Louisa and the Crystal Gazer

by Anna Maclean

“Eddie Nichols is not in custody,” I said. Reader, the news delighted me! It provided hope that Mr. Barnum had not been the one who had locked me in the cellar the day before. Perhaps it had been Mr. Nichols. Without thinking, I pursed my mouth and whistled. Lizzie, just returned from the kitchen with a fresh plate of potato hash, made a face.

  “Sorry, Lizzie,” I said. “Sylvia, eat quickly, if you don’t mind. We have an errand to attend to.”

  Ten minutes later, we were out the door and on our way. We had to pass Mrs. Percy’s house to arrive at Mr. Barnum’s rooms. I shivered, remembering that small, locked cellar room of the day before.

  PERHAPS MR. BARNUM was there, his landlady said after I had given her one of my cards. Would we wait in the second parlor, and she would discover if he were at home, and if so, ask if he would receive us? That suited us splendidly, we said, and thanked her.

  Tea was not sent in. That suggested several things. First, that Mr. Barnum had instructed his landlady that his visitors were to be treated casually and with a noticeable lack of warmth unless and until he stated otherwise. That, of course, meant that he had anticipated many unpleasant and unexpected meetings while in Boston, probably from creditors. Word gets about quickly when a rich man suffers financial embarrassment. Jackals, was how I had heard Uncle Ben refer to debt collectors, though that seemed harsh to me, since tradesmen have families to feed as well.

  Mr. Barnum kept us waiting for twenty minutes. When he arrived in the parlor, hemming and hawing and apologizing for his “preoccupation,” he was dressed again in the suit he had worn for Mrs. Percy’s first séance, that bold and bright fabric that suggested a man well-off and at ease in the world. His face was not at ease. His heavy eyebrows met over his nose in a stormy manner; his thick, curly hair stuck out over his ears in unruly style, and his red cravat was poorly tied. Preoccupied, indeed.

  “Mrs. Barnum has been ill again,” he said, holding up a letter he had obviously recently received and read. “My financial difficulties have made her headaches return. Oh, for vengeance on those who have ruined me.” Then he seemed to recollect himself, and gave us a half smile.

  “Mrs. Moony, these are friends of mine. Will you bring us tea?” he said to his landlady. Mrs. Moony grimaced in a continuing unfriendly manner.

  “You find me much reduced in circumstance,” said Mr. Barnum, when the parlor door had been shut. “I prefer hotels to boardinghouses, but the wallet is thin these days.” He smiled, but the smile did not reach those fine, piercing eyes of his.

  “That is what I am here to discuss,” I admitted.

  “Ah! Progressive education! I approve, I approve.” He nodded his large, shaggy head vigorously. “Young women these days!”

  “Not your finances,” I explained hastily. “Rather, the purpose of your visit to Boston.”

  He sat heavily in a chair opposite me and crossed his legs, folding his hands over his knees and nervously revolving his thumbs back and forth.

  “Did you ever see Madam Josephine Clofullia, my celebrated ‘Swiss Bearded Lady’?” he asked. Our expressions indicated we had not; moreover we were not familiar with the name. “Poor woman. Face as hairy as a man’s. The beard came all the way down to her waist. But you know, audiences wouldn’t pay a nickel to see the poor unfortunate until I myself spread the rumor that she was a man posing as a woman. I prevaricated, much wounding the lady’s feelings, but you see, the crowd doesn’t want the truth. It wants fantasy.”

  “I have heard of your mermaid,” offered Sylvia.

  “The Fiji Mermaid. Half stuffed monkey, half stuffed fish.” He sighed again. “Stank something awful. But when people looked at it they believed, wanted to believe, that they were seeing a real mermaid. It was good old Yankee tomfoolery.” His thumbs revolved even faster, then ceased. “What I’m trying to explain to you, my dears, is that I have done things of which I am not exactly proud. I chose a hard business—the business of entertaining the masses—and for that I often quarreled with my own conscience. Why, right down the hall from my exhibit of wax figures I kept a private office where the gullible public might meet with fortune-tellers and clairvoyants. Madame Rockwell even claimed she could see the future by staring at a rock. I grew rich off such humbug. But I am a God-fearing man. A God-fearing man. And I wished to set some things right again between my God and myself. I wanted to find a woman of true spirituality who might offer something genuine to the American Museum.”

