Murder on Gramercy Park

by Victoria Thompson

  “She must have been very grateful,” Frank suggested, not missing the fact that Potter had called Mrs. Blackwell by her given name.

  “So grateful that she insisted on giving a personal testimonial at Edmund’s lectures. Her story brought him to the public eye and convinced many people to try Edmund’s services. Her family is quite socially prominent, you know.”

  “So I gathered from meeting Mr. Symington. What was wrong with Mrs. Blackwell in the first place?”

  Potter seemed shocked at the question. “I told you, she was an invalid.”

  “You said it was a riding accident. Was she paralyzed? Crippled? Broken bones?”

  “She was injured. She was in severe pain for almost a year, so severe she couldn’t rise from her bed. With only a few treatments, Edmund was able to relieve that pain so she could live a normal life again.”

  Frank remembered what Sarah had said about most people getting well if they wanted to. Perhaps Blackwell’s true gift was being able to make people want to get better. He noted that Potter hadn’t told him exactly what Mrs. Blackwell’s injuries had been. Probably he didn’t know. For an instant Frank had an errant thought of asking Sarah Brandt to find out, but he quickly caught himself. If he truly wanted to keep her from getting involved in the investigation, that was exactly the wrong thing to do.

  OUTSIDE MRS. BLACKWELL’S bedroom door, Sarah paused to take a deep breath. Venting the fury she felt at the woman would accomplish nothing. When she had mastered her feelings, she knocked on the door and entered without waiting for a reply.

  Mrs. Blackwell appeared to be dozing, although still propped up on her mountain of pillows. She blinked uncertainly, obviously not recognizing Sarah at first.

  “Oh, Mrs. Brandt,” she finally realized. Then she listened for a moment. “The baby, he stopped crying. Is he...?”

  “He’s sleeping,” Sarah said. “The laudanum relieved him.”

  She sighed and closed her eyes. Sarah thought she probably didn’t want to face her problems, and Sarah couldn’t really blame her. They must seem overwhelming at the moment, especially to a person who needed morphine to deal with a normal day.

  After a moment Mrs. Blackwell opened her eyes again. They were clouded and full of anguish. “I never meant to hurt the baby. You must believe me.”

  This was the opening Sarah had been waiting for. She stepped closer to the bed. “You were right not to stop taking the morphine. If you had, you most certainly would have lost the baby.”

  She seemed relieved to hear this. “They said he would be fine, though. They said once he was born, he wouldn’t need it the way I do.”

  “I’m sure they told you what you wanted to hear. It wasn’t in their best interests for you to stop using morphine, now was it?”

  Her eyes filled with tears, but this time Sarah knew they were genuine and not an attempt to gain her sympathy. “I haven’t been able to stop taking the morphine, no matter how hard I try. How will he be able to stop? He’s so tiny ...”

  Her voice broke on a sob, and this time Sarah took one of her hands in both of hers. It was small and soft and icy cold. “I’ve seen this before,” she said. “With a baby, it’s possible to gradually decrease the amount you give him until he’s not dependent on it anymore. We’ll wait a few months, until he’s stronger, and then we’ll start weaning him off of it.”

  “But I’ve tried to stop so many times! The first time almost killed me, and I’ve never been able to do it again. The pain is unbearable.” The tears were running down her cheeks unchecked now. Sarah felt her anger melting.

  “We won’t let your baby suffer, Mrs. Blackwell.”

  The younger woman looked at her with desperate eyes. “I know you’re a midwife, but will you take care of him yourself? Will you come back and make sure he’s all right and help wean him from that awful stuff?”

  Sarah could not refuse. “Of course I will, if that’s what you want. Tell me, though, how did you begin taking the morphine in the first place?”

  She closed her eyes and seemed to shudder. “It was ... when I was hurt. I fell off a horse when I ... I hurt my back and my neck. The pain was horrible, and they gave me morphine. It was the only way I could bear it.”

  “Didn’t you consult any physicians?”

