. I was mustered into the First New York Mounted Rifles in August of ’62 because since I was four I could sit a horse better than most. Apart from that I was sixteen and knew nothing about anything, except that I wanted to fight to preserve the Union and free the slaves. My mother, after all, was an active abolitionist and my father shared her views, though he was less vocal about them. But neither of them knew I meant to volunteer until after I’d done it.”
“Is that why they let you go through with it? Because they were abolitionists?”
“I think it was that they knew they couldn’t stop me unless they pretty much tied me to a bedpost. I’m accustomed to getting my way, Mollie. Be warned.”
This last with a brush of her cheek with the head of his stick, gold and shaped like a horse’s head. She had asked him about it earlier and he’d said it had been in his family for years. That was a big part of her conviction that this could never be more than an escapade, her certitude that Josh Turner would soon lose interest. And her reason for keeping Josh’s attentions secret from Auntie Eileen, who would only be disappointed once again. For all the scandal concerning his parents, both the Turners and the Devreys were old New York families with deep New York roots. It was one thing to have thought she might marry the likes of Max Merkel; it was quite another to imagine herself acceptable to the Turners. “There’s nothing dishonorable in being stubborn,” she said.
“Ah, yes. The rest of the story. As I said, I was mustered in during August and saw my first action on a Virginia battlefield in September. Zuni, a small and largely inconsequential fracas over a railroad bridge.
Except not so inconsequential for me. I was taken prisoner in the first ten minutes. Never got off a shot.”
Paralyzed by the horses snorting and whinnying and frequently squealing with terrible pain, and the booming artillery firing from the hill behind, and the blood. All of it so much more terrifying than anything he could have conceived. And no way he could explain that to a woman. Not sitting here in a city park with sunset approaching and the sound of children’s laughter barely faded. “I don’t know why the reb who captured me didn’t kill me.”
Sweet Jesus Christ, you’re barely off the tit, lad. With his bayonet an inch from finality.
“But he did not. He grabbed the reins of my horse instead and pulled me out of it, and next thing I was in a particular outpost of hell called Belle Isle Prison camp. An island in the middle of the James, with fierce rapids either side so any attempt to escape was suicidal. No barracks. Just a few shacks and some tattered tents. No food to speak of. Little medical care.”
Mollie reached out her hand and lay it on his thigh. The one that had only air below the knee. Dusk now and they were mostly alone. No one to notice the remarkable forwardness of the gesture, or to see Josh cover her hand with his.
“I thank you for your commiserations, sweet Mollie. But I fared a good deal better than most. I started out young and healthy, and I survived off my own fat at Belle Isle for two years and four weeks. Then a high-ranking someone or other happened by who chanced to work out I was Ceci Devrey Lee’s half brother, and hauled me off to my sister’s plantation. Birchfield it was called, in the heart of the southern Virginia lakes. Well away from the fighting, or so we thought. I spent six months being nursed by my sister and her slaves and when, after being cosseted in this particularly luxurious enemy lap, I was once again well, I did not go looking for my regiment. I headed for north and home.”
“Small wonder,” Mollie said.
“Patently illegal,” Josh replied. “I’d signed up for three years and there were four months left to run. And I’d never so much as wagged my finger at a Confederate soldier.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” she insisted. “No one could say it was.” And when he didn’t reply, “What about your leg?”
“Oh yes, my leg. I lost it during the trek homeward. To a bear trap on a Maryland farm. The farmer’s wife saved my life by hacking the gangrenous part off with a kitchen knife. She’d never heard of the sulfuric ether my father is so famous for using during his painless surgery, nor what he calls germs, but at least I convinced her to wash the knife in carbolic before she started.”
Mollie let a few seconds go by. “What about your sister?” she said finally. “How have she and her plantation managed after the war. Without slaves, I mean.”
Josh’s face stiffened. Rather, Mollie thought, the way Auntie Eileen’s did when she was crying without shedding any tears. “Birchfield was burned to the ground by Union renegades around the time General Sherman was torching pretty much everything between Atlanta and Savannah. That barbarism freed the Union conscience, it seems. Some men found they quite liked the old raping and looting and pillaging sort of warfare. They fed off that damnable march and went rogue. Apparently my darling sister and her three children, none of whom had ever done any harm to anyone, were bayoneted where they stood. After that my brother-in-law came north to avenge their killing by burning New York to the ground. He wound up hanging from a tree in City Hall Park.”
“That,” Mollie spoke very slowly, “is a truly dreadful story.”
“Yes, it is. But it can’t be changed, Mollie, and I’m alive and grateful for it. Now, since in this world there’s no telling how long that’s to be . . . Will you see me again, Mollie? Without our needing to be watched every second by that Hamilton creature?”
“Yes, Josh. I will. But I can’t say what’s to happen beyond that.”
“Fair enough, neither can I. But I’m a gambling man, Mollie. And I’m prepared to let my winnings lie, and wait for the next card to be turned.”
“M
ORE TEA
, R
OSIE?”
“No, thank you, Eileen. But perhaps a bit more sherry wine . . .”
“An excellent idea.” Eileen lifted the decanter and topped up first Rosie O’Toole’s glass and then her own. “Your good health, my dear.”
“And yours, Eileen.”
She wasn’t using her Waterford, not for the woman who had once earned her living by dressing Eileen’s ladies, and they drank her second-best Amontillado. But Eileen had told Hatty to bake the chocolate-topped cake known as a Boston cream pie, which she knew to be Rosie’s favorite. Indeed, they had devoured fully half the cake between them. Replete now they sipped their sherry silently for some seconds, then Eileen said, “I take it things are going well at the store.”
“Things generally go quite well at Macy’s. Mrs. Getchell will have them no other way.”
“I take it my niece still meets with her approval.”
“My dear Eileen, how could Mollie not meet with anyone’s approval? Such a charming and polite lady is bound to be liked.”
Eileen noted the use of the word “lady” rather than “girl.” Twenty-two and unmarried, it was to be expected. “I remain enormously grateful to you for recommending her for the job, Rosie.”
“Mollie’s talents are much appreciated. By the customers as much as the staff,” Rosie added, not quite looking at Eileen as she spoke. Choosing instead to pick up a stray crumb of Boston cream pie on the end of a delicately moistened finger.
Eileen’s every sense was instantly alert. “Perhaps another slice of cake, Rosie. It’s your day off after all. You should indulge just a wee bit.”
“Well, perhaps only the tiniest sliver. Hatty is such a fine cook.”
“Indeed, she is.” Eileen cut a substantial wedge of the remaining cake and put it on the other woman’s plate. “We’re all gifted in something, don’t you think? Just like Mollie. Gifted with a needle.” Having brought the subject back to her niece, Eileen waited.
Rosie lifted a forkful of cake to her mouth, chewed, swallowed, then washed the delicacy down with a sip of sherry and sat back. “I shouldn’t perhaps tell tales out of school as it were . . .”
“Of course you should,” Eileen said. “As long as you tell them only to me. I am Mollie’s only living relative, after all.”
“Yes, you are. And I know you have her best interests at heart, always.” Rosie leaned forward.
“Always,” Eileen said, leaning forward in turn, so their heads almost met across the table.