Belle Cora: A Novel Read online

  From there we walked to the offices of Godwin & Co. to receive congratulations and discuss arrangements. “Well,” said my grandfather, “well, well,” and shook hands with Jeptha. There was a forced jollity to my grandfather’s manner that I remembered later.

  I intended to insist that my grandfather increase Jeptha’s stipend—which I had learned was shockingly parsimonious, less per year than the money that had been spent on the banquets of the California Missionary Committee—but I knew that Jeptha would not approve of the conversation, and I thought I would postpone it till the next day, when we were all to meet at my grandfather’s house and I could buttonhole Solomon Godwin while Jeptha was otherwise engaged. But now my grandfather, with an unconvincing smile to cover the impropriety of his request, said that since Jeptha and I were not married yet, he hoped it would be all right for him to discuss a small family matter with me alone, and took me to a small office.

  “Do you have something you wish to tell me?” he asked.

  “Yes.” I told him that after proposing to me Jeptha had mentioned the size of the salary he was to get from the California Missionary Committee. “It’s worse than parsimonious—it’s impractical.” For two minutes I spoke, adducing this reason and that one, but with a mounting uneasiness. There was an unfriendliness in my grandfather’s gaze, and I knew something unpleasant was in store. I ended with a hint that if better arrangements were not forthcoming, Jeptha and I might have to stay in New York after all.

  All at once, his rheumy old eyes emptied of all sympathy and lingered coldly on mine. “I don’t think it’s very likely that you will do that, Arabella.”

  I became very still. I waited.

  He continued, “I think you’ll do all you can to get that unfortunate young man to the other side of the continent before your past here catches up with you.”

  “Oh,” I said, stung. “Grandfather, think what you will of me, but don’t go on.”

  “I try to be a good man. I know I’m just a worm before God, but I have my vanity, and I don’t like being thought a fool, even by a clever young harlot.”

  “You’ve been listening to Agnes, a proven liar.”

  “My information does not come from Agnes,” he said quietly—the whole rather brutal conversation that followed was conducted in low voices. “You know I am a member of the Magdalene Society, which keeps close track of all such people as Mrs. Bower and Miss Harriet Knowles. I know which dress shops serve them. It made me unhappy to think that yours was one of them. And after that, the only serious impediment to my discovering everything was my own reluctance to know it. But now I do know, and you are in no position to dictate terms to me.”

  I put my head in my hands. He said, “Your life has turned you into an actress.”

  Well, that was a very unfair remark; I felt that, and it helped me get through the rest of the ordeal. For years I had been rebuking him in my imagination; I had wished he was alive so I could tell him what he had done to me by sending me away to live with poor relations—Elihu, Agatha, Agnes, Matthew—and then when he had turned out to be alive the circumstances made it impossible to tell him. Now that had changed, and at last I could say it all. There was no question of thinking of hurtful things to say; it was only a question of choosing and organizing. “You are a sinner, Grandfather. You should not speak that way. It is weak and cruel.” I could see from his face that he didn’t like this. “How strange,” I said. “You want to cover me with scorn yet keep my good opinion and until today you did. Even after you’d forgotten me utterly, your own blood, banished to live among poor relations, crude, ignorant people—”

  “You know very well why we sent you there. It was for your own good.”

  I thought that probably he had not expected the conversation to take this particular turn and I had him at a disadvantage. I leaned in close to him, so close that it was itself a gesture of disrespect. “Do you still say that to yourself? That you sent me to upstate New York, where it is colder and wetter than it is here, to keep me from getting consumption? Are you quite sure you weren’t trying to give me consumption?”

  He shook his head vehemently. “We had physicians’ advice; we weighed those elements; it was thought that country air and farm work counterbalanced them.”

  “What of your wife’s preferences?” I cooed. “Her love of peace and quiet and leisure? Her disinclination for having little children about at her age, especially difficult children like Lewis? How much did that weigh? Enough to tip the balance in favor of Livy?” Perhaps he winced—if he did it was very small. “I begged you, begged you to take us back, away from the vicious girl who plotted night and day to destroy me, and the brute who forced himself on me just as soon as he was old enough to be capable of it. Look what happened to me. Look at it whole. Look at me. This is your doing. This is your work.”

