Louisa and the Missing Heiress (22 page)

Abba poured hot milk and honey into old chipped mugs for us and gave a warning glance in May’s direction. She pretended to ignore us, but I knew the word
seduced
had caught her attention.

Sylvia stretched her arms over her head in animal bliss. Another bread-baking day had come around, so she was supping with us on the foods of paradise.

“Discretion may be a virtue of middle age, not youth,” Abba said, turning from where she had been looking out the window, perhaps daydreaming of spring gardens and fresh greens for salad.

Her wisdom was a delayed response to my question, for I had just finished my telling of yesterday’s visit with Preston and waited for my mother’s reply. “Perhaps, Louy, you should not have asked about his earlier relations with Dorothy, if there were any,” that wise woman said, pulling out a chair for herself at the wobbly deal table. She fetched from her voluminous pocket a skein of brown wool stabbed with two needles from which dangled a sock, half-knitted and looking like a bit of seaweed scraped from a rock.

“The . . . poor . . . child . . . is . . . dead,” Abba said, counting stitches between words. “What good is it to dredge up the past?”

Abba looked tired. She had been up all night, indeed for many nights, packing baskets of donated food to help a fugitive slave family from North Carolina, though such secretive night work was never part of afternoon discussion, not even when we were surrounded by family and old friends. Secrecy was paramount.

“Her murderer must be brought to justice, Abba. I owe Dorothy that.”

“But what do any mistakes she might have made years before have to do with her death? Isn’t the past over?” Abba’s needles clacked in time with her words, making an almostsong of it.
Isn’t the past over? Isn’t the past over?

The past. I remembered Dorothy as a child who had had difficulty comprehending the passage of time, and simple words such as
present
and
future
. “Now is now,” she had insisted, pouting in that very pretty way that seems unique to undersized children with blond curls. She comprehended eternity, in one of her few religious classes, as an ongoing now, with no confusing terms to muddle the moment. I, remembering, shivered and wondered if a child’s ease in understanding eternity had any connection to her death at an early age.

“Is the past over? That is what I am trying to discover, Abba.” I sipped my hot milk and honey. “We believe that the death was not an accident. That was the conclusion of the medical examiner. So there was a reason for it. Someone wished her dead. Why? Who could wish Dorothy dead? What wrong had she ever committed?”

“Constable Cobban seems certain he has the murderer in jail already, and you have discovered several motives,” Sylvia pointed out, reaching for more bread and jam.

“The evidence is far from conclusive. In fact, it is dubious,” I said. “And we must operate on a just level, Sylvia. We must maintain his innocence till his guilt is incontestable. No, we must continue to search for both person and reason till the truth of this matter is resolved.”

“If she had allowed herself to be seduced, perhaps Edgar Brownly wished her dead to preserve family honor,” Sylvia suggested, quite willing, I noticed, to sacrifice Edgar for Preston, one cousin for another.

“Sylvie, are you just now thinking of that?” I asked. “I admit it is far-fetched, that family unity could go so astray as to permit a brother to murder a sister. But, as you said, there was little love between Dorothy and Edgar for some reason, and . . . Well. Better not to say quite yet how I assess his character, except to say he seems to have little or no reason to lord it over Mr. Wortham. One is no better than the other. I wonder if they know they have shared a mistress.”

“Oh, my. May, run to the store for a cup of sugar, dear,” Abba said.

“It’s too interesting here,” May protested.

“Exactly,” Abba said. “Be on your way.” May, complaining, took a nickel from the jar and left. Mother got up from the wobbly table and went into the laundry alcove to pour a measure of lye into the vat of water she had put on to boil. The strong washday smell wafted through to us, adding a harsher undernote to the room’s gentler perfume of apples and cinnamon.

The potatoes peeled and in the pot, I, between bites of bread and sips of milk, picked up a basket from the floor and balanced it in my lap. With the sharp end of a seam ripper I began efficiently popping off the buttons from all of my father’s shirts. They would have to be removed so they wouldn’t break in the washing; buttons were expensive. After the ironing, they would all have to be sewn back in place.

I pondered a carved wooden button that appeared to have been chewed by little teeth. Probably May’s, years before. “Why would Edgar wait so long, then?” I said. “That summer in Newport when Dorothy was in disgrace was many years ago.”

