Good Man Friday (33 page)

‘We could always try something else,' pointed out Poe as they emerged from the woods.

January folded up his spyglass. ‘Not really. Once he's seen us, we're handicapped in all else that we do. Gurry and Mrs Bray were obviously on good terms when she called him in to see her husband, and any suspicious enquiries are going to be reported to her. Now that I think of it,' he added thoughtfully, ‘drugging her husband and telling her tame mad-doctor that he slit his wrists sounds like a plan to get rid of him.'

‘Wouldn't that be killing the goose that's laying golden eggs?'

‘Not if he's begun to suspect her. She may need time to transfer enough money into her four bank-accounts, but if he ‘kills himself' next week, all anyone will say is,
We were expecting it
.'

‘Anyone except Mede.'

His black hair slicked with bear's grease under a workman's cap, Poe explained to the porter at the gate in an impeccable Irish brogue that sure and Mr Gurry'd hired them to tune the parlor pianna, and they'd legged it a weary mile from Washington …

They were admitted.

‘Gurry the only one keep the daybooks,' said Deke Bellwether quietly, when Gurry's assistant – a very young Mr Betzer – led them to the day parlor and shooed the patients out into the garden. ‘Mr Betzer and Mr Klein – them other mad-doctors works with Mr Gurry – gonna have their hands full this hour, treatin' them poor folks, so I say best I bring the books here, for let you have a look. But I done say, we ain't had no Englishman here, nor no Singletary, nor no nobody what look like what you describe.'

The attendant slipped half a dozen slender, calf-bound ledgers from beneath his smock and down into the body of the very handsome Broadwood parlor grand that occupied a whole corner of the big day-room close to the garden windows. January immediately handed him a gold double-eagle – the man would almost certainly lose his job if his part in the morning's events were discovered. ‘I be back in a hour,' said Bellwether. ‘You done be done with 'em then?'

January nodded and scooped the books into his satchel. The sight of them – or of anything – resting on the wires of a good instrument raised the hair on the back of his neck.

‘Look for patients admitted in October who've died,' he whispered to Poe. ‘And for patients whose families bring them in medication.' He set the tuning fork into its wooden base and tapped it sharply, touched middle C. ‘Look for Mrs Bray's banking alter-egos: the one we know she has papers for. Allen, Sinter, Coates, or Merton …'

He inserted the mutes and checked the general condition of the piano, which was good. It wasn't badly out of tune and hadn't been abused, which raised his opinion of Gurry's establishment. Many of the mad-doctors he'd spoken to highly recommended music and singing for their patients, which made enormous sense to January. Music had always been a shining fortress for him, proof against the worst that the world could devise: slavery and mockery, fear and the death of the woman he loved. Having met a number of madmen whose senses were abnormally acute, he guessed, too, that an out-of-tune piano would be an even worse torment to them than it was to him – completely aside from the fact that Messrs Betzer and Klein, and whatever lesser attendants assisted them, would wonder at piano tuners who did their work in silence, and might come in to see what they
were
up to …

‘Drat the man,' Poe muttered, ‘his handwriting's like a fish line the cat's been playing with …'

Beyond the wide windows, an attendant crossed the garden with an empty basket, bound for the low brick ice-house. Elsewhere in the house, a woman's voice lifted in a wailing scream. January shivered. The most diehard cotton-planter in Alabama understood in his heart why a slave would want to be free. But a woman who shrieked in protest against being force-fed emetics to ‘restore the balance of her system'? Who fought when men stripped her naked and shoved her under a torrent of ice-cold water to ‘stimulate her blood'? Who wept at the thought of being tied to a board and spun round and round so that her ‘circulation would improve'? She was viewed as a child, refusing to accept what could only bring her good.

‘I see only a half-dozen patients whose families bring them medicaments from the outside,' whispered Poe. ‘Gurry seems extremely fond of opiates – no wonder his patients are docile.'

‘And no wonder he has to give them purgatives on a daily basis. Any of those who've died?'

‘Not as of December … No, wait, yes. A Mr Nyeby … His wife came in two or three times a week with medicines prescribed by their doctor in New York …'

‘I can help you with that,' said a voice from the doorway.

