by P. B. Ryan
“Wait. Does he know you? I know he knows of you.” During the war, Ulysses Grant, then General-in-Chief of the Union forces, had been quoted as declaring Will the finest battle surgeon in the Army.
“Our paths crossed a few times during the war,” Will said. “The last time was right before I was captured by the Rebs. In his letter, Grant said he toasted my memory with some ‘damned fine whiskey’ when my name showed up on the Andersonville death roll. Of course, he thought I was dead for years after that, just like everyone else.”
“Because that was what you wanted people to think,” Nell reminded him.
“Yes, well, in any event,” Will continued, “as Grant explained it, he and his advisers have been concerned of late about the escalating tensions between France and Prussia.”
“That business about the Emperor Napoleon not wanting King Wilhelm’s cousin to assume the throne of Spain?”
“You’ve been reading the papers, I see. It’s actually a bit more complicated than that, yet at the same time rather primitive. Napoleon and Wilhelm have been snapping at each other for years like a couple of dogs staking out their territories. They’re itching for a fight, both of them. It’s only a matter of time—at this point, days or weeks—before they launch themselves into a full-fledged war.”
“Don’t tell me Grant wants us to become involved.”
“Good Lord, no. He’s assured me we’ll be neutral, as will England. The thing is, our ambassador to France, Elihu Washburne, is a hometown friend of Grant’s, and a very powerful man to whom Grant owes his career, both in the military and in politics. Washburne’s sympathies are very much with France, and he’s determined to remain in Paris, come what may, never mind that city’s been a powder keg of late even without the threat of war. Washburne has asked Grant to send him various support personnel in case things get ugly, including the best field surgeon he could muster up.”
Nell expelled a lungful of air, not liking where this was headed. “The president realizes you’re among the living, then?”
“He found out when he asked the deans of the Harvard and Columbia medical schools whom they would recommend, and they both mentioned me.”
“I’m impressed.”
“Don’t be. It’s just serendipity. I’d written an article on the nature of bullet wounds for the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal shortly before I left for Shanghai, and it was published in May. The article dealt with certain conclusions I’d drawn based upon my experience in field surgery during the war. Both deans happened to recall me from my service with the Army. When Grant asked for candidates, I was fresh in their memory.”
“So you’re weighing two options now,” she said. “Harvard or France.”
“Grant has asked for my answer by the beginning of next week, so that he can find someone else if I decline.”
“And what about Harvard? When does Isaac want his answer?”
“He has no particular deadline. He said if I’m not ready to accept his offer this year, he hopes I’ll do so next year, or the year after. He just wants me on board.”
“How is Isaac? I haven’t seen him in a few weeks.”
“I know. He said he was sorry he and Emily hadn’t gotten to spend more time with you before you left for the Cape. That’s where he thinks you are right now. When I told him I was going to look for you and Gracie in the park this afternoon, he told me you’d left this morning. To say I was disappointed would be a grotesque understatement. He suggested I head down to the Cape myself, but of course that was out of the question. I couldn’t imagine sharing a roof with my old man for any length of time.”
“You could always stay in the boathouse, as you did when you were younger.”
“How did you know that?”
“Your mother told me once. She said you loved the lapping of the water.”
“I loved the distance from her and my father. I could bear her now, of course, but not him. That’s hopeless. And as for Harry...” Will shook his head. “I hate to think of my own brother as irredeemable, but the more time passes, the clearer it becomes that he’s selfish and depraved and destined to remain so. Perhaps if he hadn’t brutalized you as he did, I’d feel differently. As it is, I fear there’s no hope for him.”
“Harry probably won’t be coming to the Cape. He didn’t last year, either, in protest over your parents’ insistence upon keeping me in their employ. Then, again, if the little woman gets her way...”
“The little woman? It’s a fait accompli, then?”
