by Leslie Parry
A few people idled beneath a fan that hung from the ceiling. She’d seen a fan like that once before, in the lobby of a seaside hotel. The blades whirred and squeaked. A young couple lingered drowsily in the breeze, studying tins of blemish cream. A sunburned man stood beside them, fanning himself with his hat and squinting at jars of soda powder. No one spoke. Odile looked back and forth, but they all seemed lost in a dull, overheated stupor.
She sidled up to the counter and waited, picking at the wood-grain. She studied the spidery knobs of ginger, the bottles of dandelion ale, the roots and herbs with confoundingly poetic labels: angelica, floating-heart, rabbit tobacco, meadow-rue.
A woman emerged from the back room. She wore a homespun gray dress and a wilted-looking pinafore. “Help you?” she asked, drawing up to the counter.
She was young, Odile saw, not yet twenty, but already stooped—glum and wattled, the kind of woman whose gaze was both frank and bored, her tone unimpressed.
“Good morning,” Odile stammered, the veil sticking to her lips. She puffed it away and cleared her throat. “I’m here for a cup of tea.”
The woman didn’t blink, didn’t betray any emotion at all. “You have an ailment?” Her accent was Russian, educated—like the furriers’ wives of Brighton Beach who played their violins in the tea garden on Sundays.
“It’s a personal matter,” Odile said.
The woman shook her head. “It’s not possible today, I’m afraid.” She plucked absently at her cuffs, which stood out from her plain and workmanlike dress: they were embroidered, pristine—a piece of distinction and pride.
Odile tried to picture Belle standing at this very counter, carrying her bag of poetry and swords, the baby growing bigger inside her. She studied the woman’s face: her furrowed brow and downturned mouth, her hands busy sorting bills along the counter. She wondered if she might have been in a situation like Belle’s, too, if she’d come here to give up her baby, to live in a strange room far from home, to spend her evenings in a parlor with nothing for company but an untuned piano.
“I’ve come very far,” Odile said, feeling the burn behind her eyes as she drew up her tears. “Do you know what it is, to be homesick?”
And as she said it, she felt a tick in her throat. This was the longest she’d ever been away from home—a mere day—and already it felt as if the world had turned upside down, as if she were strapped to the Wheel but couldn’t get off. She could walk away from this place right now, she knew—she could hail her way back to the docks, head home on the ferry, retreat to the lonely glow of the bungalow, forget everything she’d seen and leave Belle to tend to this alone. She’d never asked for Odile’s help, anyway; she didn’t even seem to want it. You must believe, no matter what, that you are where you belong. But what then? Before long all the players, everyone she knew, would scatter down the coast for the winter: to Atlantic City, the Florida fairgrounds, maybe even the grimy palaces of Cincinnati and Chicago. But what would she do? Where would she go? Chin up! her mother used to say as Odile stood blinking and dazed in the stage lights. Cheat out to the crowd. There—show us your face. You have lightning bolts, for God’s sake, and you’re going to use them!
“You have a seamstress in your family,” Odile ventured. “Your mother, I suppose.”
The woman looked up sharply.
“She made you these.” Odile reached out and lifted the woman’s hands, then rolled her wrists out so she could see the embroidery on the cuffs. From a distance it looked like a flowering bough—tendrils, buds—but up close she saw it was actually a line of music. She began humming it.
The woman, spooked, drew her hands away and pressed them to her sides.
“Prokofiev?” Odile asked. She remembered it from her lessons with the émigré professor, who had clapped his hands or thumped his cane as she plunked arrhythmically at the old piano by the hearth. Now she brought her hands down to the counter and played silently against the wood, her fingers running and skipping over each other, chasing up to the meadow-rue and down to the mint.
The woman grew pensive for a moment. She nodded along, then winced. “Your counting, ach!” she said. “You have to count. Dah-dah-dah, dah-dah.”
Odile laughed. “My mother always said that, too.”
The woman brushed and straightened her cuffs. She squinted at Odile, then hesitated. “Where are you from, did you say?”
“It doesn’t matter, really. I can’t go back.”
