CHAPTER

27

We stepped off the train in Grand Central Depot to a cacophony of noise and activity. Porters hurried along the platform, removing baggage and loading it on wheeled carts. Newspaper boys shouted the latest news. A stationmaster called, “All aboard” for the next train. Laughter, voices raised in exuberant greetings, tearful good-byes, the faint scent of brewed coffee, light streaming through the windows set high in the cavernous main room: it washed over me, surrounded me, closed in on me, discombobulated me. It was familiar and foreign all at once. I needed to get outside, fresh air. Space.

Kindle grasped my elbow and propelled me through the mass of people. After a week of pretending to be clergy, we’d become used to the greetings and stares our disguises elicited. Kindle got more double takes than I did. Children stared at him wide-eyed; women would quickly avert their eyes but continued to sneak glances. Men nodded at him and some shook his hand, assuming he’d been injured in the war. I could tell the attention irritated him.

We stepped out of the station and queued up for a taxi. It was midafternoon, but the tall buildings blocked the sun, turning the city to an early twilight. I covered my mouth and coughed against the smell of trash and human waste. People jostled against one another with nary an apology or acknowledgment, too intent on hurrying to their destination. We waited in line in silence and within ten minutes were loaded into a hansom cab.

The driver opened the trapdoor on the roof and said, “Where to?”

I gave him an address before Kindle could speak. The driver closed the trap and flicked his whip against the palomino’s rear. It jostled forward and set off at a brisk trot.

“I want to see my house,” I said, by way of explanation.

Kindle nodded and took my hand, hiding our affection beneath my skirt. For more than a week, we’d played the role of a priest and nun to the hilt, never touching, rarely looking each other in the eye, blessing people who asked for it. Kindle’d had to think fast when a man asked him to hear a confession in Chicago. As we drew nearer New York, my anxiety and my doubts increased. I longed for Kindle’s comforting embrace, but the most I could wish for was a meaningful glance and the brush of his fingers against mine during the rare moments we were alone. I pressed my shoulder against his, using the small bench in the hansom cab as an excuse to feel his warmth. He leaned against me and squeezed my hand.

“Where are we going to stay?” I asked.

“Pope recommended a small hotel west of Central Park.”

“I cannot wait to shed these clothes.”

“I can’t wait for you to shed them, either. You look more and more like my sister.”

We’d avoided Saint Louis in case the Pinkertons were watching the orphanage, but I longed to see Mary and Sophia. Especially Sophia. According to Kindle, she was thriving as a junior teacher at the school, teaching the younger girls the midwifing and medical skills I had taught her.

The hansom cab wove through the traffic. “There are so many people. And so much noise.” I looked up. “And no sky to speak of.”

“Once we get your name cleared, we can go wherever you like,” Kindle said.

“Where do you want to go?”

Kindle’s expression softened and he squeezed my hand. “Wherever you are.”

I didn’t care who saw, or what the cabdriver would think if he saw; I reached up and touched Kindle’s beard. “When this is over, will you shave your beard for good?”

“I thought you liked it.”

“I waver. Today, I want to see your whole face.”

His grin faded. “The face of the man you fell in love with is gone.”

I shook my head and touched his eye patch gently. “No, it’s not.”

The cab turned and slowed down. I dropped my hand and stared at the street where I grew up, played with friends, walked a thousand times with my father. We passed the Smiths’, Reynoldses’, Jenningses’, and Williamsons’ brownstones, each unchanged. My eyes were riveted to Number 17, the eight steps to the green front door, the window where I would read Gothic novels in my youth and medical tomes in my young adulthood. The house was dark, the windows grimy. A poster was glued to the bay window, announcing an auction of the house and its contents in a week’s time. I gripped Kindle’s hand tightly as the cab continued to the end of the street and stopped.

“Will you pull over here and wait for us?” I asked, motioning to a spot around the corner.

