“Games,” I said, a bit asulk. (I was doing my best not to drink and my nerves were fragile threads.) “I do believe you’re still at them.”
IF ONLY LEAH COULD BELIEVE THAT Katie loves her boys “beyond measure” as she claims. If only she could believe that their welfare is Katie’s sole concern. Indeed, if Leah believed any of Katie’s claims, even a whit, then she would not be seeking out this god-knows-where office in this god-forsaken neighbourhood of Manhattan, the same neighbourhood, she realizes, as that for R.M, whose address Pettifew wrote on the back on his card. R.M. is likely long gone, of course, which is of no concern to Leah, as his ghoulish skills will, no doubt, never be needed. Resurrection Man is what R.M. stands for—though Grave-Robber, Leah thinks, is a more fitting title.
She pauses and then carries on. Daniel warned her not to go, but Leah was adamant. For Katie’s behaviour is in direct odds with her claims. Her poor sons are being left to fend for themselves while she is more and more often out on drinking binges. Oh, Leah has tried and tried, but no amount of cajoling can convince Katie and the boys to return to the Underhill home. “At least let the dear boys stay with us,” Leah said. “Daniel and I shall care for them as if they were our own.”
Katie’s eyes focused for once. “Hah, you’ve got your own—Lizzie, remember her? And look how that played out. She won’t even visit you. In fact I wouldn’t wonder if she hated you. No, no, no, the boys won’t ever never live with you. You’ll twist them up and spit them out.”
Twist them? And here Leah was willing to forgive Katie’s public drunkenness in Rochester, the account of which had been reported in the New York Herald. And didn’t the Taylors recently have to drag her out of a miserable saloon? They reported that Katie was despondent because Maggie left for England without saying good-bye in person. That Katie was drinking with a vengeance that put her earlier habits to the pale.
Leah circles round an ash barrel, lifts her bustled skirts out of the various excrements, thinks of how Katie’s so-called motherly concern vanishes utterly when she is on a spree. Utterly! She uses her boys as an anchor. That is all they are to her: an anchor to keep herself from total debauchery and all its sluttish potential. She is selfish, selfish, selfish.
A beggar man cups an ear in Leah’s direction. “Who’s selfish? Me for my poverty and bum leg?”
God and the Spirits help me, Leah thinks as she drops a coin in his hand, the girls have driven me to muttering.
The sign for the SPCA bears the silhouette of a dog cowering from a club-wielding man. Leah mounts the narrow stairs to the office on the third floor. She stops twice to catch her breath. Lately her skirts seem weighed down with bricks, her shoes with lead. Responsibility, she supposes, only now showing its weight. On the office door is another silhouette, this one of a horse staggered in its traces. She sees no images of beaten, neglected children. She was assured, however, that this is the place to come to report such things, has been since a few years back when a SPCA lady came across a naked, half-starved girl wandering a New York slum and brought her back for care. Soon after this the stray children of New York began arriving at the SPCA office in droves.
Leah finds the office at last. It is small as a horse stall and reeks of lister and carbolic. Leah hardly knows where to sit for all the books and animal hair. The window is covered over with a high cabinet that leaks papers. A lone gas light burns on the wall.
The lady hunched behind the desk searches out a form, clears a portion of her desk and dips her pen. She waits without much interest to hear the tale, which will no doubt have similarity to many other tales of woe. Leah has a moment of doubt, then clears her throat: “I am reporting this anonymously. It must be anonymous. Strictly so. I know someone—a woman who is a dipsomaniac of the most extreme kind. She has two young and innocent boys …”
“YOU WON’T SEND ME TO A HOSPITAL, Alvah. Please do not. Not even a Quaker one.”
She took my hand as she was doing often these days. Her grip was neither too tight nor too loose. I supposed she was practised at hand-holding, having done so in so many dim rooms, with so many strangers. I supposed, too, that she was practised at gleaning information from palms and fingers, and yet I allowed her my hand.
“No. I promised I wouldn’t, don’t you recall? Ah, never mind.”
At that she said, clear as day, and in a voice similar to mine own, “Don’t be an addle-pot, duck. Hospitals are only of use during the wars, or for when family are unable to assist, and if it must be a hospital, then a Quaker one is best, they are a goodly lot with a firm belief in practicality.”
