The Gilded Hour (52 page)

“We missed you at the party,” Jack said, shaking the hand Mr. Lee extended to him.

“I wanted to stay behind, be the first one to welcome you both home.”
With his free hand he squeezed Jack’s forearm, a fatherly gesture that wasn’t lost on Anna. “I expect you’ve had a long day and would like to retire.”

Before Jack turned away, Mr. Lee held up a letter. “For you. Came just an hour ago.”

Anna raised an eyebrow.

“From Oscar,” Jack said. “It will wait.”

•   •   •

J
ACK
HAD
NEVER
seen Anna’s room before, though he had hinted and sometimes came right out and asked. She had always put him off with a smile.

It was a large room, the windows looking out over the garden, where the day still burned bright though it was after seven. Wallpaper too faded to make out a pattern above wainscoting painted white, a gleaming wooden floor covered with small rugs, a bookcase over a desk piled with books and files and papers.

Anna stood in the doorway for a long moment, looking nonplussed.

“Something wrong?”

“That’s a new bed,” she said. “And the dresser is new too, twice the height of my old one.”

“That’s my dresser,” Jack said. “They must have commandeered the delivery wagons.”

“I can’t believe they managed all this in such a short time.” She walked across the room to open a closet door and glanced at him over her shoulder. “It’s all here. Your suits and shirts and your shoes—everything put away tidily. They must have started as soon as they got the telegrams this morning.”

There were two chairs facing each other in front of a small fireplace with a low table between them. A vase of roses sat there on an embroidered cloth that Jack recognized as the work of one of his sisters. Nothing elaborate, but still too much, it seemed.

“Are you put out about the changes?”

She turned toward him suddenly. “Surprised, but not put out. I’m—happy that you’re here. I am, really.”

But she stood on the opposite side of the room, on the opposite side of the bed, her hands clasped together at her waist.

Jack said, “Come and tell me about these pictures.”

Having something to do seemed to relax her. She joined him, but stood a little apart and fixed her attention on the neatly framed photographs and
paintings and drawings that were staggered across the full width of the wall over a dressing table. They seemed to be arranged chronologically, the oldest and simplest nearest the door: a drawing of a couple in their fifties, sitting together on a porch. Along the bottom was printed
Uphill House 1823
, and then a signature,
L. Ballentyne
. For a few minutes Jack just studied one picture after another, so many faces, all Anna’s people and Sophie’s too, because there was a watercolor of a woman who was clearly Indian, standing with a strongly built man who was Indian and African both, by his features. Again the work of L. Ballentyne:
Hannah and Ben, Downhill House 1840.

Anna stepped closer to the wall to touch a frame that had been carved with vines and flowers. The portrait was a simple charcoal drawing of another couple, very young and full of life. They sat shoulder to shoulder with a young boy no more than two between them. Before reading the words written along the bottom he knew that these were Anna’s parents and the brother she never spoke of.

“Your aunt did all of these drawings and paintings.”

She nodded, clearing her throat. “Aunt Quinlan’s first husband was a Ballentyne.” She inclined her head toward a small painting, no larger than a hand. The man pictured there was real enough to talk to.

Anna nodded to the painting of her parents and brother. “There are other pictures of them, but this is my favorite of all. They seem so alive, sometimes it’s hard to look at them.”

“You look something like your mother, but I think this”—he nodded to the first frame—“must be your grandmother, because you are her image exactly.”

“So they tell me. She was a schoolteacher and even so she had great adventures. I never met her.”

Jack thought for a moment, wondering if he should have left the portraits for another time. Asking her to talk about the family she had lost when so many other things were pressing on her.

She said, “I have an idea. Every night before we go to sleep I can tell you about the people in one of these portraits. I think that way it will come to me more easily. And you could tell me one of your stories. But now I want to go to bed. I have to leave for the hospital at half past five in the morning.”

“Is it too strange—”

“I want you here,” she interrupted him. “I really do want you here.”

And it seemed she did. She was more herself as she went about unpacking her valise and putting out clothes for the next day, talking to him about everything and nothing. When she went off to have a bath Jack pulled Oscar’s letter out of his pocket.

Jack—

Since Friday:

Item. We managed to nail down all Janine Campbell’s movements from Sunday until she arrived at the New Amsterdam, and both Anna and Sophie have solid alibis and witnesses to swear to their whereabouts. If somebody besides the deceased had a hand in the operation, it wasn’t either of the Drs. Savard.

