Pinkerton's Sister (23 page)

Later still – she could not remember the chronology of her reasoning, the journey that was as much about discovering about herself as discovering about Annie – she knew that Annie would never have been anywhere near The House of the Magdalenes, Pettifar’s Orphanage, or the North River Lunatic Asylum. She had found no clues, not even the beginnings of a trail. She was not really a Pinkerton, she felt, she was unworthy of possessing the same name as the celebrated firm of detectives. The place in which she should have looked first – over a year ago – was not on Hudson Heights.

She should have gone to the Morgue.

It was modeled on the Morgue in Paris, where Count Fosco’s body had been placed in
The Woman in White
after his murder. Crowds pressed forward to view the dead, just as they pushed into Bedlam to view the insane. It was one of the sights to see, shivering with delicious dread.

She had visualized the Morgue in
The Woman in White
as the one in Bellevue Hospital at the foot of 26th Street, a New York City building, not the one in Paris, and imagined that all the bodies within were those of people who had drowned. This might have been because of its position beside the East River, or because of memories of the opening chapter of
Our Mutual Friend
, Lizzie Hexam – with an intense look of horror on her face – and her father rowing upon the River Thames, searching for corpses. She could see the engraving – not one by George Cruikshank or by Phiz, but by Marcus Stone (few knew this name) – clearly in front of her. The father and daughter seemed to be avoiding looking each other in the face. The girl was rowing, glancing back over her shoulder, and the bearded father – clutching the sides of the boat – was gazing down into the dark water, staring as intently as if seeking for a particular face. Marcus Stone had also illustrated
The Uncommercial Traveller
, and the first illustration in the book, the one opposite the title-page was of a woman and a little girl leaving the Paris Morgue. Count Fosco had been drawn up out of the Seine, though he had been stabbed through the heart, not drowned.

(The voice whispered, as if sharing a loving, intimate confidence, and spoke the words it had spoken more than once before. It spoke in exactly the same way as it had done previously, as if no variation were permitted, all the “s” sounds pronounced with a hissing noise. It was a heavily accented, foreign voice, and the English was not quite correct.

(“There is a little light glimmering yonder – it is light of ugly little building – and inside are eight marble slabs – all in a row. It is called the Morgue, and be careful, oh, my Trilby …”)

Cold water trickled over the dead faces, and over the corpses, delaying the beginnings of decay.

(“Yes, there you will lie, fast asleep. And all day long and all night long the water shall trickle, trickle, trickle …”

(
Treacle, treacle, treacle
: this was the way that Svengali pronounced it, as if a thin golden thread of molasses was shimmering down to coat the corpses, a sweetness to lure ants and wasps, a swarming insect life to devour the glistening dead.

(“… from your beautiful white face to your beautiful white feet till they turn green …”)

Too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia.

Annie’s clothes would have hung above her to aid identification, in the drip-drip hollowness of the ill-lit room where the sheet-shrouded bodies were on display for twenty-four or forty-eight hours.

(“… and above your head shall hang your damp, muddy, draggled rags – Drip, drip, drip!”

(
Dreep, dreep, dreep.
It was like the repeated susurration of something at twilight, something drawn out by dampness and darkness.)

Unidentified bodies were then buried in a potter’s field (it was white with tumbled stacks of plates, fanned out like hands of playing cards) – she imagined a mist-surrounded island somewhere in the Harbor, accessible only by boat, like a Venetian island of the dead – but their clothes and possessions were carefully stored away, just as Mama had kept Annie’s in a trunk in a storeroom.

