by Baird Wells
“Miss Maddox, Doctor Grimshaw has come to tend me,” said Hannah over her shoulder.
“Understood.” Margaret went on poking and drawing her needle.
Hannah narrowed her eyes at him and shook her head. “Miss Maddox, will you go and settle dinner with Mrs. Tilton, please?”
Margaret rose from her seat on a protracted sigh and tossed her needlework into the chair.
He felt tired for both the women, seeing that the dim power struggle he’d witnessed on his first visit was not a rare thing.
When she’d gone out and closed the door, Hannah followed her and locked it, as she had the parlor.
“You tolerate such cheek from your servants?”
“Margaret is not a servant. She is a lady’s companion,” grumbled Hannah. “The natural daughter of Sir Maddox, who washed away her sin with fifty percent of his hired cab fortune.”
“Are you afraid of her?” he asked, when she’d settled again. There was no missing Margaret’s quelling effect.
Hannah tossed a slender shoulder. “No more frightened than one predator is of another.”
It was a strange answer. He waited for her to elaborate, to laugh even, but she shrugged again and was silent.
Giving up, he settled back in his chair. “Tell me about your headaches.”
“I wish that I could. I used to blame them on a change in the season, because I recalled having a particularly severe one in early March. But I’ve never noted a pattern since.”
“Day or night time?” he asked.
“All through the day. I seem to remember them closer to bedtime, but not always.”
“Curious.” Sun and glare, reading, and sewing were known to cause headaches from visual difficulty, but he would expect the pain to come midday. “How is your eyesight?”
“Fair enough.” She laughed. “I can see a stage coming in time to move out of the way. I can read signs and bills from one side of a street to the other.”
“What have you been prescribed for the pain?”
A rough sound grated in her throat. “Rest, as with any and every illness, as though a physician recommending it will somehow make it more effective than my having done it on my own.” Hannah shook her head. “To rest and rest, and some bloodletting. Magnetism, but that was two or three quacks ago. The last one held a séance to rid my house of the spirits which he said must torment my unconscious thoughts.”
He chuckled at her dramatic confession, astounded. “Whose spirits?”
“My husband Gregory.” Her eyes met his, a dark sadness in them, buried deep. “Emily.”
He sat up and leaned in close. “Why would Emily’s spirit be here?” If anything, her spirit should be tormenting him, hovering over his bed at night to remind him of the blood on his hands.
She shrugged. “Why would bleeding me to the point of near collapse treat a years’-long complaint? It doesn’t. It’s just ridiculous and expensive, and believed by enough people to make a few men very wealthy.”
There was no arguing with her perspective. Spring water colored with tart cherries; soda ash blended with sea salt and cloves; oils and liniments concocted from useless and often dangerous ingredients; they all abounded in the world of medicine. Bottles and tins were assured as catch-all remedies, so that one ineffective batch could be sold to scores of passersby. Their broad miracles encouraged even the most tight-fisted housewife to part with a few shillings to soothe her colicky baby, while her neighbor paid up for the same concoction in order to cure insomnia.
“What else troubles you?” he prompted, sure that headaches were not her only symptom.
“Nothing much, generally. I go through low periods and fits of pique, a few days of depressed state now and again. I wouldn’t say its cause is of a medical nature. Likely more…environmental.”
“Then you should change environments,” he said.
Her lips pursed. “Amusing.”
“I’m serious.” A woman like Hannah would have unimaginable opportunities, wealthy and independent. The seashore, Paris, or the French countryside were all on her horizon.
“My struggles follow wherever I go.” She fell back and raised her chin a fraction in a gesture he’d come to know well during their short acquaintance. “Stop evading. Tell me what is wrong with me.”
“You’re something of a mystery,” he admitted, and realized it applied specifically as much as generally. “I think an examination is warranted, and I’d like you to keep a diary. I’ll leave you a list of what things I’d like you to note.
