by P. B. Ryan
Winifred’s gaze was slightly out of focus, her cheeks shiny-pink; she’d had at least one refill of every wine or liqueur served so far. Her elder daughter, Emily, started to say something to her, then just looked away with an expression of weariness.
Emily Pratt, fresh off her tour of Europe, was a brown-eyed honey blonde whose taste in clothes utterly confounded Nell. The dress she had on tonight was similar to yesterday’s funeral attire in the simplicity of its design, but the plum Shantung silk from which it had been made gave it a lushly romantic air. Her unbound hair, which fell in waves just to her shoulders, formed a corona of burnished bronze around her face.
If Emily defied the current fashions, her younger sister, the blue-eyed, golden-haired Cecilia, embraced them with a passion. Cecilia’s gown, a frothy construction of pink tulle festooned with ribbon embroidery, was a creation of the celebrated Parisian modiste Charles Worth, of whom—as she’d confided to Nell before dinner—she was a private client. All her evening dresses—three dozen new ones each year—came from the House of Worth. She owned fifty-eight silk shawls made by Gagelin et Opigez, also in Paris, and had just ordered a dozen more. Her mamá was forever pestering her to pass some along to Aunt Vera, but she loved just looking at them all. Her day dresses, hats, gloves, footwear and underpinnings came mostly from Swan & Edgar and Lewis & Allenby in London.
Warming to her subject, Nell’s manifest disinterest notwithstanding, Cecilia had described the care that went into her specifications when purchasing new clothing and accessories. She studied every issue of Godey’s and paid minute attention to the newspaper descriptions of gowns worn by European royalty—especially those of that international icon of elegance, and Mr. Worth’s most famous patron, the empress Eugénie. Not since Cecilia was a young girl had she permitted her mother to choose her frocks. Everything she wore, she told Nell, she ordered to her own exacting standards—except, of course, for her jewelry, such as the almond-sized diamond nestled in her cleavage, and the matching, if slightly smaller, ear bobs, which she owed to “the thoughtfulness of Mr. Hewitt.”
By “Mr. Hewitt,” she of course meant Harry, with whom she’d been keeping company since throwing over her Austrian nobleman a month ago, right after the formal announcement of their engagement at the Pratts’ annual ball. Ah, yes, the oh-so-thoughtful Harry Hewitt, the “Beau Brummel of Boston,” whose only physical imperfections—a small scar on his left eyelid and a bump on the bridge of his nose—were souvenirs of his attempt last year, while drunk on absinthe, to forcibly ravish Nell. To Nell’s knowledge, Harry still swilled absinthe, seduced mill girls, and gambled away appalling sums night after night, despite his father’s threats of disinheritance. How would Cecilia react, Nell wondered, if she knew everything there was to know about Harry Hewitt? Quite possibly she wouldn’t care so long as he was discreet—assuming, of course, that the diamonds and rubies kept coming.
Both Nell and Will had ignored Harry completely, both before and during dinner, and he them. Will had, however, initiated a fairly cordial conversation with his parents, an effort greeted by his father with ill-cloaked disdain, but by his mother with delight. The rift between Viola Hewitt and her eldest son, for which she blamed herself, had been her cross to bear for years. The prospect of enjoying normal maternal relations with Will made her “fairly giddy with pleasure,” as she’d declared this afternoon in her cultivated British accent. Nell had come to her to explain about the sham courtship, and to assure her that she had no matrimonial designs on Will or anyone else. All I care about is that I’ll get to see my son from time to time, Viola had said. I’m just grateful that you’ve made that happen.
The footmen returned, bearing fresh glasses and icy bottles of Perrier-Jouët. A cut crystal champagne flute was placed in front Nell and filled with a flourish. She felt a moment of heady intoxication as the golden liquid swirled and fizzed, not because she’d drunk more than she was used to; she had, but she’d eaten so much that she barely felt it. It was because Will, seated diagonally across the table, was looking at her again.
