The Jewel Cage

by Jane Steen

  “Is that how you’re going to avoid insulting Mr. Nutt?” I inquired. “Oh well, I don’t suppose it matters to him much anyway, given that he’ll be working for the Katzenmeiers again pretty soon. I just hope this notion of yours doesn’t disrupt our household overmuch.”

  “Disrupt?” Martin, halfway through the door, halted and turned around. “I don’t see why it should. And may I point out that this was your notion?”

  He left before I had a chance to reply, and I decided to let the matter drop. There was no point in arguing—and I had probably just imagined the look on Tess’s face, hadn’t I?

  4

  Wedding

  “Your gentle giant seems to be working out well.”

  Elizabeth’s voice was a little unsteady—from nerves, presumably. After all, it was her wedding day. My lady’s maid, Alice, who was much better at hair than Mrs. Parnell’s young woman, had just put the finishing touches to Elizabeth’s coiffure by creating a cascade of smooth, corn-blond ringlets with the curling tongs.

  “Yes, he’s turning out to be a godsend.” I stepped forward to inspect Alice’s work, giving her a smile of appreciation. Earlier she had arranged what seemed like an entire garden’s worth of tiny ivory silk rosebuds into the top portion of Elizabeth’s shining locks while the bride sat, as fresh as the summer morning, in her petticoats. Then, with the longer portions of the hair still loose, we had gone through the painstaking business of helping her don the dress, finally swathing the whole arrangement in a linen sheet for fear of the curling tongs touching the silk. The merriment that had made the morning’s work so pleasant was held in abeyance as Alice wielded the tongs, Tess and I observing with bated breath; but Alice’s skill was such that not a single hair was scorched, and the linen remained unmarked.

  “Every ringlet is perfect,” I pronounced. “Now, Tess—oh, thank you.” For Tess had already held out the pincushion, anticipating my request.

  “I’ve never known a more willing worker than Donny Clark.” I moved around to Elizabeth’s front, pincushion in hand, and drew out the two long pins that held the sheet. “He never seems to get tired, and he can turn his hand to a surprising number of tasks.” I didn’t know if Elizabeth was paying attention, but I’d found that chatter helped her to relax. “Sarah finds all kinds of excuses to talk to him, and Tess has been giving him friendly advice. She’s practically adopted him.”

  “I have not.” Tess blushed but smiled at me as we each took one side of the sheet. With Alice’s help, we uncovered the vision of loveliness that was Elizabeth Parnell on the last day she would bear her maiden name.

  “It’s like unwrapping a Christmas present,” Tess crowed as I circled the bride, looking for stray threads. “The most beautiful Christmas present I’ve ever seen. Just the shoes and all will be perfect.” She darted off to the box holding Elizabeth’s satin slippers.

  I watched as Alice drew lace gloves onto the bride’s hands, noting the tremor in them. Had I been so nervous on my wedding day?

  “I feel like a Christmas present. A huge doll for a spoiled child.” Elizabeth lifted each foot in turn to allow Tess to slip the shoes over her feet. “Are we on time?”

  “Quite on time.” I turned to consult the dainty carriage clock that ticked quietly on the mantelpiece of Mrs. Parnell’s boudoir. “Your sisters should be here in a moment. Tess and I have just enough time to slip into our dresses. Thank goodness your mother is looking after the flower girls. I couldn’t have managed with Sarah here.”

  “Mother has a real knack for making little ones behave.” Elizabeth’s pretty lips twitched in a tremulous smile. “She’ll make them use the WC before leaving the house and not allow them to do anything to put a crease in those lovely dresses, if my memory serves. Goodness, what a trial it seemed when I and my sisters were young; and yet we always finished the day proud of ourselves for our exemplary behavior. I don’t understand how she does it.” Elizabeth took a deep breath. “Do I look all right?”

  She looked more than all right. I’d kept the front of the dress relatively simple, with large silk roses holding in place a fall of fine silk damask, a fabric that managed to be summery and yet grand at the same time. Bands of satin ribbon, a froth of lace, and another silk rose brought out the beauty of Elizabeth’s finely shaped bosom and emphasized her newly slender waist, while the roses reappeared as smaller flowers and a profusion of embroidered buds on the train. The train ended in three layers of pleated satin that would move like rose petals blown down by a lake breeze as Elizabeth walked.

