Murder in a mill town

by P. B. Ryan

  “Well, I haven’t wanted it. And I don’t, so—”

  “Come now, do you really want to go your grave without knowing a man’s touch, like some ugly little chit who never had a choice?” He flicked open the little buttons securing her shirt’s high, starched collar. “I won’t tell a soul, I swear, and then afterward, we can consider the hatchet well and truly buried, just as you wanted.” Lowering his voice suggestively, he said, “Relax—I know how to take a maidenhead. And it’ll be so much more pleasant if you cooperate.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  “Then it will unpleasant. But then—” he showed his teeth “—I sometimes like it that way.” He yanked at the shirt, scratching her chest; fabric ripped, buttons popped.

  “Somebody!” she cried out as she struggled against him. She tried to kick, but her spring steel crinoline made that futile.

  “You’re wearing out your voice for naught,” Harry said. “Speck is out buying me more absinthe, and even if he weren’t, he’s remarkably well-trained, as lapdogs go—hears only his master’s voice. That leaves my cook, and she’s deaf as a stump. Not that you shouldn’t scream your heart out, if it pleases you. I know it pleases me.”

  He tried to tug her right hand toward that part of him that would presumably attest to this. Nell strained against him; he laughed.

  She slammed her foot down on his, her boot’s spool heel encountering little resistance from the velvet slipper. She felt a soft, stomach-turning crunch.

  He bellowed.

  She pushed him away.

  He stumbled backward, swearing.

  She ran to the door, reached for the pulls.

  “Bitch!” Harry seized her from behind and wrestled her, thrashing and punching, back to the table. He bent her over it, facedown, kicked her feet apart. Tearing off her hat and the silk net that had secured her chignon, he fisted a hand in her hair, crushing her face against the slickly polished mahogany. She flailed at him with her fists, but because of her awkward position, the few punches that connected were too weak to even slow him down.

  “This is your fault, damn you,” he growled as he untied the sash of his lounging jacket. “You had to make this difficult. You couldn’t just admit that you want this as much as I do.”

  “No!” Nell screamed when she felt him start to gather up her skirts.

  Don’t panic, don’t panic. There must be something you can do, something you can use...

  The absinthe glass. He’d set it down on the table, but she couldn’t see it, so it must be behind her. Unable to turn her head, she groped blindly with her right hand.

  “You’ll thank me afterward,” Harry rasped as he fumbled, one-handed, with the drawstring of her drawers.

  Her fingertips brushed glass. She strained, reached... Luckily, he was too preoccupied—and too sotted—to notice.

  “You’ll beg me to do it again,” he said. “I know your kind. I know what you need.”

  Nell hooked the stem of the glass with a finger, edged it toward her as she craned her neck to look at Harry—no easy task with him pushing her face into the table, and her crinoline bunched up around her hips. His expression was a study in frustration; he was having trouble with the drawstring.

  Now. With her left hand, she seized his tie just below the signet ring, wrapping it once around her fist; with her right, she smashed the glass against the table. It shattered, leaving the stem in her hand intact.

  Harry looked more bewildered than anything; the absinthe had slowed his reactions. She yanked his head down until it was mere inches from her own and twisted toward him, pressing the makeshift weapon to his left eye—just firmly enough to get his attention without breaking the skin. The upper part of the bowl had splintered off, leaving the remnants of the narrow reservoir still clinging to the stem—a ring of jagged glass with a handle. Harry looked as if he were gaping through some sort of grotesque, nightmarish monocle.

  She said, “I wouldn’t move if I were you, except to let go of my hair.”

  He tried to pull away.

  She jerked him back by his tie. The glass pierced his eyelid, not deeply—Nell eased up just in time—but blood ran from the little nick.

  “Jesus Christ!” he exclaimed as crimson rivulets trickled down the stem of the glass and over Nell’s hand. “Jesus Christ!”

  “It’s not quite as bad as all that,” she said, relishing the sense of calm that came with knowing she could do some real damage if she needed to, or even if she just wanted to; no wonder men loved their weapons so. “Lacerations of the eyelid tend to bleed very liberally.”

