Murder in a mill town

by P. B. Ryan

  “Your absinthe habit seems to be getting a bit out of hand,” Will said. “I’d rein it in if I were you.”

  “Ah, but you’re not me. Nor are you my keeper. So I’ll thank you to keep your nose out of things that are none of your concern.”

  “It’s none of my concern if my brother has a steadily escalating habit that’s been known to lead to full-blown psychosis?”

  Harry smirked at the unfamiliar word. “If you’re trying to dazzle me with arcane medical terms—”

  “Lunacy,” Will said. “Hallucination, convulsions, violent outbursts. Absinthism has led to suicides, murders...”

  “You’re a fine one to lecture me on the subject of bad habits,” Harry said. “What do you suppose I’d find if I went through the inside pockets of that handsome tailcoat of yours, eh? A hypodermic syringe, perchance? A little vial of morphine solution?”

  “Which is precisely why I feel competent to deliver advice on the subject of bad habits,” Will countered. “You’ve been an absinthe drinker for about half a year, yes? You’d do well to give it up while you’ve still got the mental rigor to do so.”

  “Mental rigor?” Harry snorted with laughter. “What on earth makes you think I’ve ever been burdened by such a malady?” Turning to Nell, he said, “That’s your cross to bear, is it not, Miss Sweeney? If you’ve ever said or done an untoward thing—aside from that rather entertaining little spectacle in our opera box last winter—I was never there to witness it...until now.”

  She was about to ask what he meant by that when she realized that her mere presence in this den of sin, a drink in her hand, a man of William Hewitt’s notoriety sitting across from her, would be more than enough to destroy any governess.

  Harry puffed on his cigar, looking coolly amused. “What do you suppose my father would say if he knew I’d seen you here? He’d jump at the chance to be rid of you.”

  “Your mother prevented that once,” she said. “She can do it again.”

  “How many reprieves do you think you’ll get? Two? Four? Sooner or later, even Mother, resourceful though she is, will be powerless to save you from the chopping block.”

  “As long as we’re speculating about ruined reputations,” Will said, “how do you suppose Saint August would react if he found out how many bottles of la fée verte you consume in a given week? Or how much money you leave behind at places like this?”

  “What makes you think I’m not winning tonight?”

  “I’ve told you, Harry—they run a brace game here. No one wins.”

  Harry regarded his brother in surly silence for a moment. “You’re a bastard, you know that, Will?”

  “Yes, actually,” Will replied through a haze of smoke. “I’ve known that for some time.”

  “Brother...Miss Sweeney...” Harry executed a stiff little bow in her direction. “I won’t insult your intelligence by saying it’s been a pleasure.” He turned and left.

  “Wasn’t there something you needed to speak to him about?” Will asked.

  She just sighed.

  “Do you want me to call him back?”

  Nell tried to imagine finessing information out of Harry in his present churlish state of mind. She shook her head, raised her glass to her lips. “What would be the point?”

  Chapter 9

  “Dinner time!” Gracie called as she tossed chunks of bread into the water. “Come and get it!”

  There arose a chorus of greedy quacks as half a dozen fat mallards paddled toward the little girl standing at the edge of the pond. They raced toward their afternoon snack, competing over the choicest bits as Gracie giggled and clapped.

  Most afternoons in September, Boston’s Public Gardens resembled a giant lawn party, with scores of young children frolicking together under the watchful eyes of their mothers and nannies. Today, however, it was nearly deserted, thanks to a cold leaden sky that prickled with impending rain. Nell had tried to talk Gracie into spending the afternoon at the library or the Natural History Museum, but the child wouldn’t hear of it. Barely four and already a creature of habit, she tended to get out of sorts if she had to give up her daily walk and duck-feeding session.

  “Can I have some more?” Gracie asked as she ran over to Nell, sitting on a nearby bench with a quarter-loaf of stale brioche wrapped in a napkin on her lap.

  “Well, I suppose you can,” Nell said. “But—”

  “May I have some more?”

  “Of course, since you’ve asked so nicely. But you need to break it into smaller pieces, like this.” Peeling off her kid gloves, Nell tore off a hunk and shredded it into the child’s cupped hands. “And don’t throw it all in at once. Oh, and do try to stay clean,” she added as she brushed crumbs off her own coat and Gracie’s.

