by Anna Maclean
Sylvia fell silent. She seemed perplexed by the notion of Alfreda Thorney as young and passionate. I continued.
“And then the Worthams and the Brownlys seemed, for all their wealth, to be having difficulty with their finances,” I continued. “That sofa that Mrs. Brownly could not re-cover, the moth holes in her curtains . . .”
“And Dorothy and Preston quarreled over money that day of the tea party. He criticized her for hat shopping or some such thing.”
“Yes. When she came in wearing a different costume, and was confused that we were there. I suspect Digby had purposely told her the wrong date and time for the tea party, to make the lady of the house look unstable. That was also the day that Agnes fell into the water and Dorothy rescued her, so, of course, the clothes she had left the house in would have been sodden, unwearable. She had changed into an older costume stored at her mother’s house. And that was why Dot smelled of cherry cough syrup that day and why there was no money in her purse; she hired a carriage to take Agnes home and stopped at a pharmacy on the way.
“Agnes’s accident terrified her,” I continued. “It made up her mind that she was going to tell Mr. Wortham about the child, his child, that she would end Digby’s reign of terror. Dorothy was going to defy her family and convention. She had had enough of deceit. Digby had sensed the change in her, and followed her the next day.”
“But didn’t he realize that with Dorothy dead his secret income source would come to an end?”
“No. He could still blackmail Mrs. Brownly, who would not want Boston to know of Dorothy’s illegitimate child. He could still blackmail—and threaten—Preston Wortham.”
“For his many sins?”
“For murder. Digby purposely wore Mr. Wortham’s coat the day of the murder, in case he was seen. I strongly suspect it was Digby who sent the anonymous letter accusing Wortham, and then the second one, exonerating him. It was his way of saying, ‘I have complete power over you.’ ”
“He was a villain, a true villain,” Sylvia said in awe. “You have taken notes, haven’t you, Louisa?”
“Evil is misused genius,” I answered. “Digby was fond of reading the society pages, it seemed. That was how he found employment with Mr. Wortham: when the engagement was announced. He had already been blackmailing Dorothy and Mrs. Brownly for years. Achieving a position in Wortham’s household completed his web of control. If only that intelligence had been put to good use!”
“I’m still not quite certain how you knew it was he,” Sylvia said, twirling a curl that had escaped her bonnet. “Surely shoes are not enough to incriminate.”
“It was that chance remark that Mr. Mapp made. Poor Mr. Mapp. He told us he had seen Digby in Rome the year that Dorothy was there with her mother. Remember?”
“Now I do. Though I didn’t remark it at the time. I must pay closer attention to your conversations in the future, Louisa. And speaking of poor Mr. Mapp, I may assume that the poisoned bonbons were a gift from Digby, not Preston or Dorothy?” Sylvia said. “He suspected that you suspected, or were getting close. But if he was also a skilled poisoner, why did he murder Dorothy in such violent manner? Why not a quiet case of undetected poisoning?”
“I have thought of it,” I said, no longer smiling, no longer feeling contented. The world held such a burden of evil made manifest in different personalities, different natures. “Digby couldn’t be certain that only Dorothy would eat the sweets. Perhaps Preston would, as well. And then his blackmail income from that source would have ended. He was diabolical. It didn’t matter to him that my family might have shared the tin of marzipan, and died. It is quite difficult to think about, that part. I endangered Abba and Father and my sisters.”
My beloved family in danger! It didn’t bear thinking about. May, of course, had been thrilled by this proximity to danger, when I had revealed all of these events to my other family members. Lizzie shook her head, disbelieving. Father lectured me soundly, and then congratulated me on my successful application of reason to a series of mysterious events. Abba hugged me, and gave me a basket of stockings to mend.
“And what of Katya Mendosa, Louy? How did you connect her with Digby?”
“Her fragrance, attar of roses, which I smelled in Wortham’s parlor the day after Preston had been incarcerated, the day there was a woman upstairs and Digby seemed so distracted. Her shawl, too, the same shawl in the parlor and in her dressing room. Sylvia, have you yet figured out her true name?”
