The Shadow Palace

by Jane Steen

  23

  Dignity

  Getting into the Grand Pacific without being seen was surprisingly easy. A hotel employee led us by a circuitous route along utilitarian corridors and stairways. We eventually emerged into a hushed, elegant corridor. The soft hiss of the gilded gaslights was the only sound as we walked, our feet sinking into the deep pile of the carpet.

  Joe opened one of the doors without knocking, and we stepped into a small vestibule. “I’ll be in the sitting room,” Joe said, gesturing toward one of the doors. “I’ll walk you back to Gambarelli’s.”

  I shook my head. “No, you won’t. Much too risky. But I’d appreciate your help in getting out of the hotel unseen.”

  He opened the door to the sitting room, and I hesitated, looking at the other closed door. Oddly enough, I felt reluctant to intrude on Martin’s privacy now that he had some. I remembered his bitter words in the jail, his wounded pride that I had to see him at his lowest ebb. Had I once more been too impulsive in insisting on seeing him?

  Joe caught my look. “It’ll be all right,” he said softly. “It’s better than letting him brood alone.”

  I wasn’t so sure, but I took a deep breath and opened the door, hearing Joe retreat into the sitting room behind me.

  Martin was standing by the window, lit by the afternoon sun. He was staring avidly into the street as if he couldn’t get enough of the sight of it, ignoring the sounds I made as I entered. His arms were braced against the window frame. He was wearing an ordinary sack coat, which hung off him a little as if he’d lost weight. His stance revealed the tenseness of his muscles, the sharp lines of his shoulder blades appearing for a moment as he shifted his position.

  Not until I clicked the door into its latch did he turn to face me. He was clean-shaven, but the air of the cage hung about him in his cropped hair, the shadows under his eyes, and the set of his mouth. For the first time I had ever known, he reminded me of my distant memories of his father. This was the closed, impenetrable stare of a beast that could attack at any moment.

  “Nellie.” His expression relaxed slightly.

  I was determined not to “make a fuss,” as Grandmama would have said, so I smiled as if it were a perfectly ordinary day and said, “It’s good to see you.”

  Something moved behind his eyes, but his words were as conventional as mine. “Won’t you sit down?”

  He handed me to a chair as if I were a visiting acquaintance, punctiliously ensuring I was comfortable before seating himself opposite me. He was definitely thinner—the light picked out hollows under his cheekbones that hadn’t been there before.

  “I’m so glad you’re free at last,” I said after a few moments of silence while I racked my brains for something to say to him. I wanted, I supposed, a grand scene of reunion, of passionate kisses—I particularly wanted the kisses—but after the jail, I was prepared for this stiff, awkward interview. “I couldn’t bear seeing you behind bars.”

  “And yet you came.”

  I tried to smile. “I couldn’t stay away.”

  Another long moment of silence while Martin looked at his hands. They were scrupulously clean, the nails manicured, if I were any judge. A ray of sunlight made his thick stubble of short hair glow, and there was a rawness to his skin. Had he been scrubbing it?

  “Joe told me that they’ve managed to prove your innocence on the basis of the evidence,” I said at last.

  He looked up at me, one corner of his mouth twisted upward in a cynical half smile. “Proof is a relative term, I’m finding. I’ve received the distinct impression over the last few weeks that evidence counts for very little. Nor does an impeccable record of respectable living, nor do powerful friends—most of whom haven’t come near me.”

  “None of them?”

  He shrugged. “Potter Palmer came to visit me at the county jail. He’s a decent old stick. And Marsh Field has gone on record as saying he’s sure I’m innocent. But for most people, I fear, nothing I can do or say will prevent them from attaching ‘wife-murderer’ to my name unless we can come up with proof of someone else’s guilt. Perhaps even then. Martin Rutherford, wife-murderer. If I were you, I’d run in the opposite direction.”

