City of Secrets (6 page)

It was Julia Brokmeyer who had come to her rescue one day a week after Teddy had gone off to Newport for a yacht race. Julia had taken up politics—her husband, Richard, was running for a city office at the time—and she wanted Maddie to go with her to hear a speaker on women’s suffrage. Maddie had no interest in getting the vote but went along to keep Julia company. In the end it was Julia who lost interest in politics, and Maddie who found a new cause. But it wasn’t the vote.

“When a woman becomes a victim, where is she to turn?” the speaker, a beautiful but also forceful woman from Boston, had demanded after speaking at length about the lack of representation for women in government. “When she becomes the victim of crime—crime within her own home!—who will care about her? Who will even listen? The police? All men. The government? All men.

“Do you know, ladies, where the expression ‘rule of thumb’ comes from? It is derived from the supposed right of a husband to discipline his wife with a rod no thicker than his thumb. In this country there are husbands who still believe in that right and abuse it—as they abuse their wives. Women cannot call for help because they have no voice!”

Maddie had poked Julia in the ribs at this point and asked, “What does she mean?”

“She means we must have the vote to protect ourselves,” Julia whispered back.

But that was not what Maddie had heard. Surely there were not such men, men who beat their own wives? But even as the thought came to her, she knew that if she said it aloud, Julia would laugh at her innocence. And if she asked how getting the vote sometime in the dim future would help such women now, Julia would tell her to help them the way Constance had helped her African missions and earthquake victims—by attending committee meetings and raising money at church raffles. That was not enough, just as the vote was not soon enough. Maddie wanted to do something at once.

After the meeting, Julia went back to meet the speaker and to boast about Richard who, she assured the speaker, was in favor of granting women the vote. Maddie asked her instead where the women she had spoken of lived and how she could help them. The woman studied her face for a moment, then took her card and promised to send someone to see her. Two days later, Louise Drummond knocked at Maddie’s door.

Plain, taciturn Louise Drummond, in her practical brown wool dress and stiffly starched collar and cuffs, her graying hair parted in the middle and pulled back into a tight bun, was the last person Maddie would have expected to take up the cause of unfortunate women. It was not until she had worked with Louise at a hospital in St. Louis for three months that Maddie learned that Louise had once been one of them. Her first husband had beaten her and stolen money from her. But she was, Louise said, one of the lucky ones. She had found the courage to report him and the presence of mind to pick someone who would really be of use in her escape from him.

Oliver Drummond was a Pinkerton detective and did not usually deal with such cases, but he took on Louise’s. He also took on Louise and, after her first husband hanged himself in jail, they were married.

It had not taken three months, however, for Maddie to realize how small her own problems were compared to those of the women she tried to help, and how good Teddy was to her compared to those other husbands she tried to speak to but could not reach because they would not speak to a woman as an equal. For a time, Maddie was never so happy as when she went home, tired and discouraged, to find Teddy with his feet up on the porch railing and the racing forms in his hand, waiting for her with a smile and a kiss.

Hello, sweetheart. I missed you.

I’m home now, Teddy.

It was Louise who first sensed Maddie’s growing frustration that nothing she did seemed to make much of a difference in the lives of the women she wanted to help. After she helped heal their bruises, they returned to their men, only to come back to her with fresh hurts, in an endless cycle. If she gave them money to pay the rent or buy their children clothing, their husbands took it and drank it away. Maddie tried not to hate those men, because that would not help either, but her frustration was building again.

Almost without realizing it, she began to take her pent-up feelings out on Teddy, goading him about his lack of a job or any kind of useful interests. To Teddy’s credit, he did not retaliate; instead, he took a job with Richard Brokmeyer, who had won his election and was in a position to give his friends jobs that were both lucrative and, more important to Teddy, that enabled him to spend those nights when Maddie came home angry—again—with his political cronies in their favorite tavern.

It was only after Teddy disappeared that Maddie found out that Richard had fired him a month after he hired him.

