After the service, when the fine Episcopalians of Richmond gather their hats and coats, Ma steps away to speak with friends about a charity project, and I wander out to the aisle on my own.
“Eddy,” calls a familiar female voice to my left.
The weight of the sermon lifts from my lungs when I see, weaving toward me through the other churchgoers, my darling Sarah Elmira Royster—normally a Presbyterian—dressed in a blue satin dress that matches her eyes. She wears her hair pulled back from the sides of her face in smooth sheets of brown tresses, finer than silk, without the clusters of ringlets that tend to dangle in front of the other girls’ ears.
I push my own curls back from my face and smile. “What are you doing here, Elmira?”
“I came with Margaret Wilson and her family. I wanted to see you.”
I can’t speak, I’m so overcome with gratitude that she’s here for me. I take her left hand and pull her close, losing my wits to the heady lilac of her perfume.
“Not too close, Eddy.” She peeks over her right shoulder. “My father told Mrs. Wilson to watch over me. Will you meet with me in private sometime before . . .” She fusses with the gold chain of her necklace, and her eyes brim with tears. “Before you leave for Charlottesville next week?”
“Of course.” I caress the back of her gloved hand with my thumb. “I already intended to call on you later today. I have a gift for you.”
“My parents will be home today. I want to spend some time alone with you.”
“We can arrange a later meeting in the garden, but may I visit today as well? Pa and I had a fight last night that robbed me of all sleep and sanity. The bishop’s sermon only added to my wretchedness . . .”
“Please don’t silence your muse,” she says. “I don’t believe there’s anything sinful about writing poems of love.”
“I’m desperate to leave Richmond and end this suffocation, but it tortures me to know I’m leaving you, too.”
Elmira lowers her face. “I’ll going to miss you terribly.”
“My heart will bleed the moment we part.”
She smiles a wan smile and brushes tears from her cheeks. “I do believe your romantic muse is speaking through you this very moment.”
“Shh.” I peer around. “Don’t let anyone hear that I’m poeticizing in church.”
We both snicker.
“Do you see Mrs. Wilson?” she asks. “Is everyone watching us?”
I scan the crowd of my fellow parishioners—the established old families of Richmond, Virginia—fair-skinned, bejeweled, and gossipy aristocrats with blood as exquisite as a fine Bordeaux wine—blood far superior to the rot running through my body, or so I’ve come to believe.
“No, I don’t see her,” I say, and our eyes meet.
She gazes at me as though she doesn’t see the low-born filth and the ugliness that writhes inside me.
“I’m going to miss seeing those beautiful eyes of yours that can’t decide if they want to be gray, or blue, or violet,” she says, her voice husky with emotion. “And your smile. You have the loveliest smile when you’re not lost in sadness.”
I gulp down a lump clogging up my throat and lean my lips next to her right ear. “I want to marry you, Elmira. Will you marry me?”
She stiffens, so I stay in that tipped-forward position, frozen mid-proposal, terrified of witnessing the expression on her face. I close my eyes, brush my cheek against hers, and lose myself in reveries of a future world for us—a cottage by the sea, every room stocked with books, the air rich with the scents of ink and watercolor paints; balmy evenings spent tinkling out tunes on a piano; the soft warmth of Elmira’s hand cradling mine as we drift off to sleep, side-by-side.
“My father would never allow an engagement,” she says at length.
“I know he doesn’t think I’m good enough . . .”
“It’s not that. We’re both so young. I’m not yet sixteen, Eddy. You’re barely seventeen.”
I clench my jaw and lift my face. “Your father will change his mind when he sees all that I accomplish.”
“I should go before Mrs. Wilson spies me over here.” Elmira slips her fingers out of mine. “I’m sorry . . .”
“May I still call on you this afternoon?”
“Yes, before our Sunday dinner, but please, don’t mention marriage. I’ll never be permitted to write to you at the university if you do.”
She scurries away to the Wilsons. I’m still tipped slightly forward, fighting to catch my breath, my fingers sweating against the silk of my vest. Her father may as well have just struck a blow to the pit of my stomach.
A clutch of my friends—Rob Mayo, Robert Cabell, Jack Mackenzie—catch my eye from across the nave and wave me over, but I mouth to them, “I can’t. Not feeling well.”
Ebenezer Burling, who doesn’t quite fit in with the rest of the fellows either, lingers toward the back of the pews with his widowed mother. He offers a small wave, and I give one in return.
I then sidle past a couple of gray-haired old lawyers who glower at me with buzzard eyes, undoubtedly questioning my familiarity with Miss Sarah Elmira Royster. Richmond crawls with dozens of pompous asses just like them. Lawyers. Judges. Congressmen. Senators. Constitutional delegates. Rich immigrant merchants like Mr. John Allan, my Scot-blooded bastard of a foster father.
Yet poets, actors, painters, and other dreamers are growing endangered, it seems.
I fuss with the knot of my cravat—the damn thing’s strangling me—and join Ma at the rear of the church. The bishop’s sermon gnaws at my gut, and Elmira’s warnings about her father’s disapproval slices an ax blade of a headache through my brain.
Ma fits her gray bonnet over her auburn hair. “Are you all right, dear?”
I squint from the sunlight boring through the windows in the cupola of the domed ceiling and nod with my lips pressed together.
“Are you certain?” she asks.
“Yes,” I say with a rasp, but the ugliness inside me writhes with more vigor, squeezing down on my stomach, knotting around my lungs like a thick cord of rope before rising to the surface of my flesh, where my wretchedness burns and yearns to shed from my body like a rattlesnake’s skin.
CHAPTER TWO
The Muse
I awaken in the shadows, ravenous for words, hungering for delicacies dripping with dread.
My poet in the black frock coat kneels in prayer beneath the windows in the ceiling that bathe his head in a weak winter light, bronzing his brown curls and the back of his neck. He bends his face toward the floorboards, toward the crypt down below him, and I will the spirits of the dead beneath him to whisper a song:
Once upon a dark December, in a year we must remember,
Morbid mounds of ash and ember told a gruesome tale of gore—
Ah, there now—he lifts his face, sensing my presence. I smell the incense of his imagination kindling. A small shudder quivers through him.
In his mind, I’m a girl with ashen skin and raven hair who watches him from the walls with raptor eyes. He smells the smoke that still clings to me from the flames that sparked me to life all those years ago, when his mother drew her last breath in a cold and silent room. He envisions me as a young woman draped in one of the high-waisted dresses all the fashionable ladies once wore—gossamer, Grecian-inspired gowns that fluttered in the breezes of his childhood.