her rooms,” he said, unable to hide his amazement. “Bridget will show you.”
The maid had come halfway down the steps and was looking at Sarah as if she were a rare specimen in a zoo.
“Thank you,” she said to Alfred, then hesitated when he looked as if he wanted to say something more.
“Mrs. VanDamm hasn’t been well for… for some time,” he said, each word sounding as if it were being dragged from his throat. Most likely it was, since he was breaking every unwritten rule of discretion by speaking of this at all. “She’s… Miss Alicia’s death was a shock to her.”
Sarah nodded, understanding the implied warning, although she wasn’t quite certain what the warning was for. She supposed she would find out soon enough.
She followed the maid up the stairs and down the hallway to the proper door. Bridget knocked and slipped inside for a moment. Sarah heard her say, “Mrs. Brandt is here, ma’am,” and some murmured consent. Then Bridget admitted her.
The room was dim and stuffy, the cheerful sunlight of this April morning held at bay by heavy velvet draperies drawn tightly over every window. In contrast, the furniture was light and elegant, if a bit ornate for Sarah’s taste. To her amazement, the bed was an enormous canopy sitting on a platform and surrounded by what Sarah could only call a fence, albeit a low and merely decorative one.
Reminding herself she wasn’t here to critique the decor, she looked around and found Mrs. VanDamm reclining on a fainting couch by the fireplace, much as Mina had been the first time she’d called on her. Mrs. VanDamm looked much more natural in this position, however, probably because she’d had a lot more practice at playing the invalid. She wore a ruffled and flowered dressing gown, and her legs were draped with a crocheted coverlet in spite of the heat. The table beside her held an assortment of bottles and jars, and the room was redolent of the competing odors of camphor and lavender.
“Sarah Decker?” Mrs. VanDamm asked, her voice at once feeble and intense. She looked remarkably unchanged since the last time Sarah had seen her years earlier. The lines of her face had deepened a bit, but her skin was still flawless and smooth, probably because she hadn’t seen the light of day in all those years. Her hair had silvered gracefully, and it was artfully arranged. This was probably what had caused the delay in Sarah being summoned to her.
“Yes, Mrs. VanDamm,” Sarah said, going to the couch where she lay. She smiled her professional smile and took the slender hand the older woman offered. “Except I’m Sarah Brandt now.”
“Oh, yes, I remember that you married. But something dreadful happened, didn’t it?” Her face creased into a delicate frown for a moment, and then she said, “I thought you had died.”
“My sister Maggie passed away,” Sarah said, choosing not to take offense, as she would have if Mina had said the same thing. Mrs. VanDamm looked as if she might really be confused enough to make such a mistake. The pupils of her eyes seemed dilated, and a glance at the jars on the nearby table told her why. She saw Hood’s Pills and Buffalo Lithia Water and Ripley Brom-Lithia and Warner’s Safe Cure, among other brands of patent medicines. Some of these were harmless concoctions, but others contained generous dollops of morphine, which didn’t cure anything but usually made the sufferer less aware of her disease-and everything else, for that matter. If Mrs. VanDamm was taking these medications with any regularity, she would do well to remember her own name.
“Your sister, yes,” she said vaguely. “I remember now. Tragic. And now we’ve lost our dear Alicia.”
“I’m so sorry,” Sarah said. Although she hadn’t been invited, she seated herself in the chair placed strategically near Mrs. VanDamm’s chaise, close enough that she didn’t have to let go of her hand. “I really hate to intrude on you at a time like this, but I did see Alicia right before… well, the last night she was alive, and I thought you might like to hear that she seemed well.”
“I couldn’t believe it when Bridget told me you’d seen her. I still don’t understand any of it, and Cornelius is no help. That policeman told us the strangest things, but when I ask Cornelius about it, he keeps saying it’s none of my concern, but how could that be? She was my child, after all. Everything about her is my concern, isn’t it?”
Sarah nodded, although she couldn’t help thinking Mrs. VanDamm didn’t look as if she’d concerned herself with much of anything outside of this room in quite a while. “What don’t you understand? Maybe I could help.”
