Conjurer

by Cordelia Frances Biddle

  The matron’s fingers touch the woman’s shoulders, draw instantly back, then rush to her neck and the life force that should be beating there. “Nurse!” she shouts. “Send for Dr. Earle.”

  Staring at a sheet of letter paper, Pliny Earle folds his hands on his desk, then unknits the fingers and repeats the process—several times over, ten times over. He wishes he could close his eyes and erase the picture of the dead woman’s face, the vision of her living face, too, the eyes that looked only inward, viewing and reviewing scenes from the past.

  Earle takes the file on Robey’s sister, dips his pen in ink and writes a methodical Now deceased on the top right-hand corner, and then again pauses. A life ended. A life eked out in the unwholesome solitude of this place. And for what? Better, he thinks, that she should have died three decades before. Or before that. Pliny Earle doesn’t believe in the existence of a God, or this would be an excellent time to rail against that deity’s callowness and injustice. Instead, he’s left with an almost suffocating sense of purposelessness and defeat.

  He moves his left hand to the letter paper, again inks the pen.

  Dear Mr. Robey, he writes, I regret to inform you—then stops. This time he does close his eyes, and his mind begins to whip through Robey’s sister’s file as if he were reading it.

  Admitted to the Asylum thirty years prior, she was suffering the physical effects of uterine hemorrhage coupled with acute religious anxiety that produced a form of mania in which the patient alternately called herself “Martha” or “Mary.”

  The former was hardworking, whether in the kitchen gardens of a summer day or in the sewing and knitting circles that clustered together when the weather cooled. This persona also had an air of brusque and sometimes brutal impatience that kept the other patients at bay. “Mary,” on the other hand, was dreamy and often idle; when she sat alone staring into space, she claimed she was “listening to Jesus speak.”

  It was understood that Robey was not her true surname, but her mental state remained so damaged and precarious that her true identity never surfaced. Implicit in the admitting physician’s remarks was the recognition that the patient came from a family who were of some means—and as such wished their name withheld. It was not an uncommon practice.

  All this and more was described in the file: decades of interviews and observations. What did not appear in the notes, however, was Earle’s recent and disquieting conversation with the woman’s brother—and this is what now causes him to stare at the empty piece of letter paper.

  Are there means, Dr. Earle? he can almost hear “Robey” ask him, whereby my sister’s life might end sooner than nature allows?

  It’s the memory of that exchange that impels the physician to take up his pen again, although the letter he now commences is not the one he previously began. Perhaps the woman died in her sleep of natural causes as all believed. But perhaps there’s a more sinister reason. A poison that can’t be detected, an accomplice who administered it. The idea is hideous; and Pliny Earle’s uncertain how he will face his board of directors if such proves the case. Better—and safer—to ignore such a dire possibility, but that he simply cannot do. The patient should not be forgotten in death as she was in life.

  Earle composes a brief letter to a friend he’s known and trusted since their college days together. The man isn’t a physician, and his position as an aide to the mayor of Philadelphia is enigmatic and ambiguous. His name is Thomas Kelman.

  An Embroidered Shawl

  AS MARTHA SITS IN GROWING consternation and listens to a eulogy for John Durand, and Pliny Earle puts pen to paper, Thomas Kelman is admitted into Mrs. Rosegger’s second-floor sitting room. The maid withdraws, leaving the two alone in a place made intimate by soft and shadowy light: a small fire dozing in the grate, the midmorning sun stirring behind layers of heavy drapery and lace.

  “It’s good to see you again, Thomas,” Mrs. Rosegger says with some effort, then abruptly turns mute. The seven small words seem to her too weighted with innuendo, too perfumed and amorous. After several inarticulate moments, she recommences her discourse, attempting but failing to achieve a less personal tone. “It was kind of you to respond so quickly to my message.”

  Kelman continues to stand. She doesn’t ask him to sit. He nods in reply, then looks down at her chair and at her.

  “My husband is at the Durand funeral. He felt it would be too disturbing an event for me, however,” she says as though in answer to a question.

