by Baird Wells
James gave up any pretense, flexed his fingers twice and folded his arms. “And so you’ve found him. How shall we proceed?” He’d always been tall, keen to spend his days climbing trees or scaling the low slopes along the river. He’d also been a quiet boy, and that had made him a bully’s target more than once, but never more than once with the same person. His hands were intended to treat patients; that didn’t mean they weren’t skilled at a less noble practice. He stared down both men until he caught an uncomfortable rustle of their coats, a subtle shift of their shoulders. They weren’t used to a man they couldn’t outright bully, and he enjoyed a fleeting breath of satisfaction.
“Sir Simon has a want of ya’, directly,” said the tall one, smoothing a wiry mustache that wouldn’t be married to his lip.
“I’ll see him in the morning. I’m engaged just now.”
He turned away, but a hand snatched his coat, and the short man snapped him back. “He’s askin’ for you now. We’re to take you along.”
“No.”
“We managed the lady into the carriage, and she was a real fighter. So you just come along with us now, eh?”
“In the morning.” James grinned and popped his sleeve free from rigid fingers. “I can find his direction without the help of you gentleman.”
“You’re not to go to his residence. He’s been called around to Lady Hannah Webster’s, and he says to make it urgent.”
Called to Hannah’s; that would mean Margaret. He chilled inside, colder than the December air gnawing him on the outside. He took a long breath of its chill in his lungs, calming himself. This wouldn’t be like the flight from Quarrendon; he would think, do things properly. “Urgent? Then we should be off.” James grabbed his coat, shut the door, and followed them down the walk, and up the street to a smart black landau that must have belonged to Simon.
They made the short trip in silence, Simon’s apes staring him down with arms crossed. They could be the last people he ever saw. Clever, using Hannah as bait to lure him, because he could never, ever resist it. They wouldn’t kill him before the carriage stopped, so he ignored them for the moment. They weren’t going to do anything their employer hadn’t ordered, and apparently, Simon wanted one more blow. Rather than panic, he used the time to think, to contemplate what Margaret had done and how dire it might be.
He didn’t wait when the carriage lurched to a stop, bounding down ahead of the thugs, though as far as he could tell they didn’t try to follow. He took long breaths and intentional strides, resisting the memory of Quarrendon, the dash into his house and hysterical shapes wandering at the edges of his desperate blur. He braced himself and opened the door without knocking, relieved when no screams welcomed him in the hall. He took the staircase and no Doctor Harter bellowed down. The hallway to Hannah’s room was dark, but her open door spilled light like a beacon.
He spied Margaret first, hugging herself in front of the wardrobe, lace curtains billowing like ghosts at her back. Her pale face was stark, and when he stepped into the room, James saw that she faced off against Simon, who held his place beside the door. Whatever lay between them on the rug was wrapped in a sheet and utterly still. A bloody candlestick punctuated the scene. James’s heart squeezed and he couldn’t breathe.
He glanced from Simon, who ground his teeth and looked on the verge of frustrated tears, to Margaret, who stared ahead but not, he was convinced, at Simon. “What has happened?” he demanded, rushing to the bundle and falling to his knees.
“I gave her too much of the powder you left behind,” muttered Margaret, beginning to rock.
“You’re lying. That’s not all that you’ve done!” he shouted. “What else have you given her, to get her this way?”
“Several things.” Margaret’s words were as dead as her heart.
“You can’t…” He shook his head, lips trembling and thoughts a jumble. Chastising Margaret and trying to decipher what she’d given, the effects of one substance against another...they swirled between his anguish. James couldn’t think beyond his rote doctor’s lines. “You cannot do that! It’s fatal.”
“I know,” she managed through trembling lips. “I did it on purpose.”
