Or did I seize on this new emergency as an opportunity to act upon my aching desire for her, an ever-present pressure like a fist beneath the sternum, pressing on the Rectis Abdominus so that the taking of food became an absurdity?
In my wretched state, one thing remained self-evident: Somehow Eddie Poe must be stopped. The sentence roared in the mind, and to this end Elmira Royster was my only lead, being in written contact with the scoundrel.
The drawing room was furnished—or unfurnished—as it had been when last I was here. Elmira Royster sat at the tea table, crossed her legs beneath her dress, and gestured that I was to be seated as well.
“My sakes but the house is chilly for this time of year, is it not?”
“Yes, ma’am, and almost vacant. When I was last here, I confess that I wondered where you really live.”
“I declare, that is a question I sometimes ask myself. Where do I live? Where do you live, Dr. Chivahs?”
“In my mind for the most part,” I replied, surprised to hear myself say it. “Certainly not in Washington College Hospital, I hope.”
“If one lives in one’s mind, perhaps life is all a dream,” she said, and her eyes shifted as though something were written on the center of my forehead.
Of course as a scientist I detested empty mystification and all that promoted it, if only because it reminded me of Eddie Poe and his fetish of death and dreams and grotesques.
“I do not agree that life is a dream,” I said, raising my voice. “In fact, I know that it is not. A war teaches you that, if nothing else. An amputation is not a dream, ma’am, I assure you, and my patients would all agree with me.”
Elmira Royster did not seem discomfited in the least. Yet my outburst must have had some effect, for when she spoke she seemed almost reasonable. “After Mr. Shelton passed away, I began to simplify things. I sold the property except for the house itself, and freed the slaves who wished to go. When the remaining staff leave or die, I shall sell the house too.”
“An admirable plan, ma’am, and I applaud your treatment of slaves. It is more than Jefferson ever did.”
“I believe I once said that a wife is a sort of slave. It gives us something in common.”
“Many have noted a similarity.”
“It goes away when the spouse is departed.”
“Indeed. With nobody to give the orders, there is no one to obey.”
“Not so, suh. We take orders from a higher power, through Christ our Lord.”
“Believe me, ma’am, I would not dream of contradicting you.”
“Sarcasm ill becomes you, Dr. Chivahs.”
“I was not being sarcastic in the least.”
We sat in silence while the elderly and all-observing butler placed two glasses on the tea table between us: three fingers of whiskey for me, and a glass of what appeared to be lemonade, but which could have contained anything.
“I will be in earshot, Miz Shelton,” murmured the butler, with a significant glance in my direction.
Despite the fact that every word we uttered would be overheard by the staff, I decided to speak plainly. “Ma’am, I am here because I am utterly smitten by you, and because I am in desperate trouble. I don’t know which comes first.”
“That rightly makes two problems,” she replied. “Which do you think comes first?”
“The Philadelphia police have requested that Eddie be dug up— and you know as well as I that it is not Eddie in that grave.”
She frowned slightly. “Dug up? My soul, why would anyone do such a thing?”
“There is a public outcry in Philadelphia. It seems that Eddie staged spurious hauntings in a spirit of revenge.”
“He haunted Mr. Griswold?” Her eyes glinted with interest. “After that obituary I am not surprised.”
“The name of the writer was, I believe, a Mr. Ludwig.”
“Yet it was Mr. Griswold, suh. It was a most vile eulogy. Eddie was livid.”
“Do you mean that Griswold wrote under a pseudonym”
“Of course. They all dice each other up under pseudonyms. Eddie was fond of the practice himself. I called it a form of cowardice, but he differed. Truth must always wear a mask, was his opinion.”
“You have put your finger on the problem, ma’am. Having left his mortal body, at least as far as the public is concerned, at present Eddie is nothing but a mask. He can destroy anyone he likes, being forever anonymous.”
