by Paul Collins
Pick whichever turkey you like, the grocer said.
There was also an order for a bushel of sweet potatoes to be sent to Dr. Webster’s house; clearly the doctor was putting on a large Thanksgiving meal, and he was not a man known for frugality in his dinners and salons. Dr. Webster had always been one to lay in orders for everything from claret to the latest sheet music; his deliveryman, Mr. Sawin, had probably made the run out to Cambridge hundreds of times.
One of the biggest tasks for Ephraim that day was not, in fact, placing orders with the provisioner at all, but acquiring a chunk of alkaline quicklime from a supplier on the local docks. This was the same order he had to pick up for the doctor’s chemistry experiments every winter—I want a piece about as big as your head, Webster would always say. Going to Foster’s had taken Ephraim too far out of the way already; the task would have to wait. This meant that he’d go out again on Thanksgiving Day itself, improbably in search of a burning caustic, but that was the nature of working in the Medical College building. He and Caroline were readying, after all, for a Thanksgiving dinner to be held just a few rooms away from the dissecting tables—where, in the cold November moonlight, a cold jar of blood waited as red as any cranberries.
IT WAS afternoon by the time the couple returned home and set down their purchases. The medical school had that sepulchral quiet that settles over academic buildings before a holiday; the day’s lectures were done, and no sounds came from the chemistry lab anymore. Ephraim still had chores around the building to do, and as he passed through the entryway into the dissecting room, he paused as he felt a curious warmth come over his body. He turned to the opposite wall in the entryway, the one shared with the lab—and, puzzled, set his fingers upon the plaster.
He jerked his hand back—the wall was hot, almost unbearably so.
The building is on fire. It has to be.
The janitor dashed around the halls, banging on the lab door to no avail, and then ran into the chemistry lecture hall. He pulled on the door to Webster’s private stairs down to the basement lab. It, too, was locked. Littlefield thrust his head outside, half-expecting to see crackling and roaring flames leaping out the lab windows. Instead, he found dead silence.
The river had receded enough from the muddy tidal flats for Littlefield to pad behind the rear of the building. He pulled himself up on the back wall and looked inside one of the double windows to the lab. There didn’t appear to be anyone inside, nor the least hint of a fire. Puzzled, he glanced about, then hoisted himself up onto the sill and surreptitiously tried the window. It gave way under his hand; the doctor had left it unlocked. The janitor pushed it up and, with effort, pulled himself through the window and dropped catlike onto the floor.
He was alone.
In all his years at the Medical College, Littlefield had never broken into his own workplace before, and he moved about cautiously in the silent laboratory. Something was missing: the pile of pitch pine kindling he’d brought in on Friday was used up. The reason why was immediately apparent: near the privy, the assay furnace was out but still radiated heat, as did the bricks below and the flue running up the wall behind it. A heavy soapstone covered the top of the furnace, along with an iron crucible and some scatterings of minerals; perhaps Webster had been experimenting with raising them to a white heat. The furnace must have been fiercely stoked to make the very stones in the walls hot to the touch, and it was hard to imagine what beyond the laboratory’s two full sixty-three-gallon hogsheads of water could have kept the building itself from catching fire. Littlefield hefted a broom from the corner of the coal pen and thrust the handle into the giant water barrels: one was empty, the other nearly so. Not only had Webster used a pile of kindling, he’d gone through about one hundred gallons of water.
Littlefield walked up the back stairs to the lecture hall, to the other side of the door he’d been unable to open earlier. Looking down, he saw curious dark brown stains on the hard pine steps.
Blood?
Hardly unusual in the medical building, perhaps. Nevertheless, Littlefield bent down and dabbed his fingers into the stains, then cautiously tasted his fingertips: the substance was acidic. Had it been used to clean away something underneath, or was it the mere splashings of the jittery professor and his chemicals? Indeed, the state of the beakers and retorts in the room were something of an exasperation for Littlefield himself; with the door locked so much, it had been days since he’d washed any glassware for Webster. Still, he couldn’t do that now; he didn’t dare leave a hint that he’d been inside. His presence in the locked laboratory—and he’d been there for perhaps fifteen minutes or more now—was going to be hard enough to explain if the doctor returned.
