Must the Maiden Die (6 page)

"Aunt Glyn?" Emma called. "Look at this.
What do you suppose is in here? Can anyone guess?"

She had just unwrapped a tall, elegantly
carved mahogany box from Helga Brant, Emma's wealthiest customer
and wife of merchant-importer Roland Brant. Since Mrs. Brant was
not present, there was considerable speculation about what the
splendid box might hold.

"A sterling silver rolling pin?" suggested
Elizabeth Stanton with a wry smile.

When Emma raised its hinged lid, nothing
could be seen but two silver-and-bone handles fitted into slots.
Only when they were withdrawn did the gleaming steel blades of
carving knives become visible. Glynis wondered briefly if the
knives might have been made by members of the Oneida Community near
Syracuse, who were known for their fine steel. She didn't wonder
aloud, certainly not on this particular occasion; the community was
also known for its shared sexual practices, which for more than a
decade had outraged the congregations of established churches. At
Oneida, conventional legal marriage simply did not exist.

The twilight was beginning to fade, and as
the room inside the shop grew dim, Lacey and Faith lit the
kerosene parlor lamps, while Emma turned up the two wicks of a
molded glass pedestal "wedding lamp" that she had earlier
unwrapped. Rainbowed light flared inside the pair of opalescent
fonts, accompanied by the onlookers' appreciative murmurs. Emma's
eyes seemed to sparkle, and for a moment she looked to Glynis like
many another young woman approaching her wedding day. But when she
glanced up and caught her aunt's eyes, a small pucker formed
between her brows. The frown said that Emma had not forgotten the
conflict of the day before.

She had come to the library yesterday
afternoon, her face drawn with what Glynis had initially seen as
fatigue. But when Emma then asked if they could go to Glynis's
office, more than mere fatigue had surfaced.

"I don't know what to do," she had said as
Glynis closed the door on the library proper. "Can you talk a
bit?"

"Yes, I shouldn't be needed for a few
minutes."

Shouldn't be, that was, if her assistant
Jonathan Quant could raise the eyes buried in the pages of a new
dime novel long enough to take care of business.

"What is it, Emma?" she'd asked with
concern. Although this was not the first sign of trouble, it
appeared to be something more than a simple spat.

"It's Adam," Emma had answered. "We've had
an argument. A serious one."

Glynis at first doubted that attorney Adam
MacAlistair, having finally persuaded Emma to marry him, would in
any way jeopardize his hard-won victory, and she wondered if her
niece might have exaggerated the situation. Emma quickly disabused
her of that.

"Have you noticed," she began, "that all the
militiamen who are going South have new uniforms? And that the
uniforms are homemade?"

Glynis nodded. Although she had noticed, she
hadn't thought about it, and couldn't imagine where Emma's question
might be leading.

"Aunt Glynis, if we have a real war—and from
the talk these days it seems likely—there will be a demand for many
more uniforms, hundreds of them. Most women don't have the time to
sew them by hand, so I suggested to Adam that perhaps I could make
them at the shop. Naturally, I'd have to purchase additional Singer
machines and hire more women, and that would need ready cash. So I
asked Adam how I might go about obtaining some start-up money. I
thought perhaps I could make a contract with the government."

Glynis knew she was gaping at her niece,
flabbergasted that Emma had come up with such a scheme. Although
she supposed she shouldn't be surprised—Emma had always had a good
head for business.

"And what did Adam think of that idea?"
Glynis asked, trying to suppress her own distaste for viewing a
catastrophe as a money-making venture. Nonetheless, there were
undoubtedly many others who would see profit in a war.

"Adam said he thought it was 'a mercenary
scheme.' And I imagine you do, too. But someone is going to profit
from the demand for uniforms, so why shouldn't it be me? He seemed
even more upset that I'd need to expand the business. Aunt Glyn,
you know we've argued about my keeping the dress shop after we're
married."

Two years before, when Emma had first come
to Seneca Falls, her consignment work for the shop's previous
owner, Fleur Coddington, quickly gathered customers. Less than a
year later, she had opportunity to purchase the shop. Adam
MacAlistair offered—eagerly offered—to advance to Emma the money
required. After all, so Adam's reasoning went, since he intended
to marry Emma, her debt to him would simply be canceled upon their
betrothal. But at the time Emma declined both his money and his
proposal. In the end, it had been Vanessa Usher's co-signature
which guaranteed the bank loan.