  Though I had not been shouting, my throat hurt, and I swallowed the last few words. In the end he seemed to be a good deal less upset than I was, and whether he felt more remorse than he showed, or whether he dismissed everything I had said as vain posturing, I still don’t know. He shook his head again. “I only did what was right in my eyes; I regret what happened to you; it does not excuse your actions since then. You see my emotion but you misunderstand it. I mourn. I mourn for what my granddaughter has become.”

  “Tell the world, why don’t you.”

  We sat with that for a while.

  “I should,” he said at last.

  “Conceive what it would do. To you, to everyone connected to this family. And, oh, the worthy causes you espouse, they would hardly benefit. Think of it. Newsboys shouting it in the streets. I’ve stain enough on me to dye you all scarlet for generations. Worldly people would be snickering in the next century. I think, when Jeptha and I are rounding Cape Horn, you should do what you can to close up your investigations of unscrupulous dress shops and who owns them.”

  “Who do you think you’re talking to? Do you imagine you can make me do your bidding as you make others—as you make Arthur Heywood; as you make those benighted girls you lure onto the paths of shame?”

  “I’m just advising you, Grandfather, because I love you. I’ll be in California. It won’t affect me as much.” I stood up. “I hope you will reconsider Jeptha’s stipend. He deserves better, and so do I. You want to help fallen women? Begin with me. I should like a chance at a decent life doing God’s work.”

  WE WERE MARRIED BY REVEREND DANFORTH on July 7, 1849, at the Wall Street Baptist Church, on the morning of the very day our ship was to sail. Jocelyn and Monique were in the pews, happy for me. Lewis looked appreciatively at Jocelyn but gave no hint of their prior acquaintance. My grandfather did not have to disguise the change in his attitude toward me. His habitually formal manners took care of that. From my grandmother’s behavior, I judged that he had not taken her into his confidence.

  A few hours later, we were on South Street, staring up at the Juniper, a 110-foot, 325-ton square-rigged three-masted whaling barque refitted to carry passengers.

  The day was sunny. Passengers on the decks, high above us, were squinting and shielding their eyes with their hands, but down by the piers we walked in crisscrossing shadows of bowsprits, masts and yardarms, pulleys and ropes, pyramids of barrels, high placards announcing the names of the crafts and their destinations, several bound for California. My eyes followed the lines upward to a sailor hooking one thing to another high in the rigging; the sun at his back turned him into an inky silhouette.

  Members of the California Missionary Committee acted as our porters. My grandfather put a hand on my shoulder and whispered: “He’s a good man, and loves you, and I believe you love him, so—I wish you good luck. We will never meet again, very likely.”

  He flinched when I embraced him, but I held on for a moment, feeling as I did how narrow, old, and frail he really was.

  When the passengers were on deck, together with wives and relatives, members of the California Missionary Committee handed out Bibles. Rever
end Danforth, with Captain Stormfield’s permission, gave a sermon comparing us to the Pilgrims and commending us to the guidance of my husband—they were lucky to have a man of God on board this ship. Then the captain, a fiftyish fellow with brown teeth and a glass eye, gave a speech that, although not directly contradicting Danforth, made it clear that on the Juniper Stormfield was God. Then it was time for friends and relations to go ashore.

  I embraced Lewis. At the wedding, he had tried to raise money from me, from my grandfather, from anyone who looked prosperous, for a trip to California. He couldn’t bear the thought of spending another year at the Pearson Academy while other men were taking gold out of California’s rivers. “Stick it out,” I told him now, a moment before he left the Juniper. “Go later if you must; and if you go, go by the Horn, not Panama. If you go by land, go by Oregon.”

  The wind stirred up white peaks in the East River and pushed our clothes against us. People squinted and gripped their hats. Someone said that if it was this rough here it must be worse on the open sea. Already, thanks to the sail that had been let out, the ship was rocking; everything was rising and falling. The deck’s pressing upward and dropping away, endlessly repeated, was a third involuntary rhythm added to those of breath and heartbeat. It was strong and insistent. There was no arguing with it.

