Getting a quiet message to a blind man in the middle of a boisterous party would be a challenge, but the servant inclined his head and spread out a hand, waiting.
Once Conrad had left the room to meet the two unexpected visitors, it didn’t take long to explain the situation. While Jack read the summons out loud he canted his head to listen.
Dr. Anna Savard and Dr. Sophie Savard are hereby summoned to appear before Lorenzo Hawthorn, Coroner of the City of New York, on the 28th day of May, 1883, at two o’clock, in his office then and there to answer questions in the matter of the death of Mrs. Janine Campbell.
“Do you know this Hawthorn?” Jack asked Conrad.
“I’ve heard the name, but I’ve never dealt with the man. Damn me if I’m going to break up this wedding luncheon. Hawthorn will have to wait. Will one of you talk to him? Captain Baker? Tell him we’ll be there by four.” He turned toward Oscar and said, “Would you be so kind as to send a telegram to Cunard and let them know that Mr. and Mrs. Verhoeven won’t be sailing today? Mrs. Harrison will have to do something about the luggage that’s gone ahead.”
Just that easily Belmont had gotten both men out of the house, and then he turned on Jack. He let out a deep sigh and pressed three fingers to his brow as if to locate a headache. “You’re not on duty.”
Jack said, “No. My allegiance here is to Anna and Sophie, and Cap.”
“Good. Good.” He was silent for another long moment. Jack could almost hear him thinking, his mind sorting through hundreds of questions and options. Jack had more than a few of his own, but he could bide his time.
“Go back to the luncheon, please, and tell them it’s a business matter that wouldn’t wait. You’ll have to convince Anna to stay where she is, then come find me in Cap’s study. There’s a lot to do before four o’clock.”
Conrad Belmont was a first-class litigator and brilliant attorney, but he didn’t know the Savard women, not really. He seemed to think they could be kept in the dark while the men acted on their behalf.
“You’ll want Anna,” Jack said. “She’d be unhappy—more than unhappy—to be excluded from this business. Sophie, too, under other circumstances.”
“I mean to protect them,” Belmont said, clearly surprised.
“They won’t thank you for it.”
He lifted a hand in surrender. “Tell Anna to come along to the study, but I want to keep Sophie and Cap out of this for as long as possible.”
• • •
THE COMING AND going did not escape Sophie, who kept her place beside Cap at the head of the table while her uncle Adam talked. First Jack, then Conrad, and finally Anna had disappeared into the hall. She watched the door but none of them came back.
Cap didn’t seem to have noticed, which was proof of what she had known for the last hour: he could take no more. She herself was so weary that she could not formulate even the vaguest plan on how to put a polite end to the celebration.
Aunt Quinlan was saying, “On behalf of my beloved niece Sophie and her new husband, I thank you all for your good wishes and welcome company today. It’s time that the newlyweds withdraw. They need to get ready for the adventure just ahead of them, and then I invite you all to a garden party on Waverly Place.”
Aunt Quinlan had seen and understood and acted. Sophie commanded herself not to weep with relief and thankfulness.
• • •
WHEN THE ROOM was empty—even the servants had withdrawn to leave Cap and Sophie alone for as long as they wanted privacy—Cap let out a long, hoarse sigh. He was trying to smile, and Sophie was trying not to cry. They made an excellent couple.
The only time he had touched her today had been the moment he put the ring on her finger, but now as they rose he took her elbow. His grip was firmer than she would have expected.
“My body is failing me,” he told her. “But my mind is still as it ever was. Tell me what’s going on that took Conrad, Jack, and Anna out of the room.”
She grimaced. “I don’t know. Really, I don’t.”
“Then we have a mystery to solve. I suspect my study is the place to start.”
• • •
ANNA SAT AT the long worktable in Cap’s study and ran her hands over the polished oak. Once the whole surface had been covered with a riot of papers and pens and books; now a single sheet of paper had been laid in the middle. A summons, with her own name on it.
