Belle Cora: A Novel

by Margulies, Phillip

  “I am glad you disassociate yourself from them,” I said.

  “What I find so curious, though …”

  “Yes, Agnes?”

  “Since I’ve been in New York, I’ve spoken to many people who know of the Female Reform Society, and none have ever heard of them having anything to do with placing orphan children in homes anywhere. All anyone has heard of them doing is standing outside of brothels and barrooms, exhorting those within to amend their lives, for which well-intentioned work, very unfairly, they are sometimes mocked.”

  I took the risk of glancing at Heywood. After a hesitation, he coughed and interposed, “Is that so?”

  “Yes,” said Agnes.

  “Well, I guess their information is out of date. The society has for the past few years dealt in orphans—as an outgrowth of their other work. Realize, in Five Points there are children whom it were better to treat as orphans in any case, so vile are the parents.”

  The conversation turned to conditions in Five Points, Irish immigration, cholera, topics of mutual interest to newspaper editors and pious reformers, and Heywood had a lot to say, none of it useful to me. He passed up half a dozen opportunities to do what I had asked of him. Occasionally, he smiled at me as though he were noticing my beauty for the first time and wished he were young and single; I wanted to strangle him.

  Someone mentioned orphans again. “That’s right,” said Heywood, as if just remembering. “A minister I know in Boston told me the society approached him, seeking suitable families among his acquaintance for placing orphans. So, you see, that is one of their good works. George Sackett, that’s right.”

  At last. I watched Agnes and Jeptha separately respond to Heywood’s words, which meant something quite different to each of them.

  “Who?” inquired Jeptha.

  “The minister I know in Boston,” said Heywood. “His name is Sackett.”

  “George Sackett,” said Jeptha.

  “Yes, do you know him?”

  “We grew up together, near the same town—George, Agnes, Lewis, Arabella, and I. Really, the rest of us were farm children, but George was a townsman’s son.”

  He described Livy, how small it was, the old days.

  “Amazing. What a coincidence,” Heywood prodded him. “And both of you ministers now! Do you correspond?”

  “No,” said Jeptha, and he cast his eyes on Agnes, who looked back at him, thinking God knows what—racking her brains, I suppose. Whether Jeptha expected her to mention her prior relationship with George I could not tell. Perhaps she and Jeptha had discussed what should be said if the subject arose. At any rate she did not comment. So I had to speak. I spoke gently, since I was supposedly touching a tender spot. “George and Agnes remained friends,” I told Heywood, and I looked around at the guests, about a third of whom were paying attention. “In fact, they were going to be wed. Isn’t that right, Agnes? Until George took sick.”

  Agnes nodded, and Jeptha said, “Well …,” and tilted his head to acknowledge the sad fact of George’s illness.

  “Sick,” exclaimed Heywood, a little too loudly. “Is he? When did this occur?”

  “Several months ago.”

  “Consumption,” said Jeptha.

  “He is not expected to live,” I explained. “And so, very bravely, he released Agnes from her promise.”

  “Yes,” said Jeptha innocently, looking from Heywood to Agnes.

  An unhappy little smile came to Agnes’s lips. That was all she showed of what she must have known was the collapse of her fondest hopes. Her eyes sought mine. I cocked my head and returned her look. I did not smile; Jeptha was watching. The moment was sweet. I might still hang, but this could not be taken from me.

  “Truly?” asked Heywood, in whom I had come to have much more confidence by now. “I had not heard of this development. Perhaps we’ve been speaking of two different George Sacketts after all. Is this one a Presbyterian reverend?”

  “Yes.”

  “And his association is with Christ Church in Boston?”

  “Yes, it must be the same man.”

  “Well, when did you see him last?”

  “Some years ago.”

  “Then you know of his illness only by report?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I have good news for you—good for Sackett, anyway.”

  “What?” asked Jeptha.

  “What?” asked Agnes.

  “Simply that I saw George Sackett when I was in Boston not three weeks ago, and he had no complaints whatsoever about his health,” said Heywood. He tried to keep the delight from his face, but he couldn’t; this was his great moment. “All he could speak of was his broken heart. His fiancée had disappeared without a word of explanation.”

