But Anna would not resign herself to failure. Maybe the girl felt some of that, because now when Anna held the glass to her mouth, she drank the water laced with laudanum, her expression contorting at the taste.
“This will help you sleep,” Anna said quietly. “It will relieve the pain for a while, and make it possible for me to examine you.”
The girl shuddered as the tension left her shoulders and her pulse began to slow.
“We will do our very best for you,” Anna said. “Now sleep for a while, Mrs. Gyula. Let us do what we can for you.”
? ? ?
EVEN AFTER THE longest and most strenuous days Anna looked forward to the walk home, for the simple pleasure of movement and the chance to be alone with her thoughts. Most usually she used this time to go over the day’s cases and debate with herself the decisions she had made, but the events of the last two days were playing havoc with her powers of concentration. When she managed to put Comstock and his witch hunt out of her mind, Cap took his place; Cap left only to make room for Rosa Russo and her sister and brothers, who stuck like a bur in her mind, as persistent as the patients she had lost to typhus and smallpox, dysentery and sepsis.
They made up a club, it seemed to Anna, and divided among themselves responsibility for keeping her aware of her failings.
She walked down Stuyvesant Street to Astor Place and slowed down as she went by the Cooper Union, as was her habit. It felt like home to her, this place where she had spent so much of her girlhood.
Before arthritis put an end to her work, Aunt Quinlan had taught classes here. Anyone with a sincere interest in the sciences, engineering, or the arts was welcome to enroll in the school Peter Cooper had founded, and Aunt Quinlan’s classes in art theory, drawing, and painting were very popular. As a little girl Anna had come along, first to sit nearby while her aunt taught, and then as she got older, to explore.
Wandering in and out of classrooms and lecture halls, she had absorbed talk about chemical reactions, architecture, light and shadow, and the golden mean. When she was sleepy she made a nest in a deep reading chair in the faculty meeting room, and that was where Aunt Quinlan often found her. On the way home they talked about what Anna had heard that day and how it all fit together.
One February evening when she was not quite five years old, Anna had gone with Aunt and Uncle Quinlan to hear a politician give a talk at the Cooper Union. The lecture hall was crowded and overheated and no place for a fidgety child, and so she was sent out to play in the hall. And that was how she met Cap, who had not yet earned his nickname and introduced himself as Peter. He had brought a box of tin soldiers and he was delighted to tell Anna about every one of them.
At first Anna wondered if Peter didn’t realize that there were boys’ stories and girls’ stories, and then she understood something about him: he made no such distinctions. It was a revelation to her, and made an instant bond between them.
It would take another five years, two epidemics, draft riots, and a war before Sophie came to join them, but then she slid into place like a last puzzle piece. Together the three of them made the Cooper Union their own, taking lessons there along with other children of the faculty, exploring classrooms and laboratories and lecture halls. At twelve they ventured out into the neighborhood, and finally by fourteen they had most of Manhattan by heart. Now when Anna passed the main entrance she was overcome with an almost unbearable sorrow, for Cap and Sophie and for herself and the children they had been.
Evening classes—always oversubscribed—were about to start. Anna watched small groups of students as they picked up the pace for fear of being late. Most of them were men intent on engineering classes, but there were women too, here and there. None of them were expensively dressed and all of them looked as though they had a long day’s work behind them.
Someone dropped an armload of books and crouched down to gather them together, his dark hair lit by the gas streetlamps. Anna stopped, catching her breath, until he stood again and saw that he was a stranger, a man she had never seen before.
Flustered, irritated with herself, she hurried on. How very silly, to imagine Detective Sergeant Mezzanotte would cross her path again so soon, less than twenty-four hours since he had put rosebuds in her hair. She couldn’t imagine how she might see him again in the wide expanse of Manhattan, as unbreachable now in her imagination as the Atlantic.
5