Caleb Carr - The Angel Of Darkness

“I can’t quite make it out,” I answered. “But Mrs. Cady Stanton sure got the Doctor’s goat-in record time, too.”

Miss Beaux shook her head, still amused. “She was so anxious to meet him… She’s often that way with people she finds intriguing-she wants so much to exchange ideas that she ends up rushing into an argument.”

“Yes,” Miss Howard said. “I’m afraid I’ve been known to do the same thing.”

“So have I!” Miss Beaux said, still in a hushed voice. “And then I spend days absolutely kicking myself about it. Particularly with men-most of them are so blasted patronizing that when you meet one that you think might be different, you overwhelm him with opinions.”

“And being the pillars of strength that they are,” Miss Howard agreed, “they run and hide behind a gaggle of pretty, empty-headed idiots.”

“Oh! It’s so irritating…” Miss Beaux looked to me again. “What about you, Stevie?”

“Me, miss?”

“Yes. How do you feel about young ladies-do you prefer that they be intelligent, or do you like them to model their opinions on yours?”

My hand made its way to my head and started to twist a strand of my hair in a nervous sort of way that, when I noticed it, I stopped quickly, feeling childish. “I-don’t know, miss,” I said, thinking of Kat. “I haven’t-that is, I don’t know many-”

“Stevie wouldn’t put up with a fool, Cecilia,” Miss Howard said, touching my arm reassuringly. “You can depend on that-he’s one of the good ones.”

“I never doubted it,” Miss Beaux said kindly. Then she turned to the Linares woman. “Now, then, señora-the eyes. You said they were the feature that you found most arresting?”

“Yes,” the señora answered. “And the only aspect of the face that was at all exotic-catlike, as I said to Miss Howard. Almost-you have seen the Egyptian antiquities at the Metropolitan Museum, Miss Beaux?”

“Certainly.”

“There was something of that quality in them. I do not think that they were excessively large, but the lashes were quite heavy and dark and gave the eyes the impression of size. Then there was their color-glowing amber, I would say, almost a gold-”

I watched as Miss Beaux’s hands went to work toward the top of the sketch-and then jerked my head up when I heard my name being called from across the room.

“Stevie! What are you up to over there?” It was the Doctor. “Mrs. Cady Stanton would like a word with you!”

“With me, Doctor?” I said, hoping it wasn’t so.

“Yes, with you,” he repeated with a smile, waving me over. “Come along now!”

Turning to Miss Howard and giving her a doomed man’s last look, I stood up and dragged myself out to the easy chair what Mrs. Cady Stanton was sitting in. When I got there, she set her stick aside and grabbed both my hands with hers.

“Well, young man,” she said, eyeing me carefully. “So you’re one of Dr. Kreizler’s charges, are you?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I answered, as unenthusiastically as I could manage.

“He says you’ve had quite a time of it during your few years. Tell me”-she leaned closer, so that I could see small white hairs on her aging cheeks-“do you blame your mother?”

The question caught me a bit on guard, and I glanced at the Doctor. He just nodded in a way what said, Go ahead, tell her whatever you like.

“Do I-” I paused as I considered it. “I don’t know if blame’s the word, ma’am. She set me down the road to a criminal life, there’s no two ways about that.”

“Because some man was telling her to, no doubt,” Mrs. Cady Stanton said. “Or forcing her.”

“My mother had a lot of men, ma’am,” I said quickly. “And to tell you the truth, I don’t think any of them ever forced her to do anything. She put me to the work she did because she needed things-liquor, at first. Drugs later.”

“Which men supplied to her.”

I shrugged. “If you say so, ma’am.”

Mrs. Cady Stanton studied me. “Don’t blame her too much, Stevie. Even wealthy women have very few choices in this world. Poor women have virtually none.”

“I guess,” I said. “You’d know better than me. But like I say, I don’t know that I blame her, exactly, ma’am. Life was just easier when I didn’t have anything to do with her anymore, that’s all.”

The old girl studied me for a minute and nodded. “A wise statement, son.” She livened up then, and shook my arms. “I’ll bet you were trouble before you met the doctor. That’s the way with you scoundrels. My three oldest were all boys, and no end of trouble! I had whole towns that wouldn’t speak to me because of what they’d get up to.” She dropped my hands then. “None of which changes my point, Dr. Kreizler…”

As she went on, I looked to the Doctor again. He just smiled once more and indicated with a quick jerk of his head that I could go back to what I’d been doing. Meanwhile, his conversation with Mrs. Cady Stanton soon got back up to full speed.

It took about two hours for Miss Beaux to complete her sketch, and I spent the rest of that time sitting with the women, speaking when I was spoken to but mostly just observing. It was quite a process: the words would come out of Señora Linares’s mouth, enter Miss Beaux’s ear, then be transformed into movements of her hands that were sometimes very true to the señora’s memories and intentions, sometimes less so. Miss Beaux went through an entire India rubber eraser as she worked away, and dulled a stack of heavy, soft-lead pencils; but along toward eight o’clock a real, living face had taken shape on that page. And as we all crowded around to look at it, we fell into a kind of shocked silence, one what gave quiet confirmation to what Señora Linares had originally said: it was not a face anybody was likely to forget.

The señora’d been able to remember more details of the woman’s features when presented with the ability to see her memories brought to life, just as the Doctor had thought she might, and the woman who stared back at us from the sketch pad fit every adjective that our client had used in describing her. The first thing you noticed was unquestionably the eyes, or maybe I should say the expression in the eyes: hungry, Señora Linares had said, and hunger was unquestionably there. But that wasn’t all; the feline eyes had an additional expression, one what was all too familiar to me but that I didn’t want to name. I’d seen it in my mother, when she wanted something out of me or out of one of her men; and in Kat, when she was plying her trade; it was seductiveness , the unspoken statement that if you’d just do something for this person that you knew was wrong, she’d give you whatever attention and affection you craved in return. The rest of the face-she looked to be about forty or so-had probably been very pretty once, but was now kind of drawn, toughened by hard years of experience, judging from the set of the jaw. The nose was small, but the nostrils flared with anger; the thin lips were pursed tight, with small wrinkles at the corners of the mouth; and the high cheekbones hinted at the shape of the skull, instantly making me think of Pinkie’s painting of Death on a horse.

This was a woman what fit every speculation the Doctor and the others had made: a hard, desperate woman who had seen too many tough things in her time and was prepared to answer in kind. Pinkie, too, had been right in his prediction: Miss Beaux, without ever seeing her subject, had cut through to “the very essence of the personality.”

I think everyone, including Miss Beaux, was a little shocked by what she’d created; certainly the señora just sat in her chair nodding, seeming like she would’ve wept if she’d felt free to. The silence wasn’t broken until Mrs. Cady Stanton said: