The Gilded Hour (54 page)

Sophie said, “There’s also the boy himself, and the family to think about. We might well do more harm than good, in the greater scheme of things.”

This morning, getting ready for the day on one side of the room while Jack dressed on the other, Anna had hoped that going back to work would be distraction enough to keep her mind off Vittorio, but the image of him in his adoptive mother’s arms stayed with her while she saw patients and met with her assistants and students and answered mail.

Even in Judge Benedict’s courtroom her thoughts kept wandering back to Staten Island. And not to the good things—the excellent things—that had transpired, but to the little boy who was no longer lost, and still, not yet found.

She said, “I promised Rosa I would try.”

“You have tried,” her aunt said. “Are you feeling guilty?”

Anna felt Jack’s gaze on her, waiting, patient. “Not guilty exactly, but to make myself feel better I would have to cause a lot of other people great distress. I’m not so self-centered as that.”

Aunt Quinlan nodded, pleased with her.

Jack said, “I’ll approach Father McKinnawae. Just to be sure of what we think we know. And in the meantime—” He paused, and Anna could almost see the question hovering there, unspoken:
What will you do with the boy if you get him?

“I won’t be here to deal with the results of your decision,” Sophie said, as if Jack had spoken out loud. “But I will be back, and I will do whatever needs to be done. I would gladly take on all three children, if it comes to that.”

“You’d give up your profession?” Margaret’s tone was unapologetically doubtful.

“I don’t know,” Sophie said. “But it’s a possibility.”

Anna didn’t like that idea at all, but she understood, too, that Sophie would want something to come home to, when Cap was gone. She wondered if her cousin was even aware of this herself.

When Jack announced that he would see Sophie home and then spend a little time with his parents, Anna was so happy to go off to bed that she could barely contain herself. She kissed him good-bye in the front hall, and tried to think of something to say.
Be quick. Be careful. Hurry home. Must you go?
None of those things would come out of her mouth.

“Married barely two days and you’re eager to get rid of me.”

She was relieved and surprised both by the way he was smiling at her.

“Savard, you need a little time to yourself. I’m not offended. I’ll try not to wake you when I come in.”

Anna went to bed, and slept.

•   •   •

A
S
THEY
GOT
into Cap’s carriage—Sophie’s carriage, now, Jack reminded himself—a police runner dashed up and handed him an envelope. He put it away in his pocket without looking at it, but she had not missed the exchange.

“From Oscar,” he explained. “It can wait.” Which wasn’t exactly true, but he would act as if it were.

Sophie looked distracted, and he was fairly sure he knew why. Still he waited for her to ask.

“Do you know anything about the Campbell boys that isn’t in the newspapers?”

He shook his head. She didn’t believe him, he could see it, but why should she? Men lied to women all the time, and called it protection or concern for their sensibilities when really what they wanted was an end to the questioning.

“I would like to hear the truth,” she said. “No matter what it is.”

He inclined his head. “That’s good to know. The truth is, I don’t have any information that isn’t in the papers, at this moment. If and when I do, I will share that information with you. No matter how distressing.”

Satisfied, Sophie sat back. She said, “What do you think should happen with Vittorio?”

This was a question Jack could answer without hesitation. “I think he should stay where he is.”

“Does Anna know you feel that way?”

“No, but then she hasn’t asked me directly. If she does, I won’t lie to her.”

“She isn’t sure herself what would be best.”

“Yes, she is,” Jack said. “But she’s not ready to acknowledge it.”

“You do understand her,” Sophie said. “I’m glad.”

“Don’t congratulate me yet,” Jack said. “I’m sure to fall on my face sooner or later.”

“You’ll pick yourself back up, and let me tell you a secret about Anna. She doesn’t hold a grudge. At least not with people she loves.”

•   •   •

A
T
HOME
—
AT
what used to be home—Jack spent a half hour being peppered with questions, some of which he answered, many of which he ignored. It was a familiar dance with his mother; he ignored a question, she stepped away and then swung around to approach it from another direction.

