Louisa and the Crystal Gazer

by Anna Maclean

  “I think if Eddie Nichols broke her heart, it was a rather temporary situation,” said Sylvia, watching Miss Snodgrass’s slender back grow smaller in the distance.

  “I wonder,” I said, “how far she would go for her revenge against him. And I wonder if she has yet told Mr. Wilmot Green that she cannot be married in her heirloom necklace.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  A Brother’s Anger and a Wife’s Disappointment

  IT WAS, AS Mrs. Crowell had indicated, a very dilapidated house that Emily’s brother occupied, one of those sad abodes all too obviously inhabited by one who has turned his back on his fellow creatures, on all that is living and joyous. Once it had been a grand, even splendiferous domicile, but houses, like people, fall derelict if they fail to receive love and a certain amount of attention.

  If anyone, I thought, knocking on that ancient, paint-flaking door, is in need of speaking with the dead, it is this house’s inhabitant.

  “What do you want?” An elderly woman, judging from her apron and cap a servant, opened the creaking door only halfway. She did not smile.

  “To see Mr. Grayling,” I said. “Please.”

  “He don’t receive.” She started to close the door but I put my boot in the frame, preventing her. To do this I had to move around an urn of dried and withered marigolds left over from the summer, and their brown leaves crackled in protest.

  “Please,” I repeated. “It is about his sister, Emily, Mrs. Phips.”

  A man in a frayed silk dressing gown stepped into view. He was about sixty, with thin white hair sweeping unkempt to his shoulders, and spectacles slipping down his narrow nose. He wore a French military jacket over his nightshirt, and a three-cornered hat.

  “May we come in, just for a moment?” I asked. The wind was blowing, and both Sylvia and I shivered from the cold.

  We were allowed in, but barely, restrained to the threshold with the still-open door at our backs and the wind howling, and before us the dark, cold hall. I longed for a sitting room with a warm hearth. Mr. Grayling hopped from foot to foot, as children do, alternately grinning and frowning at us as he asked the purpose of our interruption of his day.

  “The soldiers are lined up for the Battle of Waterloo,” he said with a glower. “Do you think Napoleon will wait?” He clutched one of the little lead soldiers in his hand.

  Sylvia stood very close at my side, saying nothing.

  “Mrs. Percy is dead,” I said, trying to think of a way to begin my questions. “Did you know?”

  “No, I did not. Haven’t read a newspaper in years. But if Mrs. Percy is gone, good, I say. And none too soon,” replied he, grinning madly. “Are you here just to tell me that? Who are you?”

  “Miss Louisa May Alcott. And my friend, Miss Sylvia Shattuck.”

  I extended my hand. He did not take it. “Was Mrs. Percy a friend of your sister’s?” I asked.

  He shook his shaggy head. “No. They never even met. But Mrs. Percy came asking questions about her a few months ago. Good-bye.” He began to push us gently toward the still-open door.

  “I should love to see the battle scene,” I said.

  “Truly? Then come in, come in.”

  The Battle of Waterloo took up the entire floor of the front parlor. All of the furniture had been taken out and the rug rolled up, so that Napoleon and his brigades, led by Grouchy, Vandamme, and Gerard in their tricornered hats, faced off across Blucher’s Prussian army with their plumed helmets. I picked up one of the little soldiers to admire the fine detailing of the uniform.

  “Put Ponsonby back down!” ordered Mr. Grayling, trembling with emotion. “Be useful, and if you must touch, bring up some of those cavalry. They are lagging behind.” He saluted, as if he had just given an order in the field.

  I crouched on the floor, trying to keep my heavy skirts from tipping over a regiment or two, and brought up the cavalry.

  “Fine, fine.” Mr. Grayling chuckled. “Napoleon will have a surprise or two this day.”

  “Mr. Grayling, what do you know of relations between your sister and Mrs. Percy?”

  “Weren’t no such thing,” he said, tenderly brushing a mote of dust from a cunningly crafted figure of the well-known Marshal Ney. “After Emily’s funeral Mrs. Percy came and asked questions and implied she was a good friend of William Phips, knew about him in China, the old days. I had a sense of what she meant by friend. Mr. Phips was a disloyal husband. Over and over. He was a bounder, and those things often go together. Bring up more cavalry, quickly.”