He had seen this moment. He and Hannah had feared for days that it would come and had been sure of outwitting it. They should never have waited. He fell to his knees and reached for the sheet with a shaking hand, bracing and flipping it back. What he’d prepared for was not what greeted him. Hannah’s flesh was cool when he cupped her face, but it blanched and blushed beneath his touch just as it ought to. Blood smeared her forehead and clotted in her hair, thick between dark strands that parted to reveal white scalp, but no wound. James dropped her back to the floor harder than he’d meant to, before Simon got a look. Hannah didn’t stir, and he jerked the sheet to cover her again. “You’ve both got your wish,” he choked out. She’s gone.”
Simon’s fist jarred the wall. “Now I will never have my proof! Never see justice!” He struck the wall again and shook a fist at Margaret. “I was clear with my instructions.”
“I wanted to be free,” Margaret muttered, still rocking. “I just wanted to be free.”
James couldn’t tell if she was speaking of Simon, or Hannah. “Why are all the windows open?” he said, shivering at a gust that whipped the curtains.
“I broke them.” Margaret unwrapped her hands from her trunk and held them up so that James could see the blood painting her hands and staining the underarms of her gray dress. “I thought she would go faster that way, once I’d struck her a few times.”
He was terrified at the flat line of her words, and so confused. “You broke them?”
Something flickered in Margaret’s eyes, just for a moment. “They were nailed shut.”
“Nailed…” James raked his hair and cast glances between Simon and Margaret, and wondered if they were already in the asylum. Something was transpiring here, hazy and just beyond his understanding, like a dream fading away from the waking world. James wondered if he was finally cracking.
“That was hours ago,” Margaret said quickly when he leaned over Hannah again. “Hours since I broke them with the candlestick. She’s been dead for some time.”
He snapped his gaze to Margaret, followed her eyes to a tea tray on the bed, where his lost medicine sat, white powder not measurably lower than when he’d left it in the room for Margaret to find. It wouldn’t matter if it had been. Despite the label, ‘Heroin Hydrochloride’, it still contained nothing more exciting than the soda he’d filled it with. Hannah also knew not to drink anything Margaret offered her, not with such obvious danger in plain sight. He considered Margaret’s thin frame and struggled to make it possible that Margaret had overpowered Hannah, and then wondered at Margaret’s leaving the bottle where Simon could see it. He ached with fear and nerves, and frustration at so many questions but no answers.
Each second ticked by as an hour while he tried to decode Margaret’s words and face. Then, with Simon still looming behind him, he buried his face in his sleeve and gave a few sobs for his own confusion, and for the benefit of everyone present.
“Goddamit,” Simon bit in reply. “This wasn’t supposed to happen yet! Now I must contend with Charlton, the bastard, and that weeping ninny Harriette, in order to get my due.” He shook both hands at Margaret. “I should send for the police, and see you hanged.”
“And tell them what? The same sorts of things I might tell them about you?”
James went on rubbing his eyes while they exchanged fire, listening but pretending otherwise. Something about Margaret just wasn’t right, and not in her usual fashion. For no particular reason, he recalled her suffrage pin balled into her handkerchief, hidden from Simon, but was stumped for a conclusion.
“You are finished in London. The house is closed to you, money all dried up. You may take your clothes and get out.”
“You can keep the clothes. I’ll be on my way to Mister Hilton’s.”
“I wouldn’t,” Simon crowe
d. “Rowley and Grimes have already been to see him, to explain to him that you might be in a situation which prevents his paying you further attentions.”
Her eyes blazed. “You are Lucifer himself.”
“Impossible! Even Lucifer commands some obedience. Take what you can, excepting the jewels Gregory gave you, and leave town. If you’re as smart as you are clever, you’ll be gone by morning. If you have real sense, you’ll stay gone. I’ll make London to you what Sunday service to a whore, should you set foot here again.”
James heard the enraged click of her heels on the wood, an inflamed pounding across the rug, and Margaret was gone.