  Again Kelman nods, then forms his own response. “You have a fine house, Marguerite.” Too late, he notes that the use of her given name has made her shiver in discomfort.

  “Yes … Yes, I have. A luxurious house … servants. All that I ever wished.”

  “I’m glad for you.”

  Marguerite Rosegger smiles with what’s intended as a facsimile of sophisticated nonchalance but, in fact, seems only wistful. “My father would have been very gratified to see how comfortable my situation is.”

  “I’m sure he would have been.”

  She looks away. “It’s a long while since anyone called me Marguerite.” Then, as if she’s revealed too much, she continues in a hurried tone. “I asked you here because I believe I have … indelicate information concerning John Durand.”

  Her guest continues to stand and wait. “Please sit,” she says at last, inserting a barely audible “Thomas.” She tightens her lips and speaks again in the same quiet and constrained tone. “I hope you did not feel I spurned you—all those years ago.”

  “I was a very young man. Even at nineteen.”

  Her expression turns rueful. “And I was not so young.”

  “That wasn’t the intent behind my words.”

  “It’s the truth, however.”

  Kelman finally sits, although he chooses a place at some distance from his hostess. “What’s this you wish to tell me about John Durand?”

  Her answer is an elliptical “I’m surprised you haven’t married yet, Thomas.” Then she adds an equally ambiguous “How do you find Martha Beale?”

  “She’s concerned about her missing parent, naturally.”

  “That’s not what I meant, Thomas.”

  Kelman sits up straighter in his chair. “What do you know about Durand?”

  Marguerite Rosegger laughs slightly. It’s the first time in its history that the room has been party to the bright sound. Then the mirth as rapidly subsides, and the financier’s wife resumes her hesitant tone. “I told Martha Beale to trust you … when she visited us for tea … I hope she follows my advice.” After that, silence again reigns until Mrs. Rosegger concludes with a hushed “My husband has information concerning Durand. I don’t know what it is other than that he views it as something of substance. I wrote to Emily Durand, suggesting that her husband had a … had a private situation that might be of an awkward or difficult nature, but her response was to put me off … Now it’s too late … But I wanted to warn her—and her husband, naturally—as one woman to another …” The words trail away, then finally resume. “Mr. Rosegger can be a forbidding opponent.”

  Kelman remains silent a moment. “And you have no notion of what this mysterious information is?”

  “No, but I did hear Rosegger mention Durand’s name to Lemuel Beale’s secretary. They met here in the house, and I happened to be passing through the corridor during their consultation.” Marguerite pauses, uncertain how to proceed. “I had thought … in asking you here … I had thought that you might find a means of questioning Owen Simms. Perhaps he can reveal what hold my husband has … had on Mr. Durand … It might aid his widow … Although I understand her situation now is quite precarious. Those who govern society’s customs can be unforgiving.”

  Kelman looks at her, considering the suggestions; they’re of little help, but he doesn’t tell her so. Instead, he says, “I’m sorry your life didn’t turn out as you wished.”

  She shrugs in an attempt at dismissal. “I wanted to live in the lap of luxury—”
<
br />   “And you have your children.”

  “Ah, yes … Rosegger’s children …”

  Another uncomfortable silence ensues, which Kelman finally breaks. “And there’s nothing else you can reveal of this matter or your husband’s role?”

  She thinks. “At first, I assumed Durand’s difficulty was purely of a financial nature—”

  “But it could have been another problem?”

  “My husband makes it his business to delve into personal secrets, Thomas” is the vague reply.

  “Such as a young man keeping company with a woman seven years his senior?”

  “Six and a half,” she corrects him, “and that was an eternity.” Then she adds another oblique “I don’t suppose Rosegger would have chosen me if he’d found me blameless … And then, of course, there was my father’s successful commerce—”

  “Which a youth of nineteen couldn’t hope to attain to.”

