In a Gilded Cage

by Rhys Bowen

  “Of course not,” she said. “I’ll tell him about it today.”

  “I thought he went to visit his mother on Sundays.”

  “He does.” She blushed bright red. “But today he wants to take me with him. Isn’t that wonderful? I’m now the girl that a young man brings home to meet his mother.”

  “That is wonderful,” I said. “I’m happy for you.”

  “So am I,” she said. “Things finally seem to be going right for me. And now I remember that you were going to tell me what you discovered in Massachusetts.” She slipped her arm through mine. “I am all agog. You really found out the truth? Were they really missionaries? Am I really an heiress?”

  “I can’t tell you anything until I have made one more visit,” I said. “I have to verify the facts first. But with any luck you should know the truth this week. Of course, I might be barking up the wrong tree, but I don’t think so.”

  Her face was alight with hope and I felt guilty. If my news were true, then I’d hardly be making her happy, would I? Still, it’s always better to know the truth. I’ve found out that much in life.

  Twenty-three

  After Emily and I parted, I walked up and down the quiet, elegant street several times before I finally plucked up the courage to knock on the door of Mr. Horace Lynch. His butler reported that Mr. Lynch was indeed at home but was due to leave for a luncheon engagement in a few minutes.

  “This will not take long,” I said. “It is a matter of great importance.”

  I was shown into a morning room, where Mr. Lynch was just pouring himself a glass of whiskey from a decanter. He scowled as if trying to place me.

  “Yes, what is it? Asking for a donation for the poor and destitute, are you? Then you go right back and tell them to get a job and earn an honest living for themselves, you hear me.”

  I realized then that I was dressed all in black and that my hair was hidden under my black hat with its half veil. He hadn’t recognized or remembered me.

  “Mr. Lynch. You may not remember me but I visited you a week ago, asking for details of your ward Emily’s parents.”

  His scowl deepened as he recognized me. “You again? I thought I made it quite clear to you that I could be of no use to you at all regarding those missionaries.”

  “Ah, but I’m sure you can be of use to me, Mr. Lynch,” I said. “May I take a seat? I won’t keep you long.”

  I perched on the nearest chair without being asked. I saw his face flushing an angry red. “Are you dim-witted or something? I told you quite clearly that I had no knowledge of these people. They belonged to my wife’s family, not mine.”

  “I think you do have knowledge, Mr. Lynch. You’re just not willing to share it. I went up to Williamstown, you see.”

  The color now drained from his face. “What exactly is it that you want?” he demanded. “Blackmail? Is that it? Because if so you’re going to be sorry you came here.”

  “Blackmail? Good heavens, no. I just want the truth, Mr. Lynch, and I want to hear it from your lips.”

  “I’ve told you the truth—as much of it as I know.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “I spoke with various people in Williamstown and I think I’ve discovered the truth. Shall I share my thoughts with you and you can correct me if I’m wrong?”

  He was still scowling horribly. His face now looked even more like that of a bulldog. “Go on, damn you.”

  “Such language, Mr. Lynch,” I said. “Very well. When I was in Williamstown I learned of a lovely, vivacious young girl called Lydia Johnson. I learned that she loved to dance and have fun but she was raised by strict Scottish Calvinists who did not allow her normal girlish pleasures. I learned that she was a very bright girl who loved to read and wanted to go to college—Vassar, to be exact. Are you with me so far?”

  “Go on,” he growled.

  “Her parents might have agreed to a college education but then a terrible tragedy struck. Her parents were both killed when their buggy went off the road. She was left with no one in the world, her only relatives being back in Scotland.” I glanced up at him again. He was sitting as still as a statue, his whiskey glass in one hand.

  “That was when you came on the scene, wasn’t it, Mr. Lynch? You were an ambitious man and you summed up the situation correctly and seized the moment. You sensed that she needed to replace that domineering father figure, and you grabbed your chance to get your hands on her fortune and the mill. So you courted her and she agreed to marry you while she was still vulnerable and grieving for her parents. She didn’t love you but she needed someone to take care of her. Am I correct so far?”

