Conjurer (24 page)

“Oh, but, Cousin Daniel, we were there! We saw—!”

“No more, Ella. No more, I say! We will do nothing. We
can
do nothing … Listen to me, child, if I seek out the constabulary now—albeit for a worthy cause, they will arrest me for being an escaped convict and return me to prison. You understand that, don't you, girl? Don't you? And where will you be then?”

Ella's lips remain parted, her eyes wide but dry.

“We must keep what we saw to ourselves, Ella. You know we must.”

At last, she finds her tongue. “I could speak without you, cousin.”

“Oh, Ella, child … And where will you tell them you dwell?”

Ella thinks. “At the house I left when I came to you.”

“And don't you imagine the police would then return to it and question the madam whether that were true?” Daniel hobbles back and forth as he speaks. Despite his brave words, he's also growing very frightened, and his fear is infecting the girl he's trying to protect.

She starts to cry. All the fine things she's been imagining for the future seem suddenly as insubstantial as snowflakes melting in the sun. “We're in danger, aren't we, Daniel?”

“Not if we keep our heads down and our thoughts private … just as we've been doing, little cousin.”

But Ella doesn't believe this. “What if we were seen in that alley with Mr. Durand? What if someone already knows you and I were there? Maybe that policeman you met up with four days past?”

“He wasn't a policeman, child. At least, I don't believe he was—”

“Or someone else?” Ella's voice drops to the merest whisper. “Someone who may have encountered you while you were in prison?”

A Letter to a Friend

A
LMOST ALL THE NOTABLES OF
the city turn out for the funeral of John Durand, making the portion of lower Pine Street that fronts St. Peter's Church and its memorial garden a sea of people and carriages and horses. There are footmen and coachmen attending to their nervous animals as well as their equally distressed masters and mistresses; there are those same highborn people hurrying along, heads down, necks tense, eyes grimly focused on the cobbled road as they thread their way through the noisy, pushing gawkers; there are hawkers of broadsheets and penny papers, crying out the latest and most sensational headlines; and there are ordinary town folk who merely hope for a glimpse of the now notorious Emily Durand and her cohorts. Philadelphia has never known such a scandal. For those gathered to watch the spectacle unfold, it's a raucous and entertaining time.

For the true mourners, such a rowdy scene is torture. They murmur curt and somber greetings to one another when they finally pass through the wall's wrought-iron gates and achieve the sanctuary of the churchyard and the row of undertaker's men who line up to greet them: their tall hats swathed in black veils, their coats swagged in black draping as wide as capes.

Martha and Owen Simms are among the crowd who hurry in from the crowded street. Simms speaks in hushed tones to several people close by. Martha says nothing although her thoughts revolve and revolve around the catastrophe.
If I hadn't insisted on accompanying Thomas to the hotel … if Emily hadn't been hiding in Paladino's rooms … if their secret had been maintained, would John Durand now be alive?

Or is it possible that the conjurer wasn't involved in the murder, as both he and Emily continue to insist, and that this cataclysmic act
—
as some are suggesting
—
is the result of a theft gone awry? Or perhaps even a case of mistaken identity, as others hypothesize? Because what motive could Paladino have for killing his mistress's husband? What good result would the conjurer have expected from his actions? Surely he didn't imagine he'd marry her?
But even as Martha poses these final queries, she recalls her own experience with the man. Reason and logical deliberation are not attributes Eusapio Paladino seems to possess.

Then she remembers the snuffbox Thomas Kelman found, and her ruminations hit an insurmountable hurdle.
Pickpockets and cut-purses are far too agile and clever to leave behind silver boxes. If John Durand were purposely murdered, wouldn't his assassin have robbed him in order to make the crime appear to be the random act of a footpad? Even Eusapio, for all his otherworldliness, would have considered the simple precaution of searching his victim's pockets
. Something is missing, Martha feels. But what? What?

