The Angel of Darkness - Caleb Carr [63]
“Cyrus,” I said, looking up through the big tree boughs and branches to the sky, “how long do you figure it’ll be before the Doctor gives Mrs. Leshko the sack?”
“I don’t know,” he answered, polishing off the last of his food. “But things can’t go on forever like this.”
“Yeah.” I waited a moment before voicing what’d been on my mind since I’d seen Pinkie’s “Little Maid of Acadie” the night before. “Cyrus?”
“Still here.”
“You figure the Doctor might hire Kat? As a maid, I mean.”
The long pause that followed told me clearly what Cyrus thought, but he soon gave out with the words: “Kat’d have to want the work, Stevie. She’s got big ideas. Big plans for herself. I doubt she’d be interested.”
“Yeah. I guess so. I just thought…”
“I know,” he said, trying hard to be sympathetic. “You could ask the Doctor—but like I say, she’d have to want the work.”
I didn’t pursue the topic, and after a few silent minutes we passed on to other things. But the idea had planted itself in my head, and I meant to explore it.
It was past four by the time the Doctor, Mr. Moore, and Miss Howard came out of Delmonico’s—and they didn’t look happy when they did. The Doctor just strode quickly past Cyrus and me, saying “We’ll walk” crisply, and the rest of us fell in with him. I started purposely dragging my steps, as did Cyrus and Miss Howard, while Mr. Moore kept up with the Doctor, talking to him. Neither Cyrus nor I needed to ask what had happened; Miss Howard could read the question in our faces.
“It was awful,” she said. “Word of the investigation into the Institute’s affairs has gotten all over. Even friends of his cut him dead. It was like we weren’t even there. Thank God for Charlie, or it wouldn’t have been tolerable.”
We walked on down Broadway.
It was a predictable reaction, I suppose, from them what likes to call themselves “society,” and while I knew the Doctor would make like he didn’t care, I also knew that in fact it would anger him deeply. For, as Miss Howard had said, there were some few in that society crowd what the Doctor counted as his friends, and to see them retreat into rudeness with the rest… Well, I was just as glad that we had time to walk to Number 808 Broadway. I could only hope that Mr. Moore would be able to get the Doctor refocused on our purpose by the time we got there.
He actually managed that job, or at least as much of it as could reasonably be expected. When we reached the yellow brick building, we found the Isaacson brothers waiting for us, and the Doctor was all business with them. As we went up and into the sixth floor, the conversation turned to how we were going to present the sketching session to our guests. Miss Howard had apparently warned Señora Linares to say nothing about what was really happening, but she went on to tell us that “nothing” wasn’t going to be enough to satisfy the extremely curious Mrs. Cady Stanton. Miss Howard had toyed with the idea of saying that the subject of the sketch was an old friend—or even, again, a relation—of the señora’s, but that wouldn’t explain the latter’s bruises and cuts; and Miss Howard knew that Mrs. Cady Stanton would ask all about those, since husbands beating on their wives was a topic that she’d been lecturing on for decades. In fact, Miss Howard told us, Mrs. Cady Stanton had often been criticized by other women’s rights leaders because she put as much emphasis on trying to change the conditions that caused violence in the home (drunkenness and the like) and on making it easier for women to get out of bad situations by loosening up divorce laws as she did on securing the vote for her sex. I’m bound to say that I saw her point: most of the women in my old neighborhood couldn’t have cared an owl’s hoot about who was president—they were too busy trying to survive the rampages of their husbands.
Anyway, Miss Howard and Mr. Moore were still playing with ideas as to