The corner of the woman’s mouth twitched. She reached over and pulled on a chain that hung near the register. Above them the ceiling fan sputtered to a stop. In the middle of the room the other shoppers scowled and shifted uncomfortably.
“Go on!” she called to them. “No buying, no staying!”
Slowly they skulked away. The door chimed as they dissolved into the white glare of the morning. When they were gone, the woman put her elbows on the counter and leaned forward.
“A woman’s ailment, you mean.”
“Yes.” Odile found herself nodding. “Yes,” she said. “That’s exactly what it is.”
She beckoned to Odile. “This way, then.”
Odile followed her out the green shop door. The woman drew the sash and turned the lock, then looked back and forth down the street. She led Odile a few paces to the right, under a wayward thatch of ivy, through the yellow door—into the same low-lit foyer where Odile had ventured the day before, valise in hand: the same tiled floor and stacks of blankets, the quiet set of stairs.
“Stay here for a minute,” the woman told her. “I will see, yeah?”
Odile only nodded, her heart pounding. Be the part! her mother had cried from the darkness of the theater, unseen among the empty seats. Be it!
The woman walked up the stairs and paused on the landing, where a young girl was on her hands and knees in the shadows, scrubbing the floor. “Mouse, see that she waits there, yeah?”
The brush paused for a moment, then continued, dunking and whishing. Odile stood there in the heat, straining to hear any conversation from the floors above. But there was just the sound of the young girl on the stairs—the clank of the bucket, the hiss of the brush, the creak of her elbows and knees as she worked her way down to the foyer. When she reached the bottom stair, she sat back on her heels and wiped the hair from her face. Odile recognized her—the scrub-girl, surly and bowlegged—the one who’d put the knock-out drops in her coffee.
Mouse.
In her pocket the envelope crinkled. That word—a name—written in her sister’s hand.
There were footsteps on the stairs again, and the woman appeared. She nodded to Odile, her voice thick and authoritative. “Mrs. Bloodworth is ready for you.”
NINETEEN
SYLVAN CLIMBED THE NARROW STAIRS, FEELING HIS WAY IN the dark. He heard whispers above, the scurry of little feet, the rasp of a wandering, half-remembered song. The walls were hung with old tapestries, which fluttered and swayed in the draft. Everything smelled like the damp of a ship, wet fur and raw potato.
He reached the top, the Widows’ lair—nothing more than a small parlor, lit by a low kerosene lamp. He paused, letting his eyes adjust to the watery light, picking out shadowed figures along the floor. They lay scattered about, on piles of pillows and brown tasseled sheets. Some of them were curled up together on a blanket, sucking their thumbs, bleary as a litter of mice. They were all young, no older than fourteen or fifteen, with trembling lips and hooded eyes. They wore circles of blush on their cheeks, flounced skirts and fallen bouffants. But beneath their painted faces, their torsos—lean and green with bruises—were bare.
They weren’t girls at all. They were boys, and they looked at him, numb.
For a moment he didn’t know what to do—he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to be looking for. All along he had pictured a man like he’d seen at the fights—ox-chested, gourd-nosed; a bellower, a brute. But these were just children, hairless and small, who turned their eyes away as he stepped onto the rug. Then from d
own the hall came the madam, knock-kneed in her petticoats, tutting a tune, tapping her nails along the papered wall. She studied Sylvan for a moment from behind her pince-nez, then smiled.
“What’s your liking?” she asked, laying a hand on his arm.
The heat in the room was stifling, even with the open terrace doors. The stink of it—the spilled liquor; the moist pillows; the faint, yellowy flesh smell of sickness—his eyes began to water, and he lowered his voice. “I’m here about a man who once worked here?”
She drew a circle in the armband on his sleeve. “Of course,” she said with a sigh, clucking her tongue. “Wasn’t he the favorite, though?” She muttered something, then led him down the hall, back the way she’d come—to a room with only one small window, cut into the roof above. A wrinkle of moonlight lay on the floor like a dropped glove.
