by Erin Lindsey
“I considered that. In fact, would you believe, I even wondered briefly whether I might use a building. The clock tower of the Tribune, for example, or Trinity Church. But of course that would not work.”
“Because?”
“Because they are not made of conductive material.”
“Like the silver in my bracelet,” I said slowly.
“Exactly. Or the copper in my coil.” He gestured at the apparatus.
“Copper, you say?” My eyes narrowed. An idea was taking shape in my head, crazy enough to give even the most eccentric inventor pause. “How about a statue?”
“I don’t think you understand. The antenna needs to be a hundred feet tall. A statue that size … why, it would rival the Colossus of Rhodes! Such a wonder does not exist in America.”
“Actually, it does. On Bedloe’s Island. And it happens to be made of copper.”
Mr. Tesla stared. “Jebote.”
“I … beg your pardon?”
The flame ball on his shoulder flared and sprang into the air. “Please forgive my crude manners. You mean Mr. Bartholdi’s statue, yes? Liberty?” He rushed to his desk and began furiously scribbling. In the time it took me to cross the room, he’d already drawn a rough outline of the great lady’s torch, to which he was adding a series of T-shapes and what looked like giant saucers. “I station myself here, with a spark-gap oscillator. The power flows into the parabolic reflectors…”
“You’ll be able to reach Cooper Union with this?”
He looked up, his blue-gray eyes glinting with excitement. “With a few minor modifications, I can reach anywhere in the city. I just need a few days, a little assistance, and…” He paused, wincing. “Permission.”
“I’ll figure it out,” I said with a confidence I didn’t feel.
When he’d finished working out the plans, he drew up a list of the materials we would need. “It will be expensive,” he warned.
I assured him that wouldn’t be an issue either. Probably.
“Excellent.” He tore the list in two and handed me the bottom half. “We need the items on this list by tomorrow morning if I am to have any chance of constructing the transmitter in time.”
Scanning the list brought a fresh pang of worry. “It’s going to be a trick getting all this together by tomorrow.”
“Indeed, but if we begin immediately, it ought to be possible. Just.”
“In that case, I’d better hurry. I’ll start at the hardware store up the road.” I gave back the precious spectacles and stuffed the list into my overcoat pocket. “See you in a short while,” I promised.
I never made it.
I’d scarcely gone a block before a familiar figure strode into view, flanked by a pair of underlings. He loomed over me, mustache crooked, beady eyes narrowed in triumph.
“Afternoon, Miss Gallagher,” said Chief Inspector Byrnes.
CHAPTER 29
THE LAST BOAT RIDE YOU’LL EVER TAKE —THE UNLIKELY SPY—RECKONING
“Well, well,” said Thomas Byrnes. “The Good Lord is smiling on me today. I could hardly believe it when the boys wired me to say you’d been spotted on Park Row. She wouldn’t have the sand to come back down here, I said to myself. But here you are.”
They’d noticed me after all, the coppers outside Mrs. Foster’s flat. It was the only explanation.
“Inspector.” I looked him square in the eye, trying to project calm. “I think you’ll be very interested to hear what we—”
He jabbed a finger into my shoulder, hard. “I had him. At the hotel, dead to rights. Trap nicely laid. Only you spring it before it’s ready, and he’s away like a shot. Then, before I can finish interrogating his mates, you bungle it again, charging into that flat like George bloody Custer. No preparation. Not a word to the police. And surprise, surprise, he’s in the wind again. Next I hear there’s been a shoot-out on Mulberry Street, women and children scattering every which way, and a girl answering your description at the heart of it.” He leaned in so close that I could smell the cigars on his breath. “That’s quite enough out of you, Miss Gallagher.”
Strong hands seized me on either side, hoisting me toward a police wagon at the curb. “The ledger!” I cried. “The papers will have it if you don’t let me go!”
Byrnes sneered, showing tobacco-stained teeth. “Do what you like with that ledger. Price’ll deny everything. It’s not written in his hand, so you can’t prove it’s his.”
Even if I could, I’d hardly be the first to accuse Inspector Byrnes of corruption. It had been a feeble threat all along, especially now that he’d had time to think about it.
“Don’t do this,” I said, hating how high and thin my voice sounded. “You don’t have to do this!”
“Did you think I was bluffing, girl? I warned you what would happen if you made a nuisance of yourself. A visit to Blackwell’s Island will keep you out from underfoot.”
I went limp, as if someone had reached down my throat and dragged out my bones. There was a roaring in my ears so loud that I could barely make out Byrnes’s next words.
“Make sure they put her on the boat tonight. And no one breathes a word of this. I’ll not have Bill Chapman in my office whinging about his pet Pinkerton.”
They threw me into the back of the wagon and barred the door, and before I could even brace myself, we were bouncing uptown toward Misery Lane.
What followed will be with me for the rest of my days. Even now, when I think back on it, the bile rises in my throat and a tremble sets into my hands. I don’t recall the details of those first couple of hours, which is probably a mercy, except that I was dragged to the insane pavilion of Bellevue Hospital by an endless procession of rough hands, each one belonging to a rough voice that promised to be even rougher if I resisted. My first real memory, sharp as a razor, is of being told it was my turn to see the doctor. Yet another pair of brutish hands seized me, and the force of it shocked me out of my stupor.
“I don’t need to see a doctor,” I told the attendant who’d grabbed me. “I’m not sick.”
He ignored me, marching me into a small office and throwing me into a chair across from a middle-aged man. They didn’t even bother to close the door for a little privacy. The doctor just looked me up and down and said, “Name.”
“Rose Gallagher, and I’m not insane.”
He wrote that in a book.
“Stick out your tongue.”
“I … what?”
The doctor’s gaze hardened. “Tongue. Out.”
I stuck out my tongue, and he wrote something in his book. “Age?”
“Twenty.”
“Are you employed?”
“Yes, by the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. Who will certainly come looking for me,” I added loudly, “when they realize I’m being held against my will.”
The doctor’s mouth pressed into a thin line, and something almost like pity came into his eyes. He doesn’t believe you. And to think—I hadn’t even got to the part about hunting dead people.
“This is all a terrible mistake. I’m only here because the chief of detectives has it in for me, but all I’m trying to do is prevent the assassination of Theodore Roosevelt.” Dear Lord, I was only making it worse. I drew a steadying breath. “Please, if you could just contact Mr. Thomas Wiltshire or Mr. Jonathan Burrows or…”
The doctor’s pen just scratched faster. Then, without looking up, he said, “Good afternoon, Miss Gallagher.”
“Wait, is that all? How can you possibly tell whether I’m—” The attendant hauled me up, and I was deposited back on a bench in the long white hallway.
I fought to keep calm as I scanned my surroundings. I could try to make a run for it, but I wouldn’t get very far. The entrance was blocked by a pair of coppers, the rear by a heavy iron door fastened with a padlock. In between, an endless row of doors stood closed.
You can handle this, I told myself. It’s just an ordinary hospital. And when I stole a glance at the other women they’d brou
ght in that afternoon, they looked rational enough. Certainly they bore no resemblance to the wild-eyed creatures I’d seen in Frank Leslie’s.
Thomas will come for you. All you have to do is stay strong until then.
But until when, exactly? Nobody knew where I was; Byrnes had made sure of that. Thomas wouldn’t even realize anything was wrong until this evening, when I failed to turn up at Mr. Burrows’s. How long would it take him to work out what had happened? Not before it’s too late, a poisonous voice inside me whispered. For Roosevelt, and for you. Without the items I’d promised, Mr. Tesla wouldn’t be able to construct his transmitter in time. Thomas would be frantic looking for me, distracting him from the case. All the while, I’d be shut away in the most horrible place in America, fighting to keep from actually going insane.
Who will take care of Mam? She was safe for now, in a hotel with Pietro, but they only had enough money for a few nights. It would run out eventually, and Pietro wouldn’t know where to find Thomas, and …
“Stop it,” I whispered aloud. “This isn’t helping.”
“Best not be talking to yourself, dearie,” said a kind voice, and I looked up to find an Irishwoman about Mam’s age leaning on a mop. “If you want to get out of here, that is.”
I tried for a smile. “You’re probably right.”
She considered me with a tilt of her head. “You don’t look mad to me.”
“Would you mind telling that to the doctor?”
“Oh, aye, and he’d listen to me.” She was still giving me that curious look. “Is it true what you said in there? Are you really a Pinkerton?”
“Yes, I really am. And they really will come for me.” Thomas will come for me. I clung to that with everything I had.
“Well, they’d best be quick about it, because once you get on that boat, I don’t care if Grover Cleveland himself comes looking for you, he won’t find you. Not if they don’t want you to be found.”
“What do you mean?”
Glancing up and down the hallway, she lowered her voice. “There’s plenty as use Blackwell’s Island for their personal lockup. Buy one-way tickets for their wives or mistresses, or the sick or elderly they don’t want nothing more to do with.”
“The coppers use it that way, too, apparently,” I said bitterly.
“And politicians and all.”
I felt ill, and not just for myself. I could only imagine how many poor souls had been locked up purely for being inconvenient. “How do they get away with it?”
“There’s enough doctors and nurses only too happy for the coin, and the patients … Well, nobody listens to a lunatic, do they?”
Voices sounded at the end of the hallway. A phalanx of white-capped nurses was making its way toward us, looking grim and determined.
“Take my advice, dearie,” said the maid, with a hasty pretense at mopping, “if you mean to get outta here, do it tonight. ’Cause if they put you on that ferry, it’ll be the last boat ride you ever take.”
“Can you help me? If you could just get a message to Mr. Thomas—”
But she was already gone, leaving me and the other patients in the care of the army of nurses.
“This way,” said a huge woman. She looked to be the head nurse, judging from the bundle of keys dangling from her apron. “Get up, all of you. No talking.”
They led us into a corridor so damp and drafty that the cold seemed to reach out from the stone walls in thick, grasping fingers. We were marched to a bathroom and told to undress. The first woman to refuse was clobbered on the ear, so the rest of us did as we were told. Then, one after another, we were thrown into an ice-cold bath, scrubbed raw with a filthy rag, and half drowned under bucketful after bucketful of frigid water. By this point I was gasping and shivering so badly that I could hardly stand, so they dragged me out of the bath and shoved a flannel slip into my hands.
“Put this on.”
“But I’m soaking—”
A nurse grabbed my arms, and a second yanked the slip over my head. My eyes fell to the black letters across the bottom: LUNATIC PAVILION, BELLEVUE HOSPITAL.
I burst into tears.
They took my hairpin, the beautiful jade rose Thomas had given me. I fought like a banshee when they did that, but there were three of them, and I was cuffed into submission. They dragged a comb through my hair and cut my already-torn fingernails down until they bled. Then I was shoved into a tiny cell and left to sink down onto my cot, damp and bleeding, ears ringing with the warning of the Irish maid.
It was hard to tell how much time had passed since I’d got here, but it had to be at least two o’clock. The boat came at five. If I didn’t find a way out before then …
It’ll be the last boat ride you ever take.
* * *
They came for us an hour later.
“Here,” said a nurse, tossing a pile of stained clothing at my feet. This time I didn’t hesitate, only too happy to peel off the still-sodden slip they’d put me in after my “bath.” My relief was short-lived, however, for no sooner had they given us lukewarm tea than they propelled us out onto the lawn to take the air—by which they might as well have meant take a shower, since a steady drizzle fell from the sky. Within minutes, I was damp and shivering all over again. But that was nothing compared to the fear coiling around me like an ever-tightening noose. Time was bleeding away, and with it my chances of escape.
“God help us,” a young woman muttered beside me. “Do they mean for us to die of fever? Last time they gave us proper hats, at least.”
“You’ve been here before?” And survived? I kept that last part to myself.
“My brothers sent me here last year, when I was suffering from a nervous debility. I came of my own free will, tricked into thinking this was a place for convalescing. It was nothing of the kind, of course, but then I played a trick on them by convalescing just the same.” She smiled sadly. “But I don’t know if I can perform the trick again. And if they put me on the boat, I don’t suppose I’ll ever get back.”
“You don’t seem very sick to me, if you don’t mind me saying so. In fact, I don’t think I’ve seen a truly insane person since I got here.”
“The worst ones get sent to the island straightaway. Too dangerous to mix with the rest of us. They go to the Lodge or get put on the rope.”
“On the rope?”
“Chained up around the waist, all of them in a long line. Quite a sight, they say.”
I shuddered. “How do you know all this?”
“Spend a few nights here and you learn all sorts of things.” Her eyes shifted to me, pale blue and bloodshot. “They’ll beat us out there, you know. Everyone says so.”
The words sank into me like cold claws. I lowered myself onto a bench, and for a moment I just sat there, staring vacantly across the yard. Then I spied the head nurse, and something hardened in the pit of my stomach. If I could just get those keys off her somehow …
I have no idea what my plan would have been, but I never got the chance to find out. A pair of coppers appeared in the yard, making their way toward me in determined strides. My companion beat a hasty retreat. The head nurse, meanwhile, joined the coppers in front of my bench. “It’s come to my attention that you’ve got a case of lice, so we’ll be needing to take that hair of yours. All of it.”
My stomach dropped. “I don’t have lice,” I whispered. “And you know it.”
She leaned in, hands propped on her thighs, until her face was inches from mine. “What I know is that I’ve special instructions in your case, just to make sure you learn your lesson.” And before I could say another word, the coppers were dragging me across the yard, back to the long hallway and the bathroom. I struggled, kicking and cursing a streak so foul that even Pietro would have blushed, but they just laughed. Their fingers dug painfully into my flesh, and they twisted my arms behind my back until I squawked. “We’ll start with these,” the head nurse said, brandishing a pair of scissors. “After that, it’s the razor.”
>
Then a voice said, “Stop.”
Everyone froze. A doctor stood in the doorway.
The nurse frowned, miffed at having her fun interrupted. “We had instructions—”
“Yes, well, now we have new instructions,” the doctor said impatiently. “She’s to be discharged immediately.”
Color flooded the nurse’s cheeks, but there wasn’t much she could say to that, so she dropped the scissors noisily into the sink and flounced off. The coppers followed, and a moment later I was alone.
I sank to the tiled floor, shaking, and there I stayed for heaven knows how long.
When my legs were steady enough to carry me, I made my way down the hall, head spinning. Thomas must have found a way. Or Sergeant Chapman. But the figure waiting at the end of the hallway wasn’t either of those. At first I didn’t recognize him, but then he turned, and my mouth fell open.
“Ah,” said F. Winston Sharpe, “here she is.”
At first I was too stunned to speak. I’d sooner have thought to be rescued by St. Patrick himself than the head of the special branch. “H-how did you…?”
“The Agency is everywhere, Miss Gallagher,” he said gravely. “Are you hurt?”
“They stole her hairpin,” put in a familiar voice, and I noticed the Irish maid leaning on her mop a few feet away.
“We’ll have that sorted. Thank you, Mary.”
“Don’t mention it, boss.” She winked at me and shuffled off, waving her mop across the floor as she went.
I gaped in astonishment. “Her?”
“The special branch keeps careful watch on insane asylums,” Mr. Sharpe explained, lowering his ponderous girth onto a bench. “We’ve at least one Mary in every hospital in the country, keeping their ears pricked for reports of ghosts and magic and so on. There’s no better way to keep abreast of paranormal phenomena.”
“I thought you were on the train from Chicago.”
“And so I was. Modern technology is a miracle, isn’t it? A few clicks on the wires and word of your predicament travels instantaneously to Chicago, only to be flung straight back to New York, so that by the time I step out of my carriage at Grand Central Depot, voilà.” He drew his lapel aside to reveal a telegram in his pocket. “You’re too young to remember a time when that wasn’t possible, but a fellow my age still marvels at it.” He paused, peering up at me. “Perhaps you ought to sit, my dear. If you’ll forgive me for saying so, you look like you’ve been hog-tied and dragged behind a stagecoach.”
