A Deadly Fortune

by Stacie Murphy

  “After she died, they let us stay together. Although it was probably more that no one bothered to separate us,” Amelia added. “Boys and girls weren’t meant to mix after a certain age, so we were in different buildings. But Jonas found me whenever he could. He always made sure I had enough to eat, that no one was bothering me.”

  Unmistakable affection—the first emotion he’d seen from her since she began the story—colored her voice. Andrew tried not to react.

  “And they kept you both there? They never found families for you?” he asked.

  “I’m sure they tried,” Amelia said, “but there were so many of us. When they first opened the Foundling, someone left a baby on the doorstep the very first night. In less than three months, they had over a hundred. After two years, they had twenty-five hundred. It got even worse after the Panic began. By the time I came along the next year…” She shrugged.

  There was a knock at the door, and Andrew moved to answer it, relieving the orderly standing outside of a tray laden with a platter of sandwiches and a steaming coffeepot.

  Amelia wasted no time, snatching a sandwich from the plate and tearing into it. Andrew poured coffee into the lone mug, but she waved it away. He sipped at it and pondered her words.

  He’d been a child during the financial crisis of 1873, but old enough to realize something bad was happening. Banks failed. Factories laid off workers or cut their wages. Strikes and even riots became commonplace and were often quelled through violent means. His father’s business weathered it better than most, but there had been a few tense, straitened years in the household. He shook his head. Despite the wreck his family had become, he couldn’t imagine having grown up the way Amelia had. What must it have been like to be so alone?

  He didn’t realize he’d spoken the last aloud until Amelia contradicted him.

  “I’ve never been alone. I’ve always had Jonas.”

  “When did the two of you leave?”

  Having devoured the first sandwich, she reached for another. “They put the girls into domestic service at thirteen. Jonas had left the Foundling two years earlier. They were going to send him west.”

  She looked at Andrew, and he nodded, familiar with the practice. Orphaned children—particularly boys—were often sent to families in the western territories, where cheap labor was always needed.

  “He didn’t want to go, so he ran away,” Amelia said. “I’d been a scullery maid for a week when Jonas came to check on me. I left with him that day.” She grinned. “I told one of the other girls we were going to get married. They thought it was very romantic.”

  Andrew couldn’t help but glance at her ringless left hand.

  “A long engagement?”

  Laughter burst from her. Andrew realized with a jolt that it was the first time he’d heard her express genuine mirth.

  “No engagement at all,” she said finally. “I’ve never wanted to marry. And of course Jonas had known for several years by then that he preferred men.”

  Andrew, in the midst of swallowing a mouthful of coffee, choked and sputtered. When he finally regained his composure, he looked at her. “You mean he’s not—that is, I didn’t realize he was, ah…”

  Amelia looked amused. “A fairy? A mollie? Or I suppose perhaps you’d call him an invert?”

  Andrew’s ears burned, and he knew his face was red. He’d never heard a woman use those terms so casually, without any evident embarrassment. He doubted most of the women of his social set—his former social set, he corrected himself—even knew such words.

  The men did, though. By the time he was thirteen, Andrew and his schoolmates knew all about fairies—those mincing, simpering aberrations who played at being women and did unnatural things (none of them knew at that age precisely what those things were) with one another. He’d sniggered with his friends at one of their classmates, a pale, lonely boy whose family finally sent him away somewhere after catching him in some unknown—though much speculated about—transgression with one of their servants.

  There had been some brief references to the subject in medical school. A staid, uncomfortable-looking professor spent an hour describing the treatments for suspected deviance in adolescents before moving on. Those experiences, along with gossip and scenes from a few lurid novels, were the sum total of his knowledge of such men. Until now, it seemed.

  Andrew groped for the correct response in the face of Amelia’s casual revelation. “Yes. Well. The proper scientific term is a matter of some debate. I’m certainly familiar with— That is to say, I’m aware of such things, from a medical perspective. But I admit, I’ve never actually known anyone who—”

  “Yes, you have,” she interrupted. “You just don’t know it. You’d be shocked if you knew how many very upstanding, very married men come to the club and arrange to be seen disappearing up the stairs with a chorus girl, only to trade her for one of the boys once they’re out of sight.”

  The notion was stunning. Andrew took another sip of coffee as he wondered uncomfortably who among his acquaintance might be hiding such a vice. After a moment, he shook his head, abandoning the very awkward topic in favor of the slightly less awkward one—which he suddenly found much more interesting.

  “You don’t wish to marry at all? Why not?”

  Amelia looked at him as if he were simple. “You can ask such a question, given our current pursuit? Isn’t it obvious?” She ticked off points on her fingers as she went on. “A man can have his wife committed, and her protests mean nothing. He can beat her, and as long as it isn’t too severe, no one will do anything. He can wear her out with childbearing, then take her children away from her. He can take her money. He can demand total obedience while offering nothing in return.” She shook her head. “I want no part of it.”

  “There are happy marriages,” Andrew said weakly.

  “Are there?”

  Neither of them spoke for a beat.