Sylvan took a step in, squinted to see. He smelled a touch of honeysuckle, sage, then spied a basket of nosegays on a table. A row of blond heads hovered in the dark, silent and bodyless. Wigs, setting on their wicker bulbs. Behind the table was a flicker of movement. A young man, seventeen or eighteen, emerged. He was holding a brush, looking up at the madam as she rapped on the jamb.
“William!” she barked. “Gent’s here about the Rembrandt—wasn’t you close to him?”
He nodded. His head was clean-shaven—lice, Sylvan guessed—showing off his pronounced ears and round, oversized spectacles, which pinched his nostrils nearly shut. He was dressed in a bengaline waistcoat and checkered pants—all handsomely mended, even though it seemed this man (sallow and soft-chinned, as mealy as an apple) had never been out of the room in his life.
“What’s it you want?” William asked as the madam stalked away and yelled something down to the onion-eating man at the bar.
“I’m looking for a fellow,” Sylvan said. “I don’t know him, but he worked here once. Friendly with a woman up on Doyers Street.”
“Yes, yes, the Rembrandt.” He seemed very tired. He pushed his fingers under his glasses and rubbed at the pouches beneath his eyes.
“You know who I mean?”
He nodded, sniffing his spectacles back up his nose, and picked at the bristles of the brush. “Such a shame.”
“An acquaintance of Isabelle Church?”
“She ain’t anyone I met, but he went and got himself a different life, so it’s possible.”
“Blond hair?” Sylvan said. “Slender? An acrobat of sorts?”
William smiled with one side of his mouth and began brushing out the wigs. “Don’t they all look that way to you?”
Something turned in Sylvan’s stomach. The boys, he realized, did have a certain air about them—fish-pale, hazy-eyed—but it might have just been the glow of their spun hair: those soft moons floating in the black cloud of the parlor. In here the wigs, drooping and tangled on their brittle, brown stands, looked different somehow—like the dug-up heads of aristocrats.
William took a pair of scissors from his coat and began to trim the frizzled curls. For a moment the only sound in the room was the whine and gnash of the blades, the squeak of his feet as he circled the bulbs.
Sylvan pressed on. “But he knew someone on Doyers Street?”
“Well, I don’t say he knew. He was going to pay a visit there—the apothecary, as it were. He was in a predicament, as you can imagine. He wouldn’t come around here no more—no, no, not with his gold charley!” The scissors flashed as he threw up his hands. “But lo, lo: here he washes up last spring—hides down by whale, catches me off to church. Says, Billie, I’m in a spot. Needs to find a baby! And who does he run to in the end, eh? But I’ll do right for a good-hearted friend; I always do.” He laughed, grim. “What a sap. I made him one of these, for his wedding day.” He held up a nosegay. “Here, take it.”
Sylvan smelled it and tucked it into his coat, remembering what Lillian Edgar had said about Mrs. Bloodworth. He pictured a woman on the river at night, throwing her silver net into the water, bringing up babies like fish. Sold to a good family, you can only pray. “And his wife, she wasn’t very inclined to—or maybe she wouldn’t—?”
“Wife!” William smiled at him piteously. “Oh, he ain’t got no wife.” He lifted a wig and set it down on his own head, grinning with all of his pebble-gray teeth. “Don’t you see?”
Sylvan’s blood began to thrum. She don’t look right, the butcher’s boy had said. No—she don’t seem right.
“We were little ones together,” William said. “Look—he fixed me here when I was hurt.” He brushed back a curl, pointed to a burn on his cheek.
“Where can I find them?” Sylvan asked. “Where do they live?”
“Orchard and Broome, I hear it. They were all saying his charley got him a nice little house, with a nice little hearth, and hot cocoa and china plates and oranges whenever he wants. A real house!” His eyes grew damp. He brought up the brush and patted forlornly at his wig. “But I never thought that fellow so handsome myself.”
“And who should I ask for? What name does he go by now?”
William looked up at him, bewildered. “What for? He won’t be there.”
“Why’s that?”
“Don’t you know?”
Sylvan shook his head.
“I only just heard it last night myself—so sudden and all.”
“What?”
“Why, I thought that’s why you was here.” He pointed to the black band around Sylvan’s arm. “The little Rembrandt—he’s dead.”