  “Stop it.” My sorrow on Martin’s behalf was quickly transforming itself into strengthening anger. “What good does that kind of talk do? Especially when you aim it at me. I know you’re innocent of any crime, and I certainly don’t need you to offer me anything except yourself.”

  “Myself?” Martin croaked the word, rising from his chair in a jerky motion. “I’ve spent the last six years building myself into something worthwhile.” He pushed the chair he’d just vacated back with such force that I heard the wood crack. “I thought I’d rid myself of Rutherford the draper—the man who wouldn’t fight—for good and all. I thought I’d gained an empire. But it’s all worthless.”

  He lifted one foot and brought it down hard on the corner of the chair. The leg splintered with a loud crack and the whole chair sagged sideways, tumbling off the rug onto the parquet floor.

  “Further evidence that I’m a man of violence,” said Martin curtly, gesturing at the ruin of the chair. He returned to the window and leaned against the frame, his back to me, his left hand squeezed tight into a fist.

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” I was next to him in an instant, wrenching at his arm to turn him to face me. “Stop feeling sorry for yourself. Your business is thriving, and you’re alive. Your good name, if that’s what matters so much to you, can be rebuilt.”

  “Perhaps,” he muttered, turning back to the window.

  A memory surfaced, unbidden. “You leave him his dignity.” The voice was that of Bet Bratt, Mama’s housekeeper, and I was seven years old. I was glaring at her because she’d dragged me down to the kitchen and given me a good spanking with a large, solid hand. She’d caught me spying through the keyhole of the parlor door, which Mama had closed.

  “You leave him his dignity,” Bet told me as I stood before her, stubbornly determined not to rub my sore posterior. “The poor lad’s got little else he can count on.”

  The sight I had been forbidden to see was Martin, then a raw-boned lad of eighteen, thin and gangly and anxious to be seen as a man and not a boy. He had been sobbing in my mother’s arms—for what reason I didn’t know, but I could guess it had something to do with his father. How could I restore a shred of dignity to him now? And then I knew.

  “What’s happening to that poor madman who was in Harrison Street with you?” I asked.

  He frowned, turning to look at me blankly. “Poole?”

  “Is that his name? What will they do with him?”

  “Send him to Dunning, I suppose. I heard them talking about a hearing.” Martin straightened up. “God, what a fate.”

  “What’s Dunning? And what did he do? They didn’t lock him up just for being insane, did they?”

  My tactic was working. Martin had lost his frozen look, a spark of interest returning to his eyes.

  “He’d been making a nuisance of himself around women. You heard the language he used to you—that, it seems, is fairly typical. With no women around, he becomes a mild enough sort, although his habits are disgusting and his personal hygiene nonexistent. Dunning’s the insane asylum—it’s got a reputation.” He frowned. “They frighten children with the name.”

  “Does he have to go to Dunning?” For a moment, I too was taken out of myself, thinking of the fate that could be in store for the man. I’d heard bad things about insane asylums. “Martin, couldn’t you do something for him?”

  “Like what?”

  “Find him a private arrangement of some kind. You could easily afford it. If, as you say, all he needs is to be kept away from women . . . you could at least try.”

  “I could, at that. I’ll get Joe to look into it.” Martin caught my look and smiled—a genuine smile this time. “I know—I’m heaping a great deal onto poor Joe’s shoulders. Where is he, by the way?” He looked around the room as if expecting
to see Joe Salazar lurking in a corner.

  “In the sitting room, waiting to take me back to Gambarelli’s. You know about that, don’t you?”

  I held my breath, but Martin only nodded.

  “You’re working there.” He said it in a flat tone, as if the matter were of no interest at all. Under normal circumstances, he would have been angry or at least exasperated with me, told me I was putting myself into danger. But these were not normal circumstances, and Martin was not himself. I needed to remember that.