Sometimes …

Sometimes – if students needed one – the unclaimed bodies of the unknown dead were used for dissection, though members of the public were not offered the opportunity to line up to watch this taking place. Some would have offered ready money, insisting on good seats, close up, quite prepared to risk the potential hazard of spurting blood in order to have an uninterrupted view of the gleaming knives making their incisions. If they were near enough they would be able to
hear
the sound the knives made, a multi-sensual treat. Eager and alert as if in a theatre, all keyed up for the entrance of a favorite performer, they’d press their carefully focused opera glasses to their eyes, and their jaws would rotate as they chewed on perfumed cachous or violet creams. They’d go very still during the best bits, and even their jaws would pause. They wouldn’t want their opera glasses to wobble. Sometimes Alice – if she was tired and lost concentration – confused Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with Burke and Hare, the murderers who sold the bodies of their victims to Robert Knox’s school of anatomy. Existing in the same moment of time, companionably facing each other across a bed, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde leaned over an unconscious woman, her face hidden by the pillow they had placed upon it to smother her. They pressed down, gently, firmly, seemingly making her comfortable, each looking into the face of the other, not at the woman. “Sleep,
ma mignonne
, sleep,” Mr. Hyde murmured, sounding as if he was speaking to Dr. Jekyll, and not to the woman. Her limbs twitched feebly, little life left in her with which to fight, her clawed hands reaching up toward their faces, but not reaching them. Annie had been wearing her best clothes when she had gone, as well as her “jules.” Alice would recognize them, tarnished, water-stained like something wept over.

(“Sleep,
ma mignonne
, sleep. Do you hear me, Trilby? Trilby, do you hear me?”

(This was what Svengali had said, years later – Mrs. Albert Comstock in the theatre, writhing with wholly enjoyable revulsion – and she had thought of her search for Annie when she was a little girl, when they were both little girls.)

Papa had known that Annie was only a child. That was why he had been able to frighten her so easily, to make her do what he wanted.

(“Then you will do as I bid you – you will rise. You will go into the dining room and get your cloak, you will wait there till I call for you …”)

Annie did as he bade her.

She rose.

She went into the dining room and got her cloak.

She waited there until he called for her.

It was probably why …

(“I will it!”)

It was probably why – the idea was a relatively recent one – he had been attracted to her in the first place. She wasn’t entirely clear about this, and worried away at the idea from different angles, as if trying to untangle a Gordion knot of a problem, an Ariadne who had lost the means of guiding Theseus away from the monster at the heart of the labyrinth. Perhaps Alice sometimes thought these things because she wished – because she
needed
– to think bad things about her father, needed to believe him capable of such badness.

She had helped Mama clear Annie’s room – it hadn’t taken long – when it became clear that she was not coming back, and they were preparing to hire a new maid. She was hoping she might find a hidden message, something that only she would understand, telling her where Annie had gone to, and why she had gone. Papa had made them check through the house to make sure that nothing was missing. He’d left the door of his study open that morning, and Alice had seen him kneeling down, pulling out the drawers in his desk, peering into the dark spaces at the back.

“Check the cutlery!” he’d shouted at one point, as if Annie had walked out laden down with their knives, forks, and spoons, and they’d be reduced to eating with their hands. He’d probably prefer that.

Hidden in Annie’s room, under her bed – next to Reuben’s letters, stored away with the chocolate in the Baby Quieter Wheel Toy box – there was Annie’s metal clockwork bank, a Dancing Bear Bank, its paint peeled and faded. It represented a country house, three stories high with a mansard window, rather like one of the wings of the North River Lunatic Asylum deprived of its pillars. It had the look of something precious preserved from childhood, not so long ago for Annie, but it seemed to carry the weight of years. On one side – again like the asylum – was a high wall. The oversized organ grinder – his head reached the second-floor windows – stood on the lawn in front, next to his bear. Annie had once demonstrated to Alice how it worked. She had wound up the mechanism, like someone preparing a music box (the ballerina revolved and revolved to the tinkly rhythm,
ker-plunk
,
ker-plunk
), dropped a cent into the slot on the top of the organ, and pushed a knob to one side. The organ grinder’s arm had gone around, and the bear danced to a little Italian tune, something from an opera, as the coin slid sideways into the interior of the house.

“They have tied me to a stake; I cannot fly,/But bear-like I must fight the course,” Alice had said. This was what Macbeth had said, just before he met he that was not born of woman. She was demonstrating her knowledge of Shakespeare at every opportunity, and proving quite a trial to her family. Alice had brought cents to her especially, to see it do it again, but Annie wouldn’t take them.

