"A judge in Leadville?" Magda asked, wondering why she, too, had not thought of that.
"The records will be kept at the courthouse, I think. I will find them."
"But how will you get in? Surely they'll be guarded."
Gitalis smiled, a little. It made his odd face seem endearing.
"Perhaps the gods had a purpose in making me small and agile. There are places I can travel, few others could." Dwarf, acrobat; inordinate strength in arms and shoulders... Magda ticked off the attributes in her mind.
"I think perhaps you are bigger than you know, my friend," she said softly, and he was surprised to see tears fill the Gypsy's eyes.
Gitalis lifted a hand to Magda's face. Gently he brushed the moisture from her cheeks. He smiled at her, an enigmatic, knowing smile, and she bent her weary head to his small chest; he put his arms around her comfortingly. She stayed there, unmoving, for a long, long while.
Chapter 120
The record room was on the second floor of the Leadville courthouse. Gitalis, dressed in black, face darkened with grease paint from his stage makeup box, waited until the town was sleeping. He carried a scaling rope looped over his shoulders, a lockpick's tools in his pocket, a candle and two throwing knives in his belt.
He scrambled up the alley side of the building easily, lowered his small body to the ledge outside, and let himself into the room with relative ease. The filing cabinets were locked, so he waited for his eyes to accustom themselves to the gloom, then set to work opening drawers. It was difficult to see in the dark office; he was loath to light the candle he had brought with him, for a night watchman waited somewhere below, so instead he tried to accustom himself to the darkness.
Gitalis picked each lock deftly, and riffled the papers within each consecutive drawer, thankful for the moonlight that illumined the file room. Footsteps sounded in the hall outside and Gitalis hastily pushed the drawer back into place. There was no way for him to escape, and besides, he'd not yet found what he sought. He glanced up and saw an open transom leading to the locked office next door; heart pounding, he scaled the file cabinet near the door and scrambled through the small transom, to drop silent as a cat on the other side.
He heard the watchman open the door to the office he had burgled. Don't let me have left anything behind, he prayed, fingering the knife in his belt. If he had to kill someone here and now, the game would be up before it began.
The watchman, satisfied, moved on. Gitalis breathed easier and continued his search, but it was nearly morning when he found what he was looking for. Brookehaven Asylum, the commitment paper said. In the mountains far north of Denver.
"Oh, my poor, beautiful Fancy," he whispered into the empty room as he read the words. "What have they done to you?"
Jewel checked her armament and left the keys with Rufus.
"Let me come with you," he offered, worried for her safety. "Make me sleep a whole lot easier." But she shook her head.
"Somebody's got to mind the store and tell Ford and Hart where I've gone. I'm gonna get myself a job at this Brookehaven place and keep an eye on Fancy, until reinforcements get there. Tell Ford not to worry, I'm armed and I won't do nothin' stupid. Tell him to bring his tin star and a pistol, Rufus, even though he's out of practice. Tell him Dakota would understand if he tied on a gun again to help out Fancy. And tell him to come right quick, Rufus, there's no way of tellin' what shape the kid's in by now."
The bartender nodded and Jewel headed out; she had more guts than most men and was a damned good shot with rifle or sidearm, but Rufus had a real bad feeling about her going after Fancy all alone.
Chapter 121
Fancy looked around the stone ward that she shared with two dozen others, male and female; the sagging cots had ugly iron legs and mattresses too thin for more than meager rest. Mad people milled, shuffling, all around her—one pulled at her hair with clawlike fingers, another laughed dementedly and made foolish faces at her as she walked by. She felt afraid and angry and alone.
She shivered as much from cold as from anxiety—the coarse muslin she wore offered little warmth against the chill October air, but she knew enough not to complain, for things could be far worse; there were men chained in punishment cages outside, she'd been told by one of the inmates. "Be good, girlie," he'd whispered, "or they'll put you in the cage." It didn't seem possible that could be true; no one could live outdoors in a Colorado winter without protection. Or could that be just what the warders had in mind for those poor devils... death by natural causes, a relief to their "grief-stricken" relatives, perhaps?
