An Acquaintance with Darkness

by Ann Rinaldi

  I'd written about how it felt to have your father killed in the war. Myra had written a high-minded examination of Sherman's morals in his March to the Sea. It almost killed her that I won. She could not stand to be bested at anything.

  "I don't know exactly why my uncle was invited," I replied to Mrs. McQuade's question. "He doesn't discuss his doctor business with me. But he was in Ford's Theater the night the president was shot. He helped attend him."

  The girls' eyes were wide. They wore the terrible fascination with the whole business. I saw it sitting there, like a buzzard, on the shoulders of every girl in the room. Then everyone spoke at once, speculating on what it must have been like at the theater. The horror of it went through the room like a brushfire.

  Mrs. McQuade rapped her desk again. "Girls, girls, I think we should get back to our regular work now. You all will be dismissed at one instead of four. We have much to do."

  Everyone settled down. But Myra kept glancing over at me the whole morning. And her eyes glittered with malice.

  When it came time to be dismissed, she lingered in the cloakroom. "I know why your uncle was summoned to the White House," she said.

  She never spoke to me voluntarily. She would never lower herself to do so.

  "Then you know more than I," I told her.

  She came to stand beside me. "It's because he knows about dead bodies."

  I met her steady gaze. Inside me I was trembling, but I would not let her see this. "He's a doctor, after all," I said.

  "Most doctors deal in live bodies."

  "Uncle Valentine teaches anatomy." I tried to sound bored. I turned to go.

  She put a hand on my arm to restrain me. "I feel I should tell you. He is under investigation."

  I felt weak in the legs. I wanted to run. I did not want to hear her words, delivered in her clear, mocking girlish voice. For I knew they would render me senseless. I knew something bad was coming. "By whom?" I asked lightly.

  "The Intelligencer."

  The newspaper her father wrote for. "Well, go on, Myra. I can tell you're just dying to tell me something. Say it plain and get it over with."

  "All right, I will. My father is doing the investigating. Your uncle is under suspicion of being a body snatcher."

  "No wonder Mrs. Lincoln always refers to the newspapers as the vampire press," I said. But I wasn't as flippant as I sounded. "Well, for your information, Myra, the night of my mother's funeral, when I went back to the cemetery with a friend, my uncle was there, watching for grave robbers. And he chased some. And posted a guard around Mama's grave. So if he is one, how do you explain that?"

  Her smile was slow and knowing. "It's an excellent cover. Especially since he knew you were coming to live with him."

  I hated it when she spoke like a news reporter. "He didn't know I was coming to live with him," I said. "That was decided a few days later. Saturday, likely. Only Sunday did he show me the paper that said he was assuming legal responsibility for me."

  She smiled. "Do lawyers work on Saturday now?"

  "What?"

  "What is the date on that paper?"

  "I don't know. What does it matter?"

  "Why don't you look? I'll bet he knew you were coming to live with him. I'll bet that business at the cemetery was all a little farce. So you would never dream he was involved in body snatching."

  "My uncle is a respected doctor, Myra," I said. "He doesn't rob graves. The very idea!"

  She shrugged. "We'll find out, won't we?"

  "'We'?"

  "When my father finishes his investigation. It's against the law, you know. Such culprits have been convicted and sent to jail!"

  She tossed her head and started out. "I just thought I'd warn you, Emily Pigbush. I'm doing you a favor."

  I couldn't think. I felt my face go white. What right did she have to accuse Uncle Valentine of such? How dare she? Oh, I'd known there was good reason why I hated her. "You varlet!" I yelled. But by the time I got the words out of my mouth, she was gone. I dashed out into the hall after her and stood there, my lips trembling, tears coming down my face.

  All the way home Myra's words swirled around and around in my head.

  Uncle Valentine a body snatcher! The business at the cemetery a farce! An excellent cover-up! Especially since he knew you were coming to live with him.... Do lawyers work on Saturday now?...What is the date on that paper?

  I ran the rest of the way home. What is the date on that paper? I would look. I knew where Uncle Valentine kept it. In his office, under the paperweight statue of Hippocrates. I'd seen him put it there. I'd prove Myra wrong. The she-wolf! She made me ashamed of my own sex.

  13. Saving the Moments

  DADDY HAD TOLD ME a story once about a beautiful princess who had three men courting her. She couldn't make up her mind which to wed. But she'd always been told she had wonderful eyes. So she decided to ask each man what color her eyes were "Brown," said the first. "Blue," said the second. For, though they had known her since childhood, they had never paid mind to the color of her eyes. "Green," said the third, who always noticed eyes and teeth and every other thing of importance in the workings of the kingdom. So the princess married the third.

  Was that the Brothers Grimm again? I didn't know. I thought sometimes my daddy made stories up as he went along. I knew now what he'd been trying to tell me with this story. Always notice things that are important in the workings of the kingdom. I hadn't noticed the date on that paper of Uncle Valentine's. And because I hadn't, Myra had been able to get the upper hand with me.

  When I got home I would storm into Uncle Valentine's office and find that paper.

  But nobody was home. It makes no sense to storm if nobody is there to see it. So I went quietly to the office. The paper was where I expected to find it, under the paperweight statue of Hippocrates. I looked at the date.

  It was April 12, in the year of our Lord 1865. The day before my mother's funeral.

  I sank down in Uncle Valentine's chair. My head was spinning. Had he set up that scene in the graveyard, then, to make me think he was against grave robbing, because he already knew I was coming to live with him?

  Was Myra right?

  Why had he allowed me to go home to an empty house, thinking I would be living with the Surratts? Why? Why, if he had the paper already? Worse yet, how had he known I'd be there in the cemetery that night? Then I groaned, realizing how. Maude. When I'd told her I was going, she'd stopped me, suggested I go with Annie, gotten a hack. It took an hour for the hack to come. She'd sent word to Uncle Valentine.

  Oh, I was so confused! Well, I would just end the confusion, that was all. I would confront him with the matter. As soon as he came in the door.

  And then I heard talking outside the windows. I looked out.

  It was Uncle Valentine coming up the walk. With Annie! What was he doing with Annie? I ran through the center hall and flung the front door open. "Annie!"

  "Emily!" She ran to me.

  I almost killed myself going down the steps. We embraced, right in the front yard.

  In the center hall we appraised each other. "What happened? I came by your house! I saw them take you away! Oh, Annie, are you all right?"

  "I'm fine," she said. But she looked wan. There were dark circles under her eyes. "They still have Mama. They let me go after a day of questioning. Oh, Emily, it was terrible! They came and searched the house again. They said that yesterday they arrested Samuel Arnold and he made a clean breast of everything. He said he was in on a conspiracy to kidnap the president. And that Booth, O'Laughlin, Atzerodt, Herold, Powell, and my brother Johnny were involved in it."

  "Oh, how could he?"

  "And they keep questioning Mama. They have her in Carroll Prison. And we need a lawyer. And don't have one."

  "I told you I'd take care of that, Annie," Uncle Valentine said.

  I had forgotten him. We'd wandered into the front parlor and sat down. I looked up now to see him standing there in the middle of the
room.

  "Oh, I couldn't, Dr. Bransby. I couldn't allow it," Annie protested.

  "You can and you shall," he told her. "I loved President Lincoln, Annie. And this tragedy is of the utmost proportions for all of us. But I do not think it right that someone accused of taking part in it should not have proper legal counsel. That is after all what Lincoln himself would say. He was, first and foremost, a lawyer, remember."

  Annie nodded yes. "I met your uncle on the way here," she told me. "We started talking. And I'm afraid I blurted it all out. Your uncle is so good, Emily. You are so lucky to have him."

  What could I say to that? "Annie, I've got Puss-in-Boots." That's what I said.

  "Oh, I'm so glad! I thought she'd run off! Can you keep her for now? I just don't know what's going to happen."

  I said I would. She and Uncle Valentine drew chairs up close to each other and were soon deep in conversation. I went to make tea.

  I dreamed about my father that night. He was going off to war, wearing his wonderful blue coat with the double row of brass buttons and the cape collar lined with red. He wore his brace of pistols and his saber. Manfred, his horse, neighed in impatience as Daddy gave last-minute orders to Elihu, his hired manager. Daddy's hunting dogs lay around his feet.

  I awoke from the dream with a start, as if someone had put a hand on my shoulder.

  Someone had. Addie. "You wanna come see?" she said.

  I shook the dream off. I was thinking of Daddy's dogs. The day after Daddy left, Mama had had them sold off. I never knew it until I came home from school and found them gone.

  "See what, Addie?"

  "You jus' come," she said.

  I picked up Puss-in-Boots, who slept with me now, and went with Addie. I was annoyed that she'd interrupted my dream. Daddy's presence had been very strong in it.

  "There," she said, pointing out a window that overlooked the garden.

  I looked. It was a moon-flooded night and I could see that Marietta's flowers were all in bloom. I also saw two lanterns, a horse drawing a carriage, and three figures inside the carriage.

  Uncle Valentine, Robert, and Marietta.

  The neigh I'd heard in my dream was from the horse pulling the carriage into the yard. It came to a halt in front of Uncle Valentine's stone shed.

  "There," Addie was saying, "I tol' you."

  "Told me what? What are they doing?"

  She snorted. "Tha's for me to know," she said. "An'for you to find out."

  "How am I supposed to find out?"

  "You go inna that shed and look. That's how! They never home inna afternoon. Always out on biz-ness. If'n I could do it, me a half-drunk, no-'count slave woman, so could you."

  "You've been in the shed?"

  "Why you thinks he locks me up days? 'Cause I went outside coupla times. Wanted one o' them flowers that girl grows. All day long they hang down like bells at rest. At dusk they turn right up to the sky."

  "The yucca flower," I said.

  She nodded. "Sail I wanted. It wuz near the shed. I looked inna window. An' saw."

  "Saw what?"

  "You make it your biz-ness to find out, girl. And when you do, you let old Addie go. Like you promised."

  I peered out the window. Uncle Valentine and Robert were unloading the wagon, taking some barrels out, lifting them down from the wagon, then rolling them into the shed. Marietta held the lantern. "Barrels," I whispered. I felt relieved. Not coffins. Barrels. "He does experiments."

  "If'n that's what you wanna call it."

  We watched in silence for a few more moments. Then I turned around, but Addie was gone. I picked up Puss-in-Boots and went back to bed, wondering if this was part of my dream. And wondering at the same time how I could make it my biz-ness to find out what was in the shed.

  The next day was the nineteenth. The day of Washington's own funeral services for President Lincoln before his body started on that fourteen-day and sixteen-hundred-mile trip so they could finally lay him to rest in Springfield, Illinois.

  A day of marking the ends of things. And the beginnings of others. I decided to ask Uncle Valentine about the paper.

  At breakfast when I told him Mrs. McQuade was taking her girls to see the funeral, he nodded. "Stay with your teacher. It's going to be a circus out there today. I worry about you, you know that, Emily."

  I saw my opening. "Can I ask you something, Uncle Valentine?"

  "Of course."

  "You had that paper of yours saying you were responsible for me when you invited me to lunch with you here on Good Friday, didn't you?"

  "Yes," he said.

  "Then why didn't you tell me about it? Why did you let me go home from here thinking I was moving in with the Surratts? And come and get me only after Lincoln was shot?"

  He folded his paper and put it aside. He looked shame-faced. "Vanity," he said.

  "Vanity?"

  "I was trying to prove something to myself. That even after all your mother said against me, you would come to me of your own choice. And not because I had a legal paper in hand. I was wrong, child. I'm sorry."

  I nodded, humbled by this admission from him. I could see how difficult it was for him to make it.

  "But there is something else you should know."

  "What?"

  "I wasn't doing anything your father didn't want. He asked my help to get you into Miss Martin's. He wrote to me when he was away at war. He sent me the money for your education and asked that if anything happened to him I'd bring you to Washington and put you in that school."

  "Mama said she put me there. That all he did was leave the money for my education."

  "Your father wanted it, Emily. And if you and your mother hadn't moved here after he was killed, I would have brought you here anyway. Your mother couldn't have done a thing about it. It was his wish, stated in his letter."

  My daddy. I felt a warmth wash over me. And a rush of gratitude toward Uncle Valentine. How could I ask him about that night in the cemetery now?

  He was looking at me with those warm brown eyes. "Is there anything else, Emily?" He used his voice like a surgical instrument. He could cut you with it or heal you with it. I had felt both, and I much preferred to be healed. Now that voice was indulgent, with a hint of amusement and a touch of caution.

  "Did you get the lawyer for Annie?"

  "I got two, Frederick Aiken and John W. Clampitt. They are the best."

  I nodded and picked up my schoolbooks.

  "Well, Emily," he said as I took my leave of the room, "what about it? Don't you think you would have come to live with me by choice?"

  I let him think it. It was a small price to pay for Mr. Aiken and Mr. Clampitt. Another difficult arrangement entered into, I thought. Another moment saved. How many times now had I gone against Daddy's instructions? How many moments had I saved? And what would I do with them?

  Uncle Valentine was right. It was a circus out on the streets.

  "Quiet, girls. And stay together," Mrs. McQuade told us. "Abraham Lincoln's trip into American folklore is beginning."

  She was right, too. We stood across the street from the White House in the press of people who were straining to catch a glimpse of the coffin as it was brought out the front doors by the pallbearers. All the church bells of Washington were tolling. Guns began to boom from the many fortresses that had sprung up around the city during the war. For as far as my eye could see, all up and down Pennsylvania Avenue, there was an ocean of people.

  Young men were climbing trees. Young boys who had somehow staked a claim on those trees were selling places in them for twenty-five cents. A man up front was hawking places on the curb for ten dollars.

  Above us, the rooftops were crowded with people. On Pennsylvania Avenue itself, policemen on horseback were trying desperately to organize the hook-and-ladder companies, men from lodges, clubs, churches, and military regiments, into some kind of procession to follow the hearse. I saw a whole contingent of Negro soldiers ready to march.

  Mrs. McQua
de wore a bright red bonnet. Most people around us wore black. There were several remarks about her bonnet being unseemly, but she didn't care.

  "Look for my bonnet above the heads, girls," she'd told us, "if you lose sight of me. I will be there, like a beacon in the night."

  "More like one of General Hooker's ladies," Myra hissed. Myra was angry because six hundred tickets had been given out for people to file past the catafalque in the White House and she was supposed to go with her father. But at the last minute, his editor had asked him to give the ticket to a reporter from France. To assuage that unhappiness, she kept us informed about what she knew.

  "General Grant is to be at the head of the catafalque. He is supposed to be wearing a white sash across his breast to show he's the head pallbearer. Well, he'll be dressed properly, for a change—not like Appomattox, when he had to borrow a clean shirt to attend the surrender."

  She spoke in a very loud voice. Several people around our small group were listening. So Myra took on an air of importance.

  "Robert Lincoln is to be right up there with Grant, too, of course. Likely he'll be wearing his army captain's uniform. And with him will be the only other remaining Lincoln son, Tad, who's only twelve."

  "What are they doing now?" a young man asked Myra. He was done up in showy attire. Annie would have called him a hustler. Or worse.

  Myra preened. "It looks like they're putting the coffin in the glass hearse."

  "How come you know so much, little missy?" The hustler grinned. His two young friends nudged each other and winked and raked their eyes over Myra, whose black silk dress emanated anything but mourning.

  "My father's a reporter for the Intelligencer."

  "Is he, now? And you're out here alone? Couldn't you use an escort? And perhaps, at the same time, educate us as to what's going on? My friends and I are from Baltimore."