The Island of Doves (5 page)

“Father Adler has done this before?” Susannah asked. “What if Edward questions him?”

The sister threw the remains of Susannah’s gown into the fire, and they watched it flare. “He is well practiced in dealing with men like your husband and cases like yours. He will say nothing that could give you away.”

Susannah closed her eyes, praying that she could trust these strangers. “Where will I go?”

“You will go to the port tonight. In the morning, the first westbound boat of the season departs for Detroit, then Mackinac Island—do you know of it?”

Susannah nodded. She knew what most people in the East knew: the siege of the fort there in 1812, Indians and canoes, the fur trade that had made John Astor rich. But it seemed as remote as the moon.

“Good. There is a wealthy woman on the island named Magdelaine Fonteneau. She has agreed to provide refuge for you in her home. And to keep you safe until we are sure that your past has been put to rest.”

“But why? Why would she want to help me?”

Sister Mary Genevieve gave her a solemn look. “Madame Fonteneau lost her own sister to a man’s violence. Those who could have helped the girl stood by and did nothing.”

Susannah swallowed. “He killed her?” She thought of the way she had seen Edward lose control of himself when he was in a rage. She knew there were no limits to what he might do.

Sister Mary Genevieve nodded. “Yes. But we are not going to let that happen to you.”

“And what about you? What am I to you that you would take such a risk to help me?”

“You may think that no one knows the truth of what your husband has done, but I can assure you—people know.”

Susannah winced. Once again she felt exposed, embarrassed. She felt that a stronger woman would have been able to keep the secrets of her household and maintain a graceful façade to the world. Or perhaps a stronger woman would not have allowed her husband to treat her so badly. Would not have allowed things to go so wrong.

The nun put her hand on top of Susannah’s. “And yet until Marjorie came to me, no one had done a thing to help you. That, to me, is the worst kind of cruelty. Worse even, in a way, than the things your husband has done. I believe we will be judged—in the next life, but in this one too, make no mistake—by whether we do what we can to stop the suffering of others. Do we stand by and ignore another’s pain? Or do we take action to end it?”

Susannah gave her a skeptical look. She had spent so much time alone with her suffering and now in one day two people, a whole network of people, really, were willing to help her. “And there’s nothing in it for you? You must know that I cannot pay you. Edward is wealthy, yes, but I have no money of my own.”

“Oh, no. I’m not looking for payment, though you are right that I do ask for one small thing in return.”

“What’s that?”

“Madame Fonteneau has been a loyal advocate for the church for many years, and we owe her a great debt. Her life has been difficult. She lost her younger sister, as I said, as well as her older sister, who disappeared from the island the same year. She became a widow at a young age, with a little boy to care for.”

Susannah nodded. She thought of how shattered she had been when her parents died. Losses like these could become so big they swallowed you whole.

“We have arranged for a new house to be built for her—in fact, it should be complete by now—so that she may spend the rest of her years in comfort. But with so much distance between us, Father Adler worries about how she fares. Someday, when he can, he intends to travel there to see for himself. But in the meantime, in any way that you can, please try to be of use to her, to help her in return for the help she has given you.”

“But what can I do for her?” Susannah said. “What does she need that I can give her?”

“I don’t know. She has endured a great deal, and it is our wish to bring her comfort, peace. Perhaps when you arrive you will see what must be done.”

“I don’t know, but I will try.”

“That is all that I ask,” the nun said. “Now, we must address what you will call yourself.

Fraser
was Edward’s name, Edward’s brand on her arm. “It hardly matters what I am called,” Susannah said, “as long as it is something else.”

“Of course it matters,” the sister insisted. “Nothing has meaning unless we
give
it meaning.”

Susannah smiled. “Those don’t sound like the words of a religious woman.”

“On the contrary. God waits until we act—not the other way around. It took me far too many years to learn that lesson.” The sister laced her fingers together. “From now on you will go by
Miss Dove
.”

“Miss Dove.” Susannah repeated the words as she heard the
clip-clop
of a horse and wagon outside the cabin, worn wheels creaking to a stop.

Sister Mary Genevieve tipped her chin to the door in recognition. “It’s time.” She stood. “The name is a protection, and a reminder: You are in flight.”

Susannah nodded. Suddenly everything seemed to be speeding up again. She stole a glance out the window at the wagon. It was covered with a canvas tarp, the sort undertakers used to collect the dead. Susannah gave the nun a frightened look.