“I like her,” his mother said. “You know that I like her.”

“I know that you wouldn’t hesitate to tell me if you didn’t,” Jack said. “Married or not.”

His father barked a short laugh, then went back to his newspaper. In the kitchen there was sudden silence, because his sisters were listening. Which meant that the little girls were listening, too, something his mother was well aware of.

“But we are married,” he went on. “For better or worse.”

Some of the tension in her face retreated.

“Mama,” he said then. “She’ll never be a housewife. Not even when we have a family.”

That got him a smile. “She wants a family.”

“Yes,” Jack said. “Though I don’t know why you would mind if she didn’t. You’ve got too many grandchildren to keep track of as it is.”

“Never too many grandchildren,” his father said from behind the pages of
il Giornale
.

“Never,” his mother echoed.

Jack stood up. “My work here is done.”

“We still have things to discuss,” his mother said. “But go back to your bride.”

•   •   •

I
NSTEAD
HE
WENT
to the station house and took the time at the duty desk to write a note and arranged for it to be delivered to Anna at home.

Called into the station house, may be very late but I’ll be there to walk you to work in the morning. Ever yours, JM

•   •   •

U
PSTAIRS
O
SCAR
WAS
leaning back in his chair, his feet crossed at the ankle and one heel propped on the edge of the desk. It was how he did his best thinking, but it was also how he napped. Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference. In either case Jack didn’t see the need to disturb him straightaway, so he sat down to the pile of paperwork that had appeared on his own desk.

Arrest reports, most of it. He had been reading for a few minutes when Oscar said, “You leave for three days and I get stuck with two homicides, three assaults, and pulling Baldy out of trouble. Yet again.”

“Anna has rechristened him Ned,” Jack said. “He’s in the Tombs, I take it.”

“I’ll let him go tomorrow. No real evidence, but I thought he needed a night to cool off.”

“Your note said he pulled a knife.”

“Which disappeared.”

Jack whistled under his breath. “Where was this?”

“Outside the Black and Tan. He went looking for one of the younger boys and found him exactly where he didn’t want to find him. It got ugly.”

“As it always does.”

Oscar nodded and pulled his hat back down over his eyes.

He was an excellent detective, but not overly hampered by the letter of the law. Jack wondered if he should tell Anna about this newest situation with Baldy, and decided that the matter could wait. He needed to talk to Oscar about the Campbell boys, but instead Jack turned his attention to the paperwork and waited for his partner to rouse himself for the next conversation.

If he submitted the arrest reports as they stood, the whole pile would end up back here on Jack’s desk because nobody else could make out Maroney’s handwriting. He picked up a pen and uncorked an ink bottle.

Oscar’s feet hit the floor with a thump. “So what happened with McKinnawae?”

Jack put the cork back in the ink bottle and told him about Mount
Loretto and Vittorio Russo. He watched as Oscar’s expression shifted from weariness to surprise.

“I’ll be damned,” he said. “You did it. You found the baby.”

“I’m just as surprised as you are. But it’s far from settled, and there’s still the older boy. Now, are you going to tell me about the Campbell case?”

Oscar said, “I’m hungry.” He got up and walked out of the office, fitting his hat to his head as he went. Jack followed him, raising a hand in greeting to a couple of other detectives bent over paperwork on the other side of the room. He wasn’t sure if his getting married was general knowledge yet, but he didn’t want to find out at the moment.

By the time he got downstairs Oscar had already disappeared down the hallway that led to the rear exit. Jack found his partner in the corner booth at MacNeil’s, with a cup of coffee in front of him.

The only door into the diner was in the alley behind police headquarters, which was why every man he’d ever seen in the place either had a badge now or had had one in the past. MacNeil himself had been a cop about a hundred years ago, before he lost a leg at Spotsylvania. Now he stumped around the diner’s kitchen shouting at everybody, good mood or bad. He worked the night shift alone and his sons took the day shift.

