What the Dead Leave Behind Page 3

  “Mr. Conkling, there are already so many tales told of your exploits that one more will scarcely make a difference.”

  Sulzer tipped his top hat, its well-brushed beaver skin barely visible under the snow that had fallen on it. He raised his frozen eyebrows at Linwood, who shrugged resignedly, let go his companion’s arm, and stretched out his gloved hand. The two young lawyers shook as solemnly as if they were about to argue a case against each other, then Sulzer turned into the porticoed entrance of Astor House.

  Moments later, following on Conkling’s heels, Linwood continued the long trek to Madison Square. Two more miles up Broadway. At least another two hours, Linwood thought, even without Sulzer to slow them down. The trek that Conkling called a brisk one-hour walk between office and apartment would end up taking them three times that to complete.

  Prudence would simply have to understand that it was beyond the realm of conscience to allow the Judge’s close friend to totter off alone into the snowy night.

  This stretch of Broadway, usually bustling with people and carriages, was nearly as deserted as the area down by Wall Street and Trinity Church. Occasionally a bundled-up figure darted out into the snow carrying a shovel, dug frantically for a few minutes at the nearly impassable banks piled up before every doorway, then disappeared again into the warmth and security of office or apartment building. The hansom cabs and their sturdy horses had retreated to warm stables, drivers rolled in blankets and bedded down outside the stalls. As soon as the streets were clear enough to get out again, they’d be carrying gentlemen from the hotels where they’d found shelter back to their homes. At a nice price, to be sure. Nobody thought it possible that the storm could rage unchecked through much of Tuesday.

  * * *

  Prudence drew long royal blue velvet drapes over lace curtains, closing off the outside world, its unpredicted storm and unknowable future. No point continuing to peer out through the thick flakes for Charles. He might be stubborn, but he was also sensible. Too sensible to stagger along icy, windy streets to keep a promise that wasn’t even that important. Two weeks until they married, plenty of time to write her name on the documents Charles and Conkling would have gone over with the proverbial fine-toothed comb.

  She had pretended to be indisposed when the gong rang for dinner. Victoria had come looking for her, but Prudence had pleaded a headache and asked for a tray to be sent up later. She’d eaten the food, then poured the wine and the coffee out the window to join last night’s milk. She would go to bed early, she told her stepmother. She was feeling so sleepy.

  Victoria’s smug smile as she left her stepdaughter’s room had enraged Prudence, but there was nothing she could say against it, nothing she could do. She needed to talk to Charles, needed to share her suspicions and her fears. In the meantime, she had to sit out the storm as best and as safely as she could. If that meant hiding herself in her bedroom, then so be it. Being alone was infinitely preferable to having to exchange stiff excuses for conversation with Victoria and her brother. Donald Morley made her stomach churn with the force of some unnameable menace. His sister, her late father’s widow, was an unknown quantity who had lately frightened her beyond all reason. She would avoid them both until Charles came to rescue her.

  Still with the shawl around her shoulders, Prudence crawled back into the four-poster bed where she had slept since her fifth birthday, smiling as books tumbled against one another. She’d always fallen asleep in a nest of words, one hand resting on a beloved favorite, the other curled into the pages of one of her father’s legal treatises or the latest volume from Mr. Henry James or the exciting Mr. Stevenson.

  It struck her quite suddenly that her new husband might not want to have to reach his bride by crawling over her drawbridge of sharp-cornered tomes. She pushed away the thought on the same breath as it occurred to her, then, for reassurance, reached out for the small studio portrait of Charles Montgomery Linwood that had been a Christmas gift. Charles was clean-shaven, as had been Prudence’s father. She thought it made a man look neater and less fearsome not to be peering out at the world through tangles of curly beard hairs that too frequently bore evidence of their owner’s most recent meal.

  Charles was a lawyer, of course, a partner in his father’s office, destined for Prudence ever since Judge MacKenzie and his long-ago law partner agreed that a match between their offspring was to everyone’s advantage. Charles had not objected; neither had Prudence. They had expected to marry, expected to fall in love. And so they had. He was thirteen years older than she, exactly the right number. She’d known him since babyhood, and if there wasn’t a burning passion between them, there was the comforting warmth and ease of long familiarity.

  The wedding was to be a small, private affair; Judge Thomas Pickering MacKenzie had been dead less than three months. If his most recent will had not stipulated that his daughter was to marry her fiancé within ninety days of his death, Prudence would have waited for the full year of mourning to be over. Charles wouldn’t have opposed her. But her father had toyed with his final testament as frequently as some men bought new cravats. It amused him to tinker with codicils, to mention deserving servants by name, to strike out old friends as they predeceased him, to add conditions that sometimes verged on the absurd. His marriage to Victoria had necessitated major changes, but the habitual fiddling and tweaking had soon made the new document as long and complex as the one it replaced. The last version contained the stipulation about his daughter’s marriage, naming Charles Linwood as the fiancé to which it applied.

  To avoid saddling his future son-in-law with a possible conflict of interest, Judge MacKenzie turned all of his legal affairs over to his longtime friend, the ex-senator from New York. Roscoe Conkling was as adept in the fine points of the law and as maddeningly precise and bullish in the defense of a client as the Judge. Unlike his far less flamboyant friend, however, Conkling turned down President Garfield’s offer of a judgeship. Twenty years in Washington had been enough; when he quit, he quit.

  “If you don’t think being an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States is as political as it gets, you don’t know the first thing about government,” he explained when he refused the appointment. “Garfield invited me to stop by the White House for a visit. I wrote him back that I was too damn busy. He knew why. Hell of a way to die though, poor bastard.”

  She should have studied the entire will herself, from the part about being of sound mind to the distinctive and wonderfully scrawled signature, but Prudence had been too dazed immediately after her father’s death, too deep in grief and despair to be logical. Too lost in laudanum. No one expected the Judge’s heart to give out when it did; his docket had been full for months to come. She wouldn’t think of that now; she couldn’t. Just allowing her father’s name to creep into her mind made her crave the blessed oblivion of the laudanum.

  “Small amounts for a few weeks or a month or two won’t hurt,” Dr. Worthington promised. “Sometimes that’s all that’s needed to help someone through the worst of the grieving, my dear Prudence.”

  He’d delivered her, closed her mother’s eyes, diagnosed and treated every childhood ailment, and scolded her father regularly for the number of cigars he smoked and the prodigious amount of fine French brandy he managed to consume each day. Dr. Peter Worthington had seen the good that laudanum could do and he’d also attended soldiers whose worst war wound was not from a shell or a Minié ball, but from the liquid in the brown glass bottles that brought relief and unbearable pain seemingly at the same time. No one quite understood laudanum; nearly everyone who had ever dosed himself with it craved another swallow, then another and another and another.

  Charles interpreted her father’s will as only a fellow lawyer could, and if its provisions hadn’t alarmed him, and she didn’t think they had, then surely there was nothing to worry about. Nothing except that the training her father had given her screamed in her head now that she was beginning to think clearly again.

 
The Judge had delighted in treating her as the son he’d never had, as heir and lawyer-to-be. Together they had shared long evenings poring over case histories, discussing and debating the fine points of the arguments that had been made before Judge MacKenzie’s bench. Prudence had the makings of a great lawyer who, because she was a woman, would never be admitted to the bar. Even knowing how limited her future must be, she’d reveled in the challenge of it all, in the prickling dance of her stimulated brain. They’d had a wonderful life together, Thomas Pickering MacKenzie and his daughter.

  Until Victoria. Dear Victoria. So sweet, so tender.

  Prudence hated her.

  From the very beginning Victoria had tried to drive a wedge between the Judge and his daughter, inexorably determined to pry them apart. It began with the marriage itself. Victoria persuaded Thomas MacKenzie to exchange vows in a city registry office without his daughter in attendance. It had been like a knife cutting out Prudence’s heart.

  “I have a surprise for you, Prudence,” he had said one morning two years ago. “I hope it will make you happy and ease the loneliness I know you’ve felt.”

  When she asked him what the surprise was, he only smiled. Sadly, resignedly, not at all like a groom about to claim his bride. Prudence hadn’t suspected a thing.

  The woman she met for the first time that afternoon was already her stepmother, the so-called wedding picture, taken days later, as much a sham as the marriage.

  And it never got any better.

  When the Judge wasn’t there, Victoria alternately ignored or belittled her stepdaughter. Nothing Prudence said or did was right. Her clothes were unfashionable and unbecoming, her few friends unwelcome. Prudence withdrew into herself, stayed as far away from Victoria as she could, found solace in the books she read and the four-poster bed that gradually became her fortress. Invitations dwindled and then stopped. Victoria declined them all, only informing Prudence of what she had done when it was too late to reconsider.

  Victoria became another woman altogether when the Judge was witness to how she treated his daughter. Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth was the saying; Prudence had never fully understood what it meant until she saw Victoria at work. So innocent, so sincere, so fawning in the attention she lavished on the motherless girl, so sure that Prudence would never complain to her father about how she was treated when he was in court.

  And she didn’t. Even after she was certain that Victoria’s dislike had turned into a spiteful malevolence, Prudence said nothing. She believed her father loved his new wife. Why else would he have married her? No matter how malicious Victoria became, she would not risk the Judge’s happiness by telling tales.

  She thought now it had been a terrible mistake, one she would regret to her dying day.

  Divorce was rare, but it did happen. If the Judge had remarried because he believed Prudence needed a mother, she should have found the courage to tell him he had made a singularly bad choice. He might have decided to free himself from Victoria, and that would have made all the difference. Thomas MacKenzie’s last two years of life had been as much torture for him as they were for his daughter. Because she hadn’t dared tell him the truth.

  Victoria had ruined two lives.

  Prudence hated her stepmother. And she would never forgive her.

  * * *

  For almost another full hour Conkling and Linwood struggled through the snow with hardly a word said between them. The closer they got to Union Square, the more Linwood became convinced that he wouldn’t be able to continue much beyond Grace Church. Surely its doors would be open to anyone foolish enough to have allowed himself to be trapped in the city. He heard the sound of footsteps crunching through the snow behind him, and wondered if William Sulzer had changed his mind and left Astor House after warming up a bit. When he turned to wave to him, he glimpsed a figure that was too bulky to be the very tall, very slender Sulzer.

  Up ahead, Roscoe Conkling was almost out of sight, already crossing into Union Park, his long legs striding through what looked to be drifts taller than any they’d encountered so far. Charles saw him turn and raise an arm, beckoning him to hurry and catch up, signaling he was continuing on. For a moment, with Grace Church less than a hundred yards away, Linwood was sorely tempted to forget about Conkling and his stubborn determination to get back to his club off Madison Square tonight. But the worry of leaving the ex-senator alone in what was still a dangerous blizzard nagged at him. What if he fell and was unable to extricate himself from a snowbank? He’d die there, suffocated, frozen. Such an ignominious ending for so distinguished a career.

  Reluctantly, but worried now that Conkling had gotten too far ahead of him to be easily caught up, Linwood tried to make better time along the icy street, weaving between snowdrifts and solid objects. The wind hurled rubbish bins along the sidewalks, lifted baby carriages parked overnight on front stoops into the air, blew the overhanging canvas awnings off shop windows. Sometimes he sank up to his shoulders in an unexpectedly deep drift, clawing at whatever debris he could reach to help push and pull himself out. He could no longer hear Conkling, who couldn’t be more than five or ten minutes ahead of him, probably fighting mountains of snow piled up in Union Park. Barely half a mile to go. They were almost there.

  He thought he could still hear someone behind him, someone following along rather closely, but in no particular hurry. He turned around to catch another look at the man, but could make out nothing and no one through the thickly falling snow.