  Harry raved like a bedlamite, hoarse and wild-eyed, at one point calling her a truly repulsive name, something she’d never thought to hear uttered by a man of breeding. He concluded the rant with, “You goddamned lunatic, are you trying to blind me?”

  “You’ll only be partially blind if I gouge out the one eye, but you’ll also be disfigured.” She’d managed to turn and regain her feet—and the modesty of her skirts—without losing her grip on his tie or the broken glass. “My guess is that vanity actually trumps semi-blindness in your scheme of things.”

  His looked from her to the bloodied instrument in her hand, his visible eye narrowing, his own hands tensed.

  “It’s only fair to warn you,” she said, tugging on his tie until he winced, “that if you make any move at all without my leave—be it to grab my hand, pull away from me, kick me, anything—I will scoop out your eye like a peach pit and make you eat it.”

  He gaped at her. “By Jove, you are mad.”

  “No, just Irish. You were right about one thing. We are rather readily excited to anger. Or at least, I am. And when I get angry, I’m capable of just about anything. So I wouldn’t call my bluff if I were you. Now, you’re going to pull out the chair at the end of the table, slowly. If you make a sudden move, even a small one, you lose the eye. Understand? Don’t nod—just say yes.”

  His throat bobbed. “Yes.”

  After he’d pulled out the chair, Nell ordered him to give her the sash to his jacket, then sit with his hands clasped behind him. “Don’t move a muscle.” She released her hold on his tie, but exerted enough pressure with the gouger to force his head back slightly. The shield-shaped chair back had openwork carvings to which it was relatively easy, even one-handed, to lash his wrists. She double-knotted the sash and stepped back.

  “That’s scabbing over already,” she said, indicating the little cut on his eyelid. “It’ll leave a little scar. You can tell people you got it saving a lady from being ravished by an absinthe fiend.”

  “Suppose I tell them that you attacked me without provocation?” He grinned smugly. “Suppose I tell my father?”

  “Suppose I tell him that I was the lady being ravished and that you were the absinthe fiend?” Nell countered as she opened the pocket doors. “Suppose I tell all of Boston?”

  “It would be your word against mine.”

  “Given your reputation, do you have any doubt as to whom they’d believe?” She smiled. “I can’t wait to see the look on people’s faces when they find out you were bested by a woman.”

  Now it was his face that reddened. She savored the sight as she turned and left.

  Chapter 11

  “You never told anyone,” Will said. It wasn’t a question.

  They were standing together at the edge of Boston Common beneath Nell’s umbrella, the rain rinsing off it in sheets. Across Tremont Street, the mansions of Colonnade Row blurred together until they looked like one great, sprawling castle in some European city. A few yards away, Gracie—thrilled to permitted to frolic so freely in such weather—was practicing her newly acquired waltz pivots with her umbrella beneath the sheltering canopy of a giant pin oak.

  Will had grown, during the course of Nell’s account, even paler than before, his face leaching color until it resembled bleached bone in the silvery shade of the umbrella. He’d regarded her in grave silence as she spoke, except to press her, from time to time, to
clarify something, usually one of the more indelicate details that she would have preferred to gloss over.

  “No, no one knows,” Nell said. “Whom would I have told?” Her threats to Harry notwithstanding, it had never been an option.

  “The police? Not that I’m particularly eager to see my brother in prison—I do believe it was the absinthe that made him do what he did that day—but if I’d been you, I think I might have reported him.”

  Nell couldn’t help laughing. “Your father would never have let that get very far, Will, you know that. Remember, this happened before his resolve to let Harry sink or swim. Leo Thorpe would have given the Chief of Police a nice, fat envelope, and that would have been that.”

  “What about that constable from Williams Court you’re so friendly with? Big Irishman, giant head...”

