by Dianne Day
Hmm. Chances were slim to none that I would ever find my way alone through this warren of streets. There must be another way to go about it, if only one had a map. And if only all these streets were on the map. Sometimes streets, whole towns even, were left off maps; that was something I had learned last year in Utah.
Just when I was beginning to feel so hopelessly lost as to become a tad uneasy, the carriage emerged onto Hanover Street, which I recognized, and then I knew we were in the North End. Soon I saw the spire of Old North Church upon its hill. Then, with a jerk that almost upset the carriage, the driver made an abrupt turn into a street so narrow we were barely able to pass.
It was dark and noisy, full of the smells that build up when too many people have lived too close together for too long. Dogs barked and babies cried. A cat streaked across our path. Curious heads leaned out of windows—the carriage was a novelty and a disruption.
Slower and slower the carriage wheels turned. I had the presence of mind to snatch the fur hat off my head, likewise the scarf from around my neck, and to stash them and the fur muff too under the lap robe.
“Do not let anyone into the carriage while I am gone,” I admonished the driver, “not even curious children.” It wasn’t that I minded if these things were stolen, but rather that I did not want to be any more set apart from the people of this neighborhood than I had been already, just by arriving in a hired carriage.
The driver allowed as how he wouldn’t think of it, then in a surprising outburst of garrulity added, pointing, “There’s the house you’re wanting, miss. If anybody comes along and makes me move the carriage, don’t you worry, I’ll go round the block and come on back. But I don’t think that’ll happen. It’s mostly foot traffic in these parts.”
I thanked the man, gathered my skirt close in to my body with one hand, and with the cane in the other approached the door the driver had indicated. Along the way I stepped over some potato peelings and other assorted debris that was probably best left unidentified.
These houses were very old, and had never been the least bit grand even when they were new. Now they seemed to be doing all that could be expected of them if their four walls simply did not fall down. The stoop was a cracked, irregularly shaped piece of stone. I stepped up onto it and rapped on a door so old the wood had turned almost black. In some places it had cracked clear through and I could see light from the other side.
Light and movement: With what felt like a hundred curious eyes on my back, I stood waiting as the door opened and there stood Sarah Kirk.
“Sarah, forgive the intrusion,” I said, “but I must speak with you.”
Her eyes were huge and frightened in her gaunt face. She bit her lips bloodless and said nothing.
“Surely you do recognize me?”
She nodded. A whimper came from somewhere in the dimly lit room behind her and she cast a quick glance over her shoulder.
“May I please come in?” I asked, and God forgive me, I did not wait for her invitation. I put my cane on through the door and followed it one foot at a time.
Sarah backed up as I came through but still she said nothing, and she left it for me to close the door behind me. In truth the little room was so stuffy I would have preferred to leave it open, but that would have meant all those eyes continuing to stare. And no doubt a hundred ears would have been overhearing us as well.
Another whimper, and Sarah turned and left me.
She is going to her sick child, I thought.
Oh, but I’d had no idea how sick he was … I had no idea such a creature could be human and continue to live.
Sarah came back with her child—I supposed it was a boy—wrapped around her. If he were able to stand, he would likely have been as tall as she, for Sarah Kirk was a small woman both in stature and of limb. But one doubted he could stand; his arms and legs were white as mushrooms that have grown in a cellar without ever knowing light, and they were thin as the bones beneath that too pale skin. His hugely misshapen head lolled against her shoulder, his almost white hair was wispy and thin as a baby’s, his blue eyes were vague and unfocused, and his protruding tongue leaked drool down her dress.
“You see how it is, Miss Jones,” she said.
“How—how old?” My own problems, whatever they might have been, had shrunk to nothing and temporarily fled my mind. I could not even begin to frame the words I wanted to say, nor were the words I’d come in here intent on saying necessarily the right ones, the words that most needed to be said.
“Thirteen years. But he won’t last much longer. Can’t. His lungs don’t half work anymore.”
As if to demonstrate, the creature in her arms sucked in a heaving breath, so heavily congested it sounded as if he were breathing underwater.
“Can we—” I began, then backed off what I’d originally intended and tried again. “Ah, that is, he must be heavy for you. Perhaps we might sit down?”
Sarah stiffened. “I have nothing to say to you, miss.”
The words sounded as if she had rehearsed them. As if she’d expected eventually to see me here, or to be questioned by me at some time and place. Ah, but had she rehearsed them all on her own or had someone else required it, even chosen what she was to say?
With the purpose of my visit thus forcefully recalled to me, I made a quick decision. I knew it might prove disastrous, might backfire, but still I went ahead on pure instinct.
Quietly but forcefully I said, “Whatever amount any other person has paid or offered to pay you, I will pay you double. I don’t mean to offend you, Sarah—I can see you truly need money for the boy. But the thing is, I must talk to you, and have some answers from you. I think you know why.”
The boy groaned and his head lolled dangerously. He had very little control over his musculature, and as he moved, Sarah’s hand came up automatically to protect that huge head, as one does a baby’s. A glistening thread of saliva stretched between his head and her upraised arm like a piece of spider’s web.
