Church of Marvels: A Novel (21 page)

S
YLVAN CLIMBED THE NARROW STAIRS, FEELING HIS WAY IN
the dark. He heard whispers above, the scurry of little feet, the rasp of a wandering, half-remembered song. The walls were hung with old tapestries, which fluttered and swayed in the draft. Everything smelled like the damp of a ship, wet fur and raw potato.

He reached the top, the Widows’ lair—nothing more than a small parlor, lit by a low kerosene lamp. He paused, letting his eyes adjust to the watery light, picking out shadowed figures along the floor. They lay scattered about, on piles of pillows and brown tasseled sheets. Some of them were curled up together on a blanket, sucking their thumbs, bleary as a litter of mice. They were all young, no older than fourteen or fifteen, with trembling lips and hooded eyes. They wore circles of blush on their cheeks, flounced skirts and fallen bouffants. But beneath their painted faces, their torsos—lean and green with bruises—were bare.

They weren’t girls at all. They were boys, and they looked at him, numb.

For a moment he didn’t know what to do—he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to be looking for. All along he had pictured a man
like he’d seen at the fights—ox-chested, gourd-nosed; a bellower, a brute. But these were just children, hairless and small, who turned their eyes away as he stepped onto the rug. Then from down the hall came the madam, knock-kneed in her petticoats, tutting a tune, tapping her nails along the papered wall. She studied Sylvan for a moment from behind her pince-nez, then smiled.

“What’s your liking?” she asked, laying a hand on his arm.

The heat in the room was stifling, even with the open terrace doors. The stink of it—the spilled liquor; the moist pillows; the faint, yellowy flesh smell of sickness—his eyes began to water, and he lowered his voice. “I’m here about a man who once worked here?”

She drew a circle in the armband on his sleeve. “Of course,” she said with a sigh, clucking her tongue. “Wasn’t he the favorite, though?” She muttered something, then led him down the hall, back the way she’d come—to a room with only one small window, cut into the roof above. A wrinkle of moonlight lay on the floor like a dropped glove.

Sylvan took a step in, squinted to see. He smelled a touch of honeysuckle, sage, then spied a basket of nosegays on a table. A row of blond heads hovered in the dark, silent and bodyless. Wigs, setting on their wicker bulbs. Behind the table was a flicker of movement. A young man, seventeen or eighteen, emerged. He was holding a brush, looking up at the madam as she rapped on the jamb.

“William!” she barked. “Gent’s here about the Rembrandt—wasn’t you close to him?”

He nodded. His head was clean-shaven—lice, Sylvan guessed—showing off his pronounced ears and round, oversized spectacles, which pinched his nostrils nearly shut. He was dressed in a bengaline waistcoat and checkered pants—all handsomely mended, even though it seemed this man (sallow and soft-chinned, as mealy as an apple) had never been out of the room in his life.

“What’s it you want?” William asked as the madam stalked
away and yelled something down to the onion-eating man at the bar.

“I’m looking for a fellow,” Sylvan said. “I don’t know him, but he worked here once. Friendly with a woman up on Doyers Street.”

“Yes, yes, the Rembrandt.” He seemed very tired. He pushed his fingers under his glasses and rubbed at the pouches beneath his eyes.

“You know who I mean?”

He nodded, sniffing his spectacles back up his nose, and picked at the bristles of the brush. “Such a shame.”

“An acquaintance of Isabelle Church?”

“She ain’t anyone I met, but he went and got himself a different life, so it’s possible.”

“Blond hair?” Sylvan said. “Slender? An acrobat of sorts?”

William smiled with one side of his mouth and began brushing out the wigs. “Don’t they all look that way to you?”

Something turned in Sylvan’s stomach. The boys, he realized, did have a certain air about them—fish-pale, hazy-eyed—but it might have just been the glow of their spun hair: those soft moons floating in the black cloud of the parlor. In here the wigs, drooping and tangled on their brittle, brown stands, looked different somehow—like the dug-up heads of aristocrats.

