Church of Marvels

An excerpt from the forthcoming novel by Leslie Parry

Prologue

I haven’t been able to speak since I was seventeen years old. Some people believed that because of this I’d be able to keep a secret. They believed I could hear all manners of tales and confessions and repeat nothing. Perhaps they believe that if I cannot speak, I cannot listen or remember or even think for myself — that I am, in essence, invisible. That I will stay silent forever.

I’m afraid they are mistaken.

People who don’t know any better assume I’m a casualty of the stage life I was born into: a stunt gone awry beneath the sideshow’s gilded proscenium — mauled by a tiger, perhaps, or butchered by a sword that plunged so far down my throat I could kiss the hilt. But it’s a bit more complicated than that. No sword I’ve ever swallowed has been sharp enough to cut. At worst, those blades (blunted by pumice stones in my dressing room after hours) tickle like a piece of straw.

When I first came to Mrs. Bloodworth’s I knew nothing be- yond the home I had left. I’d never been to the city before. I believed I had already seen the worst of the world, but of course I was wrong. I was just a scrappy tomboy from the Brooklyn seashore, my voice a blend of Mother’s airy lilt and the peanut-cracking babel of the boardwalk. My mother was fearsome and beautiful, the impresario of the sideshow; she brought me and my sister up on sawdust, greasepaint, and applause. Her name — known throughout the music halls and traveling tent shows of America — was Friendship Willingbird Church. She was born to a clan of miners in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, but ran away from home when her older brother was killed at Antietam. She cut off her hair, joined the infantry, and saw her first battle at the age of fourteen. In the tent at night, she buried her face in the gunnysack pillow and wept bitterly thinking of him, hungry for revenge. A month later she was wounded. In the leaking hospital tent, a nurse cut open her uniform and discovered her secret. Before the surgeon could return, however, the nurse — not much older than Friendship herself — dug out the bullet, sewed up her thigh with a fiddle string and sent her back to Punxsutawney in the dead of night.

But Friendship never made it home. Instead she traveled out to the great cities of the Middle West. She joined a troupe of actors and journeyed on to New York. She played town halls and hog fairs, bawdy houses, nickel parlors. She built her own theater at Coney Island — the Church of Marvels — and made a life for herself in a sideshow by the sea. It was the water she loved most, far away from the hills of Punxsutawney, from the black dust that fell like snow twelve months of the year. But she couldn’t shake the coal mines entirely: she prized industriousness and made us work.

All great shows, she told me when I was little (and still learning to flex the tiny muscles in my esophagus), depend on the most ordinary objects. We can be a weary, cynical lot — we grow old and see only what suits us, and what is marvelous can often pass us by. A kitchen knife. A bulb of glass. A human body. That something so common should be so surprising — why, we forget it. We take it for granted. We assume that our sight is reliable, that our deeds are straightforward, that our words have one meaning. But life is uncommon and strange; it is full of intricacies and odd, confounding turns. So onstage we remind them just how extraordinary the ordinary can be. This, she said, is the tiger in the grass. It’s the wonder that hides in plain sight, the secret life that flourishes just beyond the screen. For you are not showing them a hoax or a trick, just a new way of seeing what’s already in front of them. This, she told me, is your mark on the world. This is the story that you tell.

But I was young. I mistook my talent for worldliness, my vanity for a more profound sensibility. It was only when I arrived in Manhattan that I saw myself as coarse and strange, a wayward savage with a bag of swords and ill-suited for any other life. I had come to seek the help of Mrs. Bloodworth, and in her care I tried to forget my old life, the troubles that had ended a naïve and happy childhood.

But the real troubles had yet to begin.