Sarah’s eyes lost some of their fear and gazed at me questioningly instead. Finally she jerked her head toward the dim recesses behind her and said, “All right, we can sit over here, if you think you can stand it.”
Her remark and the tone in which she said it made me thank God I had not come in here dripping Russian sable. I followed her farther into the room, which was small and therefore crowded, rather dark owing to its having only one narrow window, but perfectly clean.
I felt so keenly the unjust disparity between Sarah Kirk’s situation and my own that if I could have run out and immediately sold the things I’d left on the carriage seat beneath that lap robe, I would have done it, and given her all the money … for nothing. I’d have done it just because she needed the money far more than I needed furs; far more indeed than any human being needed such frivolity as furs, except perhaps in Russia, where furs may not be so frivolous, as without them the Russians might freeze to death. At any rate, I would have given Sarah the proceeds from such a sale gladly, whether she gave me information or not.
But that was a fantasy, and here and now the reality must be dealt with. I watched the nurse arrange her deformed and probably mentally defective son on a pallet atop a wooden platform at waist height. Nearby a very large wicker basket held soiled bedding. There was a slight stench, but not much. I surmised the boy must have no control over any bodily functions, that she changed the bedding frequently, most likely washing the boy each time she changed it, and the bedding once a day. A formidable amount of work, especially considering she also had her nursing jobs at night.
I stood looking over her shoulder, so interested in the diligent way she cared for her son that I could not feel repelled. Sarah glanced at me and said, “You can sit over there, miss.”
“Please call me Fremont,” I said absently, “I do not hold with formality. Did someone build this platform for you especially? It’s an interesting arrangement, well thought out so that you do not have to bend down so far to pick him up as you would
if he were in the usual sort of bed.”
“Yes, that is so.” Sarah seemed surprised. “You know something of nursing then? How is that, a lady like you?”
I smiled. “Those who know me in this city might disagree with you about my being a lady. You see, Sarah, I did a shocking thing a few years ago: I left home in order to work for a living, to have my own business. I went all the way to San Francisco in order to be sure of that freedom. But then, as luck would have it, the very next year we had a huge earthquake out there, and most people lost everything. Including me.”
“I heard about that.” She nodded. “Edwin will be all right for a while now, so whyn’t we sit down. I could make tea if you like.”
Edwin—what a noble name for a boy whose life turned out to have only the most pathetic prospects.
“No, thank you,” I said. “I had coffee not long ago, and I don’t plan to intrude upon you for very long. You asked if I knew anything of nursing—what I know, I learned after that earthquake. I worked for quite a while with the nurses of the Red Cross, though I never had formal nurse’s training myself. Disaster relief, it was called—we did a lot of everything. I admire women in the nursing profession tremendously. You’re obviously doing a fine job of taking care of your son, Sarah.”
Sarah bit her lips again.
I added, “I am sure you did an equally fine job taking care of my father. But still, we must talk about that.”
Sarah wore a white apron over a checked flannel dress—the apron’s material was thin yet not fine like handkerchief linen; rather it had been washed and ironed countless times to near-transparency. She unconsciously took up a corner of the apron and rolled it against her knee.
I drew in a deep breath and got on with it. “Am I correct in surmising that Edwin cannot understand what we say?”
She nodded. “He’s an idiot.”
In spite of the seeming harshness of the word, especially when applied to her own son, I understood that Sarah was speaking as a trained nurse to whom the word “idiot” was a medical classification. Meaning he lacked the mental capacity to learn and to think and behave like a normal human being.
“Very well,” I said. “To get straight to the point: Night before last, the night my father died, I came into his room at about three o’clock in the morning. Something, I don’t know what, had awakened me. You were sound asleep in the reading chair.”
“I—”
I held up my hand to stop her before she wasted valuable time defending herself. I overrode her words with my own: “I’m not taking you to task for sleeping, or even blaming you for it. In fact, I do not think it was your fault that you were asleep. I think your sleeping at that particular time and in that particular circumstance was beyond your control.”
Now Sarah’s expression was both puzzled and wary. “I don’t understand you.”
“I believe you will understand shortly. Now, at what time did you wake up?”
She bit her lips again. Any harder, I thought, and she’ll draw blood.
I decided to try another tack. “All right. Why don’t you tell me then, in your own words, what happened on the night of my father’s death. Everything, just as you remember it. Starting from whenever it was that the house grew quiet and you were left alone with your patient.”
“He … he was sick, and he died, and that’s all there was,” Sarah said in a strained voice. “I don’t know what you remember, Miss Jones, Miss Fremont, but the truth is, when he died you went all hysterical. Mrs. Jones, Mrs. Augusta, she came and saw how it was, and then she went and called the doctor. Dr. Cosgrove, that is. I work private duty for a lot of Dr. Cosgrove’s patients. By the time he came you were, well, you weren’t yourself. I wouldn’t expect you to be able to make sense of anything, on account of being out of your senses for a while. That was why the doctor gave you the medicine, to let you rest until your senses could return to normal.”