Poe snapped the satchel closed at once. January turned sharply: a girl stood in the doorway, skeletally thin, her hair cropped to a rough light-brown fuzz on her scar-crossed scalp.

‘I've tuned pianos all my life,' she went on. ‘My father taught me, as he taught me to play.' She took a step nearer. ‘His brother murdered him out of jealousy, and wanting to get his money. They killed my mother also, and put me in here so I wouldn't inherit.'

‘I'm very sorry to hear that,' said January. ‘I was told specifically by Dr Gurry not to let any of the patients assist me – or I and my friend here will lose our jobs.' He nodded to Poe. ‘But I'll certainly look forward to hearing you play after I've finished, to test its tone.'

A tall young man appeared in the doorway behind her. Past them, in the hall, January saw a sturdy attendant of nearly his own height and build supporting a fragile little gentleman, as thin as the girl but swaying on his feet and muttering, broken spurts of unintelligible words.

‘Now, Miss Kingmill,' said the young man, ‘you're not disturbing the workmen, are you?'

‘I was only telling them,' responded Miss Kingmill, ‘that Uncle Andrew had me put in here so that he can keep Papa's money. He's trying to have me poisoned,' she added, turning back to January. ‘I keep getting sick in here, and I know it's because they've paid Betzer to poison me.'

‘Miss Kingmill,' said the young man patiently, ‘you know that's not true. Mr Betzer and I – and Dr Gurry as well – have only your best interests at heart. I was looking for you just now – might you please come along with me and Silas, to help give Mr Leland his treatment?'

Miss Kingmill's thin face brightened. ‘Of course,' she said. ‘It's setonage,' she informed January. ‘Most doctors prefer it to blistering, and it accomplishes the removal of infected fluids from the body by the same principles. My father taught me how to do it. While he lived, I helped him hundreds of times. Mr Leland's relatives are trying to poison him, too,' she concluded, and allowed herself to be led away.

January went back to sounding notes and chords, gently adjusting each of the many wires. Poe went back to the daybooks.

‘A woman named Wandsworth died in January,' reported the poet after a moment. ‘After being given – good Lord! – forty-five grains of opium over a twenty-four hour period because she was “excited”. I can't find any other deaths than Mr Nyeby at the end of December. His widow claimed his effects and arranged for his burial.'

‘Where was he from?'

‘That's just it, I can't find record of his admission. His treatment – and the visits from Mrs Nyeby – are listed in the October book—'

‘Any record of what she was bringing for him?'

Poe thumbed his way back through the October daybook. ‘Nothing. You didn't happen to make a note of the address on those bottles you found in Mrs Bray's room, did you?'

‘Hunt's Pharmacy in Baltimore.'

‘I know it, it's on Gay Street.'

‘We'll have to make the trip there to confirm when she purchased the things. Make a note of the dates of Mrs Nyeby's visits … if you would, sir,' he remembered to add, though Poe seemed to neither notice nor take offense at being addressed as a friend rather than a white man. By the time Bellwether returned for the books, Poe had finished looking through them and January was nearly done with the piano. Miss Kingmill did not return – evidently Mr Leland's setonage was taking more time than planned, or else they were doing something else to the poor old gentleman – but several other patients came into the parlor, the ladies dressed in calico day-frocks and the men in trousers and smock-like shirts, to listen while January played. After a time Mr Betzer arrived also – he introduced himself to Poe – and stood listening in deep appreciation as January finished the ‘Rondo
à
la Turque'.

While January glided into the barcarole from ‘La Muette de Portici' – he could no more resist a newly-tuned piano than his little nephew Ti-Paul could resist sweets – he was aware of Poe conversing quietly with the young mad-doctor. When he finished, and turned on the bench to rise, Poe said – still in his Irish brogue – ‘Ben, me old scout, the good doctor here's been kind enough to ask if we'd like a bit of a look about.'

All we need
, thought January,
is for Gurry to return and recognize me from Mrs Bray's
…

‘I do admit I'm curious,' he said. He saw Poe slip the man a dollar.

