Hannah

by Kathryn Lasky

  Daughters of the Sea

  Hannah

  Kathryn Lasky

  SCHOLASTIC PRESS / NEW YORK

  Full fathom five thy father lies;

  Of his bones are coral made;

  Those are pearls that were his eyes:

  Nothing of him that doth fade,

  But doth suffer a sea-change

  Into something rich and strange.

  Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell.

  —William Shakespeare, The Tempest

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1 A Port City

  Chapter 2 A Lovely Child?

  Chapter 3 “They All Fit”

  Chapter 4 Number 18 Louisburg Square

  Chapter 5 Two Vases

  Chapter 6 The Room At The Top

  Chapter 7 The Painter

  Chapter 8 The River

  Chapter 9 Blood And Milk

  Chapter 10 Becoming Invisible

  Chapter 11 Proper Boston

  Chapter 12 Music!

  Chapter 13 “My Own Heaven”

  Chapter 14 “Know Your Place, Scullery Girl”

  Chapter 15 “That Damn Cat”

  Chapter 16 Beyond Words

  Chapter 17 “Don’t Or Can’t”

  Chapter 18 Girl In The Shadows

  Chapter 19 “Some News”

  Chapter 20 A Large Dark Eye

  Chapter 21 Get Out, Hannah! Get Out!

  Chapter 22 The Tail In The Wave

  Chapter 23 This New World

  Chapter 24 Ettie’s Secret

  Chapter 25 “Forever And Ever?”

  Chapter 26 “Being Mer”

  Chapter 27 The Storm

  Copyright

  1 A PORT CITY

  THEY SAY THE SEA makes some people sick. Its slow, billowing waves swelling beneath a ship make stomachs heave. But for Hannah Albury, this was unimaginable. It was land that made her sick. Sick near to dying.

  She would have never left the sea had it not been for Miss Pringle at the orphanage—The Boston Home for Little Wanderers. How she detested that woman, with her thin, piercing voice that reminded Hannah of a needle.

  The sickness started with Go Forth Day. Go Forth was the name that The Home for Little Wanderers called the day when girls who had reached their four-teenth year learned where they were to be sent. It was a day halfway between a graduation and an eviction. The girls were considered too old to continue living off the charity of others and had to start earning their keep in the world. That day had arrived a year before for Hannah and a dozen other girls, but a scarlet fever epidemic had postponed it, giving them a reprieve. Now the scarlet fever was long gone, and it was time for them to leave.

  The girls had all passed their fifteenth birthdays and sat waiting with this year’s fourteen-year-olds to be called, one by one, into Miss Pringle’s office and learn their destinies.

  They sat in alphabetical order in a row of chairs. There were two As who came before Hannah: Lucy Abbott and Tilly Adams. The girls waited, whispering in excited voices to one another. Except for Hannah, who sat locked in silence.

  Until this moment, the girls had indulged in a range of fantasies about who they really were, how some grievous mistake or cruel twist of fate had caused them, quite by accident, to become orphans. In their own minds, they had been products of wealthy, stylish families. Perhaps even royal families, as Sadie Crawford persisted in believing. Sadie was convinced that her own mother was a princess from France, or sometimes Russia. When the girls went forth, they imagined that some of these errors would be redressed.

  “Just wait and see, Bessie,” said Sadie, who sat next to Hannah in alphabetical order. “If I get sent up to one of those fine homes on Commonwealth Avenue, they will surely see that I have refinements most uncommon. And if they have a son, he might fall in love with me and then I can seek out my true mother because he will have enough money to help me find her—”

  “Do you remember Martha Gilmore, Sadie?” Bessie responded, lost in her own inventions. “Well, Martha, she got a job in a hat shop down on Washington Street, and one day, the day she turned eighteen, actually, a man came in to buy a hat for his wife, and guess what?”

  “What?” Sadie said.

  “He fell in love with her and he divorced his wife and married her. Martha was so lovely and refined that he couldn’t help himself. He saw that she was much more than a mere salesgirl.”

