The Vanished Child Read online

  Praise for The Vanished Child

  § “Stunning…Tells a grim tale of murder and duplicity in stately prose that subtly enhances the psychological horrors….”

  The New York Times (Notable Book of the Year)

  § “A stunning tale of love, amnesia, child abuse, Victorian sexual repression and murder most foul….The satisfying denouement is a shocker.”

  Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  § “Greed, suspicion, love, madness, and amnesia: Sarah Smith pulls it all together with a rare talent for telling a complex story in beautifully simple language.”

  The San Francisco Chronicle

  § “Smith deftly explores both the actual and the psychological mysteries…. Highly recommended.”

  Library Journal

  § “Deliciously intriguing…an artful literary puzzler featuring the kind of thick period detail and narrative intricacy mastered by Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, and by few writers since…. This one belongs on the permanent shelf.”

  The Philadelphia Inquirer

  The

  Vanished

  Child

  Sarah Smith

  Copyright © 1992 by Sarah Smith

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted or distributed in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including posting text or links to text online, printing, photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher.

  ISBN: 978-1-951636-04-3

  First published in April 1992 by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

  Original cover design incorporates photographs by Kelly Rose Noonan and a photograph of William Ela Buck, Jr. (disappeared 1888)

  Also by Sarah Smith

  The Knowledge of Water

  A Citizen of the Country

  Crimes and Survivors

  See more about Sarah Smith and her books:

  www.sarahsmith.com

  Facebook sarahwriter, SarahSmithBooks

  [The disappearances of children] are stories of bereavements sharper than death. The sorrow of a fixed and finished calamity abates with time; the sorrow of suspense grows intenser the longer it endures. . . . The loss of a child by the hand of man involves treachery and cruelty, the despair of the family, the misery of the child, its rearing in crime and shame for ruin, or— less wretched fate—its early death . . . [Yet the child] is not forgotten in the heart of infinite love; not unwatched by the veil that never sleeps. The hand that has spread the veil will lift it.

  —C. P. Krauth, introduction to

  Charley Ross the Kidnapped Child (1876)

  O God, who for the Three Children didst assuage the flames of fire: mercifully grant that the flames of sin may not consume us Thy servants.

  —Baltimore Catechism

  To

  S.M.B.

  M.B.C.P.

  J.R.O.P.

  with my love

  omnia mei dona Dei

  Contents

  A madman in Switzerland

  The story of Richard Knight

  Harry Boulding’s birthday; an engagement

  A madman in Boston

  Only if Richard’s dead

  “Intellectual, immoral, and unstable”

  Reisden and Harry meet

  Gilbert meets Richard

  Perdita decides what to do

  Reisden and Perdita meet

  “If we never talked about the past?”

  “Someone killed Richard….”

  Reisden and Charlie Adair meet

  Gilbert’s fears; Harry and Perdita

  Restaurant lessons

  Louis Dalloz

  The car

  To Lake Matatonic

  Anna Fen; the murder house

  Lodgings; more of Anna Fen

  Looking for Richard

  Perdita gains a teacher

  The fourth of July; Votes for Women

  The fire

  Noticing Perdita; talking with Mrs. Fen

  What do men and women do?

  Perdita asks questions

  Music or marriage?

  Last words from Victor; a picture

  Richard’s books; a dance lesson and a discovery

  Is it Richard?

  Gilbert and Reisden smash glasses

  Charlie Adair; Jay French; Washington, a dog

  Sanity

  Perdita tries on a dress

  A dance

  Anna Fen; Perdita breaks a promise

  Charlie goes to church

  Among the loosestrife; Gilbert’s dream

  How Richard disappeared; Reisden and Charlie

  “All for my own, forever”

  A fight

  A revolver

  Perdita’s birthday

  Where’s Richard?

  Anna Fen’s evidence

  Perdita won’t tell

  The play’s the thing

  “Let her have her goodness still”

  “Get him away from her”

  Gilbert reads Dante; Reisden makes a discovery

  Beginning of the play

  Acting murder

  Richard, Charlie, Perdita

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  A madman in Switzerland

  The Baron Alexander von Reisden went mad after his young wife died, and in five years he had not got himself sane. His friends were concerned about him. He had tried suicide once, early on, and had not succeeded; this was encouraging in a man who was usually both well-prepared and lucky; but even mad, Reisden might reasonably have assumed that he could shoot himself through the heart without missing, and, knowing himself, at the first moment he could, he would have learned how to do it better. He still had the gun, in a box in his top drawer behind his collar studs, and he still suffered from what had led him to the act, his singular and inexplicable and apparently incurable madness.

  “Do you still think you killed her?” Louis asked.

  Reisden looked up from making notes in his lab book. “I did kill her. That isn’t the question.”

  It was Christmas Eve, 1905, in the cold lab of the chemistry labs at the University of Lausanne. Reisden’s notes on neuromuscular connections were spread out on his lab bench beside a refrigerated box, glass-topped and glass-sided, into which the string galvanometer and Reisden’s other testing apparatus fit; but because one could not have visibility and insulation too, the whole lab was not much warmer than the box. The refrigeration coils and an electric motor took up most of the back wall; Louis had to shout above its rattle. Reisden, cold in his coat, held his hands over the Bunsen burner. In a tin pan nearby lay three frogs half stretched out, stunned by the cold. One of them stirred, disturbed by the shadow of his hands.

  “But you know it was an accident,” Louis persisted.

  “Of course.” Reisden picked up a pithing needle and opened the glass box. How much, he wondered, will the experiment be disturbed because the experimenter is warm-blooded? He measured the frog’s temperature and brushed his hand across the frog’s back, making it hop, panicked, across the lab bench until it stopped, paralyzed by the cold and the toxins building up in its muscles. Bending the frog’s neck forward, Reisden felt along the smooth skin and slid the needle into the base of the skull, upward into the brain. He moved the needle back and forth. The frog gave one slow shudder and relaxed in his hands. The procedure was supposed to be painless, which Reisden had always considered irrelevant, as if painless death were more excusable. Tasy had died instantly and probably without pain.

