An Acquaintance with Darkness

by Ann Rinaldi

  I understood. "It's what caused the argument between you and Mama," I said.

  "Yes. She found out what I was doing. She did not approve."

  "I would have approved," I said, "if you'd given me the chance."

  "I don't want your approval, Emily. All I want, if you wish to continue living with me, is your promise that you won't interfere again. If you can't promise, you may go to Aunt Susie in Richmond. I will pay for your ticket."

  I stared at him. "You'd let me go?"

  "I don't want you to go. I think you know that by now. But I will let nothing and no one interfere with my work, Emily. Ever. I will put nothing before medical science."

  "I won't interfere," I said.

  He sighed. "Now that we have that cleared up"—and he waved his hand to dismiss the matter—"tell me. Did you let Addie go?"

  The question was so abrupt, the brown eyes so accusing. "Yes."

  "Why?"

  "She begged me. Ever since I've been here. All she wanted was to be free. I didn't think it right that she was a prisoner."

  "You didn't think it right?" Tears came to his eyes. He couldn't speak for a minute. And he was white-faced. "Do you think that was your decision to make?"

  "Uncle Valentine."

  "Do you know what you have done? Letting that woman go was more an act of betrayal than going with those girls to my lab."

  I was confused. He was more distressed about Addie being gone than about the police raid on his lab. There was something here. But what? It came to me then that if I could figure it out, I would understand my uncle Valentine.

  Maybe I would even understand the secret of life.

  "Do you know how long I've been working with Addie? How far I've come with curing her of the Wasting Disease?"

  "She was better," I said. "She wasn't coughing anymore. That's why I let her go."

  "She was better because she was on my medicine." He turned and picked up a bottle from a nearby table. He set it down, none too gently, on another table before me. "This medicine."

  The bottle was dark. Or was that the medicine inside?

  "Pick it up and open it," he said. "Smell it."

  I did so. It smelled terrible. Like camphor. Yet at the same time like rotten fish. "What is it?"

  "I call it Purple Mass. President Lincoln took something called Blue Mass for his nerves and other ailments. Until I find a better name for this, it is Purple Mass. It clears the lungs. I have been working on it since my wife died. It is a mixture of my own making. Made in part from crushed leaves of devil's tongue, a flower Marietta grew in my laboratory. A nightflower."

  I remembered the flower. Remembered Marietta saying what trouble she had growing it. Remembered how the flies were drawn to it, how she'd told me it would smell of decayed fish.

  He gave a great sigh and took the bottle back. "My wife always had a cough," he said. "Valentine,' she would say to me, can't you find something to cure this cough?' Only I was too busy becoming an important doctor. I had no time for her. I thought she was being petulant because I wasn't paying her much mind. 'Keep away from damp air,' I told her. 'Take hot tea. Soup.' She got sicker and sicker. Then she got bad. Her lungs filled up. I knew nothing about lungs. I still don't know enough about lungs. She died."

  He fell silent. He set the bottle down. "I went on being an important doctor. I worked to overcome my grief. Then Marietta came along. She is very knowledgeable about slave medicine, folklore medicine. One day I told her the story of my wife. It was she who told me about the devil's tongue flower. She had all these decoctions written down from before she came north. 1 thought devil's tongue was worth a try for congested lungs. Marietta grew the flowers in pots in my lab at the college. I experimented with them and added my own ingredients. It was working for Addie. She was getting better. But her treatment wasn't finished. And without her medicine, she will sicken again and die."

  I stared at him. "She was better," I said.

  "No. She was on her way to being better. I explained to her how long the treatment would take. She agreed to it. Oh yes, every day she'd ask to leave. Every morning I'd talk with her, reassure her, tell her, 'Just a little while longer.' And she believed me. Until you spirited her up to be free. You have interfered, my girl. In a most dastardly way. With medical science!"

  "I didn't, Uncle Valentine. She kept telling me she was a prisoner."

