“The stone’ll speak the story,” says old Abby in the kitchen, but my long fingers round this pen deny it. What is a stone to the smell of this night pulled close about me as I write alone by my candle, my pen scratching into this empty book, my yellow room a dark cave cupped around this center point, this pen point into which I now begin to pour all the waters of my twenty-four years, the foghorns lowing side the wharf, my right foot placed upon my left for warmth beneath this table.

5 August

Do you wonder about me, Reader? That is good. I should like to have it so. I should like to have another—wholly unknown—read what I have written late into the evening, finally casting down the book to say, “How thrilling!” I should like that—to reach my hand across the sill and shake yours. Surely, even here, I might feel the tug upon the line between us—the crossing breeze of my reader’s gently exhaled breath as he looked up, having understood.

To be an Author, Reader!

(Now the rest follows five years later—N.G.)

10 September 1877

We have a cousin, it would appear, come to us from Ireland without warning; and though another man at table disconcerts, he is not disagreeable: rather silent, with a shock of black hair, and hands that are kept firmly in his pockets—save when they emerge to take up knife and fork. True to fashion, Susannah has coaxed some particulars from Mr. Hayden Gilroy: He was raised by a stonemason and his wife after the death of his own parents. Poor man, it must seem to him that Susannah is the only woman among us able to speak, for in the past two days since his arrival, Susannah alone has played formidable hostess, as I prefer to let her do the talking so I might best watch the scene; and Mother, unaccountably, appears incapable of direct address to her nephew. Seemingly distracted by infinitesimal noises, she bears her attention fixedly upon us, but with her head slightly turned, as if an extra sphere is newly laid around this ordinary one of humdrum conversation.

“Whatever is the matter, Mother?” Susannah asked tonight.

Mother turned round upon the landing to look at the two of us stopped upon the stair below, each of us shielding the candle flames with one hand as we waited for her answer.

“Why do you ask?” Her hand crept to the banister.

Seeing the bleak expression upon our mother’s face, Susannah shook her head.

“No matter.”