Page 46 of The Cabinet of Dr. Leng

As they walked, a troubled look crossed her face. She spoke quietly. “I’m hoping Joe’s familiarity with you will help allay his anxiety. He seems comfortable here now—but he’s hard to read. I’m worried he still harbors suspicions. Féline and I keep a careful eye on him, but it would be far preferable if we could rest easier, knowing that he stays of his own inclination.”

As they paused at an ornately carved door, he said, “I’ll do whatever I can.”

“Thank you,” she replied. “Féline will get you anything you need. Do you speak French?”

“Mais un peu.”

The two women exchanged a glance that seemed to Moseley almost sly. “Her English is fair, but she prefers to speak French. You’ll have free rein of the house. Bring any concerns directly to me. Would it be possible for you to stay away from your duties on Blackwell’s Island a few days—some pretended malady or other, perhaps—and then arrange to get sacked when you return?”

Moseley nodded. Every Wednesday the superintendent took a dinner of ham with treacle, and accidentally spilling a pint of blackstrap molasses down Cropper’s frock coat was the first of several scenarios that came to mind.

“Very good. Once that is taken care of, shall we put your hours at, say, Monday through Saturday, ten to six? Your wages will be as mentioned, and you’ll have room and board. It would in fact be preferable for you to confine your life mostly to this house and no longer visit the Rathskeller or mingle with your old friends.”

He nodded. Nothing in his old life held any attraction to him.

The maid opened the door at a nod from the duchess, revealing a bedroom with tall windows looking onto the stable yard behind the mansion. Though dusk had fallen, the room, painted blue, was brilliantly lit by gaslight. There was a four-poster bed, a dresser, and shelves of books, toys, and games.

Joe was sitting on the floor, assembling a steam engine from pre-cut pieces of wood in a box. As he frowned in concentration, Moseley noticed the youth’s black eye was healing nicely, and he’d already put a little weight on his skinny frame. He looked up—with sudden alarm in his eyes—but a smile quickly spread across his face as he recognized the new arrival.

“Hello, Joe,” Moseley said, coming forward and kneeling beside him. “How are you feeling?”

“How’d you get here, Doctor?”

“Your, ah, the duchess brought me. What are you making?”

And as Joe began to explain—haltingly at first, then with greater ease—Moseley heard the door close softly behind him.

Constance waited outside the closed door for a moment, listening to the conversation within. Then, after a brief exchange in French with Féline, she made her way back down the corridor and into her own rooms fronting Fifth Avenue. She walked through the sitting room, and then slowly through the bedroom, until stopping before the spacious windows, framed by rich curtains and lightly rimed with frost.

To date, her plans had come off without a hitch. She had enough money to live in wealth and comfort, and had already made sure her funds were well invested. It was useful to know the future, and she had put a large amount of her fortune into a firm called the Standard Oil Company, run by a young fellow named Rockefeller, which sold kerosene for lamps but was destined, she knew, for far greater success with the arrival of the automobile.

She had assembled an excellent and trustworthy staff, starting with Murphy—who was now employed solely by her and had taken rooms beside the carriage house—as well as a footman, a cook, a cook’s assistant, a parlormaid, an upstairs maid who doubled as a governess, a housekeeper, a ramrod-straight butler named Gosnold, and of course Féline. She had found them by frequenting, in disguise, rooming houses and eating places of the servant classes, listening in on conversations and making inquiries. In this way she was able to find people who were unencumbered by family, sober, efficient, and loyal. Most importantly, they were honorable and discreet. Féline had been an accidental but fortunate find: an educated woman with a clever mind and keen observation. She had been the victim of a marital fraud that left her in New York, penniless and ruined, far from her home in the 8th arrondissement. Féline in truth was more than a private maid; she was also something of a counselor. While Féline did not know Constance’s real story, she understood that not all was quite as it seemed—and let it go at that. She was good with numbers and managed her mistress’s spending and larder, smoking out the scams and cheats from tradesmen and others who sought to take advantage.

Constance thought that Moseley, too, with his sensitive nature and familiarity with Joe, seemed a good fit as tutor—as long as he kept clear of his laudanum habit.

Constance’s eyes focused now on the gaslit avenue beyond the windowpanes, and the pedestrians and coaches passing by. Heavy flakes of snow were falling, swirling like cut paper doilies around the lampposts and settling gently onto the cobbles. Her feeling of satisfaction fell away as she recalled there was another sad and cold person out in that snow: that would be herself, nine years old. How strange to think of it. She cast her mind back, trying to remember that same snowy evening back in early December 1880, when the big flakes fell. The young Constance, known to her family as “Binky,” was living on the streets, her older sister—who had smuggled food out to her whenever possible—recently taken from the Five Points House of Industry by Dr. Leng. For weeks afterward, she would go to the window where Mary handed her food, to find it shut and locked night after night. There were too many of those cold, snowy nights—when she was alone, shivering, and hungry—to discriminate between.

She wondered why she hadn’t already called for Murphy and the carriage and rushed down to that dreadful slum in search of her own younger self. Was it because she knew she would survive, unlike her siblings? Or was it just the phenomenological terror of it all?

Once she’d made up her mind in Savannah to go back to the New York of 1880, she’d assumed that freeing her siblings would be her immediate, overriding goal. And indeed, she’d tried to liberate Mary with all possible haste, and had freed Joe with the same determination. But when it came to her own younger self—she felt a strange reluctance.

Abruptly, she turned from the window. She knew Leng; she knew he was preternaturally brilliant, suspicious, and intensely devious. She needed to proceed carefully, to take time to create a base from which she could operate. She had accomplished a great deal in just over a week—but there was much still to do.

The Constance of this parallel universe would spend one last night in the cold. Tomorrow, she would find her and bring her here to comfort and safety. Mary had become her chief concern: Mary, in the hands of Dr. Leng, scheduled to die on an operating table just one week after New Year’s Day. She now had less than five weeks to find Leng’s secret lab, penetrate it, and rescue her older sister.

To save her, she would do whatever it took, spend whatever it cost, and remove whoever stood in her way. And then, once Mary was back with her siblings, safe in this mansion-fortress, Constance would focus the power of her hatred on one remaining goal: turning Enoch Leng’s earthly existence into a crescendo of agony and torment, ending in death.

28

May 26

Friday

SIR?”

Pendergast—who was sitting in an armchair, staring at the fireplace, still cold and dark—roused himself and looked toward Proctor, standing in the doorway.

“It’s done.”

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