Savage Girl (17 page)

•   •   •

Shrieking with laughter, we raced goat carts on the Mall, scattering pedestrians left and right. I had a sense of triumph when I won one of the heats, although then I recalled that Bronwyn had counseled me as to which particular goat to choose, and I realized that she was the true author of my victory.

Its being a bright and warm autumn weekend, the park was thronged with visitors. On the graveled concourses that cut through the copses and green lawns, carriages passed by of every stripe: landaus, hansom cabs and open Victorias, the last predominating with the fashionables, the better to see and be seen.

“Bronnie, come on!” Nicky said, tugging the girl through the traffic on Center Drive. “It’s time!”

I went along with them, not knowing or caring much what it was time for, willing to pass the day innocently with my two siblings, one blood, one adopted. We dodged across East Drive, avoiding the flying
carriages, and approached the Zoo from the rear. Atop a small rise, we could look down into its enclosures and cages, seeing them ringed with spectators, some of whom aped and tormented the animals displayed.

As we passed down the slope, a thick blackthorn planting confronted us, backed by a dense hedgerow that skirted the Zoo along its rear boundary.

By this time I understood that Bronwyn and my brother disdained natural entrances to any of the park’s attractions. They would rather improvise. We plunged directly forward into the thicket, following a faint track that had us bending and ducking all the way.

Emerging from the blackthorns, we hit the hedgerow, which I realized had a sturdy lath fence behind it. I considered ourselves stymied, but, taking up a secret path, Bronwyn and Nicky moved forward. I was about to suggest that this was altogether too much when the two of them stepped into an invisible break in the hedge and vanished.

Struggling to keep up, raked by blackthorn spines, after much difficulty I arrived at the lath fence to discover that it, too, had a gap. Nicky’s hand reached back, grabbed the worsted of my suit and forced me to bend down toward him.

Slipping through, I arrived to where Bronwyn and my brother crouched, a narrow, trash-strewn alleyway behind the lineup of the Zoo’s cages. The air had a heavy moschate stink, underlaid with a vinegary smell of piss. The alleyway angled and dead-ended there. A sign on a nearby brick building read
RUBBISH
, and groundskeeper implements leaned up against the wall.

“What are we doing?” I asked, but Nicky and Bronwyn both shushed me. I could hear the gabbing of zoo spectators just a few feet away, but we were invisible to them. We knelt beside a low concrete wall with bars embedded in it: the cage of some large creature.

A roar sounded from right near to us, a roar that would melt steel.

“We have to leave,” I hissed. They merely waved their hands at me.

Another immense roar, a clang, and a lion came stepping through a small portal from its outside run. The cage beside which we crouched
was the animal’s interior den. The door banged shut behind the beast, the crowd booed, and we were alone with a jungle cat, within arm’s reach, separated from us only by a low concrete wall and a few flimsy iron bars.

Near enough to feel the animal’s body heat, I tried to back away but was constrained by the small space.

It was a lion, yes, with tensile flanks and giant paws and a flowing mane, but it was something else, too. A tiger. The huge haunches that rested a mere foot from my nose were streaked with dark tiger stripes, parallel bands running over the buff pelt of a lion.

“A tigon,” Nicky whispered. “His name is Charlemagne, but everyone calls him Charlie. Tigons are much rarer than ligers.”

“Tiger father, lioness mother,” Bronwyn explained, “instead of lion father and—”

I clapped my hand over her mouth.
Shut up!
I wanted to shout at them.
Just shut up!
I had a terror of the creature’s noticing us, although we were so near he no doubt already had. In such proximity the iron bars seemed to have diminished in size until they appeared as mere wires, easily broken through.

“Presented to the Zoo nine months ago by a maharaja in India,” Nicky said, adding, for emphasis, “deepest, darkest India.”

“They feed him every afternoon, then put him in here to sleep,” Bronwyn said.

