Louisa and the Country Bachelor : A Louisa May Alcott Mystery (9781101547564)

by Maclean, Anna

  “Fanny Kemble,” said she with a little smile and a nod of her lovely head.

  “May I have your autograph? Er, for the missus, of course.”

  THE NEXT DAY, after an hour of contemplation, I went to visit Lilli. I knew there would be no lies, no more half-truths, this time.

  Mrs. Roder showed me up to her attic room; Lilli no longer came downstairs to the parlor. “She hasn’t eaten in days,” Mrs. Roder anguished. “I fear she’ll waste away to nothing. And she’s behind on her orders. Soon she’ll lose her customers and then . . . Well, I can’t give charity. I’ve got my own family to think of.”

  I had such a sense of doom then, of time passing and me caught up helpless in it. It was late summer, and the zinnias in Mrs. Roder’s garden were tall and straggly and looked faded.

  “Give me half an hour with her, and then bring up a bowl of broth and a piece of bread,” I said. Mrs. Roder shook her head but promised she would.

  “Lilli! Open the door!” I banged loudly.

  Silence. But I knew she was in there. I could sense her behind that door, frightened and alert.

  “Open, or I shall have the sheriff force it open!” I said.

  A key turned. The rusty hinges groaned. Lilli’s small, white face peered out at me.

  “What do you want, Louisa?”

  I hadn’t seen her since before Clarence Hampton’s death, and the change in her shocked me. She had grieved for her brother; now she was like a woman harrowed and broken. Her tangled hair hung loose upon her back, and dark shadows under her eyes gave her a sepulchral appearance.

  “We must talk about Clarence,” I told her.

  She hung her head and studied the floor. She looked back up at me with tears rimming her eyes. “Come in, then,” she said.

  Lilli sat on her bed. The faded red-and-blue star quilt was rumpled and the pillows bunched up against the headboard. I suspected she had lain down to rest and jumped back up again, over and over, unable to sleep. I sat on the only chair in the room, a stiff ladder-back. No wonder Lilli had preferred to do her sewing in the garden. Her room was dark and damp, and even during the day mice scurried in the rafters overhead. Strange to be wealthy, and yet live in such poverty, for that land had made her wealthy.

  “What will you do now?” I asked.

  “Now?” She looked up, pretending not to understand.

  “Now that Clarence Hampton, your fiancé, is dead.”

  She looked at me with wonder.

  “My dear,” I said, “I guessed, but your eyes give it away. The signs were there. It just took me too long to put them together. Clarence had been known as a rake, but this summer he had shown little interest in the young women of Walpole and even refused to court a wealthy heiress, my friend Sylvia. He had been aloof, preoccupied, and in a strained emotional state. He was in love with you, wasn’t he? Did you meet at Tupper’s General Store?”

  The tears now overflowed. She sobbed so hard her shoulders worked up and down. She gasped for breath and turned pink from the effort. I put my arm around her and gave her a handkerchief.

  “It is time to tell someone,” I said. “Tell me, Lilli. Do not carry this weight all by yourself; it will break you.”

  “Not at the store,” she said, blowing her nose and smiling as she remembered. “At the mountain. I had gone to the little clearing where the water pools—you know the place, Louisa? Where red columbines grow? I was sewing and he came, looking so funny with his new feathered mountain hat and shiny boots and that silly polka-dot tie. I laughed at him.

  “Have you seen him smile, Louisa? He smiled at me the day that I laughed at him. I think first he likes me for my yellow hair and because I am a working girl that he can play with. But then I saw there was more that he buried deep inside, that he wanted to be with me because there was a kind of peace between us, an understanding. Do you see that?”

  “I think I do,” I said. “Many people think that in love, like attracts like. But Abba says that opposites are more likely to attract. I think Clarence could have loved you just for being so very different from his own mother.”

  “Yes,” Lilli said. “He is not in good relations with his mother. For me, he says he will learn to farm, to like simple. He was to make a vegetable garden. But he never did.”

  I thought of the turned-over patch where Father had planted his own garden, the same place where Sylvia had once seen Clarence poking at the ground . . . the garden Clarence had not finished. That part of the riddle was solved.

