“I’m sure we could sell tickets at a premium to see that baboon’s head fly apart like a pumpkin,” said Maroney. “Set up chairs for the audience. Parasols, for the splatter.”
“The man has friends,” Jack reminded his partner.
“Not true,” Maroney said. “He has lackeys. He has compatriots. He even has admirers. But if he didn’t carry that pistol in his vest and the postmaster general in his pocket, he’d be easy enough to squash. As it is I wait daily for someone to put a bullet in his noggin.”
Jack said, “You’re forgetting about the Young Men’s Christian Association and his Society for the Suppression of Vice.”
Maroney waved his cigar like a magic wand that could make short work of such pallid adversaries. He was hoisting himself up and out of his chair when the door flew open and Michael Larkin dashed in, Comstock’s box of confiscated dirty pictures clamped under one arm. Without a word to either of them he leapt onto a desk, unlatched a high cupboard with one hand, and shoved the box in with the other.
Larkin was sitting at the same desk bent over a piece of paper when a patrolman came in, not a week in uniform. The kid ducked his head apologetically.
“Baker wants the whole station house searched,” he said. “Can I come in?”
He made a quick and superficial job of it, only glancing in Michael Larkin’s direction before he excused himself again and left.
There was a long silence.
Maroney cleared his throat. “Michael, my friend. Not on duty tonight?”
“No,” came the answer. The eldest of the Larkin brothers looked up at them and winked. “All of a sudden I’ve got quite a lot of reading to do.”
“Just out of the blue,” said Jack.
“Fell into my lap,” Larkin agreed amiably. “So to speak. Would you care to have a look yourself?”
Jack leaned back in his chair and propped his feet up on the desk. It had been a long day, starting at dawn in the greenhouses at home. He thought of the ferry, of ferocious Sister Ignatia and the orphans, of the lady doctor. Savard, they had called her.
He bent over the report in front of him but his mind stayed focused on that unusual face, Elizabeth or Mary, Ida or Edith or Helen. He fished the city directory out of a drawer and flipped through the pages until he found two listings: Sophie E. Savard and Liliane M. Savard living at the same address. Another mystery. One he would be looking into as soon as he could get away from Oscar.
• • •
WHEN ANNA CAME within sight of Washington Square she realized how tired she was. Surgery was hard work, physically and mentally exhausting, but even the most challenging case had nothing on Sister Ignatia and a crowd of orphans.
Coming home was like shedding a coat with bricks loaded into every pocket and sewn into the hem. The tension that had collected in her shoulders and back began to abate even before the house came into sight. Some days she might lament the demands of her profession, but she loved the house and garden on Waverly Place without a single reservation. During the year she spent in Europe, Anna had worked herself to exhaustion every day so that she could sleep at night in strange houses in stranger cities. In the end she had learned a great deal, about both surgery and herself. She belonged here, and nowhere else.
Anna went around the back, past the small carriage house and stable and the icehouse, stopping in the garden to say hello to Mr. Lee, who was turning soil in a steady, studied rhythm. Mr. Lee was a serious, fastidious, and deeply affectionate man. He had taught her how to tell weed from seedling, to button her shoes and tie a slipknot, how to slip eggs from under a hen without being pecked, and he knew a hundred ballads that he was happy to recite or sing. With a perfectly straight face Mr. Lee had taught her and Sophie a dozen tongue twisters that still made them laugh. Anna knew that if she was patient, he would observe things in his quiet way that he meant for her to hear.
Now he looked at the sky and predicted that contrary to appearances, winter had not given over. It was an odd turn of phrase, as though the winter were a bear getting ready for a long hibernation. To his shovel he remarked that neighbors who had already begun to clear away mulch would regret it. One more hard frost was coming, and it would take every unprotected tender new thing in the world. It would mean the end of the crocus and delicate Turkish tulips that had begun to raise their heads, a scattering like jewels all through the fallow beds and lawn.