“But surely, suh, to do so he would need an associate—someone with an interest in supporting him, and in covering his tracks. Someone in the publishing business, perhaps.”
“That was nicely put, ma’am. I expect that might well be the case.”
“Thank you, suh.” Elmira Royster appeared amused, which I found infuriating. “Eddie once remarked that he would like to become a ghost, stalking the halls and frightening folks out of their skin.”
“Then you knew that he was planning this insanity?”
She shrugged, as though it were a trivial matter. “He mentioned it in one or another of his letters. I neither approved nor disapproved.”
“You are in touch with him, then?”
“Of course. Eddie and I are, after all, engaged.”
“Pardon me, ma’am, but I swear that he is the most selfish beast I have ever encountered. I have risked everything for him, and he is cutting shines again!”
Once again my mouth had surprised my mind with its unintended frankness.
“I don’t rightly know what you mean by cutting shines,” she said.
“Eddie does awful things just to see what will happen. He always did. Now that he is ‘dead’ he is free to act upon his morbid fantasies, and take responsibility for none of it, and with no critics to complain. We—you and I—have become his creative materials. He is experimenting with our lives—-just to see what will happen! Oh, it is monstrous! …”
I do not remember what happened after that.
* * *
I AWOKE TO the fragrance of violet and a woman’s mouth against my forehead. I did not move. When I finally opened my eyes, Elmira Royster was kneeling close to me, in her plain cotton dress, with no sign of a corset beneath.
“I was testing you for fever, suh,” she explained. “You are abnormally warm.”
“Test me again. One can never be too sure.”
She put her hand on my chest and her lips on my forehead. “You are still very warm,” she said, and straightened up again.
“I am afraid I must have fallen into a delirium. It happens occasionally. A war injury. Nothing very serious. Please excuse my behavior, whatever happened.”
“For a man in a delirium, you were remarkably polite. You were able to climb stairs without assistance. You were raving about experiments, and about something called flying artillery, and about butchery—but it all made perfect sense to me.”
“Ah yes, I remember saying that,” I said, which was an utter lie. “It is a feeling I experienced in the war, of being an experiment in some monstrous laboratory. Run by some godlike creature, nothing friendly, driven by morbid curiosity, like a boy dissecting a frog.”
“I declare, that is a strange notion of the Savior.”
“I don’t know that I mentioned Him.”
“You described the Son of God, dissecting a frog. God, manifest not in the flesh but in the laboratory.”
I decided to change the subject. It would not be the first time I had observed religion to turn an intelligent individual into some kind of imbecile.
“I wish they wouldn’t use the word flesh” I said. “It makes me think of raw meat.”
“Dr. Chivahs, I do fear that you are becoming delirious again.”
Indeed, I did feel the need to close my eyes for a moment, and by the time I opened them again an uncertain amount of time had passed. I was alone in a room which appeared to be a library—and on the second floor, to judge by the trees outside. I was lying on a velvet couch. The floor was bare, with no carpet; in fact, other than a fireplace, a desk, and a chair, t
he room stood entirely empty of furniture. Only a wall, containing bookcases, interspersed by open windows, which emitted much air but little light.
Having little to look at, I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, there she was.
“It is late in the day,” I said. “You must shut the windows at once, for reasons of health.”
“I disagree, suh. It is a curious assumption, that the harmful vapors are outside the house.”
“I am a doctor, ma’am, and it is my professional judgment. Should you choose to ignore it, I hold you responsible for what happens as a result.”
The omniscient butler, of whom I had by now formed a thorough dislike, entered with a tray. “The brandy, Miz Shelton, ma’am,” he murmured in a tone of resentful resignation, primarily directed at me.
“Thank you, Mr. Washington,” she said, as though she were speaking to a business colleague. “Kindly set it on the bedside table, if you please.”
With a not quite undetectable sigh, Mr. Washington poured three fingers of brandy into a plain glass tumbler and put it before me. “Your health, sah,” he murmured, nodded to Elmira Royster, and was gone.
