Effigy (27 page)

She comes to the border of Thankful’s skirts and looks down on the crown she’s just named, for the third wife hasn’t the fortitude to lift her eyes. The most she can manage is to force a small, disdainful sound out through her nose. Ursula unhooks her gaze from the complex dressing of Thankful’s hair and drops it to her lap, watching her needle hand work free from its hiding place and attempt to execute a stitch. Again, the Scripture fits.

“‘—and the Lord will discover their secret parts.’”

Thankful freezes.

Ursula draws breath and hisses, “‘In that day the Lord will take away the bravery of their tinkling ornaments—’”

“I don’t have to listen to this.” Thankful stabs the needle into her pincushion and shoves her sewing aside.

“‘—and cauls, and round tires like the moon—’” Ursula doesn’t entirely understand this line, so she ups her volume to deliver it. “‘—The chains and the bracelets and the mufflers—’”

The third wife cannot rise—she hasn’t room. Neither can she sit and take it. Like a dog, she ducks and scuttles. Ursula quells the urge to bring her knee up hard under that sharp little chin.

“‘—The bonnets, and the ornaments of the legs—’” She’s shouting now, in pursuit of her enemy—not running, though, the mistress of a house never runs. Thankful’s dress shows to advantage in the dining room’s low light, her hind end flickering from barn-swallow blue to plum. Shot silk, the best money can buy. Dearer by far than the whore deserves.

“‘—and the headbands,’” Ursula bellows, “‘and the tablets, and the ear-rings—’”

The list goes on and on, tumbling entire from Ursula’s lips so that even she is surprised by her own capacity to recall. The children have stayed put in the parlour, and for once she finds herself wishing they weren’t quite so well behaved. Thankful stumbles twice on the stairs.
Rings, nose jewels, mantles, hoods
—item after item becomes insult, becomes threat.

“‘—veils!’” Ursula shouts the last of them to Thankful’s bedchamber door, moments after it slams shut in her face. The sliding of the bolt signals defeat, but never let it be said that Ursula Wright Hammer is one to leave the work of the Lord unfinished. She delivers the last verse in dulcet tones.

“‘And it shall come to pass,’” she informs the ignorant, wilful creature listening on the other side, “‘instead of sweet smell there shall be stink; and instead of a girdle, a rent; and instead of well set hair, baldness; and instead of a stomacher, a girding of sackcloth—’” She pauses, long and pregnant, before uttering the final phrase. “‘—burning—’ Do you hear, Sister? ‘—
burning
instead of beauty’!”

Thankful would pace, but the run upstairs in her stays has winded her. She considers flinging herself across the bed, but such a flopping impact would be dangerous. She can feel the megrim now, frothing behind her eyes, threatening to congeal. They’re coming more often of late, staying longer when they do.

Burning instead of beauty
.

The witch’s words have found purchase, not because Thankful believes them—it’s her nature to believe in little—but because she’s heard the like a thousand times before, from the time she was captive in her cradle to the day she announced her coming union with a heathen polygamist from the West. She smiles to recall how her mother gaped like a fish at market upon hearing the news. For once, for a good five minutes at least, Eliza Cobbs held her tongue.

Not that she was ever one to harangue as Mother Hammer does. Hers was a soft-spoken crusade, Methodist murmurings without cease.

“It’s no place for one of the Lord’s faithful, Thankful.”

“Mother, the Limelight is a
theatre.”
Thankful sighed it, shrilled it so many times. “We do Shakespeare!” It was true, to a point. They played the Bard, among others, but only the most popular plays—and those were pared down to scenes of swordplay and poisonings, cross-dressing and lovemaking and war.

“But I’ve work enough for two, dear. You could help your mother right here at home.”

Countless such entreaties filled the cracks between readings from the Good Book—when all Thankful wanted was to soak her feet, or to rinse the week’s sweat and powder from her one good set of drawers.

Wealth gotten by vanity shall be diminished …

Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies …

And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication …

Only words. But her mother made a pattern of them, as delicate and deliberate as any spider’s. Its lines—plucked and jangled by Mother Hammer just now—describe the fretwork of Thankful’s nerves.

