Sister Noon (16 page)

Lizzie followed Mrs. Bell to the back of the house, where a spiral staircase coiled its way from the basement to the third floor. A glass dome capped the staircase; as a result, the house was slightly brighter here. The light fell directly on a newel post that supported a statue of a woman carved of dark wood, and holding up a lamp. Of course, she was insufficiently clothed. Lizzie would have been surprised to find her otherwise.

They started to climb. The spiral of the stairs formed a murky well at its center. Lizzie watched the well deepen as she rose; it gave her a vague vertigo.

The gas was not lit on the second floor, and the curtains throughout were drawn, so once they left the skylight it was darker than ever. Mrs. Bell fetched a lantern, then opened a small door, too small to lead to a room; Lizzie would have guessed it led to a closet. “The whole house is stuffed with passageways and peepholes,” Mrs. Bell said. “There’s not a room you can know yourself safe from
spying eyes. Mrs. Pleasant designed it. This is the shortest route.” She stepped inside.

Lizzie forced herself to follow. The space was low at the entry, but opened at the back into a narrow, windowless corridor. The air was still and smelled of dust. Lizzie saw Mrs. Bell’s light receding in front of her. Mrs. Bell made a turn and the light went out. The space was narrow enough for Lizzie to hold the walls on either side. She imagined they were narrowing further. She made the turn herself and could just see Mrs. Bell’s light again. She hurried forward. The light went out.

Lizzie listened for Mrs. Bell’s footsteps but heard nothing. She groped forward and hit another wall. No one knew she had come here. She and Mrs. Bell were apparently alone in the house except for the drunken servants.
Quite
alone. No one would ever come to look for her.

“Mrs. Bell,” she called. “Mrs. Bell!” She hit the wall in front of her with her fists. The knocking echoed about her. “Mrs. Bell!”

She decided to go back. They had made only one turn. They had left an open door. It was hard to set her feet on a floor she could not see. She was moving slowly, far more slowly than when she’d had the light. She told herself that this was why it took so long to get back to the turn. Eventually she was forced to acknowledge that she had missed it. She turned back again.

Her eyes were beginning to adjust, but the beating of her heart made the corridor seem to pulse about her, as if with each heartbeat she were being squeezed. In the distance she thought she saw a tiny orange pin of light, like an afterimage of sun. Shadows now appeared, impossible
without light, and therefore illusions. She held one hand across her face to protect her eyes and groped forward with the other toward the tiny mirage of brightness. Before entering this corridor she would have said the house was silent; now her straining ears heard no end of creaks, paddings, scuttlings, and shiftings, the worst of which were her own footsteps. Her hip hit something on the wall to her right, something round and cold, which she shrank from at first, and then realized was a doorknob. She twisted it and fell into a room. In the dim light she could make out heavy velvet curtains. She ran to these and wrenched them open. The fog was still too thick to see out, but she could now see inside.

She was in a bedchamber, all done in reds. On a stone pillar by the window was a statue of a woman on a horse. She carried a bow and wore only a quiver of arrows, the strap of which fell between her breasts. There was a vase with raised figures of men and women. Lizzie had to bend close to see. They were riding each other in positions she found hard to credit. She made herself look away.

A picture hung on the wall to her left. It showed a dark woman in a white dress. She lay on a grassy hill, one hand tucked into her own bodice, the other lifting an apple toward her mouth. Her shoulders were carelessly bare, her skirt had fallen away from her ankles; clearly she thought she was alone. But the shadow of a cloaked man stretched across the grass beside her. His legs were elongated in the manner of shadows. He stood watching her, just a step outside the gilded frame. It was a dreamy scene, but full of foreboding.

Another picture showed an older, fattish woman in
modern dress. Her hair was in disarray, but not seductively so. There was something about her so out of place that Lizzie moved to look more closely. The woman in the picture took a step toward her. Lizzie’s throat closed over and then opened. It was a mirror, of course, enormous, nine or ten feet across, with grapevines carved into the frame and painted in red, gold, and green. “You’re such an idiot!” she told her reflection, who seemed unsurprised to hear it.

The bed itself was piled with cushions, puffy coverlets, and knitted shawls in such chaotic profusion that Lizzie couldn’t immediately tell whether it was occupied or vacant. The bedding lay in mounds and curves. She put a hand hesitantly onto one such drift; it collapsed when pushed. If she had touched someone in the bed this would have finished her. She would have screamed or fainted or died. It was a narrow escape, but the bed was empty.