The men sitting at the table with her showed nothing of concern or worry, each of them so relaxed that they might have settled here to drink brandy and play poker. Anna took little comfort in this, because, as she had told Jack just yesterday evening, that aura of utter calm was a kind of camouflage that doctors had to employ too, lest they alarm patients and make things worse. Now she was learning what it felt like to want answers and get only a pleasantly blank expression.
The coroner wanted to see her and Sophie both. The idea kept surfacing like a cork in a stormy sea. Clearly the autopsy report had raised questions, and the coroner wasn’t satisfied with the cause of death. Mrs. Campbell had died on her operating table, but Anna knew without doubt that she had not caused the death or even contributed to it. Any competent doctor performing the postmortem would see that, too. The coroner was a very different matter.
In Albany and Boston and every city of any size, coroners were the source of countless stories. Anna had heard many over the years, sometimes troubling, sometimes amusing, but most often just irritating for the depth of incompetence of the work done. She said something like this aloud.
“That’s what happens,” Jack pointed out, “when you ask a man who manufactures boilers or runs a silk factory to gather twelve of his friends to interpret medical evidence.”
“Nothing they say or do is binding by law,” Conrad reminded her.
“But we still have to appear when summoned,” Anna said dryly.
At that moment the door opened and Sophie came in, followed by Cap.
He said, “Uncle Conrad, I hope you don’t mind if we join the party. Tell me, what is that official-looking paper on the table?”
• • •
CAP HAD COVERED his lower face with a gauze mask and now he settled far back from the table, listening intently as Jack first read the summons out loud. Anna studied him, but she could make out little of what he was thinking.
Sophie said, “I imagined a dozen things that might have disrupted this day, from old ladies throwing themselves across the church door to”—she hesitated—“to medical emergencies. I never imagined a summons. And I still don’t know what we’re being accused of. Malpractice?”
“No reason to jump to that conclusion,” Conrad said. “The inquiry is a nuisance and an inconvenience, but nothing more than that.”
Cap said, “Comstock is behind this, I just know it.”
“That may be,” Conrad said. “But more likely it’s the family who is agitating, in my experience.”
“They are looking for someone to blame,” Anna said.
Conrad inclined his head in agreement.
Today was meant to be a happy one for Sophie and Cap, but when Anna looked at them she saw exhaustion and weariness and worry. She was overcome by anger she could not give voice to, and so she leaned over and covered Sophie’s hand with her own. “This is nothing more than a delay. Do you hear me, Sophie? A delay.”
Sophie forced a small smile. “I have to ask again, what kind of charges might we see?”
“Nobody is being charged with anything yet,” Jack said. “The coroner can only send the case to the grand jury if he finds sufficient cause to suspect something other than natural causes. At that point the grand jury may issue indictments, for anything from—”
“It won’t get that far,” Cap interrupted.
“It will not,” his uncle echoed. “But until we know what the autopsy says, it’s difficult to know how best
to approach the matter.”
He turned toward Anna. “We have to start somewhere. Can you tell me about the case?”
It was a question Jack would have asked before all others, had he had the chance to talk to Anna alone. She seemed to have been expecting it, because she sat up straighter and folded her hands in her lap.
“She was brought to the New Amsterdam by ambulance, near death. I took her straight into surgery but as soon as I began I knew there was nothing to be done. If you’re asking me for an exact cause of death, I’m sorry to say it’s not a straightforward matter. Cryptogenic pyaemia was certainly the immediate cause, and that was the result of damage to the uterus and intestines.”
Conrad started visibly, and Anna realized that he really knew nothing at all about what had transpired. The idea of being charged with malpractice had not evoked for him what it did for every practicing physician: abortion.
He said, “This Mrs. Campbell died of complications of an illegal operation?”
So he was familiar with the euphemisms.
“Yes,” Anna said. “An attempted abortion. Under the law it would be seen as a criminal abortion.”