  Marguerite Rosegger remains silent for some moments. Kelman can only imagine what she’s remembering: a driven and hardworking father who’d created his own worldly success and now demanded the very best for his daughter, an entry into Society and a name that would make her an equal with ladies higher born; a father who brusquely dispatched suitors he didn’t feel matched the stringent qualifications he’d established for a potential son-in-law; a father who at last set his sights on Rosegger only to perish before he could see his favorite child wed. These are some of the images that fly across Marguerite Rosegger’s features, but all she says is a small “Time was against us, Thomas. And circumstance.”

  He also says nothing for a minute or two, reflecting on Rosegger the suitor and then Rosegger the husband of an heiress, the brother-in-law to two men who must bear him remarkable ill will. Finally, Kelman stands, uttering a polite “Thank you for contacting me, Marguerite, but I don’t wish to compromise you by staying longer.”

  Marguerite Rosegger maintains her seated and proper pose, but her body appears to retreat into itself as if girding against a chill. “Please extend my regards to Miss Beale … Or do you call her Martha?”

  Kelman allows himself the smallest of smiles. “I have, once or twice.”

  “Lucky woman” is the brief response before another hushed volley of speech hurries forth. “When Owen Simms visited my husband, they had a good deal of discussion concerning her father—” The words cease; her eyes fly to the closed door and the keyhole there. A faint rustle of female clothing has been heard in the passage beyond. When Rosegger’s wife resumes speaking, her voice and attitude have met with a transformation. “If you should see Miss Beale, please convey our best wishes to her. We greatly enjoyed our visit with her. Were my husband at home now, I know he would add his heartiest hopes she find some resolution to her father’s disappearance. And now, I must wish you good day, Mr. Kelman.”

  Kelman leaves the Rosegger house, striding south along Broad Street past the mansions of the very rich: the Hawes residence recently built by the architect Thomas U. Walter, then the large and showy Butler home fronting Walnut Street. The Durands’ equally proud domicile lies among them, dressed now in deepest mourning: each door and window affixed with wreaths of grogram and crepe, every curtain on every floor firmly drawn.

  Rosegger had some mysterious hold on John Durand—who’s now dead, Kelman tells himself as he gazes at the dwelling. Owen Simms also met privately with the financier; his master, Lemuel Beale, is missing and presumed deceased. Intuitively, Kelman feels that there’s some nefarious connection among these four men, but what it is he cannot divine.

  His steps wander north again, leading him to the Greek Revival structure that houses the United States Mint at Chestnut and Juniper Streets, where he stops, studying every quarried block of stone in the façade, every brick and cobble in the pavement, while his mind turns and turns around what facts he has—finally alighting upon Eusapio Paladino, and the conjurer’s graphic descriptions of the hideous murders of two young girls.

  At length, Kelman begins to walk toward the “Hell’s Half Acre” that stretches beyond Lombard Street. He passes Tin Alley with its smithies, the cluster of busy livery stables facing Charlotte Street, Marble Court with its masons and chisels and everlasting whorls of stone dust, and Blackberry Alley, whose trade has nothing to do with the sale of farm-ripe fruit. He regards these byways as if they’re capable of reason and therefore possess relevant information, but the places merely gaze slyly back.

  Finally he finds standing himself in front of the Association for the Care of Colored Orphans; and his thoughts begin reeling backward to his first encounter with Martha Beale, and how earnest was her desire to “work among the poor.” Then he frowns, remembering Marguerite Rosegger—Marguerite as she was many years before when he was a youth of nineteen and she a woman of twenty-six. How is it, he wonders, that our solitary existences are so dependent upon others? We believe we’re self-governing, but circumstances continually work to remold us; and we grow like trees clustered in a forest: bowed down by prevailing winds, stunted within the shadow of larger plants, or flourishing because a neighbor has toppled and relinquished its proprietary ownership of light and air.

  In the midst of walking up the staircase in her father’s town house, Martha Beale makes a decision. She’s only recently returned from the Durand funeral and has been surprised but not at all displeased to have Owen Simms inform her that he’ll be detained elsewhere for the remainder of the day.