The tigon’s amber eyes with their gulf-black pupils came up to rest upon us or rather, as I felt it, upon me. He stopped, gave a hollow sigh and sank to the floor. A low rumbling rose up out of his chest, sounding like faraway thunder.

“Bronwyn,” I whispered.

“No,” she said softly. “Wait.”

The tigon flopped its enormous body toward us, rolling slowly over, taking its time. Still keeping its gaze fixed on me.

Bronwyn reached her hand into the cage. More specifically, she wrapped her fingers around one of the bars at about the height of the tigon’s gigantic moon face. She let it remain there, and we all crouched, poised on the cusp of something great or awful, waiting.

The tigon gave a yawn that allowed us a good look at a pair of incisors the size of cavalry sabers. Well within reach of Bronwyn’s arm.

Wait now,
I thought.
Wait.
I seemed unable to unfreeze myself. How had I allowed things to go this far?

The creature raised his eyes to Bronwyn’s. Gently but firmly, like to like, species to species, he rubbed his plush muzzle against the knuckles of her hand.

“Charlie,” she murmured, over his purrlike rumble, which in the small space sounded enormous. She reached out to pet him then, a sensuous, rhythmic rubbing that the animal gratefully allowed.

“What are you kids doing here?” came a piercing voice, and I turned to see a stocky, bearded man in a blue uniform approaching us down the alleyway. “This area is forbidden!”

I stood up awkwardly, eliciting a worried growl from Charlie, and ducked my head submissively before the zookeeper’s authority. But when I turned to collect Bronwyn and Nicky, they had somehow disappeared, leaving me to my stammering explanations as I was escorted from the Zoo grounds and instructed never to return.

•   •   •

“I’m afraid there is a detective in to see you, Mr. Hugo,” Winston said, a mournful, disapproving look barely concealed on his face.

“Really?” I sat in Freddy’s library the day after the Zoo visit. I had been occupied, all morning, compiling a list of books that I might read to Bronwyn. My parents were still in the country.

I told Winston to show the man in.

“In the stairhall below, young master,” Winston said.

The stumpy little professional I met there wore a supercilious look and a bowler hat that appeared too small for his head. “If this is about what happened at the Zoo yesterday,” I began hurriedly, “of course I can explain.”

“None of that, sir,” the little man said. “Don’t know to what you are referring. This is on some other matter.” He introduced himself to me as Otto Grizzard, “late of the Pinkerton Agency, late of Palmer House in Chicago, Illinois.”

I felt myself being carefully observed so attempted nonchalance. Fumbling, I lit a cigarette from a box on the side table. “Smoke, Mr. Gizzard?”

“Grizzard,” the man corrected, pronouncing the name in the French style. “And no, no tobacco. I’m temperance.”

“You mentioned . . . late of here, late of there and now of where?”

“Now I am out for myself,” he said.

“Sit, please, and tell me what I can do for you. I am afraid my father is not in town right at the moment.” I motioned to the Gothic bench along the opposite wall.

He continued to stand. “It is to you whom I wished to speak, if you are Hugo Delegate. And you recently passed through Chicago, staying at the Palmer?”

“Well, I don’t know how recently, but five months ago, I guess it was, I was with my family, and we spent a short stopover in the hotel on our way east.”

“There was an incident during your stay,” Grizzard said.

“I’m sorry, are you appearing in your capacity as an employee of the Palmer House? But you indicated you were no longer attached to the establishment, correct?”

“Correct.”

“So I don’t understand.”

Freddy and Anna Maria had long ago taught me that the majority of humankind, when confronted with a possessor of wealth, immediately set themselves to securing a piece of it. The greater the wealth, the harder they came at you and the more incessant were the importunities.

We were, all of us in the family, attuned to the infinite guises that such approaches might take. At that moment I felt that, if I were not mistaken, Otto Grizzard, the former Pinkerton detective, late of Palmer House, was eager to reach his hand into my pocket.

“A member of the staff at the hotel, Matthew Donleavy, fell victim of a horrible attack during your stay.”

