Sarah Canary (18 page)

Lydia snored three times. The first snore was loud, the second quieter, the third almost inaudible. The wind blew water against the window with a sound like a handful of pebbles thrown by a secret lover. Only a little rain really, just a few drops running down the glass, spreading thinner and thinner until a dozen long trails each ended in a drop too reduced, too spent, to continue its descent. The moon came out again and the water on the window pearled against a background of black branches and black sky. Adelaide began to make black marks on the paper before her, marks that flew across the page like birds.

There was an excellent chance that Lydia’s manager would want her back in the morning. Adelaide would have to think very carefully about the best way to prevent this. Something that wouldn’t draw too much attention to Lydia prematurely. Some private arrangement based, perhaps, on the ugly scene of attempted female frailty Adelaide had just witnessed.

The air was cold on the back of Adelaide’s neck and she stood up, releasing her hair from its pins. She readjusted the blanket, higher and tighter about her body, so that she was swaddled when she reseated herself. Only one hand remained outside the blanket, one cold hand on the pen. She heard the rain begin again, tapping on the roof, and the wind, shaking the trees. She turned to look at the bed, where Lydia lay still as stone with the light swimming over her.

Lydia might be feigning her current helplessness and confusion, of course. Insanity would be her best defense against a murder charge. Perhaps her manager was also a party to this deception and - for what motive? for love? for money? - had agreed to conceal her. Perhaps he was blackmailing her. Except that he had chosen such a public form of concealment. Exhibiting her, again and again, in town after town when her picture had been so widely circulated and her nose was so very distinct. No. The manager was ignorant of Lydia’s identity or he would never have suggested it. And Lydia herself must be truly mad or she would never have agreed.

Driven mad by disappointed affection. Destroyed by misplaced trust. It was not hard to reconstruct the events that had resulted in this; Adelaide had heard such stories many times. They rarely varied. She wrote down the outline of Lydia’s affair, the way she would tell it, the way Lydia would tell it if Lydia could. Of course, he had made love to her. Of course, he had said he would leave his wife. Someday we’ll be together. Not just now, though. Give me time to arrange it. Not yet, but someday. Not now. Not yet. Until the day he said he wouldn’t be leaving his wife, after all. He was home for good. He loved his wife. He was a happy family man. He had children. He didn’t want to lose the love of his children. If she really loved him, she wouldn’t ask him to risk the love of his children. And so he wouldn’t be seeing her again. Couldn’t. His wife might find out.

And besides, it was wrong.

You lied to me, Lydia said, unable to believe it.

I never lied. I was very unhappy when I met you. Things changed. Things do change.

Adelaide’s nose began to itch and she wiped at it with the scratchy edge of the hotel blanket. A flea appeared on the back of her hand. She set the pen down and reached over to pinch it, but it jumped away, landing in the ink pot. Adelaide watched it drown; kicking its little feet ineffectually, splashing invisible flea-sized drops of ink on the sides of the pot. She had been told not to stay in the Bay View. She had expected fleas.

And then she couldn’t watch anymore. She went to rescue the flea with the tip of her pen, but the movement of her arm knocked the gun from the desk to the floor, where it spun like a bottle and came to rest, pointing back at Adelaide. Lydia jerked at the sound. She seemed to wake up, kicking off the blankets, although the room was very cold without them. Then her breathing evened again.

Adelaide was immobilized within the cocoon she had made. She would have to unwind herself in order to retrieve the gun. Then rewind herself into the blanket. She sat still and stared instead.

I did love you, he said. I hope someday you’ll believe that.

So Lydia shot him three times, because things had changed for him, but nothing would ever change for her and she needed to know that he would never change again. She needed to make him as permanent as she was. She pillowed his head, because she loved him. She cut the lock of his hair to have something she could keep.

Adelaide began to write again, punctuating one of her sentences with the body of the flea. She was not going to argue that these were the actions of a normal woman, only that they might be a little less abnormal than everyone else seemed to think. Since Lydia’s disappearance, any number of experts, from alienists to phrenologists to clergymen, had been questioned and they had all agreed that suicide or prostitution were normal female responses to betrayal. Three bullets in the abdomen could not be considered part of the natural order. Lydia was either monstrously evil or she was mad.

