She finishes the quotation in her head. Made glorious summer by this son of York. Why leave off the hopeful part? The windows of Tudor Hall glow yellow with lamplight. Someday this will feel like home, Asia thinks, and then how welcome a sight that light will be.
The Halls have already unpacked for them and made it comfortable, fire in the fireplace, tapers on the tables, lamps in the windows. Furniture in the rooms, dishes on the shelves, clothes in the wardrobes. The walls and floors are clean and new and every room smells of freshly sawn wood.
Ann Hall and Aunty Rogers are waiting with a supper Asia is too tired and too sad to eat. She watches as the two women hug her mother, each holding on long enough to bring Mother to tears. “It’ll be all right,” they tell her. “Everything will be all right,” but they, too, are crying even as they say it. They hug the children next, all except for Joe who ducks away, hightails it up the stairs before anyone can lay a hand on him.
“What a beauty you’ve become,” Aunty Rogers tells Asia, as if she hasn’t said this same thing to Asia every time she’s seen her for the last two years. Most recently, at Father’s funeral.
Aunty Rogers holds her at a distance for a better look, then pulls her close so that Asia’s skirt flattens at the front, bells out over its hoop behind. “You’ve got the Booth eyes. Same as Edwin.” Aunty Rogers has doused herself liberally with a fashionable scent—bergamot and lemon. Ann smells of butter and sugar and cinnamon and is warmer to the touch.
Asia feels Father’s absence here as acutely as she feels it anywhere. Even though he never set foot in the finished house, he’s a tangible, erroneous emptiness. She remembers his excitement as Tudor Hall began to rise. “The only way I could ever be happy in a city,” he’d once told her, “is if we didn’t have to share it with anyone else. If we had the whole place to ourselves and no one ever knew we were there.”
Later that night, the wind picks up outside. Asia hears it gusting around the house, whipping the trees, rattling the windows. But she’s in her new bedroom, under the covers, warm and dry and safe inside the house her father had built. Rosalie is back in their shared bedroom, at least until Mother needs her in the night.
Asia speaks to Rosalie across the darkness between their beds. “Do you think we’ll be happy here?”
At first Rosalie seems to be asleep; she takes that long to answer. Finally the whisper comes. “I doubt it,” Rosalie says. “I can’t think why we would be.” So, as is often the case with Rosalie, Asia is sorry she asked. The effort of countering her family’s continual gloom is exhausting. Tudor Hall is Father’s last dream, his last gift. She decides to love it. Rosalie can do as she likes.
* * *
—
Asia and Rosalie:
Twelve and a half years separate the family’s two surviving girls. At the time of their father’s death, Rosalie is almost thirty, Asia just seventeen. There is nothing to suggest that they were close, though all those years of sharing a bedroom must have produced an intimacy.
Two sisters have seldom been less alike.
Asia is much the better educated. She’s been to a convent school and also a college for girls, where the standards and expectations were stringent and masculine. Competition was encouraged. Domesticity disparaged. The girls, addressed only by their last names, were told not to be soft. They played all the games of the rougher sex—ball, quoits, archery. Asia excelled at mathematics and science.
Rosalie attended school for only a few months in England. She thinks she liked it, but doesn’t remember for sure.
* * *
—
The farm was Rosalie’s first home. As a child, she ran about with the other children who lived there. She sees how hard Ann and Joe work, every minute of every day, to buy their very own daughters, their very own sons.
She remembers her grandfather’s lectures—
—that freedom is God-given while the law is man-made. So any law that gives one man the ownership of another is a moral deformity and abhorrent to God.
—that, in fact, the word owner should never be used when speaking of slavery, as no man can ever truly own another.
—Quaeque ipse miserrima vidi et quorum pars magna fui, as Grandfather would say, though Aeneas said it first. With my own eyes, I have seen heartbreaking things and even been a part of them.
Rosalie has read the recently published Uncle Tom’s Cabin and wept her way through it.
Asia barely remembers her grandfather. She grew up in the white neighborhoods of Baltimore and the only blacks she saw regularly were the women who did the laundry and the men hired to walk her to and from school. On the farm, she makes a visit every Monday out to the cabins, like a lady of the manor. “They flock around me,” she writes to Jean Anderson, her dearest friend back in Baltimore. “I really think I am beloved by the poor and the black.”
* * *
—
Rosalie is painfully shy. “The Talmud sayeth, ‘Allah sent ten measures of garrulity to earth and the women took nine.’ Rose thinks I got my share and hers, too. For a fact nature cheated her tongue of its right and my brain of its wisdom,” Asia says.
In a year or two, Asia will start referring to Rosalie as an invalid.
She’ll say that her sister has suffered from early childhood with an unspecified ailment. All her siblings routinely call her “Poor Rose.” They use the phrase so often Poor has all but become Rosalie’s Christian name.
Exactly what is so pitiable in her remains unclear. She isn’t housebound—she makes occasional trips to Baltimore, visits friends and goes shopping. But she is reclusive. She prefers books to people and spends much of her day seated. When she walks, she’s slightly askew, which gives rise to rumors of drink.
Asia, on the other hand, is in constant motion, a tomboy who hikes and climbs trees. She dances across the streams, balancing on stones and logs in her full and inconvenient skirts. She and Johnny often ride together, galloping and jumping the horses—sidesaddle for her—the two of them singing loudly as they go.
* * *
—
“Not handsome, but noble,” one neighbor says of Rosalie. It’s the closest thing to a compliment on her looks that Rosalie ever gets and that only the once. Meanwhile, Asia is rarely mentioned without someone noting what a beauty she is. She has black hair, a thin face, enormous eyes.
Asia makes conquests. Dan Burke asks for a daguerreotype of her, her hair parted in the middle, smooth in the front, clusters of curls in the back. George Mattingly, shown the image, sends her a poem entitled “Miss Asia’s Picture.” Jesse Wharton publishes his verses to her in the Harford Gazette. Henry Lee presses a silver ring into her hand and spins stories of a life together in a vine-covered cottage. Sleeper Clarke has loved her since she was eight years old.
Many nights Rosalie drifts to sleep thinking of her lost love, her forbidden love, Jacob, the lion tamer. The relationship was so brief, provides so little fodder, that it requires novelistic augmentation. Years have passed and she no longer knows which memories are real and which a dream. Nor does she even understand that she’s made things up. In her mind, all of it is real.
* * *
—
There is, however, this one thing Rosalie and Asia have always had in common. They share a conviction, held by their mother and Father, too, when he was alive, that the important people in the family are the boys.