Conjurer

by Cordelia Frances Biddle

  Simms responds, but his voice is too soft for Rosegger’s wife to hear—as are the exchanges that follow. She is beginning to quit her post when a newly energized and incisive question issues from her husband.

  “What do you know of John Durand, Mr. Simms?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “No reason.”

  “Come, man, be frank. Does this subject have some bearing on the other?”

  “Durand wishes to meet with me. His letter indicates a good degree of urgency.”

  Then the voices hush again, and Rosegger’s wife is suddenly aware that one of her children is summoning her, and that the importunate voice is coming dangerously near to where she is hiding.

  Covered head to toe in a hooded wool mantle of a weave and texture neither obviously costly nor overtly plain, Emily Durand slithers into the Demport House Hotel on lower Chestnut Street. It’s a grand place, spankingly new, full of gilt and velvet and damask. She lowers her shrouded head in quick recognition of just how perilous this rash decision is; she almost decides to flee but then realizes that she’s unwittingly attracted the attention of a number of patrons—all male, of course. Hotels only rarely cater to lady guests. She can feel rather than actually see the men regarding her, and she stands, frozen and powerless. It’s a sensation Emily has never before experienced.

  The smells and sounds of transitory male bonhomie fill her nostrils and ears: pipe tobacco, smoked herrings, onion tarts, shouted opinions, and a coarse and braying laugh that she’s certain is aimed at her. The man assumes I’m the hired companion of a hotel patron, she tells herself; and the thought makes her heart beat violently and blood race into her brain.

  She hurries across the crowded reception room and almost leaps upon the double stairs, where she must purposely slow her stride in order to avoid running upward. Within the thin kid of her glove, the hand grasping the banister is drenched and icy. Emily gasps for air; her vision blurs; she pushes on. By the time she reaches the hotel’s third floor, her body is almost not her own. She hurries to the end of the corridor and raises her hand to knock upon a door.

  The turnkey twists the jangling metal in the thick lock. Ruth hears the sound and shrinks back against the stone wall until her body is almost fused with its rough surface. Beneath the thin wool of her garment, she feels rock jab at her flesh.

  “Won’t do you no good,” she hears as the man removes the key and enters her cell. With him come the light and the view of the corridor, the sight of other doors, the miracle of noise. Ruth’s eyes dart past the turnkey; she hears an iron pot banging against a wooden surface; she hears a singsong moan issuing faintly from a cell to her left.

  “Won’t do you no good trying to hide there.”

  Ruth doesn’t respond, and the turnkey throws a dark sack toward her. “Cover your face,” he orders.

  She takes it up; panic rattles within her chest. “I cannot—”

  “Cannot or will not, missy? Cover your face, and be quick about it.”

  Ruth gazes at the guard’s pale countenance. “Please, sir … Don’t …”

  “Hurry it up. I’m not here to gab.”

  Despite her own sternest exhortations to the contrary, Ruth begins to weep. “Please, sir …”

  “Cover your head, I said!”

  Ruth raises the mask. It stinks of fear. She pulls it over her hair. The turnkey yanks it into place, scraping her neck and collarbone. Ruth quivers, then forces herself to stand defiantly still. Thy people shall be my people, she thinks, and thy God, my God. Bile rises in her throat as she decides: No, their people are not mine. I’m not like them, nor will I be. Not ever. I will be Ruth, black Ruth. I will be hard where they are soft, fierce where they tremble.

  When the guard grabs her, she shakes herself free. “Suit yourself,” he barks. “You refuse to see the Warden, no one can make you, I s’pose.”

  Ruth’s covered head jerks up.

  “Thought that’d make a difference. Suspicious wench, ain’t you? Thought I’d come to have my way with you, didn’t you? That would be the rare day, when I’d rely on Negresses like you.” He shoves her into the corridor, then looks back before banging the cell door shut. “Anything you want to take?”

  Her head now thoroughly shrouded in the sack, Ruth doesn’t answer.

  “Suit yourself.”

