Let the Dead Keep Their Secrets

by Rosemary Simpson

  “No one’s coming back. They’ve all been given notice. I can’t imagine any servant feeling so loyal to an employer like Sorensen that he’s willing to spend an extra night in an empty house just to ensure no one breaks in before the removal van arrives.”

  “I still don’t like it.”

  “We’ll be quick. Not to worry, Lydia.” Prudence hugged her friend, then gave her a gentle push toward Aaron Sorensen’s bedroom. When Lydia disappeared through the door, Prudence turned toward the suite belonging to the mistress of the house, the rooms in which both Catherine and Ethel had breathed their last.

  The bedroom was draped in a pale Federal-blue velvet, which reflected tones of smoky gray in the lamplight. The same Federal blue, executed in satin coverlet and bed hangings, set off the deep mahogany luster of a four-poster that was the largest bed Prudence had ever seen. Chairs covered with a tangled green-leaf design were scattered around the walls, as if an audience were expected to gather. It didn’t feel like a room in which a woman slept alone, except for the few hours a night when her husband sought her out until his seed took root. Prudence wondered whether this had been the suite occupied by Catherine’s parents and then her father, until he ceded it to his newly married daughter and her tall, handsome husband.

  She pictured Ethel bleeding out her child and her life as the hours passed and she drifted in and out of consciousness, perhaps unaware of exactly what was happening to her, puzzling over the pain, then floating into unconsciousness. Surely, everything Prudence had managed to find out about Ethel’s slow death pointed toward the oblivion of laudanum or a purer form of morphine.

  The drawers of the bedside tables were empty, their surfaces waxed to a high gleam. Nothing remained of what Ethel had kept beside her during the night or what someone else had placed there. Dropping to her knees, Prudence stretched her arm out between the two mattresses, sweeping back and forth for anything that might have been hidden there, moving from the head of the bed to the foot, around to the other side, and all along the length of the mattress. She hadn’t really expected to find anything, and she didn’t. She thought the housekeeper would have seen to it that the upper mattress was turned when the soiled linens were changed.

  There was nothing beneath the bed, not even the cat’s-paw dust balls that gathered under furniture in most households. Still, obeying Geoffrey’s oft-repeated Pinkerton dictum to be thorough, she ran her fingers over the legs of the bedstead and then along and under the edges of the carpet. Just where one leg of the bed pressed so tightly against the wall that she couldn’t pass the palm of her hand behind it, Prudence felt something slender and smooth wedged in the claw-foot. She pulled, pushed, and prodded until it popped loose and rolled across the carpet into her fingers. A vial—a tiny, cork-stoppered glass vial. When she held it against the chimney of her lamp, she could see that it contained at least two teaspoons of a dark, viscous liquid.

  Anyone else would have pulled out the cork stopper to sniff the contents of the vial. Not Prudence. She knew what it contained. Laudanum in a form more concentrated than that usually employed by ladies desperate to calm their nerves. Laudanum was deadly dangerous to Prudence; the slightest whiff could set off a craving that would leave her twisting in the agony known only to addicts who managed to live their daily lives without its succor. Or worse. She might upend the vial and swallow its contents. Backing out from beneath the bed, she slipped the minuscule glass vial into her skirt pocket, then scrambled to her feet.

  A moment later, Prudence froze, every muscle rigid with concentration. What was that she had heard? The snick of a well-oiled lock as a key turned its tumblers? The soft hiss of a door opening? Head pounding, fingers trembling, she turned down the flame of the lamp and waited, motionless, remembering to control her breathing as Geoffrey had taught her. Moments, then minutes passed. Nothing broke the silence of the empty house, except the tick of the long case clock in the downstairs entry hall and the occasional swish of Lydia’s skirts in the room next door. If Lydia was continuing her search of Aaron Sorensen’s bedroom, it must mean she had heard nothing. Prudence had let her always-active imagination run away with her.

  She made quick work of the dressing room with its armoires still full of Ethel’s clothing. The velvet-lined drawers in which the mistress of the house would have kept her jewelry were empty. Her writing desk contained nothing but blank sheets of initialed letter paper and matching envelopes. Nothing remained that would cast a light on the personality of the individual who had lived in these rooms. Even the round crystal dish for face powder had been emptied and washed, its feathered puff thrown away.

