A Gathering Light

by Jennifer Donnelly

  It had only just gone light when I left the Glenmore, but I was able to get a ride into Eagle Bay from Bill Jarvis, who owns the Jarvis Hotel in Big Moose Station. He was on his way to see Dr. Wallace. He was suffering from a toothache and was not in a talkative mood. I was glad for that. I didn’t want to answer any questions.

  The Clearwater was still in dock when we arrived, and I was able to get a seat on its return run to Old Forge. I had decided not to take the train so I wouldn’t have to explain myself to Mr. Pulling. The engineers change a lot on the steamers; I didn’t know the one on the morning run. I was worried when I saw the pickle boat coming, but I just scrunched down in my seat and Charlie Eckler never saw me. I looked back once, just before Eagle Bay disappeared from sight, and I felt more lonely and frightened than I have ever felt in my life. I thought about turning around when I got to Old Forge, but I didn’t. There’s no going back once you’re already gone.

  Now, as I wait for my train, Grace’s words echo in my memory. I have been bidding good-by to some places to-day. There are so many nooks, dear, and all of them so dear to me. I have lived here nearly all my life . . . Oh, dear, you don’t realize what all of this is to me. I know I shall never see any of them again . . .

  A northbound train pulls in. An express. There are only a few people on it. A handful of tourists and some workmen get off, followed by two men wearing jackets and ties.

  “That’s him. Austin Klock. He’s the undersheriff,” a man standing next to me says to his companion. “Told you this was more than some run-of-the-mill drowning.” They pull out notepads. Reporters, I imagine.

  “Who’s the man with him?”

  “County coroner. Isaac Coffin.”

  “Coffin? You’re kidding me, right?”

  “Brother, I am not. Come on. Let’s see if we can get a statement before that guy from the Watertown paper does.”

  The undersheriff holds his hands up as they approach him. “Gentlemen, I know as much about it as you do. A girl drowned at the Glenmore. Her body’s been recovered. Her companion’s has not . . .”

  Soon you’ll know more, I think. A lot more. Soon you’ll know that the girl was called Grace. And that she spent her last weeks on this earth pregnant and afraid, begging the man who’d made her so to come and take her away. But he’d had other ideas.

  I close my eyes and I can see Chester Gillette. He’s signing the guest book at the Glenmore. And having his dinner, and going for a boat ride. I see him row all the way out to South Bay. Maybe he and Grace get out and sit on the bank for a while. He leaves his suitcase there. They row some more. He waits until he’s sure there’s no one else around, and then he hits Grace. He tips the boat and swims to shore. Grace can’t swim. He knows that because she told him. She’d drown even if she wasn’t unconscious, but it’s quieter this way. She can’t scream for help.

  Later, when the boat is recovered, it will look to the searchers like Grace Brown and her companion both drowned. No one will ever find out that Grace was pregnant or that Chester Gillette was the father of her child. Her death will be Carl Grahm’s fault, and Chester will be free to return to Cortland and have a good and dandy time.

  I see Chester now, today. He’s eating breakfast somewhere. Maybe up at Seventh Lake. Maybe at the Neodak in Inlet, or the Arrowhead. Swinging his tennis racket. Smiling. He’s sure as hell not dead. Not him. I’d bet my last dollar on that.

  I see Grace Brown, too. Stiff and cold in a room in the Glenmore with a tiny life that will never be, inside her.

  And then I hear a whistle, shrill and piercing. I open my eyes and see the tracks, and the southbound train coming down them. The monstrous engine pulls in. Screeching and steaming, it comes to a halt. I cannot move. The conductor jumps down and helps passengers out. The porters unload trunks and luggage. People swirl around me. Heavy canvas mailbags land on the platform beside me.

  “All aboard!” the conductor yells. “This is the ten-fifteen New York Central for Utica, Herkimer, and all points south! Tickets, please! Have your tickets ready!”

  People are boarding the train. Mothers and children. Businessmen. Holidaymakers on their way home. Couples. And still I cannot move.

