Still Life With Murder (5 page)

February 1868: Boston

I
T WAS A SHOCKING TURN
of events, both wondrous and devastating; a miracle or a tragedy, depending on how you looked at it.

The news came while Nell was relaxing in the Hewitts’ music room, listening to Martin sing his new hymn for his parents. Accompanying him on the gleaming Steinway in the corner was Viola Hewitt in her downstairs Merlin chair, one of four she kept on different floors of the Italianate mansion that overlooked Boston Common from the corner of Tremont and West Streets. August Hewitt lounged in his leather wing chair by the popping fire, arms folded, spectacles low on his nose, his
Putnam’s Monthly
lying open on crossed legs. Nothing pleased him more on a Sunday afternoon than to bask in the bosom of his family circle in this richly formal room, his favorite. The Oriental-influenced Red Room, a silken refuge visible through an arched doorway flanked by six-foot stone obelisks, was his wife’s preferred sanctuary.

Ancestral portraits lined the music room’s rosewood paneled walls, six generations of Hewitt “codfish aristocracy,” most of them in the shipping trade; copper and cloth had gone to China, ice to the West Indies and rum to slave-rich Africa on ships that came back laden with silks, teas, porcelains, sugar, cocoa, tobacco, and the molasses with which to make more rum. But the real merchant prince among the bunch had been Mr. Hewitt’s father, scowling down from above the black marble fireplace, who’d
diversified into the textile trade by founding Hewitt Mills and Dye Works, thus greatly augmenting the family fortune.

And then, of course, there was August Hewitt himself, represented by his wife’s monumental full length portrait—flanked by modestly draped, life-size statues of Artemis and Athena—who had negotiated a lucrative contract to produce U.S. Army uniforms back when almost no one seriously envisioned a war between the states. His foresight had heaped the family coffers to overflowing.

Little Grace, in her favorite apple green frock and pinafore, lay curled up on Nell’s lap, two middle fingers still somehow firmly lodged in a mouth gone lax with sleep. The grosgrain bow adorning the child’s dark hair tickled Nell’s chin, but not unpleasantly. Gracie’s somnolent breathing, the lulling weight of her, her soapy-sweet little-girl scent, all filled Nell with a sense of utter well-being.

Across the room, Miss Edna Parrish sat propped up with pillows in her favorite parlor rocker—head back, eyes closed, mouth gaping, archaic mobcap slightly askew—looking for all the world like a strangely withered baby bird. Gracie had climbed out of her nursemaid’s lap at the first wheezy snore and clambered up onto Nell’s, dozing off almost instantly.

Through the velvet-swagged windows flanking the fireplace, Nell watched snow float down out of a pewter sky, her book—
Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty
by Mr. DeForest—neglected in her hand. She loved watching snow lay its glittering blanket over the city—so opaque, so pristine, as if absolving the streets beneath of their years of grime.

Boston had been a shock to her upon her arrival here three years ago—so huge, so raucous, a buzzing hive in which she’d felt not just lost but utterly invisible. How she’d longed for the rustic familiarity of Cape Cod—at first. Over time, the city gradually lost its daunting newness and began to feel like home—
her
home.
Just as she became a part of Boston, so she became a part of the Hewitt family. Gracie was the child of her heart, if not her womb, and time had only served to cement her sense of kinship with Viola Hewitt.

That kinship notwithstanding, it was rare that Nell joined the family for these Sunday afternoon gatherings, Viola having exempted her from her duties for the better part of every weekend. On Saturdays, she often prowled the Public Library, the Lecture Hall, or—her favorite—the Natural History Museum. There were several other Colonnade Row governesses with whom she’d struck up an acquaintance as their charges played together in the Common, and from time to time they would meet for Saturday luncheon or a lingering afternoon tea—but as Nell had little in common with them, no true friendships ever sprang from these outings.

Every Sunday morning, Nell went to early Mass, a too-brief low Mass for which she had to awaken and dress in the predawn gloom, so that she would be free to watch Gracie while Nurse Parrish and the Hewitts attended services at King’s Chapel. After that, she was once more at liberty to go her own way. If the afternoon was mild, she might take a long walk—even in wintertime if the sun was bright—or perhaps settle down with a book on a bench in the Public Garden. When the weather was less agreeable, as today, she often read or drew in her room. She would be there now had Viola not specifically requested her presence today.