  “Divorce?” Sadie gasped. “Oh, I wouldn’t want anything like that—royalty doesn’t divorce.” Sadie turned to Hannah. “Don’t you agree, Hannah?”

  There was a burst of giggles down the row of chairs.

  “Why would you ask Hannah?” someone whispered.

  Why indeed? Hannah thought. Hannah was not one to indulge in the favorite pastime of the girls at the home. These reveries of alternate lives fed the girls, nourished them, gave them hope. Hannah was not inclined toward dreams.

  Lucy Abbott had just come out of Miss Pringle’s office. She was glowing.

  “Where are you to go?” A very tiny girl, Cornelia Ellis, jumped up.

  “There’s an opening for a scullery girl at that fancy gentlemen’s restaurant on Winter Street. If I do well, I might be able to work at the hatcheck desk. You know, where the men leave off their hats and coats.”

  “Hats! Hats! That’s the answer!” Bessie exclaimed. “What did I tell you about Martha Gilmore! Oh, you’re on your way, Lucy! You always said you thought your father was a true Bostonian!”

  “Yes, yes, high born, I think. Maybe a wool merchant.” Lucy nodded.

  “What better place to meet him than that fancy restaurant?”

  Hannah settled back in her chair. She had no such thoughts, no such dreams of her parents. High born, low born, or anything else. It all seemed out of the realm of possibility that she had connections to anyone. She couldn’t even imagine what to hope for in terms of her placement, and she felt her heart sink a bit as she watched Tilly Adams walk through Miss Pringle’s office door. She would be next. Did it really matter where she might go?

  But not ten minutes later, Hannah stood before Miss Pringle in stunned silence and marveled at how she could have ever been stupid enough to think that it wasn’t important.

  “Rules are rules.” Miss Pringle sat erect behind her desk and sorted some papers that evidently pertained to Hannah. “The board of directors of the home has a policy about children who, upon reaching the age of fourteen, seem unsuitable for domestic employment—and that you are unsuitable, have no doubts, Hannah. I could no more send you into the home of a Boston family of society”—she pronounced the word “so-sigh-it-tee,” so each syllable had a poisonous little ping to it—“than teach a cow how to fly!”

  “But what about a position in a shop or—”

  “Don’t interrupt. And, no, you are no more suitable for a shop than a position in a home.”

  “Why not?” Hannah burst out.

  Miss Pringle’s mouth settled into a firm line and she regarded Hannah with a look that seemed to say Where should I begin?

  “I can read and write better than a lot of the girls here.” Hannah tried to keep her voice firm as her world reeled.

  “So, I suppose, you think that you should be a stenographer or a social secretary?”

  “Maybe.” Hannah spoke softly, barely concealing her defiance.

  “No ‘maybe’ about it. Definitely not! For one thing you would have to be older for such a job. And despite your writing skills, you are generally rather awkward. We can’t have you going into a Boston home and spilling their dinners and breaking their Wedgwood.” Hannah had no idea what Wedgwood was, but she hadn’t spilled things that often. “So there will be no more of this talk. The board says that a child for whom pl
acement cannot be found in Boston must be put on an orphan train.”

  “But I thought the whole point was that now that I am fifteen, I am too old to be considered an orphan? That is why the home is putting me out. So how can I be put on an orphan train?” Hannah was pleased with the logic of her argument. Miss Pringle was not.

  Her eyes drilled into Hannah. “You see, Hannah,” she barked. “That is precisely the problem. You know no boundaries. You argue, you challenge. Now, how can I send someone like you into a fine home or a decent shop?”

  “But I’m not an orphan now. I’m too old.”

  “Not in Kansas you aren’t,” Miss Pringle said matter-of-factly and stood up to signal that the interview had ended. “The next shipment is to depart within a week for Salina, Kansas.”

  “Shipment?” Hannah said weakly.

  “Yes, shipment of orphans.”

  “Is anyone else from the home supposed to go? Will there be others?”