  “What about you?” Amelia asked. “If you’re such a believer in the institution, then why haven’t you married?”

  A demurral rose to his lips, but he couldn’t bring himself to voice it. He would be a coward to avoid the subject when she’d been so open about her own life.

  “I was engaged, for a time,” he admitted. “It came to an end shortly before I moved to New York.”

  “Did you love her?”

  “I thought I did,” he said, although he wondered now if that were actually true. Cecilia was pretty. Educated. From a good family. He could admit to himself now that he’d never found her particularly interesting, but at the time, that hadn’t seemed like a relevant consideration.

  “I was finally established in my career.” He toyed with his empty mug. “It seemed the right time to marry, and she seemed the right sort of woman. Our families encouraged it, and I asked her almost at once. She seemed eager enough. In truth, we hardly knew each other. I think she wanted what I represented. Which is only fair, I suppose,” he added, “since I wanted the same from her. I’d have gone through with it, even so, if it hadn’t been for—”

  Andrew caught himself and glanced at Amelia. She was listening, obviously curious. But there was something in her expression that said she wouldn’t push further if he chose not to go on. He was tempted to stop. But he’d come this far.

  “When my sister died,” he said, and it felt like stepping off a cliff and into empty air, “it changed everything. I couldn’t bear the falsity of my life, the utter artifice of it, any longer. My family was—is—prominent. Everything any of us ever did was done with an eye toward protecting our position. My engagement was one more piece of that calculation.” He shook his head. “Then Susannah died, and it all began to feel like gilding painted over so much rot.”

  “You were close.”

  “Very. Our older brother was already ten years old when she was born, and fourteen by the time I came along, so it was always the two of us. Once, when I was small, an older boy pushed me into a pond and stole the toy boat I’d been playing w
ith. Susannah was like a fury. I got my boat back, and Susannah went home with a bloody lip and a torn dress.” He smiled at the memory. “My mother despaired of her.”

  He sobered as he continued. “I was home from college for Christmas when I first realized something was wrong. Susannah was withdrawn. She’d always been outgoing, but now she didn’t want to leave the house. By my next visit, she wouldn’t even leave her room. She’d have times when she was better, but they never lasted, and she was never as she had been before. My parents put it about that she was in delicate health.

  “By the time I returned to Philadelphia for medical school, the Susannah I’d grown up with seemed to be gone. She refused to bathe. She’d begun talking to herself—at least, that’s what we thought at first. Later, it became clear she was hearing voices. Sometimes she had screaming arguments with empty air.”

  He stopped, lost in the memory for a moment, before he shook himself and continued.

  “My parents engaged a nurse, and they paid all the servants well to keep the truth of her condition private, but eventually she became too unruly to handle. My father found a private asylum away from the city.”

  Andrew stopped again, struggling against the wave of guilt that always threatened to swamp him when he thought of those years. He’d been absorbed in his own life. And, he could admit now, he had been embarrassed by his sister.

  “I wrote to her occasionally,” he said, avoiding Amelia’s eyes. “I visited her once. She begged every year to come home for our birthdays. We were both born in July, and when we were children, we always had our party on the Fourth before going to watch the city fireworks. She was doing well, and so the summer after I finished medical school, our parents agreed to bring her home for the week.

  “She behaved almost normally, but there was a frailty to it. A sense that she was playing a part and straining to do it. The night before she was meant to go back, Susannah came to me. She said she couldn’t bear to return to the asylum and begged me to intervene with our parents. I refused. I told her I didn’t think she was well enough to come home.”

  Andrew would remember everything about that moment until his last breath. They stood together, watching the fireworks as they had when they were children. Her hand clasped his as bright streaks blazed over their heads and left their sulfur stench in the night air. A red shell burst as she turned to him with her plea. It lit her face crimson but didn’t hide the naked desperation in her eyes, or the despair when he said no.

  His memory of the knock at his bedroom door the next morning was no less perfect. It was a family tradition to give the servants the day off, so it was his father who stood there, stunned and hollow-eyed, when Andrew opened the door.

  Andrew looked away. “My mother found her the next morning. She’d used a bedsheet.” He swallowed hard. “I cut her down, but it was too late. She was gone.”

  37

  Jonas was quiet the next day as he led Amelia through the hallway. Still upset, it seemed, about the risk she’d taken the day before.

  She broke the silence as they stepped into the main hall. “When we get to Andrew’s office, I think we should—”

  Jonas was looking at her with a quizzical expression.

  “What?”

  “It’s ‘Andrew’ now, is it?”

  The observation brought Amelia up short. She had made no conscious decision to use his given name. She hadn’t even realized she’d done it. Perhaps it was because he’d blushed—much to her amusement—at the revelation of Jonas’s romantic inclinations. Or because he’d seemed to listen so intently as she spoke. That was a rare enough quality in a man, in her experience.

  Or perhaps it was because she recognized what he’d given her when he trusted her with the story of his sister. Her death obviously grieved him deeply, and the wound wasn’t a clean one. It wasn’t his fault, but he felt guilty nonetheless. The story went some way toward explaining why he’d been so desperate to gain Amelia’s aid in the search for Julia Weaver. He was trying to atone.

