A Fatal Four-Pack

by P. B. Ryan

  “Of course it’s not your fault,” Nell soothed as she kept half an eye on Gracie in her Nana’s adjacent boudoir, dragging hatboxes out of the closet while Viola’s lady’s maid, Paola Gabrielli, sat in the corner sewing a veil onto a purple velvet bonnet. “How could it be your fault?”

  Viola shook her head, tears dripping onto the letter in front of her, a letter that began, Dear Will... “Oh, God. I’m a horrible mother.”

  “You’re a wonderful mother.”

  “No, you don’t know. You don’t know. And now...and now my baby, my Will... They’re going to h-hang him. And it’s all my fault.”

  Her fault? Did she knife that man outside Flynn’s boardinghouse? Did she tell Alderman Thorpe to bury her son “as deep as you can get him” in the Charles Street Jail? There were people responsible for begetting this situation and making it worse, but it seemed to Nell that Viola Hewitt was as blameless a victim of it as Ernest Tulley.

  Heedless of the tear stains dotting the letter, Viola folded it and tucked it into an envelope, on which she wrote, in her signature violet ink, Dr. William Hewitt before drawing up short. She jammed the pen back in the crystal inkwell, tore the envelope away and replaced it with a fresh one, which she addressed to Mr. William Touchette. She heated a stick of violet sealing wax in the flame of her desktop candle, melted it into a tiny silver spoon, dripped the molten wax onto the envelope’s flap and imprinted it with her monogrammed insignia.

  “You must take this to Will,” she told Nell.

  “What?” Nell exclaimed as her employer shoved the letter in her hand.

  “You’re the only one who can do this, Nell. God knows August won’t. He won’t even acknowledge Will as a member of this family. He doesn’t care if he hangs—you told me so yourself. And he’ll be livid if I bring Martin or Harry in on this.”

  “Mrs. Hewitt, I—”

  “Do it this afternoon. Once they transfer him to the county jail, you’ll have a hard time gaining access to him. Right now, he’s at the Division Two station house, which is on Williams Court. I used to bring blankets and Bibles to the prisoners there. Each holding cell has a sort of anteroom for visitors. You’ll be able to talk to him without anyone overhearing you.”

  “What if Mr. Hewitt sees me leave? Or Hitchens?” The devoted valet reported everything to his employer. August Hewitt would cast her out in a heartbeat if he found out she’d gone behind his back. Nell’s most harrowing nightmare—the one from which she literally awoke in a sweat from time to time—was the one where she found herself back in her old life, with no home, no family...and worst of all, no Gracie. “Won’t it look suspicious, me going out after deciding to stay home because it was snowing so hard?”

  “If anyone asks, you can tell them you’re planning to paint Boston Common in the snow, and you need to see how it looks.”

  It was a good lie; Nell was grudgingly impressed. But what if it didn’t work? Going behind August Hewitt’s back this way was far worse than eavesdropping at his library door. She’d never heard him sound so furious—or determined. If he found out what she’d done, he would fire her, and Viola would be helpless to prevent it. No one defied August Hewitt and got away with it, ever.

  And, too, the notion of walking into a police station filled Nell with a cold dread all its own. “I don’t think I could handle this, Mrs. Hewitt.”

  Misjudging the reason for her trepidation, Viola said, “Nell, believe me, you have nothing to fear from my Will. He’s incapable of doing what they say he did. And he would die before he’d let an opium pipe touch his lips. He thinks it’s a blight on humanity—he once told me so himself. He said they should outlaw it here, as they have in China. He’s a good man, a surgeon. He would never...cause you harm, if that’s what you’re thinking, or—”

  “It’s not that. I just...I...”

  “I need to find out what really happened, from Will himself. Obviously I can’t go myself, much as I wish I could. I’ve dreamed of seeing him again—literally. I wake up sobbing from those dreams. But I have to think of Will. If I were to visit him, everyone would notice me. They know who I am there. Someone would figure out who Will really is, and he’s obviously gone to great pains to prevent that. And, if Mr. Hewitt were to find out I’d defied him...” Her brow furrowed. “He mustn’t find out you’ve been there, either. Use a false name. Say you’re doing charitable work. Talk to Will alone if you can. Tell him I’m going to try to overturn the bail decision tomorrow so he can get out of there.”