“No soul would dare to look for you here. Quickly now,” the sister said, opening the door and hurrying Susannah to the wagon. Their breath bloomed from their mouths. Susannah hoisted herself up, one foot on the wet wheel well, curling her toes to keep her boot from slipping, and lifted the corner of the tarp, then climbed over the side. The wagon was full of clean straw. She didn’t even get a look at the driver’s face.

“Father Adler was very clear in his instructions,” the nun said. “Once you get on the boat you are to find a priest named Father Milani. He will see you safely to the island. Do not speak to anyone else. If you are pressed by anyone, simply explain that you are traveling to St. Louis. The boat will make one stop, in the port of Detroit, but no matter what happens, stay on the boat. Do you understand?” The sister’s eyes were stern, and she grasped Susannah’s shoulder. “If you leave the boat, we cannot help you.”

Susannah nodded. She was so afraid, her heart writhing violently within her, that she felt she might cry out. “Shouldn’t we pray?” she asked.

“There isn’t time. Remember my instructions. And be brave—
determined
to survive.” Sister Mary Genevieve walked alongside the wagon for a few steps and began to lash the canvas in place, casting Susannah’s hiding place into darkness.

“Good-bye, Miss Dove, and God be with you.”

E
dward Fraser knew something was wrong when he returned home from his meeting in Black Rock to find a single damask tablemat at the head of his long dining table. Their hired girl, Marjorie, emerged from the kitchen with one bowl of stew and half a loaf of brown bread.

“Good evening,” Edward said. “Is Mrs. Fraser ill?”

“No, sir,” Marjorie said, turning her back to Edward to light a lamp on the sideboard. “Mrs. Fraser is not here.”

“Isn’t here? Why, it’s”—Edward began, pulling out his pocket watch—“nearly nine o’clock. What do you mean she is not here?”

Marjorie waved his concern away with her hand. “You know how she likes her rambles. I wouldn’t worry, sir—she knows those woods better than anyone.”

Edward stared at the woman, dumbfounded. He had never thought her particularly bright, but this seemed foolish even for her. “I should say she does, well enough to know that she shouldn’t be in them after dark. What the devil is wrong with you, Marjorie? Why didn’t you send for me?”

“I’m sorry, sir.” She looked at her shoes.

Edward took the hunk of bread from the plate on the table. “Keep that stew warm for me. I’m going to look for her. I can’t imagine what she has gotten into her head.” He stalked into the front hall and Marjorie followed, twisting her apron around her fingers.

“Perhaps she stopped to call on a friend?”

“And what friend would that be?” Edward barked. Both of them knew he didn’t allow Susannah to have friends of her own. Edward shoved the crumbling hunk of bread into the pocket of his coat. He moved to leave, then hesitated and crossed back into the kitchen, where his musket hung by the hearth. “I won’t be long.”

He had yet to decide precisely where he was going, but only a fool would trudge into a dark wood unarmed. In the places Susannah liked to roam, he knew, there were wolves. Perhaps bears. One of the men who worked for him liked to tell a story of meeting a bear, six feet tall on its hind legs with blood on its teeth. But Edward made it a practice never to believe a story a man tells in which he comes out the victor in the end. In his experience, most men cried like children when forced to face something they feared.

He started out into the darkness heading north with his wool muffler wrapped tightly under his chin. Still the cold wind found its way to his skin and he shivered. Buffalo had grown at a breakneck pace, and houses now stood on land that just a few years ago had been uninterrupted forest. Edward knew that he was one of the men who had determined that this city, with its placement at the mouth of the lakes, should establish itself as the gateway by which crops and settlers would flow. Just ten years before, thousands of workers and their new machines had dug out the canal that connected Lake Erie with the mouth of the Hudson and, by extension, the Atlantic. In that time, Buffalo had swelled from a tiny village to a city of fifteen thousand souls.

Trees came down in huge swaths, for fuel, for building, and to clear roads, but dense stands of pine and maple remained at the outskirts of the city. Edward now skirted one, shouting Susannah’s name. No one answered but a raven perched high in the canopy. Edward sighed. When they had first married, he had merely been amused by Susannah’s willfulness and believed that his bride would succumb to her bridle. But time and again—there was her attempt to run away, her refusal to conceive a child—he had learned not to underestimate her.

It had been a day for all sorts of frustration. At the brickworks, he had broken up a fight in the yard when he saw from his office window a crowd of men converging around two workers. One had his meaty hands clenched around the other’s neck. Edward had raced out of his office and down the hall to the door that led into the yard.

