The Mapmaker's Children (27 page)

Cleo leaned in close. “Have you checked inside?”

Ms. Silverdash placed the skirt back down. “Nothing but cotton. I restuff her every few years. A lady must keep freshly padded.” She smiled. “But the dress and buttons are original.”

Cleo's hair was down for the special day, but now she gathered it up in her professional ponytail and secured it with the rubber band from her wrist. “So…to the clues—how did Hannah's doll get the buttons? And how come the head swap?”

Ms. Silverdash shrugged. “I can't say.”

Cleo gave an exasperated sigh and threw up her hands. “The case of the Apple Hill doll's head remains open!”

“Well, partially.” Ms. Silverdash smoothed the cheek of the china doll with her fingers. “You've helped me solve a lifelong unknown. I am the great-granddaughter of a slave child sent west on the Underground Railroad, and the Andersons' house on Apple Hill Lane was most probably the station.” Her eyes flickered with tearful joy. “That's quite something to discover about one's self and town! And all because of you—New Charlestown's ace detective—and Eden.”

Eden put an arm around Cleo and gave her a confident squeeze, then placed the Fur Fairy back on the book table. How and why the head and body had been separated was still unclear, but they were certain they'd once been a match. The doll's story was developing from the darkness. The original face might've been lost for over a century, but the Fur Fairy had lived on—been loved by Ms. Silverdash's kin and made into lore by the children of Story Hour. She could not be her original human creation. Fate had bestowed much more magic.

“Don't forget this.” Eden extended the key. “If the doll belonged to your family, then this does, too.”

“That's what was inside the head,” said Cleo. “It's got the number thirty-four on the side.”

Ms. Silverdash held it up to the light, with Mr. Morris inspecting it beside her. “Looks to me like an old bank box key,” he said.

Cleo thudded her palm to her forehead. “I should've thought of that!”

“There could be more documents, letters, answers about my family's heritage and the Underground Railroad!” Ms. Silverdash was practically shaking with excitement.

Whatever was in that box was Ms. Silverdash's, and Eden was happy to have played some small role in returning the items to their rightful
owner. If the house had been part of the Underground Railroad, then it would unquestionably be added to the National Register of Historical Places. It was a win-win for all parties.

“See, Morris,” said Ms. Silverdash. “This is providential proof! The Andersons were meant to move into that house. Everything worked out just as it was supposed to.”

“Proof that
we
were right,” he muttered.

Ms. Silverdash frowned. “No, Morris, evidence that all seedlings push their way to the surface. To everything there is a season. It's nature's way.”

Mr. Morris looked down Main Street to Milton's Market, where a marching band warmed up, tooting notes and thrumming snare drums.

“Thank you, Eden and Cleo.” Ms. Silverdash dabbed the corners of her eyes with her embroidered handkerchief. “You don't know what a gift you've given me.” She pocketed the key with a pat. “I'll be at Mr. Bronner's bank first thing Monday morning, and you can bet I'll report back every speck I find in the box.”

“I'll tell Grandpa to be expecting you.” The band's
rat-a-tat
increased. “It's nearly starting!” said Cleo.

“Indeed.” Ms. Silverdash turned to Mr. Morris. “You ought to take your position with the other tasting judges so Mayor Smith can kick off the festivities. And I must get to the shop window, tout suite!”

“The new diorama!” Cleo clapped. “Ms. Silverdash unveils
Fall
when the band passes the bookstore.”

“I hope you enjoy it. I was inspired by blooms of late. The first Milton grandchild and…” She smiled at Eden. “New families of New Charlestown.”

Eden blushed, flattered but apprehensive of the honor. If she and Jack didn't work things out, they'd be a town miscarriage of sorts.

Ms. Silverdash looked around the tent approvingly. “I believe this is the beginning of a tremendous venture.”

Eden took stock: dog treats in rows neat as stitches; cash box polished to a silver shine; Cricket sleeping beneath the table; Cleo in her Sunday best, a CricKet BisKet logo pinned to her Peter Pan lapel; Fur Fairy keeping watch over books and BisKets all. Check, check, check.