“True name?”
“Sylvia, you must stop repeating. Katya was Marie Brennen. Yes, the maid whom Wortham seduced and got dismissed. She’d had a child and he had sent her money all these years, but apparently that wasn’t enough to appease Marie Brennen. She was the one who pointed out Wortham’s engagement when it appeared in the papers. She pointed out the blackmail opportunity to Digby, for who better than Marie Brennen knew all the trouble that Wortham had caused that summer in Newport?”
“Marie Brennen? How did Preston not know? He seduced the same woman twice?”
“I suspect the second time she seduced him, as part of the blackmail scheme. Women change considerably in six years, Sylvia. Look at the difference six years made in Dorothy. Miss Brennen colored her hair, adopted a false Latin accent, grew taller and heavier. She grew from a girl to a woman, and Preston did not recognize her. Remember, too, if we can believe him, that after that summer in Newport, after his engagement, he spent only one evening with Marie, who was by then known as Katya.”
“Well,” Sylvia said, thinking and trying to digest all this, “I am glad, then, that she was able to fetch her child back home to her. It would seem that Miss Brennen has had her revenge.”
“It would seem,” I agreed, not completely saddened.
We walked in silence for some time, admiring the new tips of pale green growth on the oak trees, the noisily honking geese overhead, the sheer exuberance of the season. Dorothy had loved the spring. Someday we would tell Agnes how one spring day in Concord her mother had stripped off shoes and stockings to wade in a little stream, how she had climbed a tree in her best dress and torn it . . . how lovely she had been at fifteen, when she had first fallen in love. . . . There would be so much to tell little Agnes.
“As poor and unhappy as Queenie is, at least she has been able to keep her child,” Sylvia mused.
“It is a compensation for all her suffering,” I agreed.
“What will happen to Queenie, do you think?”
I stopped in my tracks, and I’m sure Sylvia saw the hint of mischief in my smile. “Haven’t I told you?” I said, knowing full well I hadn’t. “Edgar has agreed to endow Queenie with enough money to leave Boston and set up a boardinghouse in San Francisco.”
Sylvia pondered this for a long moment, attempting to borrow some of my own methods of logic. “He is not generous by nature,” Sylvia decided. “Therefore, someone else helped him come to this decision.”
“Perhaps.” I began to whistle, a habit Abba had never been able to break me of.
“Ah,” Sylvia guessed. “You have reached an agreement with him. He will pay; you will not tell his mother.”
“We had a discussion; that is all. If he made incorrect assumptions, I did not see it as my duty to enlighten him. He will be furious, eventually, when he learns his mother already knows about his studio, his art, his models. He will be furious to learn that he suspected me of a blackmail I could not commit.” My pleasure in the fine spring day returned. “But he does not know yet. ‘Honi soit qui mal y pense.’ Shame on him who thinks evil.”
“So both Preston and Queenie are going west,” Sylvia said as we completed our circuit of the Smokers’ Circle.
The Common was crowded with beribboned, ringleted children and nurses running after them, watching over them. Robins sang in the tree branches, and ducklings paraded after their proud duck mothers. My lethargy of late winter had lifted, and I filled page after page with blood and thunder during my late-evening and early-morning writing hours.
“Perhaps Preston and Queenie will take the same train,” I said. “If so, wouldn’t you love to hear that conversation? Oh, if only I could be there to take notes . . .”
“Speaking of strange couples, young Constable Cobban has been honored with a dinner and a pay raise for his investigation,” Sylvia said. “He sent me flowers. Did he send you flowers as well, Louy?”
“He did. I gave them to the Home.” I hadn’t forgotten his harsh early judgment of Dorothy. We never really made up that quarrel, for he was stubborn and would never, ever admit he had been completely wrong in his character assessment of Mrs. Wortham. Sweet Dorothy. Laid to rest.
Never had the opera house been so full as now, gallery after gallery filled, and still the crowd poured in, for the fame of the lovely singer had flown far and wide, and hundreds gathered there to wonder and admire.
The purple curtains were open in the box of Beatrice, but the painter Claude stood with folded arms in the shadow of the gallery opposite, and watched with a strange interest. . . .
“And so does Beatrice get her revenge on the faithless Claude?” Sylvia asked. We were in my attic workroom once again, discussing the story I had begun weeks before but put aside when a friend was murdered.
“She does,” I said, putting down my pen. “A somewhat cruel revenge. A blood-and-thunder revenge. Claude will repent and spend his life regretting the wrong he did her. This story is for Dorothy.”
“It is finished?”
“Quite. See?”
I handed her the manuscript. An envelope mixed in with the pages fell to the floor and I hastily picked it up and tucked it safely into my pocket. It was a letter from the editor of the Saturday Evening Gazette. My story would be published in an autumn issue.
For an excerpt from the next Louisa May Alcott mystery, Louisa and the Country Bachelor, available in trade paperback from Obsidian in October 2011.
Please read on. . . .
Dunreath Place
Roxbury, Massachusetts
March 1887
Gentle Readers,
It was the summer of 1855 when I first began to associate potato cellars with corpses. Dear. That does sound strange, doesn’t it? Especially coming from the famous Miss Louisa May Alcott. But in 1855 I was still the unknown Louy Alcott and I was badly in need of wholesome air, sunshine, and serene days, having spent the previous Boston winter investigating the murder of my close friend Dorothy Brownly, and being almost run over by carriages and threatened with a candlestick by a blackmailing valet.
I was twenty-two years old and that sad and dangerous winter had awakened in me pleasant childhood memories of Concord, of racing through meadows, climbing trees and spending entire days out of doors, reading and daydreaming—activities impossible to fulfill in the narrow lanes and busy streets of Boston. Moreover, I wished for more time and energy to write. I had sold a couple of “blood-and-thunder” romance stories under a pen name, and a collection of children’s fables, but I had a nagging sense of nonarrival, of not yet writing what was most important for me to write, what only Louisa Alcott could write. There was a name, Josephine, and an image of a tomboyish young woman surrounded by a loving, but difficult family, but I had no more than that. Little Women was still quite a way from its conception.
I remembered that restless time again today, when Sylvie visited. She has grown plump with the years and looking at her now, with her cane and her several chins and her strict schedule of naps, it is amusing to remember her as she was decades ago, lithe and eager for adventure, my companion in danger.
Perhaps her perceptions of me are similar. I am no longer the unknown, struggling authoress in her chilly and dark attic. I look a bit “the grande dame,” I fear, though my cuffs are still ink-stained.
SYLVIA ARRIVED WITH a package that had been waiting for me downstairs on the hall table.
“It’s from London, Louy,” Sylvia gasped, breathing somewhat heavily from her climb up the stairs. She sat opposite me and leaned forward with such eagerness I thought she might open it herself. The brown package almost disappeared into the folds of her bright green plaid dress. Sylvia has buried two husbands, but refuses to wear black.
“London! Yes, I know the handwriting,” I said, taking the package. “It is from Fanny Kemble. Dear Fanny. There is a letter, and another voume of her memoirs.”
Fanny Kemble, if you are of that group that does not recall names easily, was, in her day, the finest Shakespearean actress on both sides of the Atlantic. She was one of the few of her profession who could play both wicked Lady Macbeth and girlish Juliet with wondrous credibility. To see Fanny onstage, wringing her hands and sobbing “Out, damned spot! Out, I say. Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?” why, that was to know great acting. Especially when she gave us a private enactment of that scene, in Walpole, where there was indeed a great deal of blood in the cellar.
She was a great friend of the family and one of the joys of my girlhood was to see pretty Fanny standing behind Father, hands on hips or pointing at invisible causes and perfectly mimicking his expressions and mouth movements as he earnestly expounded on his principles.
“Fanny visited you in Walpole, didn’t she?” asked Sylvia. “I think I remember her there, in that summer of ’55. This morning I have been thinking of Walpole, and potatoes.”
I patted Sylvia’s hand with great affection. Only a friend so old, so true, could say “I have been thinking of potatoes” and feel confident I would understand exactly what she meant.
“Yes,” I said, reaching for the scissors in my sewing basket. “When we had our little theater.” I cut the string and the brown paper fell away. On top of the volume (so new I could smell that wonderful fragrance of printer’s ink!) was a likeness of Fanny. She looked much the same except that like Sylvia, her chins had multiplied and her black hair looked unnaturally so. She must have had it dyed. I passed the photograph to Sylvia and a moment later the maid arrived with a tea tray. “Four lumps, right?” I asked Sylvia, picking up the sugar tongs.
“One. I’m trying to slim,” she said. “But you are too thin, Louisa,” she said sternly. “You must eat more.” She stirred her tea and eyed the little cakes that sat beside the white teapot. They had been frosted with pink icing, which I found very disagreeable but Sylvia obviously found tempting.
“I need little,” I protested, “and eat as appetite demands.”
“Not like the old days,” said Sylvia. “Remember those breakfasts you put away in Walpole? Bacon and ham and porridge and toast. Then eggs. You ate like a field hand and stayed slender.”
“Perhaps because I had to eat quickly before Father returned from his morning ramble and found me in the kitchen gorging on forbidden meats.”
We laughed, thinking of Father’s stern vegetarianism and the ruses the rest of the family had used to avoid that strict regimen. Sylvia eyed the pink cakes again and looked so wretched that I put one on a plate and handed it to her.
“If you absolutely insist, Louy,” she said, eagerly attacking it with a fork.
Outside the window, past the shoulder frills of Sylvia’s plaid frock, I watched the gardener clear away a thick mass of last year’s leaves from the lavender beds in preparation for spring, and it reminded me of the lavender bed beside the kitchen door in Walpole, New Hampshire, and just steps away from that country garden, the ravine where I ran each morning.
I was revisiting in my memory those granite cliffs, the clear blue sky with hawks circling overhead, when I heard Sylvia sigh and was brought back to the parlor, to the red plush chairs and carved table and striped wallpaper.
“I can’t quite remember, Louisa. That summer, did you perform your comic scene before or after the body was found in the potato cellar? What a strange place to find a body! I still feel faint when I think of it.”
“It did put us off potatoes for quite a while, as I recall. Another cake?”
“I couldn’t. Well, maybe a small one. Perhaps you
should write about that summer in Walpole,” she suggested. “Do you still have your journal from that time?”
I did, but even without my diaries I remembered clearly what I had written about that summer. It was a sketchy entry, which meant of course there was much I did not say. “Pleasant journey and a kind welcome. Plays, picnics, and good neighbors.”
Good neighbors indeed. Except for the occasional murderer.
IN JUNE OF THAT YEAR I had received a letter from an uncle who owned a farm in Walpole, New Hampshire, inviting me to come spend time with him. Yes, he was the unfortunate owner of the already mentioned potato cellar, but I must not rush the story. Pacing is important.
I received a letter. An invitation, handed to me by Abba, my mother, who had been concerned for me, since in the weeks before I had endured far too many hours exploring the darker and often dangerous side of family life when large fortunes are at stake.
“It is from Uncle Benjamin,” I said, hanging my damp cloak on a hook and sniffing the pot of soup simmering on our old black stove. We still, at that time, lived in the little, somewhat run-down house on Pinckney Street of Boston’s Beacon Hill, though even the rent for that modest residence was becoming difficult to meet. It had been a winter of hard work and vegetable broths.
That day Abba was cooking potato soup, I’m afraid to say, though I did not yet know the association I would soon make with that vegetable. “I haven’t had a letter from him for years. What can this be about?” I sat on a stool near the warm stove to dry off my skirts and tore open the envelope.
