A Deadly Affection (22 page)

“No, never.”

“Did you take the sword off his desk?”

“No.”

“Not even just to threaten him?”

“I never touched it, I swear! I never even knew he had a sword until I saw it lying there on the floor.”

“And you had no other way to find out Joy's whereabouts, isn't that true? If you killed the doctor, you would destroy your only chance of finding her.”

She nodded, biting her lip.

I shot a defiant look at Simon over my shoulder.

“Ask her about Dr. Huntington,” he said.

I turned slowly back to Eliza. “Did Dr. Hauptfuhrer ever ask you to be examined by another physician?”

“No,” she answered with a frown. “Why would he?”

I hesitated, choosing my words with care. “He seemed to think you might have inherited a…a certain condition from your father, that might make you more prone to violence. Apparently, he'd been planning to have an expert examine you.”

“He never said anything about it to me,” she muttered, rubbing her stomach with the heel of her hand. She seemed distracted, as though attending to some internal discomfort.

“Eliza,” I asked again, peering into her face, “are you all right?”

She winced, then bent forward with a stifled moan.

“What is it?” I exclaimed as she started rocking back and forth on the cot.

She groaned again, bending lower over her knees.

“Are you having stomach cramps?” I asked, remembering the putrid food on the breakfast trays. “Eliza, please, talk to me.”

Suddenly the rocking stopped, and she sat back up. Her eyes were wide and staring in her chalk-white face.

The matron's assistant had appeared at the door. “What's the matter with her?”

“I don't know.” As I started getting up from the stool, Eliza's eyes fluttered shut and her head dropped toward her chest. Before I could reach her, she keeled to one side and slid off the bed, landing in a heap on the floor.

“Eliza!” I cried, kneeling beside her.

“I'll get the matron,” the assistant said and dashed off down the hall.

I grasped Eliza's wrist, trying to determine whether she had fainted or had had some kind of seizure. There was none of the loss of muscle tone I would have expected with an atonic seizure, nor did she have an elevated pulse. In fact, it seemed abnormally slow.

“Eliza,” I said, patting her cheek. “Eliza, wake up…”

She was still unconscious when the matron arrived a few minutes later, followed by two men with a stretcher. The men picked her up by the armpits and dragged her into the corridor, where they dumped her onto the waiting stretcher.

“I'm coming with her,” I said as they started down the hall.

“Visitors aren't allowed in the infirmary,” the matron said, waving me off.

“But I'm her doctor.”

“Dr. Orly will see to her,” the matron said firmly, blocking my path.

I didn't know who Dr. Orly was, but I had no intention of leaving Eliza in his hands. I swiveled around to ask Simon if he could get the warden to assign her to my care, but to my astonishment, the corridor behind me was empty. Simon had disappeared.

He wasn't anywhere in the annex. Nor did I see him in the courtyard, or in the main building when I was escorted back inside. As I emerged from the Centre Street entrance, I looked up and down the street—and just caught a glimpse of him disappearing around the corner.

I started after him, zigzagging through the clusters of reporters and lawyers and bondsmen's runners loitering outside the prison wall. He was walking quickly with his head bent forward and his hands jammed into his pockets. I broke into a run and caught up to him under the connecting bridge. “Simon, wait!”

He turned. I stopped short at the look of cold fury on his face.

“Why didn't you tell me?” he spat out.

“If you're referring to my conversation with Eliza at the mission,” I said, trying not to cringe, “I didn't believe it was relevant.”

He shook his head. “Here I was thinking that you might have changed, that you might actually care what happens to this woman, when all the time, you were just trying to save your own arse.”

“That's not true! I do care what happens to Eliza!”

He thrust his face into mine. “All you care about is what people would say if they thought you'd provoked a patient to commit a murder.”

“That's absurd.”

“Is it? You convinced an unstable woman that her doctor had betrayed her, and the next day, that doctor was dead.”

“Eliza isn't a murderer.”

He straightened. “I suppose you're going to tell me she doesn't have the disease either.”

“That's right, I am.”

“People don't drop into a dead faint for no reason.”

“They don't do it because they have Huntington's chorea either! It's not a symptom of the disease.”

“If you're so sure she's innocent, why were you afraid to tell me her real reason for seeing the doctor?”

“I was concerned that you might draw the wrong conclusion, just as you have done.”

“Right. So you've never entertained the possibility that she might have actually killed him?”

“Of course I have. I've been asking myself whether she could have done it from the moment I found out she was arrested. And I still say the answer is no.”

“What a load of malarkey,” he said with disgust. “You can't even be honest with yourself, can you? You're too much of a coward to admit you made a mistake—a mistake that may have cost a man his life. Well, I've had enough of you and your lies. Good-bye to you, and good riddance.” He wheeled around and started across the street.

