An Acquaintance with Darkness (17 page)

I picked up the jar of solution with the human finger in it. "This was found on the floor in one of the hospitals my uncle worked in during the war."

She covered her hands with her mouth.

"You aren't taking notes, Myra. You'll have to report back to Mrs. McQuade."

"Horrid stuff. I won't write about it. What's
that
?"

"What?" I looked in the direction of her finger. "Oh, it's a pig's head. And, of course, that other jar holds a frog and the third a snake. On that shelf directly behind you are stones from a gallbladder. Now, see this dark stuff?" I held it up. "Iodine. Used in a field hospital in Jonesboro, Georgia, during the war. As an antiseptic. Sprayed in the air."

She nodded numbly. "Where are the bodies?"

"Nobodies, Myra."

"You've hidden them."

"There were none here when Robert first showed me around, and there are none here now. The only bodies are in the college lab. And they were bequeathed. Or they are bodies of executed criminals."

"My father says medical schools have nowhere near enough bodies. And that's why they have to steal them."

How could I scare her off if she was going to use logic? "There are no bodies here," I said again.

"How do I know you didn't get this Robert person to get the bodies out before I came?"

I sighed. "I got in here on a pretense with Robert. Do you think I'd tell him why I wanted to see the place? They trust me. And he had no time to remove anything. From the time I asked him to bring me in here to the time he opened that door, I was with him the whole evening."

She had no answer for that. She was running out of answers. But not questions. "What's in those casks?"

"They're empty now. They held pickles—don't you see the labels?"

"Pickles?"

"Yes. The solution from them is used to preserve specimens. It is very much in demand." I opened the lid. I'd known it was empty because I'd seen the lid unsealed. It hadn't been the other night.

She peered inside. "Smells of whiskey."

"They were packed in rum, arsenic, and corrosive sublimate to preserve them. Well, now you've seen everything. What have you got to say?"

"Let's get out of here." She shuddered. "I'll never eat pickles again."

Uncle Valentine was picking at the food on his plate. It wasn't his way. He had a hearty appetite. It was dinner on Saturday, the twenty-second.

He had invited Marietta. The windows were open, and from outside came the sounds of carriages on the street, children playing. It was dusk. Candles flickered. For most of the meal Marietta had kept us entertained with the clever sayings of her students and talked about their progress. Now she fell silent, and I sensed something was wrong.

Marietta sipped her wine and twirled the stem of her glass with her slender hand. "He'll be all right," she said in her low, well-modulated voice. "I promise you, Valentine."

They exchanged glances and I knew that she was "just knowing things" for him now, as she had described her special gift to me.

"Things will be difficult for him for a while," she said. "He may go on trial, even to prison for a while, but eventually he'll be released. People will understand that he did the right thing."

My uncle sighed. Then he turned to me. "We're being rude," he said. "You should know that my friend Dr. Mudd was arrested at his place in Maryland yesterday. And named in the conspiracy to murder Lincoln."

I gasped. "I don't understand," I said.

"Neither do I," Uncle Valentine muttered. "I saw him today. He's here in Washington in prison. It seems Booth and Herold came to Mudd's farm on the fifteenth after riding all night and day. Booth had a broken bone in his leg. Mudd fixed the leg. On the eighteenth, soldiers came to Mudd's place. Mudd lied. Said a man had come with a broken leg, but he didn't know who he was. The soldiers left and came back yesterday. And Mudd admitted he'd previously known Booth and known whose leg he had set."

He looked at Marietta. "He shouldn't have lied. That will implicate him. Otherwise he could just claim he was doing his duty as a doctor."

"He was," Marietta said simply.

He scowled. "Is a doctor to be persecuted, then, for doing what he thinks is right? Does he not have a duty to mankind?"

He brooded on the matter through dinner, in spite of Marietta's reassurances. And I began to wonder if he was asking the question about Dr. Mudd or about himself.

I
BECAME ACCUSTOMED
to the rhythms of Uncle Valentine's house. In the mornings, before I was out of bed, I'd hear him down the hall in his water closet, blowing his nose and making all the sounds men make upon rising. I recognized those sounds from my daddy and they were, in their own way, comforting.