Item. Don’t have much to say about the Campbell boys yet, what there is to tell I’ll do that face-to-face.

Item. Comstock’s men went through the Campbells’ place before I could get there and came away with pamphlets that have got him yelling in the D.A.’s ear. Haven’t been able to get close enough to know what exactly he found but I’m working on it.

Item. I’ve had a tail on Campbell since Friday 3 pm, nothing to report there.

Item. Belmont thinks that if we can shake loose from Comstock and the damn pamphlets that will put an end to the whole mess by Tuesday and the Verhoevens can get on the next ship.

Item. Comstock is one of the jurors. Belmont did his best to get him thrown off but no luck so far. I should know more before the hearing starts on Monday.

O.M.

•   •   •

W
HEN
IT
WAS
his turn, Jack took his time in the bathroom, thinking about Oscar’s letter, trying to draw from the words the things he would have read otherwise from the man’s face. He gave up finally with the realization that the morning would bring a long and difficult day, and they
both needed their sleep. And still, the idea of Anna waiting for him in bed made him want her.

There was a lock on the bedroom door and Jack was glad of it, because he didn’t intend to sleep in anything but bare skin, as he always had. He stripped down while she watched him, stretched out on her side, trying to stay awake.

When he got under the covers she smiled at him sleepily and held out her arms for his kiss, gentle as it was. By the time he had made himself comfortable the dusk had filled the room, and Anna was asleep.

He lay awake for a long time, thinking of the Campbell boys and of Oscar’s letter. In the morning he’d walk with Anna to the New Amsterdam and they would talk. With that idea in his head he fell asleep and dreamed of the sailboats on Raritan Bay, moving farther and farther out of sight.

NEW YORK SUN

Monday, May 28, 1883

NO TRACE OF MISSING CAMPBELL BOYS

DID JANINE CAMPBELL SUFFER FROM PUERPERAL INSANITY?

On Tuesday of last week, Mrs. Janine Campbell calmly lied to her husband about her plans for the next day. She told him she was taking their four sons to spend a week with their cousins in the countryside.

“Those boys loved it here,” Mrs. Harold Campbell, sister-in-law to the deceased, told the
Sun
. “They never wanted to go home. All the fresh air and good food, and the freedom to play. It breaks my heart to think of them lost, out there in the world wondering where their mother is, and why she left them. Janine can’t have been in her right mind.”

An autopsy determined that Mrs. Campbell underwent an illegal operation sometime on Tuesday or Wednesday, a fact her husband will not credit.

Nevertheless, physicians are agreed that she did indeed have an abortion. How she managed to travel out of town is less certain. “She must have been fevered and in terrible pain,” said Dr. Hannibal Morgan of Bellevue. “I can only imagine that she dosed herself with opiates.”

Thus far detectives have been unable to find anyone who saw Janine Campbell traveling with her boys that Wednesday, but inquiries are still being conducted.

By all accounts Mrs. Campbell was a virtuous woman who kept a spotless home and showered her sons with maternal affection. None of her neighbors have a bad word to say about her.

“She was just three months out of childbed,” noted Dr. Morgan. “This has all the hallmarks of puerperal insanity. In extreme cases even murder cannot be ruled out.”

•   •   •

NEW YORK TIMES

Monday, May 28, 1883

INQUEST BEGINS TODAY

JURY OF EMINENT PHYSICIANS TO RULE ON CAMPBELL DEATH

Coroner Lorenzo Hawthorn has released the names of the jurors who will hear evidence in the inquest into the death of Mrs. Janine Campbell. They are Dr. Morgan Hancock of Women’s Hospital; Dr. Manuel Thalberg, lead physician at the German Dispensary; Dr. Nicholas Lambert, a forensics specialist at Bellevue; Dr. Abraham Jacobi of Children’s Hospital and president of the New York Medical Association; Dr. Josiah Stanton of Women’s Hospital; and Dr. Benjamin Quinn, surgeon on the faculty at both Bellevue’s School of Medicine and the Woman’s Medical School. In addition, Anthony Comstock will serve on the jury as a representative of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice.

•   •   •

T
HE
CORONER
INSTRUCTED
his clerk to call the inquest to order, and the murmuring in the courtroom trailed off. Sophie took a last look at the notes laid out before her, shuffled them into a pile, and folded her hands in her lap. Beside her Anna was scribbling already, all her attention on the first of many blank pages she would fill before day’s end. The jury would think her inordinately attentive, but Sophie had gone to school with Anna and she knew better. Her cousin scribbled as she listened, writing down odd words that taken together made little sense; when she got home, she would hand all the closely written pages to Mrs. Lee to use as tinder for the fire.