“If she was with child at all,” Sophie volunteered.
“That’s a valid point,” Anna said. “So to be more exact, she died of a massive infection following from an attempted abortion. Some kind of probe or instrument was introduced through the vagina that punctured the cervix and uterus and the adjoining internal organs, most notably the descending colon. Something with a curved or oval head, with a keen but not an especially sharp edge. I am sorry to speak so bluntly, Conrad, but there’s no delicate way to describe these things.”
• • •
JACK WATCHED CONRAD Belmont shift in his seat, and he understood the man’s discomfort. In the privacy of a shared bed he could listen to Anna talk about anything, but in company it was quite a different matter to hear her use terminology only she and Sophie would consider technical and benign.
“A curette?” Sophie asked.
“Possibly,” Anna said. “Or a long-handled metal scraper or spoon of some kind.”
“Do I understand correctly that Mrs. Campbell may have undergone the operation to end a pregnancy that didn’t exist in the first place? And this was her own work? Self-induced?”
“I think it must have been,” Anna said. “But I can’t be sure; I was working as fast as possible. The doctors who did the postmortem will have more to say on that count.”
“Was she unbalanced, to have done this?” Conrad asked.
Anna said, “Desperate, certainly. Unbalanced is a different matter entirely.”
Conrad folded his hands on the table and was silent while he gathered his thoughts.
“I’m going to assume for a minute that neither of you has ever been questioned by the coroner before,” he began. “First, you will not be under oath and you don’t have to answer any question put to you. I’ll speak up if I don’t want you to answer. The other thing to remember—and it’s something most people don’t realize at all: the coroner himself and the lawyers who question you—during this hearing or at trial—are not under oath.”
Jack’s face was set in a grim smile, and Anna took note. She would have questions for him later, when they could speak freely.
23
ON THE WAY to the coroner’s office, alone in a cab with Anna, it seemed to Jack that she had regained her calm, or at least to have gotten the upper hand over her anger.
Sophie had changed her clothes before they left for the coroner’s office, but there hadn’t been time for Anna to go home, and so she still wore the pretty gown she had put on this morning for the wedding. It was pale yellow with a raised pattern woven in; there was a name for it that he couldn’t recall just now, and really, he asked himself, why was he worried about fashions at this moment? He wasn’t, of course. His worries were elsewhere.
He covered her hand with his own and could feel how cold it was, even through her glove.
“Are you worried?”
The question surprised him. He said, “I wish we were married already.”
She smiled at him. “You want some kind of legal grounding to stand beside me?”
“Married or not, nothing less than a bullet would move me from where I am right now.”
She drew in a short, startled breath and pressed her forehead to his shoulder. He had robbed her of words and made her forget her question, which was exactly what he hoped to do. The simple truth was, he wasn’t sure he could lie convincingly, and he was glad not to have to admit to her that he was very worried indeed.
• • •
FOR SOPHIE THE first surprise came before she had even gotten out of the carriage in front of the coroner’s office. Newspaper reporters—too many of them to count—were jostling for position like boys at a baseball game. They shouted questions before the horses came to a full stop, their voices clashing, tossing up random words impossible to overhear: Dr. Savard and Cap Verhoeven and coroner and malpractice and marriage. She wondered if the day’s scandals might even warrant an extra edition.
“Don’t,” Cap said. “Don’t engage them in any way.”
“Try to keep your face neutral,” Conrad said. He sat across from her, his hat resting on his lap. “Don’t respond to even the simplest question. Don’t scowl, but don’t smile, either.”
Sophie swallowed hard to make sure her voice wouldn’t wobble. “I will do my best.”
Cap was sitting tucked back into the corner of the leather cushions, his lower face still masked. Sophie saw now that it was flecked with a fine spray of blood.
“You should be at home,” she said. “Right now, turn the carriage around and go home.”
