THE WHITE LADY
1902—New York
The white lady was dying, and there wasn’t a thing that Cela Johnson could do about it. Cela’s nose wrinkled as she approached the lump of rags and filth in the corner. The smell of sweat and piss and something like decay was thick in the air. It was the decay—the sweet ripeness of it—that told Cela the woman wouldn’t make it through the week. Maybe not even through the night. Felt like Death himself had already arrived in the room and was just sitting around, waiting for the right moment.
Cela wished Death would hurry up already. Her brother, Abel, was due home the next evening, and if he found the woman in the house, there’d be hell to pay.
She’d been damned stupid for agreeing to keep the woman, not that she could fathom what had possessed her to accept Harte Darrigan’s request two nights before. Cela liked the magician well enough—he was one of the few at the theater who bothered to looked her in the eye when he talked to her—and she supposed she did owe him for making Esta that gown of stars behind his back. But she certainly didn’t owe him enough to be putting up with his dope fiend of a mother.
But Harte had always been too slick for his own good. He was like the paste stones she fixed to the performers’ costumes: To the audience, her creations sparkled like they were covered in precious gems—but that was all lights and smoke. Her garments may have been well made, her seams straight and her stitching true, but there was nothing real about the sparkle and shine. Up close, you could tell easy enough that the stones were nothing but polished glass.
Harte was a little like that. The problem was, most people couldn’t see past the shine.
Though she probably shouldn’t think so uncharitably of the dead. She’d heard about what happened at the Brooklyn Bridge earlier that day. He’d attempted some fool trick and ended up jumping to his death instead. Which meant he wouldn’t be coming back for his mother, as he’d told her he would.
Still . . . As much as Darrigan might have been all spit and polish on the surface, like the straight, evenly stitched seams in her costumes, there was something beneath that was sturdy and true. Cela had suspected that much all along, but she knew it for the truth when he’d appeared on her doorstep, cradling the filthy woman like she was the most precious of cargo. She supposed she owed it to him now to honor his last wishes by seeing his mother through to the other side.
Two days ago the woman had been so deep in an opium dream that nothing would rouse her. But it wasn’t long before the opium had worn off and the moaning had begun. The laudanum-laced wine Harte had left had lasted less than a day, but the woman’s pain had lasted far longer. At least she seemed to be peaceful now.
With a sigh, Cela knelt next to her, careful not to get her skirts too dirty on the cellar’s floor. The old woman wasn’t sleeping, as Cela had first thought. Her eyes were glassy, staring into the darkness of the ceiling above, and her chest rose and fell unevenly. There was a wet-sounding rattle in her shallow breaths that confirmed Cela’s suspicions. Harte’s mother would be dead by morning.
Maybe she should have felt worse about that, but she’d promised Harte that she’d look after the old woman and make her comfortable, not that she’d save her. After all, Cela was a seamstress, not a miracle worker, and Harte’s mother—Molly O’Doherty, he’d called her—was far past saving. Anyone could see that.
Still, the woman—no matter how low life had laid her or how much she stank—deserved a bit of comfort in her final moments. Cela took the bowl of clean, warm water she’d brought with her to the cellar and gently mopped the woman’s brow and the crusted spittle around her mouth, but the woman didn’t so much as stir.
As Cela finished cleaning the woman up as well as she could without disturbing her, she heard footsteps at the top of the wooden stairs.
“Cela?” It was Abel, her older brother, who shouldn’t have been home yet. He was a Pullman porter on the New York Central line, and he should have been on his way back from Chicago, not standing in their stairwell.
“That you, Abe?” she called, easing herself up from the floor and smoothing her hair back from her face. The dampness of the cellar was surely making it start to curl up around her temples. “I thought your train wasn’t due until tomorrow?”
“Switched with someone for an earlier berth.” She heard him start down the steps. “What’re you doing down there?”
“I’m coming up now.” She grabbed a jar of peaches—an excuse for being down in the cellar—and started up the steps before he could come all the way down. “I was just getting some fruit for tonight’s dinner.”
Above her, Abe was still dressed in his uniform. His eyes were ringed with fatigue—probably from taking a back-to-back shift to get home—but he was smiling at her with their father’s smile.
Abel Johnson Sr. had been a tall, wiry man with the build of someone who used his hands for a living. He’d been killed in the summer of 1900, when the city had erupted in riots after Arthur Harris had been arrested for stabbing some white man who’d turned out to be a plainclothes policeman. Her father didn’t have anything to do with it, but that hadn’t stopped him from being caught up in the hate and the fury that had swept through the city during those hot months.
