CHAPTER THREE #2
Leona’s spirits leaped as she rose to answer the door.
On the stoop and under an umbrella stood a tall, pretty woman in a green wool coat who Leona looked up to for her intelligence, and bravery.
Ruth had served as a volunteer nurse under Harriet Tubman in Virginia at Fort Monroe during the last years of the war.
On the sidewalk, her brother, Jonah Appelman, held the reins of his horse with a watchful expression.
Ruth smiled, the light winking off her spectacles, leaning down to hug Leona close.
“No Theodore?” Leona couldn’t hide her disappointment. She adored Ruth’s three-year-old nephew, a child made of sunshine and appetite.
“Sally’s feeling low and wanted him with her today.” Ruth handed Mrs. McCarthy her coat. “Good morning, Mrs. McCarthy.”
“Good morning, m’um,” Mrs. McCarthy answered with a smile. “If Mr. Appelman would wait a moment, I’ve baked a ginger cake for Theodore. He can take it with him?”
Ruth’s dimples deepened. “Thank you, ma’am.”
Leona led Ruth to the breakfast room, the rain tapping at the windows. The red-ribboned manuscript pages lay on the table with the teacups. Ruth picked it up with a smile.
“Finally. I can’t wait to read it.”
Leona sighed, unable to put the bad news off.
“Unfortunately, we’ve had a financial setback,” Leona said as she poured the tea. “Gil’s business partner has run off with all the liquid assets they held between them. Gil’s been scrambling to pay back some loans, so we don’t have to sell the house.”
“Oh, Leona, how terrible for you. So that means—”
“We have to put off the launch of our magazine, yes.”
In May of ‘69, they’d met at the Brooklyn Academy of Music at a day-long hosting of prominent reformers for the Brooklyn Equal Rights Association.
After a few moments of whispered conversation, Leona knew they were sisters of the heart and mind.
They couldn’t march in a suffragist parade side by side but worked for the day they would.
More radical of an idea than the upper middle-class women, who, from their positions of privilege, looked down on their sisters of color and working-class women.
Sisters of the pen. The magazine’s essays and book reviews would reflect their own ideas about true equality, dress reform, the vote, and shine a light on the inequities women everywhere endured every day.
If they could ever get it off the ground.
Ruth said, “We don’t even have a name for it yet. But if we aimed for July and the anniversary of the Seneca Falls Convention with more time to fundraise?”
Relieved, Leona said, “Yes, that makes sense. And we need a name before anything else.”
Her friend drew a pencil from her reticule and pulled a sheet of paper toward her. “Perhaps we can at least decide on that today, too?”
They worked into the afternoon, emptying teapot after teapot as Mrs. McCarthy moved in and out of the kitchen, lingering to listen. She lit the lamps earlier than usual, the sky grown dark and lowering.
Leona threw the last log into the fire. The wood box needed filling, and she wanted to clear her head.
She went out the kitchen door, and the air held a gripping chill from the river.
Her breath plumed in and out like gray ghosts as she crossed the small dooryard to the woodshed, drawing her shawl close.
A hulking, shadowy figure emerged from the corner of the building, startling Leona into a curse for the lack of the derringer. She grabbed the nearest weapon, a hefty log from the stack.
“What do you want?” she asked, making her voice hard.
A whiff of whiskey, stale sweat, and menace reached her. In the gloom stood a big man with a scarf around his neck, a tattered overcoat, and a hat with the brim pulled down to hide his eyes.
He’s up to no good.
Leona planted her feet and tightened her grip on the log. “Go away now, or I shall call for my husband.”
“Mrs. Gladney?” Mrs. McCarthy called out. “You all right, m’um?”
Leona turned a quick look over her shoulder at the house behind her. Mrs. McCarthy stood in the doorway to the kitchen, a halo of gas light behind her.
Ruth joined her. “Leona?” she asked, fear in her voice.
When Leona turned back to him, the glint of malice in his half-hidden eyes made Leona wonder whether mischief or madness lay in his mind. Had he come to rob or rape or both?
A deadly calm settled on her, followed by a lethal readiness begging to be released on the dirty, malicious fellow. She’d defend her home, friends, herself, to the death.
But not with this stick of wood, if he were armed. A whiff of sugar and coffee reached her. The cold metal of the derringer thrilled her as Mrs. McCarthy pressed it into her hand.
Leona brought the gun up in a swift movement. “Off with you.”
Surprise made him jerk his head out from the gloom.
A broad-faced man with a scruff of blond hair along his cheeks and chin, curling sideburns needing a trim.
Cold gray eyes. She didn’t recognize him, but at least now she could describe him to Gil and the police.
He melted back into the shadows of the dusk that spawned him.
Leona broke into a sweat, hot and cold all at once.
“M’um,” Mrs. McCarthy said quietly behind her. “I’ll take the gun.”
“He’s gone. Come into the house, Leona,” Ruth said.
Their words took a long time to reach her, as if coming from a vast distance. The sudden sharp warning barks of a dog, perhaps disturbed by the visitor’s passing, shook her out of the moment.
***
T O ESCAPE THE PULL to fret and brood while she waited for Gil, she abandoned the study, retrieved coat and hat from the rack, and left the house for a long walk.
Although chilled to the bone and tired, she was glad to have outrun her darker self though Gil hadn’t arrived by the time she returned for luncheon.
She spent the hours answering letters and reading newspapers, aided by pots of tea and a crackling fire while a shrill wind blew around the rooftop.
Later in the afternoon, Mrs. McCarthy brought Leona a note a boy had delivered. Gil would be late for dinner.
But Gil didn’t come home as he promised in his note.
She went to bed, angry and worried. A strange man had appeared on their property.
Where could her husband be? One moment her eyes closed, and in the next, her eyes opened as if a twig had snapped on picket duty.
Her mind spinning, she got up, lit a lamp, and crossed the hall to the study.
Refuge. She opened the leather-bound diary and wrote about the day until her eyelids drooped.
For once, the past pressed shapeless in the shadows, the present overwhelming it.
She paced the room, down the hall, to the bedroom and back to the study, fretting for Gil.
Settling in a chair by the window, she gazed out, willing his carriage to appear, but the night lay undisturbed.
Moving down to the kitchen, she built up the fire in the potbellied stove and heated milk in a pan, her heart tight in her chest. It took all her strength to keep from running into the street as she imagined the carriage overturned or the ferry sinking in the harbor, a myriad of awful accidents.
Like Jack.
The rising sun crept over the windowsill. The clip-clop of a horse stopped before the house. She jumped to her feet. The McCarthys or—
“Leona!”
“Oh, thank God! Gil!”
She hurried to the door, temper at war with relief.
He called out again as he climbed the steps, “Leona!” And burst in, eyes red and wild, his suit and shirt disheveled as if he’d slept in them.
“What’s happened, Gil? Where on earth have you been?” Terror struck her at his expression. “Not Grandfather?”
He shook his head, putting his hands on her shoulders; he took a deep breath and looked her in the eye. “Daphne Van Wyn is dead.”