Murder in the North End (5 page)

“It’s gone through some remarkable changes in the past few years. It’s becoming a real city, yet still with a certain raw western flavor that appeals to me. And I’d won a house on Sacramento Street in a game of faro—quite a nice one, actually, about half again as big as my house here, and newly built. I won it from a real estate speculator, and he could well afford to lose it, believe me—he’s making money hand over fist in that town. I thought about staying and...losing myself, you know? Let this brand new city just grow up around me like a giant cocoon. Forget who I’d been before, where I’d been before, forget...” He looked away from Nell’s gaze, his jaw tight. “In the end, I got on that train.”

“How long have you been back?” she asked.

“Since yesterday evening.”

Steeling herself, she asked, “Will you be...leaving again, or...?”

He shook his head, his gaze on the floor, hands shoved in his trouser pockets. “I don’t know, Nell. I really don’t. I had lunch with Isaac Foster today, and he said I’d be welcome back at Harvard any time. He’s keeping the position open for me, because there’s no one else who’s qualified to teach forensic studies. He even offered me a full professorship, but with a catch—I’ve got to give him a five-year commitment.”

“Ah. Well, you can hardly blame him, can you?”

With a rueful smile, Will said, “He knows me all too well.” Sobering a bit, he said, “I’ve received another offer, as well—or rather, a request. From the president.”

“The president.” He couldn’t mean...

“There was a letter from the White House on top of the stack of mail that was waiting for me when I got home yesterday. President Grant sent it a couple of weeks ago.”

“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 didn’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.”