by Anna Maclean
I was glad, at the moment, for the fog and the crone’s poor eyesight, for I blushed then, myself a Beacon Hill resident, though never a nob. Abba had insisted when we moved from Concord to Boston that we reside in a respectable part of town, for my sisters’ sakes.
“The children be the worst part. They are always falling in and needing to be rescued. Yesterday a child fell in and the nurse screamed bloody horror, running back and forth, not brave enough herself to jump in and fetch the child.” The old woman smiled with glee.
“When?” I asked. “When did the child fall in?”
“Let’s see. I’d had my soup, so it was after dinner, but old man Burns hadn’t come by yet for his crab and pickle, so it was before five. Quite a commotion t’were. The shipowners and managers screamed almost as loud as the nurse, for most the men stopped work to watch. They’d been working steady till then, no other distractions.”
A commotion in the afternoon. And perhaps, farther up harbor, a woman was hit on the head, strangled, thrown into the water, and no one heard; no one noticed.
“It could have happened like that,” I said to Sylvia. “Pull the woman—I know it sounds strange, Sylvia, but if I say ‘Dorothy’ just now I will weep; I know I will—pull the woman out of view, behind one of those piles of crates waiting to be loaded, at the moment when the commotion is at its greatest, and you could commit murder in broad daylight, in the busiest part of Boston.”
“Murder, Louisa?” Sylvia asked, unwilling to believe.
“Would you find suicide more believable?” I asked firmly.
“No. Of course not.”
“Second day in a row.” The crone was chuckling. “Day before, another little girl fell in. Pretty little thing she was, before she was sodden, that is. That be strange, two days in a row. Them nobs should stay at home. . . .”
“Thank you,” I said. “If you need a winter coat, you can get one at the charity house next to Trinity Church. I’ll make sure there is one there for you.”
“The young woman’s? That fur collar looked warm.”
“Perhaps,” I said. “I’ll have to ask her family.”
One part of the mystery had offered itself up to possible answers: the how of Dot’s death. It was too soon, I felt, to think about the next question: Why? The why would, of course, lead to who, and that part of the mystery must be approached cautiously, slowly, gravely.
But one other question taunted me. Dot, as a girl, had often remarked that home and hearth, not adventure, were her joy and she had spent her entire honeymoon year traveling, as fashion dictated, and, I suspected, Mother Brownly required. Surely Dot had grown sufficiently weary of the sight of ship and sea! So what had she been doing at the harbor in the first place?
CHAPTER SIX
A Mother Mourns
“ABBA, IT WAS NOT an accident,” I said, hanging my coat and hat on the waiting hooks by the front door. My mother was on her hands and knees wiping away sticky biscuit crumbs and drops of honey-sweetened milk from the bare wood floor of the hall.
“Dot’s death was not an accident,” I repeated. The words tasted strange, like burned onions, bitter and heavy on the tongue.
“Is that what the doctor said at the postmortem? Hand me that bucket, Louy. What is it about arrowroot biscuits? I swear they could use them to glue bricks together. Now, tell me about Dot.” Abba continued scrubbing the floor, well used to the necessity of blending manual labor with domestic conversation to conserve precious time.
I, heedless of my gown, got down on my hands and knees and started wiping dry with a towel those areas my mother had just scrubbed.
“He didn’t say it in so many words,” I said. “But that was the gist of his deductions. Dot was already dead when she was thrown into the river. Some crumbs over there, Abba. No, I can reach them.” I scraped at the sticky drops with my thumbnail. “There were bruises at the throat, a wound on the head, and no water in the lungs or sinuses. Oh, Abba, you should have seen Dot—Dot’s corpse—there on the marble table. . . .”
“Poor child.” Abba sat back on her heels and wiped her forehead, and that one phrase, intoned like a prayer, included Dot and me as well, as I had spent the morning studying the result of violent death.