  “Exquisite—even if I say so myself.” I grinned. “I was right to look for an ivory white that’s just on the edge of cream; it suits your coloring far more than a brighter white. Although, with the roses in your cheeks, I could almost have gotten away with a very pale pink. I’d like to design a pink wedding dress one day.”

  “Oh, if that dress were pink, I’d want it so bad.” Tess clapped her hands together. “I declare I’d break the seventh commandment by thinking of ways to steal it. Nell, this is even more beautiful than your wedding dress. I wish I could wear one just like it.” She sighed loudly.

  “You wouldn’t if you knew how much the train weighed.” I finished folding the sheet and put my pincushion where I hoped I’d find it later. “Now, ladies, we have about fifteen minutes to finish making ourselves look splendid. Alice, I’m expecting a miracle of speed.”

  Alice rose to the challenge, and we were at our own carriage in fourteen minutes. Martin, resplendent in a morning coat of immaculate cut and a pale blue vest, helped us into our seat and settled himself opposite. Mr. Nutt, now recovered from his head wound, was to crown his period of employment with us by appearing in full livery of dark green; beside him sat Donny, similarly attired. Martin, who intended to buy property in Lake Forest, was ensuring we appeared in that town in some style.

  He wasn’t entirely in a celebratory mood. “I’ve had three telegrams from Fassbinder,” he informed us as soon as Mr. Nutt had set the carriage into smooth motion. “Five hundred men from the Workingmen’s Party crossed the river in St. Louis to join the railroad men on strike. The ladies of the city are convinced they’re going to be murdered in their beds.”

  “Is he worried there’ll be rioting?” I asked. Friedrich Fassbinder, the only partner in Rutherford & Co. not directly involved in the store and not resident in Chicago, was not usually given to panic.

  Martin grimaced. “He says they’re harmless enough—speeches more than violence—but the speeches are about the working man ruling the country. I don’t see President Hayes standing for that. He could send in the troops.”

  “What do they actually want?” I asked. “I mean, I can understand the unrest. Wages have been falling since ’73 for many people, and if I couldn’t feed my family, I’d put up a fight. But what, specifically, are they asking for?”

  “Depends on who’s writing the demands.” Martin shrugged. “Many of them just seem to want an eight-hour day and an end to employing children.”

  “That doesn’t make them sound like the brigands the press want us to believe.” I observed the sunlight’s play on Martin’s pale hair and glossy top hat as we drove between the dappled shade cast by the young trees. “And yet they claim that you—we—are robber barons, stealing what should be theirs.”

  “I’m hardly a robber baron.” Martin’s eyes narrowed. “I’m one of the more generous employers, as you well know. And I can’t count the number of times I’ve worked far longer than ten hours in a day. Besides, the more extreme among them demand that the railroads and telegraph be nationalized—isn’t that stealing from the men who worked hard to create them? They’re hand in glove with the Communists, whose main aim is to take what isn’t theirs.”

  “I suppose so. But imagine what it must feel like to see all this.” I indicated the carriage and the spacious street with its large houses and neatly trimmed gardens. “You must admit we’re more fortunate than most.”

  “You’re right, Nell.�
�� Tess nodded. “If we have two coats and our neighbor has none, we should give him a coat.”

  “I might have known you’d come up with that Bible verse.” I smiled at my friend. “It always makes me feel so guilty.”

  “We give money to the poor though.” Tess frowned.

  “We do. If we gave away everything we had, we’d deprive ourselves of the power to do good. Or am I just making excuses for myself? I don’t understand what it is to be really hungry. None of us do.”

  “And you never will.” Martin reached forward to clasp my hand, squeezing it gently. “You realize, don’t you, that this provides me with yet another reason to insist you don’t go rushing off to Kansas before we’ve heard something concrete? You can’t avoid passing through St. Louis.”

  “But we have to find out what’s happened to the Lombardis,” said Tess. I’d confided my worries to her in the end and was glad; she’d stoutly promised to go with me to Kansas should the need arise.