Some days Cela thought she could hardly remember her father’s voice or the sound of his laugh, as though he was already fading from her memory. But it helped that Abe wore her father’s smile almost every day.
Times like this, it struck her just how much her brother resembled her father. Same tall, wiry build. Same high forehead and square chin. Same lines of worry and exhaustion etched into his too-young face from the long hours of working on the rail lines. But he wasn’t exactly the spitting image of his namesake. The deep-set eyes that were a warm chestnut brown flecked with gold, and the red undertones of his skin—those features were from their mother. Cela’s own skin was a good bit darker, more like the burnished brown of her father’s.
Abel’s expression brightened at her mention of food. “You making me something good?”
She frowned. Because she’d been too wrapped up in caring for the old woman to go to the market, she didn’t have anything but the jar of peaches in her hand. “Considering that I wasn’t planning on you being home until tomorrow night? You’ll have to settle for porridge with peaches, same as what I was planning on making for myself.”
His expression fell, and he looked so forlorn that she had to hold back her laugh. She gathered up her skirts and took a few more steps. “Oh, don’t look so—”
Before she could finish, a soft moaning came from the darkness of the cellar.
Abe went completely still. “You hear that?”
“What?” Cela asked, inwardly cursing herself and the old woman just the same. “I didn’t hear nothing at all.” She took another step up toward where Abel was waiting. But the stupid old woman let out another moan, which had Abel’s expression bunching. Cela pretended that she didn’t hear it. “You know this old building . . . probably just a rat or something.”
Abel started to descend the narrow staircase. “Rats don’t make that kind of noise.”
“Abe,” she called, but he already had the lamp out of her hand and was pushing past her. She closed her eyes and waited for the inevitable outburst, and when it came, she gave herself—and Abel—a moment before trudging back to the cellar.
“What the hell is going on, Cela?” he asked, crouched over the woman in the corner. The material of his navy porter’s uniform was pulled tight across his shoulders, and he had his nose tucked into his shirt. She couldn’t blame him—the woman stank. There was nothing for it.
“You don’t need to worry about it,” Cela told him, crossing her arms. Maybe it was a stupid decision to help out the magician, but it had been her decision. As much as Abe thought it was his duty to take up where their father left off, Cela wasn’t a child anymore. She didn’t need her older brother to approve every little thing she did, especially when five days of seven he wasn’t even around.
“I don’t need to worry about it?” Abe asked, incredulous. “There’s a white woman unconscious in my cellar, and I don’t need to worry about it? What have you gotten yourself into this time?”
“It’s our cellar,” she told him, emphasizing the word. Left to them both by their parents. “And I haven’t gotten myself into anything. I’m helping a friend,” she answered, her shoulders squared.
“She your friend?” Abe’s face shadowed with disbelief.
“No. I promised a friend I’d keep her comfortable, until she . . .” But it seemed wrong, somehow, to speak Death’s name when he was sitting in the room with them. “It’s not like she’s got much time left.”
“That doesn’t help anything, Cela. Do you know what could happen to us if someone found out she was here?” Abel asked. “How are we supposed to explain a white woman dying in our cellar? We could lose this building. We could lose everything.”
“Nobody knows she’s here,” Cela said, even as her insides squirmed. Why had she agreed to do this? She wished she could go back and slap herself to the other side of tomorrow for even considering to help Harte. “You and I, we’re the only ones with keys to the cellar. None of the tenants upstairs know anything about this. They don’t need to know anything. She’ll be gone before the night is over, and then you won’t have to worry about it. You weren’t even supposed to be home,” she told him, as though that made any difference at all.
“So you were going behind my back?”
“It’s my house too,” Cela said, squaring her shoulders. “And I’m not a complete idiot. I got compensated for my trouble.”
“You got compensated.” Abe’s voice was hollow.
She told him about the ring she had stitched into her skirts. The setting held an enormous clear stone, probably worth a fortune.
Abel was shaking his head. “You’re just gonna walk up to some fancy East Side jeweler and sell it, are you?”
Cela’s stomach sank. He was right. How did I not think of that? There was no way to sell the ring without raising suspicion. Not that she was going to admit it to him at that particular moment. “It’s security. That’s all.”
“Security is this here building,” Abel told her, lifting his eyes as though he could see through the ceiling above him, to the first floor where they lived, to the second floor the Brown family rented, clear up to the attic, which held a row of cots they leased out to down-on-their-luck single men in the dead of winter. “Security is what our parents gave us when they left us this.”
He wasn’t wrong. Their house had been bought and paid for with their father’s hard work. It meant that no one could turn them away or raise their rent because of the color of their skin. More, it was a testament every day that their mother’s choice in their father had been a good one, no matter what her mother’s family had believed.
