Savage Girl

Also by Jean Zimmerman

The Orphanmaster

Love, Fiercely: A Gilded Age Romance

The Women of the House: How a Colonial She-Merchant Built a Mansion, a Fortune, and a Dynasty

Made from Scratch: Reclaiming the Pleasures of the American Hearth

Raising Our Athletic Daughters: How Sports Can Build Self-Esteem and Save Girls’ Lives
(with Gil Reavill)

Tailspin: Women at War in the Wake of Tailhook

VIKING

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First published by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2014

Copyright © 2014 by Jean Zimmerman

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Zimmerman, Jean.

Savage girl / Jean Zimmerman.

pages cm

ISBN 978-1-101-61632-1

1. Orphans—Fiction. 2. Adoption—Fiction. 3. New York—Fiction. I.Title.

PS3626.I493S29 2013

813'.6—dc23

2013018408

Publisher’s Note:
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This one is for Betsy Lerner

Sweet as the first wild violet, she,

To her wild self. But what to me?

—Charlotte Mew

Prologue

Manhattan. May 19, 1876

I wait for the police in the study overlooking Gramercy Park, the body prone on the floor a few feet away. Outside, rain has cooled the green spring evening. In here the heat is stifling.

Midnight. I’ve been in this room before, many times in the course of my twenty-two years. The Turkish rug on the floor, the Empire chairs, the shelves of uncracked books, all familiar to me. A massive mahogany partners desk, from England, in the William IV style, installed as proof of the late victim’s diligence, a rich boy’s insistence that he is, after all, engaged in honest work.

Of the dead man, a schoolmate of mine, I feature two possibilities. She killed him, in which case they will surely hang her. Either that or I killed him, in a fit of madness the specifics of which I have no memory.

This last is not as unlikely as it sounds. I have taken the rest cure for neurasthenia several times and every so often suffer faints, waking to find a small swath of my life gone. Peculiarities of the recent past, a series of strange incidents and dark coincidences, force me at least to entertain the idea that I am a monster.

The fact that in recent months I developed a passionate hatred for the dead man increases the possibility of my involvement in his demise.

On the other hand, if she is indeed the murderer, I can prevent her day of reckoning only by taking the burden of guilt upon myself.

So you see, either way, if I must assume her guilt or confess my own, it works out much the same, demanding identical action on my part. My path is clear. I need to be caught red-handed. I have to wait in this room until discovery, alarm, arrest.

I summon up the mental image of a stern-faced detective with a fat, unkempt mustache.
Mr. Hugo Delegate
—for that is my name—
you must accompany us to the Tombs.
Will he place me in restraints? Will it be that bad?

But they will come, rest assured. There are numerous lawmen who would be highly interested in what has occurred on Gramercy Park this evening. From where I sit, I can almost sense them drawing near, having journeyed from all over the country—from Nevada, from Chicago, from Massachusetts and New York—their disparate paths converging at a millionaire’s mansion off a private park in Manhattan.

Not only the constabulary either but the gentlemen of the press, rabid dogs all, will no doubt descend upon the scene of the crime. The pack will be in full howl. From my experience, newsmen are even more relentless than police, profit being superior to justice as a great motivator of human beings.

The witness is a participant, or so my mother once told me. I followed the girl murderess here to this house. It is never difficult to track her. She is oddly without guile, so possessed of a naïve faith that no one would suspect her of crime.

I feel . . . what do I feel? Paralyzed. A sense of impending doom hovers over me like psychosis. Another brief shower patters at the windows. I think of the gentle rain that droppeth in Shakespeare.

The body. My longtime acquaintance and sometime friend, Beverly Ralston Willets, twenty-four years old, or perhaps twenty-three—young anyway. His corpse, in a suit of brown serge.

He has been done as the others have been done. A slashing stab to the femoral artery in the groin, meaning exsanguination within two or three minutes. A blood pool the size of a bathtub stains the twill of the carpet. The killer mutilates the corpus after death.

I position myself so I do not have to directly confront the victim. Close up, death has an arrogant smell. Should I dab some of the gore on my hands, stain the seas scarlet, impress the detectives?

There are a couple of jeroboams of blood in the human body. Six quarts, more or less. This I know because in my classes at Harvard I
pursue the study of medicine and practice as an anatomist. I dissect the dead, who do not bleed.

Could not my anatomical work serve as a reason for the authorities to suspect me of this killing? As well as for me to suspect myself?

The prosecutor, in court:
Gentlemen of the jury, I submit that Hugo Delegate is a habitual plunderer of men.

I am alone. I am already dead. Perhaps she will murder me in this exact same manner. If not, I’ll almost certainly go away to spend the rest of my life behind bars.

The body emits a horrible, gaseous sigh, startling me out of my musings.

Cocking my right leg over my left, I sit, waiting for them to come. On my way here through the city, I got caught in a spring shower. I occupy my time watching the rain dry on the leather upper of my boot.

•   •   •

Then, later that night, the Tombs, south two miles from the murder scene, on Centre Street in Lower Manhattan. The Halls of Justice. The majority of mortals rightly fear a trip to the prison; it is such a forbidding brick heap, a cold, ugly, heavy-pillared structure as gloomy as its nickname. Where the city’s criminal miscreants (that’s me) languish, and where justice languishes as well.

