The Gilded Hour (26 page)

There must be no ambiguity about our status as man and wife and thus the platonic nature of our marriage must not be public knowledge. You will promise to present yourself to the world as my wife in all ways, even after I am gone. This has to do with the law, and only secondarily with my pride.

When you are my widow, you will accept all rights and properties that come to you in accordance with the terms of my last will and testament, in which you will be named as my sole heir with the exception of provisions for Mrs. Harrison and the staff in their old age. You can be sure of two things: the testament will be rock-solid and unbreakable, and one or more of my aunts or cousins will attempt to break it anyway, in order to deny you your inheritance. To protect your interests I will make arrangements for the very best legal counsel to represent you before the courts in this and any other matter. Uncle Conrad will be the executor of my will, and he will coordinate all aspects of my estate working with the other attorney I have engaged, but your word will be final.

What you do with the estate once it is released to you will be entirely and exclusively up to you. If you choose to build a hospital, to donate it all to a school, or simply to live in comfort for the rest of your life, no one will be able to interfere with you. I know you, Sophie, and you are thinking just now that you don’t care about money or property. But I do care. This is what I want, and in this point I will not be denied.

Before I fell ill you told me again and again that you loved me but could not marry me. You imagined that in time I would come to resent you.
Somehow you convinced yourself I would miss taking tea with old aunts and regret the lost opportunity to guide debutantes around the dance floor, that gossip and fashion and interminable talk of bloodlines would become more important to me over time. You were wrong. You are wrong, but none of that matters once we are married and away from this city. Distance and death will put an end to whatever disapproval my Aunt Eugenie or Mrs. Astor and her ilk can bestow. And you will be mine, and I will be yours, and that is all that matters to me. In the days and hours of my life, you are all and everything.

It is a fine thing for me to ask for mercy where I showed none, but please do not make me wait long for your answer.

I am ever yours.
Cap

S
OPHIE
STARTED
OUT
of sleep at the first crow of Lia’s beloved rooster and realized that she was still wearing yesterday’s clothes. She had drifted off rereading Cap’s letter, which she still held pressed to herself. Cap, who loved her and wanted her for his widow.

She needed to talk to Anna before she sat down to write a single word. With a sudden burst of energy she went about getting ready for the day, washing without looking at her face in the mirror for fear of what she might see there. No more than fifteen minutes later she slipped into Anna’s room.

“An early morning visit.” Anna stretched luxuriously, arms extended over her head. “I thought it might be Lia; she has been coming in quite often recently to tell me her stories.” Then she looked at Sophie more closely and sat up, fully awake.

Sophie found that she couldn’t say anything at all, and so she held up the letter.

Anna smiled broadly, both dimples popping into view. “Finally.”

“Read it.”

She frowned. “Sophie, it’s too personal.”

“Please. I wouldn’t know where to start to put it in my own words. And I need your advice.”

That made Anna laugh out loud. “When is the last time you took my advice?” But she accepted the letter and began to read.

•   •   •

A
NNA
WAS
A
slow reader, and always had been. It was the judge in her, Aunt Quinlan always said. She had to weigh every word before she could go on to the next. When she put the letter down, finally, she looked up at Sophie with tears in her eyes.

“What are you going to do?”

Sophie came forward and sat beside her cousin, folded her hands in her lap, and felt the relief and joy blossom inside her. She would say the words now and make it true.

“I’m going to marry him. Of course.” And then, because she needed to be honest with herself, “I’m going to marry him and then be with him when he dies.”

Anna put her arms around Sophie’s shoulders and pulled her close.

“Are you happy?”

“It seems wrong, but I am.”

Anna stroked Sophie’s hair. “You’re marrying Cap because you love him and you want to be with him for what time he has left.”

There was something in Anna’s tone that struck Sophie as odd. She studied her cousin’s face, and was not comforted by what she saw there.

“Tell me,” Sophie said.

Anna didn’t pretend to be confused. Instead she picked up the letter and ran her eyes over it until she found a specific phrase. She cleared her throat and read out loud. “‘You want me to go to Switzerland and put myself in Dr. Zängerle’s care at the Rosenau clinic.’”

A small tingle began at the bottom of Sophie’s spine. Something was off, but her thoughts were racing so frantically she couldn’t catch the one she needed.

Very gently Anna said, “How did Cap know the name of the village? It wasn’t mentioned in any of the materials, as far as I remember. Was it?”