I would stand beside her in that smoky, sepulchral office, the curtains drawn against the hot glare of July. I wore a benign smile on my face while other young women, pale and nervous, sat before her desk. They cried into handkerchiefs, fiddled with abalone combs nested in their hair, drew fans to their faces when they felt sick or faint. Mrs. Bloodworth kicked her heels up on the desk and sighed out smoke. She nodded her head and closed her eyes in sympathetic meditation while the young girls sang of their sorrows. Before I lost my voice I sat there too, sick with the smell of blooming flowers, listening to my secrets echo off the mahogany walls.

Many think now that I’ve disappeared for good. They might even believe I have died. I can see them huddled in their grim houses, ruffle-breasted and thin-lipped, rattling dice over a backgammon board, kissing their pretty children goodnight. They believe they are safe. They believe that all is past and that I’ll hold my tongue. Sometimes I want to laugh and say, “Oh but I have!” I’ve stared at it in my own cupped hands, stiff and bloody and fuzzed with white, gruesomely curled as if around a scream.

At seventeen I crossed the river alone. I didn’t know, when I departed, that in a few short months I would see the islands of New York — from Coney Island to Manhattan Island to the Island I shudder to name. Like the girls who came to Mrs. Bloodworth’s, I believed my decision was singular and private; I didn’t know that it would determine the fate of people I’d never met. The girls were frightened and alone, in need of a confessor. With a name such as mine, they believed me to be some sort of saint. But how could they know, as they trembled there at the desk, just how cruel the world could be, and I a willing part of it?

Let me say, this life is not the one I envisioned for myself. I remember the long-ago days when my mother would come up to me after a show, when I was tired and sweaty and sliding my swords into the rack. She’d pull me close and say, “My girl — how proud I am,” and I would hug her and smell the hair oil melting down her neck, her gabardine coat trailing the musk of the tiger cage. There are times when I long to feel just something of that old life — the crunch of sand beneath my feet, the beads of salt in my hair, the sight of Brighton Beach at dusk. I think of my sister, who is still there. I always believed we’d be together — the two of us living in our house by the sea, playing duets on the old piano, ringing in the new century as fireworks showered from the sky. (1900 — how far away it seemed to me then! and now only a breath away.) And thinking of this, of her alone, of what I have never been able to tell her — this is something I cannot bear.

But this story, in truth, is not about me. I am only a small part of it. I could try to forget it, perhaps. I could try to put it behind me. But sometimes I dream that I’ll still return to the pageantry of the sideshow, hide myself beneath costumes and powder and paint, grow willingly deaf amid the opiating roar of the audience and the bellow of the old brass band. It will be like the old days — when Mother was ferocious and alive, before the Church of Marvels burned to the sand. But how can I return now, having seen what I have seen? For I’ve found that here in this city, the lights burn ever brighter, but they cast the darkest shadows I know.

Chapter One

New York City, 1895

Sylvan found the baby on a balmy summer night, when he was digging out the privies behind a tenement on Broome Street. All night long the damp air had clung to his skin like a fever, and now, with only a few blocks left before his shift ended, he was huddled halfway inside a buckling stall, his vision blurring and his arms growing numb. Beside him the other night-soilers, slope backed and sweating in the privy doorways, bent and pushed and hoisted and slung. They kept up a rhythm — shovels scraping at the bricks, waste slapping in the buckets, mud sucking at their boots.

Sylvan was hunched over the pit, sifting through the mire, when his shovel came up under something solid and heavy. He stopped and squinted, but it was too dark to see anything. He gripped the handle and watched the shovel head quiver up into the lamplight. Five pink toes pearled above the falling slop, then a foot, then an ankle. Leaning in closer, he saw a small face, still as a mask, floating in the dark.

He drew up the shovel and shouted. He dropped to his knees, closed his hands around the slick body, and trembling, fell back on his haunches. The head was limp and slippery in his palm, the hair like moss under his fingers.

The night-soiler next to him, a gaunt and graying man the others called No Bones, leaned his shovel against the open door of his privy and lifted his lantern. “What’s it this time?” he asked. “Good one? Piece of china? What happened to that pitcher from last week — you keep it?”

