Deception's Daughter (The Martha Beale Mysteries, 2)

by Cordelia Frances Biddle

  Then the sight is lost as the carriage and river road part company, and the city’s streets begin in earnest. Martha straightens her spine against the horsehair cushion, then reaches for her cast-aside bonnet and mantilla, pulls on her gloves, and begins to awaken the sleeping children.

  WHEN THE PAIR OF RESPLENDENT coaches with their equally grand steeds and obviously wealthy passengers vanish among the trees, the boys’ shouts intensify. In frustration, they throw clods of earth, stones, sticks, and handfuls of brittle grass down upon the wading figure, howling for her return.

  Her response to their shrieks is to sing in a soft, unfocused lilt.

  “Hush! my dear, lie still and slumber;

  Holy angels guard thy bed …

  Soft and easy is thy cradle;

  Coarse and hard thy Savior lay …”

  The boys know the hymn well. They’re forced to sing it every night by the warders in the children’s asylum of the almshouse as they pace among the rows of beds, exhorting their charges to greater heights of ardor with a rod each man carries in his right hand. The fact that their quarry can so heedlessly warble the detested words makes the boys all the more fierce in their determination to call her back. None can venture down to the river, however, because none can swim, and they’ve learned by heart the tales they’ve been taught: how devils lurk in the Schuylkill’s depths waiting to snag a foot from a slippery rock, or suck the mud beneath your legs; and how once you are pulled into the waves, the devils work in consort to drag you down to their black and lethal lairs.

  The boys wail out their distress, their bodies crouching forward while their prey’s indifferent voice continues to assail their ears.

  “May’st thou live to know and fear Him,

  Trust and love Him all thy days;

  Then go dwell for ever near Him,

  See His face and sing His praise.”

  With that, she sets the basket adrift, pushing it well beyond her reach with a mighty shove that seems to take all her diminishing strength. The basket bobs and spins, dips to one side as the burden within rolls in response to the sudden motion. The high-pitched mewl of a newborn infant rends the air; and the children on the embankment scream at the cry, raining down a fresh avalanche of missiles. “You will burn in Hell forever for what you’ve done!” the eldest of the pack bellows.

  But the threat goes unnoticed. Her tormentors cannot know that her mind is envisioning not a river in Philadelphia on a hot September day but the far-off land of Egypt and the baby Moses set adrift on the stream. Set adrift to be discovered by the daughter of a mighty king.

  “See His face and sing His praise,” she repeats in a singsong fashion that has now become tuneless and weary. Then she adds a whispered “A morteper petua … ab omnipeccato … That thou would’st spare us …”

  She watches the basket take to the currents; she hears another milky cry, imagines the red and wrinkled face, the miniature hands, the legs still sticky with blood. Then she walks deeper into the water, slipping on the slimy stones, falling and righting herself until she sets herself adrift.

  AS ONE BODY THE BOYS run, then stop as one body. What can they do? They, who have defied all rules to follow the woman and her baby. Surely the punishment meted out for such an infraction will be terrible. Fear of those who rule the almshouse paralyzes them. Then the threat of eternal damnation sends them on their way again. If they say nothing, the infant and its mother will surely drown. Why, the two may be dying already! The devils might already have lured them to their nasty graves!

  By now the bare and filthy feet are flying along. In panted breaths, it’s agreed that the eldest among them, a runty and cunning boy who goes by the name of Findal Stokes, will sound the alarm alone—while the others creep away and return to such pastimes as they’ve stealthily forsaken.

  As Martha’s twin carriages arrive in noisy splendor at the equally grand house on Chestnut Street, young Findal reaches the less consoling destination known as Blockley House.

  A TRICK OF THE LIGHT

  THE BOY WAS ALONE WHEN he came upon the mother and her child?” It’s Thomas Kelman who poses this question while he, the constable in command of the day watch in Blockley Township, and the president of the Humane Society, whose mission it is to rescue drowning persons, wait on the almshouse portico. It’s a space designed by William Strickland and so graced with Doric columns and commanding such a pleasing view of river and meadow that it appears to be fronting a country estate rather than an institution for the destitute.

