Dangerous Neighbors Excerpt

It is February, 1876, an unusually warm year in Philadelphia. The Schuylkill has at last frozen over. The skaters are out:

From where they stand, the sisters see a game being played out on the river—two groups of boys whooshing a silver pail between them with sticks. The girls and women tend to hover near the river’s shore, or drift out farther, west and north. One girl in a gray-blue coat is sailing out and fast away on a diagonal, her coattails lifting up and flapping behind, revealing a skirt made entirely of summer yellow. With her shoulders pressed forward and her blades pushing her on, she seems intent on vanishing.

“Where do you suppose she’s going?” asks Anna.

“Perhaps to Birdsboro,” Katherine guesses, as they move across the frozen earth toward the frozen ice. “Or Valley Forge.” But just as Katherine predicts a long journey for the skater, the girl performs a miraculous pivot and begins to sail toward the shore, lifting one leg behind her as she does and holding herself up like an L, on an assured leg, causing one of the boys with the stick and the scarf to stop and stare. He hollers for her then and others do, too, and she remains intrepid above the steady foot on the frozen body of the Schuylkill. There are cheers. Applause that would be so much louder if it weren’t for the muffs and gloves.