There was little pity for her either way. Even if it was madness, the men in San Francisco were in a frenzy to find her. Even if it was madness, it could not be allowed to spread. Last year in Brooklyn, there was Fanny Hyde. And then Lydia. And only this month, again in Brooklyn, Kate Stoddart. It could not be allowed. It could not be. It could not. It could . . . not. . .

From the downstairs saloon, Adelaide heard shouts and then shots and breaking glass. She opened her eyes with a start. Her head was on her papers. Her back ached and her throat was dry. The fire was out. She had fallen asleep in her chair. She tried to stretch but was too tightly wrapped in the blanket. The rain had stopped and dawn, she guessed, was maybe an hour away. The noise downstairs grew louder, as if a door had been opened. Adelaide thought she heard footsteps on the stairs. Suddenly she was frightened. ‘Get up,’ she whispered to Lydia. She tried to stand, but the blanket prevented her. ‘Get up,’ she said, more loudly, struggling to free her arms, working herself loose. Definitely footsteps, closer now. The hissing sound of drunks trying to talk quietly. A spill of laughter. It was a party. The men had spent the night drinking and now they were coming, drunken and hilarious, for the great magnetic doctress. To show her the finer points of female sexuality.

She thrashed about in the blanket until it fell away. She should never have stayed here at the Bay View, isolated from Seabeck proper by the stream. She had been told very clearly that the United States Hotel was the place for ladies. Right in town. Clean. No saloon. No squaws. But she had been too proud to stay in the proper place for ladies. She had wanted to make a point. She always wanted to make some point.

Adelaide stepped over the blanket, scooping up the gun and running to the bed. ‘Lydia,’ she said, grabbing Lydia by the shoulder with her free hand and shaking her. ‘Get up. Now. We’re leaving.’

Lydia’s dark eyes opened uncomprehendingly. ‘Now!’ said Adelaide. She would not go without Lydia. She would never lose Lydia. She ran back to the door dragging the chair, wedging it against the knob. She grabbed her coat and the bag with her money, glanced at the pen and her lecture notes. There was no time to take anything else. She returned to the bed, where Lydia’s eyes had already shut again. Adelaide took hold of her arms and pulled her upright. She kept on pulling until Lydia gave her a drowsy sort of cooperation, getting to her feet, allowing Adelaide to direct her. Adelaide unhooked the window’s catch and swung it open. She dropped the gun into her pocket with her money. The window looked out on a wide, safe expanse of roof and, beyond that, the branches of a large tree. She pushed Lydia through the window ahead of her.

Lydia hovered for a moment, half in the room and half out in the bitter darkness, like a plug in a bottle’s neck. ‘Go on,’ Adelaide pleaded. She heard the doorknob rattle, pulled the gun from her pocket, and fired a single shot in the direction of the door. Then she shoved Lydia from behind as hard as she could. ‘Ump,’ said Lydia. Her body tipped forward; her toes caught on the windowsill. Adelaide unhooked them, flinging Lydia’s feet through the window after her. Putting the gun back in her pocket, she hoisted her own skirts and climbed out. The window swung shut again.

The roof was iced like a cake with rain. A wet wind blew over it. ‘Come on,’ said Adelaide, letting go of the window frame and edging carefully around Lydia. The branch of a tree grew alongside the eaves. She stepped onto it, holding herself steady with a parallel branch higher up. Both branches dipped under her weight and then rebounded. Her fingers tightened frantically when she felt herself dropping. It was a horrible sensation, like being bounced. Adelaide moved as quickly as she could toward the thicker, steadier wood by the tree’s trunk. The wind whipped her with dead leaves. She walked hand over hand, foot over foot. When she was as close to the trunk as she could get, she began to descend. Her hair fell into her face and she stopped once to flick it back, looking back up to where, against all her expectations, Lydia was following her. ‘Hold tightly,’ Adelaide whispered. The bottoms of the branches dripped water. First Adelaide’s hands and then her skirts grew damp. Once she was forced to sit astride a branch. Her skirts bunched about her and the wet cold reached into her thighs. Her fingers began to stiffen and to ache with the effort of hanging on. The branches came at safe, reasonable intervals until the very end. From the last branch to the ground was a distance of perhaps seven feet. Adelaide hung from her hands and prepared to drop.

