A minute passed and then another.
“She misses you,” said Anna. “I don’t think you are ever very far from her thoughts.”
He said nothing, but he had heard her. His head dipped a little more in her direction, an invitation to tell him the things he wanted to hear. But because Anna could not give him what he wanted so desperately, she said nothing at all.
4
DR. GARRISON’S TRIAL was about to start, and Anna was running late. Sophie paced back and forth in front of the Hall of Justice; she wanted to go in and find a seat, and she wanted to run in the opposite direction.
People called this place the Tombs, an appropriate nickname for a building that exuded a miasma of open crypts and leaking sewers. Sophie was sure that anyone who spent any real amount of time in one of the offices or courtrooms or—worse still—jail cells must come away with sickened lungs and an aching head.
Children playing on a beach understood that sand castles must give way to water and wind even as they were being built, but the men who built the Hall of Justice had simply ignored such inconvenient truths and put it directly over a swamp. As a result the building had begun to sink before its doors ever opened. It continued to decompose like a living thing, even as people came and went, oblivious or deadened to the atmosphere.
Tenements had a stench that could make the eyes water and the gorge rise, but to Sophie’s mind the Tombs were far worse. Repeated flooding and permanent damp meant rotting timber, slimy plaster, chunks of masonry that fell without warning. The stink sat on the back of the tongue and was not easily gotten rid of, even hours later. Worse still were the jail cells below ground level, where fungus and moss sprouted from walls overpopulated with vermin and water bugs.
Anthony Comstock had arrested Clara Garrison and had her thrown into one of those cells, and more than once.
A cab came to a quick stop and Anna almost catapulted herself out onto the cobblestones, turned to stuff money into the cabby’s hand, and then grabbed Sophie’s arm to rush into the building.
The Special Sessions courtroom was cavernous and unheated, and Sophie was chilled even as she followed Anna to empty seats on the far side of the room, where, thankfully, the ceiling was not watermarked and thus less likely to leak onto their bonnets or shoulders.
“You’re shivering,” Anna said, and handed Sophie a pair of fur-lined gloves from her Gladstone bag. Sophie had never acclimated to New York weather but still regularly overestimated her tolerance for cold. Anna, who knew her better than anyone, had packed the gloves, a scarf, and even a pair of the heavy wool socks Mrs. Lee knitted for each of them every winter. Sophie was a little embarrassed, but not so vain as to pretend she didn’t need the things Anna handed her.
The room was filling up quickly, though the judges’ bench on the stage at one end was still unoccupied, as was the jury box to the right. At a slightly lower level but still well above the main floor were chairs meant for witnesses, defendants, and attorneys. Now Clara Garrison stood there with her lawyer to one side and Maude Clarke to the other, talking quietly, a small island of calm in the noise and constant movement of the gathering crowd. Clara was carefully dressed, confident and professional but unassuming. Dr. Clarke too was dressed to convey both her profession and status, but she was a smaller woman, quite matronly in both shape and persona, and thus was usually overlooked or underestimated by the men she came into contact with. The sight of Drs. Garrison and Clarke talking together was a familiar one, something Sophie had seen many times every day while she was in training. It was disconcerting to see them here, ready to be examined rather than to conduct an examination.
As Sophie looked through the room she realized that most of the prominent female physicians active in the city had come to sit in watchful support, including Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi, the most demanding and uncompromising faculty member at the medical school for women.
Mary Jacobi had taken a close interest in Sophie’s education and career and had gone out of her way to support and encourage her. At first Sophie suspected that Dr. Jacobi’s interest had to do with the rarity of black women in medical school. That thought had proved wrong when she was invited to the Jacobi home to meet her husband, Abraham, an internationally acknowledged expert on diseases of children. He happened also to be the president of the New York State Medical Society, and thus wielded a great amount of influence. Mary Jacobi had presented Sophie to her husband like a prize specimen captured against all odds in the wild.