The Impossible Girl

by Lydia Kang

  Good.

  Alexander had sent a letter, mailed from Philadelphia. Oh, she’d forgotten he had mentioned he had a trip planned. He would be livid when he found out about the attack. He went to Philadelphia occasionally, to peruse the extraordinary anatomical collection at Jefferson Medical College, sketch the items afterward, and present them to Duncan as possible new pieces. He would stay one more day before returning.

  “You should stay home tonight,” Leah said, worried.

  “I can’t. I have work.”

  “But even Jacob isn’t safe!”

  “We have a job, Leah,” Cora sighed. “I have to go.”

  After more arguing, Leah gave up. She could not bear to sit at home and worry, so she would spend the rest of the evening with the upstairs maid, whose tailor family was going out to see a show at Vauxhall Gardens Theater.

  Just before sunset, Cora, as Jacob, met with her boys down the street on the southeast corner of Union Square. Theo, Friar Tom, the Duke, and Otto the Cat were all ready to go with their equipment hidden under burlap. Puck, as expected, hadn’t resurfaced, but Cora braced herself for a possible row if he did show up, either here or at the cemetery.

  She decided to say nothing of the attack. She needed more time to gather her thoughts, about what happened, and why Theo had gone to read Dr. Grier’s diaries—and whether he had stolen them.

  “Trinity Church?” Otto said from his perch, holding the reins to his placid horse.

  “Yes,” Cora said.

  “By Wall Street, or up on One Hundred Fifty-Fifth?”

  “One Hundred Fifty-Fifth. No more interments by the church these days.” Cora hadn’t looked Theo in the eye yet; she was loath to reveal her foul mood at just seeing him. And Theo hadn’t looked Jacob in the eye yet either. Very well. She just wondered when, and how, the inevitable eruption would occur.

  “And afterward, I’ll be buying the body,” Theo said. “I’ve sixty dollars for this one.” He clapped his hand on Cora’s back, which was such a surprise that she nearly choked on her spit. “Even you can’t say that’s a bad deal. I worked a generous contribution from Dr. Wood, who wishes to keep it for the anatomical cabinet he is planning at the school.”

  They all jumped into the wagon, but Theo kept chatting, as if the discussion with Cora last night had never occurred.

  “We ought to have a clear night ahead,” he said. “Don’t you think so, Jacob? Once the cloud cover leaves, it’ll be moonlight all the way. And I have extra money for any guards.”

  Cora hadn’t had time to scout the gravesite today for guards. She was sure there wasn’t a mort house at this cemetery, but there might be other deterrents. She grunted, hoping it would stop the talking.

  “We should get more oysters tonight, after. Though less rum this time, if that’s all right,” he said, patting his stomach.

  “Och, you’re a baby! Can’t handle a brusher of rum, eh?” Tom said, laughing.

  “No. Last time Jacob and I drank, we were as numb as a peg leg. Weren’t we?”

  Cora cracked a smile. Theo’s cheer was wearing her bad mood away. “You don’t even remember me leaving, do you?”

  “Oh, I do,” Theo said, winking. “I’m just a polite drunk.”

  Cora’s brief smile disappeared. Had he really been awake? If so, had he remembered laying his hand on Cora’s second heart? But Theo was now laughing over a joke of the Duke’s, and they had their arms around each other’s shoulders, whispering and laughing quietly, as if they’d been friends since the womb.

  As the wagon rolled and clonked up Fourth Avenue, Otto quietly gnawed on a corner of hardtack. Meanwhile, Tom had joined in on the Duke and Theo’s discussion.

  “I’m telling you, I’ve given her flowers, I’ve brought chickens. And she still won’t give me her time,” the Duke said. “Still angry.”

  “Ignore her,” Tom said. “That’s what all wives want, for their husbands to give them money and then pay them no more attention! Or you could bake a good pudding. Puddings always make mine happy.” Tom brought food into every single conversation. About God (“I don’t go to church, because you can’t eat oysters in church”), about smelly feet (“Now, a good cheese might smell as good as bad feet, you know”).

  They laughed harder. The Duke poked Theo in the ribs. “I know who you like. Jacob’s sister. I’ve heard you talk about her.”

