Winter Sisters Page 15

  Too distracted before to notice, Viola saw now how exhausted the doctor was. There were heavy bags under his eyes, and despite his efficient competence, he was moving slowly. He seemed distant, troubled.

  “Have you heard whether anyone else was hurt?” Gerritt said. “In the city? Anyone missing?”

  “No numbers yet, but there were quite a few injuries, mostly from panic. Fractures, that sort of thing. Oh,” he said, turning away from the door. “Forgive me, I forgot. Your foreman. Mary was going to send you a note, but things got a little busy at our house this morning. She and I performed surgery on Mr. Harley earlier today. He suffered a gash to the back of his neck. More serious than yours, Gerritt. We stitched him up—he should be fine, if the wound doesn’t become infected.”

  “Harley?” Gerritt’s gaze sharpened. “Did he say anything?”

  “He wasn’t conscious. I have no idea how he got hurt. But he’s getting a lot of attention. A reporter is writing him up. He saved two children.”

  “Children?” Gerritt said. “Whose children?”

  “I don’t know. Why?”

  “I’ve got a lot of employees who live by the river. They’ve all got young children, and of course it’s them you worry about in a flood, isn’t it?”

  “It’s children you worry about most times.”

  “Where is Harley now?”

  “City Hospital.”

  Gerritt went as pale as the white walls and sprang from bed and began to pull clothes from his walnut armoire, agile in spite of his injury. “I have to see him. Have the carriage readied, Viola.”

  “Gerritt, get back in bed. Besides, don’t you want to see Jakob before you go rushing off to see your overseer?” she said.

  Gerritt turned and scowled, and Viola knew she would pay dearly for her admonition later. He did not like being scolded, especially not in front of anyone.

  “Don’t be an idiot, Gerritt,” William said. “Listen to your wife. Spend at least today in bed. You’ve had a blow to the head. Drink brandy to burn away the river water. And next time, use a boat, like a sensible person. I will allow you, however, to come with us to see your son.” Scowling again, Gerritt followed them to Jakob’s room, fingering a cut end of suture that had worked through the gauze.

  Jakob, like Gerritt, had donned nightclothes. His breakfast tray had been removed, and Viola was relieved to see that he was no longer a ghostly white.

  “Dear boy,” Gerritt said. “How are you?”

  “I’m fine,” Jakob said. “What happened to you?”

  “I was looking for you and slipped. Stupid of me. Tell us what happened to you.”

  As Jakob revealed the details of his ordeal, Viola learned just how close he had come to being killed. As Jakob talked, Doctor Stipp examined him, studying the tips of his fingers for frostbite, ordering him once to be silent so that he could listen to his lungs. Jakob was making light of things, no doubt a show for his father, and perhaps even for the doctor, but Viola detected a wavering hint of fear underneath his bravado, especially when he described his desperate dash across the ice. Jakob ended by nodding at the burlap bag in the corner.

  Delighted, Gerritt asked, “You got all of them?”

  “I did.”

  He beamed. “You’re a hero. Do you hear, Viola? This one chopped through the roof.”

  “He nearly died.”

  “But he didn’t, did he?”

  William cleared his throat, interrupting the exchange. “Jakob, I think you’ll be fine, but Viola, you must keep watch for pneumonia or any sign of fever. He’s been chilled to the bone. Now,” he said, snapping shut his bag, “if you’ll excuse me, I must be off—”

  “Who or what could be more important than my son?” Gerritt said.

  “Call for me if you need anything. And I most emphatically recommend that you do not go to the hospital, Gerritt. Mary and I will keep you updated on Harley’s condition.”

  “Harley?” Jakob said.

  “He’s in the hospital with an ugly cut to the back of his neck,” Gerritt said.

  “He is? What happened?”

  “No one knows,” Gerritt said, jerking his head at the doctor. “He took care of him and he doesn’t even know.”

