by Dara Horn
Once the guests overcame their astonishment, they waited, still leaning forward, for Jeannie to rise and conclude the trick. But Jeannie offered them no such relief. Instead she languished in her awful pose for one endless minute after another, as the audience’s anticipation gradually faded into animated terror. A whisper rushed through the crowd.
“My word!” Antonia exclaimed, her scrubbed face turning pale as she pressed her fingers to her lips. “She must be—she must be—” Jacob pressed his own lips together, struggling not to laugh out loud.
Jeannie lay on the landing, immobile and deformed, for a very long time. Even Jacob worried for an instant, before reminding himself of who she was. But the guests had never seen anything like this before. The stillness of her body was lasting too long, the wait for her next move becoming indefinite, frightening. The audience rustled, the guests’ confusion bordering on panic. At length, a one-armed man from the front row hastened up the stairs, pushed forward by the people around him. The man stooped down, standing just above Jeannie’s head so that her body and disfigured face were still within the audience’s view. He winced as he inspected her distorted features. “Miss Van Damme?” he asked meekly.
Jeannie did not move. The man scrutinized her, and hesitantly placed his remaining hand on the bare skin just above her dress’s low neckline, inches from her corset. The crowd held its breath, but Jacob wondered, as he saw the man pressing his palm against her bosom, whether he was secretly enjoying it. The man looked back at the audience, his face flushed. “The lady isn’t breathing,” he announced.
At that moment, Jeannie raised her hand and slapped the man’s wrist. He jumped up, startled, and then quickly lost his balance and tripped backward down the stairs, his fall broken only by three ladies who caught him by his remaining arm. The audience was still gasping when Jeannie sat up, took hold of her own jaw, and set it back into place with a loud, repulsive snap.
“Sir, even a dead lady deserves more respect than that,” she said, adjusting her décolletage and smiling at the man in the front row. “But as you all can see, it is quite possible, when the situation calls for it, to feign an apoplectic stroke.”
The crowd cheered as Antonia scowled at Jacob’s side. “The lady is a witch, an actual witch,” she repeated, with open disgust. “It’s all some sort of Oriental witchcraft. I’m sure of it.”
Jacob nodded, bewitched. Onstage, Jeannie was already moving on to her final act—demonstrating how, once dead, one could hypothetically proceed directly to the morgue, in order to conveniently escape just prior to one’s own funeral. A long pinewood box was brought up to the landing, and now Jeannie was climbing into it with great flourish, lying down dramatically in her own coffin after inviting several volunteers up to the stage to nail it shut. As his wife was hammered into her casket, Jacob began to add up the pieces in his head. He thought of the hysterical attack that the newspaper had reported, and suddenly he understood precisely how she had done it: her feigned stroke must have gotten her carried out of the prison and into a hospital, and then from there she had continued to the great beyond. Some pieces were missing, to be sure, leaving him raging with curiosity. It was one thing to fool people at a ball, for instance, but how could she have convinced doctors in a hospital of her supposed death? How could anyone have reported her death to the newspapers, with no body to show for it? How had she made it out of the hospital, or out of the morgue? After she escaped, how had she managed to cross the lines and return home? But he already knew that for Jeannie, these were mere details, the predictable limits of other people’s expectations. She would have transcended them all.
The volunteers left the stage, their task completed. The coffin on the landing rattled, and then it was still.
The silence lasted quite a while. Everyone in the room watched the casket, waiting. It occurred to Jacob that for the other guests, the scene must have been familiar, even if not consciously so: they had all been trained since childhood to expect a body to rise up from its coffin, to anticipate a resurrection. But Jacob saw the casket and thought of a different story, one his Hebrew tutor had taught him long ago: that when the Romans conquered Jerusalem, a certain rabbi saw the danger and had himself smuggled out of the city in a coffin, so that he could find a refuge for his students where they could reconstruct the edifice of life. He knew that Jeannie would never do something as predictable as rising from a coffin; her imagination was far too large to be contained within it. And so Jacob was the first person to notice when Jeannie emerged like an apparition, wrapped in a gauzy white robe—at the top of the staircase, looking down on them all.
“These shrouds are so unbecoming,” she announced.