With Owen Simms guiding her, she steps inside the packed church. The cold morning air seems chillier on the brick building's interior: the stone and marble floor frigid, the carved wood of the walls icy to the touch, despite her silk-lined gloves. An usher festooned with the customary satin ribbons silently escorts them down the center aisle and places them in a box pew already occupied by the Ilsleys and the Shippens. Below the facing seats are small braziers full of hot coals, but they do nothing to warm the wintry air. Martha nods silent acknowledgments to those closest to her, then gazes across the gathered people. Beyond the inky-hued hats and veils, beyond the crepe and bombazine, the paramatta and cashmere and grenadine, she notes that the golden processional crosses have been sheathed in a velvet so black it appears to crush the light.

Then, most astonishingly, the widow herself appears. Fully shrouded in heavy veils, she's conveyed to her family pew. To those in attendance, it's inconceivable that Emily Durand should be present, that she can lift her head in public after she's broken the strictest law of polite society; and a murmur of outrage begins echoing through the large old building. The faceless figure remains stiff and stoical. Martha wonders what her expression must be beneath her widow's weeds and feels her heart open in pity.
Surely Emily couldn't have wished her husband dead
, she thinks.
The woman may have been heedless and headstrong, and her transgression complete, but don't we all deserve our fellow sojourners' compassion as well as God's redeeming grace? Especially when we are most in need of aid?

Then the organ commences its dirge, and the funeral procession begins. Despite this signal that the service has begun, the congregation can barely cease its shocked and disapproving whispers in order to rise and sing.

“… We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out …” Martha hears intoned from the Order for the Burial of the Dead. For a moment, she thinks of her father, and the fact that she must soon have these same words recited for him.

“… I said, I will take heed of my ways: that I offend not in my tongue …” Martha can't help herself; she gasps aloud. As quick as lightning, Owen Simms touches her gloved hand with his own.

“Are you quite well, Martha, my dear? Do you wish to leave?”

The woman's short gray hair sticks to the sleeping pallet like thousands of sewing needles stabbed willy-nilly into the mattress ticking. Her lips are half-parted and colorless, her skin also curiously ashen.

From beyond the barred window in her chamber, a cock crows dawn. The woman doesn't stir. The cock crows again, and the sounds of other inmates beginning to waken jostle into the room. There are loud and unencumbered yawns, a resonant, repetitive cough, a habitual and nervous laugh, a mumbled curse. The woman's lips remain parted; her hands, clenched and gnawed to the quick at her fingertips, maintain a claw-like grasp on the gray blanket.

“Time to rise!” the matron calls in as she passes the open door.

The woman doesn't respond, and the other female residents of the Asylum for Relief of Persons Deprived of Their Use of Reason also begin walking by, lining up to wash in the communal bath. “The princess needs her beauty sleep,” one of them jeers. Several gawk at the reclining figure, then turn away and shamble forward in the queue. The corridor is cold, the bath the only room with a fire. No purpose is served in palavering over an obvious malingerer. Better to move on to the next event of the morning: a breakfast of porridge followed by the distribution of daily tasks.

The matron returns to the patient's room. “Time to rise,” she orders again, but the woman remains insensate.

“You and your dreams,” the matron adds. “You'll have us all thinking we'd be better off asleep. Are you flying about like an angel again? Is that it? Or do we have the hidden cave in the hillside and all that?” The matron regards the motionless figure for another moment. “Time to rise, I said.” She sighs irritably. “Your brother won't be visiting, if that's what's fretting you. He's only here but once every other month or so, so you've a good many weeks before you see his face again.”

Again the gray-haired woman fails to respond.

“I'll have to call Dr. Earle if you don't shake a leg, missy.”

The woman remains motionless, and the matron begins noticing the stiff fingers, the hard line of the cheekbones, the rigid shoulders. “We can't have any of this stubborn nonsense you're playing at. There's nothing to be fearful of, I tell you. You must get up at once and join the others.”