  “And so you came to see Mrs. Agatha Percy, the crystal gazer?” I asked in amazement.

  Mr. Barnum shook his great, sad head in a bovine manner, as if looking for the next patch of grass to graze.

  “Not Mrs. Percy,” he said. “There is a Miss Adelaide Lynch here in Boston. You’ve not heard of her? You see, she doesn’t bill herself in the papers or promote herself to a crowd. But I had heard she was the real thing. She could really speak with the dead and carry messages back and forth between people and angels. I came to meet her. I came to find something true and good and spiritual.” He sighed and leaned back in his chair, looking up at the ceiling.

  “You did not find it to be so,” I guessed.

  “She is a sweet child, not a calculating woman. However, her older sister controls her and uses her. Imagine the scene: trumpets fall from the ceiling, ‘apparitions’ appear out of nowhere.”

  “Like at Mrs. Percy’s.”

  “Very much like at Mrs. Percy’s. And that is why I return to Bridgeport in a day or two. My business here is concluded.”

  “Mr. Barnum, all of us at Mrs. Percy’s séance were there by invitation. I must ask: Why were you there? Did Mrs. Percy ask to see you, or did you ask to see her? Did it have something to do with Mr. Edward Nichols, your cousin?”

  Mrs. Moony returned with the tea tray, muttering all the while under her breath, and Mr. Barnum waited until she had again left before responding. He rose from his chair and stood in front of me, looking earnestly into my face. His large belly sloped, his shoulders were rounded with defeat, but his eyes had the candor of a child’s. My heart went out to him, but my reasoning faculties did not.

  “You have already guessed, Miss Louisa. I am certain you know of my financial difficulties, and that they are largely caused by that relation of mine, Eddie Nichols, who has been stealing tremendous quantities from my bank accounts by writing checks. Forging checks. Yes. A second purpose brought me to Boston.”

  “Mr. Nichols had the assistance of Mrs. Percy, who seemed adept at imitating other people’s handwriting,” I continued. “And who is now dead.”

  “Yes. Eddie let it slip out last year that he knew an excellent imitator of handwriting. He even gave me her name, as if he were boasting of it! I went to meet Mrs. Percy, to plead with her to give evidence against him, in exchange for which I would pledge my word that she herself would not be prosecuted.”

  “She laughed,” spoke up Sylvia. “In your face.” Then Sylvia laughed—”Ha, ha, ha!”—a hoarse, rude sound very unlike herself.

  I turned and looked at my friend. When the terrible laughter ceased, her face was pale and radiant as a candle flame, her eyes larger than usual and glistening.

  “I hear her voice,” Sylvia said. “What is that? An apology? Oh, Mr. Barnum, she is ever so sorry!” Sylvia burst into tears.

  “Drink this,” I said, handing Sylvia a cup of tea. “Steady yourself.” I put my arms around my sobbing friend.

  “She did laugh!” Mr. Barnum said, amazed. “And then she gave me the invitation to the circle and said if I came I would hear interesting things.”

  Sylvia twisted and turned, sat back on the settee, and put her hand to her face.

  “Why, I’m weeping! What is happening, Louy?”

  “I have no idea,” I said, “but you seem to have had some sort of fit.”

  “I give you my word, I did not harm Mrs. Percy,” Mr. Barnum pleaded.

  “He did not,” said Sylvia, her voice growing strange again.

  “Oh, no more of this!” I cri
ed to Sylvia in exasperation.

  “My word of honor,” said the showman. “And now we must end this interview. I have some last visits to make before my departure. May I accompany you somewhere, ladies?”

  We rose in unison and went back into the hall, where Mrs. Moony handed us our coats and hats, evidently much pleased that we were leaving and she could restore her parlor to its clean and unused condition.

  “My gloves, Mrs. Moony,” said Mr. Barnum, putting on his top hat and searching his coat pockets. “I’ve only one glove. Where has the other got to?”

  “Is this it?” I pulled from my own pocket the glove I had discovered yesterday on the floor at Mrs. Percy’s house.

  His stormy expression returned. “Give me that!” he said, grabbing it.

  “Why were you at Mrs. Percy’s house yesterday?”

