Clanging wind chimes competed with the clamor of Meg’s thoughts. She leaned forward to examine the rest of the page. There was a change in the color of the ink in the next passage and a slightly looser script.
Lord, please comfort our dear friend Hiram.
Meg startled at the sight of his name. She squinted at the paper and kept reading.
He won’t say why he changed his will to make Stephen, then me, then the girls his beneficiaries, only that he did it. He told us that it was something he’d done some time ago.
Meg’s heart kicked in her chest. Her fingers and feet were as cold as the empty hearth. She reread the lines, not trusting her first translation of the jostling words. She willed the letters to rearrange themselves into a different statement, but in vain.
Jasper had nothing to gain from Hiram’s death.
Stephen did.
Chapter Sixteen
Half exhausted and half exhilarated from a full day of sewing at the church, Sylvie climbed the stairs to the bedchamber she shared with Meg, preparing to tell her that they’d need to hire a crew to clear the rubble from their property. And that Jasper had offered to lead them.
A smile tipped her lips at the thought of him. Not only had he taken her to the church, he’d come back for her at the appointed time to see her safely home. It was unnecessary, she’d told him. He “reckoned otherwise.” It felt so good to be cared for, even in this small thing.
“Oh! Begging your pardon, Miss Sylvie.” Kirstin met her at the top of the stairs. “I was just fixing the fire in your room. There’s tea for you too, if you’d like it.”
“Thank you, that sounds lovely.” She nodded to the maid as she passed.
When Sylvie entered the bedchamber, however, her smile slipped. One glimpse of Meg’s pallor, and Sylvie knew something was dreadfully wrong.
The room’s blue and mustard tones that looked so cheerful in the daylight had taken on a duskiness to match the mood. Even the texture of the air was different. It was laced with scents of fire and peppermint tea, but there was something else as well, like the thickening before a change in the weather.
“Meg? What is it?” Sylvie glanced at the window and wondered if opening it would release whatever was building up and causing her head to ache.
“Did you know?” Meg whispered. “All this time you were so certain Jasper didn’t kill his uncle, and now I want to know if this is why.” She rested her hand on an open book. No, on a handwritten page atop the book. “Did you?”
Everything Sylvie had stored up to tell Meg about her day took flight from her mind. Unnerved by the accusation in her sister’s question, she turned to remove her hat and set it on the bureau. Her mouth dried as she made her way to the desk and picked up the page Meg had been reading.
Ah, so she had found it. Sylvie’s stomach churned.
“Answer me. Did you know Hiram had made Father—and us—his beneficiaries?”
With effort, Sylvie left the comfort of her mother’s handwriting to face the judgment of her sister. She laid the page on the desk and sat on the edge of the bed, fingers tracing the stitching on the counterpane. “I knew.”
Meg did not gasp or scold, but it seemed as though a curtain drew across her face, taking the light and leaving only shadow.
But Sylvie had done nothing wrong. “There are plenty of things you would have known if you had only bothered to look closely enough at Mother.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
Gathering her thoughts, Sylvie bent to unlace her boots. She pulled them off and folded her legs beneath her skirts. “Did you notice, during the war, Mother going into her room and smelling Father’s clothes in the bureau, just to remind herself that he was real? Did you notice that cleaning became an obsession with her, until her knuckles were chapped and her aprons threadbare from kneeling on them?”
Meg’s eyes shone. “I tried to help. But I could never clean well enough for her. She always came behind me and did it all over again. It got even worse after Father came home.”
“It was the only way she could cope with everything, Meg. She couldn’t make Father better, but she could wage war on dirt. It was a fight she could win.”
“Yes, and she won it over and over every day. She made herself sick with work. Scrubbing, sweeping, and polishing were all she had time for.”
“You could have helped more around the house. You could have lightened her burden, as I tried to do. You wearied too easily, choosing instead to paint and dote on the man who made her cry.” Sylvie was the only one who seemed to see Ruth—really see her—before her death and after.
