Carnegie's Maid Page 2

  After another long hour, during which passengers trickled in and anxiety mounted, a bell rang. Old men and tired mothers and young children looked at one another quizzically. Should we know what it meant?

  Finally, a door slammed open, and a thick shaft of light entered the room. “Welcome to America,” a bespectacled official announced.

  Even though no one spoke, the relief in the room was audible, like a collective exhalation. We assembled into the last line we would ever form together and walked outside into the American daylight.

  I breathed in hope.

  All around me, I heard cries of reunion as my fellow passengers fell into the arms of their waiting relatives. But I walked on. No one was waiting for me.

  Chapter Two

  November 4, 1863

  Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

  I walked with purpose. I hadn’t a clue where I was headed, but I couldn’t afford any hesitation that marked me as weak. Even in our small Galway village outside of Tuam, we heard rumors of immigrants who, upon landing in America, had been victimized by sharpers, unscrupulous men engaged in all manner of trials, plots, and chicanery. I’d talked a brash game to my family and friends when Mum and Dad decided I’d be the one to emigrate, but now, I wondered how I would fare in this strange land.

  Except for the cry of seagulls and the clop of horses, this harbor didn’t sound anything like the harbors in Galway. The fishmongers called out their wares in a language I knew was English but sounded like gibberish, and news peddlers cried out the day’s news with the same inflection. Except for the salty air and scent of horse droppings and fish, the smell was unlike home as well. Arriving passengers stumbled around me as they regained their land legs, and the air was thick with the stench of their bodies. Unwashed for weeks in turbulent seas, even the sea air couldn’t freshen them. Even the beggars recoiled from the stink of my fellow passengers.

  For the first time, in this mass of humanity, I really understood how alone I was in the vast land.

  A voice drifted through the din. “Clara Kelley?”

  The name was unmistakable. It was my own.

  I listened hard, but I didn’t hear it again. I wondered if, in my loneliness, I had imagined it. I decided that I must have. No one expected me here.

  “Clara Kelley? I’m looking for a Miss Clara Kelley from Galway,” the voice bellowed louder.

  I followed the voice. It belonged to a tall, clean-shaven man wearing a bowler hat and a houndstooth topcoat finer than I’d seen in some time. Before I got too close, before I identified myself, I stopped and watched him. Was he one of those runners we had heard about from our farming neighbors, the O’Donnells? A fellow Irishman had approached their nephew Anthony at the New York City docks, promising him a pleasant room at a reasonable rate, only to settle him in a rat-infested tenement room in the Lower East Side of the city that was already inhabited by nine other immigrants, at a rate many times more than what he had been told. When Anthony couldn’t meet the exorbitant payment, the runner tossed Anthony out onto the street, keeping his stored trunk—his only belonging in the New World—as final payment. The O’Donnells and Anthony’s poor parents had not heard from him since his last letter describing the machinations of this evil runner. This terrible fate wasn’t the worst an immigrant could expect. I overheard the O’Donnells whispering to my parents about a girl from a neighboring village traveling alone to Boston who encountered a runner who exacted a far worse penance from her than the confiscation of her luggage.

  This man didn’t look the part. In fact, my little sister, Cecilia, would have called him posh, especially as he was leaning against a highly polished black livery coach with two dappled gray horses attached. And anyway, how would a runner know my name?

  The man caught me watching him and asked, “You wouldn’t be Miss Clara Kelley, would you?” His American accent was thick and flat, but I made sense of him.

  “Yes, sir.”

  He stared long and hard at my face, clothes, and rucksack. “A Miss Clara Kelley who was on board the Envoy?”

  “Yes, sir,” I answered with a half curtsy.

  He looked surprised. “You’re not what I expected,” he said with a shake of his head. “But Mrs. Seeley knows her business. It’s not my job to judge.”