  The front door was open and an icy wind blew at us, rustling the peacock feathers in the vases of Mrs. Moony’s hall.

  “Curiosity, Miss Alcott. It is how I made my first fortune,” he said angrily.

  “You were looking for something. Did you find it?”

  Mr. Barnum’s gray eyes glared; his eyebrows moved up and down as he considered his reponse. “I did not,” he said after a long pause. “I wanted to find an example of Mrs. Percy’s forgery, a letter or check, to help prove my case against Eddie. I found the safe, but it was already opened and completely empty.”

  “That is how you heard me shouting from the cellar,” I said. “You were upstairs, not in the street. Why did you not tell this to Constable Cobban?”

  “Breaking and entering, Miss Alcott. A man about to go to the courts for bankruptcy cannot afford even minor transgressions of the law.”

  Oh, how I wanted to believe him.

  Outside, snow crunched underfoot, a soothing, familiar sound, and there was a smell of roasting chestnuts in the air and of wood fires from the thousand hearths of Boston. It was a day meant to reassure that all was as it should be. But it was not.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Mrs. Agatha Percy Speaks—Again

  READER, I ADMIT feeling great discomfort over both discoveries: that Eddie Nichols was still free and that Mr. Barnum had dropped that glove discovered at Mrs. Percy’s house. I hoped with all my heart that Mr. Nichols was my enemy and not Mr. Barnum, for I had developed an affection for the showman. Undoubtedly one had locked me into the cellar, and the only comfort was that my adventure had been meant as a warning, since if either had wished to harm me it would have been easy enough to arrange for the beam to fall on my head rather than across the door.

  That was small enough comfort, however. I was being told in a very indiscreet way to mind my own affairs.

  “Are you well, Louy?” Lizzie asked me that evening, as I sat sewing before the hearth. “You are making the most awful face.”

  “I have been thinking of the séance at Mrs. Percy’s house.”

  “An awful business. I cannot help feeling sorry for Mrs. Percy, though.” Lizzie picked up the sleeve and resumed her stitching. Have I mentioned how fine her stitches were? I watched in wonder as she placed fifteen stitches to the inch, each as even as the one before. I watched, and thought.

  A log crumbled and burst into sparks in the hearth, and that little explosion seemed an expression of this situation: There had been violence, and then little sparks of momentary illumination, and then…nothing. I was at a standstill, and though I spent another hour going through my notes about the séance, I found no pattern pointing to a solution, only two names that appeared over and over—Nichols and Barnum.

  But what of Mr. and Mrs. Deeds? Mrs. Deeds had wished to buy the pearl collar, but Mrs. Percy had asked too high a price. It seemed obvious to me that Mrs. Deeds had earlier business with Mrs Percy. “I recognize that diamond brooch,” Mrs. Percy had said at the séance; perhaps it was another stolen item Mrs. Deeds had purchased after a quarrel over the price; perhaps years of enmity had built up?

  In my heart I hoped time would prove her guilty of the crime. Such greed, such lust for luxury when so many others went hungry and poorly clothed in the dead of winter, such rapaciousness surely were excellent motives for murder.

  And what of the disappeared cook, Meh-ki? Was it guilt or fear that had made her go into hiding? It certainly wasn’t uncommon for servants to wish their employers dead, especially when a safe and theft are also involved, but the two very brief glimpses I’d had of the small woman seemed to reveal a timid personality, not a violent one.

  I finished just one shirt that evening. I still had many to sew before I could collect my fee from the reverend and make the final payment on Lizzie’s music portfolio and series of lessons. I felt the Slough of Despond begin to fall over me, that blackness of mood that arrives from a sense of stagnation and hopelessness.

  No, I told it. Soon it will be Christmas, and I am with my sister and writing stories and earning my living, and I will not give in to this. But the mood pushed back; it wrestled with me.

  “Bedtime,” said Lizzie at ten o’clock, folding her sewing into the basket. The hearth logs had burned down to embers and the sitting room was growing cold. “Will you come up, Louy?”

  “I think I will write some first,” I said, giving her a good-night kiss on her forehead. “Sleep tight.”

  “Don’t let the bedbugs bite,” she finished.