Jack paused at the counter to get the cup of coffee the old man poured for him, took a couple of minutes to be shouted at about the follies of marriage, and then slid into a booth across from Oscar.

“Any luck tracing Mrs. Campbell’s movements?”

MacNeil thumped a plate of eggs and bacon down, so Jack sat back to wait while Oscar ate. At the halfway mark he wiped his mouth and started to talk.

“You know what Grand Central’s like. I talked to every ticket seller, flower girl, bootblack, and baggage man that I could find who was working the depot that day. A few think they saw her with the boys, but nobody’s sure. I’m thinking now they traveled some other road.”

“A steamer?”

“I looked into that. Don’t seem likely, not for somebody watching her pennies.”

They were quiet while Oscar finished his plate. He had a dainty way of going about it for a big man with an appetite, something Jack hadn’t
figured out until he had known the man a good six months: Maroney was vain about his mustache and lived in fear of getting food caught up in it.

He ate the last of his bacon, crossed his knife and fork over the plate, and leaned back in the booth, trying to look casual as he ran one knuckle over the brush on his upper lip.

Jack hid his face in his coffee cup for as long as it took to get rid of a smile.

“What are you thinking?” he asked, finally.

“Well, I don’t think she drowned them. That’s the rumor, you know. She went to the shore to toss those boys in the drink.”

Jack hadn’t been around long enough to catch up on the gossip, but it made sense that people would be anticipating the worst. A rumor was like an army on the march, no stopping it.

“But the timing just doesn’t work out,” Oscar went on. “She was home when Campbell came in from work on Wednesday. Don’t see how you could drown four boys and come away looking like nothing fails you. And then there’s what the Stone woman had to say, that business about her husband finding her when he got home.”

“Hawthorn didn’t seem to take any note of that,” Jack said.

“That’s because he owns a string of lumber mills and doesn’t know what he’s doing, questioning somebody on the stand. Boston went ahead and got rid of the coroner system, you’d think we could do the same.”

Jack had had the exact same thought, listening to Hawthorn question Mrs. Stone. He might be well-meaning and thoughtful, but he was also uninformed and untrained. If Janine Campbell had said
Archer will find me when he gets home
, then that was as good as a confession: she knew she was dying, and she wanted her husband to find her dead. A lawyer would have homed in on that and asked Mrs. Stone a dozen more questions, trying to get her to clarify the deceased’s state of mind.

Oscar said, “She figured it was less trouble killing herself than it would have been to kill him. So I’m wondering, if she was that angry, maybe she did find a way to kill the boys.”

“I don’t think so,” Jack said. “She knew she was dying, sure. What she wanted was not to leave the boys to their father’s tender mercies. He looks like a hard case to me.”

Oscar nodded. “Worse, he looks like a closet hard case. One who uses
his fists behind closed doors. They didn’t say anything about bruises on the autopsy, though.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time a body turned up dead with no marks to show how it got that way.”

Oscar swallowed the rest of his coffee. “So she stowed the boys away somewhere, is that what you’re thinking?”

Jack lifted a shoulder. “They could be anywhere, by now. Canada comes to mind.”

“She was from Maine.”

Jack nodded. “I suppose we could get in touch with the Bangor coppers, but it’s a big state.”

“Well.” Oscar reached for his hat. “Tomorrow’s another day, as they say so clever and all. And there’s other things to be thinking about. First and most important, you’ve got to be back here at six thirty to start your shift and you’ve left your new bride all alone, just three days married.”

“Two days,” Jack said. “And five hours.” He rarely flushed, but now color ran up his throat to his face.

Oscar laughed, and slapped him on the back.

