Breath and Bones

by Susann Cokal

  He was so used to collecting hairs that now, in another drawer, he had a nest of fiery red locks rescued from Ophelia’s bath water, her comb, her pillows. The singsong sisters gathered them without question, drying and untangling each strand, then mounting it all on a hair receiver to await some future grand purpose. The time was early as yet, and of course he would wear no such memento while he was her doctor, but Edouard could imagine weaving Ophelia’s hairs into the prettiest object of all. He envisioned an intricate diorama of flowers, bees, and butterflies that could occupy a prominent position in his study. Or perhaps a gleaming watch fob, something he might use to replace the worn maternal one he used for fidgeting. The old woman who had made his parents’ tokens had died several summers before, but Ophelia had long, artistic fingers. Perhaps she herself could weave the fob when she recovered enough to be weaned off opium and regain her natural quickness. Or, if she did not recover—

  “Life’s Importance!” he barked, and the words echoed through the lacy structure of iron.

  The maid came as fast as she could, swaying on her crippled little feet. She stopped, face carefully blank to hide the pain, one hand behind her tunic steadying herself against the doorframe.

  Edouard assumed the stern countenance of a doctor. “Are you skilled with the needle?” he asked.

  The maid nodded. She hemmed and mended his sheets, but he could not be expected to know it, any more than he could know of her childhood spent spinning silk threads, a cricket in a cage at her elbow, to make a trousseau she would never need. She had been kidnapped at age fourteen, just on the eve of her marriage to a man as rich as the one who employed her here.

  “Could you make something like this?” He pulled out a bracelet, and she limped forward to look.

  Life’s Importance had a more than basic understanding of needlecraft, but she could not account for the little quills of hair that spiralled round the thick circlet. She hesitated, then shrugged.

  For once, Edouard was irritated at a silence. Life’s Importance, who scarcely spoke at all, was normally his favorite of the three maids. “Could the other girls do it?” he asked.

  She shrugged again, then bowed her head to show humility.

  Edouard sighed and tucked the bracelet back into its box. “Bring me Ophelia’s chart,” he ordered.

  He simply had to refine the treatment. Perhaps an extra session of electricity each day would flush out the bacilli more quickly . . .

  Life’s Importance disappeared.

  Chapter 43

  Nowhere else have so many extensive colonies been successfully planned and started as in California, much of whose prosperity is due to the scientific skill with which its settlements have been established.

  MOSES KING,

  KING’S HANDBOOK OF THE UNITED STATES

  There came a cold, gray day in February, a day on which the strongest horse would only flounder on the icy path to Edouard’s palace. Dr. Beachly put on his thickest boots and headed up the mountain.

  The latest supply wagon had brought long-awaited light fixtures to the new Institute, and for this Edouard Versailles would be grateful; but somewhere between Chicago and Hygiene the boxes had been opened, and whoever had inspected the contents had repacked them. Luckily, not a single globe or flute was broken; but the new packing materials bore disturbing implications for Mr. Versailles.

  “I thought you should see this.” Beachly handed his employer a crumpled sheet of yellow paper. “There were several among the crates.”

  Edouard Versailles took the paper and began the delicate process of unfolding. The page was grimy and soft, as fragile as lace, and it fell apart in places along the creases. Nonetheless he managed to untangle the shreds and lay them out on the desk, atop a diagram of “the inner female parts, with assorted anomalies of size and proportion.”

  He pieced together a face and a word. Ophelia’s face, underneath the legend WANTED. The likeness was crude, the nose too small and the cheekbones too low; but clearly this was his patient.

  “There were several of these handbills,” Beachly said again, rubbing his hands in embarrassment, “but I believe I have found them all. It is for you to decide what to do.” Privately, he hoped Versailles would elect to keep the discovery a secret—as the patient was virtually a secret herself—and continue his mysterious treatment. Downmountain, it was the dawn of a momentous era for Dr. Beachly and his associates, and at this stage Edouard Versailles could only be a nuisance; some months ago he had caused significant delay by insisting the rooms be wired for electricity as well as plumbed for gas. Fortunately, his work with this “wanted” woman, Ursula Summerfield, kept him out of Beachly’s way, and the three tall hexagons were nearly ready for real paying patients and their formally trained doctors.

  Edouard was silent a long moment, puzzling over the broken text.

  WAN ED

  Information as to whereabo of Ursula Summerfield,

  formerly of Prophet City, Ut Terr.

  Hair red or black, eye ue, build slender.

  REW RD

  Respond to Heber Goodho of that town or to any officer

  of the law in Deseret Cou

  “Hair red or black”? “Officer of the law”? And who was Heber Goodho? Edouard stroked his watch fob and thought.

  Behind him, Beachly coughed; not as a patient would cough, but as a polite reminder of his presence.

  Edouard acted all at once and summarily. He gathered the yellow scraps in one fist and rushed out, leaving Beachly to study the gynecological drawings, and Ancient Jade to sweep up the leaves of jasmine Edouard had torn from the banister in his haste.

  Up in her bright, airy room, he found Ophelia moving her hands beneath the bedclothes. When she saw him, she opened her mouth as if to voice some complaint, but at the look on his face she stopped herself.