  I took a single candle up to my attic room and sat before the desk, wrapping a blanket around my shoulders for warmth. The wind whistled through loose boards; a flake or two found their way to my place and landed on my page, blurring a letter here and there. I sat shivering, rereading the pages of “Agatha’s Confession.” And a new thought came to me. The story was essentially about three people: Agatha, Philip, and Clara, for in a love triangle what other characters are required?

  Ah. One other person is needed, always, someone who can secretly carry letters back and forth and make unseen arrangements. A maid. Suzie, a voice whispered in my head.

  Suzie? I whispered back.

  A cold draft made my candle flicker. Mrs. Percy could not have made herself clearer had she been trying, though of course it was but a draft that flickered the flame, and the next morning the Slough of Despond had been driven back by a new optimism that Suzie, whether she knew it or not, held the key to this mystery.

  “You again,” she said gloomily, when I pulled my chair up outside her cell the next day.

  “I’ve brought you something,” I said, holding out the raisin cake I had purchased at a little shop around the corner.

  Suzie reached greedily for it through the bars and had to break it in half to pull it back through her barrier. She began to eat immediately, cramming her face as children do.

  “The slops here is something awful,” she said between mouthfuls.

  “The menu and accommodations are not designed for comfort as much as for the encouragement of repentance, I agree. But are they treating you well enough?”

  Suzie snorted and tossed back her disheveled hair. “I had a bath and a change of linen, if that’s what you mean. Don’t know as I’d call that well, since I didn’t do nothing to be here.”

  “Miss Dear, it is nonsense to plead complete innocence of all that happened at Mrs. Percy’s,” I said gently. “Items of dubious provenance were found in your room, and I wonder if you might not have pickpocketed Mr. Phips’s watch during the séance. It is missing, he says.”

  “It fell out of his pocket and I forgot to give it back to him.” She studied the ceiling.

  “Help me, now, Miss Dear, and I will speak on your behalf. Let us be honest with each other.” I leaned closer.

  “How honest?” asked she, also leaning closer.

  “Completely. Let’s begin with a simple question. How long were you employed by Mrs. Percy?”

  “Six months.”

  “Was she a good employer?”

  “She were fine. Paid well, not as demanding as some. Friendly sometimes. I think she’d been in service herself. Can al
ways tell a woman who’s come up the hard way. They aren’t as bad as those born to it.”

  “And did you smoke opium with her?”

  Suzie snorted again. “Hell—I mean heavens, no. My mother smoked the pipe and I saw what good it did her. And Mrs. Percy weren’t no fiend, if that’s what you’re thinking. She smoked maybe once a month, no more. ‘For sweet dreams,’ she would say. Most the time she took one of those little brown pills. ‘Not as hard to break the habit,’ she said. ‘The stomach dissipates the properties of addiction.’ Them were her words. She were knowledgeable.”

  A guard came clanking down the hall toward us, his keys rattling on the large chain at his waist.

  “Constable Cobban has said I might speak with the prisoner,” I informed him somewhat prematurely, as I had not yet asked Cobban. The guard scratched his head and walked away, muttering something about ladies in the courthouse.

  “Prisoner!” moaned Suzie.

  “And for longer a prisoner if you don’t answer all my questions,” I warned her, for I could see that under that tough exterior she was truly frightened, and fear can be a great motivator for the truth. “Now tell me where you were that night before and the morning of Mrs. Percy’s murder.”

  “With Eddie, the sod, the cad. I’ll…I’ll tear his hair, I will, when I get out of here, him leaving me high and dry like this.” She made fists of her hands and banged them against her legs.

  I abstained from reminding her that according to Constable Cobban’s report she had already lightened Mr. Nichols of a chunk of hair and scalp.

  “Say,” she said, looking at me now with suspicion. “How did you know I was away that night?”

  “Because your shoes were wet from having been walking in the snow. You hadn’t had time to dry them before the fire. And your hair was patted flat from your hat. I thought at first you had been napping. I realized later you had been out, and just returned. Did you often spend nights with Mr. Nichols?”

  “Often enough. Mrs. Percy knew. She didn’t mind, long as the parlor got dusted. Like I said, she come up the hard way herself. She weren’t a lady of pretension, like that Mrs. Deeds. I’ll bet she’s never had her hands in the washbasin, not even to scrub her own—”