•   •   •

H
E
SLIPPED
INTO
bed quietly, drawn into the nest of often-washed linen sheets that smelled of sunshine and lavender and Anna. His Anna, her cheeks flushed with sleep, on her side so that he could study her face in the vague soft light of the lamp before he put it out.

One part of him wanted to wake her, but she had earned her rest. There would be more nights and mornings and middays, too, when they’d have privacy and time enough. He’d made sure of it.

T
UESDAY
MORNING
NEAR
the end of May might have been July, by the weather. Later in the summer Anna would keep an extra set of clothes in her office, but today she was faced with a choice. She could take the noon hour to try to catch up with her paperwork—in which case she’d show up at the inquest wilted and damp with sweat, or she could go home and change.

She went home and found Aunt Quinlan alone in the parlor, smiling as if Anna’s arrival were the only thing in the world she had ever wished for. In return Anna might have started to cry. Things had happened so quickly, and she had let herself be drawn along without taking time for her aunt.

“Get changed quickly,” Auntie said. “And I’ll arrange things down here.”

By the time she got back Mrs. Lee had put out a plate of sandwiches and a pot of tea and disappeared back into the kitchen. Anna sat just beside her aunt and gently picked up one of her hands. They were very delicate, as if the bones had gone as hollow as a bird’s. The skin was soft and shiny and speckled with age spots.

“You’ve been using the wax bath for your joints,” Anna said. “I hope it helps with the pain.”

“It does,” her aunt said. “The heat is wonderful. And the teas, they help too.”

But not enough, Anna knew. This woman who had spent all her life doing things with her hands would sit just as she was, for whatever time was left to her.

“I can remember you painting,” Anna said. “You handled the paintbrush like I handle a scalpel. I was little, but I remember.”

“You were seven when I stopped.”

Anna nodded. “When you were working I had the idea that you were painting a window I could walk through if I tried.”

Her aunt smiled. “Very fanciful, for such a serious young mind. You were so quiet, sitting in the corner. I often forgot you were there. Of course that was before Sophie.”

Anna remembered what it had felt like to be alone. “I love Sophie and Cap,” Anna said. “And wouldn’t change a thing, but sometimes it’s nice to have you to myself.”

“So,” Aunt Quinlan said. “Here we are, by ourselves. You married Jack Mezzanotte.”

Anna laughed. “Yes, I did. Although sometimes it all feels unreal. Was it like that when you got married?”

Her aunt’s expression was thoughtful. After a moment she said, “You know that your aunt Hannah’s people believe that the dead are never far away. She told me once—and this was before she met Ben—that her first husband and little boy sometimes came from the Shadowlands to talk to her. Some people dislike that idea because it frightens them. But when Simon died, I waited and waited. I wanted him to come back to talk to me, in my dreams at least. I wanted to scold him for being so reckless on the ice floes, the day he died. And he did come, finally, but by that time I wasn’t angry at him anymore. I just missed him.

“He still comes now and then, and when he does he looks as he did when we were young. Sometimes he has our littlest three girls with him, the ones we lost too soon.”

“And Nathaniel?”

Aunt Quinlan talked sometimes about her son, the last of six and the only boy. Nathaniel Ballentyne had died at Shiloh, on his twenty-fifth birthday, unmarried, childless.

“Nathaniel most of all,” her aunt said. “He knew how angry I was about him going off to fight. He’s been trying to make it up to me ever since. Sometimes he is as real to me as you are, sitting there.”

She shook herself a little. “Enough of that. There was something I wanted to tell you, and you let me wander off.”

Anna tried to prepare her mind, but Aunt Quinlan’s stories were never predictable.

“As a little girl you already knew what it meant to lose the people you
love, and that made you shy. Then the war came along and we lost Paul and Harrison, and made it ten times worse. When you and Cap got to be friends I thought,
Maybe he’ll pull her out of it
, and he did. A good ways, he brought you back to being brave enough to face the world. Sophie brought you along even further. But it’s there in you still, the need to hide away.”