  She made her way back into the bedroom, trying to put herself in Ethel’s frame of mind, turning slowly as she scanned one last time for a spot where Ethel might have hidden something she didn’t want her husband to see. Every wife had secrets, but if she was prudent, she destroyed old love letters and keepsakes before she married. She’d already looked behind every framed picture and painting, run her hand over the wide hems of the drapes, lifted the corners of the Oriental rugs to check for telltale scuff marks in the fine dust that housemaids never quite removed. Hopeless. Either Ethel hadn’t hidden anything, or her husband had found whatever it was and removed it.

  Prudence glanced at the watch attached to her bodice. They’d been in the house for more than an hour. Time to move on to the other rooms she’d chosen to search. She wondered if Sorensen had swept his suite as clean as he’d obviously ordered his wife’s to be.

  Wait. There it was again. A noise that shouldn’t be there. This time it was the unmistakable sound of a footfall, not against the checkered marble of the entryway, but nearly absorbed in the thickness of carpeted stairs. Someone was climbing inexorably toward where Prudence had no business being. She turned the key of the gas lamp, plunging the room in which she stood into blackness. Had she been in time to hide the narrow stream of light that must have streaked out beneath the bedroom door into the hallway? Had the person climbing the stairs been high enough to have seen it? All she could do was flatten herself between the protective bulk of a large armoire and the concealing folds of the drape that brushed against its side.

  One last thing to do: She had to alert Lydia. She could hear her moving nearly soundlessly in the master’s suite, unaware of the approaching danger. Prudence knocked once, twice, on the padded silk that lined and softened the walls of Ethel’s retreat. The rustle of Lydia’s skirts stopped abruptly. Prudence heard a soft exhalation of breath. Good. Lydia had blown out her lamp. She’d understood Prudence’s warning.

  The footsteps reached the second-floor landing, paused for a moment, then drifted away. Strain as hard as she could, Prudence couldn’t be certain which direction they’d taken. Upward toward the third floor? She didn’t hear them resume, but common sense suggested a servant. A footman, or perhaps even the butler himself, paid extra to remain in the empty house overnight. Returning from an afternoon bending his elbow or arranging for new lodgings until he could find another position. If they waited until he fell asleep, which couldn’t be long, the way down to and then out the kitchen door would be clear. Sorensen had undoubtedly made sure nothing incriminating remained in either the nursery or his library. Prudence decided she’d been twenty times a fool to believe otherwise.

  This was one daring adventure Geoffrey need never know about.

  * * *

  From the first moment he entered his house, Aaron Sorensen knew something was wrong. No one in his employ wore the expensive perfume whose faint traces floated through what should have been empty, unscented air. Miranda Prosper smelled of that special blend of sandalwood and old roses, but he dismissed that thought without examining it.

  Mrs. Hopkins wore a faint lily-of-the-valley toilet water he’d smelled on many older women. So it wasn’t his housekeeper who had trailed that tantalizing aroma through the ground-floor rooms. Yet she was here, probably sound asleep in her narrow bed up on the fourth floor. She had assured him that after her bri
ef visit with the sister to whose home outside the city she was relocating, she would return to spend one final night under his roof and greet the removers when they arrived in the morning. Once they had taken charge, she would leave for good. Perhaps Mrs. Hopkins had had a sudden attack of nerves at being alone in the great house all night; perhaps the sister had accompanied her. That was the likeliest answer.

  It had taken the threat of withholding a letter of reference, and the payment of a significant bribe, to ensure her cooperation, but at the time he’d believed he would not be able to do the job himself. Circumstances had changed since then.

  When Sorensen arrived at his destination at midday, he’d been told the paperwork that should have been ready for his signature would not be complete for several more days. Enraged, he’d demanded to know why, only to be met with lawyerly shoulder shrugs and a wall of stubborn resistance to his demands that they produce what was ready so he could get on with it. “All in good time,” he’d been told with maddening calm, “all in good time.”

  He’d slammed out of the offices and back to the railroad station, where he’d caught the afternoon train just as its wheels began to roll. He’d fumed the whole way back, then gone to the Union Club for a restorative dinner and an evening of poker. Nothing had worked out as he’d planned. The whiskey he drank before dining hit him hard; he fumbled his silverware, and the waiter had been slow to refill his wineglass. Coffee sobered him enough for admittance to the card room, but he’d begun losing as soon as he sat down at the table. His luck hadn’t changed. He’d had to sign more notes, just when he’d thought his way was clear. Long before he wanted to leave, the other players at his table made it clear his presence was no longer desired. When he turned the key in the lock of the house that had come to him after Catherine’s timely death, he was in a foul mood.

  Now he smelled a recently extinguished gas lamp as he stepped into his bedroom. Mrs. Hopkins had been showing her sister around the mansion in return for her company during the night; he’d have words to say to her in the morning. If it hadn’t been for the risk of running into Miranda Prosper at the Fifth Avenue Hotel when he’d told her he would be out of town, he might have bullied the staff into giving him a suite two days early. He never would have come back to this cursed place. Elegant, sumptuously furnished, still known as the Buchanan House, it had never fit Sorensen the way it should have. The house recognized him as an interloper and refused to enfold him in its welcoming embrace. Catherine had loved the place; even Ethel declared herself content within its walls. Aaron couldn’t wait to get it sold, pocket the money, and move on.

  Without a valet to help him with his clothes, he struggled to remove his shoes. He let his trousers, coat, shirt, suspenders, and cravat lie on the floor where they fell or he tossed them. He wasn’t in the mood to clean his teeth or wash his hands. Aaron pulled back the covers, let himself sink into the feather mattress, and extinguished the bedside lamp.

  Waves of whiskey fumes roiled in his stomach and crept up his throat. He piled extra pillows against the walnut headboard and propped himself up. He’d slept many a night in that position. But even though he closed his eyes and concentrated on what he needed to do the next day, his legs twitched and the whiskey fumes burned. He forced himself to lie still, not to twist and turn and punch angrily at the pillows. He knew that eventually sleep would come.

  In the meantime he let his imagination picture the size of Miranda Prosper’s fortune and the whiteness of her breasts and belly.

  CHAPTER 28

  Prudence’s urgent knock set Lydia’s pulse racing as she eased shut another empty drawer in Sorensen’s dressing room. She blew out the lamp’s flame, then realized the mistake she’d made when a puff of smoke rose into her nostrils.

  Lydia closed the door that opened into Sorensen’s bedroom, hoping the smell hadn’t had time to drift, then groped for the door connecting the two dressing rooms. She crossed her fingers that Prudence had hidden herself somewhere in Ethel’s bedroom and was waiting for her.

  A hand clutched Lydia’s arm the moment she emerged from the blackness of the dressing room. She stifled a scream as Prudence’s voice hissed a warning.

  “This way,” she whispered, “behind the drapes. Take tiny steps so you don’t bump into anything.”

  The two women inched their way along the wall, then behind a set of floor-to-ceiling drapes. Faint lamplight from the street below lit their faces with an eerie yellow glow, but at least they could see. Neither of them dared put down the lamp she was carrying for fear of knocking against it, cracking the glass bulb, and spilling the lamp oil onto the floor. They stood straight, still, and silent against the windowpanes, careful not to let the velvet drape outline their bodies. They were hidden, but trapped inside a soundless, nearly airless space. For who knew how long?

  Prudence looked down at her feet, then touched Lydia’s arm and pointed. What they were watching for was a shaft of light from the hallway to shine through the open bedroom door, indicating someone had entered or looked into the room. They waited, ears straining for the slightest sound, eyes glued to the half inch of space between drape and carpet. Nothing happened. No light appeared; they heard no sounds of movement.

  “I’m almost positive someone came into Sorensen’s bedroom as I was leaving through the dressing-room door,” Lydia whispered into Prudence’s ear. “I thought I heard the bed creak as the person sat down on it.”

  “It can’t be Sorensen,” Prudence whispered back. “We know he’s out of town.”

