“Such a quiet house,” Lizzie said, trying to make it sound a compliment. She set down her glass. “Your servants…”
“All of them drunk,” Mrs. Bell said. “Or I miss my guess.” Lizzie made a noise she intended as sympathetic but feared came out startled. She reminded herself that it was a scandalous household and Mrs. Bell a scandalous woman. Lizzie had not minded the last time she was here. She’d rather enjoyed it. She tried to find the mood of her last visit, the sense of waking up, the hope of her life taking a magical turn. What was missing now was the tea, the sun, and Mary Ellen Pleasant. “I’m sorry not to see Mrs. Pleasant,” she offered. “She’s in the country, you said?”
“Well, one never knows.” Mrs. Bell’s voice dropped confidingly. “But I’ve searched the house.”
She put her cordial aside, the red liquid shivering in the glass, and reached for Lizzie’s hands. Her own were as cold and soft as Lizzie recollected; the fingernails so icy they made the back of Lizzie’s neck twitch, tightened the skin over her skull. Mrs. Bell continued to stroke Lizzie’s hands, and Lizzie forced herself not to withdraw. She touched Lizzie’s wrists, rubbed them with her thumbs. She seemed to be warming her hands on Lizzie like a cat. It occurred to Lizzie that Mrs. Bell might be drunk herself. Or drugged. Hadn’t Mrs. Pleasant’s tea come from Chinatown?
Lizzie wondered exactly how old Mrs. Bell was. Her skin was so translucent the shadows under her eyes were blue. Her gold-brown hair caught the lamplight and glowed like amber. When she smiled, tiny wrinkles opened like fans at the edges of her mouth and eyes. If she didn’t smile, there were no lines in her face at all. Her shoulder touched Lizzie’s, and Lizzie smelled milkweed powder.
“You should stay away from Mrs. Pleasant,” Mrs. Bell whispered. “She don’t like fine white women.” She nodded for emphasis, then straightened. “She wasn’t always that way. She was good to me at first, she introduced me to Mr. Bell. We married in this very house.”
“Weddings are such lovely occasions,” Lizzie said. Actually she thought they lacked spontaneity, but as an unmarried woman she could hardly say so. In books they were interrupted, protested, prevented. They were the scenes of great drama. Jane Eyre’s wedding, for example, the one that had not taken place—you couldn’t call it a lovely occasion, but so much passion! As a young lady, whenever Lizzie had imagined her own wedding, she’d imagined it not taking place the way Jane Eyre’s had not taken place. (And not ever the way it had actually not taken place.)
“Ours was private. I left next day on my wedding trip. Mr. Bell stayed back.”
This was interesting, and Lizzie would have liked to know more about it. “How sad for you both,” she said encouragingly.
But Mrs. Bell waved the point past. “He’s a businessman. Business prevented him.”
SIX
On her return from her wedding trip, Mrs. Bell told Lizzie, Mrs. Pleasant felt there had been insufficient ceremony to mark the occasion. She insisted on a party. It was winter. Mrs. Bell wore a gown of green crêpe de Chine shot with silver thread, and her wedding gift from Mrs. Pleasant, a diamond choker. The mansion was strung with lamps, filled with flowers, and the food was extraordinary. Seven courses were served, smoked and fresh meats, out-of-season vegetables, pâtés and wines from France, fruits glazed with liqueurs; there were jewelry boxes containing teas from China for the guests to take home. “Mrs. Pleasant puffs herself a bit on her table,” said Mrs. Bell. “She used to cook for Governor Booth when he came to town.”
Mrs. Bell was not a good storyteller. Her affect was too even, her chronology unusual, her vocabulary common. But Lizzie loved stories with crêpe de Chine and strings of lamps and out-of-season vegetables. She was a passionate reader. She was more than able to supply whatever details Mrs. Bell omitted.
Only the men had attended. One by one they arrived, without their wives. They made unconvincing, embarrassed excuses, agues and toothaches and unexpected family obligations; a few of one, a few of the other, as if it had been orchestrated. That’s what angered Mrs. Pleasant most, the sense of collusion. She insisted on seating the men at the tables as set, with every other chair left empty. The men began to drink and, when drunk, to make discourteous comments. Teresa Bell was admired, but in an intimate, insulting way, not befitting a married woman. Ribald toasts were made to Mrs. Pleasant as well. Eventually Mrs. Pleasant told Mrs. Bell to leave, and she did so, fleeing up the stairs.
