The Gilded Hour (6 page)

And now she had to go into the house and have tea and then dinner, and instead of going to bed she would have to dress in the costume Aunt Quinlan had arranged for her, and go out into the night with Cap, to the Vanderbilts’ fancy dress ball. Because Cap was her friend, and he needed her.

A
UNT
Q
UINLAN
’
S
PARLOR
was comfortable and completely out of fashion; no slick horsehair sofas or rock-hard bolsters encrusted with beadwork, no bulky, heavily carved furniture to collect dust and crowd them all together. Instead the walls were crowded with paintings and drawings and the chairs and sofas were agreeably deep and soft, covered in velvet the dusky blue of delphinium in July.

Sitting together with her aunt and Sophie and her cousin Margaret, Anna was glad of the respite. For a few minutes there was no talk beyond the passing around of seedcake and scones, teacups and milk jugs.

Her stomach growled loudly enough to be heard even by Margaret, who was bound by convention and simply refused to hear such things.

She said, “You haven’t eaten at all today, have you.” Margaret was, strictly regarded, not a cousin at all. She was Aunt Quinlan’s stepdaughter, raised in this very house by Uncle Quinlan and her mother, his first wife. Two years ago her sons had come into the money left by their father, and set off for Europe almost immediately. Because Margaret missed them so, Anna and Sophie must bear the brunt of her frustrated maternal instincts.

“She’ll eat now,” Aunt Quinlan said. “Mrs. Lee, could you please bring Anna a plate of something filling?” Then she held out an arm to gesture Anna closer.

At eighty-nine the symmetry of Aunt Quinlan’s bone structure was more pronounced than ever. It didn’t matter that the skin over those perfect cheekbones worked like the finest silk gauze, carefully folded into tiny pleats and left to dry that way; she was beautiful, and could be nothing less. Her hair was a deep and burnished silver, a color that set off the bright blue of her eyes. Her very observant eyes. Right now they were full of simple pleasure to have both Anna and Sophie home for tea at once.

When Anna leaned over to kiss her cheek, Aunt Quinlan patted her gingerly. Her arthritis was very bad today; Anna knew that without asking because Auntie’s teacup sat untouched on the low table before her.

To Sophie Anna said, “Difficult delivery last night?”

“Just drawn out.” Her tone said it was a topic that should wait until they were alone. If Margaret were not here they could talk about things medical, because Aunt Quinlan was always interested and nothing surprised her. But Margaret was alarmingly weak of stomach and squeamish, as if she had never borne children herself.

“What about you?” Sophie asked. “Any interesting surgeries?”

“None at all,” Anna said. “I spent most of the day with the sisters from St. Patrick’s picking up orphans in Hoboken.”

Sophie’s mouth fell open only to shut again with an audible snap. “Sister Ignatia? Why on earth—”

“Because I promised you that if one of the sisters came to call I would go attend.”

“Oh, no.” Sophie was trying not to smile, and failing. “I was expecting Sister Thomasina from St. Vincent de Paul.” She pressed her lips hard together but a laugh still escaped her with a puff of air.

“What an interesting turn of events,” Aunt Quinlan said. She looked more closely at Anna. “You and the infamous Sister Ignatia together all day long, I wonder that you’re still standing.”

“Maybe Sister Ignatia isn’t,” Margaret suggested. “Anna might have been the end of her.” Margaret’s tone was a little sharp, as it always was when the subject of the Roman Catholic Church was raised. She folded her hands at her waist—corseted down to a waspish twenty inches though Margaret was more than forty—and waited. She was looking for an argument. Anna sometimes enjoyed arguing with her aunt’s stepdaughter, but she had things to do.

“I suppose it is funny,” she said. “We certainly . . . clashed. Now should I worry about Sister Thomasina? Did she come to call this morning?”

“No,” said Aunt Quinlan. “Apparently our daily allotment of nuns was met with the Sisters of Charity.”

Margaret cleared her throat. She said, “I had a letter from Isaac and Levi today. Would you like to hear it?”

