Jakob thrust the open book into his father’s hands. “There are many lawyers to choose from. You could ask any one of these to represent Harley. Or query Abraham Lansing. He’s one of the preeminent lawyers in the state. As I recall, he wasn’t too partial to Mrs. Stipp, so he should have no qualms taking the case.” Jakob’s tone was polite, but insistent.
“Don’t be obstinate, Jakob. This is really very simple.”
“I beg to differ, Father. This is no ordinary case. If what Mantel says is true, then this could be a question of child rape, complicated by the not irrelevant fact that these are children whom Elizabeth and the Stipps happen to love.”
Gerritt snapped the directory shut and reshelved it. He was fastidious with his books, careful of them. “Judge and jury, are you? Didn’t they teach you anything at that college I paid for?”
“If you want Harley to be well defended, anyone is a better choice than I am. I have never once tried a case in real court.”
“You were examined by a judge in January. You’re official.”
“Why don’t we let Harley find his own counsel?”
“Didn’t Aristotle say that law is freedom from passion?”
Jakob stared at his father.
“Yes, I know a few things,” Gerritt said, his voice imbued with sarcasm. “And I also know that if you pledged yourself to engage in the law, then you believe in morality as prescribed by law—that everyone is entitled to a dispassionate defense, even the loathsome.”
Viola chafed, but it was an oddly nuanced argument for her husband to make. Calculated to appeal to Jakob’s virtuous—and lawyerly—nature: What if Harley is innocent? She studied Jakob’s face, his disquiet. She wanted to step between the two of them, ease her son’s refusal. “Jakob, you don’t need to do this. I think—”
“You don’t think anything, Viola,” Gerritt said. “Nothing. You are not engaged in this conversation. If you wish to remain in the room, be quiet.”
“I will not be quiet,” she said, rising. “Jakob, I urge you to do as you wish. You’re old enough to do so. Your father is being unreasonable, out of affection for Harley. But you are not his servant.”
Gerritt turned solicitous. “My dear, I realize you think I am being rude. In business matters I can be gruff, as you’ve just seen. I need Harley for the business, therefore I need Jakob to defend him. Give Jakob and me a chance to work this through. You’ve raised a good son. He’ll make the right decision.”
Viola turned to Jakob, who appeared calm despite his father’s unreasonable demands. Her son nodded at her briefly, to reassure her. Reluctantly she kissed him on the cheek, gathered her skirts, and went out, almost tripping over a ripple in the Turkish carpet.
—
Gerritt went to a window, shut it, and stood silently with his back to the room. Jakob wondered what his father’s next ploy would be, because there always was one.
Finally, Gerritt turned, brushing lint from the lapel of his frock coat with one hand. “You understand, this will be the biggest court case in the entire city—maybe even the state—for a long while.”
So, an appeal to vanity. “No, Father. I won’t do this for my own aggrandizement. This is Elizabeth’s family.”
“Don’t cloud your thinking with sentiment, Jakob.” Now that his mother had gone, his father’s voice had taken a harder edge. “Those O’Donnells were only friends to the Stipps, not family. If you’re so fond of Elizabeth, defend Harley and find out who really did it. She’ll thank you for that. And that would be a challenge worthy of your virtue.”
Jakob moved closer to the fire. How was it possible to still be cold? He thought his bones might be cold forever. “I would rather not. You see, I think I could love Elizabeth, Father. After very little time, she already means a great deal to me. I don’t think she would understand if I defended Harley. She might perceive it as a betrayal.”
“Not if you couch it properly. Isn’t that what you lawyers always do? Pitch a persuasive argument?”
“Harley deserves an experienced lawyer.”
“You are being self-deprecating.”
“I’ve never practiced, Father. You know that. I haven’t been inside a courtroom except for school and my swearing in.”
