Unsigned

Chapter One: The Letter

The wind off the Delaware smelled of coal smoke, wet rope, and something sweetly rotten, and Cathleen Mulgrew decided that this was what America smelled like.

She stood at the end of the gangway with her mother's carpetbag against her knee and her brother's elbow in her ribs, and she did not move, because moving meant it was real. Behind her the steamship groaned at its moorings. Around her a thousand people shouted in six languages. Ahead, past the customs shed and the wagons and the great black flank of a warehouse, Philadelphia rose up in brick and smoke, indifferent as a mountain.

"Cathleen." Seamus's voice cracked the way it still did when he was excited, though he was seventeen and had shaved twice. "Cathleen, there's a man selling oysters off a barrow. In November."

"Then the oysters are in season and we are not," she said. "Keep your hand on the bag."

"You have the bag."

"Then keep your hand on me."

He laughed and took her arm, and for a moment the tightness in her chest let go. Six weeks ago she had buried their mother in the churchyard at Kilbrack with the priest's coat pulled over his head against the rain, and she had not laughed since, and neither had Seamus until now.

They were pushed and shoved down the length of the wharf. Cathleen kept her chin level. She had learned that from her mother, who had been a governess in a big house in Bandon before she married a tenant farmer for love and regretted it for twenty years without ever once saying so. Chin level, hands still, voice low. People will forgive a great deal in a woman who does not appear to be asking for anything.

In the pocket of her cloak she carried the letter. It had been written in the priest's cramped brown hand on the back of a page torn from a ledger, because paper was dear in Kilbrack, and it was addressed to Mr. Hugh Falvey, Almond Street, Philadelphia, and it said that the bearers were the children of Margaret Mulgrew, née Brennock, a woman of good character, and that the girl could read and write and figure and had been taught by her mother, and the boy was strong and willing.

A woman of good character. Cathleen had read it eleven times on the crossing and each time the words had felt thinner.

It took them two hours to find Almond Street. The boarding house was a narrow brick building with a green door and a scrubbed step, wedged between a cooper's yard and a shop selling secondhand boots. A girl of perhaps ten was sweeping the step with great violence.

"We're looking for Mr. Falvey," Cathleen said.

The girl looked at their bag, their boots, their faces. "Off the boat."

"This morning."

"Cork?"

"Cork."

"He'll be pleased," the girl said obscurely, and went inside bellowing.

Hugh Falvey was a broad, bald, sixty-year-old man with a face like a kindly bulldog and ink on three fingers. He read the priest's letter twice, holding it at arm's length, then set it down on a table crowded with more letters, ledgers, a teapot, and a pair of spectacles he seemed to have forgotten he owned.

"Margaret Brennock," he said. "I knew a Brennock in Clonakilty who could sing the birds down. No relation, I suppose."

"My mother sang," Cathleen said.

"They all sang." He said it without unkindness. "Sit down, the both of you. Mrs. Doran will bring bread. You'll eat it whether you're hungry or not, because you're both the colour of dishwater and I've no room in this house for a fainting girl."

They ate. The bread was fresh and there was butter, actual butter, and Seamus ate four slices and looked ashamed, and Falvey pretended to be reading.

"Now," he said at last. "I run this house, and I run something else besides, which is a book. In the book are the names of every decent family in this city that wants a girl or a boy and will pay honest wages and not beat them. It is a short book. There are longer books kept by worse men. Do you understand me?"

"I do," said Cathleen.

"You speak like a schoolmistress."

"My mother was a governess before she married."

Falvey's eyebrows went up, and something shifted behind his eyes—the shrewd recalculation of a man revising a price. "Ah," he said. "Well now. That's a different page of the book entirely."

He reached across and dragged the ledger toward him, licked his thumb, and turned pages.

"There's a house on Rittenhouse Square," he said. "Claremont. Railroads. The daughter's lady's maid married a butcher last month and the housekeeper has been three weeks looking for a replacement she can stomach. They want a girl who can dress hair, mend lace, read a note aloud without stumbling, and hold her tongue in six languages." He looked up. "Can you hold your tongue, Miss Mulgrew?"

"I can."

"I don't believe you," said Falvey, "but I'll write the letter anyway. And the boy?"

"I'm good with horses," Seamus said quickly.

"Every boy off every boat is good with horses."

"I am, though."