The woman moaned again, her breath rattling like Death himself was pulling the air from her chest. The sound had such a forlorn helplessness to it that Cela couldn’t help but crouch over her.
“Cela, are you even hearing me?” Abel asked.
Somehow, the woman’s skin was even more colorless. Her eyes were dull, lifeless. Cela reached out tentatively and touched the woman’s cool hand, taking it in hers. The fingertips beneath the nails were already blue. “She’s dying, Abe. This is her time, and whatever mistakes I might have made in bringing her here, I’m not leaving a dying woman alone, no matter what she is or what she isn’t.” Cela looked up at her brother. “Are you?”
His expression was creased in frustration, but a moment later his eyes closed and his shoulders sank. “No, Rabbit,” he said softly, using her childhood nickname. “I suppose not.” He opened his eyes again. “How long do you think she has?”
Cela frowned, staring at the fragile woman. She wasn’t exactly sure. When their mother had passed on from consumption five years before, Cela had been barely twelve years old. Her father had kept her from the sickroom until the very last moments, trying to protect her. He’d always been trying to protect all of them.
“Can’t you hear the death rattle? She’s got hours . . . maybe minutes. I don’t know. Not long, though.” Because the rattle in the old woman’s throat was the one thing she did remember of watching her mother pass on. That sickly, paper-thin rattle that sounded nothing like her sunshine-and-laughter mother. “She’ll be gone before this night is through.”
Together they waited silently for the moment when the woman’s chest would cease to rise or fall.
“What are we going to do when she finally dies?” Abel asked after they’d watched for a long while. “We can’t exactly call someone.”
“When she passes, we’ll wait for the dead of night, and then we’ll take her to St. John’s over on Christopher Street,” Cela said, not really understanding where the impulse came from. But the moment the words were out, she felt sure they were right. “They can care for her there.”
Abel was shaking his head, but he didn’t argue. She could tell he was trying to think of a better option when a loud pounding sounded from the floor above.
Abel’s dark eyes met hers in the flickering lamplight. It was well past ten, too late for a social call. “Someone’s here,” he said, as though Cela couldn’t have figured that out on her own. But his voice held the same worry she felt.
“Maybe just a boarder needing a bed for the night,” she told him.
“Weather’s too nice for that,” he said almost to himself as he stared up at the ceiling. The pounding came again, harder and more urgent than before.
“Just let it be,” she told him. “They’ll go away eventually.”
But Abel shook his head. His eyes were tight. “You wait here, and I’ll see what they want.”
“Abe—”
He never did listen, she thought as he disappeared into the darkness of the staircase that led up to their apartment above. At least he’d left her the lamp.
Cela waited as Abe’s footsteps crossed the floor above her. The pounding stopped, and she could just barely hear the low voices of men.
Then the voices grew into shouts.
The sudden sound of a scuffle had Cela on her feet. But before she could take even a step, the crack of a gun split the silence of the night and the thud of a body hitting the floor pressed the air from her lungs.
No.
There were more footsteps above now. Heavy footsteps made by heavy boots. There were men in their house. In her house.
Abel.
She started to go toward the steps, desperate to get to her brother, but something within her clicked, some primal urge that she could not understand and she could not fight. It was as though her feet had grown roots.
She had to get to her brother. But she could not move.
The papers had been filled with news of the patrols that were combing the city, ransacking private homes and burning them to the ground. The fires had been contained in the immigrant quarters close to the Bowery. The blocks west of Greenwich Village, where her father had bought the building they lived in, had been safe. But Cela knew enough about how quickly things could change that she understood last week’s safety didn’t mean anything today.
There were men in her house.
She could hear their voices, could feel their footfalls vibrating through her as they spread out like they were searching the rooms above. Robbing us? Looking for something?
Cela didn’t particularly care. She only needed to make sure Abel was okay. She needed to be upstairs, but her will no longer seemed to be her own.
Without knowing why she did it or what drove her, she turned from the steps that led up into the house her parents had bought ten years before with their hard-earned money and went to the white lady, now clearly lifeless. With the pads of her fingers, Cela closed the newly dead woman’s eyes, saying a short prayer for both of their souls, and then she was climbing the short ramp to the coal chute.
Cela pushed open the doors and climbed out into the cool freshness of the night. Her feet were moving before she could make herself stop, before she could think Abe or No or any of the things that she should have been thinking. She couldn’t have stopped herself from running if she tried, so she was already around the corner and out of sight when the flames started to lick from the windows of the only home she had ever known.