When the patient again makes no reply, the matron's temper gets the better of her. “Don't you think you can simply close your eyes and pretend not to hear me!” She strides toward the bed and reaches down to shake the inmate from her lethargy, all the while maintaining a stance of preparedness. Not a few of these cases have suddenly leapt up and tried to choke a nurse. “I'm telling you, your brother's nowhere near!”

The matron's fingers touch the woman's shoulders, draw instantly back, then rush to her neck and the life force that should be beating there. “Nurse!” she shouts. “Send for Dr. Earle.”

Staring at a sheet of letter paper, Pliny Earle folds his hands on his desk, then unknits the fingers and repeats the process—several times over, ten times over. He wishes he could close his eyes and erase the picture of the dead woman's face, the vision of her living face, too, the eyes that looked only inward, viewing and reviewing scenes from the past.

Earle takes the file on Robey's sister, dips his pen in ink and writes a methodical
Now deceased
on the top right-hand corner, and then again pauses. A life ended. A life eked out in the unwholesome solitude of this place. And for what? Better, he thinks, that she should have died three decades before. Or before that. Pliny Earle doesn't believe in the existence of a God, or this would be an excellent time to rail against that deity's callowness and injustice. Instead, he's left with an almost suffocating sense of purposelessness and defeat.

He moves his left hand to the letter paper, again inks the pen.

Dear Mr. Robey
, he writes,
I regret to inform you
—then stops. This time he does close his eyes, and his mind begins to whip through Robey's sister's file as if he were reading it.

Admitted to the Asylum thirty years prior, she was suffering the physical effects of uterine hemorrhage coupled with acute religious anxiety that produced a form of mania in which the patient alternately called herself “Martha” or “Mary.”

The former was hardworking, whether in the kitchen gardens of a summer day or in the sewing and knitting circles that clustered together when the weather cooled. This persona also had an air of brusque and sometimes brutal impatience that kept the other patients at bay. “Mary,” on the other hand, was dreamy and often idle; when she sat alone staring into space, she claimed she was “listening to Jesus speak.”

It was understood that Robey was not her true surname, but her mental state remained so damaged and precarious that her true identity never surfaced. Implicit in the admitting physician's remarks was the recognition that the patient came from a family who were of some means—and as such wished their name withheld. It was not an uncommon practice.

All this and more was described in the file: decades of interviews and observations. What did not appear in the notes, however, was Earle's recent and disquieting conversation with the woman's brother—and this is what now causes him to stare at the empty piece of letter paper.

Are there means, Dr. Earle?
he can almost hear “Robey” ask him,
whereby my sister's life might end sooner than nature allows?

It's the memory of that exchange that impels the physician to take up his pen again, although the letter he now commences is not the one he previously began. Perhaps the woman died in her sleep of natural causes as all believed. But perhaps there's a more sinister reason. A poison that can't be detected, an accomplice who administered it. The idea is hideous; and Pliny Earle's uncertain how he will face his board of directors if such proves the case. Better—and safer—to ignore such a dire possibility, but that he simply cannot do. The patient should not be forgotten in death as she was in life.

Earle composes a brief letter to a friend he's known and trusted since their college days together. The man isn't a physician, and his position as an aide to the mayor of Philadelphia is enigmatic and ambiguous. His name is Thomas Kelman.

An Embroidered Shawl

A
S MARTHA SITS IN GROWING
consternation and listens to a eulogy for John Durand, and Pliny Earle puts pen to paper, Thomas Kelman is admitted into Mrs. Rosegger's second-floor sitting room. The maid withdraws, leaving the two alone in a place made intimate by soft and shadowy light: a small fire dozing in the grate, the midmorning sun stirring behind layers of heavy drapery and lace.

“It's good to see you again, Thomas,” Mrs. Rosegger says with some effort, then abruptly turns mute. The seven small words seem to her too weighted with innuendo, too perfumed and amorous. After several inarticulate moments, she recommences her discourse, attempting but failing to achieve a less personal tone. “It was kind of you to respond so quickly to my message.”

Kelman continues to stand. She doesn't ask him to sit. He nods in reply, then looks down at her chair and at her.