  "I told you when you first came here not to listen to her, that she was a patient, not a prisoner. One of the effects of the medicine is that it makes people feel persecuted, mistrusting of others, and addle-headed. Even dizzy. They are plagued with dark thoughts. Lincoln's death didn't help. It brought her guilt over her past drinking to the fore. When these moods struck, she played on your sympathy."

  I said nothing.

  "Where is she, Emily? Can you tell me that?"

  I met his inquiring look with a dumbstruck one of my own. "Gone," I said.

  "Gone? Where? Where did you take her?"

  "I took her to the Relief Society at Twelfth and O Streets this morning. It's where she wanted to go."

  He started to get up out of his chair.

  "No," I said. "She's not there, Uncle Valentine. She's gone by now. Long since gone. She just stopped by to tell the reverend there she was all right and to pick up some things. She was leaving this very day."

  "For where?"

  I brightened. "Home," I said. "You can likely fetch her there. Or get some medicine to her."

  He shook his head sadly. "She never told me where home was, Emily. She never would tell me. Did she tell you?"

  "No," I said miserably, "she didn't."

  24. The Ferryman

  THINGS WENT back to normal. Uncle Valentine wanted it that way. "It is over and done with," he said when I told him I wanted to do something to make up for the loss of Addie. "I just want life around here to get back to normal. Do you understand?"

  I said yes. But I didn't believe it. Some matters are never over and done with. They just seem that way, is all. If you wait long enough, they pop their heads up again when you least expect it.

  Uncle Valentine didn't believe it, either. He acted differently toward me. He acted polite.

  I could have stood anger, I think. Even being punished. But in the days that followed he was so carefully polite I thought I would die. I went back to school and decided I would wait for a chance to make things up to him. It would come to me.

  Myra Mott did not speak to me. Which qualified as normal, I suppose. I could bear that. But I could not bear the fact that Robert didn't speak to me, either, when he came around. And he came most every day. He actually sat at our breakfast table and didn't speak to me. He spoke more to Ulysses the cat. He acted so superior I couldn't bear it. I sat paralyzed in his presence, tears in my eyes. How could a person's silence say such terrible things to you? And when he left, I felt so stricken I wanted to die. Uncle Valentine noticed, of course. But all he said was, "He'll come 'round, be patient."

  I didn't want to be patient. And I didn't want Robert to come 'round. I wanted to show old, superior Robert that I was not the stupid, noodleheaded, no-'count, inferior insect he thought I was. I didn't want him to like me anymore. I didn't even know if I still liked him. It had nothing to do with such insipid feelings. It had to do with respect.

  Robert would know I was someone to be reckoned with before I was finished with him, or I'd know the reason why. And if I could make things up to Uncle Valentine at the same time, why, I'd die happy. That was all I knew.

  In spite of my troubles, life went on. President Johnson granted amnesty and pardon to all who'd participated in the "existing rebellion," with a few exceptions. On Saturday, June 17, Annie came around. She looked wild eyed. I'd had it all fixed in my head how I wasn't going to talk to her because she snitched about my running away. But I don't think she even remembered that, that's how crazy-acting she was.

  They were getting ready to sentence her mother. The government's man, John Bingham, was summ
ing up his argument for the convictions, she told us. "He's been talking three days straight and shows no signs of stopping."

  "The press has condemned your mother from the start," Uncle Valentine mused.

  "Oh, what will I do?" Annie was pulling at her hair.

  I hadn't thought about Johnny in a long time. But now I wondered what had happened to his "gentleman in Washington" who was supposed to let him know if his mother was in danger. And what about the stories in the press? Hadn't Johnny seen them? Funny, I had no more feeling for him except anger. Same as I had for Robert. I was fourteen and finished with men.

  "Don't lose faith," Uncle Valentine told Annie. "A last-minute act of executive clemency is always possible. We are a civilized nation. We don't hang women. If they sentence her, I'll go myself with you to the president, on her behalf."