“Yes, I knew that. I wasn’t aware of the man’s name, but in fact I came upon the crime in its immediate aftermath.”

“Certain facts have come to light in the wake of your escape,” Grizzard said.

“My escape!” I exclaimed. “My family and I were scheduled to leave from Union Station aboard our private train at five the next morning. I did not ‘escape’ from anything. I merely followed a plan predetermined far in advance of any unfortunate circumstance that befell Mr.—”

“Donleavy, sir,” Grizzard said.

I remembered the shadowy hotel corridors, the blood. “I think I shall ask you to leave,” I said. I rang, and Winston materialized at my side.

“Not until you hear me out, sir, I wouldn’t.”

“Good afternoon, Mr. Grizzard.”

Winston stepped up to him. I waved him off. “Get Paul, will you, Winston? Or Colm, if he’s around.”

“Indications are pointing to you, Hugo Delegate,” Grizzard said, stubbornly standing his ground.

He held up the splayed fingers of his hand. “One, the cuts what made the victim fall mortal was rendered with a surgeonlike instrument, such as a lancet or scalpel, a tool anyway of an expert, with which the body were horribly mutilated. Two, such instruments had been spied among your personal belongings in the time previous to the deed, bloody and well used.”

“This is outrageous,” I said.

“Three, you are a vivisectionist—I have checked on you, at Harvard College, in Boston, is it? You have a practiced hand at such matters. Four, another of your party, a young lady and your probable accomplice, had been seen up and around in the wee hours of the
A.M.
in question, when Matthew Donleavy met his end. Further—”

“Shut up and get out,” I said.

“Further, such young lady was seen in the company of Matthew earlier in the evening.”

“What?”

“Aye, you didn’t know that, did you? Now, I ask you, seeing it objectively, what are we to think? Really, sir, what are we to think?”

I took another cigarette, my second, two more than I usually have on any ordinary day. “We were served by this man earlier at dinner, if that is what you mean.”

The waiter’s slicked-back blond hair recurred in my memory, his broad shoulders, the stupid expression he wore. She had a smile for him.

“The chippie was seen with him after that,” Grizzard said. “Theory of the crime? We detectives are always big on the theory of the crime, sir. It helps us sort through the multiplicity of reality.”

He again splayed out his fingers, checking off the chain of events one by one. “Young lady flirts at dinner, meets up later at an assignation, jealous suitor cuts down the object of affection. An old story, if I may say so, sir.”

“You may not say so,” I said, but my voice came out as a weak quaver. The whole instance brought the nightmare back to mind, disjointed and unreal. Could the woman I saw in the Palmer House maze (thought I saw? imagined I saw?) have been Bronwyn?

“Now, we don’t know her name or her relation to you, but sooner or later the bottom of this matter will be got to, whether you like it or not. And wouldn’t you prefer to be in control of the process rather than to be manipulated by the hands of others?”

Finally he was getting around to it. I said, “You must come out and say exactly what you mean, so I can thrash you within an inch of your life for saying it.”

He was short, a half hand smaller than I even with the hat, but thick, and I doubted, if it came to that, whether I could take him. Where was Colm?

Grizzard only smiled at my threat, clearly not taking it seriously. He held out both hands as if they were the scales of justice.

“Well, sir, on the one hand scandal and notoriety, your name dragged around in the pages of the popular press, associated with if not accused in a macabre passion killing. The young lady were said to be very beautiful, so she would be catnip to the gentlemen kittens of the newspapers. Scandal and notoriety, sir, notoriety and scandal.”

He allowed his left hand to fall as if weighed down by the immensity of this eventuality. Then he raised his right.

“On the other hand, there’s only a few of us actually knowing the who and the why and the wherefore of this matter, only a few voices to be stilled, a few needy souls, working people all of us, housemaids and porters and such, needing to be taken care of, and all that scandal goes away as though the light of day never once shone upon it.”