  “She’s not available to the likes of you,” Cora said, trying not to snarl.

  “See? Miss Lee will pay you more attention if you’re dead in a grave than alive and well. I’ve never seen her interested in a man,” said the Duke.

  “Ah, maybe all she needs is someone with a fat purse, and she’ll be out of this business. I’m surprised she hasn’t already caught herself a husband,” Theo said. “’Tis a sad business, ours is, though it makes us wages well enough.”

  “No one speaks for my sister, except my sister,” Cora said, taking out her knife as she often did when the subject came up. She wiped it thoughtfully on her sleeve and sheathed it.

  “If anyone did, they’d end up . . . how do you say it?” Theo grinned. “‘Scragged, sliced, soaked in a knock-me-down, and ogled in a glass jar!’”

  “Well said!” Otto said, laughing.

  Cora smiled despite herself.

  Driving up Fifth Avenue, they passed the imposing Egyptian-style reservoir for that good, crisp Croton water. The cobblestones disappeared and were replaced by hard-packed dirt. They passed the Deaf and Dumb Asylum, into the Nineteenth Ward, and eventually passed the massive double receiving reservoirs. Here, the bustle of the city dwindled to expanses of trees and small farms. Otto whipped his horse to hurry them along.

  At Hamilton Square, they turned west past the bone mill and turned again northward, past Leake & Watt’s Orphan Asylum and the Lunatic Asylum. This was where the unwanted were hidden, far away from the sizzling bright gaslights of downtown. The city only wanted food, and pulsing bodies, and water; it spit out its unwanted and dead to the periphery of its heart.

  Cora watched Theo out of the corner of her eye, wondering if he had Dr. Grier’s journals tucked away in his room somewhere. Wondering if he was planning on killing her, once he realized who she was. Well, perhaps tonight if she was able to get Theo drunk again, she could rifle through his belongings, find them, and destroy them. Of course, if it was the curator who had the diaries, well, it would take more than just a bottle of gin to get them back.

  Finally, they arrived at Trinity Cemetery. It was dark as ship’s pitch, with the moon still behind the clouds. The cemetery was enormous, spanning two whole avenues all the way to the Hudson railway line by the river’s edge.

  “How will we find the grave in the dark?” Tom complained. “I wish Miss Lee had scouted this place out beforehand. Too busy slapping her callers, I’m sure.”

  “Or too busy wanting to slap other people; that’s a fact,” Cora said, loudly enough that Theo could hear.

  “I’m sure if she did, they deserved it,” he said quietly. Cora looked at him quickly in surprise.

  “There! There’s the spot. I can see a smudge on the greenery. New soil turned over that ridge,” Otto said. He was higher in his driver’s seat and could see better.

  They drove closer, and finding the site quiet and devoid of any guards, went to work quickly. The grave was unattended, but up here, such a long drive from the medical schools, it was no surprise that new interments would go unnoticed. There was no headstone as it would be another week until the mason finished his work. Each of them took turns digging, until they hit the coffin with a hollow knock.

  “Ay, there’s the eternity box,” Otto said.

  Using a wedge, they pried the casket open and found a woman in her forties or fifties, wearing a silk dress of dark blue, bedecked in silk around her throat and wrists. Several layers of bandage and muslin were wrapped about her neck, which was misshapen and protuberant on the left side. But the group all covered their mouths in surprise.

  He
r body, still in the throes of rigor mortis, was bent and curved, her belly thrust upward toward the top of the casket. Only her shoulders and heels touched the bottom of the casket. Her arms were stiffly drawn toward her chest, fists clenched, and even in death her face was a fierce grimace of pain.

  “Why does she look like that?” the Duke said, scratching his head.

  “Looks like tetanus,” Theo said. “But she was well-to-do. Not a laborer working in dirty conditions with a traumatic wound. That’s odd.”

