by Paul Boor
“It must be lovely country. Perfect for raising a family, I suppose.” Renée gave Nicolas a quizzical look. “But you are married, aren’t you, Mr. Van Horne?” she asked. “You choose not to wear a ring, is that it?”
“Why, yes, I’m married,” he replied, glancing down at his left hand . . . indeed, he’d not worn his wedding ring for a year, since that angry night he’d tossed it in the Black River and put it out of mind for good.
“I’m sure your wife loves New York as much as you.”
Nicolas hesitated. “It’s hard country, in many ways. The winters are long and bitter. Once the snow flies, there’s little to do but dwell on one’s problems. Many fall victim to melancholy, and what we call ‘cabin fever.’ For women, especially, the winters are difficult.”
“I would love to see your North Country in winter.”
Professor Keiller joined them at the table. He plucked a shrimp off the ice pile, dipped it in sauce, and peered at it. “The remoulade’s superb!”
“You see,” Renée explained, “we’ve finally found Uncle a cook who makes a proper Creole sauce.”
“Yes,” Keiller said. “I must get the formula.”
“Oh, Uncle, you’ve never cooked a thing—outside the lab, that is.” Renée took Nicolas by the arm. “Please come along. I’d like to show you something special about my uncle Francis. Just give me a moment.”
“Now, Renée,” Keiller protested. “Ye needn’t bother our guest with none o’ yer folderol, dear.”
With a dismissive wave of her hand, Renée led Nicolas into the relative quiet of the front parlour.
“May I call you ‘Nicolas,’ good sir?” she asked.
“Please do.”
“Truthfully though, yours is such a stuffy name. Too many syllables. Nic-o-las. You should change it. ‘Nick’ would be better. Much more modern.”
“No one calls me Nick.”
“Well, I do . . . now. And you’ll call me Renée, if you please.”
“I’m the lucky one, then,” Nicolas said with a chuckle. “Your name’s perfectly lovely as is.” A faint flush rose to her cheeks. “You’ve an enchanting smile as well, I must say.”
It was well past midnight. In the front parlour, guests settled heavily into wingback chairs, and couples lounged on the settees. The servants had cleared the dining table and were passing from room to room with trays of pineapple, oranges, and mango.
Renée led Nicolas to a gold plaque that hung above the mantel. “Uncle was awarded this when we left Cuba,” she said. “It’s from the University of Havana.” The plaque was elaborately engraved and decorated with a tricolor caduceus and ornate garlands. Nicolas pulled up his mask to have a closer look as Renée translated the archaic Spanish script:
“‘. . . awarded for scientific achievement . . . heroic and noble efforts to defeat the insatiable killer of men . . . yellow fever.’”
“His science is quite esteemed, then . . . and yours, Renée. Such a noble thing to fight this awful disease.”
“Count yourself lucky, Nick, that yellow fever doesn’t venture as far as your lovely mountains.”
“In fact, the fever took my mother,” he said, recalling the emptiness his dear mother’s death left in the last years of his childhood.
“In ports like Galveston, no family escapes. My father and four of his brothers—the entire family except for Uncle Francis—were taken in the epidemic of ’73. And then, my dear husband . . . I was married, you know.”
His breath caught in his throat. “Oh?”
“A Cuban, from an aristocratic family. Two of the same mind, we were, both physicians and scientists, but my scientific work had already been published under the name ‘Keiller’ . . . so I kept my maiden name.”
“Understandable. And your husband?”
“For six wonderful years we worked side by side in the clinics and Uncle’s laboratory. But yellow fever came to Cuba and took him . . . along with our young son . . . in ’87.”
“So sad. How old was the boy?”
“Barely three. A perfect little darling named Benjamin.” Behind her feathered mask Renée’s dark eyes moistened.
“Long ago, I lost a young son, too,” Nicolas said softly, his voice waivering. “His name was Ethan. Eight years old. A sickly boy; the doctors in Albany said he had a ‘hole’ in his heart.”
“A common defect, I’m afraid. Was he blue at birth?”