“Nonsense.” The gauze mask puckered when he smiled. “I am perfectly comfortable right here. We’ll drive off a ways and come back to wait around the corner. Then I’ll nap while we wait. Anna and Jack are here. Best to get inside as soon as possible.”
The second surprise was the coroner’s clerk, who was polite and even deferential. Mr. Horner greeted them in a deep, damaged voice and bowed to Sophie and Anna solemnly, without a trace of condescension or mockery. He was a tall, cadaverously thin man, dressed in an ancient black suit carefully pressed and brushed. The knotted wide linen tie at his neck didn’t quite cover a winding scar, as thick and pale as a slug, reaching almost from one ear to the other. A veteran of the war, as were most men of his age.
Anna was studying Mr. Horner too, and Sophie knew her cousin was trying to work out for herself what injury the clerk had suffered, what the surgeon had done, and whether she could have done a better job and left less of a scar. This small evidence that Anna was, as always, more interested in practicing medicine than talking about it gave Sophie a way to focus her thoughts.
The issue before them was medical in nature, and medicine was her field.
They were shown into a meeting room that smelled of stale tobacco and sweat: damp walls, peeling paint, windows grimy with soot, the floorboards warped. City Hall always seemed to be rotting from the inside out.
Conrad’s clerk was already in place, arranging papers and notepads, ink bottles and pens.
Mr. Horner withdrew, closing the door behind himself, and their small party took seats around the industrious Mr. York, Conrad’s law clerk, who had managed to gather a great deal of information in very little time.
“The autopsy report,” he said, pushing a closely written sheet of paper into the middle of the table. “It might be best if one of the physicians read it out loud, sir.”
Anna took it up, to Sophie’s great relief. She thought her own voice would waver, and she didn’t want to give away her fear, not even to her own people.
As soon as Anna began to read, Mr. York turned to the business of making notes, his head lowered over the paper before him.
“It’s dated se
ven this morning,” Anna said, and read on quickly, stopping to summarize. “He notes normal signs of multiple pregnancies and a recent birth. This is a very blunt, technical document, I should warn you.”
“Read on,” Conrad said. “You needn’t worry about offending anyone here.”
Anna cleared her throat and did as she was asked.
The abdomen shows a standard laparoscopic incision neatly closed which I reopen. I find a puncture wound that passed through the cervix to tear the uterine wall from horn to horn made by an instrument similar in shape to a curette or probe. After sectioning and removal of the reproductive organs, intestinal and mesenteric injuries corresponding to the uterine perforation are visible. A four-inch-long piece of the ileum is torn from the mesentery. Visceral and parietal peritoneum is filled with yellow exudate, fecal matter, serum, albumin, and approximately two quarts of pus. A displaced intestinal loop was covered by fibrino-purulent deposits.
The other abdominal organs showed no irregularities, and beyond these, none other were examined, sufficient injuries being found in the reproductive organs to reach a conclusion.
Cause of death: Shock, septic peritonitis, and blood loss due to an illegal, negligent, and incompetent operation carried out by person or persons unknown between twenty-four and forty-eight hours previous to death.
• • •
“IT’S SIGNED DR. Donald Manderston,” she finished. “I don’t know the man. Sophie?”
She shook her head. “The name sounds familiar, but no.”
“At least now we know why we’re here,” Conrad said. “The sticking point is person or persons unknown. Mrs. Campbell’s injuries were not of her own making, in other words. They’re looking for her abortionist.”
“Only if you accept Manderston’s premise,” Sophie said, irritation blooming in her voice in a way she couldn’t temper. “Will this Dr. Manderston be here to answer questions?”
“Oh, yes,” Conrad said. “Here they come now. But Sophie, my dear. Leave the asking of questions to me.”
• • •
OSCAR WAS THE last man through the door, winded and windblown, a welcome face for all its ill humor. Somehow or another he had managed to insert himself into this matter, which was a stroke of luck. Another detective might not be quite so forthcoming as Oscar would be when Jack hit him with some difficult questions.