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Violet Fire Chapter OneMississippi, 1875
Grace O'Rourke sat perfectly erect, shoulders stiff and squared, gloved hands clasped primly in her lap. She looked out from beneath a gray bonnet at the passing countryside-green and lush and so very hot in August. They had passed through rolling, wooded hills and small, cultivated plots of land, by vast fields of cotton, shimmering white in the sun, ragged shacks with sagging roofs, and huge, partially destroyed antebellum mansions, with blackened-out windows, a testimony to the recent past. The train was already chugging its way across Mississippi. In a very few hours she would arrive at her destination. Unconsciously, her hands tightened.
She made a nondescript figure in her dowdy gray traveling suit. There was a light dusting of freckles over her perfectly small, slightly upturned, classically Irish nose. A pair of gold-rimmed spectacles also rested on that nose, but could not disguise wide, almond-shaped eyes of the most remarkable color-violet. Her mouth was lush and full, especially when relaxed and not primly pursed in thought or vexation. The hat hid every single strand of her fantastically red hair, a near impossible accomplishment, for it was a hip-length mass of untamable curls. Her eyebrows, arched above the ugly glasses, were a darker aubum, almost but not quite the exact same shade as her hair.
Grace was very anxious. She was terribly afraid that something might go wrong, that she might lose the job she was traveling to Natchez to claim. A very proper appearance was crucial. Her suit, however unflattering, was her best and that, along with the glasses,which she did not need, and thebonnet concealing her hair, made her look, she thought, properly matronly. Properly governess-like, she hoped. "Oh, dam," she finally whispered to herself, releasing some of the anxiety that had been building in her over the last few days.
The couple sitting in front of her turned to stare.
Grace smiled immediately, ignoring the man, whose red face and veined nose bespoke intemperance to her discerning eye. The woman was plump and sad-eyed, a sister in need-Grace could just feel it. They had boarded in Nashville. Grace had been waiting for the right opportunity to strike up a conversation. "It's such a shame," she said softly, gesturing at the still-magnificent ruins of yet another antebellum plantation.
"Yes, it is," the woman responded, twisting to look at her.
"I'm Grace O'Rourke, from New York City," Grace said, smiling and extending her hand. She felt a twinge of worry about using her real name, even though it was unlikely anyone would recognize her so far from home.
"I'm Martha Grimes, and this is my husband, Charles.
Charles turned too, after taking a sip from a beautifully wrought silver hip flask. "My pleasure, ma'am."
Grace nodded and turned her attention back to Martha. "Where are you from, Martha?"
"You wouldn't know it — a little town called Two Corners, fifty miles south of Nashville."
"No, I don't know it. What brings you and your husband south?"
"We're visiting our daughter in Natchez," Martha said, beaming. "She's just had her first."
"How wonderful. I'm on my way to Natchez, too. I'm a teacher."
Charles turned. "Hope you ain't one of them nigger teachers."
Grace stiffened, flushing. Do not respond, she told herself sternly. Do not. She ignored him. "Actually, a dear, old friend of mine has arranged a position for me at a plantation called Melrose. As governess."
"How wonderful," Martha said. "How many children will you have?"
"Just two," Grace said, with a deep sigh. She was so unbelievably lucky to have gotten this position. The pay was more than generous, and it included room and board. She would be able to send all of her income back home to help out her sick mother. And she would not have to augment her salary with part-time employment, the way she had done in New York.
Once she had been a New York City public schoolteacher, but she hadn't worked in ten months-ever since she had been arrested.
Grace was the daughter of abolitionists. Her father, Sian O'Rourke, was an easygoing Irish doctor who had died in the Civil War, accidentally shot while trying to tend to the wounded in the midst of battle. He and her mother, Dianna, had been active participants in the Underground Railroad and the American Anti-Slavery Society. Her mother had begun to question the role of women in society as early as the forties. With Sian's full support, she had attended the first convention for women's rights in Seneca Falls, New York, in '48, and had been lecturing and organizing ever since. After the War and her husband's death, she had turned all her attention to the women's suffrage movement, first as a member of the American Equal Rights Association, and when that divided into two camps, the radical National Woman's Suffrage Association.
It was only natural that Grace should join the cause from the time she was an adolescent. As a child she had heard many heated debates between her parents and their friends. Sometimes she had sat on her father's warm lap, held close to his chest, while he smoked a pipe, the fervent conversation echoing around the kitchen as the abolitionists and women agitators met and planned, Sian was as quiet as her mother was volatile-he had always teased her that her hair and her temper had most definitely not come from his side of the family. But when he did speak, never raising his voice, everyone stopped to listen. Those were wonderful, exciting times.
They lived in a small apartment in the city, with just the one bedroom for her parents. Grace slept on a cot in the kitchen. Both Sian and Dianna gave her her lessons, and Grace was reading avidly by the age of six-anything she could get her hands on. There were always plenty of pamphlets around. Sian was proud of his daughter's ability, and both of her parents always had time to answer her questions...
Violet Fire. Copyright © by Brenda Joyce. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
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