Breath and Bones (43 page)

Most nights, Ophelia slept beautifully, reflected in the shiny glass walls; and she woke with ever greater energy. Thus, by the early months of 1886, she had become what Nurse Pym proudly called a handful. Much to her
own surprise, Miss Pym had recognized that the electricity was of benefit to Famke. It helped the girl's body to uncurl, to become more elastic, more capable of assuming the postures of good health. Witnessing this, Pym came to have faith in Mr. Versailles's strange theory of hygiene and, even without his knowledge, to promote it subtly in the town below. She was grateful to be part of this wondrous new cure, and from time to time Famke discovered her kneeling on the floor, offering thanks up to God for the gift of modern medicine.

The patient, however, had had enough of her bed; she was complaining of boredom and demanding to be allowed up. Edouard felt strongly about the restful component of his cure, and he would not allow her to rise from the pillows under her own locomotion, even to use the sparkling bathroom nearby; but he knew he was losing control of his patient. Her opiate dosage had reached a level he was reluctant to increase, and he began to cast about for some sort of gentle occupation for her; something not too taxing, for which the occasional drug-induced languor of her fingers would not be a hindrance.

Seated at his great warped desk, Edouard sifted through the drawers where he kept his parents' most treasured personal items. He had long ago boxed up his pious mother's collection of prayer books and crucifixes—Edouard could not follow any creed that celebrated physical suffering—but he had collected more precious memento mori in brass coffers and faded velvet bags: locks of his mother's dull auburn hair woven into bracelets, his father's iron gray strands coiled inside rings and brooches—the jewelry he planned to give a wife if one ever found her way to his lonely mountain. He'd also had hair from both the elder Versailles twined into a wreath that he thought would look very fine atop a bridal veil. The Chinese maids sometimes jested, but always in quiet tones, that there was not a hair left on either head at rest in the miniature Taj Mahal.

He was so used to collecting hairs that now, in another drawer, he had a nest of fiery red locks rescued from Ophelia's bath water, her comb, her pillows. The singsong sisters gathered them without question, drying and untangling each strand, then mounting it all on a hair receiver to await some future grand purpose. The time was early as yet, and of course he would wear no such memento while he was her doctor, but Edouard could imagine weaving Ophelia's hairs into the prettiest object of all. He envisioned an
intricate diorama of flowers, bees, and butterflies that could occupy a prominent position in his study. Or perhaps a gleaming watch fob, something he might use to replace the worn maternal one he used for fidgeting. The old woman who had made his parents' tokens had died several summers before, but Ophelia had long, artistic fingers. Perhaps she herself could weave the fob when she recovered enough to be weaned off opium and regain her natural quickness. Or, if she did not recover—

“Life's Importance!” he barked, and the words echoed through the lacy structure of iron.

The maid came as fast as she could, swaying on her crippled little feet. She stopped, face carefully blank to hide the pain, one hand behind her tunic steadying herself against the doorframe.

Edouard assumed the stern countenance of a doctor. “Are you skilled with the needle?” he asked.

The maid nodded. She hemmed and mended his sheets, but he could not be expected to know it, any more than he could know of her childhood spent spinning silk threads, a cricket in a cage at her elbow, to make a trousseau she would never need. She had been kidnapped at age fourteen, just on the eve of her marriage to a man as rich as the one who employed her here.

“Could you make something like this?” He pulled out a bracelet, and she limped forward to look.

Life's Importance had a more than basic understanding of needlecraft, but she could not account for the little quills of hair that spiralled round the thick circlet. She hesitated, then shrugged.

For once, Edouard was irritated at a silence. Life's Importance, who scarcely spoke at all, was normally his favorite of the three maids. “Could the other girls do it?” he asked.

She shrugged again, then bowed her head to show humility.

Edouard sighed and tucked the bracelet back into its box. “Bring me Ophelia's chart,” he ordered.

He simply had to refine the treatment. Perhaps an extra session of electricity each day would flush out the bacilli more quickly . . .

