The Virgin Cure (30 page)

Her room seemed fine to me. There were beautiful things all around—a basket of apples, a shadow box that held a collection of striped, spiralled seashells, a white cambric nightdress draped over a chair. There were books scattered everywhere, lined up on the shelves and on the desk, and still more of them piled in tall, crooked stacks.

She had a collection of morbid drawings pinned to the wall beside her bed—picture after picture of arms and legs, bodies and faces, made to look as if a person’s flesh had been cut open for all to see. Jars of pickled creatures sat here and there on the mantel and between her books. Bloated frogs and twisted snakes peered out at me through murky glass, their eyes glowing, green, yellow and red.

“Would you like something to eat?” she asked, reaching high on a shelf for a tin of biscuits.

“Yes, please,” I answered. I hadn’t had anything to eat that day except the apple she’d given me.

As her hand went towards the box, I caught sight of a rat sitting next to it. I was about to scream when Dr. Sadie grabbed hold of the thing by its tail and set it aside. It stayed stiff and silent in her hand, its glass eyes twinkling. Opening the biscuit tin, Dr. Sadie offered me first pick.

“Have as many as you like,” she added.

As I took a handful of biscuits, I suddenly noticed the skeleton hanging from a hook in the corner of the room. Held together with wire, it wavered ever so slightly whenever Dr. Sadie passed near it. I could have sworn it was staring at me from where its eyes should have been.

When she caught me looking at it, she said, “Oh, don’t mind her, that’s just Miss Jewett.” There was a hint of pride in her voice, almost as if she’d known the girl and turned her to bone herself.

“Mr. Dink gave her to me as payment for coming to the rescue of a young lady who was performing in a production at his Palace of Illusions,” she explained. “The girl had lost her voice and it was up to me to get it back for her. Saltwater rinses along with lemon and honey were the first order of business.”

“Who was it?” I asked, far more interested in discovering the identity of the actress than in Dr. Sadie’s remedy for croup.

“Oh, I don’t think I should divulge her name,” Dr. Sadie said, shaking her head. “Mr. Dink is very discreet when it comes to his players and his business.” To make up for her disappointing me, Dr. Sadie playfully draped one of the skeleton’s arms around her shoulder and then rattled the entire thing by the ribs. “Poor Miss Jewett,” she sighed. She put her head on the skeleton’s shoulder, adding, “You’re the best friend I’ve ever had … I never have to cook for you, and you never complain about a thing, not even the weather.” She grinned at me and beckoned me towards her. “You can take a closer look at her if you like, she won’t bite.”

In 1865 a fire broke out at the New York Medical College on Fourteenth Street. Housed therein was a vast collection of medical oddities, having once belonged to Dr. Valentine Mott (a late professor in the College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York). Numbering over one thousand items, nearly everything was lost. What remained of Dr. Mott’s collection was shortly thereafter given to the doctor’s widow. A few, select items were donated to a Bowery museum that specialized in anatomical specimens.

There was a nasty hole in the side of Miss Jewett’s skull, yet her mouth was open in a wide, toothy grin. I reached out and wrapped my fingers around one of the long bones of her arm. It felt smooth in the palm of my hand. I could see that someone had carved words along the length of it and darkened them in with ink.
As you are now, I once was. As I am now, so you shall be
. I let go of the bone and stared at the skeleton, afraid she might set her ghostly sights on me.

“You can sleep here tonight if you like,” Dr. Sadie said, bringing out an extra pillow from a blanket chest and fluffing it into shape. “Miss Everett knows you’re safe here.”

“Thank you,” I said, grateful not to have to walk back to the house in such terrible weather. Going to the window I watched the raindrops and listened to them tapping at the pane. I followed a single drop with my finger as it nagged down the glass.

“Did you meet Mr. Dink through Miss Everett?” I asked.

“No,” Dr. Sadie said. “It was the other way around. I’ve known Mr. Dink for years.”

“Really?”

“Oh yes, I’ve been seeing to his performers’ health for quite some time.”

I tried to imagine Dr. Sadie attempting to look inside the mouth of the World’s Tallest Illusionist.
That
, I thought,
would be a sight worth seeing
.

“Why did you want me to come with you today?” I asked.

There may not be any signs of the disease when you first encounter a gentleman with syphilis.

It tends to go into hiding for long periods of time. Men think they’re safe, when they’re not.

