Where the Light Enters

by Sara Donati

  Yesterday at this time she had been sitting in the garden at Roses, where the air smelled of lilac and wisteria and sun on newly turned soil. Where people who liked each other talked and told stories. It was just a few blocks away, but it felt just now as if she could walk for days and never reach that place.

  Bellegarde looked like a brawler in a bad mood; even the cheekiest pickpockets would hesitate to rob him, whereas Ned Nediani had warned her many times that she looked like easy prey. Either Bellegarde hadn’t noticed or he didn’t care. Elise’s stomach growled as she tucked her bag more securely against herself.

  She glanced up and saw something familiar in his expression, something she saw every day. It reminded her that this man had lost his wife, that his brother-in-law had repudiated him and all but stolen his son away. A child he had never seen. Compassion was required, no matter how unpleasant he might be.

  They took Tenth Street west into a neighborhood Elise knew only in passing. Row houses and small tenements, corner taverns and grocers’ stands already closed up for the day, awnings drawn in and shades down. The neighborhood was not especially poor, just one of hundreds where children played in the street, leaping over gutters heaped with garbage and upsetting ash barrels in a wild chase for nothing in particular. All of them barefooted, though there was still a chill in the air.

  Two blocks farther and they came to a narrow street that wasn’t paved at all, a dead end. A young girl was sweeping the walk in front of a tavern, her hair hanging in her eyes.

  Mr. Bellegarde turned to look at Elise, lifting a shoulder as if to say: What are you waiting for?

  Elise approached the girl. “Can you point us to Mrs. Quig? A wet nurse, who takes in infants from the New Amsterdam.”

  The girl was terribly cross-eyed, but there was a sharp intelligence in the way she considered them, her head tilted to one side.

  “You won’t find Mrs. Quig here no more,” she said. “Stabbed in the throat what, three days ago now. Robbers, but stupid ones if they thought they’d get anything worth anything off her.”

  Elise felt Mr. Bellegarde stiffen, but she kept her attention on the girl.

  “And what became of the children she was looking after?”

  “No idea,” said the girl. “But ask Mrs. Paisley, she could tell you.” She jerked her head toward the building. “The landlady.”

  Bellegarde said, “I’ll try the tavern.” He pushed the door open and disappeared into a dim cave that belched air thick with spilled ale and stale tobacco smoke.

  Elise found the stairway that led to the apartments and climbed to the second floor, where she came across an elderly woman. She was wrapped in shawls, an old-fashioned mob cap on her head, her back twisted not with age but some other malady she had lived with all her life. She looked up from scrubbing the warped floorboards, smiled, and identified herself as the landlady, and could she help?

  “I was hoping to find Mrs. Quig, but I understand she died just recently?”

  “Aye, that’s so.” The landlady’s voice creaked and wobbled with age as she pushed herself to her feet. “Are you wanting to see her rooms?”

  It seemed like the best way to start a conversation, so Elise nodded.

  The woman pulled an old-fashioned key out of a pocket and pointed to a door at the end of the hall.

  There were two rooms: a smaller chamber with a bed, an infant’s cot, and hooks on the wall for clothes, and beside it the parlor with a kitchen at one end. Compared to other lodgings Elise had seen, Mrs. Quig’s home was almost princely in its size and furnishings. And every inch—furniture, floors, baseboards, walls—had been scoured as clean as an operating room and in much the same manner. The smells of lye soap and carbolic were enough to make the eyes water.

  “Colleen was a stickler for cleanliness,” said Mrs. Paisley, pulling out a tattered handkerchief to wipe her eyes. “A sanitarian, she called herself. She learned about all that at the New Amsterdam, how the—what was it she called them, the wee beasties that hide where you can’t see them?”

  “Bacteria?”

  “No, that wasn’t it. Germs. Germs, she called them. They pounce when you’re not paying attention and bring on malaria and diphtheria and such. She was forever scrubbing, and not just the floors, no, her hands were red as cherries from washing all the day long.”

