Effie clutched the jamb and tried to steady her breath. She stared at the tiled patio and creeping crabgrass, wrestling herself free from the memory.
“You clumsy—” Miss Mercier stopped. “Are you all right?”
“Fine,” Effie said, straightening and brushing off her gloves. But her legs wobbled, as if the tendons connecting muscle to bone had snapped.
“I didn’t mean—”
“I’ve been called worse by worse people.”
“You really ought to get better shoes. One of these days—”
“Adeline?”
It was the same thin voice Effie had heard when she first arrived, only much closer now.
“Fi donc,” Adeline said under her breath, pushing past her into the loggia. “You shouldn’t be out of bed, Mamm.”
At the base of the curving staircase stood a small-framed woman with the same light skin and dainty nose as Adeline. Black hair with only the errant strand of gray showed beneath her sagging tignon. Her lace-trimmed nightshirt clung sweaty to her spindly trunk and limbs. She sagged against the banister as if her meager weight were too much for her legs to bear. Even so, her posture had a royal air.
“Qui est avec toi? Un homme?”
Adeline sighed. “Non, Mamm. Not a man. This is . . . er . . .” She glanced sidelong at Effie.
“My name is Effie, ma’am.”
“See, Mamm. Effie. Une femme, not a man. And an American. She doesn’t speak French.”
“Une Américaine?” the woman said this with some distaste. “Effie, come here. Let me get a closer look at you. Adeline lets hardly any friends call these days.”
Mrs. Mercier’s Creole accent clouded her words far more strongly than her daughter’s, making it difficult to pluck out the Latin roots and mentally translate them into English. She glanced at Adeline, who pursed her lips but waved her onward to the stairs, where her mother waited.
Afternoon sunlight slanted in through the loggia’s archways. Effie’s heart still beat off-kilter from the apparition she’d had in the courtyard. Her toes had gone numb and the blisters on her heels cried out with each step. Even here in the sunlight, she was cold. Nothing seemed more luxurious at that moment than her tiny room and moss-filled mattress back at the boardinghouse. But an unmistakable authority buttressed Mrs. Mercier’s weak, raspy voice, compelling Effie to stay.
When she reached the stairs, Effie bobbed with a quick, stiff curtsy. Though Mrs. Mercier stood a step above her, their eyes met squarely.
“Bon Dieu, you’re a giant.” She took Effie’s chin between two bony fingers and moved her head side to side. “And so dark.”
“That’s not true, Mamm,” Adeline said, joining them at the steps. Then, to Effie, “She doesn’t see well anymore. Mamm, Effie’s own father could be white.”
“With such hair? I don’t think so. What’s your family name, demoiselle?”
“Jones,” she said, pulling her chin free of Mrs. Mercier’s grasp and smoothing her flyaway curls.
“Américaine, indeed. Who are your parents?”
Effie patted her pinned-back hair. “I . . .”
“This isn’t an inquisition, Mamm,” Adeline said. “Besides, Effie was just leaving.”
“Quelle absurdité. It’s nearly time for dinner. Effie, you must stay and join us.”
“That’s—um—very kind, ma’am, but I really—”
“It’s settled. Why, I can smell Dorothée about in the kitchen already.” Mrs. Mercier breathed deeply through her nose and smiled. “Oyster stuffed pheasant.” She inhaled again. “Wax beans au beurre, tarte aux poires. Delicious, non?”
Effie glanced back at the empty kitchen. “Yes . . . er . . . it smells delicious. I’d be delighted to stay.”
Adeline flashed her a smile. The fading afternoon light twinkled off her glassy eyes. “Dinner will be a while, Mamm. Dorothée’s only just started the roux. You should rest.” She wrapped an arm around her mother’s waist and helped her up the stairs.
Effie watched them ascend, a strange, unsettling feeling overtaking her. She wanted to break one of the glass windows overlooking the dining room and use its shards to peel away her own skin and slip into Adeline’s.
Instead, Effie hurried from the house the moment the two left her view.
