Serenity Possessed by Craig A. Hart & S. J. Varengo

Author:Craig A. Hart & S. J. Varengo [Hart, Craig A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Craig A. Hart

18

Serenity, Michigan

December, 1879

* * *

Hardscrabble men were not the only people who regularly took one of the boomtown express trains that ran to Serenity from points around the nation. Just as had been the case in California some thirty years before, enterprising women heard the news of the lumber operations there, and knew that where thousands of hardworking men congregated, there would be a need for equally hardworking women.

Upon arrival, these women found work washing clothes, (and any one of the women who did this job would tell you that the lumbermen hadn’t made use of the service often prior to their arrival). They also opened and ran restaurants, served as tailors, teachers, as well as pretty much any other role which opened itself to them or to which they pulled the reluctant door open on hinges that protested when they did.

There was, of course, one career path that was dominated by women, and many of the lonely damsels who stepped off of the train at the soot-covered station in the heart of Serenity thought they were coming to Michigan to be cooks and seamstresses, only to find that those positions had been filled by those who’d gotten the jump on them, and that the only work available, while it also involved jumping on, was not the one they’d anticipated. A ready-made “Plan B.”

For Guinevere Carver, there was no “Plan A.” Gwen had left New York City, kicking the dust of that filthy place from her polished boots as she’d stepped off of platform at the Grand Central Depot, only eight years old and called obsolete by many on the day it opened in 1871.

At no point in her journey to Michigan had she considered any other career path upon arrival. It had been what she’d done since leaving home at age sixteen. In the ten years since she had done the job well, and she saved a little money where she could, so that when the news of the Michigan lumber boom reached her, she was able to buy a fine dress—although it was last season’s fashion—and the boots which were about to step onto the platform in Serenity. Her parasol completed the picture of a sophisticated woman from the East.

She had, in fact, heard the news only ten days earlier. It had been the same day that New York City, now home to nearly two million people, had become too small for her. Because in the dark streets of Manhattan on that night she had narrowly missed being seen plying her trade by the man she’d run away to escape, her lecherous father, who had secured the services of a girl she knew. She had turned a corner onto 48th street and made out his face in the ghoulish lamplight as he agreed to terms with Suzzette, then vanished with her into the shadows.

He was a long way from the family’s uptown tenement, but it was clearly no longer far enough. Later that night she heard another girl say she was leaving New York for the clean air of northern Michigan.

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