  “Oh, my,” spoke up Sylvia, who had been watching from the doorway.

  “Are you certain?” I asked, pushing some of the cavalry closer to the center of the field. I tried to imagine courtly Mr. Phips and blowsy Mrs. Percy as illicit lovers, or indeed lovers of any kind, and admit that the effort was too much for my imagination. Certainly Mr. Grayling was wrong on that point; Mrs. Percy had been interested in Mr. Phips for reasons other than romance.

  “I know a brute when I see one,” said Mr. Grayling, crouching before a group of foot soldiers and readjusting their alignment. “I warned Emily not to marry him. Better to live with a broken heart, since August had died. But she didn’t listen. Now August, there was a good lad. I never believed that story William told Emily, about August marrying a Chinese woman. Never believed it. Now she’s dead and Mrs. Percy is murdered, and that was a job well-done. And now, I really must concentrate on the battle. Time to be off with you.”

  “Well,” said Sylvia, having little else to say after we had been shown the door and that door slammed on our backs.

  “Well, indeed,” I said, somewhat stunned by this turn of events. I turned up my collar against the cold.

  “Mr. Grayling doesn’t seem the type to forgive a trespass against his sister.”

  “Worse,” I said, “his last statement, ‘a job well-done,’ worries me. If he did not read the obituary, how did he know Mrs. Percy did not die a natural death? I wonder if brotherly love might extend as far as violence.” Yet, worry as I might about the strength of a brother’s passion to defend his sister from the woman he believed had wronged her, a dark light shone from the end of this tunnel: Perhaps Mr. Barnum was an innocent bystander after all.

  “The situation grows ever more complicated,” Sylvia said. “Truthfully, I’m having difficulty picturing Mr. Phips straying from his marital obligation.”

  “He would have been a younger man, Sylvia, and men do stray sometimes. Perhaps he attends séances because of his feelings of guilt. Isn’t that what Mrs. Percy told him? ‘I forgive you, William. I know there was another, but I forgive.’”

  “Oh, Albert!” Sylvia sighed, looking ahead to dark days in her own marriage, days I hoped would never occur, for if ever a woman was meant for domestic happiness that woman was Sylvia.

  “Constable Cobban seems the loyal type,” I said. “One could even say dogged in his pursuits. Don’t anticipate problems that will in all likelihood never arise,” I recommended.

  We walked with haste to our own abodes, the wind howling about our ears. The drifting snow blew so fiercely we could not speak, but only gasp for breath and lean forward, into the wind. A day that had begun with such promise, with payment for work and that glorious hour of buying presents for my darlings, with Lizzie’s winning of the lottery and a friendly tea with Sylvia, was now ending very badly, with low spirits and more confusion, not less.

  Martha, Auntie Bond’s housekeeper, greeted me at her door. “You look all done in, Miss Louisa. Come sit by the fire. Your aunt is in the parlor, with her guests.”

  I had forgotten she had a card party planned for that evening. “I am done in,” I agreed, sitting heavily on a bench, untying my wet boots, and leaving them there in the hall on a piece of oilcloth so that they would not stain her rugs. My toes poked out of new holes in my knit stockings. I had hours of darning ahead of me, and nothing pushed me closer to the Slough of Despond than having to mend old stockings.

  A quick thumbing t
hrough the day’s mail from the tray by the door revealed no new letters from Marmee or Father, and my chest felt hollow with missing them. There was a quick note from Mrs. O’Connor, though, and this I tore open and read greedily, hoping for news of Meh-ki.

  No word of her yet, dearie, but don’t worry, she’ll show up in someone’s kitchen. A cook has got to cook, don’t she, and I’ve ears in all the kitchens of Boston. We’ll find her.

  Feeling as heavy as one of Mr. Grayling’s lead soldiers, I put the note in my pocket and wondered for the hundredth time: Why had Meh-ki fled Mrs. Percy’s home in the middle of the night? What did she know about those strange events, or had she perhaps even witnessed the murder?

