Belle Cora: A Novel

by Margulies, Phillip

  The next day, there was a lot of waiting. London, like most such men, was not good at waiting. I let him drink a little. We played cards. He was impressed with my skill in shuffling and dealing. I showed him card tricks Charley had taught me, and while I watched him attempt them, I noticed his hands. The nails were very dirty and cracked, the thumbs exceptionally long and strong, and not as clumsy as they looked. Stains were dyed into his skin. One could not help imagining that blood had made a contribution to them. He chewed tobacco and had brown teeth and spat a lot. He also picked his nose. The dried mucus was black.

  In the afternoon, I went downstairs and waited for Cutter in a curtained booth. I had a bottle of whiskey and two glasses brought to me. My terror grew as the time of our meeting approached. Fear this great could not be hidden. I could only hope that Cutter would think it natural for me to look frightened.

  There weren’t many customers in the tavern at that time of day. I heard Cutter come in, and I heard him talking, and then nothing, and then he was pulling aside the curtain. He looked confident, but his confidence looked misplaced. His clothes hung loose. His cheeks were sunken; he had been ill, maybe seriously.

  I gave him a timid, ingratiating smile. I poured the whiskey for both of us. He waited for me to drink first, as a blackmailer should, and then he said with satisfaction, “Well, well, not so high and mighty,” and in general spoke like a villain in a melodrama, except in a Bowery accent and with a profanity unsuitable for the stage, and with more self-pity. He asserted several times that his luck was changing. Things were going to be different now. Certain people were going to be sorry for the way they had treated him. He took his shot and poured another and started telling me what he was going to do to me.

  “Business first,” I said. I told him that before we could agree on a price I had to know exactly what he knew. He replied that I was in no position to bargain. “Very well,” I agreed meekly, “tell me what you want to tell me.”

  “I know you’re after your grandpa’s money and he thinks you’re an honest woman with a dress shop. I’m going to California to make a new start. Pay me two thousand dollars and be shut of me.”

  We argued, and finally I told him that I might find the money but that he was still asking too much. At that price, it would be worth more to me to keep my old life.

  “What about your little brother?”

  “What about him?”

  “Oh, that’s right, I didn’t tell you about that,” he said, and looked at me; a sick feeling in my stomach said that at last he was about to tell me.

  And so he did. Back in 1845, before the two of them had visited me in Cohoes, they had been involved in an argument with two canal drivers in Lockport. Lewis had pitched a stone, and one of the drivers had not gotten up. Lewis and Tom had run away. They saw later in Albany newspapers that the one Lewis had hit had died, that the other driver had recognized Lewis as Lewis Buckley—the name Lewis had gone by at the time—and someone had written anonymously to tell the paper that Lewis Buckley was really Lewis Moody.

  There had been many hints of something like this, one or two from Cutter when I knew him first in Cohoes, and later from Lewis, who had a way of reminiscing right up to the point of his crime and then skirting clumsily around it.

  “Why didn’t you use it earlier?”

  “You know why. You said I was in it, too. But now I’m going to California with your money. They won’t chase me to California for what I did.”

  Now, this did not quite make sense. If Cutter had to be in California in order to use his blackmail against my brother, wasn’t that a reason not to give him the money to go to California? It was foolish of him to say this. I might have argued with him if money were my sole concern, if I had been as willing as I had claimed I was for him to unmask me as Harriet Knowles.

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll meet your terms.” I told him that I would have to give it to him in installments. I would have to sell property; I would have to earn some of it. All I had brought was a hundred. We discussed our future arrangement. Then, predictably, he told me to give him the hundred. I told him I had it in a room upstairs.

  “You took a room here?”

  “I thought that was part of our bargain.”

  He smiled, took another drink, stood up, and grabbed the bottle by the neck, while I put on the hat and the scarf. I walked with my head down, my knees weak; with each beat of my heart, my whole body seemed to vibrate like a sheet of iron struck by a sledgehammer. There was a moment of extra panic at the top of the stairs when I forgot which room it was. There was a moment when I decided to pay him: anything was better than this; this was damnation if anything was, to kill a man just because he is an inconvenience to you. But if I paid him, he’d go to California, and he’d still have what he had on Lewis, and he was the kind of man to use it just for spite.

  I opened the door. He followed me in, and, as drunk as he was, he suspected a trick immediately. He sniffed. “You’ve got a man in here.” He looked under the bed, and then he went to the closet door and jerked it open. London, who had been waiting in the small, dark, hot closet for two hours, lunged at him with the knife, but his eyes had no time to adjust to the light, and Cutter was able to evade the knife and grab the wrist that held it. They fought over the knife and Cutter took it from him. They rolled over on the floor, London trying to pin Cutter’s arm, Cutter jabbing wherever he could and finally thrusting upward repeatedly just beneath London’s ribs. Then, with London gasping and shuddering, Cutter pulled out the blade, and swiftly but somehow deliberately, like the journeyman butcher I suddenly remembered he was, he grabbed London by the hair and slashed him across the throat.

  My emotions were etherized, they existed but they belonged to someone else, as I looked down at Jack Cutter, that very inconvenient man, who sat gasping beside the killer he had slain. My carpetbag lay under the bed, a few feet behind me. Turning my back on Cutter, I took a step and bent down and found the bag. As I rose, I caught a glimpse of my face, flecked with Tom London’s blood, in an oval mirror in an elaborate brass frame on the wall just inside the door. Smiling at Cutter—as if I could fool him now!—I jerked the bag open, reached into it, and for a despairing second could not find Mrs. Robinson’s pepper-box pistol. Cutter was rising to his feet. To explain the noise the people downstairs were about to hear, I shouted, “Put the gun away, Harry, you fool! You’re gonna hurt somebody!” For a second, Cutter wore a puzzled look, and then I shot him. I had seen guns used but had never used one myself, and the recoil surprised me. As for what happened to his face, my mind could not make sense of it. “You fool!” I shouted. “You’re crazy! You can’t do that in here!” He fell forward. I stepped away.

  I grabbed the bedsheet, spat on a corner of it, and walked to the mirror to wipe my face.

  I had planned carefully to make sure that I would be far away before the body was discovered—I had planned so that there would be time, and there was no time. Trying to keep from getting bloody, and succeeding, except for my hands, which shook along with the rest of me as if I were freezing, I emptied Cutter’s pockets and London’s pockets, stuffed everything into a pillowcase, and put it in my carpetbag. By that time, men were knocking on the door and shouting at me to open it up. I could barely stand on my feet. I was quite sure that it was hopeless, but I was going to do what I could, until the very last minute, to get away safe.

  “It’s all right!” I called back. “I’m sorry. We’re very sorry! There was a pigeon! He shot at some pigeons out the window!”

  “You can’t shoot in here!”

  “We’re sorry! Nothing is broken! I told you, Harry! As if you could hit anything in your condition!”

  “Are you all right?”

  “It’s all right. I told you. It was just a pigeon. Leave us be. He won’t do it again!” I shouted as I hurried to the window. I stood there, looking out and down and around. They weren’t talking. They weren’t ramming the door down. With luck, they had gone away. I cl
imbed out the window and let myself down by the rope. I ran through an empty field and into a wood, carrying the carpetbag, which contained a skirt, a blouse, a shawl, a bonnet, all clean and different from those the men in the Bloomingdale Tontine had seen me wearing. I did not look back to see if I was pursued until I was in the trees. The loudest sound was the pulse in my head. I spat on my hands and cleaned them with my handkerchief. I changed my clothes, stuffing the ones I’d discarded into the carpetbag. I put on a pair of white gloves and walked, holding the carpetbag, through the woods, to the road, and down the road to Broadway, where I opened my parasol and strolled down the street until I took an omnibus downtown.

  The pepper-box pistol was in the bag along with the bloody clothes and the contents of London’s and Cutter’s pockets. For a moment, I had considered wrapping London’s hand around it. Then I had reflected that men shot in the head cannot cut throats, and men with their throats cut cannot shoot pistols. Even New York City’s metropolitan police would probably realize that.

  At home, in my room, I poured the contents of Cutter’s and London’s pockets onto my bed. It was a curious collection—dirty pawn tickets, and folded handbills, and sundry scraps of paper bearing names and addresses. My letter to Cutter was not there. There was a clipping from the Albany newspaper, with the name of the dead man and the name of my brother Lewis.

  I HAD LIED WHEN I TOLD CUTTER that I was invited to my grandfather’s house that evening. There was to be a gathering, with me and Jeptha and Agnes and Edward and Robert and the members of the California Missionary Committee, but not for another three days. I spent most of the intervening time in my bedroom, every so often sending out for a newspaper. The murders were recognized as a mystery, and the fact that at least one of the killers had been a woman—or maybe a small man dressed as a woman—gave the story added interest. It shared the front page of the Sun, the Herald, and the Courier with headlines about the cholera and California gold. Ragged newsboys shouted: “ ‘He was shooting at pigeons,’ cried the murderess!” The Courier called it “a conundrum worthy of the skills of Monsieur Vidocq,” Vidocq of France’s Sûreté Nationale having at that time a reputation for crime solving similar to that Scotland Yard enjoys today.

  Sometimes the fear of being caught was separate from the horror of being a murderess, but most of the time the two ideas were mingled in a poisonous brew. I told myself the world was well rid of Jack Cutter. That helped for brief periods.

  To bring on sleep, I took laudanum, which gave me long, elaborate dreams involving Lewis, Cutter, and Tom London. In one it was 1837. We were on the deck of the steamboat to Albany. A voice said, “Look.” Shadows raced across the deck, and with a murmur of astonishment we looked up to see that the sky had become an undulating ocean made of pigeons endlessly crossing the river. Sounds of gunfire came from the riverbanks. Birds dropped into the water, splashing, spinning, and drifting, as dogs swam into the Hudson to fetch the corpses. Horace handed me the pepper-box pistol. I knew something terrible would happen if I pulled the trigger. I decided I would only pretend to shoot. I pointed. I shot, whereupon every bird in the sky came down and buried the boat. Then we were in a vast deserted ballroom littered with dead birds, and I knew the way out, but my poor lost friends Jack Cutter and Tom London didn’t. I was leading them. “This way,” I said. “Follow me. I’ll help you.” On the second day, I saw Jocelyn, who was just back from Boston, where she had done an important favor for me. She came with news.

  “But this is wonderful,” I told her. “Wonderful.”

  I wrote to Arthur Heywood, and we met, and I told him how he might help me. He was delighted. “It’ll be like an amateur theatrical,” he said, assuring me that he was very gifted in that line. This worried me. He had nothing at stake in the outcome; for him it was a lark.

  XLI

  THERE WERE ALREADY CARRIAGES OUTSIDE my grandfather’s house when I arrived. It was evening. The moist air smelled of lilac and hay, the leaves shivered and hissed on a rising wind, and the long shadows grew blurry and vanished as clouds gathered overhead. Agnes and Jeptha were in the drawing room, along with the other guests, talking in little groups of two or three near the punch bowl, the fireplace mantel, the piano, the window. More than one of these groups was discussing the deaths of the two men found at the Bloomingdale Tontine, not a quarter of a mile from the room where we stood. Even civic-minded abolitionist merchants and attorneys can be titillated by news of murder committed so recently and so nearby as to give them a feeling of proprietorship over it.

  Robert had invited a pretty dark-eyed female, Amanda, the daughter of his law partner. She was about eighteen, small, her oval face framed by sausage curls, with a tiny waist accentuated by a big flouncy skirt. As we nodded to each other, I found myself thinking what I would name her and which of my gentlemen would like her best. This thought fled my mind when she began speaking of the murder, scandalizing the company with her naughty relish for the gruesome details. She was an adherent of the theory that the men had fought first and the woman had slain the winner—rather than supposing that she had killed both of them, one by knife, one by pistol, as an opposing camp idiotically maintained. She saw no reason to insist, as some did, that the killer must really have been a small, delicately featured man dressed as a woman. She did not agree that the crime was too bloody to have been committed by a woman. Women differed in their propensities.