  “No. We found suitable placements for them.”

  Suitable. Why was she considered so unsuitable? She hated the word. It was not the first time she had heard it. Miss Pringle used it the most, but the other adults at the home had picked up on it. The domestic arts teacher, Miss Baker, had just said it the other day when Hannah had gone to comfort a newly arrived orphan girl with a fresh warm bun from the kitchen.

  “You can’t just barge into the kitchen and take things without asking. That’s most unsuitable, Hannah!”

  “Why? She’s hungry,” Hannah had replied.

  “To question your elders is also unsuitable,” Miss Eakins, the home’s nurse, who happened to be walking by, had chimed in.

  But Hannah now merely took a deep breath and asked Miss Pringle another question. “Is Kansas near the sea, ma’am?”

  “Heavens, no! I took you for being brighter than that, child!” Miss Pringle glared at her, then in an acid voice said, “Certainly, not so bright as to match the brightness of your hair!”

  The sun streaming through the window had ignited the red highlights of the unpinned hair that tumbled over Hannah’s shoulders like a cataract of flames. It was a peculiarity of her hair that the color changed with the light. On cloudy days drizzling with rain, it appeared dull, a guttering flame wrapped in fog. On a brilliant winter day with the sun reflecting off snow and glistening icicles, her hair was as dazzling as rubies. And if she were near the sea toward dawn or dusk in a gathering of shadows, her hair acquired a slightly greenish cast, like old copper.

  In two quick steps, Miss Pringle strode to a bookshelf and fetched an atlas. Opening it to a map of the United States, she stuck her ink-stained index finger on a spot in the middle and tapped it several times, then snickered. “It’s about as far from any sea as you could get.”

  That was when Hannah felt the first strange twinge of the sickness.

  2 A LOVELY CHILD?

  A WEEK LATER Hannah was aboard the train. She spent her first morning observing her fellow orphan travelers. Some appeared to be her age or older, but these were in the minority. Most were much younger, under ten years old. She wondered if the few who were her age had somehow failed to “go forth” as she had. Several of these young people had boarded the train in New York. Perhaps they, like herself, were deemed unfit to serve as domestics in the grand houses of that city.

  She did not hear any fanciful tales, as she had in Boston, of orphan fates twisted away from their true destinies of distinguished families with great fortune. And yet she could not help but notice that all of the children seemed excited, full of anticipation. One particularly dingy little girl whose skin looked as if it had never seen the light of day spoke with great animation about the “wide country.”

  “I hear that there is at least a mile between every house and sometimes more. That’s why they need children to fill up the land.”

  “And to work,” said another girl. “They got more cows and chickens out there than people.”

  “The work’s not that hard and there is lots of time to play outside. Meadows for picnics and all,” said a plump girl with a band of freckles across her nose.

  “Do you know how to milk a cow?” asked another.

  “No, but I reckon I can learn fast enough. It can’t be that hard.”

  “Maybe we’ll all end up being farmers’ wives.” This caused a great uproar.

  “Hey, you!” A girl with curly black hair and bright blue eyes addressed Hannah, who was sitting across the aisle. “You want to be a farmer’s wife?”

  “Oh, Maisy!” Her seatmate giggled.

  “I don’t think I’m old enough to be anybody’s wife. Farmer or not.” Hannah laughed softly in reply to Maisy.

  “Oh, they marry young,” Maisy said. “You just wait. Why, you look old enough to me. How old are you?”

  “Fifteen,” Hannah replied.

  “A girl at our orphanage ran off with the milkman when she was fourteen,” Maisy went on. “And you’re much prettier than she is.”

  “Thank you,” Hannah replied.

  “And I bet you’re smarter, too. I saw you reading that newspaper that you found on the floor. See, if you were a farmer’s wife, you could keep track of the crops—write them all down and the price. You do figures?”

  “Yes, even a little bit of long division,” Hannah added.