If a gentleman appears to have a grey-blue complexion, suffers from sore gums and excess saliva, or bears a scent akin to fried potatoes – you can be sure he’s taking mercury to try to hold it back.

When the mercury fails, many men get desperate. Some turn to virgins thinking that their innocence holds a cure.

Slumping into a chair next to the bed, she put her feet up on a pile of books. The shadows of the room made her seem less a lady and more a girl. Her voice sounded different too, softer and more relaxed.

“I needed to know that you were going to be all right, now that your mother is gone.”

“Wouldn’t it have been easier to ask?” I wondered out loud, still confused.

“Words are an unreliable way to measure the heart,” she said. “I’m more inclined to trust what I observe rather than what someone tells me.”

“Miss Tully will die soon, won’t she.”

Meeting my eyes, Dr. Sadie said, “Yes, Moth. She will.”

“What’s the matter with her?”

“She’s got an illness with no remedy.”

She told me that Miss Tully had caught one of the meanest things a person could get. The English blamed it on the French, the French blamed it on the Italians, the Dutch blamed the Spanish. No one was sure why it did what it did, but it came like a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and just when you thought it was gone, it would turn up again, uglier than ever. After the rash faded, hair loss, muscle aches, and a pronounced limp were sure to follow. There was even a chance your nose might fall right off your face. If it didn’t kill you sooner rather than later, it was quite possible you’d go mad from it. It was so awful it had a whole handful of names—the Grandgore, the Lues, the Great Pox, Cupid’s disease.

Dr. Sadie had been chasing after it for quite a while and the one thing she knew for certain was that dishonesty spread it worst of all. Just like any other lie, once you’d passed it around, you couldn’t take it back. It didn’t care if you were a baby or a whore. There was no cure.

Sickness often took a terrible toll on the people of Chrystie Street. Mothers worried over their children with every new wave of typhus or cholera that descended on the slums. In the swelter of summer, whitewashed coffins got stacked tens high and tens across in the back of the gravedigger’s wagon, mothers keening after it as it rolled away.

I wished I could forget ever meeting Miss Tully, and every sobbing mother I’d ever seen. I wished my father had come back to Mama and me, bringing happiness instead of sorrow to our door. I wished it was easy to do all that Miss Everett asked of me, and that Dr. Sadie’s kindness would just disappear and she’d leave me to my fate. I got up and wandered over to the window. Pressing my nose to the pane, I tried to see down the street to Miss Keteltas’ house, but it was impossible to make it out in the darkness and rain.

November 10, 1871.

Yesterday began with Miss Everett complaining that Moth (or Ada as she calls her) had been acting sullen and uncooperative. She said she was at her wits end over how to shake the girl from it.

“Isn’t there something you can give her to even out her temperament?” she asked.

Loathe to blindly prescribe the type of cure she was suggesting, I asked if she’d tried talking to the child to get to the heart of the matter.

“It’s beyond that,” she said, quick to dismiss me.

“She’s too young for this,” I argued (once again.)

“Clearly the girl knows her own mind.”

In the end, I suggested I take Moth with me on my rounds for the day to see if I could do her any good. Much to my surprise, Emma agreed to it. “She’s all yours,” she said, leaving Moth to my care.

I took her to see Katherine Tully.

I thought it an idea with small risk, and perhaps great rewards. I’d hoped that introducing her to Miss Tully might sway her thinking. It was wrong of me not to be honest and tell her the whole of Katherine’s story, but I was desperate to have her turn away from Emma and turn to me, instead.

As the day went on, I was touched by the tenderness she showed my patients and her willingness to help. There were moments of true confidence between us, I’m sure of it, but sadly, it seems, they weren’t enough. Although she spent the night curled up and sleeping in my bed, she was all too eager to leave the next morning. She ran from me when we got to the house, straight up the stairs without saying goodbye.

It seems all I’ve done is remind myself of the mistakes I made in the past. Perhaps I’m not meant to take risks after all.

S.F.

May 5, 1870

Three weeks after getting Katherine Tully out of Miss Everett’s and into a spot at a refuge house, she came to my door, begging to be let in.

She’d been seduced against her will.

The man had first approached her a fortnight before as she was walking home for the evening. He strolled with her on three occasions, each time handing her a few coins at their goodbye and then making her swear she would keep his kindness a secret between them.