An Acquaintance with Darkness - Ann Rinaldi [0]
Ann Rinaldi
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GULLIVER BOOKS
HARCOURT, INC.
Orlando Austin New York
San Diego Toronto London
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Copyright © 1997 by Ann Rinaldi
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
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First Gulliver Books paperback edition 1999
Gulliver Books is a trademark of Harcourt, Inc., registered in the
United States of America and/or other jurisdictions.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rinaldi, Ann.
An acquaintance with darkness/Ann Rinaldi.
p. cm.
"Gulliver Books."
Summary: When her mother dies and her best friend's family is
implicated in the assassination of President Lincoln, fourteen-year-old
Emily Pigbush must go live with an uncle she suspects of being
involved in stealing bodies for medical research.
Includes bibliographical references.
[1. Body snatching—Fiction. 2. Physicians—Fiction. 3. Lincoln,
Abraham, 1809–1865—Assassination—Fiction. 4. Washington, D.C.—
Civil War, 1861–1865—Fiction. 5. United States—History—
Civil War, 1861–1865—Fiction. I. Title.
PZ7.R459Ac 2005
[Fic]—dc22 2004054038
ISBN 0-15-205387-5
Text set in Electra
Designed by Lydia D'moch
DOM G H F
Printed in the United States of America
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For my husband,
the wind beneath my wings
1. Johnny
April 3, 1865
I KNEW THINGS were going to be bad when I heard the knock on the door early that morning.
Nobody was up yet. I remembered that Mama and I were the only ones living in the house now. Ella May, our housegirl, had left yesterday. Ella May was a freed woman, just up from slavery. Nobody could keep freed men or women. They couldn't even keep themselves, they were so confused. Ella May told me she had thought freedom meant that Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln were going to give her two new shifts. "My old mistress give me two new shifts a year," she said gloomily. "She take care o' me. Gov'ment supposed to take care o' me. Better I go back to my old mistress."
"Don't go back," I begged her. "I'll make you a shift. Two, if you want. It's just that I've been busy taking care of Mama."
But she up and left. And our boarder, Mrs. Paxon, left—because I couldn't do for her and Mama and go to school, too. And now I was here alone. With Mama dying.
I couldn't think for a minute. The house was cold. The fires had died during the night. And it was raining. All it had done was rain this spring. Washington was crying. Four years of confusion, pain, crowding, and mistrust, with half the people on the streets carrying knives and guns and the other half crazy. Four years of scavenging for food. If I were a city I would cry, too.
I got up, put on my robe, and went out into the hall. "Who is it?" I called over the banister, just like my daddy had taught me back home in Surrattsville. "Always ask who's knocking, Miss Muffet," he'd say. My daddy always called me Miss Muffet, not Emily. He'd raised me on the Brothers Grimm and taught me all life's important lessons from fairy tales and nursery rhymes.
Here in Washington I'd already applied much of what he'd taught me. I had to. All kinds of unsavory people walked the streets. Oh, we were used to the Blue Soldiers and the Free Issue nigras like Ella May, who overran the city asking for the forty acres and a mule that they said "Mister Linkum" promised them with freedom, but now it seemed like every other person was a stranger, an interloper, an outlander who had come to prey on us.
Maybe it would be a boarder at the door, I thought. Out of the goodness of her heart, Mrs. Mary sometimes sent us a boarder when she couldn't accommodate the stranger who knocked on her door in the middle