Breath and Bones (50 page)

At least, he thought, those deeds had meaning only to those who knew Famke was with him: Dr. Beachly, of course, and the nurses who had found her, perhaps Rideaux the mortician . . . Overall, her presence here had been well concealed, as Edouard had wished. Or perhaps as
she
had engineered? There were so many lungers downslope that she was probably forgotten there by now, and if her purposes were nefarious she could accomplish much more by remaining anonymous.

Why, Edouard reasoned with belated understanding, there could be no other reason for Famke's appearance on his doorstep, with her farfetched story of a lost brother and a special relationship to his painting—no other reason than that she was scheming to make
him
, Edouard Versailles, a victim of the Dynamite Gang. Hermes reported she had done exactly this to a fellow called Stokes, whose fancy had built a medieval tower in Austin,
Nevada, which she robbed and destroyed; and then there was the owner of the Grand Hotel in Boulder, Colorado, who had seen his business literally go up in smoke while Famke entertained him at a house of ill-conceived pleasure. She must have done the same to this Goodhouse of Prophet City (or, in
Rubble on the Rails
, Elder Greathope of Bountiful)—of course—it made much more sense than her tale of a Mormon marriage and a patriarch's cruelty, for he could imagine no one being cruel to Famke. What he could imagine was the beautiful crystal palace, his father's labor of love, blown into shivers and scattered over the hillside, all the way down to the new hospital. But, no—there would be no new hospital anymore, for surely the Rubblers would destroy that as well.

These thoughts were chilling. Edouard ran up the stairs, once again shaking the house to its foundation. He did not bother to knock at Famke's door but simply grabbed the knob. He found it, naturally, locked.

This one time, this one time only, Edouard behaved like a man of violence. With his elbow he shattered the door's largest pane. “Miss Summerfield!” he called through the hole as he did so, ignoring the blood now dripping from his wrist. “I have a matter of some urgency to discuss.”

Famke did not reply, but Life's Importance materialized at his side, holding a basket of keys. Silently she held one out to him, and he fit it into the lock. Life's Importance also tried to give him a black-bordered handkerchief to use as a bandage, but he ignored it. The door was opening.

Edouard stepped through the interior curtain into the sick woman's sanctuary. And there, as he might have expected, he found no Famke; only an unmade bed.

A mixture of anger and fear made Edouard bold. He placed his hand upon the mattress, beneath the crumpled quilt, and tried to gauge its warmth. He left a streak of blood on the sheet but could not tell how recently Famke had lain there.

Moving more slowly now, filled with a sense of dawning realization, he opened the door to the water closet. Of course it was empty, and the shining flush toilet gleamed innocently back at him. He noticed a drop of blood on the seat and touched it with the index finger of his uninjured hand. Dry.

“She is gone,” he said wonderingly.

Life's Importance bobbed her head like the dutiful servant she'd been trained to be. “Gone,” she agreed.

Edouard organized a search party to comb the woods and the village, looking for Famke and her gang; but he did not expect them to find much, and in fact they did not. After swarming among the beehives and behind the cathouse, through the trees and into the rock fissures of the greening hillside, they found not so much as a lock of red hair or a scrap of the white nightgown that had been all she might have to wear—though, of course, her gang would have brought her some decent clothing, perhaps a fine silk dress like the one she'd had on when he first saw her.

Edouard himself did not join the search party. The long walk through the damp and dark had brought on a cough in earnest, and he took to his bed feeling hopeless. Famke was gone and his home, perhaps, condemned. He thought back over the last half-year, even unto yesterday, and he blamed himself.

He rang and told Precious Flower to send for Ancient Jade. “Really, I suppose I should thank her for bringing the book to my attention,” he said, coughing feebly, though he did not believe Precious Flower understood his allusion for a moment. “And I have a responsibility to the woman, after taking her from the one profession she knew.”

Precious Flower gave him the same bob of the head that he'd got from Life's Importance, but she had to tell him the third maid was gone. A search of the house confirmed it. No one could say exactly where she was, but the next morning, when the posse looking for Famke reported that a Celestial in a gray costume had boarded the train at Harmsway, Edouard considered the mystery solved. The train was headed for San Francisco; Ancient Jade must be returning not only to her old line of work but to the place she had practiced it as well.

“You might advertise for her,” suggested Rideaux the mortician, who found in the three Chinese maids a mysterious fascination.

“I might,” Edouard granted; but, exhausted by his emotions, not the least of which were disappointment in Famke and the fear of a future soon to be attenuated by disease, he could not compose so much as a single sentence fit for print.

The depredations of time have always something in them to employ the fancy, or lead to musing on subjects which, withdrawing the mind from objects of sense, seem to give it new dignity: but here I was treading on live ashes
.

M
ARY
W
OLLSTONECRAFT
,
LETTER FROM
D
ENMARK

It was as if a fire had swept through Immaculate Heart, Birgit thought as she stood in the empty office, gazing out a last time at the flowering elder tree in the girls' exercise yard. Orphans, nuns, beds, the past—all had been gobbled up. Of course this was not true; it was merely that all the people were gone, and their chattels as well. Immaculate Heart as Birgit knew it was no more: So complete was the destruction wrought by her own hands.

