Gilded Dreams E-Book

Donna Russo Morin

• Herausgeber: Next Chapter
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

From the bestselling author of GILDED SUMMERS comes a powerful novel of the last eight years of the American Women’s fight for suffrage.

The battle for the vote is on fire in America. The powerful and rich women of Newport, Rhode Island, are not only some of the most involved suffragettes, their wealth - especially that of the indomitable Alva Vanderbilt Belmont - nearly single-handedly funded the major suffrage parties. Yet they have been left out of history, tossed aside as mere socialites. In GILDED DREAMS, they reclaim their rightful place in history.

Pearl and Ginevra (GILDED SUMMERS) are two of its most ardent warriors. College graduates, professional women, wives, and mothers, these progressive women have fought their way through some of life’s harshest challenges, yet they survived, yet they thrive. Now they set their sights on the vote, the epitome of all they have struggled for, the embodiment of their dreams.

From the sinking of the Titanic, through World War 1, Pearl and Ginevra are once more put to the test as they fight against politics, outdated beliefs, and the most cutting opponent of all... other women. Yet they will not rest until their voices are heard, until they - and all the women of America - are allowed to cast their vote. But to gain it, they must overcome yet more obstacles, some that put their very lives in danger.

An emotional and empowering journey, GILDED DREAMS is a historical, action-packed love letter to the women who fought so hard for all women who stand on the shoulders of their triumph.

Leseprobe

Gilded Dreams

The Journey to SuffrageNewport’s Gilded Age Book 2

Donna Russo Morin

Copyright (C) 2020 Donna Russo Morin

Layout design and Copyright (C) 2020 by Next Chapter

Published 2020 by Next Chapter

Edited by Terry Hughes

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the author's permission.

Other Works by Donna Russo Morin

GILDED SUMMERS

BIRTH: Once, Upon a New Time Book One

PORTRAIT OF A CONSPIRACY: Da Vinci's Disciples Book One

THE COMPETITION: Da Vinci's Disciples Book Two

THE FLAMES OF FLORENCE: Da Vinci's Disciples Book Three

THE KING'S AGENT

TO SERVE A KING

THE SECRET OF THE GLASS

THE COURTIER OF VERSAILLES

Praise for GILDED DREAMS

“Packed with intrigue, textured world-building, and the fascinating rise of the women's rights movement, GILDED DREAMS is a hit!”

-Heather Webb, USA Today Bestselling Author

“Donna Russo Morin is a great writer who has done her research well and presented a lively and dynamic story. GILDED DREAMS is historical fiction at its highest and all should enjoy the story!!!”

-Crystal Reviews

“This wonderful story is both gripping and emotionally charged throughout. It can be read without having read the first but readers may long to read GILDED SUMMERS as well because of the quality writing in this one. An amazing book.”

-Kate Clifford Eminhizer, Manager of Pamunkey Regional Library

“A very intriguing read. The two main characters were very well written… it captured my attention within the first chapters with the sinking of the Titanic that took the lives of Pearl's family. It is apparent that Donna Russo Morin has done her research on the time period and the movement itself… a book worth revisiting. Five Stars!”

-Readers' Favorite

Praise for GILDED SUMMERS

“GILDED SUMMERS by Donna Russo Morin is a lush and evocative novel of the distinctive period known as Newport's Gilded Age, a period brought vibrantly to life in this powerful work. Ginevra and Pearl, unique in their own way yet equally sympathetic, are captivating from the start and never let go. The passages and chapters are exquisitely and uniquely intertwined, like the young lives of its characters, sewn seamlessly with the mounting mystery and suspense. Vivid descriptions evoke the setting and period with such mastery, one feels like a 'fly on the wall', living there with these young women who are so well-crafted and developed. A genuine 'can't-put-it-down' novel, a triumph by a masterful writer!”

-Anne Girard (Diane Haegar) author of Madame Picasso

“Author Donna Russo Morin has a knack for both character and historical authenticity, making this journey into Newport's Gilded Age a fascinating and fulfilling tale. From the well-described details of the surroundings and costumes to the social structures at play and the strictures of upper and lower class lives, Russo Morin captures an era where women are ready to break out. Pearl and Ginevra have the same spirit for freedom and choice, but they are distinctly well presented and developed as very different women who compliment one another's misgivings. Gilded Summers is sure to suit fans of the likes of Downton Abbey, but it delivers far deeper emotional connections and realistic portrayals and is a highly recommended historical read.”

