Louisa and the Missing Heiress (21 page)

“No,” I said. “There is no difficulty at home. I have only come to visit an old friend, Mr. Wortham.”

“Wortham? The wife murderer? An old friend? You must reconsider your friendships, Miss Alcott. I am against this murdering of wives, most against it.”

I smiled. I must remember to tell my father that the mayor had finally expressed a definite opinion.

“It is not conclusively proven that he is a wife murderer,” I answered calmly.

“No. But it will be. And I believe you were also in conversation with that young Cobban.”

“We exchanged greetings,” I admitted.

“Beware of him,” the mayor warned darkly. “Between you and me, he is not a great admirer of the fair sex, not since the day his certain young woman decided to marry another. Bitter. That’s what I say. And with a penchant to use force when not required. We’ve had to warn him.”

I studied the ceiling, no longer listening and only eager to end this unwanted conversation. “Yes, well, I’m sure that is none of my business. Good afternoon, Mayor. I will give Father your regards.” We were then standing before the barred and grilled door where Mr. Wortham was incarcerated. I knocked on the door myself.

The startled guard looked up from his slumber and fetched the stool for me to sit on. I accepted the stool with a polite if stiff thank-you, feeling Mayor Van Crowninshield Smith’s eyes boring into my back.

Preston had been lying on his cot, the newspaper over his face. He sat up when I knocked. He had altered considerably. Jail does that to a man, I suspected. Proof of that alteration was that he did not rise to greet me, as a gentleman would have, even in that place. Perhaps Preston had not altered, but merely become more of what he already was, and a gentleman is not a noun one uses for such a person. I had not fully considered the question of Wortham’s nature; it seemed a dark topic, but one I could no longer afford to ignore.

“What did you quarrel about with Dorothy?” I asked.

Preston looked at the crumpled afternoon-edition newspaper he had been reading. “Digby used to iron these for me,” he said.

A sinister aspect had overtaken his former good looks. His mustache had been allowed to grow wild and now weedily covered his top lip; his thick black hair was in a state of similar unrestrained naturality and stood wildly about his head. He wore a rumpled shirt lacking collar or cuffs, and his suspenders dangled over his legs rather than his shoulders. He no longer looked like a gentleman who had been brought in for a night of rowdy carousing. He looked what he was: a man with a bad conscience who had given up hope; a man who had been discovered for what he really was, which was the kind of husband all young women are warned against acquiring.

“She thought I had broken a promise. That I had renewed an . . . old connection,” he muttered.i

I looked up at the barred window behind him, high on the wall. Thin, cold sunlight seeped through, but not enough to cast shadows of the bars on the floor.

“Had you?” I asked quietly, lowering my eyes to his and gazing steadily, as if I would read him. “Is it true, Mr. Wortham, that upon your return from Europe you took Katya Mendosa as your mistress?”

Preston rose from his chair with a sudden, angry movement. “She is not my mistress!” he shouted. “Who is repeating this evil rumor?” But at that moment his exertions and quick gestures caused his leg irons to clank. Chastised by the metal reminders of guilt, he sat back down, ran his hands through his already bristling hair, and picked up the paper he had been reading, as if he would ignore further questions.

“It seems to be rather common knowledge,” I said. “Dorothy’s sisters knew. One could reasonably suspect Dorothy also knew.”

From behind his paper, Preston groaned.

“Did Dorothy know, and did you quarrel about that, Mr. Wortham?”

Preston sighed heavily and put down the paper. He looked wild-eyed. “Once. Just once I had dinner with her. Katya seemed so . . . so warm. Like an old friend. But it was just once, I swear. But I was seen. And Dorothy found out,” he admitted. “Someone told her. Oh, what a scene there was. Poor Dorothy. I’ve never seen her weep so. She said she would leave me, that I had never really loved her. She said . . . she said what her family had accused me of all along, of marrying her for her money.”

I rose and began to pace in the hall, as I always did when moved by strong emotion that could not be expressed. “Poor Dorothy,” I repeated. “Poor Dorothy. Oh, Mr. Wortham, the pain you caused.”