Uncle Valentine was afflicted by what he called "the curse of the goldenrod." My daddy had had it, too. Only he'd come by his distress in August. Here it was only April 27, and Uncle Valentine was sneezing all over the place and there was no goldenrod in sight.

"Would that I could find a cure for this wretched sneezing and eye itching," he'd say.

For half an hour each morning he coughed up phlegm. "Maude," he'd call, "two grains of quinine, an ounce of whiskey, and a mug of hot coffee." I'd hear Maude climbing the stairs.

On her way back down she'd knock at my door. "Are you awake?"

How could I not be, with all that noise?

Uncle Valentine then shaved. He did not sport a beard, like so many men of the day. And he wanted all his students clean-shaven, too. Robert was.

I'd lie in bed for a while in my second-story tower room, in my Sheraton four-poster that was draped in blue. I had never had such a lovely room. I'd feel like a princess. Until I remembered that towers also held prisoners. Like the miller's daughter. And though I liked it and everyone was nice to me, I hadn't decided yet which I was.

I'd scratch Puss-in-Boots around the ears. She slept with me every night. But I knew I must get up and get dressed. I was expected at the table for breakfast.

While dressing I'd hear Maude coming up the steps again. And I'd know it was with a tray of food for Addie. Before he went down for breakfast, Uncle Valentine would go up to the third floor to visit Addie. I'd hear Addie complaining, Uncle Valentine saying the same thing every morning. "Well now, how do you feel today, Addie? Is that medicine working?"

Every morning, Uncle Valentine ate a hearty breakfast of fresh fish, biscuits, eggs, and coffee. I couldn't bear so much food in the morning. So I'd have hot cooked oats with brown sugar. Was that what Miss Muffet ate sitting on her tuffet? I'd always wondered what curds and whey were.

Uncle Valentine would read his paper while eating. Maude would come in and out softly, setting down more food. I'd hear her talking to deliverymen at the back door—the man who brought the milk, another with fish. Then to her husband, Merry, who stopped by for breakfast. Maude and Merry lived a few streets over. And she went home each night.

Merry popped his head in the door of the dining room every morning. "No shipments last night, boss," he'd say.

"All right, Merry. You better go home and get some sleep," Uncle Valentine would answer.

Merry worked nights.

Or else Merry would tell Uncle Valentine about a shipment that had come. "A dark shipment, boss." And Merry would stand there, all four feet of him, turning his hat in his hands.

"That's all right, Merry. We could use a dark shipment."

"The Board of Guardians at the Almshouse isn't happy."

"They never are," Uncle Valentine would say. "I'll talk to them later."

"Talk won't do it. They want more money."

"Then we ought to start calling them the Board of Buzzards."

Merry would nod his head vigorously. "But there's good news, boss. The procurement committee has intelligence on some new donations."

"Good, good, Merry. I'll be in touch with them this afternoon."

Sometimes Marietta dropped by early in the morning to have coffee with us. She'd talk to Uncle Valentine. About her children. She'd ask him what to do about their ailments. "Willie has the croup," she'd say. Or, "Florence is coming down with a cold."

Uncle Valentine would tell her what to do for them. Or, if it was bad enough, he'd tell her to bring them around.

Usually Maude lingered after she served Uncle Valentine his second cup of coffee, and she'd go over plans for the day. "Funeral this afternoon," she'd tell him.

He'd ask who. It was never anybody important. Maude seemed to go only to the funerals of those who were impoverished or bereft of family. Many were at Potter's Field, which was the burying ground for paupers.

"They've caught up with John Wilkes Booth," Uncle Valentine read to me from the paper on Thursday, April 27, at breakfast.

"Where?"

"In Virginia. On a farm owned by a man named Garrett. South of the Rapahannock. Federal troops surrounded the barn and ordered the suspects out. He was in there with Herold."

"David Herold," I said.

He looked up quickly. "You never said you knew him."

"Herold is the friend of Johnny's who worked at Thompson's Drug Store. He was supposed to bring the medicine for Mama. He didn't."