  I think of my family. Of Beth’s songs. Of Lou’s swagger. Of Abby’s gentle voice. I can see Pa sitting by the fire. And Emmie and Weaver’s mamma picking beans. I see Royal plowing his father’s fields, gazing across them to my father’s land with a look of love and longing he’d never shown me. I see Barney’s blind eyes turned up to mine. And the poor dead robin at my mother’s grave.

  The conductor grabs the iron railing on the side of the car and climbs up its metal steps. “Last call! Last call! All aboard!” he bellows. The engine exhales. A huge cloud of steam billows up from under it. The wheels strain against the tracks.

  “Wait!” I cry, stumbling forward.

  The conductor sees me. “Come on, missy!” he yells. “Her bark’s worse than her bite!” He reaches down for me. I look around myself wildly, my heart bursting with grief and fear and joy. I am leaving, but I will take this place and its stories with me wherever I go.

  I reach for his hand and clasp it. He hoists me onto the 10:15 southbound. To Utica and Herkimer. And all points south. To Amsterdam and Albany and beyond. To New York City. To my future. My life.

  Author’s Note

  On July 12, 1906, the body of a young woman named Grace Brown was pulled from the waters of Big Moose Lake in the Adirondack Mountains. The boat she’d been in had been found capsized and floating in a secluded bay. There was no sign of her companion, a young man who’d rented the boat under the name of Carl Grahm. It was feared that he, too, had drowned. Grace Brown’s death appeared to be an accident, and neither the men who dragged the lake nor the staff at the hotel where the couple had registered could have foreseen that they would soon be embroiled in one of the most sensational murder trials in New York’s history. Grace Brown, they would soon discover, was unwed and pregnant, and the man who had taken her boating was the father of her child. His real name was Chester Gillette.

  Grace and Chester had met in 1905 at the Gillette Skirt Factory in Cortland, New York—a place where they both worked, and which Chester’s uncle owned. A romance blossomed between them and eventually Grace became pregnant. Shortly after realizing her condition, she left Cortland for her home in South Otselic—possibly at Chester’s urging. There, she worried and wrote to Chester, pleading with him to come for her, threatening to return if he did not.

  Eventually, he did. They met in DeRuyter, a town near Grace’s home, and from there traveled to Utica and on into the Adirondacks. They had little money and no set plan. Or rather, Grace had no plan, just a hope of marriage; Chester, his prosecutors claimed, did. Only a poor relation of the Cortland Gillettes and hungry for the society in which they moved, Chester hoped to improve his social standing by courting a girl from a prominent family. To do so, he first needed to rid himself of the factory girl he had once cared for but later came to regard as an obstacle.

  There were no eyewitnesses to Grace Brown’s death and no one knows for certain what happened on Big Moose Lake on July 11, 1906. Chester originally stated that Grace’s death was an accident, then later claimed she’d committed suicide. George W. Ward, the district attorney who prosecuted the case, reconstructed Chester’s activities before and after Grace’s death—among them his use of an alias when registering at the Glenmore Hotel, the fact that he fled the scene and did not report Grace missing, and the fact that he was found enjoying himself at an Inlet hotel three days after her death—and argued that Chester had killed Grace. Instrumental to Ward’s case were Grace’s own letters.

  In A Gathering Light, I’ve taken the liberty of having Grace give a fictional character—Mattie—all of the correspondence between herself and Chester. In reality, however, when Grace was in the Adirondacks, she had only the letters Chester had written to her packed among her things. The letters she had written to him were found by the police in Chester�
�s room in Cortland after he was arrested.

  Grace’s letters had a profound effect upon those who attended Chester’s trial. People sobbed openly as they were read. Everyone wept, it was said, except Gillette. Though the case was based solely on circumstantial evidence, the jury found for the prosecution. Chester Gillette was convicted of murder in the first degree and executed in Auburn Prison on March 30, 1908.

  Nearly a century after her death, Grace Brown’s words have the same effect on me that they had on the people who attended Chester Gillette’s trial—they break my heart. I grieved for Grace Brown—a person I’d never known, a young woman long dead—when I first read them. There is so much fear and despair in those lines, but there is much else, too—a good heart, humor, intelligence, wit. Grace liked strawberries and roses and French toast. She had friends, and a brother who teased her about her cooking. She liked to go riding and shoot off firecrackers. Her letters remind me of what it was like to be nineteen, and I often wonder what she would have made of her life had she been allowed to live it. I’m glad that she helped Mattie live hers.