“I was a Son of Temperance before Eddie arrived,” I said. “You will probably think ill of me, for transgressing my oath.”
“‘Sufficient unto the day are the sins thereof,’“ she replied, and in my imagination we kissed.
She sat on the couch beside me, which made a tight fit, so that I could feel the warmth of her body.
“Forgive me, Elmira, but…”
“Dr. Chivahs, my name is Mrs. Shelton.”
“If you insist, ma’am.”
“You were meaning to ask a question, suh. What is it?”
“What is your understanding—no, what I mean to say is, what are the terms of your engagement to Eddie Poe?”
“I don’t rightly know what you are suggesting, but there are no plans for a marriage, as I have said before. We wished to stop the rumors. People can remain engaged for decades, and nobody says a word.”
“Then I am to understand that there is no … no passion between you?
“Kindly watch your language, suh. But yes, that is why I am engaged to Eddie. I could never be engaged to you. I would find it evah so stressful.”
Infuriating as usual, yet the warmth of her hip against my side encouraged me to continue the conversation.
When I describe my feelings for Elmira Royster, please understand that the word is not love. To say that I liked Elmira would be stretching it. To say that I needed her in order to remain alive, would be more to the point.
“I am trying to imagine you as a freethinker,” she said. “A free-thinking doctor! How do you know where to cut?” And for the first time I saw her laugh out loud.
I myself did not laugh. At her mention of my profession, the entire catastrophe of my present situation struck me in the stomach with terrible vigor.
“Miz Royster—”
“I am Mrs. Shelton.”
“Mrs. Shelton, I beg your pardon but let me restate the facts of the case. They want to dig Eddie up. There has been a sensational murder in Philadelphia, and Eddie is a suspect, or rather, his ghost, at least for the present. The upshot of it is, if they dig him up I shall be utterly ruined—and, incidentally, Eddie will be suspected of murder. If you care anything for your fiancé—and I would rather you did not—you must help me to reach him.”
She hesitated, which I took as a hopeful sign, though it tormented me beyond endurance that his welfare was uppermost in her mind.
“Eddie is in Philadelphia,” she said. “He has found work there under a pseudonym. I have his address.”
“That would be most helpful. Thank you.”
She stood, crossed to the writing table, took pen and ink—and stopped. “No. I do not think so.”
“You do not think what, ma’am?”
“I do not think I shall give it to you, suh.”
“Why not in heaven’s name?”
“Because I must protect Eddie. From you.”
Damnation.
“Why on earth would you say such a thing?”
“I declare that any man with your wayward sentiments is not to be trusted alone with my fiancé.”
“Ma’am, I am a doctor. I do not take lives, I save them.” Hearing myself say this, I did not know whether to laugh or cry.
“I will assist you on one condition, suh,” she said. “I shall go to Philadelphia with you.”
“Surely that is out of the question, ma’am. How could such an arrangement be possible?”
“We will travel as man and wife. As Mr. and Mrs. Henri Le Rennet. And that is my last word on the subject.”
OTHER THAN ON the open sea and in the Sahara desert, only in America is a man truly sovereign and self-determining—if only because here it is uniquely possible for him to disappear without a trace, and to transform into somebody else, without leaving the country.
Without alerting a soul—partner, enemy, creditor, police, mistress, wife—a man may leave his house on Monday, catch an omnibus to his bank, withdraw all his money, travel five hundred miles, and literally be somebody else by the beginning of next week, with a new partner, a new mistress, a new set of creditors, and no one to call him to task.
Liberty takes many forms, some more savory than others.
Every man has a dream, and mine was simple, if somewhat farfetched: as Mr. and Mrs. Henri Le Rennet, Elmira Royster and I would travel to Philadelphia via Baltimore, locate Eddie, and one way or another end the threat to my life and reputation.
