A bucket of ashes

by P. B. Ryan

  A special correspondent writes from Mayence on Thursday:—

  This evening came a despatch from Wissembourg, announcing a Prussian victory and the occupation of Wissembourg. I have seen the official despatch and obtained the following additional details:—

  The King, on his arrival at Mayence, called a Council of war and urged that the sooner the existing infiltration ceased the better, and pressed an advance. His opinion was adopted and orders telegraphed to attack the French outposts in the neighborhood of Landau and Wissembourg.

  A Prussian force composed of two line regiments, one regiment of Bavarian troops and some artillery, together about 9,000 strong, drove the French before them into Wissembourg.

  The artillery was then brought up and opened on the fortifications of the town. The town soon caught fire. Seeing this and some confusion among the French troops, the Prussians could no longer be restrained by their officers, who were anxious to reduce the town by cannonade.

  The soldiers rushed forward with bayonets and surprised the French, who, not expecting an infantry attack for hours to come, were barricading and entrenching. The Prussians lost heavily, but took 800 prisoners and the town. The greatest enthusiasm prevails here, and there is an Immense crowd about the Palace waiting to cheer the King.

  The same correspondent wires from Mayence, Friday midnight:—Half the prisoners taken at Wissembourg were first marched from the citadel to the railway. The French had lost 2,300 killed, wounded and prisoners.

  “Dear God, please protect him,” Nell whispered. Perhaps, she thought, he hadn’t left for Wissembourg after all. Or perhaps he’d gotten away before the Prussians ravaged the town. But then she recalled what Jack Thorpe had told her of Will’s valor during the War Between the States, particularly at the Battle of Olustee in Florida. He was fearless, took insane risks, exposed himself to enemy fire time and again to retrieve wounded men. He saved a great many lives before he was captured.

  He would never have been taken prisoner at all had he not insisted on remaining behind when his unit retreated from Olustee. The battle was ending, Jack had said. Robbie was injured—badly, he couldn’t be moved. Will wouldn’t leave him. There were some other wounded men, too, but I knew it was Robbie he didn’t want to leave. He stayed with them and let himself be captured.

  Chances were slim that Will would have left the town of Wissembourg while there were still men there who needed him. If he had managed to get away, where would he have gone? Back to Paris? According to the Herald, the city was in a state of bedlam.

  The Situation in Paris Most Critical for

  Napoleon—Shame and Humiliation at the

  Army Defeats—At the Point of Revolution.

  LONDON, August 8, 1870.

  The news from Paris grows hourly more serious. None but official accounts can come by telegraph. It is from letters and Paris journals that all intelligence must be gathered. The declaration of the state of siege does not repress popular demonstrations, and it is very doubtful whether the government has force to keep order or to put down any considerable demonstrations. The Republicans believe that their hour approaches, and Paris at the moment is as likely to rise against Napoleon as to arm against Prussia.

  Skimming the rest of that article, Nell said, “It doesn’t look good, Mrs. Hewitt. The situation in Paris is getting worse. And at Wissembourg, eight hundred French soldiers were taken prisoner, and fifteen hundred others were killed and wounded.”

  Nell looked up from the paper to find Viola sitting with the telegram open on her lap, gazing vacantly into the distance; she looked strangely old and drawn. “Mrs. Hewitt? Is that cable from Mr. Carlisle?”

  Viola nodded and handed it to Nell. Written in a slapdash hand on the lined Western Union form was the message: Spoke to clerk from Paris Embassy now in London who was told I Corps lost their surgeon, Dr. Hewitt, at Wissembourg. Not sure whether captured or killed, hopefully former. Am so terribly sorry. Will pray for him. R. Carlisle.

  “Oh, my God.” Nell sat on the bench and read the cable a second time, and a third, as if the words written there might re-form themselves into a more benign meaning if only she only scrutinized them long enough. “Oh, my God.”

  “What was he doing there?” Viola demanded in a quavering voice. “I cannot comprehend it. He had no business being there. Why did he go?”

  He went there because of me, thought Nell as she buried her head in her hands. It was all because of me.