William took a pair of scissors from his coat and began to trim the frizzled curls. For a moment the only sound in the room was the whine and gnash of the blades, the squeak of his feet as he circled the bulbs.

Sylvan pressed on. “But he knew someone on Doyers Street?”

“Well, I don’t say he
knew
. He was going to pay a visit there—the apothecary, as it were. He was in a predicament, as you can imagine. He wouldn’t come around
here
no more—no, no, not with his gold charley!” The scissors flashed as he threw up his hands. “But lo, lo: here he washes up last spring—hides down by whale, catches me off to church. Says,
Billie, I’m in a spot
. Needs to find a baby! And who does he run to in the end, eh? But I’ll do right for a good-hearted
friend; I always do.” He laughed, grim. “What a sap. I made him one of these, for his wedding day.” He held up a nosegay. “Here, take it.”

Sylvan smelled it and tucked it into his coat, remembering what Lillian Edgar had said about Mrs. Bloodworth. He pictured a woman on the river at night, throwing her silver net into the water, bringing up babies like fish.
Sold to a good family, you can only pray
. “And his wife, she wasn’t very inclined to—or maybe she wouldn’t—?”

“Wife!” William smiled at him piteously. “Oh, he ain’t got no wife.” He lifted a wig and set it down on his own head, grinning with all of his pebble-gray teeth. “Don’t you see?”

Sylvan’s blood began to thrum.
She don’t look right
, the butcher’s boy had said
. No—she don’t seem right.

“We were little ones together,” William said. “Look—he fixed me here when I was hurt.” He brushed back a curl, pointed to a burn on his cheek.

“Where can I find them?” Sylvan asked. “Where do they live?”

“Orchard and Broome, I hear it. They were all saying his charley got him a nice little house, with a nice little hearth, and hot cocoa and china plates and oranges whenever he wants. A real house!” His eyes grew damp. He brought up the brush and patted forlornly at his wig. “But I never thought that fellow so handsome myself.”

“And who should I ask for? What name does he go by now?”

William looked up at him, bewildered. “What for? He won’t be there.”

“Why’s that?”

“Don’t you know?”

Sylvan shook his head.

“I only just heard it last night myself—so sudden and all.”

“What?”

“Why, I thought that’s why you was here.” He pointed to the black band around Sylvan’s arm. “The little Rembrandt—he’s dead.”

O
DILE CLIMBED THE FLIGHTS OF STAIRS, HER HAND STICKY
on the banister, her feet scuffing the boards. On the last landing the shopgirl opened the door, then scuttled back into the darkness.

Odile stood alone in an upswell of wind, staring at the scraps of sea fog that clung to the bridges, the ships at port, the glistening churn of horses on the riverbank, pulling an overturned scow to shore. Ahead of her the hothouse reflected the chimneys and the clouds, her own distorted face. Through the glass she saw a movement, pale and shapeless, like a fish in a greening bowl.

Mrs. Bloodworth.

She crossed over to the door, turned the latch and stepped inside. Her dress melted instantly to her skin; the veil puckered against her face. She smelled the sweet rot of flowers, a wet flintiness, and then something bitter and earthy, like vegetable root. She moved through the vapor, between hanging fronds, past tables overrun with plants. She saw baskets of snipped clover and feverfew, bulbs arranged like bonbons in a sweetshop window. Beds of orange poppies
bloomed on the shelf—her mother had grown those in the garden once, a long time ago.

At the end of the hothouse stood a woman. She wore a cream-colored skirt and a plain shirtwaist, loosely buttoned, with her sleeves rolled to her elbows. Her head was lowered over a workbench, obscured by a drowsy bough of clematis, but Odile could still see her hands at work, slicing up a meaty green stalk with a razor. Her thumb moved in swift easy flicks, halving the stems and letting the liquid inside bleed into a jar.

“Mrs. Bloodworth?”