* * *
Once outside, Effie could breathe again. She slowed to a hobble and drifted down Toulouse Street. Everything about the day had been a disaster. Had she really believed she’d walk away cured? If anything, she felt more broken. Was it this city that made her so foolhardy? Had she been too rash in leaving Indiana? Things had been familiar there, predictable. At least until the end.
She turned down Chartres toward Canal Street. A pack of children dashed past with their schoolbooks, nearly knocking her off the banquette in their gay parade. The whining breaks of the streetcar made her arm hairs steeple. On every corner, street vendors accosted her with their wares—mud-streaked turnips, squirming crawfish, drooping flower buds, ink-smeared copies of L’Abeille de Nouvelle Orléans.
Above the din, Effie heard her name. She turned and saw Adeline a block behind her. Effie half thought to turn around and pretend she’d not heard. She hadn’t the energy for more sparring. But her curiosity won out and she waited.
Adeline reached her ruddy-faced and panting. She clutched her side and held her hand up until she caught her breath. “Ma foi, I thought I’d never catch you.”
“What do you want?”
She pulled Effie away from the bustle and into the shade of an open carriageway. “You won’t tell anyone, will you?”
“Tell whom what?”
“You know, your friends, from the séance. My real name. That I’m . . . well . . .”
“A charlatan after their money? I thought I’d already ruined that for you, that you’d given up on their repeat business.”
She glared at Effie. “You did, and I have. But if word got around to others, those of a different set, it could ruin my reputation.”
“Madame Desâmes’s?”
“No, you ninny. My own.” A few strands of glossy black hair had fallen free from her green and gold tignon. She tucked them back into place. The redness had drained from her face, leaving only the apples of her cheeks and her full, symmetrical lips flushed with color.
What must it feel like to be that beautiful? The time it must take her to layer on all her adornments, to fix her hair and tie her head wrap just so. She’d probably not run as she just had in ages for fear of staining her dress with perspiration. It seemed as much a burden as a gift. And yet, if Effie were more beautiful, not so tall and curly haired, Samson would remember her for more than just her pert comments about overcrowded cemeteries.
“What you said before, about feminine charms, is that something you could teach me?”
“Moi?”
“Yes.” In the short time they’d been standing together, Effie had noticed several men casting slow, sidelong glances in Adeline’s direction. “Whatever these charms, you seem to possess an overabundance of them.”
Adeline smiled and ran a finger along her neck beneath her pearls. “Je suis comme il faut, it’s true. But you, I . . . er . . . let’s just say it would be quite an undertaking.”
“Good.” Effie walked back into the crowd and Adeline followed. “When do we start?”
“Non, you misunderstand me. I wasn’t agreeing to teach you. Where would one even begin?”
Effie turned to face her. Passersby streamed around them. “I know you don’t like me. And I don’t like you. I know that I’m coarse, blunt, and unfriendly. But it shouldn’t be any greater challenge than I must abide with your unscrupulous character and insufferable vanity.” Effie continued, despite Adeline’s scandalized expression. “I need your help and you need my silence. So when do we start?”
“Coarse doesn’t even begin to describe you. Even your silence isn’t worth that much.” She turned around and stamped away.
Effie watched her go. She could a
lways find someone else, couldn’t she? Someone less detestable. Someone less . . . “Wait.” She hurried after her, grimacing at what she was about to say. Damn herself for being so weak and susceptible to this infatuation. “I can help you with your spirit act. Improve your tricks.”
Adeline stopped but didn’t turn around. “How? Are you claiming to be a sensitive now too?”
“Of course not. With science and mechanics.”
The last sliver of sun sank behind the buildings lining the Rue de Chartres. For a moment, fiery light crowned the rooftops. Then shadow overtook them.
“Fine. Après-demain. Bring me proof of this science magic. If it’s any good, I’ll help you.”
CHAPTER 8
After cleaning the day’s worth of grime from her equipment, washing and hanging her apron, and measuring out the right amounts of mercury, arsenic, and zinc chloride for the next batch of embalming fluid, Effie hurried from Mr. Whitmark’s shop to the cobbler’s. She arrived to find the shop door locked, but a gas lantern still aglow within. She rapped and waited.
