Ravencliffe (Blythewood series) (5 page)

I slipped through a side door into a dim hallway lined with dark wood and carpeted with thick Oriental rugs. There was a gilt-framed mirror tucked into a velvet-upholstered niche. I peered into it and was shocked at what I saw there. My hair was standing on end, my costume wings were twisted and crumpled, my dress plastered to me and torn—and I smelled like a garbage heap. I could never go back into the ballroom. I’d have to sneak out the back door and find my way home.

I heard a door opening behind me. I pressed myself into the niche to hide myself.

Male voices—deep and throaty with amusement and content—billowed out of the room on a gust of smoke. This was where the men went to smoke their cigars and talk of matters deemed too coarse for female sensibilities. Through a scrim of smoke I made out the stout, prosperous shapes of three of my classmates’ fathers—Alfred Driscoll, president of the New York Bank; Wallace Rutherford, owner of the
New York Sun
; and George Montmorency, councilman and, many said, soon to be the next mayor. There were others—men in dark, expensive evening coats and sleek whiskers, one in a police uniform with medals, another in a cleric’s collar, and one, half-hidden in the smoke and shadows, who was looking straight at me.

Impossible!
I was hidden inside the niche and he couldn’t see me through all that smoke.

But I felt the force of those eyes on me as strongly as if they had pinned me in place—and I heard the bass bell gonging in my head. The last time I had felt this frozen immobility and heard my bell ring so madly was when I’d encountered Judicus van Drood on the streets of Rhinebeck. Was it him?

But then the door to the smoking room closed and the spell vanished. I broke from the niche like a pheasant flushed from the underbrush and ran through the servants’ quarters to find the service door, my wire wings trembling behind me and all the clocks in the house chiming midnight as though I were Cinderella fleeing the ball.

6

I MET NATHAN
and Helen at the Fifty-Ninth Street station where the Sea Beach Railway embarked for Coney Island. Nathan looked cool and crisp in striped linen trousers, matching jacket draped nonchalantly over one shoulder, and a straw boater tipped rakishly low over his face. I didn’t know how he managed it. The walk downtown had left me drenched and limp as last night’s violet corsage, which lay on my night table. Helen was also enviably fresh in a frothy lace dress with matching parasol, which looked more suited for tea with the Astors than a train ride with the masses. I wondered if she had ever ridden in public transportation before. She was peering around her at the morning holiday crowd as if she’d just landed in a spice bazaar in remotest India.

“Where’s your bathing costume?” she demanded as I joined them.

“I don’t plan to bathe,” I replied primly. “This isn’t a holiday outing. We’re going to find clues to Ruth Blum’s whereabouts, not to have fun.”

The truth was I would have loved to swim. My mother used to take me on Sundays and holidays to the beach. We’d wade in, hand in hand, squealing at the slap of waves so excruciatingly cold I couldn’t imagine going an inch farther, but when she cried “
Now!
” I would dive blindly into the swell. My mother would emerge laughing, her hair slicked back like a seal’s fur, her face radiant, as if the cold salt water had washed away the sadness that always clung to her like the lingering scent of smoke.

My body ached for that kind of release. But how could I risk even the most modest bathing costumes with my newly emerging wings? Besides, after all I’d seen last night through poor Molly’s eyes, I wasn’t in much of a holiday mood. But I was more determined than ever to find Ruth.

“Nonsense!” Helen sniffed. “This is my first excursion to Coney Island, and I’m determined to enjoy the full experience. We will ride the Steeplechase, eat fried clams, and bathe in the ocean. I’ve brought a bathing costume for you.” She held up a basket that dangled from her arm and pulled out a red and white striped bathing costume covered with ruffles and ribbons. “I used it at Newport last summer, so it’s out of date, of course, but it should do.”

“Ava’s four inches taller and ten pounds lighter—” Nathan began, until I kicked him in the shin. Aside from not wanting my physical attributes described—had he been paying such close attention?—I’d just realized why this outing was so important to Helen. Last summer—and every summer of her life before that—Helen had spent the season in Newport, but she and her mother could no longer afford such luxuries.

Instead, she had spent this summer in the hot, dusty city helping her mother pack up their Washington Square brownstone and sell their most valuable possessions to move to a dreary suite of rooms at the Franconia Hotel. Mrs. van Beek had let it be known within her social circles that she’d sold the brownstone because she was tired of its dark narrow rooms and was looking about for a grander residence on Fifth Avenue, but what she was really “looking about” for was a husband for Helen who would lift them both out of the encroaching maw of poverty. Poor Helen. She deserved a holiday.