Mr. Lee was seldom wrong about the weather, but just at the moment Anna couldn’t worry about such things. Not while she stood in the garden, knowing that in another month it would be warm enough to sit in the pergola in the soft shadow of blossoming apple and tulip trees.
The garden was her favorite place in the world. As a little girl, before Sophie, she had had the garden to herself until the war took that away, too. When their father fell in battle, Uncle Quinlan’s grandchildren were at the house most days, and from them she had learned what it meant to share more than toys and books and stories.
Someplace along the way Anna had fallen into the habit of calling Aunt Quinlan Grandma, but the summer she turned nine Uncle Quinlan’s grandson Isaac Cooper, just a year older, had taken it upon himself to correct her. In a quavering and still strident voice he made himself clear: she had no grandparents, no parents, nobody, and he would not allow her to claim his grandmother as her own. To Anna she could be nothing more than Aunt Quinlan.
She hadn’t been a child given to weeping or one who retreated when play got rough. What kept her temper in check was the look on Isaac’s face, and the brimming tears he dashed away with an impatient hand. Anna told herself that he hadn’t really meant to be so mean; he had lost father and grandfather and two uncles to the war, after all, and news of his father’s death had come not three months ago.
Beyond that, he was both wrong and right. Isaac’s mother was Uncle Quinlan’s daughter and Aunt Quinlan’s stepdaughter, which meant that Isaac and Levi were not related to Aunt Quinlan by blood, as Anna certainly was. On the other hand, it did no good to pretend that she still had what was lost, and so she kept the sting of Isaac’s words to herself.
But Aunt Quinlan knew, because Isaac himself told her. He went to her, teary eyed, righteous in his indignation that Anna would try to take his grandmother from him. Anna never knew what Aunt Quinlan had said to him, how she had put his mind to rest, but that evening she called Anna into her little parlor, gave her a cup of hot chocolate, and waited while she sipped it. Then she simply pulled Anna into her lap and held her until the tears came and finally ended, leaving her boneless and trembling.
Anna said, “I want Uncle Quinlan back.”
“So do I,” said her aunt. “I still hear him coming up the stairs, and it’s always a terrible moment when I realize it was just wishful thinking. You know he would have come home to us if it had been in his power.”
Come home to us. To us.
Anna nodded, her throat too swollen with tears to allow even a single word.
Then Aunt Quinlan had hugged her tighter. “You are my own dear little sister’s sweetest girl,” she said. “And you belong here with me. When we lost your ma and then your da, every one of us wanted you, all the brothers and sisters. But I was the lucky one, you came home with me. And you may call me anything you like, including Grandma. My ma, your grandma, would have wanted you to, and I would be honored.”
But Anna couldn’t. After that summer the word wouldn’t come out of her mouth, whether Isaac was there or not. From then on the woman who was as good as a mother and grandmother to her was Aunt Quinlan, no more or less.
The garden might have lost its magic for her then, but for Cap. He wouldn’t allow her to withdraw. Her friend, her schoolmate, another war orphan living with an aunt. Together they spent every minute in the garden planning adventures and launching schemes, reading stories out loud, playing croquet and checkers and Old Maid and eating, always eating whatever the gard
en had to offer: strawberries, persimmons, quince, apricots the color of the setting sun, blackberries that cascaded over the fence in late summer heat and stained fingers and lips and pinafores. When it rained they were in the pergola, which was outside and inside at the same time, a shadowy bower that smelled of lilac or heliotrope or roses, according to the season.
And then Sophie had come from New Orleans, and together the three of them had made an island where Isaac held no sway. And so it had been long after they left childhood behind, until just two years ago.
Mr. Lee broke into her daydreams by clearing his throat.
“Do you mark me, Miss Anna?” He smiled at her, a lopsided curl to his mouth. “Don’t put away your winter things yet,” he said. “Spring’s in no rush this year, and neither should you be.”
And now she had to go into the house and have tea and then dinner, and instead of going to bed she would have to dress in the costume Aunt Quinlan had arranged for her, and go out into the night with Cap, to the Vanderbilts’ fancy dress ball. Because Cap was her friend, and he needed her.