Life's Importance disappeared.

Nowhere else have so many extensive colonies been successfully planned and started as in California, much of whose prosperity is due to the scientific skill with which its settlements have been established
.

M
OSES
K
ING
,
K
ING'S
H
ANDBOOK OF THE
U
NITED
S
TATES

There came a cold, gray day in February, a day on which the strongest horse would only flounder on the icy path to Edouard's palace. Dr. Beachly put on his thickest boots and headed up the mountain.

The latest supply wagon had brought long-awaited light fixtures to the new Institute, and for this Edouard Versailles would be grateful; but somewhere between Chicago and Hygiene the boxes had been opened, and whoever had inspected the contents had repacked them. Luckily, not a single globe or flute was broken; but the new packing materials bore disturbing implications for Mr. Versailles.

“I thought you should see this.” Beachly handed his employer a crumpled sheet of yellow paper. “There were several among the crates.”

Edouard Versailles took the paper and began the delicate process of unfolding. The page was grimy and soft, as fragile as lace, and it fell apart in places along the creases. Nonetheless he managed to untangle the shreds and lay them out on the desk, atop a diagram of “the inner female parts, with assorted anomalies of size and proportion.”

He pieced together a face and a word. Ophelia's face, underneath the legend WANTED. The likeness was crude, the nose too small and the cheekbones too low; but clearly this was his patient.

“There were several of these handbills,” Beachly said again, rubbing his hands in embarrassment, “but I believe I have found them all. It is for you to decide what to do.” Privately, he hoped Versailles would elect to keep the
discovery a secret—as the patient was virtually a secret herself—and continue his mysterious treatment. Downmountain, it was the dawn of a momentous era for Dr. Beachly and his associates, and at this stage Edouard Versailles could only be a nuisance; some months ago he had caused significant delay by insisting the rooms be wired for electricity as well as plumbed for gas. Fortunately, his work with this “wanted” woman, Ursula Summerfield, kept him out of Beachly's way, and the three tall hexagons were nearly ready for real paying patients and their formally trained doctors.

Edouard was silent a long moment, puzzling over the broken text.

WAN ED

Information as to whereabo     of Ursula Summerfield,

formerly of Prophet City, Ut     Terr
.

Hair red or black, eye     ue, build slender
.

REW RD

Respond to Heber Goodho     of that town or to any officer

of the law in Deseret Cou

“Hair red or black”? “Officer of the law”? And who was Heber Goodho? Edouard stroked his watch fob and thought.

Behind him, Beachly coughed; not as a patient would cough, but as a polite reminder of his presence.

Edouard acted all at once and summarily. He gathered the yellow scraps in one fist and rushed out, leaving Beachly to study the gynecological drawings, and Ancient Jade to sweep up the leaves of jasmine Edouard had torn from the banister in his haste.

Up in her bright, airy room, he found Ophelia moving her hands beneath the bedclothes. When she saw him, she opened her mouth as if to voice some complaint, but at the look on his face she stopped herself.

Silently, upon the faded velvet of Grandmother's Flower Garden, Edouard patched together the handbill.

Once all the facts lay before her, Ophelia chewed her lip and coughed, then fumbled among the sheets for a handkerchief. He felt she was trying to distract him, and he did nothing, though his own linen square remained a damp but clean ball in his hand.

“I . . . that is a strange picture,” she said at last, when he made no move
toward pocket, basin, or bottle. “I know nothing about it, but that woman is very plain. She does not really resemble me, does she?”

Edouard's voice trembled as much as his hands, but he spoke clearly. “Are you Ursula Summerfield?”

She did not answer but looked as if she were trying hard to come up with words.

Edouard flung his arms wide, losing the handkerchief and disordering his cravat. “You are!” he cried. “And you remember it perfectly well!”

