by P. B. Ryan
“Lovely evening for a walk.” Foster said, but his smile looked forced.
“It is,” Will said, “and I wish I could say that’s why we came here, but unfortunately that’s not the case.”
Turning to Emily, Nell said, “Miss Pratt, do you remember my mentioning Fiona Gannon’s uncle, Brady, and how he’s convinced his niece didn’t kill Virginia Kimball?”
Emily nodded, her expression guarded.
“It turns out Mrs. Kimball was killed with a high caliber revolver that fires metal cartridges—a gun like your father’s Lefaucheux.”
Emily’s eyes widened slightly. She looked toward Dr. Foster.
“Perhaps,” Will told her, “you’d feel more comfortable discussing this with just Nell and I.”
“That isn’t necessary,” Emily said. “I...I’ve just told Isaac...Dr. Foster everything. There’s n-nothing he doesn’t know.” Her chin quivered; her eyes brimmed with tears as she lowered her face into her hands.
Foster sat next to her and rested a hand on her back. “Is this necessary? You can see how upset she is.”
“I’m afraid,” Will said, “that it’s either us or the police. Miss Pratt, I know you’re distraught, but if you tell us what happened, and why, perhaps...perhaps we can get you the legal help and...other help you might need.”
“L-legal help?” she rasped.
Foster said, “Do you think it will come to that? I can’t imagine her father pressing charges.”
Nell and Will exchanged a look.
“Why don’t you tell us what you’ve just told Dr. Foster, from the beginning?” Nell suggested. “How did the subject of the gun come up?”
“We...we’d been talking for qu-quite a while.” Emily glanced at Foster, who gave her a little smile. “And I...I felt it only right to tell him that I’d be resuming my travels at the end of this month. He, um...I don’t remember exactly what he said, but—”
“I said it was my understanding that her father had cut her off,” Foster said, “and I wondered aloud how she proposed to fund such a trip. A rather rude inquiry, I suppose, but faced with the prospect of losing Miss Pratt’s company just when I’d gotten to know her, I felt justified in making it.”
“I b-blurted out the truth,” Emily said. “About w-watching my father pass that gun around at the ball and, and thinking about the money he paid for it. My God, twelve thousand dollars... Aunt Vera and I could have spent years overseas with that kind of money. She told me what he’s budgeted for Cecilia’s wedding.”
“Vera did?” Nell asked.
Emily nodded, the handkerchief clutched tight in her fist. “Ten thousand dollars. Plus another five for the gown, and eighty thousand to build that grotesque chateau. Yet he begrudged me a few spare thousand to travel with, which meant I was left with two choices—marital enslavement to some man, or a life sentence of spinsterhood under their roof, like poor Vera.”
Emily fumbled in her reticule for her cigarette case.
“Not another one,” Foster sighed.
“Under the circumstances,” Will said as he produced a match and lit it, “perhaps we can save the reprimands for a more suitable time.”
Watching Will lean forward to light Emily’s cigarette, Nell realized she hadn’t seen him smoke since that morning, in Isaac Foster’s back garden.
Emily’s cigarette trembled as she drew on it. “I confess, I got pretty worked up, watching him show off that damned gun. Vera kept bringing me brandies to calm me down. She said, ‘Now, don’t be getting any ideas,’ but the tipsier I got, the more...ideas I seemed to get. Finally I just...” She shook her head helplessly. “I just did it. I got my hands on it, hid it in the folds of my dress and took it upstairs to my room. It was the queerest thing, almost as if I were watching someone else do it. I woke up at noon the next day with a deuce of a morning head, appalled at what I’d done. By then, my father was on a tirade about the missing gun. I went to him to make a full confession, but he started bellowing about me being just another problem to deal with, and why couldn’t I be more like Cecilia. He’d already started drinking, and he said some things...called me some things...things he had no business calling me. So I just turned around and went back upstairs and tucked the gun away under my mattress.”
Nell said, “And that evening you followed him to Mrs. Kimball’s.”