“No, no.” Nicolas cleared his throat and tried to shake the grievous memory from his head. “No, we learned of it in his first year. He didn’t grow properly and, as you say, he would turn dusky and couldn’t keep up with others.”
Renée gave a knowing nod. “A serious condition.”
“Despite his frailty, he was a game little fellow—too much so, in fact. He loved the woods and would wander, sometimes too far. That’s why we lost him.”
“How so?”
“He must’ve been tramping on a trail near town. It was late fall. He probably ventured too far for his fragile constitution. We searched and searched. Three days later, the snows came and . . . a body was never found.”
“We never forget those we lose, especially the young ones.” Renée turned toward the window that faced the street, a faraway look in her eyes. “That’s precisely why Uncle and I must carry on.”
“An unimpeachable goal, I must say.”
“It’s horrid in summer, as physicians. We spend countless hours tending to the dying, even as we must work for a cure. In Galveston, no hospital bed is empty. Every day before dawn the death wagons roll down our streets, the drivers crying, ‘Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead!’ The stench is horrible. The bodies are covered with quicklime and buried in common graves. As one graveyard fills, ground is broken for another.”
Nicolas tried to imagine this island in the grip of an epidemic. The summer smothering hot. Whole families shut in, trembling at the telltale yellow in their loved one’s eyes, the fever burning in their children’s bodies.
“You must remember, Nick, never venture to the South in summer. Stick to your mountains. Wherever your business calls, you must never, ever—”
In midsentence, Renée was cut off by a thunderous clatter at the front of the house. “What’s that?” she said. “What the . . . ?”
“It’s a horseman,” Nicolas said, stepping quickly to the window at the sound of a horse hard driven, snorting and whinnying, hooves clanging on the slate sidewalk. “And it’s at your door!”
The hum of conversation was cut off by a crash in the entranceway, followed by the tinkle of broken glass. Utter silence gripped the house, everyone froze, then the hooves retreated down the street.
Nicolas and Renée stepped through the parlour door into the hallway, where shards of colored glass—the remains of the stained-glass pelican—were strewn across the floor. In the midst of the debris lay a large, red brick. A note was secured to the brick with several wraps of hemp twine.
Keiller limped into the hallway. “Not again,” he grumbled. “Confound the rascals!”
Guests edged through the pocket doors as Keiller bent to pick up the brick and remove the note. Shuffling around the shards of the brown pelican, Nicolas and Renée crept up behind Keiller and all three leaned over a message scrawled in thick, black lines:
GRAVE ROBBERS
BEWARE
In his hand, Keiller cupped a sinister, scaly-looking object no larger than a silver dollar that had been folded into the note.
“What do you have there?” Nicolas asked.
“A charm, I’m afraid.”
“A voodoo charm,” Renée added.
Keiller went on. “I’ve learned a bit about them, lately. The wrapping is the hide of a black snake. What’s inside is meant as a warning to those who go along with this sort of bunk.”
Keiller unwrapped the charm. A coil of hair encrusted with dried blood protruded from the black casing of snake hide. Nicolas caught his breath. The lock of hair was the reddish-brown color he knew as “ginger.�
� For the second time that evening, a coarse shiver rattled his spine.
17
Aftermath
Keiller turned to the guests standing behind him, their mouths agape. “It’s nothing, ladies and gentlemen. Please . . .” Keiller’s voice rose in pitch. He closed the charm tight in his fist. “We’ll have this cleaned in a moment.”
A murmur ran through the house while servants swept the fragments of colored glass into piles and guests meandered back to the dining room. The stocky Hutchinson Sealy stepped forward and removed his mask. His wife’s face hovered unappealingly over her husband’s shoulder.
“This should tell you something, Francis,” he said with a shake of his head. “It’s what many in town are thinking. Well then, we’ll be leaving.”
“Stay for coffee, Hutch.”
“Thank you for the hospitality nonetheless,” Sealy said, a hollow ring to his voice. He gave a slight bow and led his wife around the disarray. Other business types who’d lingered in the entrance hall unmasked and, following Sealy’s lead, made for the door, excusing themselves as they circled the wreckage of the stained-glass pelican.
“There’s brandy. More cakes?” Keiller pleaded to no avail.