Sylvan didn’t answer. In his arms the baby was slack and still, lighter than the bucket he hauled across the yard and emptied into the barrels of the slop wagon. He unknotted the kerchief at his throat. In the dark he mopped the baby’s lips and cheeks and the blue bulbs of its closed eyes.

No Bones took a small, curious step forward. The heady smell of kerosene and lime powder and sweat emanating from his clothes made Sylvan’s nose sting and head pinch; he could taste it, burning, in the back of his throat.

“Lemme see there,” the old man muttered, raising the lamp over his head. “Let’s see what you brung up now.”

Light fell across Sylvan’s lap. For a moment neither man moved or breathed. The only sound that passed between them was the steady creak of the lantern.

“What is it? What’d he find?” came voices from across the yard. No Bones turned his head and whispered hoarsely, “It’s a baby — a white baby. Girl.”

Sylvan stared at her. She was pale, with a small nose and a dimpled chin like a pat of butter someone had stuck their thumb in. Whorls of dark hair were greased against her scalp. Slowly and gently he drew her up to his chest.

The other night-soilers dropped their shovels and crowded around him. Their faces were grim and green in the swinging light of their lanterns.

“Looks like a Polack,” someone said.

“No, a Scot — see the way the ears point up? That’s a kelpie.” No Bones whispered, “Is it dead?”

Sylvan tried to nod but only managed to drop his chin. He had unearthed all sorts of things in the privies: coins, buttons, bottles of hair dye and bourbon, a set of grinning false teeth. But nothing even close to this. Night-soiling was summer work — he and the crew collected waste from the slums and delivered it to a fertilizer factory on the river, always hoping for a small treasure of their own. Back in his cellar on Ludlow Street, the walls were lined with things he’d smuggled home in the dark — loot all the way from the Essex Street to Centre, from Canal up to Delancey. He knew it was foolish, but he kept hoping he might discover a gold watch chain, or an heirloom stone slipped from its tarnished, Old World bezel, some small fortune that would allow him to leave Ludlow Street forever. A ticket away from the sickness and noise, the nostrums hocked on street corners, the heavy-lidded undertakers who haunted the halls with their burlap and twine.

But now this. He hadn’t held a child since Frankie.

Suddenly the baby’s chest rose and shook. She mewled weakly. Sylvan’s hand jumped back and hovered above her in the lantern light, his shadow whipping over her skin like smoke. He watched as she took a breath and opened her eyes. They were a dark, watery green.

The foreman pushed his way to the front. “Back to work,” he ordered somberly. “To your posts — now.”

The group of men disbanded, pulling at their beards, crushing their hats between their hands. The light disappeared with them, and Sylvan was left squatting alone by the privy with the baby breathing weakly in his arms.

Beside him Mr. Everjohn scraped the ground with his boot and sighed. “Let’s see it.”

Sylvan stood, wiping away the remaining dirt with his hand- kerchief.

Everjohn leaned in closer. A slug of tobacco jumped from one cheek to the other. “Christ,” he whispered. “You see anything? Any- one here when you come up?”

Sylvan shook his head. “No, sir.”

“Anyone seen you — or this” — he tilted his head toward the baby — “since?”

“Just the others.”

The foreman pushed his hands into his pockets. He glanced warily around the yard, to the offal-stained gangway of the butcher shop, then up to the darkened windows of the tenement. “Goddammit,” he hissed.

Sylvan took a deep breath. “There’s the mission over on Hester,” he said. “Convent runs an orphanage, too, over on Mulberry.”

Mr. Everjohn turned back to him, grinding the tobacco be- tween his teeth. “You know I can’t keep it on my watch,” he said. “Someone’ll find it by dawn — take it there themselves.” He slurped and spit. “Best for all of us if we leave it where it layed.”

“She might need a nurse — ”

“We’ve got the Bloody Gutter beat tonight — you know we can’t be bringing a child through those streets.”

