Doppelgänger Page 9

  Wicks seemed to take this in the same stride she took everything else. “I don’t think you want me to be calling you Anine around the other servants or Mr. Julian. They might get suspicious about why we’re so familiar.”

  “Very well. That’s fair.”

  At long last a hint of a smile split Wicks’s face. “And my name’s Clea.”

  Anine smiled too. “Clea.”

  “One more thing, ma’am—I mean Miss Anine.”

  “Yes?”

  “Like I said before, ghosts can’t hurt you. A ghost didn’t hurt Mr. Bradbury. Mr. Bradbury hurt himself. You get scared, you remember that.”

  It took Anine a moment to realize that this was very sage advice. At last she nodded. “Thank you.”

  Clea stood, leaned over and began to clean up the tea tray. “Mrs. Hennessey will have lunch on soon,” she said. “And I expect you’ll want to change. I’ll go lay the blue dress out for you.” After a few moments she was gone, and everything was suddenly back to normal—if not quite the same. At least Anine now had someone on her side, and she had a feeling Clea Wicks, inexpressive though she was, might turn out to be a powerful ally.

  That night over dinner Julian made a blunt announcement: “Anine, I think we’ve waited long enough. I want a son.”

  She tried to show no reaction. Silently she said, after what you did to me the thought of voluntarily bearing your children is only slightly more appealing than dousing myself in kerosene and setting myself on fire. But she could not say this. It wasn’t that she feared him, but she thought that antagonizing him unnecessarily was tactically inadvisable, at least until she decided how—or if—to try to create some reasonable basis on which they could live together more or less harmoniously. All she said was, “I don’t believe the time is right for that.”

  “The time is right,” he replied softly, “when I decide it’s right. We’ve been married five months. We have our own house now. And when Hancock is elected this fall, having a child on the way will help me press my case for an office in his administration. I’ll have a family to provide for.”

  Anine almost laughed. An office? Is he serious? Julian was twenty-three. His contribution to the presidential campaign of the great Winfield Scott Hancock was to sit around in a smoke-filled club with other rich young Democrats, curse Garfield and the Republicans and promise the occasional city job to various ward and precinct captains. She swallowed the acerbic words she wanted to say with a bite of squab. What she finally said was: “I’m a part of this decision too, Julian. I’m not ready for a baby. Neither of us are.”

  Julian’s jaw bulged as he cut into the squab on his plate. After several seconds of silence he threw down the knife and fork and stabbed a finger angrily in her direction.

  “You do not decide when you’re ready for a child!” he blasted. “That’s my decision! I’m the one who’s going to be out there working to provide for him while you lay around twiddling yourself in the parlor all day. I’m going to give you a baby whether you like it or not. That’s my right as a husband and you know it. You should relish the chance to prove you’re useful for something other than as a pretty mannequin to hang expensive clothes on. I can’t even count on you to be a competent social hostess because it’s obvious the other women of New York can’t stand to be around you. So the least you can do is justify your existence by pushing out some kids. And they’d better have balls instead of slots, or I’ll divorce you and put you on the first boat back to Sweden.”

  She knew he meant this speech to sound fearsome and terrifying, but in reality it was simply pathetic. She almost pitied him. This is the man I married? He used to be so charming. When did he turn into this—thing? This time she couldn’t stop the acerbic reply. She said in Swedish, “Great idea. When do I leave?”

  He snatched the butter knife from his plate and flung it at her. “Fittjävel!” he cried—a particularly vile Swedish swear word—and his face was as red as the carpet. The knife startled her but flew wide, clattering on the sideboard behind Anine’s chair. As he got up from the table he upended his plate and deliberately knocked over his wine glass. “Get your nigger maid to clean it up,” he grumbled, and left the dining room.

  She regretted egging him on. In the hour before bed as she sat at her dressing table and brushed her hair she dreaded how forcefully he would certainly take her tonight. But some part of the conversation in the dining room gnawed at her, and not altogether unpleasantly. What if I could go back to Sweden? I obviously don’t belong in New York. Maybe that is the answer. Yes, there’s the scandal of a divorce, but I could patch things up with my own family given enough time. I might never be received in Stockholm society, but I’m obviously not going to be received here in New York either, so what’s the difference?

  As she changed into her bedclothes she decided that she must stand up to him no matter what the cost. She would not allow him to ravage her again. Her dignity demanded that she take a stand, regardless of whether the row ended in violence or not. For a very long time she sat at the dressing table waiting for him to come in, rehearsing the words of her blunt refusal. But he never came. At midnight she realized he wasn’t coming at all and had probably gone to bed. For all his bluster and threats he seemed to blanch at actually carrying them through, which meant he might not be completely without remorse for what he’d done to her. She didn’t know if she should interpret it as a victory for her or an olive branch from him, but she did think it was significant.

  Relieved, Anine blew out the lamp, got into bed and slept peacefully, undisturbed by nightmares or the creaking, giggling, red-and-black-clad phantasm with whom she shared the house.

  Two days later, shortly after Julian left for the office, Anine was lingering over breakfast when Clea entered the dining room. The maid had an insistent look on her face and the way she looked around, making sure neither Bryan Shoop nor Mrs. Hennessey were in earshot, told Anine she had something she wanted to communicate in confidence.

  “You were right,” said Clea. “There is a woman. I saw her last night.”

  “Where?”

  “I was standing at the top of the stairs, just about to go into my room. I looked down and saw someone at the railing on the third floor. I thought it was you but then I heard the door to your bedroom open and saw you come out and come down the stairs. When I looked down at the third floor again she was gone.”

  Anine had indeed left her room and gone downstairs briefly. Just before she went to bed she discovered the pitcher in her room was empty, so she took it down to the kitchen to refill it. She hadn’t sensed the presence of the spöke at that time or any time last night. Yet if Clea was right—and there was no reason to believe she wasn’t—the apparition had been one floor up, directly above her.

  “What did she look like?”

  Clea shook her head. “All I see was her hands on the railing. A woman’s hands. A white woman.”

  The third floor balustrade. “That’s the spot where…Mr. Bradbury tied the rope.”

  “Miss Anine, there is a spirit in this house. Strong one, I think.”

  It seemed hard to imagine it, here in the breakfast nook with the September sunlight pouring over the table, a cup of fresh coffee steaming gently into the slanting beam of yellow sun. Anine said, “Are you frightened, Clea?”

  Clea responded, with her usual blank bluntness: “Yes.”

  Chapter Nine

  The Cold Declaration

  That afternoon word finally arrived from Rachael Norton. The note was terse and specific, like instructions to a spy. The Central Park. Tomorrow 3PM. Hire a carriage but let it go at 57th Street gate. Walk. We can ride in my carriage. RN.

  Although it was merely a ride in the park Anine dressed for the occasion. She chose a Princess dress with golden-yellow silk and blue lace overlay—traditional Swedish colors—which she hadn’t worn since they left Europe. It was a warm sunny
day and the entrance to the Central Park on 59th Street and Fifth Avenue was jammed with carriages. Using a parasol to shade herself from the sun Anine walked boldly through the gates, finding herself on the gravel driveway that was less a path than a promenade ground for upper-class New Yorkers to show off their new buggies and phaetons.

  A carriage pulled by a white horse with bright red plumes protruding from its bridle rattled up to her. “Oh, hello there, Mrs. Atherton!” Rachael leaned out of the carriage window, carrying her own parasol. She was dressed in white. “Gone for a stroll around the park? You’ll get run over this time of day. Here, come ride in my carriage.”

  After Anine climbed into the vehicle the pretense, mercifully, became unnecessary. “Beautiful dress,” said Rachael, and Anine thought she was sincere. “You’d better get all the use out of it you can. I predict Princess dresses will be out of fashion by winter.”

  “Why should I care about fashion?” Anine replied, somewhat facetiously. “No one receives me anyway.”

  “Yes, but hopefully we’ll fix that before too long.”

  The coachman prodded the horse and the carriage began moving. The vista of the Central Park with its lawns, hedges and stone bridges began to crawl by around them. Anine had heard that the Central Park was created as America’s answer to the great gardens of Europe like London’s Kensington or the Trädgårdsföreningen in Göteborg, but she saw virtually no echo of those places in her present surroundings. Except for business and money, Americans can’t quite get anything right.

  “I’ve got two things to tell you,” said Rachael. “I found out a bit about the history of your house, and I also found out what they’ve been saying about you. As it turns out the two are related.”

  Anine couldn’t quite imagine how this could be. “What is it? What are the women saying?”

  “As I suspected it has very little to do with you. Your husband is the target of the snubbing. But when women of society wish to make a point they can only do it by acting within the sphere of women, so that’s why you’re taking the brunt of it. It’s a beastly system, to be sure. Society behaves according to its own laws, and they bear little resemblance to anything that makes sense out there in the real world.”

  Anine sighed. She wasn’t interested in Rachael’s views on social conventions. “What are they saying?”

  “They’re saying that your husband was insufferably cruel to Mrs. Quain. The whispers were started by the Minthorns right after Lucius took her in at Newport.”

  “How was he cruel to her? I didn’t even know he’d met Mrs. Quain.”

  “He didn’t,” Rachael shrugged. “Here is where the history of your house comes in. Mrs. Quain’s maiden name was de Coster. Her sister married Lucius Minthorn. Mrs. Quain’s husband was some kind of real estate speculator. He came into a bunch of money about twenty-five, thirty years ago. Mrs. Quain—I mean, Evelyn de Coster—she was Phinneas Quain’s second wife. His first wife died giving birth to their son. Phinneas Quain was much older than Evelyn de Coster when he married her. There was a bit of a scandal about that, but everyone says they were quite happy together. He built that house specifically for her. It was a very big deal at the time. Marble imported from Italy, packed with art treasures, that sort of thing. By all accounts they lived there happily for many years. Mr. Quain died about two years ago.”

  In the house? Anine wondered. She knew there was more to hear. “Go on.”

  “Mr. Quain’s son, Percy, was the executor of the Quain estate. He found out that the old man had squandered most of his fortune. Percy wanted to make sure that his mother could continue to live in the house. He mortgaged it to a bank to pay off the family’s debts. But then the Niles brokerage house failed and what was left of the Quains’ money went with it. The mortgage went into default. That was when your husband and his firm got involved. They bought the mortgage from the bank and foreclosed it.”

  “I remember Julian saying something like that. He said he got the house quite cheaply.”

  Rachael nodded. “I remember him saying that too. But he didn’t tell the whole story. Percy Quain got the Minthorns to agree to loan him money to pay off the mortgage so his mother could stay. They had the money ready and waiting, but your husband’s firm refused to take it. It was a set-up so Julian could get the house himself. He bought it at the foreclosure sale then told his crony at his office, Roman Chenowerth, to have Mrs. Quain out in three days. The Minthorns say that Chenowerth summoned the police, and they physically dragged Mrs. Quain out of the house screaming. They say she was hanging on to the front railing and they had to beat her hands with their nightsticks to get her to let go. That’s when she went mad.”

  Anine’s mouth went dry. “That’s monstrous. Is it true?”

  “Does it matter? The rumor around town is that your husband had an elderly woman beaten about the hands with police batons, her only crime being wanting to stay in the house she’d lived in for over twenty years. Even if it wasn’t true, you’d have no hope of making headway against a rumor like that. So now you see what you’re up against.”

  The carriage clattered on, its wheels crunching against the gravel of the pathway. I can understand why they shun me, Anine thought. It is horrible.

  “I assume he told you nothing of this,” said Rachael after a long silence.

  “No. While we were in London he went to the telegraph office just about every day and I knew his business there had something to do with buying a house, but I never knew any more than that.”

  “Well, now you know.” Rachael sighed. “Unfortunately nothing that I learned explains the strange goings-on in the house. I was expecting to hear sordid tales of murders or suicides, but the caretaker hanging himself is the first anyone’s heard of such troubles.”

  “I’ve seen a woman,” Anine spoke up. “And my maid has seen her too. We also found a diary left behind by the caretaker. He was mad, but he wrote about seeing things in the house—a child and a child’s toys that weren’t really there. He was certain there was the spirit of a dead child in the house. It reminded him of his own daughter who died years ago. That’s what caused him to go crazy and take his own life.”

  “A child and a woman, you say?”

  “Yes.”

  “The house obviously has a history that we don’t know about. Haunted places are the scenes of murders, calamities, dreadful accidents. You must be seeing people who died there.”

  Dreadful accidents. Anine shuddered at the memory (or the imagination) of watching Ola Bergenhjelm’s apparition vanish in front of her.

  A thought crossed her mind: “You said Mrs. Quain—the one who now lives with Lucius Minthorn—was Mr. Quain’s second wife and that his first died in childbirth. A woman and a child. Could that be who’s haunting the house?”

  “I don’t see how. I’m fairly sure they died before the house was even built. By all accounts, it was only Mr. and Mrs. Quain—the second Mrs. Quain—and Percy who ever lived there. Mrs. Quain didn’t have any children of her own, so she raised Percy as her son.”

  Another silence passed. Anine said, “I’d like to talk to someone from the Minthorn family. Perhaps not Lucius, but maybe his wife or someone, a woman who knows the story.”

  “That’s completely out of the question. Do you really think they’ll receive you?”

  “It could be done secretly,” she suggested. “If the Minthorns truly are angry at Julian but not me, wouldn’t it stand to reason they would talk to me so long as no one in society found out?”

  Rachael thought, her lips pursed. She said: “I’ll see if it can be done.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Anine, tell me one thing.” Rachael’s brown eyes were staring intently, almost plaintively, into hers. “This story about your husband—do you believe it’s true? Is he capable of doing something like that?”

  It shamed her. Anine could only nod. Rachael
’s eyes seemed to grow slightly colder as she considered it. A moment later she patted Anine’s hand. “I feel for you,” she said.

  Well, at least someone understands. When she left the Central Park and returned home that afternoon Anine felt at once deeply dejected about what she’d learned and also hopeful that Rachael, whose morbid curiosity about the house had led her into something of a conspiracy against Julian and society, could ultimately be a source of help. We have to know more, she thought as she stared up the ostentatious staircase, its polished balustrades gleaming dully in the gaslight. Bradbury was not the first person to die here. The spirits in this house are crying out to have their stories told. For the first time Anine felt more than simple fear of the woman whose spirit walked the halls; she began to feel a little sorry for her, whoever she was.

  That day she saw the cat for the first time. The afternoon grew strangely cloudy and foreboding after she returned home from the Central Park and by the time she changed her dress and retired to the Green Parlor where a fire was laid crackling between the andirons large, oily black raindrops had begun to tick against the parlor windows. It was past five o’clock, perhaps only an hour before Julian would be home from his office—or perhaps not, if he chose instead to dine at his club instead of at home, which he’d been doing more often lately. Anine played solitaire, listening to the ticking of the clock and the patter of the rain, and she turned over in her mind all that she knew and suspected. It wasn’t a pretty picture.