Free Sister Noon by Karen Joy Fowler Page A

dark, in the dead of winter, on a whim.” There was an uneven place in the road. Lizzie stumbled.
    One man offered his arm. One man offered to take Jenny.
    Lizzie refused both offers. She carried Jenny without stopping, all the way to the edge of the Brown Ark’s sandy yard, though her arms and back ached as a result. The men strolled beside her, smoking cigars and continuing a private conversation about a friend named Darby who’d recently fallen down a flight of stairs and yet was planning a balloon ascension. Lizzie tried twice more to send them off, but they were enjoying her embarrassment too much.It was highly likely that one, at least, had blue eyes, but Lizzie refused to permit either of them the dignity of being portentous. There’d be plenty more blue-eyed men to choose from, men she liked better. When she turned in at the Ark, they finally left her, tipping their hats and congratulating themselves, no doubt, on their fine manners.
    Lizzie was so angry her jaw hurt. She paused outside to remove Jenny’s shoes and brush the sand from her stockings. “Let’s not tell,” she suggested. “Can you keep a secret?”
    “Yes,” said Jenny. Lizzie suspected she excelled at it.
    “Of course, if they ask us right out, did you walk to Mrs. Pleasant’s last night, we won’t lie,” Lizzie added. “You must never tell a lie, Jenny.”
    She led Jenny up the stairs to her cot, helped her undress and get into her nightgown. There was no movement or sound; the abandoned girls slept like princesses, each with a scuffed pair of shoes waiting by the bed.
    Lizzie returned to the cupola, wishing for her bed at home. She could not get comfortable; she was not tired enough. Cold, anger, and the itchy settee kept her awake. Her first escapade, and nothing had come of it but her own ridiculous panic and the insults of chivalrous men. She had been laughed at in the public streets.
    But by the morning she saw things quite differently. She had gotten away with it completely. Surely her impulsiveness could only improve. It just wanted practice.

FOUR
    B y morning Lizzie was finally tired. She went home for a restorative nap. On the breakfast table, she found an invitation from the Putnams. “I’ll watch over Lizzie until the day she weds,” Mrs. Putnam had once promised Lizzie’s mother, and she’d been as good as her word. Lizzie’s mother was on her deathbed at the time, so the promise was a binding one. So many people watching over Lizzie! Of course, no one had imagined Lizzie’s wedding day to be quite so far off as it was proving.
    She slit the Putnams’ invitation open with her father’s marble-handled letter knife and read that she was to be included in an evening of inquiry, in Suite 540 at the Palace. Dr. Ellinwood, a medium visiting from Philadelphia, would host an informal discussion of spiritism and itscompatibility with the tenets of Christianity. If the aspects were favorable, if the guests then desired it, Dr. Ellinwood was prepared to contact the dead. “Such an obliging man,” Mrs. Putnam wrote, “for you can’t imagine how exhausting Contact is.”
    And yet Lizzie could imagine this perfectly well. Lizzie didn’t really want to talk to the dead. It was a difficult thing to say to the Putnams. It was a difficult thing to acknowledge even to herself. Her parents had loved her. They were entitled to be deeply missed. Lizzie didn’t want to be present when they came back and discovered they were not.
    Besides, she had gone to séances before, heard many a table rapped, been a link in many a magnetic chain. In her experience, the dead had surprisingly little of interest to say. It seemed to be all me, me, me, after you died.
    And on the other hand, the Palace! Eight hundred rooms, seven floors, and an enormous amber skylight topping the whole. The opulent hotel had been built with the profits of the Comstock Lode supplemented by the embezzlement of the Bank of California. Leland Stanford was the first