-Readers Favorite

“The characters of Pearl and Ginevra provide two different but compelling lenses to view life at the time… as segments of delightfully descriptive Gilded Age Newport abound. The twist is unexpected!”

-Historical Novel Society

“Gilded Summers perfectly illustrates the lives of women in the 19th century and how few rights they had at the time. I have long been a fan of this author. She knows how to vibrantly tell a historical story while still staying true to the historical side of things. Her passion for the Newport area shines through in her words. Gilded Summers is an insightful glimpse into an age and place where women, even women of power, were merely objects and ornamentation. It is also an inspiring story of two women who chose to buck convention and live lives of their choosing; women who pioneered the way for the women of future generations.”

-The True Book Addict

“This is remarkable historical fiction that this reviewer highly recommends. Donna Russo Martin's writing has evolved into something more meaningful, serious but joyfully engaging, and memorable in a creative, new style sure to endear her to readers of all ages! Wonder-full!”

-Crystal Book Reviews

“A wonderful peek at the Gilded Age of Newport, RI, filled with the Astors and Vanderbilts and a bit of mystery.”

-Baer Books Blog

For my sons…For all my descendants to come…May you understand my fight,May you always fight the good fight.

“I long to hear that you have declared an independency. And, by the way, in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.”

Abigail Adams, in a letter to her husband, John Adams, written March 31, 1776

The fight for the suffrage rights of women, the battle to have our voices heard, began in earnest on July 19, 1848. It would be a 72-year journey. This is a tale of the last eight years.

Gilded Dreams

“You bring shame upon us all!” She accused me, her spittle stinging my face.

“Get out. Get out of my house this instant!” I knew my pointed finger shook on the end of my outstretched arm. I could not defeat it. I would not lower it.

It is the last thing I remember… that and her raised fist.

GINEVRA April 16, 1912

The day started like any other. It would soon become like none other that came before.

I made my way down to breakfast, having stayed in bed too long. My husband had the children in hand, giving me leisure I rarely indulged. The sound of my daughter laughing at him in the other room woke me. Such sounds to be woken by… a child's laughter and the bird song just outside my window, bright as the spring sunshine.

“No, Father, I cannot wear one of your ties to school, silly.”

I had lain there, listening, letting the joy they brought me slowly bring me wakefulness. With such happiness filling the house—my heart and mind—I made my way to the kitchen and the small table in the sunny corner of the room.

As was my way, I picked up the Providence Journal to read as I ate my corn flakes and sipped my coffee. I had learned English by reading when my papa and I had come to this country from Italy. I would keep reading, keep learning. What I learned with one look at the headline, shattered the joyous morn into tiny shards of bloody glass.

“LINER TITANIC, AFTER CRASH WITH ICEBERG, FOUNDERS OFF NEW FINLAND. 1200 DROWN”

My coffee cup fell to the floor; I didn't feel the hot sting of liquid on my flesh though I would later bear the scars of it upon my ankles.

I dropped like a stone, somehow on a chair, well-placed by fate.

They had been traveling on that ship. Had they survived?

I read the names, the far-too-long list of them, as fast as I could – those belonging to some I had once watched from the anonymity of my maid's uniform, through spectacles of contempt, and some that had loomed large in my adolescence.

My face grew wet; the hand on my lips trapped the sobs in my throat.

One of the first names was that of John Jacob Astor, of the Astors, son of the Mrs. Astor, Caroline Schermerhorn Astor who had summered in Newport, whose gown I had once cleaned while the seamstress at The Beeches.

The name of George Widener was familiar as well. They had just started building his cottage down at the very tip of the island, the wealthy tip. Would it ever be built now that he and his son Harry floated like dead fish in the cold Atlantic sea?

The names, the very letters that formed them, blurred in my watery sight… William Dulles, who lived on Narragansett Avenue… the entire Clinch Smith family, whose house sat on the corner of Harrison and Halidon Avenues… Karl Howel Behr and Richard Norris Williams, two tennis champions I had watched play at the Casino, two men I would never watch again.

I kept reading, faster, ever faster.

I cried out. I did not remember the words… if there were words. I did not think or care that it was a wail echoing around the world.

To see their names upon the list was like seeing my own.

At once, she captured my heart and mind, squeezing both with clenched fingers of grief.

On the list of the dead – those who had gone down on the Titanic – were her parents, her brother and his wife… my dearest Pearl's entire family. Gone, all gone.

“Osborn!” My screech, at last released, broke the stillness the morning had brought.

Footfalls of all weights thundered over my head… those of my husband, my children. Yet the sound of them together was not loud enough to bury the savagery of my sobs.