“No dreams,” she said, pulling an exaggerated frown. “I won’t have you analyzing my sleeping mind for symbolism about my father or other such nonsense.” Then she smiled. “I can supply you with plenty of that while I’m awake.”
* * *
At week’s end, when he was more established, James accepted Tad Hamilton’s hints for an invitation and asked him to dinner. Mrs. Fitzgerald supplied a reasonable and bachelor-satisfying three courses followed with a sticky, buttery-crusted fig pie. Tad brought good brandy as a gift to his host, which they opened the moment the table was cleared, and used it to christen James's new lodgings.
When two glasses had made them honest and relaxed, Tad sank his long frame deeper into the embrace of his red velveteen wing-backed chair and grinned. “Sir Simon has designs on you too, now, I take it.”
“Nothing beyond what my profession already entails,” James half-fibbed.
“Hah. That’s how he got me, too.”
James drained his tear-shaped crystal glass and reached to refill it, then considered his new, wobbly-legged sobriety and set his glass on the hearth instead. “Meaning what, exactly?” Like Hannah, Tad spoke sparingly, without revealing what James mist wanted to know. He wondered if it was a side effect of being obligated to Simon.
“He tosses a handful of coins my way now and then. Carrot on a stick, just enough that I keep trudging forward and don’t stop or turn back. Tells me my scheme ‘has merit’, but never tells anyone about it.”
“Tell me about it,” said James, drawn off topic by what exactly Tad was always up to.
“A rail tunnel.” Tad smacked long hands together. “A high terrain tunnel in Colorado.”
“In America? Hm.”
“Inhabitants of a large area can avoid treacherous hauling through the mountain passes. Dangerous terrain like Tin Cup. It’ll be the highest tunnel in the country.” Tad grinned, looking as happy with the prestige as with his proposed engineering marvel. ‘The Alpine Tunnel’. Isn’t that something?”
“And you’re determined to build it?”
“Oh, no. No. My engineering skill is fair, enough to know that the man who is building it knows what he’s about. My role is to give a little advice and a lot of cash.”
James nodded. “Why wouldn’t Simon throw whole handfuls at it?”
“Maybe he does, direct from his own pocket to their hand. He just doesn’t like sending it my way.” Tad scowled. “Anyway, I doubt he invests in it at all. American; New Money. Simon is a purist of the old families and old English industry.”
“Well, here,” said James, getting up and going to a small walnut box atop the mantle. He took out two hundred of the five-hundred pounds retainer and went and pressed it into Tad’s palm, feeling an inebriated amount of pleasure in getting the better of Simon.
Tad colored and tried pressing it back, but James clenched the man’s fingers into a fist around it. “Consider it an investment. Just think of me when you finally make your fortune.”
“It won’t be long!” Tad assured, stuffing the money into his coat. “There’s a lot of trouble with the granite, but the men are shoring it up fine. You won’t regret this.”
Tad’s enthusiasm made him believe, and James dared some vague treason. “Why does Simon take a set against you?” he pried.
“I’m a nobody,” Tad shrugged, refilling his glass. “His daughter, Daisy, was my wife; I think we’ve talked about that.” His eyes dulled and his gaze
was far away, just as he’d looked at Simon’s dinner. James saw a shadow of his own wound, and longed to offer some consolation.
“Did you marry without his blessing?” James wished the moment passed, and wondered if Tad was in a similar purgatory as the one he enjoyed with the Lennoxes.
“That’s just it!” Tad drained half his glass and then cradled it between his palms, spinning it slowly to gather up his tale. “Simon and Evelyn, his first wife, were a disaster. When Evelyn got sick and was bedridden, it was all the encouragement old Webster needed. He took up with a dancer.” Tad smirked “You’ve met her.”
“Irena?” James exclaimed, head aching more than ever at the tangled Webster clan.
“Mmm. Old Simon throwing flowers down on her from the balcony the night poor Evelyn lay on her deathbed.”