  Cora would have clutched her own chest at the sight of Ida, but she composed herself. “It’s not odd; it’s unnatural,” Cora said. “Look at her face. Her hands. I’ve seen this before, once, a few years back. It’s not tetanus. It’s strychnine poisoning.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “I can’t,” she said. “There’s no way to prove it by dissection. But there was a boy who lived near our cottage who would poison rats with strychnine. He’d a dark heart, that one. One day, he gave it to his grandmother after she beat him with a switch for stealing sugar. He was angry, but thought it killed rats, not people. He’d hoped she would receive a stomachache in return for the whipping. When my aunt found her, she looked the same. Stiff, like all her muscles had been stretched tight. Fists in balls, teeth clenched . . . It happens faster than tetanus.” She threw down her shovel. “Anyway, back to work before someone sees us.”

  It was back to business, but not for Cora. Another body, dead before death was ready. She was so chilled by the regularity of these bodies turning up conveniently and unnaturally that her hands trembled as they gripped the knife that sliced away at the woman’s silk gown.

  In her head, she apologized to Ida over and over again, which made no sense. Cora hadn’t killed her. But the people being killed were on her list. The apologies didn’t prevent her hands from shaking, though. She could no longer ignore this pattern. She thought of who was next in her ledger. Of course—Conall Culligan, the gentleman with an abnormally tall stature. She would send him a note to warn him to be careful. Cora would have to be vague because everyone on her list so far had died of disparate causes.

  Soon, they had Ida undressed and out of the coffin. Cora helped the others heave the body onto a cloth and roll her up tightly. The cloth-covered corpse was bent like a half-opened parentheses, with the other side encasing the answer, missing. Cora gently laid her head down when they placed her in the wagon.

  “That tumor is a piece of work, Flint,” the Duke said, closing the casket. The rest of the team began replacing the soil. “But for the strychnine, we should charge another ten. If you can’t pay it, we can see if Duncan will.”

  “No, I’ll pay it. It’s worth it. I’ve the money,” he said.

  After cleaning up the grave site as well as possible, they took the long journey 144 streets back through the darkened city to the new university building, where Cora had been only twelve hours ago looking for Dr. Grier’s journals.

  They took the body around the back of the building, and into a rear room where it would be prepared for dissection tomorrow. Theo handed over the seventy dollars, and Cora quickly counted out ten each to Otto, Tom, and the Duke. She split the remainder and gave fifteen dollars to Theo.

  “And now? We drink?” the Duke said.

  “As soon as you put your horses away. It’s time for some flickering and a slap-bang.”

  They all gave one another hearty claps on the back, but Cora didn’t share in their rejoicing. She quietly said her goodbyes to Ida. Down to the Bowery they went, and by two o’clock in the morning, they had eaten their way through four platters of fried oysters and drunk three rounds of porter. The Duke and Tom were having a row over which pugilist would win at the match tomorrow. The Duke stumbled home, and Otto left to find a square game at the gambling house next door, tucking his tail carefully into his rear pocket after it had gotten stained from oyster grease.

  “I’m not ready to go home. I’ve no lectures tomorrow. Come, Jacob. There’s a billiard saloon down the street. Shall we?” Theo asked, clapping him hard on the back.

  “I don’t like billiards,” Cora said. Despite her four drinks, she was feeling wary, and because of her four drinks, she was swaying slightly. “Or bowling. Not tonight.”

  “Come now. You’re better company than my empty boardinghouse. At least you go home to Leah when you go home,” Theo said, staring at the wall. “And Cora.”

  “Leah snores” was all that Cora could say, before she remembered. Theo’s loneliness had a way of materializing at the edges of scenes, behind words and gestures, hidden under neat stacks of textbooks in his bedroom. She remembered that his parents had died of yellow fever. “Haven’t you any other family?” she asked.

  “No.” He shrugged.

  “Well, you should do what Leah says I should do. Get married.”

  “I’ve no money. No one wants to marry me.”

  “No one would want to marry me either,” Cora said, grimacing into her empty glass.

  “We should marry each other, then.”

  Cora turned in surprise, and Theo was grinning. “I’m not a bugger,” Cora said. “Not my taste, is all.”

  “Still, you wonder. Who cares, as long as someone is there to come home to every night? I’d like that. I’d like that very much. Wouldn’t matter what they looked like, or where they came from. Would it?”

  Cora blinked, and her hearts hardened. “You don’t mean that.” She looked away. This was the same Theo who had demanded that Cora reveal who she was, or rather, what she was. Was he just trying to sweeten up her brother, to get into Cora’s good graces again?