“My darling, what is it?” My husband skidded into the small breakfast nook, falling upon his knees at my feet. The worried care in his blue eyes was not enough to give me the power of speech. I shoved the newspaper with its horrifying headline, creased and ragged where I had crushed it in my fists, into his hands. My shaking finger demanded his eyes fall to the bottom of the list of the dead, the very long list.

“What's wrong, Father?”

Felix came to stand beside me; I could not let him see my face. Angelina squeezed her tiny self between us. My mind spared a fleeting thought for them… at eight and six, how would they be scarred by this tragedy?

Osborn's wrinkled brow and probing eyes now sat on bloodless skin, on a head dropping to his chest. To see my grief upon his face nearly broke me; the heaviness of it pressed down harder upon my shoulders.

Pushing against its weight, I stood. Osborn's hand flashed out, taking my arm, steadying me as I wavered.

“I must go to her, I…” The muddled command I demanded of myself scrambled like eggs with those of my duties, my children, my work.

“Of course you must,” Osborn assured me as he so often did, no matter what he might be encouraging me about, it seemed. He was the ease of the turning of a light switch, and not a lamp with only one bulb but a many-tiered chandelier.

“The children, school—”

“I will take care of everything.”

He put his forehead against mine. That had been our first intimate contact, so many years ago when we had met, the night we stepped out together. I thought he would kiss me. Instead, he gave me this and the sweetness of it had bloomed inside me. We offered it to each other ever since when one or both of us was in need.

“I will phone Anna and Laura as well. They will understand.”

“Sì, sì, they will,” I muttered. My employers – wives, mothers, Italian immigrants, business owners – yes, they would understand.

My hands clenched the fabric covering my body, the silk of my housecoat instead of a dress. I had forgotten what I wore.

Osborn's firm hands fell upon my shoulders, turning me toward the stairs.

“Go, go dress.”

I nodded, I went. I moved but couldn't feel my feet upon the floor.

Somehow I dressed, thoughts flashing to the mess of breakfast. Hazel would not come till nine. She never did; we never minded.

I don't think I put on the right hat for the dress I wore – or the shoes, for that matter. My only thought was that I needed shoes I could walk fast and safe in upon the cobbles.

Upon the cobbled streets of Newport, I walked.

We had fled the city on the sea of Narragansett Bay twelve years ago, fled to college at Rhode Island School of Design, and fled the scandal that had been born here, a scandal that nearly felled us. But on that magnificent day eight years ago, as we each held our scrolled and beribboned diplomas in our hands, we knew. We would return to the beauty of this little island, to the place where the “we” of us had been born.

For Pearl, the socialite she had once been – that still hid in a shadowed corner of her soul – insisted she come back, to face those who had treated her… us… so poorly. To stand tall in the face of them.

I had come back for my father and to escape my demons. What Herbert Butterworth had tried to do to me, what I had endured because of it, had to be faced. Only by looking a demon in the eyes could it be defeated.

Yes, we had returned, though neither of us ever imagined we would settle here, marry here, have our children here. But we had. We both wore the medal of victory proudly. I remembered Pearl's words with as much fear as amusement: “The best revenge, dahling, is success.”

She had used her old snob accent, as I called it, the one she had rid herself of. My Italian accent had mostly disappeared, save for times when my emotions opened the door to it. My emotions were opened wide and deep at that moment, a jagged hole in the fabric of my soul.

I walked fast and determinedly through the haze of a spring morning on the island, when the cool ocean waters danced with the warming earth, leaving rolling tendrils of elusive white mist to dance itself about us. I did not have to walk far. Osborn and I lived only a few blocks from Pearl and Peter and their daughter, in the Great Common area. We lived north of Bellevue, the avenue of the rich who came every summer, who built mansions there and called them “cottages”. Pearl could have lived at The Beeches, one of the grandest of all the “cottages”, but to do so meant she would have had to endure six weeks of every summer living once more with her mother.

She would never have to endure her mother again, not ever.

I stumbled on the thought, on the stones, on the unreality of it all.

What would I say to her? What could be said? I did not know. I knew only that in our darkest times, merely the presence of the other was enough. I would be that presence for her now, and always.

I stood on the dense dirt walkway streaming past her house on Marlborough Street, no more than two blocks from my own home on Farewell Street. Its lovely white porch wrapped itself around the brown clapboard house, its tower escorted by off-kilter gables, and the decorated eave that hung over the door all blazed with the happiness that had always lived within… happiness that defined this family of three. It might vanish. Happiness could, after all, be conquered by grief.