“Wasn’t the insult to me?” Mrs. Bell asked Lizzie. Her voice was plaintive. “I was the bride.” But Mrs. Pleasant insisted on appropriating it. Years before Mrs. Bell had even arrived in San Francisco, Mrs. Pleasant had tried to host a dinner for society’s finest. The result had been the same. The result would always be the same.
Although at the time of their marriage she lived with Mr. and Mrs. Bell, Mrs. Pleasant still owned Geneva Cottage on the San Jose Road. She began to redecorate it. She put in oriel windows, reddened the wood floors with stains, bought gold-veined mirrors, marble basins, and fountains. She hung curtains of lace patterned with orchids. The gardens were replanted to make a large, lush greensward surrounded by groves and private trysting grottoes. There were cool shaded places where ferns and violets could grow, patches of sunny grass perfumed by hidden herbs. When she was finished, she sent out invitations again.
This time she invited only men, some of the most powerful in the city and all of them married to the women who had snubbed her. The invitations were delivered in secret by Negro messengers. Two of the men were bankers; there were a railroad millionaire, three mine owners, and a newspaper baron. There were a blind ward boss and a judge from the state supreme court.
“She never told me the guest list,” said Mrs. Bell. “She does keep her secrets. But anyone could guess that much.”
Mrs. Pleasant promised the men a special evening in the country without their wives. The invitations were written on heavy red paper; the ink was silver. Only one man declined.
The story moved briefly south. When Mrs. Pleasant had left New Orleans, under the name of Madame Christophe, she was only a step ahead of the hangman. She had been stealing slaves, connecting them with the Underground Railroad, and the plantation owners were closing in. She escaped through the help and intervention of Marie LaVeau.
“You’ve heard of LaVeau?” Mrs. Bell asked.
Lizzie hadn’t, but Mrs. Bell did not elaborate further except to say that Mrs. LaVeau had taught Mrs. Pleasant many things and that one of them was how to give a party.
There was little to eat and much to drink. They called the drink champagne, but it was really something far more lethal. Mrs. Pleasant had put it down herself from strawberries she’d grown in special barrels. “The entertainment tonight is voodoo,” she told the men. There were ten beautiful young women, dressed like princesses, but with the skin of slaves, to sit with the men while they smoked and to dance the calinda with them after. There were drums. There were ritual incantations. The ballroom grew hot from the dancing and the liquor; the drumming quickened.
One of the women was a sixteen-year-old named Malina Paillet. She wore yellow roses on her wrist and yellow silk on her shoulders. She caught the attention of one of the men, perhaps a banker, perhaps a mine owner. What appealed to him most was her shyness. She couldn’t answer his questions, couldn’t smile at his jokes. Her movements during the dance were slight, but this, he thought, made them even more suggestive. He drank and she didn’t. When he put his hand on her skirt, groped through the petticoat to squeeze the leg beneath, she froze suddenly, awkwardly, and asked another of the women to change places with her. There was a silence in the room. When the dancing began again, the man had a different partner.
Mrs. Pleasant could see that he was angry and very drunk. She took Malina aside and told her she was a fool to be rude to a rich man. Mrs. Pleasant wanted the men entangled, wanted the women installed as mistresses, draining whatever time and money they could from the men’s wives.
But this was not New Orleans
. Malina refused to listen. “I hate him,” she said, and it was loud enough to be heard throughout the room. She was sobbing, salty tears that would ruin the yellow silk, an expensive dress that belonged, Mrs. Bell noted, to Mrs. Pleasant and not to Malina.
Lizzie had begun to wonder whether this was a story she should be hearing. Mrs. Bell’s manner was so tranquil there was no anticipating the things that came from her mouth. And yet Lizzie was far too engrossed to stop her. It was like a story by Conan Doyle, but with voodoo instead of Mormons. The Palace Hotel hired pretty young mulatto girls as maids. Lizzie could easily picture one of them in a floating silk, tears falling like diamonds from her eyes.
Malina ran from the room and the man went after her. She ran through the pink-and-white parlor, into the courtyard, and into the trees. The man followed. There was silence, and then a single scream. It might have been the peacocks Mrs. Pleasant had purchased to patrol the grounds.