But what then? Return to Washington College Hospital, and a life I found so devoid of interest that I contemplated ending it, on a daily basis? Would Elmira Royster return to her shell of a house and her tactical engagement to await the demise of her staff, and her fiancé, and herself? How much better if she and I were to simply continue together to San Francisco, as Henri Le Rennet and his wife Elmira, and begin anew, leaving Eddie Poe behind, and ourselves as well!
I imagined inventing a suitable French ancestry for Mr. Le Rennet, and purchasing certificates to prove it. I might join the church of my wife’s choice. I might set up a private practice, patching people up, treating their aches and pains, delivering their babies. For the first time since my birth I might be, dare I even pronounce the word, content.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
* * *
City Hall, Independence Square, Philadelphia
Councilman Wendel Grisse, not for the first time, was deeply troubled over the presence of Shadduck in his office and his city. Was it possible that he had brought a snake into the house to control the vermin, only to see it turn on the family?
Many times he reviewed his actions of the past year, and was unable to find his mistake. For what did he deserve this troublemaking?
The need for professional policemen had become urgent after the disturbances of forty-four, when the only officer on duty was the sheriff, with no budget to pay or arm a posse comitatus. Then the militia refused to step in over a dispute with the city over reimbursements. By the time a force of firemen had been cobbled together (led by Mayor Swift, in a frightful display of grandstanding), the rioting had gone to anarchy and madness—churches and businesses were burnt and many were killed and injured.
What a terrible humiliation for the county, to think that Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love, could not impose the most rudimentary law and order!
More humiliation for the county followed, when the state assembly passed an act requiring the city and surrounding townships to hire a force of one policeman for every hundred and fifty taxpayers. The law went so far as to specify that the force be “able-bodied,” indicating that the senior government regarded local officeholders as idle buffoons who could not be trusted.
Seeing the spree of patronage hiring to come, and the resulting opportunity for political advancement, Wendel Grisse, a German immigrant and a pillar of the Pennsylvania Deutsch, ran for office on a platform of law and o
rder and a clampdown on criminal wrongdoing. In this he secured support from the militia, who then delivered sufficient votes to secure victory—literally so in some polls, where voters for Grisse arrived in covered wagons.
Grisse’s first action as a spokesman for law and order was to convince Mayor Swift that, since riots seldom confine themselves to one township, an officer must be brought on staff to oversee and coordinate the effort. As well, on the principle that a politician’s duty is to dance with the suitor who brought him to the ball, Grisse proposed that a militiaman be appointed to the position and that he should report, naturlich, to himself.
As a militiaman and a war veteran, as well as having contributed to Grisse’s campaign, Shadduck suited the position as though it had been tailored to his measurements. And for the first few months the appointment seemed inspired, as Shadduck buckled into his new task with an energy and competence seldom seen in municipal politics.
Early on, however, Councilman Grisse sensed trouble. With the ink hardly dry on his covenant with Philadelphia County, already the inspector had begun to burrow his way into the structure of government, on his own. Then came the announcement that Shadduck was to advise Commissioner Clark, whose respect for military men was out of all proportion. Grisse was not consulted on this, and was not made party to whatever passed between them. Then came another unpleasant surprise, when Mayor Swift announced the forming of new riot control measures under Inspector Shadduck—again, with no consulting of himself, Wendel Grisse, the councilman who fought and won the last election on the issue of law and order!
The commissioner later paid for his snub when a scandal erupted in the press involving brothels, and that fixed his flint for sure. Yet Shadduck could not so easily be brought to heel, having no scandals outstanding and, to Grisse’s discomfiture, having contributed to the mayor’s campaign as well as his own.
It was by now clear that Grisse’s patronage appointee meant to ignore the normal duties of fealty and obedience, and had set off on his own. To the councilman it was a vicious stabbing in the back; worst of all, to retain any credit as the law-and-order representative, Grisse was in the excruciating position of having to appear supportive!
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