My breath hitched as I stepped forward, climbed the stairs, and knocked upon the glass-and-wood door. I knocked and knocked again. I stepped back to look up to the shuttered windows, praying for some sign of her.

“Oh, Missus!” The screech wavered, but it was a screech. “Oh, Mrs. Taylor, thank the good Lord you're here!”

Rotund and normally rosy, a pale Sarah rushed from the door, grabbing me by the arm, and tugging me into the foyer. She blubbered in the silent stillness of the house that brought an ache to my gut.

“Sarah, dear Sarah, calm yourself.” I took her hands in mine, captured her gaze with mine, and took deep breaths until she followed my lead. Beads of sweat trickled down her pale brow and into her eyes, making a soup with her tears. Sarah had been nanny and governess to Pearl's daughter since her birth seven years ago; she could have borne the family name, so tightly did she belong to it.

“Is anyone else here, Sarah?” She had calmed and I needed desperately to know.

Her head shook wildly. I kept her hands in mine, my breathing slow. I hoped.

“No, no.” Sarah continued to shake. Her shaking captured all of her plumpness, made it wobble.

“T-the Mister had already left for work and taken Mary to school when… when…”

Tears fell from her thinning lashes as her lids squeezed and crinkled over her dark eyes, fell and poured around her cheeks.

“When what?” I whispered as I often did to Angelina when she had had a bad dream.

“When the telegram came,” she blurted on a quick huffed breath.

“She was alone,” I said but not to Sarah. It was the very last thing I hoped to hear.

“She was. She was alone. I was upstairs cleaning the young lady's room when I heard the knock at the door but I just kept cleaning cause I knew the missus would get it, so I…” Sarah sucked in air, her only pause… “just kept cleaning and then I finished and went downstairs, thinking I would go to the kitchen to clean up from breakfast but, when I passed the breakfast room and saw her, I couldn't go anywhere. I couldn't move.”

I knew I squeezed Sarah's hands now rather than caressed them; I didn't care.

“What did you see? What was she doing?”

Sarah's chin dropped to her chest and more tears fell to the floor.

“She looked like a ghost but one from winter, so frozen was she. I saw the telegram in her hand. They always bring bad news, always. And then…”

Sarah had climbed the summit to revisit the height of the horror.

“And then she stood up. The telegram fell from her hand as if she had never been holding it. I called to her but it was as if she was deaf. She walked past me and out the door without a word, not a single sound. No coat, no hat, no purse. The sight of her made me shiver.”

The chill wormed through the fabric of my coat. Pearl was in shock and she had left the house alone in such a state. I had to find her. I tried to release my hold on Sarah but she would not allow it.

“The telegram just lay there on the floor. I read it, I did, though I know it was poorly done of me. When I saw… as I read…”

Her sobs drowned out anything more she had to say. I put my arms around her as far as they would go and held her as tightly as I could.

Without releasing her, I gave her instructions in someone else's calm voice. “It is a terrible thing, Sarah, terrible. We must do all we can to help our Pearl.”

Her quivering head nodded against my shoulder.

“Go and get Mary from school. Tell her nothing, do you mind me? Not a word of this. It is for Pearl and Peter to do so. I will find Pearl.”

“Oh, thank you, Missus. Thank you ever so.” Sarah pulled away from me – purpose brought her composure. I knew I could leave Pearl's daughter safely in her keeping.

And I knew exactly where to find Pearl.

I took the hill leading from the harbor's edge to the more rarified air on Bellevue Avenue at a very unladylike pace. The pinched looks of passersby marked my passage. I stared them in the eye as I lifted my skirts, revealing my ankles, and the laced boots upon them. Being a scandal in this city was nothing new to me. Being a scandal meant nothing to me, not anymore, especially not then.

Someone had put three black wreaths on the high and rounded arched front doors of The Beeches already. It must have been Mr. Birch; though well into advanced years, his devotion to the family was as strong as ever. Mrs. Briggs still reigned over the servants, but I could not imagine such an emotional gesture from that cold crone.

I slipped around the left side of the mammoth home, the side furthest from the servants' entrance, and scurried along the very edge of the vast lawn that rolled away from the back of the marble stairs and statues. Those statues… their eyes still made me shiver. Before I made it halfway to the trees, I saw her, her blue dress standing out brightly in the center of the moss-colored tree trunks. She stood, just stood there. I ran faster.