“What the devil is going on here?” he had shouted as he made his way into the crowd. Some of the men dispersed at the sound of his voice, but the fighters did not yield.

“I
said
, what the devil is going on?”

A young man so scrawny it seemed impossible that he could lift fifty-pound bags of sand all day said, with a little too much excitement in his voice, “It was a friendly disagreement, sir, until Colm started in on that fat one’s mother.”

Edward stepped up to the men and put his hands on their shoulders to pull them apart. Both men panted. Colm Riley, whom Edward had hired a few months back, rubbed his neck where the other man had gripped it. He spit a clot of blood and mucus onto the ground.

“Blasted Irish,” Edward said. “Nothing has any use to you if you can’t punch it. Or drink it.”

Both men waited for him to say more, their hands hanging at their sides. All the nearby workers waited too. Edward hesitated. Some factory owners tolerated fighting as a part of this kind of business. It was rough work and you needed strong men to do it, men whose fathers’ knuckles had beaten all the bright ideas out of them. But the knowledge that other men in his situation made allowances only redoubled Edward’s anger. He felt it race up his spine, and his voice took on the eerily calm tone that signified his most intense rage.

“You’re no better than garbage, both of you. As of today, you no longer work here. And I’ll be damned if you ever work anywhere else in this city.”

The men stood there, staring at him. Colm’s bottom lip hung wet and swollen, like the underside of a slug. They were the kind of men you might see fishing on a Sunday morning, relaxed, patient, as if there were nothing else in the world to concern them. Edward had known that particular serenity as a boy: watching the surface of the water, the dance of the slack line in the sunlight as his small boat bobbed. Nothing pleased his mother more than a pail full of cold fish, and he loved feeling that he had done something, really
done
something useful to assuage her worry, even if only for an afternoon. But he had outgrown the hobby. His father’s beatings had seen to that. He could only see his mother cower for so long before he lost respect for her, and for himself. The violence had warped him, made him see sympathy as a weakness. He learned that there was only one way to get power, and that was to take it.

Things got worse in the afternoon when Nathaniel Root came to inquire, his tone casual, without suspicion, about financial records the city needed in order to renew its contract with Edward’s company for building supplies. He wanted information about Edward’s backers for the factory.

This created a minor problem, for Edward’s only backer was Edward himself. When he had borrowed all he could from the New York banks and they cut him off, the grim bankers shaking their heads, he drummed up credit elsewhere, in Pennsylvania and Ohio. These funds Edward used to expedite the construction of new homes, to build the jail he had boasted about at the dinner with Beals and Root. But the money only went so far, and profits were slow to come in. When the note on the loans had come due, he couldn’t pay.

A lesser man, one without any gall, would have curtailed his projects, perhaps waited until the first crop of homes sold so he could pay off the loans, then wait some more while he saved enough to begin again. But Edward saw tremendous opportunity for gain, and he was loath to sit around while someone else grabbed it. He felt like the king of the city. His fingerprints were on every construction project, and thoughts of his legacy crowded out any impulse toward moderation. He understood that he was spreading himself very thin, but that was only in the short run. If only the banks could look down the line, consider the opportunities. But they were unwavering in their disdain for his plans.

“Suppose the market were to fall,” a rat-faced man in Manhattan City told him. “Suppose we were to have trouble with Britain in the Northwest Territory again. Or Nat Turner’s ghost incites the negroes to burn up all the cotton in Virginia. You’ve got no equity, no security. You must exercise some caution, Mr. Fraser. This boom cannot last.”

It was lack of imagination, Edward thought. But then, they were small men, happy slaving their lives away in little offices, moving stacks of paper around. They weren’t willing to take a risk on creating something important, something big that would outlast them all. But Edward was willing. No, he was more than that; he was determined. And so he found another source of funding, an unlimited source: his own hand, the steady, confident quill of the forger.

The woods yielded no sign of his wife, and Edward changed direction. There was another place, a place he dreaded most, where Susannah might be, and a musket might come in handy there too. He thought of the sort of men who populated Canal Street—illiterate dockworkers, drunks, toothless degenerates who would wager their own mothers in a poker game without batting an eye. And the women. They turned his stomach. Filthy, used-up whores, the lot of them godless, hopeless. It seemed impossible that Susannah even knew that place existed. But if she had taken up with someone—and Edward had suspected for a long time that she had—well, that was the place they would go. Where people would look the other way, mind their own business, and feel no moral obligation to inform a man that his wife had made a cuckold of him.