  I was about to ask him why he was looking for me and who was this Mrs. Seeley when he said, “Come on, miss. Climb into the carriage. We’ve been waiting for you for well over an hour. Long after the rest of second class exited from Lazaretto. God alone knows what sort of dawdling you were up to. Now we’re well behind schedule to Pittsburgh. And Mrs. Seeley does not like us to be late, particularly since she’s paying extra fare to get you to Pittsburgh safely by coach.”

  I knew there were confusing assertions imbedded in the man’s words, but all I heard was “Pittsburgh.” Was he truly offering to take me to Pittsburgh? The industrial city over three hundred miles from Philadelphia was my planned destination. Back home, we’d heard the city had work aplenty, and it was the one place in this boundless country where my family had relatives. Not close kin, mind, but a second cousin close enough to reach out to once I found employment in a textile mill or in one of the big homes that needed domestics.

  I’d squirreled away the rest of the pounds and pence Mum and Dad had given me to secure the passage to Pittsburgh. I’d assumed I would have to cobble together the cheapest route I could find, some combination of rail and canal rides and wagon, since the train route didn’t extend all the way from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh. But now a complete stranger was offering me a continuous horse-drawn carriage ride across the Allegheny Mountains and seemingly not asking for payment. Would I be a fool to decline? Or would I be a fool to accept?

  I had a choice. I could tell this man the truth. That I was not the Clara Kelley for whom he was looking. That Clara Kelley was a common enough name. That the second-class passenger Clara Kelley for whom he was waiting probably never made it off the ship ferrying her here from Ireland if he had not yet come across her. Cholera and typhoid took many of us from all classes of travel. Illness did not discriminate. It was perhaps the one thing that did not.

  Or I could become that other Clara Kelley. At least until I got to Pittsburgh.

  I stared at the black carriage, trying to decide. On board the Envoy, I had promised myself that I wouldn’t wait any longer, that I would take my future in my own hands when I could.

  The man opened the door to the carriage for me. “Come on, miss.”

  I glanced up at him and said, “My apologies for the delay, sir. It won’t happen again.” And then I climbed up the steps into the carriage.

  Chapter Three

  November 4, 1863

  Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

  The carriage was not empty. Once my eyes adjusted to the dim interior, I saw that there were two other girls inside. Both were near my age, with the reddish hair of my people, but there, the similarities stopped. Wearing dresses with crinoline underskirts peeking out at the hem, thick silk sashes, high necklines with lace collars, and wide pagoda sleeves, the girls had clothes finer and more fashionable than anything I’d ever owned. Finer than anything I’d ever seen, in fact, except the two occasions I served as a temporary kitchen maid for a holiday meal at Castle Martyn, the medieval citadel owned by the Martyn family, who served as landlord to all the farmers in our region.

  Who in the name of Mary was this Clara Kelley I’d become?

  From their gawking, I saw that the girls found me as alien as I found them. But I could not let on, or I risked losing my place in the carriage. How could I best ensure that I stepped into the mysterious shoes that the other Clara left me to fill?

  Not by speaking in my usual manner, that was for certain. These girls didn’t look as though their accents would match my farmer’s daughter’s West Ireland lilt, no matter how posh our fellow neighbors found it compared to their own,
thanks to Dad’s education of us girls. And I guessed the other Clara Kelley spoke like them. Not me.

  Mrs. Seeley’s man poked his head into the carriage. “Miss Kelley, I need to load your trunk onto the carriage. Where is it?”

  How could I answer that the rucksack slung over my shoulder contained the entirety of my worldly possessions? The real Clara Kelley undoubtedly had traveled with trunks large enough to carry the kind of dresses these girls wore, and my bag was so small that it wouldn’t hold even a single one of my treasured volumes of history and poetry, only my necessaries. No matter my efforts, Dad’s battered copy of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, which he had used as inspiration for his earlier political involvement with the Fenians and I used as a primer to understand American life before my departure, would not fit. Leaving behind those books, from which Dad had educated all his daughters (much to the outcry of our farming neighbors), was nearly as hard as leaving behind my family.

  I answered, “My apologies, sir. I should have told you that my trunk was lost en route.” I prayed that these words bore a good approximation of an Anglo-Irish accent, with which I assumed my carriage-mates spoke. My model was the Martyn family.

