“He said he wished to see the corpse,” Eliza said. “I would have felt more comfortable if he had said, ‘view the deceased,’ but he did not; he said, ‘see the corpse,’ and it sounded a little gruesome.”
“He was a medical examiner,” I explained. “He has an interest in . . .” I paused. I had almost said, “corpses.” “An interest in mortal wounds,” I finished.
“Well, little Lilli Nooteboom did not seem pleased to receive him,” said Uncle Benjamin.
“No?” asked Abba somewhat distractedly; she had left linens hanging on the line to dry, and now it certainly looked like a storm.
“They were having words,” said Eliza. “More lemonade?”
“That was thunder,” Abba said. “We must try to make it home before the rain starts.”
I agreed wholeheartedly, since a wet costume would mean a whole day of washing, drying, and ironing those twenty pounds of muslin that constituted accepted female attire. (Wearing Amelia Bloomer’s new short skirts and trousers was still liable to get a woman arrested for indecency.) However, a thought had formed in that part of my brain in which I was keeping mental notes and jottings about the death of Ernst Nooteboom.
“What words?” I asked urgently, as the Alcott tribe rose as one and moved to the hallway.
“Why, last summer when Dr. Burroughs was visiting he exchanged angry letters with Ernst Nooteboom, and the two never made it up,” Eliza said, rooting around in the cluttered hall table for Abba’s straw hat. “Ernst had been ill with a high fever. Dr. Burroughs wished to inspect him to make sure it was not yellow fever. He is an old busybody, isn’t he? At any rate, Ernst refused to see him. The old man was sorely wounded, thought it an affront to his reputation.”
Uncle Benjamin clucked his tongue and straightened his Turkish cap, which had tilted somewhat. “You don’t know what an epidemic of fever is like. Dr. Burroughs remembers the last one. He thought Ernst owed it to this community to prove he carried no mortally communicable illness.”
Big drops of rain splattered heavily on the slate walk; the sky had turned a sickly green.
“Oh, dear,” said Ida, frowning up at the glowering clouds. “I have my parasol, but neglected to bring my walking stick, and the paths will be slippery.”
Without so much as a by-your-leave she helped herself to a cane from Uncle’s elephant-foot stand.
“Good day, all,” she called over her shoulder, her pink-striped skirts flashing.
THE NEXT DAY the Alcotts attended the funeral of Ernst Nooteboom. There were few mourners there, since many of the Dutch workers had already moved on to other places, while the railroad company finished its negotiations for the final line. Mrs. Roder had taken time from her chores to attend, and a few of the town’s older citizens were there, as funerals sometimes pass as a form of entertainment, or perhaps preparation.
Uncle Benjamin and Cousin Eliza attended, and Ida Tupper had also arrived, dressed in black silk and lace and with a black silk corsage on her shoulder that flounced all the way up to her little pointed chin. She wept copiously and murmured, “Poor Ernst,” several times.
To my surprise, Dr. Peterson Burroughs attended, dressed in his black suit and looking sterner than usual, as if he did not approve of the young dying.
“Foolish boy, foolish boy,” he kept muttering. Lilli studied him from behind her handkerchief with barely concealed fear.
“I understand you tried to administer to Mr. Nooteboom last summer, during a fever,” I whispered to the doctor, who had chosen a place at my side, as we circled the final resting place of that poor young man.
“He would not permit me to see him,” Dr. Burroughs whispered back with some agitation. “He had never seen an epidemic of yellow fever. He endangered us all.” Was the good doctor capable of carrying a grudge all the way to the grave-side?
The minister looked in our direction and we ceased whispering.
The Walpole churchyard was an ancient ground filled with stone memorials of leaning angels and stone tablets of funeral poems. I made notes in my head about one particular stone angel that drooped and wept in exaggerated Gothic fashion, suitable for description in a “blood and thunder” story.
Lilli, dressed in her black mourning, looked almost like a spirit, so pale was she. She wept quietly as the minister intoned the brief service, and Abba and I held her hands throughout it for comfort.
“He did not fall,” were her last words to me, when the brief service was over and black dirt was shoveled over the wooden coffin.