  “Can you do that? Without Mr. Hewitt finding out?”

  “The husband of an acquaintance of mine is a judge in the criminal court. Horace Bacon is his name. I happen to know she likes to live beyond her means, and I’ve heard rumors Horace has accrued a fair amount of debt. I can’t see him turning down my request if it’s accompanied by a nice, fat envelope. And if it’s fat enough, I imagine you can convince him to expedite the process and keep my name off any paperwork having to do with—”

  “I can convince him?”

  “You’re the only one I can ask to do any of this, Nell.” Frowning, she said, “I’ll need to hire a lawyer, too.”

  “Won’t the court appoint a public defender?”

  “No, we need our own man, someone very good and very discreet, who’ll agree to keep Mr. Hewitt out of it. That will be trickier than the business about the bail. My husband knows just about every lawyer in Boston.”

  A flurry of nonsense babbling drew Nell’s attention to the bedroom, where Gracie was gamboling in circles, arms outstretched, an ostrich-plumed bonnet jammed low over her face. Paola—Nell’s only real friend on the Hewitts’ staff—caught Nell’s eye and smiled. A darkly beautiful woman about Viola’s age, although she looked much younger, Paola was known as “Miss Gabrielli” despite being married—assuming her husband was still alive, for she hadn’t been back to Italy in the thirty or so years she’d served as Viola’s lady’s maid. By the same token, tradition regarding housekeepers dictated that Evelyn Mott, a spinster, be addressed as “Mrs. Mott.” None of it made much sense to Nell, but she’d long ago stopped trying to understand Brahmin customs.

  “I can’t leave,” Nell said. “Who’ll keep an eye on Gracie?” She was a child who got into everything and needed frequent running after, which was why Viola was unequal to the task.

  “Nurse Parrish will awaken from her nap soon enough. In the meantime, Paola can set aside her work long enough keep a proper watch over her. Please, please, Nell—I beseech you. I must find out what really happened last night. I won’t rest until I do.” Fresh tears pooled in her eyes. “You’re the only one I trust, and I know you can do this. You’re so strong, so clever and capable. And people respond to you. Men respond to you. You’ll have no trouble getting in to see Will.”

  Nell pressed the heel of her hand to her forehead, feeling trapped and woozy and increasingly resigned. If not for Viola Hewitt, she would still be in East Falmouth, wearing frayed cast-offs as she tended round-the-clock to Cyril Greaves’s every need. Not that she’d begrudged him any of it, God knew. She’d been fond of Dr. Greaves, very much so. He’d quite literally saved her life—only to remake her into the kind of woman who could function in a world of glittering privilege. He’d let her go regretfully, but with a measure of grace that had touched Nell deeply, because she’d known he was doing it for her. For all that, she would be eternally grateful; but she was grateful to Viola Hewitt as well, exceedingly so, for having invited her into this world—and for giving her Gracie, the only child she would ever have.

  In a quiet voice still rusty with tears, Viola said, “You’re lucky in a way, you know that?”

  “Know it? I think about it every morning when I awaken and every night as I’m falling asleep.”

  “I don’t mean that. I mean... You’re so much freer than I am, really—freer than any woman of rank. We’re all kept shrouded in cocoons of propriety lest we somehow bring scandal upon our families—and there are more ways of doing that than y
ou can imagine. The governess, however, occupies a singular niche in our world, neither servant nor pampered gentlewoman, but something quite apart. Do you have any idea how blessed you are to be able to come and go as you please? The demands of my class have crippled me more surely than the affliction that put me in this chair. You, on the other hand, have no cocoon to bind you.”

  Reaching out, Viola stroked Nell’s cheek. “You’re a butterfly. How I do envy you.”

  Chapter 2

  “A lady to see you, Touchette,” announced the pockmarked guard through the iron-barred door of the holding cell.

  “I don’t know any ladies.” The voice from within—drowsy-deep, British-accented and vaguely bored—did not belong here. It was a voice meant for the opera box, the ballroom, the polo field...not this fetid little police station cage.

