MAY 1911
LATE IN the afternoon, Maureen knocked at the door. By then the day was warm and Coralie’s room was stifling. When there was no answer, the housekeeper cracked the door open and peered inside.
“Even if you’re ill, you have no choice but to face the day,” she called.
Maureen bustled into the room, convinced she had a cure for anything that might plague her ailing charge. Coralie wished that for once the housekeeper had left her alone. She was in no mood for human interaction, and in no condition to face anyone, least of all Maureen, who had a talent for reading her emotions. Coralie shrank beneath her blanket, mute and withdrawn, as a tray of tea and biscuits was placed on her bedside table. She sank down further when Maureen went to open the curtains.
“Don’t,” Coralie pleaded. When Maureen threw a worried look over her shoulder, Coralie said, “My eyes burn with the light.”
She did not wish Maureen to spy the marks that had been left on her. There were two scarlet circles, fading in color but still quite evident on her wrists.
“Are your eyes the only problem?” Maureen knew her charge’s temperament so well she quickly guessed there was more at hand. She sat at the edge of the bed, then pulled the quilt down and spied the bruises on Coralie’s arms. She drew in a breath, then grasped Coralie’s wrist and traced a finger over the red impression left by the fishing wire. “What happened to you?” she asked, distraught. “Some man, I’ll wager. Don’t tell me it’s the photographer, for I told him I’d make him pay if he wronged you.”
“No. Not him.”
Maureen’s expression was fierce. She rose to her feet, frantic, as if she intended to find justice. “If it wasn’t him, then who? Where is this man who’s treated you so badly?”
“Far from here, I hope.”
Maureen and Coralie held hands and kept their voices low.
“Did he have his way with you?”
Coralie shook her head.
Maureen went to the kitchen and in a short time returned with a poultice of madder root and a thorny thistle, which she insisted would heal Coralie’s bruises. The thistle was common enough, but it often caused the death of stray dogs when they carried off stalks growing wild in the fields. “Your father needs to know,” Maureen put forth once the bruises had been treated.
“Do not speak to him of this! Do you hear me?”
Coralie was so firm in her assertion, and so grim, that Maureen grew ashen as a glimmer of understanding took hold. “Did he have a part in this?”
“It was a doctor he employed to see if I was still pure. The gentleman thought he might take it upon himself to ruin me.” Coralie was so emotional, she held nothing back. It was a relief to be truthful with Maureen as she now admitted to the night viewings she had always kept secret. “It was to be mere theater. A show like any other. And yet it ruined me in some way, more so than what this horrid man tried to do to me.”
Tears flooded the housekeeper’s eyes. “I haven’t allowed myself to believe it, but now I know you should never have grown up in this house. I wanted more for you,” Maureen said with yearning. “And you’ll have it.” She appeared resolved, though her face was wet with tears. “You’ll have a proper life, and when you do, you’ll see that love has nothing to do with what you’ve found under your father’s roof.”
Coralie could not help but think of the tattooed woman who had thought her to be a whore. “I doubt that any man who really knew me would have me after all I’ve done.”
“That’s not true, Cora. Look at me! Would you think a man of any worth would ever want me? Would he travel from Virginia and wait outside my door even though I have been ruined a hundred times over? Mr. Morris doesn’t see me from the outside. Men are men, with all their flaws, as we have ours, that’s true, but the best among them manage to discover who we really are.” The housekeeper lifted Coralie’s chin so they might look into one another’s eyes. “If we had no hurt and no sin to speak of, we’d be angels, and angels can’t love the way men and women do.”
“And what of monsters?” Coralie wished to know. By then her face was streaked with tears; her emotions were raw. “Can they love?”
Maureen tenderly ran a hand over her charge’s dark hair. “We know quite well they can,” she murmured. “For we know that they do.”
THE MUSEUM OF EXTRAORDINARY THINGS failed to reopen. One or two customers rapped at the door, and, when their knocking went unanswered, they went away, puzzled but ready enough to find another entertainment. Professor Sardie’s announcement that he would allow free entrance into the museum if he were unable to produce the Hudson Mystery was a promise he couldn’t keep. At the present time he hadn’t the ready cash to pay his players or his bills. He had been drinking heavily ever since finding his workshop door ajar, the coffin containing the body of his fabulous creature vanished. He held the liveryman responsible; that unsavory character had never dared to return, and the Professor could be heard cursing his missing employee late into the night.
The last weekend in May was fast approaching, the beginning of the season marked by streets swelling with crowds, all searching for relief from the hot city and the brittle confines of their own lives. Soon enough Dreamland would reopen in all its revamped glory and beaches would be blanketed with visitors from Manhattan. All of the bathing pavilions, including Lentz’s and Taunton’s Baths, would be overflowing with customers. The New Iron Pier walk was busier each day, as all of the summer establishments prepared for the onslaught of visitors. The wooden horses at Johnson’s carousel were freshly painted. The steel skeleton of the Giant Racer Roller Coaster, that heart-stopping ride, was readied as well, with the empty cars sent up on practice runs that rattled the street below.
No announcements were made concerning the closing of the museum. The door was simply barred and padlocked from the inside. The Professor was already humiliated among his peers, many of whom said they’d never trusted him or expected to see anything resembling the Hudson Mystery. He was a known con man who relied on the na?veté of the masses, those inexperienced customers who might be convinced to believe in such things as mermaids and butterfly girls, when they were in fact being offered freaks of nature, harmless individuals dressed up to resemble the inhabitants of their nightmares or dreams. But if there was no Hudson Mystery, there would be no reversal of their downward fortunes. That was not fantasy but fact. Already the tortoise was being fed weeds rather than lettuce and fresh greens. The caged birds were pecking at crumbs.