The Island of Doves (2 page)

Flight

1835

S
usannah Brownell Fraser, dressed only in her chemise and petticoats, stood before a three-paneled mirror in the morning light that filtered through the drapery. The dressmaker Madame Martineau held swatches of fabric to Susannah’s bust and described the cuts and colors that would complement her fair complexion and red hair.

“The fashion this spring is a hem that goes all the way to the floor,” Madame Martineau said as she draped a length of dark green gabardine from Susannah’s waist. “It hides the shoes like this—very elegant.”

Susannah sighed as she imagined wrestling with the impractical skirts. March still had the town in its chilly embrace. But when spring finally came to Buffalo, she would spend as many hours as she could walking in the woods to collect specimens for her herbarium, preparing the plants in her greenhouse, and recording their names and characteristics. The forest path was sometimes muddy and always narrow, and the rough-hewn worktable in the greenhouse likely to snag fine silk. But Edward had instructed his wife to order five new dresses in the latest styles, and Susannah had learned never to ignore Edward’s instructions.

Madame Martineau measured out enough gabardine for a gown with gigot sleeves, the fabric ballooning out around Susannah’s upper arms and tapering to tight cuffs at the wrist. Susannah said a silent thank-you that the bruise on her shoulder had lately yellowed to near invisibility. Next was sky-blue silk taffeta embroidered with nosegays for a dress with a high neckline that could be worn buttoned up or open with the collar turned back. After the taffeta came gauzy netting over red satin silk, then a soft cotton dress with piping and an elaborate lace tucker. The buttons would be mother-of-pearl or amber-colored glass; the hems would be wrapped in silk ribbon.

While Madame Martineau pinned and measured, Susannah’s thoughts drifted over the horrors of the previous year, the way a bird might sail high enough above an acre of burning forest to avoid its smoke and heat. Had it been just twelve months since the March day when Edward first introduced himself to her father, Phillip Brownell? The simple handshake between two men who stood on the cobblestones of Amity Place in Manhattan City seemed to seal and hasten all of what would come next: Edward and Susannah’s three-month courtship, their summer wedding, her parents’ sudden death two weeks later when cholera surged through the city. Then, of course, Edward had discovered that her father had left nothing but debts for his new son-in-law. The Brownell money was gone.

By the fall Edward had sold her parents’ row house and moved them to Buffalo, where his uncle helped him secure his first business loan. Soon Edward had established a brickworks and a construction company and was building houses at an astonishing pace. His ambition was matched—fueled, even—by his conviction that he had been robbed of what was rightfully his, the money his wife should have brought to their marriage. Though Susannah had had nothing to do with her father’s financial woes, Edward needed someone to blame and she was the only Brownell left.

He had charmed her parents when he was seeking her hand, but now he revealed his true nature. Edward would tell anyone who asked that Susannah was merely clumsy. She fell down the stairs, put her hand too close to the fire, cut her lip on a chipped crystal goblet. She was careless and she was willful—the marriage was yet another trial for him to endure.

Only Susannah knew the terrible truth of it all, and there wasn’t a soul on the earth to whom she could tell it. She had no family left, and Edward allowed her no friends of her own in Buffalo.

“My father
trusted
you,” she said to him more than once, back when she still held out hope that he might come to his senses.

“Your father was weak,” he had replied. “A fool.”

But her father had never even struck her on the hand when she was a child to correct poor behavior. Susannah had not known this kind of violence. Sometimes, the morning after one of his episodes, Edward brought her a gift—a cluster of amaryllis bulbs with skins like parchment, a magnifying glass to use in her work with the plant specimens—though he never spoke of apology, never spoke at all, in fact, of what had taken place. And Susannah would wonder if she had misremembered. She felt betrayed by her own instincts, her own memories.

Madame Martineau was folding layers of fabric along Susannah’s waist when she whispered, “These pleats are easily let out, should you find yourself with child.” When she saw Susannah’s expression change, she clucked her tongue. “You’d be amazed what one can hide under a well-constructed dress. You’ll be out and about until quite close to your time.”

Susannah stared at herself in the mirror and thought of the teaspoon of Queen Anne’s lace seeds she chewed each morning to keep her womb barren. Edward, of course, had no knowledge that she was meddling with creation. She had learned the method from a pamphlet she found wedged between botany texts in a bookshop near Washington Square, just after Edward beat her for the first time, and she knew it would be her salvation. If she did not have a child, she thought, she had a better chance of escape. She had been hopeful then. Now she wondered whether she would spend the rest of her life in this hell. She was just twenty-three years old and Edward was just thirty—hell could last a long time.

After she and Edward first arrived in Buffalo, Susannah noticed the flowers—
wild carrot
, some called it—growing next to the roads into town. In the hottest part of the season the white flowers began to close, the long sepals pressing in on the spent blossoms from all sides like the ribs that held the fabric of a parasol in place. Susannah gathered as many clusters as she could in her apron each day, delivering them to a basket covered with a board in her greenhouse. Hiding them was unnecessary—Edward rarely came out to the greenhouse, and when he did, he merely scowled at her “collections.”

Susannah wondered whether the method was an old wives’ tale, but she was willing to try anything. She knew she understood anatomy better than Edward did. He viewed a woman’s body as a mysterious vessel that did not operate according to reason or system. He would climb the stairs from his study where he worked into the late hours and nudge her awake, long after she had fallen into a deep sleep with a book splayed on her chest, and it never occurred to her to refuse him. Two flesh become one in marriage. As he heaved above her, rushing his seed to new places inside her he hoped to claim, he made the sounds of a laborer at his toil.

Once recently he had rolled off her and in a flash of vulnerability rested his cheek on her arm and asked, almost whimpering, “Do you think it will happen soon? For I should very much like to have a son.”

And she smiled blandly and nodded, her heart so hard against him that even this show of tenderness couldn’t make a difference. She saw in her mind a long line of the children they had never created, a row of cradles lined with fleece, a boy, then a girl, then two more boys, then three girls, stretching off into the distance like a road that no map had charted. She felt nothing for these babies, though it shocked her heart to admit it, and she knew she was flouting God himself.

“Are you all right, Mrs. Fraser? You look a little pale.”

Susannah glanced at Madame Martineau, then took in the peach frippery that encircled her own body. Beneath the soft layers of silk, the feminine rustle of the flounces cascading to the floor, Susannah could feel that her resolve remained lodged in her chest, as smooth and sure as a stone.

A large fire heated the room. “The room is a little too warm for me—that’s all.” Susannah felt herself sway on the platform.

“Indeed it is. But we are almost finished,” Madame Martineau said as she handed the pieced peach silk to her seamstress, who hustled the bundle to the curtained back room where she and the other girls would work late into the night on the dresses. She gave Susannah the dress she had worn into the shop, then helped her lift it over her head and fastened the buttons at the back.

Susannah stepped down from the platform and Madame Martineau smiled at her. “We will send them to Hawkshill as soon as they are ready.” Their house, a stately mansion Edward had purchased and renovated for them, was well known throughout Buffalo.

Outside the door of the shop, a paved footpath stretched along Pearl Street past the downtown shops. The chilly March air was a welcome relief and the sun shone brightly. The Saturday shoppers thronged about her, despite the cold. Two well-dressed women nodded to Susannah. “Good afternoon, Mrs. Fraser,” they said in unison, stepping aside on the footpath to let her pass. The crowd seemed to part for her, each cluster of people deferring to her as the wife of one of the town’s wealthiest men.

Since October had brought the frost, she had grown accustomed to work and solitude in her greenhouse, where winter never came. A woodstove boiled water that ran through pipes beneath the floor, and rows of steam-clouded glass panes captured and enhanced the weak light of the sun. Even now, in March, every surface was alive with the urgency of plants at work—climbing, rooting, stretching their petals. Grapevines crept like green insects up the glass walls, and the lavender fanned out in a muted purple cloud. On the highest shelf, orchid blossoms lolled, their leaves draping down like tongues. The most remarkable thing of all was that this life pulsed frenetically along in perfect silence. She heard only the occasional clank of the steam pipes.

Out on the street now with all the people coming and going, from the market to the theater to the saddle shop, the noise and motion were terrific. Carriage wheels crunched over snow-covered gravel in the road. A woman shouted after two cackling boys who had swiped a bun from her child’s hand and taken off running; her little girl wailed. In front of a tavern, a tethered mare shied away from a terrier that nipped at its hooves. The horse’s owner kicked at the little dog. “Get back, yeh!” he yelled.

Susannah stepped off the footpath and leaned against a brick wall, trying to breathe. Everything felt too loud, too bright. She smelled all at once coffee and smoked meat and manure and sugared almonds, and she tried not to gag as it all rushed in on her. She closed her eyes and inhaled, then willed herself to walk the last half mile back to Hawkshill. Edward wouldn’t come home until the late evening; there were hours of peace to look forward to if she could make it the rest of the way home.

But just as she began walking again, determined to remain calm, she felt her breath catch in the bramble of her lungs. There
she
was again, the strange woman in the black gown and bonnet. Susannah had seen her three times in the last week alone: on the way home from church two Sundays in a row as she’d held Edward’s elbow, and once as they walked to a party at the mayor’s home. Always, the woman peered from behind a pillar or the side of a carriage, meeting Susannah’s eyes but never revealing herself to Edward. She stood now on the opposite side of the street and watched Susannah, her hands clasped in front of her as if she were waiting. Two carriages shuddered by, then a wagon piled high with onions, translucent skins fluttering in the air as it passed. Finally the woman strode across the street to her.

“Good afternoon,” Susannah said. “Is it more than a coincidence that I seem to see you everywhere I go?”

“Mrs. Fraser,” the woman said, her voice low. “Let us walk together for a bit.”

She moved to touch Susannah’s elbow, but Susannah moved it out of the path of her hand. “Who
are
you?”

“My name is Sister Mary Genevieve.”

Susannah glanced at the simple woolen gown and white apron, the plain black bonnet tied beneath her chin. “You are . . . a Roman sister?”

The woman nodded. She seemed to be in her midforties and she had the long black lashes of a doe.

“I never knew there was a convent in Buffalo,” Susannah said.

The sister nodded. “There is not, but I have been assigned at the rectory at the Lamb of God Church to assist Father Adler.” Susannah knew of the church—there was only one Catholic church in Buffalo, but one was more than enough, according to most people of her class.

People were stepping around them, each man tipping his hat, each woman bowing her head, all of them saying, “Good afternoon, Mrs. Fraser,” then glancing curiously at the nun. Susannah could only imagine the explanations they were inventing, the rumors they might whisper about Susannah Fraser consorting with a Catholic woman in the street. The only thing Edward despised more than Papists was gossip, and what a woman might do to incite it.

“I see,” Susannah said. She had walked past the church before, though she didn’t know Father Adler or anyone associated with it. It was tucked away in the woods, little more than an old barn with a few colored-glass windows and a painted sign. “But what does that have to do with me?”

“I wanted only to make your acquaintance. Your hired girl, Marjorie, has often spoken of you.” The nun held Susannah’s gaze for a long moment. “And of your husband.”

Susannah blinked at the nun, and the road seemed to lurch like a boat in a storm.
Oh, Marjorie
, Susannah thought.
What have you done?
If the girl had revealed anything about Edward, Susannah would pay the price.

“I have to go,” Susannah said, still aware of the eyes of strangers.

Sister Mary Genevieve nodded. “Perhaps we will have the chance to meet again. If ever you find yourself in need of help, I hope you will remember me. My door is open to you.”

Susannah turned away without responding, hurrying down the road toward Hawkshill. Marjorie had each Saturday night off to spend with her husband in Black Rock, so for the few hours until Edward returned home, Susannah would be alone in the house. As she walked she tried to shake off the strange encounter and convince her rattled nerves that it would come to nothing. She decided to spend her evening doing the one thing that brought her peace: working in the greenhouse with her plants.

The greenhouse Edward had built for Susannah was to her both a heaven and a hell, a prison and an escape. At times she hated its stifling, fetid air and the clang of the steam in the pipes that kept it warm throughout the long winter. It was a mere
simulation
of the natural world, with the wildness edited out. For Edward it was a symbol of their wealth, a place for Susannah to host tea parties with the wives of prominent men. He had given her orchids and cloying overblown lilies to tend because that was what a greenhouse was for: coaxing up temperamental plants designed for warmer climes, proving with each stretching stem, verdant tendril, and lush unfurling petal that nature was a pawn in man’s ongoing game of dominance, that it could be tricked, cajoled, and compelled to bloom and flourish at the place and time of his choosing. A greenhouse was mind over matter, order over chaos, man over God. Susannah thought this false pride seemed dangerous in a place where enough snow could fall in twenty-four hours to bury a full-grown man.