  Chapter 6

  “Isn’t that your Dr. Greaves?” asked Eileen, looking toward the house as she sat at the edge of the bay with Gracie, building a sand castle.

  Nell, standing at her easel nearby, turned to find Cyril crossing the lawn, his hand raised in greeting. Eileen and Gracie waved back, as did Nell, wondering what he was doing here. The last time she’d seen him, just over two weeks ago, he’d told her he would stay away until she’d decided whether to accept his offer of marriage.

  Gracie, her damp bathing dress frosted with sand, got up and ran over to him as he strode across the beach. “Come look at my sand castle, Dr. Gweaves!”

  “Greaves,” Nell corrected.

  “Can I call you Cywil instead?” she asked him. “I mean, Cyril?”

  Nell said, “No, you may not. It wouldn’t be respectful.”

  “But you call him that.”

  “Because he asked me to.”

  “How about Uncle Cyril?” he suggested. “I know I’m not actually your uncle, but it strikes me as an acceptable compromise.”

  “Uncle Will’s not weally my... really my uncle, either, but I call him ‘Uncle,’ too. Can I, Miseeny?”

  “Yes, you may,” she replied, whereupon the delighted child grabbed ‘Uncle Cyril’s’ hand and dragged him over to her sand castle, upon which he heaped munificent praise. Rejoining Nell, he nodded toward the paint-crusted tunic she wore over her black-dyed shirtwaist and skirt. “That smock looks to have done you yeoman’s service.”

  “I’ve had it for years.”

  “What are you painting?”

  She stepped aside so that he could have a good view of the canvas, which depicted Waquoit Bay beneath a dense slab of storm clouds, executed mostly in shades of lead, pewter, and slate.

  “Not painting from life?” he asked, looking around at the cloudless midday sky and glassy bay.

  She said, “I started it about a week and a half ago, when the bay really looked like this. I’ve just been polishing it since then.” Or rather, ruining it. Disinclined to declare the painting finished, for some reason, she’d reworked it to the point where it just looked stilted and muddy and dead.

  “I hope the tone of this painting doesn’t reflect your state of mind regarding...” He looked toward Gracie and Eileen, industriously molding towers from empty flower pots. “You know. What we discussed the last time I was here.” His proposal, he meant.

  “No, of course not,” she assured him. “Not remotely. If I’ve been in a black mood, it’s been... for another reason entirely.” Not wanting Gracie to hear the reason for her despondency, Nell asked Cyril if he wouldn’t help her haul her equipment back to the house.

  When they were out of earshot of the child, he carrying her easel and paint box and she the wet painting, she told him about Will being unaccounted for after the Battle of Wissembourg.

  “We keep hoping we’ll hear from him, or at least of him, but so far... not a word.”

  “God, Nell, I’m sorry,” he said earnestly. “How awful not to know what happened to him. Isn’t there any way—”

  “Paris is in a state of chaos,” she said. “There are no cables going in or out except for official French dispatches. I believe the American Embassy is still functioning, but there’s no way to contact them, and even if we could, who’s to say they even know what happened to Will?”

  Cyril said, “I truly hate to burden you with this when you’ve so much on your mind, but I have some new information about your brother.”

  Nell stopped wa
lking at the edge of the flagstone court behind the house. “What information?”

  “I was leaving the East Falmouth post office yesterday, when who should I run into but Warren Leatherby.”

  “Why do I know that name?”

  “Chief Bryce mentioned him. He’s the county coroner. I’ve had to deal with him from time to time, so I recognized him. I told him I had an interest in the Cunningham case, particularly as regarded James Murphy, so we chatted for a few minutes. It seems he’s quite put out with Chief Bryce and his ‘provincial ineptitude.’ He’s particularly irate because his report following Dr. Monk’s postmortem on your brother, which interpreted Monk’s findings for forensic purposes, was all but ignored by Bryce.”

  “Did he tell you what was in the report?”

  “I asked. He told me Dr. Monk’s autopsy notes were perfunctory in the extreme, but that he had noted a nick on the left fourth rib.”

  “A nick?”

  “As if from a blade of some sort.”

  “Could Dr. Monk have made that mark himself, during the course of the autopsy?” Nell asked.

  “Leatherby questioned him about that, but he insisted the only tool that had come anywhere near the ribs was the scalpel used to make the Y incision.”

  “That isn’t possible,” Nell said. “He would have needed a bone saw or shears to cut through the ribs.”

  “He didn’t cut through the ribs.”

  Nell stared at Cyril for a moment, wondering if she’d heard him right. “He didn’t remove the chest plate? Then how could he have examined the organs?”

  “He didn’t,” Cyril said. “My guess is he cut the body open to make it look as if it had been properly autopsied, in case anyone checked, but then he just sewed it back up so as not to damage the merchandise before it was delivered to Harvard.”

  Nell shook her head in dismay.

  Cyril said, “He did notice that nicked rib, which he concluded was a souvenir from some long ago knife fight.”

  “One that my brother would have been unlikely to survive,” Nell said, “seeing as the left fourth rib is pretty much directly over the heart. Did you notice any wounds or scars to the chest when you looked at Jamie’s body?”

  After a moment’s hesitation, Cyril said, “His torso—the front of it—was far too badly burned for any such mark to have been visible.”

  “Yes, of course. Of course. I wasn’t thinking.”

  “Leatherby is a lawyer, but he seems to know more about human physiology than Monk. He made the point about the nicked rib’s proximity to the heart in his report, but he said Chief Bryce completely dismissed it. Bryce told him if a surgeon said it was from a knife fight, that was good enough for him. It goes without saying that Bryce has no desire to investigate alternate theories as to how your brother might have died. He’s in over his head, and he knows it. He just wants this case to go away as quickly as possible.”

  “So Jamie may not have actually died in that fire,” she said. “He may have died from a knife to the chest.”

  “Not that we’ll ever know for sure, given Bryce’s disinterest in finding out what really happened.”

  “I’m not disinterested,” Nell said. “If my brother was deliberately murdered, I want to know why and how. I want to know who did it. I want to know what I can do about it.”

  “My avenging angel,” Cyril said with a smile.

  My? “Jamie was my brother,” she said gravely. “Who better to avenge him than me?”

  She ushered him into the greenhouse-turned-studio and put away her gear while he perused her paintings.

  “Your work is remarkable,” he said. “You’ve made extraordinary progress. Your light... it shimmers.”

  “Mrs. Hewitt has taken me under her wing. She studied painting in Paris when she was young.”

  Leafing through one of Nell’s sketchbooks, he said, a bit too casually, “Any news about the status of your divorce petition?”

  “Mr. Mead has written to me a couple of times. His visit to Duncan went much as I thought it would. Duncan was surly, and refused to sign the papers. Mr. Mead gave him my letter and his business card before he left. He begged him to reconsider, and asked him to write if he did.”

  “Do you think he might?”

  “I pray that he will.” Hanging up her smock, she said, “Mr. Mead said it will take a good deal longer for the divorce to come through if Duncan contests it. I stayed up half the night composing that letter to Duncan. I was completely frank. I told him that I’m expecting, and that I’ll be ruined if I can’t remarry soon.”

  “Do you think that was prudent?”

  “I don’t have time for prudence, Cyril. I’m more than a month along. I told him that I trust him with this information because of everything we’ve been through. I asked him, if he has a spark of true affection left for me, to search within himself for the gallantry I know is there and release me from my marriage bonds. And I... I told him I forgive him for... what he did to me.”

  “Do you?” Cyril asked incredulously.

  “I think I actually do. For years, I’ve prayed for God’s help in learning to forgive him, but I couldn’t. He’d taken my baby from me, the only baby I thought I’d ever have. But now...”

  She rested a hand on her stomach, remembering the words she had struggled over during those long, candlelit hours. God hasn’t just given me another baby, Duncan, he’s given me the grace to forgive you. The bitterness that had burdened me all those years is gone. It’s like a thousand-ton weight off my shoulders.

  “Now that darkness, that hate, is all part of the past,” she said. “I can put it behind me and move on.”

  * * *

  “Are you expecting another guest, Viola?” asked August Hewitt as he sat on the front porch late that afternoon enjoying a preprandial sherry with his wife, Nell, and Cyril, who had been coaxed into staying for supper.

  They followed his gaze across the lawn to a hackney passing through the front gate. As it neared Gracie, who was throwing a stick to Clancy about fifty yards from the house, the driver reined in his horses. Gracie paused to look in the hack’s direction as its door opened.

  The stick dropped from her hand. She shrieked and raced toward the hack as a tall man in a black frock coat and fawn trousers stepped down from it, took off his low-crowned top hat, and opened his arms.

  “Oh, my God,” whispered Viola.

  Gathering up her skirts, Nell dashed down the porch steps and across the lawn.

  Will, kneeling in the grass to embrace his daughter, looked up as she joined them, breathless and shaking. He stood, a bit stiffly because of that old bullet wound, and pushed an errant lock of black hair off his forehead as he smiled into her eyes. “God, Nell, I can’t tell you how good it is to see you.” His voice, so achingly familiar—deep and resonant, with a lingering accent from his many years in England—was barely audible over the pounding in her ears.

  “Will.” She wanted to throw herself into his arms, but mindful of their audience on the porch, she maintained a suitable distance. “We thought you were... We were told that I Corps lost their surgeon at Wissembourg.”

  “Which was true, but open to interpretation, I suppose.” Taking in her afternoon dress of gauzy black melrose, he said, “Please don’t tell me you’re in mourning for me.”

  “Oh. No. My... my brother, Jamie... He died about three weeks ago.”

  “Oh, Nell. I am so sorry.”

  “Nana’s cwying,” said Gracie as she cradled Clancy in her arms.

  Looking toward the house, Nell saw Cyril, standing next to Viola at the top of the steps, hand her a handkerchief. This wasn’t the first time her eldest son had been resurrected after she thought she’d lost him.

  “She’s happy,” Nell told the child. Everyone is happy to see Uncle Will.”

  As she said that, August Hewitt opened the front door and disappeared inside.

  “Not quite everyone.” Will paid the driver, retrieved his old alligator physician’s sat
chel and traveling case, and accompanied Nell and Gracie back to the porch. He kissed his mother’s tearstained cheek and extended his hand to Cyril as Nell introduced them. “It’s good to meet you at last. Nell has spoken highly of you.”

  “Same here.”

  Nell had the impression, as the two men shook hands, that their gazes were connecting just a bit too intently, as if they were taking each other’s measure.

  Once he was settled on the porch with a glass of sherry, Will explained that he’d suffered an injury to his right arm during the battle, whereupon Marshall Patrice MacMahon, who commanded Napoleon’s I Corps, declared him unfit to perform surgery and excused him from further service. “I managed to give Wilhelm’s boys the slip before they started rounding up prisoners,” he said. “I got out of Wissembourg and was transported to Calais, where I found passage on a mail packet bound for Boston. I arrived yesterday.”

  Cyril, ever the physician, asked Will how he’d sustained the injury, to which Will replied that he’d “had a bit too he much absinthe and took a spill.” He met Nell’s gaze and smiled. She smiled back; it wasn’t the first time he’d used that absinthe line.

  “Perhaps you should let me have a look at it,” Cyril suggested.

  “Uncle Cyril is a doctor, too,” Gracie told him as she sat on the floor cradling Clancy.

  Will lifted his glass and took a sip, his eyes dark, jaw slightly outthrust—although Nell was probably the only one who noticed. She wondered if it was because his daughter had bestowed avuncular status, once reserved solely for him, on the interloper Cyril Greaves. He said, “It’s actually an embarrassingly minor wound—as you can see, I’ve full use of the arm—but it does make my hand a bit unsteady, which is why I can’t do surgery.”

  Viola said, “You look exhausted, Will.” It was true. His gaze was somnolent, and his skin had a washed-out translucence that made him look almost consumptive.