My rush brought me within the cave the weeping beeches created, buds just beginning to open on the long trickle of vine-like branches that tumbled from the tops of the trees to the ground. This cave, it had been our refuge through those beautiful and awful years.

I moved to stand beside the ghost Sarah had described, the ghost that wore Pearl's face. Her dark eyes, so like my own, gazed upward… to the tops of the trees, to the heavens… to what I didn't know. Her long dark hair flowed unpinned down her back, a medieval ghost.

I stood beside her in the silence she seemed to need. She knew I was there – how could she not? I left it to her to speak first.

“They're so much taller than they were… back then.”

I didn't know how to respond to such words – such thoughts – that owned no belonging to the moment.

Birds twittered gaily all around us, so happy for the growing food that spring brought them. The tips of my fingers tingled with numbness.

“I am an orphan, Ginevra,” Pearl spoke her heartbreak flatly, a hollow sound from an abandoned heart.

Without a pause, she stepped upon the long branch that bowed to the ground, the branch that had always been our ladder up into the trees.

We were much older since the last time we had climbed it, older and less nimble. I followed. She wore the same look my father and my relatives had worn at the moment of my mama's death so long ago. I knew what it meant. Pearl might have no knowledge of what she was doing; she could not be alone.

Shock is the strangest form of armor; it could protect the mind when great harm had been done to the body. But it could also shield out reality, allowing us disbelief when we had no right to it. I had to break the shield that surrounded Pearl so thickly.

“You are not an orphan, my darling, I am your family,” I said only what she knew already. Pearl patted my hand but still did not meet my eye. I would have to strike deeper.

“Your father loved you with all his heart. That love will belong to you forever.” Perhaps it wasn't well done of me, to bring up the first and perhaps deepest love of Pearl's life, to mention that parent who had most understood her, encouraged her no matter how far from the path she strayed, and the man who shielded her from her mother's constant contempt.

A small smile tickled the corners of Pearl's lips. It was not the response I'd hoped for.

“Oh, I know, that I do know.”

We were not in a real cave, but I swear her voice seemed to echo.

“I will have it with me forever and I am so very glad he was able to spend so much time with Mary. She will have his love to hold on to as well.” Her voice remained like the shoreline on the horizon, straight and the same no matter where one viewed it.

“Has Daisy's family been told?” It was not a question that would break her free but one I should have thought about sooner, for the sake of her sister-in-law's family.

Pearl simply lifted her shoulders and dropped them just as quickly.

Fear came to sit between us on that branch. I could not bear the thought of my dearest friend, one of the most vibrant and vivacious people I'd ever met, become, in truth, no more than a ghost of herself for the rest of her life.

“When did you last speak with your mother?”

Pearl's head snapped around as if slapped. Her eyes bored into me so fast and sharp, I felt their cutting edge nick me. I had hit the mark.

“Not for many, many months. You know that, Ginevra. How dare you ask me that? How dare you ask me that today?”

“I only thought to—”

“Well, do not think, do not think you know what this feels like, what this is. How dare you?” Color returned to her face, the hot color of anger. I preferred it to the white wraith I had first found.

Silence returned but Pearl no longer looked to the sky, she stared at the ground.

“Did you—”

“I never reconciled with my mother, Ginevra, never. I would answer her questions about Mary but we never spoke of anything else, never.”

The quiver began in her hands, gripping the branch so tightly her knuckle bones tried to break through her skin. I watched as her trembles moved upward as a vine grows on a trellis.

The face she turned to me was one I recognized, though broken bits indented it like pockmarks.

“I never truly reconciled with her, Ginny, though I should have.” Her whole body shook. I inched close enough to wrap an arm around her. Like rain, her tears fell to the ground.

“Yes, I should have. It wasn't her fault, who she was. She was created by her parents, by society… it was too much for her, I think. That's why she did the things she did. She never felt she was enough.”

Tears flew from her cheeks as her head shook back and forth.

“I should have told her I had forgiven her. I had, Ginny, I had. I had forgiven her long ago and now… now she will never know. She will never hear…”

Pearl's shield had vanished, vanquished by her truth, the truth buried deep in mind and spirit at last released.

Her head dropped back on her neck, her lips parted, and she set free the scream she had held so tightly within.

PEARL May 1912

We were to leave for Canada in the morning, or rather to Nova Scotia, to Halifax. It was where all the… the bodies were being taken, those they could find.

It had been nearly two weeks since I lost my family, two weeks of swimming underwater; every movement, every thought, a slow, painful undertaking. I had my darling husband and beautiful daughter, yes, but there was something untethering to lose the whole of the family you were born into. Suddenly, you became a marionette without any strings.