  “Your brother did not approve, did he?” I asked Lilli.

  Lilli twisted the damp handkerchief. “He had a friend in Holland who was to come over and marry me. I had agreed before we left home, but I was just a little girl, you see. And then I met Clarence.”

  “My dear, I am so sorry.” It was all I could think of to say, and Abba had taught me that sometimes it was enough.

  Lilli rested her head and sobbed for a long while. When she grew calm again, I gently pushed her away so that we were eye-to-eye.

  “Lilli, think carefully before you answer. You have already met with so much tragedy that a lie could make life unendurable. You will survive this, but only with truth. Tell me: Do you think Clarence could have wished to harm Ernst? So that you might wed?”

  Lilli’s blue eyes darkened. “No,” she said. “Clarence would not do that. He would not hurt me so much, to kill my brother.”

  “Even if you could wed afterward?”

  “No. Because there was Clarence’s family, too. His mother wanted him to marry a rich girl. We kept it a secret from them. Clarence said we must wait for the right time or . . .” She hesitated. “Or something terrible would happen.”

  A knock sounded at Lilli’s door. Mrs. Roder, with the broth.

  “Go away!” Lilli said.

  I opened the door and took the tray from the landlady’s hands. I set the tray on a small table, and opened the curtains over Lilli’s one window, letting in a little light. “Both Ernst and Clarence loved you,” I told her. “You must live—for them.” I broke the bread into the broth, and after a few attempts Lilli let me spoon-feed her.

  After she had eaten she grew sleepy, so I pulled the quilt over her and left. The truth does more than set you free. It allows you to rejoin the living, to eat and sleep and pick up the threads of a life come unraveled, so that it may be made whole again.

  I HAD PROMISED to sit with Ida Tupper that afternoon, to relieve Anna. My sister greeted me at the door when I arrived, and she looked thankful to see me.

  “This is a strange house, Louy,” she said. “Mrs. Tupper sleeps mostly from all the drops she is taking, and Mr. Wattles refuses to speak to me, or even see me.”

  “He has returned to his misanthropic ways,” I said. “And . . . Clarence?”

  “In the dining room. Abba helped me with the laying out.”

  “Mrs. Tupper did not assist?”

  “In honesty, we did not wish her to. She either sleeps or raves.”

  “Go home and get some rest.” I kissed Anna on the forehead and gave her a little push in the direction of the Alcott cottage. She looked at me thankfully over her shoulder and disappeared through the hedge.

  Mrs. Tupper’s house smelled musty and unused, the way large houses do when too few people inhabit them. The little maid seemed to have disappeared, so I hung my linen coat and straw hat on the hall rack. I moved quietly down the hall, over the expensive Turkish rug, noticing the new wallpaper, the new pictures hung over the wallpaper, the new little figurines on the bric-a-brac shelf. Mrs. Tupper and her brother seemed disinclined to favor old and sentimental memorial objects over the new and stylish.

  The door to the library was closed. I knocked. “Mr. Wattles?” I called.

  A long silence, then a gruff voice: “I do not wish to be disturbed” came from deep within that room, from behind the locked door.

  “I thought you might want some tea and toast,” I suggested.

  Another long silence. I heard paper
s being rearranged, the squeak of his wheeled chair.

  “Come back in half an hour. If you don’t mind,” he added.

  I found Ida upstairs in her bedroom. On the dresser was the same tintype picture of Jonah Tupper that hung in the general store; it was the only masculine element in a room that was a frenzy of pink chintz and lace.

  Ida herself was sleeping on her back, her mouth open and moving as if she talked in her sleep, though no sound came out. I looked down at her, and for the first time felt the compassion that is the essence of human friendship. Without the horsehair rolls to fill it out, her hair was limp and thin; without the rouge, one could see all too clearly the papery complexion of a woman past her youthful beauty.

  The water glass with its dregs of laudanum was on her night table. I washed it and filled it with clear, health-bringing water.

  Then I went into the parlor, to where Clarence Hampton had been laid out.

  No candles had been lighted here; no sister or mother or uncle knelt in prayer. Clarence was alone.

