Death on Beacon Hill

by P. B. Ryan

  Emily propped her elbows on the table, her glass of Madeira cupped lightly in one hand. It was the sort of posture all well-bred girls were exhorted to avoid, yet far from looking vulgar, Emily exuded an aura of graceful insouciance. “We escaped to Italy as soon as we could. Aunt Vera met this Russian lady there who traveled quite a bit, and we more or less threw our lot in with her.”

  “Madame Blavatsky.” Vera might have said, The Holy Mother, so reverent was her tone. “A marvelous lady with marvelous gifts. She’s fairly young, actually—not yet forty—but so wise and enlightened, you might think she’s lived for hundreds of years. Perhaps she has,” Vera added with a private little smile. “It was a remarkable experience, traveling with her.”

  “Remarkable,” Emily muttered into her Madeira. As she lowered the glass, Nell saw her biting back a smile.

  “What kinds of...gifts does she possess?” Viola asked.

  Vera looked around the table, a hectic red stain crawling up her throat.

  “Go ahead, Auntie,” Emily urged. “They can’t be any ruder about it than I am, and they’ll probably be a good deal kinder. Most people are.”

  “H.P.B.’s gifts are—”

  “H.P.B.?” Viola asked.

  “Helena Petrovna Blavatsky,” Vera said in her thin, warbly voice. “It...it’s what we call her, those of us who travel with her. Her gifts are of a...spiritual nature, profoundly spiritual.

  “Ah,” Viola said after absorbing that for a moment. “By ‘spiritual,’ do you mean...?”

  “She performs séances,” Emily said.

  Vera’s blush spread over her face. “Well, yes, there’s that, but—”

  “Real séances?” Harry sat forward, his grin widening. “With people sitting ‘round a circle and ghosts rapping on the table? Does she speak to the dead?” Harry had on one of his signature garish scarves tonight, a swath of Chinese-patterned red-and-gold silk draped with studied negligence over the shoulders of his tailcoat.

  Vera hesitated, her gaze on the plate in front of her, her mouth working as if she couldn’t quite find the words to express what she wanted to say. It seemed to Nell that she wasn’t accustomed to being the center of attention, wasn’t at all comfortable with it, but that she felt an obligation to enlighten her fellow diners on the subject at hand. “H.P.B. does have an...an aura that enables her to commune with, and even possess, the spirits of those who have passed into the dimension we call death. But as an esotericist, she—”

  “Have you seen her talk to the dead?” Harry asked.

  Vera sat back, still staring at her plate. “Yes. And...and she can move objects just by staring at them, and make letters from departed souls appear out of thin air. I’ve seen her make a piano play music.”

  “Good heavens, even I can do that,” Cecilia said with a piercing little giggle.

  “I’ll wager the dead can do it better,” Emily muttered into her glass.

  “I meant w-without...” Vera stammered, “I meant without anyone actually sitting down at—”

  “She knows what you meant,” Emily said. “She thinks she’s being hilarious. H.P.B. believes in... What is it?” she asked Vera. “There’s something she calls it.”

  “Theosophy,” Vera said.

  Emily nodded. “It’s this sort of religion she made up.”

  “She didn’t make it up,” Martin said as he dipped a bite of duck into the currant jelly and lifted it to his mouth.

  Everyone turned to watch him as he chewed and swallowed.

  “She didn’t make up the word,” Martin said. “I learned it in my divinity curriculum at Harvard. Theosophy, it’s...well, it’s sort of when you apply eastern teachings to western theological—”

  “Yes,” Vera said. “Yes! The ancient wisdom, the mystical insight. Karma, the rebirth of the soul into a new human form...”

  “Reincarnation?” Martin asked. “Do you really believe in that?”

  Vera stammered painfully until Emily said, “H.P.B. does. She believes in all that mystic hocus-pocus. Reincarnation, ghostly visitations, communion with the spirit world... Aunt Vera, being more of less a...follower of hers...”

  “Disciple,” Vera corrected.

  Attention refocused on Vera.