  “We do.” I looked at Martin. “You said the denominational office was worse than useless.”

  “It’s a scandal that they can remain so sanguine when one of their missionary families hasn’t been heard from for months.” The storm clouds gathered in Martin’s eyes. “I’m putting my hope in the Pinkertons.”

  “How long do you think it will take to get some news?” My attention was on the road ahead; we were almost at the church.

  Martin was also alert to our imminent arrival. He twisted round to consult briefly with Mr. Nutt about the best place to stop and then unlatched the landau’s door, holding it closed as the carriage halted.

  “Any day now,” was his eventual reply. “I’ve told the Pinkerton bureau where to find me. I can’t think we’ll need to wait much longer.”

  Had the wait felt as long to him as it did to me? At that moment, the Lombardi mission seemed infinitely distant from this leafy, nicely ordered little town with its smart churches and well-dressed, well-fed people. It was hardly possible that the same sun would shine down out of the same blue sky, or that the Pinkerton agents could be heading toward us, bearing news of—what?

  But there was Sarah, standing in front of Mrs. Parnell with Elizabeth’s niece Eudora, who, like Sarah, was six years old. Both children were still clean and tidy, and both of them were waving at us with big smiles on their faces. I waved back, my spirits lifting.

  “Let’s put our worries aside for a few hours, shall we?” Martin had descended from the high landau without anyone’s assistance and was pulling down the steps as Donny came to help. I grinned; in his eagerness to get his womenfolk where they needed to be, he was forgetting his desire to look dignified in front of the Lake Forest townspeople.

  “Elizabeth was extremely nervous when I left her,” I remarked as I stepped out of the carriage, my hand in Martin’s.

  “I don’t know why.” Martin let go of me and offered a hand to Tess. “Were we nervous at our wedding? David was as white as a sheet last night when the fellows were trying to ply him with whiskey. I hope they didn’t succeed—supposing he’s sick?”

  We needn’t have worried. David Fletcher was sober and serene as he said his vows; and Elizabeth, Feminist as she claimed to be, promised to obey her husband without the slightest catch in her soft, clear voice.

  “A splendid wedding,” was Mrs. Parnell’s verdict as she watched her youngest daughter—surrounded by her siblings, their families and children, and various generations of Fletchers—trying to talk to everyone at once and almost succeeding. “Perhaps I like it best because it’s my last, Mrs. Rutherford. I have seen all of my children married from this church. Elizabeth is quite the prettiest, particularly in that absolutely marvelous dress. When the happy couple returns from their tour of the Great Lakes, I will arrange for them to visit a photographer’s studio and be immortalized in their wedding clothes. I understand it’s the modern thing to do, although my husband finds the notion very vulgar.”

  “It’s a shame she has to change into a traveling dress later.” Tess’s eyes were on the bride too. “I wouldn’t want to get on a boat just after I got married. I’d want to stay in my dress for as long as I could, even if it meant being up till midnight. Being a bride is the most wonderful thing there is.”

  “You know, Miss O’Dugan, I can’t agree with you.” Mrs. Parnell’s bright blue gaze sharpened. “When I was a young woman, we didn’t make nearly so much fuss over weddings. Everything important comes after the ceremony; I believe that our society is losing sight of that crucial reality. It’s the marriage that’s the true turning point in our lives, not the wedding. I tell all my children so. Elizabeth, of course, calls it ‘Mother’s little lecture,’ but then I have always allowed her to speak too freely. Of all my children, she is the one who reminds me the most of myself.”

  “I suppose being married would be nice too.” Tess’s brow was creased in a frown. “I hadn’t really thought about that part. Isn’t it difficult?”

  Mrs. Parnell burst out laughing, and I joined in—not at Tess’s naïveté, of course, but at the peculiar aptness of her question. Tess, never one to see a slight where none was intended, laughed too.

  “It is, in my opinion, the second most difficult task that falls to our lot,” Mrs. Parnell pronounced. “The first, alas, is when those we love die; but the good Lord is kind enough to soothe our grief as the years pass. When it comes to marriage, the challenges change almost daily, but they are always there. We do not live in a novel, which inevitably ends with a happy couple and declines to follow them into the future. Except,” she held up a finger in reflection, “for the second volume of Little Women. Yet although I believe Miss Alcott to be a most worthy person, I find her somewhat saccharine, and besides—she has never married.”