Not that I know it intimately, but I have been to the Tombs before, too, a couple of times, as an observer. The law grinds on, night and day, pulverizing its victims to dust while elevating others, attorneys and jurists, to heights of wealth and power.

For the Tombs is not just a prison but an all-in-one buttress of justice, with busy courts, jury rooms, clerkdoms, offices for judges and prosecutors, smoky hallways, and deal-making alcoves. A palace of diligence or, if you happen to be wearing police bracelets, a hive of evil.

The building rests upon the site of a former swamp, and it began sinking into the ground immediately upon being erected. Vapors rise continually from its foundations, resembling the fingers of demons,
pulling all occupants, willing or not, toward the stinking pits of Lake Avernus.

As I did in the little Gramercy Park study, I wait, having been brought here, yes, in bracelets.

I delight to imagine my lawyers, William Howe and Abraham Hummel, two lords of the Tombs, hurrying to my prison lair.

In the still of the night! At four
A.M.
, the deserted hour, the hour that no one wants!

Such are the benefits of wealth. I am the son of Friedrich Delegate, nephew of Sonny Delegate, grandson of August Delegate, so lawyers hurry through the dark.

The surrounding neighborhood represents the foulest that Manhattan has to offer. The streets are deserted of all honest men at this time of night and the nearby financial district wholly abandoned of its scrivener ants and predatory beetles. In my mind’s eye, I see my attorneys, two figures, one tall and plump, one short and bony, proceed through empty streets.

At the portal of the prison, a uniformed officer of the city sleeps at his post. He wakes, alarmed, at the creak of the massive brass door. “Attorney Howe, sir! Attorney Hummel!” A common enough sight, these two, even in the wee hours, but somehow their arrival is forever unsettling.

Howe is resplendent in dozens of diamonds, which he wears even to bed. Hummel all in black like a crow, observing perpetual mourning, they say, for the death of his conscience.

Deeper and downward they come, closer to where I wait, into the prison’s fetid lower levels, the cramped cell block designated “Murderer’s Row” because it lodges killers. Finally to arrive at an end-of-the-line passageway.

Where I sit, calmly passive, on a rude pallet in a filthy cell, the confessed assassin.

Hugo, Mr. Howe says, wringing his hands and rushing to my side as if I were his dying mother. The man is always a shade histrionic. Abe Hummel a silent shadow beside the talkative Bill Howe.

Howe rails at the turnkey about my accommodations, the scandal
of it, treating an eminent scion of Manhattan this way, it is totally outrageous, did he, the turnkey, know who I, meaning me, was, if he, Howe, and his esteemed partner in the law, Hummel, have anything to say about it, the turnkey will soon find himself transferred to outdoor duty at potter’s field on Blackwell’s Island, et cetera, et cetera.

So the three of us, myself and my attorneys, move to more comfortable quarters for our talk.

Upstairs, we pass through dark, echoing halls.

On the way they explain (Howe, that is; Hummel remains mum), that because I had been arrested on a Friday night, they will likely not be able to arrange my bail until Monday.

Three nights in the Tombs. Perhaps a sympathetic judge, and they know many, will see his way clear to hold a special arraignment hearing. If not, they will endeavor to make me as comfortable as they can. Stay by my side through thick and thin. It is best not to be caught in the commission of a crime on the weekend, Howe counsels me.

Four flights up, more empty hallways. A right turn into the offices of the director of the jail. Unoccupied. Howe and Hummel make us at home.

Say nothing to no one except us, Howe says, admonishing. But to us, Hugo, you must tell everything.

Hummel silent as a snake, as usual.

I don’t know where to begin, I say.

It is traditional, in these situations, Howe says, fluttering his hands expansively, to begin at the beginning.

I take a deep breath. There was a cabin in the wilderness of the Washoe, I say, where a headless body was discovered.

Another body, Howe says, a mournful expression on his face.

Yes.

Not the one discovered this night in Gramercy.

No. This is outside Virginia City, Nevada, in the Comstock.

We must interrupt you, Attorney Howe says, twisting his face in little moues of apology. At times I think he has taken Hummel on as partner only so that it might appear natural for him to speak in the royal “we.”

We must ask, Hugo. Did you yourself discover this alleged body?

Well, no, I say.

He asks, Then were you present when the discovery occurred?

Again I say no.

So we must stop you at the outset, Howe says, directing you, in your best interest, not to speculate, not to fabricate, not to re-create scenarios from whole cloth but to stick to the hard fact of what you yourself saw, heard, and experienced, and refrain from flying off halfway across the country to a cabin in the wilderness.

Yet that is where— I start to say, but Howe interrupts.

No, Hugo, no. We must insist. Only that of which you yourself have firsthand knowledge. The truth and only the truth. Out of that we, your duly engaged attorneys, will pick and choose.

I recall a directive of my father’s, coaching me in business practices. It is a good idea, he said, to tell your lawyers everything.

Why do I have to tell it at all? To these men who will never understand, who represent the wider world, that also will never understand?

I begin again, saying,
In June of 1875, we made our way down Virginia City’s “A” Street . . .