On the surface, the streets were clogged with abandoned wagons, horsecars, and dead horses. Hack drivers were collecting appalling fees, in advance, for the attempt to reach destinations that might normally be fifteen minutes away. Some made it hours later, some not at all. Sturdevant could almost see the desperation on the faces of clerks and factory workers as they struggled on toward jobs in which job security was unknown. A day's pay was the least an absence might cost them. Even the owners of businesses felt compelled to appear, partly as an example to their employees, partly as an obligation to those who might otherwise arrive and find the doors locked, and because they knew no other way.
Tuesday's entire issue was dotted with tales of futility, venality, heroism, and tragedy. B. Altman's department store had opened Monday and had one customer all day. A woman bought a spool of thread. R. H. Macy's on Fourteenth Street closed early, brought in food, and turned its furniture department into a dormitory for the staff. Four patrons turned up for the dinner show at Tony Pastor's. Pastor put the show on anyway and treated the cast and the loyal four to a champagne and sandwich party afterward. Several well-dressed men appeared at the city jail, confessing that they were vagrants who ought to be incarcerated, at a time when the understaffed jail was offering to release legitimate vagrants, all of whom declined with thanks. A policeman found a wagon driver who was coated with ice and appeared frozen stiff. Upon being roused, the driver was shocked to learn where he was. He had thought he was home in bed in Brooklyn.
Others never woke up at all. Bodies, either dead or nearly so, were being found everywhere. The old woman who sold flowers in front of the New York Herald Building died of exposure on her wooden box before anyone noticed that she was no longer moving. Some of the poor who huddled for warmth near the sidewalk steam grates of office buildings succumbed there. Several children were discovered. Two of them had been given baskets and sent out to beg by their fathers. One man had been observed trying for a full hour just to cross Seventy-second Street near the Hudson River. At each attempt the wind would slam him down or drive him back. He finally crawled across only to disappear in a whirl of snow out of which the helpless witness knew he would never rise. In the fifties, an asthmatic malts and hops merchant tried to reach his office and sank exhausted into a drift not a block from his home—Hello! Sturdevant looked up at Corbin, who was helping Gwen thread a spool of the Greenwich Graphic.
“Jonathan,” he asked, “does the name George Baremore mean anything to you?”
“Baremore?” Corbin narrowed his eyes. “Was that the George found dead in the snowbank?”
“You tell me.”
“I'm not sure. Baremore sounds like it could be right.”
“How well did you know him?”
Corbin shrugged. “The best I can tell you, I sort of see myself saying hello to him at the elevator and making polite conversation. He was in the beer business, I think.”
“Malts and hops. What did he look like?”
”A big man. Bigger than me. About my age.”
Sturdevant rubbed his hands. The newspaper account gave Baremore's age as thirty-seven and noted that even a two-hundred-pounder was helpless against this storm. “Did you know he had asthma?”
Corbin shook his head, a touch impatiently.
“Yes, Jonathan,” Gwen reminded him. “You said he looked as though he was gasping for breath.”
“Never mind Baremore.” Corbin moved to Sturdevant’ s shoulder. “If you're looking at a list of the dead, look for Ella.”
“There's no list.” Sturdevant gestured toward the page. “Only random anecdotes. The storm is still going strong as this is written. But I'll move ahead.”
Wednesday's paper. March 14. The New York Times described a city that was entirely cut off from the outside and eerily stilled. No trains ran anywhere. All supplies, especially coal, were rapidly being depleted, and profiteers were selling eggs for as much as forty cents each. In the harbor, nine of New York's pilot boats were sunk. Authorities feared the loss of up to two hundred other ships of every description. Searches at sea were impossible because Tuesday's winds still averaged forty-five miles an hour and the snow kept falling, although temperatures had risen from one degree below zero at dawn to twenty-three by mid-afternoon. More people were found. Many of those who survived would lose one or more limbs to frostbite. Sturdevant reached for the fast-forward switch and was about to advance the reel to the next day's edition when he felt Corbin’ s hand on his own.
“No,” Jonathan whispered. “Next page.”
Sturdevant brought it into frame. Before he could scan it, Corbin's hand moved slowly into view and his finger pointed at a column in the top right corner next to an ad for Scott's Emulsion. Sturdevant saw the name at once, although it was only one of a dozen names. Missing. Mrs. Tilden Beckwith. Age 24. Ella. Reported by her husband. Last seen the evening of March 12th. Heading east on 58th street. Destination unknown to Mr. Beckwith.
“How dare you accuse me?”
“Answer me, Ella.” His voice was quiet, controlled. “How is it possible that the child can be mine?”
“By the usual method, I suppose. There are books on the subject if human reproduction remains a mystery to you.”