He turned the cab and parked. Kindle helped me out. “We’re leaving our bags,” he said. “I’ve taken down your number and will find you if you leave.”

“It’s your dime, Father.”

Kindle looked taken aback. “Of course. Right.”

I led Kindle down the alley behind my house. “You forgot you’re wearing the collar, didn’t you?”

Kindle nodded. “The one benefit to being a priest is no one is brave enough to cheat you.”

I stopped at the sight of the rear of the house. Boards covered the kitchen windows. We descended stairs covered in broken glass to the back entrance. The door was surprisingly whole.

“Why worry with the door when you can break a window?” Kindle said.

Beneath the window I jiggled a loose stone until it came free, reached into the void, removed a skeleton key, and replaced the stone. “My father was forever losing his key. After he died, we left it in case we ever lost ours.” The lock resisted at the quarter turn, as it had done for thirty years, before releasing. Emotion at the familiarity of it welled in my throat. I opened the door and walked in.

The kitchen was in ruins. Broken crockery littered the floor. Maureen’s worktable had been overturned, kitchen chairs broken and splintered. The icebox door stood open. The whole room was covered in what I thought was dust but realized was flour. A rat scurried past, creating a new trail amid the dozens of older, uneven trails woven in, around, and over the trash. I walked through the butler’s pantry, saw the open tin that had held the extra household money Maureen squirreled away in case of emergency, the money she’d taken and hidden at the bottom of a basket of produce when she left the house the last time.

There had been little of value in Maureen’s room, but what there had been was gone. The quilt she hand-sewed. The crucifix hanging on the wall above her bed. A small sewing kit my father gave her one Christmas. Clothes hung haphazardly from hangers, not nice enough to be stolen. I ran my finger through the thick layer of dust and rubbed it against the pad of my thumb. Kindle watched me from the doorway. “Maureen would be horrified.”

He stepped aside to let me by and followed me up the stairs to the main hall, which looked undisturbed. The furniture was too heavy to be portable. I pushed open the door of the library with trepidation. I gasped at the sight of the empty shelves and books scattered all over the floor. A few were stacked around the room and on top of the desk as if someone had tried to clean up, a tiny bit of order in the chaos left from the looters. The curtains covering the bay window had been pulled down and the paisley cushion I’d curled up on to read was faded with dust. The medical tome I’d left open and facedown on the window seat was tented on the floor, the pages bent and deformed. I picked it up, closed it, and placed it on the seat. A shaft of weak light filtered through the dirty windows, illuminating the cloud of dust floating around us. I ran my fingers over the threadbare cushion corner I’d absently fiddled with through the years and wondered at how something so comfortable and consistent in my life, a touchstone even, now looked forlorn and shabby. I turned from the room and walked upstairs.

The bedrooms on the third floor hadn’t been disturbed. Maybe the looters had been run off before making it this far. Maybe they’d been discouraged by the lack of valuables in the other parts of the house.

“Genteel poverty has its benefits,” I said.

Kindle squeezed my shoulder. “The cab is waiting.”

I shrugged his hand away and stepped into my room. “I’ll be there in a minute.”

The landing creaked with Kindle’s retreating tread.

I opened my wardrobe. There, undisturbed and covered with dust, were the clothes I’d left behind. I lifted out a deep purple dress and swallowed the sudden lump in my throat. I was at the dressmaker’s, full of excitement, the promise of a successful future spread before me like a feast. I was graduating from medical school and wanted a dress to mark the occasion. Deep purple to honor the mourning the country was still in, thin ruffles framing the buttons down the front and on the cuffs to make it feminine enough to satisfy society but tailored in a way to project my professionalism. It was the dress I wore underneath my robe when I received my diploma. The dress I wore when I stumbled down Twenty-Seventh Street, starving and begging for patients, and met Camille King. The dress I wore on the visit to my first Washington Square patient, Beatrice Langton.

