Free Mrs. Poe by Lynn Cullen Page B

at Miss Lynch’s insistence on moderation, especially had he learned that she and her mother, with whom she lived, were actually quite well-off. It infuriated him when those who had money would not flaunt it. He thought them dishonest. Only the rich, he said not a little bitterly, can afford to act like income does not matter. I wondered if he would ever return to New York. He was missing the opportunity to fish in this new pool of wealthy beauties while mocking their intellectual pretensions. Whoever had hooked him now must have pots of gold to be keeping him away for so long. Or maybe he just cared that little about his children and me.
    Vinnie stroked the shiny satin of my skirt as Mary arranged my low-cut neckline around my shoulders. “You look pretty, Mamma. You’re going to be the prettiest lady there.”
    She did not know of Mrs. Butler, whose beauty was renowned on both sides of the Atlantic, nor of Miss Lynch, with her kittenish pink-and-white sweetness.
    “I hardly think so, dear, but thank you. Thank you, Mary,” I said when she’d finished.
    “You do look nice, ma’am.”
    I smiled at Mary, whose plain dress could not hide her own brightbeauty. With large dark blue eyes accentuated by a beauty mark below the left one, and the red cheeks and mouth and dark hair of the Black Irish, she was as breathtaking as the green countryside from which she’d come. Some man would claim her soon and Eliza would be out a competent children’s nurse.
    Ellen, sitting on my bed, said, “I wish Papa could see you. Then he’d never go away.”
    I stepped over and gathered her to me, furious at Samuel for hurting his daughters and, worse, for being so self-involved that he had no idea he was hurting them.
    “I don’t think there is anything that you or I could have done to make him stay here, love. He’ll come back, as soon as he can. It has nothing to do with us.”
    Ellen’s face crumpled with doubt. “Has he written yet?”
    “No.”
    “Maybe you should have been nicer to him.”
    I opened my arm for Vinnie, suddenly tearful, and brought her close, too. “Your papa loves you both very, very much. How can he help it?” I kissed the tops of their heads in punctuation: “You are the most lovable, most clever, most adorably silly girls in the world.”
    I stood back with a smile, although my heart was breaking for them. “Well,” I said brightly, “what kind of necklace do you think Miss Fuller will have on tonight—made of shells, bones, or animal’s teeth?”
    Vinnie wiped her eye. “Bones.” Both she and her sister had met Miss Fuller on afternoon promenades down Broadway last fall, when the weather had been fair. As one would guess, Miss Fuller’s distinctive dress had left an indelible impression on them.
    “Teeth.” Ellen retreated again into her solemn facade. “People teeth.”
    “That is possible,” I said. “Maybe she’ll stop off at the dentist’s on the way to the party and get herself a few.”
    Ellen frowned. “Maybe she steals them from people.”
    “Ellen!” My overly shocked tone brought out her smile.
    As they exchanged gory and inappropriate ideas for how Miss Fuller might bolster her supply of teeth, I examined a sudden thought for a shivery story. What if a beautiful woman who had lost her teeth due to illness forced her maid to give up her own teeth and had themimplanted in her gums, only to find that she was starting to think and speak like the maid . . . ?
    I shook my head to clear it of ugliness. How could I ever write the kind of poetry that was selling well when dwelling on the dark side unnerved me? How did Mr. Poe bear it? You would think that his mind was ill. Yet the Mr. Poe I was beginning to know did not seem ill at all, but steady and even thoughtful, when I spoke to him alone. To be honest, more honest than I could be with Eliza, I found that I liked him a great deal.
    As I fastened on my ear bobs, a pair Samuel had given me when he had been courting me—a