It wasn’t like Margaret to give up an argument so easily, and now Anna
understood why. She loved nothing more than letters from her two sons. They all enjoyed the letters, which were long and entertaining. This time Levi had done the writing, and they heard about climbing in the Dolomites, a difficult journey to Innsbruck, a long essay about laundry, and how each nation distinguished itself on the way underclothes were folded and how the bedding smelled.

It was good to see Margaret so pleased about her letter. And maybe, Anna reasoned to herself, maybe while she was distracted it would be possible to slip away before she remembered the ball and more to the point, the costume Anna was going to wear to the ball.

She was almost out the door when Margaret called after her. “When is Cap coming to fetch you, Anna?”

“I’m going to stop for him, as he’s on the way,” Anna said, inching away. “At half past ten. Things don’t get started until eleven.”

•   •   •

O
NCE
UPSTAIRS
S
OPHIE
said, “The longer you make Margaret wait and wonder about your costume, the more outraged she’s going to be.”

“But she does so enjoy ruffling her feathers,” Anna said. “Who am I to disappoint her?”

She followed Sophie into her room and stretched out on the bed with its simple coverlet of pale yellow embroidered with ivy in soft gray-greens. When they were schoolgirls they did this every afternoon, meeting in one bedroom or the other to talk before they launched themselves into chores and homework and play.

Sophie took off her shoes with an uncharacteristic impatience and fell onto the bed, facedown.

Her voice came muffled. “How bad was Sister Ignatia really?”

Anna crossed her arms over her waist and considered her answer. “It’s a sorry business, what goes on with orphans. It reminds me how fortunate I was. We both were.”

“We were,” Sophie agreed. “We are.”

“I knew in the abstract, of course. But those children were terrified. And Sister Ignatia—” She sat up suddenly. “I’m going to vaccinate children tomorrow, at the orphanage. I have no idea how many.” When she had told Sophie about her confrontation with the nun, there was a small silence.

“Anna,” Sophie said. “You know there are at least ten Roman Catholic
orphanages in the city, small and large. St. Patrick’s is the biggest, and it has beds for two thousand children or more.”

That brought Anna up short.

“I’ll have to come with you,” Sophie said finally. “If there are less than a hundred, we can manage.”

“And if there are more,” Anna said, “I will pay a call to the Board of Health.”

Sophie gave a soft laugh. “Sister Ignatia will regret underestimating you.”

“I doubt Sister Ignatia has many regrets.”

There was a long silence and then Sophie said, “Have you ever seen your face when you’re angry at the way a patient has been treated?”

Anna collapsed back against the pillows, and a low laugh escaped her.

“You are not saying that I frighten Sister Ignatia, of all people.”

“Of course you do.” Sophie yawned. “It’s why you’re so effective.”

“So then we’ll go tomorrow afternoon,” Anna said. “I need to be in surgery in the morning.”

“Clara’s hearing is tomorrow afternoon at the Tombs. Did you forget?”

For a long moment Anna was quiet, trying to think of a way to do two things at once in different parts of the city. She had to be at Dr. Garrison’s hearing, to show her support and respect for a colleague and former professor. There was no help for it.

“I’ll write to Sister Ignatia and reschedule for Wednesday afternoon. Unless I’m forgetting something else?”

When Sophie didn’t answer, Anna turned on her side to look at her directly. She said, “What happened today, really?”

“Mrs. Campbell asked about Clara.”

Anna felt herself tense. “And?”

“I can dissemble when necessary,” Sophie said. “I said that yes, I had read about Dr. Garrison’s arrest. And then I made it clear that I do not have contraceptives—”

“—or know—”

“—or know how to find them or information about them, and that I observe all laws to the letter.”

Which was no protection at all, both Anna and Sophie knew. Just the previous week Clara Garrison had been arrested for the third time simply
because she had answered the door to a man distraught about his wife’s health and offered him a booklet of information. But the next knock—not five minutes later—brought postal inspectors and uniformed police officers.