What Anna needed to know, she retained without writing down; she took notes for another reason altogether. As a girl she had disliked being called on in class and found that most teachers would leave her be if she looked busy. It wasn’t that she couldn’t answer questions, only that she
wanted to decide which ones to answer. Some teachers left her this small vanity, and others did not, but nothing kept her from her scribbling.

Cap had often stolen her notebook away to read those random words out loud, like an actor on a stage. But they weren’t children anymore, and Cap was at home where he belonged, fighting for every breath.

She made herself focus on the proceedings.

Judge Benedict’s courtroom had been made available for the inquest, given the number of witnesses, the size of the jury, and the overwhelming public interest. Sophie had hoped that Judge Benedict himself would be absent, and was relieved to see that he was. Benedict and Comstock together were a disaster for any woman who came to their combined attention.

Because it was an inquest and not a trial, Hawthorn had some latitude in how he ran things. He handpicked the reporters—just three of them—to sit in the back of the courtroom—and he had spent some part of the morning considering case by case people who applied for permission to sit in the gallery. The ones he turned away were the ones who were there hoping for scandal and in particular, news of the missing Campbell boys. The whole city seethed with rumors and supposition about those little boys. They rarely left Sophie’s mind.

The coroner was saying, “This is an inquest into the death of Mrs. Janine Campbell, nothing more or less. We are here to decide whether her death was the result of malpractice and criminal abortion, and if so, the police will then be responsible for locating the responsible individuals and bringing them into a court of law to be tried. The jury may also rule that Mrs. Campbell died of self-inflicted injuries amounting to suicide. Given the complexities of the case, I have asked physicians to hear the evidence. They are free to ask questions at any time. Persons admitted to the gallery may also ask questions but should first apply to me.”

There were different kinds of evidence, he went on to explain. They would be considering the autopsy and physical items found at the Campbell home, and also they would discuss the deceased’s state of mind.

He said, “This is not an inquiry into the whereabouts and fate of the Campbell sons. The subject will come up but will be kept within bounds. I also want to remind both the jury and those sitting in the gallery that the
question of pregnancy is irrelevant. Under the law, it doesn’t matter if the deceased was actually with child. The operation itself is illegal, in any case.

“This final point. The chief of police has submitted the results of a preliminary investigation, and on that basis both Dr. Savard and Dr. Savard Verhoeven have been cleared of any direct involvement in the illegal operation. They are here because they were the last physicians to treat the deceased and their testimony will be relevant.

“However, it has been pointed out to me that one or both of them may or may not be guilty of a different but related crime, that of supplying information and instruments to the deceased that made it possible for her to carry out the operation on herself.”

Sophie didn’t look at the jury box. She had sworn to herself that she would not, because there was nothing to be gained by it. She knew exactly who had reminded the coroner that dispensing medical advice of certain kinds was illegal, and he was sitting just fifteen feet away.

Comstock was just a single vote of seven. Of the six physicians, three could be counted as allies: Abraham Jacobi of Children’s Hospital, Manuel Thalberg of the German Dispensary, and Dr. Quinn, a Bellevue surgeon who also taught surgery at the Women’s Hospital and had been something of a surly but effective mentor to Anna. The other physicians were known to her only by name and reputation. Dr. Stanton, because he had published article after article attacking women physicians and the New Amsterdam in particular, and Dr. Hancock because he was one of the surgeons from Women’s Hospital, where women physicians were not welcome or even tolerated. The last physician she knew only as a Dr. Lambert, a specialist in forensics, one with an excellent reputation.

With the exception of Thalberg, who worked exclusively among the poor German immigrants, all of the physicians had thriving practices. Some of them—Jacobi in particular—also did a large amount of charity work, but they all lived well. In this group Comstock looked out of place. The physicians were all carefully groomed and expensively clothed, while Comstock, ponderous and pompous, wore his poorly fitting black wool suit and standard grim expression. But for the whiskers he always reminded Sophie of an overgrown infant. It was his round face with its flawless
complexion and high spots of color where the cheekbones would be, below the layer of fat. She had no intention of studying the man, but it was impossible to ignore the habit he had of sucking his front teeth.