“He and Cecilia were joined in matrimony April second,” Nell said with a smile that felt just shy of a smirk. “Your mother said the Pratts threw the hugest, most lavish bridal dinner she’d ever attended, never mind it was Lent. She said Cecilia was festooned with jewels, some of which were said to have been gifts from various former beaus and fiancés.”
With a wry little chuckle, Will said, “Almost makes me feel sorry for Harry. He has no idea what he’s gotten himself into, shackling himself to that cold-eyed, avaricious little nit.”
“They’ve been honeymooning in Europe, but they’re due to return next month, and I understand Cecilia wants to visit Falconwood after they get back.”
“What Cecilia wants, Cecilia gets. I don’t envy you, having to put up with the two of them—although Martin is there, isn’t he? I expect his presence will have a chastening effect on Harry.” Twenty-three-year-old Martin, the youngest of the Hewitts’ three living sons, was the only member of his family with whom Will remained on genuinely affectionate terms.
“Martin isn’t there yet,” Nell said. “He’s to deliver a sermon at King’s Chapel this Sunday, and then he can go, but he’ll have to come back early next month to formally begin his ministerial duties. He was ordained there last month as an assistant pastor.”
“He was ordained in a Unitarian church?” Will said laughingly. “Saint August must have been apoplectic.”
“He refused to attend the ordination ceremony. Your father called him a heretic, told him he was jeopardizing his immortal soul.”
“You’re joking.”
“I’d never seen him like that. Martin was utterly serene, of course. He said he was sorry your father found it so upsetting, but that it was a well thought out decision, and he was very content with it. That was about a month and a half ago. He’s been sharing digs since then with a friend at one of the Harvard dormitories while he looks for a place of his own. He says it’s a bit cramped, the two of them in one room, but that it’s been a ‘refreshingly humbling experience,’ given the privilege he grew up with.”
“Martin will make a good minister,” Will said with a smile. “He’s a positive thinker, and a born diplomatist. So, I take it Nurse Parrish is looking after Gracie until you can join them on the Cape, or has Eileen pretty much taken over that end of things?”
“Oh.” Nell wished she didn’t have to convey this particular piece of news. “I’m sorry, Will. Nurse Parrish...”
She didn’t have to finish the sentence. Will seemed to deflate. “Damn,” he whispered.
The elderly Edna Parrish, who’d served as nanny not only to Will and his brothers, but to their mother as well, had long been regarded by the Hewitts as a member of the family.
“When?” Will asked.
“March. It happened during a Sunday service. Your mother was sitting on one side of her, I on the other, and we caught her as she slumped over. By the time we got her stretched out on the pew, she was gone. I tried to revive her, but it was no use. It was her heart, I think. It just gave out.”
“I don’t understand. You were in church with her and my mother? At King’s Chapel?”
“I, um...it was decided that Gracie should start attending services with your mother. She needed someone along to look after her in church, and given your mother’s infirmity and Nurse Parrish’s age...” Nell shrugged.
“Yes, but you’re a Catholic. It seems rather an unreasonable requirement on the part of my mother, I’d say.”
“She did
n’t require it,” Nell said. “She didn’t even suggest it. I did.”
“You volunteered to attend Protestant services? You?”
Will’s surprise was understandable. More than once, she and Will had argued over her unwavering devotion to the demands of her faith, particularly as regarded her refusal to divorce Duncan. He found it unfathomable that she would choose to remain married to a man she didn’t love, an imprisoned felon who’d brutalized her, no less. She’d tried to explain it to him, to make him understand how the Catholicism she’d embraced when she was at her lowest had helped her to remake herself. He maintained that her rigid adherence to Church law had become, in recent years, a crutch that she no longer needed.
I want what’s best for you, he’d told her last autumn, and what’s best is to divorce Duncan. Then, if you ever choose to remarry, and you are excommunicated, it will be the Church turning its back on you, not God.
That little speech had affected Nell more profoundly than Will could possibly have foreseen. She’d reiterated it countless times in her mind these past months, pondering its repercussions, its consequences. It was no simple thing for her to dismiss the faith of her fathers, the faith that had been her bulwark for so many years; yet neither could she dismiss Will’s simple logic, his heartfelt plea.