Anna had heard this before and she knew that it was at least in part true.

“So you’re saying Jack is going to change my view of things?”

Aunt Quinlan looked at her with an expression that was pure surprise. “That would be a silly thing to say, Anna. You know as well as I do that people rarely change once they reach a certain age. What I’m saying is, you’re a turned-inward soul; it’s the way you cope with the hard things in life. You hide away.”

“You think Jack doesn’t realize that about me.”

“Maybe he does,” her aunt said. “But if he does it’s only in his mind; he doesn’t know what it will feel like. I’m taking a long time to get to my point, so here it is. Hard things come along; they always have and they always will. When that time comes, you have to turn toward Jack and not away from him. And that’s not in your nature. You love the man—don’t bother blushing, I know you love him even if you can’t say the word in your own mind—but your first instinct will be still to shut him out. So be aware of that, and do what you can to stop yourself.”

Anna tried to smile. It made sense that Aunt Quinlan would worry about such things, simply because she had suffered so many losses herself. Nathaniel was gone, but she had also lost three girls before age ten, one to childbirth, and her second youngest to a cancer of the breast when she was just fifty. Only her oldest was left. There were grandchildren and great-grandchildren; she had her brother Gabriel, though she hadn’t seen him in a long time for the simple reason that she would not go home to the village where she was born, and he wouldn’t leave it. She was closest to her sister-in-law Martha, who wrote every week and did sometimes come to the city. And there were nieces and nephews and their families. But she felt the losses, and how could she not?

She said, “Auntie, I was right here, beside you, when the worst news came. I’d like to think that I learned something from you. That I have some of your strength.”

“That’s just it,” her aunt said. “That’s the hardest part, being strong enough to let the hurt in, and deal with it, and then let it settle in time, as it will.”

“Yes,” Anna said. “I see that. I can make one promise at least. I will think of you and this conversation when things are hard, and try not to turn away from it.”

“That’s all I’m asking,” said her aunt. “Now eat before you have to go off to the courthouse, or Mrs. Lee will scold me without mercy.”

“I have a few more minutes.” Anna bit into a sandwich, thinking. When she swallowed she said, “You’ve been following the news about Janine Campbell in the paper?”

“I have.”

“The rumors going around are that she killed her boys.”

Aunt Quinlan had a particular look, one that said she was at the end of her patience, and it was there now. “That’s pure foolishness.”

Anna swallowed another bite. “What do you think happened to them?”

“I can’t say, but I do know that nobody is asking the real question, the important one.
Ubi est morbus?
”

Anna laughed out loud to hear her aunt quoting the great physician Morgagni.
Where is the disease?

“Where did that old chestnut come from?” she asked.

“This family is chock-full of doctors,” her aunt said. “You know when your ma and pa came to Paradise to take over Hannah’s practice, they lived with us at first. And did they love to talk medicine. They did it over every meal. Sometimes your aunt Hannah would be there too and they’d get into arguments and drag out books to prove each other wrong or themselves right. Nothing mean-spirited about it, mind. They were laughing half the time. And when they couldn’t get anywhere with a case, one of them would put that question on the table,
Ubi est morbus?
, and they’d start looking at the evidence again, from the very beginning. And most of the time, they figured out what was going on, and more than that, why they had been looking in the wrong place.”

“You’re not asking me what disease Mrs. Campbell had.”

“No, I’m saying that you have got to look and think symptom, not disease. If she’s a symptom, then ask, where is the disease?”

And Anna knew two things: her aunt was right, and she wouldn’t be able to get it out of her head until she could talk it through with Jack.

•   •   •

T
HE
COURTROOM
WAS
crowded and hot, and Sophie wished herself away, someplace where she wouldn’t have to sit and listen to men talk about Janine Campbell. A woman they had never known and would never understand, not if her ghost came forward to answer their questions.