“Wait for what?” Sylvia asked.

“To punish Dorothy for her indiscretions with Wortham. For tarnishing the family name, is probably how he would have put it if he had discovered that his sister had been seduced.”

“You think he would have killed her for honor?” Sylvia’s eyes were wide.

“No. But he might have found her by the water’s edge and struck her, never intending the blow to be so hard, so lethal. But why so many years later?”

“I can barely remember that summer,” Sylvia agreed. “We were fifteen, weren’t we? Is there more bread, please? And some of that berry jelly? I am so tired and hungry!”

“And why is that, child?” said Abba, back from the laundry room and now reaching for her knitting.

“I could not sleep. I am half-convinced my mother has hired one of those Pinkerton fellows to follow me! I have heard steps behind me, and last night when I looked out the window I could have sworn I saw a man in a long coat staring up at my window.”

I nodded in recognition; two nights before I, too, had looked out the window and seen a man standing, watching. I cleared my throat and tried to warn Sylvia not to continue this conversation. Abba gave me a sharp glance and was about to ask me something, when the front bell chimed.

“We will talk more about this later,” Abba said darkly. I knew that, to my mother, contemplating the mystery of a friend’s demise was one thing; ending up in danger myself was not Abba’s intent for her daughter. It was comforting to have a mother worry about one, especially at a moment when I myself was becoming more and more worried.

Abba put down her knitting and went to answer the door.

“Sylvia, I had the same sensation earlier this morning, when I walked down Beacon Hill to do the day’s marketing. Footsteps, close, in rhythm with my own . . . but no one there when I turned around,” I whispered, so that Abba in the front hall couldn’t hear.

“At least we know it can’t be Preston,” Sylvia whispered back. “He’s under lock and key.”

“In leg irons,” I agreed. “Are they really necessary? I wonder.”

Abba returned a moment later, and while she was still thin-lipped with concern, she had her arm through that of an amiable-looking older gentleman with long white hair and a well-traveled dark suit. Abba’s eyes flashed with pleasure, and the visitor grinned excessively, abashed to find himself an object of attention.

“Uncle Henry?” I asked, disbelieving. My wide eyes grew wider. “Uncle Henry!” I cried with greater conviction, putting down the shirt I’d been debuttoning.

“Who else? Give me a hug, my girl; it’s been a long while.” He opened his arms wide and I flung myself into them.

Henry Mapp wasn’t really an uncle, merely an old friend of the family who had known us since before we were the Alcotts, having once been a traveling lecturer on the same circuit as Father in his bygone bachelor days. Henry Mapp had taken a different course, though, and instead of being true to his calling as an educator and philosopher, as Father had, he had invested in stocks, earned enough to buy a small manufactory of woolen gloves and stockings, and from there had progressed into wealth and a very comfortable old age.

“I have been in Europe for some time,” he explained, accepting a wobbly chair at the table and hungrily eyeing the bread and jam. “Baking day,” he said with youthful vigor. “I am lucky.”

Abba fetched another plate and mug. “Mr. Alcott will be so sorry he missed you,” she said. “Will you be in Boston a day or two?” She did not say where Father was that day, which of course meant he was involved in one of his many committees, probably at that very moment seeking safe refuge for the runaway slaves Abba had cooked for all last night.

“Much longer,” Mr. Mapp said, biting into the bread and leaving rosy dots of jam nesting in the bristling mustachios at the corners of his mouth. “I’m here for good, Mrs. Alcott. I’ve had enough of abroad . . . all those sauced foods and ancient ruins . . . and now that my two girls are married, I can do as I please. Boating on the Charles. That’s what I’ve in mind. And a little garden with some roses. Louisa, I see you’ve not wed.”

“No, I have not, Uncle Henry.” I placed my ink-stained, long-fingered hands on the table, as if to emphasize the point that I wore no rings, no bands of gold.

“No rush,” Abba said, patting my shoulder.

“Exactly,” Mr. Mapp agreed. “Better to take a while and look around, not rush into anything. Marry in haste, repent at leisure, I always say. Take that poor Brownly girl. What was her name? Dorothy?”

“So you’ve heard,” I said, resuming my work on the shirt. A button popped off and made a little
keplunk
into the button jar.

