Caleb Carr - The Angel Of Darkness

Mrs. Franklin nodded. “Hasn’t contacted you? Well, that doesn’t surprise me, either! I don’t know why that girl never could take care of the smallest details. We’ve gotten one or two little notes, over the years, but never so much as a single visit! She just dances through life, doing as she pleases. Ah, well, some people are that way, I suppose.” She pulled the picket gate open. “Please, please, come in and sit on the porch out back-we’ve screened it in, so you won’t have to fight off these terrible flies. What with all the moisture this summer, I’m afraid the insects have been positively thriving!” We started to follow her around the side of the house, none of us getting a word in. “Now, I’ve made lemonade and iced tea-I thought it would be too warm for anything else. There’s some gingerbread, too, and we might find something even sweeter for you, Stevie, if you crave sweets as much as my boys did! But as for Libby, I don’t know how much help I can be…” Moving onto the back porch of the house, we found that the big screen panels did in fact remove us from the annoying blackflies what had started to swarm in the afternoon sun. “It may be that you can tell me more, really. As I say, we haven’t even seen her in-how long has it been, Eli?”

Eli Franklin looked at Miss Howard what you might call pointedly. “Ten years,” he said.

“ Ten ?”his mother repeated. “That can’t be right. No, you must be mistaken, Eli, I can’t believe that even Libby, careless as she is, would go ten years without a visit! Has it really been that long? Well, sit down, sit down, everyone, and have something to drink!”

I took a seat in a big wicker chair, sighing a little to myself: getting information out of this biddy was going to be a job, all right.

“Thank you, Mrs. Franklin,” the Doctor said, taking a seat in another of the wicker chairs. “The afternoon is warm, and the drive was a long one.”

“Yes,” Mrs. Franklin answered, pouring out glasses of her cool refreshments and handing them around. “All the way from Ballston Spa! I must confess, I never would’ve guessed that Elspeth would be the center of so much attention.” In the words, and also in their tone, there was something what reminded me in a chilling way of the first time we’d ever heard Libby Hatch speak, outside her house on Bethune Street. “She was never the kind of girl that people took much interest in.” Eli Franklin shot Miss Howard a quick look again, asking her with his eyes not to bring up the things he’d mentioned the day before. “Her brothers were more outgoing, of course, more social-they got that from me, I suppose. But Elspeth was more like her father-a daydreamer, too busy in her own mind to ever be of much use, really.”

“I understand your husband is no longer with us,” Miss Howard said.

“No, bless his heart,” the woman answered, reaching around from the table to slip sprigs of fresh-cut mint into all our glasses and then passing around a plate of gingerbread. “He’s been gone almost five years, now. Poor George worked himself into the grave, keeping the farm going. He never was much good at it, really-if he hadn’t had the boys to help him… but they’re born workers, both of them. They get that from me, too, I expect. Practical heads. But George was a dreamer, like Elspeth. It was all we could do to raise three children and keep this place afloat.”

“And Elspeth?” the Doctor asked carefully. “Surely she was some help to you.”

Mrs. Franklin laughed: the light, well-oiled sound of a woman what was used to handling men. “Well, I don’t know how many ways I can say it, Doctor, but the girl was never really any good to anyone , not when it came to the practical business of living. Oh, she was pretty enough. And clever, too, especially with her studies. But not useful in any way that would have really been important for a young lady.” I saw Miss Howard near choke on her piece of gingerbread, but she managed to keep a pleasant expression on her face. “A positive fright in the kitchen,” Mrs. Franklin went on. “And as for housework, well… I couldn’t even put her to dusting without her breaking whatever we had that could be broken. A sweet thing, but what does sweetness matter when you’re all grown up? It was no wonder she never had any suitors. Lived with us until she was near an old maid, and not one man ever came to ask for her hand. I didn’t wonder. Men around here work hard-they need a woman who can tend house, not a clever dreamer. And prettiness fades, Doctor, prettiness fades…” The little dog, who’d followed us onto the porch and was panting in excitement beside Mrs. Franklin’s chair, let out another yap. “Oh! Leopold, you want gingerbread, I’m so sorry! Here…” Handing the dog a piece of the cake-which I had to admit was as good as any I’d ever had-Mrs. Franklin began to stroke his head. “Yes, there, my sweet boy. You don’t remember Libby, do you, Leopold? She left before you came to live with us…” The woman looked back up, lost in thought. “We had another dog, then- Libby’s dog. What was his name, Eli?”

“Fitz,” Eli Franklin answered, munching on his gingerbread and swilling his third glass of lemonade.

“Yes, that’s right. Fitz. Oh, she loved that dog. Cried awfully when he died-I thought she might expire herself! Remember, Eli?”

Suddenly Eli Franklin stopped chewing: he looked around at all of us what you might call guardedly, then slowly got the gingerbread in his mouth down his gullet. “No,” he answered, quickly and quietly.

“Well, of course you do!” Mrs. Franklin said. “Don’t be silly-it was just before she left to work with that family in Stillwater-”

“The Muhlenbergs?” Miss Howard said hopefully.

“Oh, then you know the Muhlenbergs, Miss Howard?” Mrs. Franklin replied, happily surprised. “Fine people, Elspeth said-she wrote from there once. Very fine. And just before she left, she had that attack of bilious fever-”

“Mother-” Eli Franklin said, still looking a little alarmed.

“-and the morning after that Fitz died. I’m sure you remember, Eli-we buried him out by the barn. You built a little coffin, and Libby painted a headstone-”

“Mother!” Eli Franklin said, a little harshly now; then he smiled around at the rest of us, though it was a strain. “I’m sure these people don’t want to hear about every little thing that happened to Libby while she was living here-they’re interested in what’s happening to her now .”

“Well…” Mrs. Franklin looked at her son in some shock; but along with the shock there was a trace of sudden, cold anger, of the variety what I’d sometimes seen come into Libby Hatch’s face. “I certainly apologize if I’m embarrassing my own son . But I was telling them about the Muhlenbergs-”

“You were telling them-” Eli Franklin said; then, catching his mother’s look, he dropped it. “All right. Go ahead, tell them-about the Muhlenbergs.”

“They were very fine people,” Mrs. Franklin went on, giving her son one last warning look as her tone became musical again. “That’s what she said in her letter. And of course I was glad, because it seemed the perfect sort of work for her!”

Miss Howard’s face near dropped, and I imagine mine did the same. For anybody to say that being a wet nurse was the “perfect sort of work” for Libby Hatch indicated that they didn’t know her at all; and Mrs. Franklin, however addled she might’ve seemed at moments, did appear to be aware of her daughter’s strengths and weaknesses. Before either of us could give voice to our confusion, though, the Doctor, suspecting that the story’d undergone a change somewhere along the line of communication, asked, “And what sort of work was that, Mrs. Franklin?”