  Mrs. Blackwell stared at her in amazement. “Of course! My father called in every doctor he could find. There were dozens. None of them could do anything for me. They said I’d be an invalid for the rest of my life. I didn’t leave my room for almost a year, and I hardly even left my bed. Walking was excruciating and I could only sit in a chair for a few minutes at a time. And then Edmund came.”

  “Your husband,” Sarah said. “What did he do that the others didn’t?”

  Mrs. Blackwell’s smooth brow furrowed as she struggled to explain. “He touched me. The others wouldn’t touch me. It caused me too much pain. But Edmund told me he could make me well if he could just do some simple adjustments.”

  “What kind of adjustments?”

  “To my spine. That’s how he cures people. It’s like a miracle. I felt better almost instantly. Within a few weeks my pain was completely gone.”

  “But you still needed the morphine,” Sarah guessed.

  Mrs. Blackwell closed her eyes again, and Sarah could only imagine the anguish these admissions cost her. “Edmund thought I shouldn’t need the morphine anymore because my pain was gone. My father thought so, too. I didn’t want to take it anymore, so I did what they told me and stopped taking it. I thought I was going to die.”

  “Stopping morphine is extremely difficult. Few people ever succeed,” Sarah told her, not mentioning that some of the aids physicians sometimes used were even worse than the agony of withdrawal itself.

  “But I did succeed!” she informed Sarah. “It was the hardest thing I ever did in my life, but I did it! I was finally free of both the pain and the morphine. I thought I could go back to my normal life again. That was all I wanted.”

  “But you didn’t?”

  Mrs. Blackwell sighed, and another tear slid down her cheek. “Edmund asked me to help him. He said he could cure many other people, just the way he’d cured me, but he couldn’t unless those people knew his treatments worked. He was going to give a lecture in the city, explaining his techniques and how successful they were, but he needed someone to testify, someone he’d cured. He said ... I mean, after what Edmund had done for me, how could I refuse?” she asked, her eyes pleading for Sarah to confirm her decision.

  “Of course,” Sarah said, knowing she could only imagine the pressure he must have put on her. “You must have been very grateful. But how did your father feel about it?” Sarah couldn’t imagine her own father allowing her to do such a thing as speak about her health problems at a public lecture.

  “He didn’t really think it was proper, but he was so grateful to Edmund that he couldn’t refuse. I think he felt some sort of debt of honor to him. Edmund told me what to say. He wrote it out for me. All I had to do was read it, but I was so frightened! There were hundreds of people, and they were all looking at me. I was so terrified, I almost fainted. I don’t even remember giving the speech, but Edmund was very pleased, and many people came to him for his treatments after that. So of course he wanted me to speak again.”

  Sarah was beginning to understand what had happened. “You must have been very frightened,” she guessed.

  “I was so frightened, I knew I wouldn’t be able to get up on that stage again, but my father felt we owed Edmund for what he had done. Edmund hadn’t even accepted any payment for treating me, even though he’d been practically penniless. He only wanted my help. What could I do?”

  “You could have told Edmund and your father how terrified you were,” Sarah suggested kindly.

  “I did, but they couldn’t understand. They kept saying I’d get over it, that I’d be fine, just as I was the first time. But I hadn’t been fine the first time, and I couldn’t explain that to them! They made me do it, but
the only way I could get through it was to take some morphine. Just a little,” she hastened to explain, lest Sarah think badly of her. “Just enough so I didn’t feel afraid. I wasn’t going to take it anymore after that, but ...”

  “But you couldn’t help yourself,” Sarah guessed. She’d seen the power of the opiate to hold someone in its thrall.

  “Once I started again, I couldn’t seem to stop, especially when Edmund asked me to go to other cities for lectures. My father went with us, of course. It was all very proper, but I was still terrified of the crowds. I hid the morphine from them, so neither of them knew I was taking it. It was awful, lying to both of them and trying to buy the morphine when they didn’t know. They would have been so angry ... and so disappointed with me.”

