Savage Girl (28 page)

He struggled to his feet, but by that time Fince had run off, shouting, “I’m mad! I’m mad!” Colm trained his LeMat at him. But the crowd was too general, and he pulled the gun up. Knocking over gawkers and ballgoers like tenpins, Fince tore through the panicked throng.

Tu-Li met him at the edge of the sidewalk. As he dashed past her, she extracted a long, thin dagger from the sleeve of her simple silk gown and drove it directly into Butler Fince’s heart.

The man’s momentum pitched him forward, and he staggered out onto dung-carpeted Fifth Avenue. He lay dead by the time Colm reached him. The thinness of the blade, the strike directly to the heart, meant little blood was spilled.

I stayed with Anna Maria at Bronwyn’s side. She remained remarkably unhurt, having only had the wind knocked out of her. Saved by a cuirass of embroidered diamonds.

“You’re bleeding,” she said to me. Feeling weak, I sank down on one knee in front of her as if asking for her hand. Then I looked at my foot and toppled over into a faint. The last sound I heard was my handgun clattering to the paving stones.

•   •   •

A squeamish anatomist, William Howe says lightly. I fear for your future in medicine, young Hugo, if you faint at the sight of blood.

Hypovolemia, blood loss, I stutter, laughing sheepishly at the memory. My shoe entirely filled with blood!

But she did not die, Howe says. The newspapers call it a miracle. The bullet is meant for her, but it ricochets off her bejeweled gown and strikes you in the foot.

We can thank the Comstock for that, I say. My parents’ wealth is what I mean, being able to afford pearls and diamonds sewn into silk for a bulletproof frock.

The fifty-thousand-dollar coming-out dress, Howe says.

Yes.

I pause in my narrative, contemplating the vagaries of fate. Outside the Tombs the self-satisfied silence of a Sunday evening grips the streets of Manhattan. Most of the residents have been fed, fortified with spirits and, earlier in the day, forgiven their sins.

So Bronwyn Delegate tucks herself into bed that morning . . . Howe says.

. . . And wakes up that afternoon famous, I say, completing the thought.

Only to become more and more so as the week progresses, Howe says. Her story splashed across the pages of the popular press.

She had but a single moment, I say.

Before scandal descended with its ugly truths, Howe says. Not a San Francisco cousin after all. Merely an urchin from the West, without standing or family, a nobody.

She was allowed to feel triumph only briefly, I say. The few golden hours from when she was introduced to when she left the ballroom.

Scandal! Howe cries, entering his histrionic courtroom mode. Society withdraws its regard! It casts the pretender out! The newspapers still love her, but what is that? Notoriety! Not fame but infamy! Scandal! The fall from grace!

Yes, I say. All that and more.

In these degraded days, Howe says, this decadent time of ours, infamy is celebrated, notoriety cozened.

What followed next, I say, was worse. Much worse.

The Hunter’s Camp in Lansdowne Ravine

23

Stories spilled liberally across the pages of the
Herald,
the
Sun,
the
World,
flooding New York in the days following the debut.
DEBUTANTE DISASTER!
was a favorite of the headline writers, but the focus shifted, as the week progressed, from the ball to Bronwyn herself.

The reporters soon ferreted out the facts of her life in Virginia City. This was delicious beyond all deliciousness. She was not a blue blood after all. “My Bronnie Lies,” was one of the milder taunts in the press, punning off the momentarily popular ditty of the day, “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean.”

My sister came to be known in the popular imagination by a singular epithet, “The Wild Child of the Washoe.” The telegraph wires between New York and Virginia City melted with all the traffic. What the newspapers knew of her stopped with Dr. Scott’s freak show. Nothing of jaguars or Comanches. But that was enough.

When they couldn’t glean new truths about her, they made up lies. Tu-Li, sleuthed out by the press and labeled the “Dragon Lady,” came in for her share of attention. The fact that she habitually concealed a stiletto about her person was made much of.

But the newsmen really couldn’t get enough of Bronwyn, especially the luscious gulf between the debutante and the wild girl.

Engravings of Bronwyn in the gem-encrusted gown (on one side of the card) and on all fours with streaming hair (on the other) appeared, to be traded among shopgirls and delivery boys. A photograph reproduced from a stolen carte de visite was popular, too. Representations in burned wood, stereopticons, sheet music (“The Wild Child of the Washoe: A Ballad”), silhouettes.

Alone among all New York, Victoria Woodhull and her sister, Tennessee, took up Bronwyn’s cause. With friends like those two . . . I regretted the evening I ever put them together. They gave copious space to the affair in their newspaper,
Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly.

“Miss Delegate is a free, untrammeled New Woman,” Woodhull wrote, “and therefore she strikes dread in the heart of every male.”

