The Girls with No Names Read online

  New York City in the 1910s, when suffragettes marched in the streets and unions fought for better work conditions—and girls were confined to the House of Mercy for daring to break the rules.

  Not far from Luella and Effie Tildon’s large family mansion in Inwood looms the House of Mercy, a workhouse for wayward girls. The sisters grow up under its shadow, understanding that even as wealthy young women their freedoms come with limits. But when the sisters accidentally discover a shocking secret about their father, Luella, the brazen older sister, becomes emboldened to do as she pleases.

  But her rebellion comes with consequences, and one morning Luella is mysteriously gone. Effie suspects her father has made good on his threat to send Luella to the House of Mercy and hatches a plan to get herself committed to save her sister. But she made a miscalculation, and with no one to believe her story, Effie’s escape from the House of Mercy seems impossible—unless she can trust an enigmatic girl named Mable. As their fates entwine, Mable and Effie must rely on each other and their tenuous friendship to survive. This atmospheric, heartwarming story explores not only the historical House of Mercy, but the lives—and secrets—of the girls who stayed there.

  “A stunning story of sisters, friendship, secrets, and ultimately survival. I fell in love with the courageous Effie and Mable.”

  —Jillian Cantor, USA TODAY bestselling author

  “A mesmerizing tale of strength, subterfuge, and the unbreakable bond between sisters.”

  —Whitney Scharer, author of The Age of Light

  About the Author

  Serena Burdick graduated from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in California before moving to New York City to pursue a degree in English literature at Brooklyn College. Author of Girl in the Afternoon, she lives in Western Massachusetts with her husband and two sons.

  www.SerenaBurdick.com

  Also by Serena Burdick

  Girl in the Afternoon

  The Girls with No Names

  Serena Burdick

  For the girls who lost their voices to the House of Mercy; for the women whose stories will never be told.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Book One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Book Two

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Book Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Epilogue

  Jeanne

  Mable

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  I lay with my cheek pressed to the floor, the cement cool against my spent rage. I’d screamed. I’d bitten and scratched. Now I was paying for it, but I didn’t care. I’d do it again.

  Rolling onto my back, I held my hand in front of my face, but only black stared back at me. They’d left me in complete darkness. My palm throbbed where a splinter of wood had pierced it, a glorious wound of rebellion. A wash of cold air drifted across my face and I shot upright, certain it was the ghost of one of the forgotten girls. Fear pricked the soles of my feet, turning into pins and needles nicking their way up my calves. How long would they leave me here? Would they starve me, forget about me until I began to rot and stink? I imagined Sister Gertrude dumping my wasted body into a grave next to other nameless girls. My family would never know what happened.

  I crawled across the floor with the pressing need to urinate. My sister and I had spent our whole life thinking up stories, dreaming up our futures, but life was not a story. It was full of solid, irrefutable facts like the fact that I needed to pee; like this cold, hard cell and my inability to imagine any way out of it. I clenched my body trying to hold my bladder tight, but it was no use. Squatting, I hiked up my skirt and pulled down my knickers. Pee splashed down my leg and I sighed with hot relief. The acrid smell of urine mixed with the onions and garlic they kept in barrels on the other side of the door. I’d been planted underground, buried with the vegetables. I’d be found purple and bruised and unrecognizable.

  I tried counting backward from five hundred, then from one thousand. I recited scripture, but became furious with God and switched to Shakespeare. I thought of the gypsy children performing Romeo and Juliet in the rain, of Tray and Marcella and the foretelling of my future. I thought of all the mistakes I’d made. I wanted to blame my father for them, for betraying our family and sparking a rebellion in our home, but down here, trapped in the bowels of the House of Mercy, I’d forgive him anything, if only he would come for me.

  After a while, time became blurred and boundless, as it had when I was grieving for my sister. My mind grew hazy. In this windowless room, there was nothing to distinguish day from night. No way to tell a minute from an hour. When the door opened and a wan band of gray light slid in with a tray of food, I tried to guess between dawn and dusk, but I couldn’t. The door shut and darkness slammed against my eyes. I sipped the water, bit into the stale bread crusted with old molasses. It didn’t matter what time of day it was. Whether out of this room or in it, no one was coming for me.

  When I grew tired, I lay on the unforgiving floor with my hands cushioned beneath my cheek. It was a relief to escape into a different darkness. It made my fear less palpable. I could be anywhere behind my lids. I could go back. I could make another choice on that night when the simple, beautiful sound of a fiddle, in another impenetrable darkness, called to us.

  If only they hadn’t played, or my sister and I hadn’t listened.

  Book One

  Chapter One

  Effie

  Luella and I carved our place in the world together. More accurately, my sister carved and I followed, my notches secured inside the boundary of hers. She was older, courageous and unpredictable, which made it a natural mistake.

  * * *

  “Luella?” I called, afraid my sister would lose me.