“It’s just another few blocks,” Sylvan said, but he saw the look on the foreman’s face and knew he should retreat before his shovel and bucket were taken from him and he was turned out into the street without the week’s wages. At nineteen Sylvan was youngest on the crew, strong-limbed and quiet. Mr. Everjohn liked him well enough, but the other men were clannish and wary. Under their breaths they called him Dogboy. He’d been puzzled over and picked apart all his life — the skin of a Gypsy, the hair of a Negro, the build of a German, the nose of a Jew. He didn’t belong to anyone. They stared at him with a kind of terrified wonder, as though he were a curiosity in a dime museum. One of his eyes was brown, so dark it nearly swallowed the pupil, and the other a pale, aqueous blue.

Sylvan looked down at the baby. He thought of the drunkards and gang boys, roosting in alleys and doorways from Mulberry clear out to the river, waiting in the warm night for someone, anyone, to cross them. And the night-soilers, a piecemeal crew of blacks and Irish, Slavs and Chinese, near-cripples and convicts and rye-pickled drifters, were a mark. He’d heard a story last summer about a night-soiler who tried to help two children find their way home. A gang of neighborhood men, believing he meant to kidnap them, clobbered him to the ground and tied him to the back of a wagon. Sylvan wondered if the children were there to see it, if they saw him die in the street, if they screamed because they couldn’t understand why the man who’d taken their hands and helped them home was now being dragged through the dirt with his mouth open and eyes bulging like two boiled eggs from their sockets.

The foreman’s tongue flicked up into his moustache, tobacco juice wetting the ends. “I’m not putting the boys in danger — not for some whore-trash’s baby.”

He put out his hand and rested it on the baby’s head. Then, pulling away, he cleared his throat and said, “At least you dug it out. But we’ve just got one job to do — and you keep doing it, right?” He clanged his shovel against the ground and disappeared across the yard, down the narrow gangway to the street. “Gather up, gather up!” Sylvan knelt down and placed the baby on the ground, far away from the butcher’s barrels, which were filled with feathers and bones. He stroked her forehead to soothe her, then stood up and jammed his fists into his pockets. He willed his legs to move but they felt like wood. He watched as the folds of the knapsack sagged around her, exposing her naked body to the night air. He bent down and tucked her in again. When she pushed out her tiny fists and bat- ted down the sides, he found the clasps and buckled the sack tightly across her chest. Her body arched and trembled. She opened her mouth and began to cry.

Sylvan felt his throat close and his nose prickle. He took his kerchief from his pocket and dropped it over her face, then grabbed his bucket and shovel and staggered down the gangway to the street, where the slop-wagon was waiting. The other soilers were resting on the curbside among ash heaps and garbage piles, their knapsacks open in their laps. They took draws from water canteens and shared slices of bread, chatted in loud whispers, but Sylvan could still hear the faint cry, raw and tuneless, coming from the yard.

He emptied his bucket over a barrel in the back of the wagon. There was nothing he could do, he told himself. Mr. Everjohn was right. By morning she’d be sleeping alongside a dozen other foundlings in the troughlike crib of the orphanage, nursing Tammany milk. Or some family from the tenement might take her in, raise her as their own. Or perhaps the person who’d left her behind would still come back for her.

Sylvan rubbed his eyes as if trying to make the image stick. Even through the stench of the slop-wagon, he could smell the blood and viscera from the butcher shop. He raised his eyes to the windows above. There could be fifty people living in that building, maybe a hundred. Who would have done such a thing? The baby wasn’t just abandoned to the whims of the city streets — she hadn’t been entrusted to another’s care, or left in a well-traveled place to be discovered and rescued. Sylvan shivered though the night was hot and still. The baby, he knew, was meant to die.

“Broome to Orchard!” the foreman called from down the street, clanking his shovel head against the walk. “Orchard and Broome — step in, hey!”

