Chapter 2: A Lady of Her Standing

The patrolman stood with the door half open, looking down the corridor, and the light came in flat across the boards and the crates.

“Well,” said a woman.

She had been walking past with her feet already pointed the other way. Now she turned them back. Two more came up behind her, and then four, and then everyone had stopped, and every one of them had come out of that room pleased about something, and now they had this.

Nell knew her. Miss Lund, who had a colonel for a father and looked at a girl’s hem before she looked at her face.

“Miss Corrigan,” said Clarice Lund. “Or is that wrong now?”

“It’s her,” somebody said. “The one with the veil.”

“The one they took off the floor.”

“The one with the knife strapped to her leg.”

Nell stayed where she was and did not get up off the crate.

“Why’s she in a storeroom and not in a cell?” said a man.

“Because I’m kept for the magistrate,” said Nell. “Alone. On account of my standing.”

Two women laughed at once, and then everybody did.

“’My standing,’” said Miss Lund.

“A lady of her standing,” said another woman, “and not one soul’s come to fetch her. Doesn’t a lady’s family come and fetch her?”

“Which of us has had her to dinner?” said one of the two who had laughed. “Not I.”

“Nor I.”

“Nor me,” said a man, “and I’ll dine with anybody.”

Nell’s throat was dry. She put her hand flat on the crate and looked at the back of it. There was gray on it still, from the table or the gun or whatever she had put her hand into, and she had rubbed at it twice and it had not come off.

“That dress has been turned,” said Clarice.

It had been turned. It had cost four dollars, and she had turned it herself, and it hung better than Lund’s did.

“And the gloves are kid, and the seams are open.” Clarice said it kindly. That was how she did it. “Tell us about your standing again.”

“I saw the sheet in that room.” She had a paper in her hand. She opened it with two fingers and held it up and read from it, which was more than Nell could have done. Nell could write her own name. She could not read a clerk’s hand, and the paper was a row of hooks and loops to her, and the writing on it ran to four lines.

“Nell Corrigan,” said Clarice. “Harlan’s Mill. Mill hand.”

The talk got quieter. It did not stop.

“I never said I wasn’t from upstate,” said Nell.

“Nobody cares where you’re from,” said Clarice. “They care that it’s been six months. Six months in this city with your chin up and your purse shut—“

“I’ve been in that house,” said Nell.

Clarice stopped.

“What house?” she said.

Nell lifted her chin. “The house you’re all so careful about.”

“Say which way the gate faces,” said Clarice.

The corridor waited. Somebody’s ice moved in his glass.

Nell looked down at her hands.

It faces the lake. There’s a chapel at the back of the house, and a stone set in the wall of the chapel, and a name cut in the stone. Josiah Van Alst. There’s a regiment cut under the name. Nobody will ask you which one.

“Say it,” said Clarice.

“It faces the lake,” said Nell. “There’s a chapel at the back of it, and a stone in the wall, and the name cut in it is Josiah Van Alst, and there’s a regiment cut under the name. I’ve put flowers on that stone more than once.”

She had never put a flower on anything in her life. She heard her own voice go out into the quiet, and she left it there.

Nobody laughed.

The man at the back took his hat off. He was indoors and it was not the thing to do, and nobody told him.

“Josiah Van Alst,” a woman said, to nobody in particular.

“She’s right about the lake.”

“Who told her about the chapel?”

Nell waited. She had thought there would be more noise than this, and she was put out about it.

Stand up straight. She has to ask. Answer as though you’d answered it a hundred times before.

She stood up straight.

“Anybody who’s driven up the Heights knows which way that gate faces,” said Clarice, and two women near her agreed at once.

“Then ask me something else,” said Nell.

“Do you know Adrian Van Alst?” said Clarice.

The name went through them like a dropped plate. A woman near the front put her hand out and said, “Miss Lund—“ and two men turned their heads at the same moment.

“Adrian?” she said.

She said it slowly, the way you would say a word in a language you had only that minute decided to speak.

“He never told me it was a thing to say out loud,” she said. “He only said he wanted me to meet his grandfather.”

For a moment there was no sound at all.

Then there was a great deal.

“She called him Adrian.”

“Did you hear what she—“

“She’ll have met the grandfather next.”

“No—she’s met him already, didn’t you hear? He wanted to introduce her.”

“Who is she? Who is she to that family?”

“She came up through the kitchens, is what I heard.”

That’s enough. You’ve gone further than you had any right to. Be quiet now.

The door at the far end opened.

A man came out with a paper of his own in his hand and two men behind him, one of them saying something to him that he was not listening to. He was gray and tall and his coat was good, and he stopped when he saw how many people were standing in the hall.

Clarice Lund turned and put her hand up.

“Mr. Van Alst,” she said. “Mr. Van Alst—this one’s slandering your family.”