But now it seemed the issue was to be
revisited. "I thought the matter of your shop had been resolved,"
Glynis said. "That Adam agreed, even if reluctantly, that you
should keep it."

"I thought so, too," Emma said, "but just
this morning he brought it up again. He doesn't want his wife to
work, although I made myself hoarse trying to explain, once again,
that the dress shop is not what I consider work."

Glynis felt reasonably certain that defining
the word
work
was not the problem.

"But now," Emma continued, "I'm worried
about something else. I'm afraid, Aunt Glyn, that after we're
married, Adam might insist on selling the shop. And then what could
I do about it?" As she spoke she twisted the large, glittering ring
on her left hand, a circlet of diamonds surrounding tiny blue
sapphires which formed the initials A.M.

Glynis told herself to say nothing. This was
between Emma and Adam. But after a moment or two of studying the
misery on her niece's face, she said, "Emma, have you thought of
putting this down in writing?"

"Like a contract, you mean?"

"It's not unknown—I think it would be
somewhat like a trust agreement. Adam certainly would be aware that
such a thing exists, though I'm not sure that you need it, Emma.
Last year's passage of the Earnings Act should—at least I
think
it should—protect your shop even without a specific
agreement."

Prior to the Earnings Act, a married woman
could not sell or give away property she had acquired before or
during her marriage without her husband's written consent. The
British jurist Sir William Blackstone had portentously stated: "A
husband and wife are one, and that one is the husband." The
American Revolution, for whatever other tyrannies it might have
overthrown, had not freed married women from the chains of English
common law.

"But," Glynis went on, "you should
investigate the new law. Conveying property is one thing, and the
conduct of the business itself might be another. You could ask
Jeremiah Merrycoyf...." She paused, then said, "No, on second
thought, Jeremiah won't do." Merrycoyf was Adam's law partner and
would probably refuse to become involved. And rightly so.

"I don't want to rely on some law, anyway,"
Emma said. "But if I had something specific to hold onto, a legal
document signed by Adam, that would satisfy me."

Glynis did not want to probe the
contradictions of that remark. "You would trust Adam's intentions,
then?"

"Oh, absolutely, once he had signed
something."

Emma had given this qualification without a
moment's hesitation, and apparently without even a hint of irony.
And had then added, "But if Adam doesn't agree to it, I don't know
what I'll do...."

Her voice had trailed off at Jonathan's
knock on the office door, and she had left the library shortly
thereafter.

Glynis, now studying her niece's expression
over the twin flares of the wedding lamp, was fairly sure the issue
had not as yet been settled.

An hour later, while the guests were leaving
and Glynis stood rolling up yard upon yard of ribbon, she realized
she had not seen Bronwen for some time. She asked Emma if her
cousin was still there.

"I think she's asleep upstairs in my
bedroom," Emma answered, but as if she were so preoccupied that her
cousin's absence had barely registered.

"Asleep? Surely not!" snapped Vanessa Usher,
her violet eyes flashing as she pulled a hood of black velvet over
the harp.

"I wouldn't be surprised," Glynis said.
"Bronwen has had an exhausting day."

"Yes, I heard all about it—as who in this
town did not," Vanessa retorted. "Far be it from me to criticize
your relatives, Glynis, but that particular young woman seems to
have small regard for decorum."

Emma, despite her distracted manner, began
to smile although turning her head to hide it, but Glynis
experienced a perverse kind of relief. During the course of the
evening, the fair Vanessa had appeared so subdued, so nearly
resembling the image of a beatific Renaissance angel, that Glynis
had wondered if the woman was ill. Clearly it had been a temporary
condition. And perhaps, since Vanessa must know how infuriating she
could be on occasion, this restraint had been for Emma's sake.
Glynis did not question for a moment that the woman adored Emma, at
least insofar as there was room in Vanessa's affections for anyone
other than herself. And Glynis had speculated before now that the
loss of Vanessa's sister to consumption, several years before, left
a void that perhaps Emma had come to fill.

