The Alienist - Caleb Carr [204]
Ted grinned wide. “Good boy, Pompey! That’s better than boring old steak, isn’t it? Now all you’ve got to do is learn to catch them for yourself, and then you can go off and be with your friends!” Ted turned to me. “We found him in a hollow tree in Central Park—his mother’d been shot, and the other hatchlings were already dead. He’s come along fine, though.”
“Look out, below!” came a sudden cry from the top of the stairs, at which Ted’s face grew very anxious and he hustled back out of the hall with his owl. The maid tried to follow him, but became transfixed by the sight of a large white mass that was bulleting down from the second floor atop the staircase bannister. Unable to decide which way to run, the maid finally crumpled to the floor and covered her head with a shriek, narrowly avoiding what might have been a very grim collision with Miss Alice Roosevelt, twelve years old. Slamming from the bannister to a carpet on the floor with well-practiced skill and a howling laugh, Alice proceeded to jump up, straighten her rather busy white dress, and hold a taunting finger out to the maid.
“Patsy, you great goose!” she laughed. “I’ve told you, never stay still, you’ve got to pick a direction and run!” Turning the delicate, pretty face that would, in several years, cut a swath through Washington’s most eligible bachelors like a scythe through so much wheat, Alice faced Sara and me, smiling and curtsying ever so slightly. “Hello, Mr. Moore,” she said, with the confidence of a girl who knows, even at twelve, the power of her own charms. “And is this really Miss Howard?” she went on, more excitedly and ingenuously. “One of the women who works at headquarters?”
“It is, indeed,” I replied. “Sara, meet Alice Lee Roosevelt.”
“How do you do, Alice?” Sara said, extending a hand.
Alice was all mature confidentiality as she took Sara’s hand and replied, “I know that a lot of people think it’s scandalous that women are working at headquarters, Miss Howard, but I think it’s bully!” She held up a small satchel, the drawstring of which was wrapped around her wrist. “Would you like to see my snake?” she asked, and before the somewhat startled Sara could answer Alice had produced a wriggling, two-foot garter snake.
“Alice!” It was Edith’s voice again, and this time I turned to see her lithely moving down the hallway toward us. “Alice,” she repeated, in the careful but authoritative voice she used with this, the only child in the house that was not her own. “I do think, dear, that we might let newcomers in the house get their things off and sit down before we introduce them to the reptiles. Hello, Miss Howard. John.” Edith touched Alice’s forehead gently. “You’re the one I depend on for civilized behavior, you know.”
Alice smiled up at Edith and then turned to Sara again, putting the snake back in the satchel. “I’m sorry, Miss Howard. Won’t you come into the parlor and sit down? I’ve so many questions I want to ask you!”
“And I’d love to answer them sometime,” Sara said amiably. “But I’m afraid we need to talk to your father for a few minutes—”
“I can’t imagine why, Sara,” Theodore boomed, as he emerged from his study and into the hallway. “You’ll find that the children are the real authorities in this house. You’d be better off talking to them.”
At the sound of their father’s voice the other Roosevelt children we’d encountered reappeared and mobbed him, each shouting out the events of his or her day in an effort to gain his counsel and approval. Sara and I watched this scene along with Edith, who simply shook her head and