“We’ll see,” I said, looking doubtfully at the dreadful bathing costume. I would look like a candy cane in it. “You can certainly swim while I show Ruth’s picture around.”

I showed Nathan and Helen the photograph.

“Oh, how droll!” Helen cried. “It looks like they’re driving down the Champs-Elysées. Do let’s get our picture taken, too!”

It was rather sweet to see Helen, who had had her portrait painted by John Singer Sargent, so enthusiastic about having our day in Coney Island memorialized in a souvenir photograph, but when I looked at Nathan I saw the color had washed out of his face.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“The man,” Nathan said between tight lips. “He looks familiar.”

“How can you tell?” Helen asked. “His face is all funny.”

“That’s just it. That’s how I remember him—the man who questioned me that day in the Wing & Clover. Whenever I think of him—or dream of him—his face is a blur just like that.”

“If it’s the same man,” I said, remembering the day that Helen and I spied Nathan in our local Rhinebeck tavern beside a strange gentleman, “that means the man who took Ruth is Judicus van Drood.”

A gust of cool salt air hit us as soon as we got off the train in Brooklyn. It felt delicious but didn’t blow away my ominous thoughts. I’d learned last year that Judicus van Drood was Nathan’s real father, but Nathan didn’t know that. And if I had anything to do with it, he never would.

“What’s the plan?” Nathan asked me as we descended the stairs from the elevated platform to the street.

I
did
have a plan. We would start at the entrance to Steeplechase Park, where Ruth was going to meet her mysterious stranger, and locate anyone—ticket takers, buskers, security guards—who worked there regularly and show them Ruth’s picture. But I hadn’t figured on the crowds. As we descended from the train platform we were swept up into a stream of people and carried along like bits of flotsam and jetsam onto the Bowery, the wide avenue named after the more disreputable street in Manhattan, which led to the amusement parks and was, itself, an amusement park of sorts.

“Hang on!” Nathan cried, linking our arms under his as we plunged into the masses. It was impossible to even hear each other over the cacophony of the laughing crowd, the antic calliope music that seemed to come from everywhere at once, and the buskers advertising the many attractions.

“Look well upon this group of savages, ladies and gentlemen!” one cried. I craned my neck to make out an African tribesman in a fur loincloth, his shaved skull and bare chest covered in tattoos.

“That man is nearly naked!” Helen whispered into my ear.

“See the freak show! See the bearded lady and the ape woman of Borneo!” Out of the corner of my eye I saw a woman dressed in a beautiful lace dress, only her face was covered with fur. She stood with an odd regal dignity, her eyes fixed on a point above the heads of the crowd.

“This way for Delilah of the Seven Veils,” another shouted. “The hottest show on Earth! See her dance the hootchy-kootchy! Anywhere else but in the ocean breezes of Coney Island she would be consumed by her own fire!”

A woman with a veiled face but an exposed midriff shimmied by us, clinking finger cymbals and twining one of her scarves around Nathan’s neck. An intoxicating scent of jasmine mingled with the aromas of fried clams, salt air, and circus animals. Nathan’s eyes followed the dancer as she wove through the crowd.

“How very familiar of her!” Helen sniffed.

The hootchy-kootchy dancer wasn’t the only one who was familiar. Twice I felt a stranger’s hand on my person, but when I turned to catch the offending party I looked into a sea of laughing faces so distended with hilarity they resembled the grotesque sign the changeling had mimicked. And then I saw the face itself, looming over the crowd like the guiding spirit of the place—a spirit of antic glee that put my teeth on edge but somehow made me want to smile and dance to the crazy tune of the calliope.

“Over here!” I shouted to Nate, who was fending off a mountebank in plaid trousers holding out a handful of playing cards. Helen, wide-eyed, was watching a spooning couple whose limbs were so intertwined they appeared to be one creature. I steered them both to the entrance of Steeplechase Park, where there was a pocket of open space just below the funny-face sign. I saw why when we got there. A giant of a man stood in the center of the empty space. He wore white robes that billowed in the breeze, a white tunic and turban, brilliant red pantaloons, and a matching sash. He stood absolutely still, his dark face immobile as a statue carved out of mahogany, jet-black eyes boring into the crowd of spectators that had stilled around him as though under a spell. I thought he might be a statue until he raised his arm and pointed at a girl in a navy blue swimming costume.

“You!” he bellowed. “Do you not believe in the magic of Omar the Magnificent!”