He realized now that Margaret had tried to tell him. Margaret, whom he'd taken out of Georgiana Hastings's house only to neglect most cruelly when a month later Ella told him she was with child. Ella, who for the first and only time in her life had actually pleaded with him to come to her bed during his second night home from his trip abroad. Ella, who had never again shown such appetites after that one night. Margaret, in whom he again sought comfort and companionship, although not without guilt as before because of the child who was swelling his wife's belly. Margaret, who had been all his joy these past eight months. She had tried to tell him. In her gentle way, she had tried to make him count the months. She would never have said, “Tilden, an infant born in mid-January had to have been conceived in mid-April of the year preceding. You were in London then,Tilden. All that month and parts of March and May as well. You have been cuckolded, Tilden.” No. Instead, Margaret spoke of mother cats and the number of days in which their kittens would invariably be born after the encounter that ultimately produced them. Only sixty-three. So much faster than for cows and women, both of whom take a full nine months. But Margaret would not mind. That, she told him. She would take pleasure in every single day of the nine-month term as long as she had the child of a man she loved growing inside her. Margaret would speak of these things and Tilden would notice an odd sorrow in her eyes. He had never questioned it. He felt sure that her sorrow was no more than an unspoken regret that it was Ella who carried his baby and not she.
In the end it was Georgiana who told him. On a Saturday, two days past when she came to his office to discuss her investments, Georgiana inquired of the child. She asked, innocently enough, with what name he had been christened. Ella's choice was Huntington, he told her, after her family name, but the christening would not be until Sunday a week. Describe him, she then asked. What is his coloring? And from there on her questions became even more pointed until at last he demanded their purpose. It was then she told him of the laughter she'd heard in her house that past April from men who spoke of the absent Tilden and the available Ella with equal contempt Men who chortled about Ella's loose tongue in matters of Tilden's business and who made reference, however unclear to Georgiana, to a relationship between Ella's infidelity and the financial destruction of Cyrus Field at Jay Gould's hand. Men to whom she had thereafter barred her doors. Men named Albert Hacker and Ansel Carling and another whose name she could not recall.
“There are books,” Ella had sneered.
”I need no books, Ella,” he answered her, “only a calendar. The child, as all but the blind could see, is not mine. Whose child is it, Ella?”
“You are such a fool, Tilden.”
“We can rule out Albert Hacker. Hacker is fat, has bad teeth, and does not clean his fin
gernails. It is hard for me to imagine you tumbling with a man so unfastidious. There's another in that crowd, I forget his name, but he chews cigars and leaves brown spittle to dry on his vest. Enough said of him. That would seem to leave Ansel Carling, Ella.”
She stiffened but quickly recovered. ”A long rest in an asylum would do you a world of good, sir. Consider it.”
“Tell me about Ansel Carling, Ella. He is quite the cultivated gentleman, isn't he? And a lion of commerce on top of it. A latter-day Ivanhoe.”
“It is unbecoming, Tilden,” she said icily, “to mock that to which you cannot aspire.”
“Hardly the sort of man,” Tilden continued, “who would bandy a lady's name about in a Thirty-sixth Street whorehouse. Hardly the type to boast of his conquest to his friends without even being discreet enough to do so behind closed doors.”
Ella paled by several shades. “What are you talking about?” she asked.
“He laughed at you, Ella.”
“You are a liar.”
“Oh, he laughed at me as well. He laughed at me for being blind, which was true enough. But he laughed at you because you were so easy for him, Ella. And because he finds you silly, Ella.”
“Liar!” she screamed.
“Aside from that unaccountably dark and sallow infant in there”—Tilden gestured toward the nursery—“what else did you easily give him? Did you give him the knowledge of Cyrus Field's business affairs? Did you give him the means, from my private records, to destroy a man who is worth a thousand of you, Ella?”
Her eyes went wide. She stared at him for several long moments, her face first a mask of fear, then of contempt, then fear again. ”I will hear no more of this.” She turned away from him, passing an iced-over window that crackled under the assault of driven sleet.
”I want you gone, Ella,” he said coolly. “Tomorrow, if the trains are running, I want you to take your child and go home to Philadelphia. Take your twin beds as well. I intend to divorce you on a bill of adultery.”
“Do you indeed, sir?” She stopped and faced him.
“With all possible haste. If you do not go of your own accord, by the way, I will put you and your belongings on the sidewalk.”
“To make room for your slut, I presume.”
Now Tilden paled.
“Hypocrite,” she spat.
Tilden held his tongue, though alarmed by her use of the word slut. It troubled him less that Ella seemed to know of Margaret than that she might know of Margaret's origins and could use that knowledge to do her harm. And if Ella knew, so, by deduction, did Carling. And therefore Jay Gould as well.
“There will be no divorce, Tilden”—she smirked—“except at a time and on conditions of my choosing. Press me on this and I swear I will leave your life in tatters.”
“As with Cyrus Field, for example,” he hissed.
“He's as great a fool as you. Though not so great as to have bought himself a private whore.”
Tilden took two steps closer to her and paused, an expression almost of sorrow on his face. Then he slapped her hard across the mouth.
“Tomorrow, Ella,” he told her. “Tomorrow I want you gone.”
She'd almost fallen, not from the force of the blow but out of shock. She had never dreamed that Tilden might strike her. No one had hit her, ever, not in her entire life. He is a madman. An animal. Ansel. I must get to Ansel. He will protect me. Gathering herself, Ella crossed to their entrance hall and fought the knob of the clothes closet : there. When I tell him what has been done to me here, when I show him, he will rush back here and give Tilden the caning of his life. He will avenge me. And oh, how he'll laugh at Tilden’s childish lies. Easy, indeed. Silly! We shall see who is silly.
