She kicks a little against the cuffs. They rattle and tighten against the legs of the chair.
“Let me show you how agreeable I’ve been,” she says.
She locks her gaze on him, stares into his blue eyes with her blue-and-brown ones. Setting her bare heels against the ground, she begins to lean back, slowly, carefully.
The front two legs of the chair scrape against the floor and rise into the air. Not by magic, just leverage. She shuffles one foot forward then the other. Then she shifts her weight forward again, setting the chair back down.
He gets a sicker feeling in his stomach.
The cuffs are no longer locked in position around the front legs of the chair. Her ankles are linked to nothing. She has lifted the chair legs right out of the cuffs. In barely half a minute, if even that.
She crosses one knee over the other, and the circle of a steel-gray cuff dangles from her slim ankle, swinging gently back and forth, hanging empty in the air.
“There’s no way to lock the cuffs around the legs of the chair,” she says. “When the seat is bolted straight onto the legs like this, there’s nowhere to catch them. A different kind of chair would work, one with a bar between the front legs closer to the floor, but not this one.”
He forces himself to keep his eyes on hers instead of glancing down at the chair legs to see what she’s talking about. He doesn’t want to get up from his perch on the edge of the desk. Moving would mean she’s had an effect. He has to remain calm, or at least appear that way.
She goes on, “If I were going to run, I wouldn’t have shown you the weakness in your plan. I would have manipulated you into adding more weaknesses until your entire plan was weakness, until I could easily break free.”
She’d known from the beginning that the ankle cuffs were useless, and he hadn’t seen it. He wishes he were thinking more clearly. He needs to. To hear her story, to make his decision, to turn this situation to his advantage. So he doesn’t lose what little he has.
“It’s not enough, of course,” she says, jiggling her foot so the empty cuff bounces in the air. “I’m still cuffed to this chair. Even if I could get free of three pairs of handcuffs, which I can’t, you’d just tackle me like you did before. I’d be right back where I started. And that door is still locked. Isn’t it?”
He gets up, then picks up her discarded boots and carries them away, setting them next to the front door, off to the side. He thinks about twisting the knob to make sure it’s locked, but she’s watching. It’ll be all right, he tells himself. No one will interrupt them from the outside, and from the inside, he’s doing everything he can.
“Isn’t it?” she repeats to his back.
Enough, he thinks. Instead of answering her, he draws himself upright, all business.
“Tell me about this Adelaide,” he says. “Now.”
Chapter Fifteen
1896–1897
The Bullet Catch
New York City was not an easy place to live in 1896. Maybe it never has been. Life there is dark and noisy and crowded. The only smell I remembered from my grandparents’ house was plum pudding at Christmas and clean sheets the rest of the year; in Tennessee, I had become acquainted mostly with the smell of dirt and horses and hay; at Biltmore, grass and soap and roses. Here every smell was on top of every other, good or otherwise. Garlic and perfume and manure. Silk and smoke and mud. Voices came at you the same way: a trilling woman’s soprano shouting out the price of oysters, overlapping with a Sicilian shopkeeper’s dusky accent and two German teenagers arguing at full volume, blotting out a whispering group of Irish girls on their way to work.
Positions were not hard to find. The engine of life needed to be fed. Boardinghouses needed to be run, the stately mansions of Fifth Avenue needed servants of all stripes, and restaurants needed people to cook and serve food. But running away from Biltmore gave me the opportunity to try something new, and the theaters all up and down the city needed performers on their stages every night, to feed the people in a different way. I wanted to dance on the stage for the people of New York.
I was out of practice from my journey up the coast. I’d been exercising every day, but in a stealthy and halfhearted fashion, trying to keep quiet. A port de bras was silent and so was a rond de jambe, so I’d kept those up, but I’d neglected anything noisier. I could feel the difference in my body, the weakness in my ankles where there had previously been strength. Once in New York, I quickly resumed the Cecchetti exercises as if there were someone watching me do them, as if someone were keeping track. On the rare occasions that the hallway in the boardinghouse was empty, I practiced my cha?nés tournes, but the rest of the time I practiced in my room, tuning out the smell of boiling cabbage and the impassioned cries of my neighbors as best I could. That way I regained my full range of motion: temps levé, fouettés en tournant, my full vocabulary of battements.
I’d taken a shared room at the boardinghouse that the other house’s proprietor had directed me to. I thought about moving again, in case Clyde convinced her he wasn’t the abusive husband I’d made him out to be. His charm could undo my hastily made plan in a snap. Unfortunately I knew almost nothing of the city, and even staying where I was, I knew the money I had would last exactly four and a half weeks. So instead I threw myself into the search for employment, and miracle of miracles, I found it. I did what I most wanted to do and found a job dancing onstage every night.
The show was The Belle of New York at the Casino Theater, a musical about a modest young Salvation Army worker in love with a playboy who believes he loves someone else and then finds he loves the modest young lady after all. Toward the end of the show, she somehow becomes more noble by singing a horrendously naughty song. The entire enterprise aspired to elegance while also satisfying the audience’s need for vulgarity. It was a huge hit. A dancing chorus filled the stage first as sober soldiers and later as flouncing tarts, and I was one of the chorus, though I was more impression than actual person, dancing as far back as I did. I never got to watch the entire show and be swept up in it like the audience did, but there were still moments that whisked me away. The playboy’s first entrance, radiating confidence and charisma as he settled a white rosebud into the buttonhole of his fine evening jacket. The modest young lady’s ballad, sung alone in a tight spotlight on a huge and deserted stage, the longing in her voice exquisitely pure and painful. Their kiss at the close of the show, brief and merry, a perfect tableau of celebration and romance and joy.
The girl sharing my room was a young Englishwoman named Clara who worked the night shift at a garment factory south of Canal. Her pay was better than mine, and she offered to get me a job at the factory, but I couldn’t stand to be stuffed up like that. And I’d found what I wanted as a dancer. As much as my feet ached and my cheap costume itched, I was a performer, dancing for a theater full of people, for their joy, for their applause. There was a thrill in that I had never felt anywhere else.
Every night, the curtain came up and the curtain went down. Beforehand, I was lost in the itch of the costumes and the smell of the greasepaint and the bustle. Afterward, I was fully exhausted, as if I’d been dancing for ten hours and not just two. In between, things were a blur. But the blur in the middle was the happiest, most amazing blur, and I felt truly myself at every moment.
For nearly five months, all I could think of was survival. That was enough. The show’s schedule was punishing, nine shows a week, including the weekend matinees. To condition my body to better handle the two hours of dancing, I needed to rededicate myself to practice and exercise, which also took time. There was always something to do, even if the range of things that needed doing was much narrower than it had been at the Biltmore. It was exhausting. The weather outdoors went from a hot summer stink to a cold winter chill, and as the months passed, the sun began to set before I left for the theater instead of after the last show ended, but other than that, little changed day after day after day.
By December, I was more settled. They raised my salary at the theater, which very nearly shocked me into a heart attack, since all they’d told any of us since the day we started was how worthless and weak we were. But apparently, I wasn’t too worthless and weak to be promoted straight up to second line, and with second line came fifty extra cents a week, which made a world of difference to my body and my spirit.
I thought of my mother then, for the first time in a long while. She had probably assumed the worst. I should have left her a note when I fled or written her a letter sometime after. It crossed my mind a hundred times, but I didn’t put pen to paper, even though it would have been such an easy thing. Had she seen the note that Mrs. Severson sent, or did she still wonder what had happened to me, with no news from any quarter? I should have done things differently. But now I felt it had been too long. I couldn’t quite brush the thoughts away, but as the days passed, they occurred to me less and less often, and I made peace with myself again for a time.
The theater was dark on Christmas Day, so I spent the day at a roof garden sipping at cups of eggnog with Clara, who referred to me charmingly as her flatmate, and several of her coworkers. She and I had paid for the eggnog between us, and every time one of the coworkers downed another cup, I winced. I was calculating figures in my head the entire afternoon. Clara and her friends gossiped about people I didn’t know and fell deep into discussions of methods for sewing and stretching and cutting fabric that I could barely understand. It was not as festive a holiday as it could have been. But the eggnog was warm and rich. I could see the buildings of the city arrayed like dollhouses below. And at the end of the day, we strolled home arm in arm, our cheeks pink with cold, caroling our voices hoarse.
The new year began as the previous one had ended, in a busy city with no particular friends but no particular enemies, and all told, I was happy, in my way.
Then January came.
Days that change your life don’t always feel momentous. It’s hard to know when or where the whole world will shift into something new. You can only stay alert and watchful and take things as they come.
The year 1897 was an eventful one in the world. It was Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, a huge celebration. Mr. Stoker published a novel called Dracula, the artist-pervert Oscar Wilde was released from prison, and in New York, they held a ceremony to dedicate the tomb of President Grant.
And I saw a woman shot in the face, to wild applause.
January started gray and bitterly cold. By the second week, it began to warm, and there was no snow, which gave me the opportunity to save streetcar fare by walking to and from the theater. The days were short, and it seemed always dark. One evening when I exited the stage door of the theater into the usual darkness, someone was waiting in the alley. I caught the smell first, a sweetish smoke, and then a blur of motion caught my eye.
I moved closer, carefully, and the shape resolved.
There was a man in the shadows, in light-colored clothing, smoking a large pipe. He spoke to me in a bright high voice, saying, “Good evening, young lady.” I couldn’t place the accent.
I said, “Good evening,” and started walking past.
He said, “Wait a moment, please. I’d like to speak to you.”
“I need to get home, sir.”
“Ma’am,” the voice corrected, and I took a closer look. Despite the breeches, the smoker was a woman. A large woman. Not fat but simply large, like an Amazon, built on a grander scale. My fear lessened somewhat without draining fully away.