  Silently, upon the faded velvet of Grandmother’s Flower Garden, Edouard patched together the handbill.

  Once all the facts lay before her, Ophelia chewed her lip and coughed, then fumbled among the sheets for a handkerchief. He felt she was trying to distract him, and he did nothing, though his own linen square remained a damp but clean ball in his hand.

  “I . . . that is a strange picture,” she said at last, when he made no move toward pocket, basin, or bottle. “I know nothing about it, but that woman is very plain. She does not really resemble me, does she?”

  Edouard’s voice trembled as much as his hands, but he spoke clearly. “Are you Ursula Summerfield?”

  She did not answer but looked as if she were trying hard to come up with words.

  Edouard flung his arms wide, losing the handkerchief and disordering his cravat. “You are!” he cried. “And you remember it perfectly well!”

  Finally recognizing his absolute conviction, Famke took a deep breath and sighed. She picked at a loose seam in the quilt, feeling sad that she’d never got to use the flush toilet; she had always known this was just a matter of time, but she had hoped to be considerably better before Edouard threw her out into the streets. “Yes,” she admitted reluctantly, “my name is Famke Sommerfugl. Or Ursula Summerfield—Ursula is the name the nuns gave me, and Summerfield is what Americans made of my—”

  Edouard would not be distracted with etymologies. “But what have you done?” he demanded. “The law is asking for you. Was it murder, robbery . . .” His words trailed away as his thoughts reached toward depravities of which he could not quite conceive.

  Famke realized she had not enjoyed her pretense at amnesia; what a relief it was at last to claim her own name and to let herself remember her life. Even to her own ears, her voice sounded different now, more like a real voice. “I have not killed anyone. And I have not stolen anything.” Briefly, she thought of the silver tinderbox that Heber had once thought she’d taken from Herr Skatkammer: How long ago that seemed. “I don’t know why they would mention the law.”

  He regarded her through narrowed eyes; for once he was not too embarrassed to meet her gaze. “
So now you tell me you can remember? That is convenient.”

  She would not look up; the quilt top was coming apart nicely. “Yes, I remember. I always have remembered.”

  Moving like an automaton, Edouard sat down in the chair from which he’d explained the intricacies of tubercle and bacillus, the chair from which he had watched her sleeping and dreamed, himself, ambitious dreams for her cure. So she remembered. He was not as surprised as he thought he should be; he thought he must have known this all along. Opiates aside, the woman had always seemed too sharp and too quick of wit, and Edouard knew now that he had been her willing dupe. Even so, he was tempted to believe her protestations of innocence . . .

  Irrelevantly, Edouard’s mind played a game of word association in his all-but-forgotten native tongue: Famke . . . femme que . . . She was la femme que—the woman whom—what?

  “Alors,” he asked, in a bit of a daze, “who is this Heber Goodho of Utah?”

  “Heber . . .” Famke hesitated. No clever story sprang to mind; all she could think about, inexplicably, was that half-seen flush toilet. “Goodhouse. He is my husband.”

  Edouard’s face went pink. “You have a husband?”

  “Yes.” She looked away again, feeling rather shy but at the same time suddenly hopeful. She thought Edouard must be thinking of the electrical treatments Down There and what a husband might have to say about them. Certainly Edouard and his nurses had been rather free with her body. Famke wondered what she might make of this; for, just at the moment, she wanted nothing more than to stay right here in Hygiene and continue her treatments, to regain her health completely. Edouard must be made to want it as badly as she did.

  “But he doesn’t advertise for you under his last name. You are Summerfield and he is Goodho—Goodhouse.”

  “That is because . . . in Utah . . .” Here her powers of explanation truly failed; she had seen enough of the world to know that Edouard would not be so delicate with a plural wife as he would with the singular companion of a man’s heart and soul.

  But Versailles read her silence as easily as he read an anatomical chart. “It was a Mormon marriage,” he guessed, and he put all the proper meaning into the word.

  Miserably, Famke nodded.

  “And you are a Mormon?”

  “The proper term is ‘Latter-Day Saint,’” Famke said, much as Sariah or Myrtice might have done. She remembered her baptism in the Salt Lake tabernacle, the shock of the cold water and the tangle of undergarments around her body; then those meetings in the ward house, where she had stood up and described the moments at which God had revealed true faith to her. Those had been just stories, but didn’t they combine with the baptism to make her something different? Certainly she had done more to prove she was Mormon than she’d ever done to assert her Catholicism.

  “I’m not sure if I’m a Saint,” she said at last. “I did not want to be one particularly, but I think I was made one when I married—when circumstances forced me to marry Mr. Goodhouse.” She felt a twinge of disloyalty, remembering again that Heber had been good to her. It was thanks to him, after all, that she first experienced what she now knew enough to call the healing powers of hygienic crisis. “I was an orphan, you see . . . The sisters raised me in the Immaculate Heart orphanage in Denmark. That is where I got my cough—they called it the Immaculate chest—”

  “Catholic?” Edouard interrupted.