  Nell’s view of William Hewitt was limited by her position against the wall of the cramped visitor’s alcove and the fact that it was only the cell’s door that was comprised of open grillwork; the walls were solid brick. From her angle, all she could make out through the barred door were two long legs in fawn trousers, right ankle propped on left knee. A hand appeared and struck a match against the sole of a well-made black shoe. The hand was long-fingered, capable—a deft hand with a scalpel, she would guess.

  Or a bistoury.

  “Her name is Miss Chapel,” said the guard as he hung Nell’s snow-dampened coat and scarf on a hook. “She’s from the Society for the Relief of Convicts and Indigents.”

  The aroma of tobacco wafted from the cell. “I don’t suppose it would do any good to point out that I am neither a convict nor an indigent.”

  “You’ll be a convict soon as they can manage to drag your sorry...” the guard glanced at Nell “...drag you in front of a jury. And then you’ll be just another murdering wretch swinging from a rope over at the county jail.”

  Nell clutched to her chest the scratchy woolen blanket and Bible she’d brought. She hated this. She hated being in this monstrous brick box of a building, surrounded by blue-uniformed cops who all seemed to stare at her as if they knew who she really was and why this was the last place she should be. She hated the way Gracie had cried and reached for her, squirming in Paola’s arms, as she’d put on her coat to come here. And she really hated having to confront this man who may or may not have cut another man’s throat last night in a delirium born of opium—or lunacy.

  “You can give him them things, ma’am, but I’ll have to check ‘em first.” The guard held his hand out. “The blanket, then the Bible.” He unfolded and shook out the former, fanned the pages of the latter, and handed them back.

  “You can sit here if you’ve a mind to pray or what have you.” The guard scraped a bench away from the wall and set it up facing the iron-barred door from about five feet away. “You’d best keep your distance. If he tries anything, like grabbing you through the bars or throwing matches at you, you give me a holler—loud, ‘cause I’ll be all the way down the hall.”

  Matches? Nell thought about the flammable crinoline shaping her skirt, and the newspaper stories of women burned alive when their dresses brushed candles or gas jets. She stood motionless after the guard left, listening to the receding jangle of his keys as he returned to his station at the far end of the hall.

  “I’ll take the blanket.” The long legs shifted; bedropes squeaked. “You can keep the Bible.”

  With a steadying breath, Nell stepped away from the wall and approached the door to the cell, staying a few feet back, as the guard had advised.

  Its occupant was standing now, his weight resting on one hip, drawing on a cigarette as he watched her come into view. He was tall, somewhat over six feet, with hair falling like haphazard strokes of black ink into indolent eyes. His left eyelid was swollen and discolored, with a crusted-over cut at the outer edge. Two more contusions stained his beard-darkened jaw on that side, and his lower lip was split. They interrogated him at some length last night.

  Even unshaved and unshorn, his face badly beaten, there could be no mistaking that this man was Viola Hewitt’s son. It wasn’t just his coloring—the black hair and fair skin—but his height, his bearing, the patrician planes and hollows of his face.

  His gaze swept over her from top to bottom as he exhaled a plume of smoke, but it felt different than when Harry did it. With Harry there was always a speculative glimmer behind the roguish audacity in his eyes, a spark of real heat that he could never fully disguise. The eyes of the man assessing her at the moment betrayed no such illicit interest. He took her measure as indifferently as if she were a mannequin in a shop window.

  Nell felt like a mannequin sometimes, or a doll, given Viola Hewitt’s enthusiasm for dressing her. I’m too old and too crippled to wear the newest styles, she would tell Nell, so you must wear them for me. The dresses she ordered were always of the latest Paris fashion, but discreet in cut and color, as befitted a governess—no stripes or plaids, no swags, ruffles, bows, or rosettes, no feathered hats. Today’s costume was typical: a gunmetal day dress with the sleek new “princess” skirt and a small, front-tilted black hat. The only jewelry she wore on a regular basis was the pretty little gold pendant watch Viola had given her their first Christmas together. Just this morning, Viola has praised her “restrained elegance.” Nell didn’t think she would ever understand how rich people could interpret such dreariness as elegant.