But who would wish to murder the young Dutchman? Who would push him over a cliff to his death?
Someone he knew was the immediate answer, for he went to that spot willingly; he hadn’t been dragged or carried. Someone he knew who had power over him of some sort, for he went to that dangerous, wild place in his town shoes. Or someone he trusted, and did not fear, until it was too late.
I wished I had spent more time with that inebriated camper, although my own sense of self-preservation had discouraged lingering at the time. It was such a small walk from that campsite to the cliff’s edge.
CHAPTER SIX
The Strange Encounter Explained
WHEN, THE NEXT day, Father found an old row of raggedy rhubarb at the edge of his weedy vegetable patch, Abba decided she would preserve the stems with sugar for next winter.
“Excellent tonic,” Father said with approval. “Cleans the body. Nature does provide, doesn’t it, Abba?” he asked happily.
“It should provide the jars as well as the rhubarb,” said Abba. “Louy, will you walk into the town square and buy a dozen jars?”
I had finished my morning run and not yet begun my afternoon writing, so I agreed readily enough. I had woken up with a strange thought that morning. In small towns, and even in the individual neighborhoods of larger cities, shopkeepers often attend funerals when the deceased was a customer. The Nootebooms shopped at Tupper’s, yet he hadn’t been there. Perhaps he feared Lilli’s accusations, feared that others would believe her.
“Madam, I am here to do your bidding,” I said to Abba with a bow. “A dozen jars, purchased from Tupper’s. And half a pound of wax for sealing, I assume.”
Sylvia accompanied me, and Lizzie came along as well. She seemed to be growing even shyer, and the family had decided we should try to “bring her along” a little more.
“I don’t see why you need me to come shopping with you,” said Lizzie, who had been reading a sheet of music and practicing the fingering of it on the scrubbed kitchen table. While May, the youngest, was our spoiled child, Lizzie was our angel, quiet, gentle, never complaining—until one required her to don a party frock and go to some home where gavottes would be played and young men would ask for a dance, or to some afternoon party where other young women would wish to talk of hair fashions and skirt trimmings. Lizzie was more like Abba than any other of the “Golden Brood,” believing that “society” was purposeful only when the stronger were helping the weaker, and that all else was frivolous and often just plain silly.
“It’s silly to comb your hair up and put on a better frock just to do the marketing,” she complained.
“I know, my dearest,” I said. “But come just the same. Keep us company. We may need you to help carry things.”
That settled it, of course. If she might be of use, all dissent from Lizzie ceased.
Walpole was enjoying a golden summer day, with red and purple flowers glowing in tidy brown beds and green trees overhead all aflutter. With each passing summer day the village seemed to grow even more beautiful. Yet a crime had occurred, I was certain, and I felt an undercurrent of menace. I believed Lilli Nooteboom: Her brother had not fallen, but had been pushed.
Our first stop was at the post office, to send off Anna’s correspondence—a dozen envelopes thick with pages of her elegant handwriting, going off to friends in Boston, Concord, Syracuse—and Father’s own thick correspondence to Ralph Emerson. Our second stop was at Tupper’s General Store.
She stood there, her face stormy, her ungloved hands clenched. She wore dusty black mourning. The two of them, Lilli and Tupper, were staring each other down in the center of the store, leaning forward but not touching, as if some macabre dance were about to begin. The bell chimed as we entered, but they seemed not to hear it.
“I know,” she said, glaring at him, her white face, surrounded by all that black mourning, looking like the full moon in a midnight sky. “I know what you have done, and you will pay for it.”
He stared back, his hands opening and closing into fists.
“I know,” she accused, then ran out, brushing past us.
Mr. Tupper rearranged his features into their more habitual expression, something between a smile and a sneer, and took my list and basket. His glowering posture, those severely forced-back shoulders, the chin jutting into the air, even the way his ginger whiskers seemed to bristle, discouraged me from making inquiries about that confrontation between himself and Miss Nooteboom. People in the state of mind that seemed to engulf the shopkeeper usually do not talk at all, or when they do talk, express half-truths and obfuscations. Or he might just tell me it was none of my business.