  “We’ve imposed on you too long, Dr. Stipp,” Viola said. “You must be exhausted. Thank you so much for coming. Please allow me to show you out.” In the hallway, Viola steered William toward the stairwell, but she stopped when they reached it. “I want to assure you, Doctor Stipp, that I do not exaggerate. Nor do I live, as my husband stated, for drama. He sometimes likes to paint me as hysterical. He thinks me flighty and silly. And perhaps I am. But I was terrified.”

  The doctor’s gaze turned soft with kindness. “Mrs. Van der Veer, are you all right?”

  “I was terribly frightened,” Viola said. She felt her knees buckling. “Jakob is my only child.”

  “He will be all right.”

  “I apologize,” she said, “for my husband’s rudeness.”

  “Remember that he almost lost his son, too. Strain like that will undo anyone. I’ve heard worse from other patients. I’ve probably said worse.”

  “The war?”

  “Violence and fright loosen tongues.” He paused and cleared his throat. “Forgive me, but, if at any time you need anything, Mary and I are always here.”

  “Thank you. That’s very kind.”

  When Viola returned upstairs, she found Gerritt in his bedroom, dressing. He thrust his arm toward a dangling coat sleeve but missed and yanked the whole thing off and threw it on the floor.

  “What are you doing, Gerritt? The doctor said you shouldn’t go anywhere.”

  He turned on her. “How dare you embarrass me in front of the doctor?”

  “He says you should stay in bed.”

  “Don’t you know that we’ve just lost thousands of dollars? Maybe tens of thousands. I have to see Harley. I have to know what he thinks we should do now.”

  “What does money matter when we almost lost our son? What possessed you to send Jakob into the district when the ice was breaking?” There was a new edge to her voice, one she hadn’t chanced with him in a long while, reminiscent of long ago, before she started feeling the avalanche of his scorn. Out of the corner of her eye she caught sight of herself in the mirror. The filtered light betrayed age: shallow half moons bracketed her mouth, and her eyes looked hooded.

  “Oh, please, spare me, Viola. No one knew the water would rise that fast. It never does. And if it was too dangerous, he shouldn’t have gone in. The boy’s got a brain. A good one, that I paid Harvard to give him. And he got himself out of that pickle pretty well. Bloody hell, woman. Help me get dressed or get out of the way.”

  “Didn’t you hear Jakob? He thinks the office might have been crushed. He could have been lost to us.”

  “But he’s here, isn’t he?” Gerritt bent over and scooped the jacket from the floor and punched at it to remove dust. “You see what I mean about your penchant for drama?”

  “I was terrified, Gerritt. I didn’t know where you were. I didn’t know if Jakob was alive.”

  Gerritt drew very close. “What? No sherry this morning? Really, for a woman to fall into drink is such a tawdry thing, don’t you agree?”

  Viola started and backed away. “I’ve learned not to care about the awful things you say to me. And I’ve also learned not to care about the other women you see, either.”

  He snorted, apparently unperturbed that she knew. “For God’s sake, Viola, there are more important things than how you feel.” He stumbled past her, wrestling with his coat and screaming for the carriage.

  Viola shut her eyes, fighting an overwhelming desire to sneak into the butler’s pantry for some sherry.

  “Mother?” she heard Jakob call. “Is that bath ready?”

  She turned away fro
m the stairwell and made for her son’s room, calling for another tray of tea.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  It was two in the afternoon, and James Harley was slowly coming around. He could determine little of his whereabouts, because sandbags prevented him from turning his head. Indistinguishable voices and the occasional groan of agony filtered above a mild buzz of activity. His neck throbbed, his head ached, and his throat flamed with thirst. He lay in the throes of this discomfort for some time until he reared up, grabbing at a searing pain scorching the back of his neck. His hand came away with a white square stained with pale, pinkish fluid that smelled of musk. He stared at the strange object, wondering how such a benign thing could cause him so much pain. He turned his head an inch. He was in a square, high-ceilinged room with three other recumbent men, and seated next to his bed a fourth man in need of a change of clothes slept in a chair, his long legs resting on the edge of the bed, his arms knotted in a loose pretzel of repose around a folded newspaper. Whirling with nausea, Harley lay back down.