  The physical elegance of Blockley House combined with its distance from the city never ceases to perturb Kelman; one hundred eighty seven acres encompassing kitchens, washhouses, workhouses, a surgical amphitheater, and a chapel: all built of stone and at vast expense, although, the poor within its protection subsist on gruel and exhortations to improve their slothful habits.

  “The boy was alone” is the constable’s guarded answer. Unlike Kelman, who is tall and uncompromising in his stillness, the constable jerks with movement, like a hedgehog trying unsuccessfully to roll itself into a ball. True, he would rather the infant and mother had taken themselves to another part of the river—to be dealt with by another member of the day watch—but he especially wishes he weren’t under the scrutiny of Thomas Kelman.

  The man’s black eyes and steady stare, his somber clothes, his habit of quiet vigilance would make anyone nervous, but it’s Kelman’s association with the mayor that causes the most anxiety. With no unified police force, the constable knows, the mayor privately relies upon Kelman to sort out criminal matters that lie beyond the scope of the day and night watches that have patrolled the city’s districts and boroughs since colonial days. But who tells Kelman if he’s correct or not when he claims a person is guilty? If he were to declare a member of the watch derelict, who could argue against the charge? Not a mere fellow who lives on sleepy Darby Road. No wonder the constable wishes he could transform himself into a prickly circle of fur and hide under the nearest bit of shrubbery.

  Instead, he begins rattling off information. “Findal Stokes, twelve or thirteen years old according to what history the authorities were able to procure when the lad first came here. Of slight stature. He arrived malnourished, so his age is hard to gauge. One parent, a father, residing in the men’s ward. Findal and his father have been at Blockley two years. The parent works now and then, sometimes displaying a strong desire to quit the place and resume his former trade, but more often succumbing to lethargy and drunken oblivion—which in turn depletes his meager coffers. The boy insists he was alone. He shouldn’t have been wandering from the institution grounds, and has been disciplined for such infractions and other misdemeanors many times in the past.”

  Kelman makes no comment, but the president of the Humane Society does. Easby is his name, and he’s an avuncular figure, exceedingly portly, with a weakness for colored silks, elaborate waistcoats, and satin cravats. It’s as if his nature were warring with itself, and he would rather organize a dancing school for cultured young gentlemen and ladies than urge his fellow missioners to retrieve the bodies of the despairing from the river. “We owe that boy a debt of thanks. It was most fortuitous that he spotted the woman and her baby when he did. Else we could not have rescued the child. It’s tragic about the mother, of course. She must have filled her pockets with stones to have so successfully vanished from view, although I imagine her body will resurface. They generally do.”

  Kelman doesn’t respond to this final comment. Instead, he turns away from his examination of the deceptively benign vista—the far-off city no more than colored air, and the river like a soft silk sash. “And this young Findal Stokes can’t describe the missing mother?”

  “He said the glare was playing tricks on his eyes,” the constable answers with regimental swiftness.

  “Is he poorly sighted, then?”

  But any reply is interrupted as the main doors to Blockley House open, admitting the three visitors, who are then escorted to a se
cond-floor office where the boy himself is waiting.

  Amid the comfortable appointments provided for the institution’s director, the handsome Turkey carpet and burnished mahogany of the furniture, Findal is an anomaly. It’s clear he’s been in this room before, for his eyes don’t dash about in wonder at the richness of his surroundings. But neither do they rest. Fear is what Kelman reads in the child’s expression. Fear whose refuge is deceit.

  The boy looks at the constable with eyes that are as pale as standing water, then at Easby, sizing up the lazy girth of the latter and the fretfulness of the former, but the colorless eyes avoid Kelman’s unflinching gaze. Kelman notes that the boy makes much use of his hearing, that his head tilts and twists with minute but intentional motions, and that his ears have an oddly pointed quality like those of a bat.

  “Did you take anything from the missing woman?” Kelman asks before the director has time to make the appropriate introductions.

  Findal’s head snaps upward, although he doesn’t regard his interlocutor. “How could I, with her already down in the water and me atop the embankment?”