  Abba and Anna had done an excellent job, combing his dark, wavy hair carefully over the spot in his skull by which he had been felled, and tying a lace cravat over the long gash in his throat. His hands were folded over his chest. He looked dissatisfied, I thought. And so he should be, to have been young and in love and have all that destroyed, all that taken from him.

  “I am sorry, Clarence,” I said to him. “I suspected you of being a villain.” But I felt dissatisfied, as well. There was still the chance that he had been; being in love does not always guarantee a person will forever more do only good, and who is a more likely suspect to want to do away with an interfering brother than a lovelorn suitor? This is one of the greatest evils of death—it cuts short the truth, the possibility of discovering the truth.

  Half an hour later, Mr. Wattles opened his library door, and I carried in the tea tray.

  “Ah, Miss Louisa,” he said. “It was kind of your sister . . . What is her name? Anna? It was kind of her to come and attend to my sister, but I admit to some discomfort at having a stranger in the house, even if the stranger is a woman. Of course, you are harboring some unusual guests at the Alcott house.”

  He was in his wheeled chair, with a lap robe over his legs and a shawl over his stooped shoulders. His white beard gleamed in the dim light.

  “If you mean Llew, then be reassured he is as gentle a man as you could hope to find. May I put the tray on that table? It won’t disrupt your papers. His involvement in the death of your nephew is accidental, I am convinced. He found him, but had no hand in the violence that . . .” I paused.

  “That killed him, you were going to say,” said Mr. Wattles. “You are a writer. Don’t shy from the words, Miss Louisa. And don’t try to spare my feelings. They were destroyed long ago.”

  I poured tea for both of us, though I could not drink mine. I paced, as I do when preoccupied with unresolved thoughts.

  “Did you love your nephew?” I asked Mr. Wattles.

  “Why, my dear, of course I did,” he said. He stroked his beard. “I have known him and helped Ida care for him all his life. She has had such misfortune with husbands. Clarence was a difficult child, unaffectionate and unbending, but he was family. One must love them, despite their faults, especially when we are the only ones who will probably ever love them.” He seemed very sad, very alone.

  “I’m relieved to hear you say you loved Clarence,” I said. “He sometimes seemed very estranged from all of us. I often had the feeling that he wished to speak about something, but could not.”

  “He was independent by choice, my dear, by choice. Young men will have it so.” Mr. Wattles finished his toast and yawned without hiding it. I took the tray into the pantry and spent the rest of the evening upstairs, on a chair in the hall, outside Ida’s door, in case she should awaken. She did not.

  Once, though, she did cry out, and I went in to check on her. She still slept, but fitfully, her eyes under their lids darting here and there, her hands making small grasping gestures, as if clutching at something. I lit a lamp, for sometimes even in sleep a light can bring some comfort. I spied a box on her dressing table, the kind in which women keep their sentimental trinkets and letters. My hesitation lasted only a moment; what was mere etiquette when lives were at stake? I lifted the lid. I found the telegram that announced the bell order that Jonah Tupper had never actually received. There were five or six penny cards in the box, all with much the same message: Thinking of you. Send regards to Father. I am well. Messages meant to reassure. Messages not sent by Jonah Tupper, but arranged by his murderer.

  THE NEXT MORNING Sylvia arrived to watch over Ida so that I might go home and rest, and we had a hurried consultation. I walked outside to meet her on the porch, where we might talk. Dawn was turning the sky from gray to rosy, and the air smelled fresh and sweet, especially after the heavy atmosphere in Ida Tupper’s house. I stretched and breathed in deeply, relieved to empty my lungs of the mustiness of Ida’s house. I was physically exhausted, but my mind seemed to be dancing the same two steps over and over, to the music of Mr. Wattles’s refrain, We must love family.

  “Mrs. Tupper slept all night but will refuse food because of the drug,” I explained to Sylvia, whose ramrod posture indicated displeasure with the task she was determined to fulfill. Others might deem Sylvia flighty—I knew her to be as staunch as Gibraltar. “Try to force her to eat an egg or two, or at least some bread and butter. And use this only if necessary.” I gave Sylvia the bottle of laudanum.