  We were standing close enough that either one of us could have reached out and pulled the other in. I could feel the warmth radiating from his body, see the rise and fall of his chest. If I stretched out my hand, I would be able to feel the regular thud of his heartbeat. Ceding to the temptation, I lifted my arm—and then noticed, with a faint sense of shock, that he wore a black crape armband on his sleeve.

  “You’re in mourning for Lucetta.” I slid my hand up his arm to the band of material, feeling its slight roughness under the tips of my fingers.

  He shrugged his arm slightly, and I withdrew my hand. “And I will continue to be in mourning for an appropriate length of time. She was my wife. My faithless tormentor, but my wife.”

  I hoped my face didn’t betray the dismay I felt. I let a long moment of silence stretch between us before saying, “I’m sorry for your loss.” The conventional phrase was all that came to mind, but to me it had layers of meaning behind it. I felt a deep sense of irreversible change, a future that seemed to be turning its back on me—on us.

  He pivoted away from me again, his gaze fixed on the street below. I realized that he was shaking, just a slight tremor of the arms and shoulders.

  “He took her voice.” When he spoke at last, his own voice had a strangled sound. He cleared his throat before continuing. “Do you think he thought about what he was destroying? Her stupendous voice. It was the one thing I could still—”

  He didn’t finish, and the shaking intensified. I wrapped my arms around his rigid back and laid my head against his shoulder. What else could I do? What could I say to him? Below us, the life of Chicago flowed in an endless tide, heedless to the agony of the man beside me.

  We must have stayed like that for three minutes before he finally turned within the circle of my arms and buried his face in my neck. He hadn’t made a sound, but I could feel the wetness of his tears against my skin.

  Leave him his dignity. I said nothing—made no attempt to stroke his hair, to comfort him as I would Sarah—but merely brushed my lips against the short white-blond bristles, my own eyes squeezed shut to deny my tears.

  After a few more minutes, he drew a deep, shuddering breath and spoke in a more normal voice into my shoulder.

  “I wish to God I hadn’t seen her. She haunts my dreams, staring up at the ceiling with that awful look on her face. What kind of a man could do such a thing?”

  “Not you.” My arms tightened around his shoulders, but he hunched them and drew himself gently out of my embrace, dragging his sleeve across his eyes.

  “I never hit her.” The words came out with a sort of proud insistence. “She used to goad me, did I tell you that? Not alluding to her lovers in any direct way, but hinting. As if she were daring me to lose my temper.”

  “And you never did.”

  “No. I suppose I passed that test, at least.” Martin gave the ghost of a smile, but it disappeared in an instant. “She waited for me half the morning,” he said. “She was trying to get me back.”

  “Are you certain?”

  “She’d tried—hard—soon after I returned from Kansas. She visited me at the hotel—talked me into having dinner sent up. She tried to seduce me.” His tone was again flat.

  “And couldn’t.” A momentary surge of joy went through me. But it wasn’t the real Lucetta who bothered me now—it was her memory and the legacy of pain she’d left behind her.

  “Not even when she tried to make me angry by taunting me about her lovers, more openly this time. I told her that I knew about them and was sorry I hadn’t made her happy enough to abandon them. That I took the responsibility on myself.”

  “You weren’t responsible for Lucetta’s behavior.”

  “Wasn’t I? I was wrong to marry her when I was in love with you. I played a considerable part in the wreck of our marriage.” His tone was bitter. “Lucetta didn’t want to be loved in a halfhearted way. She was desperate to be worshipped utterly—for someone who would never despise her or cast her off, no matter what she did. Perhaps her affairs were a way of testing me, and I failed.”

  “You married her because she told you she was having your child, and that was a lie. She knew she couldn’t have children.” I could hear the anger in my voice. “You can’t bear the responsibility for her deception of you.”

  I wasn’t sure if Martin had even heard me. “She knew about you before I even did, I believe,” he said, his eyes seeing something far-off. “How do women know these things?” His gaze snapped back to me, his gray eyes like the sky before a storm. “It was in my power to save her, and I didn’t.”

