The Gilded Hour

  He stopped in front of her, so close that she could feel the heat of him. One brow quirked up, as if to ask permission; Anna could have stopped him with a word or a raised hand. But she didn’t. She raised her face and looked at him to show that she was not intimidated or frightened or even embarrassed, and then she canted her head slightly. An invitation.

  His attention was on her hair, one finger moving in a curve just over the silver hair clasp that Sophie had fixed there earlier this evening. Such a light touch, but she felt it moving down her spine in clear notes. Very gently he slid the stem into place, paused to consider, and moved it slightly. And then he stepped back and smiled at her.

  “This rose is called La Dame Dorée. The breeder was trying to achieve the perfect white bourbon rose, but he didn’t succeed. When they open you’ll see that the inner petals are a very pale pink at the edge. The color isn’t perfect, but the scent is truly beautiful. And before you ask, we sell these wholesale, a hundred for ten dollars.”

  He said, “I don’t know your first name.”

  Her voice came hoarse. “Liliane. But I’m called Anna.”

  There was nothing untoward in his expression or tone, and still she felt his regard. This morning she had been a different creature to him, only nominally female. That had changed, or more exactly, Countess Turchaninov had changed that. Anna found that this both irritated her and gave her a perverse pleasure.

  She said, “Your hands will smell of La Dame Dorée all night.” Shocked at the impulse to put her face to his palm to test this assertion, she stepped away. “Pardon me, I have to go back to my friends.”

  Then she slipped through the door into the hallway and out of sight. As soon as she had turned a corner she stopped and leaned against the wall to catch her breath.

  Anna touched the rosebuds in her hair with a tentative finger, sure for one moment that she had imagined the whole odd encounter in the walled courtyard.

  • • •

  MR. LEE WAS waiting with the carriage at one thirty, a time worked out carefully to make sure Cap did not overextend himself and that Anna would be able to see her patients the next day. Helping Cap into the carriage, Anna thought of the day ahead of her—surgeries and then Dr. Garrison’s trial—and all the excitement and high spirits left her immediately.

  Cap had begun to cough into his handkerchief even before they were outside. Now he collapsed into the seat, turned his whole body into the corner, and hunched over, shaking violently with each paroxysm. If he turned to her, Anna knew that she would see that his face and neck were drenched with sweat. His complexion would have darkened to purple with veins standing out on his forehead and temples and in his neck. And there would be blood.

  He wanted no help and would be angry if she offered, and so Anna gave him the privacy he needed. She closed her eyes and reached for the calm she had trained so hard to achieve. Cap struggling to breathe; there would be no worse sound in the world.

  Finally he sat up a little straighter, folded his handkerchief in the shadows and out of her line of sight, and immediately pulled another out of his pocket, a fresh white flag in the darkened carriage. He blotted perspiration from his face.

  He said, “Thank you for coming with me.” His voice came very soft and hoarse.

  A minute passed and then another.

  “She misses you,” said Anna. “I don’t think you are ever very far from her thoughts.”

  He said nothing, but he had heard her. His head dipped a little more in her direction, an invitation to tell him the things he wanted to hear. But because Anna could not give him what he wanted so desperately, she said nothing at all.

  4

  DR. GARRISON’S TRIAL was about to start, and Anna was running late. Sophie paced back and forth in front of the Hall of Justice; she wanted to go in and find a seat, and she wanted to run in the opposite direction.

  People called this place the Tombs, an appropriate nickname for a building that exuded a miasma of open crypts and leaking sewers. Sophie was sure that anyone who spent any real amount of time in one of the offices or courtrooms or—worse still—jail cells must come away with sickened lungs and an aching head.

  Children playing on a beach understood that sand castles must give way to water and wind even as they were being built, but the men who built the Hall of Justice had simply ignored such inconvenient truths and put it directly over a swamp. As a result the building had begun to sink before its doors ever opened. It continued to decompose like a living thing, even as people came and went, oblivious or deadened to the atmosphere.

  Tenements had a stench that could make the eyes water and the gorge rise, but to Sophie’s mind the Tombs were far worse. Repeated flooding and permanent damp meant rotting timber, slimy plaster, chunks of masonry that fell without warning. The stink sat on the back of the tongue and was not easily gotten rid of, even hours later. Worse still were the jail cells below ground level, where fungus and moss sprouted from walls overpopulated with vermin and water bugs.

  Anthony Comstock had arrested Clara Garrison and had her thrown into one of those cells, and more than once.

  A cab came to a quick stop and Anna almost catapulted herself out onto the cobblestones, turned to stuff money into the cabby’s hand, and then grabbed Sophie’s arm to rush into the building.

  The Special Sessions courtroom was cavernous and unheated, and Sophie was chilled even as she followed Anna to empty seats on the far side of the room, where, thankfully, the ceiling was not watermarked and thus less likely to leak onto their bonnets or shoulders.

  “You’re shivering,” Anna said, and handed Sophie a pair of fur-lined gloves from her Gladstone bag. Sophie had never acclimated to New York weather but still regularly overestimated her tolerance for cold. Anna, who knew her better than anyone, had packed the gloves, a scarf, and even a pair of the heavy wool socks Mrs. Lee knitted for each of them every winter. Sophie was a little embarrassed, but not so vain as to pretend she didn’t need the things Anna handed her.

