23
I WAS TREMBLING when I went into the house. I set my things down in the hall. Ulysses meowed again, poor dear, and I opened the basket and let him out. He ran scampering off, right up the stairs. I wished I could follow him and jump into my bed and pull the blankets over my head.
Where was everybody? Except for the ticking of the tall clock, the house was as silent as the inside of a marble vault. Was Maude out? I hoped so. I didn’t need her around, chiding me. It was enough I had to face Uncle Valentine.
What would he say? I knew how he could cut you with his words, like he was doing surgery. Like he was cutting the bad parts out and throwing them away. Would he cut parts out of me now? I’d seen people he’d done it to. They walked away limping. Or all white in the face, like they were bleeding and didn’t know it.
“I’m in here, Emily.” The voice came from the parlor, muffled and sad.
I went down the hall. He was seated in a large wingback chair, reading. He looked up. I was a sight, all right, with grass stains on the skirt of my dress. It was torn at the hem, too. My arm was in a makeshift sling, my face dirty.
He stood up at the sight of me. The book dropped to the floor. “Are you all right? What happened? You look as if you were run down by a carriage.”
“No. A horse, almost. It’s a sprain, Robert said. And there’s a bump on the back of my head.”
He came over to me and felt my head with expert hands, knowing hands. “That’s quite a bump. You’ve got to get some ice on it. But you don’t have a skull fracture.” He went to the kitchen next and I heard him fussing around out there. He came back with some ice tied in a rag. “Sit down and put this behind your head.” He gestured to the wingback chair. I sat. He did, too, across from me.
“Emily,” he said, “we have to talk.” He looked so sad.
I said, “Yes.”
“Why did you run away from me, Emily?”
“Because of what I saw yesterday.” I wished his voice wasn’t so kind. I wished he would scold. But he didn’t.
“The bodies in my lab?”
“Yes.”
He leaned forward. “You have suspected the true nature of my work all along, haven’t you?”
I told him yes again.
“Then why didn’t you ask me outright? Don’t you think I deserved at least that?”
“I wanted to. But every time I set my mind to it something happened. You did something good for Annie. Or me. I was thrown off the track and thought I was being silly.”
“I meant to throw you off the track. I couldn’t have my work compromised. And it was, yesterday. It was more than compromised. It was almost ruined. I was almost ruined. If Robert hadn’t been tipped off about the police raid and gotten the bodies out, I would have been arrested.”
“Uncle Valentine, I didn’t lead those girls there. They forced their way. The only reason I went along with it was because Robert told me there were no bodies at your lab. I never meant to hurt you.”
“You discussed all this with Robert?”
“Yes, but he wasn’t honest with me, either. Any more than you were.”
“Don’t call me to account, Emily.” He turned sharp.
“I’m not calling you to account, sir.”
“This has nothing to do with honesty. It has to do with research. With treating shattered bones and torn muscles. With head injuries and ghastly injuries of the face, the spine, the chest. The war taught us all we do not know about the human body. But we must now apply what we have learned in the war. Only, there are not enough available legal cadavers. We need Anatomy Acts to provide us with legal cadavers. New York has one now. Pennsylvania is working on one. I am authoring a pamphlet telling of the need here for such an act. When it is passed, the traffic in bodies will end. Until that time, I shall continue my practices. It is not a pleasant business. I do not profit from it, and I will not purchase a cadaver from anyone who profits from it. But it is my work, the most important thing in the world to me. Do you understand?”
I understood. “It’s what caused the argument between you and Mama,” I said.
“Yes. She found out what I was doing. She did not approve.”
“I would have approved,” I said, “if you’d given me the chance.”
“I don’t want your approval, Emily. All I want, if you wish to continue living with me, is your promise that you won’t interfere again. If you can’t promise, you may go to Aunt Susie in Richmond. I will pay for your ticket.”
I stared at him. “You’d let me go?”
“I don’t want you to go. I think you know that by now. But I will let nothing and no one interfere with my work, Emily. Ever. I will put nothing before medical science.”
“I won’t interfere,” I said.
He sighed. “Now that we have that cleared up”—and he waved his hand to dismiss the matter—“tell me. Did you let Addie go?”
The question was so abrupt, the brown eyes so accusing. “Yes.”