  Whatever it was, he was real to her now. He wasn’t Cavanaugh, the doctor who stood between her and freedom. He was Andrew. He yearned for something, and he believed she could help him have it.

  And she found that she wanted to.

  Amelia blinked at this new realization, unsure how she felt about it. She followed Jonas down the hallway, suddenly reluctant to arrive at their destination.

  They were down the hall from the office—Andrew’s office, Amelia thought to herself, testing the words—when a nurse called out for Jonas’s help with the patient she was escorting, who had begun to struggle out of her grip.

  “Go on ahead,” Jonas said. “I’ll be there after I take care of this.”

  Amelia stood alone in the hallway, trying to ignore this unexpected bout of nerves. She took a deep breath, set her face to pleasant neutrality, and strode through the door.

  Andrew looked up as she entered, and his hesitant smile of greeting set off a round of moths fluttering in her chest. She swatted them down. This was ridiculous. She was not a schoolgirl. Perhaps they were friends now. But there was no need to make it more than it was.

  “Jonas had to help with something.” She gestured at the open door, through which the patient’s fading howls echoed. “He’ll be here soon.”

  She took her seat, and though neither of them said anything, the unexpected intimacy of the previous day’s conversation continued to hang in the air between them, as palpable as smoke.

  They both started when Jonas appeared in the doorway, slightly out of breath. He closed the door behind him and leaned against the wall. “Well, what’s the plan? Are we going to get back to searching the asylum, or are we going to take another jaunt out to the lighthouse to—”

  Andrew’s voice was sharp. “The lighthouse?” He leaned forward, his face strangely intense. “Tell me exactly what happened.”

  Amelia glanced at Jonas, who looked as puzzled as she felt, then recounted the episode, step by step. “And then it was like something slammed into the back of my head, and he was gone.”

  “A blow to the back of the head. Out by the lighthouse.” Andrew was pale. “Amelia.” His voice shook. “I don’t think you summoned John McCarthy. I think you summoned John Blounton.”

  “What?” Jonas’s voice was sharp. “You said Blounton drowned.”

  “He did,” Andrew said. “There was water in his lungs. But there was also damage to the back of his skull. The autopsy report speculated that he hit his head on something—possibly a rock—when he fell in. And based on where his body was found, they determined he’d gone into the water near the north end of the island. Near the lighthouse.”

  “You never said anything about that.” Jonas’s voice was outraged.

  “I didn’t have any idea it mattered.”

  “I couldn’t tell exactly what happened to him—whether someone hit him, or whether he fell,” Amelia said. “I’m not sure he knew. But there wasn’t much of him out there. He was… ‘thin’ is the best way I can describe it.” She frowned as a thought struck her, then stood and walked into the storage room.

  “What are you doing?” Jonas followed her to the doorway.

  “Looking for something.” She tried to remember where she’d put the cuff link she’d found in the drawer. She spied a flash of red atop one of the cluttered cabinets. She held it up. “I think this belonged to Blounton. Maybe I can use it to bring him through more strongly.”

  Jonas peered at it, then at her. He continued to look at her for a long moment, then sighed in resignation, his shoulders dropping. “Will you listen if I tell you I think this is a bad idea, or will you just wait until I’m not here and try it without me?”

  Amelia grimaced. “I don’t particularly want to try it at all. But it seems likely Blounton knew more than we do about what’s going on here. We can’t afford to ignore that. We’re not spoiled for choices.”

  With another sigh, Jonas stepped aside and waved her ahead of him into the
office.

  Amelia resettled herself on the chair and tried to relax. Both men hovered, their anxiety thick in the air, and she frowned at them until they stepped back. Jonas took up a position against the wall, while Andrew leaned against the edge of his desk.

  Amelia evened her breathing and closed her eyes, rolling the cuff link between her fingers, feeling the raised silver swirls of the letters and the smooth enamel beneath them. She tried to re-create the tone she’d used the day before and called the dead man’s name—his full name, this time. “John Blounton,” she said, her throat dry. “Come to me.”

  If he formed, she didn’t see it. Her eyes were still closed when the itch began in her chest. She took a breath, and he was there, flickering against the borders of her mind. Amelia fought the urge to shove him away and instead leaned into the feeling. The shade began to slide through the barrier. She rode the panic and allowed it, feeling herself being pushed aside, as if a thick glass wall was between them—her side growing smaller, his larger, as he came on. And then it stopped. She’d been right. There wasn’t enough of him to take her over. Amelia was still there, behind the glass. She reached out and felt Blounton’s confusion, his lack of self. Words, not her own, slid from her lips, slurred and indistinct.

  “Wss appng.” Her voice was lower, huskier. His, layered over hers.

  “John?” Jonas’s voice sounded as though it came from a great distance. “John Blounton, is that you?”

  “Y’ssss,” they sighed together.

  “The women on the list, John. Who brought them to the asylum? Who is doing this?”