  My grandmother, who worked as a waitress in a Big Moose camp in the twenties, says Grace Brown still haunts the lake.

  Her letters will always haunt me.

  Jennifer Donnelly

  Brooklyn, New York

  October 2002

  Acknowledgments

  Though Mattie Gokey, her family, and her friends are fictional beings, some of the story’s characters, like Dwight Sperry and John Denio, were real. Others, like Henry the underchef and Charlie Eckler the pickle boat captain, are fictional but drawn from descriptions of real people. Several area authors helped me put the flesh back on old bones. I would like to acknowledge my great debt to Marylee Armour; W. Donald Burnap; Matthew J. Conway, my granduncle; Harvey L. Dunham; Roy C. Higby; Herbert F. Keith; William R. Marleau; and Clara V. O’Brien. Their memoirs and histories allowed me to weave fact with fiction by providing names, dates, and events; accounts of area people and their daily lives; and chronologies of towns and resorts. A list of books by these authors, plus additional sources and suggestions for further reading, follows.

  Jerold Pepper, director of the Adirondack Museum’s library, allowed me access to a transcript of the Gillette murder trial and much else, including the diaries of Lucilla Arvilla Mills Clark—a Cranberry Lake farm wife—and ephemera from the great camps. The museum’s exhibits provided me with information on logging and transportation. The Farmers’ Museum in Cooperstown, New York, gave me valuable insight into earlier methods of farming and animal husbandry. I am obliged to the staff at both of these excellent museums. They could not have been more helpful, or more patient, with my endless questions.

  I am also indebted to Peg Masters, Town of Webb historian and former director of the Town of Webb Historical Association, for allowing me to view the association’s collection of photographs as well as its census and tax records. She also provided information on early Inlet businesses and the Inlet Common School. I would also like to thank the librarians at the Port Leyden Community Library, who gave me extended loans of out-of-print Adirondack titles.

  My thanks, too, to Nancy Martin Pratt and her family for keeping the beautiful Waldheim just as it always was, and to the staff of the current Glenmore (originally the Glenmore store, now a pub) for letting me prowl the premises and play with their very own “Hamlet.”

  A very heartfelt thank-you goes to my mother, Wilfriede Donnelly, for introducing me to Grace Brown; my father, Matt Donnelly, for lessons in botany and the fine art of bug roping; my grandmother, Mary Donnelly, for telling me stories about her lumberjack father and her waitressing days at the Waldheim; and my uncle, Jack Bennett, for having more stories about the woods than the woods has trees. Lastly, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Steven Malk, my agent; Michael Stearns, my editor; and Doug Dundas, my husband, for their unstinting encouragement, wisdom, and guidance.

  Sources and Suggestions for Further Reading

  GRACE BROWN AND CHESTER GILLETTE

  Brandon, Craig. Murder in the Adirondacks: “An American Tragedy” Revisited. Utica, N.Y.: North Country Books, 1986.

  Brown, Grace. Grace Brown’s Love Letters. Herkimer, N.Y.: Citizen Publishing Company, 1906.

  People of New York v. Chester Gillette. Court transcript, Adirondack Museum, Blue Mountain Lake, N.Y.

  EAGLE BAY, INLET, BIG MOOSE LAKE, BIG MOOSE STATION

  Aber, Ted, and Stella King. The History of Hamilton County. New York: Great Wilderness Books, 1965.

  Armour, Marylee. Heartwood: The Adirondack Homestead Life of W. Donald Burnap. New York: The Brown Newspapers, 1988.

  Higby, Roy C. . . . A Man from the Past. Big Moose, N.Y.: Big Moose Press, 1974.

  Marleau, William R. Big Moose Station. New York: Marleau Family Press, 1986.

  O’Brien, Clara V. God’s Country: Eagle Bay Area—Fourth Lake/In the Heart of the Adirondacks. Utica, N.Y.: North Country Books, 1982.

