Conjurer (17 page)

In the street, Kelman and his sergeant separate, the policeman to return to his duties of patrolling the streets, Kelman to simply walk and think. A great tide of weariness rolls over him, and he feels his shoulders bending under it as though from a physical weight.
Do you ever work among the poor?
he remembers Martha Beale asking him, and he thinks:
Yes. But my efforts are for naught. There are none that I can save. None that I can help
.

He trudges down the narrow roadway to where it ends in a warren of soot-fronted houses and tiny alleys. Carver Street, one is called, as if a name can bring respectability. In the dim light of a desultory winter day, Carver Street looks grease-coated, blackened by decades of human and animal waste. In some places the muck lies near to knee-high; in some places, the lane is so narrow and the buildings' upper floors so ragged and tilting that even the air seems unwilling to enter. This is the area of the city where the landlords have decreed that a single outhouse is sufficient for three dwellings—no matter how many residents.

He tries to imagine the scene during the previous night. What brought a man in a fur-lined cloak to a place like this? he wonders. Where did he come from? How did he discover this forgotten terrain? “Mary,” he'd insisted upon calling the girl. Was that the kernel of fact that would aid in this search? But what to make of such a common name?

Kelman walks on. He'll get no more aid from Indian Nell, he realizes; and in truth, there'd be little interest in the case among the police who patrol the ward. A dead girl with no known family. A contentious Negro madam. Who would care what happened in her fancy house? That a white man had been involved would be of scant consequence—unless, of course, the man was the victim.

He turns his steps toward South Street and begins walking west, but before he reaches Eighth Street, a man, avoiding a careening horse and cart, lurches into him. The man is slight; his face has the pallor of one who never sees the sun. He appears to walk with a limp, and the shoe on his left foot looks stitched of cotton as if it were a piece of clothing fashioned for a doll. The man glances up, terror-stricken in an instant, like someone who's come face-to-face with death.

“Excuse me, sir,” he mutters. His eyes run over Thomas Kelman, noting the scar, the somber coat. His horrified mouth rounds in an O, then snaps shut as if he can't bear to give voice to the word he thought.

Who—or what—he assumes the taller man to be, Kelman doesn't know. Nor does he have time to formulate an opinion, because the little man hurries off, disappearing into the crowd as he leans adroitly upon his good leg while favoring the bad.

It's only after the man has vanished that Kelman suddenly realizes he recognizes the smell the man carried with him. It's the reek of Cherry Hill.

“You won't go there again, Cousin Daniel, will you?” Ella very nearly cries out, although she knows better than to talk to her savior in such a noisy and demanding fashion. “To where that policeman was? You won't, will you, cousin? Say you won't!” By now Daniel has returned safely home, but Ella, in her anxiety for his safety—and her own—cannot cease posing these frightened questions.

“I do not think he was a policeman, child—”

“He was something official! You said so yourself. You said you were afraid he would discover that you were a—” Ella's words gush out in spite of herself.

“Quiet, Ella! I won't go up that street again, girl” is the equally anxious reply. “Now let us return to our work, lest we fall behind. And let us also remember that we must keep our voices low.”

“But, Cousin Daniel, if you'd—”

“Ella … Ella … hush … I don't want to leave you any more than you wish me to.” He hobbles to her side and bends down to awkwardly embrace her. “And I will never desert you if I can help it … But we both have some powerful secrets, and we must whisper them or not speak of them at all.”

The reminder of Daniel's criminal past—and of her own unsavory one—makes Ella whimper again. “But if the man followed you?” she murmurs in a quavering voice.

“He didn't. I looked back. He was nowhere in sight.”

Ella chews on her lips. Despite his seniority, she feels her benefactor is naive and trusting when it comes to the ways of the world. Perhaps, she thinks, that's what comes from all those years in prison.

“Come, little cousin,” Daniel says in a louder and rosier tone that Ella realizes is intended for their neighbors' ears. “Let us return to our work while we still have the daylight.”