He bowed and turned toward the door. “I knew you would want to hear me out,” he said. “I’m staying at the New York Hotel, not quite as nice as the Palmer House, I must say, and I’ll only be there another week, should you need to contact me.”

Grizzard turned at the door and gave me a broad wink. “Which I know you will.”

Colm appeared in the doorway, a looming presence. Grizzard sized him up. “You needn’t bother to escort me, my man. I can find the way.”

At a gesture from me, Colm ushered him out.

14

Poor Grizzard, Bill Howe says, his voice dripping with feigned regret. So foolishly confident. He was fairly easily disposed of, wasn’t he? It’s a wonder that a man such as that would even try, when the outcome is so clearly preordained. When a verminous field vole comes up against the might of an eagle, what will be the result?

He rises to his feet and stretches. There could be no question of payment, he says, since money, once applied, tends to act as a stimulant, until it becomes an addiction and the poor victim becomes enslaved to it like a Chinese coolie to his hop.

Now, he says, a bath behind this partition here, a late repast, some coffee—or you prefer tea, don’t you?—and we’ll have at it once more. Are you tired?

The shadows of Saturday evening have fallen outside the Tombs. I tell him I am not. Are you tired, Mr. Hummel?

The question does not apply, since Hummel looks as though the very concept of sleep is foreign to him.

We are getting to the heart of it now, Howe says, to the very heart of it, which is where we want to be, eh, Mr. Hummel?

The sheriff of Nottingham, Hummel says inscrutably, astonishing both myself and Howe not by his words but by the very fact that he speaks at all.

Yes, yes, Howe says, the lawman from Virginia City. We will get to him. But first we must render young Delegate here wholly refurbished and refreshed. Replace that waistcoat with its nasty bloodstains.

Perhaps, he adds, ushering me behind a screen, where a scented bath has been prepared in an elegant copper tub, perhaps you might
want to continue while you soak. I and Mr. Hummel will be right on the other side of this modesty panel.

I undress and slip into the scalding-hot water.

From behind the screen, I hear Howe’s prompt: Grizzard’s visit did unsettle you, did it not?

•   •   •

Grizzard’s visit unsettled me a great deal, and I felt I had no choice but to lay out the whole affair to my father, as soon as he and Anna Maria returned from their country weekend upstate.

And yet, when it came to that, when my parents arrived and took up their busy city lives, asking me how my time with Bronwyn had gone, something prevented me from divulging anything more than bland and uneventful details. I told them we had gone to the Zoo, which was true. I left the freelance Chicago detective entirely out of the narrative.

I realized I had to do something to put Grizzard off, thinking briefly of paying him out of my allowance and then rejecting that as a last line of defense, to be employed only when others failed.

Instead I called upon two excellent, excellent attorneys of my acquaintance, genius lawyers, partners at the bar, to take care of the matter for me.

Which they did. Without, I may add, an unnecessary outlay of funds. The pair really are magicians.

•   •   •

You are too, too kind, Howe says, making a rare interruption in my narrative.

Not at all, I say.

Pray continue, Howe says.

I shall, I say.

And I do.

•   •   •

A stray thought nagged at me, and I turned out all the drawers in my wardrobe and searched through the contents of the desk I kept in the
office off my bedroom. Finally I found it, tucked away in my copy of Suetonius, the newspaper article from the
Gold Hill News,
concerning the shooting I had witnessed in the club dining room of the International Hotel in Virginia City.

A word set off little dinging alarm bells in my memory. This was the phrase, in the second paragraph of the article: . . .
mutilated and headless corpse was found . . .

Mutilated. I suppose it might be common enough for bodies to be mutilated in the course of murder, violence being a great disturber of persons. I did not know enough about homicide to be able to hazard a guess as to the incidence of mutilation attendant upon it. Still, it could possibly violate the rules of randomness, the fact that the word had cropped up twice in the past few months, first in the
Gold Hill News
, then from the gizzard of Mr. Grizzard.