"Don't concern yourself with all those extra
chairs," Vanessa told Emma. "I'll have a servant pick them up
tomorrow. You should get some rest, dear—that is, if your cousin
hasn't appropriated your bed."

"It's a large bed," said Emma softly. She
leaned over to bury her smile in an immense bouquet of lilacs and
iris, trailing ivy, and long white satin ribbons that had arrived
in the hands of a delivery boy just before the party had begun. The
attached card read: "To my beloved Emma." The large, self-confident
scrawl of Adam MacAlistair required no signature.

After Vanessa had left—sharply warning her
two beleaguered servants to handle the harp as if it were bone
china— Glynis and Emma went upstairs to the several rooms above the
shop. Emma, raising a glass chamber lamp by its handle, stopped at
the door of one of her workrooms. "Want to take a quick look at the
gowns for the wedding?"

"Yes, of course. Are they finished?"

"All but mine and Bronwen's. Before everyone
got here tonight, though, I persuaded her to stand still long
enough for a final fitting."

She opened the door and Glynis, holding her
own lamp, followed her niece into the cluttered room. Although it
was as strewn as usual with bolted fabric and spools of ribbon and
yards of lace trim, and although in the eye of the hurricane sat
two Singer sewing machines, what Glynis first saw, draped over a
dress form, was Emma's wedding gown. It shone softly as if creating
its own light, a white waterfall of gleaming satin with froths of
delicate, point d'Alencon needle lace and droplets of seed
pearls.

"Emma, it's absolutely beautiful! I've never
seen anything to compare."

Emma smiled, put down her lamp on a sewing
table, and pointed to two other dress forms holding pale green
bridesmaid gowns, trimmed only with white satin sashes and, at the
flounced hems, tiny white satin roses.

"Green is not a traditional color—at first I
had planned to have pink," Emma explained. "But then I realized
pink would be a terrible color on Bronwen, while Aunt Gwen and
Cousin Kathryn can wear any shade in the rainbow."

Glynis nodded at the thought of Kathryn,
transformed almost overnight—or so it seemed—from a rather plain
girl, who had lacked the early good looks of her sister and her
cousin Emma, into a real beauty.

"And pink is not by any means your color
either, Aunt Glyn," Emma said, and Glynis heard not the slightest
intent of meanness, but rather the voice of an artist.

"Here's yours," Emma said, lifting from a
standing rack a hanger that held a gown more silvery green than
those of the bridesmaids. The color reminded Glynis of sea foam.
She was to stand in for Emma's mother, who had died two years
before. Her sister Gwen, Bronwen and Kathryn's mother, would be
matron-of-honor, and Gwen's gown, which Emma was now holding up,
was a darker shade of the same green. All of them would look,
Glynis thought, like fresh spring leaves surrounding a white
rose.

They went back out into the short hall, and
when Emma opened the door of her bedroom, they found Bronwen, who
was indeed asleep, sprawled face down across the bed's
coverlet.

"Should I wake her?" Glynis asked.

"No, let her be. I can sleep around her,
though I'm not very tired," Emma said softly, her eyes suddenly
grave. "I can't imagine why, but I guess it's from worry about the
wedding. I haven't even talked to Adam today. I just couldn't find
the time."

Glynis, noting Emma's swift change of mood
from the lightheartedness of the sewing room, might have thought
that all else would have been secondary to clearing the air with
Adam, but did not say so. And when she went down the stairs, she
almost called,
Don't underestimate Adam's generosity,
but
on second thought decided that would sound patronizing. Emma had
good sense.

Outside the shop, and while Glynis walked
down a few marble steps under a green-and-white-striped canopy, she
heard hoof beats coming toward her. She peered into the soft
darkness that was barely relieved by the kerosene lanterns on posts
along Fall Street, and saw the black Morgan just rounding the
corner of State Street. Cullen reined in the horse beside her.

"Glynis, I hoped to find you here." His
voice held an uncharacteristic tension.

"I saw you go by earlier tonight, Cullen.
Did something happen down at one of the taverns?"