  “What is it, dear? You are grimacing,” said Lizzie, who had come downstairs to join me in our favorite chairs in front of the blazing fire. Auntie Bond believed in old-fashioned comfort, and her chairs were plumped with feather cushions, not the new kind built around creaking springs that almost made one seasick if one shifted too quickly. I was glad for this comfort, for the blazing hearth, for coming home to a friendly soul who would listen, for more than ever I missed Marmee—Marmee who, with her knowledge of human nature, would have made sense of all this.

  “I am lost in a wood,” I told Lizzie, putting my stockinged feet perilously close to the hearth. “I cannot find the path.”

  “You refer to Mrs. Percy,” Lizzie guessed. “Louy, look at those holes in your stockings! They are whoppers!”

  Auntie Bond came in just then to fetch another lamp for her card party visitors. “I knew this was going to be problematic as soon as you announced you were attending one of her séances,” she said, having overheard us. “I’ve never, Louisa, never heard good of Mrs. Percy. I’m not surprised that even dead she is proving to be difficult.”

  “Who is being difficult?” asked Martha, gliding into the room and holding a tray with sliced bread, strawberry preserves, and two toasting forks. “Tea is coming as well, my dears.” She put down the tray and returned to the kitchen.

  “I’ll put bread on the fork for you, Louy,” offered Lizzie.

  “Have you heard much at all about Mrs. Percy?” I asked Auntie Bond, pressing deeply into those old-fashioned feather cushions for warmth and comfort.

  “Oh, all sorts of talk,” she admitted, wiping a bit of dust from the lamp with her dress sleeve, “though I don’t like to repeat gossip.” She cleared her throat and pursed her mouth as if forbidding herself to say more.

  “Gossip about affairs?” I asked.

  “Who is having affairs?” Lizzie asked. Her face had flushed red from sitting close to the flames.

  “You are too young, dear,” said Auntie Bond.

  “I’m twenty,” retorted Lizzie, “and anything that concerns Louy also concerns me.”

  “That is the gossip I wished to avoid,” admitted Auntie Bond. “Yes, affairs. And suspicions of other irregularities in her household. She was in Boston some years before, you know, and there were all sorts of rumors. Mrs. Percy was a very unhappy woman, I fear.”

  “Have you heard any reports about her cook, Meh-ki?” I asked, pushing my toasting fork closer to the flames. A little clot of flour on the crust sparked and flamed in a small explosion for a second, and I thought of Mr. Grayling and the ongoing Battle of Waterloo in his parlor, and the funny sounds I had heard men make when they played at war or described it, those pops and bangs, with a life ending with each one, though that was not discussed, not described.

  “Nothing about the cook. Many people disapproved of her having a Chinawoman in the house, but she had to eat and sleep, didn’t she? She needed a place, and to Mrs. Percy’s credit she gave her one.”

  “Out of the kindness of her heart,” I said softly, “though kindness does not seem to have been one of Mrs. Percy’s virtues.”

  “I must return to my guests, Louy. Look, your toast is burning.”

  I plucked the bread from the toasting fork and spread jam thickly on it. “Happiness consists in virtue, not winning, Father always says.”

  “That would explain Mrs. Percy’s lack of happiness,” said Auntie Bond. “See you later, darlings. I must win at least one round before the evening is over or I shall be out of sorts all tomorrow.” She left us to return to a new hand of cards. A moment later we heard laughter in the front parlor and then the buzz of voices spoken so as not to be overheard. I was sure that the older ladies playing at cards had plenty to say about Mrs. Percy that they did not want the “young” ladies to overhear. I speared another piece of bread with my fork.

  I began to wonder—just wonder, mind you—if a life lived with something other than virtue as its premise might also have some rewards, adventure among them.

  The doorbell rang. Martha padded lightly down the hall. She came into the sitting room a moment later.

  “A gentleman here to see you, miss,” she told me. “A Mr. Cobban. Should I bring him in?” Lizzie looked up, her eyes bright with interest.

  “Ah.” Constable Cobban was already standing behind her, in the hall, twisting his hat about in his hands and blushing fiery red. “I had hoped…had hoped I might find you alone,” he said.

  “What!” exclaimed a startled Lizzie, smiling.

  “I mean…I mean…I had hoped for a few private words with Miss Alcott.” I had never heard him stammer before. That was how I knew he was there to discuss Sylvia. He twisted his hat so furiously I was afraid it would be torn to shreds.