  “Miseeney, why that man watching me?” Gracie asked.

  “What man?” Nell’s scalp tingled.

  “That man wight over there,” the child said, nodding over Nell’s shoulder.

  Nell turned to look behind her. A tall man in a low-crowned top hat, black frock coat and fawn trousers stood about fifty yards away, leaning against the trunk of an enormous copper beech tree. He smiled and tipped his hat, then pushed off the street and started toward them.

  “Do you know him?” Gracie was watching Nell stare.

  “I...yes, that’s...” Nell looked from Will to his daughter, and back again. “That’s a friend of mine.” The statement came so easily. A friend. When, precisely, had she and the complicated, difficult, too-charming William Hewitt become friends?

  His limp, as he walked toward them, was barely noticeable; he must have dosed himself with morphine very recently. By midnight last night, when he bid her goodnight at the front door of 148 Tremont, he’d been limping rather badly—but then, he’d probably gone over four hours at that point without an injection.

  He’d insisted on escorting her home, despite the fact that Patrick Nulty was waiting outside Poole’s hell, as promised, to take her back in his hack. Will collected Nell’s things and sent Mr. Nulty on his way with a dollar for his trouble, then took Nell’s arm and walked her back to Colonnade Row. He asked her what she’d wanted to talk to Harry about, and she told him—about Bridie Sullivan’s disappearance, her visit to Charlestown, and her abortive attempts to wring information out of Harry. She disclosed everything, even her visit to Duncan and the uninvited correspondence that had prompted it.

  All Nell had ever told Will about Duncan was that she had been involved with him before Dr. Greaves, that he’d hurt her badly eight years ago, and that he was serving a thirty year prison term for aggravated assault. That was essentially all he knew. She hadn’t revealed everything about her life back then, nor did she intend to. It was one thing to trust him with information that could damage her; it was another to arm him with the ammunition to utterly destroy her.

  It saddened her to have to cordon off parts of her past from this man with whom she’d forged, during their fiery association last winter, a grudging but very real bond of affection and trust. But then she reminded herself that she’d felt that same bond once with Duncan, and before that, with her brother Jamie, despite their being reprobates of the first order. In fact, she often wondered if that hadn’t, in some unwholesome way, been the source of her attraction to them. Had her judgment improved so dramatically during the past few years? Like Duncan and Jamie, Will was an inebriate who lived outside the law. Perhaps he wasn’t really that different. Perhaps he was just smarter, subtler, better at disguising his true nature.

  And therefore, potentially far more dangerous.

  “Is he nice?” Gracie asked as she watched Will walking toward them, then answered the question herself while Nell was still ruminating over an answer. “Of course he’s nice. Otherwise you wouldn’t be fwiends with him—wight?”

  “Wight. Um, right.” More or less.

  Will lifted his hat again and bowed when he joined them. “Ladies.”

  “Will.” Nell’s gaze connected with Will’s for a brief
, expressive moment; sensing his uncertainty at finally presenting himself to Gracie, she offered a smile of encouragement.

  Gracie stared openly at Will as she cupped the bread crumbs carefully in the bowl of her chubby little hands.

  Nell said, “May I present Miss Grace Elizabeth Lindleigh Hewitt. Gracie, this is...” She looked toward Will.

  He hitched up his trousers and crouched down until he was eye level with Gracie. His smile touched something in Nell’s chest. “Will Hewitt. I’m most pleased to make your acquaintance.”

  Gracie, in admirable command of her manners when it suited her, replied, “And I yours, Mr. Hewitt.”

  “Dr. Hewitt,” Nell corrected.

  “You’re a doctor?” Gracie asked. “Like Dr. Drummond?” Old Dr. Drummond had been treating the Hewitt family for the past three decades.

  Will hesitated. “I used to be.”

  “Did you forget how?”

  “Er...no, but...”

  “We have the same last name.” Gracie’s attention occasionally leap-frogged during a conversation.

  Nell said, “That’s because Dr. Hewitt is Nana and Papa’s son.”

  “Like Uncle Martin and Uncle Hawy?”

  “That’s right.”

  Leaning toward Nell, Gracie whispered, “Then shouldn’t I call him Uncle Will?”

  Nell looked toward Will, who, still crouching, studied his hands for a moment. He nodded, smiled at Gracie. “That would be fine...at least for the time being.”

  Will reached out to straighten his daughter’s hair ribbon, his fingers trailing lightly through her hair and along her big, downy cheek as he withdrew his hand.

  Indicating her bread crumbs, Gracie said, “I’ve got to feed the ducks. I feed them evwy day after my nap. They get hungwy in the afternoon.”

  “Then you’d best get to it,” he said as he straightened up.

  She turned and sprinted to the edge of the pond, into which she sprinkled a few crumbs for the eagerly awaiting ducks.

  Will watched her for a few moments, then turned to Nell and said, “You’ve done well with her.”

  “Thank you,” she said, sincerely gratified.

  “Does she know she’s adopted?”

  “She knows your parents aren’t her real parents. Your mother told her she picked her out special because she’d always wanted a little girl just like her.” It was actually close to the truth, if a simplified and honey-coated version of it. “That’s as much as she can comprehend for now. Your mother intends to explain more when Gracie gets older, but she doesn’t know whether she should tell her about you...and Annie.” Annie McIntyre was the chambermaid whose one grief-fueled night in Will’s bed during that Christmas furlough in ‘63 resulted in Gracie’s birth nine months later.

  Will looked thoughtful as he watched Gracie dispense the brioche a few crumbs at a time to the ducks.

  “May I?” He gestured toward the unoccupied stretch of bench, on which she’d lain her large black umbrella and Gracie’s smaller pink one.

  “Please.” She propped the umbrellas against the arm rest.

  He seated himself a respectable distance from her, crossed his legs, and withdrew a handsome sharkskin cigarette case. “Do you mind?”

  “I don’t, but the Boston constabulary might.”

  “They tend to hunker down indoors on days like this with their bottles and their dice.” He lit the cigarette, flicked out the match. “I went back to Poole’s hell after I left you last night.”

  “Was your brother still there?” she asked, picking at the brioche as she kept an eye on Gracie.

  Will nodded as he expelled a stream of smoke. “Still hemorrhaging shiners at the faro tables. He’d lost over six-hundred dollars by the time I got back.”

  The air left Nell’s lungs. Six-hundred dollars was almost a year’s salary for her.

  “He was down to his last two double eagles,” Will said, “so it was no great challenge to talk him into going elsewhere. I suggested a little grog shop on Devonshire where one can play vingt-et-un on fair terms for low stakes. It’s only a few blocks from Poole’s, so we walked. I took him to task for refusing to talk to you at the mill, and I explained that you’d wanted to ask him about this Bridie Sullivan—at the behest of Lady Viola, so he’d understand he was slighting her as well as you. He said a lady as savvy as our mother ought to know better than to enlist the likes of you for anything other than cooking and scrubbing, if that, and that he had no intention of encouraging your continued employment by cooperating in this—how did he put it?—‘farcical attempt by one little high-reaching Irish drab to locate another.’”

  “Does it mean nothing to him that Bridie may have been kidnapped—or worse?”

  “I asked him that. He said the world was better off without the lesser breeds in general, and larcenous strumpets like Bridie in particular, and that if any harm had befallen her, it was almost certainly of her own making.”

  “Larcenous? Did you ask him what he meant by that?”

  “I didn’t have to. He was drunk as a lord by that point—he’d been swilling absinthe the whole time I was gone—and he tends toward verbosity when he’s in his cups. He launched into a rather fervent soliloquy on the subject of Bridie Sullivan and her many defects of character, although she does apparently possess certain...amorous talents that made her acquaintance worth cultivating for a while.”

  “I’ll bet.” Cupping her hands to her mouth, Nell called out, “You’re a bit too close to the water, Gracie. Back up a step.”

