Page 6 of The Cabinet of Dr. Leng

Yesterday.Constance staggered, raising the hand holding the stiletto as she did so.

Mistaking the movement for aggression, the lady said: “Do your worst. I am ready to meet Him as made me.” And she stared at Constance with defiant scorn.

“We’re leaving now,” said Murphy, as the clerk reached for the alarm bell. He took Constance’s arm and urged her toward the door. She went unresisting. Just before it closed, he yelled back at the man within: “Buinneach dhearg go dtigidh ort!”

The walk back to the coach was more of a stagger, Constance oblivious to the jeers of the onlookers and the stench of the street. When she came fully back to herself, they were once again on Canal Street, heading for the hotel.

The trap door opened slightly. “I’m very sorry, mum, that we couldn’t have done more.”

“Thank you, Mr. Murphy,” she managed to say. “You did all you could.”

As the cab pulled up at the hotel’s porte cochere, and the doormen rushed out to open the carriage door and assist, Constance rapped on the trap. Murphy opened it. She handed ten dollars up to him through the opening. “Mr. Murphy? I wonder if I might hire you exclusively for the next week or so.”

“As you wish, mum—and thank you kindly.”

“Very good. Please be here tomorrow morning at nine and wait in the cabbie queue for me.”

“Yes, mum.”

“And Mr. Murphy? Perhaps you might use this sunny afternoon to do me a small kindness.”

“And what would that be, mum?”

“Fix this lumpy seat.”

He touched his hat with a grin. “Sure it will be done, mum.”

As the trap door closed, she descended from the cab, walked up the marble steps through bronze doors and into the great lobby, finishing under her breath the children’s rhyme she’d heard an hour earlier, when she’d been so full of hope:

I gave him back his cherries,

I gave him back his pears.

I gave him back his sixpence

And I kicked him down the stairs.

4

CONSTANCE STOOD BEFORE THEbow window of her parlor, watching as lamplighters lit the gaslights, one by one, along Fifth Avenue. She remained there, motionless, for some time as night crept over the city and a winter fog rolled in from the harbor, turning the lamps on the passing coaches into fireflies and the lights of Madison Square into a constellation of soft globes.

A blackness had settled over her and, for a while, rational thinking was extinguished. Slowly—as she looked into the dark—emotion and reason reasserted themselves. First came anger: blind, useless anger at the quirk that had brought her back one day,one day, too late to rescue her sister. Dr. Leng now had Mary in his “sanatorium”—and Constance had good reason to believe the woman at the House of Industry when she professed ignorance of its location. That was not something Leng would want known, because his sanatorium was not a place from where people emerged cured—or even emerged at all.

Constance knew Leng had begun donating his “services” to the House of Industry that summer. Before returning here, she’d already known she might be too late. She could take some comfort—cold though it was—in knowing her sister was relatively safe for the next few weeks. Leng would put her through a period of special nourishment and observation before he performed his surgery…and made his harvest from her body.

The more urgent problem involved her brother, Joseph, who had just turned twelve and was imprisoned on Blackwell’s Island. Constance knew he would be released on Christmas Eve. She also knew that he would be beaten to death the following day—Christmas—during a pickpocketing attempt gone bad. She knew, because she had witnessed the horrifying event herself.

The traumatic and brutal six-month stay on Blackwell’s Island would change Joe: upon his release he would have become a different person, skilled—but not skilled enough—in the criminal arts that so quickly led to his death. Every day he was incarcerated, she knew, was damaging him further, making him less like his former innocent, trusting self.

And then she had to consider her own doppelganger. In this parallel reality, there was another Constance Greene out there: aged nine, cold and hungry, roaming the streets of the Five Points. That was the strangest caprice of time and the multiverse: that she also had to find and save her own younger self. Now that Mary had been taken, young Constance could not even rely on the crusts of bread her older sister had been able to toss to her from the barred windows of the House of Industry. But the young Constance of this era, this parallel world, would survive. Constance knew this—because she herself had survived.

She needed to collect herself and devise a plan. She knew now she could not remain Mary Ulcisor. A young, single woman, traveling alone, would attract attention of the wrong kind. She regretted she had caused a scene at the House of Industry—she should have been more careful. Luckily, she had not given her name, but what had happened there would not soon be forgotten by that iron-fisted woman.

Turning from the window, she walked over to a nearby writing desk and took a seat. Several items lay upon it: an afternoon newspaper, her atlas of New York, the stiletto—and the bag of gemstones and two folded parchment sheets that had never been far from her side during the last few years.

The Fifth Avenue Hotel would be an acceptable abode—for her and her two nonexistent maids—over the coming week. But for what she had in mind, she needed a secure base of operations, a place she could retreat to, where she would have privacy and security for herself and others. She also needed a persona and a history that would explain her presence and allow her to be accepted in New York society without stirring up unseemly gossip. And she needed accomplices she could trust. Murphy was a good start. But she would need others to carry out various assignments and to help her navigate her way through this strange, barely remembered time.

Money would make all this possible. An intriguing young woman of great wealth and beauty, with a mysterious past, could enter society—if she was clever and careful.

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