Our purchases were quickly made and even more quickly paid for—ten more cents out of the thirty-two dollars I had to my name—and we left without a word other than “Good day.” Tupper gave us a withering glance, which reminded me of another errand.
“We also need some greens for supper,” I said to Sylvia and Lizzie when we were back in the sunlight. “Abba is making a fish chowder with river trout.”
Next door, at the greengrocer’s—which was frequented by Whigs and Democrats alike, since Walpole had just the one greengrocer on the square—the store was busy with shoppers and animated conversation, much of which seemed to be about Ernst Nooteboom and his sister. “Looking to buy that acreage near the river,” I heard one man say. “Add to the lot he already had.”
“Tupper wanted it for his son,” another whispered.
I hovered over a bin of strawberries and selected a basket for our dessert. Eliza had a strawberry patch, but her brood had dispatched the fruits almost before they were ripe. Another dime gone from my steadily lightening purse. How soon, I wondered, before I sold another story? Would the Saturday Evening Gazette purchase “The Lady and the Woman”? And could I finish my tale of woodland elves in time for Christmas? That was a lovely thought—another book in the Boston Corner Book Shop, perhaps right next to Father’s and a shelf or two above Emerson’s, a case over from Hawthorne’s; poor Henry Thoreau, down there alone on the right in the Ts. If I finished Christmas Elves in time for that holiday, think of the celebration the Alcotts could have!
“Louy?” asked Sylvia. “You seemed to disappear there for a moment.”
“Ah. A lovely daydream struck me,” I said.
Just as we were leaving the store, Dr. Peterson Burroughs entered, towing two unhappy-looking grandchildren who just about reached his knees. “A penny each,” the doctor said sternly.
“Mama let us have two pennies each on Tuesday, after our castor oil,” the older of the two spoke up, looking up at her grandfather with huge, round black eyes.
“She is a spendthrift,” said the gentleman. He spied me and tipped his old-fashioned derby hat. The other men of Walpole wore the new light straw boaters to keep the sun off their heads, and much fun they were, too, those wispy hats that tended to fly off and leap about the streets; it was a pleasure to see men chase their hats like children chasing their hoops. But Dr. Burroughs wore his beaver hat in winter and his derby in summer, and that was that, I assumed.
“Ah, Miss Alcott. You have recovered from the sad occupation of yesterday? Not feeling liverish? Funerals are not good for young women, not good.” His smile was vulpine.
“I would rather they were unnecessary, especially when the deceased dies before his reasonably expected length of years, but one goes to these rituals to support friends in mourning,” I said.
He looked at me from under his knitted brows. “I, too, felt it my duty. Yes, my duty. A man must do his duty, even when it is unpleasant.”
His emphasis on duty left me somewhat queasy; it was a word used often by politicians to justify the unjustifiable, as in, “It is our duty to return fugitive slaves to their owners.” What had Dr. Burroughs meant by it?
BACK AT THE Alcott cottage, I unpacked my shopping basket at the kitchen table. Abba looked unhappy.
“Eliza and Benjamin are here examining Father’s vegetable patch,” she said. “And Mrs. Tupper and her son are in the parlor. He seems to have returned from wherever he has been. It’s not quite clear. Well. Best to get tea over with. Prepare yourselves.” Abba handed me the teapot to carry in, while she and Sylvia cut and buttered more bread for the tray.
I saw him before I entered the room, his dark hair and sunburned face peeking through the fringes of the parted doorway curtain. It was the strange young man I had encountered at the forest campsite. He was better groomed, of course, with a clean shirt and stock, dark jacket, and his dark hair brushed back from his bronzed forehead. His back and shoulders seemed not quite so rounded, and he carried himself with self-assurance. His green-and-gray needlepoint waistcoat set off his green eyes very smartly. He would have caused quite a stir in what Sylvia and I termed the “meat market” afternoon socials of Boston, where mothers displayed their marriageable daughters.
I paused. It happened, in that pause, that I overheard a bit of conversation. Is it my fault if people will continue private discourse even after they hear a tread at the threshold?