  The chair-sitter snorted to life, slapping his feet against the floor and throwing his head back in a violent way before coming to full animation with a bracing shake of his head and a scratching paw at his short beard, now drizzled with saliva. He hugged the newspaper to his chest and leaned forward with keen interest.

  “You’re awake,” he announced in a high, reedy voice. “Do you know how lucky you are?”

  “Lucky?” Harley said.

  “You’re at City Hospital. You’re a hero.” The man waggled his newspaper in front of Harley’s nose, aggravating the swells of nausea.

  “Hero?”

  “Don’t be modest, sir. Those little ones would have died if not for you.”

  “Little ones?” Harley remembered nothing of little ones. “Do you have any whiskey?”

  His strange companion laughed. “Thirsty, huh? I’m afraid they frown on whiskey here. All I’ll be able to scare up is some weak tea, if that. Think on what happened while I go hunt that down. I want to hear all the details, everything from the moment the waters felled you.”

  Harley pondered these declarations—Little ones, Hero, Waters—as the man shambled out of sight. Harley heard him imploring someone for tea, how he needed it for the hero. Harley wondered whether he might be dreaming. From the hallway, a harried explanation of a problem with a broken water main was followed with a warning about an expected menace of typhoid. But, no matter, a voice said, the man—hero or not—couldn’t drink for eight hours after receiving chloroform. And he still had half an hour to go. “And for goodness’s sake, keep him in bed. When they wake up, they don’t know where they are. They can’t remember a thing. Keep an eye on him.”

  Full recollection, or what Harley believed to be full recollection, came suddenly. His feet hit the cold floorboards. The room reeled. He made it as far as the door before he sank to his knees.

  “Hey now, hey,” said the high, reedy voice. “You can’t be getting out of bed. Ye gods, man, you can’t be so brave as all that, can you? Going to look for them again, eh? Don’t worry, don’t worry. The little ones are fine. They’re fine.” His strange companion knelt and helped Harley up, then let loose a low, thin whistle. “Dear God, that cut is still ugly. What did you do with your bandage?”

  “Where are they now?” Harley squawked.

  “The little ones? With their mother.”

  “No. They can’t be.”

  “Rest easy, Harley. You saved them.”

  “I saw it in the papers, by God. They buried them just the other day. The whole family.”

  “No one’s had time to bury anyone. And everyone survived. They had good warning. Don’t you remember those bells?”

  Harley remembered no bells. He aimed for the bed, one knee catching on the disarranged sheets. The room continued to spin as the stranger settled him against the hard edges of the sandbags.

  Harley said, “Are they at the house? They shouldn’t be alone. They’ll be frightened.”

  “God, man, you’re in bad shape. That chloroform plays tricks, doesn’t it? They’re not at their house.”

  “But where are they?”

  “With their mother. Look. I found you and brought you here. Everything is fine, because of you. Name’s Horace Young. I wrote an article. Let me read it to you.”

  He launched in, oblivious to Harley’s protests.

  A True Hero

  The wealthy and famous Gerritt Van der Veer will be pleased to know that early this morning James Harley, his stalwart stevedore and head foreman, despite having suffered a crippling blow to his head during the flood, carried two boys on his back to the safety of the intersection of Westerlo and Grand Streets in the low-lying Pastures neighborhood, after which he then collapsed.

  He was operated on at City Hospital by Dr. William Stipp and lightly assisted by his wife, Albany’s famous native daughter, the former Miss Mary Sutter who defied the usual squeamishness of her sex to become a doctor. But in a coquettish display of temper, Mrs. Stipp declined to outline for this concerned reporter Mr. Harley’s prognosis.

  Perhaps such unprofessional behavior is to be expected, for in the past six weeks, it is known that Mrs. Stipp exhausted herself in an endless and ultimately futile search for the two O’Donnell sisters, lost in the winter blizzard. No doubt she is now unhinged with grief, for on Wednesday last, the Stipp and Sutter family finally set a stone in remembrance of them in our magnificent Albany Rural Cemetery.

  The reporter grinned, his teeth gleaming through an untended mustache as he tapped the newspaper against Harley’s chest. “Good, yes?”

  The article had prompted in Harley ghostly flashes of wading through water and a frightening feeling of drowning, but clarity remained a flickering goal, just out of reach. There had been a flood, apparently. And he had rescued not Emma and Claire, but two boys he had no memory of. Harley concentrated on breathing, trying to calm the throbbing in his neck, but all he could think about was the girls. Where were they? Were they safe? Still in the house? Why couldn’t he remember? He hoped they were alive, hoped they were all right. He’d often thought he ought to give them back, but that had been impossible, wishful dreaming. He’d grown awfully fond of them in the past weeks. He’d done everything he could for them. It was like losing his own children now, not knowing where they were. A wave of remorse washed over him. What if they were dead? Oh, his darling girls! He rose on one elbow, leaned over the side of the bed, and retched at Young’s feet.

  “James Harley?” a disembodied voice thundered from the hallway. Never before had Captain Mantel’s coarse tones roused terror in Harley. But they did now. He had lost the girls, and he didn’t know where they were.

  Young rose and stuck his head out the door. “Harley’s here. Who’s asking?”

  “Who are you?” Mantel said, his considerable bulk filling the doorframe.

  Young offered his hand. “Horace Young. The Argus.”

  “Could you excuse us? Police business,” Mantel said, steering the reporter into the hallway and shutting the door on him. Mantel took Young’s seat and grinned at Harley, clearly mindful of the close quarters and Harley’s fellow patients, who were staring now.

  “I didn’t mean to lose them,” Harley said. “I love them. Especially—”

  Mantel leaned in and whispered, “Who didn’t you lose?”

  Harley swallowed. “I don’t know.”

  “Goddamn it, man,” Mantel hissed. “Do you have those O’Donnell sisters or not?”

  Harley tried to remember what he’d said before but couldn’t. Words seemed to float out of him of their own accord. But by the look on Mantel’s face now, he feared he might have said too much. “Sisters?” he finally rasped.

  “The whole of the Pastures is under water,” Mantel said, still whispering, still leaning in. “Did you leave them in the house while you were busy rescuing nei
ghbors? Is that where they are? Drowned? Are you responsible for that?”

  Tears slid down Harley’s cheeks. Oh, his beloveds. His head was clearing, the nausea fading. The back of his neck ached, and he reached for the wound, hoping it would remind him of what had occurred. A murky memory returned, of Emma and a coal shovel. He scrambled to find some explanation now that would appease Mantel, but couldn’t. He was terrified of the man, who flared at the slightest provocation. The girls might be dead. Oh, it was too terrible. Had there been water in the basement when he went down to fetch them? Or had he left the door open at the top of the stairs? Maybe they had escaped. That thought was even more terrifying. It was him they knew, him they would recognize. “I remember nothing,” he said, hoping to put the police captain off.

  Gerritt Van der Veer strode into the room, a rakish bandage affixed above his left eye. Mantel rose and shook Van der Veer’s hand, turning affable: a clap to the back, an extended hand, a hearty shake.

  “What happened to you, Van der Veer?” Mantel said. “Don’t tell me you were mucking around in the water, too?”

  “I was down at the river last night. My son was caught in the district. I slipped. What are you doing here?

  “Just visiting our hero. I read about him in the paper. Did you see the article?”

  “Bought one from a newsboy just as I came in. You had time in the middle of all this”—Gerritt made a gesture that seemed to encompass the whole city—“to pay tribute to my overseer?”

  “I just went off duty. Harley will be up for a medal, I say. You should be proud. Such a public display of bravery.”

  “Two little boys. Display of courage beyond compare. Speaking of courage, my son hightailed it off the ice this morning. He was caught in the flooding—waited on the roof all night. Saved my books,” Gerritt said.

  “Loyal boy,” Mantel said.

  A nurse appeared carrying a tray of gauze and bandage scissors, a brown bottle of iodine balanced between them. “Excuse me, gentlemen, but I need to change Mr. Harley’s dressing.”