  “Sir,” the director barks. He raps the boy’s ankle with a cane, and Findal automatically stiffens and straightens.

  “Sir … Didn’t I say I spotted her in the river, trying to drown her poor newly born babe? That’s a crime, that is. Murdering an innocent who’s naught but a few moments old.”

  Easby sighs in gargantuan empathy, and the boy’s quick ears hearken to the sound. “I was right to come running, wasn’t I, sir? If I hadn’t, that wee infant would be dead, too. And now I must suffer for my good deed.” He looks at Easby with practiced appeal; the president of the Humane Society seems on the verge of making a conciliatory remark when Kelman interrupts.

  “But you would have pilfered something if you could. You’ve been disciplined before for stealing from your fellow inmates, have you not, Master Stokes?” Kelman doesn’t wait for an answer; instead, he produces another query. “What were you doing outside the institution grounds?”

  “Running away.” The response is daring. Findal’s bat ears flush pink; his eyes stare Kelman full in the face as if defying further interrogation. Noting the thin white scar that cuts across the man’s left cheek, however, the boy reflexively reaches up to his own cheek, and an expression like admiration flits across his brow.

  “Leaving your boots and your worldly possessions behind?”

  In answer, Findal’s gaze slides toward Easby, who has now squeezed his bulky frame into a chair and is rapidly fanning himself with a handkerchief whose color is the crimson of fire. “If it weren’t for me, that baby would be no more alive than his mother,” the boy whines. “I should be praised for my act, not punished. He’d be feed for the fish, were it not for me. Or the bog demons would have got him.”

  “For someone who claims to have been at a distance when the act occurred—and to be unable to identify the mother—you seem quite certain the child is not only a newborn but a boy. When the basket was found, the baby was tightly swaddled in a cloth. Perhaps you could explain these riddles for us? Or how you came to know the child had been newly birthed? And don’t tell us you were blinded by the glare.”

  The boy opens his mouth, then pinches it shut again. It’s obvious that no amount of browbeating will elicit further information.

  AS HE RETURNS TO THE sternwheel paddle steamer that will carry him and Easby back to the Schuylkill’s eastern shore, Kelman parts company with the constable, whose relief is all too apparent. “A female vagrant,” he speculates while his body gratefully uncoils itself and his gaze seeks out the welcome path toward home. “We get them out here now and then—even along the Darby Road. Escaping rough treatment at the hands of her family or masters. Likely, this one was turned out for immoral behavior and she was journeying into the city’s anonymous streets when her labor pains came upon her—”

  “Ah, yes,” Easby concurs as he steps into the welcome shade of an elm growing beside Blockley’s chapel. “What you say makes perfect sense. And having given birth, the poor soul places her baby in the basket she was carrying when she fled her dwelling place. Then, in a fit of melancholy and terror at an unknown future, takes herself down into the river. It’s not uncharacteristic for new mothers to behave irrationally. Indeed, for some months following parturition their humors can be quite inconsistent.” Easby nods as though agreeing with another’s observation, then hurriedly shakes hands with the constable. Both men are now so anxious to be finished with the dilemma—and with Kelman—that their leave-taking has a disconcerting air of jocularity.

  The Humane Society president carries this convivial humor through the rest of the almshouse’s spreading grounds, past the stables and kitchen gardens down to the river and the ferry.

  Not Kelman, however. While the boat slips over the heat-flattened waves, he responds to Easby’s remarks with fewer and fewer words. Instead, he gives himself to brooding over the boy Stokes and his father, and the vanished and most probably drowned mother of the infant.

  Then, eschewing an offer to ride in Easby’s waiting phaeton, Kelman begins retracing his steps into the city. As he walks he reflects on the changes time has wrought upon it. In ten or twenty years, he knows, little will remain of William Penn’s “greene countrie towne” or the peaceable waterways that border it. Instead, there will be additional wire suspension bridges like the one constructed the previous winter, more coal barges churning through the canal, more pleasure steamers spewing smoke above the falls at Fair Mount. From the banks of the Delaware to the rocky cliffs of the Schuylkill, the city will be nothing but hard, paved streets, brick and stone buildings lined cheek by jowl, abattoirs, woolen mills, match factories, tanneries—and the children of the poor.