By then, Maddie had found a new way to do something definite and lasting for her cause. She bought a large house in downtown St. Louis and had it converted into a hotel for abused women and their families, where the women could live free of worry about money or fear of their husbands. Pleased with her efforts at last, she was ready to try yet again to make Teddy happy, too. But they had drifted even farther apart without her noticing it.

“Maddie, I hope that when you stop running around in circles, you end up at home again.”

“How can you say that? I must have something to do or I shall go mad!”

“You can stay at home. That’s your job!”

“But you’re never here!”

“And who told me to get out and find something to do?”

It was true. Everything that Maddie had done for her own good had been the worst thing she could have done for Teddy. Conscience-stricken, she tried to apologize, to assure him that she would never relegate him to second place again, that she would never take his love for granted again.

She was never sure later if he believed any of it.

#

“Mrs. Malcolm?”

Maddie’s wandering attention was drawn by Geoffrey Wingate’s voice behind her. She looked around to see that Laurence Fox had disappeared under his black cloth again and that Florence was still fixed to her field glasses.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, smiling up at Geoffrey. “The sun must have made me doze off for a moment.”

“Have you no burning desire to spy on your neighbors, Mrs. Malcolm?” he asked and, indicating the empty space beside him, offered to move her chair into the shady part of their box.

“I have no doubt that your wife will pass on the most interesting gossip about all the fashionable people here today,” she said, accepting his offer and a glass of champagne. “And Mr. Fox will do the same—with illustrations—about the less exalted folk obliged to stand to view the horses. Is there going to
be
a race, by the way? Nothing seems to be happening at the gate, and there are people wandering around on the course. Surely they will be in the way of the horses if they are not warned off.”

“The next race is not scheduled for nearly half an hour, I’m afraid. Are you bored waiting? We might take a stroll.”

Maddie would have liked to stretch her limbs but knew that she would have to wait until Laurence Fox was ready to accompany her. She was not sure she would recognize her quarry, despite the photograph Laurence had shown her of Peter Kropotkin, and in any case, she could not very well march up and introduce herself to a notorious anarchist when she was supposed to be just strolling with an unsuspecting Geoffrey Wingate.

“Thank you,” she said, “but I believe I should wait to watch at least one race. If it proves too tiresome—or too exciting, for that matter—I’ll have fulfilled my obligation to look at it and may make my escape afterward. Is this your first visit to Newmarket, Mr. Wingate?
Is
there anything else to see here?”

“I’m afraid I can be of little help there; this is my first visit as well. I obtained the use of the box from a friend I ran into at my club who was obliging enough to provide the carriage as well. Everything else has been young Mr. Fox’s doing.”

“Then you can’t tell me about the races, either? Shall I place a bet?”

“The Prince of Wales has a horse running today. You may bet on it if you wish, for the sake of Anglo-American friendship. My friend informs me that the prince’s horses generally do well, although my brother-in-law says precisely the opposite and invariably bets against the prince.”

“Your brother-in-law? I didn’t know that Florence had a brother.”

“Oh, yes. His name is Frank, but as he is something of a black sheep in the family, it’s no wonder that she hasn’t mentioned him. Not that she has confided much about him to me either.  It’s been several months since we have had any word from him, in any case.”

“Thank you for warning me, then. I won’t embarrass Florence by asking about him.”

Geoffrey smiled. “Oh, Frank is not so bad as all that, so far as I can tell.  At any rate”—he leaned back in his chair and added, in the most off-hand tone possible—“not when you consider Florence’s Aunt Louella May Falcone, who conjures up the spirits of her dead ancestors on her Ouija board. Or her Grandmother Hartwell, who claims to have been a spy for Jeb Stuart. Or her cousin Josiah Giddings.
He
keeps his dead mother’s embalmed corpse on display in the parlor.”

Maddie, appalled, stared at Geoffrey until, looking closer, she saw the sly twinkle in his kind eyes.

“Oh, you are dreadful to tease me that way!” she said, laughing. “I almost believed you!”

He smiled. “Oh, some of it’s true.”

