Conjurer
Page 18
Martha doesn’t express these unconventional thoughts, though; what she says is a simple “I would prefer to question Signor Paladino tomorrow—when he is not entertaining.”
Daniel and ella finish their warm potatoes and move on with John Durand trailing close after them the way a dog follows a butcher’s boy, sniffing the air, ears alert, searching for a sign.
“But why, Cousin Daniel?” he hears. “Why do you fear you cannot count on Mr. Robey’s commissions much longer—”
“Hush, Ella. Remember, we’re in a public place.”
“But why?” Ella persists almost as loudly as before.
“Ella, please. We must take care. Remember what I told you?” Then he relents, continuing with a hushed but reasoned “I believe something powerful is troubling the man. A wasting disease, I suspect … He asked if I knew of an apothecary who could be ‘trusted.’ He put particular emphasis on the word—as one who does not desire his motives known.”
“Oh, cousin!” Ella whimpers. “Does he mean to end his life—?”
“Ella, you must not take on so. Your voice calls too much attention to us.”
Durand moves closer. He fingers the Derringer; and the self who is the man with a fine home on a fashionable street succumbs to the self who has no name, no allegiance, no mercy for his own sorry state or that of his fellow earthly travelers.
“But what will become of us, cousin? What will we do without Mr. Robey?” Ella continues to protest.
“He hasn’t deserted us yet, child. And we must pray he does not.”
“Oh, but Cousin Daniel!”
“Peace, child, peace—” As the tailor speaks, John Durand slides the pistol from his pocket and takes aim.
The Silver Snuffbox
THOMAS KELMAN STANDS BESIDE THE man’s lifeless body. It’s a little after seven in the morning, and the light still dim and gray and sunless. The alley is strangely devoid of daytime activity—only an undertaker’s cart, the steaming and woolly horse that pulls it, the two men who will haul away the corpse, and the day watchman who happened upon the scene.
Kelman studies the watchman as he rephrases his question. “And the body was in this precise position?”
“I never touched him” is the anxious reply.
“I didn’t ask if you’d touched him. I asked whether you found him lying in this exact fashion.”
The day watch is a young man, thin and frail and scrawny-necked beneath a coat cut for a larger person. He gazes at the mica-flecked stone of a wall and refuses to look at the ground, although from the tremor troubling his left eyelid, it’s clear his mind’s eye sees the dead body—sees it over and over and over again.
“All that blood under the head,” he replies at last. “I got some on me boots.” The boy’s pinched nostrils flare; a pallid sheen of nausea douses his face. “I’ve never seen a man shot before …”
Kelman waits while the young man composes himself. “When you arrive for work, you replace a night watchman, do you not?”
The watch shifts his nervous gaze from one quarried stone to another. “Sometimes,” he mumbles.
“Sometimes you shirk your responsibilities? Or sometimes the watch you relieve has already departed?”
“The second one.” The reply is muted; the boy lowers his narrow head. Speaking to such a person as Thomas Kelman can bring little good, but a great deal of harm if certain folk were to learn that a potential snitch walked among them. “The night man’s a good fellow, though … Been a member of the constabulary since I was dressed in nappies. Us younger fellows have learned a lot from him.”
“But he never reported hearing a weapon fired? That’s quite an explosion during the still of the night.”
“The neighbors didn’t say nothing, neither,” the boy retorts, then adds a hopeful “Maybe the fire gangs were out … When there’s a blaze raging, you can’t hear yourself think. What with the shouting and the horses and bells and whatnot.”
Kelman studies the day watch’s face. It’s still blue-gray and shiny with physical revulsion. “Have you seen this man before?”
Unwillingly, the boy’s glance returns to the corpse. “I don’t think so, sir … But I don’t really know … What with his body all twisted up, and his head—”
“Yes, the bullet entered the skull near his right ear. What about his clothes?”