I gaped, then said her mimicry was a fine trick, though I was peeved. “You are mixing up your memories, making a cocktail of them.”
“As is my wont, to be frank,” Maggie said, and again in a voice that echoed my own.
She talked of Katie again, and how she was sent to prison. But again she spoke of the experience as if it were somehow her own.
KATIE IS ESCORTED past the blackened ornate pillars, then down through the cell-pocked courtyard, then under the Bridge of Sighs. No pretty bridge where lovers stroll, this, but one over which condemned prisoners walk to the gallows step by quaking step.
“Take her to the Bummer’s Hall,” the matron says. “I’ve got plenty on this night.” She is rake-thin but she does not appear weak, rather the contrary. Her bones look sharp enough to cleave Katie in twain.
The policeman, one Officer Purdy, pushes back his cap. “She’s not drunk is what, though. Not at the moment, like.” He is blond and fat and Irish, and at the moment obviously wishing himself in some other occupation.
The matron jabs at the paper. “It says right here that she was arrested for drunkenness and neglect of children.”
“The Bummer’s Hall will be fine,” Katie says, her teeth chattering with cold, with terror of this lady whose appearance reminds her of Amy, but in the cruellest incarnation.
The matron glowers. “Oh, the lady thinks she has a choice, does she? This room or that, as if sashaying herself up to a hotel?”
Katie stutters an answer. Officer Purdy holds up his hand. “You wouldn’t want to be in the Bummer’s Hall, Mrs. Jencken. There’s no private cells, like. Just one room full with drunkards, of the male kind mostly. No place for a lady, that.”
“Damn you, Purdy. Here, then.” The matron scrabbles at the enormous keys at her waist.
In her cell Katie weeps, and her weeping adds to that of other women in other cells. The sound is one of absolute misery. Surely they must hear it in the Manhattan streets beyond. Ah, no, the dank walls are too thick. Sights and sounds come here to be buried. Not for whimsy is this place was called “the Tombs.” Not even the newspapers call it the Halls of Justice, its proper name. Not even the judges and lawyers. It is designed after an Egyptian mausoleum and is haunted by the miasmic air of the swampy land upon which it was built. Odd how Katie has passed the Tombs for many years and never truly noted it. Despite the fact, or perhaps because, it takes up an entire city block. Well, she will certainly notice it henceforth.
A sad-eyed boy sweeps the corridor, his feet shod only in yellow light from the set-down lantern. Another boy walks by holding a chamberpot, and with as much care as a ring bearer at a wedding. The stench as he passes merely adds another layer to those of sweat, rot, vomit. At least Ferdie and Henry escaped incarceration here. Only criminal boys are kept here, and in the same ward as the women prisoners. No, her darling boys are in “juvenile asylum.” Officer Purdy assured a sobbing, begging Katie that this asylum is a comfortable place from whence children can be sent to reputable “fostering” families. “It’s a grand new system, Mrs. Jencken,” Purdy assured her
The mould-coloured light at the high, barred window indicates afternoon. Katie is not to see a judge until the following day. It will all be sorted out then. Yes, it will. She will insist her boys be released to her care. Insist on a newspaper reporter’s attention. The name Katie Fox Jencken is still celebrated. Surely. And she w
ill find a way to telegraph Maggie in England. Somehow Maggie will help her. Not Leah. No. This is Leah’s damned own doing. It must be. Who else would report that Katie’s young men were “neglected children”? Who else would want control of the offspring of the high priestess of Spiritualism, as Katie is still sometimes called? A fostering family? And what “family” would that turn out to be? Katie kicks the stone wall. Curses Leah. Curses her own weaknesses for stimulants. She even curses her beloved Maggie for leaving her so. I’m staying here a month longer. Dr. Wadsworth’s generosity is astounding. We shan’t have to worry for a time about money. Such is what Maggie wrote in her latest missive.
The matron clanks her keys on the bars. “Stop that howling and crying now. It won’t make no difference. Shut it, I say!”
Katie bites her palm. Perhaps some brandy will seep from it. There must be enough of the damned stuff in her veins.