When Mrs. Pleasant and the others reached the yard, Malina was returning. Her hair was loose about her face and she was not wearing her roses or her shoes. She stumbled between the two fountains with their statues—“statues of women,” said Mrs. Bell, in a tone that Lizzie understood immediately to mean they had no clothes on—her head at a strange angle. She fell in the courtyard. Her throat had been cut.
“I’ll take care of this,” Mrs. Pleasant told the men. The other women had fled. “You can rely on my discretion.” She removed her housekeeping apron and covered Malina’s face. “No one will ever know you were here tonight. Your wives need never know.”
Teresa Bell’s hands reached for Lizzie’s neck. Lizzie gasped and pulled away, but Mrs. Bell had caught hold of the chain of her necklace and held her fast. “Such a strange coin.” Her face was very close to Lizzie’s. Lizzie could feel the heat of her breath, could see the raspberry stain like blood on her tongue, the pores of her skin clotted with powder. “Is it very old? I never saw its like,” she said.
“I really must be going.” Lizzie opened Mrs. Bell’s icy fingers by force and stood. Won’t you promise to stay away from Mrs. Pleasant, Mrs. Putnam had begged her, and if the question were put to her again, put to her just now, she would return quite a different answer. Despite every effort, her words came out with a tremble. “I must get back. Everyone is so worried about little Jenny. Please take me to her at once.”
“Did I scare you? I apologize.”
“Not at all.” Lizzie managed to govern her voice, though not her legs. They shook and she sat again. “Why do you keep her on?”
“Keep her on?” Mrs. Bell smiled so her teeth showed. They were small and perfectly graduated, like strung pearls. “You don’t understand a thing, do you? Old Mrs. Pleasant does what she likes. And Mr. Bell, if he has a fault, it’s loyalty. He’d never turn on her.”
“Who was the murderer?”
“She never said. Mr. Bell knows, of course, seeing as he was there.”
“Why have you told me this?” Lizzie asked.
“Because you’re a white woman. And so am I.”
“Then why won’t you take me to Jenny?”
“I will, of course. Are you worried about her? She’s just upstairs, asleep.”
Lizzie felt her heart rattling against the cage of her ribs. Mrs. Bell’s face was too composed; her tone of voice too even. It had all been a performance, and Lizzie had been taken in. “You’re lying, then. She’s frightened to sleep by herself. What have you done with her?” She remembered Mrs. Bell’s face the first time they had met, her courteous, placid voice. My mother set me out on the windowsill in a thunderstorm, she’d said.
Now Mrs. Bell’s face showed annoyance, perhaps—surprise, at least. Something swam through the bright glass surface of her eyes. She picked up the painted canary, wound its key. “We played with this music box here until she dozed off. I lugged her upstairs. I see my word isn’t enough. I’m happy to show you.”
There was a sequence of tinny chirping, then a strangled cry. The automaton froze into place, its beak open in silent alarm.
Lizzie followed Mrs. Bell to the back of the house, where a spiral staircase coiled its way from the basement to the third floor. A glass dome capped the staircase; as a result, the house was slightly brighter here. The light fell directly on a newel post that supported a statue of a woman carved of dark wood, and holding up a lamp. Of course, she was insufficiently clothed. Lizzie would have been surprised to find her otherwise.
They started to climb. The spiral of the stairs formed a murky well at its center. Lizzie watched the well deepen as she rose; it gave her a vague vertigo.
The gas was not lit on the second floor, and the curtains throughout were drawn, so once they left the skylight it was darker than ever. Mrs. Bell fetched a lantern, then opened a small door, too small to lead to a room; Lizzie would have guessed it led to a closet. “The whole house is stuffed with passageways and peepholes,” Mrs. Bell said. “There’s not a room you can know yourself safe from spying eyes. Mrs. Pleasant designed it. This is the shortest route.” She stepped inside.
Lizzie forced herself to follow. The space was low at the entry, but opened at the back into a narrow, windowless corridor. The air was still and smelled of dust. Lizzie saw Mrs. Bell’s light receding in front of her. Mrs. Bell made a turn and the light went out. The space was narrow enough for Lizzie to hold the walls on either side. She imagined they were narrowing further. She made the turn herself and could just see Mrs. Bell’s light again. She hurried forward. The light went out.