  The Martyns. It pained me to conjure them up in any form, even as a reference point. Their actions were the cause of my departure. When rumors surfaced again about Dad’s years-earlier alignment with the Fenians—an Irish-led movement that maintained Ireland should be its own state, that farmers should have fair rent and fixity of tenure, and that all people should have rights and the ability to better themselves, it had arisen from the near nonexistent assistance offered by English leaders to the sufferers of the Irish famine—the Anglo-Irish Martyns retaliated. Bit by bit, the Martyns took away land from the twenty-acre tenant farm Dad had amassed, a size permitting the crop diversity that allowed our family to survive the famine, unlike so many with the standard one-acre tenancies that could grow one crop only, the decimated potato. Our family needed another source of income to bank against the reduction in the family’s earnings, and I was to be that other source. Lord Marytn, his wife, and their daughter might as well have placed me on the Envoy themselves and steered the ship through the rough Atlantic waters to America.

  “Lost?” the driver asked.

  Did he not understand my feigned accent, or was it skepticism I saw in his eyes? Either way, he was questioning my explanation, and I had to stay firm.

  “Yes, sir. Lost in a squall.” As soon as the lie spilled from my lips, I regretted it.

  The girls, who had been surreptitiously watching this exchange behind the slow wave of their fans, openly stared. They too were on board the Envoy, and while the boat regularly cut through rough chop and suffered through the storm that had flooded steerage, no squall had pummeled the old whaling ship. Would the girls reveal my lie?

  He tilted his head in clear disbelief. “A squall? These girls said nothing of it. Nor have I heard any talk of a squall among the sailing folk.”

  “Yes, sir.” I nodded emphatically. The girls’ askance expression or no, I had to adhere to my claim and convince this man.

  Shaking his head, in disbelief or frustration, I could not tell, the man slammed shut the carriage door. I was left alone with the two girls, who had curiously chosen to keep my secret. For now.

  The crack of a whip broke the awkward silence, and the carriage lurched forward. The careening took us off guard, and at first, we were all preoccupied with restoring our belongings and ourselves to order. Once the carriage began rumbling along with only the odd jerk when the wheels hit a rock or rut, the uncomfortable quiet and scrutiny began again.

  I stared out the window, pretending to be engrossed in the passing sights. It started as a ruse to avoid the girls’ gaze, but as the minutes passed, my astonishment was genuine. As the carriage left the harbor and progressed into the grid of Philadelphia streets, I saw no gray stone buildings climbing with moss and ivy. None of the verdancy and history of Galway existed in this new city. Instead, the streets were wide and straight, intersecting at right angles, and abounded with redbrick buildings trimmed with bright-white columns and window sashes as well as freshly painted signs proclaiming the name of the purveyors and their wares. Everything here looked tidy and freshly hewn, though not as elegantly designed as the Dublin and London buildings and squares of which I had seen engravings in Dad’s books.

  “Miss Kelley?”

  I looked away from the window. “Yes, Miss—” I realized that I had not been properly introduced to the girls.

  “I am Miss Coyne, and this is Miss Quinn. You told the driver that you were on board the Envoy?”

  Now I understood. Even though the girls chose to keep my secret from Mrs. Seeley’s man for reasons known only to them, they weren’t going to let me off so easily in the privacy of the carriage. I would have to maintain my confidence, no matter our shared, unspoken understanding that my story was, at least in part, fabrication. “Yes, I was.”

  “In the second-class cabin?”

  “Yes.” I hoped I sound convincing. I needed to tread carefully, or they might reveal my lie to Mrs. Seeley’s man and ruin this opportunity.

  “Curious. Neither Miss Quinn nor I saw you during the long days of travel.”

  “Nor I you. Although from my vantage point, I did not see much of anything or anyone during the voyage.” My words, spoken slowly and deliberately to maintain the accent, sounded false to my ears.

  “Your vantage point?”