“This is as much your fault as hers,” said Simon, coming close. “I expressly ordered you to dose the medicine, not Miss Maddox.” He jabbed at Hannah’s bundled thigh with his shoe, and when that didn’t seem to satisfy his rage, bent and grabbed the sheet. James swung hard, more reflex than calculation. His fist bowed Simon’s lean frame, bent him and tumbled him to the rug.
“You defiled her enough in life, with your scheming and threats. You won’t keep at it now.”
Simon was already up, clutching his face and dusting himself. “She’s of no use to me now. Dispose of her; that should be something of a punishment for you.”
“It is,” James whispered, face in his hands and offering whatever agreement might hurry Simon along. “But you’ll get yours eventually.”
“I’ve already had mine,” sniffed Simon. “Putting up with one harlot married to my brother and another sharing his bed. Him murdered by the first one and betrayed by the second. I will never have justice now, unless I outlive those damn Lennoxes.” He stepped back and tugged on his gloves. “And you, incompetent from the start. Dispose of her,” he ordered again, “Throw her in the bin for all I care. That’s all she’s fit for. All she’s ever been fit for.” James held a breath and restrained a second blow, the tradeoff being Simon’s retreating back.
Boot steps faded down the staircase, and a slamming door ushered a perfect, eerie stillness.
James worked his hands and then his arms beneath the sheeted mass, fingers stiff at breaths of night air from the screaming mouths of open windows. He scooped her, cradled her close, and carried her through the house to the servant’s door. Under the first flinty hue of dawn across a winter sky, he settled her in a carriage beside the stables and hitched the horses, rushed along by chattering teeth. He climbed up onto the bench, snapped the reigns, and as the first hint of a cold sun lighted the horizon, he carried Hannah away.
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CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Village of Meadowcroft – December 24th, 1882
The day that the woman’s body was discovered in an unmarked grave was the same day Doctor Grimshaw’s old house had burned to the ground, which everyone in Meadowcroft agreed were terribly paired omens. They also agreed that it was a doubly black event on Christmas Eve Day, and in the next breath concurred heartily that it was good to be only six days from a new year, whose fresh white calendar might clean away such sinister tragedy.
Someone had taken a stone from the collapsed and still smoldering wall, a smooth gray river stone which had once held a spot near the door, and decided it ought to be placed at the Grimshaw memorial, atop Emily’s grave like a third victim.
When the little band of sad and soot-faced villagers had processed through the cemetery and up the low hill, the sight greeting them there had been so disconcerting that for long minutes they’d stared and passed the stone between them in an effort at freeing up the most capable to act on their discovery. When no one proved equal, they had abandoned the stone altogether in order to ring the mound of barely turned and frozen earth just beyond the boundary fence of Emily Grimshaw’s grave.
A constable had been sent for by the lone clear-thinking attendant, a constable who examined the matter while they stood shivering and, at a loss, summoned the vicar. The vicar surveyed his little kingdom of the churchyard and, equally bereft of ideas, declared that of all people, they ought to summon Lord and Lady Lennox, since the problem fell so closely to their daughter’s plot. The Lennoxes had seemed the next best thing, since not one of them could agree on where Doctor Grimshaw might be found these days.
The Lennoxes’ oldest daughter, it was explained to the Meadowcroft elders by Mrs. March, who had a clothesline straight to London, was missing. She was missing and feared for on account of her fragile mind. Given the affairs of the morning already, no one was capable of surprise on learning she’d been intended for the asylum. They weren’t even agitated to hear that the daughter, a stranger, was a concern to her family, not in the face of a day filled with more immediate distress. On the simple map of their little village, there was no room for placing the coincidence of a missing woman and a found body, so close to Emily Lennox Grimshaw’s grave.
While the Lennoxes were fetched and then a smart-looking, black-suited London detective, just to be safe, everyone huddled in the knave of the church and cast silent glances or whispered predictions about their discovery. At last, near mid-afternoon, when everyone’s stomachs grumbled over the importance of hanging about the churchyard versus having lunch, the detective sent for a crew from the village to fetch shovels and a canvas tarp.
