by P. B. Ryan
Will exchanged a grim look with Nell. No doubt he, too, was recalling what his brother had said about Munro’s ravishment of Sophie. I was sure someone would come upstairs to see what the ruckus was, but nobody did.
“Finally,” Catherine said, “I heard Miriam’s feet on the stairs, but instead of going out the back door, she came and found me in my sewing room. She said she knew I didn’t like her, and that she didn’t much care for me, either, but that I would want to hear what she had to say. She said she was giving up on trying to get through to Philip. She’d been trying all summer, but he was being thick, and even though she’d promised herself long ago that she’d never tell anyone, she’d finally broken down and told Philip, and now she had to tell me, because Philip didn’t believe her, and if anyone could convince him, it would be I.”
Catherine shut her eyes and rubbed her temples with tremulous fingers.
Will rolled Munro’s leather chair from behind the desk and offered it to Nell, who sat. Leaning back against the big desk, arms crossed, he said, “Was this the first time you realized Miss Bassett’s visits to your brother were platonic in nature? That she was merely trying to...‘get through to him’?”
Catherine nodded with her eyes still closed, fingertips kneading her temples. “Philip never discussed his women with me. He had too much...” She sighed. He had too much respect for me. That was what she’d told them the other day. Nell wondered if she still believed it.
“What did Miriam tell you?” Nell asked.
“She said she needed my help in keeping Philip from marrying Rebecca. I assumed she was opposed to the marriage on the basis of Philip’s low birth, so I lied and told her I didn’t care if they got married, in fact I was all in favor of it. She asked me...she asked me if would still feel that way if I knew that Rebecca wasn’t really Noah Bassett’s child, that she’d been fathered by someone else. I told her it wouldn’t make any difference to me, but that it was a vile affront to her mother to say such a thing, true or not. So she said...”
Catherine wrapped a hand around the locket. “She said that Rebecca wasn’t really her mother’s child, either, that her mother hadn’t given birth to her—that she, Miriam, had, when she was sixteen. And she said that the reason we must do everything possible to prevent the marriage was because...” Catherine looked up wanly, her gaze lighting on Will, then Nell. “Because Philip was Rebecca’s father.”
Chapter 12
Will crossed to the cocktail cabinet and poured three stiff brandies. Catherine drank half of her fairly quickly, then lay back on the chaise, looking exhausted. “Do you want to hear the whole—?”
“Yes,” Nell and Will said in unison.
“This all happened some twenty years ago, and I didn’t come to Boston till ‘fifty-seven, so all I know is what Miriam told me Wednesday night. She said she’d had a beau when she was young who went to Europe, Chet something.”
“Langdon, I think it was,” Nell said.
“Philip had been trying to court her, too, around the same time, but she’d been discouraging him, undoubtedly because of his lack of lineage. Anyway, Miriam had allowed Chet to compromise her before he took ship, and Philip found out about it. Of course, now that he knew what kind of female Miriam was, he abandoned the notion of marrying her, but he was still, well, a man. He had Sophie. She was his mistress. But he also had a masculine drive to pursue and conquer, so...”
It was an indication of Catherine’s obsession with her late brother, Nell thought, that her recounting of these events should be from his perspective rather than that of the person who’d related them to her.
Catherine drank some more brandy, looking preoccupied. “The gist of it is that Philip pursued and conquered Miriam Bassett. Sometime afterward, Miriam realized she was in a delicate condition—by Philip, not Chet. Of course, she never thought to give Philip the chance to do the right thing and marry her. She never even told him she was with child, that’s how contemptuous she was of his social standing. Instead, she went to spend her confinement with relatives in New York under the guise of taking the yearlong finishing course at Miss Finch’s. Meanwhile, her mother feigned a pregnancy by padding her dresses, and when Miriam returned with baby Rebecca, Mrs. Bassett reared her as her own.”
Catherine knew all this the last time they spoke, Nell realized, but all she’d told them was that Miriam was virulently opposed to the marriage, not why. She’d wanted them to suspect that Miriam might have had something to do with her brother’s death, while concealing the fact that he’d come perilously close to marrying his own daughter.