Gracie is better behaved with you than with Nurse Parrish
, Viola had told her,
and you know how Mr. Hewitt gets when she starts fussing. He’ll send her to the nursery if she makes so much as a peep, and I so long for her company this afternoon. You’ll be home anyway, because of the weather. Please say you’ll sit with us
.

Unable to refuse much of anything to Viola, who’d come to hold as dear a place in her heart as her own long-departed mother, Nell had agreed. Mr. Hewitt had cast a swift, jaundiced glance
at Gracie when she abandoned Nurse Parrish’s lap for Nell’s, but otherwise ignored her—as he did her governess.

Nell tried to recall the last time she and Mr. Hewitt had occupied the same room, and couldn’t. That their paths rarely crossed was due to his distaste for children in general and—from all appearances, although it made little sense—to Gracie in particular. At his insistence, the child took all her meals, with the exception of Christmas and Easter dinners, in the nursery with Nell. On weekdays he put in long hours at his shipping office near the wharves, dined at home with his wife and Martin—Harry almost always ate elsewhere—then spent the remainder of the evening at his club. He came and went on the weekends, as did Nell; on those rare occasions when they passed each other in the hall, they merely nodded and continued on their way.

“It’s different,” Mr. Hewitt concluded when the hymn ended. “Not bad, actually, but that bit about God bestowing his grace on all the sons of man, welcoming them into his arms and what not…You might think about rephrasing that.”

Martin, standing by the piano, regarded his father with a solemn intensity that might be interpreted by someone who didn’t know him well as simple filial deference. At a quick glance, the flaxen-haired, smooth-skinned Martin looked younger than his twenty-one years; it was those eyes, and the depth of discernment in them, that lent him the aspect of an older, wiser man.

His mother closed the piano softly, not looking at either her husband or her youngest son.

From the front of the house came two
thwacks
of the door knocker. Nell heard Hodges’s purposefully hushed footsteps traverse the considerable length of the marble-floored center hall; a faint squeak of hinges; low male voices.

In the absence of a response from his son, Hewitt said, “It’s just that one could interpret ‘all the sons of man’ as encompassing, say,
the Jew, or the Chinaman. Edging awfully close to Unitarianism there.”

Long seconds passed, with Martin studying his father in that quietly grave way of his. “Thank you, sir. I’ll give it some thought.” His gaze flicked almost imperceptibly toward Nell.

A soft knock drew their attention to the open doorway, in which Hodges stood holding a calling card on a silver salver. “For you, sir.”

Motioning the elderly butler into the room, Mr. Hewitt snatched up the card. “It’s Leo Thorpe. Dear, weren’t you just saying we hadn’t seen the Thorpes in far too long? Show him in, Hodges.”

Just as August Hewitt looked to have been chiseled from translucent white alabaster, his friend Leo Thorpe could have been molded out of a great lump of pinkish clay. Florid and thickset, with snowy, well-oiled hair, his usual greeting was a jovial “How the devil are you?” Not today.

“Ah.” Mr. Thorpe hesitated on the threshold, looking unaccountably ill at ease as he took them all in. “I didn’t realize you were with…”

“I was just leaving.” Martin offered his hand to the older man as he exited the room. “Good to see you, sir.”

Mr. Thorpe dismissed the sleeping nursemaid with a fleeting glance before turning his attention to Nell. Rather than rising from her chair, and thereby waking Gracie, she simply cast her gaze toward her open book, as if too absorbed in it to take much note of anything else. He hesitated, then looked away: the governess tucked back in the corner with her sleeping charge.

Nell didn’t mind, having become adept not so much at mingling with Brahmin society as dissolving into it. Dr. Greaves was right: It could work to one’s advantage for people to forget you were there. The formal calls and luncheons to which she often accompanied Viola Hewitt, with or without Gracie—Mrs. Bouchard having little tolerance for them and Viola needing help
getting about—afforded, despite their tedium, the most remarkable revelations. Nell had innumerable sketches upstairs of fashionably dressed ladies and gentlemen whispering together over their fans, their champagne flutes, their tea cups. They hardly ever whispered as softly as they should.

“Leo,” Viola began, “we were just saying it’s been far too long since we’ve had you and Eugenia over.”

“Hm? Oh, yes. Quite.”

“Why don’t you join us for dinner Saturday? Ask Eugenia to call on me some morning this week, and we’ll work out the details.”

“Yes. Yes,” he said distractedly. “I, er…That sounds splendid.”