  “Where is Mother?” Elizabeth’s voice cut across our conversation, and in a moment the bride had joined us and flung her arms around her mother’s neck. “I haven’t had one second to hug you, you excellent parent. I waylaid Father right after the ceremony, but I might have known you’d be somewhere on the fringe of the crowd, giving Nell your opinions of the bride’s and groom’s performances. Did I do splendidly?”

  We all joined in with congratulations and reiterations of our opinion that there had never been a better wedding. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Martin holding on firmly to Sarah with one hand and Eudora with another. Should I rescue him? But there was so much hilarity in his countenance that I deduced he was enjoying himself and continued chatting with Elizabeth. Her earlier nervousness had given way to such a degree of animation that she was a joy to watch. I saw David Fletcher gazing at her with an expression that combined love, amusement, and admiration to such a degree that I did not hold any qualms about their honeymoon.

  “Of course, the best is yet to come,” I heard Elizabeth say. “After all,” she rounded her eyes into an expression of the utmost candor, “I have been to Europe, but I’ve never seen Detroit. I’m looking forward to our lake voyage immensely. So many quiet days when we will have almost nothing to do.”

  Mrs. Parnell took her remark at face value and began chatting about the glories of Mackinac Island and the Niagara Falls, while I avoided catching my friend’s eye and fought the temptation to kick her in the shins. Only Elizabeth could allude to her forthcoming honeymoon with such delicate use of the double entendre and get away with it.

  “And I will be enjoying myself just as much,” said Mrs. Parnell in all innocence. “After all, we will have Mr. and Mrs. Rutherford, Sarah, and Miss O’Dugan all to ourselves. Their presence will get us nicely over the difficult moment of seeing our last chick fly the nest.”

  5

  Loss

  The news of the strike that had distracted Martin from the Fletchers’ wedding was no better by Monday.

  “They’re having guns delivered to police stations in Chicago.” Martin, his face grave, laid the most recently opened telegram on the Parnells’ breakfast table, on top of a pile of letters and newspapers.

  Mr
s. Parnell, at the other end of the table, was deep in her own correspondence. “Ah!” she remarked, not having heard Martin. “The Alpena has altered its itinerary and will avoid Detroit.” She looked up. “Guns?”

  “The militia has been told to prepare itself for riots.” He pushed his fingers through his hair and glanced at me. “I must go back, Nellie. I know Joe has the matter in hand, but I should be there. They had better not damage the new store, or I won’t be responsible for my actions.”

  “Is that letter from Elizabeth?” I asked Mrs. Parnell since it seemed more polite to respond to my hostess first.

  “No, from the shipping office.” Mrs. Parnell’s sharp blue eyes lifted once more, dancing with amusement. “I don’t imagine Elizabeth sat down to write to me on the first day or two of her honeymoon tour.”

  I caught Martin’s eye, and we both grinned. I’d hinted to him about Elizabeth’s impatience for her wedded life to begin. I hoped that a large cabin in a paddle steamer would be a congenial setting and the weather on the Great Lakes would be free of the violent storms that swept over the water even in summer.

  “The Alpena will avoid the larger cities altogether, in case of violence, and instead call in at some ‘charming’ smaller ports.” Mrs. Parnell shook her head. “I find it a great shame that these—these socialistic elements of society should so disrupt the lives of ordinary people, don’t you?” She looked at Martin. “It would be a terrible pity to cut short your stay, but I understand that, for a man, business comes first.”

  “I should go back with you,” I said to Martin.

  “No,” he replied with emphasis at the same time Mrs. Parnell exclaimed, “Not at all! The women and children must remain here; there will be no rioting in Lake Forest, I’m sure.” She turned her head to look through the open window, through which we could see Tess and Sarah taking a turn in the garden with Miss Baker. Sarah’s governess had rejoined us the previous afternoon, full of news about the angry mood in Chicago, now sweltering in the summer heat. Sunday had been a day of meetings, and many were calling for a general strike to bring the country to a halt until the employers raised wages.