by P. B. Ryan
“On the contrary, he recommended her to the Astors, her husband as well, and made a generous settlement on them.”
“To keep her quiet.”
“Annie was even more concerned about that than your parents. And I thought your mother acted admirably. If not for her, your own child could have ended up in an orphan asylum, or even some...some county poor house. When we spoke last night, she gave me permission to tell you about Gracie.” Nell nodded toward the photograph. “You can have that if you’d like.”
Will snapped it shut and handed it back. “You should have kept this particular revelation to yourself, Miss Sweeney.” He stabbed out his cigarette.
She slipped the case back in her bag, remembering with a pinch of guilt how Gracie, still in her night dress, had clung to her this morning as she was leaving. Miseeney stay! Don’t go ‘way again. “You have a child, Dr. Hewitt, a perfect little daughter. How can you not care—”
“Will you stop making your bloody assumptions?” He grabbed the pipe and gave it a desultory sponging.
“What am I to think when you tell me you’d rather not even know she existed?” Nell demanded. “For someone who heaps such scorn upon the shallowness and venality of his class, you can be remarkably self-indulgent.”
“Self-indulgence,” he said as he set about scraping the bowl clean. “Is that what it is?”
“You like to think you’re so different from the rest of them, but you’re not. You’re just another...” how had Detective Cook put it? “...rich young bounder who takes what he wants when he wants it, and never mind the havoc it wreaks on the lives of others. It was left to Annie McIntyre to deal with the consequences of your...’indiscretion.’ She told your mother she’d intended to keep quiet about your having fathered the baby and just try to find a good home for her after she was born. She felt your mother had done her a great kindness in being so understanding about the pregnancy, and that it would ill repay her to reveal to the world that her own son was responsible. But when she found out she’d need a Caesarean, she was afraid she’d die and the baby would end up—”
“She had a Caesarean?” He looked genuinely shaken.
Nell nodded. “The baby was transverse. It was lucky for Annie—and Gracie as well—that Dr. Greaves was there.”
Will was rubbing his eyes with the hand that held the cigarette. He sighed and shook his head. “You may not credit it, Miss Sweeney, but I’m sorry for Annie’s anguish, and for any part I may have played in causing it.”
Steeling herself against the grudging sympathy she felt for him, Nell said, “I should say you played quite a significant part.”
“Not that it’s any of your affair, but this wasn’t some tawdry melodrama wherein the innocent serving wench is ravished by the...what was it?...rich young bounder. If you want to know the truth, and not some dime novel version of it, it was...” He ran his thumb thoughtfully over the pipe bowl, as if to gauge how good a job he’d done cleaning it. “It was Christmas morning,” he said in a subdued voice. “I’d gone to the butler’s pantry for some brandy to help me bear up under the festivities and found her in there on the floor, weeping.”
“Annie?”
Will nodded as he leaned back against the wall. “At the time, I didn’t even know her name. I was hardly ever there, remember. I asked her what was wrong. She told me she missed her husband, who’d been off with the Eleventh Regiment since March. She’d been hoping he could be furloughed for Christmas, as Robbie and I were, but he wasn’t. I offered some poor words of comfort—I’m not really very good at that sort of thing. She pulled herself together and returned to her chores. That night, I heard a soft knock on my door as I was falling asleep.”
“It was her?” Nell asked.
Will nodded, gazing in an unfocused way at the pipe in his hand. “It wasn’t the lovemaking she wanted, not really. That was the price.”
“The price for what?”
“For what comes after. Being held, feeling someone else’s heartbeat, knowing that there’s someone in whose arms one can fall asleep. I suppose I knew that was all she really...needed. She needed it, but I let her pay for it anyway. I’d been too long at war. I had needs of my own.” He glanced at Nell and looked away, rubbing the back of his neck. “And, in case you’re wondering, Miss Sweeney, I did wear a French letter. It had grown brittle from disuse. It broke.”
Nell’s cheeks grew warm.
“I’ve made you blush again,” he said, sounding amused. “You really are rather conventional after all. Or is it my mention of the French letter? Are you outraged on religious grounds?”