  “You,” said Agnes, turning her whole body toward me, and she spoke loud enough to stop the two or three other conversations that had been going on in the drawing room. Amanda, Robert, and John Harrington, who were standing to the right of the piano, looked our way. My grandfather and Ronald, the male servant who was now called a butler, were talking near the window, and they, too, looked silently at us.

  “Agnes?”

  I have no doubt she had given her cause up for lost and was about to vent her rage at me, but she recovered quickly. With everyone in the room looking at her now, she moaned, “I see it clearly at last, Arabella!” and put the back of her hand to her head. “I’m faint,” she said. A high-backed chair was found and moved near her, and she was held by the elbows and lowered to it, a satin pillow placed beneath her head. She spoke in such a weak voice that we all had to lean in to beg her to repeat herself. “I have been deceived. Dear Arabella!” She reached her hand out to me and I took it, and she spoke with glistening eyes and cocked head. “You told me once that George was not what he seemed, and now I know.”

  “I don’t remember saying that, Agnes.”

  “Oh, you did, long ago. You knew. You saw clearly, when I was blinded by love.”

  Give her her due. She never quit. Every man in the room was bent over her, including the one who counted most. Jeptha’s eyes flicked just once toward mine. Lawrence Jameson of Jameson Ironworks brought her a glass of punch.

  “He was a coward,” Agnes continued, looking at the floor, and then at the faces of the company. “A moral coward. You saw that, Arabella, when you warned me against him. I would have freed him from his promise if he had simply said that he had changed his mind, and asked me. By this time, I had doubts about the engagement myself. But he was not as forthright as are better men”—and here, lifting her head, she gave Jeptha a tender, brave smile—“and he had to pretend that he was sick—and to have picked consumption for his imaginary affliction, knowing that both my aunt and my grandmother died of it, was an added cruelty I attribute to his selfishness and thoughtlessness rather than a determination to wound me.”

  Yes: with me standing not two feet away, the chief tormentor of my childhood demanded sympathy on the grounds that her aunt had died of consumption. There were times when I wondered if there was any soul lurking within Agnes, or if she was just a complicated piece of clockwork designed to manipulate other people’s misconceptions about womanhood and honor and decency.

  I looked at Jeptha, who was looking at her, and tried to determine if he believed what he was hearing. He gave me a quick glance, which I felt like a stab, before saying, “What a blackguard.”

  “Yes, my dear.”

  There was something hidden and steely in his expression as he said, “Let me know your wishes, dear. I’ll go to Boston and have a word with George.”

  “What good would it do, my darling? Do I want to be betrothed to a man who doesn’t want me and is so cowardly that he was afraid to tell me?”

  “No, of course not. Yes, I see what you mean.”

  “I’d have released him if he’d been forthright enough to ask.”

  “Yes. You’re sure you don’t want me to go to Boston, Agnes?”

  “Yes, dearest.”

&n
bsp; A servant opened the door to the dining room and invited us in. We did not speak to each other much throughout the meal, but often Jeptha gave me warm glances and his demeanor for the remainder of the evening confirmed every theory I had formed about his relationship to Agnes and his feelings for me. He talked very freely and enthusiastically with everyone else at the table, especially with Arthur Heywood, whom he seemed to regard as his new best friend; also, he ate heartily, and I could see that for a man who had just been shown how easily he could be made a fool of by a woman, he was in an extraordinarily fine mood.

  THE NEXT EVENING, SEAN HANDED ME a letter that Jeptha had left at the dress shop.

  “Agnes and I have broken off our engagement. I would like to see you tomorrow morning somewhere, anywhere, you pick the place. I want to ask you a question.”

  XLII

  I DID NOT SLEEP THAT NIGHT. The cause was not just the anticipation of our meeting; I was worried about the police, who were being propelled into a state of unusual diligence by the attention the newspapers had given to the murders in the Bloomingdale Tontine. If Tom London was identified, the police might know enough to go to the Almanack Dance Hall. From there the trail might lead to Sean, who had found Tom London, and eventually, inevitably to me. If Cutter was identified, and his name printed in the newspapers, I would have to worry about Mrs. Bower, and half a dozen other people who knew of my feud with Cutter.