The other men got to their feet, gathered and readied them- selves. Sylvan felt nauseous and light without the sack on his shoulder, without the loot clinking and knocking against his hip. From the yard the wail seemed to come louder. Quietly he slipped out of the stretching, laughing knot of men and ran back down the gangway and into the yard. He stared, breathless, at the small bundle beneath him in the shadows. He knelt down and picked the kerchief off her face. The crying stopped. The baby stared up at him, her eyes glimmering in the darkness.

“Moving out, moving out,” the foreman cried down the road. Sylvan fell into the back of the line and marched down the street with the others, their caps shoved tight on their heads, their clothes black with grime. They began to sing, as they did every night when they felt their limbs tiring and eyelids pulsing. They moved together like one giant shadow, their bodies low-bent and taut, their shovels striking out a beat in the moonlit dust. The baby slept soundly against Sylvan’s chest, rocking with each long stride. When the band turned on to the main thoroughfare, she kept so quiet that Sylvan thought no one could know she was hidden there among them, except for the brief moment she flashed into view, like a cap of foam on a dark wave, as they rolled through a nimbus of streetlight.

At the corner he slipped away. He fell back behind the others, hid the baby in his coat. He made his way blindly down the alley — stumbling past wheelbarrows and rabbit hutches, blinking back the drizzle in his eyes. They wouldn’t notice he was gone, not right away — maybe not until they returned to the stable, where the men heeled off their overshoes and scrubbed themselves clean. It was near the end of the shift, he reminded himself. When he reported for work the next evening, he’d say he’d been jumped — maybe by a tough he’d once trounced in an underground match, a fellow fighter hungry for revenge. Would they believe him? Would they even be surprised? Dogboy’s a wild one. He has no people. He’s got no tribe.

He reached his home on Ludlow Street just before dawn. In the yard he placed the baby on a crate and peeled off his sticky shirt. Ducking his head under the spigot of water, he rubbed at his curls and lathered his arms and face with a bar of soap. He gazed at the girl through the falling water and realized he was shaking. Perhaps he could put on Mr. Scarlatta’s brown suit and take her to the convent himself, where blind Sister Margaret taught orphans to make shoelaces.

He filled a bucket with water and carried it down the steps to the cellar door, cradling the baby in his arm. Inside they were greeted by loot from the privies — the rusted door-keys and clay pipes, the saucers and belt buckles and green glass bottles — and the few things he’d foraged from the Scarlattas’ glove shop upstairs: a good pair of mittens for winter work, and the dummy hands that now lined the shelves like drowning men reaching for air.

He warmed the water on the stove and poured it into an old washtub. He set the tub, sloshing, on the floor and knelt down beside it. Other than the throaty purr of flies, the room was silent. As he bathed the baby, he saw the red lattice of veins beneath her bluing skin, the tiny claws of her fingernails. She was skinnier than he thought she’d be, with puffed-up eyes and a trail of fuzz down her back, like a wolf pup.

When she was dry, he fashioned a diaper from a rag, then swaddled her in an old tablecloth. From the shelf he retrieved a glass bottle with a rubber hose attached. It had been Frankie’s. He’d been born just over two years ago, heir to the glorious emporium his father dreamed of building: Scarlatta and Son’s Fine Gloves and Handwear. Frankie, with his hammy legs pedaling through the air as if he were riding an invisible bicycle. “An athlete, maybe!” his father cried, tossing him up. “A strong-man!”

Sylvan filled the bottle with milk, which he kept cool in a hole in the floor. He pushed the nipple, gnawed and misshapen at the end of the hose, between the baby’s lips. She ate slowly, sluggishly, her skin growing warm against his.

