He could think of no response to this.
She looked up at him and offered a horrible smile. “You want the truth or don’t you?”
“I do.”
She continued to smile, though her eyes shone with tears. “If you want it, you have to keep digging for it.”
He attempted to piece together what he knew with what she had insinuated. “You are not personally acquainted with Lieutenant Andrews,” he reiterated, “but you know that he did not murder your friend. You only know of him because Mary spoke of him to you. You know also that Mr. Payne and Mary Rogers were not well suited romantically, but that he did not treat her badly. You know that Mary, then, more romantically inclined than her fiancé, sought out other avenues of…”
He paused for a moment, then looked her squarely in the eye. “She worked with you at the Sportsman’s Hall.”
“She did not,” said Adelia Blaine and smiled more broadly, pleased with the intrigue she had created. She ran a finger over her lips, then trailed her hand down to the collar of her blouse, where she again fingered a button or pin fastened there.
Poe considered how best to proceed. Stroking his chin, he stood and paced back and forth for a quarter minute. He asked her a few irrelevant questions about the tobacconist, and then, before returning to his chair, he lifted the candle from its sconce on the wall and carried it with him to the table. He dribbled a pool of wax onto the center of the table and stuck the candle in it.
Finally he could see her face plainly, saw that she was smiling still, enjoying the confusion she wrought with the riddle of her life. But it wasn’t her face he had hoped to illuminate. He looked at her collar, no longer hidden beneath her hand, and saw the gold and sapphire brooch she wore. A winged seraph. An angel. Identical to the brooch he had first seen in Mary Rogers’s room. Identical to the one worn by Felicia Hobbs.
It came to him then, as clearly as if his movement of the candle had illuminated the very heart of the mystery. It came together so snugly, all seams flush, the three angel pins dovetailing with the nimbus apparent in the Hobbs coat-of-arms, a halo circling a unicorn’s head.
“Johnston Hobbs,” he said.
The utterance of the name struck her like a slap. But she strove quickly to recompose her smile. “You’re only guessing,” she said.
“Ratiocination. The facts conjoin.”
“And what facts would that be?”
Poe ticked them off for her on his fingers and as a means of aligning them for his own confirmation. “It was Johnston Hobbs who first sent me to the Red Onion, hoping there to mislead me with a subterfuge. Unfortunately for him, he trusted the subterfuge to the hands of a dolt. Namely Josiah Lehnort.
“Secondly, it was a servant of Johnston Hobbs who caused me to visit the Sportsman’s Hall, where I was further misdirected and discredited.
“Thirdly, Johnston Hobbs’s efforts appeared to be aimed at the protection of his future son-in-law, but this, I now suspect, was also calculated to misdirect.
“Fourthly, how would a man like Johnston Hobbs become sufficiently acquainted with a man like Josiah Lehnort to employ him in the perpetration of a fraud?
“Fifthly, the Hobbs family crest, which I have had the pleasure of viewing, is adorned with several interesting elements, but none so intriguing as the halo employed to suggest a life divinely guided. As does the angel on your rather expensive brooch, Miss Blaine. Which, as you know, is identical to the brooch once worn by Mary Rogers. A third I have seen on the lapel of Mr. Hobbs’s daughter, his own beloved Leecie.”
“Leecie?” she said. “His daughter’s name is Leecie?”
“Her given name is Felicia.”
“But he calls her that?”
“I have heard him do so, yes. Why does this surprise you?”
She closed her eyes to him and sat there motionless. With wrists crossed atop her chest, fists closed. Her posture struck him as at once religious and defiant.
Softly he told her, “Your silence protects only him.”
“You don’t know,” she said in a voice grown suddenly meek. “He’ll hurt anybody he has to just to get what he wants.”
“Mary Rogers is dead, Miss Blaine. And you are dying. As is your lover.”
“If only she hadn’t brought me into it,” she said, which seemed to Poe apropos of nothing. “I could blame her just as easy. Or him that got her started in it too. He’s the first person to blame.”
“Hobbs himself, yes. All blame comes back to him.”
“Not him, the other one. The one that put her onto Hobbs in the first place.”
“And that would be?”
“The one she worked for.”
“Mr. Anderson?”
She shook her head. “The boss of that councilman that was murdered. The fella with the longish name.”
“You have lost me completely.”
“It’s Dutch, I think.”
He could not believe it even from his own mouth. “Van Rensselaer?”
She held up a hand. “That’s all. Not another word more.”
“But Miss Blaine—”
“That’s all!”
“Only this, I beg of you. This one last thing.”
She exhaled loudly. She waited.
“Your reaction to the name of Hobbs’s daughter,” he told her. “It strikes me as extreme. It is almost as if you have heard the name before. As if, perhaps, you have heard it whispered in your own ear?”
She shuddered now; he had found a nerve.
“It is what he called both of you, isn’t it, Miss Blaine? Was it not Johnston Hobbs’s endearment for both you and Mary Rogers? He called you Leecie, did he not?”
She stared straight across the table at him, murderously, but he could not find himself in her eyes. He could hear her breathing.
