The pearls that matched it were before him now, in this magnificent portrait, in this study of a woman tortured by demons she'd revealed to no one except—surely inadvertently—this gifted artist, this genius with paint and canvas who laid bare people's souls for all the world to see.
For the moment, Ames did not care about this woman's soul. He cared about her pearls. In the portrait, the necklace was whole—not one pearl missing. But of course, even if one had been missing, the artist would have painted it in.
But she would not have worn it if it had not been whole. He did not know her well, but he knew her well enough— her pride, her blazing ambition—to believe that.
So the necklace had been undamaged when this picture was painted—sometime in the past year, without doubt. The pictures at the St. Botolph exhibition were always new ones, straight off the artist's easel.
“Addington?” Professor James had moved on; it was De-lahanty speaking to him again.
He felt a sudden surge of something that was not panic but was very close to it.
“Are you all right, Addington?” Delahanty asked.
He needed to get away—out of this room with its chattering mob and its rising temperature, its smell of too many highly perfumed bodies too close together. He needed to have a little time to sort out the facts that were racketing around in his brain—isolated facts that until an hour ago had made, he'd thought, a logical path to the door of the man he sought.
But he'd been wrong about that. He'd known it when he'd left Longworth; and now he knew it all over again, much more forcefully.
Wrong.
Someone besides Longworth had worked for Colonel Mann—for a long time, perhaps years. Someone who knew many people in Boston Society, and who had the running of the Christmas Revels, with all its attendant opportunities for matchmaking.
And someone, two years ago, had told Colonel Mann about Marian Trask's affair with Winston Sprague. Perhaps had even abetted the affair, as Longworth said.
Had that person been at the Colonel's rooms on Monday night? Yes—almost surely. And she had dropped a pearl from her necklace.
Had the Colonel told her the necklace wasn't payment enough? Not enough for the secret—what could it have been?—that someone had told him about her. And so had she—desperate—killed him?
So she herself had been betrayed to the Colonel. By whom? By Marian Trask, whose affair with Sprague had been revealed to the Colonel?
Mrs. Trask had sought revenge—bitter revenge that must have been deeply pleasurable to her, sweet and soul-satisfying.
But she had paid for it with her life.
One of two people, Mrs. Trask had believed, had betrayed her to Colonel Mann—she hadn't known which.
She'd blackmailed one: Richard Longworth.
Who was the other? Was it this woman—this woman? Knowing of Marian Trask's affair with Winston Sprague, had this woman told the Colonel about it?
On Monday night, had she argued with him? And in the end, had it been she—in panic, in despair—who killed him? Why? Had he known something about her that was so terrible that it caused her to kill him?
Valentine, he thought. Did she know something, too, that might put her in danger?
“Dr. MacKenzie, I need you to do me a service.”
“Yes?” MacKenzie, startled, met Ames's blazing dark eyes.
“I must ask you to go to Val. You know the address? Tell her that I ordered you to take her to Louisburg Square and to stay with her until I come. Your weapon is there? Have it with you, then. She will be expecting her young man shortly, but that cannot be helped. If necessary, she must postpone her interview with him. She must leave Euphemia's house, and she cannot be left alone. You must make her understand that. Can you do that?”
“Of course.”
Delahanty was listening, openmouthed. “What is it, Ames?” he asked. “Have you had some revelation?”
But already Ames was turning away. “Yes, and pray it didn't come too late,” he flung over his shoulder.
“Ames!”
But he was gone, heedless of Delahanty's cry. He pushed his way through the crowd, ignoring the startled exclamations as he went, muttering an excuse here and there, nearly knocking one old gentleman off his pins as he careened into him, escaping into the hall, the lobby, demanding his hat and cloak from the startled porter. Then at last he stood on the front steps and paused, drawing in deep breaths of the cold, foggy air—much colder now, a raw, bitter night—trying to order his thoughts as he waited for MacKenzie to follow him outside. They said a parting word, and then he watched as the doctor hurried away, limping across Arlington Street and into the Public Garden, lost in the fog.