Bronwyn received an enigmatic if ostensibly sympathetic note from Professor James’s sister, Alice. “The cuckoos imitate the clocks to perfection,” it read.

Amid all this Bronwyn, Bronwyn, Bronwyn, I found myself sullen and ignored, hobbling around on my bad foot with a borrowed cane of Freddy’s. A couple of my metatarsals had been fractured by the spent bullet, according to the bone doctor whom Anna Maria brought in (and who asked if he might meet Bronwyn).

Serious, the doctor said of my wound. Might limp for life if I didn’t stay off it.

I woke every morning, foot throbbing, sunk deeper and deeper into humiliation. Some days I could not move myself to get out of bed. Fifth Avenue in front of The Citadel crawled with gawkers and news hacks. The latter repeatedly attempted, with some small success, to suborn the servants for the “inside story.” Colm told me he was bid a hundred dollars in an attempt to secure his cooperation.

I felt upset in general and irritated with Colm in particular.

“Why weren’t you there?” I asked him. “The one time when Fince knew exactly where’d she be.”

“I know, I know,” he said.

Colm told me his strange story. The morning of the debut, on his way out to accompany Bronwyn on her day of days, he received a piece of bad news. Sheriff Dick Tolle had been shot and killed in a low tavern on Pearl Street. Rushing there, he found the man very much alive.

“Why, Dick, they told me you were kilt,” Colm said.

Tolle had gotten a similar note at his hotel, that Colm Cullen had been murdered at the Red Lion tavern on Pearl Street downtown.

The two men had the same thought at once. “Fince is here somewhere,” Colm said.

They glanced around the Red Lion, an ancient, low-ceilinged place with inch-deep tobacco stains on the walls and pockmarked rafters that looked as though they had been attacked with hatchets. A few waterfront drunks, but none who looked like Fince. Colm and Tolle spilled out into the street.

“There,” Tolle said. Up the curving cobblestoned block, a tall, leather-coated man in a Stetson Boss hurried away.

“Well, he gave us a merry chase,” Colm told me. “The streets down there have no sense to ’em.” They pursued Fince across Exchange Place, losing him in the daunting neighborhoods of the financial district.

“But we seen a Boss Stetson on a ferry just pulling out of the slip, crossing to Brooklyn, so we took the next one over. That hat of his . . . well, it just made it easy for us to track him in a crowd.”

“Brooklyn,” I said.

“Yup,” Colm said.

“That’s where you were when you should have been with Bronwyn.”

“I thought I was doing the right thing,” Colm said. “Tolle had a lot of information that Fince was living over there. We picked up his trail.”

“And when I saw you coming up out of the crowd at the Fifth Avenue Hotel . . . ?”

“We soon enough realized it was a hoodwink,” Colm said. “Fince had costumed up some drunk to look like himself in order to lead us astray. I raced back to Manhattan as fast as I could, but I was just a step too late.”

Almost lost amid the flurry of Bronwyn reports was the death of Edna’s escort, poor Percy Roehm, his body discovered in the Fifth Avenue Hotel the night of the ball. Edna, beside herself, retired for a sojourn at an upstate rest resort.

The details were enough to send anyone running.

Percy Roehm’s body had not been intact, had been separated from its manhood like the others. A hotel maid found his corpse discarded among cast-off dirty linens, a flood of blood pouring out when she tipped a laundry cart trying to deposit a soiled tablecloth.

To the newsmen it all seemed to blend into one rolling, tawdry mess—a beauty with a scandalous past, a street shooting and, at the same venue, a mutilated dead heir stuffed into a closet.

Confused as usual, the press blamed Fince for Percy’s death. But even without a hint of suspicion of guilt falling on the girl, it was one more element to taint Bronwyn—and the whole Delegate clan—even further.

“I can’t get my police sources to tell me what’s what,” Colm said.

“We know the Percy Roehm killing was grisly, and we know where they found him—off the second-floor balcony, above the ballroom.”

“Bronwyn was up there, wasn’t she?” Colm asked. “In the little powder room at the top of the stairs?”

“Every deb was in that room,” I said. “The atmosphere was intense. More like a gunpowder room.”

“Did Bronwyn leave the receiving line when you were there?”

“No,” I said. “Yes. Maybe once or twice. I don’t know!”

“Did you accompany her when she left?”

“No,” I said, despondent. “No one did. She’s so damned free, she just walked off upstairs.”

“So she could have . . .”

“Murdered the boy and then calmly gone back to the quadrille?”

“Well, I don’t see Fince for it,” Colm said.

“Neither do I,” I said. “But lucky for us, everyone in the world does.”

I might not have trusted Bronwyn, but I wanted to make sure no one else suspected her.