The rude interruption, coming on the heels of an evening full of revelations, put Nicolas on a keen edge. He would take his leave as well. When he approached Keiller to deal with the formalities, the elder professor ignored him and called to the kitchen:
“Sara, would you see to coffee? And brandy?”
Renée, reading Nicolas’s face, reached for his hand. “Come, Nick. Uncle’s new cook makes wonderful coffee.” She started toward the dining room. “Just a little longer,” she whispered, “for Uncle’s sake.”
At that moment, Pierre Bonferri was headed for the door with the Merry Ladybug, whose cockroach escort was slung across a settee, blind drunk. As they crossed paths, Bonferri took Nicolas by the sleeve. “Your payment should be ready tomorrow, mon ami,” he said. “Remember—second floor, Cotton Exchange.”
“Excellent,” Nicolas said. “Good to do business with you, Pierre.”
Bonferri gave a chuckle as he steadied the Merry Ladybug’s erratic gait out the door. “But wait until well after noon, mon ami. You’ll find business slow to start on the first day of Lent.”
Throughout the house, the festivities were reduced to a low undertone punctuated by moments of deathly quiet. Guests unmasked. Chairs were dragged about. Coffee arrived on a silver serving set and Nicolas Van Horne, a Northerner raised on hot tea, settled onto a settee with Renée and drank murky Creole coffee.
As Sara poured a second cup, Nicolas asked, “Who’s behind these attacks on the college? Surely you have an idea.”
“It’s our dissection, of course, Nick. Across the nation, resurrectionists pillage the paupers’ fields while they leave the rich in their graves. The poor have rioted in Philadelphia and Baltimore. Here in Galveston, our supplier returns again and again to Galveston’s colored cemetery, and I’m afraid he’s opened one too many pine boxes. He may be leaving town soon.”
Too many pine boxes. Nicolas’s mind flashed to Sailortown. She doesn’t yet know about the lynching, he thought.
“I can only hope,” he said, “your attackers don’t know about me. But won’t the law help you?”
“We can hardly go to the constable, Nick. You, of all people, must realize that,” she said with a dismissive wave of her hand. “And there’s more to the problem. Elements I don’t understand. Elements more pernicious, more powerful than the voodooists.”
Crystal brandy snifters arrived on silver platters. While the last of the partygoers drank to the beginning of Lent, Nicolas’s mind began to lag.
The sky had lightened with dawn by the time Nicolas settled into a carriage bound for his hotel, with the events of the evening spinning in his head . . . the masquerade . . . the revelation of the lynched grave robber . . . the rude interruption of their gaiety . . . and the lovely Renée.
There was something about a church, too, but at this late hour, details slipped his mind.
18
The Beginning of Lent
A German steamer had made port at daybreak, and long lines of immigrants seeking passage inland clogged the cavernous interior of Galveston’s train station. Nicolas maneuvered his way to a window to arrange his and Adam’s trip home by way of Chicago and Buffalo, connecting to the Adirondack Mail Express from the Buffalo–Albany line. He requested departure for late that day but was told by the clerk behind the bars that one of Pullman’s private sleeper cars wouldn’t become available until noon tomorrow.
As he stood outside the station and tucked the railway tickets into his jacket, Nicolas decided against stopping by Molly’s Rooms to inform Adam of their plan. His foreman had been out late whoring and was better left to sleep, as were, most likely, the other occupants of Molly’s establishment.
Nicolas thought how refined, how enchanting was his evening at Keiller’s party. He’d felt friendliness and warmth last night, far more than at even the grandest balls at the lakeside cottages of the Adirondack railroad tycoons, especially near Francis Keiller’s niece. Certainly an evening so fine could not be gotten at a house of ill repute.
Unlike most men of the day, Nicolas had only once in his life availed himself of a whorehouse. It was during last winter’s trip with the ice when he’d succumbed to the needs of the flesh and accompanied Adam to a Canal Street haunt in New Orleans. He found the tawdry façade, the dark purple wallpaper of the sitting room, and the madam’s false exuberance enormously disagreeable. Indeed, the boredom of the girls and abruptness of his failed encounter left him with a nervous melancholy that lasted for days.