Emily nodded as she expelled a cloud of smoke. “I felt so guilty, listening to him accuse her of taking the gun. I’d half convinced myself to give it back, but later that night, Vera and I were talking over a bottle of sherry, and she told me some things about my father...how he’s always had mistresses, even when he and my mother were first married, and how he cheats his clients out of money—as if he needed any more! This was the same man who’d lectured me since birth about propriety and responsibility, who continues to insist that I give up everything I love to become a proper, insipid little Brahmin matron. His hypocrisy sickened me.”
“So you decided to sell the gun,” Nell said.
Emily nodded as she tapped her ash onto the ground. “I brought it to a master gunsmith with a good reputation. He told me it wasn’t Stonewall Jackson’s gun at all. It was virtually worthless. I told Aunt Vera I should give it back to him, but let everyone know it was a fake, just to embarrass him. But then she said something. She said, ‘Too bad for Mrs. Kimball that she doesn’t have the gun. Orville would pay her just to get it back, and more than a measly five-hundred, too.’ She just said it in passing, but it got me thinking.”
“Yes, I imagine it would,” Nell murmured.
“I stayed up all night thinking about it,” Emily said. “The next day, I told Fiona that Mrs. Kimball’s maid had quit, and perhaps she should offer herself as a replacement. I told her about the blackmail. I said if she got the job, and if she was willing to handle that end of things, as Clara had, she could save a great deal of money for her shop.”
“She didn’t know at the time about your plan to sell your father back his Lefaucheux?” Nell asked. She knew the answer, but she wanted to hear it from Emily.
Emily shook her head. “I thought it would scare her off. As a matter of fact, she was fairly balky a couple of weeks later, when I suggested it, but she wanted that shop so badly that she finally agreed. I didn’t want to send a note, because I wasn’t sure I could duplicate Mrs. Kimball’s handwriting well enough, so Fiona went directly to my father and laid out the deal. He paid up the next day. Fiona and I split the money.”
“And the first thing you did,” Nell said, “was book passage for Liverpool.”
“That very afternoon,” Emily said.
“Vera didn’t mind not being included?” Nell asked.
“Mind?” Emily said on a burst of incredulous laughter. “She went mad when she ran across that ticket and realized what it meant—I mean completely out of her wits. She was shrieking, sobbing... I half expected foam to come spewing out of her mouth.”
Nell and Will stared at each other. This didn’t sound much like Vera’s account.
“I’d never seen her fly off the handle like that.” Emily shook her head as she crushed her cigarette underfoot. “I didn’t know she had it in her. Part of me was actually impressed. Finally, a strong human emotion from docile little Vera Pratt. But it was also pretty unnerving. She was screaming things about Fiona and me...things I’d never thought to hear out of her mouth. She was incensed that we were ‘hogging all the money.’ She said she thought we’d had an understanding.”
“You offered her part of your money?” Nell asked.
“A great deal of it, actually, but she said it wasn’t enough to finance her travels with H.P.B. She said she’d been forced by virtue of being a portionless old maid to live under her brother’s thumb as if she were a child, and she knew we all thought she was naïve and gullible, but that she was a lot smarter than she let on. She said H.P.B. was the only one who realized that, who took her seriously and respected her as a person. I calmed her down eventually. Regardless of what
she may think about herself, she’s really pretty malleable.”
Nell and Will mulled that over to the silvery rushing of the fountain.
“Are you all right, Emily?” Foster asked softly.
She nodded. “It’s just...I’m not used to feeling ashamed.” She sniffed, and wiped her nose with the handkerchief. “As much as I needed that money, and as justified as I felt, doing the things I did...it doesn’t feel remotely as if it was worth it. I used to take such pride in having principles and ideals. Now...”
“Now you’ve had a taste of humility,” Foster said with a smile. “You’ll be an even better person for it, believe me.”
She gave him a watery little smile in return.
Will said, “May I ask you, Miss Pratt, why you didn’t return the Lefaucheux to your father once he’d paid the five thousand?”