The girl covered her face with a cheap paper fan and giggled. But when Omar spoke next her giggles stopped and the whole crowd fell silent.

“And why do you not believe? Because it is told to you at Coney Island and in your heart you say . . . what is the word?
Humbug?
But I ask you, why should I come all the way across the oceans, far from my own land where the sun is hot all year and the sacred Ganges flows to the sea from the great hills that wear white turbans of eternal snow and whisper secrets in the ears of the stars—why should I do this if my entertainment is humbug?”

His voice dropped to a low whisper that seemed to tickle the inside of my ears. He seemed to be looking straight at me now.

“And why should you come if not to find the lost one you seek?”

Then, without another word, he turned, his robes billowing around him in a white swirl. There was a flash of blinding light, a puff of smoke, and he was gone. The crowd gasped as one.

“See more of Omar the Hindu Hypnotist at the Golden Pavilion!” a spieler announced.

“Oh, do let’s!” Helen cried. “I want to see if he can hypnotize me. I’m sure he can’t. I’m much too strong-willed.”

“It’s a parlor trick,” Nathan said dismissively.

I found it curious that my friends who knew magic existed were so doubtful of the possibility that it might exist
here
.

“If he does that little demonstration here every day, perhaps he saw Ruth,” I said, getting on the ticket line. I showed Ruth’s picture to the ticket seller, but he only shrugged and told me he saw “a thousand mugs a day and they all look alike after a while.” I thanked him and asked for directions to the Golden Pavilion. “Just past the Steeplechase and before the freak show. Don’t miss the winged woman.”

I started, but he was already turned to the next customer on line, and Helen was urging me along.

“Look at the beautiful horses!” she cried, pointing to the mechanical wooden horses on the Steeplechase. “I’ve missed riding since we sold our stables! Can we ride on them?”

“After we’ve located Omar,” I said, beginning to feel like the dowdy governess to two rambunctious charges. But when we found the Golden Pavilion there was a sign telling us that Omar the Magnificent’s next sitting wasn’t for another forty minutes. I asked the attendant if we might have a private word with Omar, but he told us that the Great Omar was meditating in preparation for his appearance.

“We might as well ride the Steeplechase in the meantime,” Helen pointed out.

Seeing that it was fruitless to argue, I agreed. We went back to Steeplechase Park and selected our horses. For all Helen’s horsemanship, she needed quite a lot of assistance from Nathan to mount her wooden steed, and once seated she professed herself terrified of falling.

“Look!” she told Nathan. “Everyone is riding in pairs. There’s plenty of room for you, and you can keep me from falling.”

“And who will keep Ava from falling?” Nathan asked.

“I’m perfectly capable of holding on to a hobby horse!” I snapped, sure now why Helen had been so anxious to ride the Steeplechase. All around us I saw girls giggling as their young men tightened their arms around their waists. The whole ride was one big excuse for cuddling. I suddenly felt ridiculous riding alone. I would get off and go show Ruth’s picture around . . .

But then a juddering of gears and a sudden jolt told me the ride was starting. Helen gave a little yelp and Nathan swung into the saddle behind her with all the ease of a cowboy in a Wild West show. I grasped the pole and hung on as the wooden horse trembled beneath me, swooped down over an artificial stream, and then began climbing a long upward-sloping track. I could see the minarets of Luna Park and the great Ferris wheel and the terrifying Loop-the-Loop. We were rising high above the stultifying crowds into clean, cool air.

Beyond the park lay the Atlantic Ocean, blue-green and vast, seagulls wheeling over the whitecaps. The cold salt air lifted the damp hair off my neck and slid under my fine lawn shirtwaist. I closed my eyes and let the air lap over me. It was like diving into a wave. It was like
flying
. Beneath my corset my wings itched to flex themselves and soar over the ocean with the seagulls. And why not? Here at Coney Island wasn’t everything allowed? Men and women held each other in public, women danced bare-bellied on the streets, magicians vanished in a puff of smoke . . . If I spread my wings now and took off, would anyone think it was more than one of the wonders of Coney Island?

I opened my eyes. Ahead of me, Helen had her head buried under Nathan’s arm, her arms wrapped rigidly around him. I remembered suddenly that Helen was deathly afraid of heights. She must not have realized that the ride went so high up in the air. Nathan had his hands full—literally—with keeping her from going into hysterics. All the other couples were engrossed with each other. Who would notice my absence?

We had come to the crest of the course.
Now!
my whole body urged. But even as I rose from my saddle, a scrap of conversation floated toward me on the wind.

“But I can’t leave my family behind!”