Sophie knew Dr. Zängerle’s letters almost word by word, and she didn’t recall any mention of a village called Rosenau. For ten seconds she held herself completely still, and then she let out a barking laugh.

“This is too much, even for Cap.” But even as she said it, Sophie knew that it was not. Cap was more than capable of planning complex, long-reaching schemes; he took huge satisfaction in them. She had refused him, but he had never given up, not really.

“This is an insane idea. Are we really thinking that Cap cut himself off from me as a—” She reached for a word that would not come.

“Strategy,” Anna supplied. “Yes, I think maybe he did.”

“So he was in contact with Zängerle more than a year ago. But why a year? Why set this up and wait a year?”

Anna spread her hands out over her lap and considered. “He was aiming for your tipping point. The day you would be lonely enough for him to say yes to this—” She touched the letter.

“But Zängerle’s letter, how could he have timed that?”

“By holding off and then delivering it himself. It wasn’t dated, if I remember correctly.”

Sophie felt herself flushing with anger and amusement, frustration and resignation. “What a stupid chance he took. What cheek, the underhanded swindler. Could he have really been so desperate?”

“Hold on,” Anna said. “We’re just speculating. This might not be what it seems.”

Sophie let out a sputtering laugh. “Oh please. Once you pointed it out, it’s obvious that it’s one of his schemes.” She put her face in her hands. “He kept us apart for a whole year to force this marriage.” Her shoulders shook, but she wasn’t sure if she was on the brink of laughter or tears.

“He knows you too well,” Anna said. “A year ago, would you have accepted him under the same circumstances?”

Sophie tried to imagine how she would have reacted to this particular proposal. She had been so sure of herself when she refused him. “I don’t know. I doubt it.”

Anna said, “I can’t get over the fact that he drew Dr. Zängerle into this scheme.”

“Really?” Sophie said, taking out her handkerchief to wipe her eyes. “Now that I think about it, I’m wondering why it took so long.”

She rolled over and pressed her face into Anna’s pillow so that she could scream without rousing the house.

•   •   •

L
ATER
,
BUTTONING
HER
shoes, Anna watched Sophie put the last pins in her hair. There was another subject she wanted to raise. She just couldn’t imagine holding her own news back for a whole day.

When she looked up again, her cousin was studying her.

Sophie said, “What is it? Jack?”

Anna drew in a deep breath and nodded.

“Has it come that far?”

She lifted a shoulder and held out a hand, palm up. “Let’s just say that I need to speak frankly to him before things go any further.”

Sophie’s usual calm manner had returned, and Anna was glad of it. She said, “What are you going to tell him, exactly?”

“Everything,” Anna said. “I have to tell him everything.”

“Yes,” Sophie said. “Do that, and leave no room for misunderstanding.”

•   •   •

T
HEY
WENT
TO
work as if it were any other day, Anna off to the New Amsterdam where she had three surgeries scheduled, students to meet with, and patients to see; Sophie took the el and then an omnibus all the way north to the Infant Hospital and made the rounds with medical students, examined incoming patients, signed three death certificates, and taught a nursing student how to care for a surgical incision that was still draining. She put everything into her work, and still when she allowed herself to look at the watch pinned to her bodice, the hands seemed not to have moved at all. At three, when she had finished with a difficult case she went to see Dr. Granqvist, who served as the hospital’s administrator.

Pius Granqvist was a fifty-year-old native of Sweden, a man who had been working with sick children for all of his career. He was nondescript, fairly short and thin with a frizzle of dark hair on the very top of his head and bushy eyebrows that he twisted at the ends into kinked horns. On first meeting him she had wondered if children found him frightening, but then she saw how his smile transformed him. His whole face changed shape, his mouth too wide, his nose too small, and his eyes disappearing into a mass of wrinkles. He looked like a sprite or an elf, but he was as gentle as any mother when he examined a frightened child.

With his staff he was neither gentle nor amusing. He ran the hospital like a dictator; where he had no authority he took it anyway, and narrowed his eyes at anyone who would gainsay him. And he did not like Sophie’s news at all.

“You can’t leave,” he said shortly. “You’re the best we have.”

“Thank you for the compliment,” Sophie said. “But I am leaving to get married.” Saying the words out loud made her swallow hard.