Falvey studied him. "They keep eleven in the mews behind the house. Their head coachman is a Kerryman named Tade Loughlin who owes me a favour and hates it." He wrote for a while, scratching. "You'll go together, then. That's rare and it's lucky, and lucky things in this city come with a bill attached, so mind yourselves."

He blotted the letter, folded it, and held it out. Cathleen took it and did not let go of it immediately.

"Mr. Falvey. What is the bill?"

He smiled at her, and for the first time she saw that his kindness had a floor of iron under it.

"You'll be in a house where the money is," he said. "There's no such thing as a small favour asked of a servant in a house like that. And when the day comes that you want something they don't want to give you—and it will come, girl, it comes to everyone—you'll find you've nothing to bargain with but your own wits. So sharpen them."

They walked to Rittenhouse Square the next morning in a cold clean light. Cathleen had washed her collar in the basin and dried it against the stovepipe, and she had made Seamus scrub his neck until he complained.

She was not prepared for the square. She had understood, in the abstract, that there were rich people in America. She had not understood that they built houses like cathedrals and put only one family inside. The Claremont house took up the better part of a block: brownstone and iron, four floors and a mansard roof, windows tall as church windows, a portico held up by pillars, and a scrubbed area railing without a fleck of rust on it. A gardener was clipping the last dead heads off something in a stone urn as though the plant had personally offended him.

"Holy God," said Seamus.

"Servants' entrance," said Cathleen. "And don't say that in front of them."

The housekeeper was a Scotswoman named Mrs. Kinnaird with grey hair pinned so tightly it looked painful. She read Falvey's letter, then read Cathleen, top to toe, the way a woman reads a bolt of cloth for flaws.

"Turn round."

Cathleen turned.

"Hands."

She held them out. They were not soft, but they were clean and the nails were short.

"Read that." Mrs. Kinnaird pushed a folded newspaper across the table.

Cathleen read six lines about the failure of a banking house in New York and the suspension of trading, in a level voice, without stumbling, though she did not understand half of it.

Mrs. Kinnaird's mouth did something that in another woman might have been a smile. "Well. Where did you get that voice?"

"From my mother, ma'am."

"And where is she?"

"Buried in County Cork, ma'am. In September."

"Hm." The housekeeper folded the paper precisely. "Thirteen dollars a month, your board, two afternoons off, Sunday morning for Mass provided you're back by eleven. You will attend Miss Rosabel. You will not speak to her of anything that occurs below stairs and you will not speak below stairs of anything that occurs in her rooms. Mr. Claremont does not tolerate gossip. He does not tolerate lateness, familiarity, breakage, or opinions." She rose. "The boy goes to Loughlin in the mews. If he's idle he's gone by Saturday."

"He isn't idle."

"They never are, for a fortnight." Mrs. Kinnaird took a ring of keys from her belt. "Come. You'll meet Miss Rosabel now, and God help you if you're the sort that stares."

Cathleen followed her up the back stairs—bare wood, narrow, four flights of it—and through a green baize door, and the house changed the way a day changes when the sun comes out.

There were carpets so thick her boots made no sound. There were paintings in gold frames, dark landscapes with cattle in them, portraits of men with side-whiskers. There was a marble bust on a pedestal in a niche, and a clock under a glass dome, and a great hanging lamp of cut crystal, and above it all a hush, a deep upholstered hush, as though the house were holding its breath.

At the end of the corridor Mrs. Kinnaird knocked once and opened a door.

"Miss Rosabel. The new maid."

The room was full of pale light from two tall windows. A young woman stood at one of them with her back to the door, and she turned slowly, and Cathleen saw a face she would come to know better than her own: fair, fine-boned, with the kind of composure that is put on in the morning like a garment. Rosabel Claremont was twenty-two, dressed in dove grey, her hair perfectly done, her hands folded.

But her eyes went at once to the door as if measuring how long it would stay open, and there was a smear of something on the edge of her left thumbnail, a thin crescent of dark blue.

"Thank you, Mrs. Kinnaird," Rosabel said. "What is your name?"

"Cathleen Mulgrew, miss."

"Mulgrew." Rosabel considered it. "You may go, Mrs. Kinnaird."

The housekeeper went. The door clicked. Rosabel looked at Cathleen for a long moment, and Cathleen, keeping her chin level and her hands still, looked back—and found that she could not read the girl at all, except for that one thin blue crescent of paint, and the way, quite without thinking, Rosabel curled her thumb into her palm to hide it.