  As for William Hewitt, he might have passed for something akin to elegant this time yesterday, but now... He was in his shirtsleeves; moreover, his shirt was flecked near the top with reddish-dark stains—whether his own blood or Ernest Tulley’s, she had no way of knowing. His collar and tie were both missing, giving him a decidedly disreputable air. Adding to the effect was the cigarette, which Nell had never seen a man of his station smoke, although she’d heard they were catching on in certain fast circles.

  He came toward her, hand outstretched.

  She stumbled back, dropping the Bible and knocking over the bench.

  He looked at her through the bars, not smiling exactly, although there was a hint of something in his eyes that might have been amusement. Idiot! Nell berated herself. She knew not to show fear around dangerous men. A man with the predatory instinct was like a wolf; if he sensed your weakness, you were done for. It was a hard lesson, but one she’d learned well. She was out of practice, that was it; too much soft living among civilized people.

  He gestured toward the blanket wadded up in her arms. “I was just reaching for the—”

  “Of course. I... Here.” Swallowing her trepidation, she stepped just close enough to push the blanket through the bars. The unbuttoned cuffs of his sleeves, which should have been white, were stiff and brown, as if encrusted with mud; but of course it wasn’t mud.

  He took the blanket, shook it out and draped it over his shoulders, chafing his arms through it—curious, since it was quite warm in here, thanks to a wood stove out in the hall. “Good day, Miss Chapel.” He turned his back to her in brusque dismissal.

  Retrieving the Bible, she stammered, “I...I actually need to—”

  “Trust me when I assure you that any time spent praying over me would be quite wasted.” He crossed with a slight limp to the cot he’d been sitting on before, one of two against opposite walls of the windowless cell. Both mattresses were sunken and lumpy, their ticking soiled with a constellation of stains that didn’t bear thinking about. There was no pillow, no furniture—just an empty stone-China chamber pot in one corner and a tin bowl of gruel studded with cigarette butts in the other.

  He flung his cigarette into the gruel and sat again, stiffly. Tucking the blanket around him, he leaned back against the wall, yawned and closed his eyes.

  “I didn’t come here to pray over you, Dr. Hewitt,” Nell said.

  If he had any reaction to her use of his real name, he kept it to himself.

  “Your mother sent me,” she said.

  He opened his eyes, but didn’t look at her.

  �
��She’s brokenhearted over what’s—”

  “Go away, Miss Chapel.” He shut his eyes again.

  “It’s Miss Sweeney, actually.”

  “Go away, Miss...” He looked at her, interest lighting his eyes for the first time since she’d arrived. It was the Irish surname, she knew. He glanced again at her fine dress, her kid gloves and chic hat—and for the first time, he really looked at her face. “Who are you?”

  “My name is Nell Sweeney. I work for your mother. I gave a false name because...well, she sent me here secretly. Your father doesn’t...he doesn’t want anyone to know who you really are.”

  It took a moment, but comprehension dawned. “He just wants William Touchette to be quietly tried and hanged, thus solving forever the William Problem.” When Nell didn’t deny it, he chuckled weakly, but something dark shadowed his eyes, just for a moment. “So you work for my mother, eh? As what, some sort of companion? Or are you a new nurse? Did she finally oust Mrs. Bouchard for having a backbone?”

  “No, I was trained as a nurse, but it’s not what I do—Mrs. Bouchard is still there. And although I do believe your mother has come to regard me as a sort of companion, officially I’m a governess. Your parents hired me to help Nurse Parrish care for a child they adopted.”

  “Adopted?” He sat up, staring at her. A bitter gust of laughter degenerated into a coughing fit. “Haven’t they ruined enough sons?” he managed as he fumbled inside his coat.

  “It’s a little girl, actually. Gracie—she’s three.”

  “I pity her.” Dr. Hewitt produced a small, decorative tin labeled Bull Durham, which contained pre-rolled cigarettes, and put one between his lips. “I mean, I’m sure you’re a capable governess,” he said as he lit it. In the corona of light from the match, his face had a damp, candle-wax pallor. “You strike me as a sensible woman, in spite of the knocking over of the bench. But it is my opinion that people should recognize when they’re hopeless at something, and give it up—and if there were ever two people utterly hopeless at parenting, it’s Viola and August Hewitt.”