  Awkwardly, they walk through the compound, the guard half pushing, half guiding, as Ruth tries to peek at her feet through the bottom of her mask. They cross the upper corridor where she was housed, then stumble down a steep flight of stairs that feel wet under Ruth’s thin shoes. The guard propels her forward through another silent hall, then finally out into the cold afternoon air. Ruth jumps in reflexive surprise. Her head still wrapped, she looks up, imagining she’s gazing into the darkening sky, the moon perhaps beginning its faint glimmer, the skeletal branches of the trees reaching longing fingers toward each other. Despite the rough fabric covering her nose and mouth, despite the stench of the prison, she smells freshness and hope. She’s out of doors. For the first time in nearly three years, she stands within the sight of Heaven.

  The turnkey shoves her forward, then hands her to another guard. “B415,” he says to this person. “To the Warden’s office.” Ruth passes ahead in wondrous silence, then is pushed through a door, which shuts behind her with a bang. The space in which she finds herself is warm, scented with wood smoke, tobacco, and a metallic aroma like polished brass. She’s told to remove her hood.

  “Ruth, maid-of-all work, beggary, larceny.”

  The man (Ruth assumes it’s the Warden) looks up at her from a chair that sits behind a long oaken desk. His face is as translucent as an ear of summer corn; his fair hair is silken.

  “I am Ruth,” she answers.

  The Warden appears disturbed by her quick reply. “You are free to go,” he tells her after a moment.

  “Go?”

  “Are you dull-witted, girl? Leave the penitentiary. Go away from this place.”

  “But—” Ruth begins.

  The Warden interrupts. “I have no time to spare in argument, girl. You will present your prison clothing to the matron and receive, in return, the garb in which you arrived. Then the gate facing Fairmount Street will be opened, and you will be set free. It is the prison managers’ fervent hope that these months and years of enforced reflection and meditation will have proven instructive, and that you will have been forever reformed from your evil ways. It is also our fervent hope that you will become what God intended, a willing and exemplary citizen of this fair city, and that you will apply yourself to wholesome work and so resolve to strive to live a pure and righteous life.” He returns his glance to his desk to indicate the interview is over.

  “My son?” Ruth asks.

  The Warden looks up, annoyed. “I know of no son.”

  “My little Cai … He was—”

  “I know of no son.”

  A spirit of rebellion overtakes her. “My Cai … He was with me in the court. A little boy with the falling sickness—?”

  “Your affairs beyond these walls are your own.” The Warden resumes perusing the sheaf of papers lying upon his desk. “Insolence will force the penitentiary managers to reconsider their leniency. Take care, girl.” Then he adds a curt and bitter “And if you happen upon a club-foot tailor limping along in some secretive alley, you should consider it your duty to alert a member of the day watch.”

  “A tailor—?”

  The Warden sneers. “Never mind. We’ll catch the miserable fellow quick enough. He won’t find it so easy to escape from this fine house.” The tone that utters these words is filled with both resentment and revenge.

  “Escape?” Ruth echoes in fear.

  “Are you stupid, girl, that you must repeat my words? Yes, that’s what our unfortunate tailor did, and the managers don’t look kindly on that type of transgression. When we haul him back in, he won’t find his life so easy. But you’ve won your freedom honestly. Now go.”

  What
seems like mere moments later, Ruth stands in the street, a free woman. Dray horses pulling great carts rumble past. Bone-thin dogs dodge between the wheels; some hurriedly bury their snouts in fresh and steaming piles of manure; others bite the carts’ wood siding as if remnants of food can be found there; all dart about as though anticipating blows and hard-booted kicks. Ruth has forgotten how noisome the city is, and how unfriendly. The day is now waning; evening will soon approach; and she has no place in which to lay her head, no coin with which to purchase her supper, no friend she can remember.

  She plunges into the melee and begins the two-mile walk down into the city proper.

  “Aimilee … bimba triste. Non piangere.”

  Emily’s quite dry and untragic eyes sweep around Eusapio Paladino’s rooms. She spots his assistant, hunched and watchful in a corner; and the little man’s pose, rather than appearing sinister and fearsome, emboldens her.

  “What do you wish from me?” she demands. “If it’s money, I won’t supply it.”