  She squinted at Elise’s hands, reached out, and picked one up as if it were an apple to be examined for soundness.

  “You too, I see. You knew our Colleen, did you? From the hospital?”

  “From the New Amsterdam, yes. I was a nurse there.”

  “Not no more?”

  “I’m in medical school now.”

  The look of honest surprise was something Elise was used to.

  “Is that true, then, they’ve got lady doctors at the New Amsterdam? I thought she was having me on.”

  “It’s true,” Elise said. “And not just at the New Amsterdam.”

  “Well,” said the landlady, finally letting Elise’s hand go and folding her own hands at her waist. “Well, so. I never imagined such a thing, but the world is changing all around us every day.” She seemed to be studying the scrubbed tabletop while she talked. “Colleen was as close to a doctor as we got. She looked after everybody in this building and the ones to either side, with teas and such. A practical woman, a hard worker, but tenderhearted, too. I never heard a cross word from her. Never complained, not even when she lost her husband and little boy in the same week.

  “I’ll tell you true, the babies she nursed, they never knew what it was to be hungry or cold. That’s how I knew something was off, you see. I heard them screeching with hunger, all three of them, and I knew there was something bad wrong. The coppers come later that evening to say she was dead, robbed and stabbed. And her not yet five-and-thirty.”

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Paisley. It sounds as though you lost a good friend.”

  “She was my great-niece,” the old lady said. “My brother’s only grandchild, and the last of my family. Now tell me, you’re not after rooms, are you? What brings you here from the New Amsterdam?”

  “I was looking for one of the babies Mrs. Quig was nursing. It turns out he does have family, and his father wants him. Do you know what happened to her charges?”

  “Sure I do,” she said. “I went down to St. Andrew’s, just around the corner, and told the Reverend Larabee. He came and took them away. To a home for orphans, he said. Called the Shepherd’s Fold.”

  26

  BELLEGARDE WAS COMING out of the tavern as Elise reached the street.

  She said, “He’s at a foundling home called the Shepherd’s Fold. The landlady didn’t have an address.”

  “The barkeep told me the same thing. And he knew the address.” He started off and Elise followed, picking up her pace as they walked to Sixth Avenue and then south, under the elevated train line.

  He said, “Have you heard of this Shepherd’s Fold before?”

  “No,” Elise said. “But there must be fifty places like it in the city where they take in orphans.”

  She might have told him more, both good and bad, about foundling homes and asylums, but an elevated train was passing overhead and she could not compete with the screech. And anyway, she told herself, it was best not to volunteer information he hadn’t requested. Nor would she ask him any of the questions that were piling up in her head about him, his wife, or the situation he found himself in.

  This resolution was still foremost in her mind when they turned another corner and came to a stop in front of a large building, very old, half timbered. Like the others on the block it was decently maintained, with a quiet severity about it that struck Elise as off, somehow. Because, she realized, it was so very quiet.

  Over the door a hand-painted sign declared that they had found the Shepherd’s Fold, under the directorship of Reverend Hamilton Crowley. Elise
followed Bellegarde to the door, where he rapped three times, waited, and rapped again.

  The maid who opened the door was stick thin and pale, her complexion marred by smallpox scars. Her apron, hems, and cuffs were threadbare but very clean.

  “Can I help you?” She held up a hand to block the sunlight, squinting. Her nails had been bitten to bloody crescents, and her eyes were bloodshot and red-rimmed.

  “I want to see whoever’s in charge. Right now.” Bellegarde pushed forward without waiting for an invitation and marched down the hall, scanning doors right and left.

  “Sir,” the maid said to his back. “Please wait. Wait.”

  She ran after him, and again, Elise followed. Wondering what she could and should do, whether she might try to temper Denis Bellegarde’s harsh manner, or if that would only serve to inflame his temper.