3
AUNT QUINLAN’S PARLOR was comfortable and completely out of fashion; no slick horsehair sofas or rock-hard bolsters encrusted with beadwork, no bulky, heavily carved furniture to collect dust and crowd them all together. Instead the walls were crowded with paintings and drawings and the chairs and sofas were agreeably deep and soft, covered in velvet the dusky blue of delphinium in July.
Sitting together with her aunt and Sophie and her cousin Margaret, Anna was glad of the respite. For a few minutes there was no talk beyond the passing around of seedcake and scones, teacups and milk jugs.
Her stomach growled loudly enough to be heard even by Margaret, who was bound by convention and simply refused to hear such things.
She said, “You haven’t eaten at all today, have you.” Margaret was, strictly regarded, not a cousin at all. She was Aunt Quinlan’s stepdaughter, raised in this very house by Uncle Quinlan and her mother, his first wife. Two years ago her sons had come into the money left by their father, and set off for Europe almost immediately. Because Margaret missed them so, Anna and Sophie must bear the brunt of her frustrated maternal instincts.
“She’ll eat now,” Aunt Quinlan said. “Mrs. Lee, could you please bring Anna a plate of something filling?” Then she held out an arm to gesture Anna closer.
At eighty-nine the symmetry of Aunt Quinlan’s bone structure was more pronounced than ever. It didn’t matter that the skin over those perfect cheekbones worked like the finest silk gauze, carefully folded into tiny pleats and left to dry that way; she was beautiful, and could be nothing less. Her hair was a deep and burnished silver, a color that set off the bright blue of her eyes. Her very observant eyes. Right now they were full of simple pleasure to have both Anna and Sophie home for tea at once.
When Anna leaned over to kiss her cheek, Aunt Quinlan patted her gingerly. Her arthritis was very bad today; Anna knew that without asking because Auntie’s teacup sat untouched on the low table before her.
To Sophie Anna said, “Difficult delivery last night?”
“Just drawn out.” Her tone said it was a topic that should wait until they were alone. If Margaret were not here they could talk about things medical, because Aunt Quinlan was always interested and nothing surprised her. But Margaret was alarmingly weak of stomach and squeamish, as if she had never borne children herself.
“What about you?” Sophie asked. “Any interesting surgeries?”
“None at all,” Anna said. “I spent most of the day with the sisters from St. Patrick’s picking up orphans in Hoboken.”
Sophie’s mouth fell open only to shut again with an audible snap. “Sister Ignatia? Why on earth—”
“Because I promised you that if one of the sisters came to call I would go attend.”
“Oh, no.” Sophie was trying not to smile, and failing. “I was expecting Sister Thomasina from St. Vincent de Paul.” She pressed her lips hard together but a laugh still escaped her with a puff of air.
“What an interesting turn of events,” Aunt Quinlan said. She looked more closely at Anna. “You and the infamous Sister Ignatia together all day long, I wonder that you’re still standing.”
“Maybe Sister Ignatia isn’t,” Margaret suggested. “Anna might have been the end of her.” Margaret’s tone was a little sharp, as it always was when the subject of the Roman Catholic Church was raised. She folded her hands at her waist—corseted down to a waspish twenty inches though Margaret was more than forty—and waited. She was looking for an argument. Anna sometimes enjoyed arguing with her aunt’s stepdaughter, but she had things to do.
“I suppose it is funny,” she said. “We certainly . . . clashed. Now should I worry about Sister Thomasina? Did she come to call this morning?”
“No,” said Aunt Quinlan. “Apparently our daily allotment of nuns was met with the Sisters of Charity.”
Margaret cleared her throat. She said, “I had a letter from Isaac and Levi today. Would you like to hear it?”
It wasn’t like Margaret to give up an argument so easily, and now Anna understood why. She loved nothing more than letters from her two sons. They all enjoyed the letters, which were long and entertaining. This time Levi had done the writing, and they heard about climbing in the Dolomites, a difficult journey to Innsbruck, a long essay about laundry, and how each nation distinguished itself on the way underclothes were folded and how the bedding smelled.