The pearls, he thought. He had seen them at last: the pearls that matched the one he'd seen in Colonel Mann's suite on the night the Colonel was murdered.
And the woman who owned them, the woman who wore them so proudly in her portrait by John Singer Sargent, was the mother of Alice, Val's dearest friend, the woman whose ambition for her daughter knew no bounds, the woman— not the man—with the most to lose.
AT DR. HANNAH BIGELOW'S CLINIC, THE AFTERNOON WAS winding itself down as darkness fell. From her station behind the reception desk, Caroline scanned the half dozen patients still waiting to see Dr. Hannah. If no one else came in, they'd finish in good time for her to be on hand for poor Val after her interview with George Putnam.
She smiled at a woman who had looked up and met her eyes. A humble, impoverished woman, like all of them here, she wore a faded scarf around her head, and her clothing was patched and shabby and none too clean. Many of these women lived in tenements without running water, Caroline knew, and soap, even the cheapest soap, was perhaps, for them, a luxury.
The woman sniffled and then coughed—a deep, wrenching cough that must have hurt her, Caroline thought. Pleurisy, perhaps. Or—far worse—tuberculosis, consumption, the White Plague, as it was known. The women here suffered everything: consumption, broken bones, cancers, female disorders of all kinds, complications of pregnancy, complications of self-mutilation, botched attempts to rid themselves of a pregnancy—another mouth to feed—that they could not afford.
And not for the first time, Caroline thought, how can I say “poor Val,” when here before me are women who are truly poor? Who will never know the life Val has had—and, for that matter, I have had as well? Yes, we've had to watch our pennies, Addington and I, but we have never known the hardship these women face, and probably we never will.
Nevertheless. Poor Val. Who had said that she met the young man of the letters—the young man who had, indirectly, caused all this trouble—at the Christmas Revels.
A photograph of which—jolly, laughing faces—Caroline had unearthed earlier that afternoon.
The outer door opened, letting in a draft of cold, damp air. The women sitting on benches around the room looked up briefly, expecting to see someone like themselves. When they did not—when they saw that the person coming in was as different from them as if she had come from another world, as indeed she had—they stared at her. They could not help it.
She was a slight, delicate young woman dressed in the height of fashion in a brown tweed walking skirt and matching jacket. Peeping beneath the hem of her skirt were dark-brown morocco shoes; perched on her pale blond hair was a pert little brown hat decorated with a pair of barred bronze-and-black feathers. Above the high, lace-trimmed collar of her white shirtwaist, her face was as pale as the fabric itself. She stood in the doorway as if she could not quite believe where she was. Slowly she gazed around the room, taking in its bleakness, its barrenness, the benches occupied by the impoverished women come to seek Dr. Hannah's charity. It was painfully obvious that she had never been in such a place before, and for a moment she seemed tensed to flee, as if she could not bear to seek the help that she must desperately need, or she would not have come here at all.
And then at last her frightened eyes met Caroline's.
“Why, hello,” Carol
ine said after a moment, knowing her shock must be plain to see. She forced a smile as she thought, but did not say, Does your mother know you're here?
DARKNESS NOW, AND FOG SO THICK HE COULD NOT SEE across Arlington Street. He searched for a herdic, but he could not distinguish one in the dark mass of slowly moving shapes. In the traffic's near standstill, drivers were shouting in frustration, and here and there a horse reared up, panicked at being so tightly hemmed in.
On foot, then. Safer in any case, in this blinding miasma of the elements.
He could see no way clear, but he thrust himself in, ducking under the flailing hooves, ignoring a driver's angry imprecations, darting out of the way of a brougham trying to back up.
Safe across, he plunged into the Public Garden. It was dangerous at night, footpads and thugs awaiting their prey, but he had no time to take the longer way around.