  “You, you’d understand if you’d ever met her.” Vera still seemed unable to look her listeners in the eye; her face was a blotchy red now. “She, she’s an amazing lady. She’s experienced things you and I could never conceive of. She’s been known to awaken and find herself...well, someone else entirely. A different person, with a completely different voice, different mannerisms... And she wouldn’t become herself again until someone called her by her real name. I’d never heard of such a phenomenon. She’s truly a gifted soul.”

  Will sat forward. “She displayed two personalities?”

  Vera said, “Yes, but the other one wasn’t really her. It was a departed spirit looking for an earthly shell to inhabit—a human host, if you will. They do that, you know. They miss having bodies, being able to do all the things living people do.”

  Will sat back, ruminating on this.

  Dr. Foster met Will’s gaze with a discerning look, his smile so mild it was almost imperceptible.

  Will smiled back.

  “How extraordinary, Miss Pratt,” said Nell, breaking her silence at last. “Did you and Emily spend the rest of those four years traveling with this Madame Blavatsky?”

  “Yes. Oh, yes. It was the most fantastic adventure.” Vera’s smile was rapturous. “We went everywhere with her. All through the Balkans, Greece, Egypt, Syria, Russia, India, Tibet...”

  “Tibet?” Will said. “It’s devilishly hard to get into Tibet. I know—I’ve tried.”

  Most of Will’s fellow diners, including his parents and brothers, turned to stare at him.

  “We wore disguises,” Vera said. “We were guests in the home of Master Koot Hoomi, and we saw and learned things...well, things I’ll never forget. I’ll never be the same, and I have H.P.B. to thank for it.”

  Winifred, probably bored with the Madame Blavatsky conversation, said, “Emily kept a travel diary. There are notes and sketches from everywhere she visited—churches, galleries... She drew the local flora and fauna, the way people dressed and spoke, the music they played, their bizarre heathen traditions... You should bring it down and show it around later, Emily.”

  “Mother, please,” Emily said.

  “I’d like to see those sketches,” said Viola. “I’m sure Miss Sweeney would, too. She’s quite an accomplished artist in her own right.”

  “Really?” Emily said.

  “Of course,” Winnie said, “what I really wish is that Emily would set aside her sketchbook and her wanderings and start thinking about settling down. And perhaps relearn how to dress.” Winnie let out an edgy little giggle. “She’s spent just a bit too much time among uncivilized peoples, I think.”

  Dr. Foster said, “Oh, I don’t know about that, ma’am. She looks rather appealingly comfortable, if you ask me, and I shouldn’t think there’s anything particularly uncivilized in that.”

  Nell, whose snugly laced corset felt as if it were all but pinching her in two, would have given anything at that moment to be clad in loosely draped silk.

  Winnie emitted another little burst of laughter in response to Dr. Foster’s chivalric defense of her daughter. Nell wanted to throw something at her head.

  “I quite agree,” Will said. “Say, Foster, was it you who wrote that article on pulmonary obstruction in the New England Journal of Medicine a couple of months ago?”

  “It was.”

  “Excellent research,” Will praised, “very well presented. There was a similar piece in The Lancet not too long ago, but I felt you made your points with greater clarity.”

  “You’re too kind.”

  Will, a professional gambler for some five years, still read the medical journals? Judging from his mother’s nonplused expression, she found this news as remarkable as did Nell. The two women ex
changed incredulous little smiles.

  “I was particularly interested in what you had to say about diagnosing drownings during post-mortems,” Will said. “I autopsied a young lady last Autumn whose body had been found in a field, but not only were her lungs waterlogged, they were clogged with bits of algae and water weeds and the like.”

  “Any mucous froth?” Foster asked.

  “Quite a bit,” Will said as he cut into his duck. “The lungs had gone spongy, of course, and—”

  Viola cleared her throat. Will looked her way. She said softly, “Perhaps this is a conversation for another time?”

  Will looked around the table as if it had slipped his mind that he was at a formal dinner party, which it probably had. “My apologies if I’ve ruined anyone’s appetite.”

  “You haven’t ruined mine,” Emily said. “I was finding it quite interesting.”

  “You were probably alone in that sentiment,” Will said. “Some other time, old man,” he told Foster.

  “Looking forward to it.”