I thought of calling Colm in, changed my mind and rang for Winston instead, asking him to summon a Western Union boy. I sent a telegram.

TO: SHERIFF DICK TOLLE, VIRGINIA CITY, NEVADA.
SIR, DURING OUR RECENT SOJOURN IN YOUR FAIR CITY LAST JUNE . . .

I couldn’t think how to proceed. After several false starts, I settled on the following.

THE FATAL SHOOTING THAT OCCURRED IN THE INTERNATIONAL HOTEL, WHICH I WITNESSED WITH MY OWN EYES, HAS CONTINUED TO ENGAGE MY INTEREST [STOP] I WONDER IF YOU COULD FORWARD TO ME SOONEST ANY DETAILS REGARDING BUTLER FINCE, PETER FINCE, HANK MONK AND THE SURROUNDING CIRCUMSTANCES OF THE INCIDENT, AS WELL AS THE SUBSEQUENT DISPOSITION OF THE CASE [STOP]

Perfectly straightforward, and should Sheriff Tolle be so indiscreet as to share my communication with my father, a message that I could easily pass off as one of general interest.

From the back of my mind, stories of feral children surfaced, how both Victor of Aveyron and the Songi girl were subject to sudden fits of uncontrollable anger. I had witnessed Bronwyn’s raging eyes many times, but so far she had indulged in no overt incidents of violence. At least not against human beings. I thought of her expertly braining that jackrabbit outside Kelton station. I wondered if the deprivations of her Savage Girl captivity might somehow lead her to shed human blood.

One evening after supper—this was two or three days following the fiasco at the Zoo—I ventured into the South Wing. Bronwyn had her rooms there, on the same third-floor corridor as Tu-Li and the berdache. Her windows thus looked out not only on Sixty-second Street but on the courtyard and stables at the back of the house.

I knocked upon her door, received no response, knocked again, waited, then entered.

Her private quarters. I felt like a spy.

Bronwyn’s bedroom had been decorated by my mother and thus had little personal expression of its occupant. Against one wall stood a four-poster bed of dark walnut with a fringed yellow silk canopy and a set of curtains that could be pulled around the posts for privacy. A half dozen rose-colored embroidered pillows lay heaped up at the head of the bed, its satin quilt likewise rose pink.

Rooting through her room, I would have had a horror of her finding me, but the girl was quite obviously gone, probably next door in Tu-Li’s bedroom or perhaps playing at Chinese tiles with the berdache.

A matching walnut armoire and chest of drawers ranged along the interior wall. A deep turquoise carpet made a circle in the center of the floor. Framed cameos and tranquil landscapes crowded the walls.

I passed through the empty, silent bedchamber, picking up and putting back down various objets. That was what was most arresting about the room, the collection of gewgaws and trinkets that stood arrayed on every surface.

Alabaster bud vases, tiny illustrated booklets of “ladies’ rhymes,” gilt clocks, spider plants in Chinese urns. Everything had come from Stewart’s, or Macy’s, or from somebody’s trip to the Continent. A bottle of orange water.

Gifts from my mother.

Nothing in the room was of Bronwyn herself, except perhaps the indentation in the pillow where she had rested her head.

The room was cold. The big sash window on the eastern side had been thrown wide open to the night. I went to the window, stuck my head out and saw that it communicated to The Citadel’s courtyard.

Behind me Bronwyn entered the bedroom from the adjoining dressing chamber. She did not see me at first, but I startled out a little cry, because I realized she was done up in a boy’s clothes—shirt, trousers and boots—and was in the process of concealing her long black hair beneath a cap.

She stopped and stared at me as I stared at her.

“What do you want?” she asked coldly.

I was struck speechless.

“Don’t be foolish about this,” she said. Referring to her garb.

Gathering my wits, I said, “I saw you once before when you were dressed as a boy.”

“On the back of a pony. You could not believe it. You asked yourself, Does she get smaller and smaller, like some shrinking person, or could she really be leaving us far, far behind?”