He tried to envision a woman creeping outside to the privy, shaking out the folds of her skirt and watching the baby turn over into the shadows. He tried to picture her posture, the set of her face, the way her moist and terrified eyes would have widened in the dark. But as hard as he tried, the only person he could imagine standing there, stooped over the hole and feeling the bloodstained skirts fall back around her ankles, was a tall woman with wet cheeks and a white kerchief tied around her head. He didn’t know if this woman was a dream or a memory, but it was an image that had been flickering in his mind for as long as he could remember. She was leaning against a wall, crying into her hands. Her shoulders were bunched and heaving, her cheeks half-shadowed and wet. He tried to recall what had happened, who she was — his mother; his nurse? Had she died? Had he wandered away from her in the street? Had she looked up from the fly-spotted flanks of meat at the butcher’s and realized he was no longer at her knee? Or had she, for whatever reason, set him down in front of a Punch and Judy show in the market square, turned on her heel, and walked away?

He didn’t remember much before the age of four or five, when he came to the Scarlattas’ — just strange fragments of a life on the street, which clicked through his mind like the framed photographs in a Mutoscope machine. A few months ago he’d gone to a Mutosocpe parlor up on the Bowery. He waded through the cavernous room amid a crush of eager, queuing people. It was so crowded he only had the chance to see one strip. He balanced himself on a rickety stool and pressed his face to the cool, slick metal of the eyepiece. He wound the crank slowly at first, so that the pages creaked for- ward. Each photograph was a little different from the next. Then he spun it so rapidly the pictures whizzed by and turned into a single movement: a boxer knocking out his opponent with a bloodthirsty windmill punch. Slow, then fast. Slow and fast. Separate photographs, then a living story. The boxer’s arm poised behind him, his lips pulled back over his teeth. Then, a few flips later: the opponent’s chin thrust in the air, the muscles in his neck twisting, a spray of saliva fanned against the black. Sylvan stood there, alternating between still life and moving image, until his nickel was up and the screen snapped to black.

His early life, he thought, was like the slow flip of photographs: the images were too sparse and sporadic to make any sense together, but each was so vivid that whenever one flickered to his mind, he was startled by its intensity. How could certain visions like these remain so luminous, and yet he had no recollection at all of what had come before or after? A whip-scarred pony, neighing in a leaky stable. A band of red-haired children chasing him down the riverbank, pelting him with rocks. Sleeping in a pile of damp, foul hay. Sleeping in a cedar box on the waterfront. The wood of that box, unpainted and cotton-soft under his cheek, and the sticky sap that dripped from it like a wound. (Mrs. Scarlatta later told him those were the paupers’ coffins, waiting to be filled and taken over the river.) And then this, perhaps the most vivid of all: a square of white cotton blowing down a frosted alleyway. The shape of a hand had been cut out of it. It flapped in the breeze, the missing fingers waving him forward. It tumbled down a set of cellar stairs and landed at a door. He tried the latch, and it opened.

The day Mr. Scarlatta found him hiding in the Ludlow Street cellar, he brought him upstairs to the family’s apartment and crowed, “Look, a stowaway!” Sylvan had heard Mr. Scarlatta recount the story over countless suppers, damp eyes alight with wonder as if seeing it for the first time: “I’d gone down, you see,” he’d begin, roll- ing his hands in the air as if to coax the story into motion. “A cold, cold morning. There was nothing down there, just a little room of things nobody wanted anymore, not even robbers!” He was proud of the fact he could afford to own things he didn’t use. Some things had come with him and Mrs. Scarlatta from across the sea, and now they had the dignity of occupying their own quarters, too, rather than being turned into firewood for beggars and vagrants. “What I was even looking for that morning — how can I remember?” he’d chuckle, tugging at his whiskers. “But what I should come upon! I go inside — and! Like a little elf had been there. Everything was nice on the shelves! The floor was swept. And this little boy, he was rolled up in a yard of cotton, fast asleep. I was astonished. This little elf ” — he lowered his hand to his waist — “just this high, and how did he do all of it?”

