An Acquaintance with Darkness (13 page)

"Here, kitty-kitty," I called.

We went in through the kitchen. I kept calling for Puss-in-Boots. Then I heard her meowing. "She's upstairs," I told Robert.

He gestured that I should go and he would follow. We found Puss-in-Boots in Mrs. Mary's room, on the bed. She blinked at us. I gathered her up, stroked her black fur. "Isn't she pretty?" I asked Robert. "Look. She has white feet and a white vest."

"Feed her," he growled, "and let's get out of here."

"I'm not going to feed her. I'm taking her with me. To Uncle Valentine's."

"You can't."

"Why can't I?"

"Because— Look around. This place has been searched. Everything here is evidence."

"Not Puss-in-Boots, Robert. She isn't evidence. I'm taking her."

He sighed. He ran his hand through his hair in distraction. We looked around. He was right. Mrs. Mary's room was a shambles. Pictures had been taken from the walls. The desk in the corner, where she kept her accounts, was in disarray. "One picture had the arms of the state of Virginia," I told Robert. "And it said, '
Sic Semper Tyrannis.
'"

"Wonderful," Robert said dryly, "that's what Booth is supposed to have said when he fled across the stage after shooting Lincoln. Let's get out of here, for God's sake."

He hurried me downstairs. I clutched Puss-in-Boots in my arms. Robert locked the back door and put the key back under the flower pot, and we went back across the two yards and out into the street to the carriage.

Only when we were driving off did it all come together for me in my head. "Robert," I said, "if Uncle Valentine had let me come yesterday as I wanted, I would have been able to see Annie. Now she's gone."

He did not answer.

"I'm never going to forgive him for that. I may never see her again."

"You'll see her again."

I stroked the cat in my lap. "And I'm not going to stay with him," I went on as if Robert hadn't spoken. "I just won't. I'm going to find a way to go and live with Aunt Susie in Richmond."

"Well, that would be going from the frying pan into the fire. Richmond is the only place in America probably in a worse state than Washington right now."

"I don't care. I'm not staying with him."
Nothing could be worse than Washington right now,
I thought. The president was dead. The whole town was in an uproar. People were running through the streets, forming mobs. Detectives were arresting anybody who looked suspicious. Cavalrymen were riding in groups with drawn swords. My best friend had been taken by the police. And Robert had just told me he'd been in the cemetery at midnight and seen a man I knew, a man who'd been a guest at the Surratts', climbing out of a marble vault.

"I thought you told me a person doesn't desert a friend in time of need? What about Annie?" he asked. "You going to run to Richmond when she needs you now?"

"That's why I hate you, Robert," I said.

He sighed. "I know, because I'm not Johnny."

"No," I said, "because you're always right."

"Well, I hope I'm not right about this."

"What?"

"I'm not so sure your uncle is going to let you keep that cat."

U
NCLE
V
ALENTINE
let me keep the cat.

But he made me go back to school. And so it was that I stood in the large carpeted hall outside my classroom in Miss Winefred Martin's School for Young Ladies the very next day, knowing that I had seen too much in these last two weeks to ever feel like one of Miss Winefred Martin's young ladies again.

Mrs. McQuade smiled at me. Her large blue eyes, usually so open to the possibilities of the world around her, looked bleary this day. Black did not become her. She usually wore lavender or yellow. Clothing was her one passion. "Life can be a costume party or a wake, girls," she'd once told us. "I prefer to think of it as a costume party."

"I am so glad you are back, Emily," she whispered. "The girls are very unsettled, what with the assassination. And I must confess, I am myself. This is a most dreadful thing, most dreadful. I never expected to find such chaos in America."

The last four years have been chaos,
I thought.
Haven't you noticed? Of course, nobody is cutting off anybody's head and the blood isn't running in the streets like it did in France during your revolution. Leastways not in any way you can see yet.
In all the time I had known her, Mrs. McQuade had refused to let anything shock her out of the ordered certainty of her existence.

Now this had. The assassination. She was plainly shaken.

"We are having our Wednesday Morning Discussion Group," she said. "Your calming influence is needed."

I had always thought of myself as the hand-wringer type. I muddled through, trying to get things right, while everyone else knew what they were doing. "It's Tuesday," I reminded her.

"I know it's Tuesday. But I thought the girls needed it this morning."

"I don't know, Mrs. McQuade. I don't know if I can even go in there. I just know they're all whispering about me because my mother died."

"Mr. Lincoln's dying is all that's on their minds. I am afraid they have quite forgotten your mother's passing, Emily. I shall remind them."

"Don't, please. If I have to come back to school, I'd just as soon slip in and take a seat and have nothing said of the matter."

"'If'?" She scowled. "Certainly you aren't thinking of leaving school, Emily."

"It isn't school, Mrs. McQuade. It's that I just don't know if I can come back and be one of Miss Winefred Martin's girls again after all that's happened."

And then there was Myra Mott, my archenemy. I just knew she'd have something vengeful to say to me. She never let me forget that I did not have the social standing of the other girls. I did not think I could abide Myra Mott this morning, but I didn't say it. Mrs. McQuade did not allow rivalries in her classroom.

"You never were one of them, child," she whispered now. "You always had a bucketful of common sense that the others don't have."

"Thank you. But sometimes I wish I didn't. And now I feel so old. And all they do is talk about parties and boys."

"Not this morning. So come right on in. I'm sure you can contribute something, can't you?"

In the Wednesday Morning Discussion Group everyone was expected to have an opinion. Sometimes the discussion would be about food prices, especially with all the inflation with the war. Sometimes it was the freedmen problem. Sometimes it was fashions. We were graded on our comments. Mrs. McQuade did not hold with the notion that women should speak of nothing but children and matters of the home. New times were coming, and we must be ready for them.

I went into the bright, sunny classroom and slipped into my seat. The discussion was already in progress.

"The newspaper says his body is in the East Room of the White House," Lydia Rath was whispering, "and that he's wearing the suit he wore at the inauguration, just five weeks ago!"

"The doors of the White House are to be thrown open today!" Carol Johnson put in. "And the public is going to be allowed to file by and see him!"

"Remember, girls"—Mrs. McQuade rapped the desk with her pencil—"this discussion must remain on an intelligent level. Where should Mr. Lincoln be buried? Here in Washington? Or back in Springfield? And are the fortunes of the Republican Party, and not the needs of the people, on Mr. Stanton's mind?"

"I think he should be buried right here in Washington," Lucy Cameron said firmly, "under the Capitol's dome, the space originally made for George Washington." Lucy wore glasses and always made intelligent comments.

"Do you consider Mr. Lincoln on a par, as president, with Washington, then?" Mrs. McQuade probed.

Everyone agreed he was.

"I think the funeral should be long," Lydia Rath said wistfully, "and stately. I think all the cities that want to see him should be allowed to see him."

"Well, I'll tell you what I think," Marcia Wilson put in, "I don't think all those Southern relatives of Mrs. Lincoln's should be allowed in the White House. Not until they find out if this was a Southern conspiracy or not."

Everyone murmured their approval.

"My daddy said that the Todds are already here." Myra Mott knew they regarded her as someone to be reckoned with. Her father was a reporter for the
Intelligencer.
And she always knew more than anybody. She smirked. "My daddy tells the story that Mr. Lincoln once said the Todds spell their name with two
d
's. And one
d
is enough for God."

"Gossip," Mrs. McQuade said. "We do not want gossip, Myra. We want to speak of issues."

Myra flushed, then recovered. "All right then, issues. For everybody's information, it's all true about a man named Powell stabbing Secretary of State Seward. He broke into Seward's house the night Lincoln was shot. And tried to stab him in the throat. Only thing that saved Seward was a steel brace he was wearing to hold his broken jaw in place."

"Thank you for that information, Myra," Mrs. McQuade said.

"And, I'm going to the White House to see Mr. Lincoln's remains this afternoon with my father," she said imperiously. "He said it's an historic moment, and I mustn't miss it."

The others
ooh
ed and
aah
ed.

"Is she getting out of school early, then?" Lucy Cameron asked.

"You all are," Mrs. McQuade said. "But I advise you not to go near the White House. The crowds will be crushing. The papers say that tomorrow there will be a grand procession along Pennsylvania Avenue. Certainly you can catch a glimpse of the hearse there. We'll be going together as a class."

"People are charging twenty-five cents to sit in a window along Pennsylvania Avenue," little Elizabeth Townsend piped in. "Isn't that exploitation, Mrs. McQuade?"

"It is. But I imagine we'll be seeing a lot of that, human nature being what it is. What other signs of exploitation do we see in all this ceremony, girls?"

"I think dragging poor Mr. Lincoln's body around for fourteen days is exploitation," Elizabeth said. "How can a dead body last fourteen days?"

That's when I spoke and shouldn't have. "My uncle Valentine was called to the White House yesterday," I said.

They all stared at me. And of a sudden, I wanted to get up and run out of the room.

"Emily is living with her uncle, Dr. Bransby, now, girls," Mrs. McQuade said softly. "Since her mother's untimely death. Tell us, Emily, why was your uncle called to the White House?"

Myra was glaring at me. I had no real friends in my class, though I got along with everyone after a fashion. The girls respected me, though outside school we did not mix. But with Myra Mott my relationship was clearly defined.

She considered me something that had been sneaked in the back door. Someone not worthy of my place in the school. And I had the nerve to get better marks than she did, too.

Her marks were respectable; she was prettier and popular. Her mother had social standing. But the enmity had come to a head when I won the midwinter essay contest, hands-down, over her. The prize had been a copy of
Uncle Tom's Cabin,
signed by the author, Harriet Beecher Stowe. Mrs. McQuade knew her.

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."