The janitor slid back out over the sill, pulled the window shut behind himself, and dropped down to the muddy earth. Out on the river, men were still probing the frigid and murky water with grappling hooks, dragging the bottom for their missing man.
10
THE FINAL REWARD
HELLO.
The servant froze in mortification. Dr. Webster had returned unexpectedly.
The doctor was miles from the Medical College, back in his house in Cambridge—and as a new maid, Anne simply had to accustom herself to Webster’s unexpected comings and goings. She’d been working in the Garden Street home for only two weeks, and it seemed a respectable if queer placement. The doctor maintained a fine house—two parlors, six bedrooms, sumptuous carpeting and easy chairs throughout—and yet did so with a curiously minimal staff. Indeed, it was just Anne; for instead of employing a housekeeper, Mrs. Webster and her three daughters still in residence would get up every morning at five o’clock and go about the house dusting, polishing, and trimming the lamp wicks. And then there was the furnace to maintain, always the furnace: the Websters kept their house stoked so warm that, had the doctor brought home the thermometers from his lab, they might have registered eighty degrees inside.
The doctor was not, thankfully, in the kitchen to ask for his afternoon tea—which was a good thing, as Anne hadn’t readied it yet.
He instead passed briskly into the living room to check on his daughter Marianne and to remark on the book she was perusing. Of late they’d been discussing yet another new purchase of his for the family library—an illustrated edition of Milton’s pastoral “L’Allegro.” The voice that sometimes struggled above the lecture hall could easily fill the parlor with the blind poet’s stanzas:
To hear the Lark begin his flight,
And singing startle the dull night,
From his watch-towre in the skies,
Till the dappled dawn doth rise;
Then to com in spight of sorrow,
And at my window bid good morrow,
Through the Sweet-Briar, or the Vine,
Or the twisted Eglantine.
It was indeed the vine the doctor had really come home for, not the poetry. He drew up the long, sharp knife he favored for pruning and went behind the house to one of his great comforts: his garden. While Webster’s daughters had their own talents and pastimes to retreat into—Hattie had even built herself a little studio in the garret of the house—none shared the doctor’s enthusiasm for weeding, trimming, and the patient espaliering of vines. Like the laboratory, his garden was a place where he could labor and cogitate alone. He certainly needed the fresh air and physical labor. Now that he was fifty-six years old, his short frame had become stout with encroaching age; and though still energetic, Webster was no longer the youthful doctor of two decades earlier, when he’d installed an open-air gym on Harvard’s grounds. Back then, he’d led the undergraduates in pole vaults and parallel bar exercises before dinner; now, a quiet afternoon in the garden with a pruning knife was what he liked best.
It was a fine, clear day, and his plants were waiting for him—nectarines, pears, currants, and bare tangles of grapevines. Cambridge families took a great pride in their abundant gardens; it was the highest of crimes to pilfer produce from over the town’s picket fences. Over
the years, Webster had provided fruit and floral displays to the local horticultural society, and the doctor had a scientific interest in the plants as well: he shipped carefully packed boxes of precious bulbs and cuttings to his in-laws in the Azores, to better spread and trade new varieties.
One by one, Webster took to cutting the dense, fibrous old grapevines in his back garden. It was pleasant work, interrupted occasionally by the honking of geese; they’d been flying in formations overhead for days, escaping the chilly north. Webster was collecting thick vines for staining—for, as he patiently explained, grape was “a very porous wood.” By soaking it in dye and cutting it into cross sections, he could get the vessels of the wood to reveal themselves in blue and purple, a marvel to be passed around the lecture hall by his students; and then too, with such dyeing, the plant’s xylem and phloem showed even more dramatically under a microscope.