  Scheffler, William L., and Frank Carey. Big Moose Lake, New York in Vintage Postcards. Charleston, S.C.: Arcadia Tempus Publishing Group, 2000.

  ADIRONDACK GUIDES

  Dunham, Harvey L. Adirondack French Louie: Early Life in the North Woods. Utica, N.Y.: North Country Books, 1953.

  Keith, Herbert G. Man of the Woods. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1972.

  FARMING

  Allen, Rev. Daisy Mavis Dalaba. Ranger Bowback: An Adirondack Farmer. West Virginia: Edwards Hill Press, 1997.

  Clark, Lucilla Arvilla Mills. Diary entries of a Cranberry Lake farm wife, from 1897, Ms 87-18. Adirondack Museum Library, Blue Mountain Lake, N.Y.

  Cutting, Edith E. Whistling Girls and Jumping Sheep. Cooperstown, N.Y.: Farmers’ Museum, 1951.

  Davidson, J. Brownlee, and Leon Wilson Chase. Farm Machinery: Practical Hints for Handy-Men. 1908. Reprint, New York: The Lyons Press, 1999.

  Herbert, Henry William. Horses, Mules, and Ponies and How to Keep Them: Practical Hints for Horse-Keepers. 1859. Reprint, New York: The Lyons Press, 2000.

  Myer, Ruth. A Farm Girl in the Great Depression. Ithaca, N.Y.: BUSCA, Inc., 1998.

  LOGGING AND LUMBERJACKS

  Bird, Barbara Kephart. Calked Shoes: Life in Adirondack Lumber Camps. Prospect, N.Y.: Prospect Books, 1952.

  Hochschild, Harold K. Lumberjacks and Rivermen in the Central Adirondacks (1850–1950). Blue Mountain Lake, N.Y.: Adirondack Museum, 1962.

  Welsh, Peter C. Jack, Jobbers and Kings: Logging the Adirondacks 1850–1950. Utica, N.Y.: North Country Books, 1996.

  GENERAL HISTORY

  Beetle, David H. Up Old Forge Way. Utica, N.Y.: North Country Books, 1972. Originally printed in the Utica Observer-Dispatch, 1948.

  Grady, Joseph F. The Adirondacks: Fulton Chain–Big Moose Region: The Story of a Wilderness. Little Falls, N.Y.: Press of the Journal & Courier Company, 1933.

  Janos, Elisabeth. Country Folk Medicine: Tales of Skunk Oil, Sassafras Tea, & Other Old-Time Remedies. Guilford, Conn.: The Globe Pequot Press, 1990.

  Kalinowski, Tom. Adirondack Almanac: A Guide to the Natural Year. Utica, N.Y.: North Country Books, 1999.

  Milne, William J., Ph.D., Ll.D. High School Algebra. New York: American Book Company, 1892 and 1906.

  Peterson’s Magazine. Philadelphia, Pa.: 1860.

  Teall, Edna West. Adirondack Tales: A Girl Grows Up in the Adirondacks in the 1880s. Jay, N.Y.: Adirondack Life magazine, 1970.

  If you were engrossed by A Gathering Light, you will lose yourself in Jennifer Donnelly’s evocative new novel, Revolution . . .

  The bestselling and Carnegie Medal winning author

  JENNIFER DONNELLY

  entwines the past and the present in a heartbreaking story of two girls growing up and finding the strength to forgive

  Praise for A Gathering Light:

  ‘A wonderfully involving novel, beautifully constructed and immensely rewarding’

  Guardian

  To order direct from Bloomsbury Pu
blishing visit www.bloomsbury.com/jenniferdonnelly

  or call 01256 302 699

  www.bloomsbury.com

  Bloomsbury Publishing, London, Oxford, New York, New Delhi and Sydney

  First published in Great Britain in June 2003 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP

  This electronic edition published in 2015 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  www.bloomsbury.com

  Bloomsbury is a trademark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  Copyright © Jennifer Donnelly 2003

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved

  You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  eISBN 9781408876176

  To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com. Here you will find extracts, author interviews, details of forthcoming events and the option to sign up for our newsletters.