  Robert remarked that Amanda’s enthusiasm for the discussion was itself a revelation about the capacities of Woman. John H. Harrington, of the New York Carpet Lining Company, asserted that women have broader scope than men: they are capable of greater self-sacrifice but also greater depravity. With a certain formality, this silly question was then debated.

  Jeptha, when his opinion was solicited, remarked, “Saint Peter, who asked to be crucified upside down, was a man, and so were the fellows who obliged him. So it would seem men have a great deal of range, too.”

  My grandfather was pleased with this comment. “What say you to that, John?”

  “I think it an excellent point for a clergyman to make.”

  Robert enumerated history’s best-known female assassins and murderesses: Judith, Livia, Messalina, Agrippina, Lucrezia Borgia, Charlotte Corday.

  Agnes apologized for her inability to take any amusement in the tragedy. “I’m sorry, but I can’t help thinking it a grave matter, and that these men have souls that are being judged now; and each of them had a mother who never dreamed they would meet such a sordid end. And as Christians we should try to wish that the woman who committed this terrible, unwomanly deed should find her way to repentance and Christ’s forgiveness.”

  She sought Jeptha’s eyes, and he gave a slight nod of acknowledgment. Robert said, “That’s a rebuke to you, Amanda. That’s how a woman should respond to terrible events.”

  “Oh no,” Agnes protested. “I would never say so.”

  “Of course not,” said Robert. “You’re too good to say it. But we are able to make comparisons. Amanda is bad. She should follow your model and improve.”

  “He wants us to fight,” said Agnes. “Let’s confound him and be friends.”

  Agnes was pretty, too, it had to be admitted, and would command high prices from discerning gentlemen.

  “What about you, Arabella?”

  “I’m just like Agnes. Mostly, I pity the mothers.”

  “And the woman?” asked Robert.

  “I suppose she had a mother, too.”

  “Though there are some, like that poor babe you brought to Livy, who never know their mothers,” observed Agnes.

  “It is certainly sad when that happens,” I agreed. “Though there is hope that Frank will find some happiness in the place where I once spent so many happy hours.”

  “I’m sure he will. It is a miracle, what you have found the time to do, Arabella. That you, a woman on your own, have been able to manage your own shop, and yet to have time to care for another woman’s child, is almost more than I can
believe.”

  For the part of the company that had not heard of this, I explained about Frank and my work for the Female Reform Society. “But Agnes has an exaggerated idea of my contribution to Frank’s first year of life. I was only responsible for a portion of his care.”

  “That’s not the impression one would get from my mother’s letters. She said it called you ‘Mama’ and cried its heart out to be parted from you.”

  “I’m surprised to hear that. As I recall, he was sleeping when I left.”

  “Perhaps my mother’s memory is faulty.” She was interrupted by the arrival of Arthur Heywood, who greeted me with too much formality, almost winking at me, and I became more nervous. I was afraid he would not play his part very well, though I was sure he would play it with enthusiasm.

  “This is Arthur Heywood, editor and publisher of the Courier,” said Robert.

  “I have heard of you, of course,” said Agnes.

  “Arthur Heywood, this is my cousin Agnes Moody,” said Robert, “and our young minister Jeptha Talbot.”

  “Agnes,” repeated Heywood. “So this is Agnes. And Jeptha.”

  “Mr. Heywood,” said my cousin, “we were just discussing the good work that my cousin Arabella, whom you know, has done for the Female Reform Society.”

  We heard a crack of thunder, followed by a hiss of falling rain. Lawrence Jameson of Jameson Ironworks—a pious, awkward, middle-aged widower, very thin, with a white streak running through his hair, not quite down the center—went to the window and shut it before a servant on the same mission could reach it. Jameson never spoke at these gatherings, but was rich and dedicated to the cause.

  “Indeed, I have heard of that society,” said Heywood. “I regret that in the past scoundrels in my employ have made light of their efforts.”