  “One of the servants Sorensen paid to remain here tonight? Maybe he decided to sleep in his master’s bed instead of an uncomfortable iron bedstead in the attic.”

  “We’ll give whoever it is an hour,” Prudence said. She pulled out the tiny watch she wore pinned to her bodice in a jeweled case and read the timepiece by the murky gaslight filtering in through the window.

  Lydia nodded. She leaned back against the wall and settled herself in to remain alert but motionless. If she turned her mind to figuring out how the pieces of the Aaron Sorensen puzzle went together, the time would pass quickly.

  * * *

  It was almost midnight before Prudence nudged Lydia and moved out from behind the drape, looping it back from the window so the streetlight illuminated the bedroom enough to outline the furniture. Shapes of lighter and darker gray, with here and there a reflection off glass or polished brass. Enough to allow them to make their way to the door without bumping into anything. They would have to carry the two oil lamps they had used in their search of the bedrooms down the main staircase and place them back on the side table where they had gotten them. The house seemed to be fitted with gaslight wall fixtures throughout the family living quarters, so perhaps the lamps were no longer used on a regular basis. Whoever was sleeping in Sorensen’s bedroom had obviously not missed them. Probably hadn’t even noticed they were gone.

  Prudence eased open the door of Ethel’s bedroom. A gas wall sconce lit the central section of the wide, carpeted hallway, though the far corners were in deep shadow. The house was so quiet, she could hear the faint hiss of the gas as it streamed into the mantle and burned.

  Prudence planned to tiptoe across the hallway and make her way down the great staircase as Lydia waited in the doorway to Ethel’s bedroom. Neither woman could remember whether the steps had creaked under their combined weight when they climbed to the second story, but there was no sense taking a chance. Once Prudence was safely on the ground floor, Lydia would follow. A few moments later they would be in the servants’ stairwell. From there, through the kitchen, out the back door, up the steps into the cobbled back courtyard, and through the carriage gate into the alleyway—where they could breathe deeply again and hurry back to the Fifth Avenue Hotel.

  Adventure completed and no one, but the two of them, aware of it.

  * * *

  Mrs. Hopkins had tossed and turned ever since hearing Mr. Sorensen enter the house and climb the stairs to his bedroom. The man came
and went at all hours, often without giving warning of his plans. She remembered the horrible night when Mrs. Ethel had labored unconscious and all alone while the household, unaware of what was happening, slept around her. He had come home unexpectedly that night also, though it hadn’t done his wife any good. If memory served, he’d put her to bed himself, then firmly closed the door between their adjoining rooms and slept through the hours of her long, futile labor.

  Housekeepers knew more about their employers than they ever let on. Like butlers, they reprimanded junior servants for gossiping, enforced the rules of appropriate behavior, covered up what couldn’t be condoned, and carried on as though nothing were amiss. Not until he or she had secured another position was it safe to think about a former employer’s missteps. Not that they would ever be talked about openly.

  Mrs. Hopkins, twisting and turning beneath her inadequate blanket, would be glad to be shut of Mr. Sorensen. He’d already written the good reference he’d promised and been surprisingly generous with what he’d paid her for this one extra night. Waste of money, since he’d come back himself, not that he couldn’t afford it. Rich as Croesus when Mrs. Ethel died, or so the rumor ran, and he’d inherited from another wife, too.

  The thought of two dead wives haunting the soon-to-be-empty house didn’t make it any easier to fall asleep. Tired as Mrs. Hopkins was, her eyes refused to stay closed. Maybe she’d feel more secure if she got up and locked the door at the foot of the staircase that led from the family bedroom corridor to the servants’ sleeping quarters in the attic. The butler had seen to that every night, which was why she hadn’t thought to secure the passageway herself tonight.

  Not that Mr. Sorensen posed any threat, she thought as she climbed out of bed and shrugged her arms into her dressing gown. And not that a locked door would keep out ghosts if they chose to roam. But there was something about turning a bolt that made you feel safe. She put her feet into a pair of embroidered slippers; the floors in the servants’ quarters were uncarpeted and always cold.