  I wanted to scream at him in frustration. It was Lucetta’s fault that things had worked out the way they had, not his. Or perhaps it was mine—for not being strong enough to tell Martin to go away, for coming to Chicago when I knew I shouldn’t. I clenched my fists, casting around for a way to turn the conversation away from Martin’s sense of his own guilt.

  “Was that the last time you saw her?” I asked.

  “No.” I could almost see the memory behind Martin’s eyes. “She asked me to do one thing for her after that. To attend Domenico Gambarelli’s Santo Stefano gathering with her to avoid gossip that we were separated.”

  “When was that?” Jealousy reared its head inside me, and I stamped on it. They had appeared together socially as man and wife, after all. Martin had connived with the deception Lucetta had elaborated, perpetuated it for her sake.

  “Santo Stefano is the day after Christmas. Papa—Domenico—spends Christmas Day very quietly, as his wife died during the Christmas season. But on Santo Stefano, he holds a huge feast—a sort of symbolic rejection of mourning, I suppose. He invites every last relative and acquaintance, even some of his more senior employees. Lucetta sang, as she often does—did—at parties.” His eyes had the distant look again. “She wore a gold dress, and even with three hundred or more people in the house, I seemed to see her constantly. She shone under the lights like—like treasure.” He shook his head, a bemused look on his face. “Gold and diamonds, amethysts and rubies. Everyone turned to look at her as she passed.”

  I had to know. “Did you go home with her?” That “Papa” had hurt more than I could have anticipated, and my voice was small, mean sounding. Martin looked directly at me.

  “I left early and alone,” he said shortly. “I never saw her alive again.”

  I dropped my eyes, feeling the blood mount to my cheeks. “I’m sorry.”

  “I understand.”

  There seemed to be nothing I could say that would steer us in the right direction. Perhaps there was no right direction. So I resorted to practicalities, a thought prompted by Martin’s description of a gold dress.

  “Lucetta’s maid—was that still Trudy? The one who came to Kansas?” Trudy had been well aware of Lucetta’s affairs and might prove useful.

  “Trudy left Lucetta just after we returned to Chicago. I didn’t meet the maid she hired after that as I’d already moved to this hotel. It was some Italian girl—the police have tried to find her, but she’s nowhere to be found.”

  “Don’t you think that’s significant? That she’s disappeared?”

  Martin turned his head to look out of the window yet again, and I wanted to shake him. Or kick him. Or kiss him. But the sky outside was darkening, and Joe’s discreet knock sounded on the door.

  “Come in.” Martin crossed to the center of the room, brushing past me as if I were a passerby on the sidewalk.

  Joe’s eyes
flicked to the broken chair and then to me. I gave a tiny shake of the head to indicate there was nothing drastically wrong, and his mouth relaxed.

  “You’ll make sure she gets back safely.” Again, the flat, expressionless tone. In the twilight of the unlit room, only Martin’s face, hair, and hands stood out. The black of his armband was absorbed into the gloom, invisible against the black fabric of his jacket, as if mourning had become a seamless part of him.

  I didn’t remember how I got out of the building and barely registered what I was doing as I made my way back to my garret room at Gambarelli’s. My whole being was concentrated on one man, who perhaps was still standing in the darkness, looking out of the window. A free man—but not, by any stretch of the imagination, truly free.

  24

  Risk

  With only Sunday afternoons off, and devoting those to Sarah and Tess, I didn’t see Martin. The newspapers—which, I remembered, were probably in the Gambarellis’ pockets—continued to cast doubt on his innocence. I grew tired of reading such articles. I didn’t know what, if any, progress he was making with the case himself. Had he hired men from the Pinkerton Agency, or was he concentrating on his business? I understood the need to stay away from Martin, for both our sakes, but it was wearing on my nerves. I felt more shut off from him than I had in my early days in Kansas, when we had corresponded regularly.