Ella snatched the first coat she found and struggled into it. She reached for a hatbox, knocking several to the floor, and plucked from the debris a small feathered toque that would be useless for the conditions outside. She ignored three pairs of boots that sat in the rear of the closet.
Tilden considered stopping her. She was dangerously out of her senses. If her intention was to cool her fury she might find more coolness than she bargained for. But let her go, he decided. He was sure that she would go no more than a few steps once she saw that the storm was slapping her with a force much greater than he had used. His back was to the door when he heard it slam. In the hallway outside he heard a single squeal of rage and then a series of smacks, which he imagined were the sounds of her hand pounding the call button of the elevator.He regretted that the night operator must see her condition. He heard the sound of sliding doors and the clatter of metal gates.
“Tilden.” He jumped at the echoing sound of his name. You are not a man, Tilden.” Oh no. He closed his eyes. The operator. The neighbors. “I know what a real man is like. Sleep well, Tilden. But do not be surprised if Ansel pays you a visit and whips the life out of you.” The elevator doors rolled shut.
“My God! Is it possible?” he gasped through his embarrassment. Would she actually go there? At night? Unescorted? He could not permit it. Tilden walked quickly to the closet and found a gray lamb's-wool coat and hat. But what of the infant, he thought as he pulled on his gloves. Neither Bess, the housekeeper, nor Mrs. Vickers, the nurse, had come because of the storm. In the whole building, hardly any servants and few staff had made it through. Could he leave the infant alone? Tilden crossed to the nursery door and looked inside. All was quiet. The infant would be fine for the few minutes it would take to remind Ella of her duties and to drag her back if necessary.
Tilden chose a stout walking stick from the hallway stand and stepped through the door, closing it quietly behind him. He headed toward the stairs. A visit from Ansel Carling, he muttered to himself as he descended them. I dare not even pray for such a blessing. But there will be a visit. Depend on it, Carling. And it is I who will do the visiting.
Tilden reached the lobby and went quickly into the storm. No one saw him leave.
Sturdevant moved his chair aside to afford Corbin and Gwen Leamas a better view of the projected microfilm page. He glanced up at their faces. Gwen's expression was animated, excited. She caught her breath when she saw the name Tilden Beckwith on a printed page and repeated it aloud. Corbin, fascinated at first, now seemed confused, dazed. But a bit angry as well, Sturdevant decided.
He watched as Corbin’s hand reached slowly forward and his thumb began brushing over the glass at one edge. Gwen stiffened. She knew at once what the hand was doing. It was attempting to turn the page. Sturdevant touched a finger to his lips and advanced the reel, slowly, one page at a time, moving on only when Corbin's thumb began to move. On page 2 of the newspaper dated Thursday, March 15, Corbin's hand went flat.
There it was. Storm victim. Ella Huntington Beckwith. Age 24. The wife of Tilden Beckwith of the Osborne Apartments. Reported missing on March 12th. Found between stacks of bricks on the construction site of the new Plaza Hotel. Police were investigating.
Investigating? Why? Ah, yes, Sturdevant realized. Sturdevant probabilities. How is it that two unrelated neighbors from the same apartment house perished in the same storm in the same general area? It might be possible to dig up the record of that investigation for what it might be worth. Probably not much. Once the police established that no relationship existed between Ella Beckwith and George Baremore, the coincidence would have been accepted and Ella would be just one more person who fatally underestimated the storm that first night.
“Can we talk in private, sir?” The policeman, a hulking figure who introduced himself as Inspector Williams, cocked his head toward John Flood, who had visited Tilden daily since Ella was first reported missing.
Flood rose to his feet. “I'll just use that fancy bathroom of yours a while, lad. Sing out if you need me.” He met the inspector's eyes and held them. Neither man blinked until Flood had passed.
“That's John Flood, ain't it? The Bull's Head Terror?”
“Yes.”
”I seen him fight Sullivan up in
Yonkers. I don't guess a gent like you would have been there.” His voice was curiously high-pitched.
”I was there, Inspector.”
“Tough man.” He raised a fist. “Went eight rounds against John L. No one but Paddy Ryan has lasted longer.”
Tilden nodded, waiting.
”Appertainin' to that, sir,” he asked, “how is it that a society feller like yourself is pals with the likes of John Flood? You wouldn't be feelin' no need for a bodyguard, would you?”
“John's been a friend since I was twelve.” He ignored the last part of the policeman's question.
“Though by the look of you, sir, you've mixed it up once or twice yourself.”
“Can we get on with this, Inspector?”
“We can, sir. We can indeed.”
Tilden waited again.
“You can understand, sir, how the Baremore feller and Missus Beckwith both bein' from the same address caught the eye of the department. Could there have been a connection, sir?”
“No.” Tilden shook his head. “They scarcely knew each other on sight.”
”I thought as much myself.” Williams spread his hands. “Mr. Baremore left for work that morning. Your wife a full ten hours later. Odd thing, though. She must have practically stepped right over his body to get to where they found her.”
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