Death on Beacon Hill

by P. B. Ryan

  Nell might have found all this more galling had not Fiona Gannon been declared innocent of all wrongdoing on the front pages of the Boston Daily Advertiser, the Massachusetts Spy, and every other paper in the city. No doubt the item would have been buried on an inside page had it not been part of a much bigger story, that of the highborn Miss Vera Pratt’s descent into lunacy and murder. Fee’s public exoneration didn’t bring her back, Brady had said, but it did take some of the anguish out of it.

  Walking through Forest Hills was like taking a stroll on an English country estate. Rolling lawns were punctuated with craggy outcroppings and patches of woods; two swans drifted by on a glassy lake. A hawk circled overhead; birds chattered. Gracie, dancing and twirling with her bouquet, looked like a fairy child celebrating Summer.

  “That would be it, I should think.” Will pointed to the tips of a pair of white wings just visible beyond a rise up ahead.

  He paused, staring at the wings, and touched his frock coat over his wallet pocket. It was a familiar, if increasingly rare, gesture.

  “Have one,” she said.

  He smiled his thanks, withdrew a tin of Salem Aleikums, and lit one. It was his first cigarette all day—perhaps in several days. He’d been on the same tin for a couple of weeks now.

  Are you smoking less because of what Isaac said? She’d asked him when she realized he was only lighting up at times of stress.

  Yes, he’d said with a smile. That smile had gotten her thinking: Isaac Foster’s warnings about the dangers of smoking had gone beyond health issues. No lady likes to be kissed by a man whose mouth tastes like an unswept hearth.

  Perhaps it was that aesthetic drawback to tobacco that had prompted Emily to give up smoking once Isaac started courting her seriously, which was shortly before she’d been scheduled to depart for Liverpool. According to Emily, he’d pleaded with her to put off her trip. He wasn’t looking to enslave her, he’d promised, nor lay claim to her property, nor strip her of her rights. All he wanted was to love her and give her everything she wanted, whether it was travel, or writing, or babies, or all three. The argument had proved compelling; Emily had cashed in her Cunard ticket.

  Will finished his cigarette as they walked slowly over the rise to Virginia Kimball’s gravesite. Her monument, conceived by Max Thurston and carved out of flawless white marble by a respected Boston sculptor, consisted of a larger-than-lifesize angel atop a pedestal. The pedestal was tall and stately, with odd crenellations around the top edges and an inscription on the front:

  VIRGINIA EVELYN KIMBALL

  DEPARTED THIS LIFE

  June 1, 1869

  Aged 48 Years

  And from her fair and unpolluted flesh

  May violets spring

  There were, in fact, violets growing on the grave, a veritable blanket of them—Max Thurston’s doing, obviously.

  The angel, who was attired in a gown identical to that in which Virginia Kimball had been buried, was executing a curtsey, hair rippling, arms outspread to display her magnificent wings. What Nell had taken for crenellations around the pedestal were, on closer inspection, sculptural representations of footlights. The angel’s smile was enigmatic, and although her head was bowed, her eyes were looking forward, as if at an appreciative audience.

  “That’s Mrs. Kimball’s face,” Nell said.

  Will nodded.

  She re-read the inscription. “Forty-eight years... That doesn’t make sense.”

  “I know,” Will said. “If she was forty-eight when she died, she would have been only eleven during the Asiatic cholera pandemic of ‘thirty-two. Assuming she was sixteen or so when the pandemic hit New York, she would have to have been about fifty-three when she died.”

  “I won’t tell if you won’t.”

  Will smiled at her, took her hand. He started to say something, then seemed to think better of it. He looked toward Gracie, cavorting among the beautiful headstones and memorial statues with her bouquet, then back to Nell.

  Squeezing her hand through her glove, he said, very softly, “I’ll miss you, too, you know.”

  Well, you’ll be getting a bit of your own, because I miss you horribly when you’re away, which is far more often than I’m away. That was what she wanted to say. Instead, she said, “Will you be in Boston when I come back?”