Quelle horreur,
the words on the lips of the society matrons. The highest echelon of their ranks, Caroline Hood and the Tremont aunts, had been tarred by the scandal—the former had even lent the offending lass her coach!—which rendered the affair all the more titillating.

“How did this Delegate girl possibly believe she’d ever be accepted?” the society ladies said, one to another. “I saw through her from the first.”

A few days passed, and Colm was able to duck his way out of The
Citadel through the milling crowds of the curious. None of the rest of us could venture out. We couldn’t even go near the windows. We were all marooned in the house, but each alone, not taking our dinners together.

Anna Maria and Freddy kept to themselves in the aviary. I lost myself in an intricate anatomy drawing of the chambers of the human heart.

Nicky clung to Bronwyn as though she were his life preserver. I recall a paroxysm of jealousy I fell into around this time, when I happened to be in the South Wing one morning and I bumped into Nicky emerging from Bronwyn’s room, bed-haired and sleepy-eyed.

“Brought her some tea, did you?” I asked.

“Couldn’t sleep, so I crawled in with her,” he said.

No, old man, no. Not done.

“Don’t worry.” Nicky laughed. “Nothing happened.”

I told myself my brother was just a child, they were both just children. I couldn’t believe I had lowered myself to the point where I was jealous of my little brother.

It wasn’t the first time. Everyone said Nicholas Delegate was the spitting image of his Uncle Sonny. Sonny had made much of the boy, and the two of them (Sonny died in 1869, when Nick was seven) had an easy, conspiratorial friendship. Sonny had taken him down to the Merchants’ Exchange on Wall Street, settled a trust fund on him, taught him the rudiments of investing, declared the boy “a natural Midas.”

I was envious then. The dynamic between my father and his brilliant brother was beginning to be played out between myself and Nicky. Nicky was always the funny one, the bright one, the lucky one. I was the one who fainted and spent time in a sanatorium. I was the one rickety on my pins.

Perhaps family relationships are handed down like heirlooms, to turn up in generation after generation, enacted again and again, ad infinitum or, more to the point here, ad nauseam.

“It would help if you weren’t so damned chummy with her,” I told my brother one day soon after I caught him coming from our sister’s bedroom.

“Help whom? Poor Hugo. You should have stuck with Delia.”

“Shut up,” I said, suddenly thirteen again. We were in the aviary, but for once our parents were elsewhere.

“You can’t marry her,” Nicky said. “You know why?”

“Don’t be filthy-minded,” I said, becoming flushed. “She’s a child. She’s our sister.”

“You can’t marry her because I am going to.”

“Shut your mouth!” The problem was, I half believed him.

“You’re pathetic,” Nicky said. “Everything you know is wrong.”

I hadn’t been moved to hit my brother since we were children together.

He effortlessly parried my near-powerless blow, knocking my fist from the air, then rose to his feet and struck a pose. Uncle Sonny had taught him boxing as well as the stock market, the principles of which were, after all, similar.

Feeling shamed, I left the aviary. A blue parrot squawked, commending my retreat.

“Everything you know is wrong,” Nicky called after me.

•   •   •

In March, just as the gawkers outside The Citadel were beginning to thin out, the showman P. T. Barnum put in an appearance on our block one afternoon. Playing to the spectators and shouting his offer up at our curtained windows through a red-white-and-blue megaphone, he proposed that Bronwyn appear for an exclusive engagement in his “Grand Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan & Hippodrome,” a combination circus and sideshow of “freaks” and
lusus naturae.

Nicky said he considered it a “smashing” idea. “Bronnie should go with Barnum, and I could go with her!” he cried. “As her manager!”

The ignominy deepened, and the press did not let up. Weeks after the debacle, I found Anna Maria weeping, collapsed on a divan in the aviary, Freddy pacing in front of her. As I entered, Freddy stormed out.

I comforted my mother. “It will be all right, dear,” I said. “This will all blow over.”

Sobbing, she rose to her feet. “You don’t know anything,” she said, and rushed out after her husband.

That should have been my first inkling that something else had gone seriously wrong. But in the rolling crisis surrounding Bronwyn, I missed it.

I hobbled up to the South Wing drawing room. No one around, Tu-Li and the berdache off in their own chambers. I knocked at the door communicating to Bronwyn’s bedroom.

“It’s me,” I called out.

She startled me by opening her door and surprised me more by her unperturbed demeanor. No tears, no rending of garments. Through her doorway I could see discarded newspapers littering her floor. But she herself seemed the still eye of the hurricane.

“Dear Hugo,” she said, emerging from her bedchamber into the drawing room and plopping down on an overstuffed chair, tucking her legs beneath her. She wore one of her artist’s gowns and an embroidered pair of silk slippers.