Winter Sisters Page 14

  Chapter Twenty

  I can tell you’ve been hurt,” Mary said, kneeling in front of Emma. “Someone hurt you, didn’t they?”

  Emma shook her head, and with her thumb wiped dirt from Claire’s upturned face. Emma was still trying to decide what to do. She didn’t know whether they were safe. Where were their parents? They were the ones she wanted, though she remembered—a long time ago, it seemed—loving Auntie Amelia and Aunt Mary, and feeling safe in this home. And here was Elizabeth, too, who had been gone so long. Had Emma conjured her into being? Paris, her mother had told her—a city across the ocean. But here Elizabeth was, and she had played her violin. But Emma didn’t know what was real anymore. Were they really here? And she didn’t know who she could trust. She had lost the ability to trust, to believe in anything. For a moment, Elizabeth’s music had reminded her, but when it stopped, she forgot again how to think. She didn’t know what to do, what to say. Claire would run if Emma said to. Claire would do anything Emma asked. But Emma was so tired. Where would they go? The clean sound of water tumbling into the bathtub spilled from the other room. She remembered the bathtub from nights they had stayed here. Auntie Amelia was drawing a bath, Aunt Mary said now. Had Emma agreed to take one? Had she spoken? She had learned from Claire to say nothing, but they kept asking her questions. She looked at Elizabeth again, at a loss as to whether to believe it really was Elizabeth. She had forgotten how to ask for help, had forgotten, even, what help felt like.

  “We want to help you,” Aunt Mary said. “Please let us give you a bath. You’ll be much warmer if we do, and you’ll be safe, I promise.”

  Help. Safe. Could Aunt Mary read minds? With the flicker of an eyelid, a gesture so involuntary that Emma hardly knew she made it, she acquiesced. Did she? She didn’t know, but she did not protest when Mary took Claire’s free hand in hers and led them both into the steamy room. Water was falling from the tap, a cloud of mist hanging in the air. Emma could feel the seductive promise—the memory—of warmth and being clean. She needed that, wanted that, because she smelled of sewer. She smelled of him.

  “Let’s get those dirty nightgowns off you,” Aunt Amelia said. Her voice was bright with kindness. Claire turned to Emma for permission, but Emma didn’t give it. Instead she backed them both against the wooden enclosure of the tub. She didn’t know how she was going to get clean with her nightgown on, but she was. And so was Claire. No one could ever make her take her clothes off again. She sidled out of their reach and boosted Claire onto the bathtub frame so that she could slide into the water. Emma slid in behind her, their nightgowns billowing shields they could hide behind. The water was warm and soothing, and she closed her eyes, yielding to the enveloping heat. The water lapped against her, her nightgown clinging to her wet skin.

  It was then that she heard Aunt Mary and Auntie Amelia gasp.

  Emma opened her eyes. Her nightgown had turned invisible. They could see her, could see everything.

  Emma cried out, and when she did, Aunt Mary’s face broke.

  It was the only way Emma could think to describe the way the light in her beautiful eyes fractured, the way her mouth dropped open, as if its hinges had failed, the way Amelia and Mary and Elizabeth saw through the watery, transparent cloth what a terrible girl Emma had been: the flowering purple stain that engulfed one entire shoulder, the scratches and deeper cuts that crosshatched her forearms and thighs, the bruising on her hips, all the evidence of her shame. She sank against the warm copper. Now it wasn’t that Emma did not want to speak, it was that Emma could not speak, could not form the words to explain what had happened, because she did not want to remember any of it. She felt a little dizzy. What she ought to remember was competing with what she yearned to forget, and it was impossible to keep them straight. Especially after last night. They’d broken free. Done the terrible thing and run. Not even the dark night and clanging bells and swirling river had intimidated them. Not even the pain or the cold. They’d flown like sparrows, the two of them. Taken wing.