“Not...outraged.”
“Discomfited, then. Your priests disapprove.”
“As do yours,” she pointed out.
“I have no priests.”
“Then I’m sorry for you.”
He seemed to ruminate on that as he tapped ash from the pipe into the stone bowl. “Curious that my mother would choose someone like you as her... Well, you’re obviously more to her than either a governess or a companion. This is, after all, a rather challenging and delicate mission she’s sent you on. ‘Trusted retainer’—how’s that for a title?”
“I’m quite content with ‘governess.’”
“You would say that. It’s the right thing to say, and you’re good at that—saying the right thing, doing what’s expected, acting the part of the straightlaced little governess. You’d get a standing ovation at the Howard Athenaeum.”
“That’s actually quite insulting, Dr. Hewitt.”
“Perhaps, but that doesn’t make it untrue. You’re not altogether what you seem. That’s what I meant when I said I was surprised my mother employed you, even just as a governess. She’s quite a perceptive woman, despite her faults, and I find it hard to believe she doesn’t at least suspect your true nature.”
Her true nature? Nell couldn’t even fathom how to respond to that. “I...I don’t know what you...mean to imply, but—”
“I only meant,” he said mildly, “that there are facets to you that aren’t apparent until one...lifts you up and turns you round in the sunlight.” He smiled. “You’re just a bit too quick-witted beneath all those tiny little buttons, a bit too tough and canny and wise for your years. You remind me of all those young soldiers who started out as pink-cheeked youths and ended up...” He lifted the horn box and the spindle. “Well, the ones who lived might still look the same on the outside, but in here—” he tapped his bloodstained chest with the tip of the spindle “—they’ve changed. They’ve seen things, done things, that boys like them should never have seen and done. They’ve been cast into Hell and survived to crawl out again, but you don’t go through something like that without ending up singed. Which is to say wiser but sadder. You’re like them.”
He didn’t wait for a response, but commenced the laborious ritual of cooking and kneading of the opium.
Even half-intoxicated, William Hewitt was far too incisive for comfort. There seemed to be no way Nell could keep him from scratching open glimpses of her miserable past. If his mother was perceptive, he was doubly so. It was a quality that must have served him well in the practice of medicine.
“What would possess a person like you to enslave yourself to this drug?” she asked.
“The same thing that possessed your doomed Tommy.”
“Pain? Were you injured?”
“Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed the bum leg.”
“I assumed it was from the beating the police dealt you.”
“That didn’t help—one of them took a baton to my legs—but it’s an old bullet wound, actually.”
“From the war? I thought surgeons weren’t supposed to be fired upon.”
“I wasn’t—not in battle.”
“When, then? At Andersonville?”
“This conversation is becoming tedious,” he said as he gathered the gummy little mass on the tip of the spindle.
“It was at Andersonville,” she said, the bits and pieces coming
together in her mind. “You escaped, didn’t you? That’s when you were shot.”
He lay on his side, snugging his head into the chum tow.
“Why would they have reported you as dead?” she asked. “They said you had dysentery.”
“I did. We all did. I didn’t die of it, though.”
“Obviously.”
“I died during a thunderstorm in the middle of the night.” He seated the dab of opium in the bowl, leaned over the lamp and brought the pipe to his mouth, flames twitching in his heavy-lidded eyes. “I died facedown in the mud.”
o0o
“I don’t understand,” Nell said as Will roused into wakefulness after a particularly long period of insensibility.
He groaned, draping an arm over his head. “You do know how to ruin a perfectly good stupor.”
“You’re obviously still alive.”
“Christ, but you’re literal. Perhaps I should hold you down and force a smoking pistol into your mouth. A little gong might do you a world of good.”
“As it’s done for you?”
He sat up, reaching for his cigarettes. “I don’t limp after a couple of bowls.”
“You don’t appear to do much of anything else, either. A man like you, with your background, your education...” She shook her head. “You don’t belong here.”
“Do stop hiding behind that kneejerk respectability, Miss Sweeney—at least with me. I’m growing weary of it.”
