Alias Dragonfly Read Online Free Page A

before, but you know how they can be.”
    “We don’t know,” my father said. “Nellie seems a fine woman. Goodnight, Salome.”
    “I do declare,” my aunt muttered over and over as she bustled off.
    “There are forty-six roses on each wall,” I said. “Now let’s get out of here, Papa.”
    He just sighed and I silently unpacked my things; the buttercup yellow chemise Mama made me, a linsey-woolsey day dress, my favorite coveralls I wore most every day, two woolen work-shirts, a straw hat, and a handkerchief that belonged to Mama, her sweet scent; lilacs and summer rain, still on it. I held it to my face, inhaling the last of her.
    “We have to let her go, Maddie.” Papa said softly as he traced his finger across a sampler Mama finished on one of her better days. On it, a little girl with brown braids stood waist high in tall summer grass, nubbins of thread making freckles on her face. She was pointing at the sky. On the bottom Mama had written My Madeline , and the year, 1857 . Papa put it on the dresser and closed the trunk containing his belongings with a thud and a snap of the latch. “Jenny,” he whispered.
    Papa had tears in his eyes. I’d cried so hard earlier mine were nearly swollen shut.
    “We’ll make it through, Maddie. Somehow. Find your strength.” Papa curled up in a big, overstuffed chair, and I fell exhausted into a small spindle bed. My feet hung over the end.
    The last thing I remember before sleep finally came was Nellie’s chicken, struggling to right itself and run away.

Four
     
    Raucous cries of “Knives for the lady! Pots fine! Rags and bones, ashes too!” jolted me awake. I peeked through the window over my bed and saw a crush of carts and carriages, mules and soldiers all massed in the street below. I thought about our tiny, quiet cabin on the riverbank and Mama dancing like a fairy princess in a patch of sunlight on the grass.
    I splashed water on my face and tried to run a comb through my tangles of hair. I saw two dresses lying across the chair in my room. One was a pale, yellow homespun with a high white collar and a wide skirt. The other was a lightweight spring frock, faded brownish, sewn by a careless hand, uneven stitches up the bodice and down the front. A stiff petticoat and a small hoop with metal scaffolding sat like a collapsed pumpkin beside it. A corset with cotton laces, a pair of scratched leather high button boots, a tan porkpie hat and green bonnet completed my new wardrobe. My black dress and stockings were jammed into the drawer of an old wooden wardrobe. That was okay. I never wanted to see them again. I hated wearing black for Mama. She was all brightness, like my own sun.
    But I guessed—rightly, I might add—that even though it sounded like I’d be a mere scullery maid in that house, Aunt Salome wanted me to look like something resembling a lady.
    My father was still sleeping. I gave him a quick kiss on the forehead and went behind a tattered dressing screen to change out of my high-necked sleeping gown into my clothes.
    I put on the yellow dress, the petticoat and hoop skirt, that was too short for me. I’d never worn such garb back in Portsmouth. Mama said hoops made folks look like they might tip over in a light wind.
    “Besides, darling,” she’d say, in her lilting Irish brogue, “the mark of a fine lady lies not in her hoops, but in her manner and mind.”
    I peeked at myself in a looking glass that hung on the wall. The color made my face pale, and my freckles looked like deep brown dots rampaging across my nose. The boots pinched my feet worse than my black, scuffed up ones. I sighed, and like a sailing craft pitching on a rough sea, I went to find my aunt.
    Her boardinghouse had three stories and ten rooms: an entrance parlor, six bedrooms and a sewing room. Of course, Nellie’s room was the tiniest, just off the kitchen. There was a small door I’d seen when Papa and I were there I imagined led to a cellar.
    The furnishings were a