  “Get on with it,” he snapped.

  “But Lydia was a romantic. She longed for balls and parties and you were as strict as her father had been. You had her money but you were a bit of a skinflint, weren’t you? And you were not the romantic husband she had dreamed of. She was ripe to fall in love when you hired a handsome Italian gardener—Antonio, was that his name? She fell madly in love with him. They had a passionate affair and she found herself in a difficult and embarrassing position. She was going to have a child. Am I right in my hunch so far, Mr. Lynch?”

  I waited for him to react to this but he sat there as if carved from stone.

  “Now, I don’t know if she was just honest by nature or she knew that the darker-skinned baby would never pass as yours or”—I looked at his face and made a stab at the truth—“that you couldn’t father a child of your own?”

  He flushed beet-red again.

  “Anyway, she told you the truth. You were enraged, but you couldn’t throw her out and risk the scandal, or risk losing her money. She might have run off with Antonio but he died tragically and fortuitously by falling off a bridge. So now she was at your mercy, wasn’t she? You acted the forgiving and magnanimous husband. You would keep her, but you weren’t going to keep the child. She pleaded and at last you cooked up a scheme. You sent her away to the West Coast and when she returned she brought the child of relatives who had conveniently died in China. Is this how it went so far, Mr. Lynch?”

  Again he sat staring past me.

  “But you never forgave her, did you? You made it clear that you’d hold it over her for the rest of her days and make her life a misery. The birth, plus her grief over the loss of her love, had weakened her. She never regained her strength and she died of a broken heart. And you never forgave Emily either just for being born. You showed her not one ounce of love or affection and turned her out at the first possible moment.”

  “And how did you come up with this preposterous idea?” he sputtered.

  “I suppose the germ of the idea was planted when I heard about Lydia’s character—so bright and fun-loving but married to you, described as a dour old skinflint by one person I spoke to. And the mention of the handsome Italian gardener who was sweet on her, and his convenient death, and the rumor that she had been sent out west because she had contracted consumption. A healthy, vibrant young lady, living in comparative isolation—how would she have contracted this foul disease? But what gave it away was the name she chose. Boswell. Her name was Johnson, you see.”

  “And?”

  “Boswell’s Life of Johnson is a very famous book. She was quite a scholar, according to her old headmistress.”

  There was a long pause, during which I was conscious of the slow tock-tock of the grandfather clock in the corner.

  “May I ask your purpose in this?” he said at last. “It goes rather beyond writing a book on Chinese missionaries, I take it?”

  “It does indeed. I did this on behalf of my friend Emily. I am a detective, Mr. Lynch. I felt she deserved to know the truth. She also deserves some of her mother’s money, and yours, as a child born in wedlock, to a married woman.”

  He looked at me and smirked. “You’d never be able to prove any of this rubbish.”

  “But I think I would, Mr. Lynch. I believe I could easily produce the doctor in Williamstown who confirmed her pregnancy, or
the friend to whom she confided the truth. No woman keeps her pregnancy completely secret, you know. And if necessary I could retrace her steps out west and find the place where she gave birth to the child and where, presumably, a birth certificate has been filed. I might also find a witness who saw you follow Antonio home from the bar that night and push him off the bridge.”

  I looked up and our eyes met. “And the buggy,” I went on as this thought crystallized in my head. “You might also have tampered with the buggy that killed her parents . . .”

  He rose to his feet then and came toward me. He was a big man, powerful for all his flabbiness. “In which case you are a very foolish young woman to come here and find yourself alone with a murderer, aren’t you?”

  Of course, I hadn’t considered this. I had been saying these things as they popped into my head—putting together the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle as I spoke. One of my major failings. “Not at all,” I said, in what I hoped was a jaunty manner. “I have just now left Emily Boswell, or should one say Emily Lynch, with instructions to call for me in half an hour. If I fail to appear, she will most certainly go for the police.”

  I waited to see if he would call my bluff. He turned and walked over to the window, pulling back the drape and staring out. I wondered if he was checking to see if Emily was standing there, but after a long silence he said, “I am no murderer, Miss Murphy. I was raised on the Bible and I am a God-fearing man. I have never, to my knowledge, broken any of the commandments. Those two accidents were accidents and nothing more. Fortuitous for me, I have to admit. Oh, and I did jump in and take my chances with Lydia, but not entirely for the reason you stated. I loved her, Miss Murphy. She was the most beautiful creature I had ever seen. When she agreed to marry me, it was the happiest day of my life. But I soon discovered that I couldn’t—uh—satisfy her, that she didn’t love me. And then the nightmare with the child. Everyone would have looked at it and known it wasn’t mine. Hate and despair consumed me, Miss Murphy—have consumed me for years.”

  “But you have your salvation waiting for you, salvation you have refused so far.”

  “What are you talking about now?”

  “Emily, Mr. Lynch. The daughter you refused to acknowledge.”

  “She is not my daughter.” He spat out the words.

  “You say you loved Lydia. You could still see part of Lydia alive and flourishing in Emily. Wouldn’t that be better than nothing?”

  He was silent.

  “You hated Emily for something that wasn’t her fault. Is that what a good Christian does?”

  He turned away again. “If you think I’m welcoming her with open arms and handing over my money to her, you are mistaken.”

  “I’m not saying you should do either, Mr. Lynch, although I think we could make a good case in court for a share of Lydia’s money. But Emily has suffered from loneliness all her life and so have you. I thought maybe you might find that you could be solace for each other. You could at least give it a try.”

  He crossed the room and stared at himself in the mirror above the fireplace. “I’m an old man, Miss Murphy. Set in my ways. What you’re asking goes too much against the grain.”

  “Then at least start by making her a small allowance so that she doesn’t have to live in one room in a seedy boarding house.”

  “Is that what she does?”

  “She has a job but the pay isn’t wonderful and it’s hard for a woman alone to find somewhere respectable and safe to live.”

  “And a young man?” he asked. “Does she have a young man?”

  “She does, but he is also struggling to make his way in the world. He is apprenticed to a druggist and learning that profession. I understand he’s very smart and ambitious. Rather like yourself at the same age, I suspect.”

  “I see,” he said. “You’ll now tell her everything you told me, I suppose?”

  “Unless you’d like to tell her yourself.”

  “I don’t think I could bring myself to do that.”

  “Then I’ll tell her.”

  “She’ll hate me, won’t she?”

  “I don’t think she’s brimming over with love for you at the moment,” I said, and he laughed.

  “You’re a rum one, Miss Murphy. And you’ve got guts, I’ll say that for you.”

  “So may I tell her to call on you if she wants to?”

  “I suppose so,” he said at length.

  Twenty-four

  One case closed most satisfactorily, I said to myself as I left Horace Lynch. I like it when the threads all tie up neatly. And if all went well, Emily and Horace might find some companionship. I wanted to go straight to Emily and tell her the truth, but of course she’d be spending the rest of the day with Ned and his mother. How wonderful it would be for them if Horace Lynch did decide to give her some of her mother’s money. Ned would have the funds to start his own company and Emily could work at his side. The perfect match, in fact, rather like Daniel and me.

  I had two strands of Dorcas’s hair wrapped in my handkerchief, so I went straight to Daniel’s apartment, hoping he might be there. But he wasn’t.

  “Called into work early, he was,” Mrs. O’Shea said. “They never give that poor man a moment’s peace. I tell you, Miss Murphy, if you marry that one you won’t be in for a quiet life.”

  “I’d find a quiet life rather boring, I suspect,” I said with a smile. “And how are your children, still sick?”

  “If it’s not one thing, it’s another,” she said. “They went through chicken pox and now the doctor says it’s ringworm. Still, he’s given us the medicine to treat it and let’s hope that will be the end of it.”

  I went up to his rooms and left the hairs in an envelope on his desk with a note about where they came from. Then I had the whole of an afternoon ahead of me. And a beautiful afternoon it was too—bright, warm, just the right kind of day for a stroll in the park, or even a row on the lake. Of course these activities would be no fun alone. I walked along Twenty-third until I came to Madison Square. The little park was looking lovely and I sat on a bench for a while, enjoying the sun on my face and watching children play.

  I should put my work to one side today and just enjoy myself, I thought. I’ve concluded one case and the other—well, perhaps the other was never a crime in the first place. But I found I couldn’t let it go. Too many coincidences, for one thing. Fanny falling sick right after she asked me to snoop on her wandering husband and announced plans to divorce him. Dorcas falling sick after a visit to Fanny. Honoria falling sick after a visit to Dorcas. All three could have been the flu, of course, and I would have been prepared to believe that if someone hadn’t tried to run me down with that carriage, and snooped inside my house.

  We could wait and see if Daniel and Ned turned up any arsenic in Dorcas’s hair, or in the bottle of stomach mixture. But I’m not the kind of person who is good at waiting. What else should I be doing, I wondered. Would I learn anything from paying a visit to Mademoiselle Fifi, or to Bella? Probably not, and Daniel would say that I’d only tip off a murderer with my blunderings, but I’ve never been one to take wise advice. I decided that Sunday afternoon would be a perfect time to visit Mademoiselle Fifi. Theaters were dark and she’d most likely be resting.

  So I walked to East Twenty-first and knocked on her door. I hadn’t planned in advance what I was going to say, and this was a mistake, because when the maid opened the door I just stood there.

  I decided to play it straight. “Is your mistress at home?”

  She took in my funereal appearance. “If you are from the church, you waste your time,” she said in her French accent. “She will not see you.”

  “I’m not from the church. I have some questions about a friend of Mademoiselle’s.”

  “Mademoiselle has many friends,” the maid said.

  I bet she has, I thought. “This particular friend is called Mr. Poindexter.” She pretended to look blank. “And don’t try to deny that she knows him. I am a detective and I hav
e been watching the house. I saw him here.”

  She shrugged in that wonderfully Gallic way. “I see if Mademoiselle is awake and wishes to speak to you.” And she admitted me to the house.

  It was very warm inside and rather untidy, with a hat thrown on a chair in the front hall, a feather boa draped from the hat stand and a pair of high boots lying on the linoleum. Clearly the maid was not known for her housekeeping prowess. I was told to wait, overheard a rapid exchange in French, and then was admitted to what can only be described as a boudoir. Mademoiselle Fifi herself lay on a daybed, looking as if she were about to audition for La Dame aux Camélias.

  “I’m sorry to disturb your rest,” I said, “but I would like to ask you a couple of questions regarding your relationship with Mr. Poindexter.”

  At this she leaped up, her peignoir flying open to reveal too much flesh for my taste. “That monster! Do not speak his name to me! Never again. Never.”

  This was a surprising turn. I took a minute to recover.

  “I take it that you and Mr. Poindexter are no longer, shall we say, friendly? And that you didn’t part on good terms?”

  “Two years I am with him,” she said, her Gallic eyes still flashing. “Two years of my life. I know he is married, but he say his wife is cold and does not love him and he is only happy when he is with me. But then last week he comes to me and says it is all over. Finished. He never want to see me again.”

  “Did he say why?”

  She shook her head. “I think another woman, of course. Or that his wife found out about us and makes a big fuss.”

  “His wife is dead,” I said. “She died right after he came to see you.”

  “Mon dieu.” Her eyes opened wide with surprise, then narrowed again. “Then it is another woman. Someone suitable for him to marry, not someone like me whom he could not take into polite society.”