“I know,” he muttered, wiping at his eyes, though those eyes were dry. “I have not lived a single day since without doing penance of some kind. Can a man never be forgiven? I am no worse than most.”

“Certainly no better than most.” I sighed. “But answer me this question: When did you have your one-evening affair with Katya Mendosa?”

“A month ago. The day after the paper carried the notice in the society column that Dorothy and I had returned from Europe. How Dorothy hated that, having our names in the paper. I tried to tell her that times had changed, that society columns were quite acceptable, but . . .”

His train of thought had begun to wander, so I steered him back to our course.

“How did you first meet Katya Mendosa?”

“At the theater, of course. She was dancing in the production of
Hiawatha
. Her costume was nothing but feathers, as I recall.”

I cleared my throat.

“Yes. Well,” he continued, somewhat abashed, for his memories had wandered down shameful paths. “She saw me in the front row with some friends, and sent a note asking if I would like to have a glass of punch with her, after. I was most flattered.”

“Was the note addressed to the gentleman in the front row, or did it have your name on it?” If Preston heard the irony in my voice, he did not respond to it.

“My name was on it.”

“And you had not met before that?”

“Not that I can remember. And I’m certain I would remember.”

“You spoke of a promise to Dorothy. Did she require you to promise that you would never see Katya Mendosa again?”

“Yes.”

A man in Preston’s precarious predicament might well be grateful for all assistance shown. Preston, however, seemed unwilling to be quizzed further about this affair, and now resumed his perusal of the front page, which contained a rather lurid account of his seduction of the young maid in Newport some years before. Accused of wificide, he now was fair game for the reading public.

“Mr. Wortham, I must tell you that I saw your calling card in Miss Mendosa’s dressing room. You asked for an appointment with her.”

Preston sighed and again put down his unironed paper. “To . . . to be certain that Katya understood our friendship was at an end.”

“Let’s see. You wanted to see her to tell her you wouldn’t be coming to see her anymore.”

Wortham blushed. “That’s right,” he said. “I told her I couldn’t afford the expense. She expected me to buy her things.”

I sighed. Wortham was one of the new men who associated money with morality, perhaps even saw money in its place.

Accept people as they are, Louy
, my mother often instructed.
We each have our own nature, and while we can be improved, we can’t be what it is not our nature to be.
All right. I would accept Wortham on his own terms. “Mr. Wortham, your marriage made you wealthy. Surely you had the means to keep . . .” I could not complete the sentence; even the words were another betrayal of Dorothy.
To keep a mistress
.

“A good wardrobe is so very expensive these days,” he muttered. “I’m a lost cause, Miss Alcott. Perhaps you should give up on me. Besides, I’m not sure I want to live. I miss her so damn much. I hadn’t realized . . .”

“How much you loved Dottie?” I finished.
Or how impoverished you would be upon her death?
I wondered, but did not say.

“Ah, so many regrets.” He sighed.

I began to pace again, then turned to confront him.

“And that was the sum of the quarrel with Dorothy?” I asked. “She suspected—discovered, I would say—that you had visited a woman?”

“There were other words and accusations. To be frank, I suspected Dorothy herself was keeping a secret of some nature from me.”

This brought me up short opposite Wortham’s cot, our eyes meeting through the bars on the door. “Keeping a secret? Dorothy? What did you suspect was the nature of her secret?”

Preston grew pale. “I think there was . . . someone else.” “You suspected Dorothy of being disloyal?” I asked finally, having remembered what Mrs. Brownly said, that Dorothy had loved—and lost—another before her marriage to Wortham.

“I did. Yes, Miss Alcott, I did. There. I’ve said it. Even during our honeymoon I would come across her writing a letter, and she would hide the letter and pretend it was nothing, just a scrap of paper. And as soon as we were home in Boston, she disappeared for the entire afternoon, and came back red-eyed.”

“So that afternoon of the first tea party, when she arrived late . . .”

“I thought she had been with him.”

“Mr. Wortham, I don’t know what to say. Except, perhaps, this. I knew Dorothy longer than you did, and perhaps even more closely, at least for a few years, as we were growing. Fidelity was her essence.”

“People change. Women change. What, then, was her secret? A wife owes her husband complete honesty.”

