Winter Sisters Read online

  By the next morning, their driver, Harold, had managed to dig out their sleigh from the carriage house, and he drove them to the police station on Dove Street, located several blocks from the former Sutter home.

  The precinct house seemed to be in the process of disintegrating. The dull red bricks emanated a shabby weariness that cast a deep pall on the otherwise well-kept neighborhood. Until now, Mary had never once had cause to visit the station, and the narrow vestibule, where little daylight penetrated, did nothing to dispel an impression of suffocating gloom. A lanky policeman hunched at the front desk, a kerosene lantern flaring on a hook above his head, its sooty ghost smoked into the wall. No gas jets burned in this hulking building, for it was too old for such modern conveniences. Inside it was so cold that you could see your breath.

  “Missing, eh?” Officer Colm Farrell’s accent was thick Irish, a product, no doubt, of his Sixth Ward upbringing, where the Irish in Albany had lived since anyone could remember and turned out policemen like a factory. Thin, fair-haired, and long boned, he nonetheless gave the impression of uncommon physical strength, perhaps because of his square jaw and the large size of his hands. He listened to their panicked entreaties with patience and sympathy, soliciting clarification on timelines and the particulars of Emma’s and Claire’s appearances and where they had last been seen. Dutifully he took careful notes and when he had exhausted his questions said, “They’ll likely turn up. You’ll see. But we’ll be looking for them. You might want to give the orphanages a look on your own. It’ll be faster.”

  “What’s this? Someone missing?” came a voice from the hallway in as thick an Irish accent as Farrell’s.

  Captain Arthur Mantel was less burly than round, less tall than average. But his demeanor gave the impression of an angry bull, with a matching stance that appealed to Mary. He demurred from taking them back to his office for a private conversation, claiming that it was a death trap, piled about with sundry ledgers and papers and too many guns to count.

  “Orphans,” he said, after hearing them out. “And you say no one’s seen them? That’s a shame.”

  “Yes,” William said. “What do you usually do in such a case?”

  “Keep a keen eye out. Ask the neighbors. But it’s not quite the usual, is it, with the snow? And their names are Emma and Claire O’Donnell? You’re certain, now?” His voice carried a measured curiosity, as if he were aware how even this routine question could elicit grief from a panicked citizen.

  “Why wouldn’t we know their names?” Mary asked, incredulous.

  Mantel shook his head. “No reason. Have no worries, now. We’ll be vigilant. Every police officer will get a copy of their descriptions. We’ll ask at churches, orphanages. You can, too. You’ve already shown good initiative. Keep it up. It can only help. But I warn you, it’s possible that they could have gotten confused in the cold and wandered in the direction of the river.”

  “Why would they have done that?”

  Mantel shrugged. “Like I said, confusion. And then some rift in the ice could have swallowed them up. But that’s the worst possible outcome. Keep heart. We’ll search with every resource we have.”

  During the next two weeks, Mary and William braved the cold and snow and swept through the rest of the city’s hospitals, posted notices, published a daily ad in all the newspapers, and toured the seven orphan asylums multiple times, including three in Watervliet and Troy, their sleigh flying across the frozen Hudson at the marked crossing. One evening, William took the train to Troy and walked the streets with a lantern. Mary took the train to Schenectady and inquired at a dozen churches and orphanages.

  At night, they curled into one another in bed, enervated, nearly broken, and carried on a variation of a single conversation, Mary always beginning, her mind mulling the inconsistencies. “The principal said she didn’t dismiss them until the storm ended. They were so close to home. The sun was shining. They simply couldn’t have gone into the river by mistake. Their school is too far from the river. None of that makes sense, William.”

  “They may have made it home and discovered that David and Bonnie weren’t there. It’s not out of the question that they could have wandered off looking for them, attempted to go to the district—”

  “But the neighbors said they didn’t come home.”

  “They may have gone straight for Bonnie’s shop or to the Lumber District. Misconstrued where the Lock Bridge was, ventured out onto the unstable ice. Just like the police think.”

  “But it’s all such conjecture. And convenient. If the police decide Emma and Claire are dead, then they don’t have to look for them anymore.”

  “But the girls aren’t the only ones, Mary. Dozens of others, too. Gone without a trace.”

  His voice, that low, glorious growl that Mary loved, was grim with sorrow. From the moment she’d first seen him, at the beginning of the war, when she’d overheard him begging the nuns of the E Street Infirmary to send him a nurse, and she’d taken advantage of that need and shown up at the Union Hotel Hospital insisting he take her on, the deep tones of his distinctive voice had not only chastened and challenged her, but also validated the notion that her intelligence was more valuable than gold, and her unexpected presence in his life a blessed, lucky thing. And on one crucial day at Fairfax Station, when thousands of wounded Union soldiers lay on damp, hay-covered hills, needing an evacuation that seemingly could not be accomplished, his impatience and fury had illuminated the inversion that triage was not cruelty but instead mercy, and that pity was not compassion but instead a useless waste of time. Now, he held her in his arms, and in that way they had of skipping a thousand unnecessary words, read her mind.

  “This isn’t Fairfax,” he said.

  “But this isn’t the war. People don’t just disappear.”

  “They do if they’ve gone into the river.”

  “William.”

  “But where else could they be, Mary?”

  Where else indeed?

  —

  At the end of those two weeks, Mary was certain that Captain Mantel had grown tired of her. She recognized the signs: the weary sigh of recognition, the overly polite greeting, the fathomless volume of platitudes lobbed in her direction. How good to. I’ve been thinking of. I admire your. She had called on him daily, and once again early on Monday, March 24, after yet another fruitless weekend of searching. Out of necessity, William had reopened his clinic to patients, but Mary, they had decided, would go on looking. Or rather, Mary had decided. She would not let missing stand. She would look for Bonnie and David’s children forever.

  “But there must be something else you can do?” she implored Mantel now, ignoring the slightly disdainful turn of his lip. She noticed a faint smell of rum about him. She’d heard things, too: he lived in a far nicer house and had more money to spend than a police captain ought to. “Surely you can look harder. Surely there is some solution you haven’t thought of yet.”

  “What more do you want me to do?” There was a new, brittle edge to Mantel’s voice. “Pick up the cobblestones one by one and inspect their undersides? They’re gone, madam. We have looked in every cranny of the city, just as you have. Most times, you’d been to a place even before we’d gotten there ourselves. There’s nowhere else to look.”

  “That’s not possible. There’s always something else to be done.”

  “Listen to me. We kept watch for your young ones, we did. Stopped urchins on the street—you know, those ones that live in the hovels near the tracks and down by the gasworks. Asked after yours. We’ve done more than that, more than you can imagine.”

  “But—”

  “If you don’t mind my saying, madam, grief plays nasty tricks on people, especially when it’s children that are perceived to be in trouble. I think it’s time you come to terms, and if you cannot, you best head to Saratoga Springs to take a water cure, because you’ve gone out of y
our mind with grief. You’ve got to understand. You’ve got to believe it. They’re gone, and no amount of anger at me is going to find them now.”

  Outside, Mary put a hand to the side of the brick building to steady herself.

  In the twelve years of her marriage to William, children had never come for them. As a substitute for their longing, they had instead lavished attention on Elizabeth, and on Emma and Claire, too.

  But now Emma and Claire had vanished.

  And it seemed the river was the only explanation.

  Chapter Three

  Two days later, at four o’clock in the afternoon on March 26, in an apartment on the rue de Rivoli in Paris, Amelia Sutter looked out an open casement window overlooking the Tuileries and the avenue below. A finely boned woman, she had grown slightly fleshy at the waist with age, and in this angled light her face revealed deep lines earned by myriad decades working as a midwife. Amelia considered herself very fortunate. She had rented this high-ceilinged, wainscoted apartment from Elizabeth’s former French teacher in Albany, Madame Hubbard, who was French and the wife of a former diplomat to Paris. Madame Hubbard was a practical woman who from time to time suspected her husband of infidelity, and she retained the apartment in case she one day felt compelled to return to the French capital, though she had readily leased it to Amelia a year and a half ago when Elizabeth had auditioned for a place at the Paris Conservatoire.

  Recently, Elizabeth had implored her grandmother to let her travel to and from the Conservatoire alone, and despite some trepidation, Amelia had conceded. As the mother of Mary Sutter Stipp, Amelia knew when to give in to an intrepid and stubborn young woman, though in Paris, as in Albany, young women ordinarily did not travel alone and they certainly didn’t take the omnibus alone. But, as Elizabeth herself had argued, she was a Sutter, or at least the daughter of a Sutter, and Sutter women had been driving themselves hither, thither, and yon for an eon. No adhering to societal expectations for Sutter women—Sutter women took care of themselves; Sutter women bore up at all times.

  And so for the last few months, Amelia had awaited her granddaughter’s return from her classes not outside the tall double doors of the Conservatoire at no. 2 rue Bergère, but at this window, enjoying a cup of tea, admiring the beautiful view, and reading Le Figaro, the premier Parisian newspaper, to improve her French. But she was uneasy today and had been for some time. It wasn’t because they hadn’t heard yet from Mary or Bonnie since news of the great northeastern blizzard had reached Paris; the mails and telegraph were said to be down, and only essential communications were being transmitted. It was instead because despite Elizabeth’s daily protestations of well-being, Amelia had lately detected a new disquiet in the girl.

  Certainly, Elizabeth no longer seemed the self-assured prodigy she had been at the end of October 1877, when they had traveled to Paris for her audition. At fifteen, she had stood alone on the stage of the conservatory’s U-shaped performance hall—the first of its kind in the world and widely celebrated for its sublime acoustics—and played Viotti’s complex Violin Concerto no. 17 in D minor with confidence and verve, earning unanimous high marks and immediate entry to Charles Girard’s vigilant instruction. A faculty member, he was the most famous violinist in France—some might say infamous—and brilliant besides, but he was also exacting.

  Gradually, over the year and a half under his charge, Elizabeth had stopped practicing as much, an unsettling development. And she had not been sleeping well, either. And though on Sunday she had played with distinction in one of the periodic public concerts in which only the most gifted students performed, and had earned a standing ovation for her solo, afterward at home Elizabeth had turned critical of her performance, dissolved into tears, and slammed the door of her room. It sometimes occurred to Amelia that perhaps Bonnie should have accompanied Elizabeth to Paris instead. Elizabeth adored Bonnie and shared confidences with her, and Bonnie’s pride in Elizabeth’s prodigious talents pleased the girl the most. But of course Bonnie had her own family and her millinery shop to take care of.

  Amelia took a sip of tea, thinking through the problem of Elizabeth’s unhappiness. Perhaps a leave of absence was in order—or a holiday. They could travel to Italy or Nice, where the girl could sort herself out. Elizabeth had grown so temperamental that it was often hard to know how to put things, but she would offer the prospect of time away anyway, because something had to be done.

  There was a brief tap at the outer door and within a moment the housemaid, Flavie, a discreet, elfin young woman, appeared carrying a telegram on a silver plate.

  Amelia opened the envelope, expecting a confirmation from Albany that all was well.

  Bonnie and David dead in blizzard. Emma and Claire missing. Delayed in informing you in hope of finding them. All hope now gone. We are heartbroken. Will bury at thaw. Sending our deepest love.

  The mulberry trees in the Tuileries, just budding, blurred as if they had been drowned in a deluge. Amelia put a hand to the arm of the chair, tried to get up, sat back down again.

  “Madame?”

  “Bonnie. And the girls—oh, the girls. And David. How will I tell Elizabeth?” Amelia said.

  Flavie knelt beside Amelia, her black dress puddling on the lush threads of the Turkish carpet. “Êtes vous malade, madame?”

  Amelia couldn’t find the words in French, though Flavie was right. She did feel ill. “Emma and Claire. They’re so little. Petites.”

  “Qui, madame?” Who?

  Flavie was still holding Amelia’s hand when Elizabeth unlocked the apartment door, her rosewood violin case tucked under her arm. She removed her gloves and set them on the marble-topped table by the door, then looked up.

  “Grandmama? What is it, Grandmama? What’s the matter?” Elizabeth sank into the chair opposite and set the violin case at her feet, her gray eyes widening. The pale afternoon light fell across the smooth skin of her face. Sometimes Elizabeth’s beauty struck Amelia with such force that she forgot how young she was. At seventeen, she lacked the showy twinkle of velvet eyelashes or rose-splashed cheekbones, but she unfailingly brought to mind a Botticelli or a da Vinci. Or, sometimes, her deceased mother.

  “Darling,” Amelia said. She was measuring her words. “Bonnie and David—Mary has written—”

  Elizabeth went white. “What?”

  How careful Amelia had always been in matters of death, to leave mothers of stillborns in her care under no illusions. But what other way was there to tell the news? The O’Donnells were gone. “Lizzie, darling. Bonnie and David have died.”

  “What? No.”

  “I don’t know the particulars. It’s something to do with the blizzard.”

  “They died?”

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “During the storm, I think.”

  Elizabeth absorbed the news with a stillness that terrified Amelia. Her granddaughter lifted a gaze turned dull and unseeing. “But Emma and Claire? Are they all right? Aunt Mary and Uncle William have them?”

  Amelia hesitated.

  “Tell me, Grandmama.”

  “I am told they are lost.”

  “Lost?”

  Amelia handed Elizabeth the telegram, which she still held in her hand. After reading it, Elizabeth looked up and said again, “Lost?”

  —

  Within a week, Elizabeth reported that she had negotiated a leave of absence from the Conservatoire, and within another week, Amelia had booked their passage on the SS France of the General TransAtlantic Company at Le Havre, bound for Manhattan City, to arrive on April 12.

  Just before boarding, Amelia sent a telegram to Mary and William from the dingy steamship offices on the windy quay at Le Havre, informing them to expect their arrival in Albany on Sunday, April 13, on the 12:55 New York Central Express, without fail. Later that night, as the steamship plowed through the choppy gray waters of the Engli
sh Channel, the hum of the indefatigable twin screws reverberating through their small cabin, Amelia would not admit to herself that she had waited until their plans were irreversible to telegraph. She had no doubt that had Mary been chaperoning Elizabeth in Paris, her stalwart daughter would have refused the girl’s petitions to return home, naming perseverance and courage and dedication as reasons to stay. But Amelia was not Mary. She had known too much grief in her lifetime not to understand that Elizabeth’s inconsolable sorrow over the loss of the O’Donnells was too much for her now. The girl had changed. Something unknowable had rendered this once devoted musician utterly indifferent to her once all-consuming passion.

  Asleep now in the small bed in the alcove of their cabin, Elizabeth looked so much like her deceased mother that Amelia, observing Elizabeth from her vantage point at the porthole window, had to grip an armchair to keep herself upright. Amelia would never stop missing Jenny, dead now seventeen years, would never forget the hours of her daughter’s complicated labor that had overwhelmed even her expertise. Ironically, Elizabeth, whose birthday they had recently marked with a sugary cake from the tiny bakery in the Palais-Royale, had been born during a blizzard that had delayed a more gifted Mary from getting to her twin sister’s bedside to deliver her until it was too late.

  Amelia thought now how much she despised winter.

  She wiped fresh tears from her eyes. This was how people kept on, wasn’t it? You got on with things. If you wallowed in remembrance, every day was a crucible in which your past exploded into your present. It was how she managed to rise from her bed every morning. Why she forgave everyone nearly everything. At sixty, half the people she had loved had left her. Her son Christian, her daughter Jenny, her husband Nathaniel. She lived now for what was, not for what had once been. After all, what was growing older but a reminder of the loss of everyone you had ever loved? But losing Bonnie, too, and those darling girls was more than she thought she could bear, for Elizabeth’s sake. Emma and Claire had been like little sisters to Elizabeth.