The woman looked up. She was tall and middle-aged, with the kind of hawkish face that stagehands loved to light—blue-green eyes that bulged above lean, sculpted cheeks. Her hair was gray at the temples and peak, her bare arms all freckles and sinew. Odile paused, unsure how to introduce herself, but the woman only wiped a hand on her apron and nodded.

“There’s cold tea over there,” she said. Her voice was burred and honeyed. She gestured with the razor. “On the table. Please.”

Odile looked over and saw a glass pitcher, sweating in a slant of light, filled with melting chunks of ice and lemon halves. She remembered what Pigeon had said about the coffee. “Thank you, ma’am,” she said, “but I’m well enough without.”

“Then please—sit down.”

Odile lowered herself onto a nearby stool, watching as Mrs. Bloodworth picked up a pair of shears and wiped them down with a rag. “What exactly is your situation?”

Odile cleared her throat. What would Belle have said? “I’ve left home.”

The woman nodded and reached above her head, snipping a stem from the clematis. “Your family knows of your trouble?”

“No, ma’am.”

“You’re alone?”

“Very.”

“Have you anywhere to go?”

Odile shook her head. “That’s why I’ve come to you.”

Mrs. Bloodworth plucked a leaf from the stem and chewed it for a moment, then spit a green wad of pulp into her hand. “Hmm.” She lifted the shears again.
Snip, snip.
The branches came down in a basket. Odile stared at the blades, at the way they chirruped and bit, the way Mrs. Bloodworth dragged them across the front of her apron, wiping away the juice.

“And how did you come to find me?” she asked.

“Another girl”—Odile licked her lips—“she spoke of you.”

Mrs. Bloodworth laid the shears back on the table. She smiled at Odile, not unkindly. “You may take your hat off, if you wish. It gets a bit humid in here, doesn’t it?”

“I’d prefer not to.”

She inclined her head. “If you’re worried you might be spied on, that someone should know you’re here, let me say plainly that you’re very safe.”

Odile looked up. “Am I?”

“You have my word,” Mrs. Bloodworth said. “Where are your people from?”

“Gravesend, ma’am.”

“Quite a ways. I mean your heritage.”

Odile hesitated. She couldn’t say the Scotch-Irish Willingbirds of Punxsutawney, or her great-grandmother’s clan of Pennsylvania Dutch: Belle might well have said the same thing. She thought of her father, the sign-painter from Glastonbury. “Saxon, I believe.” She nodded at the basket of clematis. “What’s that for?”

“Oh—to brew.” Mrs. Bloodworth touched one of the blossoms. “A little bark tea—good for cramping. And sadness.”

Odile shifted in the heat, breathing deeply and evenly, using the muscles of her diaphragm, the way her mother had taught her. There
were sheets of paper pinned to the corkboard above the table—she squinted to read them through the veil. It looked like the ingredients for some kind of witch’s brew:
chewing’s fescue, dame’s rocket, bearded sprangletop, night-flowering catchfly.
She tried to imagine why Belle would have gone to such lengths—to come all the way to Manhattan, to a dangerous woman in the middle of the slums. Surely there was someone reputable and nurturing in Brooklyn? Odile would have helped her, without question—she would have kept her secret. If only Belle had asked.

“This is all very confidential, you understand?” Mrs. Bloodworth sat down on a castered stool and rolled closer to Odile. “People’s reputations are at stake.”

Odile swallowed. “Whose?”

“Well, for one—yours.”

She clipped a flower from the clematis and pinned it to Odile’s dress. It was big and scruffy and white, blown open in the sun. “The smell of this, I find, is so soothing. Especially when you’re in distress.”

Odile dipped her nose and breathed in the perfume. This had been her sister’s world, from the sooty crook of Doyers Street to the children underground to an apothecary’s botany. What was it she was missing? Belle, unwed and alone, had come here—to a Jennysweeter hidden in a hothouse fog. All without a word, even a hint, to Odile. But something had gone wrong—and here was this blithe, heron-necked woman, filling the bowl of her pipe, unhurried, as if everything else in the world were of no consequence. But Belle had sensed something—she’d written Odile, telling her in no uncertain terms to stay home. She’d been trying to protect her. From shame and scandal, from the dangers of the city—any number of things. From her own addled mind: melancholy, fantastical. From people out to do her harm.

