“A very good likeness, that,” said Quinn, perceiving the jaw in the portrait to be stronger than the jaw beneath it. Of Gordon’s past he remembered only Yale law school, but he would come to know the man as the successor to his father in running the family foundries, a serious churchgoer who abandoned his father’s Presbyterian life for the Episcopal high church, who translated Vergil’s Aeneid from the Latin and then dramatized the story of Aeneas and Dido for the stage; a man of many interests. One too many: Maud.
“It’s only been up a week,” said Gordon of his portrait, “but I am pleased with it. The artist worked on it five months. He began it even before I took title to this place.”
“You were very sure of yourself.”
“Once I heard Dirck was selling it, I had to have it. I bought it for Maud, really. She’s mad about being here.”
“It was quite a surprise to see Maud.”
“She’s spoken of you, but then again, who hasn’t? She’s here only a few days and then we’re going to Saratoga for the racing. She has a relative up there.”
“She looks well.”
“Indeed she does. She’s dazzling. We’ll be married soon.”
“Now, that’s a surprise, Maud married,” Quinn said, reaching for the grapes.
“She’s trepidatious about it.”
“Maud is always trepidatious about relationships,” said Quinn, popping grapes into his mouth.
“We’re solving it,” said Gordon.
“You’re a sturdy fellow,” said Quinn.
Quinn popped his final grape, then stood up and drank his whiskey in a gulp. “I must be going,” he said, “but first tell me about Hillegond.”
“The killer went upstairs and found her sleeping, looped the garrote around her neck and dragged her from the bed with it. It was clear she died in a moment and did not suffer.”
“Some suffer in a moment what takes others twenty years to feel.”
“I’m sure you’re right,” said Gordon, and his voice was receding for Quinn, only sporadic words registering: “. . strangled Matty. . the stairs. . she fought. .” For Quinn there was only Maud’s coldness, and he silently recited the old Irish poem of warning:
Wherefore should I go to death,
for red lips, for gleaming teeth?. .
Thy pleasant mien, thy high mind,
Thy slim hand, O foam-white maid,
O blue eye, O bosom white,
I shall not die for thy sake.
Repeat it now. Repeat.
For this is your fate.
“. . the fellow was shameless. . dressed like a priest. . Hillegond’s young lover, can you imagine?. . But he shows up in no records as a priest. . Did you know him?”
“Who?” asked Quinn.
“The priest fellow. Finnerty, if that’s his name. It’s what he went by in the theater. A bad apple, to say the least.”
“What about him?”
“Aren’t you listening, Mr. Quinn? He’s in jail. They’ve charged him as her killer. He had her jade ring. He said she gave it to him.”
“Hillegond?”
“Damn it, Quinn, are you all there? I took you to be acute. Are you ill, or what ails you?”
“I’m distracted, forgive me,” and he turned to leave, turned back. “Thank you for the whiskey.”
“I hoped to hear of your war experiences.”
“Another time.”
“Perhaps tonight if you’re not busy. Join us at the Army Relief Bazaar.”
“Perhaps,” said Quinn, straining.
“It’s for the sick and wounded, you know. I’m chairman of the thing. I’ve been so involved with the war that my father considers me a practical amalgamationist. I actually recruited an entire company of army volunteers out of our two foundries. A good many were Irish.”
“That’s very patriotic,” said Quinn.
“You must come to our bazaar,” said Gordon. “We’ll lionize you if you’ll let us.”
“I doubt I could handle that.”
“We’ll be going at seven. We could pick you up. Where are you staying?”
“I’m not sure.”
“You mean you don’t have a place? Why, stay here, then.”
“That’s generous, but I think—” and Quinn, in this instant, could not think at all.
From the doorway Capricorn intruded on the hesitational moment. “Mr. Quinn, Miss Maud say she got a letter she want you to read. She be upstairs in the sittin’ room.”
Quinn turned to Gordon, who was smiling.
“It’s pleasant in Maud’s sitting room,” Gordon said.
Quinn returned Gordon’s smile, feeling the sudden urge to stuff several grapes up the man’s nose. Then he followed Capricorn out of the room and up the stairs.
As he walked, Quinn perceived that with a brusque offering of her hand, with a summons to come hither for a letter, with a decorous public invitation to chat in proper confines, Maud again proved herself a creature of quixotic ways, social fits. Quinn made the first turning on the mahogany staircase, that broad, expansive work of art that rose out of the foyer into the mystery of the mansion’s upper labyrinths, and he measured the distance from his last meeting with Maud: six years — the year 1858, when, as journeyman paragraphist and sometime essayist on sporting events, theater, crime, and judiciality for Will Canaday’s Albany Chronicle, he was present as Maud made her debut in Mazeppa.
This was a hippodramatic spectacle, an innovation within a hoary melodramatic theatrical corruption of a Lord Byron narrative poem that had been inspired by a passage in Voltaire’s history of Charles XII of Sweden; and it proved that Maud Fallon not only possessed a singular body but was willing to demonstrate said fact to the world at high risk to that very same singularity.
Lo, the poor Mazeppa. A Tatar foundling who comes to young manhood in the court of the King of Poland, he shares love with the King’s daughter, who is abruptly promised to the Count Palatine. Professing his love for the princess, Mazeppa assaults and wounds the Count in a duel and for his effrontery is strapped supine to the back of a wild horse. The horse is then lashed into madness, loosed upon the Ukrainian plains, and runs itself to death. Grievous torture is the lot of Mazeppa during this wild ride, but he survives, is discovered near death by his father (what a coincidence is here), who is the King of Tatary. And Mazeppa soon returns to Poland with the Tatar army to wreak vengeance on Poland and marry his beloved.
In early years of the play the Mazeppa ride had been accomplished onstage with a dummy athwart the live animal, the dummy role in time giving way to intrepid actors. But not until Maud’s day had the intrepidity been offered to a female, this the idea of Joseph K. Moran, Albany’s Green Street Theater manager and erstwhile tenor turned theatrical entrepreneur, who invited Maud (a horsewoman all her life, as well as a danseuse with acrobatic skills and risqué propensities — her famed Spider Dance, for example) to impersonate the male hero, ride supine and bareback upon Rare Beauty, a genuine horse, and to rise, thereon, up from the footlights and along four escalating platforms to a most high level of the stage, and to do this as well at a fair gallop while clad in a flesh-colored, skin-tight garment of no known name, which would create the illusion of being no garment at all. And so it followed that Maud, barebacked, perhaps also barebuttocked and barebusted, and looking very little like a male hero, climbed those Albany platforms to scandalously glamorous international heights.