I watched him go for the space of several pounding heartbeats, before ten years of pent-up anger let loose inside of me. I started after him, reaching him just as he was climbing the opposite curb and pulling him around by his coat sleeve. “Who do you think you are to speak to me like that? You, of all people! What right do you have to question my honesty?”

A horn blared behind me. I turned to see an electric motorcar bouncing toward me over the rough pavement and leaped up on the sidewalk.

“What right?” Simon asked, landing beside me. “Can your memory possibly be that short? I suppose you thought it was very amusing, putting ridiculous ideas in the stable boy's head, bringing his blood to a boil before you tossed him out like so much dirty dishwater to go off on your grand tour.”

I stared at him in disbelief. “Are you suggesting that I owed you something? What, it wasn't enough that you bragged about me to the other stable hands? Was I supposed to remain at your beck and call? Oh, I know! You encouraged the other boys to have a go at me, is that it? Told them how stupid and gullible I was, how willing to let you touch me?”

“What are you saying?” he muttered, his eyes very dark in his suddenly ashen face.

“Ahh, so you didn't know I'd found out! That would explain how you'd have the gall to stand there and call me dishonest!”

“I never said a word to anyone about what happened between us.”

He looked so sincere that, if I hadn't known better, I would have believed him. “You only discredit yourself further by denying it. The kitchen maid overheard you while she was feeding apples to the horses. She told Father all about the boasts you made to the other boys.”

“The kitchen maid? You mean cross-eyed little Margaret O'Leary? Why, she had her sights on me from the minute she arrived at the house.”

I slapped my palm against my forehead. “Thank you so much for sharing that with me!” I cried, unable to keep the hysteria from my voice. “I'm sure I couldn't have rested easy until my list of your conquests was complete!”

He moved a rigid step closer. “I wouldn't have anything to do with her. She was peeved with me for it, but I paid her no mind.”

“I'm not interested in what happened between you and the kitchen maid,” I told him between gritted teeth.

“Well, maybe you should be, if she's the one who accused me.”

I didn't take his point at first, but when it finally hit me, it hit me right between the eyes. Details I'd long forgotten started trickling into my mind: how badly Margaret had wanted to take the apples to the stable herself that night, and how I'd practically had to pry the bucket from her hand. I hadn't wondered about it at the time. Nor had I bothered to hide my own nervous excitement from her.

She was a cunning girl—when she left our employ a year later, she took a silver teapot with her—and must have realized what was happening between Simon and me. Perhaps she had followed me to the stable that night, or perhaps she'd only guessed. Either way, in her jealousy, she might very well have made up the story about Simon's boasting, just to spite us both.

“Sweet Mother of Jesus,” Simon said, raking his hand through his hair. “So that's why your father threw us out. All because of silly Margaret O'Leary.”

“Threw you out?” I gaped at him. “What are you talking about? My father didn't throw you out.”

This time, his expression was one of such absolute, uncontrived astonishment that I couldn't doubt its veracity. I felt a terrible sinking sensation, as if the solid pavement I'd been standing on had just developed a sizable crack. “You left,” I said, “because your mother found a better position.”

Simon had grown very still. “Is that what he told you?”

I didn't answer, paralyzed by the cold brilliance of his eyes.

“And you believed it.”

“My father has never lied to me,” I said, pulling my coat more tightly around me.

“He did if he told you it was our idea. He ordered us out the day after you left, without giving any reason. He wouldn't even write my mother a reference. She couldn't find decent work without one. She worked in a factory on Orchard Street until her eyes gave out, and then she scrubbed floors in the public baths until I could make enough to make ends meet.”

I hadn't asked, when I returned from Europe, what had happened to the stable boy who'd caused me such disgrace; indeed, I don't believe the question could have been dragged out of me by a team of Percherons. My father had informed me nonetheless, in the clipped tone he used for dealing with necessary unpleasantness, that Simon had gone to Boston with his mother, who'd found a more lucrative position there.

I believed my father was a fundamentally honest man. But he was also a devoted father who'd thought his daughter had been sullied by an arrogant stable boy. If he'd been angry enough to send me off to Europe, I realized now, it was possible—even likely—that he'd sent the Shaws packing as well. I didn't know why it hadn't occurred to me before, except that one didn't dismiss a servant lightly, especially a single woman with a half-grown son in tow. Mrs. Shaw had done nothing wrong; I wouldn't have believed my father could treat her so harshly. But the timing, I saw now, was too coincidental. I knew in my heart that what Simon had said must be true. “I didn't know.”

He shook his head in disgust. “Maybe you should have asked.”

