Breath and Bones (49 page)

“There you are!” In his relief, he hardly registered her nudity or her slow covering of it with her hands. But now that he saw her, smelled the faint sharp smell of her soap, Edouard's reason for being in this room seemed absurd. Of course he was not alone; he was surrounded by people. And those people not only served him but depended on him to be a model of comportment as well. “There is something wrong with the bells,” he said lamely, backing away. “Have them fixed in the morning.”

In his confusion, Edouard almost failed to notice that Ancient Jade's washbasin was teetering, for she had shoved something beneath it. But, painfully aware as he was of the traces other people left in his world, he did see it just as he backed over the threshold.

“Be careful,” he said, “that basin is about to fall.”

The maid twitched; the basin fell and shattered. Edouard saw the object that had destabilized it.

A book in a yellow wrapper.

Even Edouard knew what that particular shade on a wrapper meant: a Dime Novel, the cheapest and most popular type of literature, chronicle of sensational violence and too-yielding despair. Its cover was gaudy, its title dripping purple ink. He picked it up.

“
Rubble on the Rails
,” he read out loud, in a tone so forbidding that Ancient Jade nearly toppled over in fear. “
Being the True Story of the ‘Dynamite Gang,'
by Hermes, Western correspondent. My word, woman, what you have been reading!”

For all her alarm, and for all her secrecy, a tiny part of Ancient Jade took umbrage that Versailles hadn't noticed what to her was most important: She was reading English—not quickly, but she was reading it. She was no ordinary hundred-men's-wife; she was one who could read.

She watched as Edouard pulled the book closer to his face, though he did not need to do that to confirm his eyes' first evidence. In the year that had brought
The Bostonians
,
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
, and
The Evil Genius
,
this
execrable work—a slim hundred pages long—was illustrated with a picture that gave no doubt as to the story's contents: lively youths in newsboy caps, a giant locomotive, a décolletée heroine whose free-flowing hair bled into the smoke of a billowing explosion. Beneath her likeness was printed a legend, “The gallant Robber Baroness.” And her hair was bright flame red.

Surely she could not be . . . but then Edouard was just as sure that she was. Ursula Summerfield Goodhouse had come to him a Wanted woman, after all.

Standing there in the maid's bedroom, Edouard read the first page, and the next. He stalked away to his office with his face still buried in the book.

Much to its author's gratification,
Rubble on the Rails
had been circulating through the world for several weeks. When it arrived in Hygeia Springs, it had been an instant sensation, no less than in Saint Louis or San Francisco; the Good Life Mercantile sold all five copies in a day and ordered more, only to find the publisher was out of stock. The precious volumes passed from hand to hand throughout the village, and each set of yellow covers acquired a mosaic of marks and stains—cooking splatters, sprays of blood, fingerprints; from the laboratory of Dr. Rideaux, mortician, a wash of arsenic so dark and final as to make the title unreadable.

Precious Flower had lifted a copy out of Miss Pym's pocket, and she and the singsong sisters practiced their English with it. But this activity they, like Miss Pym, kept secret from their employer; and in this they conspired
with the town at large. Everyone knew that with his notions of mental hygiene and tranquility, Edouard Versailles would disapprove. Thus he had remained unaware of the book's existence, even as Miss Pym interrogated the staff about her lost volume and Dr. Beachly himself locked his door and cracked a set of yellow covers.

Famke was equally ignorant. In the past months, she had had far too much to do with her
Hygeia
to think about matters literary.

Now
Rubble on the Rails
utterly transfixed Edouard Versailles. The words of this Hermes had a ring of certain truth, as if the man had written so much and so often of strange happenings as to be almost cold to them now. Edouard read the entire ignoble work that night, and in its pages his hypothesis was tested and proved: The flame-haired baroness with the mysterious accent and the crippling cough, the siren called, with a Keatsian flourish, the Belle Dame sans Merci—this could be none other than his Ophelia. And, oh! the things she had done! The scheming, the deceptions—the men beguiled by butterfly eyes while her team of rebels laid their dynamite, the hotels raided for food and valuables, the brothels paid to provide refuge. In a few chapters, the Belle Dame even dressed as a man, the better to snare her victims.

Edouard knew this was no time to act in haste. He spent some hours considering what he should do and reread John Keats's poem:

She took me to her elfin grot
,

And there she wept, and sigh'd full sore
,

And there I shut her wild wild eyes

With kisses four
.

How many men had seen those cerulean eyes droop shut? How many had made her sigh—without the medical benefits of galvanic treatment?

He opened Famke's fat file of test results and other documents and reviewed them all thoroughly, including the contents of the pocket that had been found beneath her skirts: some newspaper clippings about artists; a few lucifer matches naked of phosphorous; a scrap of paper that was a great smudge on one side and, on the other, a mysterious scrawl, almost equally blurred. Edouard could make out only four words there: “love,” “world,” and “no crime.” This looked to him like absolute proof, no doubt
some communiqué from the Rubblers. He was sure they instructed Famke to feign love, to make love, and in the eyes of the world commit no crime . . . And all those articles about art were probably the research she had done in order to convince him she came from a family of painters—for of course, he realized now, Albert Castle and her relationship to him had been a mere fiction. Her clumsiness with the paintbrush surely demonstrated that.