It wasn’t rare behavior. Even happily married men withdrew from a dying wife with a desperation which bordered on callousness. Tending patients, he’d seen the lengths a husband would go to for a chance at self-preservation, faced with losing his whole world. He skipped over his own rudimentary efforts. Besides, he could hardly muster up disdain for Simon on that subject alone, when so many men in London had worn it out of him already. There were plenty more areas in which to find fault with his employer, though Tad’s next words made it a little more difficult.
“But Simon loved Daisy. She was his whole world even when things with Evelyn got frosty. So, imagine the pickle in which he found himself, an imprudent marriage to his mistress – his pregnant mistress – and a daughter just coming out into society. Caught between two scandals.”
“Nobody wanted her,” predicted James.
“Daisy? No family worth having, not for all her prettiness or her money. She would have been a blight on the proud branches of their family tree. But I had a little money of my own and my pedigree is gray enough to conceal a blemish.”
Understanding dawned. “He begrudges you.”
“He does. He hates that I was the best he could get but is duty bound to show gratitude that he could get me at all. He leads me behind him with a trail of coins, so that I can’t leave him and he doesn’t have to be alone.”
James refilled his glass now, frustrated that he’d imbibed just enough to be confounded by such a tangle, but little enough that he knew he was frustrated about it. “He has Irena and Elizabeth.”
“Elizabeth is too little to be of any interest. And Irena is too dull. Her sparkle has all worn off, one dressmaker’s bill at a time.”
“And what about Hester?” he blurted.
Tad chuckled and settled deeper in his chair, which James took as an omen. “Do you like her? I do, very much. She makes putting up with Simon rather bearable.”
“Is she a murderer?”
Tad’s laugh was a small explosion. “She’s capable of it.” He sighed. “Hannah has a survival instinct more ironclad than most. Whether she killed Gregory Webster?” He shrugged. “I can’t say. Was she ill-used during her marriage? Absolutely, by Gregory and Simon, and their friends. She suffers Simon’s wrath, and it isn’t always obvious, but she makes him suffer in return.”
“Why doesn’t she just leave?” James demanded, annoyed by Simon’s treatment of Hannah as much as her tolerating it. However much negligence loomed on one side, he found it ridiculous that two people intentionally tolerated their brand of relationship.
“I think she tried. There was a will, of course. But after the scandal of old Gregory’s turning the dirt, Simon managed to get the documents looked at by a friend who was in the law. He has a friend in every place, every type of person in his employ. The body of the document was too solid to be overturned, but Simon did manage a lot of additions to it, insisting that Gregory had stated his intent to rewrite the will.”
“How is that possible?” demanded James. “How is it even legal, to just say you know someone wished a thing to happen?”
“A single word: murder. Any time someone challenged him, Hannah or her solicitor or anybody, Simon just claimed that Gregory’s death had been too sudden and unexpected for him to make the intended changes.”
“What a fantasy land,” muttered James, disgusted by how easily money could buy a man his own reality.
Tad exhaled and relinquished his glass in a finale. “She keeps thirty thousand a year as long as she remains unmarried. And the house in town, the staff, the art, the carriages, and every other bit and bauble. Margaret continues on as lady’s maid, at the pleasure of Simon Webster.”
“Meaning that Hannah can’t dismiss her?”
“It’s not easily done, not under any circumstances; she’s not a servant. Usually it ends when the lady’s mistress marries, which Hannah will never do. But Margaret came in mid-act, and Simon is determined to keep her where she is.”
James got up and paced from the fireplace to the door and back. “Why? Why insist on forcing a relationship neither woman could possibly want?”
Tad followed suit, passed him by and then settled at a polished oak card table beneath the windows, indicating that he wished to do something besides talk. “Oh, Margaret wants it. She withdraws her funds from Simon’s pocket like the rest of us, in quantity. Fine house, lots of grand parties. She’s the eyes and ears of that house, more mistress than Hannah, I’d wager.”