“You should never have married him,” muttered this young man, making fists that he held at his sides.
“You’ve seen his postal cards; you know as well as I, there’s been no harm,” Ida Tupper whimpered.
“That is not good enough. Tell me the—”
But just then Sylvia came into the hall with the clattering tea tray, and Ida Tupper and this young man stepped apart from each other and assumed neutral expressions.
“Louisa, my dear,” said Ida Tupper with forced good cheer. “Come in, come in.” She invited me into Abba’s parlor as if it were her own. “Meet my son, Mr. Hampton.”
Clarence Hampton and I stared at each other in amazement.
“The running fairy,” he said.
I thought it wiser not to exclaim, “My weeping tramp!”
“You have met?” Mrs. Tupper asked, her voice high with surprise and a little distrust. I have often remarked that tone of voice in mothers who have sons of a marriageable age when those sons are smiling in a friendly manner at a young single woman without fortune or prospects of one—a woman such as myself.
“We have, ever so briefly,” I admitted. “Please have a chair, Mr. Hampton, and don’t stand about so formally.” He sat. Mrs. Tupper looked pale and trembled slightly; she seemed afraid of Mr. Hampton, whose teeth were clenched and whose eyes flashed angrily whenever he looked at his mother.
Sylvia gave me a knowing glance and sat next to me on the faded settee. She looked longingly out the window to where Benjamin and Eliza were admiring Father’s vegetable patch.
“Please meet my friend, Miss Sylvia Shattuck,” I said.
Sylvia gave Clarence Hampton a forced smile, which he returned with a curt nod. He seemed in an unsociable mood. Had he come to tea simply to quarrel with his mother?
“Clarence has been on a trip, haven’t you, dear?” said Mrs. Tupper. She had dressed in dark blue that day, with skirts so fully crinolined they puffed and billowed like high seas on a stormy day. Her hair had been pulled back into a snood decorated with glass pearls, and she had rubbed rouge into her lips and a little stove black into her brows. She looked pretty, in a bold sort of way.
“Just as you say, Mother,” said he of the flashing green eyes and clenched jaw.
“His avocations
often take him afield,” she continued, fussing with the knitting in her lap. She had taken to carrying it about constantly, but never seemed to make much progress with it. “Like his stepfather. It is my misfortune to surround myself with men who must wander. Except for my dearest brother, of course, who is completely housebound.” She sighed heavily, and I’m sure would have shed a tear if I gave her my full attention. I did not.
“Are you also a man of business?” I asked her son.
“I am an amateur scientist,” said Clarence Hampton. “An undergroundologist.” He did not look at me when he spoke; I could tell he remembered our earlier meeting and was ashamed of it. He had been drunk; he had cursed and wept. Why?
“Ah,” I exclaimed now with interest. “The new science of geology.”
“Some call it that, though the name will not hold. No, it will be hereafter referred to as undergroundology,” Mr. Hampton asserted with masculine confidence, and finally raised his eyes to meet my glance.
I had a tart retort on the tip of my tongue for Mr. Hampton, my own impression that most people will not prefer a science with six syllables to one with four, but at that moment Uncle Benjamin ambled in, wearing his red fez cap and tapestry slippers, as usual. He had added an embroidered robe—Arabic, I think it was—to his ensemble, and he looked, for all the world, as if he belonged to some eccentric gentleman’s club and was costumed for the Fourth of July parade.
“Benjamin, Benjamin.” Mrs. Tupper sighed, shaking her head so that the pearled snood swung with disapproval.
“My dear?” Uncle asked, genuinely puzzled by Ida’s criticism. “Louy, pour me some tea, if you will.”
“Were you speaking of geo . . . of undergroundology when I first entered and brought your conversation to a close?” I asked Ida Tupper.
She began trembling once again. Her son laughed most oddly.
“Yes, in a way,” he admitted. “Shall I tell them, Mother?” He rose and stationed himself before the fireplace, as if to begin a lecture.
Louisa and the Country Bachelor : A Louisa May Alcott Mystery (9781101547564) Page 7
