Louisa and the Crystal Gazer

by Anna Maclean

  “It’s called fencing,” I corrected. “And by find, might I assume you mean steal?”

  “Not always,” said Suzie, plainly hurt. “This he bought fair and square, I know. I was with him.” She produced from under the collar of her much-rumpled dress a little locket. Half a locket, actually, half a heart.

  “Mrs. Percy had other interests,” I said. “Tell me what happened that day.”

  Suzie tucked her locket back into the stained lace of her dress and sat upright like a schoolgirl about to recite a lesson.

  “Well, the night before I didn’t sleep well. I thought I heard voices downstairs. A man and a woman, Mrs. Percy being the woman. They were quarreling. Very angry, they were. So I put a pillow over my head and tried to go back to sleep.”

  “You were accustomed to hearing voices downstairs at night,” I guessed.

  “Mrs. Percy were a great one for company of the gentlemanly sort,” Suzie agreed.

  “Was it by any chance her stepbrother, Mr. Nichols?” asked Sylvia, who had been listening intently.

  “No. Eddie’s voice I would know. This one I wasn’t certain of. It sounded familiar but I couldn’t place it. Maybe one of her clients, the one with the curly black hair. It were a deep voice.”

  Mr. Barnum, I thought. “Could you hear what they were saying?” I asked.

  “Something about misdeeds, about it costing too much, from the gentleman. Mrs. Percy laughed and said he was to leave her alone, or pay.”

  “And then what?”

  “It got quiet. I figured they were making up. I heard the sound that Mrs. Percy’s brandy cabinet makes when it’s opened. The door squeaks. Then I heard the cook, the Chinese woman, moving around downstairs. Her bedroom is right under mine. Sometimes she gets up early to bake yeast bread, and I didn’t think nothing of it. I went back to sleep. Needed my beauty rest, you know.” She grinned. She’d had an appointment with Eddie the next day, she explained.

  “Well,” she continued, “when I got up the next morning, the cook was gone and Mrs. Percy was locked into her preparation room, where she’d been sitting the night before. She fell asleep in there. Least, I thought she was asleep.” Suzie yawned. “Don’t sleep well here. Wish I had some of those sleeping powders of hers. Or maybe not,” she corrected.

  “Continue with the events, please.”

  “In the morning I run down, quick, to the kitchen, to get the breakfast tray for Mrs. Percy, and lordy, was that kitchen a mess! Broken plates everywhere, things spilled, and that cook up and gone. Nowhere to be found. I looked in her room, and she had taken her valise and hairbrush and left. Left me in a bad spot, she did!”

  “Time’s up,” shouted a man’s voice up the stairs.

  “Ten more minutes, please!” I shouted back. There was a deep muttering, a clanging of keys, but the footsteps retreated and I was allowed more time. Being Mr. Bronson Alcott’s daughter carried some weight.

  “Quick, Suzie,” I said. “What more can you tell me about the cook?”

  “Mrs. Percy hired her a year ago. Our other cook had just quit to get married and move to Worcester. Mrs. Percy found her in a poorhouse. Mrs. Percy goes—went—to poorhouses sometimes, just to get gossip for her séances. Kicked-out servant girls will talk on and on about their employers, you know. Reveal all sorts of things.”

  “And what had Meh-ki revealed?”

  “Nothing that I know, but Mrs. Percy kept saying how lucky she was, that first week that Meh-ki was there. I thought she just liked the cooking. Meh-ki did tell me once that she’d been working in New York, but her employer died and she came north, hearing there was work in Boston. She seemed afraid, though, and would never say why. Almost never left the house, ’cept to go to market. Said once she was going to go back to New York as soon as she could get the money.”

  “Did she have any visitors?”

  “None that I knew of.”

  Heavy footsteps came down the darkened hall. Keys jangled. A man with a shock of black hair falling into his eyes glared at us. “Time’s up,” he repeated. “You were to have fifteen minutes with the prisoner; that’s all. Don’t know what females are doing in a jail, anyway. Not fitting.”

  “Hey! Ain’t I a lady?” Suzie protested, tossing back her dirty, uncombed hair.

  “Yeah. And I’m the king of France.” He snorted.

