Savage Girl (19 page)

The chemical reek of the place stung my sinuses, reminding me of dissections in days past. A stab of missing Harvard hit me. So simple, that life. Labs! Classes! Examinations!

Beneath the morgue’s formaldehyde smell, a honeyed stink of death. Along the walls, immense blocks of river ice cooled the room to the point where I could see my breath.

“A moral visit?” asked the attendant, a gaunt man in a rubber apron.

“What?”

The attendant gestured to Kleinschmidt. “Him. Put the fear of the Lord into him, will you?”

I still didn’t understand.

He shouted into the Stone-Thrower’s face. “This is where you’ll be if you keep on your degenerate ways!”

Kleinschmidt buried his face into the breast of my waistcoat, an extremely disagreeable development. I extricated myself as quickly as I could. The poor man gazed about at the surroundings as though he had entered a nightmare.

Perhaps, I thought, the visit could do him some good after all.

Small grave lights hung from the ceiling, illuminating the bodies. They lay carelessly shrouded, some half uncovered, men and women both, oaken blocks propping up their heads. Pale, pale, the faces of the dead.

“I wonder,” I said in a low voice to the attendant, “if any of your charges might exhibit signs of peculiar violence.
Pudenda abscissa sunt.
”

This was an occasion for some delicacy. In the case of the Palmer House waiter, the genitals had been taken off and carried away. And with Peter Fince in Nevada, mutilation had also been mentioned.

The morgue doctor’s Latin training might have been deficient, since I had to ask the question in the mother tongue. “The private parts cut off,” I muttered.

The man gave me a frowning look. “Are you with the newspapers?” he said, low-voiced.

I shook my head.

“Then how do you know?”

“Just show me the corpus.”

We were both whispering, a common practice with which I had become familiar in my anatomy studies, where loud voices and exuberance were considered anathema in the presence of the dead.

While Kleinschmidt stood gaping, I followed the attendant to the rear of the morgue. There a rickety wooden-framed structure supported yet more cadavers, a dozen or so stored in some sort of monstrous pigeonhole arrangement.

Pulling out a wooden body board from one of the cubbies, the attendant unsheeted the deceased.

“Police was here and gave up on him, seeing how he were just a Gypsy,” he said. His voice took on a conspiratorial undertone. “The missing part was never found.”

I had seen the man only a single time, in the dead dark of the Central Park wilderness, with just a campfire illuminating the scene. Yet I was certain that the well-mustachioed corpse, displaying deep incisions across its torso, the femoral artery expertly severed between the
adductor and the sartorius, the disfigured pelvic saddle a mass of clotted blood, was Bronwyn’s dancing partner of a few nights before.

“Would you like to tell me what’s going on?” said a familiar voice as I stood contemplating the dead man.

Colm Cullen. I felt guilty, as though I had been caught out at something, which of course I had.

“What might we be doing here, Hugo?” he asked. He had not gone on his holiday visits after all but trailed me to see what I was up to.

“The Stone-Thrower . . .” I managed to say.

Colm poked his thumb toward the door behind him. “He just tore out of here, white as a ghost. But that’s not what this is about, is it?”

“No,” I said.

“It’s about her, ain’t it?”

I nodded.

“Well, I won’t tell you how you should run your life,” he said. “But if you let me in on it, maybe I could help. That’s what you’re paying me for, ain’t it? To keep you out of jams?”

So I laid it out to him, the two of us standing together in the chilly morgue room. The killing I had stumbled into at Palmer House in Chicago. The headless body in the Washoe. Finally the present one, the Gypsy dancer.

Gesturing at the corpse on the slab, I said, “I saw her with this man in the park just a few nights ago. Dancing like a bar girl.”

Colm gazed down at the dead man. “You sure it was him?”

“Well, no,” I said. “But don’t you see? They’re all being done to in the same way!”

Colm shook his head, unconvinced. “You’re telling me you think the wee girl is capable of something like this? What does she weigh? She’d blow away in a strong wind!”

“I know, I know,” I said. “I think it’s crazy, too.” I omitted my other crazy thought, that I myself might be capable of such crimes. But Colm seemed to speak on it.

“Listen, I knew of a man back on Dudley Square, when I was growing up in Boston,” Colm said. “He was the jealous type, liked to keep his girlfriends shut up in a room, and only he had the key. He was
attracted to a wild girl, really lively, out in the dance halls every night, everybody loving her.”