“Just ordinary clothes, sir. The kind most rich gents wear. Besides, they’re all … They’re all—”
“Yes, I know … There’s a great deal of blood.”
“Never seen anything like it,” the watch repeats quietly.
“And I hope you never do again,” says Thomas Kelman. The voice is not unkind. He moves his focus away from the day watch and is again struck by how devoid of passersby and curiosity-seekers the scene is. Save for the undertaker’s men and the watchman he’s currently questioning, it’s as if every denizen of the alley off lower Lombard Street has made a pact to stay away. It strikes him as odd indeed. Someone nearby, he feels, must have information concerning this slaying. And that person is deliberately choosing to stay away.
With the day watch gone, and the undertaker’s horse pawing the ground, Kelman bends down and pulls the dead man’s arms from beneath his blood-spattered torso and begins examining his pockets for some identifying object. The legs he leaves in a tangle of frozen wool.
The first pocket yields an intricately stitched handkerchief. Brand-new, from the look of it, with needlework that must have been a severe hardship on some poor woman’s vision. Kelman places it in a satchel he has close by and moves to another pocket. The horse whinnies; one of the undertaker’s men shifts his weight from one stout boot to another and seems about to speak, then apparently reconsiders as Kelman reaches into the second pocket and retrieves a silver snuffbox.
“A regular toff,” the undertaker’s two men whistle in unison.
Or a thief, Kelman thinks; although he doesn’t voice the opinion. He turns the snuffbox over in his hand. Carved in the silver are the letters JnDurnd.
Kelman sits back on his heels while he studies the snuffbox, then leans cautiously forward and reexamines the clothes. They’re finely made and of excellent material, but they also bear a countrified air as if the wearer eschewed city ways. No thief—no matter how much he desired to emulate those of the landed gentry—would attire himself thus. The man lying dead in the alley must be none other than John Durand.
Kelman’s brain jumps back to the previous evening and the discovery of Emily Durand in Eusapio Paladino’s rooms. Although Martha insisted on leaving without specifically ascertaining that it was Durand’s wife who was keeping company with the conjurer, they both privately understood that to be the case. In light of this present discovery, Emily’s action and Paladino’s position look more than questionable; and Kelman quickly deduces what the populace will make of the news.
At length, he stands, but he does so slowly as if reluctant to set in motion the events he knows will follow. Then he gestures to the undertaker’s men, who move forward in unison to heft the dead man into the cart. The horse whinnies at the quick shift in weight as Durand’s body falls on the floorboards, but otherwise the scene remains eerily silent. And eerily empty.
The broadsheets spread the horrific news across the waking city. The Citizen Soldier, the Spirit of the Times, the Daily Black Mail, and other penny presses trumpet headlines that blare: MURDER! WHO CAN BE SAFE? and WHENCE OUR CITY OF BROTHERLY LOVE? as all of Philadelphia reels under the unspeakable notion that a prominent citizen can be gunned down while traversing its orderly streets. The coffeehouses and oyster cellars, the private drawing rooms and public street corners buzz with gossip, blame, and fear. By afternoon, the newspapers have discovered the greater scandal: Emily Durand had been in the Demport House Hotel with a lover on the evening before her husband’s body was found. And that man is none other than the famous conjurer and mesmerist Eusapio Paladino, who is now in the custody of the constabulary on charges that he murdered his
mistress’s husband.
“Shouldn’t we tell them, cousin Daniel? What we know? Shouldn’t we be telling someone what we saw?” Ella’s words tumble out in a high-pitched stream. “There in the alley?” she continues. “Where—?”
“No, Ella,” Daniel tells her. “No joy will come of our talking to the police.”
“But—” she persists.
The tailor, equally nervous, issues a firmer “No! No, we cannot” while the child, as if compelled by a higher force, repeats her anxious appeal:
“But the broadsheets are saying that Mr. Durand—”
“Stop it, Ella! Stop, at once!” Then Daniel immediately regrets his temper. “Child, I cannot go to the police. You know that.”