“Go home, Dr. Hewitt,” she said with feeling.
“No, I think you’re the one who should go home, Miss Sweeney.” He lit the cigarette, flicked the match into the little stone dish and settled against the wall. “Go back to Palazzo Hewitt. I daresay you do belong there.”
“Your mother made me promise to take you home.”
“She would understand your not wanting to remain in this den of sin while I gradually smoke myself into oblivion, which could take a while.”
She would, at that. “All right, just...tell me where you’re staying, at least, so she has some way to get in touch with you.”
He expelled a heavy sigh. “Very well, if it’ll buy me a little peace. I’ve got a room at the Belmont.”
“Where is that?”
“My mother knows it.”
“Be careful, Dr. Hewitt. If the police find out you’re frequenting places like this while you’re out on bail, you’ll be thrown right back in the Charles Street Prison, and you’ll stay there until your trial.”
“If you don’t tell them, I won’t.”
When Nell rose to leave, Will insisted on walking her downstairs and out to the street, where he hailed a hack that had just turned onto Tyler from Kneeland. His limp had, indeed, all but disappeared; no wonder he’d become so enamored of opium.
“Dr. Hewitt,” she began as the old blue-curtained carriage drew up.
“Yes.”
“Did you really buy that girl in Shanghai?”
“I did.”
“How...how old was she?”
“Thirteen, but she looked older, and she was very beautiful. If I hadn’t snapped her up, someone else would have beaten me to it.” Will greeted the hack driver and handed him some money. “The lady is going to Colonnade Row.”
He opened the door for Nell and held out his hand. She faced him patiently, making no move to enter the carriage.
He smiled. “I took her to a convent and arranged for her to be schooled there. She lives there still. Is that what you wanted to hear?”
“If it’s the truth.”
“I am many despicable things, Miss Sweeney, but I am not a liar.”
“Are you quite sure...Mr. Touchette?”
He nodded as if to acknowledge her point. “I am not often a liar. I was weaned on lies and secrets and genteel fabrications, and as a result, I’ve developed an aversion to pretense—except on the stage. I’m actually quite fond of the theater. You know, I really do think you’d make a brilliant actress—if it weren’t for that dreadful propriety you wear like armor around your soul.”
She let him hand her up into the hack then, closing the door behind her once she’d gotten her skirts gathered in.
“Miss Sweeney.” He reached in through the open side window to tug at her loosely draped green scarf, warmly chafing the back of her neck. “Do tuck this in. You’ll catch your death.”
Chapter 9
A knock came at Nell’s bedroom door that night as she sat at her drawing table in the sitting room alcove, putting the finishing touches on her sketch of the hop joint above Deng Bao’s grocery store. She glanced at the clock on the mantel; not quite eleven. It was late for Mrs. Hewitt to be stopping by, and Nell had already reported to her on the day’s events—quite an intense conversation this afternoon, during which she’d revealed Will’s opium addiction, and the fact that he made his living through gambling.
She stacked her sketches—this evening’s and those she’d drawn last night after Viola’s visit—and covered them with a blank sheet of paper before she rose to answer the door, mindful of all she had to lose should the wrong person find out what she was up to.
“I’m so glad you’re still up,” said Viola, seated in her rather rickety old third-floor wheelchair, when Nell opened the door and ushered her into the room. She had on one of her many kimonos, the lime green one; on her lap was the bulging needlework bag she used for toting things around the house. “I’m not disturbing you, am I? Oh, were you about to turn in?” she asked when she noticed that Nell was in her dressing gown.
“Not at all. I was just finishing up a sketch, but I’m so tired I’ll just ruin it if I keep going.” Was it Nell’s imagination, or was Viola a little tipsy? Her speech, normally so crisp and refined, sounded suspiciously thick, and there was something about her too-bright eyes and ruddy nose—although that could easily be from all the crying she’d done of late. Nell had never known her employer to have more than a glass of wine at dinner, two at the most.