He didn’t know the names of the people in this horde, but he was willing to bet they knew his. He almost smiled at this thought, despite his sour mood. There wasn’t a soul in Buffalo who hadn’t heard about his work. The people of Canal Street either worked for him or worked for someone who worked for him. But they didn’t
like
him, not one bit.
A man like me
, Edward thought,
reminds them of everything they can never have, can never be
.

Before long, he had reached Canal Street. He saw the light of the open fires, the ramshackle buildings that seemed to sway with the drunkenness of the people inside them. If she was in one of them, he would find her.

The walkway along the canal was strewn with garbage and dotted with frozen puddles, and Edward moved slowly past couples and clusters of men who drank from all manner of crockery. He tried to get a look at their faces to see if he recognized any of his workers from the brickyard. But it was dark, and anyway he felt out of his element. A gang of men could rise up to beat him and throw him in the canal without a second thought. An undertaker’s crude wagon passed on his right, almost knocking him off his feet. The driver seemed not to notice what he had done, only tipped his hat, his clenched fist of an Irish face cordial.

Edward knocked on doors. A saloon, then a sort of trading post that sold hats and tobacco. Each person scarcely listened to his description of Susannah before shaking his head, saying, “No, I ain’t seen nobody like that.”

It was after eleven when he approached the front path of Hawkshill with his gun slung over his sagging shoulder, like a man who had spent the morning hunting and come home without a kill. He was worn down by the search; the narrow alleys and sinister faces had been a whetstone turning his anger into fear. Where could she be?

Marjorie met him at the door. “Mr. Root is waiting for you in your study.”

“Root? What’s he doing here?” Edward’s tone sounded more startled than he meant it to. He couldn’t imagine why his maid had summoned the city attorney. It wasn’t as if they were friends—Edward didn’t have friends. He had hosted the recent dinner for Root only to gain favor he might use later on.

“I thought it wise to find someone to assist you. I hope I did right, sir.”

Edward sighed with disgust, then peeled his coat from his shoulders and leaned the musket upright in the hallway corner. He strode into the study. Nathaniel set down his glass and stood. Edward rubbed his numb fingers together.

They shared a brief handshake, and Edward searched the other man’s face for any sign that he was using Susannah’s disappearance as a pretense to get a moment alone with Edward’s desk drawers.

“Marjorie sent word that you were out searching. Do you have news?”

“None. I’ve been to the woods north of here—it’s her habit to walk there, nights, sometimes, though never with
my
permission. As far as I can tell, she hasn’t gone to the slums either.”

Nathaniel’s eyebrows leapt. “Down at the canal—are you mad? I can’t imagine Mrs. Fraser would have anything to do with such a place.”

“I can’t either,” Edward said grimly.
What is this feeling?
he thought.
Guilt? Remorse?
He searched his chest for the anger that kept him solid, the way one searches with his toe for a stair in the dark. But Edward felt only hunger, exhaustion.

Nathaniel grasped his shoulder. “Whatever you need, I am at your service.”

Edward stared at him. Nathaniel was younger than he was, Edward felt sure, maybe by five years. This was an irritating fact, as was his simple presence. Why couldn’t Marjorie have sent for Wendell Beals instead, supplicating Wendell, who would do whatever Edward asked without a question? Edward wondered, fleetingly, what Nathaniel would do, if Susannah really was dead, about the loan documents. Would he insist on investigating a grieving man?

“I wonder,” Edward said, the thought occurring to him for the first time. “Should we notify the constabulary? I thought for certain I would have found her by now.”

“When was she last here?”

“This afternoon. Marjorie said she set out for her usual walk. Nothing seemed amiss.”

Nathaniel looked at his watch. “If she left at three, that means she has been gone nearly nine hours. In the cold.”

Edward sighed. “She’s a willful girl, but to be honest she knows the hazards of the woods better than most. She wouldn’t be careless enough to stay out there alone.”

“Yes, let’s go,” Nathaniel said. “I’ll just get my hat.”

Edward walked over to his desk and pulled open the drawer where he kept money in a locked box. The constabulary was a volunteer force. In Edward’s experience, men worked harder when they were getting paid. He filled his coin purse and dropped it into his pocket.

As he went into the hallway to join Nathaniel, there was a knock on the door. The men looked at each other, and Marjorie appeared.

“Well,” Edward said, “Aren’t you going to answer it?” Even now, in this moment of crisis, there was a way things should be done. A man like Edward Fraser did not answer his own door.