  Aunt Mary reached for towels hanging on a rod above her head. She was moving slowly, as if she had to tell her body what to do and how to do it. Then Aunt Mary and Auntie Amelia both reached into the tub and pulled her and Claire out. No one said anything. From the corner of her eye, Emma could see Auntie Amelia wrapping Claire in a towel and drawing her into her lap. Aunt Mary drew Emma onto hers. She did not hold her too tightly. Emma felt she could leave if she wanted. She could feel tears wetting her hair. Elizabeth had sunk to the floor between them and taken hold of both Claire and Emma in any way she could.

  “We looked everywhere. Everywhere,” Aunt Mary was saying. “Orphanages. Schools. The police looked, too. Uncle William took the train to Troy and searched every single cranny. I went to Schenectady. We went out at night with lanterns, we walked up and down the alleys. We took out an ad in the newspapers. We looked in all the hospitals. We looked everywhere. The police thought you had drowned after the blizzard, but I knew you hadn’t.”

  Silence roared in Emma’s ears, a heavy quiet that blocked out pain.

  “Am I hurting you?” Mary said, holding her close.

  Everything hurt, but so much less than anything had hurt in a long time.

  Mary said, “The water is cooling.”

  The taps were opened again and the muffled sound of falling water filled the room.

  Amelia and Mary helped Claire and Emma rid themselves of their wet nightgowns. Amelia ran a frantic gaze over Claire’s small body. When she discovered nothing—a scratch here, a rash there, but no bruises, no cuts, no intrusions—Emma swelled with pride. At least she had kept Claire safe. The Other Man had never touched her. Not once.

  Mary picked Emma up and eased her again into the water. Mary knelt beside the tub at its edge and ran the soap gently over Emma’s arms and legs while she eased her body into the warmth. The water was a balm. Claire was beside her, the water lapping at their waists and then their armpits as they laid back against the curve of the tub. Emma wondered whether you could clean time, too, as you could a body, whether you could scrub it of everything that had gone before. She slid down to her neck to let her hair drift in the water.

  “Take as long as you want,” Amelia said. “Do you understand? As long as you like. We are here.”

  Mary murmured something about getting her doctor’s bag and left the room. Amelia and Elizabeth kneeled beside the tub, and Emma and Claire floated together in the tide of warmth. A long time passed like this. She and Claire locked their hands together and shut their eyes and did not cry. They were together. They were safe. They needed nothing. Only their parents. Soon, they would come for them.

  Emma reached for the soap and lifted Claire’s arm and ran the square up and down her skeletal limbs. Nudging Claire forward, she washed her back, gliding over the nubs of her spine. Emma then washed herself, the slippery square melting and gliding over her broken skin, getting caught in the tendrils of her hair. She eased Claire back again and made her float until only her round, freckled face showed above the soup of suds and water. She ran the soap through Claire’s hair with her fingers, working her scalp.

  How much time passed, Emma didn’t know. She was lost in safety, lost in the respite of hot water, lost in the escape from vigilance. In the water she felt light, when lately her body had felt so heavy. She shut her eyes. Mary came back. Amelia inspected them and said their hair needed to be rewashed, so they kneeled in the tub as she ran clean water over them and rubbed more soap in to sluice away the last of the dirt. They allowed their hair to be tugged and fought with and tamed. New nightgowns appeared as if by magic. They allowed themselves to be dressed. They allowed this as Emma had been made to allow the other.

  They were carried out of the bathroom and up the stairs and tucked into clean sheets that smelled of the sun. Mary gave her and Claire a pill to swallow, then went to the door and opened it and called for someone and asked for food. In a li
ttle while, a tray appeared with plates of scrambled eggs and ham and mugs of warm milk, and they ate the food from the tray set on a low table between their two beds. They ate too fast, trying to extinguish the flame of want. When they could eat no more, they let go their spoons and lay back against their pillows and closed their eyes. It had been an eon since they had slept for longer than a few hours at a time. Emma left her bed and climbed into Claire’s and spooned herself against her sister’s curled body. Light spilled through the windows. The light was so beautiful that Emma did not want to shut her eyes. She had been in darkness so long. She lifted her head and looked at Mary, who leaned forward, her face a question mark.

  Still, Emma couldn’t speak.

  “Ah,” Mary said. “Don’t worry. I won’t leave, I promise. You can sleep.”