I was too stunned by this recital to say anything at all.
Sarah looked at me steadily. “I’m glad to see you’re feeling so much better now, and I appreciate your coming by.”
I turned my head away. The impulse to simply give up and leave was very strong, but I fought it down. When I had control of myself and had regained a measure of determination, I looked at her again and said:
“I believe either Augusta or Searles Cosgrove paid you to tell me that story, and perhaps to tell it to the police or anyone else who might ask, as well. I say to you again that I will pay you double, if you will tell me the truth. And I will protect you too. I can do this because I, not Augusta, am Father’s heir. No one will say you neglected your patient.”
I took in another deep breath, and with it that faint stench of soiled bedclothes from the basket by the bed with its human burden. “So, Sarah, shall we begin again?”
Sarah stood up, tall as she could, which was not very. She folded her hands very properly and said, “Miss Fremont, there is no need to say any of that again. I won’t tell them you offered me money. I’ve already told you what happened, and now I think you’d best go.”
FIFTEEN
THERE WERE FOUR of us around the dinner table at Beacon Street that night: Augusta, Larry, Michael, and I. Augusta was very properly dressed in unrelieved black, not even pearls or a cameo in sight; her jewelry was jet. This was the first I’d seen of her since Dr. Cosgrove had rendered me insensible with laudanum.
It was chilly in the dining room in more ways than one.
Michael looked grim. I wondered if I were the cause, or just this whole unhappy situation.
He has his black moods from time to time; generally when he has them he goes off alone somewhere, sometimes without notice. Would he do that now? Would Michael completely, physically desert me? I felt he had already deserted me in a significant way, because he did not believe in the legitimacy of my concerns about Father’s illness and death. I felt doubly wounded, as if not only had I lost Father but now Michael was drifting away from me too.
My inner voice, which had not had much to say to me for a while—or perhaps I had not been listening—made a comment. It seemed to come from so far away that I had to strain to hear it: You could be overreacting, Fremont.
I replied to the inner voice with a silent snort: If I’m overreacting, then why isn’t he helping me to find out what really happened to Father?
Because he too had fallen under Augusta’s spell, that was why. I was sure of it. Why, even now he was smiling at something she had said. Some inconsequential frivolity I had missed.
Hah! This was hardly a time for inconsequential frivolities. I felt an awful urge to jab him with the toe of my shoe, and I probably would have except that he was sitting on the other side of the table, where my foot could not reach. Augusta had seated Michael at her right hand.
I decided to leave him to flirt with her—if he dared do such a thing right on the heels of her husband’s dying—and I turned to try my wiles on Larry.
Two could play at the flirting game, and in my case it was more excusable because I had loftier intentions. Michael was only acting like a man, and of course all men are beasts … at least, from time to time. They have been only barely civilized by women down through the centuries, I am convinced of it.
“I hope you had a pleasant afternoon,” I said to Larry. “Did you go out in search of old acquaintances as I suggested?”
He looked up from his soup, which he had been taking from the spoon with a slight slurp. “I’d thought I might, but then right in the middle of the afternoon, when I was about to leave, Ma got a call from the bank.”
Oh dear, I thought. So Augusta had heard about the will already.
“I had to go down there with her. To keep her company, you know. She’s upset still at losing Leonard.”
I could not tell if I were imagining it, for we were dining by the uncertain light of candles flickering in two candelabra, but I thought Larry Bingham was regarding me speculatively.
“Of course she is,” I said.
“So am I.”
Larry looked as if he expected me to say more, but I resumed eating my soup instead.
Augusta’s visit to the bank and what she likely learned there was not a subject I could pursue, nor could I encourage her son to do so. Augusta would have to broach it herself if it were to be discussed at all—and I rather hoped it would not. Not tonight, I did not want to deal with all that tonight. Money, property, who would get what—surely it was unseemly to talk of these things before Father’s body was even laid in the ground!
I heartily wished Elwood Sefton had not been so insistent upon it—especially since the only items in the will having to do with the funeral itself had been the mention of the plot in Mount Auburn Cemetery and the proviso that Father’s coffin be made of wood. I had already known both those things, and would most certainly have told Augusta, so really it had been unnecessary for Sefton to get into Father’s will now.
On the other hand, said my inner voice, when you know something is bound to be unpleasant, perhaps it is best just to get on with it. Do you really believe revenge is a dish best served cold?
Revenge. Was that what I was embarking upon, a course of revenge? I did not think of it as revenge, but rather as a search for the truth, and for justice, for my father’s sake.
Tears pricked at my eyes, and I covered them with my hand. If only I were not so very tired—it was hard to keep myself in control.
To my great surprise, Larry, who was seated at my left, sensed my disturbance and reacted with sensitivity. He reached out and put his hand over my other hand, which remained in my lap. Too intimate a gesture, perhaps, for one of such short acquaintance. Yet I appreciated it, because at that moment I was in need of a human touch.