The Woman Who Came After

Chapter 1

Chapter One

Mrs. Corliss died at four o’clock in the afternoon.

Hannah knew the time because she had been counting the breaths.

Not on purpose — she had stopped watching the clock hours ago.

But somewhere in the long afternoon her own breathing had fallen in with the old woman’s, and when the next one did not come she felt it in her own chest first, the gap where the air should have gone in and did not, and looked up at the mantel, and the hands said four.

She sat a moment longer. Mrs. Corliss’s hand was between both of hers.

She had been holding it since two, or maybe earlier — she could not remember picking it up, only that her thumb had been moving back and forth across the knuckles the way she did when she rolled out pastry crust, slow, finding the measure of a thing by feel.

The hand was cooling now. She went on holding it.

The room smelled of camphor and the lavender water she had put on the pillow that morning because Mrs. Corliss liked it, and of the tea on the nightstand that had gone cold hours ago, poured for a woman who could no longer drink it because Hannah did not know how to come into this room without bringing tea.

Ten years.

She had been twenty when she first came into this room with her references folded in her reticule and her boots still damp from the walk. Mrs. Corliss had looked her up and down from the pillows — the look she gave tradesmen who came to the side door instead of waiting to be sent for.

You’ll do, she had said.

Hannah had done. She had run the house when Mrs. Corliss was well and nursed her when she was ill and sat with her on the bad nights when neither was quite the word for it.

Once Mrs. Corliss had looked up over her spectacles and said, “You could rob me blind, you know.” And Hannah had said, “Yes, ma’am, but then I’d have to find another position, and I’ve only just got the cupboard door to behave.

” Mrs. Corliss had laughed at that — a real laugh, dry and surprised, the kind that came out of her once or twice a year like a bird from a chimney.

She drew the sheet straight. She tucked it as she had a thousand mornings, folding the edge under twice so it would hold. Then she opened the window an inch. Then she stood in the room with both those things done and no next thing to do, and her hands found each other and held on.

After a while she went downstairs and put the kettle on.

There would be people in the house before evening and people wanted tea.

She stood in the kitchen she had kept for ten years and waited for the water to boil, and while it heated she took down the good cups, the ones Mrs. Corliss kept for company, and washed them, though they were already clean.

The doctor came. The undertaker came after.

Hannah let them in, showed them up, waited in the kitchen while they did what they had come to do, and let them out again.

She sent word to Charles Danforth. She banked the stove.

She locked the front door — top bolt and bottom, as she did every night — and stood a moment in the dark hall with her hand still on the latch.

The bolt had slid smooth and sure, and she had liked the sound of it.

Her hand stayed on the metal until it warmed.

She sat in the kitchen with a cup of tea she did not drink and her account book open on the table, and went through the month’s figures by lamplight.

The cab came the following morning. Hannah heard it from the kitchen and went to the window, and the first thing she saw was the trunk — a good trunk, leather, larger than hers — coming off the back before the door was even open.

Mrs. Danforth stood in the street while the driver set it on the walk, and looked up at the house the way a woman looks at a house she is about to own.

Hannah took their coats in the hall and hung them on the oak stand by the door — ten years of hanging coats on that stand — and said she was sorry for their loss, and Mr. Danforth said he was sorry for hers, and the hall was small enough that both of those things sounded about the same size.

He would not sit until she did. He pulled the chair out for her — the good chair, the one she had re-covered in September, and she sat in it, and the good chair told her everything she needed to know about what came next.

Mrs. Danforth stood at the window looking out at the street, her gloves still on, one finger running along the sill. It came away clean. Hannah had dusted that sill yesterday. Mrs. Danforth looked at her finger and put her hand back at her side.

“She meant to alter it.” Mr. Danforth had the will in his hand, a single sheet. He turned it over as though something might be written on the back that would help. “She spoke of it, Miss Bell. I know she did.”

“Yes.”

“The will is twelve years old. The house, the investments, the personal property — it all comes to me. There are smaller bequests to relatives and to the church.” He set the paper on the table between them. “Your name does not appear.”

He had practised the words. Hannah had heard enough practised sentences in her life — from tradesmen, from Mrs. Corliss’s solicitor, from her own father’s creditors standing in the front room — to know when a man had got his words in order before he walked through the door.

Mr. Danforth had driven here knowing what the will said and what he meant to do about it, and the doing was nothing, and the nothing had been decided before his trunk came off the cab.

The will lay on the table between them. Her hands stayed in her lap.

Her father had taught her about paper — had died when she was nineteen, and men had come the following week carrying documents her mother had never seen.

The debts were properly signed. Her mother’s understanding of matters was not.

Hannah had kept accounts ever since. She knew what a will looked like, and this one had her name nowhere on it.

Three winters ago, when pneumonia had kept Mrs. Corliss in bed for the better part of a month, she had caught Hannah’s hand and held it against the coverlet.

I shall see that you are looked after.

She had said it again afterward, at intervals, as though saying it often enough would make it hold. Hannah had not pressed her. You did not press Mrs. Corliss. You waited, and kept the house, and assumed the paper would follow.

The paper had not followed. And Mr. Danforth, who had inherited a house and its investments and every piece of silver Hannah had polished for a decade, was sitting across from her looking grieved about it, which cost him nothing.

“I wish there were something —” he said.

There was something. He had a house and investments and he could write her a cheque on the spot and call it what he liked — a gift, a settlement, an act of conscience. The thought crossed his face and left it, the way a man checks his watch and puts it away, satisfied that he has noted the time.