  Somehow Linwood reached a tree-sheltered bench on the edge of Union Park, a bench miraculously outlined as such, beckoning whitely to him through the darkness. He hadn’t even realized that he’d kept hold of his leather briefcase, but now he used it to brush mounds of snow from the wood and metal seat. If he could just sit down for a few moments, he knew he’d be able to push on fast enough to join Conkling before he reached the lights of the New York Club.

  There was something menacing about being so absolutely alone, even in a place he knew very well in daylight. He told himself he’d count slowly to twenty, then get up and get going again. Willing his eyes open the whole time he was counting, he could feel a terrible lethargy creeping over him. He didn’t dare risk falling asleep.

  When the blow struck Charles Linwood on the back of his head, he fell forward without a sound. A hand reached for his briefcase, then rifled his leather wallet from the inside pocket of his suit jacket. With no identification, the body would remain unclaimed a little longer, the inquiry less urgent. The tree branch that had been used to crack his skull was tossed atop the body, a few others added, as if the weight of the snow had caused them to fall at precisely the moment when their unlucky victim sat beneath them.

  Within minutes Linwood was no more than another hard-to-discern shape rapidly disappearing under what was likely to be two more feet of snow before morning.

  * * *

  An hour after Linwood died, Conkling staggered into Madison Square. He had floundered in the deep snowdrifts of Union Square Park longer than a lesser man would have been able to endure, battling his way along what he thought must be pathways beneath his frozen feet, swinging his arms to keep his balance and the blood moving through his body, utterly determined that nothing as impersonal as an act of nature would defeat him. Linwood might have given up and sought refuge in Grace Church, the last place he’d glimpsed him through the white, but Roscoe Conkling never, never surrendered, so matter how dire the situation.

  He thought later that he might actually have been only semiconscious for the last several blocks of his journey because all he could remember of it afterward was the crackling of his frozen beard against the snow every time he fell and the agony of feet that pained and burned unmercifully. He made it across Madison Square and nearly to the door of the New York Club before collapsing one last time.

  A porter half carried, half dragged him the rest of the way.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Herald listed Charles Linwood among the two hundred m
etropolitan victims of the Great Blizzard, many of them found buried in snowdrifts that paralyzed the city. One by one the dead were discovered, their stories pieced together from what could be surmised by where they fell and what grief-stricken friends and relatives could tell reporters. New Yorkers read the newspapers, shook their heads over the sadness of it all, and as the piles of snow began to melt, gradually forgot the fate of strangers they did not know and got on with the business of daily living. Easter came early this year, on April 1; it would be just three short weeks after the storm.

  * * *

  “I don’t know how it happened,” Roscoe Conkling said. He held Prudence MacKenzie’s hands lightly but firmly in his own. “I’ve thought about nothing else for the past four days, but all I can recall is struggling our way up Broadway together, then gradually getting separated. I know I fell into huge drifts in Union Square. I remember seeing the lights of the Fifth Avenue Hotel and knowing that Madison Square had to be right in front of me. By that time I was stumbling and falling every few steps. If the doorman at the New York Club hadn’t happened to be looking toward the park, he wouldn’t have seen me.”

  “They think Charles sat down on a bench to rest, and a limb fell on him.” Victoria MacKenzie touched a small lace-edged handkerchief to her eyes. “We didn’t begin to worry until Wednesday night. He hadn’t sent word.”

  “He would have wanted me to know he was all right,” Prudence said quietly. Her voice sounded flat and muted, as though she were not fully aware of having spoken. “He would have sent someone to inquire about us. Or come himself. That’s how I realized something was wrong.” She eased her hands from Roscoe’s, folding them in her lap.

  Eyes on her stepdaughter, Victoria continued the story. “Mr. Sulzer called on us. He said the first thing he did when he was able to leave Astor House on Tuesday was check to make sure that you and Charles had made it through to the New York Club. The doorman there told him he’d pulled you in out of the night, but that he hadn’t seen anyone else. They might not have found Charles as quickly as they did if they hadn’t known he was missing. A policeman called on Charles’s father after they located him.”