Page 43 of The Cabinet of Dr. Leng

And the way he said it, Coldmoon couldn’t tell if it was a compliment—or the opposite.

26

December 5, 1880

Wednesday

SEVERAL DAYS PASSED WITHOUTMoseley hearing anything from the strange young woman. Not that it particularly mattered—he was kept busy enough with the aftermath of the escape.

A total of ninety-eight inmates had escaped the workhouse. The cook had finally broken out of his locked quarters, but it turned out not to have been a good idea, as he was set upon by some of the inmates and badly beaten. By dawn, fifty-six had been chased down and apprehended. Over the next two days, another twenty-one were discovered hiding in various island nooks. Another ten had been apprehended as they reached either Manhattan or Brooklyn by various means—on ferries, improvised rafts, a few even by swimming. It was presumed the remaining eleven had either drowned in the crossing or vanished in the great city.

Once the majority had been returned to their cells, the superintendent’s attention shifted to the cause of the mass escape. The locks had been forced open and disabled in a way nobody could figure out. The two keepers who had been attacked couldn’t explain what happened to them. Prisoners were interrogated, but in the general confusion of the escape nobody seemed to know how they had been freed, or by whom. Everyone had a different story. All the escapees were from the third floor—save one, a youth incarcerated on the first floor, who had disappeared, but he was scrawny and they presumed he’d drowned trying to swim the East River. The investigation was inconclusive and the superintendent ended up blaming the keepers, docking their pay and accusing them of sleeping on the job.

To his great relief, Moseley, who remained in the north wing with the superintendent at the time of the breakout, completely avoided attention. Once most of the prisoners were recaptured, the story dropped out of the newspapers, and the ephemeral attention of the public moved on to new subjects.

But four days later, on an early December evening as he was approaching his rooms, Moseley heard a sharp hiss from the street. There, in the flickering gaslight, he saw a coach—and the lamps bracketing the driver’s seat illuminated the man he had come to know as Murphy.

The coachman gestured for Moseley to get in. After a brief hesitation, the surgeon’s assistant put a foot on the carriage step and hoisted himself into the passenger seat. Almost before he’d closed the door, Murphy snapped the reins and they jostled out into traffic.

Murphy took a roundabout route to their destination, and it was half an hour before they pulled up in front of a house on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-Eighth Street. Here the coach halted, and Moseley waited, unsure what was going to happen and nervous about their stopping in such a conspicuous neighborhood. This was the section of Fifth Avenue known as the “Gold Coast” or “Millionaires’ Row,” and while most of the buildings here were elegant brownstones—large and lavishly appointed, some double-width—others were vast, gaudy palaces. Among them were the mansion-fortresses owned by the Vanderbilts, and beyond was the as-yet-unfinished “Clark’s Folly” being built by copper king William Clark, which when completed—the papers claimed—would boast several art galleries and an underground railroad for bringing in coal.

Still, the coach did not move.

“Are we waiting for someone?” Moseley finally asked the driver through the sliding panel. “If we linger here, Mr. Murphy, the police will surely be coming by, asking our business.”

“Out with you,” came the reply from above. “Up the main steps, bang the knocker. Be quick now.”

“But…is the woman in service here? What should I say to the person who answers the door?” The building looked very grand, but Moseley somehow didn’t think this woman would be a domestic.

“There ain’t a need to say nothing.”

Moseley stepped gingerly down from the carriage. Once on the pavement, he paused to take a closer look at the structure. Though big, it wasn’t as absurdly lavish as some of the other grand palaces on the avenue. This mansion looked graceful, and the worddelicatecame to Moseley’s mind. It had an unusual marble façade—a rich white that revealed hints of pink in the glow of gaslight.Whimsicalmight be a better word: the details of its façade had a sculptural quality, almost akin to calligraphy, that seemed to fuse the Byzantine and Gothic—quite unlike the neoclassical giants surrounding it. He was reminded of postcards he’d examined of certain buildings in France: the Palais du Trocadéro; the chapel of the Sorbonne. The mansion was, apparently, still in the process of final completion: a small section of a rear gable was exposed, and this revealed that, while the fabric was marble, its bones were of iron, brick, and concrete.

A muttered imprecation from Murphy, sitting atop the coach, served to propel Moseley up the flight of stairs to the ornate front door.

Within seconds of his nervous tapping, the door was opened by a maid, and he entered a hall framed in gilt—a remarkably long and beautiful space. Sheets hung over furniture and paintings, and unopened wooden packing cases were stacked to one side, evidence the house was still being fitted out. Moseley had little time to examine the interior: the maid who answered the door led him—without asking his name or demanding a card—down the hall and then right, through a pair of open French doors with lights of pale jade, and into a study lined in dark wood. It, too, was only partially furnished, but nevertheless the bookshelves were half-full of books, several paintings graced the walls, and an antique harpsichord stood in a corner, open, with music on the stand. The rich Persian carpeting and silk-upholstered sofas exuded warmth and intimacy. A fire crackled in the fireplace, and it—along with candles set upon tall wrought iron stands—furnished all the light.

“Mr. Moseley,” came a voice from the dark recesses of the room. “Good of you to come.”

He recognized the voice instantly, and saw it came from a dark figure seated at the far end. He began to approach, once again full of confusion, but the voice stopped him. “Before we speak, there’s one item of business. Please go out the way you came in and descend the steps to the pavement. You’ll see something familiar lying there. Please retrieve it—and return.”

Mystified, Moseley followed these instructions. Back outside in the chill of the evening, he spotted a small leather pouch lying on the pavement that was, indeed, familiar. Glancing down the avenue, he saw the coach now parked some distance away, Murphy keeping a close eye on the proceedings.

He snatched the heavy pouch off the sidewalk and retreated back into the warmth of the mansion and its candlelit study.

“Please take a seat over here,” came the voice again.

Moseley did as he was told and, as he approached, his eyes adjusting to the dim lighting, he could finally see the woman, perched on a tête-à-tête love seat of buttery leather, wearing a pale dress. Her left hand rested on two books on a tea table next to her.

He awkwardly took a seat in an armchair on the other side of the tea table.

The woman could now be seen clearly for the first time. He’d seen her dressed as a workman; he’d seen her dressed as something like a carnival artist. Now here she was, apparently a wealthy member of New York’s most privileged class. But in his experience she had already shed two skins, and he had no confidence that the woman he saw before him was not merely another disguise. She was in her mid-twenties, strikingly beautiful, with violet eyes and a slender yet curvaceous figure. Her eyebrows were thin and arched in the French fashion, and her dark mahogany hair was straight and cut quite short—Moseley would be tempted to call it pixyish, save that nothing else about the woman’s presence betrayed evidence of an ingenuous nature. Quite the opposite.

“Welcome,” the woman said in her velvety contralto voice, lifting her hand from the books, which he could now see. One was a volume of Latin poetry. The other wasFrancis’s New Guide to the Cities of New-York and Brooklyn.

She nodded at the pouch in his hand. “I see you found something lying in the street. Have you examined the contents?”

Moseley had not, but he knew well it was packed with gold double eagles. “Thank you,” he managed to say. “You are most generous.”

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