  Annie left, plied with food and comfort. But she still looked wild eyed. "He's a good man," she said of Uncle Valentine. "How could you ever have wanted to run away from him?" So. She did remember.

  School let out. I made myself useful around the house, minded my business, and kept my eyes and ears open. You can learn an awful lot that way. I helped Maude, greeted Uncle Valentine's patients, did some baking, and sorted out Uncle Valentine's mail daily. Bills came from Aiken and Clampitt, Mrs. Mary's lawyers. There was correspondence from the Almshouse. Did Uncle Valentine go there and visit the poor? Another bill from the Board of Health. It fell out of the envelope.

  It was not a bill but a permit to bury material from the dissecting room in Washington Asylum Cemetery. Quickly I put it back in the envelope and sealed it as best I could. Why had I never paid mind to this stuff before?

  I even weeded Marietta's garden, for she hadn't been around in a week. Uncle Valentine said he hoped she wasn't sick. She wouldn't tell him if she were. She was afraid of his medicines. Merry still popped his head in the dining room door every morning to tell about shipments. There hadn't been any in a while.

  I started reading a book called The History of Anatomy. It told how Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci studied dead bodies hundreds of years ago to learn anatomy for their artwork. And how they had trouble getting the bodies.

  It was better than the Brothers Grimm. I kept thinking of Michelangelo getting bodies sneaked to him in a garret someplace. Not so he could cure the Wasting Disease. But so he'd know how to paint pictures on the ceiling of a church in Rome.

  On June 30 all the conspirators in the Lincoln assassination were found guilty. Herold, Payne, Atzerodt, and Mary Surratt were sentenced to be hanged. Spangler was given six years. The others got life sentences, including Uncle Valentine's friend Dr. Mudd.

  Annie's mother to be hanged! I couldn't believe it! Mama's girlhood friend from that fancy school that gave them notions. I'd wager Mrs. Mary had no notions now.

  Uncle Valentine was having an uneven time of it with this news of Dr. Mudd. "They're putting all doctors on notice," he said. And I know he was talking about more than a doctor's decision to set the leg of a man in pain who came to him in the middle of the night.

  He brooded. But he kept his promise to Annie. He arranged to go and see the president with her. And he was so busy arranging things that he never even noticed it when my chance came along to make things up to him.

  On Saturday, July i, we were at breakfast. Uncle Valentine was awaiting Annie's arrival. They were to go and see President Johnson today.

  Merry popped his head in the door. "Shipment tonight, boss."

  "Where?"

  "The Almshouse."

  My ears perked up.

  "Is it a good one?" Uncle Valentine asked.

  "Robert's been in touch with our man inside. He says it's just what you need."

  "Is the Board of Guardians cooperating?"

  "No. We gotta pick it up ourselves. Robert's ready, but we haven't heard from Marietta. He's too busy to call at her house. He wants you to write a note."

  "All right. This is a devil of a time for it, I'm so busy. But then maybe it's a good time. Most of Washington is taken with the trial and sentencing. Go along, Merry. Help Robert. I'll get a note to Marietta."

  He asked me to fetch paper, pen, and ink from his office. I did so. Then he wrote the note and asked me to deliver it. Marietta lived in a small roominghouse on L Street. He seemed distracted. "She must keep this appointment tonight at the Almshouse. It's all here in this note. She is to meet Robert. We're depending on her," he said.

  "Isn't there anything I can do to help, Uncle Valentine?"

  "Yes. Come directly home after delivering the note, and stay in the house. From the meeting with the president, I'm going to see Dr. Mudd before they take him away. Washington is in an uproar over the prospect of hanging a woman. I don't want you out on the streets. Go along now."

  I went, glad to be out of the house. I wouldn't be here when Annie arrived. It was cowardly, I knew, but she didn't want me. She wanted only Uncle Valentine. There was nothing I could do for her now, anyway.

  I found Marietta in bed, upstairs in her small neat room. She was sick. And her landlady was concerned. "She's been coughing all week," she said.