When the coroner announced that Archer Campbell was delayed, there was a great sigh from the reporters at the back of the room. Then he called Anna to the stand and Sophie thought that they would have enough to write about, once Anna started to testify.

She took her seat across from the jury of men who were, supposedly, her peers. With the exception of Comstock, all of them dressed in somber colors and expensively tailored suits. Most of them had been reading journals or newspapers, but as she approached, Abraham Jacobi and Manuel Thalberg met her gaze and nodded, as colleagues greeted each other across a room. Dr. Lambert even raised a hand, which was a bit of a surprise. She couldn’t remember ever speaking to the man, but apparently he knew Anna.

The coroner left most of the questions to the physicians, and there were many of them, but Anna was a good teacher and that carried over to her testimony. Even when Josiah Stanton asked the same question three times like a particularly dull student, she stayed calm. She described her education, talked about medical school and work at dispensaries and clinics when she was an intern, about postgraduate work and the professors she had studied with in New York and abroad.

Stanton wore an expression of unapologetic surprise that a woman physician should have such credentials. For a moment Sophie thought he was going to challenge Anna, but then he thought better of it. And good for him.

The coroner had only one real question for her.

“In your professional opinion, Dr. Savard, how did Mrs. Campbell die?”

Sophie appreciated the man’s clarity and lack of melodrama, and so did Anna, because she answered in kind.

“Sometime late on Tuesday or early Wednesday Mrs. Campbell attempted to induce an abortion on herself by means of an instrument as
much as ten inches long, with a keen edge. In the process she punctured her uterus and caused damage to other abdominal organs. Infection will have set in immediately and once that happened, her death was inevitable.”

“Why would you assume that?” Hawthorn asked.

Anna blinked at him, and really, it was a question that should need no answer.

She said, “Dr. Lister’s and Dr. Pasteur’s findings on antisepsis have been accepted by doctors and surgeons—” Anna paused to look at the jury, her expression almost inviting someone to disagree. Morgan Hancock of Women’s Hospital stared back at her, his mouth in a hard line. If he was going to challenge the very idea of bacteriology, they would be here a very long time. There was a pause, and he looked away.

“It is accepted,” Anna repeated, “that bacteria, which are too small to be observed by the human eye, are the cause of infection. Some types of bacteria are harmless or even beneficial, but there are also pathogenic bacteria that cause infection and illness. Bacteria are everywhere, but an infection starts, or can start, I should say, when pathogenic bacteria enter the body through a wound. Surely you’re aware of the way President Garfield died.”

She stopped herself, because James Garfield’s death was still a very controversial subject among doctors. If the coroner asked for clarification, there might be an extended debate. But he did not, and she went on.

“In Mrs. Campbell’s case, she used an instrument that was not sterilized—in a well-run operating room, every object that comes in contact with a patient is sterilized, made free of bacteria by means of heat. Mrs. Campbell inadvertently introduced pathogenic bacteria of many different kinds into puncture wounds in the uterus and intestines. If she had come into any good hospital at that point there’s a chance she might have been saved if all the septic matter had been evacuated, but only a very small chance. Would any of the jury care to disagree with me? Dr. Hancock?”

“No,” Hancock said, his voice gruff.

Anna allowed herself a small smile. “As it was, the infection ran riot, so to speak. There was so much damage and so many different kinds of bacteria, the natural defenses of the body were simply overwhelmed. The result
was a systemic infection, and the huge amount of pus and purulent matter found in her abdomen. When she was brought to the New Amsterdam she was near death following from cryptogenic pyaemia, blood loss, and shock.”

“But you operated anyway.”

“I didn’t know the extent of the damage until I had her on the operating table. She died not five minutes after I made the first incision.”

“To be clear, you agree with the postmortem report on the cause of death?”

“I agree on the cause, but I do not agree about the agent. The postmortem reads ‘person or persons unknown’ performed the operation. I am fairly certain that it was Mrs. Campbell who operated on herself.”