Maybe it does know you, Mary, her sister Susan will say; Yeah, and maybe I ought to quit that job, Mary will say, and that house full of evil things; and someday she will; but not today. Instead, with much grunting and groaning and panting, she will drag the trunk and the two bags upstairs, while my mother sits on the sofa, dreaming over her Papa’s map: Idling her day away as usual, and me like a dog, around and around and up and down them stairs with milady’s boxes and bundles and bags . . .
All right, you silly girl, you can leave them.
The bags drop at the center of the parlor rug.
Does madam wish to pack her things?
No—sharply this time—I said to leave them.
The girl, grumbling under her breath about the obscenely out-thrust tongue of the div—evil things in this house, evil things!—disappears back down the corkscrew stairs into the kitchen.
Of course my mother will not pack directly. She isn’t ready yet. There is much that she will need—so much that she can hardly think of it all. Clothes. Shoes. Maps. A ship. Advisers. Money.
A very great deal of money.
She contemplates her suitcases.
It will take time. For the moment, it is just a dream. She has accomplished the easiest part of the dream, summoning the bags, then sliding them underneath the bed, where my father will not see them. There they will wait, like a promise. Sometimes a promise can be enough. My mother is aware of those bags, hyper-aware. There is not a moment that she spends on or in or around the bed that she is not conscious of the bags beneath it, waiting, patiently, until she is ready. Sometimes she wants to laugh, thinking about them; but she does not laugh.
Instead she grows very silent. She goes to Lars Kiersta’s in Flowergate and has a dress made. It is the first of what she will need. My father curses when he receives the bill, thinking the worst. So little imagination! Because of my father’s negative response, my mother has the next bill sent to Thomas Argument. He will pay for the next dress—With pleasure. And for the boots as well. His Vesuvius is making him rich. He can buy enough dresses to pack my mother’s entire trunk. He will also buy, before my mother is done, corsets, camisoles, petticoats, cotton hose, and a dozen nice cambric handkerchiefs, all of which my mother will fold carefully, reverently even, into her suitcases. Thomas Argument has no idea why Clotilde wants so many clothes; he has less imagination even than my father. Women want new clothes, therefore she shall have them. It may occur to him, once or twice, to wonder why he never sees her wearing what he has bought; he supposes he has forgotten which ones he paid for, and which her dear Papa bought her in Paris, back before the disappearance (he assumes Leopold hasn’t bought her any, which is very nearly true); but he never goes so far as to imagine those suitcases hidden beneath the bed.
Nor could he imagine that she has obtained the schedule for the steam packet Emerald Isle (departing the pier, Wednesdays to London, Mondays to Stockton; John Barritt, agent), which she has also folded up, and keeps among her underthings, along with her Papa’s map, in her trunk.
• • •
She is such a delicate creature. Incapable of planning.
• • •
It is true she hasn’t purchased her ticket yet.
She is waiting.
She already has a few coins tied up in one of those cambric handkerchiefs, and each week she will stealthily extract a single coin more from my father’s pay packet and hide it within that tight cambric knot.
So she is a thief, too, in her own way, and with her own justification.
My Papa is alive!
But he must be in trouble, or else he would return to me. I have to find him. I have to help my dear beloved Papa.