With a show of energy and gusto, he resumes his sewing, and eventually Ella also takes up her task. During Daniel's absence, she forgot to tend the fire, permitting it to die down—which then left the floor upon which they sit cold and uncomfortable and the air acidic with ash.

As she stitches, Ella's fingers feel numb with the chill, but her heart feels far worse. Take away her “cousin.” Take away “Mr. Robey” and the many articles of finery he requires, and she will be out roaming the streets again. Or worse, returned to a fancy house with a gentleman client who has stronger and quicker fingers than the last one. Considering these awful choices, Ella moans aloud. Her stitchery falls to her shivering lap.

“Hush, girl, it's all right. I'm home. I am safe—”

“But if they took you away—”

“Which they will not—”

“But you're a convict—!”

“Ella! Child! Enough!” Daniel whispers urgently. “We cannot let anyone hear … Now please, be a good girl and take up your work. If you wish to help me, and yourself, that is how you may do it.”

Ella stifles her frightened tears although her chest continues to heave in silence. At length, she dutifully picks up the vermilion-colored silk that will be the lining in Mr. Robey's new waistcoat. Her small fingers have proven easy to train, and her handiwork has become so tidy and neat that the tailor is finally permitting her to sew the expensive cuts of cloth. “He must be a very wealthy man indeed, cousin,” she observes after several moments, trying to match Daniel's bright and resolute tone. “To think this is on the inside where none may see it!”

“His wife will notice it, I imagine” is the tailor's absorbed reply. His concentration is wholly on the cloth in his hands.

“He has a wife, then?”

Daniel pauses and frowns. He looks up at Ella as he speaks. “No … I think he does not—”

“But you said—?”

“I told you Mr. Robey had a wife, child, because most gentlemen do—”

“You don't.”

“I'm not a gentleman,” Daniel states with some asperity, then his voice grows softer and sadder. “But I did have a wife, once … and a baby girl, too.”

Ella notes the melancholy in Daniel's reply. She waits for him to continue while she bites off a loop of thread and commences another seam. When he doesn't speak, she finally murmurs a sympathetic “They died?”

“No, they didn't die … But they are gone from me as surely as if they were dead.”

“Oh! Daniel! You sold them!” Ella is so perturbed she forgets the all-important “cousin.”

The tailor stares at her. The thought is completely foreign, so that even hearing it produces astonishment. “Sold them?” he repeats. “Sold them? What monster would—?” But the stricken look on Ella's face stops the question in his throat. “No, child. My family was taken to the Asylum when I was away at work one day … My little girl … My little Susan suffered from imbecility. Congenital imbecility. That's what I was told … My wife developed dementia and raised her fists against her own child …” His words trail off. “Nothing will ever heal their brains. They know neither me nor each other … Now, no more questions, Ella, child. You must let me do my work. And you do yours. We cannot risk offending so fine a client as Mr. Robey.”

“You Will Bead”

A
S DANIEL AND ELLA STITCH
his new finery, Mr. Robey descends from a public coach after an uneventful journey northward past the outskirts of the city and into a distant farming community surrounding the sleepy village of Frankford. The establishment he seeks so early in the day is set apart with its own kitchen gardens, a farm that supplies the residents' needs for meat, poultry, butter, cheeses, milk, and eggs, a carpenter's shop, and an icehouse dug neatly into a hillside. The main edifice is two-storied and long: twin arms extending from a square central body. Although elegant in its simplicity, the structure boasts none of the embellishments householders often add—a stone urn for greenery or flowers, a birdcage or potted plant set within a sunny window—and for this reason the place seems odd and a little frightening.

Robey traverses a drive lined with evenly spaced poplar trees and approaches the main entrance. Despite the morning hour, he appears every inch the fashionable gentleman Daniel described, a fine figure striding effortlessly along in a velvet jacket, a spotless linen shirt, a silk cravat, a cloak and beaver hat. His bearing is self-possessed and assertive in the manner of all mature men of means. He mounts the edifice's broad front steps and knocks at the door of the Asylum for Relief of Persons Deprived of Their Use of Reason. He has no way of knowing, of course, that this is the same portal his tailor has often stood before.