  Sometimes a pedestrian out in the street, or a gentleman coming into the parlor house, would look like Cutter for a moment, as happens with the face of loved ones recently deceased: a part of me wished him alive, so that I would not be a murderess. Sometimes I simply could not believe that I had killed a man. Other times I was glad or indifferent or frightened by my cold-bloodedness. Each of these feelings seemed in its moment like a candidate for my permanent state of mind.

  I had so much to think about, and so little of it bore any resemblance to the thinking of a young woman hoping for a proposal of marriage from the man she has loved for over half her life.

  JEPTHA STOOD WAITING NEAR THE FOUNTAIN at City Hall Park, and I saw him before he noticed me. We sat on the fountain’s cool marble edge. “What an imbecile I am,” he began. “I wonder if it is wise of them to send such a fool to California.” With no more introduction than this, folding his hands in his lap, and looking out at the passing parade of New Yorkers—young women with parasols, dandies with canes and old ladies also with canes, and mechanics and their sweethearts—he proceeded to tell me about his first wife, Grace, the clergyman’s daughter, who had revealed on their wedding night that one doctor had predicted she had two years to live, another gave her six months, and another said five, and that she had wanted to tell him, but her mother had warned her not to. Was it wrong of her to lie to him? she asked, so pitifully, and childishly, that it hurt him to have to say, “Yes, my dear, it was.” But would he have married her if he had known? she asked. That was why it was wrong, because it was so unnecessary, right? He said, “Yes, I would have,” and thus began their married life with a lie of his own.

  “She’s gone, and I should not speak badly of her.”

  But bad things were essential to the tale. She spent money like water. He felt like a brute when he got angry with her. He gave up the ministry in order to take a job as a drummer that promised more pay. When she took ill, only the nature of the expenses changed. When she died (it took two years), there was sadness, but also relief, and he was able to free himself from debt.

  Abruptly he turned, bringing his face closer, and in the summer light I noticed a scar on his lip not there when I knew him in Livy. He looked at me intently, and I had a feeling of being inspected and probed, that his words were meant to stir me while his eyes noted my reactions. “So you see why it’s been such a shock to me, to realize that I was fooled a second time, with Agnes. I’m very glad you spared me that. It was you, wasn’t it, who found those things out about Agnes, and told them to Mr. Heywood?” I nodded, and he finished, “Who likes you and was happy to help. Well, that was lucky for me. I’m grateful.” He touched my cheek. “But you didn’t do it out of kindness, I hope? You want something, and you’ve told me what it is.”

  Well, yes, I had said so at the oyster saloon, but it wasn’t gentlemanly of him to remind me. “This isn’t very romantic,” I observed.

  “I’m a lout,” he agreed. “Still—” He looked out at the park, where two well-dressed children had begun to fight and a matronly woman scolded them, and he said, as if thinking out loud, “I love you, Arabella, and you know it; and for the rest, you have to make allowances.” He put his hands between his knees. I watched them struggle with each other. “We had a courtship once. It was ruined. We’ll never get it back. You’ve been hurt. I’ve been fooled.” Once again his eyes interrogated me.

  It would come now. He would ask me now. Hurry, I wanted to tell him.

  But instead he stood up, walked a little away, thrusting his hands in his pockets, and looked back at me this time as if I were some work that could be done in different ways, and he was deciding on the method and where to start. “I feel as if I know you.”

  “You do. You always have.”

  He nodded. “But I have to be skeptical about that feeling. Your manner changes to suit whoever you’re with. I see that. I ask myself, is my Arabella the real one?”

  “She is. You see my heart. You see to the core of me. The outer details—perhaps the details do not matter so much as you think.”