Fancy forced herself to think methodically; she must steer clear of the wardress who hated her. Then she could figure out how to escape. She'd thought of seducing the young doctor who seemed less callous than the rest, but looking as she did, she couldn't rely on succeeding. If she failed and was branded "sexually overactive," she could be forced to submit to surgical removal of her womb and ovaries, or even of her clitoris. Several women on the ward had been subjected to such horrors and she couldn't risk mutilation by these conscienceless butchers.
The mind seemed to take strange turns in captivity; she found that when she faltered and needed strength just to survive, if she thought about Hart, she felt comforted.
Françoise Deverell walked, head down against the cold, in a long line of patients brought outdoors for exercise. There were several small outbuildings on the grounds, each with a different purpose—one was for surgery, one for the criminally insane, one for the addicted, one for the children.
She was grateful to be permitted this exercise, for she knew she mustn't let her strength fail before the opportunity to escape presented itself. Fancy raised her dark head as they passed the punishment area, and glancing toward the addicts' house, she was shocked to glimpse her daughter. Aurora looked frail and vacant, thin as a stick; even at that distance Fancy could see the gray-blue skin of the opium addict and the unseeing eyes staring beyond the barred window of the little house. Jason had decided to leave no evidence in Leadville.
Fancy walked on breathless with this new knowledge; there was nothing to be gained but punishment by crying out to the girl, and from the look of Aurora, she would not respond. Laudanum was as deadly as its opiate sister, yet it was used as freely by physicians as if it had no side effects at all. Aurora was obviously dosed and docile; Fancy tried not to think of the girl's incarceration as divine justice. At least she knew her daughter was alive, but her presence here would complicate immeasurably her own plans for escape.
Jason paced back and forth in the room to which the wardress had brought Fancy and tried not to focus on his own culpability. She looked dreadful: bruised, scratched, her abundant hair chopped short because of lice, the asylum gown hanging on a body already gaunt and bony, after only a few weeks.
"God damn it, Fancy," he said, angered by his own guilt. "Can't you see you've done all this to yourself? I would have given you anything you wanted—showered you with gifts, houses, whatever it would take to make you happy..."
Fancy looked at him with consummate scorn. "Why you sanctimonious hypocrite! You murdered my husband, killed my best friend, stole damned near every penny that should have been mine, and now you've kidnapped me and imprisoned me against my will in this pesthole, and you have the brass-plated balls to tell me I'm the one who's done wrong? Why, you're nothing but a savage in a business suit, Jason... a lying, cheating, murdering, no-good horse thief who dresses up his dirty deeds in highfalutin language to soothe his own degenerate conscience."
The hostile, articulate truth made Jason low and mean. "I should have killed you, Fancy. If I didn't love you, I damned well would have."
"Love me? If this is love, Jason, what on earth would you have done to me if you'd hated me?"
Jason quelled an urge to throttle this woman who had tortured his life so long, and who now presented an unsolvable problem.
"I want power of attorney from you, Fancy. Nothing more. You became unhinged because of you
r failure with Aurora, everyone will accept that easily enough. You are not yourself, that's plain to see. Leadville needs your mine and I'll see that the town gets it."
Fancy straightened her spine, and even in the asylum rags she looked curiously regal. "And once I've signed that paper I suppose you'll just let me walk on out of here like none of this ever happened? I'd be signing my own death warrant, Jason. Without my signature you'll have one hell of a time laying hands on my holdings—at least I'll get to enjoy your annoyance, vicariously."
"Then you'd best accept the fact that you'll never leave here alive, Fancy. Make no mistake about the seriousness of your position—there are a great many accidents that can befall a madwoman. If you were to die, everything you own would revert to me. Just remember that."