Meg closed her eyes for a moment, her mouth a tight stitch before she spoke again. “Right now we’re talking about the will.” She tapped the journal page once more. “You knew Hiram had changed it to benefit our family, and you didn’t tell me.”
“You would have known too if you loved her like I did.” Ruth and Sylvie understood each other, in life and in ways that defied the grave.
Meg drew back. “What did you say?”
“After she died, I was still the only one paying attention to her. I combed through all her books and notebooks, especially the one that contained her prayers. I turned the pages so many times that the glue on the binding failed and they came loose, so I put them in the novel so they wouldn’t get lost. I tried to read every word she read, every word she ever penned. Anything to imprint her on my mind. You didn’t, and I always wondered why not. Why wouldn’t you want to honor her by knowing more fully who she was? I would have welcomed you beside me. Instead, I mourned our mother alone, while you spent all your time fretting over Father.”
Meg’s nose pinked with emotion. “I did not give myself over to dwelling in the dark the way you did. Have you never considered that my ‘fretting over Father’ honored her in the way she wanted? She loved him, in spite of everything! Her dying wish was that I take care of him! He was reeling from her death, his despair so complete it was all I could do to tether him to this world when he might have followed her, willingly, into the next. I had no choice but to focus on his care and keeping.”
Sylvie nodded, unable to squeeze a response past the lump in her throat. It should have been her in the room with Ruth when she died. But in a fit of restlessness, she had escaped to visit Beth, just for an hour. It was the wrong hour.
She had felt like she’d lost her entire family in the months following Ruth’s death, and perhaps that was punishment for her lapse of vigilance.
“You were so busy with Father. Is it any wonder I looked for solace in books and my friends, since I could not find it elsewhere?” Sylvie had intended to sound angry and resentful. But all she heard in her voice was hurt, and that was worse by far.
Meg bowed her head for several long moments. She blinked rapidly, until finally catching a tear on her bandaged hand. “You left me to pick up the pieces of our father alone. I had no friend to turn to except you, but you were turning elsewhere. But if you felt neglected by me, as I did by you, I’m sorry.”
The flames behind the grate bobbed lower, allowing a chill to creep into the chamber. Sylvie climbed down from the bed, resisting this new information—that she’d hurt her sister in the same way Sylvie had been hurt by her. The blame she’d cast on Meg circled back and settled into the hollow of her chest.
Careful to keep her skirts out of the way, she stoked the fire and added another log. “Mother’s death is not what you wanted to talk about,” she said at last, facing her. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore either.”
“Good,” Meg agreed, her voice cool. She looked away, turning back again only when her expression had resettled into firmer lines. “Explain to me why you withheld a crucial piece of information about the will from me.”
Sylvie crossed her arms. She shouldn’t be surprised that she needed to spell this out for Meg. “You wanted to protect Father by finding the will. I wanted to protect him by leaving it alone.”
“Because it’s a motive
.”
“Yes. If he’s not convicted on a plea of insanity, he could be for premeditated murder.”
Meg lifted her teacup with her left hand, supporting it on the back of her right. “But given his state of mind the night of the fire, it would have been nearly impossible for him to pull off such a crime in the midst of chaos and catastrophe. He feared for his own life. He would not have traveled south through the flames to find Hiram when the only safety was fleeing north.” She sipped the tea, then returned the cup to its saucer. “The question now is, what do we do with what Mother wrote about the will?”
Sylvie rubbed her arms as her back began to absorb heat from the fire. “They’ve already charged him with murder. If we keep this to ourselves—at least for now—he’ll still be tried. I don’t think an old journal entry would stand up in court. Unless the will itself is found, there’s no conclusive evidence.”