Alice had taken out a cent then, sitting on the floor beside the bed as Mama folded the two dresses, and copied what Annie had done. She watched the bear dancing, and listened to the music.

“Have you checked your dressing-table drawers?” Papa shouted to them from the hall.

“Yes, Lincoln,” Mama said, though Alice knew that she hadn’t. She smiled at Mama, who made a hush-hush gesture, her finger pressed to her lips.

“
La donna è mobile
.”

That was the tune the organ grinder was playing, as the clockwork whirred, the arm turned, and the bear danced. Mama hummed along with it. Alice had heard her playing it on the piano, sometimes singing if she thought there was no one there to hear her. Alice had heard her voice coming up through the chimney.

Women were fickle, like feathers flying in a wind.

There was no money in the bank, only the cent that Alice had just inserted, looking rather small and solitary, but there were various crumpled tickets, and some bright little medals made out of thin-hammered tin, awards for fragile bravery.

One of the tickets was for something called “The House of Dreams,” sounding like some brightly illuminated attraction on the Bowery or in sight of a crowded boardwalk. She had held it in her hand, as if it were a visiting card from a long-awaited visitor, brought in on a tray by a servant. How that name would have appealed to Annie. She had read her an advertisement for a company that offered steamer excursions to Rockaway and Coney Island. These journeys were not as exotic as those made by Grandpapa’s steamship company – the Occidental & Eastern Shipping Company crisscrossed the world, the routes marked in red like highways that only
their
ships could travel – but the descriptions seemed to fulfil Annie’s most extravagant dreams of indulgence.

“The boats are provided with every luxury,” Alice had read, “and are famous for their excellent table.”

“‘Every luxury,’” Annie had repeated, savoring the possibilities, her eyes glowing. “‘Excellent table.’“

They held out possibilities not offered by the streetcars, an aura of elegance and sophistication. She had held herself upright, imagining herself gliding like a princess through glittering high-society scenes as her boat steamed down the Hudson, the gleam of silver and crystal on white linen, flickering candles, multi-colored rockets exploding in a night sky. The menus were printed in ornate script on thick cream paper, and she would magically be able to read what it was they offered.

“I shall begin with the Quail Eggs
en Croustade
,” she would announce regally, her jules – quotation marks no longer required – sparkling.

These white-gloved hands would not be fluttering in the air as she sang an amusing darkie song, prod-proddingly poked by Mrs. Albert Comstock’s parasol to keep her in time.

It was no wonder that she had been unable to resist the attraction of
ELEGANT ROOMS
.

She found Annie’s hidden messages – if that was what they were – when she returned from an entire cold day of circling the North River Lunatic Asylum, listening at the silent stone. Some people seemed to need to return to a source of comfort, curled up on their side in bed clutching a much-loved favorite toy. She imagined Annie, rustlingly surrounded by Reuben’s letters and unable to read them, dropping the same cent – over and over – into her Dancing Bear Bank, in order to hear – over and over – that women were fickle, ever-changing, never constant, like feathers flying in a wind, like stars falling from the sky. She would embrace its sharp edges, warming the cold metal against her breast, as if it were all she had in the world to hold against her.

Alice didn’t embrace her playthings. She sought no source of comfort, but seemed – instead – to seek out where discomfort could be found, and this was why – that day – she had gone in search of
Hard Cash
, to complete the fourth reading she had started a year earlier, to begin a fifth reading. All day she had been wandering around the outside of a madhouse, and now she wanted to be trapped inside one again in the Charles Reade novel, feeling the walls closing in, as if it were “The Pit and the Pendulum.”

She had last been reading the novel on the day that Annie had disappeared, and then – before they had realized that Annie was not coming back – Charlotte had called with her mother and thrust
The Bride of Lammermoor
eagerly into her hand.

“There’s an Alice in it! Another one for The Alice Collection!” she had said, and Alice had started to read this instead.