  “Yes. But when I wanted to come to America, the only way was to borrow money from the Saints . . .” She stopped there, unable to explain her decision to marry the man who had lent her the money.

  But Edouard surprised her once more: He seemed exhilarated, running his hands through his hair in delighted agitation and regarding her with the light of a rescuer in his eyes. “You married outside your faith, and you converted under pressure. A Mormon union will be easy to annul. We need merely ask this Goodhouse to sign some—”

  “Oh, no!” Famke cried. “He must not learn where I am!” She was sure that Heber would come at once, would assert his right as her husband to sweep her up and bear her off to Utah, where Sariah’s vigilant gaze would make it even harder to escape than before. Heber loved her; but Edouard was helping her, though even he did not know how much. Soon she would be cured, and then she could leave.

  Versailles regarded her hands, which lay weak and white upon the quilt, for a long minute. “Was Goodhouse . . . cruel to you?” he asked.

  That could explain a great deal. She thrust loyalty and obligation aside, and scarcely hesitated this time as she said: “Yes.”

  “And that is why you lied about your memory? So that I wouldn’t send you back to him?”

  “Yes.”

  “And when you came here—when you were looking for your brother—it was so he could rescue you?”

  “Yes, rescue me.”

  “Well, then,” said Edouard, “we must try to contact him.”

  We must try to contact him. Famke felt a glow deep inside. At last, she would have help looking for Albert! With the Versailles fortune aiding her quest, it should not take long. She had given up hope that he might find his way here on his own.

  Almost perversely, however, her mind recognized a related danger: “Whatever you do, I pray you to . . . You must not use my name at all. Mormons . . . They read the newspapers. They post those signs. They have many ways of communicating—if even one of them found out I am here, they would all know, and then . . .”

  “We shall certainly be cautious,” Edouard said. “Your brother has a different surname, does he not? Albert Castle?”

  Famke thought he was asking for more than confirmation of fact; or perhaps her guilty conscience made her explain more than she needed to. “Orphans in Denmark have only Christian names. We may give ourselves second names if we wish, and Albert lived a long time in England. He thought Castle a good one for a painter.”

  Edouard accepted this without further question; and indeed much of it was true. “We will use only his name in the advertisements—‘Albert Castle is asked to contact his sister in Hygeia Springs—’”

  He continued drafting the announcement aloud, and with each word Famke’s heart sank. Albert might see such an advertisement, it was true; but since he had no sister, he would not respond. He might even think it was one of the Ludere who had written to the papers. Either way, this would be no help, and it might somehow draw the Goodhouses; but she could not think how to word an announcement that would call Albert and only Albert to her. And anyway, did she really want him to see her like this, with her bones showing and the blood still blue beneath her skin? Perhaps it was best to stay here and wait till she was well, if Edouard would have her.

  Meanwhile Edouard’s heart was plummeting, too. Already he regretted his offer to help in this way. Of course he was happy to discover that Ophelia—or Ursula Summerfield Goodhouse, as he must now think of her—had family who might come to her aid; but this brother might think she needed rescue not only from the Mormons but from Edouard as well. And then there was the risk that an emotional scene, whether joyful or distressing, would affect the progress of her cure. In point of fact, Edouard thought, it would be best to make no haste with the search.

  He let his voice trail away and simply looked at his patient, who was studying her own hands and clearly had not heard him the last ten minutes. Ursula, he thought, named for the saint who led eleven thousand virgins across Europe. This namesake appeared to be on the point of tears: her lips were very red, and her eyes had swollen. Indeed, as he watched her, one fat opalescent drop rolled out of each eye and trailed its way down her cheek.

  “Perhaps we should not risk it,” he said in the deep silence of that sunny room. “You need your rest, and travel is dangerous in winter. Your brother might be injured as he tried to come to you. What would you think if we waited till spring?”

  He held his breath, studying each nuance of her reaction.

  At first she did not react, merely continued her contemplation of her hands and the counterp
ane. Then she wiped her eyes on the backs of her wrists and looked up at him. “I am grateful,” she said, “that you will allow me to stay.”

  It was clear that she felt emotional, but he was not sure if gratitude were uppermost. Yet her emotions lent her restored face such grace and loveliness that at last his mind completed its jeu de mots:

  She, who called herself Famke, was la femme que j’adore.

  Edouard would not let the words’ full meaning sink into his mind, not yet. Instead he blurted out the first question that came to his lips: “Are you skilled with a needle?”

  Chapter 44

  In any Eastern sense there is no rural life in California, and the thing called rustic simplicity is unknown. [ . . . ] The instant you rise to the dignity of a home, with women and comforts in it, fig-leaves disappear and Eve’s flounces grow artistic.

  BENJ. F. TAYLOR,

  BETWEEN THE GATES

  Among the packing materials for Hygeia Springs’ new light fixtures were not only the Wanted posters but also countless sheets of newspaper, some of which might have borne nearly as much interest for Edouard as the yellow pages Beachly found. But as the significant text was small and buried among other notices, Beachly did not see it, and so it was burned along with the rest of the trash.

  Harry Noble, However, Had Seen The Item When It First Appeared, In Both The New York Times And The Rocky Mountain News.