Currents (22 page)

“A
nd ooohh, the faerie folk. Watch out for them, Louisa.” Mary Margaret's blue eyes grew wide. “They have been known to snatch up naughty children from their parents and leave a stranger in their place.”

Louisa was sitting at the kitchen table, listening raptly, her teacup suspended in midair. “All these stories, Mary Margaret. Leprechauns and banshees, pookas and changelings. Ireland must be a fearsome place.”

“Not if you know your way around,” Mary Margaret boasted. “And if you're careful to watch out.”

Ma hummed softly to herself while she put the finishing touches on the Bennetts' dinner, and Mary Margaret washed and dried the dishes and pots while regaling Louisa with her stories.

“Was Bridget asleep when you checked in on her?” Ma asked.

“No, she was reading her primer in bed,” Mary Margaret answered. “She seems a bit perkier today, Ma.”

“Let's hope,” her mother answered. But Mary Margaret noticed Ma's forehead was pleated with worry lines.

Ma often told her daughters that she didn't mind cleaning and cooking in the Bennetts' sunny kitchen with the sounds of the dishes and pots clattering, the smell of food baking or roasting. She had confided that the last few years they had lived in Ireland she woke up every day worrying how she would put food on the table. Bare cupboards. Empty potato bins. Barren fields blackened with scarcely a turnip to dice for a watery stew. They'd begun to live off wild blackberries, nettles, old cabbage leaves, edible seaweed, roots, green grass, and even roadside weeds. Mary Margaret had vague memories of that time.

After those days, Ma often told Mary Margaret and Bridget, she would never take the smell of supper cooking for granted.

“You could be the writer, Mary Margaret,” Louisa said. “The stories you tell are wonderful. And if you write them down half as well as you tell them, you should become an author, too.” Louisa drained her cup with a slurp. A drop fell on the flounce of her skirt, and she brushed it off absentmindedly.

“No, I must work for a living as soon as I'm able. But I do write in my journal a lot. Stories about my life,” Mary Margaret said. “Sometimes about the customers that come in to Mr. Eaton's. I wrote a story about the time Lucas Lowe took you and me sledding on the Common, and that strange man asked him if I was an Irish mick, and Lucas threatened to sock him in the nose if he called me a name again!”

“Ha! Wasn't he wonderful that day?” Louisa said. “He was so brave. Oh, Mary Margaret, won't you let me read your journal?”

She was flattered to think that Louisa, living in this grand home, with her beautiful dresses and fancy rooms, would want to read what she wrote.

“Mary Margaret, it's time to go,” her mother announced, placing a cloth over the still-hot bread and a cover on the beef stew she'd prepared for the Bennetts' dinner. “Did you fill the scuttles with coal from the back?”

“Yes, Ma,” she answered.

“Well, then, pick up your wild stories and your coat and say your thank-yous for the tea and cookies.”

“Mary Margaret, I have a thought,” Louisa said. “Can you run down and get your journal now? I can begin reading it tonight, and you can come back for tea when I'm done, and we can discuss it. Oh, please? Your stories are too dear for me to wait another day.”

They both looked at Mary Margaret's mother.

“Aye. You can run along now and fetch it,” her mother said, slipping her white apron over her head and tucking it in the wash hamper.

“Louisa,” Mrs. Bennett called down to the kitchen. “Please change for dinner.”

“Just bring it up to my bedroom,” Louisa said. Before vanishing up the staircase, she wrapped two fresh cookies in a napkin and gave them to Mary Margaret. “Here, these are for Bridget. Please tell her I'll be glad when she feels well enough to come back upstairs with you and your mother.”

It wasn't hard to locate her journal in their little home. The Caseys had so few possessions that everything was easy to find. Her father said that was the wonderful thing about how they lived now: no one had to hunt around through a lot of useless clutter for their belongings.

Ma said that when Da, the eternal optimist, died, she was going to have an old Chinese proverb carved on his tombstone. It would read:
Now that my house has burned down, I have a better view of the mountains.
He often hopefully referred to Bridget's symptoms as growing pains, which irritated Ma to no end. “Joint pain, numbness, too weak some days to even walk?” Ma would sputter. “Tomas, I don't know what it is—but I know what it isn't.”

Ma brewed endless teas and herbal poultices, all recipes from the old country, that she packed on to Bridget's swollen knees and ankles in a vain attempt to make her youngest child robust again. At times they seemed to help, but then Bridget would take another turn downward.

Out of breath from running down the stairs and back up, Mary Margaret was anxious to take another look around Louisa's bedroom. Days when she helped her ma with chores at the Bennetts', she often watched as Louisa rushed up the stairs after school with her friends. They all dressed alike, with long bell-shaped skirts decorated with laces and braid. Sometimes they would bring their dolls along—even they were dressed in finery such that Mary Margaret could not have dreamed of.