“With you here,” Poe told her then and leaned forward across the table and spoke in a whisper, “and with Mary Rogers dead, do you think Felicia Hobbs will remain safe for long from her father’s desires?”
With that she slapped her hands onto the table, she shoved back her chair, she raised a hand and swung it out and sent the candle flying against a wall. She stood and turned, and like a midnight storm, she fled the pitch-black room.
42
“What now?” It was all I could think to say at the conclusion of Poe’s narrative.
“Firstly,” he said, “I must go to Lieutenant Andrews with this information, the knowledge I now possess.”
“What about the constables? Should you tell them too?”
“The constabulary is owned by Hobbs.”
“Van Rensselaer’s watchmen?”
“It was one of the same, was it not, who showed us the murdered witness?”
“It was, wasn’t it? Now why in the world…”
“Because it was he who had murdered the witness. Because Mr. Van Rensselaer somehow knew that the man, the witness, was provided to me courtesy of Mr. Hobbs. Who contrary to all appearances actually wanted his future son-in-law to be indicted for the death of Miss Rogers. Van Rensselaer’s man acted preemptively, then, to silence the bogus witness.”
My head was spinning. “I can’t tell who’s in the right here. Has everybody been playing us for fools?”
“To a man.”
“So again I ask, what now?”
“Now,” he said, “now we do what little we can. We attempt to save the young Miss Hobbs from her own descent into her father’s Hell.”
Because Poe had nearly been a navy man himself, briefly a cadet at West Point, and knew well the rigors of military discipline, he suspected that Lieutenant Andrews would have been relieved of his teaching duties aboard the Somers pending the outcome of the murder investigation, and so would be passing the time in private quarters. In other words, he would be keeping a low profile either at his usual r
esidence, Mrs. Rogers’s boardinghouse, or in the mansion of his future father-in-law. Poe hoped to locate Andrews in the former, for he had no desire as yet to beg entrance to the lion’s den.
In either case, he could not show himself in public lest he be apprehended and jailed, or, worse yet, shanghaied again by Hobbs’s thugs. Even the lieutenant might fly into a fit of temper at the sight of him. So at the boardinghouse, Poe concealed himself around the corner of the building while I knocked at the door. The door was answered by one of the boarders, a man I did not recognize.
“Is Lieutenant Andrews about?” I asked.
The man gave me a disapproving once-over while he picked his teeth with a thumbnail. “What’s your business with him?”
“I have a message for him from a friend.”
“Let’s have it,” he said, “and I’ll see that he gets it.”
“It’s a private message,” I answered.
He scowled at me a few moments longer, then turned away. I went to the corner of the porch and peeked around the wall and held out my hands and shrugged.
“Is he here or not?” Poe asked in a whisper.
“He wouldn’t tell me.”
Just then the door opened again and out stepped the lieutenant. He put only one foot over the threshold, held open the door but did not yet step fully onto the porch. He was dressed in civilian clothes now, blue pantaloons with a white blouse and matching vest. To say that he seemed a different man from the one I had first met says little to convey the change in him. It was almost as if he had become smaller in the interim. Or had been shrunken by some savage illness. The pallor of his skin, the dark shadows of his eyes, the slope of his shoulders. I knew immediately that Poe need fear no attack from this man. This man was already beaten.
He did not smile to see me there. He said, “I was told the message was from a friend.”
I pointed toward the side of the porch. “Your friend is over here.”
He no doubt reasoned by the time he reached the corner of the house that the person waiting for him was Poe. In any case he showed no surprise, though he squinted like a man unused to sunlight. “Mr. Poe,” he said. “I am glad to see that you have recovered from your recent illness.”
“Are you, sir? Are you glad indeed?”
“I wish you no harm, Mr. Poe.”
“Then I ask that you might join me here. If you would not mind, sir.”
The lieutenant had no energy for jousting. “What is it you want from me? I can tell you nothing I have not already told the police.”
“Have you told them about Adelia Blaine?”
“I know no such person.”
“And yet she knows you quite well. Well enough, at least, to speak of your relationship with Miss Rogers.”
At this the lieutenant lifted his chin and hardened his eyes. There was life in him yet, it seemed. “You have made many statements about me that are not true,” the lieutenant said. “And no doubt will make even more. But the one thing I will not allow, Mr. Poe, the one assertion I will never abide, not from you or from anyone else, is that my affections for Felicia Hobbs have ever strayed. Tell what other lies you will, but I warn you: do not voice this implication ever again.”
“For that,” Poe said, “I wish to apologize. I was mistaken. And I beg your pardon, sir.”
The lieutenant did not know whether to trust him or not.
Poe smiled. “What a maze a man’s life is,” he said. “Would you not agree, Lieutenant?”
“Of whose life do you speak?”
“Please, if you would join me here. I have a great deal to tell you about.”
Andrews considered the invitation for a moment, then smiled as if in resignation, in surrender to whatever might come, and went down off the porch and around the corner of the building. Poe stood as close to the building as was comfortable and made certain to conceal himself from the street behind the lieutenant.