This wasn't unusual – he was heartily glad Poe kept the payment within the bounds of what a couple of piano tuners might have been expected to have on them. He followed quietly, keeping his mouth shut, as they were taken through – inevitably – the ward of the maniacs, the most ‘exciting' or ‘interesting' cases: men straitjacketed and chained in darkened rooms, women writhing against the coffin-like confines of the barred ‘cribs'. He saw the fragile Miss Kingmill sobbing in the hands of one attendant while another held a sack of broken ice against her shaved scalp, while in the next ‘consulting room' poor little Mr Leland was strapped down and forcibly dosed with medicine from a sinister collection of black bottles.

Scarcely surprising
, reflected January,
that the patients come to the conclusion they're being poisoned
.

A newer wing had been built in the back, to house the ‘consulting rooms' and, upstairs, the maniacs. ‘We try to make the others as comfortable as possible,' explained Betzer as he led the way along a downstairs corridor of what had once, January guessed, been a servants' wing. ‘Some, of course, we can do little for, like Mrs Campbell here—' He gestured toward the judas in one door, through which January could see a woman sitting on a corner of her neatly-made bed, staring dully at the opposite wall. Like some of the others, her head had been shaved; rather than being thin, there was an unhealthy corpulence to her, bloated and pale. ‘By means of bleeding and emetics, we made some progress against the uncontrollable temper and hysterical religious mania which characterized her upon admission, but even the most persistent application of the Swing, setonage, and various forms of hydrotherapy have not yet succeeded in banishing this torpor in which she now spends her days. Yet Dr Gurry has achieved some remarkable cures by cold-water baths and plunges—'

January shuddered and looked through the judas in the opposite door.

The room was empty. Like Mrs Campbell's, it was whitewashed, small, and nearly bare of furniture; the bed was made and the chamber pot scrubbed and sitting ready at the bed's foot. A muslin screen over the window blocked all view of the outside but admitted a soft, pleasant light.

And every inch of the walls were covered with magic squares.

‘T
hat's Mr Leland's room,' replied Mr Betzer, when January had recovered sufficiently to ask. ‘A Boston gentleman, though by his accent I'd bet he originally hailed from the north of England.'

A place whose dialect doesn't sound a thing like a Londoner's. How much experience has Bellwether HAD with the way Englishmen sound?

Would a Frenchman conclude that the attendant's throaty Gullah speech originated in the same country as Mr Noyes' New England yap?

‘We used to whitewash over his drawings, but as Mr Klein pointed out to Dr Gurry, they harm no one. His nephew brought him in, but it's his niece – a Mrs Bray – who comes to see him once or twice a week—'

Bringing opiates to dose him with
…

‘Here he is now.'

Attendants led the fragile little man along the corridor. Looking at the stooped, thin shoulders, the roughly-shaved head, January felt like kicking himself:
No wonder nobody recognized his description at any of the hotels in town. The description originated with Rowena Bray
.

The old man's eyeballs were pinpoints. He staggered as the attendants eased him into his room, where he sank down on the bed and was at once asleep.

‘How long has he been like that?' January cursed the fact that the daybooks were already back in Gurry's office.

‘He came to us in October. According to young Mr Merton – his nephew – and Mrs Bray, he was a very articulate and personable gentleman. This condition came upon him very suddenly and has the family quite concerned.'

‘Why leave him alive?' demanded Poe. Early afternoon sunlight glittered on the long tidal flats of the Potomac. Riders and pleasure carriages passed them on the road from the city, a circumstance which made January want to dive into the roadside bushes every time one went by. Young Mr Klein had described how Rowena Bray visited her ‘uncle' with fresh supplies of medicine every few days:
We're expecting her today or tomorrow, in fact.

Every pair of black carriage-horses looked like hers, and the distance from Alexandria to the Long Bridge seemed to have doubled since that morning.

‘It can't take six months to establish that he'll be buried under the name of Leland.'

‘She doesn't want Oldmixton to know.' January wiped sweat from his face. The afternoon, like many of Washington in the spring, was nastily sticky, in an odd way more so than the worst of New Orleans.