“It's all right, dear. Just go on up.” Mrs. Bennett waved her toward the stairs. Mary Margaret walked her best ladylike walk past the third floor where the Bennetts' bedroom was, making sure to keep her eyes downcast.

“Louisa?” she called out softly when she reached the top of the staircase.

“In here,” Louisa called from her room, as she finished adjusting the bow on the back of her dress. Mary Margaret placed her journal in Louisa's hands as if it were a precious jewel.

“I swear, I will take care of the beautiful prose in your journal like you can't imagine. You have my solemn oath on that,” Louisa vowed.

“I know you will. We'll discuss it another day, perhaps over tea, like you said.” Mary Margaret Casey tossed her shawl around her neck with a flourish and marched back down to her home.

M
r. Eaton was bent over a pair of black patent-leather slippers, his balding head shining in the light, when Mary Margaret came to work early.

“Well, you are eager to get to your ironing today!” Mr. Eaton said, glancing up at the clock..

“Yes, sir,” she said. “But I was hoping you might have a minute to look at something my da and I pulled up from the docks the other day. Sure it's a grand mystery, Mr. Eaton.”

“Well, it's slowed down a bit here, so I don't suppose it would do any harm. And I do love a good mystery. What is it you have there? Let's have a look.”

She pulled the bottle from the bag where she had carefully stowed it and placed it in his hands.

“Mr. Eaton, sir, there is a note that appears to be about a slave's birth and a splendid gold cross on a chain inside. My ma says it would fetch a pretty penny.”

“Oh, my.” He carefully shook out the note and cross before pushing his spectacles up on his nose to get a better look. He squinted and held the bottle and gold cross closer to the light.

“The bottle certainly has an unusually wide mouth on it,” he noted. Then he rubbed his finger over the bottom. “Here. Here is a marking. See this? It's an anchor. Looks like an anchor inside a circle.” He explained to her that some things could be told about bottles by their markings, and perhaps the bottle she found had such identifications. He moved his head so Mary Margaret could see for herself, and she leaned in and examined it.

“What would that stand for?” she asked.

“Let me see,” he said, rifling through a few different stacks of books. He pulled out a thin volume about glassmakers and their identifying marks from one of his tallest piles. He thumbed through carefully for several minutes until he stopped and slapped a page. “Aha! Look here!”

Together they studied a page that had a drawing of the anchor inside a circle, exactly like the one on the bottom of her bottle.

“What do you suppose it stands for?” she asked.

“Well, let's see. It says that it is the mark on bottles that were made at the Richmond Glass Company in Richmond, Virginia. Of course, we can only speculate how or where it went into the water. The bottle could have been made in Virginia and ended up anywhere after that. That's really all that we can know from this.”

“The cross looks to be real gold.” He rolled it over in his fingers. “DSS J. K.,” he read. “Doesn't mean anything to me. They appear to be someone's initials.”

Mr. Eaton examined the note that was inside the bottle. “Perhaps a slave girl on a Virginia plantation. Again, no way of really knowing, I'm afraid. You were right about one thing, Mary Margaret—it is a grand mystery, indeed!”

He carefully returned the note and necklace to the bottle and handed it back to Mary Margaret. The bell above the door tinkled and a customer entered, inquiring after her boots.

T
he next week Mary Margaret arrived at Mr. Eaton's shop bubbling over with curiosity about Miss Daphne Cummings. Mr. Eaton hadn't mentioned her again, but Mary Margaret now noticed the smell of cinnamon whenever she came in to work. None of their regular customers smelled of cinnamon.

“Good morning, Mary Margaret,” Mr. Eaton said.

“Good morning, sir.” She gave him a sly smile, and he returned it.

“How is Miss Cummings, if you don't mind my asking, sir?” she said, hoping she wasn't being too bold.

“Well,” he began, “Miss Cummings has visited here two weeks in a row now. She's a very fine lady. And I met her this morning for a walk by the Frog Pond. I'll see her again this evening, as well.” He looked down at his lap and blushed. “And every evening after that she's free and will see me.”

“And I believe she smells of cinnamon.” Mary Margaret tilted her freckled nose up.

“She does indeed.” He chuckled. “But of course, we can only see one another for a couple of hours a few times a week because of her mother. Apparently, Mrs. Cummings is terribly ill. And poor Daphne is all the family she has in the world. The dear girl is limited as to what work she can do, as she needs a cane to get around. I don't want to be indelicate and ask her what she uses it for, but it seems she has a slight limp.”

“Ah. I understand. My sister sometimes needs a cane and it does slow her down, but she still manages quite well. Da says that sooner or later everyone has something they must learn to live with.

“Well, then,” Mary Margaret continued. “As I see it, sir, you and Miss Cummings are both practically alone in the world. So it's a grand thing that you've found one another.”

“It's true,” Mr. Eaton said. Mary Margaret hoped he wasn't feeling embarrassed at having shared so much. “Well, now, enough of this idle chatter. If we don't get to our work, I won't have money to pay you or to take my new lady friend out for tea and cakes!”