  “Well, there you go! You really could be a farmer’s wife, keep all the accounts. I knew you were different the first time I clapped eyes on you when I got on in New York. I said to my best friend, Amy, here, ‘Look at her. Ain’t she a different-looking thing?’” Hannah was not sure how to respond. It was not as if Maisy was making fun of her, not in the least. There was only kindness in Maisy’s remarks.

  “But me,” freckle-faced Polly began, “I think I’d rather be a farmer’s daughter than a wife, because if your father, say, owned a huge cattle ranch, then you’d maybe get a cowboy for a boyfriend. They have big ranches out West and handsome cowboys.”

  A bright light suffused Polly’s face and soon a hush fell on the others. All the girls were beginning to construct their Western dreams, their fantasy lives. They were no different from the girls back at The Home for Little Wanderers. And they all felt that this train was carrying them toward something. But Hannah felt she was moving away, farther and farther with each mile that the train devoured the track. It was also right then that the twinges she had first felt in Miss Pringle’s office turned into pain.

  Later that same night, somewhere between Pennsylvania and Ohio, Polly looked down at Hannah’s wrists and asked, “What’s that?” Tiny, dark red bumps had appeared where the cuffs of Hannah’s dress ended. By noon the bumps had spread to her hands and were creeping up her neck.

  One of the matrons who was in charge of the children took Hannah into a private compartment and made her take off all her clothes. Her body was a conflagration. The woman inhaled sharply.

  “You say you’ve had measles?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Well, that’s a relief, we don’t want to be bringing a plague to the middle of the country.” Hannah felt a shock course through her entire body. A double shock that she could be the source of a plague and then those awful words “middle of the country.”

  “What other symptoms have you had?”

  “Symptoms?” Hannah wasn’t sure what the woman meant.

  “You know—itching.”

  Until the woman mentioned it Hannah hadn’t itched, but suddenly she did. It was the worst in the regions that her combis—her sewn-together chemise and drawers—covered. “I think that if I could take my combis off, it would help.”

  “You mean travel without your underwear?” The woman’s eyes widened. She was completely speechless for several seconds. “You mean naked? Are you depraved, child?”

  “No, I’m just itchy. It’s only the clothes beneath my dress. I won’t be naked. No one will know.”

  “But…but…I’ll know,” the matron sputtered.

  “But you won’t tell�
�I mean, what does it matter?”

  The matron’s mouth quivered, and then her thin lips pleated with vertical lines moved, but no sound was forthcoming. It was as if they were feeling their way around the shape of words she could not quite utter.

  “I won’t tell anyone,” Hannah said. “Not a soul.”

  Finally the matron spoke. “No, you shan’t.” Hannah felt a little worm of panic squirm deep in her gut. “You shall remain in here. In this compartment for the rest of the trip.”

  “But it’s so tiny!”

  The matron continued to stare at Hannah, saying nothing.

  “And what if I have to…you know, go to the privy?” Hannah asked.

  “I’ll bring you a pot.”

  “But I don’t understand! I won’t be able to talk to any of the others. Why are you punishing me? I’ll wear my combis and itch. I don’t want to be alone.”

  “You are infected!”

  No, I’m not! Hannah wanted to scream. But she could feel her own skin drying up and suddenly yearned for the fog-drenched air of Boston, the moist winds coming off the water.

  “You better pray this rash doesn’t spread to your face,” the matron snapped. “No one will ever want to adopt you then!” The woman turned and shut the door.

  The window in the compartment was much smaller than the one in the passenger section, but it didn’t matter. Hannah didn’t need to look out to feel that she was getting farther and farther away from the ocean.

  Matron would come by and set down a tin bowl of food, but Hannah rarely touched it. She had no appetite. Time ceased to have meaning for her. Although the itching was always present, it was as if there were times when she left her own body, slipped the prickly inferno of her skin, and entered a kind of dream state. With extreme concentration, she could conjure up the feel of the sea wind against her skin.

  It was very late one night when the train pulled into a tiny station somewhere out in the middle of the empty plains, and the conductor called out, “Enterprise! Next stop—Salina.”