  The room was filling up quickly, though the judges’ bench on the stage at one end was still unoccupied, as was the jury box to the right. At a slightly lower level but still well above the main floor were chairs meant for witnesses, defendants, and attorneys. Now Clara Garrison stood there with her lawyer to one side and Maude Clarke to the other, talking quietly, a small island of calm in the noise and constant movement of the gathering crowd. Clara was carefully dressed, confident and professional but unassuming. Dr. Clarke too was dressed to convey both her profession and status, but she was a smaller woman, quite matronly in both shape and persona, and thus was usually overlooked or underestimated by the men she came into contact with. The sight of Drs. Garrison and Clarke talking together was a familiar one, something Sophie had seen many times every day while she was in training. It was disconcerting to see them here, ready to be examined rather than to conduct an examination.

  As Sophie looked through the room she realized that most of the prominent female physicians active in the city had come to sit in watchful support, including Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi, the most demanding and uncompromising faculty member at the medical school for women.

  Mary Jacobi had taken a close interest in Sophie’s education and career and had gone out of her way to support and encourage her. At first Sophie suspected that Dr. Jacobi’s interest had to do with the rarity of black women in medical school. That thought had proved wrong when she was invited to the Jacobi home to meet her husband, Abraham, an internationally acknowledged expert on diseases of children. He happened also to be the president of the New York State Medical Society, and thus wielded a great amount of influence. Mary Jacobi had presented Sophie to her husband like a prize specimen captured against all odds in the wild.

  “She has a natural and quite astounding talent for pediatric and obstetric medicine,” she told her husband. He was a slender white-bearded man with a serious but kind
demeanor. Gently he took Sophie’s hands in his own and smiled at her as he examined them.

  “You must forgive Mary,” he had said in his heavy German accent. “She is always on the lookout for talent to nurture, but her approach can be abrupt. Now that she has brought you home you must sit and tell me about your studies.”

  Sophie didn’t know if Abraham Jacobi’s acceptance and support of female physicians was a consequence of his marriage, or if it had won his wife over in the first place. What she did know was that he was one of the few male doctors who welcomed women into his lecture hall, and Sophie had learned a great deal from him even before she was introduced. She still called on the Jacobis regularly, and might have sat next to Mary if there had been space for herself and Anna.

  Her cousin sat in an uncharacteristic and almost moody silence, filled with a thrumming tension. Sophie put a hand over Anna’s folded fingers and pressed. There was reason to be worried, and to claim otherwise would not help.

  A small commotion near the door had heads turning to see Comstock coming in, flanked by his colleagues from the Society for the Suppression of Vice and the Young Men’s Christian Association. They marched through the room to take the seats reserved for the prosecution, all of them dressed as Comstock was in somber black wool, identical hats tucked under their arms, all of them with mustaches and beards that shone with pomade. Sophie’s dislike of these men was so extreme that she felt it like a mass in her throat.

  Anna roused herself a little, her brow furrowing as if she were remembering some crucial task left undone.

  Sophie wondered if she was going to finally talk to her about Cap. This morning she had planned to draw Anna aside to get whatever news there might be to share, but for once Anna had risen first. She was already in the kitchen when Sophie finally roused, deep in conversation with Margaret and Mrs. Lee, who had had a never-ending list of questions and an even longer list of grievances, because Anna had failed to observe the very things they most wanted to hear about the costume ball. Sophie would have been amused, under different circumstances.

  Cap was dashing, Anna had told them. His costume was something Spanish dancers wore for a formal performance; he had had it made in Spain when he visited a few years ago, very elegant and understated and emphasizing his long, wiry form. His spirits were good; he had laughed at the outrageous stories told by his cousins; she even recounted one of the stories herself, something to do with a goose, the color of goose shit, and Mrs. Decker’s treasured Aubusson rug. Anna described the more ridiculous costumes, answered endless questions about the house, the draperies, the carpets, the furniture and fireplaces and pictures and sculptures. She recounted the names of all the friends who had stopped to visit with Cap, what costumes they wore, and all the conversations she could remember. She did not say, did not need to say that Cap had kept himself apart, touched nothing and no one, permitted no one to come near, and wore his gloves all night. Nor did she talk about his health, the one thing Sophie wanted most to hear.

  Instead Anna recollected quite suddenly that she had patients to see, and she was off. Sophie didn’t see her again until she arrived at the front entrance to the Tombs at just before two in the afternoon, and they walked together into the courtroom. She would have to wait until Anna was ready to talk, as difficult as that was to do.

  With some effort she pulled her thoughts together and turned to her cousin.

  “You are very far away in your thoughts. Difficult case?”

  Anna frowned extravagantly. “I have to say, that’s not the question I was expecting.”

  “But I would like to know, nevertheless.”

  “A new mother came in this morning, she can’t be more than fifteen. Stillbirth, and I think she might have been unattended. That she didn’t die is a mystery. One of the worst fistulas I’ve ever seen, severe damage to the bladder and urethra.”