  Sarah knew that morphine was readily available at any drugstore, but she also knew women of the upper classes had little freedom. An unmarried girl would have been chaperoned wherever she went. Mrs. Blackwell must have been clever indeed to manage to obtain her morphine without discovery.

  “Then Edmund told me he’d fallen in love with me and asked me to marry him,” she went on, so anxious to tell her story that she hardly seemed aware of Sarah’s presence anymore. “I thought if he really loved me, he wouldn’t make me do the lectures anymore, but I was wrong. Once we were married, he could take me anywhere he went without worrying about a chaperon anymore. I wanted to stop the morphine again, but I couldn’st, not unless I told Edmund that I was taking it and unless he would let me stop doing the lectures. I tried telling him I didn’t want to do the lectures anymore, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He told me I had no choice, because without the lectures, he wouldn’t get new patients and he wouldn’t be able to make a living. He was my husband. I had to help him, didn’t I?”

  Sarah chose not to answer that question. “I can understand that you wanted to do the right thing.”

  “I don’t know what the right thing is anymore,” she said with a weary sigh.

  “Well, one thing is for certain, with your husband gone, you won’t have to attend those lectures anymore. So if you’d like to try stopping the morphine again, I can help you when you’re stronger,” Sarah offered.

  “I can’t think about that now,” she said wearily. “I can’t think about anything now. I just want to sleep.”

  “That’s certainly a good idea. I’ll make sure no one bothers you.”

  “Especially my father,” Mrs. Blackwell said when Sarah started to leave. “He came yesterday, and he made me cry, talking about Edmund. I don’t want to cry anymore. Please tell him I’m not able to see him.”

  “Of course,” Sarah agreed, wondering how she would explain this to Mrs. Blackwell’s father. She left to check on the baby.

  MALLOY WAITED IN the parlor for Sarah Brandt. She didn’t even say hello when she came in.

  “So, Malloy, when do you plan to arrest the killer?” she asked instead, trying to nettle him.

  He didn’t let on that she had succeeded. She was the only woman he knew who could look appealing while being infuriating. “I need to ask Mrs. Blackwell some questions. When can I see her?”

  “My guess would be a few weeks,” she told him without a hint that she was teasing him. “She asked me a few moments ago to tell her own father she was too ill to receive him, so she’s certainly too ill to see you.”

  “Is she?”

  “If she says she is, then she is,” she informed him. “Would you dare impose yourself on a woman during her lying-in?”

  Frank tried not to feel the irritation he was feeling, mostly because it wasn’t entirely unpleasant. He actually enjoyed arguing with Sarah Brandt, as difficult as that was to understand. “I need to find out what she knows about her husband’s death, and the sooner I do that, the better chance I have of finding the killer.”

  “I would be happy to question her for you if you’ll just tell me what you need to know,” she said, taking a seat on the sofa and making herself comfortable.

  “You are not a member of the police force, and you are not involved in this investigation,” he reminded her.

  “Well, then, I suppose you won’t be interested in the fact that Mrs. Blackwell uses morphine.”

  “What?” Although he hadn’t intended to, he sat down in the chair opposite her.

  “Mrs. Blackwell has used morphine for several years, except for a brief period,” she said. “It seems she began using it when she was injured in a riding accident.”

  “That’s the accident her husband cured her of, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “What was wrong with her exactly?”

  “She said her back and neck were injured.”

  Frank frowned. “He cured her of a broken neck?”

  “I doubt it. More likely, she sprained her back or pulled something. Such injuries can be extremely painful, and there is no effective treatment except bed rest and opiates for the pain. Sometimes they get better, and sometimes they don’t.”

  “Except Blackwell knew of a treatment for it,” Frank reminded her.

  “So it appears. From what his wife told me, I think Blackwell must have been a bonesetter.”

  “A bone-setter? You mean he set broken bones?”

  “Not exactly. I suppose in the old days, that’s what bonesetters did, back before the science of medicine was so advanced and doctors began setting bones themselves,” she said, and Frank managed not to snort in derision. His opinion of medicine wasn’t quite as high as hers. “Nowadays,” she continued, “bonesetters perform manipulations on bones that make people feel better.”

  “What do you mean ‘manipulations’?”

  “I mean they move the body around and somehow manage to make bones shift position, on the theory that they are somehow out of their proper position, which is what is causing the problems. I imagine that something in Mrs. Blackwell’s spine or neck was somehow out of line from the accident, and Blackwell managed to realign it, thus relieving her pain.”

  “Is that possible?”

  “Apparently. She said her pain was completely gone within a few weeks, after she’d been confined to her bed for almost a year.”

  “How did you find out she uses morphine?” Frank asked.

  “Her baby became ill because he was no longer receiving the drug from his mother. I recognized the symptoms.”

  “You mean to tell me the woman gave her baby morphine?” Frank was horrified.

  “Not directly,” she explained patiently. “He would have gotten the effects of the morphine through the umbilical cord before he was born. Once he was born, he would no longer receive it. Sometimes, the baby receives enough of the drug through his mother’s milk to satisfy the craving, but Mrs. Blackwell chose to use a wet nurse, so after about a day, he was desperate for the drug and showing all the signs of deprivation. He would have died without it, so I gave him a small dose of opium to ease his suffering.”

  “You let him have morphine?” Frank asked, horrified all over again.

  She sighed with long-suffering. She always found Frank unreasonable, although he could never understand why. “My choice was to either give him the drug or watch him die in agony. What would you have done?”

  Frank chose not to reply to that. “All right, so Mrs. Blackwell uses morphine. That’s unusual for a woman of her social class, but—”

  “It’s not as unusual as you might suppose,” she disagreed. “Many women of her social class use opiates of some sort.”

  “What on earth for?” He could understand why the poor used stimulants like alcohol and opiates to help them forget the grim realities of their existence, but what could a woman like Mrs. Blackwell need to forget?

  “There are all kinds of pain, Malloy. Life can be hard even if you’re rich.”

  He didn’t bother arguing with her. It was usually a waste of time, even when he knew she was wrong. “All right, so she uses morphine. What does that have to do with her husband’s death?”

  “Her husband didn�
��t know she was still using it. He knew she’d given it up after he cured her, even though it was very difficult for her. Have you ever seen anyone going through the process of weaning himself off an opiate? Few people ever manage to do it. But then he forced her to speak at his lectures. He gave lectures to promote—”

  “I know all about his lectures,” Frank said. “His assistant explained it to me, but he said Mrs. Blackwell was only too pleased to give her testimony of what the good doctor had done for her.”

  “Mrs. Blackwell tells a different story. She hated speaking in public. It terrified her, but her father and Blackwell forced her to do it.”

  “How could they force her if she didn’t want to do it?”

  “Really, Malloy, how do you force people to tell you things they don’t want to tell you?” she asked, that gleam in her eyes that made her look so wicked he thought he should probably lock her away before she could cause any more trouble.

  “Are you telling me they gave her the third degree?” he asked, giving her trouble right back.

  “Of course not. You should know there are more effective ways of managing someone like Mrs. Blackwell. Women of her class are taught from birth to be obedient and compliant and to please men.”

  “You’re from her class,” he pointed out, reminding her that she had been born into one of the oldest and wealthiest families in the city. “What happened to you?”

  She gave him one of her looks, but she didn’t dignify his words with a reply. “The important thing for you to know is that Mrs. Blackwell started using morphine again to help overcome her fear of appearing at those lectures. It was the only way she could do it. Her husband didn’t approve of her using morphine, and she must have lived in constant fear that he would discover her secret. She also hated speaking at his lectures, which was why she needed the morphine in the first place. I imagine she was excused from doing them once her condition became apparent, but surely, he would have expected her to resume her appearances once the child was born. In fact, she told me he’d forbidden her to nurse the child herself because she had to be free to attend those lectures.”