  “Yes.” He smiled a little sheepishly, rubbed the back of his neck. “I, uh, I’ll be teaching a course in medical jurisprudence at—”

  “What?” she exclaimed through a burst of laughter. “I don’t believe it. “You told me you only met with the dean to humor Isaac. You said if he offered you the position, you’d turn it down.”

  “What can I say? He promised me a laboratory and equipment, and it started to seem as if it might be rather amusing to get up there in front of the lecture hall—but only for one semester. I’m only committed through mid-winter. After that...”

  “What? More wandering from city to city, playing cards in smoky back rooms?”

  “It suits me well enough.”

  “If it suits you so well,” she said, “why did you buy that house?”

  With a bemused little smile he said, quietly, “I’ve been trying to figure that out.”

  Nell held his gaze until she couldn’t bear it any longer, then looked toward Gracie and cupped a hand around her mouth. “Don’t go too far, buttercup. Stay where we can see you.”

  “Why don’t you bring me those flowers?” Will called.

  Gracie sprinted back with the bouquet—an assortment of orchids so huge that Nell suspected Will had stripped every florist in Boston of that particular flower. Instead of laying it at the base of the monument, as was customary, he placed it on the pedestal, just brushing the feet of the bowing angel, like a tribute tossed onto a stage. The orchids, with their delicate pinks and creams and yellows, looked exquisite against the snowy marble.

  Will smiled. “I got it right this time, Mrs. Kimball.”

  ###

  Other Electronic Books by Patricia Ryan

  Nell Sweeney Historical Mysteries by Patricia Ryan writing as P.B. Ryan:

  Still Life With Murder

  Murder in a Mill Town

  Murder on Black Friday

  Murder in the North End

  A Bucket of Ashes

  Medieval Romances by Patricia Ryan:

  Falcon’s Fire

  Heaven’s Fire

  Secret Thunder

  Wild Wind

  Silken Threads

  The Sun and the Moon

  An EXCERPT from Book #4

  Nell and Will investigate two suicides that may not be what they seem in

  MURDER ON BLACK FRIDAY

  by Patricia Ryan writing as P.B. Ryan

  Chapter 1

  September 25, 1869: Boston

  “Are you expecting someone, Mrs. Hewitt?” Nell Sweeney scooped up a spatula full of warm hide glue and spread it on the freshly stretched canvas propped on her easel.

  “A bit early in the morning for callers, I should think.” Wheeling her Merlin chair away from her work in progress, a still life of autumn fruit, Viola Hewitt rummaged amid the paint tubes and turpentine-soaked rags on her worktable. “Where in Hades did I put that watch?”

  “I’ll get it, Nana.” Little Gracie Hewitt leapt up from the solarium’s slate floor, on which she was chalking the shifting patterns of sunlight streaming in through the tall, leaded glass windows. Clicking open the little diamond-encrusted pocket watch, she offered it to Viola.

  Nell, ever the governess, said, “Can you read the time yourself, Gracie?”

  Gracie studied the watch intently.

  “Where’s the little hand?” Nell asked as she ran the spatula down the drum-tight linen, skimming off the surplus glue.

  “At the eight.”

  “And the big hand?”

  “At the thwee.”

  “Three,” Nell gently corrected; they’d been working on her diction. “So that would mean it’s...?”

  “Eight
, um...” Gracie screwed up her face in concentration. “Thirty?”

  “Eight-fifteen,” Nell said.

  “Good try, though,” Viola said in her throaty, British-inflected voice as she mixed a dab of ultramarine into the rose madder on her palette. “Nell, dear, what makes you think I’d be expecting someone at this hour? I’m not at home for callers till ten—and I’m hardly dressed for company.” Like Nell, she wore a gray, paint-spattered smocked tunic over her morning dress.

  “Someone knocked at the front door,” Nell said she dipped her spatula back in the glue pot, which was snugged into a pan of hot water. “You didn’t hear it?”

  “My ears are only there for show nowadays,” Viola said as footsteps shuffled toward them along the long, marble-floored central hall.

  Hodges, the Hewitts’ elderly butler, appeared in the open doorway looking oddly hesitant. “So sorry to interrupt, Mrs. Hewitt. Your son is here to see you.”