“What poor child? Where have you been, Louy?” My father, tall, silver-haired, and still handsome despite his fiftysome years, came out of his study and hooked his thumbs behind his suspenders. His black trousers bagged at the knees, the elbows of his jacket had worn through, and he had forgotten to shine his boots. Yet still he maintained the aura of an Olympian, albeit a down-at-the-heels deity, especially when viewed from floor level, where Abba and I still searched for crumbs. Father did as well as a philosopher can in a money-loving world, but one could never describe his appearance as prosperous.
I smiled up at him, glad to have him safely home again. We all brooded about Father, about whether he had remembered to eat, to sleep, to wear a clean shirt collar.
I felt warm when he came home, but I felt a reserve with him that I did not with my mother. Perhaps because he often called me his topsy-turvy Louisa in a tone of voice that indicated doubt in my ability to amount to anything; perhaps it was because I could not completely be myself with him but had to hide some of that intellect, that ambition, that was all my own, for the sake of domestic peace. I had learned this difficult lesson at an early age. Yet I loved him, and knew that anything real I would write would contain elements of him.
“Your father has been cheated once again.” Abba sighed. “Promised ten dollars, and paid one.”
“Promises have been broken,” Father agreed.
The wealthy, we had noticed, promised considerable fees and often forgot to pay them later.
“And the conversation went well enough. But I am alarmed at the superficial readings that are popular today,” he said, pulling at his suspenders and rocking on his heels. “Too many are reading the sensational trash published in today’s papers. Adulteries and murders and men competing for a faithless woman. . . .”
I studied the floor with complete concentration to force down the blush rising to my cheeks, since my own story in progress, “The Rival Prima Donnas,” fell into that very category my father now so robustly condemned. If it were to be published, I would have to use a nom de plume. Oh, how that thrilled me! Flora, I quickly decided. In honor of The Flower Fables, which, if they were published, could be published under my real name. Yes, Flora Fairfield, authoress of “The Rival Prima Donnas”!
“I must carefully consider what allusions I use,” Father said, lost in his own train of thought as he often was and not noticing that I, too, was daydreaming, “as most are lost completely, as a result of people reading trash. Would you believe that Iris Barfoy wasn’t familiar with Epicurus’s essay on the phenomenon of atmosphere?”
Mother and I exchanged covert glances.
“Shocking,” I agreed solemnly.
“But we digress. I distinctly heard the words ‘poor child’ and inquired if a child of mine was in some distress.”
“Not a child of yours, Father. But a child you have known. Dorothy Brownly is dead,” I said softly.
“Ah. So soon. Is the child alive and well to console its bereaved father?” Father had assumed that since Dorothy had been a young and healthy woman, she had died while—or soon after—delivering a first child. Many young women did.
“It wasn’t childbed fever, Father. Dorothy . . .” I had almost said drowned, but that no longer seemed the case. “Dorothy was found in the harbor.”
Father frowned, making a perplexed face.
“The harbor? Poor child, indeed. What measure of despair can drive people to self-destruction?” He scratched his chin. “It is the times,” he concluded. “The world has become heartless and depraved and the innocent suffer. Isn’t . . . wasn’t Dorothy the little girl who got herself entangled with that bounder Preston Wortham?”
“Father, she married him.”
“I see. And to think he once
came calling on you. I have more than once had cause to thank the Creator for the common sense of my own offspring.”
I could not suppress a smile of pleasure. “Father! I didn’t know you had even noticed! And to think you remembered such a trivial event!”
“Of course I noticed. I remember the man sitting right there, in that chair.” He pointed into the parlor, at the brown velvet easy chair. “I didn’t like the looks of him. Like a peacock. Overdressed and probably the kind who never bothered to pay his tailor. As if tailors don’t have rent to pay, and children to feed . . .”
I quickly perceived that the philosopher’s mind would soon digress into more familiar territory, the abuses perpetrated by the upper classes on the working classes, unless I could shepherd his thoughts back onto the subject at hand.
“You needn’t have worried, Father,” I said. “At the time I had no great objection to Mr. Wortham, as I recall, except that I suspected that being his wife would be much too timeconsuming. All that brushing of hats and coats and pressing of trousers. But Dorothy had no such reservations, of course, being of an independent income that allows for maids and housekeepers.”