  “I don’t always know what I’m talking about,” Theo said hollowly. “Sometimes when I say things out loud, I realize how stupid and wrong I am.” After a long silence, he said, “Let’s just go home. After one more drink.” He waved his hand, and another round of tumblers were refilled with water, instead of the night’s deep scarlet porter. Cora was slightly surprised. Apparently, Theo didn’t want to repeat the other night of thorough drunkenness.

  They paid for their drinks and went out into the night. Here, the Common Council didn’t bother to pay for gaslights, as the people were considered below the worth of a gas line and good lamps. It was a good ten blocks before they could see the street enough, when the clouds loosened their fist, releasing the milky half-moon again.

  It was a long walk home, as the omnibuses had stopped running at midnight. Theo was drunker than Cora had first thought—he stumbled over some loose cobblestones and twisted his ankle. Cora helped Theo drape his arm over her shoulders, and she kept her hand firmly around his waist. She hadn’t been this close to a man since falling asleep in Theo’s bed only days ago. This time, she would not make the same mistake.

  And yet, she kept finding herself glancing at Theo’s silhouette, faintly lit from the shy moonlight. After a time, Theo wasn’t limping nearly so bad, but he didn’t withdraw his arm from her shoulders. It was strange and sweet to feel the warmth of another human being, borrowed as it was.

  Cora wished they had another ten streets to walk, but they had already reached Theo’s boardinghouse.

  “She’ll be so angry with me, when she opens that door,” Theo said, finally unhooking his arm from Cora. The left side of Cora’s body was suddenly chilled in the night. For someone who’d seemed so disgusted by Cora’s parentage last night, Theo didn’t seem bothered by it now, with Jacob.

  “Well, good night,” Cora said lightly.

  “Good night,” Theo said. He hesitated awkwardly by the door, unwilling, for some reason, to go inside.

  “Good night,” Cora said again, and still, Theo didn’t knock on the door.

  “May I . . . Can I tell you something?” he asked, his face sober all of a sudden.

  “I suppose so. You’ve told me your sad tale of woe already, so I’m ready for more.”

  “Well, all right. Here.” He pulled Cora’s sleeve, and they ventured to the alleyway by the boardinghou
se. Crickets chirped in the tufts of weed growing nearby. Theo leaned in closer. Maybe he was going to tell her about Grier’s journals. Or about a new body to procure. Oddly, she didn’t care. She was strangely happy to have another few minutes with her competition, who drove her a little mad at times, who was now swaying a bit closer than expected. He didn’t smell like oyster pie or wine, just like smoky September night air. A scent that promised impossible things, like the idea that the coming winter would bring nothing to fear.

  “What is it?” Cora asked. “Are you mauled? You going to be sick?”

  Theo blinked, furrowed his eyebrows, and leaned in to kiss her.

  CHAPTER 17

  Cora didn’t know what to think.

  She didn’t know how to act, or what to do. Thoughts intruded in lightning-fast streaks while Theodore Flint went on kissing Jacob Lee’s mouth for far more seconds than zero, which was what Jacob ought to have allowed.

  When it seemed both too soon and too late, Cora pushed Theo away. They were both panting slightly, and Theo immediately began to shake his head.

  “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, I shouldn’t have done that,” he said in a waterfall of words.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” Cora said, wiping her mouth with her sleeve. “I guess that answers the questions as to whether you were courting my sister, after all. I never pegged you as a bugger.”

  “I’m not.” Theo spun halfway to the right and leaned against the brick wall of the boardinghouse, looking up at the moon because he wouldn’t look at her. “I’m no bugger, Cora.”

  There was a long silence. Cora covered her mouth, afraid to utter a word. Maybe he was drunk still; maybe the words were a simple mistake.

  “I didn’t misspeak, Cora.” His head turned to look at her. “I know who you are. I know you’re one woman playing two people. I’ve known for days now.”

  Cora shook her head. She’d fooled her entire team of diggers, she’d fooled the entire island of Manhattan, and parts of Brooklyn, and—oh—how could she not have fooled Theo? How could she have been so stupid as to let him close enough to discover the truth? How could she do anything now, knowing that her one protection was gone?