Everyone looked up, flabbergasted. How had she gotten there? Jacob didn’t know either, but it didn’t matter. She was proceeding down the stairs now; soon she was standing on the landing again, next to her own coffin. She cast the shroud aside, revealing, yet again, an entirely different dress. It was a plain white gown that was strangely inappropriate—too poor for this sort of society ball, even under the circumstances. Despite his compromised vision, even Jacob could see where the skirt had been torn and patched. The audience, still amazed, burst once more into applause. But Jacob kept watching her, his one eye watering as he struggled not to weep. She was wearing her wedding gown.
“Thank you all so much for indulging me this evening,” she declared, with a sweeping curtsy. “I hope to see you all again soon, well above ground.”
Miss Cary had ascended to the landing, a wide grin on her face as she took Jeannie by the hand and announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in a round of applause for Miss Eugenia Van Damme!”
The cheering was loud and long, almost endless. Jacob watched as Jeannie wearied of it and began to retreat, gradually edging toward the curtained door at the back of the landing. And that was when a man near the front of the room, with officer’s epaulets, raised his one remaining arm and shouted over the crowd’s applause, “Miss Van Damme, will you marry me?”
Jacob assumed that this was simply an offhand joke, crude but unremarkable. But the other guests made no such assumptions. To Jacob’s astonishment, the guests stopped clapping and leaned forward with genuine curiosity, waiting to hear the celebrity’s reply. Every person in the room was drunk on dirty water and dreams.
In her wedding dress, Jeannie was perfectly poised. “Of course,” she replied.
The guests gazed at her, unsure of whether to believe her. Jacob sat motionless. Then Jeannie smiled, and everyone laughed. “But yours is a rather popular request, and I’m afraid it would be cruel to the other gentlemen in the room not to acknowledge their interests as well,” she said. “So I must try to be fair.” Jacob swallowed. Had she seen him? No, she was still grinning, still Miss Eugenia Van Damme. It was all a joke to her. Even her own wedding gown was nothing more than a disguise.
“Hold a lottery!” someone shouted.
“Why don’t we hold an auction?” Jeannie suggested, eyeing Miss Cary. “For the benefit of the hospital, of course. Miss Cary can be the auctioneer.”
Antonia nudged Jacob, gasping. “Can you imagine?” she huffed. “How utterly revolting. I’ve heard she’s had dozens of paramours.”
Had she? He thought of his affair with her cousin, and was surprised to discover that he did not care if she had. He only cared—and cared desperately—whether she had one now.
But now Miss Cary was holding a wooden spoon that someone in the audience had passed to her, her angular face grinning wildly. “An excellent idea, Miss Van Damme. Let’s begin!”
Jeannie jumped up onto the coffin, standing on it as if it were an auction block. Miss Cary banged the spoon against the end of the banister, and affected her best attempt at a baritone drawl. “Gentlemen, next on the block is Eugenia Van Damme, age twenty-one, in the prime of her breeding years. She has proven herself to be exceptionally industrious in the fields, and her former masters have lauded her for her unimpeachable servitude. I am, h
owever, obliged to admit that she does have one demerit—her attempts at escape.”
Everyone laughed, but Jacob was sickened. He watched as Jeannie paced back and forth on the wooden coffin and thought of Dorrie, naked on the block, down the street from Philip’s old office. What had so nauseated him on that long-ago afternoon was, to everyone here, simply routine, ripe for parody only because it was so familiar. He glanced at the glasses of dirty water that were littered about the hall, and realized something. The secret service had been sending him gold coinage to defray his expenses, much of which he was obliged to keep on his person, out of fear of burglary in his inconspicuously poor lodgings. But even his commanders did not appreciate how starved the city was. He suddenly understood that he was the richest person in the room.
“Shall we start the bidding at twenty dollars for Eugenia Van Damme?” Miss Cary called. “In gold only, gentlemen.” Confederate cash was worthless, of course; even the otherwise deluded knew that. “Do I hear twenty dollars for Eugenia Van Damme?”
“Twenty-five,” a man in the back of the room yelled.
“Thirty,” countered another, near the front.
“Thirty-five.”
“Forty.”