  Outside, in front of the courthouse we encountered Constable Cobban, who was returning from some errand or investigation. He tipped his cap and stopped to speak, which delighted Sylvia and pained me, for I must now tell him I had again interfered and perhaps caused some difficulty. I would have told him eventually, reader, but I had hoped for a moment of peace to gather my thoughts. Fate willed otherwise.

  “Afternoon, ladies. Having a little visit with your Suzie?” He grinned at me and nodded politely at Sylvia, lifting his head up and back in an exaggerated gesture to show that he wore the muffler she had knitted for him.

  “She needs a bath,” said Sylvia. “Are there facilities?”

  Cobban blushed. “I’ll bring in my mother and have her attend to it, Miss Sylvia.”

  “How is your mother?” I asked, delaying. I had never met this undoubtedly long-suffering woman, but I imagined her as a feminine form of her son, tall and lanky, carrot-haired and freckled.

  “You are withholding,” he said. “I know that look in your eyes. They turn hazel instead of green.”

  “Now that you mention it, I should report that I found Mrs. Percy’s cook,” I said, using one booted foot to wipe snow off the other so that I would not have to meet his gaze.

  “Splendid. Where might I find her?”

  “Well, that is the difficulty. She saw me, and fled.”

  Cobban took off his cap and slapped it in his palm; he turned in a little circle, shaking his head and muttering, probably cursing, under his breath. Temper often accompanies hair of that hue.

  “That beats all,” he said. “You couldn’t have sent word to me first, before sending another suspect into hiding?”

  “She was already in hiding, and there was no time to send for you,” I said firmly.

  Sylvia reached up and tied more tightly the muffler about his throat. Reader, I have mentioned before that young Cobban blushed frequently, but at this touch from Sylvia he turned livid purple and then whiter than snow. Sylvia smiled at him and he began to tremble.

  “All is not lost,” I said.

  “Indeed it is not,” said he, looking at Sylvia.

  “I refer to the matter of Mrs. Percy’s cook.” I sighed and stamped my feet, which were growing cold.

  “Of course,” said Cobban, shaking himself as does a person awaking from a dream. “Explain yourself, Miss Louisa. Please.”

  “We might make inquiries of Mr. Deeds.”

  “Deeds?” said Sylvia and Cobban in unison.

  “I learned the cook’s name today. It is Meh-ki. And Agatha Percy delivered a message to Mr. Deeds from Mickey, or we heard it as Mickey. I believe she meant Meh-ki.”

  “How could she?” asked Sylvia. “Meh-ki is very much alive if you just saw her this morning.”

  “As is my sister, whose arrival she announced,” I reminded my friend. “I begin to suspect that Mrs. Percy’s messages had more in them than met the eye…rather, the ear, of course.”

  “We’ll pay him a little visit. Let me just go inside for a moment and tell them I’ll be away a bit longer,” said Cobban, rushing up the courthouse steps. He turned back to wave at Sylvia, as if they would be parted for years, not moments, and stumbled in the snow.

  “Oh, Sylvia.” I sighed in irritation.

  “I know. Isn’t it wonderful? He wore the muffler,” she whispered in delight. “I think Father will be pleased.”

  “VERY, VERY INCONVENIENT,” Mrs. Deeds fumed at us over her maid’s shoulder when Sylvia, Cobban, and I arrived at her doorstep half an hour later. “I am most busy, and wish to forget this sordid business with Mrs. Percy. She was a great disappointment.” Mrs. Dee
ds was dressed plainly in blue wool and a white cap with no necklaces, no bracelets, no jeweled rings, quite unlike my memory of her from the séance. Why this lack of adornment from a woman who prided herself on her jewels? I wondered.

  “It is important,” insisted Cobban.

  She glared, then ushered us in.

  Mr. and Mrs. Ezra Deeds resided at 6 Newbury Street in a large, cluttered house filled with acquisitions: cuckoo clocks from the Black Forest, rows and rows of glass vases and paperweights from Venice, painted fans from the Japans, tapestries of peacock feathers from India, huge bouquets of silk flowers. Her home felt like the interior of a shop, the type that sells mementos and gifts and never a truly needed item. The windows were hung with four layers of lace and draperies; each table—and there were many, all located where more sensible people might wish to circulate—was covered with three cloths each, one atop the other.

  “I trust this will be brief?” she said when we were seated in her back parlor, where the furnishings were less fussy and had a slightly worn quality that better suited me. “I am expecting guests.”

  I hazarded a guess then as to why she was dressed so plainly. She was not expecting guests, at least not guests of the usual variety. At last, my luck had changed, but I could not inform Cobban until we had a more private moment.

  “We’ll need to speak with Mr. Deeds as well,” said the young constable.

  She glared, knit her brows, decided a veneer of politeness would work well in the situation. “Very well. I’ll go bring him in. He is working on his insect collection. He discovered a strange moth in his wardrobe last evening.” Her smile was forced.

  “Yes?” asked the beleaguered husband a few minutes later. He stood in the doorway of the parlor, his stooped posture and genuine surprise indicating he rarely was summoned from his collection to the parlor, even the back parlor.

  “Please be seated,” said Cobban. “I have some questions for you about Meh-ki.”

  “Who?” asked Mr. Deeds, scratching his head, ruffling the thin gray hair that fringed out from a bald circle like a monk’s tonsure.

  “Mrs. Percy’s cook,” I said.

  “Oh, that woman!” Mrs. Deeds exclaimed. “Bad enough that her séances were a bore, and then she died and upset my schedule for a week, for I had counted on her to come and do a private séance for a party I was giving.” Mrs. Deeds seemed very put out that her crystal gazer had had the bad taste to die before fulfilling her social engagements.

  “Mrs. Percy’s cook’s name is Meh-ki, and I believe that Mrs. Percy gave you a message regarding her,” Cobban said to Mr. Deeds, who had begun wringing his hands.

  Mrs. Deeds glared at the clock on the mantelpiece.

  “Couldn’t have,” said Mr. Deeds. “I don’t know her.”

  “The message was from Michaela,” said Mrs. Deeds, still staring at the clock.

  “So we thought. Actually, I believe Mrs. Percy said Meh-ki,” I said. “The exact message was…” I took out my notebook, in which I had recorded the séance the evening I returned home, the better to have the details should I wish them for one of my “blood and thunder” stories. “…was that Meh-ki was afraid of something, that she had a secret, and there was a cost. Ring any bells, Mr. Deeds?”

  “No,” he insisted, looking genuinely perplexed. “How could she have a message for me, if we have never met?”

  Cobban, who had taken out his own notebook, slapped it shut and rubbed his fingers over its worn leather cover. Mrs. Deeds cleared her throat and made a show of looking at the timepiece pinned to her dress. She cleared her throat. “I am somewhat pressed for time,” she said again. Mr. Deeds shrugged and looked confused.

  We rose. Cobban shook Mr. Deeds’s hand in a way that seemed to indicate sympathy, I thought.

  Outside, the snow fell heavily, a beautiful snow that made me joyous with one breath and anxious with the next, for it reminded me of Christmas, and the presents I wished to buy for my family, and the shirts that must be stitched before such presents could be purchased.

  “I think we should wait a bit across the street, behind that shelter for the omnibus,” I said, for I had formed a speculation about why Mrs. Deeds had forsworn all jewels that afternoon.

  “It’s cold, Louy!” complained Sylvia.

  “It will be worth the wait, if I am correct. Button your coat, Sylvia, and pull the collar tighter.”

  Cobban undid the muffler from about his neck and put it around Sylvia’s. She gazed at him with adoring eyes.

  We stood in silence for ten minutes, shifting our weight back and forth from foot to foot and wrapping our arms about ourselves for greater warmth. Because I had given away my gloves my fingers were numb, and I longed for the warmth of Auntie Bond’s hearth. But I was correct; the wait in the cold was worthwhile.

  At exactly three o’clock, a closed carriage pulled up in front of Mrs. Deeds’s home; a man in a high-collared coat and low-brimmed hat descended from the carriage. He looked furtively about before climbing the steps to Mrs. Deeds’s door.

  “It is Eddie Nichols,” I said, “come to sell her some jewelry. That’s why she was wearing none. When you are to bargain for a good price, it is better not to wear your wealth about your neck.”

  Cobban let out a low whistle. “Ladies, return to your homes. I’ll take care of this.”

  “LOUY, I HAVE never seen you stitch with such determination,” Lizzie said to me later that evening. I was finally warm, with dry stockings and house slippers, a thick shawl over my shoulders, and a cup of hot chocolate on the table at my side. When I had returned home Auntie Bond’s house smelled of cloves and oranges, for she had been baking her famous fruitcake, and the scent of that seasonal delight drove me to a frenzy to finish the reverend’s shirt order—or at least diminish it, so that I might move closer to the reward, the promised payment.

  “I am far behind,” I told her. “There. Two shirts done. I shall finish the third this evening, I think.”

  “Nine more to go. And the cuffs need double-stitching, and there should be a touch of embroidery on the button placket. I shall do that.”

  “It doesn’t seem fair, Lizzie,” I confessed. “I am sewing shirts to purchase a Christmas present for you, yet you are doing the work as well!”

  “Oh, Louy.” She came and knelt by me and put her blond head on my knees. “Don’t you know it is gift enough to have this time with my sister? I have you, and letters from Father and Marmee, and a piano, and a hearth. What else could I need?”

  A red leather portfolio of Liszt, I thought. And to help read the music, a series of lessons with Signor Massimo, who teaches only the best of the best and has agreed to work with the winner of Mr. Crowell’s lottery.

  “Speaking of letters, there is a note just arrived for you, Louisa,” said Auntie Bond, coming in to join us. She handed me an envelope and sat down in her favorite chair, a soft chenille one near the hearth.

  “From Constable Cobban,” I said, recognizing the writing on the envelope. I tore it open. “Mr. Edward Nichols has been detained for questioning about certain thefts and the distribution of jewelry of questionable provenance.”

  “Justice is done,” said Auntie Bond, who had been following my adventures in the aftermath of Mrs. Percy’s death.

  I had half expected Constable Cobban to write me that there had been a fond reunion, albeit brief, between Suzie Dear and Eddie Nichols, but it had not fallen out quite that way.

  He called her a snitch and several other less pleasant names, and when he passed by her cell she reached out and pulled at his hair. She took a good chunk of it. He was dazed by her violence, but then the name-calling grew very nasty and loud. I was relieved that Miss Sylvia was not there to hear that language.

  Poor Suzie, I thought. She had thought herself in love, I suspected. And poor Mr. Cobban. Did he realize yet what was in store for him?

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Bride’s Tale

  I SAT UP stitching long past the moment wh
en Lizzie, sighing, stretched and yawned and went up to her bed; long past Auntie Bond’s cheerful, “Good night, Louisa, sleep tight,” till the last embers in the hearth had turned gray and cold, till my fingertips were numb, picking pieces of white linen from the basket and matching sleeve to shoulder, front seam to side seam, doggedly stitching what are known as French seams, twice-stitched first on the right side then outside in so that the stitches don’t show and there are no unfinished edges. It is, in the correct frame of mind, satisfying work, almost meditative, though I doubt Father and Mr. Emerson have so meditated despite their passion for Transcendence.

  One thought ran through my mind over and over: If the message about Meh-ki wasn’t for Mr. Deeds, as I strongly suspected it was not, since he seemed incapable of guile, then for whom was it meant? And why had Mrs. Percy taken such a roundabout path to deliver the message?

  I put down the shirtsleeve and took my notebook out of my pocket.

  Mrs. Percy had first asked Meh-ki with whom she wished to speak. Meh-ki’s spirit or presence, or whatever Mrs. Percy pretended it was, did not answer. She had then asked Meh-ki if she had a secret, and there had been two taps. Yes. And then the only other part of that “message” had been from Mrs. Percy herself: “When the soul’s ether is so unwilling to make itself known, it desires only continued secrecy. There is a cost. Am I understood?”

  There is a cost. Am I understood? Was Mrs. Percy threatening someone in the room? Asking for payment? Who?

  Immediately after had come the “message” for Sylvia: “Marry,” and then that strange garbled deep voice that had issued from Mrs. Percy saying, “Marry in haste, repent, repent; marry out of your station, woe, woe. But marry well, and prosper after. None will know.”

  None will know. There is a cost. Am I understood? None will know. The secret message had been hidden in the others. I flipped two pages back, to the message to Mr. Barnum: “Forgiveness rather than vengeance. Women are easily led astray and abused by those with power.”