Mrs. Baker had gotten rid of Eliza’s atlases before I arrived, so all I had to entertain me were edifying texts about good girls and boys, eating apples, playing in creeks, and obeying their parents. I found, however, that the paper in these books was satisfactorily thick, just begging for sharp scissor blades to sink into the beige card stock. Since no one but me ever looked in the books, I could cut them up as I pleased, starting from the back to make my vandalism less noticeable. Some pages I cut into tiny triangles to hide in the winter boots that sat at the back of my closet, and some I fringed like the dress of a cowgirl from the Old West show I had been taken to see just the year before.
Tonight I was cutting a careful halo around the head of the industrious little girl with the sewing basket when the door creaked open and Daisy peered in. I froze on my bed, scissors guiltily still, and she slipped in like water through a grate, shutting the door behind her.
“Well!” she said in her oddly husky voice. “So you’re the heathen!”
I shoved the paper and scissors under my pillow, sitting up so my bare legs dangled over the edge of the bed. I wore a ribboned lawn nightgown, but Daisy was well turned out in a short dress of rustling mauve silk. Her neat black boots and dark stockings made me think of the fox kit I had seen in the backyard just a few nights before. Like the fox kit, she was utterly fearless, coming into my room, taking in it and me with an innocent avarice in her large blue eyes. That night she was ten years old, two years older than the age Eliza Baker had guessed I was, just my own age in truth, though it would be a long time before I found that out.
“I was hoping I might see you tonight,” she continued. “Mother said that you were no different from the ones who wash our clothes, but you are different, aren’t you? I can tell, you’re not like them at all—you’re something else…”
I wanted to put my hands over my ears to fend off her flood of words. Mrs. Baker was parsimonious with her speech, the judge even more so. I took my education at home with a tutor, and so I had never heard anything like Daisy’s chatter before. More to stem her words than from any eagerness on my part, I answered her.
“I was saved from Tonkin,” I told her. “Miss Eliza saved me. When I was little.”
Her eyes went as large and round as saucers. I saw the white all around them and I thought of a horse running mad. She crossed the small space between us as familiarly as if it were her own room, snatching up my hand in hers. Her hand was hot and soft. She smelled just faintly of citrus, pepper, pine, and musk, her mother’s Blenheim Bouquet dabbed modestly behind her well-formed ears. The scent made me pause before pushing her away, but in my imagination, it clung to me.
“Oh darling, you must tell me all about Tonkin! I was born in boring old Louisville, and I have never been anywhere at all! I’ve heard of Tonkin. Papa knows men who trade there, when the French let them, and it sounds so much more beautiful and elegant and fine than China. Tell me about it, please!”
“I was very young…” I said, but as the excitement drained from her eyes, I felt a surge of desperation, unformed and wordless but no less powerful. I clung more tightly to her hand. I did not want to be alone.
I remembered what Miss Eliza had said about Heaven, where there would be gold in the streets, but no one would care. She was unable to rise from her bed by then, but she whispered about Heaven as if she could see it just beyond the canopy of her bed, touch it if only she could sit up.
“It’s gold,” I blurted out. “The roofs and the walls and even the roads. At noon, we had to sleep because the sun made it shine so bright it might have blinded us.”
“A city of gold?”
If there had been any doubt or animosity in her voice, I would have cried at having been caught in such a lie. I didn’t remember Tonkin at all, or at least, I told myself I didn’t, but I knew that it had certainly not been leafed with gold.
Instead, there was nothing but pure credulous excitement in her eyes, and she leaned in closer, coming to sit with me on the bed.