Ursula returns to the parlour with blood in her cheeks. Resuming her chair, she goes on to recount the story of the Prophet’s martyrdom—the children wide-eyed with horror to the last. They file off to their beds quietly, planting dry little kisses on her lips as they go.

Alone now, Ursula fingers the cold hump of the ring’s stone. Her chin drops. She exhales his holy name along her breastbone. “Joseph.”

Jailed for such a trifle. Doubtless he had indeed ordered the destruction of the
Nauvoo Expositor’s
offices—the type hurled like so many pebbles into the street—but it signified little. Those who lived by rights in the blessed city knew the rogue newspaper
to be nothing but a tool of vengeance for the Church enemy, William Law. Still, the first and only edition had brought a secret gladness to Ursula’s heart.

Like anyone possessed of a pair of ears, she’d heard the rumours concerning the Prophet’s many wives. Law’s editorial—reviled though it was among loyal Saints—gave credence to that which she had long hoped to be true. If, like ordinary men, the Prophet had only one wife, then Ursula’s sole chance at happiness was dependent upon that woman’s death—and the thin-lipped Emma Hale Smith seemed the kind to live on and on. If, on the other hand, Brother Joseph was indeed married to many, who was to say his eye might not one day alight upon her?

She cracks the ring, the stone tilting to rest its round back against her middle finger. His hair is so very soft. Trailing the lock like a paintbrush across her cheek, Ursula closes her eyes.

Eighteen forty-four. She was twenty-two years old. She could have married a dozen times over by then—there had been Hammer’s many proposals and others besides—but she was determined to wait for her heart’s desire. Only now that desire was locked away in the Carthage jail.

She was fretting over her beloved’s safety, hurrying to market with a basket of the Simmses’ eggs, when Porter Rockwell thundered past at a gallop, howling the awful news. The Prophet’s strongman resembled nothing so much as a madwoman that day—grey locks streaming, pale eyes bloody with tears.

Joseph is killed—they have killed him! Goddamn them! They have killed him!

Ursula felt her legs turn to serpents beneath her. They slithered in opposite directions, dropping her in a dead faint, a mess of eggs and straw.

It was a mournful contingent that carried the martyr’s body back to the city he had dreamt into being—back through the wailing thousands to the mansion that had been his blessed home.
Martyrs’
bodies, to say truth, for Brother Hyrum came too, though his coffin might have held a hog for all Ursula paid it any mind. She had her strength back by then. Had her wits about her, too. She would need both to force her way to the front of the crowd and make use of the small scissors in her hand.

Bendy does his best to be a good Saint. He’s started the Book of Mormon a dozen times, but never makes it past the Lord’s commandment to Lehi that he
take his family and depart into the wilderness
before dropping off or recalling some task left undone and rising from his bunk. At such a rate it’s plain he’ll never make it through the book’s catalogue of journeys and wars, so he takes to reading the way he was taught to—a page here, a passage there. This night, the book falls open at Alma, the final verse of chapter two.

And it came to pass that many died in the wilderness of their wounds, and were devoured by those beasts and also the vultures of the air; and their bones have been found, and have been heaped up on the earth
.

A small enough morsel, but it’s all he can manage. He allows his eyes to close.

The dream is brief, a hushed and vivid tableau. There is high ground, a hill independent of valley or cliff. He both stands and watches himself stand, barefoot on its grassy back. Before long a secret worms up through his naked soles. The hill is no work of the earth’s. Were he to break through the turf beneath him, he would turn up a spadeful of bones.

No cause to unlock the sideboard and fish out the kill book tonight. The entry would be a short one:
20th of May 1867. No luck
.

Instead, Erastus opens the door to his third wife’s bedchamber. He has to squint in the half-light, but as always when Thankful treats him to his favourite of all her creations, there is the smell. A fox is a plush and pungent creature. He begins to make out the line of her, drawn back between wardrobe and dresser. She greets him with a high, inviting bark.