It was good to see Margaret so pleased about her letter. And maybe, Anna reasoned to herself, maybe while she was distracted it would be possible to slip away before she remembered the ball and more to the point, the costume Anna was going to wear to the ball.
She was almost out the door when Margaret called after her. “When is Cap coming to fetch you, Anna?”
“I’m going to stop for him, as he’s on the way,” Anna said, inching away. “At half past ten. Things don’t get started until eleven.”
• • •
ONCE UPSTAIRS SOPHIE said, “The longer you make Margaret wait and wonder about your costume, the more outraged she’s going to be.”
“But she does so enjoy ruffling her feathers,” Anna said. “Who am I to disappoint her?”
She followed Sophie into her room and stretched out on the bed with its simple coverlet of pale yellow embroidered with ivy in soft gray-greens. When they were schoolgirls they did this every afternoon, meeting in one bedroom or the other to talk before they launched themselves into chores and homework and play.
Sophie took off her shoes with an uncharacteristic impatience and fell onto the bed, facedown.
Her voice came muffled. “How bad was Sister Ignatia really?”
Anna crossed her arms over her waist and considered her answer. “It’s a sorry business, what goes on with orphans. It reminds me how fortunate I was. We both were.”
“We were,” Sophie agreed. “We are.”
“I knew in the abstract, of course. But those children were terrified. And Sister Ignatia—” She sat up suddenly. “I’m going to vaccinate children tomorrow, at the orphanage. I have no idea how many.” When she had told Sophie about her confrontation with the nun, there was a small silence.
“Anna,” Sophie said. “You know there are at least ten Roman Catholic orphanages in the city, small and large. St. Patrick’s is the biggest, and it has beds for two thousand children or more.”
That brought Anna up short.
“I’ll have to come with you,” Sophie said finally. “If there are less than a hundred, we can manage.”
“And if there are more,” Anna said, “I will pay a call to the Board of Health.”
Sophie gave a soft laugh. “Sister Ignatia will regret underestimating you.”
“I doubt Sister Ignatia has many regrets.”
There was a long silence and then Sophie said, “Have y
ou ever seen your face when you’re angry at the way a patient has been treated?”
Anna collapsed back against the pillows, and a low laugh escaped her.
“You are not saying that I frighten Sister Ignatia, of all people.”
“Of course you do.” Sophie yawned. “It’s why you’re so effective.”
“So then we’ll go tomorrow afternoon,” Anna said. “I need to be in surgery in the morning.”
“Clara’s hearing is tomorrow afternoon at the Tombs. Did you forget?”
For a long moment Anna was quiet, trying to think of a way to do two things at once in different parts of the city. She had to be at Dr. Garrison’s hearing, to show her support and respect for a colleague and former professor. There was no help for it.
“I’ll write to Sister Ignatia and reschedule for Wednesday afternoon. Unless I’m forgetting something else?”
When Sophie didn’t answer, Anna turned on her side to look at her directly. She said, “What happened today, really?”
“Mrs. Campbell asked about Clara.”
Anna felt herself tense. “And?”
“I can dissemble when necessary,” Sophie said. “I said that yes, I had read about Dr. Garrison’s arrest. And then I made it clear that I do not have contraceptives—”
“—or know—”
“—or know how to find them or information about them, and that I observe all laws to the letter.”
Which was no protection at all, both Anna and Sophie knew. Just the previous week Clara Garrison had been arrested for the third time simply because she had answered the door to a man distraught about his wife’s health and offered him a booklet of information. But the next knock—not five minutes later—brought postal inspectors and uniformed police officers.
After Clara had been arrested and taken away to the Tombs, the inspectors had searched her home and practice in the most destructive manner possible. They found an envelope sitting in plain sight on her desk with a half dozen of the same informational pamphlets she had given to Comstock’s undercover inspector, as well as two new female syringes.