Lizzie listened for Mrs. Bell’s footsteps but heard nothing. She groped forward and hit another wall. No one knew she had come here. She and Mrs. Bell were apparently alone in the house except for the drunken servants. Quite alone. No one would ever come to look for her.
“Mrs. Bell,” she called. “Mrs. Bell!” She hit the wall in front of her with her fists. The knocking echoed about her. “Mrs. Bell!”
She decided to go back. They had made only one turn. They had left an open door. It was hard to set her feet on a floor she could not see. She was moving slowly, far more slowly than when she’d had the light. She told herself that this was why it took so long to get back to the turn. Eventually she was forced to acknowledge that she had missed it. She turned back again.
Her eyes were beginning to adjust, but the beating of her heart made the corridor seem to pulse about her, as if with each heartbeat she were being squeezed. In the distance she thought she saw a tiny orange pin of light, like an afterimage of sun. Shadows now appeared, impossible without light, and therefore illusions. She held one hand across her face to protect her eyes and groped forward with the other toward the tiny mirage of brightness. Before entering this corridor she would have said the house was silent; now her straining ears heard no end of creaks, paddings, scuttlings, and shiftings, the worst of which were her own footsteps. Her hip hit something on the wall to her right, something round and cold, which she shrank from at first, and then realized was a doorknob. She twisted it and fell into a room. In the dim light she could make out heavy velvet curtains. She ran to these and wrenched them open. The fog was still too thick to see out, but she could now see inside.
She was in a bedchamber, all done in reds. On a stone pillar by the window was a statue of a woman on a horse. She carried a bow and wore only a quiver of arrows, the strap of which fell between her breasts. There was a vase with raised figures of men and women. Lizzie had to bend close to see. They were riding each other in positions she found hard to credit. She made herself look away.
A picture hung on the wall to her left. It showed a dark woman in a white dress. She lay on a grassy hill, one hand tucked into her own bodice, the other lifting an apple toward her mouth. Her shoulders were carelessly bare, her skirt had fallen away from her ankles; clearly she thought she was alone. But the shadow of a cloaked man stretched across the grass beside her. His legs were elongated in the manner of shadows. He stood watching her, just a step outside the gilded frame. It was a dreamy scen
e, but full of foreboding.
Another picture showed an older, fattish woman in modern dress. Her hair was in disarray, but not seductively so. There was something about her so out of place that Lizzie moved to look more closely. The woman in the picture took a step toward her. Lizzie’s throat closed over and then opened. It was a mirror, of course, enormous, nine or ten feet across, with grapevines carved into the frame and painted in red, gold, and green. “You’re such an idiot!” she told her reflection, who seemed unsurprised to hear it.
The bed itself was piled with cushions, puffy coverlets, and knitted shawls in such chaotic profusion that Lizzie couldn’t immediately tell whether it was occupied or vacant. The bedding lay in mounds and curves. She put a hand hesitantly onto one such drift; it collapsed when pushed. If she had touched someone in the bed this would have finished her. She would have screamed or fainted or died. It was a narrow escape, but the bed was empty.
The knob on the door to the outer hallway was made of white china and painted with a woman’s eyes and apple-red lips. Lizzie walked across a carpet whose edges were embroidered with roses, and turned the knob.
Mrs. Bell was waiting in the hallway with her lamp.
“Right through here,” she said, as if she and Lizzie had never been separated.
Lizzie wanted nothing more than to run for the staircase, the mule, the Ark. But a person who has freely chosen to spend her days asking rich people for money is no coward. She governed her spirited imagination and followed Mrs. Bell down the hall, down a second hall, and into a room at the very end.
SEVEN
The room at the end of the hall was a nursery, although not just now in use. There was the smell of trapped air, and sheeted forms that suggested chairs, chests, rocking horses, phantasms. There had been some testimony about the Bell children at the William Sharon–Allie Hill divorce trial. Lizzie couldn’t quite recall it and couldn’t imagine how it had been relevant. She did remember a cartoon from the Wasp at about that time—Mrs. Pleasant, dressed like Gilbert and Sullivan’s Buttercup, but with a basket of babies. “In my youth when I was young and charming, I practiced baby farming,” the caption had read. She remembered Mrs. Bell telling her there were six children, but some of them grown.
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