Webster had other experiments on his mind as well, of course—he’d been toying with a new method of tanning leather and had long known that extracts of chestnut bark had shown particular promise in that process. A man of talents in plant chemistry might make a fortune in this industrial era. Webster’s work a few years earlier had narrowly missed the rush of the gutta-percha trade, when everything from telegraph-wire insulators to shoe soles and stethoscope tubes was being made from the rubbery plant sap. He could scarcely afford to keep failing to capitalize on such opportunities.
Webster cut carefully; he could become abstracted in thought when gardening. Just a couple of weeks earlier, his knife had slipped and gashed his hand, blood welling up onto the blade. The doctor had to be careful—much more careful.
HALF THE Webster clan boarded the six-twenty p.m. omnibus into Boston, bound for a family party at the widow Cunningham’s. Mrs. Webster and daughter Hattie both stayed home, which was no surprise; Hattie had recently become engaged to a cousin, and now had rather less need of meeting other dashing, distant relatives. Nor was Sarah present, as she was already married and living in the Azores. It was Sarah and Hattie who took after their father—and so now, dressed for the party, daughters Catherine and Marianne were rather like ambassadors for their mother’s Hickling branch of the family.
The full moon was rising over a lovely and clear November night, a fine evening for a party. The doctor and his daughters disembarked from the omnibus and made their way up to Mrs. Cunningham’s house on Vine Street. The residence was scarcely a block from the Medical College—though the Websters could have continued to any other house farther down in Beacon Hill, so intertwined were the families in this neighborhood. Webster had married up into a tangle of maritime trading clans—the Hicklings, the Dabneys, the Prescotts, the Cunninghams—all of them interlocked and partnering in the merchant trade since before the Revolution.
The Cunninghams were a spartan, thrifty side of the family—“dignified and severely polite,” as one acquaintance explained. It was widely rumored that the patriarchs Andrew and Charles sat atop fortunes of $100,000 apiece, though one could hardly tell from the unremitting labor of the old men. They still kept offices on the docks, where they arrived promptly at seven in the morning; and there, through a hole cut into their counting room window, the brothers placed a spyglass to keep a watchful eye over their incoming and outbound clippers. Mrs. Cunningham, as a well-provided daughter-in-law, maintained a house whose hospitality to relatives was worthy of the old Puritan days: generous but plain, with little economies visible in every linen and lamp, every cupboard and closet.
Her recently married son, Charles, at least, could keep things lively, for though a Cunningham, he had an inordinate love of Italian opera, the latest fashion for Bostonians. And since his home bordered the theater district, it was a passion he could indulge in easily.
Mr. Barnum, the local chatter ran, is trying to bring over Jenny Lind to America. Guaranteed her a thousand dollars a night!
It sounded like a scandalous sum, but Barnum was no fool. The tickets would sell. The Cunninghams understood the verities of business: Barnum imported Swedish sopranos and Fiji mermaids, and the Cunninghams imported Sicilian lemons and Portuguese Madeira. It was all perishable goods, all calculated risk, all the careful laying away of insurance and reserves for loss and spoilage. The doctor and his two remaining unmarried daughters were not impressed, though, by such business-mindedness.
“They think only professional men are worth noticing,” the doctor’s sister-in-law sniffed.
That disdain had not kept Dr. Webster himself from marrying into the Hicklings, even as he chose a Harvard appointment over the dockside counting rooms; nor had it kept his daughter Sarah from marrying into the Dabney branch. Nor, for that matter, had it kept young Hattie, back home this evening, from becoming engaged to yet another Dabney brother. The Websters liked the starched civility of old Boston money, even if they did not much like the grimy particulars of how it was made.
Still, there was another, less mercantile matter for the party to consider. Mrs. Cunningham’s house was near Holland’s grocery, and her block, like every other in the neighborhood, had been mobilized for searches into basements and attics for the missing George Parkman. The widow’s windows looked out upon streets covered with reward bills. The very doors and sheds of the college itself had been plastered with them. The almost painful politeness of the Cunningham family was not quite enough to keep one guest from blurting out her thoughts that evening.
“So, Doctor,” she asked Webster, “you were the last person who saw Dr. Parkman. What if you should be suspected?”
The doctor scarcely interrupted his intellectual disquisitions to the other partygoers.
“What do you think?” he answered drolly. “Do I look like a murderer?”
THE WEBSTERS left at ten-thirty p.m. Although the toll bridge was only a few blocks away, the eleven o’clock omnibus was a busy one—the theater omnibus, it was called—and they would need to make sure they could find seats among the press of people returning from plays and moving-panorama shows. All the omnibuses and trains had been busy, though, with Bostonians making Thanksgiving pilgrimages out to Concord, Salem, and far-flung hamlets, while country cousins, conversely, poured into the great metropolis. The new laying of rails around the state had changed the nature of the holiday; with travel between distant towns now so readily done in the space of a day or two, Thanksgiving was evolving into a grand occasion for family reunions. This year, one local observed, “livery stable keepers, omnibus proprietors, and railroad companies found handsome sums in profits.”
The collectors in the busy tollhouse were a good source of gossip; that day’s story was how two men, confounded by a one-cent toll “per foot passenger,” promptly piggybacked up to the tollbooth, demanding to pay only a penny. It was a story about Irishmen, of course; local tales about such antics generally were, and the latest account fit neatly alongside the one about the Irishman trying to pay his penny toll with a twenty-dollar bill.
What is that?
Short as Dr. Webster was, his girls were even shorter, and they were craning to look up at yet another new handbill posted that very evening. The father peered through his spectacles at the note and read it aloud to them.
$1000 REWARD.
Whereas no satisfactory information has been obtained respecting DR. GEORGE PARKMAN, since the afternoon of Friday last, and fears are entertained that he has been murdered,—the above Reward will be paid for information which leads to the recovery of his body.
ROBERT G. SHAW
BOSTON, November 28th, 1849.
On the banks below the bridge, the rivermen had hung up their empty hooks for the night. The family’s reward seemed to be simply a final, dignified gesture of propriety in the face of a hopeless loss.
The omnibus lurched forward and into the night. It was still possible in these waning days of 1849 to feel that one could leave the city and its mysteries behind. The railroad to Cambridge would not be ready until the New Year, and the doctor and his daughters arrived at the Harva
rd Square stop not with a steam whistle and the hiss of a boiler but with the subdued snorting of horses and their languid clatter upon the road. The walk up Garden Street was a quiet one, even for Cambridge; true to its name, the street held stretches under tillage, the remains of the old Cow Common, and the placid expanse of the small local reservoir for fires.
Behind them, a stealthier step might be heard in the shadows. Mr. Sanderson, the town’s night policeman, made a habit of quietly trailing those returning home from the theater omnibus. In this peaceful part of town, it was as much to protect revelers from themselves as from anyone else.
The door swung inward to a home largely darkened with sleep; Hattie hadn’t stayed up. It was getting late. But the doctor, a devotee of the Evening Transcript, shifted into his nightgown and stayed up to read the paper as midnight approached. A strange Thanksgiving, this one: the California gold rush of 1849 had diminished many family gatherings.
“How many circles have been thinned by the allurements which the golden prospects of California have held out!” the evening’s paper mourned. “The young and middle-aged have left us, not by hundreds merely, but by thousands, and many a Thanksgiving board will miss their genial presence.”
The rest of the paper consisted of the usual announcements: a train conductor had slipped that morning on the tracks by Fresh Pond and lost his legs; yet another water-system reservoir had been opened by the mayor, this one in South Boston; and for Thanksgiving Day, the post offices would close at noon, and there’d be no Thanksgiving edition of the Evening Transcript. They’d all be rising on the morrow to roast turkeys, to bake plum puddings, to spoon out bowls of squash and potatoes and oyster sauce, and to enjoy a day without news, a day too sleepy and homebound to warrant it.