Sarah figured that enlightening Mrs. VanDamm on any subject might earn her the wrath of the rest of the family, but she was willing to take the chance if she was able to get any information at all out of her. Besides, Mrs. VanDamm might not even remember her visit an hour from now.
“I thought Alicia was at Greentree,” Mrs. VanDamm said plaintively. “That’s where we sent her. Or where Cornelius sent her, I should say. He didn’t consult me. He never does, not anymore. Alicia was always high strung, and lately she’d been very nervous. Crying for no reason, that sort of thing. I told him she was just at that age when young girls become emotional, but he thought she would do better away from the city, where things were quieter. She loved Greentree, and she had her horse there, so I saw no harm in it. But now they say she was living in some boardinghouse. I don’t believe it. I’ll never believe it. Why would she go to a boardinghouse when she had two perfectly fine homes of her own?”
“Alicia was living in a boardinghouse,” Sarah assured her. “That’s where I saw her, although I didn’t know who she was at the time. I noticed her because she looked so much like Mina did at that age.”
“Oh, yes, she did. Alicia was the very image of Mina at the same age. Sometimes I even called her Mina by mistake. I know she didn’t like it, but she never let on. She was so sweet.” Her eyes filled with tears, and for a moment, Sarah regretted causing her such pain, but then she realized that Mrs. VanDamm was unable to hold onto that pain for more than a moment. Her watery gaze drifted, and along with it her attention. “Oh, I saw you admiring my bed. It’s Marie Antoinette’s.”
“I beg your pardon?” Sarah asked, confused.
“It’s an exact replica of Marie Antoinette’s bed. She used to receive her attendants while she was still in bed. It’s a French custom, don’t you know? But Marie wasn’t French and she didn’t like having all those people coming up to her bed, so she had them put up a fence to keep them from getting too close. Isn’t that clever?”
Sarah had no idea if it was clever or not, but she nodded and smiled politely and tried to figure out how to turn the conversation back to Alicia. She need not have worried. Mrs. VanDamm might be vague, but she hadn’t slipped entirely away.
“Please tell me, Sarah, how did Alicia come to be living at that boardinghouse?” she asked after a moment.
“I believe she ran away from Greentree.”
“That’s nonsense. Why would she run away? She had no reason.”
Sarah knew Alicia had a very good reason, but she was fairly sure Mrs. VanDamm didn’t know it, and even if she did, would never admit it. “I believe she was upset by a marriage her father was arranging for her,” she tried.
Mrs. VanDamm frowned as she considered this. “I had no idea she was upset. I didn’t think she even knew. Cornelius had talked about it, of course, but I couldn’t agree. I thought she was too young, although I wasn’t much older than she when I married Cornelius. I think marriage can be good for some girls, don’t you? Especially to an older man. Cornelius is twelve years my senior, and he helped me settle down. I remember how proud I was to be seen with him when I was a bride. He was so handsome and tall.”
For a moment, she seemed lost in her memories of happier times, while Sarah tried to picture Mrs. VanDamm as a sixteen-year-old bride to her twenty-eight-year-old groom. Although it wasn’t the perfect picture, it was still a long way from Alicia and Sylvester Mattingly, who must be over sixty.
“Do you know who the man was?” Sarah asked, hoping against hope Mrs. VanDamm could shed some light on the uneven match. “The man her father was planning for her to marry?”
“Oh, yes, but I don’t think Cornelius would have gone through with it. He doted on Alicia too much to let her go just yet. And while I think the husband should always be older than the wife, the man Cornelius had in mind was much too old. Too young and too old, do you see? When I was young, many girls married at sixteen, but nowadays, that’s not done anymore. She hadn’t even made her debut. She would have missed so much.”
“That’s something I still don’t understand. How could she have gotten away? How would she have known where to go?”
“Someone must have helped her,” Sarah offered, remembering Malloy’s pledge to keep the groom’s help a