  “What about Mr. Wattles?” Sylvia looked terrified. Her own father had been so rarely present in her own life that mature men made her somewhat uneasy.

  “I’ll bring soup over at noon,” I said. “Otherwise, leave him be. He prefers his solitude.”

  “Louy, before you go, I almost forgot to tell you. . . .”

  “What, Sylvia?”

  “Sheriff Bowman has arrested Mr. Dill. You remember him, the Irish laborer who was the recipient of the firewood your father gave away?”

  I sighed heavily and felt, then, very tired indeed.

  “On what basis?”

  “That he was seen often in the neighborhood and he brawls on Saturday night. And they found some stolen things in his house. A silver cup and a garnet ring.”

  “But not Ernst Nooteboom’s gold watch? Then he has the wrong man,” I said. Sheriff Bowman had leaped to conclusions and made accusations on the flimsiest circumstances.

  “He seems to require two murderers,” Sylvia added. “Llew is still under house arrest.”

  UPON ABBA’S INSISTENCE, I slept late the next morning, and woke up just before noon to the sound of more rain on the roof and Father, housebound, pacing and muttering downstairs in his book-lined study.

  “Isn’t it the way?” he said, when he heard me come downstairs. “Deprive a man of work, make it impossible for him to care for his family and himself, and then accuse him of a crime. Where is the real crime here?”

  I was barefoot and with my hair loose on my back, fresh from my morning rest, and Father gave me a peck on the cheek and tousled my hair, as he used to do when I was a small child.

  “I think I preferred it when I was the sole suspect,” said Llew, who appeared behind Father. “Well, not really, if I am to be quite honest. I have a reasonable fear of hanging. What must you think of me, Louy? And I had so hoped for your highest esteem.”

  Llew took my hands. His eyes were dark and large and searched into mine.

  “You have my highest esteem. I know you are no more guilty of this crime than I could be, or Father.”

  Father, seeing my hands in Llew’s, cleared his throat. Llew and I stepped apart.

  “I will always be your fondest sister,” I told Llew. I looked at the two men I loved most in the world, my father and my friend, and felt a new urgency that all of this must be set straight, order must be restored, truth must be victorious; else there would be no peace in the Alcott household, or in my friendships, for
once a man has been accused he must be proven innocent, even if he is never proven guilty, or the stain lasts his lifetime.

  “Where are you going, Louy?”

  I ran back upstairs to don my afternoon dress and linen coat.

  “Remind Anna to send soup over to Sylvia,” I answered.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  A Father Grieves

  MY NEW WALPOLE acquaintances, those I knew by name and those I knew only to nod to as we passed, were friendlier that afternoon, since Mr. Dill had been arrested. He was, after all, one of theirs even if he was a fairly recent import from Ireland, not one of the “Boston crowd,” and so my family had achieved an early vindication at Mr. Dill’s expense. Hats were tipped and “good days” exchanged as I walked to the main square. Several people shyly inquired about Mrs. Kemble’s health and indicated that they would be happy to host a party or dinner in her honor, but I gave the response that Fanny had required me to give: Mrs. Kemble was in the country for a rest, thank you, and too exhausted for calling, but I would relay the kind thoughts to her.

  “Such a shame about Jonah,” added one woman. “Such a terrible shame. We thought something strange was going on, but never thought he might actually be dead.” The woman shuddered with a kind of delight.

  I nodded. It’s difficult to believe that someone is dead when his penny cards keep arriving in the mail, I thought to myself. Whoever arranged that had a cruel heart, indeed. Again I thought of Clarence and wished with all my heart that on those occasions when he had opened his mouth to speak, and then decided in favor of silence, why, I wished I had forced him with all my ability to say what was on his mind. It was not inconceivable that Clarence had been involved in Jonah’s death. And if I thought so, so would Jonah’s father, and he was a man of anger and violence, the kind of man who would require revenge. Both young men had been beaten and then had their throats slit; either they had been killed by the same man (and I could think of no reason why that should be), or the second murder had been an imitation of the first, as part of the revenge.