“He will resist.”
Aunt Quinlan gave her one of her sweetest, most disturbing smiles. “I have lived a long time,” she said. “And I have come up against walls far higher than the one Cap’s built. He’ll listen to me. He surely will.”
? ? ?
SOMETIMES SOPHIE DREAMED about knocking on Cap’s door. In these dreams that simple gesture caused the door to swing open, revealing rooms that had been emptied of every familiar and beloved thing, a shell as clean and cold and impersonal as an operating theater. In her dream she went from room to room desperate for some sign of him, any sign at all, and then woke, bereft.
She had loved him for as long as she could remember, but she had refused every marriage proposal for reasons she had explained, again and again, in great detail. Sometimes she felt she might give in and accept him, because she could not deny to herself that she wanted nothing more than to marry Cap. Then in the quiet minutes before sleep she would see how his whole life would change. He claimed to know what he would be giving up, but he didn’t. He simply could not. He was the son of Clarinda Belmont, a descendant of the Dutch who had founded New Amsterdam, a Knickerbocker, and all that word implied. She was a mulatto. A mongrel.
It was an ugly word. Cap could reject the mind-set that came along with it, but he couldn’t make others do the same. She would never be free of it, and their children would bear it too, an indelible mark on the skin. He could not see that truth.
Cap’s diagnosis had not changed her mind, but it had changed his. On a chilly wet day last April the truth had been waiting for her at the breakfast table.
A parcel wrapped in brown paper and tied with string, in and of itself nothing unusual; it wasn’t the first such parcel from Cap or even the fiftieth. It seemed there was a packet at least once a week, sometimes addressed to just one of them, and sometimes to The Ladies at 18 Waverly Place.
Over the years there had been rare fruits, books about Mesopotamia or windmills or German philosophy, pens of ivory inlaid with pearl, confectionery, beautifully etched and painted ostrich eggs, tiny carvings from Japan, watercolors or sculptures by young artists whose work had caught his eye, a canary in a wrought-iron cage, cuttings from a wild rose, yards of lace from Brussels, bolts of figured damask from India, sheet music, concert and lecture tickets. When they protested he listened politely, nodded, and then carried on as always.
That morning Sophie’s name alone had been written across the wrapping paper. It was a slim parcel that contained a short biography of Dr. René-Théophile-Hyacinthe Laennec; a stack of lecture notes tied with string, dated the twenty-fourth day of March 1882 and titled Die ?tiologie der Tuberculose; and a letter.
The biography needed no explanation. Dr. Laennec had been a talented, widely respected researcher who died at forty-five of tuberculosis, contracted from his own patients. On the other hand, at first she didn’t know what to make of the notes. A pile of papers, closely written in a neat, sharp hand. Only after a quarter hour of reading did she realize that Cap had paid someone—most likely a medical student—to travel to Germany specifically to attend Dr. Robert Koch’s lecture on the tuberculosis bacillus. The notes—painstaking, exacting—must have been sent by special courier.
Cap left nothing to chance. It wasn’t in his nature.
She put the notes aside, and when she had gathered her courage she opened the letter. For all its brevity it cut as surely as a scalpel.
Sophie, my love,
Forgive me. After four years of earnest effort to convince you to accept my proposal of marriage, I withdraw my offer with the greatest sorrow and regret. As the enclosed will make clear, the research of the physicians you study and respect is now unequivocal. I may live a year or five, but I cannot live even a day with you without putting your life in danger. This I cannot, will not do.
Forgive me.
She had written, to no avail. He allowed only Anna near enough in order to examine him once a month, as long as she wore a mask that had been treated with carbolic acid and observed the strictest hygienic measures. The housekeeper and maids who had served first his grandmother and then his mother would not be sent away, but he spoke to them only through a closed door of the chamber he rarely left. His secretary could sit in the same room but only at the opposite side, and turned away. A few of his closest friends were so persistent that he finally allowed them to visit if they too kept to the far side of the room where Cap himself never went, and on these visits it was Cap who wore the mask.