  “Reverend Crowley isn’t to be disturbed. Really, sir. He won’t thank you for interrupting his—”

  Elise touched the maid’s arm. “You can’t stop him.”

  The narrow face contorted. “But I’ll get in so much trouble,” she whispered. “Reverend Crowley—”

  She broke off, because a door at the back of the hall had opened to Mr. Bellegarde’s knock.

  The man standing in the doorway fit every preconception Elise had about Protestant ministers: a tall, robust man with bushels of slate-gray whiskers and a naked chin the color of raw liver, tiny reading glasses perched on the end of a nose like a hatchet, and a stern expression. His eyes were as pale as water as they moved over Mr. Bellegarde, from head to toe and back again.

  “What’s the meaning of this? Grace?”

  “Pardon me, sir. He wouldn’t wait,” the maid said.

  The pale eyes fixed on her, and the girl dropped her gaze to the floor.

  “Dr. Mercier.” Mr. Bellegarde spoke to Elise, but he never looked away from the minister. “You’ll join us for this conversation.”

  * * *

  • • •

  IN A TERSE recital that lasted less than a minute Denis Bellegarde related the facts: the wreck of the Cairo, his wife’s death in childbirth at the New Amsterdam, and the clerical error that caused her son to be classified as an orphan.

  “The wet nurse who took him home died, and according to her landlady, he was brought here.”

  Mr. Crowley had retreated to sit behind his desk. His elbows rested on the polished wood surface, his fingers laced together and knuckles pressed to his lower face, as if to stop himself from talking.

  Now he laid them flat on the desk. His mouth stretched across his face like a bloodless wound.

  “And this infant’s name?”

  “Denis Bellegarde.”

  “How do I know you are the boy’s father?”

  Before Bellegarde could reply Elise spoke up. “I am on staff at the New Amsterdam and I can attest to his identity. I have the records here, and I’ve seen the marriage certificate.”

  She might have been invisible for all the attention Crowley paid her because he responded to Bellegarde directly. “So your claim is that this child is your legal issue.”

  “It is.”

  “I take it you are Roman Catholic.”

  Bellegarde stiffened. “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “Unfortunately, nothing at all.” The thin mouth puckered and relaxed, puckered, relaxed.

  For a moment the tension in the air swelled, and then the minister’s eyes strayed to the clock on his desk and he shook his head.

  “Very well,” he said. “Grace will show you to the nursery.”

  * * *

  • • •

  FROM WHAT ELISE could tell, the ground floor of the Shepherd’s Fold was dedicated to office space and a dining room crowded with a dozen small tables. There would be a kitchen and a courtyard with an outhouse and likely a laundry, but from the silence it seemed the whole business end of the house was deserted. The evening light poured in from the window at the end of the hall onto a wood floor that glistened with polish.

  As they followed the maid up the stairs, Elise experienced a wave of something like fear: a tingling in her arms and hands and gooseflesh rising all along her back. She had spent most of her life among sick and orphaned children, and the utter quiet struck her as more than unusual. It felt off. She couldn’t take another step without asking.

  “I have a question.”

  For a moment it seemed that they would ignore her and go on, but Elise stayed just where she was until both Bellegarde and the young woman called Grace slowed and then stopped. In those few seconds she had time to ask herself what exactly she hoped to accomplish. Then she thought of Anna and how she would handle this situation, and a calm came over her.

  “Yes?”

  “First, what is your full name?”

  “Grace Miller.”

  “Miss Miller, can you tell me, where are the children?”

  She looked relieved to be asked something so simple, but then her voice came so softly that Elise could hardly hear her, even in this quiet house.

  “The nursery is just ahead, on the right.”

  “And the others? Surely there are more children. Are these their rooms?” She pointed to the doors that lined the opposite wall and stepped in that direction.

  “Don’t,” said the maid. “Please. Everyone is sleeping.”