  So Emma did.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Viola Van der Veer hurried ahead to open the door to her son’s room as one of the servants carried Jakob in and laid him on his bed. She had collected eiderdown quilts from the other bedchambers and now she peeled away Jakob’s wet evening clothes, toweled him dry, and piled five quilts on top of his prostrate form.

  “Call for a doctor,” Viola said to the butler, who had raced up the stairs behind her. “One of the Doctors Stipp—they’re just across the park—on Madison. Hurry.”

  The butler turned on his heel, his coattails whipping behind him as he barked orders to the other servants to bring warming bricks and to stoke the fire. Viola stroked her son’s stubbled cheek. It was frigid to the touch. His eyes blinked open and shut. She reached for his hands to warm them, but her own hands were still numb from having spent the entire night on State Street. Though she had worn her fur hat and gloves and hugged the carriage blanket around her shoulders, toward three in the morning she had grown so cold that she left the carriage and began to pace in an effort to warm herself. Gerritt had come and gone after buying a lantern from one of the nearby stores, opened by its proprietor in a burst of entrepreneurial genius to serve the anxious crowds. An enterprising chestnut roaster had trundled his cart to a corner and fired up his brazier, and she had gone and purchased several for herself and her driver to hold in their hands. From time to time, Gerritt returned and reported on the state of the flood. Furious with him for sending Jakob into the district, she pummeled his chest with her fists. Toward dawn, Gerritt departed on another reconnaissance mission and did not return. Alone, she sat vigil another three hours, her heart in her throat, hardly able to breathe as the waters edged up Broadway. And then at nine Jakob stumbled out of the floodwaters like an apparition, carrying those accursed books with him. Now, Viola rubbed her stiff hands together and kneaded Jakob’s shoulders and arms and urged him to talk, trying to will him back from the edge of unconsciousness. Servants hurried in with warmed bricks wrapped in towels. Viola nestled them close to Jakob’s body. A fire roared in the fireplace. Someone brought hot tea.

  “Jakob, please, darling, wake up. Can you wake up and drink some tea?”

  His eyes fluttered open.

  “Jakob?”

  His voice was slurred and raw. “Are you all right?”

  “Me?” she said, incredulous. “How are you?”

  “I think I will never be warm again.”

  She gasped with laughter, relieved. “What happened?”

  “Father wanted the books, but Harley didn’t come. I had to save the lumber—” He shut his eyes again and drifted away.

  Downstairs, a flurry of voices, punctuated by Gerritt’s roaring bray, carried up the stairwell.

  Viola handed the cup of tea to a hovering maid and said, “Make him drink this.” She flew down the three flights to the foyer, where Gerritt sat slumped against the wall, his legs thrust out before him. His hands were sickly white, his bald head was moist with sweat, his lips chapped, and his face a ruby blister of chilblains. Slashed above his left eye was a bloody welt that a maid was attempting to stanch with her apron while a footman knelt before Gerritt unlacing his sodden boots. His clothes were soaked through.

  “I couldn’t find ’em,” Gerritt muttered, shivering.

  “It’s all right. He is home,” Viola said, but he appeared unrelieved by the news that Jakob was safe. “Did you hear me? Jakob’s home. He’s safe. Where did you go? What happened?”

  “Slipped. Fell in the water. Knocked my head against a lamppost.”

  “What were you doing?”

  “Searching,” he said.

  “Call for more help, would you please?” Viola asked the footman, who had managed to yank off the second of Gerritt’s boots.

  The footman hastened outside and returned with a stable hand. They crossed and linked their arms together and bore Gerritt up the three flights to his room. Gerritt, like Jakob, was shivering uncontrollably, and Viola tugged off his wet socks, then the wet canvas work clothes he’d changed into after the party, and then his underclothes. She threw a quilt over him and leaned out the door and pleaded with a maid to unearth more. He had dropped the apron, and the cut was bleeding profusely. Viola ripped a pillowcase off a pillow and bunched it against his forehead.

  “Why didn’t you go to the hospital?” she said. “You’re bleeding.”

