by Hall, Ian
“I need a woman telegraph operator, and you’re the only one I’ve found so far.” I said, trying to be as low-key as possible. “I’ll just spirit you away.”
“And Stanley?”
“You let me deal with Stanley.” I said steadily.
Annalise drank some of her new beer, and I picked up my own glass, its white foamy head now long gone. “How will you do this?” she asked, wiping her lips with a slim finger.
“Again, let me worry about details.” I put my glass close to hers. “Do you want to do this?”
“Yes,” she said with some sudden conviction, and clicked her glass onto mine. “Yes!”
“Then it’s settled!” I grinned, buoyed by both my hiring of the rarity of our female telegraph operator, but also looking forward to a little bit of action. Detective work felt good, but sometimes I missed the excitement that the war had provided so much of. “Welcome to the Pinkerton National Detective Agency.”
I clicked her glass again and swallowed half my beer in one swallow. Annalise followed my example.
Outside, a fog had drifted in from the lake, and we walked briskly along the streets, making some random turns, but heading steadily east to the Henley Bridge, where we entered my district, my territory. Certain we hadn’t been followed, I made directly for our 6th Street building, and entered by the stables at the back.
“Ready the old coach, Charles.” I said to the stableman, Henderson. “We’ve got a job to do on the west side.” His eyes lingered on Annalise. “This is our new telegraph operator.”
He looked impressed as we dragged an old battered carriage out into the main part of the stables.
“Who’s upstairs?” I asked as I dusted my hands. “Which detectives?”
“Only Roscoe,” Henderson replied as he entered one of the horse stables.
“You wait here, Missus Schenk,” I said, then loped off up the staircase. True to Henderson’s word, Spencer Roscoe sat at his desk, head down. “Hey Roscoe!” I called as I neared him. “I need a hand on the west side, you busy?”
His considerable frame rose from his desk smiling. “Nothing I can’t put down for an hour or so.”
I explained the situation as we descended the stairs. “We’ll scout out the apartment, then somehow get Missus Schenk inside to get her belongings. I just need some extra muscle in case we get caught.”
“No problem, Paul.”
The ‘old coach’ had seen far better days, but its appearance had been kept shabby on purpose, most of the time detectives didn’t need to draw attention.
Following Annalise’s directions, with Henderson driving, and Roscoe, Annalise and I in the back, we soon sat just a few yards from the dilapidated wooden building that she called home.
“How will you deal with Stanley?” she asked, tears welling up in her eyes. “He’s not really a violent man, except against me, that is.”
The glimpse into her marital problems just made my resolve firmer. “We’ll just make up some bogus story; looking for ‘Jimmy’, or something. Roscoe will take the lead on that. It would be better if I’m not seen at this stage.”
I remained in the shadows of the dingy corridor as Roscoe knocked on the apartment door. He exchanged a word or two with someone inside, then walked back towards me. “He’ll follow, he can’t help himself.” Roscoe grinned as he passed.
I ducked further into the shadows. “Just make sure he doesn’t double back.”
“He won’t.” he looked up at the corridor above as a door slammed. “How much time do you need?”
“Half an hour, no more.”
“I’ll make my own way back to the office, don’t worry about me.”
“Thanks Spencer,” I said as I turned away, following the ground floor corridor, back into the building. Literally five seconds later, a six-foot man passed, his face staring towards the front door, donning his jacket as he walked. With a mention of his wife’s name, Mister Schenk had been lured from the building as surely as if the ‘pied piper’ himself led the way.
The one room apartment itself hadn’t been cleaned in a while. There were beer bottles on tables, and the dirty dishes in the sink looked dry and dusty. “Just grab what you really need.” I said as Annalise walked in.
“How did you open the door?” she asked, her head tilted slightly to one side.
“I picked the lock,” I said quite matter-of-factly. “I had to ensure the apartment was clear before you came up.”
She quickly grabbed a hold-all from under the bed and began to retrieve her clothes from a large chest of drawers. A couple of books on top of the case completed her clear-out. “You’re travelling light?”
She stood in the center of the room, and gave it one last look-over. “Yes I am.”
It had been the quickest escape I’d ever seen. An hour later and we stood in the bank on Pinkerton’s street. “Anna Jenkins,” she calmly told the cashier. She had chosen the new name in the coach after a minute’s deliberation; a man called Jenkins had been kind to her once. In minutes, she had a new bank account under her assumed name.
After she’d been introduced to her new ‘boss’, with Missus Bainbridge’s help I arranged for two weeks wages to be deposited to help with her immediate needs, then took her to my apartment block and introduced her to the superintendent.
Within three hours of her raiding her old room, I had her firmly ensconced, her bag unpacked, and sitting in my restaurant.
“I think this is my first proper meal in weeks.” She said, and her face looked like she’d shed a few years as well as worries.
“Well, this is how you live from now on.” I said, beaming my biggest smile. “You’ve only got yourself to look after now.”
“I can cook, you know.” She looked at me indignantly.
“I don’t doubt it, but it will take me a few days to get some furniture into your room.” Again I radiated the smile. “Best wait a few days before throwing any dinner parties.”