Mrs. Bloodworth lit her pipe, then leaned back and examined Odile thoughtfully through the smoke. “No one came with you?” she
asked, picking a bit of tobacco from her tongue. “No one followed you here?”

“No, ma’am.”

“What’s your name?”

“Threadgill.”

“How old are you, Miss Threadgill?”

“Seventeen last October.”

“And the father—does he know?”

“My father?”

Mrs. Bloodworth smiled patiently. “No, the child’s.”

Child.
She wondered if Belle had actually told the father, if that was why she’d left so abruptly. It pained her to think there was a man that she herself might have passed every day on the street—an ordinary, no-face man, or someone she might even know well—there, selling waffles on the boardwalk, clapping wooden tongs in the air; or perhaps counting out her shabby dollars at the bank. Someone who had smiled and said hello, knowing exactly who she was and what she’d lost, but who had kept her willingly a fool. The father of that beautiful baby.

She shook her head. “He does not, ma’am.”

“What are your relations with him now?”

Odile paused, unsure of how to answer.

“Has he tried to call on you?” Mrs. Bloodworth prompted. “Write to you? Does he know where you are now?”

“No, we’ve not spoken since the . . .” She gestured weakly in the air. She knew about sex, of course—she had from a young age. Mother never talked about it in any certain terms, although she’d always spoken plainly of their bodies. She’d given them menstrual belts and hot water bottles when their monthlies began, explained that they shouldn’t take their clothes off in front of a man, not even in a dressing room. It stirred men’s blood in
an animal way
and made their organs swell. (Odile had simply assumed she was talking about the heart.) The rest she’d heard about from Georgette and the other
girls in the show—it made her squeamish at first, but then she began to see it everywhere, in every madcap, hootenanny revue. All those comics with their pull-whistles and cranks; all the dancing girls with powdered legs. But sex wasn’t something she’d given much thought to in her own life—why would she? She’d never expected she’d get married or fall in love. She’d never considered a life beyond the one she had always lived: a house full of women, at work on the stage.

“Tell me what he looks like,” Mrs. Bloodworth continued. “Or do you know?”

Odile bristled. “I’m not a whore, if that’s what you mean.”

Mrs. Bloodworth smiled. “You don’t look it. You look cared for. You look like a loved girl.”

“It was only once,” she sputtered, embarrassed at her own imaginary coupling.

“Just a sketch,” the woman said again, patiently. “His people, his origin, his temperament.”

Odile tried to think of something credible and bland—a moment of hesitation that Mrs. Bloodworth mistook for bashfulness, or even shame. “Fair?” she suggested. “Dark? Stout, thin? A gentleman? A drunkard? Intelligent, crude, fluent in music? Anything you can offer will help me.”

“Oh,” she stammered. “He was just a boy, like any other. Dark hair. A beard.”

“I know it’s difficult to talk about.”

Yes, it is,
Odile thought.
But not in the way that you think.
“I’m not a bad person,” she felt compelled to say.

“Of course not.” Mrs. Bloodworth shook her head. “There are no bad women here. You understand that, don’t you?”

“I suppose so.”

“And how long ago was the event?” She took a draw on her pipe. “With this dark-haired boy like any other.”

“A few months?”

“And how do you know that you’re with child?”

“Because I know myself, I suppose.”

She blew a line of smoke in the air. “You’ve missed your monthlies?”

Odile nodded: a brief, demure drop of the chin.

“Have you been examined by a doctor, a midwife, a friend—anyone at all?”