“Oh, but, Cousin Daniel, we were there! We saw—!”
“No more, Ella. No more, I say! We will do nothing. We can do nothing … Listen to me, child, if I seek out the constabulary now—albeit for a worthy cause, they will arrest me for being an escaped convict and return me to prison. You understand that, don’t you, girl? Don’t you? And where will you be then?”
Ella’s lips remain parted, her eyes wide but dry.
“We must keep what we saw to ourselves, Ella. You know we must.”
At last, she finds her tongue. “I could speak without you, cousin.”
“Oh, Ella, child … And where will you tell them you dwell?”
Ella thinks. “At the house I left when I came to you.”
“And don’t you imagine the police would then return to it and question the madam whether that were true?” Daniel hobbles back and forth as he speaks. Despite his brave words, he’s also growing very frightened, and his fear is infecting the girl he’s trying to protect.
She starts to cry. All the fine things she’s been imagining for the future seem suddenly as insubstantial as snowflakes melting in the sun. “We’re in danger, aren’t we, Daniel?”
“Not if we keep our heads down and our thoughts private … just as we’ve been doing, little cousin.”
But Ella doesn’t believe this. “What if we were seen in that alley with Mr. Durand? What if someone already knows you and I were there? Maybe that policeman you met up with four days past?”
“He wasn’t a policeman, child. At least, I don’t believe he was—”
“Or someone else?” Ella’s voice drops to the merest whisper. “Someone who may have encountered you while you were in prison?”
A Letter to a Friend
ALMOST ALL THE NOTABLES OF the city turn out for the funeral of John Durand, making the portion of lower Pine Street that fronts St. Peter’s Church and its memorial garden a sea of people and carriages and horses. There are footmen and coachmen attending to their nervous animals as well as their equally distressed masters and mistresses; there are those same highborn people hurrying along, heads down, necks tense, eyes grimly focused on the cobbled road as they thread their way through the noisy, pushing gawkers; there are hawkers of broadsheets and penny papers, crying out the latest and most sensational headlines; and there are ordinary town folk who merely hope for a glimpse of the now notorious Emily Durand and her cohorts. Philadelphia has never known such a scandal. For those gathered to watch the spectacle unfold, it’s a raucous and entertaining time.
For the true mourners, such a rowdy scene is torture. They murmur curt and somber greetings to one another when they finally pass through the wall’s wrought-iron gates and achieve the sanctuary of the churchyard and the row of undertaker’s men who line up to greet them: their tall hats swathed in black veils, their coats swagged in black draping as wide as capes.
Martha and Owen Simms are among the crowd who hurry in from the crowded street. Simms speaks in hushed tones to several people close by. Martha says nothing although her thoughts revolve and revolve around the catastrophe. If I hadn’t insisted on accompanying Thomas to the hotel … if Emily hadn’t been hiding in Paladino’s rooms … if their secret had been maintained, would John Durand now be alive?
Or is it possible that the conjurer wasn’t involved in the murder, as both he and Emily continue to insist, and that this cataclysmic act—as some are suggesting—is the result of a theft gone awry? Or perhaps even a case of mistaken identity, as others hypothesize? Because what motive could Paladino have for killing his mistress’s husband? What good result would the conjurer have expected from his actions? Surely he didn’t imagine he’d marry her? But even as Martha poses these final queries, she recalls her own experience with the man. Reason and logical deliberation are not attributes Eusapio Paladino seems to possess.
Then she remembers the snuffbox Thomas Kelman found, and her ruminations hit an insurmountable hurdle. Pickpockets and cut-purses are far too agile and clever to leave behind silver boxes. If John Durand were purposely murdered, wouldn’t his assassin have robbed him in order to make the crime appear to be the random act of a footpad? Even Eusapio, for all his otherworldliness, would have considered the simple precaution of searching his victim’s pockets. Something is missing, Martha feels. But what? What?