“I wanted to, but I couldn’t,” she said. “When I went to fetch it from under my mattress the next morning, it was gone. I suspected it had been pinched by the chambermaid who does my room—I can’t bear her, and the feeling is mutual—but there was no way I could question her about it without giving away the fact that I’d had the gun. Vera and I tore my room apart, and then the rest of the house, but it was as if it had disappeared into thin air. That day went by, and then the next, and the next. I’d never seen my father so out of sorts. I knew why, of course. He thought Mrs. Kimball had taken his five thousand dollars but kept the gun. Then he showed up with that black eye, and I just knew it had something to do with this mess.”
“When did he get the gun back?” Nell said, curious as to Emily’s take on it.
“The day of the funeral. But he already knew it was a fake, and that I was the one who’d taken it. The day before, he told me the gunsmith I’d spoken to had been at the inquest and told him everything. He said I’d cost him five thousand dollars, over and above the original twelve he’d spent on the gun. I pretended not to know what he was talking about—I told him I’d just taken it to vex him. Do you know what he plans to do? He’s going to make back that five thousand, plus a little more for ‘mental anguish,’ by skimming it from Mrs. Kimball’s estate after he sells her house. He called me a liar when I said I hadn’t seen the gun for five days, but he didn’t care about getting it back at that point. He said it was worthless—almost as worthless as I—” Emily’s voice broke; her shoulders shook.
Foster wrapped an arm around her, whispered something in her ear. She nodded, blotting her eyes with the damp handkerchief. Will handed her a fresh one. She mumbled her thanks.
Still embracing Emily, Foster said, “This is where the tale takes a bit of a strange turn. The next day, after the funeral, Mr. Pratt showed Emily the gun and said he’d found it in her room.”
“I t-told him he couldn’t possibly have,” Emily said, “because it had disappeared from there almost a week before, but that only infuriated him. H-he said he’d found it under my mattress, but how could he have?”
“He didn’t,” Will said. “He got it from your aunt Vera. She told him she’d taken it from your room.”
Emily gaped at him. “That’s impossible. Why would she have said a thing like that?”
Nell said, “We’re just telling you what she told us she said. She asked him not to let you know she was the one who’d returned it to him.”
Emily shook her head with an expression of dazed confusion. “But it wasn’t in my room. It wasn’t. It hadn’t been in my room for almost a week. Where would she have gotten it?”
“Perhaps,” Will said, “she’d had it the entire time.”
* * *
“Aunt Vera?” Emily knocked a third time on the door of her aunt’s bedroom; still no answer.
“She’s probably still out back,” Will said, “summoning the dead.”
Foster grabbed Emily’s hand as she reached for the doorknob. “Let the men go first.”
“He’s right,” Will said. “Why don’t you and Nell stay back till we’ve had a look?”
Foster cracked the door open, paused, opened it further. He and Will stepped into the room; a few seconds later, they gestured for the ladies to enter.
It was a small room, humbly furnished in relation to the rest of the house. The bed was narrow, the rug small, the walls bare. In front of the single window stood a writing desk, on which an oil lamp illuminated a scattering of books and papers. Everything had a uniform, colorless look to it, almost as if it they’d entered a pencil sketch of a modest little bedroom rather than the real thing.
Nell’s gaze was drawn to the only spot of color in the entire room: a thick red book lying open and facedown on the desk.
Chapter 16
“I see it,” Will said as Nell extended her hand to point.
He got to the desk first and lifted the book, using his thumb to mark Vera’s place. It was bound in crimson snakeskin, its pages densely inked on both sides with minuscule handwriting. Some of the ink had seeped through the tissue-thin, finely ruled pages, but not badly enough to obscure what was written there. Virginia Kimball’s penmanship was neat and unhurried.
Emily said, “I remember my father saying something to Mrs. Kimball about ‘the Red Book.’”
“This would appear to be it,” Foster said. “It’s a recounting of her...relations with men.” After a moment, he added, “She’ll have written about me in there.”
Emily looked at him. He held her gaze, looking not so much embarrassed as worried as to how she would take this revelation.
Presently she nodded, her expression relaxing into a near-smile. “Thank you for telling me.”