He went swiftly, and soon he was at a half-run. Danger here, too, of colliding with another pedestrian, but he had no choice; he could not walk at a normal pace, not now, not when he carried in his mind's eye the image of that woman in her pearls, her ostentatious, probably heirloom pearls. Did she even know that on Monday evening last, in the Colonel's suite, she had dropped one of them on his garish carpet?
Or had she been too frantic to escape, too appalled at what had happened there in that overheated room, the Colonel dead on the floor and by her hand? Almost certainly by her hand.
Had she given the necklace to the Colonel earlier—days or weeks before, and had she gone there that night to reclaim it?
Or had she taken it to him that night—in lieu of payment, perhaps, an offering to deflect his malice, his greed, his threats to expose her?
For what? What had she done to put her so fatally into the Colonel's power?
He—or she—who has the most to lose.
What did she have to lose? Not her own position, surely, but her daughter's. Yes—Alice was her Achilles heel, her vulnerability. It was—it must have been—for Alice that she had paid the Colonel what he demanded, if not a sum of money, then a priceless pearl necklace.
Across the miniature suspension bridge, its globe lamps blurred and dim; across Charles Street and into the Common, darker even than the Garden, its long, straight paths obscured in the fog, danger lurking here, too, but no matter. He strode on, his long legs eating up the distance. Agonizing moments before he could cross Tremont Street, but then he was on his way down to Washington, past Eben Jordan's store, people making way for him, a tall figure of a man in a trilby and flowing cape, coming at them from out of the fog and quickly vanishing again like some phantom from their dreams, their nightmares.
By the time he came to Longworth's building, his heart was pounding in his ears, and despite the raw cold, he was drenched in perspiration. He paused, one hand on the wall of signboards, to catch his breath before he went in and climbed the stairs.
The place was dim and deserted as it had been before, no one about, the offices empty until Monday morning. He strode down the long, echoing corridor and came to the door he sought. Dark here, too, no one inside—and yet the door opened when he tried it.
He went in. The reception room was in shadow, the inner office beyond its partly opened door more shadowed still.
“Longworth?” He spoke in a low tone, but still, his voice sounded alarmingly loud in the silence.
No answer.
Go in, he thought, and speak to him. Despite the silence, his every instinct told him that Longworth was in that inner room, waiting for him, perhaps, and now at last prepared to tell him what he needed to know.
“Longworth? Are you there?”
Silence.
He did not want to open wider that inner door. He wanted to hear Longworth—miserable chap, sitting alone in darkness, contemplating the ruin of his life—to hear Long-worth reply before he did so.
He stood motionless in the little reception room of what had been the firm of Longworth & Sprague, poor Sprague, dead in London after a most unsatisfactory affair with Marian Trask….
Who had been betrayed to Colonel Mann…
Whose husband, as a consequence, had paid the Colonel ten thousand dollars…
Who had found Harry Morgan in flagrante… with whom? Who was that girl of good family whom Mrs. Trask had seen with him?
And Mrs. Trask had learned of Longworth's bigamy and had tried to blackmail him for it….
And, like the Colonel, had been silenced forever….
How did it all fit together?
Longworth knew. Longworth could tell him, he was sure.
He tried one last time. “Longworth?” He put his hand on the wooden panel and pushed.
The door opened.
From what he could see, the room was empty of any human presence. Desk, chairs, bookcases—but no Long-worth.
But it was dark, hard to be sure. He felt very strongly that he did not want to go in, but he did so all the same.
In the darkness, he knocked into a chair, stumbled, and caught himself. “Longworth? Are you here?”
Silence. And yet—someone was here. He knew it, he could feel it even as his flesh began to crawl, even as his heart, which had momentarily quieted, began again to beat in a fast, frightening thump-thump that nearly suffocated him.
Something caught at the corner of his vision.
Something—some dark thing, a solid blot of darkness in the dark, shadowy room.
It swayed a little, and it was that movement that his peripheral vision had registered.
He stood quite still. He did not want to turn to see it fully, and yet he knew that he must, for he felt—he knew— that it waited for him.
There was a human presence in the room, just as he'd feared; or, at least, a presence that had been human not long before. It was human no longer now, and he knew that, knew it even as at last, reluctantly, his heart in his throat, his sight piercing the gloom, he turned to face it.
Dangling from a rope attached to an overhead heating pipe was Richard Longworth's lifeless body.
IN EUPHEMIA'S PARLOR, VALENTINE SAT ON A SMALL VEL vet chair before the crackling fire and went over again in her mind the speech she planned to make to George when he arrived.
She'd had all day to compose it, and now, in the late afternoon, she felt that she knew it perfectly. It was a good speech: not too long, not too bitter, with just the right amount of condescension to let George know that she considered him to be the loser in this affair. He was going to lose her, wasn't he? That was the way she wanted to think of it: not that she would lose him, but that he would lose her— and, she hoped, spend the rest of his life regretting that loss. Regretting that he had been so weak—there was no other word for it—as to mind his mother's objections to her, now that she was connected, however peripherally, to Adding-ton's scandal.
But really it is my scandal, she thought. Mrs. Putnam, you don't know the half of it.
She lifted her chin in an unconscious gesture of defiance. All week, ever since Tuesday morning when Addington's name had appeared in the newspapers, she had known in her heart that this moment would come—the moment when George, to pacify his mama, would break their engagement. Until today, she had not been able to fully face that fact, but now, at last, she had. George was lost to her. He was coming to tell her that—would be here, in fact, at any moment. But she was going to tell him first; for the rest of her life, she would have that small satisfaction—that she had spoken before he did. It would be she who broke off with him and not the other, more humiliating, way around. And when she did—
The door knocker sounded. Through the closed parlor doors, she heard the butler going to answer. She took a deep breath—as deep as her corset would allow, at any rate, which was not very.
The doors slid open; the butler held out to her a silver tray bearing George's card. She told him to show George in. She stood very straight, pulling herself up to her full height, her shoulders well back, as she waited before the fireplace.
George cam
e in pink-faced but solemn, and he was hardly in the room with the doors pulled shut behind him before he began to stammer out what it was he had to say.
“Valentine, I—”
She stopped him with a grave look that matched his own; she did not hold out her hands to him as she usually did, but stayed quite still.
“I know why you've come, George. But I want to say it first.”
“But, Valentine, I want you to—I mean, it is important that you understand. That is to say, I don't want—”
“Please, George. Don't try to explain.” Ordinarily, having greeted him, she would have offered him her cheek for a chaste kiss, but she did not do so now.
“Valentine, I must explain—”
“No. It is not necessary.” Strange, she thought, how cool she felt, how absolutely in control, and oddly outside of herself, too, so that she seemed to be watching herself as she spoke, watching as the two of them stood awkwardly together and yet so far apart, separated now by a chasm of ancient, iron-clad social custom.
“You have come to break our engagement,” she said. So cool, chilly almost—and that was good, she thought. I mustn't let him see what I feel.
His mouth dropped open, making him look foolish. Valentine was seized by a sudden desire to laugh, but she repressed it.
“Very well,” she went on. “Let us break it.” She slid his ring from her finger and held it out to him.
“Oh, no,” he said quickly. “You keep it, Valentine. It was meant for you—”
“No,” she said. “I don't want it.” When he did not move to accept it, she reached out and took his hand and pressed the ring into it, closing his fingers tightly around it.
“As you wish.” His face, pink at first from the cold, was pink still, and she realized that he was blushing. With, she hoped, embarrassment.
“Be sure to tell your mother that I gave it back,” she said as lightly, as pleasantly, as she could.
“I say, Valentine, this is very decent—”
The DEATH OF COLONEL MANN Page 26