Scratch an Irishman and he’ll bleed a story.

“I used to . . . well, I mean,
he
used to dream up misdeeds this wild girl was doing, imagining all sorts of dark adventures just because she was fun-loving. A man’s thoughts can run away with him. Do you see what I’m telling you?”

I did see. Colm Cullen, the workingman’s version of a psychologist. I wondered what Professor James would make of him.

“Bronwyn ain’t Delia Showalter,” Colm said. “She ain’t your fragile society girl. She might like her men. But that don’t mean she’s done deeds would make the devil blush.”

It was all in my head, he was saying. My fantasies sprang from my own fears. Men normally like their women firmly under control. Savage Girl was simply too free-spirited for me, and that led me into dark suspicions.

“Now, for the sake of our peace of mind, let’s go get a damned drink,” Colm said. “This place is giving me the piss shivers.”

•   •   •

All that Thanksgiving holiday, Bronwyn remained shut up in her bedchamber.

Mrs. Herbert kept the keys to every room in The Citadel on a chatelaine she wore at her waist, barrel keys for the silver cabinets, flat keys for the linen trunks, most of the room keys skinny iron skeletons. The head housekeeper was, as Freddy said, the rock upon which we built our home.

We had a small disagreement that evening, when I suggested that Mrs. Herbert accompany me to gain access to Bronwyn’s quarters.

Freddy and Anna Maria had left the house on their Thanksgiving evening calls. Winston, too, seemed to be unavailable. Lacking appeal to superior powers, the formidable Mrs. Herbert had no recourse but to accede to my wishes.

“I’m worried about my dear sister,” I told her. “We will only check to see if she is well.”

“We’re all worried, Mr. Hugo, but she insists on privacy,” Mrs. Herbert said. “The Chinese maid goes in with dinner trays.”

“I’m sure Miss Bronwyn is fine. But I’d like to speak to her directly.”

Unlocking and opening the door, we came upon Bronwyn at a small writing desk on the far side of her bedroom. She was perfectly presentable, dressed in a pleated frock, the overskirt pulled up to a deep bow at her back. I noticed on the desk the torn-in-half Bible, propped open.

Mrs. Herbert waited at the open door as I ventured into the maiden’s bedroom. “I’m sorry,” I stammered, suddenly abashed. “Dear sister, you have been so secluded lately, I thought to make a visit to see if there was anything I could do.”

“I want to be alone,” she said.

“Yes, yes, surely,” I said. “But too much aloneness can be mentally unhealthy, isn’t that so?”

She appeared paler than when I left her last, when the upstairs maid turned me out of her room the morning after her escapade with the man now lying dead in the morgue.

“I wonder if it would be better to not only get out of this room but perhaps out of the house,” I said. “I’d like to invite you to an evening on the town sometime, say, this Saturday, when we can sightsee the Young Patriarchs’ Ball down at the Academy of Music.”

She remained silent. In the doorway Mrs. Herbert coughed into her hand. “It might be amusing for you to see all the howling swells,” I said. “Of course, we ourselves shall have to wear proper evening dress.”

A backhanded reference to her going out in boy’s garb.

“As you wish,” she said. “But I’d like you to leave me to myself now.”

“Saturday evening, then,” I said, bowing backward out the door like a courtier.

Mrs. Herbert closed Bronwyn in her room once again. “Very good, young master,” she said to me. “Very, very good. You’ve always been a kind boy. It will be a blessing for her to go out and about a bit.”

Behind us we heard Bronwyn’s door lock being turned.

That Saturday, the night of the Young Patriarchs’ Ball, represented the traditional start of the Christmas social season. I was of course expected at the occasion myself but begged off, pleading illness. This was an untruth, though I was still feeling punky on account of the crushed-in noggin I’d received during the incident in the park.

Delia Showalter, with whom I was to attend, communicated her irritation by attending the ball instead with Bev Willets.

We finally had it out, she and I, Delia accusing me of shunning her and I protesting all sorts of maladies, among them one with which I thought she could not argue, tuberculosis of the bone.

The truth lay elsewhere. I was bored with her.

When Bronwyn descended the front staircase from the third floor to the second that evening, I had a thought that while she was not quite a woman, she was definitely no longer a girl. I recalled the body lying in the morgue. Perhaps killing a man matures a person.