  She was not only coughing but feverish. "I'm all right," she told me. "I've got my cough syrup with Balm of Gilead."

  "Why didn't you tell Uncle Valentine?" I asked innocently.

  "He's got enough worries now. I read where Dr. Mudd and Mrs. Surratt were convicted. I know he's in a state."

  I sat down on a chair. Maybe her "knowing" was a special power. But I'd found out something. Every time you knew something about another that they didn't know you knew, you had power. I gave her the note. She read it and had a spell of coughing, took a drink of water, and looked at me. "I don't think I can go. The medicine makes me sleepy. And nights, my head hurts. I must apply feverfew to my temples. You must tell him to make other arrangements."

  "Is it a fresh body at the Almshouse?"

  She looked at me in surprise.

  "I know all about everything," I told her. "Uncle Valentine told me. And he trusts me."

  "When?"

  "He decided I can be trusted," I said simply. I must appear strong to her, like she did to me. "What do they want you to do?"

  "The usual." She shrugged. "The Board of Guardians at the Almshouse has been charging too much for bodies. They're not supposed to sell them in the first place. But they do and they've been constantly raising their prices. Which is why Robert and your uncle started calling them the Board of Buzzards. Uncle Valentine has a man inside there. He is called the Ferryman and attends to the burials at Potter's Field behind the Almshouse. He informed your uncle of the death of a young man who lived there. I am supposed to claim him tonight, as a long-lost female relative."

  "Like you did in Memphis," I said.

  "Yes. When I appear for the burial, the Ferryman has to release the body to me. That way your uncle outwits the Board of Buzzards and the Ferryman is protected. No one can help it if a relative appears at the last moment."

  "Don't they recognize you by now?"

  "I have many different disguises. Sometimes I'm a sister, sometimes a wife. I can even look like an old lady."

  "What would you be tonight if you could go?"

  "Likely a sister," she said, "who just found out about the death of a long-lost wastrel brother."

  I felt the blood pounding in my temples. "I could go in your place," I said.

  "You?" She had an immediate fit of coughing. I poured her fresh water from the pitcher. "You?" she said again when she recovered herself.

  "Yes. Uncle Valentine said I can do it if you're sick. He said I should let him know and he'll come around with some medicine." I looked at her innocently. "Of course, I don't have to tell him you're sick. I could just go in your place. What with all the worries he's got, going to see the president."

  She met my eyes. I don't know if she believed me about Uncle Valentine saying I could go. But she saw me as someone strong, someone in charge. And someone who could tell Uncle V
alentine she was sick. I was someone to be reckoned with. That was all I wanted from her. All I wanted from anybody, when it got right down to it.

  "All right," she agreed. "Over there in that closet. I have several outfits. Let's see which one is best for you."

  We went through the clothes. They were all black, of course, and smelled worse than Uncle Valentine's Purple Mass medicine. I tried on a few things and settled for a black silk dress with lace ruffles at the neck and long sleeves. There was a darling velvet hat with netting that came down over the face. Even a little black satin reticule with a scented handkerchief in it. And black kid boots. They were too large. We had to stuff old copies of the Intelligencer in them. Marietta coughed a lot.

  "Why don't you take some of Uncle Valentine's Purple Mass medicine?" I asked her.

  "Foul stuff," she said. "I prefer my Balm of Gilead. But speaking of that medicine, this shipment is very important to your uncle. Do you know what the man died of?"

  "What?"

  "The Wasting Disease. Dr. Bransby will be able to study his lungs."

  I could scarce contain my elation.

  "Now, as for you. Your story is that you come from a wealthy Maryland family. You are high placed. Your wastrel brother ran off when the war started because he didn't want to fight for the South. In Maryland they call it skedaddling. What with the war and all, nobody could locate him, but they've been on the trail. Your father is failing, so he couldn't come. He wants his son home, though he's been a drinker, a gambler, and an all-around bounder. His name is Johnny."