Nicolas was not a man prone to dalliances, though men certainly did such things. Keeping mistresses was commonplace; even respectable ladies fell prey. He was well aware that his pale blue eyes, the clean line of his jaw, and his lean limbs were appreciated by women. He might easily have had his way with them, even those decades younger than his forty-one years. But for that one lapse in a New Orleans bordello, Nicolas chose to remain true to a rustic, rural New Yorker’s ideal of marriage, and to a lifelong union with his childhood sweetheart Ruth Stuyvesant—no matter how drastically, how irrevocably, the years had changed her.
Settling in a hansom cab as it pulled away from the railway station, Nicolas was disturbed by the distinct floral scent that clung to his jacket. He’d noticed it first while dressing that morning. Apple blossoms.Her perfume. Had he been that close to Renée last evening? She had taken his arm, sat quite close, he remembered, but in the excitement that followed the attack, it hadn’t seemed untoward. Perhaps he’d had too much of the professor’s whiskey. There’d been brandy, too. And a vague discussion about a church, of all things, kept shifting about at the edges of his mind.
Moments after Nicolas had stepped down from his carriage and entered the Majestic’s foyer, a clerk handed him an envelope with his name written in a refined, symmetrical hand. The envelope was sealed with the familiar star of Texas pressed into orange wax.
Dear Nick,
Will we be meeting at the church, as discussed?
I shall be there at noon. Saint Augustine’s, in the 1700 block of Esplanade. Please do.
Yours Sincerely,
Renée Keiller
A church? he mused. Of course, yesterday was Mardi Gras, making today Wednesday, the beginning of Lent. Well, one shouldn’t be late to church, should one? It was still an hour before noon. The finalization of finances at the Cotton Exchange could wait till afternoon. Today was a day to attend church. Ash Wednesday.
Nicolas knew his mother to have been a churchgoer, but his own religious upbringing after her death had been spotty. As a young man in Boston, the atheistic college life and the rites of Alpha Delta Phi, his fraternal order, took precedence. He considered himself a sporting gentleman, an upstater whose Sundays were spent hunting or fishing. He found no time to worship a deity, except, perhaps, an ill-defined
, personal God he felt near to when tramping alone in the Adirondack woods or standing on the frozen expanse of Upper Spy Lake before an ice harvest.
As he approached on foot, the brilliant white stone of Saint Augustine’s Church shone from three blocks away in the noonday sun. A statue of Christ, with hands outstretched, capped the impressive structure. Citizens from all stations in life kept the massive front door swinging constantly to and fro. The crowd gathered on the sidewalk spilled into the street. For an instant, Nicolas nearly turned back. Had Renée arrived earlier? Was she already inside? He wasn’t about to waltz into that place on his own.
A tall, dignified young lady in a chocolate-brown dress with a white lace collar backed away from the crowd. Her wry, tight-lipped smile and dark eyes were unmistakable. She hurried over, her two gloved hands extended.
“Nick. So glad you came.” She wore a broad-brimmed hat with a shock of pink feathers gathered at the side. The feathers swayed in the breeze as she took his arm and steered him toward the church door. “Come along then, good sir.”
“I’m not Catholic, you know,” he said with a sheepish grin. “Actually, I’m not anything.”
“No matter. Follow me and do as I do. It’ll be fine.”
The interior of the church was cool, dark, and laden with the sweet smell of incense. Renée gave a shallow bow toward the front, then walked down the aisle and pushed into a crowded pew, shuffling over to make room. Nicolas tried to mimic her bowed head but soon found himself craning his neck to admire the raised frescoes depicting Christ’s life and the stained-glass windows throwing geometric patterns of muted color over the congregation. He’d seen colored church glass in Boston, but only from the outside. In the Adirondacks, church windows were clear; church interiors were bare of artwork and full of light.
What’s this religion about? he wondered, scanning the stages of Christ’s downfall portrayed in the colorful frescoes. The entrance to Jerusalem. The gruesome nails. The crown of thorns. Wasn’t this the Protestant’s story, too?