The message had been strangely curt, though I assumed it was because of the vast number of them that had to be sent. Come here and see if you can find them. Those weren't the exact words of it but they might as well have been.

We learned more from the newspapers who fed greedily on so much tragedy, filling column after column, page after page, day after day.

It took four ships, ships chartered by the White Star Line, to bring back the bodies of those lost with the sinking of the Titanic. How kind of them; if not for their bungling my family might still be alive. I needed them, though, I needed a target; grief and anger made for a powerful weapon. White Star became the enemy… became my target. Only one ship of the four was a passenger ship. The others were supply ships or cable ships. How appropriate, the bodies became naught but cargo.

The newspapers couldn't seem to agree as to how many bodies were recovered. One had said 316, another claimed it was 337. All seemed to agree, whatever the number, it accounted for only a quarter of those that had perished.

“A quarter, only a quarter,” someone mumbled – me. “That means… that means… more than a thousand—”

The newspaper disappeared from my hands. Snatched and crumpled by my husband.

“You don't need to be reading these, my Pearl.” That he used the endearment my father had always used became ever dearer to me. He stomped away to toss the crumpled paper in the bin.

Peter tried to hide all this from me, for those whose graves would forever lay at the bottom of the ocean were there because there was little left of them, not enough for any family to identify them… not enough to put any family through looking upon them. Not enough for the greedy crane fingers to grab on to, to haul up. But no one would know who those lost souls were until we identified who they weren't.

I stared up at him, I returned to this place and this time, swimming up from the bottom of the dark ocean where I sank to with every word I read. I nodded. He was right, I knew. I also knew I could not stop and would read them whenever I could.

“You look quite silly, Mother.”

I flinched, just slightly. I thought I heard my mother's voice in my daughter's words until Mary giggled.

I leaned down from my place on the settee to wiggle my nose in her face as she sat on the floor and played with her dolls. One of her dolls was a doctor; I had told her so when I gave it to her, another a ballet dancer, and one, like her, a musician. Oh, how beautifully she played the piano.

“And why do I look so silly?” I asked her. I stared at her; her golden, hazel eyes and her dark curls – a true mix of her parents' features – gave me warmth in these spring days where I could find nothing but winter's merciless, unrelenting cold.

“Well,” she began and I almost laughed at her matter-of-factness, “your hair is just a mess, it's all…”

Mary waggled her hands above her head like seaweed moving with the tide.

I popped my eyes. “It is? Well, my goodness, and I just fixed it up.”

Mary gifted me with her giggles again.

“And just look at your lovely skirt. You've wrinkled it terribly.”

I looked down at my lap. Mary was right, it was wrinkled. I could see where my hands had crumpled it in my fists. I had to be more aware. She would be touched by this – how could she not? I wanted to do my best to make that touch as gentle as it could be.

“But… but that is the latest style,” I feigned a startled tone. “Aunt Ginny told me so.”

Mary collapsed on the floor, her small, high-topped boots thudding upon the floor; she rolled as she giggled. She acted for me.

Children always know so much more than we think they do; they discern truths unspoken. They see all we try to hide. Mary had cried herself to sleep for over a week after we told her. She'd wake in the night calling for her Pop-Pop. How my father loved that silly moniker. Like me, Mary grieved for him most of all.

Her gaze found mine. We both saw our truths glistening there.

I held out my arms. She came into them gladly and for a while I rocked her gently, caring not a whit that she was a seven-year-old. It was what we both needed.

Above our heads, footfalls moved here and there. Now and then a thump thundered. Peter and Sarah finished our packing.

“You are going away tomorrow, Mother.”

I didn't know if it was a statement or a question. I simply nodded.

“Will you… will things..?” Mary twirled the ribbon of her drop-waist dress in both hands. She couldn't finish, but I knew.

“Perhaps not right away, but it will help.” I held her tighter and as she did me.

The footsteps grew faster, the thuds more.

“Would you play for me, merry Mary?”

We had called her that from when she was still a babe for her giggles, her laughter, that which came long before her first word, were so infectious she made us all merry just listening to them.

Mary kissed my cheek and hopped off my lap. The piano – the Schoenhut with its colorful angels painted on the Fallboard – was still a good size for her. Her Pop-Pop had gifted it to her when she turned six, when she had climbed up the stool of the grand piano at The Beeches and started to peck at the keys, when the pecking started to sound like music. She stunned us all, even Felice who had been among us. Like a third grandfather, he had found her the best piano teacher in Newport, a teacher who told us she was a prodigy. It was a word we would never use again but hers was a talent we would foster, no matter the cost.