Time for the final touch. Mr. Morris brought his stepladder from the café and unfurled the banner across the tent's top:

CricKet BisKet Dog Treat Co.

Sponsored by Morris's Café and the Silverdash Bookstore

Cleo and Eden had kept the tagline a secret. Mr. Morris and Ms. Silverdash beamed up at it, arm in arm, like proud parents. Cricket's doggy caricature shone down on them, bright as the North Star.

“You're famous,” Cleo told him and scratched behind his ear.

Eden was elated. It had turned out better than she'd envisioned, and there were very few things she could say that about. She wished Jack could've seen it all. She chastised herself for thinking of him. She'd been hostile for so long, it felt almost natural. However, perpetual heartache wasn't a legacy she wanted to continue.

If she was honest with herself, she'd been as secretively traitorous to their marriage as he. Perhaps even to a worse degree. She'd been unnecessarily cruel; volleyed hateful words; shut him out when he tried to reach her; schemed to divorce him while accepting his gifts of a beautiful house, roses, puppies, and unwavering kindness.

Throwing Jack out was the ultimate cliché: cheater gets kicked to the curb; wife cries herself to raging strength, then raises a fist in vindication and moves on to self-sufficient success while the two-timing husband wallows in the awareness that he's lost the better woman. Hadn't she seen that tiresome run-on story a thousand times? It was the made-for-TV movie of every week. Fine for the Lifetime channel, she thought, but she refused to be a platitude. Jack was not her father.
She
was not her mother. She would not live the rest of her life in bitterness—either way.

She loved Jack. She hadn't
liked
him very much the last couple years, but even while she questioned everything else in their relationship, she couldn't deny loving him. She felt guilty for that. It wasn't what she was supposed to feel, according to social standards.

But her life wasn't a public relations agency's campaign. There was no
public
in personal relations. So she'd be turning thirty-seven soon and hadn't had a child. So what?

She'd quit her PR career to move to West Virginia and was actually happier than she'd been in cosmopolitan D.C. Who was judging?

She liked eating
Holistic Hound
dog food more than any fancy restaurant meal she'd ever had. And?

She was hopelessly in love with her husband, despite the fact that he might have had an affair…She stopped. Her breath caught. How could she say such a thing? Feminist blasphemy.

Yet it was her truth, and that was really why she'd come to New Charlestown—to find
her truth
. She'd been transformed by Cricket, Cleo, Ms. Silverdash and Mr. Morris, the children of Story Hour, and this town that Jack had put his faith in from the start.

The crowd gathered. Families sat east and west on the street's curbs, squinting under the fullness of sunlight. Ms. Silverdash was right. The sky was blue as a robin's egg, with only a brushstroke of haze on the horizon. The fog was gone, with the day opening bright and clear and free of regrets. All save one.

Eden pulled up Jack's number on her cell phone. The trumpets and clarinets, tuba and drums had come together to form a triumphant melody, a resounding trill of excitement that matched the bubbling chatter of the townsfolk. A woman in a wide-brimmed hat, leading a fleecy poodle on a leash, came to their table. A customer.

No time to talk now. Later. Eden put her phone away.

“Dixie loves treats,” said the woman. “I'll take two Original Pumpkin and an Apple Hill.”

And so they made their first CricKet BisKet sale—before the kettle corn vendor had popped his kernels and perfumed the air sweet-and-salty; before Mayor Smith had inaugurated the Dog Days End, wearing a red top hat in honor of her redbone coonhound, Little Ann; before the panel of baked-goods judges had been introduced and Mr. Morris bashfully sat behind the
PIE CHIEF
nameplate; before the band had marched down Main to fanfare and a giant town sing-along of Big Joe Turner's
“Low Down Dog”; and before Ms. Silverdash had unveiled the
Fall
diorama, a miniature Main Street constructed from pages of ornate floral illustrations: mauve-hued balsams and green firs etched with gold and bronze stems. So vivid that when Eden lifted her gaze from the miniature to the real, the trees and doorways along Main seemed to shimmer with gilding, too.