  “Come,” I said, rising. “We can speak openly before Lizzie.”

  He seemed much younger, boyish, since his visit was social rather than professional. Feeling almost sisterly, I poured him a cup of tea and gave him my toasted bread. He turned it this way and that and finally took a bite, then put the toast down on his tea saucer.

  “It’s about Miss Shattuck,” he said finally.

  “I know,” I said. Lizzie hummed to herself and crouched close to the hearth, pretending to concentrate on her toast.

  “You do?” He looked up in shocked surprise. Men can be so very slow-witted about these things.

  “I…I…I would like to know the name of her fiancé.”

  “Fiancé?” I repeated, confused.

  “Has Sylvia a fiancé?” asked Lizzie.

  “She mentioned plans for a honeymoon in Niagara Falls. I distinctly heard her,” he said.

  “Oh! That!” How long ago it seemed, that afternoon when Mrs. Percy had first been discovered dead, with the Niagara Falls souvenir pillow on the floor next to her sofa. “I assure you, Mr. Cobban, she has not got a fiancé. She was just thinking of a possible future event.”

  He nodded, comprehending. “She intended me to feel jealous.”

  “She did. Did it work?”

  “I…I…” The stammer had returned. “I have feelings for your friend, Miss Alcott. Do you mind?”

  I put another piece of toasting bread on my fork, hesitating to answer. “It is not that I mind,” I said after a while. “More that I don’t understand.”

  “What is there to understand? She is kind and gentle and virtuous, is she not?” Cobban said.

  “She has lovely hair,” Lizzie agreed, twisting her fork in the flames.

  “And a lively humor and disposition!” Cobban said, glad for an ally. “All in all she’s a splendid girl, I think. First-rate. I could not ask for a finer friend in life.”

  “But I fear for the two of you,” I said, deciding to speak openly. “Married life is very trying, and does need infinite patience and love as well as an eye to practical matters. Mother and Father taught me that much. You would both rebel if you were mated for life. You are too different and both too fond of freedom. Sylvia is…Well, she is not the kind to make a stew and boil lye soap for the laundry, if you see what I mean. She has never had to work in that manner.”

  “Do you imagine I haven’t thought of that?” Cobban drank his tea in one gulp. “But I would help her. And she is quick. She could learn. And though I am penniless now, I am industrious.
I have bought stock in the railroad and shares in a trading vessel. I plan to do quite well, Miss Alcott.”

  “I am certain you shall,” I said, leaning back and studying his earnest, freckled face. It seemed I might be seeing Mr. Cobban on a regular basis in the future, and as a friend, not as an officer of the law. Suddenly I felt that this could be a pleasant situation, that he could provide the masculine comradeship I’d not had in a brother, if he were attached to my closest friend.

  “I intend to speak with her mother,” he said. “But, Miss Alcott, Sylvia is closer to you than anyone else in this world. If I should interfere with your friendship, I would feel like a cad.”

  His blue eyes were round with earnest sincerity. I took his hand in mine. “Mr. Cobban, if you make Sylvia happy, then you also add to my happiness.”

  “Thank you! Thank you!” Now he swallowed the toast in one bite. “I am so glad that barrier is removed. I dislike this kind of scene.”

  “But you handled it very well!” exclaimed Lizzie. “Oh, bravo!” She applauded.

  “I would rather discuss Mrs. Percy,” I agreed.

  “Eddie Nichols is in Worcester, we believe, and Pinkerton’s men are hot on his heels. It is just a question of time. Is there more toast, Miss Alcott? I haven’t had supper.”

  “Martha will bring us more. You still think Eddie Nichols murdered Mrs. Percy?”

  “All signs point to it. He had the reason to wish her dead and the morals that would allow him to take another life. Obviously they had a falling-out and he wished to be rid of her. She knew too much about him. More tea, too, please?”

  “I have met the brother of Mrs. Phips,” I said. “He also has a motive, though an old one, and I don’t know if he is capable of murder. But he believes that Mrs. Percy once caused his sister great unhappiness, so much unhappiness that it added to her death.”

  “Then I shall speak with him, though I think it is a waste of time. Mr. Nichols is our man.”

  Was he?