  The first mate was shouting at the men to lay this and lay that. And then: “Let go the bow line, let go the stern line, pull away.” We moved up and down in one place while everything else moved away: the men below us, the hulls and masts and rigging of the other ships, the heaps of barrels, the cobblestones, warehouses, signs, red chimneys, and pointed roofs. The lifting and dropping of the deck became more forceful, as if it were a sort of pump pushing away the island of Manhattan. The nearest buildings shrank. The ones behind them rose. The piers seemed to turn like the spokes of a great wheel as the shoreline began to simplify, a wiggly thread gradually pulled straight; the wind blew my hair into my face. Jeptha wrapped his arms around me, and if our story had ended there, it would have had a happy ending.

  XLIII

  FIVE WEEKS LATER THE SHIP WAS BREATHING like a live creature beneath us. I sat on a barrel, Jeptha at my feet. A three-legged dog was pursuing a wispy hare across the sky when we heard a voice shout “Land Ho! Land Ho!” Murmuring “At last,” Jeptha lifted me off the barrel. All around us men were shaking themselves out of their torpor, dropping the journals they had been writing in and the cards they had been gambling with, rising and stretching their limbs: all sorts of men—carriage-makers, coopers, farmers, clerks; a schoolteacher, a homeopath, a small-town mayor, a daguerreotypist, a traveling lecturer on animal magnetism; the man who had not left his stateroom until the third week, the man who only talked about how thrifty his little wife back home was, the man who had dreamed last night of drinking fresh water from a cold stream. Several climbed into the rigging for a better view. The rest swarmed to the side, and those with the best eyesight discerned a strip of blue one shade paler than the ocean and one shade darker than the sky. For five weeks they had had nothing to feed their eyes but this ship and the water around it, and they studied that faint line with a good deal more interest than it deserved.

  For two days, the blue line grew and acquired details, eventually yielding to our starved eyes a clump of strange bald mountains set like monstrous eggs in a colossal nest of greenery; a cliff-top fortress; church spires; paradisiacal islands; terra-cotta roofs of white villas among orange and banana trees—wonder on wonder, until our patriotism was offended. “To think that all this was given to the heathens,” murmured George Ewell, the reformed drunkard, about to be tested by a wicked port city full of brothels and grog shops. With Jeptha’s help he had been good, for the first time, at sea. Could he be good on land, too? He didn’t think so. We must let him stay near to us. We must help him. We promised him we would, although the truth was, we wanted desperately to be alone.

  It had been crowded aboard that heaving ship, and belowdecks, where Jeptha and I spent our nights. It had been dark, cramped, filthy, and heavenly. For weeks we had walked in a protected sphere of our own, invulnerable to every care or danger, indifferent to every other human being. Other passengers stared, amused, envious, as we fed each other the dreadful food (usually a pasty hash of soaked biscuits and bits of preserved codfish) and poured the stale water down each other’s throats as if under the misapprehension that it was wine. We noticed other people only when it came time to quench our desire for each other: then, each night, we confronted the sobering fact that the California Missionary Committee had not purchased the stateroom we had been promised; for sleep we had just two narrow shelflike berths, one over the other, amid a hundred such berths, all occupied by men. For privacy we had darkness. A greasy cleat had torn a wide rent in my traveling dress when we were two days out and everyone was seasick, and the replacement buttoned in the back, so each night, when the time came, I would whisper from my shelf to his above me, “Dress me”—it would not do to be overheard by all these men saying, “Undress me.” He would come down, undo the buttons, and shuck me of my clothes, either slowly and teasingly, or quickly, with imperious impatience, as the mood took him. Later, as we caught our breath, we would begin to hear the snores and coughing all around us. Then we would rummage under my bunk for a secret jar of plum preserves and sit face to face. I would slip a plum into his mouth. He would slip a plum into my mouth.