  Her hand grips the carved balustrade as the revelation arrests her in midstride: one foot resting upon a polished oak tread, and the other rising toward the landing and the Vandyke brown and syenite blue Turkey carpet installed there. Then her thoughts galvanize her, and she begins hurrying up the remainder of the stairs toward the forbidden room that’s her father’s private office in the house. Yes, she tells herself, yes! I need no longer be passive: allowing Mr. Simms to guide me, or Rosegger to provide a clue as to my father’s associations—or even Thomas to give me assistance. I’ll search Father’s correspondence myself. If there’s an enemy who wished him dead, surely I can find reference to such a person.

  But taking the key into her fingers, she pauses. Such a momentous step! Such boldness and daring! What would Lemuel Beale say if he saw his daughter embarking on this clandestine and unladylike mission? Affairs of business, affairs of the world must be left to men’s capable hands, not women’s. As she thus argues with herself, Martha’s mouth tightens, then she clasps the latch, releases it, and thrusts open the door with a solid push.

  Inside, all is dim and cold. No fire has been lit in many a day; no lamp has been trimmed; no air has stirred. Martha shuts the door behind her but hesitates at locking it. The gesture seems too secretive by far. What would she say if Simms were to return home and discover her thus sequestered? Better to find some simple excuse … Martha thinks until she devises one she finds acceptable: In light of Mr. Simms’s proposal to arrange a funeral service for her father, she was hoping to find her parent’s prayer book and take inspiration from it. Owen Simms dare not question such a sincere and heartfelt motive, and one so seemingly innocent and benign. In the pallid light, Martha smiles in satisfaction at the ruse.

  She lights a lamp, then two, and her father’s ponderous walnut desk with its many drawers and cupboards rises from the shadows, a hulking thing as black and forbidding as a bear. She stifles a tremor of doubt, then moves purposefully toward it, pulling open drawers, peering at the contents, and lifting out personal and public papers to arrange them on the desktop. She has no idea what she’s searching for, and so the words she reads upon the pages have scant meaning.

  Her father has made brief notations about a business entitled “Northern Liberties Gas Works,” and then cryptic asides listing numerous street addresses. “Tamarind Street” is underlined on one page; “Coates” and “Brown” and “St. John,” as well. There’s also mention of “Loomis’s Chemical Works,” “Globe Mills,” and “Henry Derringer.”

  There are letters
to her father, but no copies of his correspondence in reply. The missives he received are brief and suggest that longer and more detailed messages preceded them, but those accounts are apparently missing—referred to only in numerical jottings from her father’s pen. Martha realizes that it’s his hand she’s studying and not Owen Simms’s, which intimates there were business affairs Lemuel Beale kept concealed even from his confidential secretary. She frowns at this curiosity. Secrecy has ever been her father’s way, but she presumed he shared every one of his various concerns and interests with the man he’d hired to do that work.

  She returns the pages she’s read to their rightful places and searches on. A noise in the passageway disturbs her and sends her hands fluttering to her sides. She stands erect and slowly turns to face the door, readying her excuse for the intruder she assumes will be Owen Simms, but the sound of footsteps moves on, and she decides it’s probably the ash boy cleaning out the hearths. There’s a bump of something metallic like a pail.

  Martha conquers her fright, sweeps away another stack of papers, then opens the bottom drawer, where she discovers a lady’s embroidered shawl. The shawl is not a new one or a very fine one, and moths have done it considerable damage. She lifts it from its resting place thinking that it must have belonged to her mother, her mother as an unmarried maiden before she wed into the growing wealth that would become Lemuel Beale’s.

  Martha holds the thin woolen fabric to her face, trying to imagine what it would be like to hold the real person, or how it would even feel to have a mother. A parent to talk with, to walk arm and arm with, to share enthusiastic excursions into the city’s shopping emporia as she’s watched other mothers and daughters do, or simply to sit with in companionable silence listening to the ticking of a clock.

  As her daydreams drift in this melancholy manner, the front door bangs open. Martha can hear Owen Simms march inside, stamping his feet from the cold. Something tells her to return the shawl to the drawer lest he approach the study and discover her with the object in her hands.