She snuck me a mischievous sidelong look, one tinged with the emotion of our embrace, and began playing. I almost laughed though tears were closer. The song Mary played was My Melancholy Baby.

* * *

It was so early in the morning, the day's light still struggled to pull itself up over the horizon. Mary stood on the porch, still in her nightgown and robe, still with sleep heavy in her eyes. In one hand, she clutched the soft and fuzzy teddy bear, the only toy she ever brought to bed, one that had been born the same year as she. Her other hand sat tightly in Ginevra's.

I knelt to her. “You will be the very best girl for Aunt Ginny, won't you, Mary?”

With the teddy still in the crook of her arm, she knuckled a sleepy eye and nodded. The word precious can be just a word until one has a child.

I took her in my arms, squeezing tightly as if I could make her feel them until I returned.

“Let me come with you.”

Over Mary's head, I saw the need in Ginevra's eyes.

“Let me be by your side when…”

Whether she could not finish or would not finish in front of Mary, it didn't matter. I knew.

We would be apart for longer than we ever had, save for our honeymoons which were joyous and rousing fun for us both.

Unlike that time, the stories told afterward would bring no joy. I had no idea what would cling to me when I returned, nor did she. Our fear pooled in the corners of her eyes, as deep and dark as the ocean bottom from where they had raised the bodies.

Through the whole of our adolescence, through the assault upon her and what came after, through the frightening years completely on our own in college, we were always by each other's sides. I would have felt the same need as she were our roles reversed.

I rose, taking her in my arms.

“I need you here more, Ginny. Knowing she is with you will be the best thing you can give me.”

I felt her nod against my shoulder.

“Felix and Angelina will keep her merry,” Ginevra said with a smile as we separated. “They didn't sleep a wink, knowing she was coming today.”

“Come here, my merry Mary. Give your Dada a big hug.”

Beside us, Peter launched Mary into his arms. With her head upon his shoulder, he whirled her slowly about.

“She need not go to school if she doesn't want to.” I turned back to Ginevra. “Don't push her but I would rather she did.”

“Of course. She will go. I bet Felix will take her by the hand and make sure.”

I stared at the face I knew almost as well as my own, had seen it change as mine had. There was a home for me there.

“Our children,” I whispered.

“We will show them the world is theirs…” Ginevra began, chin aquiver.

“No matter boy or girl, no matter rich or poor,” we finished together. It had been our pledge, made upon our engagements, a pledge we would never gainsay.

I kissed Ginevra's cheek and turned for the carriage. There was no delaying the inevitable any longer.

I barely slept on the train, through the very long day-and and-a-half train ride. I knew I should, I knew I would need my strength, but the ghosts were too many and too loud through the whole journey. These relentless specters played me a picture show, each crackling frame a version of what might await me. From nothing to disfigurement and all that lay in between. At times they were nothing but bones, the sea having stripped them of their skin, just as what had happened to so many of them as I had read in the paper.

Perhaps Peter was right, I shouldn't have read so much.

The thought walked the silent, slim corridor down the sleeping car of the train with me as I moved from one end of it to the other.

The worst of them were the ones who weren't there at all. Their existence completely erased by the egotism of men, the greed of corporations, and the anger of Mother Nature.

We were in Dante's nine circles of hell, only they weren't circles, they were a mammoth complex of ice rinks, for curling, whatever that was. But it was the very size and low temperatures of the Mayflower Curling Rink which made it the most best suited to this function… to hold and embalm the hundreds of recovered bodies.

Like a field of misshapen, different-sized mounds, they stretched out before my eyes, to the very horizon… body after body, mound after mound. I no longer felt I existed in a world that was real, but rather a dream world, a nightmare. Nowhere in a sane world should such a sight exist, should I see such a sight. So many people, so little sound; the silence unnerved as much as the landscape.

Only muted sobs, like the gurgle of a distant stream, ebbed and flowed throughout the massive structure. Nurses in blue dresses and long white aprons moved from sob to sob, holding, rocking, consoling. For some came the rush of smelling salts. I thought the whole place smelled like those salts – that smell bit the inside of my nose as the ghosts chewed at my mind.

“I imagine the cries will be the same whether someone is found or not,” I thought aloud, expecting no answer, receiving none.

The far corner was closed off by framed draping, silhouettes and shadows wavered behind it. I had no idea what happened in there; I had no wish to know.