  Tearing was not uncommon when a young girl, slight of frame and undernourished, gave birth unattended to a child of even normal size. In such cases patients were often in such extreme pain that they had to be anesthetized before it was even possible to examine them.

  “But at least there wasn’t a delay,” Sophie said. As bad as an obstetric fistula could be, women often didn’t come for treatment out of shame and embarrassment. They hid themselves away, as unwelcome as lepers in their own homes, swallowing agony until infection had turned into peritonitis and there was nothing to be done.

  “Three hours in surgery,” Anna said. “And I’ll have to go in again. Tomorrow, if she’s strong enough. I fear she won’t last that long.”

  She turned toward Sophie; her gaze was diagnosis sharp. “I wish you’d just go ahead and ask what you really want to know.”

  “And I wish you’d just go ahead and tell.”

  After a long moment Anna said, “He is in decline. He won’t admit to much pain, but the signs are there.”

  “Ulcerations?”

  “Not that I could see in his mouth or on his face. Not yet.”

  Sophie was so long in trying to organize her thoughts into coherent sentences that she was startled by the cry of the bailiff bringing the room to order and announcing Judge Micah Stewart’s court in session.

  The judge came out of the antechamber, his head of snow-white hair standing out not just for its abundance but for the contrast to a mustache and brows that were still a carroty red. He paused before taking his seat, looking over the spectators, nodding to bailiffs and roundsmen and colleagues. Then his gaze came to rest on Anthony Comstock, and even from halfway across the room Sophie saw the disdain darken his expression.

  “Mr. Comstock,” Judge Stewart said in a dry voice that still managed to fill the room. “Up to your old tricks, I see.”

  • • •

  IF IT WEREN’T for the seriousness of the situation Anna would have enjoyed watching Judge Stewart sparring with Anthony Comstock. Comstock could not hold his temper or keep his opinions to himself; what he lacked in rational argument he made up for with posturing, thundering rhetoric, and Bible verses, a tactic that was not serving him well.

  “You can’t summarily dismiss the charges,” Comstock was saying in a patronizing tone. “The grand jury handed down the indictment, and you must proceed and allow me to prosecute this case.”

  Stewart leaned back in his chair. “You might be right.”

  Comstock looked genuinely surprised.

  “In fact, if there were a legal indictment, you would be right,” the judge went on. “But District Attorney Wilson found insufficient cause to let you bring your complaint before the grand jury, as he told me, just an hour ago. So you snuck behind his back, didn’t you. Crept into the grand jury room like a thief in the night and approached the foreman directly with your complaints.”

  Comstock sputtered. “The district attorney was very busy, and I—”

  “You took it upon yourself to wheedle an indictment out of the grand jury even after you were told the case wasn’t solid enough to prosecute.”

  “Judge Stewart,” Comstock began again. “Have you looked at the material we seized from Dr. Garrison’s office?”

  “You ignore my question to ask one of your own?”

  “If you have looked at those materials you know that the defendant’s purpose is to distribute—unlawfully distribute—immoral and obscene tracts and implements and thereby to pollute the public and cast the innocent into mortal danger. The first indictment concerns the booklet that Dr. Garrison herself pressed into Inspector Campbell’s hands, one that instructs women how to prevent conception.”

  Sophie sat up straighter, craning her neck to catch sight of Comstock where he stood.

  “What?” Anna whispered.

  “That’s Mr. Campbell there with Comstock. It was his wife I was attending yesterday when you went off to Hoboken.”

  Judge Stewart was saying, “As it happens, I have read the
pamphlet you mention here. Read it twice, and nowhere did I come across the word conception. Plenty about hygiene and health, but nothing about procreation or conception or anything along those lines.”

  “You read the word syringe, did you not?” Comstock demanded.

  “Certainly.”

  “Well, then.”

  “Well, then, what?”

  “You know what syringes are used for, sir.”

  “I think I do, yes. But maybe it’s time we allowed the defense a word or two. Dr. Garrison?”

  Clara raised her voice to be heard clearly. “Female syringes are first and last a therapeutic tool, Your Honor. The syringe is indispensable in the treatment of disease and for applying local remedies to preserve personal health. Syringes are also used in the irrigation and cleaning of wounds and body cavities—”

  “Hogwash!”

  The judge drew back sharply. “You forget yourself, Comstock. Dr. Garrison, do you have anything to add?”

  “No, Your Honor.”

  Comstock’s voice rose to an indignant wobble. “But the publications Dr. Garrison distributes so freely are an incentive to crime to girls and young women!”

  “I don’t see it.”

  “Great evil,” Comstock shouted, “is often very subtle!”

  “Too subtle for me,” Judge Stewart said. And to Anna it seemed certain that he was trying not to smile. “I find nothing unlawful here. The first indictment is hereby struck.”

  “Your Honor! I am a representative—”

  “Mr. Comstock. Listen closely: I do not care to hear about your society, and if you interrupt me again, I will find you in contempt.”

  “If you’ll permit me to share Judge Benedict’s rulings—” He put his hand on the papers before him.

  Stewart’s expression hardened. “You may not,” he said. “I am not bound by Judge Benedict’s rulings.”