His father scoffed. “There always has to be a first time. And besides, I clothed you, housed you, fed you, saw to it that you were educated at the best college in the nation, and provided you with a job at the biggest lumber concern in the world. Without me, you would have nothing. And now I am giving you one more thing—the chance to do what you say you want. Criminal law. You see, I’ve been paying attention.”
His father could cobble a cogent argument out of anything, even guilt. “You’ve missed your calling, Father. Why don’t you defend Harley?”
“I’ll tell you what, Jakob. You do this for me, and I’ll let your mother divorce me.”
Jakob gasped. He sat down hard, the cracked leather cushion giving way with a hiss.
“Isn’t that what she wants?” His father stared at him, his level gaze unflinching. “You want the best for your mother, don’t you? I believe you want that even more than you want Elizabeth. I’ll be frank with you. It can be no surprise to you that your mother and I have our differences. And I’ve seen you two, scheming together, exchanging looks and conspiring about what to do about me. I’m not blind to your bond. Nor do I begrudge you your love for your mother. It’s natural and right. Now I’m providing you with an opportunity to ease her unhappy situation. When the time comes, after the trial, I’ll allow someone to find me in flagrante delicto with someone. Then you can file on her behalf. And to sweeten the deal, I’ll make sure that your mother is as rich as Croesus. Is that good enough for you? Reason enough to set aside an infatuation to serve your family in the way that will do everyone the best good? Yes, it’s a bribe. But Harley is a man who has made my life much easier. And I believe in him.”
It was as long a speech as his father had ever made, when sober.
“If you divorce her, Father, she won’t be welcome anywhere.” The law granted dissolution only in cases of abandonment, usually, infidelity, rarely, and generally only when committed by the wife. It was an ugly, public process despised by those in society and looked down upon by most. One could never remain a member of a church afterward. For the sin of divorce, shunning and shaming were the order of the day, and it was always the woman who fared worse.
His father swirled the liquor in his glass and mused over it before looking up again. “Fine. Instead, I’ll give her a generous allowance and she can live apart from me, wherever she likes.”
Jakob couldn’t believe it. Finally, his mother would be free. “But you are forcing me to choose. My mother or Elizabeth.”
Gerritt shrugged. “It’s not really a choice, is it? Not for a son as loving as you. And you can easily fix it with the girl. Just explain to her that you are doing your family a favor. That seems easy and clear enough to me.”
“Why, Father? Why insist on me? It makes no sense.”
His father lowered his voice and leaned in, speaking almost in a whisper. “If you won’t do this, then get out.”
“What?”
“Get out of the house. Of Van der Veer Lumber. Of Albany.” A glint of steel flashed in his father’s eyes.
Jakob said, “I don’t understand—”
“I’ve asked very little of you in your life, Jakob. Now I ask you for just one thing—”
“So going to get the company books in the middle of the river breakup was ‘little’?”
“I need this, Jakob. I need this very much. Another attorney would have no regard for our family, our fortune, our privacy. But you would. You would be discreet, careful. You would protect our reputation. Our livelihood depends on you. Do you understand? Your mother’s livelihood depends on you. And if you are not loyal enough to do this for us—for your m
other—then our family, our life, will mean nothing after this. If I am willing to sacrifice the woman I love, shouldn’t you be willing to sacrifice a mere flirtation, alluring as it may seem to you now?”
The lie that he loved Viola had tripped off his father’s tongue without even a hint of sarcasm.
“Do you swear to me, Father, that you will ask nothing else of me for the rest of my life?”
“Your debt to me is fathomless, but I promise, not so much as an invitation to dinner.”
—
Upstairs, Viola greeted Jakob’s news with fury. “Don’t do it, Jakob. There are more lawyers in Albany than there are rats. Someone will defend Harley. It’s not as if he’ll be abandoned with no one to help him.”
“I don’t understand why Father is so insistent.”
“That is the question, yes. Why?”
“He claims loyalty, family duty, honor.”
“Rather ironic that he would claim family honor while offering to divorce me in the same breath.”