Uncle Valentine nodded and continued reading. "Federal troops set afire the barn where Booth was hiding. He wouldn't come out. Then someone fired a shot and killed him. They're bringing his body back to Washington for identification and an autopsy."

"Why are they doing an autopsy?"

"They want to determine what killed him."

"A bullet killed him,"I said.

Booth dead. It set me to thinking of Annie. What would she say? "Can I go to Annie's after school? I think she's going to need me."

"No," he said sharply. "I don't want you near that house!" Then he softened. "Annie can come here anytime she wishes," he said quietly. "But there is no telling when the Metropolitan Police may search that house again. You must listen to me on this, Emily. Don't you see what happened to my friend Dr. Mudd?"

He was absolutely devastated by his friend's imprisonment. So I supposed I must humor him. Annie would come. She'd been around twice in the last week, to tell Uncle Valentine that her mother found the new lawyers most satisfactory. She'd also said her mother was not eating.

It looked to me as if Annie wasn't eating, either. She'd gotten thin. There was a stain on her dress the last time she was here. Her hair needed washing. She went, every day, to see her mother in prison. Then she'd go home to the empty house on H Street, without even a cat to greet her.

"Annie told me that her mother is manacled at the wrists and is in leg irons," I said.

"She is lucky. The others, including my friend, are on ironclads in the river, manacled, with hoods over their heads, in the heat."

"I'm sorry about your friend, Uncle Valentine," I said.

He sighed. "I'm sorry, too, Emily. We have something in common now, don't we? Friends involved in this nasty business. There is nothing more I can do for Mrs. Surratt, child. The rest is up to Mrs. Surratt's lawyers. And her son Johnny. If he would come home, likely they would let his mother go free. It's Johnny Surratt they want, not his mother."

I flushed and looked down at my tea. Nobody had heard from Johnny. But it was what people were saying, that if Johnny came back to Washington and gave himself up to authorities they would let his mother go.
Oh, Johnny,
I thought,
where are you? Have you heard about what's going on? Why don't you come home?

"Now, let's change the subject," Uncle Valentine said. "This is dreary. What do you have planned for after school today?"

It was Thursday. I knew what he wanted. On Tuesdays and Thursday he saw patients here at the house. They started arriving at three. And Maude was never here at that time. She was either at market or at one of the many funerals she attended. Usually nobody was home.

The first time I'd seen all the patients waiting outside the house I hadn't known who they were or what to do. Once they explained who they were, I let them in. It seemed the civil thing to do. But then they started crowding around me, telling me their names and their ailments, wanting to be first when the doctor arrived. There had been such commotion I did the only thing I could do. I took names and ailments. I decided which ailment sounded the worst and put that person down as first to be seen. I seated them in the small waiting room. I fetched water for the coughers, brought down some old soft toys I'd found upstairs for the children. One day I made tea for an old Negro woman with three children hanging on her. She was so grateful, she cried.

"You're wonderful," he said when he came home. "I never saw anyone make such order out of chaos. I've always dreaded coming home and having all those people yelling at me."

He asked me if I would do it every Tuesday and Thursday. I said I would. No one had ever accused me of making order out of chaos. I liked the charge. Perhaps if I did a little more of it I could soon make order out of the chaos of my own life. I was starting.

"I'll be home from school directly," I promised. "Do you want me to sort the mail?"

"If you would be so kind."

He got tons of mail every day. From students asking to be in his classes; colleagues all over the world; old friends in Edinburgh, where he went to medical school; suppliers from out of state; quacks writing to him of their cures; old patients he had made well again. There were bills, newspapers, periodicals. I kept a log as to what letter had come in from what place on what day.

It was on that very Thursday, the twenty-seventh, that I found the letter addressed to me in the pile of Uncle Valentine's mail. I had just finished ushering four patients into the waiting room and was sorting the mail out on Uncle Valentine's desk.

My heart jumped right up from my chest, like Puss-in-Boots jumped for a dangling string. It was on its way out of my mouth when I saw that the letter had no postmark. How had it gotten here?

I had to put my hand over my mouth to hold my heart in.

There was no return address. It was Johnny's handwriting.