The scandal around herself and Famke—a scandal founded on anonymous and unproven rumors—had brought new attention to the infamous Immaculate chest. Too many orphans had died of it, and no lesser personage than the Queen herself had insisted on moving the surviving children to the new
Børnehjem
—where no doubt they would be rebaptized as Lutherans within the month—and dispersing the nuns to convents with more salubrious reputations. So the history of Immaculate Heart, founded in 1373, came to an inglorious end. The building had sold to a merchant who dealt in rare stamps; he would use the cells and dormitories as sorting rooms. The sisters were assigned to farflung convents in Odense, Skagen, and the northernmost reaches of Norway. They would take their coughs with them. Only Birgit remained, to clean the building alone in an act of penance.

It was her own idea, one which the bishop approved heartily. “God smiles upon the truly penitent,” he promised her. “The lost lamb, the prodigal son.”

As she blew on a diamond-shaped pane and wiped it with her sleeve, Birgit thought again that there had been something not quite right in the bishop's words to her. Yet she was too tired to think what it might be; she merely checked the windows one last time for dust and fly specks, then left the room where she had held sway such a brief time as Superior. For the last time, she locked the door with the ancient brass key.

Outside, in the weak sunshine on the doorstep, with her bedroll and her Bible tucked beneath her arms, Birgit hesitated. She was not quite ready to leave. And no one was waiting for her; she was not expected to finish the cleaning for another day at least, and she was not particularly welcome at Handmaids of the Precious Blood, the tiny convent that the bishop had ordered to house her while she awaited passage to Tröndheim. The Handmaids were dedicated to prayer and did not take kindly to liars and cheats.

In short, for the next twenty-four hours, Birgit could go anywhere. She could do anything.

She turned and, with sudden purpose, unlocked the heavy front door again. Her shoes, ground down from years of wear, made a vague clomping noise on the hard floors, and when she got to the inner courtyard once used by the girls, she unlaced those shoes and set them on the lip of the stair, with her stockings rolled neatly inside.

Barefoot, she started toward the elder tree.
This is where everything started
, she thought, though of course that was wrong, too. The elder tree, the day of the soapmaking, had been simply a warning that Birgit should not let the girl have her heart; and Birgit had paid it no attention. Perhaps if she had listened, if she had punished Famke as the other nuns thought she should, none of this would have happened. Famke would have shed her wildness, might still be at Herr Skatkammer's house—no, with the farmer in Dragør—and she, Birgit, would still be parceling out equal measures of impersonal Catholic love to dozens of coughing orphans. It was all Birgit's fault.

These thoughts flitted through her mind in a few seconds, the time it took to cross the courtyard and grasp the elder's lowest limb in her hands. A flock of early butterflies flurried up and resettled as she gave a tentative tug on the branch. Near the trunk, Birgit thought she could see shadowy scorchmarks from that long-ago fire; but the branch held nonetheless, and she hoisted herself upward. Her arms were strong, if tired from the hard labor
of cleaning, and she managed to get high enough to swing a leg up. She sat, then stood; she could nearly see into the empty second-floor rooms. She grabbed another limb and climbed higher, till she could see the rooftops first of Immaculate Heart and then of larger Copenhagen, all the way to Nyhavn. She almost thought she could discern a fuzzy gray hint of Sweden, which was very close here; though of course she could not see Norway, much less the dark northern reaches of Tröndheim, a city so distant that a letter would take over a week to travel there from Copenhagen. If in fact the bishop and the Handmaids of the Precious Blood sent Birgit's mail on. If in fact Viggo wrote from America. If there was ever news worthy of sending . . .

Birgit bounced on her elder branch, wondering if she might risk pushing up to the next one. If she fell from this height, she would break her skull, her spine, at the very least an arm or a leg. But she might also see Sweden.

Much to his own surprise, within days Edouard's cough improved and then vanished, leaving him with no symptom but that old abstracted ache in the chest and no conclusion but that he'd been suffering from nothing worse than a cold. This ache, he realized, he would have to live with; and indeed it was only what other healthy mortals bore. Sooner than he might have liked, he was on his feet again.

While he lay in his sickbed, Edouard had had time to mull over the events of the winter and spring and to reread Hermes's novel. He concluded that his house was not so likely to shiver to bits after all. Wasn't Famke known as the
Gallant
Robber Baroness? And hadn't she protected a wealthy widow's house in Santa Fé from sure destruction, by convincing the boys that those who had lost their loved ones should not lose their homes as well? Surely such a woman, however perfidious—and Edouard still felt that she was this—would show mercy to the man who had lodged her, cured her, even (he allowed the thought, however unmedical) pleasured her after a fashion.

It was time for Edouard to rejoin the world. But the sad fact was that the world did not welcome him. The hospital's three towers were just days from opening their doors, and during the months in which Edouard had been occupied
with Famke, the doctors and nurses had grown used to making decisions without him. It was almost, but not quite, as if they had sneaked the hospital out from under his nose. Similarly, under the auspices of Precious Flower and Life's Importance and the butler, Wong, the house was running itself, and the grooms and gardeners were equally capable. For the first time since he'd been inspired to found the Institute for Phthisis, Edouard felt aimless.