  “I’m right here,” I heard, only I couldn’t see her.

  A moonless night had swallowed the woods of the upper Manhattan isle that we knew so well in daylight. Now we were stumbling, running blindly, bumping into one tree, turning and bumping into another, our hands held out in front of us, everything foreign and out of shape.

  From the depths of my blindness, my sister grabbed my arm and yanked me to a halt. I gasped for breath, my heart rattling my whole body. There wasn’t a star in the sky. My sister’s hand on my arm was the only proof I had that she stood next to me.

  “Are you all right? Can you breathe?” she asked.

  “I’m fine, but I hear the creek.”

  “I know,” Luella groaned.

  It meant we’d gone in the wrong di
rection. We should have gone directly over the hill to Bolton Road. Now we were near Spuyten Duyvil Creek and farther from our house than when we’d started.

  “We should find the road and follow it home,” I said. At least on the road there would be lights from houses.

  “That will take twice as long. Mama and Daddy will have the police out looking for us by then.”

  Our parents were worriers—Daddy for our physical well-being, Mama for our souls. I still wanted to take the road because, either way, they’d be searching soon. “It’s better than not getting home at all,” I pleaded.

  Luella moved forward, pulling me with her until she stopped abruptly. “I feel something.” She took another step. “It’s a woodpile. There must be a house around here.”

  “We’d see a light,” I whispered, the ground squishy under my feet and pungent with the smell of manure.

  “It’s worth finding out.” Luella let go of me. “I’m going on ahead. Follow the woodpile.”

  I traced my gloved hands over the rough, rounded logs until they ended and I dropped a step into empty space, the darkness like a blindfold I wanted to rip off. I could hear the rush of the creek nearby. What if we walked straight into it? A few steps more and my shoulder grazed a tree. I stretched out my arm. The trunk was massive. I followed it, my gloves snagging over the dips and grooves in the calloused bark until I suddenly knew where we were.

  “Lu!” I gasped. “We’re at the Tulip Tree.”

  Her footsteps halted. Luella and I were staunch believers in ghost tales, and everyone knew the story of the oysterman who hung himself in the rickety house next to the Tulip Tree. We’d never dared come this close to the house; not even in the light of day had we found the courage to do more than peek from the hilltop.

  There was a hiss of air through Luella’s teeth, and her tone grew sturdy. “Even if it is haunted, someone lives here. At least it’s too dark to see the oysterman’s ghost dangling from a rope in the window.”

  This was not reassuring. My throat constricted, and my breath caught in my lungs. Luella had always been braver than me. Even in normal situations I panicked with shyness. Now I was frozen solid, and as always when afraid, my imagination took over.

  * * *

  When day breaks, the girls are nowhere to be found. The sun rises and warms the hill where they last stood. The river swells in the distance under the boat of an early rising fisherman who pulls up his net, the light catching the silver fish as they writhe in protest. He dumps them on his deck and catches sight of something floating in the water—a back, curved, buoyed to the surface by a skirt that bubbles up like a bloated fish. The girl’s face is in the water, her dark hair trailing from her head like seaweed caught on a rock.

  * * *

  I shook the image from my head. The ground beneath my boots, the tree under my hands, the smell of rotting fish and manure were not my imagination. The twigs snapping under Luella’s feet were real, the rapid knock on wood, silence, then the sound of a heavy bolt sliding back and the click of a latch. A light flared and the ghastly face of a man appeared, bearded, with red-rimmed eyes and gnarled teeth exposed in a mouth wide with surprise. I screamed. The man jumped and made as if to slam the door when he saw my sister.

  “What the devil?” His voice boomed and the lantern in his hand swung, splintering light across the trees.

  I was about to scream again when I heard my sister say, honey-sweet, “I apologize for the disturbance, sir, but it appears we’ve gotten waylaid in the dark. If we could trouble you for your lantern, just to get us home, we’d be ever grateful. I’ll have it returned first thing in the morning.”

  The man held up the light and stepped forward, peering into my sister’s face, and then glanced down her dress. “We?” he said. It disgusted me the way he looked at her. I’d seen men look at my sister like that before, but we’d never been unchaperoned and alone in the dark.

  “My sister is just behind me.” Luella took a step back, closer to me, but still out of reach.

  “The screamer?” The man barked a laugh.

  “If you can’t spare a light, we’ll simply take the road.” There was a quiver to Luella’s voice as she retreated.

  “Hang on, now.” The man caught her by the arm.

  A ghost would have been better than this solid man of flesh and blood. I thought of crying out for help, but there was no one to hear us. Maybe I could lunge out of the darkness and take him by surprise, knock the light from his hand, then grab my sister and run.

  I did none of these things, standing paralyzed with fear as my sister took a step closer to the man, the hem of her skirt brushing his leg.

  “Oh, you dear, sweet thing.” She placed her hand over his that gripped her arm, the affection startling him enough to ease his hold. “Aren’t you kind to be concerned. Your chivalry will not be overlooked.” In a flash she kissed his pocked cheek, at the same time slipping her arm free and plucking the lantern from his hand. Turning swiftly with two long strides, she caught me by the hand and rushed us up the hill as fast as she could.

  Plunged into darkness, the man stood dumbfounded on his doorstep, knocked so far off balance by that kiss that I was sure for years to come he would think we were the ghosts who had come to haunt him.

  We didn’t slow down until we reached our front door where the fear of facing our parents replaced my fear of the dark and the ghost of hanging oystermen.

  Out of breath, I pitched forward with my head between my knees.

  “You’re not going to have a blue fit, are you?” Luella sounded unsympathetic. If I had a fit, our parents would blame her, since she was older and therefore responsible for me. I was not allowed to run; it was a simple rule to follow.

  I shook my head no, unable to speak as I took slow steady breaths, regaining my equilibrium.

  “Good.” She blew out the lantern, grinning at me as she stowed it behind the abelia bush, proud of her cunning to obtain it and not at all bothered at the idea of being in trouble for missing curfew. Daddy would get angry. Mama would scold. Luella would look appropriately regretful. She’d apologize, kiss Mama, throw her arms around Daddy and it would be as if she’d never done any wrong because, for all of my sister’s rebelliousness, she was adored.

  Tonight, however, we had no need to worry. Neala was dusting the glass panel on the grandfather clock as we stepped into the hall. It gave a resonant tick tock announcing our lateness. “I’m not even going to ask,” she said in her Irish brogue. Neala, our household maid, was young and “spirited,” as Mama called her. Maybe that’s why she never tattled on us. “Your parents are out, and Velma’s been kind enough to leave your dinner in the kitchen. No use setting the dining room for the likes of you two.” She swatted the dust cloth at me as I passed, shaking her fiery-red head in mock disapproval.

  The only person we had to look out for now was Mama’s French maid, Margot, who had come with Mama from Paris. She was a solid, handsome woman, with dark hair that refused to gray and eyes the color of steel. Loyal only to her mistress, she reported our every misstep. Tonight, Margot’s room off the kitchen was empty and Luella and I ate quickly, escaping to our rooms before she had a chance to return.

  I was too tired to bother brushing my hair before crawling into bed with my notebook, where I would embellish our adventure into a story worthy of our tardiness. It was Daddy who encouraged my storytelling. As a child, my mind froze when people asked me questions. I’d stare at them, reaching for what they might want me to say, never finding the right words. When I was six years old Daddy gave me a notebook and a shiny black pen and said, “Your eyes are full of mystery. I love a good mystery. Why not write one for me?” After that, at least in my imagination, words flowed.

  When my hand began to cramp, I slipped the book under my pillow and turned out the lamp to wait for Luella, who religiously brushed her hair one hundred times before bed. She’d re
ad in Vogue it thickened limp strands.

  Despite our separate rooms, we still slept together. When we were little our beds were so far apart in the nursery that one of us would creep across the room to climb in with the other. When Luella turned thirteen she got her own room and the nursery became mine. My twin bed was replaced with a double oak canopy, my child’s wardrobe swapped out for a lovely, large one fit to accommodate all the womanly dresses I would grow into. I was only ten at the time and had high hopes for my future figure.

  At thirteen it was becoming harder to pretend I’d ever grow into a dress meant to hang in that wardrobe. I had always been small for my age, but as the girls around me filled out and inched their way upward into the world of womanhood, I remained short and thin with no figure to speak of. Luella had long since left me behind. Her breasts filled out a chest that had once been as scrawny as mine, and her straight waist curved over enviable hips. Even her face had rounded out, her dimples sinking into full cheeks. But it was her fingernails I envied the most. Smooth and flat, her white cuticles like upside-down smiles, or tiny cresting moons. My cuticles were invisible under the murky lumps that grew like pebbles from my nail beds, bulbous and round as if I’d dipped my fingertips into melted wax.

  Jumping into bed, Luella wriggled next to me whispering, “Wasn’t it absolutely marvelous? I keep hearing the fiddles and that voice. I’ve never heard anything like it. It was wildly sinful, wasn’t it?”

  It was.

  Our toes had been inches above the icy spring water at the base of the Indian caves when the music interrupted us. We had peeled off stockings for our pre-spring ritual of numbing our feet when fiddle notes pierced the air. Bewitched by a euphonious voice sailing through the trees we forgot about our mission to will the buds of flowers open, snatched our shoes and socks and scrambled up the grassy slope, halting at the tree line. The normally empty meadow was ringed with tents and brightly painted house wagons. Tethered horses munched on grass while dogs lay with heads in their paws, watching a group of people encircle a woman dancing with her hands above her head, her floral skirt swelling like the surf, voices and fiddles singing around her in circles.