All We Were Promised by Ashton Lattimore EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Authors: Ashton Lattimore
- Language: English
- Genre: Family Saga Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 4.4 MB
- Price: Free
CHARLOTTE
Philadelphia, 1837
THE CITY OF PHILADELPHIA WASN’T what it claimed to be. But after four
years of living here with her father, Charlotte knew there was a lot of that
going around. It was unseasonably warm that November morning in
Washington Square Park, enough to leave Charlotte and her friend Nell
sweating under their dresses even as amber and gold leaves crunched
beneath their feet. In Philadelphia, a stray hot day was as good as summer,
when folks would gather at parks and carousels and crowd onto the
cobblestone streets in messy, loud-talking clumps that circled and melted
into one another.
But warm weather also meant rioting season: when all the
city’s resentments between Black and white, freedman and immigrant,
working folks and the struggling poor boiled over. Though the near-holy
parchment at Independence Hall claimed all men were equal, the words told
only half the story—in the heat, the city’s people rarely shied from acting
out the rest. And in the cooler months after all the ruckus, the city would
hush and turn itself inward, with everyone huddled into stately brick town
houses and tumbledown back-alley tenements alike, as if embarrassed by all
the thrashing and carrying on.
Charlotte had seen the same cycle play out for four years going, and that
morning she knew that all the conditions were ripe for a mob scene. Still, as
she and Nell sat together fanning themselves a few rows back from the
open-air wooden stage waiting for Mr. Robert Purvis’s speech to start, she
was lulled into a fool’s sense of safety.
After all, it had been Nell’s idea to attend. With her hair pulled back into
a neat bun, two perfectly curled tendrils framing her deep brown face, and
an immaculate lace shawl draped over her lavender wool and silk dress with
pleated sleeves, Nell looked every inch the daughter of the city’s monied
Black elite—not the sort of woman you’d expect to lead you into a street
tussle. Beside her, Charlotte self-consciously smoothed down her drab gray
housemaid uniform.
The color did nothing for her tawny brown
complexion, but even such a sorry palette didn’t dim the natural prettiness
of her face: deep mauve lips shaped in a Cupid’s bow beneath the wide-set
mahogany eyes she’d inherited from her father. Those were among the
many things he’d given her that she’d never asked for.
These days, Charlotte was in the habit of going more or less wherever
Nell suggested, if only to get out of the little row house on Fourth Street
that her father—no, boss—meant to serve as both her charge and her cage.
“I’m so pleased you decided to come,” Nell said, “but are you certain
your employer won’t mind you stepping away from your duties this
morning?”
“He’d have to notice before he paid it any mind,” Charlotte said. Lately
her father was far too wrapped up in his work to have any idea what she got
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