  “The floor of a laundress’s cabin. My seasickness was so profound, no one would bunk with me.” I gestured to my dress. “It also explains the dowdiness of my attire. None of my own gowns survived my illness. I was forced to buy clothing from a shipmate.”

  The girls recoiled in unison at the very word seasickness. Although they might have suffered from the same affliction, it was not considered polite to discuss the reality of the common sailing condition. It shut down the conversation, as I’d hoped.

  I returned to my window and tried to keep my attention fixed on the world of curiosities unfolding before me. But the whispering of the girls distracted me, and I used the opportunity to try and glean a few words and phrases from their hushed mutterings. “Seeley,” “service,” and “Mrs. Carnegie” were only a few that stood out from their murmurs.

  “Did I hear the driver say that you were headed to Mrs. Seeley in Pittsburgh?” The other girl, Miss Quinn, spoke this time.

  “I am. Are you as well?”

  “We are indeed. Do you know to whom you will be posted?”

  What did she mean by “posted”? Wracking my mind for a response, I thought on the whispers I had overheard and pieced together an understanding of her question. Perhaps she was asking to whom I would be placed in service. Was that the role Mrs. Seeley played, matching employers with servants? If so, she must be asking what family I would be serving.

  After an uncomfortably long pause during which my fear of giving the wrong answer paralyzed me, Miss Quinn asked, “You aren’t going to serve Mrs. Carnegie, are you?”

  I grasped at her suggestion. “Yes. Yes I am.”

  The girls shot a glance at one another. I interpreted nothing of its meaning. “You are to be the new lady’s maid to Mrs. Margaret Carnegie? We were considered for that role, but then Mrs. Seeley realized that our educations qualified us for the more important positions of tutors.” This time, their meaning was unmistakable. Clearly, they deemed me unsuitable for the role. Most mistresses would agree. I looked like a farmer’s daughter—which I was—and such girls were rarely permitted above the station of scullery maid, if they were ever permitted into service at all.

  “Yes,” I answered, steeling my voice. If the girls wished to challenge this role I was playing, then better the battle commence here than in front of Mrs. Seeley. Whoever she was. At least then I would already be in Pittsburgh.

  Miss Quin
n was cowed by the steadiness of my stare, and her eyes shifted to the floor. But Miss Coyne held my gaze and finally spoke the thoughts that had been brewing. “Well, you certainly don’t look the part. A servant’s appearance conveys not only her standing but the standing of her mistress, as a lady’s maid should well know. As tutors to the daughters of the Oliver and Standish families, I can assure you we would be rejected out of hand if we were to appear for our positions dressed like you, Miss Kelley. Seasickness or not.” She crinkled her tiny nose as if the very thought of nausea conjured up its smell. “But then you will be serving the Carnegie family, and I understand that they are new in their rise. Perhaps they don’t yet know the difference in servants.” The girls giggled at Miss Coyne’s boldness.

  If Miss Coyne hoped to discourage me by her words, she was wrong. In fact, her words had the opposite effect. They only wedded me to this new role I played, firing the stubborn determination Mum and Dad often accused me of having in droves. It was that determination they hoped would serve me well in America and perhaps pave the rest of the family’s way here, if the Martyns exacted the worst upon the family.

  Reminding myself of my parents’ síofra label, I thought about how this new Clara Kelley would respond. I smiled sweetly and folded my hands in my lap. “Doesn’t Proverbs say that ‘strength and honor are her clothing’? I think I’ll let my character—character of which Mrs. Seeley is undoubtedly aware—speak for me in lieu of my clothes.”

  Chapter Four

  November 11, 1863

  Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

  Mrs. Seeley stared at me as though she could see beneath the tattered dress I wore, straight through the story I’d started to tell, and deep into the identity of the Clara Kelley I truly was. My false confidence started to slip away. Fear began to replace it, and I knew that if I didn’t right myself and stare straight into Mrs. Seeley’s eyes as the Clara Kelley I pretended to be, this opportunity would be lost. The prize that Mrs. Seeley held, a coveted job, so recently unimaginable but now in my sights, would be gone forever.