  But all Paladino responds is a lilting “Aimilee … Non piangere.”

  “I’m not crying,” Emily insists. She stands taller, statelier, although even as she strikes this pose she remembers the reflection in her mirror: the woman she didn’t recognize, the one with the sorrowing eyes. “If it’s gold you’re seeking—”

  “Bimba triste,” Eusapio interrupts, and the toadish assistant hurries to translate:

  “Sad little girl—”

  “Yes. Yes. I know that,” Emily briskly interrupts. “Ask him what he wants. I cannot stay here all day.”

  A swift consultation ensues; Emily cannot understand a word of it, but as she tries to ascertain its sense her eyes take in Paladino’s rented rooms. She’s shocked to see a large and canopied bed through the open door, and even more disturbed to note her reaction to such an inappropriate scene: “Voluptuous” is the word that springs to mind. The bed with its hangings, eiderdowns, and pillows seems as hedonistic as a pasha’s lair.

  So engrossed is Emily in this most unladylike response that it takes her a moment to realize that Paladino has taken her hand, and another befuddled moment to recognize that the assistant is no longer present. “What do you wish of me?” she manages to whisper, but the words have lost their urgency and force, and she can only gaze at her hand in his. She knows full well that he’s about to kiss it, and that she will let him.

  Oh God, her brain cries out, what have you done by sending me into this place? By now, she’s weeping openly; she knows she should flee but also realizes that that is the last thing she wants—or is capable of accomplishing.

  So Emily permits Eusapio to untie her mantle and pull off her gloves. She watches him push back her long sleeves and kiss her wrists, then smile into her face as he holds her palms to his lips. His eyes are mesmerizing; they seem to bore all the way into her. All Emily desires in this world at this moment is to trust them.

  In the bed, obscured within a welter of silk hangings and crumpled sheets, Emily turns her face toward the man who is now her lover. Her tears are long since dried, and her apprehensions miraculously withered away. She raises herself on one elbow and begins to stroke his chest. He has the torso of a statue, she thinks, chiseled and perfect and seamlessly young. Emily feels ancient beside him.

  “Bimba triste,” Eusapio laughs, pulling her face up toward his own, and kissing her damp face and swollen mouth.

  I am not sad, Emily wants to protest. Instead, she runs her warm hands down over his wondrous body, and he responds by wrapping his arms around her and pressing his hips into hers. Again? she thinks. Do we do this again? Not even in her most unbridled dreams has she experienced anything like this encounter.

  When their bodies are fully joined, length to length, she has a sudden and disconcerting memory of her husband. He’s climbing into his favorite gig with his Thoroughbred gelding at the ready. Poised, whip in hand, his broad back tensed within his driving equipage, John is a spectacle of accepted power.

  “Cavallo,” Eusapio murmurs into Emily’s ear. “Vedo.” I see a horse.

  The Italian words mean nothing to her. “Hold me,” she answers.

  “Vedo un cavallo … Aimilee…”

  “Eusapio,” she moans in reply. She has no comprehension that her lover is envisioning the same picture as she.

  In the midst of their lovemaking, Eusapio’s legs suddenly stiffen and his hands turn into claws. Emily protests in words he can’t understand, stroking his thighs, then taking his tightened fingers into her own. “My love? Eusapio? Are you quite well?” But his distress increases; and by the time she recognizes the totality of his affliction, he’s begun to recoil from her, sitting huddled in the corner of the bed. His body trembles; every sign of his previous lust has dwindled to nothing.

  “Una scarpa,” he mutters. “Senza lo piede.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Emily reaches for him. He draws farther back until he seems in danger of tumbling through the bed’s half-drawn draperies.

  “Una scarpa.” He points to a shoe lying on the floor. “Lo piede.”

  He grabs his own foot as if to wrench it off, then begins to stroke his toes, curling them under until they all but disappear.

  “Don’t,” Emily says. “You’re hurting yourself.” She sits upright, drawing the sheeting around herself while Eusapio Paladino grows ever more irrational.