Her shoulders fell, and she seemed to relax, smiling as she ate.
The telegraph got installed that same week, but we had to wait another fortnight for the cables to work their way across from the nearest wire office. By mid-December, Allan, on one of his now rare visits to the office, pronounced the foreign-looking device working, and we waited for the first message to arrive.
And that’s how we spent the next four months.
We shopped for new clothes suitable for her new position, and we shopped for furniture, although she insisted that her room retain some of its Spartan look.
Pinkerton left us alone for most of the winter months, spending his time either lobbying Congress, or rubbing shoulders with the myriad of railroad companies that sprung up across the country, looking for more and more funding.
I hired two new detectives in December, and immediately dispatched them to distant Dallas, investigating a case of payroll theft in the railroads there. The railroads were indeed the place to hit for cash, whether you were robber or Pinkerton.
Winter blew in hard from the lake, but that did not stop Anna and I celebrating Christmas together, I mean, it seemed almost obligatory, we both had no one else to share the season with. Missus Bainbridge, the only other Pinkerton employee regularly in the office had taken off south to visit her son.
By mid-February, as the snows began to retreat, and the purple shoots had poked through the branches of the red-bud trees opposite our front windows, we had the full telegraph system firmly in place. When a message arrived, four copies got typed onto plain paper sheets. If it held importance, one copy got immediately passed to any detective in the building for immediate action. The second sheet was filed in alphabetical order by the perpetrators surname. The third was filed by State, and county, and the fourth simply in a large folder filed by date order. The four sheet system would enable us to investigate the crimes from three differing avenues, and hopefully notice patters quickly and efficiently.
Anna proved proficient at the telegraph, but also seemed t
o build a comfortable working relationship with Missus Bainbridge, who maintained a matronly acceptance of whatever relationship Anna and I had established.
Then March arrived, and I knew we’d have to head down to Springfield soon enough. If Johnny Reb was going to strike for the fifth time, we needed to build on last year’s investigation.
The time had arrived to recall Francis from Harvard.
Falling in Love with Emily
Francis Smalling, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts
December 7th, 1866
I could not help but fall in love with Emily Hettinger; due to our mutual scientific interests, I felt destined to do so.
Her countenance seemed to have walked directly from the stage of a fairy princess out of the plays of Shakespeare. Yet her grasp of the sciences made me heady just to listen to the technical terms fall from her lips.
Oh, those lips.
We had made no mention of the kiss in our first meeting two weeks ago, but we had met every single night since.
Through our endeavors, we had indeed perfected an instrument capable of indication of voltage size, or Potential Difference, the term used by our peers. With her assistance, we had then taken the steps necessary to transform our drawings and calculations into a prototype. On the bench stood our contraption, a large black needle stood out against the pasted white paper behind it.
We both looked with some pride at our creation.
“What will we call it?” Emily asked me, her fingers smoothing some wrinkle from the paper.
“Well, it has a coil of wire, and will move when voltage is passed through it.” I said, gazing past the mechanism at her prideful look.
“A volt-measurer?”
I shook my head. “It has to mention ‘moving coil’, that’s the important part.”
“You’re right,” In her eyes I could see the words chase around in her mind.
We stood for a moment in silent contemplation.
“There’s a lecture next week in the Great Hall.” I began. “It has some connection to our work.”
Emily turned to me. “Connection or no, I cannot attend.”
“Ha!” I raised a finger to stifle further protest. “It is not a closed lecture. It is open to the public.”
She clapped her hands together and almost jumped on the spot. “So I could wear a dress!”
I joined in her euphoria, smiling and enjoying her smile. “I would be happy to offer my arm to you on such an occasion.” I tentatively offered.
Her eyes narrowed. “Are you trying to court me, Francis Smalling?” A grin lay close under the surface of her serious pose.
“I merely offer you my arm and my protection in these dark days.” I hoped my rejoinder would moderate her mood.
“You mention ‘dark’ as if it has a particular personal reference.” I bit my tongue. “You never mention your detective work much, Francis, yet Uncle has told me you are under Pinkerton’s employ.”
“They do pay my wages,” I said. “And they pay all my expenses.”
“So if you were to take me to dinner, for instance, you could claim back your money on the company?”
“I could.”
“And what would you say if the condition of my accepting your invitation to dinner was to hear your story, Francis Smalling?” she inched closer. “Your personal story,”
She had quite expertly cast me into a corner, with only one way out.
“I shall count it agreed.” I said, and held out my hand. She placed her fingers delicately on mine and I raised them to my lips. I know my kiss would be dry, but I could taste the smell of waxed paper from her fingertips, and somehow it held more sensual overtones than the finest lavender water. My girl was indeed a fellow scientist. “And yes, unless you correct me, I shall consider it our first evening of ‘courting’, but it shall celebrate another occasion too.”
“And that would be?”
“My birthday. We shall celebrate my eighteenth birthday on the same evening as our first official date.”
I waited for a moment in silence, expecting some glib remark to quash me once again, then her lips slowly opened. “Who is giving the lecture?” she asked, changing the subject.
“Eh, an inventor from Brooklyn: Edward A Calahan.”
“And what does he do?”