Finally recognizing his absolute conviction, Famke took a deep breath and sighed. She picked at a loose seam in the quilt, feeling sad that she'd never got to use the flush toilet; she had always known this was just a matter of time, but she had hoped to be considerably better before Edouard threw her out into the streets. “Yes,” she admitted reluctantly, “my name is Famke Sommerfugl. Or Ursula Summerfield—Ursula is the name the nuns gave me, and Summerfield is what Americans made of my—”

Edouard would not be distracted with etymologies. “But what have you done?” he demanded. “The law is asking for you. Was it murder, robbery . . .” His words trailed away as his thoughts reached toward depravities of which he could not quite conceive.

Famke realized she had not enjoyed her pretense at amnesia; what a relief it was at last to claim her own name and to let herself remember her life. Even to her own ears, her voice sounded different now, more like a real voice. “I have not killed anyone. And I have not stolen anything.” Briefly, she thought of the silver tinderbox that Heber had once thought she'd taken from Herr Skatkammer: How long ago that seemed. “I don't know why they would mention the law.”

He regarded her through narrowed eyes; for once he was not too embarrassed to meet her gaze. “So now you tell me you can remember? That is convenient.”

She would not look up; the quilt top was coming apart nicely. “Yes, I remember. I always have remembered.”

Moving like an automaton, Edouard sat down in the chair from which he'd explained the intricacies of tubercle and bacillus, the chair from which he had watched her sleeping and dreamed, himself, ambitious dreams for her cure.
So she remembered
. He was not as surprised as he thought he should be; he thought he must have known this all along. Opiates aside, the
woman had always seemed too sharp and too quick of wit, and Edouard knew now that he had been her willing dupe. Even so, he was tempted to believe her protestations of innocence . . .

Irrelevantly, Edouard's mind played a game of word association in his all-but-forgotten native tongue: Famke . . .
femme que
. . . She was
la femme que
—the woman whom—what?

“
Alors
,” he asked, in a bit of a daze, “who is this Heber Goodho of Utah?”

“Heber . . .” Famke hesitated. No clever story sprang to mind; all she could think about, inexplicably, was that half-seen flush toilet. “Goodhouse. He is my husband.”

Edouard's face went pink. “You have a husband?”

“Yes.” She looked away again, feeling rather shy but at the same time suddenly hopeful. She thought Edouard must be thinking of the electrical treatments Down There and what a husband might have to say about them. Certainly Edouard and his nurses had been rather free with her body. Famke wondered what she might make of this; for, just at the moment, she wanted nothing more than to stay right here in Hygiene and continue her treatments, to regain her health completely. Edouard must be made to want it as badly as she did.

“But he doesn't advertise for you under his last name. You are Summerfield and he is Goodho—Goodhouse.”

“That is because . . . in Utah . . .” Here her powers of explanation truly failed; she had seen enough of the world to know that Edouard would not be so delicate with a plural wife as he would with the singular companion of a man's heart and soul.

But Versailles read her silence as easily as he read an anatomical chart. “It was a
Mormon
marriage,” he guessed, and he put all the proper meaning into the word.

Miserably, Famke nodded.

“And
you
are a Mormon?”

“The proper term is ‘Latter-Day Saint,'” Famke said, much as Sariah or Myrtice might have done. She remembered her baptism in the Salt Lake tabernacle, the shock of the cold water and the tangle of undergarments around her body; then those meetings in the ward house, where she had stood up and described the moments at which God had revealed true faith to her. Those had been just stories, but didn't they combine with the
baptism to make her something different? Certainly she had done more to prove she was Mormon than she'd ever done to assert her Catholicism.

“I'm not sure if I'm a Saint,” she said at last. “I did not want to be one particularly, but I think I was made one when I married—when circumstances forced me to marry Mr. Goodhouse.” She felt a twinge of disloyalty, remembering again that Heber had been good to her. It was thanks to him, after all, that she first experienced what she now knew enough to call the healing powers of hygienic crisis. “I was an orphan, you see . . . The sisters raised me in the Immaculate Heart orphanage in Denmark. That is where I got my cough—they called it the Immaculate chest—”

“Catholic?” Edouard interrupted.