It was a plea with an unspoken implication. Were she free of the restrictions of the Church, she could be free of Duncan, free to be courted by another man. Of course, Will had never disclosed any feelings for her that ran deeper than heartfelt friendship—not in words. He wouldn’t have, knowing that she was fated to remain a married woman, and therefore wasn’t free to hear such a declaration.
Then had come the kiss, after which they were to go on as before. It had been his explicit promise, and Nell had no doubt that he would hold to it. That kiss would never be mentioned again, unless Nell were to bring it up. Even at Will Hewitt’s most dissipated, he’d always had the instincts of a gentleman.
“So, do you still attend Catholic services?” Will asked.
Nell nodded. “Early mass at St. Stephen’s every Sunday.” Or rather, most Sundays; she’d actually skipped one or two recently, a first for her.
“Two church services in a row every Sunday,” Will said with a little shudder. “That’s positively heroic.”
With a roll of the eyes, Nell said, “You still haven’t told me why you broke in here in the middle of the night. What were you doing in the nursery?”
“I brought Gracie a gift from Shanghai, a set of miniature Chinese furniture for her dollhouse. I...brought you something, too. I was going to leave it here for you to find when you got back from the Cape. I dropped it when I saw you running down the hall.”
Will crossed into the nursery through the door connecting the two rooms, returning a moment later with a long, paper-wrapped tubular object in one hand and his hat in the other. He retrieved a little folding knife from inside his coat—a scalpel, she saw.
“I was going to hang this on the wall,” he said as he cut the twine securing the rough brown paper. “My intent is to have it properly framed under glass, to protect it. It’s a couple of hundred years old.”
He peeled away the paper and unrolled a silken scroll about three feet wide and six or seven feet long.
“Oh, Will,” Nell breathed as he laid it across the bed so that she could get a good look at it. It was a painting executed in watercolor and gold leaf of a beautiful, smiling woman in a lavish headdress and Chinese robes, standing on a lotus surrounded by clouds and waves. “It’s exquisite.”
Sitting at the foot of the bed, Will said, “It’s the Guanyin Buddha. She’s a bodhisattva. That’s someone who’s attained a high level of enlightenment, but who postpones paradise in order to help others. She reminded me so much of you that I knew you had to have this.”
The woman in the painting had raven hair and delicate, Oriental features. “I can’t say there’s much of a resemblance,” Nell said.
“The Guanyin is the goddess of mercy and compassion,” he said. “She exists to free others from their suffering and help them overcome their obstacles. I’d say there’s a very strong resemblance.”
Nell looked up to find Will regarding her in that quietly intent way of his. The candlelight softened his sharply carved, world-weary features—the shadowed eyes and hard jaw—making him look younger than his thirty-five years. There was a suggestion of something in his eyes, a vulnerability, a quiet yearning.
“If it weren’t for you,” he said quietly, “I would have long since succumbed to my demons. I’d have died at the end of a noose, or with a needle in my arm. You drained the poison from me. You turned me back into some semblance of the man I was before...the war, and all that. I owe you more than I could possibly repay. You must know that.”
“You don’t owe me anything, Will.”
“Regardless, it would ill repay you for all your kindness to allow you to remain here alone and vulnerable. I’m going to stay here with you. I’ll sleep next door, in the nursery.”
“What?” She got off the bed and crossed to him, frowning in bewilderment. “But, Will...”
“It isn’t safe, you staying here alone.”
“Will, you just said you were concerned about my reputation. If that’s the case, how could you even think about sharing this house with me?”
“No one will know. I’ll use the back entrance. The windows are all curtained. I won’t be seen.”
“But...what if someone does see you? What if—?”