‘ “You won’t find many women in Washington,” ‘ someone to the right and below her said. ‘That’s what they told me when I wanted to come here.’ Adelaide turned her head to look. A man stood and watched her, his arms across his chest. He was tall and thin, dark and bearded, warmly dressed, self-satisfied. ‘It was one of the things that appealed to me most. I figured it’d be so quiet. But here I stand, minding my own business, and the women are falling out of the trees.’ He removed the hat from his head with exaggerated courtesy. ‘Miss Dixon. I’m Will Purdy. Postmaster here. At your service.’

Adelaide tried to pull herself back up onto the last branch. She kicked her legs and strained her arms but was not strong enough. She tried to hold on to the branch with one hand only, fumbling inside her coat for her pocket with the other. Opening her fingers proved just as painful as keeping them clenched. ‘I have a gun,’ she said, although she couldn’t produce it.

‘So do I,’ he told her. ‘Fortunately, neither one of us is in any danger.’

Adelaide felt her grip on the branch giving way. She reached frantically upward with her free hand. Too late. Her heels hit the ground first, her legs folding so that she sat. The man - and she recognized him, he’d been at her lecture - offered her a hand, which she refused, standing up without his help. There was a litter of glass around her. What remained of the windows in the Bay View saloon hung and dripped in their frames like icicles.

The branch over their heads shook down a shower of rain. Adelaide looked up. Lydia sat above them, swinging her legs. Her skirt was bunched beneath her, her shoes and ankles were completely exposed. ‘And here’s the other one,’ Purdy said.

‘My traveling companion,’ Adelaide said tightly.

‘Absolutely enchanted.’

Lydia jumped, plummeting toward them, skirts flying. Purdy moved out of her way. She landed lightly on her feet beside Adelaide, who now grasped the gun but did not display it. ‘If you’ll just excuse us,’ Adelaide said.

‘I’d like to. But Bill Blair is a personal friend of mine. Very popular man. Very generous with the drinks. I can’t help wondering if, in your haste to leave by way of the Bay View roof, you mightn’t have forgotten to pay your bill. It’s so hard for Blair to make a living when guests do this.’

‘Mr Blair can expect his money when he manages to guarantee the safety of his guests,’ Adelaide told him. There was a crash upstairs and more breaking glass. Someone shoved the chair from Adelaide’s room through the window. It bounced on the roof and flew over the edge, landing on its back in the mud.

‘Did you see that?’ The voice from the bedroom expressed drunken exultation. ‘Did I tell you? It skipped. Just like a stone. I skipped it.’

An empty bottle skidded across the roof and stuck in a branch of the tree. ‘Two skips.’ The second voice was higher and steadier. A man leaned out the window to look, and Adelaide stepped in nearer to the hotel, out of his sight.

‘Miss Dixon!’ someone called. ‘Miss Dixo-o-on.’

The envelope with Adelaide’s lecture notes fell past her face. Some of the pages spilled out and were caught and thrown again by the wind.

‘Two skips.’

‘But that was a bottle,’ the first voice said. ‘That was a bunch of papers. I skipped a
chair.
‘

‘Fetch me a chair!’ the second voice shouted.

One of Adelaide’s gloves dropped down, balled up like a fist. There was laughter. A third drenched voice. ‘Missed the roof entirely.’

‘Someone fetch me a chair!’

Adelaide stepped forward carefully, watching the upstairs window. It was empty. She ignored the single glove and reached instead for the envelope, which had landed near her. It contained her pamphlets and whichever of her notes remained: her observations on the Fanny Hyde case, her thoughts on Belle Starr, her refutation of the points made in phrenologist Orson Squire Fowler’s recent treatise
Science of Life.
Fowler’s enormous book had sparked yet another round of controversy about the need for antiseduction legislation. His position toward women was sympathetic and protective and pernicious. Adelaide had outlined it and it came down to three simple points: