Libertie by Kaitlyn Greenidge (best short novels .txt) 📗

“My mother lets you come and go.”

“I’m not a servant here,” he said, sounding offended, which seemed strange to me.

“She never did with me,” I said. “I could only leave the clinic for errands. She said if I got too used to wandering off on my own, it would break my concentration. She knew it took me so long to work it up.”

“So you were a servant then. The little scullery maid, forced to become a doctor.”

“It was not so bad,” I said. “If you were a girl given to that work.”

We walked on a bit longer in silence. Then I took a breath. “Has my mother told you how she taught herself anatomy? When she was a girl my age, there was a cholera outbreak downtown. She followed the gravediggers for a day, until she found a baby’s body, asked for it, and took it to her father’s barn to dissect. She did it because they wouldn’t let her work with the cadavers.”

I am not sure why I told him this, this secret my mother kept. It was a story she did not even trust to Lenore, and only told me when my dedication waned, when she suspected I would not work hard enough, to shock me into diligence. It had worked, but I had told no one since.

Now I looked over at Emmanuel Chase. I had told him, too, to shock him, to see if it could shake that look off his face. But he was saying nothing, only looking back at me, as if what I had said was perfectly normal, as if he’d expected no less from me or from her. So I took an even deeper breath, and told him my greatest secret.

“I am not so passionate as my mother,” I said. “I could not do something like that.”

He nodded, and then he let his hand brush against mine and took it in his. We kept going like that, hand in hand, not speaking, only looking at the road laid out before us until we could see the turn for my mother’s house. Then he squeezed my hand once and tossed it away from him. I thought, in this new language we were building together, that maybe it meant he believed I was passionate after all.

“Good afternoon, then, Libertie,” he said. And he turned to go back the way we’d come.

I was at the front door again, but I could not bring myself to go in.

I had admired my mother, in her ability to use the people around her for greater good: the baby in the bush; Mr. Ben and his delusions; the matrons who funded her hospital. I had thought myself a coward that I could not do the same. I had burnt in anger at a physics of the world that my mother took as given. And even in that anger, I had failed to do anything, had been disgraced as a student. I was no one’s promise.

But Dr. Emmanuel Chase still thought me good. Or, at least, thought of me as someone to admire. Mama had made it clear my anger was useless, unbecoming, superfluous in this world. But anger looked marvelous on Dr. Chase. It gave him a conviction, a heaviness, that he would not have had if he was sweet, if he was asked to be as polite as I was. He would be my avatar.

Through him, I could taste righteousness.

And he understood me. I thought.

To choose him would be to hurt my mother in a way I was not even sure of yet. I knew it would make a wound. I did not know then how deep, or how lasting.

I had been a success in something after all, and there were too many people to fit into the church alone. The children would marry in the copse of trees, which we hung with garlands of flowers. Colored people came from Manhattan, from Jersey, from Long Island. Some even came up from Philadelphia, on the word of Lucien and Madame Elizabeth. The whole thing had turned into a kind of homecoming for the older people, some of whom had not seen one another since the war ended, who cried as they embraced, who walked together arm in arm, who stopped to whisper to one another or sometimes draw back to laugh at some change in fortune.

Sometimes, when I looked up from wiping a child’s nose, I saw my mother in the crowd. She was on the arm of Madame Elizabeth, and the two of them were always in the midst of at least five other ladies. None of the former members of the LIS—that was not to be. But a few women stood gravely beside her as she spoke, and only allowed themselves to smile when Madame Elizabeth broke in and interrupted her.

Suddenly, Mama looked up and caught my eye, and I looked away. I crushed the purse at my side, just to hear the crinkle of a piece of paper there. It was a note, slipped under my door that morning in the small span of time between the Graces leaving the bed and when I turned over in sleep. The note was addressed to Erzulie, and it had been written in a hand I had not seen before but had known immediately who it belonged to.

“You need to say ‘dearly beloved,’” I told Chester, the boy we had picked to play minister.

He looked up at me and twisted his face into a scowl.

“You need to at least try raising your hand at them,” Emmanuel Chase called.

I raised my hand half-heartedly, but the boy had already jerked his arm free, and now he ran.

“You showed him your bluff,” Emmanuel Chase said as he came closer. “You’re too kind.”

“You would not call me kind if you knew me.”

“But I do know you, or at least the most important part of you,” he said. “You are my