  “I’m representing Dr. Foster on the sale of his house,” said Mr. Pratt as he dabbed his mouth with his napkin, having polished off all of his duck save the requisite last bite. “It’s right here on Beacon Hill, just a couple of blocks away. Charming little place, four stories with a verandah and a private garden, brand new kitchen and, er, comfort rooms. If anyone knows of someone looking to buy a home in a lovely neighborhood—”

  “Well,” Winifred said, “it is Acorn Street.”

  Pratt glared at her down the length of the table.

  “I’m just saying people should know that right up front,” Winifred said. “Because Acorn, well...you know... One would be living next door to shopkeepers and the like.”

  Mr. Pratt sighed and motioned to the butler, who had the footmen clear away the duck course.

  “I find Acorn Street quite delightful, actually,” said Viola. “That narrow little cobblestone lane with the lovely brick houses on one side and the garden walls on the other... Reminds me of some of the quainter parts of London.”

  Dr. Foster said, “I like it, too. I wouldn’t be moving if I didn’t need more room for my surgical practice. I’ve built a larger place in the Back Bay. The entire first floor is set aside for examining patients and performing operations.”

  “Whatever the reason, it’s wise of you to trade up to a bigger house in a better neighborhood,” Winifred told Foster. “You’ll attract the more desirable young ladies that way.” She looked toward Emily, who pointedly looked away.

  The footmen returned with the next course—ham mousse and green salad—and the subject under discussion turned to the current Boston real estate market and whether up-to-the-minute amenities made houses that much more attractive. Someone brought up the elevator August Hewitt had installed for his wife, permanently crippled from a bout of infantile paralysis acquired in Europe before the war, thus redirecting the conversation to the advantages and disadvantages of modern innovations. Mr. Hewitt was, for the most part, opposed to them, especially in the home; he never would have considered an elevator had not Will pressed the issue. Will’s having cared enough about his mother’s well being, despite their estrangement, to broach the idea, and Mr. Hewitt’s having actually taken his advice, boded well, Nell thought, for their future as a family.

  * * *

  The subject of conversation among the ladies, once they’d retired to Winifred’s pink and lavender sitting room to allow the gentlemen their cigars and brandy, swiftly homed in on Emily Pratt’s eccentric taste in clothes. Emily’s presence in the room did not deter her mother from characterizing her style of dress as “frumpy,” “ugly,” and “guaranteed to send gentlemen running in the opposite direction.”

  Cecilia, unsurprisingly, took her mother’s side. Viola, familiar with the so-called “aesthetic dress” movement because of her interest in art and things European, came to Emily’s defense. Nell, who remained quietly neutral, wasn’t entirely sure of Vera’s position on the matter, since she couldn’t seem to get a word in edgewise.

  Vera’s poorly fitted satin gown had a ruffle of a slightly different green attached to the bottom, suggesting that it had been restructured—perhaps by Vera herself—to accommodate her height. Recalling what Cecilia had said earlier about her mother wanting her to pass some shawls on to Vera, Nell wondered if the poorly altered gown had at one time been Winifred’s.

  “The thing I really can’t fathom,” Cecilia told her sister as she freshened up her sherry, “is how you can bring yourself to leave the house without a corset on. I’d just as soon walk outside stark naked.”

  “Darling, really,” Winifred huffed as she plucked two chocolate bon bons from the tray in front of her, her inebriation embarrassingly obvious now.

  “Oh, Mamá, don’t be such a priss,” Cecilia chided. “You know what I mean, and you agree with me. Just yesterday you were telling me how proud you were that I’d gotten my waist down to nineteen inches. I’m aiming for seventeen by the wedding,” she told the assembled ladies.

  “Have you and Harry set a date?” Viola asked.

  “We’ll do that as soon as I figure out how long it will take me to lose those two inches,” Cecilia said.

  “Long engagements are best, anyway,” Winifred decreed.

  Vera nodded in agreement. “A year at—”

  “Two,” Winifred said. “A year isn’t enough time for young people to really get acquainted, Vera. You’d know that if you’d ever had a beau.”

  “In two years,” Cecilia mused, “I could get it down to sixteen, maybe less.”