It was that look of slightly dazed admiration that he’d given her when he first saw her tonight, dressed not in her usual high-necked, stylishly austere manner, but in her one and only evening dress—a luxuriously feminine gown made of prismatic, greenish-purplish silk that shifted colors as she moved. It was snug enough to require tighter stays than usual, and cut so low as to reveal far more bosom than Nell was accustomed to. Viola had had it made for that dinner party a year and a half ago. A lady of rank might balk at being seen twice in the same gown by the same people, for the Pratts had been guests at that dinner, but Nell had no option but to wear what she owned.
Gracie, who’d “helped” Nell get dressed earlier this evening, had been effusive in her praise. Nell looked “just like a pwincess,” she’d decreed. “Evwybody will say you’re the pwettiest lady there.”
Indeed, Nell had received many admiring remarks that evening, and one rather off-putting comment, from Cecilia, when they were first introduced. At first, Cecilia couldn’t recall having met her at that dinner party—until Nell’s wrap was removed. Cecilia took one hard, trenchant look at her gown and said, “Ah, yes. Now I remember you.” As if unaware of the insult she’d quite deliberately dealt, she’d launched into that soliloquy on the subject of her vast and painstakingly chosen wardrobe, keeping at it until Will finally rescued Nell with a gentle tug on her elbow.
Will, crisply handsome tonight in white tie and tails, his hair lightly oiled, a sprig of lily of the valley in his lapel, had stolen glances at her all through dinner. Nell found his reaction gratifying, of course—she was still a woman, after all—but also a bit unsettling. There were boundaries to their friendship, like a wall of frosted glass, very real but also very fragile—so fragile that neither of them dare speak of what lay on the other side. By looking at her that way, Will was, whether he realized it or not, pressing his face dangerously close to the glass.
“Well, then.” Mr. Pratt pushed back his chair and stood as the footmen backed away from the table. “It gives me the greatest of pleasure to...” His gaze shifted over the heads of his guests. “Foster! I’d all but given up hope.”
All eyes turned toward the open doorway to the central hall, where a gentleman in white tie—brown-haired, forty-ish, with robust good looks—stood holding a silk top hat in one hand and a pair of white kid gloves in the other. The Pratts’ butler stood behind him, an evening cape draped over one arm.
“So sorry to be late.” Foster’s coatsleeve rode up a bit as he handed his hat and gloves to the butler, revealing a smear of what looked like fresh blood on his shirt cuff. “It’s inexcusable, I know,” he said as he tugged his sleeves down and straightened his lapels, “but there was an emergency just as I was getting ready to leave the house.”
“Not at all, old man.” Pratt waved the newcomer into the room. “Some champagne for our new guest,” he told the nearest footman, “and a plate of whatever he’s missed up till now. Some of those oysters, certainly, and one or two lamb cutlets—”
“No, don’t bother—please,” Foster said to the footman directly. “I’m really not very hungry. Whatever’s yet to be served will more than suffice. I never turn down good champagne, though.”
Addressing his guests, Pratt said, “May I present Dr. Isaac Foster, one of my newer clients, and a gentleman of no small achievement. For those of you who don’t know—though I daresay you should—Dr. Foster is a professor of clinical medicine at Harvard Medical School, in addition to being one of Boston’s most respected surgeons—as were his father and grandfather before him, both of whom I was proud to call my friends.” There followed formal introductions and bows all around.
Nell met Will’s gaze across the table in silent communication: Isaac Foster was one of the men who had visited, and presumably bribed, Detective Skinner the day before yesterday.
“Was it a medical emergency?” Winifred exclaimed. “Nothing serious, I hope.”
“The pati
ent was a dog that got in the way of a horse car,” Foster said as he took his seat next to Nell.
“A dog?” Vera pressed a hand to her gaunt chest. “Oh, my word. Poor little thing.”
Foster smiled. “Quite a sizable thing, actually—part bear, I think, hauled to my front door in a tipcart by a fourteen year old boy in an apoplexy of tears. What was I to do?”
“Will he be all right? The dog, I mean.” Vera Pratt had the high, thready voice of a younger lady, although, on close acquaintance, she wasn’t as old as Nell had originally thought—fifty, perhaps. There were but a few strands of gray in her reddish-blond hair, but she had an underfed, drawn look about her, accentuated by her ill-fitting green satin gown, that aged her beyond her years. Vera had merely picked at the dishes served thus far, and drunk nothing but water; she’d covered her wine glass every time a bottle of was brought around.