“I’m not certain, but he’ll give a lecture on ‘The Future of Communication’.”
And so it transpired that on the tenth day of December, Emily Hettinger and I took a carriage for a mile or two into Boston and had dinner.
And as we had agreed, I told her my story.
How father had gone to war, how I had run the farm, how I had pilfered the money to gather my reading materials and my experiments, and how I had been tied to a chair and forced to watch my sister be murdered.
What I did not tell Emily, was that as I came to the last details of my sister’s death, I envisaged her taught breasts, Johnny Reb’s marauding hands and the sudden introduction of her own bosom into my thoughts. For the first time since we’d met, Emily had been allowed to wear a dress, and the very slight rise in her bosom had caught my eye in the very first instant.
The next evening, I dined with Professor Wattles, the first family meal with Emily in attendance.
As we talked of tomorrow’s lecture I realized that Emily and I had met every single evening since our first kiss. For vast areas of the evening, I have no idea what was said. I just reveled in the company, took delight in our friendship, and hoped that one day we could duplicate the embrace of our first night together.
The next evening, the lecture hall was by no means full, with only forty or so people in the two hundred seat auditorium. When we arrived, Emily’s hand on my arm, we decided to sit high, away from the main throng. When we’d climbed the stairs, and sat down, she took my hand and squeezed it. “It’s so exciting, Francis,” she said, “Perhaps one day women will sit in these halls and take full advantage of the education facility.”
When the doors below opened, and two men walked onto the small raised stage, Emily did not relinquish her hold on my hand.
“Gentlemen,” Ernest Wattles’ voice soared clearly into the high ceilinged room. “Or should I say Gentlemen, and Ladies.” Emily squeezed my hand again, but did not remove it from my grip. Many heads turned to see the only woman in attendance. “Tonight it is my pleasure to welcome Edward Augustus Calahan to Harvard’s Great Hall. He has studied communications with Western Union for many years, and will give the lecture tonight.”
To be honest, after his introduction, the guest did not quite live up to his introduction. His words were dry, and his concepts seemed to be intentionally vague.
“Perhaps he’s nervous.” Emily leant close to me and whispered. I could feel her breath on my ear, her lips only fractions of an inch away.
I reciprocated. “He doesn’t seem to want to go into specifics.” But as I murmured the words into her ear, my own lips brushed ringlets of her hair, making me want to speak for ages.
Then, of course, the next time we leant close, our heads moved in unison and our faces more collided than met of any conspired purpose. We kissed, short and sweet, smiled our apologies, and faced the front, Calahan’s voice far clearer, the room seemingly far brighter than before.
When the lecture ended, Professor Wattles introduced us to Calahan. “These two will be the future of science in Harvard.”
We shook hands, embarrassed.
“In that case,” he said. “Perhaps you can help me with my latest conundrum?”
“We can try.” I answered.
“I have made a new telegraph device, one which strikes an impression on paper as it receives an incoming message.”
“For what purpose?”
“Well, as the telegraph’s hammer hits the brass clacker underneath, we should be able to take paper and pass it under the hammer, make an impression, and be able to read it later.”
“A permanent record,” I offered, immediately seeing th
e possibilities.
“Exactly!” his eyes showed far more passion than he’d shown in the lecture. “But the method of delivering the message to the paper has eluded me.”
“In what way?” Emily asked to Wattles stifled grin, and Calahan’s slight frown.
“The paper is always too short.” He looked at Emily as if she had grown horns. “I cannot see how to develop a typewriter system, I don’t have the technology needed for the power of the line return.”
“Then make the paper longer.” She said simply.
“Then it becomes cumbersome, not to mention expensive.”
“No, I don’t mean large paper sheets,” She gave me a questioning look, then turned back to Calahan. “Then get a thin roll of paper, like they print tickets at the railroad.”
Of course, I thought, but said nothing, quite happy to let them slog it out like prize-fighters.
“Ticket-tape.” He said. His grin seemed distant, as if he were already developing the idea. “How simple.”
Wattles clapped his hands. “I did tell you, Edward. These young faces mask quick and nimble minds.”
Calahan nodded, then grabbed her hand from her side, and shook it warmly. “Thank you, miss.” He said, obviously excited to leave and begin work on his new invention.
Emily and I took our leave, and briskly crossed the cold campus to the laboratory. Our hands remained joined as we walked.
Winter and Christmas arrived together that year, and I spent it with Professor Wattles, his wife Harriet, and the young Emily Hettinger.
As the snows descended in January, I wrote to Margaret, initially hoping to keep my romancing a secret, but it spilled like a flood onto the paper.
My dearest sister.
It is the fifteenth day of January, and I write in apology. I have been working so hard here in Harvard, in the laboratory, that I have had little time to write, but I do have a revelation to deliver to you.
Your brother Francis has fallen in love.
I do not use it as an excuse for my pen’s inactivity, but introduce her to you as a friend.
Emily Hettinger is the niece of my professor here in Harvard, and has been at my side in the Laboratory every single day for weeks. Her mind is a constant joy to me, a scientist in her own right, and yet unable to practice her arts because of Harvard’s laws against your gender.