Tu-Li stood behind her, watching her navigate the stairs. The Chinese maid had performed her part admirably. She’d ornamented Bronwyn’s plain pleated dress with shawls and scarves and added accoutrements of gloves and jewels and other flourishes. Bronwyn wore no bonnet but had her black hair arranged in a chignon to which tiny blue flowers were affixed. The upsweep exaggerated the pale slenderness of her neck.

“Are you ready, sister?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said.

A ride in a carriage was not a new experience for Bronwyn, but she seldom had gone out at night (except, of course, on her own). Now she wrapped herself in her mohair mantle and gazed out the window as we proceeded down Fifth. Our footman Randall drove. The smoky glow of the gas lamps, the cold black of late-hour Manhattan in autumn.

The Young Patriarchs’ Ball at the Academy of Music started fashionably late. Guests arrived no earlier than ten o’clock, collected themselves, primped and chatted and took refreshments before the band struck up at midnight and they started in on the quadrille. They might well dance until dawn.

It was now eleven. We turned the corner of Fourteenth Street and proceeded crosstown past Union Square to the Rialto. I called for Randall to halt. Our brougham lined up among dozens of carriages on Irving Place and along Fourteenth. Chaises, landaus, whiskeys, even a fly or two—all of them disgorging the grandees of the city.

The zoom, in full force.

I reached across Bronwyn and slid open the window so that she might see.

Initially the splendid nature of the spectacle did not assert itself. Splatters of horse manure marked the thoroughfare, but the academy rolled out an elaborate purple carpet at the curb so that milady’s train should not drag in the muck. Gaslight set the whole street ablaze. But the scene was too jumbled, too chaotic to be impressive.

Then something happened. Edwige D’Hauteville disembarked from a carriage ahead of her escort, DeLancey Kane. The lady looked a picture. A silver ball gown, a negligently bared shoulder as her stole slipped, and she stood poised, as if displaying herself to the crowd of gawkers held back from the entrance by big police.

“Oh!” Bronwyn exclaimed. I reached into my suit pocket and handed her some tiny mother-of-pearl opera glasses.

The D’Hauteville girl was damnedly handsome. But something more, she was caught there at the entrance to the ball as if frozen in a carte de visite or a tableau vivant, an emblem of something, the Evanescence of Beauty. A line from one of de Vere’s sonnets applied: “Sad is our youth, for it is ever going . . .”

“Do you know that girl?” she said, holding the glasses to her eyes.

“I believe I know pretty much everyone going in,” I said, not as a boast but merely to assert my fluency. “They are my friends.”

It was the Age of Silver, silver was the color of the day, of accents and fabrics and jewelry settings.

“Over there is Elizabeth Rink, the older sister of a friend of mine,” I said, indicating a young woman in a dress of white tulle (probably Worth) embroidered in silver, with pansies brocaded over the train.

Of another new arrival, I said, “I met Irene Davidovich, who is a marquesa, through my mother.” The tall brunette made her way from her
carriage to the doors of the academy in the finest satin, carrying a small bouquet of sweetheart roses circled round by, yes, a ribbon of silver.

“But her . . .” Bronwyn said as D’Hauteville entered the academy with DeLancey Kane.

I laid my hand on my sister’s arm. “You could be that lady, Bronwyn. Come spring, if you apply yourself assiduously to your studies, if you learn to dance and speak and carry yourself, you could be her. You could be the one!”

She looked at me. “‘Assiduously,’” she repeated. “You always use such big words, and I never know what you are talking about.”

I laughed. “You will.”

I wanted to tell her that to become fully human she needed more than vocabulary and dance steps and proper comportment, that one must look to the heart and the head, if not the soul. But on such basis her character appeared an unfathomable mystery to me.

She gazed out at the flamboyant parade around the entrance. “That blond woman has a bird in her hair.”

“It’s fake,” I said. “Shall we go inside?”

“Us?” she said. I had never seen her react with timidity before.

“Let’s go,” I said, smiling. “I know a secret way into the lion’s lair.”

I handed her down from the brougham. She lifted her hem up from the dirt of the street and took my arm. We threaded our way through the crowd of spectators. We were dressed for the evening but not for the ball, and the gawkers dismissed us as unworthy of their attention.