Meg stood and padded toward the hearth, her feet leaving imprints on the thick rug. She looked pale and fragile, even away from the shadows. “The will. I meant to tell you, today I visited the office of the lawyer who drew it up. He wasn’t in, so I made an appointment to speak with him on Monday. But the clerk said he thought Hiram had made two different wills, or amended the first. He has no record, but I’ll ask Mr. Grosvenor about it in person.” A fine sheen of sweat filmed Meg’s face and neck. She looked unwell.
Sylvie felt her sister’s brow, then made her sit. The news must have overwrought her nerves. “That would be consistent with what Mother wrote in her prayer journal,” she said. “At some point, Hiram changed his will. We just don’t know why. Are you sure you want to keep digging, even if it could lead to evidence that Father is truly guilty?”
Meg slumped in the chair. “I don’t think I could live with not knowing.”
Firelight flickered over the silver tea service. But the thought of drinking anything only made Sylvie’s stomach tilt uncomfortably. “Jasper needs to know too. None of us can afford to be in limbo forever.”
The next afternoon, Meg still felt ill. But with the revelations of the night before, how could she be well?
She wanted to believe that Sylvie’s secret-keeping was well intended, that it didn’t signify a breach of trust. But something had shifted in the atmosphere between them. It wasn’t hostility that cast a pall, but distance. Here was a new stone to add to the pile of burdens pressing down on her: when she had felt abandoned by her sister in the wake of their mother’s death, Sylvie had felt just as neglected by Meg.
As far as it was in her power, Meg would not neglect her now.
Sylvie had said they would need to pay a crew to clear the rubble of their home. They could use the money Mrs. Palmer had paid for the two paintings for that purpose. There would be some left over, but it wouldn’t go far. They needed a source of income.
Stomach still unsettled, Meg made her way to the servant’s closet and plucked a dusting rag from a pail. Jasper was in class, Helene and Kirstin were out working for other clients, and Sylvie was sewing at the church, making new friends, while Meg was home alone. Again.
She could at least do some light housework. It took no dexterity to push a cloth along a surface. By its smell and feel, the fabric still retained some linseed oil.
Her right hand hung at her side, inert, while she dusted the library. It was all she could do.
This was how it had begun for her mother. As much as Meg hated that nothing was ever clean enough for Ruth, she understood that, at least at first, keeping the house clean when life was messy was her mother’s way of loving her family. At the time, however, it hadn’t felt loving. From Meg’s perspective, her mother had cared more about the paint on the floor than the paint on the canvas, and more about symmetrical stacks of dishes in the cupboard than about the harmony of artistic composition.
She shoved that notion away and wiped down a bookshelf. Her mother had loved her. Ruth had loved all of them the best way she knew how. It was a mercy she wasn’t alive to see her husband locked in the asylum.
Head aching, Meg struggled to knit her thoughts in orderly rows. Her mother, her father, her sister, her hands. The bookstore, the murder, the will. But each line of thinking unraveled, and her mind bounced from one dropped stitch to another. She pushed the rag across the study table in long, smooth motions, then sat when the newspaper lying there caught her eye.
The paper crinkled as she slid it closer. There was a notice calling for portrait artists. The fire had destroyed so many paintings that the wealthy needed to have their likenesses recaptured.
A chord inside Meg thrummed in response to this call. Here was a need. Could she meet it?
Dusting rag forsaken, she picked up a pencil, dropped it a few times, then began sketching right there on the newsprint. Her lines were atrocious, as they had been yesterday. She concentrated harder, her right hand a lead weight in her lap.
A knock sounded at the front door. Expelling a sigh, Meg dropped the pencil and went to answer it. Nate stood on the porch, his hat in his hand.
“Why, Nate!” She’d seen him yesterday when he’d escorted her to Mr. Grosvenor’s office. She hadn’t expected him to visit again so soon.
He offered a tentative smile as he came in. “Are you well? You look tired.”
After he hung his bowler on the hall stand, she brought him into the front parlor and opened one set of velvet draperies. Light poured in, reviving the colors in a stained-glass lampshade and gilding the pedestaled fern.