  “Harry? Really?” Viola’s roguish and dissolute middle son had spent the past year and a half in self-imposed exile from the family’s Tremont Street mansion. As far as Nell knew, Viola hadn’t even seen him since June, when his engagement to Cecilia Pratt was announced over dinner at her parents’ home. Of Viola’s three living sons, twenty-two-year-old Martin was the only one still at home—and the only one who still enjoyed cordial relations with his parents.

  Hodges said, “It’s not Mr. Harry, ma’am. It’s...Dr. Hewitt. William.”

  “Will?” Viola gaped at Hodges, and then at Nell, who shared her astonishment.

  It had been almost six years since the Hewitts’ eldest son had set foot in this house. Even during his youth, Will had been more of an occasional visitor than a member of the family, having been shunted off to England when he was Gracie’s age to be reared by indifferent relatives and educated in a succession of boarding schools—thus inaugurating three decades of semi-estrangement from Viola and August Hewitt. Will’s coolness toward his mother had begun to thaw a bit this past spring, before the Hewitts and their staff left for their summer home on Cape Cod, and Will for Europe. As for the stern and venerable August, Nell doubted he and Will would ever exchange a civil word again.

  Nell listened to Will’s approaching footsteps as she buttered the canvas with glue and scraped away the excess, thinking she would have known his unhurried, long-legged stride anywhere. She tried to draw a deep breath, but her stays hindered that, which made her feel like a ninny for wearing so many pointless layers of clothing under this blasted smock frock that hid everything anyway, making her look like some great, fat, ugly, repulsive farmwife. It didn’t help that her hastily coiled chignon was held in place with two paint-crusted hog’s hair filbert brushes.

  The footsteps stopped.

  Nell turned, spatula dripping, to find Will standing just outside the doorway in a handsome black morning coat and fawn trousers, top hat in hand, inky hair smartly combed, smiling at her. She’d seen him only twice since she’d been back from the Cape, all too briefly both times. In the past, he would sometimes join Nell and Gracie for their afternoon outings in the Common and Public Garden—when he was in Boston, and not off playing faro and vingt-et-un for outrageous stakes in some exotic and dangerous city. But now that he was teaching, he had a good deal less free time during the day.

  “Mother.” He bowed to Viola, straightening only partially as he ducked into the sun-washed solarium. “What a remarkable display of industry for so early in the morning.”

  “Almost unseemly, I know,” Viola said.

  “My thoughts precisely.”

  Every time Nell saw Will and his mother together, she was struck by their similarities, not just in appearance—the height, the dramatic coloring—but in their manner of speech. Although Will’s accent was stronger than that of Viola, who’d spent the past thirty-two years in Boston, they both spoke with the refined nuances of the British upper classes. Even when Will had been an embittered, soul-weary opium addict, he’d always sounded like a gentleman—and usually acted like one, too, despite his best efforts to turn his back on the “hollow, gold-plated world” he’d been born into.

  “Nell.” He bowed, smiling that coolly intimate smile that he never seemed to use with anyone else.

  “Good to see you, Will.”

  “Uncle Will!” Gracie launched herself into Will’s arms as he crouched to gather her up.

  He groaned with mock effort as he lifted her high, taking care not to let her head bump the ceiling. “By Jove, you’re taller every time I see you—a raven-haired beanpole, just like your nana.” To Viola, he said, “She’s the spitting image of you.”

  Gracie made an exaggeratedly bemused face, as if “Uncle Will” had said something ludicrous. “Nana’s not my weal mommy. She picked me out special ‘cause she always wanted a little girl, and she never had one, but now she has me. I’m dopted, wight, Nana?”

  “Adopted. Yes, that’s right, darling.” Viola met her son’s eyes for a weighty moment before looking away to set her palette on the worktable.

  Will, suddenly sobered, kissed the child’s forehead and set her down. “I knew that. I was just teasing.”

  He glanced at Nell, who offered a weak smile as she knelt to wipe up the glue that had dripped onto the floor from her neglected spatula. Setting his hat aside, Will hitched up his trousers and crouched down, a bit stiffly because of the old bullet wound in his leg. “Here.” He took the rag from her hand and set about cleaning up the mess himself. “Watching you scrub a floor is like seeing a lovely little mourning dove on a trash heap.”

  Having always thought of mourning doves as gray and ordinary, Nell wasn’t entirely sure how to take that.

  “Uncle Will, guess what?” Gracie asked excitedly. “Tomowwow’s my birthday, and the next day I get to go on a twain and a steamship.”

  “You do?”

  “The twain goes to, um...” The child looked to her nana for a prompt.

  “Bristol, Rhode Island,” Viola said.

  “Bwistol, Wode Island, only it’s not weally an island, and then we get on a steamship called the Pwovidence that looks like a palace inside.”

  “The Providence, eh? You’re going to New York, then, I take it?”

  Viola said, “Your father and I are taking Gracie on a birthday visit to your Great-Aunt Hewitt in Gramercy Park. We’ll be gone a week.”

  “Really?” There was a note of genuine surprise in Will’s response, and Nell knew why. August Hewitt had never made any secret of the fact that he found Gracie’s presence in his home as vexing as that of the upstart Irish nursery governess entrusted with her care. On his instructions, the child took all her meals, except for holiday dinners, with Nell in the third floor nursery, and he never spent very long in the same room with Gracie before ordering her removed. For him to consent to a weeklong trip with the child was remarkable.

  Viola said, “Aunt Hewitt commanded us to visit when she found out Gracie was turning five. She wrote and said she was afraid she’d die without ever having met her. I wrote back that I was more than willing, that it was your father she had to convince. She sent him a letter. I didn’t read it, but that evening over supper, he suggested the trip. We’re bringing Nurse Parrish along to look after Gracie.”

  “Nurse Parrish?” Will said dubiously. “She must be ninety by now. Can she still travel?”

  “She’s eighty-three, and she tells me she’s looking forward to the trip. She loves New York, and she hasn’t been there in years.”

  Taking Nell along would, of course, have been out of the question. Mr. Hewitt loathed her as deeply as he did Will. It was only his indulgent love for his wife, and Viola’s own steely resolve, that had permitted Nell to remain with the family as long as she had.

  “You must draw pictures of the things you see in New York,” Will told Gracie, “so you can show them to me when you get back. I know you like to draw, like Nana and Miss Sweeney.” Pointing to the crude but oddly cheerful design chalked onto the floor amid the fo
rest of easels, Will said, “This is your handiwork, is it not?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Yes, sir,” Nell softly corrected.

  “Yes, sir,” Gracie echoed. “I dwew the morning sunshine, ‘cause Miseeney says she misses it when it goes away.”

  “How very thoughtful of you,” Will praised as he awkwardly gained his feet.

  “And how very thoughtful of you,” his mother told him, “to pay a call at the house. You don’t know what it means to me, Will. Your, uh, your father is at his office, by the way, so...” She glanced at Gracie, who was sprawled on the floor again, chalk in hand. “You know. You needn’t worry that there will be any...unpleasantness.”

  “He’s working?” Will asked. “On a Saturday?”

  “He’s worse than ever,” Viola said with a slightly weary, smile. “Six days a week, he’s at India Wharf by dawn.” August Hewitt’s dedication to the shipping empire founded by his great-great grandfather was legendary among his fellow “codfish aristocrats.”

  “I wish I could claim that my visit was prompted by mere thoughtfulness,” Will said. “The fact is, I’ve something rather distressing to report.”

  “Oh, dear.” Viola’s smile waned. “I can’t say I’m eager for any more bad news, after that frightful gold business yesterday. Your father knows men who lost their entire...” Looking up sharply, she said, “You’re all right, aren’t you, Will? You didn’t...?”

  “Good Lord, no. I’ve never invested in gold.” Will kept his considerable gambling swag in the weather-beaten alligator satchel Viola had gifted him with upon his graduation from medical school at the University of Edinburgh. “No, I came through yesterday quite unscathed, but as you’ve pointed out, the same can’t be said for everyone.” He looked around, rubbing his neck. “I say, are there any chairs in this room, or...?”

  “Here.” Nell pulled out a paint-speckled kitchen chair that had been tucked under a table. “It’s safe to sit on. The paint’s dry.”