Sylvan had been sick and delirious when the Scarlattas found him. For days he slept on a makeshift bed in their apartment — three uneven chairs pushed together — next to a pair of sewing machines. He lay wrapped in that same yard of cotton, shivering and hot, while the treadles tamped out a rhythm beside him, while knitting needles tsked from unseen hands. Once in a while he’d open his eyes and see the flash of scissors, hear the whish of a skirt. Sometimes a hand would slide under his neck and roll his head forward, bringing a saucer of broth to his lips.

As he grew stronger, Mrs. Scarlatta asked him where his mother might be. Sylvan had answered quite plainly that he didn’t have one. She’s dead then? No. She’s left you? No. You’ve run off then, haven’t you? Sylvan, confused, said no once again. When he was able to sit up and move about, she gave him a pair of old shoes, a mended coat, and a polished penny. If he went up the street and bought himself a new set of laces from the convent, she said, he could have a sweet roll when he returned. But the prospect of being out on the snowy street again paralyzed him; he only stared at the penny, red as a burn in his palm. When Mrs. Scarlatta nudged him toward the door, he tried to carry the stained yard of cotton with him, whimpering and clinging, getting tangled up in its train. Finally she took a pair of scissors and cut away the corner. She tucked the square in his pocket, next to the penny. There — just if you get scared — but you won’t, will you?

The cotton, which he had found in a scrap heap in the cellar, had come from a mill in Connecticut. Sylvan & Threadgill, Mr. Scarlatta explained as he rubbed his fingers against the grain — it makes for good church gloves, see? And so this was how Sylvan Threadgill — collective son of the East Side winter, a glove’s carefully scissored outline, and an unlatched basement door — came to Ludlow Street.

After this, the images in Sylvan’s memory came quicker and easier; they joined together in a smooth, whirring story, one he recognized. Mr. Scarlatta kept him clothed and fed in return for daily chores: mopping the stairs, replacing cones of newspaper in the privies, shoveling out the effluent that flooded the yard from the street, washing soot from the windows with a cold wadded rag. He hauled buckets of water up to the tenants, plugged cracks in the walls and floors, brushed ice from the walk in the winters, polished the banister until it gleamed. He made a room for himself in the cellar: sewing his own pillow and stuffing it with newspaper, teaching himself to read those same newspapers, stacked in the corner for kindling; shoveling coal and fixing the stove, boiling his own coffee in a small tin can.

Now the sunlight crept into the cellar, gilding the grime on the high, narrow panes. The baby coughed wetly, rolled her head away. He tried to picture her in the convent’s home for girls: marching in single file under the milky eyes of Sister Margaret, breaking the stale bread that had been donated by parishioners. A life of answering to a false name like Agnes or Claire, pretending to be some other girl in an ill-fitting dress, waiting to emerge from the gloomy, floating world that separated the child she was born as and the free woman she’d become.

Her eyes fluttered open, staring wetly at nothing. A dogboy brought you in when you were no more than a babe, one of the sisters would say. And that’s all I can tell you.

Sylvan knew he would never be able to pass the clapboard wing of the convent, where the orphaned and abandoned girls lived, without craning his neck and imagining what had become of her. He couldn’t see those girls marching down the street — with their powdery complexions and nunlike pinafores and modestly parted hair — without wondering which of them she was. And so she, too, looking for a bearded man in a wrinkled brown suit, would turn her head as they passed on the street. It would be a moment of frightened curiosity when their eyes met: a tremor of recognition, an ache so hollow and lonely in their stomachs that it made them feel faint. They’d find themselves unable to speak, and later, when they turned to look back into the crowd, the apparition would be gone and they’d wonder if they had even seen each other at all.

Excerpted from Church of Marvels, a new novel by Leslie Perry, published May 5, 2015 by Ecco. Reprinted from the FREE Buzz Books 2015. For more information and to preorder the title, go to Buzz Books 2015. Also available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and your local independent.

Top image credit: Gane, via creative commons