  All at once, her thoughts begin focusing not on Eusapio but on her own predicament. She, Emily Durand, a married woman of great social standing, is in a hotel with a man who is neither her husband nor her peer. Her eyes dart across the room, searching for her hastily discarded clothes. If an acquaintance of John’s were to discover my presence here, she thinks, but doesn’t allow the idea to advance. Nervous sweat beads on her brow and neck and shoulders, running in rivulets between her breasts.

  “Dal piede corto …” Eusapio marches two fingers over the mattress, creating a lopsided gait like that of a person horribly deformed.

  “Eusapio …” Emily enjoins with a stilted, pleading smile, praying that he won’t cry out as he did in the Ilsleys’ drawing room. “No more of this nonsense. You’re not on display here. You needn’t pretend. Come … I will be your bimba triste … your Aimilee…” She begins smoothing her hands across his shoulders. “… Come, no more pretense …” But Paladino scuttles away, jumping from the bed, then favoring one leg as if it were of no use while he stares into the room’s dark corner as if intently watching someone moving there.

  “Un huomo dal piede corto,” he says. “Vedo.”

  Parallel Lives

  “PLEASE SHOW HIM IN,” MARTHA Beale tells the footman, then immediately regrets her decision as the man withdraws. The hastiness of her action seems both anxious and overt—as well as clumsy and unsophisticated. And I should be in the withdrawing room rather than the parlor, she reminds herself grimly. Father would never receive a guest here. Handsome though the space is, it doesn’t have the grandeur of the other. Besides, it seems … it seems too intimate.

  But she cannot call the footman back, and she can’t go running through the corridors of Beale House hoping to reach the better room before her visitor does, and so she sighs and sits, takes up the book she was reading, but finds her hands are trembling. She returns the volume to the table, then looks at the title as if noting for the first time what type of reading matter she has selected from her father’s library: Plutarch’s Lives.

  Oh dear! she thinks, oh dear, what a mistake! Her cheeks redden as she recognizes how overweening and unfeminine the choice seems. She reaches for the spine to turn the title from view, but before she can accomplish the task, Thomas Kelman is admitted to the room, and the footman withdraws, closing the doors behind him and leaving the visitor framed at the swagged and garlanded entrance.

  Martha forces herself to sit erect and motionless in her chair: an acceptable although wholly false facsimile of a self-possessed woman. “Mr. Kelman. I’m surprised to see you in the countr
yside again. It’s quite a journey you’ve made, and I thank you.”

  “The pleasure is mine, Miss Beale.”

  Both smile politely, hesitantly, noting the colors of clothing, of carpets and tabletops, of brocade and plush-covered chairs. They recognize and categorize the hour—it’s approaching midday—by the amount of winter sun filtering through the high, draped windows, and they observe the yellow and gaseous light emanating from the numerous lamps. Their two faces, however, remain unexamined: a haze of pinkish flesh that the eye brushes rapidly past. When they speak again, their words fall out in unison.

  “Mr. Kelman, I must apologize for that unfortunate missive you received. I questioned Mr. Simms—”

  “Miss Beale, please forgive my brusque behavior in the street—”

  As if they could physically retract the awkward beginning, both straighten their spines and shoulders, pulling themselves infinitesimally farther apart.

  Kelman begins again. “My behavior the other day was hurtful. I’m sorry for it, and now, too late, I realize I should have written you to request this interview—”

  Martha’s speech breaks in upon his a second time. “You are always welcome at Beale House, Mr. Kelman. And at my father’s house in town, as well, of course.”

  Each pauses. Each takes a breath. Each reassesses the situation.

  “You were reading,” he says at length. “And I have interrupted.”

  Martha feels her face and neck grow hot again. She glances sideways at the book as though it were a prohibited object while Kelman moves closer and picks it up.

  “Plutarch’s Lives.”

  She lets her gaze travel to an inconsequential part of the room; she doesn’t reply.

  “Plutarch,” he says again. He opens the cover and reads aloud. “‘As, in the progress of life, we first pass through scenes of innocence, peace, and fancy, and afterwards encounter the vices and disorders of society …’” He shuts the book quickly but doesn’t return it to the table; and he and Martha remain motionless, arrested by words.