  “Colin Cook? He’s not at the Williams Court station anymore. I ran into him at the Public Library right after I got back from Falconwood. He’s been promoted to the Detective Bureau at City Hall. He thinks Chief Kurtz did it to ingratiate himself with the Irish.” Cupping her hands to her mouth, Nell called out, “Stay where I can see you, Gracie.”

  “You might have gone to him,” Will said. “It’s possible he could have...I don’t know...”

  “Kept Alderman Thorpe from burying the truth beneath a pile of greenbacks? Let’s say he managed to do that. What then?”

  “Well, then I suppose Harry would have had to face the music for once.”

  “As would your mother. She would have been forced to acknowledge the fact that one of her sons—one of the two who still occupied her world—was capable of such brutality.”

  “Ah, yes—always thinking of Lady Viola.”

  “Because four years ago, she thought of me,” Nell said with feeling. “She plucked me out of my humble existence on Cape Cod and brought me here and gave me the life I have now. To say I’m indebted to her would be an understatement.”

  Will looked away, his jaw set.

  Gentling her tone, Nell said, “Will, I understand why you feel as you do, although I wish you’d learn to see it as water under the bridge. But for my part...she’s been so good to me, so kind and giving. And she’s seen so much heartache. If she had to face the truth about Harry, it would kill her.”

  He laughed shortly. “She’s far tougher than that, I assure you.”

  “It wasn’t just her I was thinking of,” Nell confessed. “It was myself, too. If I’d brought charges against Harry, I would surely have lost my job.”

  “And Gracie.”

  Nell nodded, looked down. That Will had sired the child whom she had come to think of as her own seemed to bind them together in some curious alliance that had no name.

  And no rules.

  “So you just walked out of Harry’s house that day,” Will asked, “leaving him tied to a dining chair, and put the entire unpleasant episode out of your mind?”

  She winced, remembering. “Oh, God, a man saw me leaving the house, all...undone, and with my hair loose and no hat.”

  “You left the house that way?” he asked through a gust of laughter.

  “All I could think about was getting out of there. I forgot about my...my state until I was halfway down the front walk, and then I ducked back onto the front stoop to right myself. It was still somewhat light out. I was so embarrassed, thinking someone might have seen me, and sure enough, there was a man leaning against a tree on the esplanade that runs down the middle of Commonwealth, watching me button myself back up and tidy my hair.”

  “Oh, no,” Will said, but he still looked pretty amused.

  “He was some sort of laborer or workman or the like, judging from his clothes,” she said. “You know—a leather cap, old reefer jacket, hemp trousers. God knows what he thought.”

  “He probably thought whoever lived in that house was a very lucky man.”

  Nell glanced at Will, wondering how he’d meant that—as a compliment? A tease? He reached into the coat pocket in which he kept his cigarettes, frowned distractedly, withdrew his hand without them. He must have decided the quarters were too tight, with the two of them huddled together in this intimate little refuge from the rain, for him to light up. Indeed, they stood as close as if they were dancing, her skirts rustling around his legs, their arms occasionally brushing.

  It was as if they were surrounded by one of those glass domes, like the one in Mr. Hewitt’s library that held a stuffed owl. Breathing in a heady fusion of Bay Rum, wet wool and rainwater, Nell allowed herself to imagine that the world outside their little dome—except, of course, for Gracie—had simply dissolved away in the rain.

  “This man who was watching you,” Will said, “he didn’t...say anything to you, or...”

  “No, he was too far away, but I could tell from his expression that he thought he knew why I was so disheveled. Ever since that day, I’ve had this dread of being watched. I find myself thinking he’s back, following me, lurking in the shadows.”

  “The same man?”

  She shrugged. “It’s just an absurd fancy, but yes, I suppose I think of him as being the same man. It’s usually just some dark, anonymous figure I see out of the corner of my eye, some man about the same size. Perhaps I should ask Dr. Drummond for a nerve tonic.”

  “Given the way you turned the tables on Harry, I shouldn’t think your nerves need bolstering. That was a remarkable accomplishment, Nell. You really showed your mettle.”