They came for her that forenoon. Banged on the apartment door. The neighbours, gluttonous for excitement, ranged behind the officers. Ferdie answered. Katie was at her desk writing a letter. To Maggie in England? Yes, of course, to Maggie. Officer Purdy and his cohort looked puzzled when they realized that Ferdie, this tall, strapping young man, was one of the poor, neglected boys. Henry, too, was a puzzle. Certainly he looked less imposing, but he did not appear ill-fed—ill-mannered, perhaps, given that he looked up from his book and announced he smelled rotting potatoes. The policemen showed the warrant, at which mayhem ensued, what with the boys trying to protect Katie and Katie crying and raging, and the neighbours now turning against the police and protesting the injustice of it all.
Katie thinks of Officer Purdy’s broad, anxious face, his muttered apologies as he sat with her in the police wagon, how he said, “You’ve got the grand luck, you do. You’ve only got ghosties and ghouls to be dealing with. Me, I’ve got the damned of this earth traipsing in my precinct.”
If it was an attempt at consolation, it scarcely worked.
Katie sits on her hard cot. Imagines Henry as a boy again, his face plumbed against hers, asking for the rhyme again, saying he doesn’t give a fig if Auntie Leah hates it.
Old Mother Tabbyskins
Said ‘Serves him right!’
Gobbled up mousey doc
With infinite delight.
Very fast, very fast,
Very pleasant, too.
What a pity it can’t last.
Send another, do.
Doctor Dog comes running,
Just to see her begs.
Round his neck a comforter,
Trousers on his legs.
…
Doctor Dog comes nearer,
Said she must be bled.
I heard Mother Tabbyskins
Screaming in her bed.
Very fast, very fast, scuffling out and in,
Doctor Dog looked full and queer
Where was Tabbyskins?
I will tell the moral
Without any fuss:
Those who lead the young astray
Always suffer thus.
CHAPTER 42.
“And how did your Katie escape?” I asked. “Did she slip through the cracks in the walls or floors or what have you? You said she could do such things.”
My patient smiled. “You have a sterling memory, Alvah. But no, Katie was released after three days. After it was sorted. She was frantic about the boys. They were staying with Leah and Daniel, Just as Katie predicted. I did what I could from distant England. Thank the good grief for Dr. Wadsworth. I was confiding everything him, though I hadn’t known him long. We weren’t intimate, no, not in that fashion, but I appreciated that he did not judge me, that he thought it all amusing. Anywise, it was good practice, this honesty, for what came next.”
I set down the cover-all. Took up the gin bottle. I was allowing myself only a measured amount per day. Prison. Well. I know prisons. I searched many for August after the war. I did not give up trying to find him.
“I should have looked longer,” I muttered, and took up the coverall again. “I need finish.”
“What is that? Finish what now? Not the gin there, you’ve had sufficient, Alvah.”
“Oh, are we switching places? You the caretaker? Me the indigent?” It was a ridiculous question, I realized straightways, being somewhat true. I added, “If you must know, I meant the cover-all.”
As I did. August’s birthday was the fifth of March. It was marked in the calendar I kept in my satchel. Marked out in indigo ink. “It is imperative I finish it,” I further added as I clutched those knitting needles in my fists.
BOYS IN ASYLUM. HEARTSICK. LEAH TO BLAME. NIGHT IN TOMBS. HIDEOUS. MAG PLEASE HELP. KAT
The telegram boy takes one look at Maggie’s face and decides against waiting for a tip. She clutches the paper. Damns the sparse, clipped sentences. The unknown is a black hole in Maggie’s brain. Better a hysterical letter, scrawled and blotted and lengthy.
She seeks out Dr. Wadsworth. He is rolling pills, his heavy hands deft. Maggie tells him the news, adds, “We must send word back. Immediately. But, God, God, what can I do from England. Nothing!”
God does not answer, but Dr. Wadsworth—who Maggie is starting to believe is the next best thing—has a suggestion.
