An Acquaintance with Darkness - Ann Rinaldi [57]
It looked to me as if Annie wasn't eating, either. She'd gotten thin. There was a stain on her dress the last time she was here. Her hair needed washing. She went, every day, to see her mother in prison. Then she'd go home to the empty house on H Street, without even a cat to greet her.
"Annie told me that her mother is manacled at the wrists and is in leg irons," I said.
"She is lucky. The others, including my friend, are on ironclads in the river, manacled, with hoods over their heads, in the heat."
"I'm sorry about your friend, Uncle Valentine," I said.
He sighed. "I'm sorry, too, Emily. We have something in common now, don't we? Friends involved in this nasty business. There is nothing more I can do for Mrs. Surratt, child. The rest is up to Mrs. Surratt's lawyers. And her son Johnny. If he would come home, likely they would let his mother go free. It's Johnny Surratt they want, not his mother."
I flushed and looked down at my tea. Nobody had heard from Johnny. But it was what people were saying, that if Johnny came back to Washington and gave himself up to authorities they would let his mother go. Oh, Johnny, I thought, where are you? Have you heard about what's going on? Why don't you come home?
"Now, let's change the subject," Uncle Valentine said. "This is dreary. What do you have planned for after school today?"
It was Thursday. I knew what he wanted. On Tuesdays and Thursday he saw patients here at the house. They started arriving at three. And Maude was never here at that time. She was either at market or at one of the many funerals she attended. Usually nobody was home.
The first time I'd seen all the patients waiting outside the house I hadn't known who they were or what to do. Once they explained who they were, I let them in. It seemed the civil thing to do. But then they started crowding around me, telling me their names and their ailments, wanting to be first when the doctor arrived. There had been such commotion I did the only thing I could do. I took names and ailments. I decided which ailment sounded the worst and put that person down as first to be seen. I seated them in the small waiting room. I fetched water for the coughers, brought down some old soft toys I'd found upstairs for the children. One day I made tea for an old Negro woman with three children hanging on her. She was so grateful, she cried.
"You're wonderful," he said when he came home. "I never saw anyone make such order out of chaos. I've always dreaded coming home and having all those people yelling at me."
He asked me if I would do it every Tuesday and Thursday. I said I would. No one had ever accused me of making order out of chaos. I liked the charge. Perhaps if I did a little more of it I could soon make order out of the chaos of my own life. I was starting.
"I'll be home from school directly," I promised. "Do you want me to sort the mail?"
"If you would be so kind."
He got tons of mail every day. From students asking to be in his classes; colleagues all over the world; old friends in Edinburgh, where he went to medical school; suppliers from out of state; quacks writing to him of their cures; old patients he had made well again. There were bills, newspapers, periodicals. I kept a log as to what letter had come in from what place on what day.
It was on that very Thursday, the twenty-seventh, that I found the letter addressed to me in the pile of Uncle Valentine's mail. I had just finished ushering four patients into the waiting room and was sorting the mail out on Uncle Valentine's desk.
My heart jumped right up from my chest, like Puss-in-Boots jumped for a dangling string. It was on its way out of my mouth when I saw that the letter had no postmark. How had it gotten here?
I had to put my hand over my mouth to hold my heart in.
There was no return