"And you just remember that I'll see you in hell before I'll sign that paper. And if any harm comes to me, Jason, as God is my witness, I will curse you with my dying breath."
Jason started to leave, then turned, frustration making him malicious. "Perhaps you'd like to know that Aurora's here with the other addicts, Fancy... you might not recognize her, she's so doped up on laudanum. The doctors are increasing her dosage at my suggestion, they say that if it gets much higher, she won't live beyond Christmas."
Fancy lunged at Jason across the intervening space—she clawed his face with her fingernails before he even had a chance to call for help. She cursed him and her jailers like any lunatic, and kicked one guard savagely in the groin. She broke another's nose with the heel of her hand before she was finally subdued by brute force and dragged away.
The guards beat Fancy senseless, took away her clothes, her food, and even light itself. Naked, she woke to find herself in darkness, only the padding on the walls met her frantic grope... bruised and filled with renewed fury, she screamed and screamed until she couldn't anymore. It wasn't pain or fear that shrieked out of her this time, only rage! Murderous rage at Jason's threatening her with Aurora's death, and at every other black- guardly act he'd committed against her, and at every folly of her own that allowed him power over her. She pounded hour after hour on the padded walls, until her hands bled from abrasion and her voice lost all power of speech.
Nearly a day and a night passed by her, until finally there was nothing left but a low, smoldering flame where an inferno had consumed her. Fancy let her body slide finally to the cold floor and lay there panting and ravaged, in the last extremity of despair, imagining only death as deliverance.
Then Atticus was somehow in the cell with her, tall and strong, the old understanding smile on his lips and strength in his hands, as he raised her up from the fetal position in which she crouched. Are you dream or vision or memory, she begged to know.
"Don't matter, chile," he answered her. "I'se here, ain't I? De good Lord mean to save you, He send somebody what loves you wif a helpin' hand." He said other things as well... and because Fancy knew that Atticus had never lied to her, she believed and survived.
Chapter 122
Fancy touched her hair, which hadn't been combed in longer than she could remember. She had not bathed except in a small bowl of water since her incarceration began, however long ago that had been, for time had quickly lost all meaning at Brookehaven. She'd thought in the first week that she would go mad from grief, fear, anger, despair, but there was much she'd learned about herself in solitary confinement.
She'd been stupid in underestimating Jason, yet he had not killed her, as he had Chance. There was some nugget of useful knowledge in that and Fancy clung to it. He must still feel something for her... be it lust or love or pang of conscience, it had kept her alive so far.
A wraithlike creature wandered by her, silent, ghastly, toothless. In the beginning Fancy had feared the mad ones, cast adrift by those who should have loved them, then she'd grown to understand and care for them.
This was not the state asylum to which she had been brought, but a private place, where people could be made to disappear if their relatives paid the tariff. She'd learned to play many roles in the weeks since her arrival, placating subservience with the guards and wardresses, madness with the mad, nurse to the helpless. What if this is all there is ever to be for me? she asked herself sometimes.... What if no one ever finds me here?
After the horrible scene with Jason, Fancy had ceased to hope that he would relent and grant her freedom, but perhaps as long as she kept her wits about her and didn't sign his power of attorney, she could stay alive long enough to make a plan for escape.
She no longer tried to convince the doctors of her identity; many people here thought they were someone else. Napoleon, Galileo, Christ, a Virgin Mary or two. A Fancy Madigan would cause the doctors no second thought. "Who you be is inside you, Fancy, " Atticus had said. "Nothin' dey do to you kin change dat."
She found that she'd learned to pray to God, not merely to chide him, as she'd done all her life. Are you listening, God? I could use some help down here. Help me stay alive... help me understand. But not only that... not only for herself.
The ragged woman who sat on the edge of the cot next to Fancy's rocked her empty arms in front of her, and crooned to the dead baby who had perished at her breast the month before she'd been committed by her husband, seven years ago... Fancy prayed for her.