They were sitting on the narrow settee by the window in her bedroom. Sunlight fell on the pink and red stripes of the tufted silk cushions.
“Mother, I know you are not happy. I will help you file, and after it is all done I’ll make certain you are not alone. You could live with me, or you could move back to Manhattan to be with your parents.”
“That would be social suicide, darling. I would be the disgraced failure, shuttered in the house on Fifth Avenue, suitable only to provide gossip for the house maids.”
Jakob grasped his mother’s hands. Her fingers were bone thin and ice cold. In the sunlight, her skin looked like bisque porcelain, unmarred by any real furrow. The black profusion of her eyelashes was wet with tears.
“You’re more important to me than anything,” she said. “Don’t do it. Our problems—your father’s and mine—should not be your concern.”
The real problem, Jakob thought, was that his father was not a stupid man. Nor was he ignorant of the law or human nature. Jakob was aware that his father was manipulating him, but that did not mean that his father was wrong. It was impossible to shake the sordidness of the possible charges, but even so, everyone was entitled to a defense. Everyone. And the real possibility of Harley’s innocence remained. With the exception of Harley’s puzzling absence the night of the flood, his interactions with Jakob had always been straightforward. While every man was capable of harboring secrets, the truth remained that the right to a fair trial was superior to any repugnance on the part of anyone. It was more honorable to defend Harley than to prejudge him or abandon him. And what was the truth of what had happened? Impossible to know, unless he looked for it.
“I think it’s best if your concerns are mine,” Jakob said.
“Are you sure?”
“I am.” But he couldn’t imagine Elizabeth ever trusting or forgiving a man who would defend a person she believed had hurt Emma and Claire. Nor could he imagine Elizabeth’s face when—if—he told her. What he wanted was to remember her as she had looked at him last night, her eyes shining with happiness and relief at seeing him. But his heart ached for her and all she had been going through. He wished she’d felt free to tell him last night about Emma and Claire, especially since he’d babbled on and on about himself. “But remember, Mother, this whole thing may be a mistake. Maybe charges won’t be filed after all. We—all of us—have made a leap. Harley could already be freed.”
“Didn’t you hear the police captain say that he’d long had his eye on Harley?”
“Yes. But I’m not sure what he meant.”
Jakob left his mother writing her note to the Stipps and went out to the stable to saddle Dolly.
He turned the mare down upper State in the direction of Maiden Lane and the magistrate’s office. The noontime air was thick with the earthy promise of tulips and daffodils, though it was still chilly. Across the park there was a faint din and a cloud of dust rising above the row houses that were being demolished, but when he looked through the wrought iron fence in the direction of the Stipps’ residence, he couldn’t make out their house at all. It might as well, he thought, not even be there.
Chapter Thirty-One
Across the park at the Stipps’, Emma and Claire held on to Elizabeth’s hands as they ventured into the back garden. One of William’s patients had presented at the house with an emergency, and Mary and Elizabeth had whisked the sisters outside. There had been no question of turning the man away. A metal lathe had crushed three of his fingers at the ironworks at the NY Central rail yards. Their clinic was closer than any of the hospitals, though in truth there was little William could do for the man here at the house aside from splinting the mangled remains in an attempt to preserve them. Surgery would probably be needed, in the form of amputation, especially if the fingers turned gangrenous. Through the open kitchen windows, Mary could hear Vera humming, no doubt in an attempt to dampen the gruesome noises coming from William’s clinic.
It was Thursday. Amelia had gone to the morning prayer service at church, driven by Harold, who had been charged with posting a note afterward on Mary’s clinic door, explaining that once again she wouldn’t be seeing patients. Mary hated to do it, especially after the kindness they had all displayed last week, but she wanted to stay at home with the girls. Yesterday, when she and William had been rooting out Farrell, Emma had slept under Amelia’s watchful eye, helped along by the chloral, but Claire had attached herself to Elizabeth and followed her around the house, asking again and again where her parents were. Elizabeth explained about the cemetery and promised to take her there, but Claire didn’t really understand. Claire’s misery had been hard for Elizabeth, and Mary didn’t want to desert her again. This morning, she’d already had to leave for an hour to make her rounds at the hospital.
