I smiled, then, to let him know it was all right. That part of it, I’d made my peace with. That part, I didn’t regret.
And he smiled back, patted my hand, and tipped a heavy pour of whiskey halfway up the glass. I reached for it with silent gratitude.
I told him the rest briefly. Weakened and fading fast, Paul died a month later. Two months after that, my family traveled to Boston so my father could appear in The School for Scandal at the Newbury. When my traveling sickness didn’t subside after the journey was over, I began to suspect I was with child. After that, it was only a matter of weeks until my parents found out, cursing me as a whore and a burden and threatening at last what I’d always feared in secret: utter abandonment, casting me out into the world alone. Perhaps that wouldn’t have been as bad as what actually happened. Only days later, my father shoved me toward Charlie Warne with a sum of money to sweeten the pot. I found out much later they’d only met twice, over cards. The rest was inevitable.
Perhaps I should not have spoken of it. That night, I dreamt terrible dreams. The gore that streaked the bed. The animal sound of my own screams. The child, who I never saw, not more than a glimpse of a blue elbow smeared with red blood. Perhaps a midwife could have helped, but there was no one to call her; I was alone. The doctor afterward had said there was no way of knowing what could have made the difference. Charlie had been on a riverboat bender and didn’t return until two days later, or so I was told. I was mad with fever by that time. The infection nearly killed me, the doctor said, and no other child would ever take root in my womb. I had no memory of the week. Only its first hours, which I would have given anything to forget.
The night of Sarah Harrington’s funeral, I awoke from the nightmare of my memories, my bedclothes soaked with whiskey sweat. It was not even midnight.
It was a strange end to a strange day, one of the longest of my life.
But strange days were becoming more and more common in my life after choosing the path of the Pinkerton operative.
? ? ?
The first year of my employment flew by, and before I knew it, the second chased after it. Sad President Pierce left office, replaced by the bachelor Buchanan. Both the North and the South hoped that his presidency would bring them something they wanted, though in the end, we could not both be right.
I grew more confident in my work but could not shake the feeling that the other operatives regarded me as a mere curiosity. I confided in Mrs. Borowski, who was my best confidante though she was no longer my landlord. As we lounged in a beer garden on a warm afternoon, I told her everything.
“And Bellamy! That one. He still looks at me as if I were a dog riding a bicycle.”
“And how do you look at him?”
I wasn’t sure what she was getting at. The suds swirled in my empty mug. “What do you mean?”
“As an obstacle?”
“Yes, I suppose.”
“Not a person?”
“Of course he’s a person.”
“But do you credit him that way? With thoughts and feelings, the same as you? Everyone is just doing what he thinks best, Kate.”
“But they’re wrong.”
“And likely, they think the same of you. They think you’re mistaken, and you think they are. What’s the difference? You need to treat them with respect, no matter what. Eventually, they will do the same.”
“That could take a long time.”
“What’s your rush?” she asked and took a long drink of her lager.
She made a good argument. Who cared what they thought? I was able to do what I needed to do. And every time we brought a criminal to justice, I felt the flood of excitement course through my body, and there was no better feeling. I had found a good place in a bad world, and there was nothing else to be done but stay in that place as long as I could and do my work as well as I could do it.
In the fall, it seemed only a curiosity, if a tragedy, that a hurricane off the coast of the Carolinas brought down a ship with four hundred souls aboard. But then the news spread that there had been an unearthly amount of gold—two million dollars!—aboard as well. The Ship of Gold went down in September. The Panic began shortly after.
The month the banks closed was the worst. Once-comfortable people who’d lost their savings in bad investments became desperate, quick to turn to crime. And the enterprising criminals of the Midwest were quick to take advantage, setting up snow jobs and long cons that made the victims of the crash believe they could make a quick buck and get back to where they’d been. But there was no going back; there never was. We kept busy, to say the least.
But we had reason to fear for our future. The Panic was a disaster for the railroads, and our fate was utterly entwined with theirs. Ohio Life’s collapse, plunging grain prices, declining settlement in the West—it all added up to less for our friends at Illinois Central.
And I found that the more I worked with the Pinkerton Agency, the less I found myself thinking about anything else. By the end of the year, Mrs. Borowski nearly had to drag me away from the office to socialize. I canceled plans with her on short notice twice in a row, so when she proposed tickets to an Olive Oatman lecture, I agreed and promised I would not renege. I was glad she persisted, as I didn’t want to lose her friendship. Still, even as we sat in the audience looking up at the woman at the podium, I found myself thinking like a detective.