  I know it was an accident, Reisden thought. I never had any trouble knowing that.

  The frog flopped limply in his hand. Frog a moment ago, preparation n
ow. He cut quickly through the skin of the leg, dissecting out the nerve and muscle.

  Louis Dalloz peered over his shoulder, snuffling like one of the pigs he studied, puffing vapory breaths like a wrathful French Santa Claus. From the sleeves of his old overcoat rose a rich odor of large animals and barns. His muffler, which his wife had knit for him, bulged the neck of his coat. He looked like an accident with a hat, and even in his own university he had been taken for the janitor. Only his hands, short-fingered and delicate and stained with acid like Reisden’s, looked like a chemist’s. “How can you stand this cold?”

  “How do you stand pigs? The cold slows down the recovery reaction.”

  “This isn’t an experiment, it’s a hair shirt.” Louis sniffed. He squinted at the string galvanometer. “What happened to your lab assistant?”

  “Gone to Zurich for Christmas.”

  “And you stay here doing work that any lab assistant could do. If you were in Paris . . . Berthet doesn’t let a twenty-seven-year-old man act like a monk. Not in Paris.”

  Reisden reached over and turned off the refrigerator. For a moment the silence deafened them both.

  “I’m not going to Paris.”

  Louis snorted and glared up at him.

  “You will hear me, Louis.” Reisden kept his voice neutral. “I like Berthet’s people. Yes, I’d probably be good there. Yes, I would like living in Paris. We’ve been through that. I am not going.”

  “You don’t think you’re good enough.”

  “It won’t work, Louis. I’ve seen all your bait before.”

  “You like Switzerland. You want to stay here and make money.” Louis fiddled with Reisden’s big microscope, spinning it up, then twiddling it into focus again. “Whose slide?”

  “Ramón y Cajal’s.”

  “Pretty.”

  “New stain. I’m not out of touch here,” Reisden said.

  Louis looked up at him. “No,” said Louis, “only with yourself. You’ve locked yourself away so long that you don’t remember how to come into a room with people in it, eh? Or tell a joke that doesn’t have an edge to it. You’re like a wild animal in the corner of a pen, going grrrr”—Louis bared his teeth and growled convincingly—“because he doesn’t know what else to do. And he thinks even to himself, Je suis la bête sauvage, I’m mad. But isn’t he only afraid of what’s going to happen next? Don’t look down your nose at me, Sacha, like the Baron von Reisden. I knew you when you were nineteen.”

  Reisden sighed and put the frog down. “Make yourself useful, would you? Write while I measure.”

  Louis sighed loudly and took the pen. Onto the string galvanometer Reisden fit a translucent string of frog preparation, once frog. The current barely made the muscle twitch. Reisden moved the dial in tiny increments, reading out numbers.

  “Just for a few days, come with me to Genoa,” Louis said. “It’s Christmas. It’s not good for you to stay here alone. Jeanne will fuss over you. We’ll have a nice roast pig. Everyone from the lab will be there. You can look down your nose at our research methods.”

  “No, I shall spend Christmas day cutting apart innocent little frogs.”

  Louis opened his mouth and closed it.

  Now, thought Reisden, we will get into deep waters. Louis would ask, did Reisden know that most suicides happened at holidays? Louis, he thought, look here, Louis, one doesn’t shoot oneself because it’s Christmas.

  “You were my best student,” Louis said forcefully, holding up his hand as if he were about to swear to something. “Now you are—” He waggled his fingers, looking for words. “Now you can choose between working for Berthet or Sherrington. But you’re wasting it, you’re not doing chemistry, you’re just being sorry for yourself and calling it guilt. I’m here out of interest for you, that’s all, freezing my ass in this refrigerator you call a lab on the day before Christmas, to tell you that you are being stupid. You didn’t mean to kill her. You had a nervous breakdown and thought you did. And that was five years ago.”

  Ah, was it? “And in another country, and besides, the wench is dead. And it will never happen again. But I am not going to Paris.”

  Louis glared up at him, his face reddening. “Sometimes I want to throw a bomb at you. Take the job, and don’t play Saint Alexander in the Icebox. It’s not good for you.”

  Reisden let that go. He watched the hand move instead. That was Louis’ gesture, what one would take of him first if one were to act him: holding the hand up, wiggling the fingers. This is my hand. Why does it move? At nineteen Reisden had taken Louis’ undergraduate chemistry course because the passion of his life had been acting and he had wanted those French-peasant gestures. He had found instead a question that he had been unable to answer.

  And that had kept them allies ever since: that and Louis’ persistence. Sometimes Reisden was grateful for Louis. Not by any means always.

  “Look,” Reisden said, “when is the next train to Genoa?”

  “Two hours,” Louis said instantly and added, “Will you come?”

  “I’ll take you to the train. You don’t want to be away from Jeanne at Christmas, do you? We’ll stop at your hotel and get your luggage.”

  “We can’t get a cab at four in the morning. I’ll have to stay.”

  Reisden looked out into the dark streets; his breath fogged the ice crystals that grew up the window. “I’ll drive you,” he offered.

  “In the auto!" Louis said under his breath, rounding his eyes sarcastically. “In Saint Alexander Reisden’s holy cursed automobile! Vierge Marie!”

  I do give rides, Reisden thought, suddenly very tired. I don’t kill everybody. He checked the still-living frogs and picked up one. The frog stirred a bit in the warmth of his hand. “Live,” he said to the frog, and let it drop back among the rest.