A hand clutched my arm.

“Are you sure, my Pearl?”

My gaze traveled from the hand to the face. Peter stared intently at me through a haze of worry.

“You are unsteady on your feet.”

“I am?” The notion surprised me. “But… yes, I am sure. We must try, no matter—”

“Pearl!” The wail tore through the silence, bouncing up to the high metal ceiling and back down, ever louder.

The opulently dressed wraith rushed toward me. I tripped against my husband, erratic steps moving backward, not knowing where they would land. His warm, strong hand braced my lower back. I pushed against it. The wraith came closer.

“Oh Pearl.”

The wraith was in my arms, the furs covering it tickling my nose. I held it; I knew not what else to do.

“It is Madeleine Astor,” Peter leaned down to whisper in my ear. His vision had not been twisted by the same nightmarish fearful distortion as mine.

My arms flinched. I wanted to leave go, to let her fall to the ground. The Astors had shown me little care throughout my life; they, who had deemed themselves worthy above all, had been a harsh judge and jury for as long as I could remember. But then I did remember, it was not this Astor. This Astor was but a nineteen-year-old girl, barely a woman, almost half my age. Some had called her a gold-digger; I believed no man could be dug unless he gave the woman a shovel. No, this poor child had been none of those Astors who had riddled my life with their harshness, their holier-than-thou judgments. She had been a wife for less than a year. This child carried a child in her womb.

I smoothed her dark raven curls even as she muttered into my shoulder.

“He was there, he was standing right there, next to the boat he put me in. I s-sat, I sat down and l-looked up, and he was gone… gone.”

A gaze of such devastation turned up to me. The horrors of the moment played in those dark and tear-reddened eyes. I closed my own to it.

“He should have…” She pulled slightly away from me, took me by the shoulders as if I could hear her better that way. I could see only her deathly pale skin, sunken cheeks, and dark circles that turned the aristocratic face into a death mask. “I should have waited for him. I should not have gotten on the boat without him. There was plenty of room for him, for him and more than-than at least a handful of others.” She shook me, tossing me forward and back as if we stood on the deck of the ship. My stomach churned. “So many others, I tell you!”

Her screams brought more than one nurse to us, brought my husband's hands to hers as he released the clench they had upon me.

I heard Peter's mumble, “So the stories are true.”

I had no time to ponder them, to acknowledge the devastating truth.

“Mrs. Astor, calm yourself,” the nurse's voice had a strange lilt to it, an accent perhaps, and yet it only made the sweet calmness of it more so. “If not for yourself, for your wee babe.”

Another woman, uniformly dressed, handed Madeleine a glass of water.

“I think it best we help her find her husband as soon as is possible,” the first said… to us. Somehow we had become Madeleine Astor's retainers. Peter would have none of it.

“We are not here with Mrs. Astor, we are merely acquaintances.” I had never seen my husband's golden skin so blotched. “We are here to find my wife's… entire… family.”

There were times I regretted having married a lawyer; this was not one of them.

“Oh. Oh my. I… we… we had no way of knowing. Please let me assist you, let Amelia and me assist you all.”

My husband's splotches feathered away; he reached out a hand, “Thank you, Miss…”

Amelia still held the sobbing Madeleine Astor in her arms.

“Ruth will do.” The nurse accepted the kindly gesture, returned it. “How many are we… that is, how many members of your wife's family are we looking for?”

To one side of me, the pregnant Madeleine Astor cried in a strange woman's arms. On the other, my husband conversed with another stranger, speaking of me and my family. I stood in the nowhere in between.

“Both her parents,” Peter replied softly. “Her brother and his wife.”

It was the first time I received the “look.” The dark shades came from shock, the withering colors were those of pity. I would soon come to despise such a look.

“We are not supposed to assist,” Ruth leaned closer to us, “there are so many looking for so…” she held her tongue, realizing that we… I… were not the best recipients for such an admission. “We are here to help as many as we can.”

Peter grunted. Ruth had saved herself well.

“But in light of Mrs. Astor's condition and your wife's great losses, we will make an exception.”

I thought that, in reality, it was the Astor name that garnered such special consideration. Perhaps being an Astor retainer was not such a terrible thing to be, after all.

I almost giggled. I trapped it behind a gloved hand. They would think me insane. They would not be wholly wrong.

“Let us start this way.” Ruth led us to the corner to our left with an outstretched arm. Madeleine, still in Amelia's arms, followed. “We have found it best to conduct the search in a clockwise rotation on the outskirts, working round toward the center.”