  “Are you sure that’s such a good idea?” Viola asked. “I’ve heard about livers being damaged from tight-lacing.”

  “Oh, the liver.” Winifred said with a flippant little wave. “It doesn’t really do anything. I mean, just look at it the next time you have a piece of it on your plate. It’s just this lump.”

  “Tight-lacing is beneficial to the constitution,” Cecilia said. “It promotes proper posture and stirs the circulation. And no male can resist a tiny waist. No normal male. Frankly, I wouldn’t want anything to do with a gentleman who was drawn to that.” She cocked her head toward her sister’s gown. “I’d wonder if he was, you know...one of them.”

  Emily, who’d fallen silent a while back, pushed herself to her feet with a groan and lifted her glass of sherry. “If you ladies will excuse me,” she said as she turned away, “my intact liver and I are going out back for a smoke.”

  Chapter 8

  After Emily left, Winifred tsk-tsked about her elder daughter’s shocking new habit, for which she blamed Vera. “Where were you when she started smoking cigarettes? I tell you, she’s going to die an old maid, and there doesn’t seem to be a thing I can do about it. She was always a hopeless bluestocking, even when she was little. Bookish, solitary...”

  “Well, yes,” Vera began hesitantly, “but don’t you think she—”

  “I think she’d better smarten up and start following her sister’s example before she’s completely unmarriageable. One spinster is quite enough for any family to have to support, I should think.”

  Vera sat back and looked at her lap, her lips tight, color rushing up her throat like a fast-rising tide.

  “We tried to do right by her,” Winifred lamented while gathering up a fat little handful of bon bons. “She had lessons in dancing and comportment, but none of it seemed to take. When she left for Europe, I thought, ‘Thank God. She’ll be in London for the Spring social season. She might find a husband, maybe even someone with a title.’ But then she and Vera embarked on this absurd odyssey of theirs, and...”

  She shrugged and popped another lump of chocolate into her mouth, chewed it once or twice and swallowed it down, evidently nearly whole. “Now she’s back, even worse than before. Those godawful dresses—if one can even call them that. And she won’t go calling with me, or make friends with the better class of young ladies. Do you know whom she befriended while she was still he
re, working for us? That Fiona Gannon. A chambermaid, and not just any chambermaid—a thief and murderess!”

  Nell shook her head in commiseration, then leaned toward Winifred and whispered, “I say, Mrs. Pratt, would you mind telling me where I might find the necessary?”

  * * *

  Luckily, the bath-room was located at the rear of the house, so Nell didn’t attract any suspicion when she headed in that direction. Instead of going into it, however, she located a pair of French doors and went outside.

  The sun had set while they’d eaten dinner, and there wasn’t much of a moon, so the Pratts’ private courtyard was lit only by a haze of yellow lamplight glowing through the windows and French doors. Emily was lounging in a chair surrounded by potted trees, her bare feet crossed on an ottoman, her glass of sherry in one hand, a cigarette in the other. She raised it to her mouth, its orange-hot tip glowing brighter as she drew on it. On a stream of smoke, she asked, “Are you really a governess?”

  “Yes.”

  Emily gestured toward a nearby chair—cast iron with striped cushions—and scraped the ottoman over so they could share it. Nell sat, kicked off her beaded evening slippers and put her feet up, waving away the silver cigarette case Emily flipped open.

  “Do you like it?” Emily asked. “Being a governess?”

  “I do. I love Gracie as if she were my own. And I’m very fond of Mrs. Hewitt.”

  “I’ve always liked her.” Emily laid her head back, her eyes half-closed, her smile wistful. “When I was little, I used to imagine that she was my mother.”

  Unsure how to ease into the subject, Nell simply said, “After you left, your mother mentioned that you’d been friendly with that maid who’s supposed to have murdered Mrs. Kimball.”

  Emily turned her head to look at Nell. “Supposed to have?”

  “An inquest isn’t a trial. I don’t really consider her convicted. She was the niece of a friend of mine, you see, and—”

  “Brady? The Hewitts’ driver?”

  “Yes.”

  “She spoke of him often. God knows what he must be feeling right now.”