I buried my face in the fabric, inhaled its musty, unused scent, and struggled not to cry. For the last year with everything I’d been through, everything I’d done, this dress hung in my wardrobe, forgotten and useless, full of lost possibilities, waiting for my return. I held the dress against me and stood in front of the mirror. The light was poor, but the image reflected back at me wasn’t the woman returned, but the woman I had been. The woman full of hope and possibility. The woman determined to take on the world. The woman I hoped I still was. I would find out soon.

If Catherine Bennett had a good-luck charm, this dress was it. I took it from the hanger and removed my headscarf.

Ten minutes later I exited the back door, clutching my folded nun disguise. I pushed the skeleton key up the sleeve of my dress and walked down the alley toward Kindle and the waiting cab. Peg McCord, one of Maureen’s closest friends and the Reynoldses’ cook, stepped out the back door of the house. I looked at her square on, forgetting I wasn’t in the nun’s habit that had protected me for so long.

“Peg,” I said.

She nodded back distractedly, then did a double take, her eyes widening. I continued on, my stomach dropping in realization of my error.

“Katie Girl?”

I walked on as if I hadn’t heard her and turned the corner at a trot. Kindle leaned against the cab, smoking a thin cigar he’d apparently bummed from the cabdriver, who was smoking his own. He straightened at the sight of me. “Get in, get in,” I said.

He threw the cigar aside and followed me into the cab. The driver, understanding the urgency, cracked the whip and the horse took off like a shot past the alley where Peg McCord stood, eyes wide, hand raised, calling out my name.

“Godammit, Laura. What were you thinking?” Kindle threw his hat across the room.

Kindle waited until we were alone to explode, which was impressive considering how long it took. Not knowing I was going to discard the disguise, Kindle had told the driver the address for the hotel Pope had suggested. The driver dropped us off and we walked in as if checking in. Instead, we walked straight through the lobby and out the back service entrance. We barely hid in time to avoid our driver catching sight of us as he made the block with a new fare. Kindle ripped off his priest’s collar and threw it onto the trash-strewn ground. He waved down another hansom and gave an address for a different hotel in a seedier part of town.

“I don’t know. I wanted to feel like myself again. Catherine Bennett.” I ran my hand over the front of the dress. It was looser than when I’d last worn it and would need to be taken in to look like anything other than a hand-me-down dress. I turned and looked at myself in the mirror. I’d pulled my hair back into a messy twist, held with a comb I’d found in my dresser drawer. It was looser and more feminine than the tight bun I’d worn for years—again, to denote a level of seriousness to my male counterparts. My cheekbones were more pronounced and there was a slight bump in my nose from its being broken by Cotter Black. I closed my eyes, dizzy from trying to square the woman who stared back at me with the woman I wanted to be.

“And do you? Feel like Catherine Bennett?”

I turned to Kindle, marveling once again how he always seemed to be able to read my thoughts.

“I don’t know who I am.”

Kindle stepped forward and took me in his arms, his anger from before gone. “I do. I know precisely who you are.”

I sobbed into his shoulder and immediately felt ridiculous. Where was the strength I was so proud of? Why had returning to New York turned me into a blubbering mess?

“Did we make a mistake coming back?”

“Say the word and we’ll leave.”

I gritted my teeth and shook my head. “No. I can’t.” I pushed away from Kindle and paced the room. “When we were at the orphanage we had a good life, didn’t we?”

“Yes.”

“That’s what I want. I want that life with you. We will have no life at all if I don’t get out from under this … this … sword of Damocles. Rosemond used it to convince me you sent me away. Cora Bayle was killed because of it. Hankins used it to take advantage of my skills, to line his pockets. Every person I meet, I wonder if they recognize me, if they’re going to use me or turn me in. You’re too easily recognizable now. There is nowhere we can run.” I sighed. “You know it’s true.”

“Who was the woman?”

“A friend of Maureen’s.”

“Will she talk?”

I shrugged. “I honestly don’t know. She and Maureen were close, but she didn’t approve of my profession. Though it didn’t bother her overmuch when she was sick.” I rubbed my forehead. “When do we meet Henry?”