  For a moment he pauses, recalling the scenes of his youth. Was I any different than young Findal, he wonders, running barefoot through these vanishing fields? Wild and untamed, and filled with the same hard-won valor. True, my father was never relegated to an almshouse, but was that because he was a wiser man than Stokes senior—or merely more fortunate? For he was no saint. Nor any remote approximation of one, either.

  Kelman marches on, his shoes chafing at the dust and weeds of the dirt road, his black jacket prickling with heat. By now the elegant homes of the wealthy are beginning to dot the streetscape: new mansions and walled gardens filling what was once open grazing land. It’s all he can do to prevent his path from turning in the direction of Martha Beale’s residence on Chestnut and Eleventh streets. He knows she was expected home the day before, but he has been purposely keeping his distance. Better for her that I remove myself from her acquaintance, he recites in bitter silence. Better that she has a clear choice in a husband and companion, someone of her own means and background. I only cloud the issue. She must forget me. She’ll be happier for it. Happier and more content, by far.

  AS KELMAN TRUDGES EAST, MERRIER feet than his flutter through less gloomy air, passing down a set of freshly washed marble stairs that front a home on lower Pine Street. This is Theodora Crowther; and she, in the company of her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Harrison Crowther, is on her way to visit the newly established daguerreotypist on High Street. The city is abuzz with this marvel—freshly arrived from France, of course, while the man who owns the gallery boasts a name full of hyphenations and ducal-sounding associations: Monsieur Jean-François Baptiste-Gourand, who learned his craft from M. Daguerre himself.

  Theodora, or Dora, for this is how her mother and father call her, is nineteen and affianced to Percy VanLennep, who like her is fair-haired and given to quick flushes of embarrassment and impetuous bursts of enthusiasm. Together, they are like fledgling chicks, bobbing up and down with hopeful hops; apart, they are more restrained. Dora, in her parents’ company, can seem no more assured than a girl of fourteen.

  “Oh, do come, Mama,” she now trills, lifting her little heart-shaped face, which today is framed in a bonnet of pale pink satin. Like her walking dress, the hat is piped in viol
et satin and trimmed with silk flowers; and she fairly spins in pride at this new ensemble. Excitement shivers across Dora’s lilac-hued shawl, down her arms in their tight sleeves, and makes her lace gloves dance in the air. “Mama! Do come! Else we’ll be late!”

  Georgine Crowther appears in the doorway at that moment. She precedes her husband, whose tall hat rises less than an inch above the top of her own bonnet. Mrs. Harrison Crowther is a commanding presence. Where her daughter dances along the brick walkway, she promenades in a measured gait, with a frame so much broader and higher that she looks as though she might be descended from another race of peoples altogether. Dressed head to toe in moss green, Georgine Crowther resembles a leafy tree moving toward the street.

  “Mama, do come!”

  But the party is called back again as Harrison Crowther’s elderly maiden aunt Lydia steps outside to stand on the topmost step. The aunt so perfectly resembles her great-niece as to appear a portrait of youth turned old—and at the age of eighty-two, she is indeed ancient. Where Dora’s hearing is sharp though, Lydia’s is failing. Despite repeated applications of Scarpa’s Acoustical Oil, she exists in a realm that encompasses both past and present, and where the remembered conversations of her youth often have more relevance than present ones.

  Now Miss Lydia, as the Crowther servants refer to her, totters down the stairs in order to embrace her great-niece and to remind her—loudly—to “mind her manners when in the presence of the general.” Dora’s mother starts to protest the interruption, but Miss Lydia continues speaking as if the tall lady dressed in green were invisible.

  “He admires a pretty face,” she states in a rapturous singsong tone, “but not a pert retort. Silence is advisable when in doubt, especially because he’s so often burdened by affairs of state.” The “general” is George Washington, dead for over forty years but alive in Lydia’s mind—as is her father, who served as the great man’s aide-de-camp. “I feel a plume in your hat might be better than those flowers,” she adds, but Dora’s mother interjects a domineering: