Clara was consigned to the servant quarters in the basement. Her bedroom was windowless, airless, more like a cave or a prison cell. I was given a comfortable room upstairs. We saw each other daily but it was dangerous for us to speak. Clara was threatened with a whipping if she said a word to me...
Around him in the compartment, and in the tourist compartment behind him, were 130 of his well-wishers and supporters, participants in this “Pilgrimage to Rome.” That was Mike Furia’s name for it. When Joe Cohane headlined it in the archdiocesan paper, the grandiosity made Matthew Mahan slightly ...
He caught me at the door of Moffat House and complimented me on the dress I was wearing. It was scarcely a dress at all but one of the new jackets and skirts worn by women office workers, without an iota of brocade or frills. The fine dresses the Fenian ladies had bought me a year ago were showin...
THE FOLLOWING morning, Caleb Chandler began his journey back to Morristown. Wiert Bogert and John Nelson escorted him across the Hudson at the usual place, several miles north of New York City. Above them, for the first time in months, a few random stars glinted through broken clouds. The Great C...
They are just what we would be in their situation. If slavery did not now exist amongst them, they would not now introduce it. . . . I surely will not blame them [Southerners] for not doing what I should not know how to do myself. If all earthly power were given to me, I should not know what to d...
His maternal grandmother, Mary Uppington Fawcett, separated from her dour, aging husband, Dr. John Fawcett, and moved from the West Indian island of Nevis to neighboring St. Kitts with her only surviving child, Rachel. Mary must have been extremely unhappy; she gave up her rights to Dr. Fawcett’s...
Dick Stone found himself wishing it was a real fire, not one of nature’s electrical stunts. Beside him, Amalie Borne read Elle, the French fashion magazine, relentlessly tearing out page after page of dresses she intended to buy in Paris. It was insane, his doomed irresistible love for this woman...
THE WORD ECHOED AND re-echoed in Janet Todd’s head. He was a soldier who lived on risk. He admired other people who lived the same way. Her tongue moved slowly across her bruised lips. He loved her—he had almost confessed it out there in the darkness beneath the cottonwoods. He had been on the br...
Above him, light seemed drained from the gray sky. With the windchill factor the temperature had to be twenty degrees below zero. His body was a piece of frozen meat; a curiously satisfying thought. Father Hart jogged every day, regardless of the weather. Yesterday he had jogged in driving, sting...