“Why?”
“She begged me. Ever since I’ve been here. All she wanted was to be free. I didn’t think it right that she was a prisoner.”
“You didn’t think it right?” Tears came to his eyes. He couldn’t speak for a minute. And he was white-faced. “Do you think that was your decision to make?”
“Uncle Valentine.”
“Do you know what you have done? Letting that woman go was more an act of betrayal than going with those girls to my lab.”
I was confused. He was more distressed about Addie being gone than about the police raid on his lab. There was something here. But what? It came to me then that if I could figure it out, I would understand my uncle Valentine.
Maybe I would even understand the secret of life.
“Do you know how long I’ve been working with Addie? How far I’ve come with curing her of the Wasting Disease?”
“She was better,” I said. “She wasn’t coughing anymore. That’s why I let her go.”
“She was better because she was on my medicine.” He turned and picked up a bottle from a nearby table. He set it down, none too gently, on another table before me. “This medicine.”
The bottle was dark. Or was that the medicine inside?
“Pick it up and open it,” he said. “Smell it.”
I did so. It smelled terrible. Like camphor. Yet at the same time like rotten fish. “What is it?”
“I call it Purple Mass. President Lincoln took something called Blue Mass for his nerves and other ailments. Until I find a better name for this, it is Purple Mass. It clears the lungs. I have been working on it since my wife died. It is a mixture of my own making. Made in part from crushed leaves of devil’s tongue, a flower Marietta grew in my laboratory. A nightflower.”
I remembered the flower. Remembered Marietta saying what trouble she had growing it. Remembered how the flies were drawn to it, how she’d told me it would smell of decayed fish.
He gave a great sigh and took the bottle back. “My wife always had a cough,” he said. “‘Valentine,’ she would say to me, can’t you find something to cure this cough?’ Only I was too busy becoming an important doctor. I had no time for her. I thought she was being petulant because I wasn’t paying her much mind. ‘Keep away from damp air,’ I told her. ‘Take hot tea. Soup.’ She got sicker and sicker. Then she got bad. Her lungs filled up. I knew nothing about lungs. I still don’t know enough about lungs. She died.”
He fell silent. He set the bottle down. “I went on being an important doctor. I worked to overcome my grief. Then Marietta came along. She is very knowledgeable about slave medicine, folklore medicine. One day I told her the story of my wife. It was she who told me about the devil’s tongue flower. She had all these decoctions written down from before she came north. 1 thought devil’s tongue was worth a try for congested lungs. Marietta grew the flowers in pots in my lab at the college. I experimented with them and added my own ingredients. It was working for Addie. She was getting better. But her treatment wasn’t finished. And without her medicine, she will sicken again and die.”
I stared at him. “She was better,” I said.
“No. She was on her way to being better. I explained to her how long the treatment would take. She agreed to it. Oh yes, every day she’d ask to leave. Every morning I’d talk with her, reassure her, tell her, ‘Just a little while longer.’ And she believed me. Until you spirited her up to be free. You have interfered, my girl. In a most dastardly way. With medical science!”
“I didn’t, Uncle Valentine. She kept telling me she was a prisoner.”
“I told you when you first came here not to listen to her, that she was a patient, not a prisoner. One of the effects of the medicine is that it makes people feel persecuted, mistrusting of others, and addle-headed. Even dizzy. They are plagued with dark thoughts. Lincoln’s death didn’t help. It brought her guilt over her past drinking to the fore. When these moods struck, she played on your sympathy.”
I said nothing.
“Where is she, Emily? Can you tell me that?”
I met his inquiring look with a dumbstruck one of my own. “Gone,” I said.
“Gone? Where? Where did you take her?”
“I took her to the Relief Society at Twelfth and O Streets this morning. It’s where she wanted to go.”
He started to get up out of his chair.
“No,” I said. “She’s not there, Uncle Valentine. She’s gone by now. Long since gone. She just stopped by to tell the reverend there she was all right and to pick up some things. She was leaving this very day.”
“For where?”
I brightened. “Home,” I said. “You can likely fetch her there. Or get some medicine to her.”
He shook his head sadly. “She never told me where home was, Emily. She never would tell me. Did she tell you?”
“No,” I said miserably, “she didn’t.”