Maddie resisted asking which part and changed the subject to something less provocative. But Geoffrey treated every subject as if it were something he had never considered before and found novel, and Maddie discovered that she enjoyed talking to him. He was very much at ease and made no demands; he did not expect her to be witty or to flatter his male pride. She thought she could understand a young woman being tempted to marry someone as kind and reliable as Geoffrey, although she did not quite understand what Florence in particular had seen in him.

They turned to perusing the racing calendar, deciding on bets that they could both bear to lose but would not be embarrassed to have to report winning, and Geoffrey sent the messenger who came by for the purpose to place their bets for them. Having taken her host’s advice not to bet on the showiest animal in the running, which would very likely not “stay the course,” Maddie was pleased when the horse she chose did indeed win the first race but declared that she would quit while she was ahead. She interrupted Laurence Fox in the act of stowing some glass plates in his traveling photographic case to ask if he would take her to the window to collect her winnings. Mr. Fox, recalled to his escort duty, readily agreed.

“You are a cautious gambler, Mrs. Malcolm,” Geoffrey observed admiringly.

“It’s her only major fault,” Florence countered. She had bet on the showiest horse and was totting up her loses with an annoyed scowl.

“I take chances only when the prize is worth the risk, Mr. Wingate,” Maddie said with a smile. “Shall we bring you back another bottle of champagne?”

“No, there is more than enough here, thank you. Florence, as you may have noticed, does not stint on the important things in life.”

With that, Maddie took Mr. Fox’s arm, and they turned out of the box in the direction of the paddock. The crowd around them included small groups of Jockey Club members talking blood lines, and, as they walked on, fathers of families and younger bloods calling to one another across the stands about this or that horse’s chances in the next running.

“I spotted our quarry in the crowd by the oval,” Laurence told Maddie. “We should meet him if we go on this way.”

“How very efficient you are, Mr. Fox.”

“One sees many things through the camera lens,” he replied, patting her arm with his hand in an avuncular way that made her laugh.

They exchanged small talk as they strolled across the green, as if making for the refreshment stand, although they were in fact gradually edging toward the fence separating the grass in front of the stands from the track. Maddie was trying to guess which of the men standing around the fence might be Kropotkin when, still with no more effort than any accidental encounter might require, Laurence raised his hat to a gentleman nearby and said, “Mr. Kropotkin. How do you do, sir?”

A large man with gold-rimmed spectacles and a bushy brown beard turned toward them, his preoccupied frown changing to a genial smile as he raised his hat to Laurence. He smiled even more broadly when he looked at Maddie, and he made a little bow to her. Maddie felt herself stiffen, but the contrast between Kropotkin’s manner and what she had expected was so great that he disarmed her considerably even before he spoke. She had to force herself to remember that this was a dangerous man—the more so, no doubt, for his geniality.

“Mr. Fox,” he said. “Well met, indeed, young gentleman. Are you here at Newmarket in your professional capacity? You do not have your machine by you.”

He spoke with only a slight accent that did not sound to Maddie particularly Russian, but Peter Kropotkin had lived in London since he fled arrest nearly thirteen years before in his native Russia for his anarchist activities. She did not know whether it was his life in the tranquil English countryside or merely a clever adaptation on his part, but he seemed far more the geographer he had been earlier in his career than any kind of revolutionary. Indeed, he might have passed for a village schoolmaster, except for the traces of his aristocratic heritage that lingered in his posture and his speech. He had been born a prince, after all.

“Mrs. Malcolm, may I make Mr. Peter Kropotkin known to you? Sir, this is my American friend, Mrs. Edward Malcolm, of St. Louis.”

Kropotkin bowed and took Maddie’s hand to bestow a light kiss on her glove, in the Continental manner, before professing himself pleased to make her acquaintance.

“St. Louis is, I believe, in the state of Missouri and on the banks of your great Mississippi River, is that not correct, Mrs. Malcolm? I regret I have never visited America, but naturally, like all envious Europeans, I have made a fascinated study of it.”