He was right. I should have. Instead, I'd avoided him like one of the debased sex fiends in Professor Fowler's book. Given a choice between acute humiliation and the purposeful obliteration of all tender feeling, I'd chosen the latter. The obliteration must have been incomplete, however, for as I looked at his agitated face, memories of our night in the stable raced through me like a rogue freight train. With a violent uprising of my senses, I remembered the rivers he'd traced along my back and breasts, and the intoxicating sweetness of his kisses, and the way his heart had pounded when I pushed up his coarse shirt to press my ear against it. I remembered too how he'd sounded when he spoke my name. Certain. Determined. As if making a promise no one could ever make him break.

It had all been very novel and exciting for an inexperienced young girl like me—but also, I saw now, rather innocent. Certainly, he could have gone much further than he had, could easily have pushed my willing body past whatever puny resistance my mind might have tried to impose. But it was he who had finally buttoned me up and stood me on quivering legs, he who had brushed off the strands of hay and urged me to return to the house before I was missed.

I was swamped by regret. Margaret had lied, Father had lied, but Simon had done nothing wrong. Because of my willingness to believe the worst, something good had been turned into something ugly and hurtful. I wished I could ask for his forgiveness, to explain that my distress at thinking myself deceived by the one person I'd believed cared for me had blinded me to the truth. I wished I could just wave a magic wand that would make the last ten years disappear. But of course, the past could never be undone.

So I asked for the only thing I felt I had a right to. “Will you help Eliza anyway?”

He slowly released his breath.

“It's not her fault. She shouldn't pay the price for my mistakes.”

“You really believe she's innocent?”

“Yes. I do.”

“You've known her less than a week. How can you be so sure?”

I considered reiterating the arguments I had made to Detective Maloney, marshaling logic and fact in Eliza's defense. But in the end, it was neither of these that had persuaded me. “I can't give you any absolute proof,” I said. “It's just…what I feel.”

“What you feel,” he repeated.

I nodded.

He looked out over the street. Though he had changed over the years, I could still see the boy I had known in his profile—in the strong, flushed cheekbones and the determined set of his chin. For a moment, the years fell away. I felt a rush of longing, followed by a painful twist in my gut. Simon Shaw: in one fell swoop, found and lost again.

“All right,” he said flatly, turning back to me. “I'll get her out.”

“You'll what?”

“I'll get her released into house arrest on medical grounds. That's what you wanted, isn't it? To get her out of there?”

I stared at him. “Is that possible?”

“Judge Hoffman's son is running for state assembly. He needs Tammany support, and he has to go through me to get it.” He consulted his pocket watch. “The judge'll be in session all day; I'll have to wait for him to break. Is there someone willing to take responsibility for Mrs. Miner after she's released?”

“There's her mother. They live together over the store.”

“Tell her to be at the prison by three o'clock. I should have the papers for the warden by then. I'll send a man to transport her.”

I nodded in a daze, not quite able to believe what was happening. “Do you really think the judge will agree?”

“He'll agree.” He closed his watch. “But he's going to want to keep it as quiet as possible. I'll do what I can on this end to make sure no reporters get wind of it. I'll have to promise him to post a man in front of her building, to make sure she doesn't leave, and to have a doctor provide updates on her condition. I assume you're willing to take charge of her medical treatment?”

“Yes, of course.”

“You'll want to be there when they release her, to make sure she's in good enough shape to get home.”

“I'll be there.” I hesitated, searching his closed face, brimming with emotions I didn't know how to express. “Simon, I—”

“I'll go talk to Hoffman's clerk, then,” he said, cutting me off, “and find out when the judge will be free.” Pulling up the collar of his coat, he turned his back on me and started toward the courthouse.

• • •

I continued on toward Attorney Harlan's office, which was just a few blocks south on Broadway. I was now more determined than ever to engage the lawyer's services, even if I had to sell some of the stock Grandfather had left me to pay for them. Imagining Eliza out of jail and Attorney Harlan working on her defense, I could feel something almost like optimism stir inside me.

When I arrived at Harlan & Bidwell's bustling office, however, I was advised that Attorney Harlan had been detained in court. The receptionist invited me to wait, but as he had no idea what time the attorney would be back, I arranged instead to return at four o'clock, after Eliza's release.

On my way to the Italian restaurant the receptionist had suggested for lunch, I stopped at a Western Union office to send a telegraph to Dr. Huntington in Hopewell Junction. In blunt telegraphic phrasing, I informed him that Dr. Hauptfuhrer had been murdered; that his former patient Elizabeth Miner had been charged with the crime and was being held under house arrest; and that as Elizabeth's current physician, I urgently needed to know if she was suffering from Huntington's chorea. I provided my home telephone number and address for his reply. My next stop was a corner telephone booth, where I called Mrs. Braun at the shop to tell her that Eliza was going to be temporarily released. She fretted with characteristic gloom that the release would only falsely raise her daughter's hopes, but agreed to close up early so that she could be at the prison by three.