After a second cup of tea, Sam lowered his voice and asked Alice, in the most solicitous if not flirtatious voice, if she might consider doing the mercy of taking some food to two of Dogtown’s last lost souls. “No one has seen so much as a hair of the women for months now,” said Sam.
“I could certainly pay them a visit myself, but I am given to understand that the poor unfortunate suffer less shame when help arrives on the arm of a lovely maiden, like yourself.” Alice immediately agreed to take on Sam’s commission.
“I’ll bring the basket later today,” he said.
When Sam asked Mrs. Long if she would fill a basket for Molly and Sally, she would not hear of his paying for the food, so she could advertise her own good deed while trumpeting Sam’s. He would be hailed as a redeemer of the old ladies of Dogtown, a consideration that might just eclipse the fact that they were not, nor ever had been,
“ladies.”
Alice delivered the food and hurried back to Sam, wearing a new bonnet and shade of powder that did her no favors. “Oh, Mr. Maskey,” her eyes shining with the tale, “it was awful. The smell,” she said. “Like an outhouse.”
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Sam put on a grave face while Alice delivered her report. She had discovered Molly and Sally huddled on their mattress on the floor. It took her a moment to find them under the stack of blankets and clothes, which was nearly all that was left inside the place. They had burned all the furniture for heat, and a dusting of fresh snow had blown in through the chinks in the wall.
“A terrible thing,” he said. “We Christians cannot permit such misery, can we, Mistress Ives.” He kissed her hand and left immediately, borrowing a horse to ride into Gloucester. Sam directed the town clerk to have Molly and Sally taken to the workhouse and laid five silver dollars on the desk. “This should cover the cost of bringing them in, and the rest is to be applied to their care.” The fellow didn’t have time to open his ledger before Sam was gone.
Molly and Sally spent the rest of March and April in the workhouse, knitting or mending as required by the matron, who found them polite and tractable, nothing like what she’d expected of prostitutes. At night, they held hands across the gap between their narrow cots and whispered to each other.
When Molly caught the fever that had killed off the three last residents, Sally tended to her night and day, and for a while it seemed that Molly would
pull through. When she died, the matron thought her friend would turn her face to the wall and be dead within a fortnight as well. But Sally disappeared two nights after Molly passed away, taking every scrap of bedding and clothing with her, including the matron’s wool shawl. She pinched a heavy pewter tankard, too, which was the only item of any value in the whole miserable place.
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When Sam heard that both of them were gone, he
bowed his head and covered his eyes with his hands.
Widow Long told everyone about how he had been
overcome with grief, and what a goodhearted fellow he was to have bothered with such awful trash. In fact, Sam had hidden his face so no one could see the relief and satisfaction he feared would be all too evident there.
It might take a year or even five, but eventually his name would be uncoupled from the Dogtown doxies.
Newcomers might never even hear the name “Sammy
Stanley.” And even if a few stories lingered about that unlucky boy, no one would ever think to connect him to Samuel S. Maskey, a deacon in his church, the captain of the fire volunteers, part-owner of the town’s first cotton mill.
A different man altogether.
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Easter and Ruth
Easter Carter knew her days in Dogtown were
numbered. With the widows long dead and Judy