Miss Cary held the spoon high. “Forty dollars. Do I hear fifty?”
Rose had warned him to stay back, to avoid being noticed. She hates you, he heard Rose say in his head. Surely it was true. But how could he simply watch?
“Fifty,” a man just past Antonia called.
“Sixty.”
“Sixty-five.”
“Seventy.”
If Jeannie saw him, she would turn him in. It wasn’t even a question. Perhaps she would even expose him onstage, in front of everyone. But what if he were to wait, and someone else were to take her? The auction was just a game, of course, but to Jacob it represented something larger: at any moment, she might fall in love with someone else, and forget him forever. Every man in Richmond was clearly drooling over her; it was surely only a matter of time before she attached herself to someone else, if she hadn’t already. But if he at least made the attempt, then there was some small possibility that he might stand beside her again, even if only for a moment. And even if he were caught and hanged tomorrow, she would at least know that he had never forgotten her—that he had made a promise to her father and kept it, that he had wanted to see the baby, that he knew the meaning of devotion, that he had tried.
“One hundred,” Captain Strathmore shouted, to cheers.
Jacob raised his hand. “One hundred fifty,” he called, with as much drawl as he could summon.
“Jacob!” Antonia gasped.
Her idle jealousy made him smile. The other hands in the room had gone down by now; only Captain Strathmore remained. “One hundred fifty-five,” he announced.
It was a transparent tactic, one Jacob recognized immediately as a businessman. He was finished. “Two hundred,” Jacob said. Dorrie had sold for more than six times that.
“Two hundred,” Miss Cary repeated. “Two hundred. Going once. Going twice.” The room was silent. Miss Cary banged the spoon on the banister. “Sold, for two hundred dollars gold, to the gentleman with the eye patch. Please, sir, come up to the block and claim your property.” The crowd cheered.
Jacob stood up, slowly, with the eyes of the guests on him. Jeannie squinted in his direction and quickly looked away, granting her beautiful smile to the crowd. She didn’t recognize him.
Miss Cary helped him up the steps to the landing. He stood in front of Jeannie, displayed on the platform in her wedding dress, and tried not to stare. She looked at him again, but only briefly. She still had barely glanced at his face. Instead, she watched as he pulled out his change purse, leaning on his cane as he dropped gold coins into Miss Cary’s open hands, to the applause of the guests. “What is your name, sir?” Miss Cary asked with a smile.
“Sergeant Samuels,” he replied, employing the accent to full effect. It was a name he was used to.
“Sergeant Samuels, we cannot thank you enough for your generous contribution to Chimborazo Hospital,” she said, to further applause. Then she glanced at Jeannie, who fell immediately into character. Jeannie swooped down in a deep curtsy, dropping almost to her knees before him on the coffin. He could barely breathe. “As there are no priests on the premises this evening to perform the sacrament,” Miss Cary continued, “I’m afraid you will have to consider this merely a betrothal, rather than a wedding ceremony. I trust that will be acceptable.”
“Quite acceptable,” he said in his artificial drawl. The guests tittered. But he couldn’t take his eye off Jeannie, groveling before him for the benefit of the crowd.
At last she rose, shimmering in her wedding gown. “Thank you for your purchase, Sergeant Samuels. I shall look forward to loving, honoring, and obeying you for the remainder of my days,” she said, winning laughs from the guests. But before he could even catch her eye, she turned to Miss Cary, silently urging her. Miss Cary nodded quickly, and turned back to the crowd.
“I’m afraid we must say goodnight to Miss Van Damme now and allow her to return home, so that she may continue to raise the morale of her adoring public in the future,” Miss Cary announced, and turned to Jacob. “Sir, if you would like to meet your betrothed outside, a servant shall escort you,” she said, and then eyed Jeannie. “If that is all right with Miss Van Damme.”
“Don’t worry, Miss Cary,” Jeannie grandly announced. “If he attempts anything ungentlemanly, I can outrun him.”
Jacob smiled. She always could. The crowd laughed as a slave took him by the elbow, helping him down the stairs and back into the audience, around the edges of the room, and toward the front door. But no one was looking at him now; once again, all eyes were on Jeannie.
“Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in one more round of applause for Miss Eugenia Van Damme!” he heard Miss Cary announce behind him. He glanced over his shoulder and saw Jeannie curtsying one more time, and then hastening down from the coffin and through the curtain behind the landing, as two slaves hurried up behind her to begin moving the coffin through the same curtain. The audience was still cheering when the slave deposited Jacob at the entrance to the Carys’ home. The door closed behind him. He stood leaning on his cane in the cold evening air, wondering if the person he was tonight was the person he would always be.
JACOB WOULD HAVE expected a carriage to be waiting for Jeannie after her performance, but he was surprised to find nothing outside but the empty road, lit by the grand lamps beside the Carys’ front door. He had forgotten that Jeannie wasn’t actually part of high society here any more than he was. She was merely their entertainment, work for hire. A quarter of an hour later, when his legs were on the verge of collapse, he saw her rounding the corner of the house, emerging from a servants’ entrance. She wore a thin dark cloak over her white wedding dress, with a satchel slung over her shoulder, her hair pulled back, unadorned, behind her head. She saw him standing by the door and squinted, hesitating for an instant before continuing to approach. He saw her coming toward him in her wedding gown, walking with unassuming steps, her grandiosity dissolved, and he could not believe that he was not dreaming. His remaining eye filled with tears.
Now she stood before him, and looked down at her feet. She still did not look at him. “Sergeant Samuels, I am quite appreciative of your generosity toward the hospital,” she said. She spoke in her real voice this time, drained of all pretense. “But I trust you recognize that the tone of the evening was in jest. I would be pleased to become better acquainted with you at another time, I truly would. But I must hurry home now. I hope you will understand.”
“I do,” he said, in his own real voice. “But I would very much like to become better acquainted with you, Jeannie. With you, and with our baby.”
Now Jeannie looked up, and stared at him. She stared and stared, her beautiful dark eyes taking in his eye patch, his cane, his scarred face, his smile. The world opened up between them. Before he could say anyth
ing more, his wife fainted—this time for real.
PART NINE
ALL OTHER NIGHTS
1.
“I WILL KILL YOU, I WILL, IF YOU SO MUCH AS COME NEAR ME OR MY baby, I will kill you, I will—oh God, Jacob, what happened to you?”
Jacob leaned over Jeannie as she opened her eyes, crouched painfully on his cane as she rose up from the ground. At first she backed away from him, frightened, shaking as she threatened him. When she stopped speaking, she stood watching him for a very long time, motionless in her wedding gown. She stepped toward him and squinted at him, absorbing his eye patch, his disfigured skin. He stood in silence as her eyes moved along the scars on his face.
“I thought you had died,” he finally said.
She remained motionless. He watched her, still amazed that it was really she, and tried to imagine what she was thinking. Did she hate him? Was he a beast to her now, inside and out? What reason could she ever have to forgive him?
At last she said, “Our daughter looks like you.”
The sound of horses’ hooves clopped toward them as a carriage rounded a corner in the distance, coming toward the house. “The guests will start leaving soon,” Jeannie said, under her breath. “Come this way.”
She began hurrying toward the back of the Cary sisters’ home, where he had seen her come out of the servants’ door. But he couldn’t walk as fast as she could, and it took her a moment to adjust to his pace. He saw where she was taking him—to a large wooden tool shed on the far side of the house.
She pulled open the door of the shed and stepped into it. Jacob followed. As she vanished into the shadows, he leaned against the wall inside the shed for balance, reached into his pocket and struck a match. When the match ignited, he looked around and saw that the shed was full of Jeannie’s props: the trick handcuffs, the slip-knotted ropes, the barrel nailed shut with too-short nails, and even her red dress, its skirts rumpled inside-out and its dozens of secret pockets revealed. Opposite the door, Jeannie’s coffin was standing upright, the trap door in its side hanging open on its hinges. In the flickering light of Jacob’s match, Jeannie stepped back toward him. He watched as she took a half-burned candle out of the satchel on her shoulder and touched it to the match’s flame between them, a tiny quiet kiss of heat and light. She dipped its other end into the flame and planted it on the lid of the trunk, before closing the door behind them.