“You brought her death!”
“Mercy. Your sister, all of them — only mercy.”
“All of them? How many others besides Grace?”
“Does the number truly matter?”
“Does it truly—! How many, Miss Mercy?”
“I can’t say. So many miles, so many places...”
“How many?”
“Thirty? Forty? Fifty? I can scarce remember them all...”
“Dear sweet Lord! You poisoned as many as fifty pregnant girls?”
“Unmarried girls. Poor foolish girls,” Miss Mercy said gently. “There are worse things than death, oh much worse.”
“What could be worse than suffering the tortures of hell before the soul is finally released?”
“Enduring the tortures of hell for years, decades, a lifetime. Isn’t a few hours of pain and then peace, eternal peace, preferable to lasting torment?”
“How can you believe that bearing a child out of wedlock is so wicked—?”
“No,” Miss Mercy said, “the lasting torment is in knowing, seeing the child they’ve brought into the world. Bastard child, child of sin. Don’t you see? God punishes the unwed mother. The wages of sin is death, but God’s vengeance on the living is far more terrible. I saved your sister from that. I brought her and all the others mercy from that.”
Again she picked up the lamp. With a key from around her neck she unlocked the small satin-lined cabinet Elias had made, lifted out its contents. This she set on the table, the flickering oil lamp close beside it.
Verity looked, and cried out, and tore her gaze away.
Lamplight shone on the glass jar and on the thick formaldehyde that filled it; made a glowing chimera of the tiny twisted thing floating there, with its face that did not seem quite human, with its appendage that might have been an arm and the other that might have been a leg, with its single blind staring eye.
“Now do you understand?” Miss Mercy said. “This is my son, mine and Caleb’s. God’s vengeance — my poor little bastard son.”
And she lifted the jar in both hands and held it tight to her bosom, cradled it and began to rock it to and fro, crooning to the fetus inside — a sweet, sad lullaby that sent Verity fleeing from the wagon, away into the deep dark lonesome night.
Connoisseur
Norman Tolliver was a connoisseur of many things: art, music, literature, gourmet cuisine, sports cars, and beautiful women. But above all else, he was a connoisseur of fine wine.
Nothing gave him quite so much pleasure as the bouquet and delicate taste of a claret from the Médoc region of Bordeaux — a 1924 Mouton-Rothschild, perhaps, or a 1929 Haut-Brion; or a brilliant Burgundy such as a Clos de Vougeot 1915. His memory was still vivid of the night in Paris when an acquaintance of his father’s had presented him with a glass of the impériale claret, the 1878 Latour Pauillac. It was Norman’s opinion that a man could experience no greater moment of ecstasy than his first sip of that venerable Latour.
Norman resided in an elegant penthouse in New York that commanded a view of the city best described as lordly. That is, he resided there for six months of the year; the remaining six months were divided among Europe and the pleasure islands of the Caribbean and the Mediterranean. During his travels he expended an appreciable amount of time and money in seeking out new varieties and rare vintages of wine, most of which he arranged to have shipped to New York for placement in his private cellar.
It was his custom every Friday evening, no matter where he might happen to be, to sample an exceptional bottle of claret or Burgundy. (He enjoyed fine whites, of course — the French Sauterne, the German Moselle — but his palate and his temperament were more suited to the classic reds.) These weekly indulgences were always of a solitary nature; as a connoisseur he found the communion between man and great wine too intimate to share with anyone, too poignant to be blunted by even polite conversation.
On this particular Friday Norman happened to be in New York and the wine he happened to select was a reputedly splendid claret: the Chateau Margaux 1900. It had been given to him by a man named Roger Hume, whom Norman rather detested. Whereas he himself was the fourth-generation progeny in a family of wealth and breeding, Hume was nouveau riche — a large graceless individual who had compiled an overnight fortune in textiles or some such and who had retired at the age of 40 to, as he put it in his vulgar way, “find out how the upper crust lives.”
Norman found the man to be boorish, dull-witted, and incredibly ignorant concerning any number of matters, including an understanding and appreciation of wine. Nevertheless, Hume had presented him with the Margaux — on the day after a small social gathering that they had both attended and at which Norman chanced to mention that he had never had the pleasure of tasting that difficult-to-obtain vintage. The man’s generosity was crassly motivated, to be sure, designed only to impress; but that could be overlooked and even forgiven. A bottle of Margaux 1900 was too fine a prize to be received with any feeling other than gratitude.
At three o’clock Norman drew his study drapes against the afternoon sun and placed one of Chopin’s nocturnes on his quadraphonic record changer. Then, with a keen sense of anticipation, he carefully removed the Margaux’s cork and prepared to decant the wine so that it could breathe. It was his considered judgment that an aged claret should be allowed no less than five hours of contact with new air and no more than six. A healthy, living wine must be given time to breathe in order for it to express its character, release its bouquet, become more alive; but too much breathing causes a dulling of its subtle edge.
He lighted the candle that he had set on the Duncan Phyfe table, waited until the flame was steady, then began to slowly pour the Margaux, holding the shoulder of the bottle just above the light so that he could observe the flow of the wine as it passed through the neck. There was very little age-crust or sediment. The color, however, did not look quite right; it had a faint cloudiness, a pale brown tinge, as wine does when it has grown old too quickly.
Norman felt a sharp twinge of apprehension. He raised the decanter and sniffed the bouquet. Not good, not good at all. He swirled the wine lightly to let air mix with it and sniffed again. Oh Lord — a definite taint of sourness.
He poured a small amount into a crystal glass, prepared himself, and took a sip. Let the wine flood over and under his tongue, around his gums. And then spat the mouthful back into the glass.
The Margaux was dead.
Sour, unpalatable — dead.
White-faced, Norman sank onto a chair. His first feelings were of sorrow and despair, but these soon gave way to a sense of outrage focused on Roger Hume. It was Hume who had given him not a living, breathing 1900 Margaux but a desiccated corpse; it was Hume who had tantalized him and then left him unfulfilled, Hume who had caused him this pain and anguish, Hume who might even have been responsible for the death of the Margaux through careless mishandling. Damn the man. Damn him!
The more Norman thought about Roger Hume, the more enraged he became. Heat rose in his cheeks until they flamed scarlet. Minutes passed before he remembered his high blood pressure and his doctor’s warning about undue stress; he made a conscious effort to calm himself.
When he had his emotions under control he stood, went to the telephone, found a listing for Hume in the Manhattan directory, and dialed the number. Hume’s loud coarse voice answered on the third ring.
“This is Norman Tolliver, Hume,” Norman said.
“Well, Norm, it’s been awhile. What’s the good word?”