  She mumbled her thanks and looked away, heat blooming in her face until it felt like a box stove. Will followed her line of sight to Gracie, spinning and giggling. In her peripheral vision, Nell saw his expression soften as he gazed at this wondrous little creature who’d sprung so unexpectedly from one isolated act of comfort and need with a near stranger.

  Her gaze still trained on Gracie, Nell saw Will turn to study her in that quietly intense way of his. He looked away, looked back, opened his mouth to say something, sighed. “I don’t know what I would have...” He shook his head, a faint pink smudge streaking each cheekbone. “I mean, if Harry...if he’d managed to...”

  “He didn’t.”

  Will nodded in a preoccupied way. “I worry about...next time.”

  “There won’t be a next time.”

  “I’d like to think so, but if his absinthe consumption continues at this pace—”

  “No, I meant I won’t give him another chance. I’ve no intention of ever being alone with him again. I must tell you, though—I’m not so sure it’s the absinthe so much as, well, Harry himself.”

  “If I’d been through what you’ve been through, I’m sure I’d feel exactly as you do. In any event, it gives me some measure of comfort to know that you’re so savvy, so adept at defending yourself.”

  “Savvy?” She shook her head. “If I were savvy, I wouldn’t have had to defend myself. I would have seen what was coming long before Harry made his move, and gotten out of there before he’d had the chance to act. You’d think, after what happened with Duncan, I’d have learned to anticipate something like that.”

  “The signs aren’t always so obvious,” Will said. “Sometimes it’s just a look, a comment, a hunch. Something seems out of place, something smells different, the little hairs at the nape of your neck start tickling. It’s a matter of analyzing that which others don’t even notice, not consciously, but as a matter of course. That way, if trouble is lurking just up ahead, you might be able to sidestep it before it trips you up.”

  “I suppose it was at Andersonville that you cultivated this instinct,” she said.

  “More so those places where the predators are a bit less obvious, but no less lethal. Certain quarters in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Paris, San Francisco, New York, New Orleans... Any place where there’s gambling, money and whiskey—or, of course, opium. One learns to be ever watchful for that flicker of steel in the dark.”

  “Are you telling me you can avoid trouble every single time if you’re just vigilant enough?” she asked.

  Will lau
ghed. “If only that were possible. No, but I’ve learned how to deal with it when it arises.”

  “How to fight your way out of it, you mean?”

  “How to keep a cool head so that I can fight my way out of it.”

  “Fisticuffs, or...?” She thought about that little folding bistoury from his pocket surgery kit, the one with which he was presumed to have slashed Ernest Tulley’s throat last winter.

  Evidently sensing the direction of her thoughts, he said, “I rarely used the bistoury as a weapon—not that I didn’t waved it about to good effect from time to time, but I’ve found that one or two well-aimed punches are generally quite sufficient, and a good deal tidier.”

  “Just one or two?” Nell teased. “I must say I’m disappointed, Dr. Hewitt. I wouldn’t have thought you were the type to brag.”

  He grinned down at her. “And I wouldn’t have thought you were the type to grace me with such a delightfully coquettish smile, Miss Sweeney—but I won’t pretend to be disappointed.”

  Cheeks warming yet again—Will really knew how to get to her—Nell rolled her eyes and looked toward the big pin oak to check on Gracie, who was practicing her curtseys.

  “There was a sort of unofficial boxing club at Oxford,” Will said, “where I discovered that an eighty-four inch reach tends to put one at something of an advantage.”

  “An eighty-four inch...?”

  “Long arms—rather embarrassingly simian, actually. Makes me think Darwin is on to something. Over the past few years, I’ve found them to be as handy on the streets as in the ring.”

  Nell hated the image that materialized in her mind’s eye: Will squaring off against some knife-wielding assailant in some dismal back alley halfway across the world. Redirecting the conversation, she said, “I utterly panicked, that day with Harry. All I could think about was what Duncan had done to me, and that it was about to happen all over again.”

  “You got hold of yourself in time,” Will said.

  “Only just. It was a narrow squeak.”