“The beast is a she, ma’am,” Foster told her. “And I believe she’ll pull out of it just fine—although I doubt she’ll get off without a limp.”
“My son William is a surgeon,” Viola offered. “He earned his degree from the University of Edinburgh.”
“Yes?” Foster asked, clearly impressed; Edinburgh was the world’s premier medical school. “Do you have a practice in Boston, Dr. Hewitt?”
“I do not,” Will said. “I’ve led a rather nomadic existence of late.”
Dr. Foster looked as if there might have been something more he wanted to say to Will, or ask him, but instead, he turned to Mr. Pratt and said, “Sir, I believe I interrupted you in mid-toast.”
“Thank you, Foster.” Pratt cleared his throat. “It gives me great pleasure to inform you all that young Harry” –he nodded toward Harry Hewitt— “came to me this afternoon seeking permission to ask my lovely daughter Cecilia for her hand in marriage.”
Winifred burst into jubilant applause. The Hewitts murmured expressions of surprise. Vera gasped; this was obviously news to her. Emily stared unblinkingly at her sister.
Will looked from Harry, flushed and grinning, to the smugly triumphant Cecilia, to Nell.
She met his gaze with a rueful little smile.
Pratt said, “Need I tell you I granted said permission, whereupon the proposal was made and duly accepted.”
Spoken like a true limb of the bar, Nell thought. This would be Cecilia’s Pratt’s third engagement, and she was barely twenty.
Pratt raised his glass high; his guests followed suit. “To Cecilia and Harry.”
Everyone congratulated the newly betrothed couple—except for Will and Nell, but no one seemed to notice that in all the excitement.
“How perfect to have your whole family here for the announcement,” Winifred told Harry. She gestured expansively, knocking over a lit candelabra. Vera grabbed it just in time; her tipsy sister-in-law did not appear to notice. “I’m so pleased we ran into William at the funeral yesterday.”
“Did you know Mrs. Kimball well?” Will inquired of his hostess.
“Me? Oh. No. No. Not at all. She was Mr. Pratt’s client, you see.”
“Oh, so you’d never met her?” Will asked.
“Well...once. She, er...” Winifred let out a jittery little laugh. “She showed up at our annual ball at the end of April. Yes. Well.” She shrugged and spread her hands, laughed again and lifted her champagne glass, but it was empty. She turned toward a footman, but he was already crossing to her, bottle tilted and ready to pour.
“‘Showed up?’” Will asked. “I’m afraid I don’t quite understand.”
“She crashed the party,” Emily said. “She and that old Betty of a playwright. Really livened things up.”
“How can you joke about it?” demanded Cecilia with quaking outrage.
“Girls...” Mr. Pratt glanced meaningfully at their guests.
“I think she must have been” –Winifred lowered her voice to a thick-tongued whisper— “drinking.”
Pratt said, “My dear, I’m quite sure our guests aren’t interested in—”
“Oh, come now, Orville,” she said, “people could talk of nothing else after those two left, and for days afterward. You even thought she’d stolen that precious gun of yours, remember?”
Orville Pratt pinned his wife with a look that oozed venom.
“Not your Stonewall Jackson gun?” August Hewitt, the most dignified gentleman Nell knew, was gaping at his friend.
“Stonewall Jackson gun?” Will asked.
“My husband collects weapons,” Winifred explained. “Edged weapons—knives and swords and what-not. But last winter he bought this fancy French gun that had belonged to General Jackson.”
Will said, “I’m impressed, Mr. Pratt. That’s quite a famous revolver.”
“It must be,” Cecelia said. “He paid a fortune for it.”
Pratt looked sharply at his daughter, clearly irked that she’d brought up money in polite conversation. “My dear, we really needn’t—”
“Twelve thousand dollars,” Cecilia declared.
A stunned silence greeted this pronouncement.
“It went missing from his study the night of the ball,” Winifred said.
“I’m sorry to hear that, Pratt,” said Dr. Foster. “It’s a beautiful weapon. I remember you passing it around that night.”
“Did you report the theft to the Police?” Mr. Hewitt asked.
Mr. Pratt shook his head; his bruises had taken on a livid bloodred cast. “It wouldn’t have done to let the constabulary interrogate my guests as if they were common sneak thieves. And I blamed myself for showing off the gun so indiscriminately and leaving it unlocked.”
“But never fear,” Winifred said, “for our little tragedy had a happy ending after all. Yesterday, after we came home from the funeral, I walked into Mr. Pratt’s study. He was sitting at his desk, and what do you suppose he was holding in his hand?”
“The Jackson gun?” Mr. Hewitt asked. “By Jove, you don’t say.”
“I suppose I must have...been in my cups during the ball,” Pratt said, “and simply forgotten which drawer I’d locked it up in. You can imagine my chagrin when I stumbled upon it yesterday, looking for my favorite cigars.”
“And after all that ranting about how Mrs. Kimball must have stolen it,” his wife said. “You should have heard him after the ball, the things he called—”
Pratt said, “Winifred,” in a soft, leonine growl.
“I know, I know, she’s a client. Was.” Winifred finished off her champagne and held her glass up for a refill.
“Merritt, where the devil is the next course?” Pratt asked his butler.
The butler gestured to the footmen, who stumbled over each other leaving the room. An agonizing silence descended over the table. Winifred was the first to surrender to it. “So!” she chirped. “You Hewitts will be making your annual pilgrimage to Cape Cod again this year, I presume?”
“Yes, of course,” Viola said. “I live for those summers at Falconwood.”
“When will you be leaving?”
“Mid-July, as usual,” Viola said.
Winifred nodded. Viola smiled.
Everyone looked at each other.
Will’s brother Martin, ever the diplomat, punctured the tension by speaking up for the first time since taking his seat. “Emily, I haven’t seen you since you went overseas. I must say, your travels seem to have agreed with you. You look very well.”
“Thank you.”
Winifred followed the exchange with bright, doll-like eyes and a self-satisfied little smile.
“What was it, four years altogether that you were gone?” Martin asked.
“Almost. I left—we left, Aunt Vera and I—in May of sixty-five, right after the war ended. We came back this past February, when Father cut off our—”
“Emily,” Pratt said quietly. “Don’t bore our guests with details.”
Martin looked from Pratt to his eldest daughter with those placid blue eyes that saw everything. Although the youngest of the Hewitts’ three
remaining sons, Martin was, in many ways, the wisest. He was also the fairest, resembling the flaxen-haired August, just as Will, with his inky hair and rangy limbs, took after Viola.
The footmen returned with gold-rimmed plates of sliced duck and bottles of Madeira, which they served all around. Emily declined the duck. “Honestly, dear,” her mother inveigled. “Not even a little?”
With strained patience, Emily said, “Mother, you know I don’t eat meat.”
“But it’s not meat,” Winifred said. “It’s duck.”
“You’re a vegetarian?” asked Dr. Foster as he waved away his own plate. “So am I.”
Emily seemed to notice him for the first time. “Really?”
“Perhaps it’s all those years of surgery,” Foster said, “but I’ve gotten to where I can’t bear the thought of eating flesh.”
Winifred’s elation seemed only to increase as she looked back and forth between Emily and Foster, from which Nell concluded that the wellborn surgeon was a bachelor. How thrilled she must have been to have not one, but two gentlemen of breeding chatting up her marriageable daughter at the same dinner.
“Four years,” Martin said, bringing the conversation back around to Emily’s tour. “That’s a long time to spend traveling.”
“It was to have been a year-long tour,” Emily said. “London and the Continent.”
“I love London,” said Martin as he spooned currant jelly onto his plate.
“I loathed it.” With a glance at Vera, Emily amended that to, “We loathed it.”
“Terribly gray.” Vera rubbed her arms, shivering delicately. “Terribly damp. Perhaps it was just that particular Spring, but—”
“It wasn’t the weather,” Emily said.
“No, of course not,” her aunt quickly responded. “I didn’t mean—”
“It was those stuffy English prigs and their absurd caste system. No offense intended, Mrs. Hewitt.”
“No, I quite agree,” replied Viola, who’d been—and remained, for the most part—as much of a free spirit in her own way as Emily. “I couldn’t wait to get away from there myself.”