  “Don’t you think that’s too convenient a philosophy? Not just for you. For me, too. I can just look away. I don’t have to think.” I smiled, until I saw from the look on his face that something quite serious was coming. “Back in Livy,” he said, “our last walk in the woods. We hid in the corn, do you remember? We stopped when we heard the children coming. Do you know what I am talking about? I alluded to it in … that very cruel letter I wrote to you that year.”

  “Yes.” I saw what was coming.

  “You thought that you were carrying Matthew’s child.”

  The wrong answer and I would lose him after all. An assortment of denials and evasions passed through my mind—all obviously no good. It wasn’t gentlemanly of him to bring such a thing up; but it was honest, and I respected him for it. It was perfectly obvious that I had tried to trick him into thinking Matthew’s baby was his. I didn’t know what to say. I put my palms together and rocked, truly beside myself.

  “So,” he said, with a sigh. “So that part of my letter was true.”

  “Jeptha,” I whispered, “I was terrified. I was fifteen years old.”

  “And what happened?” he asked, as I knew he would. “With the child.”

  Agnes would have told him about Madame Drunette’s Lunar Pills. To a Baptist it counted as murder. Fortunately, Agnes’s testimony had no authority now. But had he asked Titus?

  “I lost it,” I said. “The day before I got your letter.”

  I waited for him to challenge me. Instead, his arms reached out—tentatively, as if to give me a chance to escape if I wished. I fell against him, pressing my face on his coat, while he kissed my hair and held me close, and he said, “Then I’m not cursed after all, and we can be happy at last, praise God. This is how we should be, this is how we’ll be from now on. It’s better to tell me things, don’t you see? I love you, and you can tell me.” But what I felt was his relief that I had not murdered a baby, and I drew a different moral. “We may be poor for a long time.”

  “I want to be poor with you,” I said, and it was true. We had struggled separately; now we would struggle together. Let troubles come, trial on trial, victory on victory, until they made a great heap dwarfing the events of 1845 to 1849, and the various errors I had made during our separation.

  “We’ve got to trust each other,” he said, putting my palm to his cheek. “You mustn’t keep secrets.”

  “I won’t.”

  I told myself that I would keep no new secrets from him. I daydreamed about telling
him everything someday, when we were two or three hundred years old.

  He stood up again and took my arm in his. “Let’s take a stroll around the park.”

  We walked, discussing the church, the guests, the ship, the voyage. At last I asked him, “Are you under the impression that you have proposed to me?”

  He laughed, and kissed the palms of my hands, first one and then the other, and he got that detail out of the way.

  …

  THE SHIP WAS TO SAIL WITHIN A WEEK. We had to rush. I was glad of it. I lived in terror that at any moment a passing gentleman might greet me as Harriet; or that Agnes would appear, bearing irrefutable proof of my true profession. Every conversation about our experiences during the years of our separation held pitfalls for me. I thought there would be less to worry about once we were at sea, dealing with the difficulties of the voyage.

  When we were apart, I said goodbye to my girls; some were sentimental, and some were cold. I sold the parlor house as a going business to Mrs. Bower. I met with bankers and lawyers. I bought jewels and racked my brains to think of a place to hide them. I kept looking over my shoulder for the police.

  I wrote to the Parker House in San Francisco.

  Dear Charley,

  I’m going to try being respectable again. If all goes well I’ll be in San Francisco before long, and if we meet there you’ll have to pretend you don’t know me. I’ll be Arabella Talbot and you’re going to laugh when you see what I’m passing myself off as. All the same, you’re going to be glad for me, too, because I’ll be happy. I’ll get you my address once I’m there. I’ll be living very simply, but I’ll have money put away for a rainy day, and if you ever need a stake I want you to come to me.

  Jeptha wanted us to be married by his friend and guide, Reverend Charles Danforth of the Wall Street Baptist Church, and we visited the reverend and his desiccated wife, both of whom looked at all times as stiff and astonished as if they were posing for their daguerreotypes. Mrs. Danforth took me aside for a dismal talk about my bedroom duties, which she presented in the light of a martyrdom. She left me with several pamphlets expressive of her views: the one I remember best was called Marital Chastity.