“No one. I simply walked out the door and left.” She met Mrs. Bloodworth’s gaze and felt something harden in her chest. Little Friendship Willingbird, hitchhiking through the hills of Pennsylvania in her dead brother’s suit. Isabelle Church, sailing off to the city in a tumbledown boat, carrying her bag of swords. “Only a letter under the inkwell, to tell them not to come after me. I’d write.”

Mrs. Bloodworth paused to refill her pipe. “Any cramping?” she asked, tamping down the tobacco with the handle of her shears. “Aches, nausea, spots of blood? Anything giving you trouble?”

Odile had no idea how to answer. What did pregnant women feel like? Sick, she figured. Swollen. Fatigued. What was it she used to say when she feigned sickness as a child? “Just a little fuzzy-feeling, I suppose.”

“Have you had any bouts of melancholy or distress? Hallucinations? Macabre thoughts?”

Odile thought of the fanciful lines from her sister’s letter: describing their mother as a mermaid. The tigers, undersea. Even Pigeon had talked of such magical beasts—mighty and finned, battling a suckered colossus. “Please,” she said. Her throat grew watery and raw; her eyes began to burn. “I only want . . .”

“You want to move on with your life. I understand,” Mrs. Bloodworth replied. “You want to return to the world unashamed, without consequence or disgrace. You want to wake from this dream and be able to resume your life. Yes?” She plucked a handkerchief from her apron and handed it Odile. “I understand.”

Odile took it and drew it up under her veil. It smelled sweet and homey, like rosewater.

“You will be provided for while you’re here,” Mrs. Bloodworth went on. “But I must be strict on this point. You will not be allowed to leave the house during your confinement, or associate with anyone who might come to the door. I don’t mean to be cruel, you see, only safe. If you must contact anyone, if only to maintain decorum or avoid suspicion, you mustn’t relay one word about what happens under this roof. That’s vital. We can never be too certain. Do you understand what I mean?”

“Yes.”
Like a captive,
Odile thought. All those secrets, just as Miss Edgar had said. She wadded the handkerchief up in her hand, stared at the poppies on the shelf. Mrs. Bloodworth, supplying her flowers to the underground dens; mixing her nostrums and salves for unwed mothers, then selling off their babies to those who couldn’t carry them, or who needed to cover up secrets of their own. She thought about the scrub-girl downstairs—sullen, fuzzy-lipped, eye-rolling Mouse. She must have known Belle, despite what she’d claimed yesterday. Odile smoothed her skirt and felt the envelope crackle in her pocket.

Mrs. Bloodworth stood up, the stool squeaking beneath her. “I’ll have to examine you, all right?”

Odile looked up at her, startled. “I beg your pardon?”

“A normal procedure,” the woman continued. “Just to see how you’re faring. See when your term ends, what we can expect.”

“Now?”

“It will be easy, I promise. Just a touch. Stand up.”

“What about downstairs? You have a room somewhere, yes? Isn’t there a proper way . . . some paper I should be . . . ?”

“Yes, just after this, I promise. No one can see you in here—you have my word.” She drew closer, so close that Odile could smell her breath—leafy, a trace of tobacco and tea—through the veil.

“You wear a corset?” Mrs. Bloodworth asked.

“Just—just my knickers and a cami.”

“Good, that’s as it should be.”

Odile swallowed hard, her fingers numb. There was nowhere to go in that little glass room; she was already backed against the table, tickled by vines, keeping company with old phosphate jars of snippers and razors and shears. Slowly she stood. She shook out her blouse and unbuttoned her skirt until the pleats of her knickers showed. She looked away as Mrs. Bloodworth’s fingers, warm and tough, massaged her stomach and pushed gently around her navel. The veil, the fog, the tremulous threat of tears—she stood as still as possible, blinking in the swelter, waiting for it to be over. Perhaps Mrs. Bloodworth wouldn’t be able to tell anything (she’d eaten so many sweets lately, after all—there were always bags of caramels and taffy backstage); perhaps she’d invite her down to the office to talk things over further—any place where she could find a trace of her sister, why she’d gone.