“Perhaps I am. I haven’t felt quite myself since last evening, but I’m sure it will pass.”
He sat beside her on the sofa, his fingers twisting through the fringe of a throw pillow. The callus on his third finger sparked a yearning in Meg to be similarly marked by long hours of creating. But other than his hands, he did not look his usual self either.
“How are you?” she asked.
“Fair enough.”
Surely he could do better than that. “Perhaps you’re more comfortable asking the questions than answering them, but we are friends, aren’t we? Or we could be, if you would share with me even a fraction compared to all you know about me and my family.”
She smiled to lighten her words, but mercy, she sounded desperate. Perhaps she was, but people were designed for connection and companionship, and it had been so long since she’d felt either.
He removed his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Do you have any idea how long it’s been since someone other than my stepsister asked me anything about myself?” A chuckle vibrated his chest. Spectacles still in hand, he leaned back and fixed his hooded gaze on the plaster rosettes and ornate moldings of the ceiling. His thoughts seemed to carry him away from her.
“Too long, apparently.” Unwilling to rush him, she said nothing more.
What irony, she mused, that a man who bent his life to pumping the wells of information should be of unmined depths himself.
Birdsong was the only sound mingling with their silence. Though she wanted to hear whatever he would say next, it was not awkward to wait for it. There was comfort in being together. There was relief in thinking about someone other than herself and her family.
Nate finally stirred and said, “I seem to be out of practice at this. You asked how I am. I’m a little tired, though I’ve already had more than my share of coffee today.”
Obviously. But it was a start. “Are you working too many hours? If I’m burdening you by asking for your help—”
He touched her wrist above the bandages. The pressure was light as a hummingbird and as fast, but enough to reassure. “You’re not a burden to me. But I can see how burdened you are to help your family, and I understand what that’s like.” He told her about raising his stepsiblings Edith, Harriet, and Andrew, adding new layers to her understanding of who he was. His care for his family was evident.
Meg warmed to this tender side he’d revealed to her. “You loved them very much.”
“With everything I had. If it was enough, that’s only
because God was more than enough and gracious to fill in where I lacked. We can only do so much, Meg. Ultimately, the outcomes are not up to us, but Him.” His voice held a conviction and compassion that touched her.
For a moment, she could only return his earnest gaze. “And how do you feel, now that they’ve all left your nest?” she asked. “Lonely? Free?”
Faint lines fanned from his eyes as he replaced his glasses and straightened his posture. “You can be both, I’ve learned. But I didn’t come here to talk about myself. I have news.” His tone shifted. “Is Jasper about? This concerns him too.”
She told him he wasn’t. “He knows of the appointment with Grosvenor, and he’ll go in my stead, since the attorney will likely only speak to family.”
“No one is going to that meeting.”
“What’s wrong?” When he hesitated, Meg’s gaze moved to the bust of Robert Burns sitting mutely across the room. “The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry,” he’d penned. Something was awry, indeed.
“I’ve come to tell you in person what the newspapers will be printing tonight for the morning edition. Thomas Grosvenor is dead.”
Meg stared at him.
“Last night he was on his way home from a meeting that kept him out past curfew. A young man in the First Company of Chicago volunteers, a student named Theodore Treat, challenged him. When Grosvenor explained he was on his way home and kept walking, Treat shot him. He’s dead.”
Meg’s pulse thudded between her ears. “Dead?” she whispered. She felt dull and childlike.
A muscle flexed in Nate’s jaw. “I saw the body and wrote the story myself. Whatever information he might have had for you has gone to the grave along with him. I’m sorry. For Grosvenor and his family, for you, for Jasper, and even for that wild-eyed student from Wisconsin who thought he was doing his duty. I’m sorry for this city, which begged for protection and is harming itself instead.”
Another man dead for no good reason. This was worth mourning on its own. It also meant they may never know who Hiram had left his property to.
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