With Owen Simms guiding her, she steps inside the packed church. The cold morning air seems chillier on the brick building’s interior: the stone and marble floor frigid, the carved wood of the walls icy to the touch, despite her silk-lined gloves. An usher festooned with the customary satin ribbons silently escorts them down the center aisle and places them in a box pew already occupied by the Ilsleys and the Shippens. Below the facing seats are small braziers full of hot coals, but they do nothing to warm the wintry air. Martha nods silent acknowledgments to those closest to her, then gazes across the gathered people. Beyond the inky-hued hats and veils, beyond the crepe and bombazine, the paramatta and cashmere and grenadine, she notes that the golden processional crosses have been sheathed in a velvet so black it appears to crush the light.
Then, most astonishingly, the widow herself appears. Fully shrouded in heavy veils, she’s conveyed to her family pew. To those in attendance, it’s inconceivable that Emily Durand should be present, that she can lift her head in public after she’s broken the strictest law of polite society; and a murmur of outrage begins echoing through the large old building. The faceless figure remains stiff and stoical. Martha wonders what her expression must be beneath her widow’s weeds and feels her heart open in pity. Surely Emily couldn’t have wished her husband dead, she thinks. The woman may have been heedless and headstrong, and her transgression complete, but don’t we all deserve our fellow sojourners’ compassion as well as God’s redeeming grace? Especially when we are most in need of aid?
Then the organ commences its dirge, and the funeral procession begins. Despite this signal that the service has begun, the congregation can barely cease its shocked and disapproving whispers in order to rise and sing.
“… We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out …” Martha hears intoned from the Order for the Burial of the Dead. For a moment, she thinks of her father, and the fact that she must soon have these same words recited for him.
“… I said, I will take heed of my ways: that I offend not in my tongue …” Martha can’t help herself; she gasps aloud. As quick as lightning, Owen Simms touches her gloved hand with his own.
“Are you quite well, Martha, my dear? Do you wish to leave?”
The woman’s short gray hair sticks to the sleeping pallet like thousands of sewing needles stabbed willy-nilly into the mattress ticking. Her lips are half-parted and colorless, her skin also curiously ashen.
From beyond the barred window in her chamber, a cock crows dawn. The woman doesn’t stir. The cock crows again, and the sounds of other inmates beginning to waken jostle into the room. There are loud and unencumbered yawns, a resonant, repetitive cough, a habitual and nervous laugh, a mumbled curse. The woman’s lips remain parted; her hands, clenched and gnawed to the quick at her fingertips, maintain a claw-like grasp on the gray blanket.
“Time to rise!” the matron calls in as she passes the open door.
The matron returns to the patient’s room. “Time to rise,” she orders again, but the woman remains insensate.
“You and your dreams,” the matron adds. “You’ll have us all thinking we’d be better off asleep. Are you flying about like an angel again? Is that it? Or do we have the hidden cave in the hillside and all that?” The matron regards the motionless figure for another moment. “Time to rise, I said.” She sighs irritably. “Your brother won’t be visiting, if that’s what’s fretting you. He’s only here but once every other month or so, so you’ve a good many weeks before you see his face again.”
Again the gray-haired woman fails to respond.
“I’ll have to call Dr. Earle if you don’t shake a leg, missy.”
The woman remains motionless, and the matron begins noticing the stiff fingers, the hard line of the cheekbones, the rigid shoulders. “We can’t have any of this stubborn nonsense you’re playing at. There’s nothing to be fearful of, I tell you. You must get up at once and join the others.”
When the patient again makes no reply, the matron’s temper gets the better of her. “Don’t you think you can simply close your eyes and pretend not to hear me!” She strides toward the bed and reaches down to shake the inmate from her lethargy, all the while maintaining a stance of preparedness. Not a few of these cases have suddenly leapt up and tried to choke a nurse. “I’m telling you, your brother’s nowhere near!”