“First thing tomorrow morning in Central Park.”

I unpacked, hanging the clothes Rosemond bought for me in the wardrobe. I ran my hand along the navy vest’s lapel and wondered what the future held for Portia and Rosemond. They were embarking on a future much like the one I was trying to shed. Their public life would be based on lies, and the threat of exposure and loss of everything they held dear would hang over their heads for the rest of their lives. Their only solace would be when they were alone together. I’d decided that wouldn’t be enough for me. Would it be enough for them?

“Laura?”

I turned to find Kindle watching me with a strange expression. “Yes?”

“I like that. It looked good on you.”

“Rosemond bought them for me. As an appeasement for her lie about your execution, I suppose.” I chuckled and shook my head. “It was a despicable thing to do.”

“Yet you forgave her. You seem to like her.”

“I understand her.”

Kindle laughed. “You understand the motivations of a Sapphic whore? No, you don’t.”

“I understand the lengths she went to, to be with the woman she loves.” Kindle scoffed. “Think of the things you’ve done for me. What’s the difference? That she did it for a woman and you think it’s unnatural?”

“It is.”

“Or is it your pride is wounded that she would rather lie, kill, and cheat to be with a woman instead of a man?”

“My pride? What about yours? I saw how she looked at you on the train. Did she seduce you?”

Kindle’s gaze was challenging, ready to switch to confrontational if I gave the wrong answer. “No.” The muscle in his jaw pulsed. “Then again, I’m not as easily seduced as you are.”

Kindle tried to look defiant but failed. Guilt was written plainly on his face.

I turned and started to undress. “Thank you for confirming it for me. She wouldn’t.” When he was silent, I continued. “You aren’t going to try to deny it? To blame Rosemond? Or me?” I stepped out of my dress and draped it on a hanger. I went to the dresser, removed my comb, and brushed my hair. I saw Kindle in the mirror, rooted to the floor by anguish. “You wondered in Cheyenne how I could trust Rosemond. There are a half dozen reasons, but the root of my trust, I think, was her refusal to confirm your betrayal. One word would have devastated me, and she knew it. She remained silent, which was confirmation in its way, because she respected me? Loved me?” I shrugged. “It doesn’t matter.” I placed my brush on the dresser and faced my husband. “I have to face the accusations against me or we will be forced to make other decisions that go against our better judgment, our morals. I can’t do it anymore. I won’t.”

“What if Henry’s investigator hasn’t found the evidence we need?”

I didn’t answer, which was confirmation enough.

I made love to Kindle that night as an act of absolution and was almost moved to true forgiveness by his murmurs of affection, pleas for forgiveness, and promises for eternal loyalty. I finished him quickly so I didn’t have to hear another word; his incessant talking made it real, turned an encounter I had been able to push from my mind, to think of as fiction, into the realm of reality. When done, I rolled over onto my side and faced away from him. He curved his body into mine and rested his hand on my bare hip, everything I’d dreamt of in Cheyenne when I thought I’d lost him forever. This ache was different, sharper, harder. Not grief at all, but anger.

I rolled over. Kindle’s one good eye reflected the moonlight shining through the window. His empty eye socket was partially hidden in the pillow. I stroked his beard. “William, I love you.”

“I love you.”

I ran my hand down his chest and over his flaccid cock, sticky from our lovemaking, and cupped his testicles. His eyebrows rose, as if surprised, but hoping I was instigating another, better, encounter. I squeezed his testicles and he flinched and grabbed my wrist. “But if you ever betray me like that again, I’ll cut your balls off and shove them down your throat.”

Kindle stilled in astonishment. He released my wrist and I released him. His smile unfurled slowly, like a flag in a tepid wind. “I’ll sharpen the knife for you.”

I kissed him briskly. “Shave your beard tomorrow. No more disguises. We meet Henry as ourselves or not at all.”