“I wish to begin,” Poe told him, “with a more complete apology. I know now that I have accused you unjustly. I ask for your forgiveness.”
I would have thought that such an admission would bring a smile to a man’s face, but not so the lieutenant’s. At first his eyes widened unnaturally, as in witness to a horrible accident. Then his eyes drooped shut, and he looked to be a man asleep standing up, at any moment to topple forward.
He spoke even before he opened his eyes again. “You have uncovered the truth, then?”
“I have.”
Lieutenant Andrews nodded. Half a minute later he opened his eyes. His face appeared calmer now, less drawn. He had all but consigned his fate to the inevitable.
“And what will you do now?” he asked.
“I will make it right, sir. To you and all concerned.”
“You will not be persuaded to do otherwise?”
“I cannot.”
Again the lieutenant nodded. “Thank you for coming.” And he moved to turn away.
Poe touched him lightly on the sleeve. “About Miss Blaine,” he said. “Miss Blaine and Miss Rogers. There are still a few particulars…”
“Which you will not get from me,” said Andrews.
“As you wish. But there is one thing I must make known to you.”
The lieutenant stood there and waited, slouched, lax, exhausted enough to fall over.
“The man you protect, sir, has been attempting, quite ingeniously I might add, to cast you as the young lady’s murderer.”
“Now I see that you cannot be trusted.”
“I am the only man you can trust,” Poe told him. “And you, I think, are the only one I can.”
Andrews blinked once, hard, a long hard squeeze of his eyelids. Then, “Continue.”
“Johnston Hobbs has provided for me two witnesses to the fact that you were Miss Rogers’s escort on the day of her disappearance.”
Something tightened in Andrews; he stood an inch taller, stiffer, but one shoulder higher than the other, still crooked.
“Two, sir. So as to lead me to the assumption that you and you alone are responsible for her death.”
“These witnesses…” Andrews said.
“Have since been proven spurious. Not that I now believe you were not in the young lady’s company. But that you were delivering her to a third party. The man with whom she and Adelia Blaine were engaged in their ménage à trois.”
The lieutenant blew out a breath. He sagged again.
“But on this day, at the Red Onion, there was no such liaison intended, was there, sir?”
The lieutenant stared at the ground.
“She was taken there for an abortion, was she not? Performed by Madame Lehnort?”
It seemed to my eyes that the lieutenant began to tremble. His fingers, a hand pressed to a trouser leg, tapped against the cloth.
Poe moved a step closer; he laid a hand on the younger man’s shoulder. “I only want to add,” Poe said, “that I understand your actions. You were placed in the untenable position of having to implicate yourself in protection of your future father-in-law.”
Andrews shook his head for a moment, settling into the truth, allowing it, giving up. “My concerns were not for him alone,” he finally said. “How could I not consider Mrs. Hobbs? She is as kind and generous a woman as any you would meet and has been unstinting in her affection for me. But principally…principally my thoughts were of Felicia. Of how the news of her father’s…dalliances? No, the word is insufficiently appalling. How the news of his turpitudes might have affected her.”
“And so you resolved to do his bidding.”
“Had I not, he would have found a way to turn her feelings for me aside.”
“You felt you could not reveal to her what you knew of him?”
“She would have despised me for it and labeled me a liar.”
“As I said: an unten
able position.”
“Well…” said the lieutenant.
“It was Adelia Blaine who exonerated you.”
The lieutenant thought on this a moment. “I never knew her name,” he said. “I was aware that he had enlisted the services of a second young woman awhile back, but Mary was always careful not to reveal her friend’s identity. I doubt that even Hobbs knows her real name.”
“When did you come to know that he was employing two mistresses instead of Mary alone?”
“In the early autumn of last year, he began providing two silver eagles for me to pass on to Mary, rather than the usual one. This continued until a fortnight ago, when Mary returned one of them to me and asked that I return it to its owner. But Hobbs pressed it back into my hand with the admonition that I instruct Mary to do what she could to find it a grateful home.”
“He had grown used to the arrangement.”
“Mary claimed to have no knowledge of where her friend had gone. And she was equally reluctant to enter into a similar arrangement with anyone other than the friend she held so dear.”
“Might I ask how Miss Rogers and Mr. Hobbs first became acquainted?”
“He stopped regularly at the tobacco shop. He had known her for several months, I believe, when one day, when the opportunity arose, she suggested to him that they…that he might…”
“Would it surprise you to learn that Mary was probably instructed by another man to begin this affair?”
“By Jacob Van Rensselaer. No, it would not surprise me now.”
“Is that why Hobbs had her killed? Because she was a spy for his rival?”
“Had her killed?” Andrews said.
“Are you insinuating that he did so himself?”
Now that the truth was out, there was no holding it back. “When we were informed of Mary’s subterfuge…” Andrews began.
“Informed by whom? The Red Onion’s barman?”
“How would you know that?”
“He was the lover of Adelia Blaine. Blaine insinuated to me that she had betrayed her friend. For gold, no doubt.”
“Of course,” Andrews said.
And now Poe kept silent.
On Night's Shore Page 30