  Elise tried to remember if any of the dormitories at St. Patrick’s or the Foundling had been so quiet at such an early hour. Children were fed and bathed before bed, and none of that happened without a great deal of noise. Young children who were hungry or tired were not docile; even content children were noisy in the evenings: they talked or babbled, sang or shouted, sometimes all at once.

  Bellegarde’s patience was at an end. “It’s none of our concern.”

  Elise saw that he was anxious, and more than that: anxiety was foreign to him and roused his anger. It made perfect sense. After a great deal of worry and uncertainty, after news that his brother-in-law had somehow managed to convince his wife that she must get on a ship to France and that she had died as a result, after all that he was about to see his child for the first time. But there was something off here, and she couldn’t pretend otherwise.

  “It may not be your concern,” she said. “But it is mine. How many children on this floor, miss? Other than in the nursery.”

  “Twenty.”

  “Their ages?”

  “No older than seven. After that they’re sent off. Usually.”

  Elise looked at her more closely. “What does that mean?”

  She wound her fingers together. “Some orphans are kept on after they turn seven. If they can be used. Useful,” she corrected herself.

  “As you were.”

  She nodded.

  Elise crossed the hall and tried a door, only to find it locked.

  “They are all locked,” the maid said. “Except for the one at the end. But please—”

  Elise walked calmly to the end of the hall and turned the knob. The door opened quietly.

  There was a breeze in the room and the familiar smells that any woman who had ever cared for young children would recognize immediately. Like the air after a thunderstorm in the countryside, the very essence of pure. And other smells, also familiar and comforting: wood polish, lye soap, starch, and the particular scent of Reckitt’s Bluing. The bed linen would be a vivid white, carefully hemmed and pressed. Also, as expected under this quilt of scents was a trace of urine and waste and diapers soaking in a pail.

  She couldn’t really see into the room, but she could tell that it ran the length of the building, which meant that they had taken down internal walls to make a dormitory. With her head canted to the side Elise listened, expecting to hear the sounds she associated with sleeping children. And heard nothing.

  Behind her Bellegarde
cleared his throat.

  For a long moment Elise debated with herself. Certainly she could insist on seeing more. Ask for a candle, for the gas lights to be turned up, the shades to be raised. It would most certainly wake the children, and that meant rousing the whole house. She listened again and heard a small creaking sound. A rocking chair.

  Someone sat in the dark, observing her at the door, and said nothing. It should have made her more uncomfortable, but instead Elise thought of the nuns she had known. Women who waited, who watched. That thought was enough to calm her, for the moment. She closed the door.

  There was a third story to this house, but the staircase was closed in and behind a door that Elise knew would be locked.

  “Reverend Crowley’s apartment?”

  The girl nodded. “The nursery is here.”

  She opened a door that led into a long, narrow room. There were windows on two sides with shades and drapes, all drawn shut. It was close and humid and so warm that it felt almost airless. In the dim light of a single gas lamp, Elise counted ten cribs in a line that stretched the length of the room. On the far wall two tables were piled with the things to be found in every nursery: on one, neatly stacked blankets, sheets, diapers, and caps; on the other, basins small and large, sponges, dishes, waste buckets, laundry baskets, pots of what she took to be ointments and liniments, a crate of jugs, and empty pannikins. Below a dry sink were water buckets—no doubt Grace Miller was the one who was responsible for hauling water up the stairs multiple times every day and then heating it in the little stove. Beside the sink were racks of bottles, corks, tubes, and rubber teats. Nothing out of the ordinary, again, but for the silence in the room.

  Her mind cataloged all this while the maid spoke to an older woman in a whisper too low to be heard. The woman was dressed in sober black, her hands folded at her waist, her expression severe. Her hair was pulled so tightly back on her scalp that it might have been painted on, and deep vertical lines framed her mouth. She looked up sharply at one point, her gaze fixing on Denis Bellegarde in an openly suspicious manner. He returned her animosity with a look just as cold and disapproving.