TWENTY
ODILE CLIMBED THE FLIGHTS OF STAIRS, HER HAND STICKY on the banister, her feet scuffing the boards. On the last landing the shopgirl opened the door, then scuttled back into the darkness.
Odile stood alone in an upswell of wind, staring at the scraps of sea fog that clung to the bridges, the ships at port, the glistening churn of horses on the riverbank, pulling an overturned scow to shore. Ahead of her the hothouse reflected the chimneys and the clouds, her own distorted face. Through the glass she saw a movement, pale and shapeless, like a fish in a greening bowl.
Mrs. Bloodworth.
She crossed over to the door, turned the latch and stepped inside. Her dress melted instantly to her skin; the veil puckered against her face. She smelled the sweet rot of flowers, a wet flintiness, and then something bitter and earthy, like vegetable root. She moved through the vapor, between hanging fronds, past tables overrun with plants. She saw baskets of snipped clover and feverfew, bulbs arranged like bonbons in a sweetshop window. Beds of orange poppies bloomed on the shelf—her mother had grown those in the garden once, a long time ago.
At the end of the hothouse stood a woman. She wore a cream-colored skirt and a plain shirtwaist, loosely buttoned, with her sleeves rolled to her elbows. Her head was lowered over a workbench, obscured by a drowsy bough of clematis, but Odile could still see her hands at work, slicing up a meaty green stalk with a razor. Her thumb moved in swift easy flicks, halving the stems and letting the liquid inside bleed into a jar.
“Mrs. Bloodworth?”
The woman looked up. She was tall and middle-aged, with the kind of hawkish face that stagehands loved to light—blue-green eyes that bulged above lean, sculpted cheeks. Her hair was gray at the temples and peak, her bare arms all freckles and sinew. Odile paused, unsure how to introduce herself, but the woman only wiped a hand on her apron and nodded.
“There’s cold tea over there,” she said. Her voice was burred and honeyed. She gestured with the razor. “On the table. Please.”
Odile looked over and saw a glass pitcher, sweating in a slant of light, filled with melting chunks of ice and lemon halves. She remembered what Pigeon had said about the coffee. “Thank you, ma’am,” she said, “but I’m well enough without.”
“Then please—sit down.”
Odile lowered herself onto a nearby stool, watching as Mrs. Bloodworth picked up a pair of shears and wiped them down with a rag. “What exactly is your situation?”
Odile cleared her throat. What would
Belle have said? “I’ve left home.”
The woman nodded and reached above her head, snipping a stem from the clematis. “Your family knows of your trouble?”
“No, ma’am.”
“You’re alone?”
“Very.”
“Have you anywhere to go?”
Odile shook her head. “That’s why I’ve come to you.”
Mrs. Bloodworth plucked a leaf from the stem and chewed it for a moment, then spit a green wad of pulp into her hand. “Hmm.” She lifted the shears again. Snip, snip. The branches came down in a basket. Odile stared at the blades, at the way they chirruped and bit, the way Mrs. Bloodworth dragged them across the front of her apron, wiping away the juice.
“And how did you come to find me?” she asked.
“Another girl”—Odile licked her lips—“she spoke of you.”
Mrs. Bloodworth laid the shears back on the table. She smiled at Odile, not unkindly. “You may take your hat off, if you wish. It gets a bit humid in here, doesn’t it?”
“I’d prefer not to.”
She inclined her head. “If you’re worried you might be spied on, that someone should know you’re here, let me say plainly that you’re very safe.”
Odile looked up. “Am I?”
“You have my word,” Mrs. Bloodworth said. “Where are your people from?”
“Gravesend, ma’am.”
“Quite a ways. I mean your heritage.”
Odile hesitated. She couldn’t say the Scotch-Irish Willingbirds of Punxsutawney, or her great-grandmother’s clan of Pennsylvania Dutch: Belle might well have said the same thing. She thought of her father, the sign-painter from Glastonbury. “Saxon, I believe.” She nodded at the basket of clematis. “What’s that for?”
“Oh—to brew.” Mrs. Bloodworth touched one of the blossoms. “A little bark tea—good for cramping. And sadness.”