“Everything all right, Thorpe?” inquired Mr. Hewitt. “It isn’t your gout acting up again, I hope. Here—have a seat.”

Viola offered her guest tea, “or perhaps something stronger,” but he shook his head. “This isn’t really a social call, although I dearly wish it were. It’s about…well, your son.” Thorpe fiddled with the brim of his top hat, upended on his knee with his gloves inside. “But you see, Hewitt, I was actually hoping we could speak in private.”

Viola’s smile was of the long-suffering but taking-it-well variety. “You can talk in front of me, Leo. What mischief has Harry gotten himself into this time?” As August Hewitt’s longtime confidant and personal attorney, Leo Thorpe had been most accommodating, over the years, in sweeping the worst of Harry’s libertine excesses under the carpet. Mr. Thorpe was also, as of the last city election, a member of Boston’s Board of Alderman, and thus responsible, along with the mayor and members of the Common Council, for all facets of the municipal government.

“Not another row over a woman, I hope,” said Mr. Hewitt. “It
was
awfully late when he came in last night—or rather, this morning. Heard him crash into something down here, so I got up to check on him. Found him reeling drunk, of course, and he’d lost his new
cashmere coat and scarf somewhere—or had them stolen off him, or gambled them away. Slept through church, as usual. Had a bath drawn around noon, and his breakfast tray brought up to him while he soaked in it—must have spent over an hour in there.”

“It’s not about Harry.” Rubbing the back of his neck, Mr. Thorpe informed his hostess that he would perhaps, after all, appreciate a nice, stiff whiskey.

She rang for it. “You can’t mean that our
Martin
has done something…?”

“Absurd.” Her husband banished the notion with a wave of his hand.

“I couldn’t imagine it,” the alderman agreed.

“We only have the two sons, Thorpe,” Hewitt said. His wife fingered the primitive turquoise necklace half-buried in the froth of blond lace at her throat, her mouth set in a bleak line.

Thorpe looked toward the doorway as if hoping the drinks tray had materialized there.

“If it wasn’t Martin or Harry…” Hewitt persisted.

“A man was arrested last night on Purchase Street in the Fort Hill district, outside a place known as Flynn’s. It’s a…well, it’s a sort of boardinghouse for sailors, among…” his gaze slid toward Viola “…other things. Gave his name as William Toussaint. That’s how they—”

“Toussaint?” Viola sat up straight. Her French pronunciation was a good deal better than Mr. Thorpe’s. She looked away when her husband cast her a quizzical glance.

“That’s right,” Thorpe said. “So that’s the name they booked him under at the station house, but then this morning, when the shift changed, he was recognized by one of the day boys—Johnston, a veteran.” He took a deep breath, eyeing the couple warily. “Please understand—it came as a shock to me, too. He’s William—your son William.”

The Hewitts gaped at him.

“Seems Johnston hauled him in back in July of fifty-three,” Thorpe explained, “along with almost a hundred others, when they raided those North End bawd—” he glanced at Viola “…houses of ill fame. That’s how he knew him.”

Finding his voice, Hewitt said, “That…that was fifteen years ago. How could he possibly re—”

“He remembers the raid because it was the biggest one they ever staged, next to St. Ann Street in fifty-one. And he remembers your son because, well…he was a Hewitt.”

Viola stared at nothing, as if in a trance. “Will was home for the summer, and we hadn’t left for the Cape yet. It was the day after his eighteenth birthday. He’d gone out for the evening with Robbie. Your Jack was probably with them, too,” she told Leo. “But Robbie came home without him around midnight…”

“Impossible,” declared Mr. Hewitt. “Must just be some passing resemblance. William is dead.”

Dennis, one of the Hewitts’ two handsome young blue-liveried footmen, came with the drinks, which he offered, unsurprisingly, to everyone but Nell. Had Viola noticed, she would have said something, as she invariably did when Nell was slighted by one of the staff. Governesses, because they were often treated more like family members than employees, tended to draw the wrath of a household’s domestic staff; but at least most of them had been born into privilege and were therefore nominally deserving of a show of respect. Not so with Nell, who was widely scorned by servants with similar working class backgrounds who regarded themselves as her equals—or, in some cases, her betters—and resented having to serve her. Particularly disdainful were Mrs. Mott, Dennis, Mr. Hewitt’s valet and most of the maids—especially the sullen Mary Agnes.