That speculation was put to rest when Viola withdrew from her bag a bottle of amber-colored liquid, about three-quarters full. “Do you have a couple of glasses? I left my snifter downstairs. Anything will do.”
Nell fetched a small water glass and empty tea cup off her night stand and brought them to the drawing table, thinking this would be the first time strong spirits had touched her lips in over seven years. She exclaimed in protest as Viola filled both glass and cup nearly to the brim.
“I’m trying to finish it,” Viola explained.
Um... “Do you think that’s such a good idea, Mrs. Hewitt?”
“No, it’s a terrible idea. We’ll both have blinding headaches tomorrow.” Handing Nell the tea cup, she raised her own glass toward the half-open door to the darkened nursery, where Gracie was fast asleep. “To Grace Elizabeth Lindleigh Hewitt.”
“To Gracie.” Nell took a sip; the liqueur tasted sweet and nutty and a little musty, but pleasantly so...deliciously so. It went down like hot satin. “This is good.”
“It should be.”
Something in Viola’s tone gave Nell pause. She held the bottle in the light from the oil lamp on her drawing table to read the brittle old label through its fine, finger-smeared powdering of dust; it was a Hennessy cognac. “This isn’t...you wouldn’t... Um, how old is this cognac?” she asked, taking another small sip.
“It spent twenty-six years in an oak barrel.” Viola smiled. “And another seventy-four in this bottle.”
Nell choked as she was swallowing. “This...this is Mr. Hewitt’s hundred-year-old cognac!”
“It is,” Viola said as she took a generous swig.
“But he’s saving it for the birth of his first grandchild!”
“So you reminded me yesterday. So, last night I reminded him that our first grandchild had, in fact, been born three and a half years ago. I asked him if it wasn’t past time to uncork Grandpapa’s cognac. He gave me that look.” Tilting her chin up just slightly and peering down her regal nose, Viola fixed Nell with a subtle bu
t altogether withering disdain.
So flawless was the impression, and so surprising—Viola never criticized her husband, and certainly never mocked him—that Nell burst out laughing.
Viola laughed, too, and they clinked their glasses. Nell silently prayed, as she drank, that August Hewitt would never discover the part she’d played in polishing off his precious cognac—not to mention bailing out his son! Her position here, her charmed life...Gracie... It was vulnerable, all of it. She’d begun to take it for granted, but it could all be snatched from her in a heartbeat, and then where would she be?
“What are you drawing?” asked Viola as she wheeled closer to the table. Nell lifted the blank sheet and handed Viola the gloomy little charcoal sketch she was working on. “Is this the opium den he took you to? I can hardly make anything out.”
“It was dark.”
“So I see.” Viola shuffled idly through the stack of drawings: Flynn’s Boardinghouse; the alley outside Flynn’s, rendered in pencil except for a dilute ink wash to indicate the bloodstained snow; a map of Boston she’d traced out of the city almanac, with her notations scrawled on it... “Ah, you’ve finished this one.” Viola picked up the meticulous pen and ink drawing of Deng Bao’s grocery store to examine it more closely. “The detail is extraordinary. Was it really this...” She stilled, her gaze on the pencil drawing at the very bottom of the stack. “Oh, my God. Is that him?”
“Oh...Mrs. Hewitt,” Nell said as Viola lifted the sketch, a pencil portrait of Will, pale, unshaven and battered. “I’m sorry. Yes. That’s him.”
Viola’s eyes reddened as she brushed a fingertip over the contusion surrounding his left eye. “My poor Will.” She gazed at the portrait through a shimmering glaze of unshed tears. Laying the drawing aside, she opened her needlework bag and produced two flat, embossed leather cases, which she handed to Nell. “This is who he used to be.”
Nell opened the top case to reveal a smoky-silver daguerreotype of a woman and two children framed in an oval of golden scrollwork. The woman, seated with a baby in her lap, was a very young, very pretty Viola; she wore a flower-sprigged dress, with her hair center-parted and ringleted in the style of the late thirties. Leaning up against her, his arm resting protectively on the baby, was a boy in knickers with neatly combed black hair, huge eyes and a beguiling smile.
