The Twelfth Card

she referred to as “saving her girlfriend,” which she didn’t go into with him either; her advisor for this particular endeavor seemed to be Amelia Sachs.
    “I wanted to show you something.” The girl held up a piece of yellowing paper containing several paragraphs of handwriting that Rhyme immediately recognized as Charles Singleton’s.
    “Another letter?” Sachs asked.
    Geneva nodded. She was handling the paper very carefully.
    “Aunt Lilly heard from that relative of ours in Madison. He sent us a few things he found in his basement. A bookmark of Charles’s, a pair of his glasses. And a dozen letters. This is the one I wanted to show you.” With beaming eyes, Geneva added, “It was written in 1875, after he got out of prison.”
    “Let’s see it,” Rhyme said.
    Sachs mounted it on the scanner and a moment later the image appeared on several computer monitors around the lab. Sachs stepped next to Rhyme, put her arm around his shoulder. They looked at the screen.
    My most darling Violet:
    I trust you have been enjoying your sister’s company, and that Joshua and Elizabeth are pleased to spend time with their cousins. That Frederick—who was only nine when I saw him last,—is as tall as his father is a fact I find hard to grasp.
    All is well at our cottage, I am pleased to report. James and I cut ice on the shore of the river all morning and stocked the ice-house, then covered the blocks in saw-dust. We then traveled some two miles north through substantial snow to view the orchard that is offered for sale. The price is dear but I believe the seller will respond favorably to my counter-offer. He was clearly in doubt about selling to a Negro but when I revealed that I could pay him in greenbacks and would not need to offer a note, his concerns appeared to vanish.
    Hard cash is a great equalizer.
    Were you not as moved as I to read that yesterday our country enacted a Civil Rights Act? Did you see the particulars? The law guarantees to everyone of any color equal enjoyment of all inns, public conveyances, theaters and the like. What a momentous day for our Cause! This is the very legislation about which I corresponded with Charles Sumner and Benjamin Butler at length last year, and I believe that some of my ideas made their way into this important document.
    As you can well imagine, this news gave me cause for reflection, thinking back to those terrible events of seven years past, being robbed of our orchard in Gallows Heights and jailed in pitiful conditions.
    And yet now, reflecting upon this news from Washington, D.C., as I sit before the fire in our cottage, I feel that those terrible events are from a different world entirely. In much the same way as those hours of bloody combat in the War or the hard years of forced servitude in Virginia are forever present but—somehow,—as removed as the muddled images from an ill-remembered nightmare.
    Perhaps within our hearts is a single repository for both despair and hope, and filling that space with one drives out all but the most shadowy memory of the other. And tonight I am filled only with hope.
    You will recall that, for years I vowed that I would do whatever I might to cast off the stigma of being regarded as a three-fifths man. When I consider the looks I still receive, because of my color, and the actions of others toward me and our people, I think I am not yet regarded as completely whole. But I would venture to say that we have progressed to the point where I am viewed as a nine-tenths man (James laughed heartily when I told him this over supper tonight), and I continue to have faith that we will come to be seen as whole within our lifetimes, or in Joshua’s and Elizabeth’s, at least.
    Now, my dearest, I must say goodnight to you and prepare a lesson for my students tomorrow.
    Sweet dreams to you and our children, my darling. I live for your return.
    Your faithful Charles     
Croton on the Hudson,
March 2, 1875               
    Rhyme said, “It sounds like Douglass and the others forgave him for the robbery. Or decided to believe that he didn’t do it.”
    Sachs asked, “What was that law he was talking about?”
    “The Civil Rights Act of 1875,” Geneva said. “It prohibited racial discrimination by hotels, restaurants, trains, theaters—any public place.” The girl shook her head. “It didn’t last, though. The Supreme Court struck it down in the 1880s as unconstitutional. There wasn’t a single piece of