Hannah had made a similar claim, though he hadn’t understood it at the time. Guilt ran over him in a cold douse, that he served the same function as Margaret, and even indirectly was causing Hannah to suffer for it. But no one knew if she was a murderer, no one save Simon’s nameless witness, which stirred him up inside with doubt, all over again. An interpreter of what people did not say, James considered a wondered at everyone’s ease in condemning her.
“Anyway,” said Tad, opening a small drawer on the table top’s edge and fishing out a crisp new deck of cards, “Hannah claimed to me a time or two, at the beginning of it all, that she was the victim. And on that belief, she’s made a whole life of punishing the people she thinks responsible.” He shuffled the deck with a succession of sharp snaps. “I don’t know how she does it, sitting in the middle of the lion’s den night after night, sipping her coffee and giving them all the silent what-for.”
James knew exactly how she did it. Either she was a brazen criminal too rotten in the middle to feel their derision, or she had immunized herself to scorn just as he had with Lord and Lady Lennox. He settled across from Tad. “Considering her parents, the ability doesn’t surprise me.”
Tad snapped up and stopped with a card half-dealt between his fingers. “You know her family?”
“Oh,” he stammered, clawing through a haze of brandy and fatigue to catch his mistake and drag it back. “It’s just, you hear everything in London. Sounds as though her family gave her a head start on the life she leads now.” He regretted lying to Tad and regretted that he couldn’t risk the truth.
“I don’t know much about them; she never says anything. I know they practically took Simon’s side of things when Lord Gregory died. And when all of that was just simmering down, Hannah lost her sister.” Tad frowned over his cards. “She took that very badly. When she came back from settling it, she was in such a state that I thought for sure she’d finally break, that Margaret and Simon and all the rest would wear her through. For a few days, I felt she was set to do herself harm.”
It had never occurred to him that Hannah had suffered after Emily. She had come to Meadowcroft so capable, so in command. A trickle of guilt ran through him at the knowledge that life had not been easy for her, afterward. He’d been so deep in his own misery that he hadn’t thought of anyone else.
“Did she say anything about the time while she was away?” James probed for any sign that he was about to be discovered, and constructed a preemptive confession.
Tad drew a card and made a face that lost him the game. “Not a word. She kept getting up and going out, and just soldiered ahead with determination until it seemed she had come through it. She was quieter from then on, but she neve
r gave up her campaign to discompose them all.”
So many questions. He wanted to know about Hannah when she was first married and what had happened at the end; what ingredients had cooked up her scandalbroth, and who Simon’s clandestine witness might be. But he had to be careful, couldn’t look too eager or pry Tad for details he shouldn’t seek, and he was clearly tipsy enough to blunder. Best to turn back now, dredge some patience, and revisit it another time.
But while they drew and discarded, and particularly when he played the queen of spades, James continued to chew over Hannah with a hungry curiosity.
.
CHAPTER EIGHT
James came to his second appointment with Hannah scuffed by a measure of shame at what a poor job he’d done the first time. He’d kept that visit for his own selfish curiosity, and Simon’s. Today that translated to an overeager brightness when he came into the drawing room, fed by a determination to do things right. After all, he’d stopped practicing owing to his belief that if he couldn’t do things properly, then he wouldn’t do them in the first place.
He set his exam bag in the armchair and looked Hannah over where she reclined on the sofa, marveling at whatever serendipity had colored her in dark hues but, like the sun, made it impossible for him to gaze on her for too long. “How are you feeling today?” he asked, turning away when nothing better came to mind.
“I’m well, thank you.”
He paused with his fingers on the bag’s black leather handle and dared another glimpse, surprised by an answer that contradicted her pinched appearance. “No headache, no complaints?”
“No.” Her fingers strangled the edges of a small moleskin-covered book, its brown rectangle almost bold against her black skirts.
“Your journal?” he asked, pleased she’d followed an instruction that most patients did not.
“Mmhm.” She arranged the little volume just so and pressed her hand over it as though trying to conceal a suspect title.