“Her father knew the truth, didn’t he?” Nell asked.
“He knew that Rebecca was Miriam’s daughter, but not that she’d been fathered by Philip. His wife had made Miriam promise never to tell him, for fear that he might come to blows with Philip. I don’t have to tell you who would have prevailed in such an encounter. Philip was a strapping man, well-versed in fisticuffs from Harvard, and quite a bit younger than Mr. Bassett.”
“Does Becky know?” Will asked.
“Oh, good heavens, no. Say what you will about Miriam Bassett, but she’s no fool. She knew that if she ever told that yammering little bag of wind the truth, it would be all over Boston in the blink of an eye, and their reputations would be in tatters. No, as far as she knows, she’s the legitimate daughter of Noah and Lucy Bassett. Miriam didn’t even dare tell her after Philip started courting her, because she knew Rebecca would blurt it out to the wrong person sooner or later. Miriam seemed particularly concerned that her fiancé not find out about all this. He’s a clergyman, I take it. No idea what kind of woman he’s really marrying, poor man.”
“I take it you tried to talk your brother out of marrying Becky after that,” Nell said. She was fit to be tied, Harry had said. Crying, wailing... “You can’t do this! It’s unspeakable!”
“Philip wouldn’t accept that he was Rebecca’s father. He insisted Miriam was already expecting when he and she...” Catherine waved a desultory hand. “I wasn’t so sure. You see, it was Sophie who’d told him about Miriam being with child. She’s never been what you’d call the trustworthy type, not to mention her unwholesome attachment to my brother.”
If ever a pot had called a kettle black, Nell thought.
* * *
“Eileen! The door!”
Nell, standing next to Will on the Bassetts’ front stoop later that morning, could not have been more surprised when the door was opened by Eileen herself.
“Och, Miss Sweeney. Dr. Hewitt. Come in, come in.”
“Have you given your notice yet?” asked Will, sotto voce, as they stepped into the front hall.
“I’ll be doin’ that right before the surgery. You’re here to see Miss Bassett and Miss Becky, I suspect.”
“Just Miss Bassett this time,” Will said.
“She and Dr. Tanner went over to that church on Newbury to see the pastor that’s gonna do the funeral this afternoon, but they should be back presently. Miss Becky, she’s up in her room readin’ one of them dime novels. Ye can wait in the parlor if you want. Mr. Bassett ain’t laid out in there no more. They went and took him over to the church already.”
Nell said, “There’s actually something I’d like to ask you first, if we can speak privately.” To Will she said, “I’ll join you in a minute.”
“Of course,” replied Will, whom Nell had told to expect this.
He retreated to the parlor, Nell and Eileen to the dining room. Closing the door behind them, Nell said, “Yesterday morning, when we were talking about Miss Bassett’s dress being buttoned wrong, you were adamant that she and the gentleman she’d been visiting hadn’t been intimate, but you couldn’t tell me why you felt that way. I’ve been thinking about it, and it strikes me that you might feel more comfortable discussing this without Dr. Hewitt present.”
Eileen, her face blooming with color, mumbled, “I...reckon so.”
“You can be candid with me,” Nell assured her. “There’
s nothing you can say that would shock me. Why is it that you think Miss Bassett hadn’t been with him that way?”
Her head down, apron twisted in her hands, Eileen said, “Not that I’d know fer sure, but from what I’ve heard, you know, from them that have husbands... I might be wrong, but, well, ya don’t really want to be...doin’ that sort of thing when you’re...you know...unwell. Do ya?”
“Ah. Well, one can, but many ladies prefer not to. Do you have some reason to think Miss Bassett was having her monthlies?”
Reddening even more, Eileen said, “I went up to lay out her bedclothes Friday night, not thinkin’ she was in her room, ‘cause she likes to read in the parlor before she turns in. ‘Course, Friday wasn’t like other days, but I had so much on me mind after all that’d happened, and...well, I just barged into her room without even knockin’. She’d already changed fer bed, and she was gatherin’ up the clothes she’d worn that day...”
“The yellow and pink striped walking dress?” Nell asked.
“Aye, and her...unmentionables. She jumped when she saw me, and she turned ‘round real quick, but I seen what she was holdin’—just for a second, but I seen it well enough to know it was her time of the month.”
“You saw blood?” Nell asked.
Eileen nodded.
“On her underthings?”
“On them and on the dress, too. She’d turned it inside out, and I seen there was a little on the inside of the skirt. A terrible lot on her petticoat, though.”
“Did she give you those things to wash?” Nell asked.
“Nah, she dumped it all in the dye pot the next morning. Well, not the crinoline. I think she musta managed to get the blood outa that, ‘cause she’s been wearin’ it since then, and it looks fine to me. And the dress didn’t take the dye too good, so she gave that to the rag picker. But I know she dyed some of them underthings—I reckon on account of the bloodstains.”
“I reckon so,” Nell said.
* * *
“So that was why she wouldn’t discuss it in front of me,” Will said with an amused little shake of the head after Nell had joined him in the parlor and relayed the substance of her conversation with Eileen. “Too embarrassed to mention the female cycle in the presence of a physician, eh?”
Easy for Will to scoff. Nell, her pragmatic nature and nursing experience notwithstanding, had had to steel herself to relate Eileen’s observations to Will. It just wasn’t a subject for a gentleman’s ears, doctor or no.
“The thing of it is,” Nell said, hoping he didn’t notice the heat rising in her cheeks, “I’m not altogether sure that the blood Eileen saw had anything to do with...female matters.”
“Indeed.”
“Eileen said there was quite a bit of it on Miriam’s petticoat. In order get there, it would have had to, well, soak through her drawers and crinoline first—assuming it really was...that kind of blood. It probably would have also stained the bottom part of her shimmy. But oddly enough, none of those things made it into the dye pot.”
“She did, however, dye her corset and corset cover.”
“Curious,” Nell murmured.
“Yes, quite.”
* * *
Miriam, who returned home about twenty minutes later, accompanied by Dr. Tanner, was understandably irate upon finding Nell and Will sitting in her front parlor, given her furious ousting of them the day before. She adamantly refused to speak to them privately.
“I have nothing to say to you,” she told them. “Please leave now, or I shall be forced to summon a constable.”
“If you won’t speak to us,” Nell said, “we’ll go from here directly to the Detectives’ Bureau at City Hall and tell them some things I feel quite certain you would rather we didn’t.”
Miriam sent her fiancée from the room and closed the door. “I know you think you have it all sorted out,” she said as she turned to face them. “You think I was smitten with Philip Munro, and that was why I wanted to keep him away from Becky. You think I was so maddened by jealousy that I murdered him rather than let him marry my sister, but believe me, nothing could be further from the truth.”
“We know that now,” Nell said. “We also know it wasn’t Chet Langdon’s baby you had when you were sixteen—it was Mr. Munro’s.”
“And you opposed the marriage not out of jealousy,” Will added, “but because you couldn’t permit your daughter to marry her own father.”
The color leached from Miriam’s face; she put a hand to her stomach, swaying slightly. Will crossed to her in two long strides and lowered her gently into a threadbare armchair. Nell poured her a glass of red wine from a carafe in a cupboard.
Miriam’s color returned as she drank the wine, almost as if it were going directly to her cheeks.
Will said, “It’s true, I take it. Philip Munro fathered Becky.”
“How did you find out? From Catherine Munro?” Miriam looked thoughtful as she set the half-empty wine glass on a little marble-topped table. “It must have been Catherine. No one else knows. With Mamá gone, it’s just been me keeping the secret, so I never fretted about it. But now...” Leaning her elbows on her knees, she buried her face in her hands. “What else do you know?”
Will said, “We know that your father came home Friday afternoon with the news that Munro had ruined him in order to force his approval of the marriage. If he blessed it, he’d get the fifty thousand back. If he didn’t, he’d remain an impoverished debtor. You had an excruciating choice to make. You couldn’t allow the marriage, but you also couldn’t allow your father to end up in the poor house.”
“As usual,” Nell said, “it was all up to you. For months, Philip Munro, apparently eager to rekindle your affair of twenty years ago, had been trying to seduce you. So you went to him and offered yourself in return for his breaking it off with Becky and giving the fifty thousand back to your father. He let you fulfill your end of the bargain, but afterward, in true Philip Munro style, he told you nothing had changed. Either he’d end up married to Becky, or your father would end up ruined. You were seething. You’d debased yourself for nothing. In a blind rage, you smashed him over the head with one of his own cricket bats, then heaved him out the window to make it look like suicide.”
“You assumed the gold crash would provide a motive for his having taken his life,” Will added, “little knowing he’d sailed through it unscathed.”
“Unfortunately, when you got home,” Nell said, “you found your father dead by his own hand, and a note from him explaining that he had nothing left but his life insurance—his parting gift to his daughters.”
Miriam, still hunched over with her head in her hands, was shaking uncontrollably.
“Miss Bassett?” Nell said.
She looked up, her arms banded around herself, face wet. “I hadn’t known about the insurance,” she said in a voice rusty with tears. “Neither had Becky. Not until the note.”
“What happened to the note?” Will handed her a handkerchief, but she just wadded it up in her hand.
“I b-burned it.”
“Why?”
“It was the least I could do.”
“I don’t understand,” Nell said. “Why was it the—”
“It should have been me. I wish it had been me. It was my doing. If I h-hadn’t had Eileen bring him that extra, if I’d only been thinking, he never would have...he wouldn’t have—” She broke off on a sob.
Nell looked toward Will, but he didn’t seem to be on any firmer ground that she.
Miriam bolted out of the chair and flung the door open.
“Miss Bassett!” Dr. Tanner, standing on the other side of the door, caught her in his arms as she fled from the room. “What the...?”
Miriam said something through her sobs she strove to wrestle out of his grip, but it was unintelligible. “Easy...” Tanner soothed. Shifting his gaze to Nell and Will, he asked, “What the devil happened?”
Nell, at a loss, looked to Will. Seeming no more sure of himself than
she, he said, “It would appear that Miss Bassett... We believe she was involved in the death of Phillip Munro.”
“What?” It came out on an incredulous little flutter of laughter. “You can’t be serious.”
“She’s not denying it,” Will said.
“She’s not capable of denying anything right now,” Tanner said. “Look at her. She’s beside herself.” Leading her back into the parlor, he lowered her into the armchair she’d just leapt out of, took out his handkerchief and gently blotted her face. “How reassuring to see you produce tears,” Tanner told his fiancée with a mild smile. “Your self-composure has always been a bit unnerving.”
This curious observation actually seemed to calm Miriam down a bit. She looked at Dr. Tanner as if she’d never seen him before in her life.
“I know you didn’t kill Philip Munro,” Tanner told her as he crouched down next to her. “You’re incapable of taking a human life. Anything else you may have done, either recently or in the far past, is just part of who you are, part of the person I love and want to spend the rest of my life with. So, why won’t you just tell us what happened Friday so that we can put all this nonsense behind us and move on?”
“It...it’s because of Papa,” Miriam said.
“Your father is gone,” Tanner said. “Nothing you say can hurt him now.”
“It can hurt his memory, and that’s all that’s left of him. How can I do that after everything he did for me?”
“I knew Noah Bassett fairly well,” Tanner said, “and one thing I know for sure is that he would have been horrified to think of you suffering because of something he did. He always believed in taking responsibility for one’s own actions. Let him do that now.”
Miriam closed her eyes and gave a slight nod. A tear slid down her cheek. Tanner brushed it away, lightly caressing her face before withdrawing his hand.
“Early in the afternoon,” Nell said, “you sent Eileen out to buy an extra about the gold crash from the newsboy, and you had her bring it up to your father.”