The knob on the door to the outer hallway was made of white china and painted with a woman’s eyes and apple-red lips. Lizzie walked across a carpet whose edges were embroidered with roses, and turned the knob.

Mrs. Bell was waiting in the hallway with her lamp.

“Right through here,” she said, as if she and Lizzie had never been separated.

Lizzie wanted nothing more than to run for the staircase, the mule, the Ark. But a person who has freely chosen to spend her days asking rich people for money is no coward. She governed her spirited imagination and followed Mrs. Bell down the hall, down a second hall, and into a room at the very end.

T
he room at the end of the hall was a nursery, although not just now in use. There was the smell of trapped air, and sheeted forms that suggested chairs, chests, rocking horses, phantasms. There had been some testimony about the Bell children at the William Sharon–Allie Hill divorce trial. Lizzie couldn’t quite recall it and couldn’t imagine how it had been relevant. She did remember a cartoon from the
Wasp
at about that time—Mrs. Pleasant, dressed like Gilbert and Sullivan’s Buttercup, but with a basket of babies. “In my youth when I was young and charming, I practiced baby farming,” the caption had read. She remembered Mrs. Bell telling her there were six children, but some of them grown.

In one corner was a small bed. Mrs. Bell stepped toward it and her light fell on Jenny Ijub, lying on her back
under a tumbling-blocks quilt. The bedding had been pulled over her, but incompletely, so that Lizzie could see the brown shoulders of her dress, the dirty toes of one stocking. She had a finger in her mouth and there was a high flush on her cheeks.

She was asleep. For the second time in as many hours, Lizzie felt relief shoot through her. She knelt on the floor and touched Jenny’s face, drawing a finger along the brow of one closed eye. Beneath the lid, the eye flickered, then stilled. Lizzie shook her shoulder gently and then less gently. “Jenny. Jenny Ijub. I’ve come for you.”

The little girl didn’t move. “I gave her something to help her sleep,” Mrs. Bell said. “She was so agitated. It wasn’t healthy.” Dust spun about Mrs. Bell’s lamp, swirled across her powdered face.

Lizzie leaned in and smelled camphor on Jenny’s breath. She shook Jenny harder. Was it possible to come into the House of Mystery and not go away drugged?
Don’t eat or drink anything.
She herself shouldn’t have had the cordial. She felt fine, but it had been incautious. She wedged her arms under Jenny and pulled her closer.

Jenny came awake all at once, kicking and striking out till Lizzie released her. Her body relaxed then, but her features remained pinched and her voice was strung with tears. “I won’t go back,” she said. “You’re not the mother of me.”

Lizzie didn’t want a quarrel in front of Mrs. Bell, with whom she was still angrier than she could say. She didn’t want to take the time to overcome Jenny with reason and gentleness. Neither did she want to carry her forcibly from the house. She had a happy inspiration. “I’ll take you to the ducks, then.”

Jenny regarded her, suspicious but sleepy. Her pupils were black points in the brown eyes. Her hair was wild and blown about her head. One ear stuck out. Lizzie smoothed the hair to cover it.

Jenny indicated Mrs. Bell. “Can she go, too?”

“
May
she go,” said Lizzie. “No, we’ve taken too much of Mrs. Bell’s time already.”

“All right,” Jenny said. She fell asleep again.

Mrs. Bell stood above her, half lit by the lamp she held and half in shadow. She didn’t look at Lizzie and she didn’t say a word. On a shelf behind her, a row of expensive dolls stared into the middle distance of the room, seven painted skulls, seven tiny Cupid’s-bow mouths. This made Lizzie think, inevitably and guiltily, of Jenny’s broken doll.

Lizzie couldn’t see that these dolls had ever been played with. She’d had three dolls herself as a child and never played with any of them, not liking their compulsive smiles, their lumpy bodies, the emptiness of their lives. Without her to pick them up, move their arms, and speak their voices, they were nothing. It was too much to ask. And then they had stared, of course, much like Baby Edward. Their eyes had never closed.

“You lie there until you calm down,” she’d said to them sometimes, to justify her neglect. (“Lizzie keeps her dolls just like new,” her mother told people, with obvious approval.)