N
EW
C
HARLESTOWN
, W
EST
V
IRGINIA
S
EPTEMBER
1862

I
t took a week for Freddy's fever to break. Two more for the wound to cease weeping and stinking putrid. The only one to venture out for supplies was Siby, under cloak of night. Her family didn't dare come up to the Hills'.

The unrest between the occupying forces had made the Fishers' freed papers inconsequential. Free or slave, they were a Negro family living in their own house. Siby reported that her father stayed up all hours walking the property with his shotgun, though they knew if he shot a white man, he'd be hung regardless. Better he hang than let evil befall his wife and children, he told them. Siby's mother argued that she'd rather him alive than territory claimed. She set her mind to cooking off every fruit and vegetable in her garden rather than see it fill a Rebel's stomach. Siby brought over the johnnycakes, jarred lemon custard, potato and corn pies, molasses beans, and more.

Though they'd alerted their Underground Railroad friends that they'd have to halt transportation and deliveries while George and Freddy were on the battlefield, the Hills' house remained a green stop on the UGRR maps and pictorials; thus, they continued to receive secret knocks. Priscilla refused to turn away any hand of need. So they gave out knapsacks of Mrs. Fisher's vittles to contraband slaves and those fleeing north by starlight.

Freddy took only soft grits through August. While he was detached from acute danger, Sarah wasn't sure they'd be able to save his leg until the morning they found the maggots wriggling out to forage for better feed and the abscess scabbed over. At the spectacle of worms crawling down the bed linens, she'd announced him on the road to recovery. Priscilla
kissed his left cheek, Ruthie his right; Alice held up her Kerry Pippin like a saint's statuette and paraded about the room singing a hymnal. Sarah dared only to bring her hand to his cheek.

“I made you a promise to get well. Now you've got to keep yours and
paint
,” he said, his bearded jaw tickling her palm.

By early September, Freddy was out of bed. His leg had healed, but he was left with a substantial limp. Mr. Fisher whittled a cane out of an oak branch to Freddy's height specifications, but Freddy was still getting used to his slow amble and instability. He fell often, and they heard his curses from inside the kitchen.

“I never knew he was a man of profanity,” remarked Ruthie while churning butter with Sarah.

Sarah laughed. “He wasn't, but I always knew there was a rogue down in him.”

Ruthie looked at her curiously, and Sarah realized she'd spoken out of turn.

“Don't we all have a bit of rogue in us?” she amended.

Ruthie continued plunging the milk without responding.

Sarah observed that while they were kind to each other, Freddy and Ruthie's relationship was unlike George and Priscilla's and more like her own parents': side by side yet distant. Ruthie cleaned, cooked, and waited on Freddy's every need. Freddy called her “good wife,” complimented her on her food, and thanked her for darning his shirts and socks.

In the evenings, Priscilla read aloud George's letters, when they came, or various war reports from the
New Charlestown Spectator
. Freddy's leg made it impossible for him to walk without the aid of his cane, never mind carrying a rifle in battle march. He was finished as a soldier. That fact comforted Sarah and the women as much as it shamed Freddy. He didn't speak of his experience on the front lines or his furloughed status.

Instead, he talked of the New Charlestown Church and inquired of Sarah's studies in Saratoga: literature, art, and the abolitionist work. The latter he never brought up in Ruthie's company, despite having called the Nileses trusted
friends
, code for UGRR advocates. Similar to Sarah's father,
John, Freddy saw fit to keep this vast part of his life a secret from the woman who should've been his closest confidante, his wife.

Sarah and Freddy walked the barnyard and barren orchard each dusk to exercise his leg. Only then did he openly speak of the Underground Railroad. Sarah's suspicions about Auntie Nan's dolls were correct. Where once the UGRR had used them to smuggle supplies to plantations, now they were even more critical to the anti-slavery efforts. The dolls carried Union messages and diagrams demarcating allied homes across battle lines trusted to shelter runaways and Union spies.

“So the Freedom Train continues to move?” Sarah had pressed on one walk.

“Unofficially, yes,” said Freddy. “Though it's much more difficult for passengers to determine which towns are occupied by which side. It could make the difference between life and death, and the Rebels are catching on quick to the dolls. We had a whole crate gutted, the maps destroyed in shipment. So now we send only by carriage. Mr. Silverdash is our conductor. It's risky but no more dangerous than carrying live baggage. Still, they've nearly got us entirely blockaded.”

Suddenly, it came to Sarah like a cloudburst. “What if the maps weren't inside the dolls?” Her pulse quickened with the bolt of the idea. “The Rebels have figured out our hiding spot. So we let them continue to spend their energies inspecting shipments and shredding toys. Maybe even plant misleading information inside the dolls while the truth remains as plain as the noses on their faces.”

He stopped walking at the line of apple tree stumps. “How so?”

She put a gloved finger to the patterned tree rings and followed them round, fat to wide, flood to drought, year after year. The last ring, nothing but splintered bark.

“Paint the maps on the dolls' faces.” She pointed up. “Like the man in the moon.”

It was that time of twilight when the sun garishly clung to the day's frayed edges while the moon budded translucent and quiet to the east. Both fighting for the same sky.

“The Rebels will be looking for the veiled secrets. They'll miss the
obvious. Like the slave songs and my landscapes. Hair can be painted to look like river waters. Eyes, UGRR stations and hospitable towns. Freckles and rouge spots as safe houses between. A nose, a trusted church, and so forth. Even if soldiers remove the doll's body, the real message—the way north—would remain.”

Freddy tapped his cane against the tree stump. “It just might work!”

Her stomach fluttered at his approval, and she beat it down with a thought: “Unless the head broke.”

Like it had for Mr. Storm's daughter. She winced at the memory and suddenly felt her idea terribly foolish.

But Freddy continued: “Only the porcelain ones.” His mind turned faster than Sarah's now. “We can still use the dolls Auntie Nan sent as templates but make all replications on wooden heads.”

“Yes!” Sarah agreed; then she thought of one drawback. “But paint on wood is prone to erosion. On a natural substance like that, it could disappear altogether with time.”

“We don't need them to last a hundred years, Sarah.” He smiled. “If slavery remains that long, the dolls have failed in their mission.”

He was right. Immediately, they put their plans in motion. With Alice's permission, Sarah tested her facial map skills on Kerry Pippin. She repainted the hair in dark waves—the Shenandoah and Potomac merging at the center part; the right eye filled in black for Harpers Ferry, occupied by Rebels; the left eye bright green for the Hills' station house. The New Charlestown Church nose left white and stately. The lips drawn together, whistling the slaves to free Ohio. The pink swirls of her cheeks extending too low on either side—Quakers in Pittsburgh and a safe house in the Appalachian Mountains.

When she showed the doll to Freddy and Priscilla, they marveled.

“It's brilliant,” said Priscilla.

“Paint every doll we have here,” said Freddy. “We'll send a batch with Mr. Silverdash so they can be duplicated by our northern friends.”

He went to the post office early the next day to telegraph word to Mr. Silverdash. At noon, he returned, calling Sarah's name as he hobbled across the lawn, Gypsy at his heels. She came from her room, where she'd
just finished painting a dozen doll visages. Her head was reeling from the paint fumes.

“Sarah!” Freddy stood at the bottom of the staircase, panting from the effort of his walk from New Charlestown Square and clutching a sheet of newspaper.

Priscilla and Ruthie appeared from the parlor, Siby and Alice from the kitchen, so that everyone was gathered, looking from Freddy at the base to Sarah at the top.

“Gracious Lord.” Sarah wiped charcoal from her fingers with a rag. “Whatever are you shouting about?”

“Hollering like it's Resurrection Day,” said Siby.

“ ‘For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout!' ” sang Alice.

“Sarah, we must pack you and send you home as quickly as possible. This very hour,” he explained.

Sarah's heart shot to a gallop. Her knees buckled. She grasped the banister. This was the second time she'd been hastened away, and it brought back pained and panicked memories from the last. “Home? Today? Impossible. Freddy, I don't understand.”

He held up the paper in hand. “They're coming. The Rebel army is marching here now. I can't protect you like a man ought.” He shook his head and stomped his cane. “The best I can do is send you to safety. Siby? We've got to pack her. Now.”

“Yes, Mister Freddy.” Siby took the stairs in double time, rushing past Sarah to the guest room.

“Wear the nun's disguise,” he instructed.

Sarah remained on the landing, staring down at Freddy, her mind wheeling as she tried to find some logical argument, but all that came out was “I—I don't want to go.”

“Please,” Ruthie implored. “Must she?”

Freddy nodded, and it launched everyone into action. Sarah had grown accustomed to being part of the family's workings, but now it was as if she were a fish caught in a ferry's wheel, bumping from paddle to paddle and nearly being squashed.

Priscilla and Alice helped her dress in the habit. Freddy hitched up the wagon with Ruthie's aid. Within the hour, the women were crying round her and bidding her farewell. Freddy sat with the reins in hand as she climbed in, the white guimpe hung around her neck like a flag of surrender. Old Gypsy gingerly pulled herself into the back of the wagon. Seeing all was secured, Freddy clucked his tongue and the horse started to trot. They were off, and the autumn sky had never seemed so piercing blue. It reminded Sarah of her father's eyes.

She assumed they were headed to the capital's train depot, like last time, and so was surprised when Freddy pulled off on a side road leading to a wooded farmhouse. There waited a weatherworn, covered carriage pulled by a team of horses. The coachman wore a soldier's kepi hat with two spoons instead of guns crisscrossing the brim. A bandana concealed his face. Freddy halted the horses.

Without hesitating for invitation, the man hoisted the crate from their wagon bed. “Hey there, Gyps,” he said from beneath his mask. Then, to Freddy: “These them?”

Freddy nodded. Priscilla and Siby had packed the dolls Sarah had finished painting, minus Alice's Kerry Pippin.

“Mr. Silverdash, may I introduce Miss Sarah Brown.”

Mr. Silverdash gave a nod while securing the box with ropes.

“A more trustworthy man, I know not,” said Freddy.

They were the words Sarah's father had spoken about Freddy's father. Her stomach knotted; she missed both men. How much had changed since that first introduction. How much heartache she and Freddy had endured.

“I wouldn't rely on anyone else to take you safely.”

Mr. Silverdash tossed her carpetbag into the carriage, then climbed atop.

“If I could,” Freddy continued in a whisper, “I'd take you all the way to Saratoga myself. No words of gratitude are enough for what you've done.” He looked down at the cane lying sideways at their feet. “Despite what you've said, Sarah, you must've loved me at some point to care for me as you have—to stay by my family's side. But, you see, I'm…broken.
I pity that Ruth must spend the rest of her days as a nurse wife, and glad that you are free of such a burden.”

Sarah rubbed away a tear. It mingled with the paint on her fingers and stained the white of her habit.

“You could never be a burden to anyone. Ruthie loves you. She will give you many children, Freddy. That…I could not.” Her breath caught.

Now was not the time or place, but life was no fabled Once Upon a Time. There was no time and place but the present.

“You see, that is why I turned you down. I cannot bear children. I am broken, too.”

The words had been heavy as lead bullets on her tongue but did not strike as such. Freddy's gaze remained unchanged: earnest and affectionate.

Mr. Silverdash cleared his throat loudly. “Best be off, my friends.”

Freddy took her hand, his pulse radiating hot beats through her skin. He lifted her palm and kissed the inside of her wrist. His lips, soft and true as the year before. She would conjure that feeling for all her days.

“I would've loved you even more,” he said.

Sarah's vision softened about the corners, her fortitude over the last many months dissolving.

Mr. Silverdash gave a signal, and his horses whinnied and pulled, eager at their bits.

“You must go now,” said Freddy.

She climbed down from the wagon and took a last glimpse at him before entering the carriage, where there was but a fraction of room for her between stacks of paper-wrapped packages. Once she was wedged into the padding, the men exchanged mumbled words outside and the wheels set to a harried pace. She knew not which direction they went. The windows were covered. All she could do was lean back and pray—for Freddy, the Hills, and New Charlestown, with the enemy on its way; for these parcels and their harbored secrets to arrive at their good purpose; for her and her dolls to do the same.