A male servant answers and ushers in the guest.

“I will see Dr. Earle before visiting the patient” is all Robey says. He doesn't supply his name; the servant doesn't ask it.

“Please to wait here in the foyer, sir. I will inform Dr. Earle.”

Left alone, Robey continues his show of lofty indifference, remaining beside a central table around which the otherwise sparsely furnished room revolves. He's in the process of perusing a published copy of the Asylum's twenty-fifth annual report when the resident physician, Pliny Earle, enters.

“You wished to see me, Mr. Robey?” Earle is a young-appearing thirty-three, concave of shoulder and soft as new butter, but he also possesses densely observant and probing eyes that some people instantly warm to—and that others equally dislike. His present visitor is among the latter. “You don't wish to first see your—?”

“Not yet, Dr. Earle. I'd like some prior words with you.”

The physician studies the Asylum's visitor, his gaze tunneling inward through the man's many layers of personal disguise. “What is it you need to discuss?”

Robey's response is a calm “Is there somewhere more private we might talk?”

Earle doesn't immediately answer, although his brain rings with words of silent protest.
For Heaven's sake man
, he wants to shout,
we could entertain
an
entire symposium of medical experts and openly discuss the case, and none would connect the patient to another human on this earth
. Instead, he announces a terse “My office” and leads the way through the foyer to the stairs and up to his inner sanctum.

There, Robey hesitates. Earle watches him. He feels as though he were observing a spider gauging the haphazard progress of its prey.

“There's no improvement, then?” Robey at last demands.

“For the past seven years that I've been attending physician here, I've endeavored to explain to you that there can and will be no ‘improvement,' sir. She suffers from mania and has, according to our files, suffered so since she was admitted three decades ago. Surely you've been told as much more times than you would desire.”

“Yes. Yes … I understand. Mania. Dementia … Melancholia—”

“It is not melancholia, sir; it is mania. Produced, so the admitting notes suggest, by a uterine hemorrhage—”

“I know all that—”

“And ‘domestic difficulty,' as the previous physicians so cautiously phrased it—”

“Yes … yes—”

“Relating to an unnamed sexual situation—as well as to an acute anxiety over religion”—Pliny Earle's eyes bore through his guest—“bearing some, as yet undiscovered, connection to her other problems. Now, what is it you wish to say to me, sir? We have a full complement of patients, as you know. Mornings here are a busy time.”

“Of course. Of course. I understand perfectly your situation here, Dr. Earle, and I'm grateful for the opportunity to discuss the case with you.”

Pliny Earle makes no reply; instead, his mind's eye watches the spider begin a slow and circuitous descent to the center of its web.

“She is …” Robey commences, then hesitates, as if attempting to better phrase his remarks. “At forty-nine years of age, she's no longer a young woman …”

“You're correct, sir. Forty-nine is well past the prime of life for a woman. However, your sister is in excellent physical condition, as is sometimes the case with those whose cares are essentially cerebral.”

“Then I infer that she may survive to a goodly age?”

“Barring an unforeseen accident or illness, yes.”

“Does this not seem a terrible waste to you?” Robey asks at length. The words are full of sorrow, but Earle instinctively doubts their authenticity.

“A waste that she should have been so physically and emotionally wounded as to become demented, yes—”

“No. No, I mean a waste of a life upon this earth, a squandering of the gifts God gave us—”

The physician holds up a white and flaccid-seeming hand. “Considering the patient's anxiety concerning religion, I advise we avoid it in our private conversations—as well as in public consultation. And frankly, sir, I fail to see where this discussion leads.”

Robey regards Earle; as the elder of the two, he has assumed an expression at once tutorial and forbearing. “Might it not be better, Dr. Earle, that she …? What I mean to say is: Are there means—gentle ones, naturally—whereby her life might end sooner than nature allows?”

For all his wisdom and training, Pliny Earle's response is horrified astonishment. “This is your sister you're discussing, man! Your own flesh and blood! Surely you've hurt her enough already without plotting her death?!”