Sophie and Anna sat in the foremost row of the gallery, behind the table where the defense would be situated in a real trial. Behind them in the second row were Conrad and his clerk, and beyond them, about two dozen faces scattered in a room that would have seated many more. Hawthorn might be a businessman with little knowledge of medicine, but in Sophie’s view of things, he had done very well in arranging the inquest.

She smiled a greeting at five classmates from Woman’s Medical School, and then got up to greet the three professors who had come as a powerful gesture of support: Mary Putnam Jacobi, Clara Garrison, and Maude Clarke. Sophie was especially surprised to see Dr. Garrison, who had so recently been on trial herself, another one of Comstock’s favored targets. She was especially glad to see Mary Putnam, who had a mind sharper than any of the men in the room, including her husband, Abraham Jacobi, who sat on the jury.

“Steady on,” Mary said, and left everything else unsaid.

•   •   •

J
UST
AS
S
OPHIE
returned to her seat the coroner asked the jury to put forward any questions they might have.

“I’d like a clarification.”

“Dr. Hancock, please go ahead.”

“You’ve mentioned the possibility that the deceased may have operated on herself in a frame of mind that amounted to suicide. I agree, it’s something to consider, but if we’re going to look at suicide, we are talking about a woman who was suffering from severe mental illness. That discussion will necessarily lead to consideration of the Campbell sons, and what happened to them.”

Anna stopped scribbling and her gaze fixed on the jury box. Then she wrote something down and turned the writing pad toward Sophie. She was writing with pencil, in sharp, straight strokes that pressed through many layers of paper. In her bag she’d have another dozen sharpened pencils to replace the one in hand when it got too dull. She had written,
Morgan Hancock, Women’s Hospital?

Sophie nodded.

Studied with Czerny?

Sophie nodded again.

“I didn’t forbid the subject,” the coroner was saying. “But I would like to keep in mind that our primary purpose is something else entirely.”

The coroner said, “We’ll start with Dr. Graham of the ambulance service.”

•   •   •

A
NNA
WAS
AWARE
of Jack at the back of the room. He stood there with Oscar Maroney and another detective, his arms crossed and his chin lowered to his chest as he listened to Neill Graham recount what had happened the previous Thursday.

Graham was a good witness, clear and focused. The jurors asked questions—some of them very pointed—but Neill Graham didn’t fluster.

“How many abdominal surgeries have you observed?” Abraham Jacobi’s tone was neither kind nor confrontational.

“Mrs. Campbell’s case was the thirty-third.”

“And your impressions of Dr. Savard’s performance?”

He faltered then and glanced in Anna’s direction. She focused on her writing pad, where she wrote
thirty-third
and
impressions of
. Abraham Jacobi was asking questions he knew the answers to, to reestablish her credentials. He was subtle, as ever, in his support and therefore very effective.

“I’m not asking you for a detailed critique,” said Jacobi. “Just your impression.”

Graham didn’t hesitate any further. “She was confident. She moved quickly but not hastily. And she told me what she was doing and pointed out what she was seeing. I learned quite a bit in that short period of time.”

Benjamin Quinn cleared his throat. “And what was it you learned?”

“I thought I was pretty good at thinking on my feet, but I have a long way to go.”

Anna wrote:
a long way to go.

Conrad Belmont leaned forward and put a hand on her shoulder to whisper. “He said not one thing to contradict your testimony.”

“Of course he didn’t,” Anna whispered back, irritably.

Conrad patted her as if she needed encouragement, and she resisted the urge to pull away.

•   •   •

NEW YORK POST

Monday, May 28, 1883

CAMPBELL INQUEST BEGINS

A NEIGHBOR’S CONCERNS FOR THE MISSING BOYS

SUICIDE MENTIONED FOR THE FIRST TIME

THE DECEASED’S HUSBAND TO TESTIFY TOMORROW

Coroner Lorenzo Hawthorn began the inquest into the death of Mrs. Janine Campbell today by presenting seven prominent and educated men with a long list of admonishments about their responsibilities as jurors. A short discussion of the possibility of suicide, insanity, and the relevance of the Campbell sons’ disappearance was left unresolved, but it was the coroner himself who first raised the subject with one of the witnesses.

The first witness was Dr. Neill Graham, an intern at Bellevue who works part-time for the police ambulance service. Despite pointed questions from the jury, Dr. Graham had only praise for Dr. Anna Savard, the surgeon who tried to save Mrs. Campbell’s life.