“Poverty saved you, Louy,” Father said.
“Just don’t say from a fate worse than death. Let’s perhaps simply conclude that Dorothy’s wealth was not always an advantage,” I said. “I will call on her mother tomorrow, and offer our condolences.”
Father nodded. “I would come with you, as the head of our household, but I must complete this speech I have promised for the Boston Vigilance Committee.”
“Don’t give it a thought,” I said quickly. “Finish your work.” The last thing Mrs. Brownly needed was one of Father’s lectures on reincarnation.
I SPENT THE next morning at home seeing to my little schoolchildren, since I had left Abba and Lizzie at home with them the day before and May was still too young for such responsibility. Such days, locked indoors with wailing six-year-olds and sulky ten-year-olds, could be difficult. But even with its moments of drudgery, such work was bliss compared to last year, when I had taken work as a housemaid. I sometimes thought that the world offered women tedious choices when one must select between wiping sticky noses and chanting the state capitals over and over, or cleaning boots and emptying bedpans for strangers.
By two o’clock in the afternoon, Johnnie had been sick all over the carpet and Betty had wept because she could not remember Albany in New York, and Ruthie hit James when he hogged the pickup-sticks at playtime, and I was wishing I could flee to my garret and my desk, and go back to that other world I was creating, the world of Italian opera, with its prima donnas and handsome admirers. “It is whispered—and with truth, I fear—that she will bestow the hand so many have sought in vain upon the handsome painter yonder,” I whispered to myself, rehearsing dialogue for the next scene in the story as I cleaned up after my little charges.
But my writing would have to wait. I had a condolence call to make at the Brownly mansion. I dressed with careful attention to each detail of my costume and then made a face at myself in the mirror for even trying, for I knew that I would never come up to Mrs. Brownly’s standards.
If the Brownlys of Boston did not arrive on the Mayflower, it was the ship right after it, beating even the Lowells to that marshy landing spot near Plymouth Rock. The first Brownly of Boston was a planter with the sense to marry a wealthy widow and invest her fortune in a glass manufactory, one of the first in the country. There was Brownly glass in every church in New England, at one time. Along with wealth the family acquired a retroactive family tree: It was said (in whispered, jealous tones) that every deposit made to the family safe seemed to bring the family one degree closer to William the Conquerer, the most coveted of English ancestors.
The most recent Brownly mansion had been built fifty years before the events surrounding Dorothy’s death, on Beacon Hill, of course, and while the façade of red brick and white columns was demure enough to meet even Boston standards, the interior of that home was garish with carved wood paneling, gilt mirrors, marble floors, stuffed peacocks, mounted boars’ heads, and overstuffed sofas and armchairs covered with floral patterns.
There were three parlors, and a maid for each, and I had rather hoped myself and Mrs. Brownly might converse that day in the little green parlor, for in that velvet-tufted, Moorish-tiled room hung some lovely Fra Angelicos, which some earlier Brownly had had the wiser taste to purchase than whatever Brownly had commissioned for the carved inglenook. The inglenook, large enough for a child to hide in—as I knew from my own experience—and therefore to scorch from the fire both frock and matching lace petticoat, was covered with leering gargoyles and virulent wreathing vines. It had been oft commented that when the Brownly clan rebelled against the simplicity of the Regency style, that rebellion was not subtle. So despite gargoyles and inglenooks, I had hoped to gaze once again on Madonna and Child in an Olive Grove. But no, the upstairs maid was sent to fetch me upstairs, to the nursery. Mrs. Brownly was one of those unfortunate women who, after decades of childbearing and child raising, had anticipated a happy retirement from such responsibility, only to discover at the age of fifty that yet one more baby had taken up temporary occupancy in her womb.
The change-of-life daughter, Agnes, had been born six years before, to the chagrin of her father, who had promptly died of apoplexy after discovering there was one more daughter to be provided for, and to the joy of Edgar Brownly, who remained the only son and heir to the Brownly fortune, aside from whatever considerations were made for Sarah, Edith, and Dorothy. And like other change-of-life children, Agnes was largely ignored by her exhausted mother until some event in the child’s life demanded maternal attention. Today seemed to be one of those days.
I, unsmiling, stepped behind the maid, past the green parlor, the beige parlor, and the red parlor, up the curving polished staircase, and down the hall. I glanced into the green parlor as we passed it, hoping for at least a brief glance of my favorite painting. But the wall where it had hung the year before was empty. Mrs. Brownly must have tired of it.
Halfway down the hall I heard weeping, and saw a woman dressed in a brown wool travel suit dabbing at her eyes as she came out of one of the second-floor service rooms—a linen closet probably, I thought.
The maid, seeing my curiosity, nodded at the woman, who ignored us and struggled to lift a heavy carpetbag. “She’s been let go,” the maid whispered. “Mrs. Brownly said she was negligent and a danger to the child. Now there’ll be more work for everyone, with the nanny gone.” The dismissed nurse sniffed as I continued the long walk down the hall, up yet another flight of stairs to the attic.
Mrs. Brownly followed the custom of keeping very young children in the attic, as out-of-sight as possible, except for rare and brief occasions when they were scrubbed, becurled, camouflaged with layers of lace, and, after promising not to say a word, allowed downstairs for brief glimpses of the grown-up world. Most of the time, though, the child Agnes was simply incarcerated upstairs.
That afternoon the Brownly nursery, large, well lighted with plenty of windows (barred), and kept warm with a tile stove, smelled of eucalyptus steam; Agnes was sniffling and thumbsucking in her little bed. She looked up at me with big placid eyes and crooned a little nursery song to her dolly, a song soon interrupted by a fierce spell of coughing.
“A touch of whooping cough, I’m afraid,” Mrs. Brownly said. “One of childhood’s many illnesses. It’s just as well she has no brothers or sisters at home to catch it from her.” And she sighed, already anticipating the long line of other illnesses to follow before the child would be grown and wed and someone else’s responsibility. “And I’ve had to give notice to the nurse. It is so very, very difficult these days. . . . I don’t suppose you . . . ?” That half-asked question was addressed to me, who forced a smile. Having a philosopher as a father often meant that neighbors and friends felt free to offer me employment. Surely a philosopher’s daughter could always use a little pin money?
“I am already employed, I am afraid,” I reminded Mrs. Brownly. “My little school at Pinckney Street. I hope Agnes is well soon.” I gingerly patted the child’s head and looked discreetly about the nursery, which was a marked contrast to the children’s room at the Charles Street Home. This child’s abode was stocked with a painted and gilded puppet theater, a row of bisque dolls dressed in French-silk fashions, a doll’s house with minuscule carved furniture and silver plates, and a bookcase of children’s favorite stories. I knew the titles, beginning with Struwwelpeter, an awful morality tale about a little girl who burns to death from playing with matches. Surely children deserved better to read than those nightmares that promise dire punishment for every misdeed, I thought. My Flower Fables would surely be more enjoyable. I would make them so.
The dolls, hand-me-downs from Dottie, Sarah, and Edith, were lined up against the wall in somewhat forlorn condition, worse for the years of childish hands pulling at their button eyes and yarn braids. No new dolls had been purchased for Agnes, I saw.
Mrs. Brownly was dressed in black crepe. But there had been no other sign of mourning for Dorothy in the house. The black wreath had not yet been put on the door, black cloths had not been draped over the mirrors, and hothouse rose bouquets had not been replaced with white lilies. Perhaps with Agnes ill, there had not yet been time to make the complicated mourning arrangements of the household.
“Mrs. Brownly, I have come to offer my condolences and my family’s,” I said gently, patting Agnes once more and then accepting a teacup.
“Thank you. It is a great loss, Miss Alcott. Cream or lemon? And how is your mother?” The omnipresent tea service had followed us up the stairs, borne by a maid.
“She is well, thank you. I shall tell her you asked for her.”