  After about twelve days out, Jeptha recalled that we were missionaries. Sometimes alone, sometimes with his arm around me, he made the acquaintance of the other passengers and talked religion to them. He held services each Sunday on the quarterdeck, on rainy days beneath a canopy. The pious men were drawn to him immediately, and they seemed to feel that he ought to have been satisfied with their company, but Jeptha insisted on preaching to the unbelievers, too, and in the three weeks between this decision and the sighting of the Brazilian coast, he had made eight converts and given each of them a dunking in the ocean. The most impressive of these acts of reclamation, a soul snatched directly out of the devil’s claws, was Ewell, who had been sent to California by his father in a last, desperate effort to make a man of him, or maybe just to be shut of him. Care had been taken to keep his baggage free of stimulants, but he had managed to find plenty of liquor aboard the ship. In those days, the scent of him used to linger in a room long after he had left it: but not anymore.

  Now Jeptha stood behind the nervous Ewell and clapped his right hand on his shoulder, while with his left hand he blew me a kiss. “We’re not worried about you, are we, Arabella?” he said, and I murmured that it was not my husband who had taken Mr. Ewell in hand; it was God Almighty, who never leaves us. But we would help him, too.

  Within sight of Rio, there were frustrating delays, boardings by inspectors and agents. At last, in the morning, Captain Stormfield assembled us and sternly repeated the date and time of day by which we must return to the Juniper or be left behind.

  Jeptha, his arm around my waist, whispered, “Tonight in a bed.”

  We went ashore in a falua, a boat with a lateen sail and oars. A Negro at its helm commanded four rowers of his race: half naked, sweat-spangled, faces scarred into beadlike designs. Near shore, the water was full of refuse. A rower invited me to hop on his back, but Jeptha took off his boots, rolled up his trousers, and carried me himself.

  The city was reached by great stairs that put us abruptly in the middle of everything: hackney coaches, carriages, omnibuses, men in foreign uniforms, women walking with platters of fruit on their heads, a man in a metal mask—scenes that would have been strange to us even if our receptiveness to every novelty had not been heightened by our long confinement aboard the Juniper. Fifteen barefoot Negro coffee carriers, big men clad only in short white pantaloons, rounded a corner at a trot, each with a sack balanced on his head. The leader carried a flag and a rattle. We passed a boy about four years old. Our necks all swung to keep him in view a little longer, as though we’d seen an elf or a fair
y—so they really existed, this fabled other order of humanity, the race of children!—and I thought of Frank.

  Ragged, underfed-looking porters took our bags without permission, for all we knew stealing them, and—waving their bony arms and pointing—led us to the Custom House, a stately domed building swarming with soldiers and clerks. It was going to take hours. With a secret anxiety, I told Jeptha that I could not bear to wait here doing nothing, and I volunteered to go to the General Post Office, where we expected to find letters waiting for us: mail came by steamboat, much faster than by sail, and friends and relations back home had been told to send their first letters here. I offered to retrieve mail addressed to several other passengers as well. There would be newspapers, too, and that worried me. Mary Dunn (the wife of a Fulton Street fishmonger now turning miner, and the only other woman among us) insisted on going.

  In the Correio Geral, the letters were piled randomly in heaps behind a counter. I positioned myself near a stack of New York Couriers. My worry must have shown. “Is something wrong?” Mary asked.

  I shook my head perhaps a little too emphatically, and, feeling that there was a risk in reading the newspapers with such fascination under Mary’s scrutiny, I did it anyway, murmuring, “I ought to be ashamed of myself, Jeptha would scold me, but before I left I was following the story of that mysterious murder in Bloomingdale. Perhaps it is solved by now.”

  After all, it would be absurd for her to imagine the preacher’s wife was the murderess. I had nearly persuaded myself it wasn’t true.

  Days were missing from each paper, but between the Couriers and the Heralds I had almost the first two weeks since our departure. If the mystery had been solved, or even if there were any promising clues—if the victims were identified, and one of them had bragged to a friend that he knew something an unusually young parlor-house madam would pay to keep quiet—both newspapers would be sure to mention it. But there was nothing. As I thumbed through issue after issue, I was relieved to watch the story sink from the front page to the inside pages, from a column to a paragraph, until it drowned in the ooze of local history.