After Clara had been arrested and taken away to the Tombs, the inspectors had searched her home and practice in the most destructive manner possible. They found an envelope sitting in plain sight on her desk with a half dozen of the same informational pamphlets she had given to Comstock’s undercover inspector, as well as two new female syringes.

Clara Garrison had been the lecturer in obstetrics at the Woman’s Medical School when Anna and Sophie were students. She was an excellent practitioner and teacher, and utterly uncompromising when it came to patient care. Sophie had a theory that Clara Garrison had once been a nun; she had the energy, high standards, and quiet efficiency Sophie associated with the sisters who had taught her as a child in New Orleans. It was from Clara that they had learned what it meant to care for the most vulnerable.

It was Clara’s good fortune that for both her previous arrests the grand jury had simply refused to issue an indictment. This time she had not been so lucky, and tomorrow she would appear in court to answer the charges Anthony Comstock had gone to so much trouble to secure.

“I want to send a pamphlet to Mrs. Campbell anonymously,” Sophie said. “She is truly desperate.”

“Yes,” Anna said, resigned to the necessity that they do at least this much. “And then what will we do when she comes looking for pessaries or a syringe or a dutch cap?”

It was the most difficult problem they faced. A problem without a solution, and repercussions that were all too real: at one extreme another child might be born into a family of six or eight or more, living in a single room without a window or a privy. On the other extreme were the midwives and doctors who might be sent to prison or harassed until nothing remained of their careers. One day Sophie or Anna could very well misstep and end up in front of Judge Benedict, Anthony Comstock’s partner in his endless crusade against empty wombs. The two of them would smirk and frown and see to it that the defendant suffered the maximum possible embarrassment and personal and professional damage.

For a half hour she and Sophie spoke very little, drifting in and out of a light sleep. The house was peaceful, and Anna might have fallen into a
deeper sleep and stayed there until morning, if not for the wail rising up the stairwell. It catapulted them out of bed and into the hall, where they leaned over the banister.

•   •   •

C
OUSIN
M
ARGARET
STOOD
in the foyer with a delivery boy who was holding a flat, square box in both hands.

Brown packing paper had been torn away, revealing the gilded frame of an oil portrait familiar to everyone in the household.

“Oh dear,” Sophie said. “Isn’t that Mrs. Parker’s delivery boy? What is he doing with one of Auntie’s paintings?”

“Returning it,” Anna said. “Mrs. Parker was using it as a model for—”

“Your ball gown.” Sophie bit her lip, but the smile was there and would not be held back.

Cousin Margaret looked up and caught sight of them. “Not Countess Turchaninov!” Horrified, as Anna had known she would be.

“I’m afraid so,” Anna said.

“But you’ll be half-naked!”

The delivery boy shuffled his feet.

Margaret said, “But your aunt Quinlan said she sent Countess Turchaninov out to be cleaned.”

Anna didn’t doubt that at all; Aunt Quinlan wasn’t above misdirecting attention if it helped her with a plan.

“I believe the canvas was cleaned,” Anna told her. “Before it went to the seamstress. Mrs. Parker had it for two weeks, at least.”

Margaret threw up her hands in disgust and disappeared down the hall to the kitchen.

“I wanted to go as the warrior queen Boadicea,” Anna said on a sigh, “but Aunt Quinlan talked me out of it and into Countess Turchaninov. What there is of her.”

The boy cleared his throat. “You’ll pardon me, but I’m after getting this receipt signed. It don’t matter which one of youse signs it. It don’t matter that your countess here is wearing a night rail; if I’m not away with a signed receipt the mistress will box my ears, so she will.”

Mrs. Lee came marching down the hall, took the receipt from the boy, fished a pencil out of her apron pocket, and signed with a flourish. The boy grabbed the receipt and the coin that Mrs. Lee offered with one hand,
tipped his cap with the other, and dashed down the hall to the service entrance in the rear.

Mrs. Lee looked up at Anna and shook her head in disapproval.

“I won’t be alone,” Anna reminded her. “There’s no need to worry about me.”

Mrs. Lee scowled. “If you’re Countess Turchaninov, who is Cap going to be?”

Anna lifted a shoulder. “I have no idea.”