The Angel of Darkness - Caleb Carr [181]
Which wasn’t to say that she’d felt nothing for the Hatch kids, who, Mrs. Wright’d told Miss Howard, were caught in a strange and mixed-up situation that kept them in a constant state of skittishness. They’d all spent their early months, as Miss Howard had suspected, with a wet nurse, a setup what’d stopped them from becoming living demonstrations of Libby Hatch’s maternal shortcomings—and was, because of that, the only reason why they’d survived their infancies at all. But life after those early months had still been pretty rocky for them. Clara’d had things the best, being as Daniel Hatch was as sure as he could be that she was his child. But the arrival of first Matthew and then Thomas had caused trouble, being as by then Hatch had begun to suspect his wife of being unfaithful. The fact that the two boys had thick, curly black hair, deep brown eyes, and olive skin (unlike either of their parents or their sister) was taken by Hatch as proof that they’d been fathered by another man; and even though he was never able to say who that man was, he grew more and more hostile to Libby as time went by, and lost interest in Thomas and Matthew altogether.
Strangely enough, Mrs. Wright said, all this hadn’t been just an old man’s ravings: Libby had been cheating on her husband, though with a man that her husband never would have suspected of the crime. It seemed that the minister who’d married the Hatches, one Reverend Clayton Parker, had the same coloring as young Matthew and Thomas, and paid regular visits to the Hatch homestead, where old Daniel entertained him to the best of his curmudgeonly ability. Apparently Mrs. Wright had more than once seen Parker and Libby locked in steamy embrace in the woods beyond the Hatch house, and Libby’s sudden relapse into moody agitation in the summer of 1893 had occurred, coincidentally, right after Parker’d told his superiors that his spiritual talents were being wasted in Ballston Spa, and he’d been dispatched to do good works in that modern-day Babylon, New York City.
“A minister?” Marcus said, when he heard all this. “What the hell did a minister have to offer a woman who was married to one of the richest men in town?”
“Youth, good looks, and charm, for openers,” Miss Howard answered. “Though I think Mrs. Wright is correct when she says that Libby wouldn’t be satisfied with just those qualities. No, it was something else, too. A kind of—respectability, in a way. No, more than that. Redemption, maybe.”
“Redemption?” Lucius said.
“An inside track to God?” I threw in.
“Yes, that’s closer to it, Stevie,” Miss Howard answered, urging the little black Morgan along toward Mr. Picton’s house. “I’m not exactly clear—I want to get the Doctor’s opinion …”
We’d reached the section of our route where the Charlton road became Charlton Street. Standing up to try to peer ahead through the dimming light of the evening, I soon caught sight of the four turrets of Mr. Picton’s house—and I also saw the surrey standing horseless by the porch.
“Well, it looks like you’ll get your chance,” I said to Miss Howard. “They’re back from the Westons’.”
After we’d pulled up to the house, we put the section of boarding and the driver’s seat from the Hatches’ wagon up on the porch and went inside, entering the living room to find Cyrus at Mr. Picton’s piano and our host standing in the far corner, where the Doctor was transferring notes onto a large chalkboard what had appeared.
The thing