“And what does a husband owe a wife?” I couldn’t resist. He did not answer. There was a long, ominous silence, filled only with the intrusive noises of guards coming on duty downstairs, their heavy, echoing footsteps, the mumbled exchange of greetings, a rattling of keys. Outside in the street a water seller called out his wares of cool sips of good well water, children sang and laughed, horses and carriages rumbled past. Life.

“I am beginning to understand,” I said softly. “If . . . when . . . you are released, perhaps Dot’s family will allow you a proper period of mourning in the Newport house.” This was a ruse. At that moment his guilt seemed almost palpable, and I wasn’t at all convinced he would be released, but I needed to direct this distressing conversation to other topics.

Preston looked up from his distracted study of his prison floor with a small glimmer of, if not actual hope, then a recognition that such a word as
future
did exist, after all. “If I’m not hanged, that would be a fine idea,” he admitted with some longing in his voice. “It will be summer by then. Dot always loved Newport in the summer. So did I.”

A single tear trickled down his cheek, and he wiped it away with the back of his hand, as children do. There was something stagey about the gesture, something that reminded me of that first visit at the beginning of this tragic affair, when Dottie had come home and he had gently, but with a larger gesture than necessary, brushed a wayward lock out of her eyes.

“My God,” he groaned. “I even miss that foolish little dog of hers. How she loved Lily. The dog looked like a silly little thing, but you know it had a reputation in Rome, when we spent the spring there. Give it a glove to sniff, and it could track the owner all over the city. We used to play at it for fun, with our guests.”

So that was why the dog died, too, I mused. It could identify its mistress’s killer.

I felt weary. I wanted justice. I wanted to finish this business so that I could get on with living, remembering Dorothy as a gentle, loving girl and not as a murder victim.

“I will find the truth, Mr. Wortham,” I promised. “Whether it suits you or not. One more question, Mr. Wortham, before I leave you to your paper, perhaps the most painful of all. It is true, is it not, that some years ago you seduced a certain young girl by the name of Marie Brennen, who then had your child?”

“You have seen the afternoon paper, Miss Alcott. It is now a matter of public record. Of course, what the reporter did not manage to fit into his piece is that I have sent money for the child every quarter since. I did all that a gentleman could be required to do in the circumstances.”

I, being a realist, did not point out that he could have been expected not to seduce an innocent girl in the first place. I hadn’t come to lecture, but to acquire information. “There were rumors of other seductions that summer, Mr. Wortham.”

“Am I to hang for the sins of my youth?” He moaned. “I was young and callow. I have since repented and done what I could to set matters right. I have, in ways I will not speak of, tried to make amends for those I injured. You must believe me, Miss Alcott.”

“I am trying. But you must tell me, Mr. Wortham. Did you also seduce Dorothy that summer?”

“OF COURSE HE denied it,” I said. “I had, just a few minutes before, accused him of being ungentlemanly in his complaints about Katya Mendosa. Why would he then admit to having seduced Dorothy? When will I learn to better guard my tongue?”

Sylvia and I sat peeling potatoes in the kitchen of the little Pinckney Street house as Abba chopped the shriveled remainders of last year’s apples for our supper pie. May sat at the table reading a book, her dark curls held back with a pretty red velvet ribbon, and I could hear Lizzie upstairs, sweeping and dusting.

The room was rich with the fragrances of nutmeg and yeast, reminding me of so many hours spent in warm domesticity with my mother in other kitchens—in Concord; at the Fruitlands, with its yawning fireplaces and immense drafty rooms where wandered Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, so imposing to others but to me a friendly group to invite to a game of tag; and the smaller, more manageable kitchen of Hillside, where Abba had hung old lace curtains and weekly polished the deal table to a high sheen, never rubbing away the scratchings her growing girls had left in that wood.

It was midafternoon and the sun lingered high as if reluctant to be on its way. Geese flew in the eastern part of the sky, their exuberant honks sounding through the window Abba had opened to let out some of the steam of her cooking. Spring was coming, but I felt none of the sweet expectation of springtime. I had dreamed again of Dorothy, and Dorothy, in that dream, had wept. “I am terrified of him,” she had said.