  Gerritt wrenched the pillowcase from her hands. He stared at the bloodstain, then held it against his forehead himself. “It’s nothing. I’ve had worse.”

  “I thought you were both gone.”

  “Well, neither of us is, are we?” Gerritt said, scowling. “You said Jakob’s fine?”

  “He is so cold. I sent for one of the Doctors Stipp.”

  Gerritt winced as he raised one eyebrow. “The Stipps? Are they coming?”

  “I hope so.”

  He pushed himself up to one elbow, yanking the quilt to his neck. “Did anyone die? Has everyone been evacuated?”

  “I don’t know,” Viola said. “No one knows.”

  “Damn,” he yelled. “My new ice-yacht. Oh, why didn’t I think of her? Damn, she’s gone now.”

  A footman arrived with more warming bricks and muscled them under the covers and set about hunting for a nightshirt for Gerritt. Viola left the footman cajoling Gerritt to dress.

  Jakob, thank God, was sitting up in bed. A maid had brought him a breakfast tray of boiled eggs and toast and a full pot of coffee. He had stopped shivering and could speak now without slurring.

  “Did I hear Father?” he said.

  “He slipped in the water looking for you. He’s got a cut above his eye.”

  “Did he go out onto the ice?”

  “I don’t know.” Her voice caught in her throat. Last night, she had pictured losing Jakob over and over, and now here he was, safe. “Dr. Stipp should be here soon.”

  “I’m all right,” Jakob said, reaching for her and pulling her to him.

  “I thought I’d lost you,” she said, laying her head on his shoulder. He used to do that, when he was little, when he was frightened.

  “I’m here,” he said.

  “I couldn’t bear it,” she said. She had been so selfish of late, had asked too much of him. But last night she had made it through the entire party without a drop of sherry, braving the scrutiny of her guests. She was glad that she had, for she had her wits about her when Gerritt refused to take her to the river with him. She had fought him and won.

  Jakob let go and fell back against the pillows. “I’ll never be warm.”

  “I’ll have them draw a hot bath. Try to eat, if you can.”

  She floated back and forth between her two patients. For his part, Gerritt was refusing food but had downed two cups of black coffee.

  Unlike the noisy flurry of Gerritt’s arrival, Viola did not know William Stipp had arrived until he knocked on Gerritt’s open door, his bag in hand.

  “Despite your misadventure, Gerritt, your brain is intact,” the doctor said after examining him. He�
�d asked Gerritt a series of questions, waved a lit match in front of his eyes. “But we need to stitch that gash.” He doused a needle in alcohol and guided a length of catgut into the needle’s eye. “I’m surprised you even dared to go near the river, Gerritt. Someone who works as close to it as you knows how dangerous it can be.”

  “I’m not afraid of the river,” Gerritt said, throwing off his covers.

  Dr. Stipp pushed him back against the pillow. “Be still and drink this,” he said, handing him a shot of whiskey he’d ordered from a footman.

  Gerritt grimaced under the pricks and tugs of Stipp’s needle as the doctor warned that sometimes deeper injuries took a while to reveal themselves, and that it was best if Gerritt rested for at least the rest of the day, if not tomorrow, too. Wrapping Gerritt’s head with gauze to keep the bandage in place, he said to Viola, “If he is not himself, or you cannot wake him, call for me immediately. I’ll take him to City Hospital and put a trephine in to lower pressure in his skull. But I’m being overly cautious. I think he’s suffered only a mild bump. I put in five stitches, but only out of an abundance of caution. During the war we wouldn’t have paid such a slight wound any attention.”

  “There was so much blood,” Viola said.

  Gerritt scoffed, “There wasn’t that much blood. Viola lives for drama. I tried to dissuade her from calling you, but you know how ladies can be.”

  Viola flushed at Gerritt’s lie and said, “Doctor Stipp, could you come now and see Jakob? He was out on the ice all night. He had only his evening cloak—he was so cold. I still don’t know how he got to shore.”

  “It’s been a night,” Dr. Stipp agreed. “Mary and I were at the hospital till morning.” He hesitated, as if he were going to say something else but then decided not to.