“When will you require the house?” she said.

He looked up. The question was too soon — it did not leave room for the rest of his sympathy.

“My wife and I will remain through the funeral. After that, the inventory. Thursday, perhaps.”

Four days.

“Very well.”

“You are owed wages through the month. Those will be paid, naturally.” He paused. He leaned forward in the chair. “And I shall give you a reference. A strong one. You deserve that, at the very least.”

He said at the very least as though putting a coin on the counter and waiting to be told the price had been met.

At the window Mrs. Danforth turned her head toward the room.

She had said nothing since the hall. Her gloves were still on.

She looked at her husband with the expression of a woman who has sat through this conversation before, in the cab, and knows how it comes out, and is waiting for it to be over so she can measure the windows.

“Thank you,” Hannah said.

Mr. Danforth seemed to expect more — some word that would let him leave the room feeling he had done right by a woman he was choosing not to provide for.

She had spent ten years making rooms comfortable for people, and she was not going to make this one comfortable for a man who could afford to do better and had brought a trunk instead.

She stood. “Will you take tea?”

That evening she pulled the trunk from beneath the bed and set it open on the floor.

Clothes. Two books. Her mother’s small wooden box, which held a brooch, a curl of hair, and her mother’s Bible. Her account book. Eleven dollars and forty cents.

She put Mrs. Corliss’s photograph in last. Then she took it out again.

It had been taken six years ago. Mrs. Corliss sat stiffly in black silk, her chin up, displeased with the photographer and unwilling to hide it.

Her mouth was set. Her hands were folded in exactly the way they folded when she had given an opinion and been ignored and intended to make that clear without repeating herself.

Hannah laughed. It came out short and strange in the empty room. She sat on the edge of the bed with the photograph in her lap and looked at it a while longer, and the woman in it went on being displeased and would not stop.

She wrapped the photograph in a handkerchief and set it back.

Four days later she closed the lid.

Ten years had fitted with room to spare.

Hannah read Mr. Danforth’s reference twice. It was better than she deserved from a man who had given her nothing else.

Within two days of moving into Mrs. Sheldon’s boardinghouse, she had the name of a family wanting a housekeeper.

“An elderly gentleman and his unmarried daughter.” Mrs. Sheldon set the coffeepot down and reached across for Hannah’s cup without asking whether it wanted filling.

It did not, but that was not the sort of question Mrs. Sheldon put to a vote.

“Good house on Harrison Street. I’m told they pay well.

The last woman was with them six or seven years — left to marry. ”

She filled the cup and set it back.

Six or seven years.

Hannah could call that afternoon. With Mr. Danforth’s letter she might have the position before supper.

Another house to learn. New cupboards, a new woman’s preference in tea, a new way of folding the linen.

She would make herself necessary. Good at the nearby — she had spent ten years being good at it, and at the end Mrs. Corliss had loved her and left her nothing, and the love was real and the nothing was real, and the nothing was on paper.

The coffee Mrs. Sheldon had poured was black and strong and nobody had asked for it.

“No.”

Mrs. Sheldon’s hand stopped on the coffeepot.

“No?”

“I won’t call on them.”

“Have you another position?”

“No.”

Mrs. Sheldon set the pot down. She looked at Hannah the way she had looked at the cup — a thing she intended to fill whether it wanted filling or not, only to find the hand over the brim.

Across the table Miss Tate was reading the newspaper.

She was sixty-one. She had arrived at the boardinghouse the week before Hannah, with a trunk much the same size and a letter of reference much the same quality.

She was waiting to hear about a position with a family in Springfield.

Her last employer had died in June. Before that she had worked for a family in Decatur until they moved east. Before that, a different family. Before that, one more.

Miss Tate turned a page. She ate her toast in small bites that made no crumbs, the way a woman eats who has learned to leave no evidence of herself at another person’s table.

Hannah looked at her own hands.

“Harrison Street would be perfectly respectable,” Mrs. Sheldon said.

“I don’t doubt it.”

“Then why not take it?”

The answer was Miss Tate, sitting across the table with her careful toast and her excellent references and her whole life measured out in other women’s houses.

Miss Tate folded the newspaper and left it beside her plate.

Hannah reached for it. She turned past the situations vacant, not reading them, and her eye caught a small notice set in different type farther down the column.

MATRIMONIAL.

She nearly passed it. Then she read:

Widower, 35, cattle rancher in Wet Mountain Valley, Colorado, seeks correspondence with respectable woman with view to marriage. One daughter, aged ten. A hard-working woman of good character preferred. Address T. Avery, Silver Cliff, Colorado.

Hannah read it twice.

Mrs. Sheldon’s eyes were on the newspaper.

“You’re not considering that.”

“I haven’t said I am.”

“A man advertising for a wife. In a newspaper.”

“He’s been plain about what he wants. That’s more than most manage across a table.”

“He could be anyone.”

“Yes.”

Mrs. Sheldon waited for more. Hannah folded the newspaper around the advertisement and set it beside her plate.

She could write a letter. She could ask questions and require names and verify whatever answers came back. And if the answers did not satisfy her, she would still be here, at this table, with her reference and her eleven dollars and Miss Tate’s newspaper.

“Harrison Street —” Mrs. Sheldon began.

Hannah stood and took the newspaper with her.

“I believe I’ll write a letter,” she said.