The telegraph office is cramped and busy. The telegraph operator, his visor hiding his eyes, chooses not to question if the respectable, barrel-chested Dr. Wadsworth is indeed whom he claims to be. Maggie watches the operator’s brisk tap-tapping. It is as if he is part of the machinery, and likewise without thought or intent. She reflects on how she has often been called a telegraph, a spirit telegraph, as if she were no more animate than this brass gadgetry. Certainly the tap-tapping bears comparison, as does the vast distance travelled, near instantaneously. What need do people have of magic when man can create such things with his own hands? Maggie wonders. One day such machinery will triumph over superstition. Until then, well, Maggie is forming a plan. Gathering her courage.
In the carriage Dr. Wadsworth claps in triumph. He is enjoying the intrigue. Has no compunctions about drafting the telegram to the New York authorities.
SEND HENRY AND FERDIE JENCKEN HOME AT ONCE TO MRS. HENRY JENCKEN OF NEW YORK. FUNDS AND DETAILS TO FOLLOW. BY ORDER. MR EDWARD JENCKEN. BROTHER TO MR HENRY JENCKEN SENIOR.
Dr. Wadsworth says, “We must follow it with a barrister’s letter. I have a friend who will assist us. Not to worry, Mrs. Kane.”
“I can’t thank you enough.”
“As long as the true Uncle Edward does not—”
“He won’t. The man is somewhere on the continent. He’s not spoken nor written to Kat since her Henry died. He’s abandoned her.” Maggie leans towards Wadsworth. “Everyone has abandoned her, excepting me. I’m the only one who can save us both. Our souls, that is.”
Wadsworth eyes her. “And how shall you do that?”
“Revenge.” Maggie thought it would be a difficult utterance, but it is a soft, whispery word. One could easily utter it a hundred times without stumbling.
“I do hope you’re not plotting any, any, hmm, bodily harm. I had a time in my life where such actions seemed jolly fun, but the consequences, my dear, they are …” Dr. Wadsworth breaks off, his heavy brows raised.
“Not to worry. You can kill without weapons, you know.”
“My dear, your nerves are stretched like catgut. Ah, but I have just the thing.”
The “thing” is poppy tea mixed with honey and nutmeg. The effect is like that of laudanum—which Wadsworth does not allow Maggie because of the alcohol base—but much stronger. She becomes featherlight. Happiness whirls inside her, like the coloured ribbons round a maypole. Objects—vases, paintings, tables—are all limned with radiance.
Wadsworth and a maid lead her to a bed soft as clouds in which she slumbers on and on until just past midnight, when she wakes with a start. She panics for a clock-tick then recalls that she is in England. England. That’s where I am. At Wadsworth’s home. There’s hope yet. I’m n
ot alone and ranting. Not yet.
She walks on her tough, knobby feet to the windows. On the cobbled street a man staggers under the yellow head of a gas light. His shadow stretches and grows monstrous. A mongrel noses at rubbish. Maggie nods to herself, all purpose, then yanks on a grey gown and black cloak. She takes up a pocket-lamp and walks down the corridor, now down the stairs. She is not afraid of waking the household. When she chooses, Maggie can be absence itself. Her sliding feet make no noise. The stairs do not creak at her weight. Not even the cats note her. It is from long practice, from all that disappearing while she let the dead take over her self and soul.
The moon shines out obligingly as she nears a small, squat church. The gates to the graveyard are unlocked. How unlike an American cemetery, she thinks, with its greened expanses around each plot. Here the graves are crammed tight as passengers on a omnibus. She wonders how deep the graves go, how many coffins have been stacked one upon the other over centuries, millennia. Then realizes that in this ancient island country the dead must easily outnumber the living.
She chooses a grave at random: Hortence Mithelwaith. Beloved Wife. Beloved Mother. Dead these hundred years. “Speak to me,” Maggie whispers. “Please. You must. A token. That’s all.” Distant sounds of the living stirring in their city. Nothing else.
Maggie moves from grave to grave. The moon has turned a molten silver and she can read the dedications without her pocket-lamp. Here are the veterans of the Napoleonic Wars. There, those who died during the reign of the virgin Queen. There the victims of London’s Great Fire. There the victims of Cromwell’s terror. Childbirth. Disease. Drowning. Accident. Some of the dead even reached a good age.
She reads the oldest stones by tracing her fingers over the worn indentations. All are silent to her pleas—the wealthy with their tombs, the newly dead with their sharp-carved statuettes, the long-dead infants with their gravestones worn to nubs the size of a hand.
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