  “Bridie started at the mill in June,” Will said. “Harry noticed her the first day, as she was leaving work. The next morning, he summoned her to his office on some pretext. He said as soon as she walked in, he could tell by her smile that she knew exactly why she was there. He was quite eloquent on the subject of that initial encounter. I’ll spare you the details except to say that it was not remotely a seduction. She was no shy maiden he had to coax and romance—in fact, she took the reins herself rather early on.”

  “According to him.”

  Will nodded to acknowledge her point. “In any event, she was his favorite all summer. At first, he just gave her the same sorts of little tokens he gave the others—lace stockings, hair combs... But she started demanding more lavish gifts—jewelry, bonnets, silk frocks. It rankled him—he felt manipulated—but by that point, he was utterly in her thrall. He told me he felt he’d finally met his match, in terms of...physical appetites, and he didn’t want to lose her.”

  Having reduced the hunk of brioche to a pile of crumbs, Nell gathered them up in the napkin and brought them to Gracie. “Did he mention seeing Virgil kiss Bridie last Friday?” she asked as she returned to the bench.

  “Mention it? He flew into a sputtering rage over it.”

  “Why? As you say, she was no innocent, and he knew that. Theirs was hardly an affair of the heart.”

  “To understand, you need to know that she’d informed him, not two weeks before, that she was...in an interesting condition.”

  “Oh, dear. By him?”

  “She swore it had to be, that there’d been no one else all summer.”

  “Ah, yes. He didn’t know about Virgil.”

  “He gave her forty dollars and the address of a midwife who’s apparently adept at dispensing with such problems.”

  Nell winced, one hand automatically coming to rest on her stomach. “It can’t possibly cost so much to...avail oneself of such services.”

  “It’s just a few dollars, from what I’ve been told,” Will said as he ground out his cigarette. “The rest was...a bribe, if you will. Inducement for her to keep her mouth shut about her relationship with him.”

  A rather stingy bribe, Nell thought, considering how much Harry regularly threw away at the gaming tables. “Why did Harry make these arrangements himself?” Nell asked. “Your father always has Leo Thorpe take care of these things.”

  “It would appear that the old man’s tolerance for Harry’s antics is beg
inning to wane. He’s started to fret about the family’s reputation and standing. As far as Saint August is concerned, there are but two Hewitt sons—Martin and Harry. Now that Martin has settled on a religious vocation, that leaves Harry to take over the family enterprises and represent the Hewitts in Boston society. A couple of months ago, he called Harry into the library and told him his days of carefree excess were over, that he was to start toeing the line or face the consequences.”

  “Consequences?”

  “Disinheritance.”

  Nell turned to gape at Will. “He wouldn’t.”

  “According to Harry, he was deadly serious. Threatened to have Leo cut him loose the very next time he got arrested, or knocked up a mill girl, or otherwise embarrassed the family.”

  Will gazed at his daughter as she strolled along the edge of the pond, sprinkling bread crumbs in front of a raucous parade of ducks. His sharply carved profile and marble pale complexion—the latter owing, most likely, to his morphine habit—called to mind what the mill girl Cora had said. That fella had a face like on one of those Roman statues. It was a dramatic face, a face that begged to be rendered in black, dense charcoal on paper that had a nice, rough tooth to it.

  “Yes, well, threats or no,” she said, “Harry doesn’t exactly seem to have mended his ways.”

  “He did tell me he’s trying to be more discreet,” Will said. “He’s limiting his carousing to indoor venues, at night, and he’s having that vapid little valet of his act as procurer when he’s in the mood for ‘street trash,’ as he calls it, rather than soliciting such trade himself.”

  “That’s his idea of discretion?”

  “As far as Harry is concerned, these are major accommodations. Believe me, he dreads the prospect of losing all those lovely privileges that come with being a Hewitt.”

  “So instead of running to Papa when Bridie got in trouble,” Nell said, “he paid her off himself.”

  “And that was supposed to have been the end of it, which just goes to show how naïve Harry is, beneath his urbane exterior. Leo Thorpe would have given the girl much more money, sent someone with her to the midwife, and arranged for her to move somewhere quite far away, but Harry thought he could throw her a bone and get away with it. He let her stay on at the mill so that she could continue to pay him those diverting little visits up in his office. He really hadn’t thought the matter through at all.”