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Always business.
    Joseph was free to enjoy his father’s supply of liquor and cigars, the only pleasures the man allowed himself. As far as he knew, his father had never even taken a mistress, an arrangement that was more common than not in their circle. Maybe life would have been better for his mother had he done so, had his father indulged himself even just a bit, allowing imperfection to nick his self-defined veneer. Joseph knew his father’s fidelity was due more to his tight thriftiness and self-image as a man of temperance than any real regard for his wife or vows. Women, mistresses, cost money, money that could be better spent being reinvested in his numerous financial enterprises.
    Joseph sat on the divan in front of the fireplace, concentrating on the woman who had not only escaped a husband but who had abandoned her son, as well. He knew one day that he would take a wife. It was his duty as heir. Also, his father wanted to make sure there would be a generation born who would be worthier of his money and name than the present successor. But as Joseph stared at Anne Luce’s set gaze, he knew that he could never marry a woman he held in such disregard as his father had held his mother. Theirs had been a marriage with rarely an exchange of kind words. Anne’s attempts at intimate conversations and loving embraces had been met only with dark silences that delivered more pain than any physical blow ever could. Even as a young boy, he had picked up this tacit hostility and had wondered about it, thinking then that this was what marriage was about.
    Looking up at his mother, Joseph vowed that he would only marry for love and not merely for duty—or to acquire a possession to display on his arm. He would love his wife, dearly, madly, completely. He would adore her, worship her so that she would never leave him. The one who finally won his heart would be his forever. Even death would not part them.

C hapter 5
     
    S itting in the Newberry Library, Rhea Simmons paused at one of the records listed on page 134 of the African-American Freedmen’s Sourcebook . She’d been leafing through the book all afternoon and the names and text were beginning to blur. She took off her glasses, rubbed her eyes, put the glasses back on. Yes. There it was, the name she had been searching for, for nearly an hour. The listing leapt from a page of the Register of Signatures of Depositors of the Freedmen’s Saving and Trust Company, New York 1865–1876.
 
    Record No. 1013 Record for Rachel Chase
    Date: Feb. 20, 1876
    Where born: New York
    Where brought up: New York
    Residence: 358 W. 15th St.
    Age: 24 Complexion: Brown
    Occupation: Teacher
    Works for: Colored School #1
    Wife or Husband: George (Attorney)
    Children: None
    Father: Lawrence Simmons, died on Thompson St., 1873
    Mother: Gertrude Olmsted of NY.
    Brothers and sisters: Lawrence, Jr. of NY.
    Remarks:
     
    This was a start. She would have to research the collections some other day for more information. The research would take a lot of time and effort, but ever since her grandmother had handed her the bundle of letters, her curiosity had been piqued about the woman who’d written them.
    Rhea copied the information into her lined notebook, then double-checked to make sure she had written everything correctly. With a sigh, she closed the heavy vellum-bound book, put her pen down and sat back in the chair. In the hour since she’d first arrived, the room had partially filled with people. College students like her, mostly. There were a few older patrons, browsing through large tomes, probably researching their family genealogies. The librarian had told her that the second floor of the Newberry Library held an extensive collection of urban histories, census reports as well as 17,000 genealogies. Here was the place to come to research the past, to find information about somebody who lived and died over a century ago.
    Rhea peered around at the bronze-grilled oak cases holding thousands