Will opened the book to the place Vera had saved; Nell read along with him:
Nov. 21st, 1868
It took me half an hour to get Orville laced up into my pink satin corset this afternoon, the new one with the black lace trim. There was a ten inch gap in back, and the front view was even more ludicrous, of course, but he didn’t care. He thought he was beautiful. He always does. His self-delusion would seem pathetic if it weren’t born of such arrogance. Hell, it seems pathetic anyway. It’s all I can do, once he’s got on the stockings and the jewelry and the face paint, not to howl with laughter.
Skinning his rabbit when he gets himself tricked out that way takes all my self-control. I close my eyes and imagine I’m someplace else with some other man, someone who can inspire some semblance of passion from me—that simpleminded young Adonis who drives the ice cart, or Tommy Kimball in that barn loft where he took my maidenhead while begging me to marry him, or my old standby, Doc, who makes love with feverish passion and exquisite tenderness every time...for such is the advantage of a lover one has only ever enjoyed in one’s imagination....
Will closed the book, his eyes shadowed.
“I saw my father’s name on that page,” Emily said. “May I read it?”
Will glanced at Nell, who gave him an almost imperceptible shake of the head. “There’s really no point to it, Miss Pratt,” he said. “Suffice it to say she had ample ammunition for blackmail.”
“And not just against your father,” Nell said. There was a list of men’s names on the desk, with dates and scribbled comments next to them. She turned it around so she could read it. “Your name is on here, Dr. Foster, and Mr. Pratt’s, and...oh, my. These must be the men Mrs. Kimball wrote about in the Red Book, but this isn’t her handwriting.”
Emily, reading over Nell’s shoulder, said, “It’s Aunt Vera’s. She must have read the whole book and taken notes.”
“Listen to this.” Foster, who’d been sorting through the papers on Vera’s desk, showed them a letter bearing that day’s date. “It’s to Helena Blavatsky. ‘My dearest guru, priestess, and friend of the heart,’” he read. “‘Soon, very soon, I shall be able, at last, to rejoin you in your journeys—by which I mean, of course, not just your travels around the globe, but your explorations of the mind and the spirit. The pecuniary limitations which have thwarted me thus far shall soon be vanquished. And you will be pleased to know t
hat I am progressing in my quest to coax a departed spirit into this earthly plane. Recent events seem to have focused my abilities in this area, to the point that I feel as if I am on the verge of a glorious assimilation not unlike that which you yourself have experienced.’” Foster scanned the rest of the letter. “There’s more. It’s all pretty much in the same vein.”
“Vera’s been busy.” Nell picked up a letter with Mrs. Virginia Kimball embossed across the top in crimson. It had been folded at one time to make an envelope, and sealed with crimson wax. “This is a blackmail letter from Mrs. Kimball to Mr. Pratt, dated March twenty-fifth. My guess is that Vera got this from her brother’s study. It looks as if she was using it as an exemplar to teach herself to copy Mrs. Kimball’s handwriting.” Nell pointed to several sheets of paper on which Vera had practiced, over and over, Mrs. Kimball’s signature and various snippets from the blackmail letter.
Finally, there was a half-finished letter Vera was composing to “Orville” on Mrs. Kimball’s writing paper, and in the late actress’s hand, demanding three thousand dollars within two days “or I will share your most entertaining performances from the Red Book, complete with costume changes, with your wife, your clients, every member of the Somerset Club, your friends, your business associates, in other words, everyone in your world who matters. Do not call my bluff, as you did the first time. I swear to God, if I don’t have that money in my hands the day after tomorrow, you will be a ruined man.”
“This makes no sense,” Foster said. “How could Vera think Mr. Pratt would take a letter like this seriously? Virginia Kimball is dead.”
“Relatively speaking.” It was a female voice, throaty and seasoned with a hint of a genteel southern accent.
They turned to find Vera Pratt standing in the doorway wearing an open silk wrapper over a matching nightgown, her hair cascading over her shoulders, a stemmed cordial glass in her hand. The glass held a ruby-colored drink with a cherry in it; even from ten feet away, Nell could smell the sweet red vermouth and gin. It was a Martinez cocktail.