Amid all these horrors, Edouard felt curiously numb. He picked up the long red curl that had been wound among the pocket papers and sniffed it. It smelled to him of medicine, chemical and bitter, and it shed shorter, coarser locks of brown and gold and black, the provenance of which he did not wish to contemplate—it would seem the Robber Baroness scalped her victims like a savage. He gazed long at the repaired handbill, also yellow, that marked her out as Wanted.

In the small hours of the morning, he took a dropperful of laudanum that calmed his hands, and he wrote a letter that covered both sides of the page; this he tore to shreds. He took another page and wrote a few choice, brief sentences. He blotted the sheet haphazardly, folded it into an envelope marked “Harmsway Telegraph,” and put on his coat, for he was strangely frozen inside. Under a fading moon, he saddled his huge black horse and rode down to the Hygiene post office, where he found the postmaster asleep. The man woke easily enough when he realized who was there, and Edouard directed him to take the message and make sure, personally, that the words left Harmsway that morning.

“You may take my horse,” he added, and to the postmaster that was almost the most terrifying part of the order. No one but Versailles ever rode the noble black horses. The man left immediately, without even pausing to urinate.

The laudanum surged through Edouard's veins, making his heart weary and slow. He forced himself to trudge back up the hill. He regretted only that he had not been able to deliver the telegram himself; once again, he had too much to do to go abroad. The hospital. The maidservant. Famke herself to deal with—though she, at least, would be staying here some days longer; and now she would be truly his prisoner rather than his patient.

He went upstairs to lock Famke's door, then woke Ancient Jade again
and told her to bring warm milk to his office. They had a brief interview in front of the jars of bobbing fetuses and limbs.

“You have aroused my severest displeasure,” he said as sternly as he could manage in his weariness.

Astoundingly, she spoke up against him. “Is my book,” she said. “My pleasure to read. You give back to me.”

Edouard's temper flared. “No one under my roof will waste time on such trash!” he snapped. “If you want a good book of poems—”

“No poem,” she said stubbornly. “
My
book.”

Suddenly he remembered her standing naked before him, and he did not remember her covering herself; in his mind she stood on display for him as she had done for countless other men, as the red-haired baroness did on the cover of
Rubble on the Rails
. “My house,” he said. “And there is no further place for you in it.”

Ancient Jade stared at him with glittering button-brown eyes, as if she were putting some Asian curse on him; but she hobbled away without a word.

After she left, Edouard felt exhausted. He drank the last dregs of the milk, which in his distress tasted bitter as opium, and the room swam before him. All at once that faded armchair looked the most comfortable seat in the world, and he sank into it as an eagle might sink into its nest after a long flight.

For some hours, Edouard slept.

John [Chinaman] is inevitable. He has discovered America, and finds it a good country. But it is ours, and not his, to determine whether he shall be a curse or a blessing to us. If we treat him as Christianity teaches that we ought to treat our fellow-men; if we do unto him as we would that others should do to us; if we see that he is instructed in that which we believe to be right, he may become a useful part of us. Teachable he certainly is; a far more civilized being—or rather, a far less savage creature—than many we get from Christian Great Britain
.

C
HARLES
N
ORDHOFF
,
C
ALIFORNIA
: F
OR
H
EALTH
, P
LEASURE, AND
R
ESIDENCE

As Ancient Jade packed her few belongings into a shawl, the singsong sisters spoke their mother tongue together for what could well be the last time. Under normal conditions they used only English with each other; their English was good, far better than they let anyone know, and they honed it like a weapon. After having served American businessmen in various ways, they thought someday they might open an American business of their own; but they were so accustomed to invisibility that for now they were keeping their competence, like their aspiration, to themselves. From five years' wages, each had saved nearly fifty dollars toward this enterprise. Tonight, Ancient Jade's banishment confirmed their sense that the safest course was secrecy. They rehearsed the facts to themselves and felt better, because understanding was a kind of mastery.

“For reading a book, he dismisses you,” said Precious Flower. “I would like to know how this is just.”

“He who is so proud of saving you,” said Life's Importance.

Ancient Jade explained, “He thinks Chinese prostitutes make good maids. Chinese readers are criminals.”

“He made the red-haired woman read poems,” Precious Flower observed—the three of them said Famke's name aloud no more often than they said Edouard's. “She did not want to.”

“She wanted to paint,” said Life's Importance, “and that was a crime too.”

“Especially what she painted,” Ancient Jade ended. “Hairy American lady.”

“
Eight bits fuckee
,” Precious Flower whispered in English.

“But he never got a chance to fuck her,” Ancient Jade said, and the three of them indulged in a mirthless giggle that might have sounded, from far away, like the glee of carefree young girls.

When Edouard woke, the house was strangely quiet; even quieter than he liked it. It was delightful. Just as good, the sun stood high in the sky, filtering through the glass and the palm leaves in the way that he loved. He smiled. He stood up and stretched, feeling deeply refreshed despite the crick in his neck and the ache that had spread from his chest now to his spine. He wondered for a moment why he had fallen asleep where he did. Then his eye fell on the lurid yellow cover of
Rubble on the Rails
and memory came flooding back—the perfidy revealed in those worn pages, the horrible deeds that must be known now to the entire world.