“Hasn’t everyone? I always knew that young man was a rotter. He made eyes once at my Harriet, down at our Newport house, and I gave her what-for. I’ll not have that blood mixed in with mine, I told her. She listened, thank God. Sent him packing. Do you have any coffee, Mrs. Alcott?”

Abba rose and fetched a pot from the stove.

“When was that, Uncle Henry?” I asked lightly. I bent over the shirt I was working on.

“Let’s see. Just before I took the girls to Rome. Must be seven years ago, already. Harriet was just sixteen, if that old. Come to think of it, that was the winter the Brownlys were in Rome, too. And the McCormacks, and the Miltons. Kept bumping into Bostonians. The old city was packed with Americans abroad. Never had to bother with a word of Italian.”

“Were you in the same set, in Rome, with the Brownlys?” I tried to remain calm, and not spice my voice with an edge that gave the question unclear significance.

“Should have been,” Mr. Mapp said, taking another large bite of bread and jam, which thickened his speech somewhat. “But Mrs. Brownly and Dorothy pretty much kept to themselves. I understood the girl was in disgrace, had misbehaved the summer before and her mother had carted her off to Europe. Fifteen is a hard age with daughters.” He sighed and trailed off, obviously caught in painful remembrance of his own Harriet’s girlhood.

I frowned and leaned more closely over my work. Dorothy had been in disgrace in Rome. Because of Newport, because of Preston? Mrs. Brownly had done what any wealthy society matron does when her daughter falls in with a bad lot: taken her to Europe for distraction, for punishment (punishment! I reflected. Oh, to go to Europe!). I forced my thoughts back to Dorothy. Yes, the mother takes her away and hopes she forgets him. But Dorothy had come home and six years later married the man! No wonder her family had been exasperated and alienated.

“Yes, those years between childhood and marriage are hard for a parent with daughters.” Mr. Mapp swallowed his bread and jam and sighed heavily. “Not that sons make it much easier. Take my own Herbert. Gambling. The times I have paid off his debts with a final warning . . . Didn’t walk the straight and narrow till he met Mary, and she laid down the law. Thank God it took. I think it took.” He scratched his beard and stared out the window, wondering.

“Yes. And poor Mrs. Brownly with Edgar, who seems disinclined to wed at all,” I added.

Mr. Mapp chuckled. “I think Edgar is well inclined, but his mother is not. Those two are uncommonly close. Or at least were. There is a distance between them these days. Come to think of it, there was talk about Edgar that year in Rome, as well as Dorothy. Seemed he’d threatened to leave Boston and never again speak to his mother, because she took Dorothy on the grand tour, but none of her other children . . . not Edgar, and you can imagine how a young man like Edgar would look forward to visiting Rome and Paris . . . all those opera dancers. Strange, isn’t it? I never pegged Dorothy as Mrs. Brownly’s favorite. Quite the opposite.”

“Stranger and stranger,” I agreed.

Mr. Mapp pursued his own train of thought. “There will be no cavorting with Roman opera dancers for Edgar, not with Mrs. Brownly requiring him to keep the books, lunch with the bankers and mill manager, and look to the family interests. Though gossip pairs him off with a few American young persons of the stage. Youth.” Mr. Mapp sighed again and fell silent. I had already learned that when older gentlemen mention youth and fall silent they are enjoying fond remembrances best not shared with the gentle sex.

Abba poured another cup of coffee for our visitor.

“But I didn’t come for gossip,” Henry Mapp said happily, refreshed by his memories and the excellent Alcott bread. He accepted his steaming cup and grew earnest. “I need your help, Mrs. Alcott. I’m setting up a household for myself and I need a staff. Upstairs maids, cooks, valet, the whole kit. Can you help?”

“Of course.” This was Abba’s speciality, matching the unemployed with households in need of service. “There’s Betty Donner, the cook. The woman she was with just passed on without leaving so much as a nickel to her, much less a retirement bequest, so Betty will be needing a new place. And I’m sure I can convince Brigid Connor to come to you. The situation she has is not a good one. There is a young man in the house who follows her about and makes eyes and they are stinting her wages, as I’m sure you’ll never do. Can’t think of a capable valet free at the moment, but I’m sure a name will come to mind.”