Gazing into the distance as at the horizon, waving her hand, she repeated, “Far, far behind.”

She gave me a droll look and resumed bustling determinedly around the room, collecting a leather satchel, slinging it over her shoulder. Her appearance in those homely male clothes had an unsettling effect on me, especially when, completing the ensemble, she donned a leather coat.

“For Lord’s sakes, are you going out?” I could not control the dismay and surprise in my voice.

Bronwyn didn’t immediately answer. Reaching beneath her armoire, she extracted the dirty canvas bag I had first discovered in her sleeping quarters on Sandobar. From it she took out her set of steel razor claws, tucking the device away into the leather satchel.

“For protection,” she explained. Then, again gesturing to her
costume, “It’s the only way I can venture out alone without people bothering me. I did it in the Comstock this way.”

“No,” I said firmly. “No, you can’t leave the house. I forbid you.”

She merely gave me a look, eyes blazing with purpose. The question rose unbidden in my thoughts, as if inserted there by some superior psychic force:
Who was I to forbid her to do anything?

Nevertheless I babbled on. “This is just not done, Bronwyn, you could get hurt, something could happen, no, really, no, no, no!”

“Yes,” she said. The first word I had ever heard her speak, back on the train.

“But it’s nine o’clock! Where is there for a girl to go at night?”

She looked at me meaningfully. “Where do
you
go at night?”

Could she possibly know? Upon my recent return from Harvard, I had immediately taken up my old nocturnal habits, frequenting Delmonico’s, meeting Bev or Chippy or Jones Abercrombie there, then going on to the shivarees at Mrs. Tolson’s or the Dauphin, our favored brothels in the Tenderloin.

“That is entirely different,” I said, not saying it, more like sputtering it.

“Is it?”

I realized later that she did not in fact know what I did with my evenings, that it was only my guilty mind reading into her words, but the effect was the same.

She crossed the room, heading for the window. I moved to block her, but she effortlessly dodged around to the side, making me stagger, in a move uncannily reminiscent of when the Toad servant had tried to prevent her from leaving Dr. Scott’s barn.

“Bronwyn!” I called out.

She poised a moment on the sash, said “Hugo,” over her shoulder, and disappeared.

I rushed to the window, in time to see her clamber downward on the ornamental crenellations of the exterior, cross the stable courtyard and slip out toward Sixty-third.

Thunderstruck, I rushed down the corridor to my own rooms in
the opposite wing, dressed hurriedly in evening clothes and took the stairs down two at a time.

I found Freddy and Anna Maria in the aviary. Crossing the space quickly, spooking a fluttering cockatoo, I peered outside into the courtyard.

“Going out?” Freddy asked.

“Is there something wrong, dear?” Anna Maria asked.

“She’s—” I began, then broke off.

“You look entirely out of sorts, Hugo,” Anna Maria said. “Doesn’t he, Freddy? Stop a bit, take a cigarette, you should never leave the house upset.”

I’m sure I reminded her of the unhinged way I looked when I was carted off to the sanatorium.

“No, no, I’m all right,” I said. “It’s just— I must go!”

Freddy followed me out of the aviary as I crossed the stairhall. “Take the brougham,” he called.

“I’ll get a hack,” I said back to him.

“Take Colm!” he called.

But this was not a night for Colm Cullen to know about. I needed his protection but more particularly wanted to keep Bronwyn’s misconduct secret.

Once out on the street, I felt at a loss which way to turn. I proceeded the short half block up to Sixty-third, looked east, found the street empty. The whole district was quiet as a cemetery, as befitted a neighborhood of two homes only.

Winds shook the trees in the park and along Fifth. I pulled my topper close, tightened my scarf around my neck and crossed the avenue. I didn’t know where I would find her. The only thing I could think of was that day at the Zoo, when she had known all the park’s nooks and crannies, all the places a person could slip in and slide through unseen.