The ancient blind woman who paced a small square of floor endlessly back and forth, because the chain that held her reached only so far... she prayed for her.
The demented boy, with the misshapen face and limbs who had once been sane, until his parents had locked him in the root cellar for fourteen years because of his deformities... for him, she prayed most of all. How he must have railed against the darkness. How he must have shrieked and screamed to heaven to free him from the torment of captivity... and then become mute, in the face of odds beyond the capacity of the mind to accept. Now he was docile. Ever since the last shred of hope had died in his heart, the boy had been a model patient. His fate seemed a grotesque, misshapen image of her own. She, too, was docile now. But she wasn't beaten—not by a long shot.
Fancy rose from the cot and fastened her asylum gown about her. She didn't hate it as vengefully now as she had, she was too grateful for its scant warmth. Others at the sanitarium were far worse off than she. She'd learned compassion and endurance here, an end to false pride and a thankfulness for the smallest crumb from God's table.
She stood in the early morning dark and looked around the ward full of little iron cots and tried to decide who would need her most today. Perhaps the old woman who'd been sent here by her son so he could steal her money. Or the young man with the amputated leg that wouldn't heal. She thought she might have convinced the young doctor who liked her that a poultice of comfrey and marigold would do more good than the evil-smelling salves the staff kept slathering on the putrid wound.
Then she would see to the seventeen-year-old girl who sat and stared into space, from dawn to dusk. Fancy could never look at her without seeing Aurora. This girl harmed no one, but lived in some fathomless darkness where life could not harm her either. Was that the limbo that Aurora sought through opium? And if so, what terrible sorrow had brought her daughter to such despair? What had she herself done or not done to cause Aurora to lose faith in life?
There were many she could help today; if only the doctors would let her use her own vast knowledge of healing herbs to help the sick and injured ones here... the poor desperate mad ones, who no longer repelled her. In helping them she had found a measure of salvation.
The young fair-haired doctor with the golden beard stood in the doorway and watched Françoise move from bed to bed, comforting here, smiling there, soothing everywhere she went. She had begun to sing, a beautiful, intricate melody in some minor key. The doctor paused to listen—what an unexpectedly beautiful voice she had, surely not that of an amateur. He shook his head in sadness; how much more unfair it always seemed to him when the gifted ones were mad—the beautiful, the intelligent, the talented. Somehow madness was easier to bear in the miss
hapen and ugly— then at least you could tell yourself they were simply an example of nature gone awry. But when you looked at one like Françoise... why, it made you question God's wisdom.
He shook his head sadly again, and went about his rounds.
PART XIII: INTO THE STORM
The Chips Are Down
"The Lord tends to wait 'til the last minute... maybe He means to strengthen our trust."
Bandana McBain
Chapter 123
Hart felt he'd grown old somewhere between Apacheria and Paris. He wasn't sure where or when it was he'd lost the last vestiges of youth; perhaps when Destarte, Charles, and Sonseearay had perished, perhaps when Chance had died, perhaps when he'd accepted Fancy's farewell. He was now a man who understood life's finite limitations; he supposed that meant he'd come of age.
He'd achieved more fame than he'd ever dreamed possible and he was wealthier than any man needed to be, in his estimation. The money he'd left behind with Rut had grown in the man's competent care, and the money he'd earned from his paintings in Europe would guarantee he could live the life of his choosing. If there were only someone with whom to share such a comfortable life, Hart would have bought a farm and settled down; he longed for the stability of the kind of love his parents had shared, and wondered if he must finally settle for less, in order to find some measure of peace.
Hart wanted to go home, even before the telegrams arrived that made the trip imperative. It was as if one day he awoke in the midst of his opulent life, and all the gold of it had turned to dross. Surely enough years had passed by, so that all old scores were settled, old flames were embers; there was no longer any reason to remain in exile. He felt a longing for the familiar, for the world in which he'd been formed.