“What if Skinner finds out you’re here and breaks in some night to teach you a lesson?” He closed his hands over her shoulders and ducked his head toward hers, gentling his voice. “Look, Nell, I understand why you’re staying behind to help Cook. I admire your loyalty to your friends and your willingness to stick your neck out, I always have. But I can’t and won’t let you make a sitting duck of yourself. Make no mistake. I’m not asking if I can stay here. I’m telling you.”
“When did you become so...so damned dictatorial?”
“And when did you start cursing like a sailor?” he asked with a chuckle. “Not that I don’t approve. I do—heartily. Your lofty character has always been a bit too overplayed for my taste.”
“It’s good to see you laugh,” Nell said. “I’ve missed you, Will. I’m...” She swallowed to ease the tightness in her throat. “I’m glad you’re back.”
Will nodded, his smile fading. He leaned down to kiss the top of her head. “Good night, Nell,” he said, and retired to the nursery.
Chapter 5
“What a charming area,” Nell said as Will knocked on the front door of the three-story redbrick townhouse to which the Cooks’ Fayette Street neighbors had directed them. Through the lace-swagged, glass-paned door could be seen a small entrance hall with a curved stairway, and beyond it, a corridor terminating in a pair of glass doors. “Reminds me of Beacon Hill.”
Will said, “That’s because most of these houses were built by the same carpenters and masons, for their own families.”
Shielding her eyes against the late morning sun to peer up at the house, Nell said, “Cook must be making good money as a state constable, to be able to afford a place like this.”
“Cops have ways of supplementing their incomes,” Will said dryly.
“I doubt he’s taking payoffs,” Nell said. “I know he did at one time, on a small scale, but after the hearings and all that, I would imagine he’s toeing the line. I know I would.”
“You’re the type who learns from the past. Most people can’t be bothered to examine their own lives or question their actions. They operate more on dumb instinct than self-reflection.”
“Feeling a bit more pedantic than usual this morning?”
Nell had expected some flippant reply to match her teasing tone—Cheeky vixen, something of that nature. Instead, Will merely said, “I suppose.”
It had felt strange, last night, sleeping so near to Will, their beds aligned headboard to headboard on ei
ther side of the wall separating her bedroom from the nursery. He’d insisted on leaving the connecting door open during the night, reasoning that he could hardly protect her if he couldn’t hear the sounds of an intruder in her room. She’d lain awake for some time, listening to the restless creaks of Gracie’s bed and wondering if the situation felt as oddly intimate to him as it did to her.
She awoke this morning to the sound of her name on Will’s lips. Squinting against a searing haze of morning sunlight, she saw him standing at the foot of her bed. He was in his shirtsleeves, and leaning against the bedpost with his arms crossed. How long had he been there, she wondered, watching her sleep.
“My word,” she muttered groggily when she managed to focus on the mantel clock. “Is it really almost nine o’clock?” She couldn’t remember the last time she’d slept so late.
“I’ve got coffee on,” he said as he turned and crossed to the door, “and it’s not half bad. It’s the one thing I know how to do in a kitchen. But it’ll burn if it sits on the stove much longer, so don’t tarry.”
Just as Will lifted his hand to knock again on the Cooks’ front door, there came a flicker of movement from within the house. The doors at the far end of the corridor opened and a petite, dark-haired woman walked toward them. She wore a brown paisley frock and a bib apron, with a wide-brimmed straw hat clutched in front of her like a shield. As she got closer, Nell saw that she was little older than herself, thirty at most.
The young woman cracked the door open just enough to peer out warily at Nell and Will. Her eyes, Nell saw, were puffy, her nose shiny-red; nevertheless, she was strikingly pretty, with creamy skin and dainty features. “Yes?”
“We’re here to see Mrs. Cook,” Will said, reaching into his coat for his calling card.
In a rusty-damp voice inflected with a subtle Irish brogue, she said, “I’m Chloe Cook.”
“Ah.” Will handed her his card, saying, “I’m Dr. Hewitt, and this is Miss Sweeney. I know this is a difficult time for you, Mrs. Cook, but I wonder if we might impose upon you for a—”