Lizzie searched the floor for Jenny’s shoes. She took them in one hand and lifted Jenny into her arms. She recognized the smell of Jenny’s hair, sweet but spoiled, like stale cake or those candies in Chinatown that came in a
thin wrapping of rice paper that you ate along with the sweet. “We’re most grateful for your kindness,” she told Mrs. Bell stiffly.

“My pleasure.” Mrs. Bell’s voice matched Lizzie’s, note for impeccable note. Her face was as vacant and unused as the dolls’. “Do call again.”

Jenny was an awkward load. The steps seemed steeper descending, the bottom of the well a terrifying distance away now that Lizzie had no hand free for the banister.

There was a portrait on the wall next to Lizzie where she paused to rest. She assumed this was the likeness of Mr. Bell. If so, he was a balding, handsome man with a sharp nose and white side-whiskers. His eyes were very, very blue. Mrs. Bell’s portrait hung next to him, life-sized and wearing fewer clothes than you might expect of a mother of six. In her arms she held a tiny white dog with a smashed flat face. Its color was incontrovertible.

Behind Mrs. Bell and the dog was the grandfather clock from the entryway. The time in the picture was just past two, an artful reference to Mrs. Bell’s age at the time of the sitting, or so Lizzie supposed. The longer hand was just past twelve. XII, in fact, but what difference did that make?

If Lizzie had seen these things on the way up, her magical juncture might have begun in wandering lost and frightened in the dark. This would have been an awful way to start the rest of her life.

Of course, if she’d seen her signs on the way up, they would have come in the wrong order.

Lizzie shifted Jenny in her arms and continued down the stairs. At the bottom she paused to look up. Mrs. Bell
stood with her lamp in the darkness of the floor above. The lamp lit her face from below, gave her a ghoulish tint. It occurred to Lizzie that she really should have asked Mrs. Bell to thank Mrs. Pleasant for the chickens, but it seemed unbearably awkward to do so now. She passed the real grandfather clock and went out the door.

T
he not-white terrier was delighted at the chance to ride in the buggy. Lizzie knew she should go straight back to the Brown Ark, where everyone was worried most to death. Jenny was asleep and could hardly appreciate an outing. But Lizzie had promised her one.

Besides, Lizzie thought she could use a little time to compose herself before facing her magical juncture, not that she believed in such things, not that the appearance of the clues hadn’t been all too neatly arranged in the House of Mystery. It didn’t feel like the hand of fate; it felt like the hand of Mrs. Pleasant. Still, Lizzie was tense and nervy; the morning had been too much.

So she turned right instead of left and drove out to Golden Gate Park, letting the mule pick the pace, giving
the hacks for hire a wide berth, so as not to risk a meeting with Mr. Finney. A road to Ocean Beach was being constructed. South Drive swarmed with laborers. The fog was burning away, exposing a watery sun, reluctant and cold.

If Jenny had been awake, Lizzie would have taken her to the new Children’s Quarters and maybe bought her a ride on the merry-go-round. She would have stood with the mothers, watching from the balcony of the Sharon building. Lizzie had not seen it yet herself, but the orphans at the Ark had been guests there twice and come back talking of painted horses and maypoles.

The original plan for the William Sharon bequest had been a huge marble gate with the senator’s name cut into it. As if he’d donated the entire park instead of merely an unnecessary portal, the outraged papers had said. The park commissioner had persuaded the estate into the Children’s Quarters instead—croquet sets, tricycles, ice cream fountains, donkeys, and goat carts. A happy memorial, then, but a curious consequence, to turn Senator William Sharon into Saint Nicholas when his case hadn’t even been settled yet. Allie Hill had accused him of adultery, and his spirited public defense was that he’d paid her five hundred dollars a month to share his bed and never once considered marrying her.

Lizzie stopped the buggy at Alvord Lake, where a tribe of mallards had settled the past autumn. She was sorry not to have bread. She’d noticed how children who themselves had nothing enjoyed the chance to be generous. She’d seen dreadful bullies who, when given a handful of stale biscuits and a mob of ducks, suddenly developed a fine sense of justice. It was wonderful to see them trying to feed every
duck, no duck more than the others, taking special pains to see that the littlest got a share. That would have been worth waking Jenny. That would have been a treat. “We’re here,” Lizzie said, shaking Jenny until her eyes opened.