An Acquaintance with Darkness - Ann Rinaldi [55]
She peered inside. "Smells of whiskey."
"They were packed in rum, arsenic, and corrosive sublimate to preserve them. Well, now you've seen everything. What have you got to say?"
"Let's get out of here." She shuddered. "I'll never eat pickles again."
Uncle Valentine was picking at the food on his plate. It wasn't his way. He had a hearty appetite. It was dinner on Saturday, the twenty-second.
He had invited Marietta. The windows were open, and from outside came the sounds of carriages on the street, children playing. It was dusk. Candles flickered. For most of the meal Marietta had kept us entertained with the clever sayings of her students and talked about their progress. Now she fell silent, and I sensed something was wrong.
Marietta sipped her wine and twirled the stem of her glass with her slender hand. "He'll be all right," she said in her low, well-modulated voice. "I promise you, Valentine."
They exchanged glances and I knew that she was "just knowing things" for him now, as she had described her special gift to me.
"Things will be difficult for him for a while," she said. "He may go on trial, even to prison for a while, but eventually he'll be released. People will understand that he did the right thing."
My uncle sighed. Then he turned to me. "We're being rude," he said. "You should know that my friend Dr. Mudd was arrested at his place in Maryland yesterday. And named in the conspiracy to murder Lincoln."
I gasped. "I don't understand," I said.
"Neither do I," Uncle Valentine muttered. "I saw him today. He's here in Washington in prison. It seems Booth and Herold came to Mudd's farm on the fifteenth after riding all night and day. Booth had a broken bone in his leg. Mudd fixed the leg. On the eighteenth, soldiers came to Mudd's place. Mudd lied. Said a man had come with a broken leg, but he didn't know who he was. The soldiers left and came back yesterday. And Mudd admitted he'd previously known Booth and known whose leg he had set."
He looked at Marietta. "He shouldn't have lied. That will implicate him. Otherwise he could just claim he was doing his duty as a doctor."
"He was," Marietta said simply.
He scowled. "Is a doctor to be persecuted, then, for doing what he thinks is right? Does he not have a duty to mankind?"
He brooded on the matter through dinner, in spite of Marietta's reassurances. And I began to wonder if he was asking the question about Dr. Mudd or about himself.
16. Wish You Were Here
I BECAME ACCUSTOMED to the rhythms of Uncle Valentine's house. In the mornings, before I was out of bed, I'd hear him down the hall in his water closet, blowing his nose and making all the sounds men make upon rising. I recognized those sounds from my daddy and they were, in their own way, comforting.
Uncle Valentine was afflicted by what he called "the curse of the goldenrod." My daddy had had it, too. Only he'd come by his distress in August. Here it was only April 27, and Uncle Valentine was sneezing all over the place and there was no goldenrod in sight.
"Would that I could find a cure for this wretched sneezing and eye itching," he'd say.
For half an hour each morning he coughed up phlegm. "Maude," he'd call, "two grains of quinine, an ounce of whiskey, and a mug of hot coffee." I'd hear Maude climbing the stairs.
On her way back down she'd knock at my door. "Are you awake?"
How could I not be, with all that noise?
Uncle Valentine then shaved. He did not sport a beard, like so many men of the day. And he wanted all his students clean-shaven, too. Robert was.
I'd lie in bed for a while in my second-story tower room, in my Sheraton four-poster that was draped in blue. I had never had such a lovely room. I'd feel like a princess. Until I remembered that towers also held prisoners. Like the miller's daughter. And though I liked it and everyone was nice to me, I hadn't decided yet which I was.
I'd scratch Puss-in-Boots