Emma and Claire were wandering barefoot, walking gingerly on the cold, green grasses, taking mincing steps, not venturing from Elizabeth’s side. Elizabeth had brought out her violin case and placed it on a blanket she had spread under a maple tree. The girls’ toes were already turning blue in the dew. They needed shoes, but no cobbler made house calls, and Mary certainly wasn’t going to take them out in public. Not yet. Not until she had to. And certainly not today. Hampered by her stitches and bruises, Emma moved with greater caution than Claire, whose step was lighter. The two looked so much like their parents. They had Bonnie’s beauty and David’s lanky limbs, though their hair was their own. It glowed cinnamon in the sunlight, falling in a warm cascade about their shoulders. After the blizzard, the Stipps had cleaned out the O’Donnells’ rooms and donated their clothes to the community basket at the church. Yesterday, when Mary and William had returned from seeing Farrell, Amelia, in search of something for Emma and Claire to wear besides nightgowns, had gone there and discovered two of their dresses still in the basket. This morning Emma and Claire had pulled them on with near reverence. Later, Mary would have a seamstress measure them for some new ones, but she doubted they would love anything as much as they did these remnants of their old lives.
Their resurrection still seemed impossible, yet here they were, making a tentative first foray into the world at Elizabeth’s side. Elizabeth seemed to instinctively understand what the girls needed. Her touch, at once careful and affectionate, earned no reflexive withdrawal from Emma and Claire. Elizabeth looked over her shoulder at Mary and smiled her mother Jenny’s conspiratorial half-smile, which Jenny would flash as a ceasefire in order to get through a rainy summer afternoon or a long winter evening. Now it seemed a ghostly benediction across time.
Claire loosened her grip and ventured one step, then two, then plopped onto the ground, gathering the skirts of her dress tightly around her ankles. Emma, however, froze. After a few moments, Mary went over and took Emma’s hand and coaxed her back to the stoop. Emma had not spoken a word this morning. Seated beside Mary, she made herself small, knotting her hands together, drawing them over he
r knees and pressing her folded legs to her chest. A single raised vein snaked across the expanse of her right cheekbone and disappeared into the ghost of the yellowing bruise. The dress that Amelia had unearthed was the pink calico that Bonnie had sewn for Emma last Christmas. Dense vertical lines of lace decorated the bodice, along with tiny pearl buttons that Emma used to finger at meals or in the rare times anyone could get her to sit still. But she sat still now. David, Mary thought, would not be able to bear his scrappy daughter—whom he had encouraged to scramble up trees and dig in the dirt and laugh at anyone who scorned her—in so lifeless a carapace. During the war, her patients often wanted to recount the battle to her, to make her understand. But mostly they called for their mothers. Throughout that first terrible night at Antietam, when it seemed as if the entire world was bleeding, calls of Mother had filled the air. And in the nights and days afterward, their keening cries obliterated even the battlefield gunfire. Emma had had six eternal weeks of difficult nights. Had she called for Bonnie? And how had she survived, with no mother to answer her call?
A whisper of a giggle drifted across the garden. Claire was plucking early buttercups from a crop growing in the shade of the overhanging maple. Emma watched her sister intently, and Mary remembered Bonnie gazing at Emma and Claire with that same fierce love.
“Emma?” Mary said.
Emma shook her head.
“It’s all right. You can tell me.”
Emma hesitated, then turned to Mary and said, “Claire told. She wasn’t supposed to tell.”
“Tell about what?”
“He said—” Emma closed her eyes, as if she were trying to shut out the memory. “He said if we told—”
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