The director’s mouth puckered as if he had taken a mouthful of vinegar. “Anybody can get married, Dr. Savard. Few people can do what you do. Your fellow can find someone else to marry, but I can’t find another doctor like you.”

Because Sophie had anticipated this reaction, she had taken the time to
write out her resignation in very formal language. Now she put the document on his desk. He jerked away and wrinkled his nose as though she had put a decomposing rat in front of him.

“This is my official resignation letter. Three weeks from today will be my last day on the staff.”

When she left his office her hands were shaking, but otherwise she felt great relief. She had wondered if she would feel regret or even resentment, and found instead a heady joy, a child let out of school for the summer. She so rarely took time away from work, she had forgotten what it felt like to put down the multitude of burdens, small and large, just to breathe. In another day—or even an hour—she would begin to feel guilty, that was inevitable, but she would put it off as long as possible.

In her office she sat down to finish her chart notes and then she took a piece of her own stationery and wrote out the note she had been composing in her head for a day.

Dearest,

Today I handed in my resignation at the Infant Hospital, and tomorrow I will do the same at the New Amsterdam and the Colored Infirmary. On Saturday I will come to call midmorning so that we can talk about Switzerland.

With all my love,
your Sophie

It was her intention to have everything organized and in order before she went to see him. She wouldn’t give him any opportunity to change his mind, or the terms he had offered. Given all he had arranged to force her hand, it would be foolish to underestimate his propensity for forging and then taking advantage of the tiniest of loopholes.

She stopped at the New Amsterdam to check on a patient before heading home for the day, and had just gone into her office when there was a soft knock at door. The student nurse who came in bobbed her head in apology.

“A Mrs. Campbell is here to see you. She says she doesn’t have an appointment.”

It took a moment to place the name, and then it came to her. Mrs. Campbell, four little boys and a postal inspector husband, one of Comstock’s henchmen. Dr. Heath’s patient, but here and asking to see her.

“Thank you, Mrs. Henshaw. Just a postpartum exam. Please send her in.”

Just recently there had been a rash of letters, sent to the house by strangers pleading for medical intervention and contraceptives, and now she wondered if this visit could be coincidence, or if it was just another one of Comstock’s tricks. Those thoughts left her as soon as Mrs. Campbell came in; she was a physician first, and she recognized that this woman was in trouble.

She was very pale, the flesh around her eyes so dark that in the first moment Sophie thought of healing bruises, and then saw just what would be expected when a woman had three small children and a new infant, without household help. Sleeplessness was to be her lot for some time to come. Sleeplessness, and irritability, and perhaps full-blown depression. Mrs. Campbell was a woman taxed to the point of breakdown.

“Dr. Savard. May I speak to you?”

A month before Mrs. Campbell had been rounded, cheek and hip and thigh, and strong. Now her jaw and cheekbones were more prominent, and there was a brittleness to the way she held herself.

Sophie gestured to a chair. “Please.”

The fewer questions she asked at this stage, the sooner a patient would come to the point. Mrs. Campbell started slowly, relating facts about the new baby and the older three, her hands clasped in her lap so hard that her knuckles went white.

“And how are you, how is your health?”

Mrs. Campbell drew in a breath and held it for three heartbeats. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know how I am.”

“Have you seen Dr. Heath since the birth?”

She shook her head, quite sharply.

“Then what can I do for you today?”

The pale face came up suddenly, her gaze fixed on Sophie. “I want you to examine me.”

Rather than ask questions, Sophie went to wash her hands while Mrs. Campbell disrobed behind the privacy screen. Throughout the
examination she was quiet and cooperative, staring at the ceiling overhead blankly, hands still wound together.

“You are healing well,” Sophie said. “But you are losing weight, and too quickly. You need four or five small meals throughout the day. Nothing too heavy or spicy. A poached egg and a piece of bread would do, or oatmeal with cream. Meat or fish once a day, but in small amounts. Leeks, collards, spinach, any kind of bean will provide you with the iron you need as a nursing mother.”

The thin mouth contorted and an arm came up to cover her eyes.

“I’m pregnant, aren’t I.”

Sophie had turned away to pick up an instrument, but she looked over her shoulder in surprise.

“Pardon?”

Mrs. Campbell sat up, rough patches of color rising in her cheeks. “I know I am, I can always tell.”

“What makes you think that? Have you missed your menses?”

“I haven’t had a period for four years,” Mrs. Campbell said. “Doesn’t seem to matter, I fall pregnant anyway.”