The day had been a busy one with two bodies to embalm—a child taken by scarlet fever and a man kicked in the head by his horse. Business had continued to grow, thanks in no small part to the hours she’d spent cleaning and scrubbing and bookkeeping. Mr. Whitmark’s fledgling sobriety helped too. He’d even taken her advice and hired on another assistant, an Irishman named Colm. A bruiser of a man, Colm was only a few years older than Effie, and—in her estimation—good for lugging supplies, hitching the wagon, and not much else. Had she known this was the sort Mr. Whitmark would hire, she’d not have suggested another assistant at all.
Today, as was quickly seeming to become his habit, Colm had managed to nettle her. She hadn’t needed his help with the child—the boy was small enough to move on her own—and she’d asked Colm to ready the cooling table at the next house. He scowled at the request, reminded her she weren’t his boss, then sauntered off to do as bidden, leaving Effie to the boy.
He was a beautiful child with hair the color of dried clay and freckles stamped across his nose. His small artery had been limp and fragile from dehydration, but she’d managed to secure her cannula and he took the fluid quickly. His mother had finished bathing him just as Effie arrived, and stayed in the room while she worked, her face turned away, her gaze locked upon the worn wool rug, her hand resting on the mattress beside his little feet.
In cases like these—children—Effie’s hand never slipped, her mind never wandered. With enough focus, she could drown out even the loudest sobs and most deafening silences.
But today, after she left, thoughts of the boy’s mother stayed with her, harrying her nerves, unsettling her calm. Her next case, though complicated in the careful reconstruction she’d had to do on the man’s skull, did not prove sufficient distraction. She thought of Adeline and her mother, and the ache that watching them together had inflicted. She thought of the sallow-faced woman, freshly exhumed from among her forgotten memories, and what she’d said about Effie’s own mother. Diseased. Besides a few hummed notes, this new fragment of recollection—of beans scattering and the woman yanking her toward that shed—was all she knew of ta mamm, her mother.
The cobbler emerged from the back of his shop. He carried the gas lamp to the door and, after shining it upon her face, smiled and let her in.
“Are they done?”
“Yes, yes, have a seat.” He waved her toward a stool and headed back into the bowels of his workshop. “I had to use a man’s mold, but I narrowed it some and tapered the toe.” He reappeared with a pair of women’s boots larger than any on display.
Effie ran her fingers along the smooth black leather and careful stitching, then knocked on the soles—thick and sturdy, each nail flush and evenly spaced. “They’re beautiful.”
“Try them on before you fall in love now.”
Effie unlaced her old boots and yanked them off. Her scrunched toes unfurled. She wiggled them to bring back feeling, then slipped her feet into the new boots. The leather hugged the long, wide plane of her feet like a second skin—not too tight, but not so loose they’d slip and rub while she walked. Her toes spread and straightened without constraint, no longer crammed one atop the other like string beans in ajar. “I ain’t never—I’ve never had a pair of shoes made just for me before. They’re . . . perfect.”
He smiled again. “Well, I saved the mold, so it ought not take so long next time you be needing a new pair.”
“Thank you.”
“Here, let me wrap them up for you.”
“No,” she said, scooping up her old boots. “I’m never putting these on again.”
He laughed. “They’re well-worn, that’s for sure, but I’ll take them to the poorhouse if you won’t be wearing them.”
Effie handed them over and he tossed them into a nearby crate filled with other cast-offs. The heels clapped together as they landed atop the heap, calling to mind Madame Desâmes’s fabricated spirit knocking. Effie still had no idea what she was going to bring to Adeline to aid her act. Why had she offered to help in the first place? The whole idea of deception for profit repulsed her. Still, if it were going to be done, it could be done much better.
She pulled several bills from her purse, handed them to the cobbler, then turned to leave, glancing one last time at her wretched old boots. “How difficult would it be to make a hollow boot heel?”
“Not so hard, I’d think. But it’d have to be made of something pretty sturdy to bear someone’s weight.”
“Hmm . . . like steel?”
He shrugged, flipping through his keys and unlocking the bolt. “That ought to work. Little paint and you probably couldn’t tell the difference.” He opened the door. “Careful walking home now, don’t scuff your boots on your first stroll about.”
She smiled, only half hearing him, her mind roused with the possibilities.
* * *
“A hollow boot heel? That’s your brilliant idea?”
Effie watched as Adeline rummaged through a basket of yarn, stuffing a few skeins into her carpetbag and tossing the rest haphazardly back into the basket. “All we have to do is fashion a lever and hammer mechanism inside. Depress it with your heel and you’ve got a veritable sound box. No more joint popping.”
“It’s worked fine so far.”
“It took me two minutes to figure out you were manipulating your knee joint in and out of its socket. And you’re likely to do permanent damage to your ligaments.”
Adeline gave her a look that suggested both confusion and disinterest.
“The sinew that holds your bones together. You might lose your ability to tolerate long bouts of standing or repetitive squatting movements.”
“Why ever would that matter?”
“Suppose you’re taking the streetcar across town and all the seats are occupied.”
“Chère, a gentleman always yields his seat.”
Not in Effie’s experience. “You mightn’t stand dancing long either.”
At this, Adeline stopped her rummaging and looked at her. “Vraiment? Tell me more about this hollow boot heel.”
Effie further explained the contraption—how they might make it with soldered scraps of steel from the rail yard and a small, spring-loaded hammer with a rubber head—but Adeline waved her through the details.
“Are you sure it will be loud enough?”
“It will take some experimentation, but once we have all the dimensions and proportions right, the acoustics of the box will amplify the sound.”
Adeline shouldered her bag and returned the basket of yarn to its place beside the settee. “Bien. When will it be finished?”
Did she think Effie just wiled away her hours like a fatted house cat? “I’ll look for parts when I can, but I do have more pressing obligations.”
“Ah, oui, I forgot. The encumbrances of employment. What are you? A teacher? One of those reformers come down from the North to educate the ignorant freedman and his children?�
�
Adeline’s comment didn’t surprise Effie—many people assumed she was a teacher—but her blithe, almost disdainful tone did. Light as her skin was, Adeline was still a Negro. Didn’t she care for the advancement of her race? “Historically, societies who educate their citizenry fare better than those—”
“Yes, yes. No need to raise sand about it. I’m sure you—” The porcelain mantel clock chimed three. “Fi donc! We’re late.”
“For what?”
“Your first lesson. That’s the deal, isn’t it?”
The deal yes; the plan no. She had her clothes to press and new boots to polish back at the boardinghouse. She had errands to run on Canal Street. She hadn’t brought pad and pencil to take notes. She hadn’t even decided for sure a deal like this with a woman like Adeline was worth making, however much these feelings for Samson troubled her.
But she hadn’t time to argue. Adeline had already quit the parlor and donned her shawl.
They walked in silence for several minutes, turning up this street and down the next. Not arm in arm as other women did. Not even side by side—for Effie still had no idea of their destination and lagged a step behind—but as two strangers strolling in a common direction. Adeline seemed to know everyone in the Quarter, bobbing her head to shopkeepers and coachmen, newsboys and Sunday promenaders, echoing their bonjou.
When they arrived at a large two-story home, more American in style with colonnades and clapboard siding, Adeline stopped. Her long, manicured fingers knotted around the straps of her bag and she eyed Effie from head to toe. “This is your Sunday dress?”
“Yes.”
Adeline’s lips screwed into a frown. “Is everything you own so dark and . . . plain?”
Effie smoothed a hand down her dress. Perhaps the navy-blue muslin wasn’t as fine as Adeline’s silk. Fewer ruffles, a smaller bustle. But the fabric was good—soft and durable. The color was, well, serviceable. Death, after all, could call at any time.
The Undertaker's Assistant Page 8