The men chipped at frosted dirt, which the detective did not remark upon, though Peter Cates saw him put down in his little notepad that the hole must have been dug in the middle of the night, to be so hardened. The policeman asked aloud, as they dug, when the fire had first been noted at Doctor Grimshaw’s. Old Addison Smythe assured that his dog barking had woken him precisely at two fifty-two; he had checked his watch to see if he might as well get up and feed the chickens and horses. By the time he had gone from the first floor to the ground floor to let in his hound, tongues of flame were licking out from the eaves and up the thatch of the Grimshaw house.
Lord Charlton Lennox came bounding up the hill then, igniting a murmur from the church crowd clear on to the work party. Everyone recalled the sad circumstances of his last visit to Meadowcroft, a stay which, though they had tolerated the man for Doctor Grimshaw’s sake, had left a bad taste in their mouths. Meadowcroft prided itself on kindness and good manners, so everyone bowed and curtsied, but no one did more than necessary to make a boorish man feel welcomed.
Shouts went up between the men while Lord Charlton and the detective stood murmuring, and the tarp was brought directly and spread over the excavated hole, ivory canvas a question mark between the mounds of snow and soil.
Both smartly frocked gentlemen crouched at the tarp, and then Lord Charlton got up and paced away, clutching at his breast. He removed his hat and scrubbed his face, swearing and dabbing at his eyes with a coat sleeve. Cates and Smythe and Paul Pendley stood at the base of the hill watching what seemed an unmistakable answer to the village’s day-long question.
The detective called Lord Charlton back with a shout and a wave. There was a confused hitch to their body language. Mrs. Gert Tailor shuffled down the slope, arms wide for balance and in danger of rolling, until she reached the village men. The detective had asked Lord Charlton about a tattoo, which had been answered in the negative, and now the men were back to talking. A woman had been found in the hole, a dark-haired woman wrapped in a sheet, but not one from the village and not the Lennoxes’ missing daughter.
The detective had her rolled in the tarp and carried down to a cart waiting on the church road. He explained to Lord Charlton and the Meadowcroft elders – hopefully not with an expectation that anything he shared be kept private once he’d moved beyond the cemetery gates – that the woman was a prostitute, which he reckoned by a tattoo on her chest. Pearl Payton, of Whitechapel, he said.
Murder, they had cried. But no, he assured them. Pearl was known in his precinct and took heavy drink. She had died of the same and to his knowledge, with no kin to claim her, had been handed over to one of the body farms to be used for science. Meadowcroft had nothing greater to fear than a strange sort of backward grave robber. The
fire at Doctor Grimshaw’s house, he’d muttered, was a matter over which he still puzzled.
To the knowledge of Meadowcroft’s placid and content residents, the detective was still puzzling over it a decade later. Neither he nor their doctor had returned with an answer.
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CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Boston Harbor
Boston, Massachusetts – January 6th, 1883
“Doctor Grimshaw?”
Several disembarking passengers were obliged to go around the man in the smart blue suit, his lean frame clad in heavy wool against damp needles of the harbor’s air. Several more stopped to fiddle with coats and valises, turning curious ears to the dockside exchange.
“No, I’m sorry.”
A young, blue-suited gentleman frowned and, just as quickly, smiled. “One of the crew pointed you out as the passenger who boarded under the name ‘Grimshaw’, out of Plymouth.”
“He’s mistaken.”
“I have the manifest here, sir,” explained the fine suit, waving his paper.
“Well and good, but they’ve steered you wrong.”
He tucked the passenger list into his coat pocket. “Can you or your lady offer any sort of identification?”
The gentleman and a softly freckled, flush-faced lady on his arm exchanged a glance. “Are you a policeman?” she asked.
“No ma’am. Phillips, private detective.”
The other man lifted his hat and smoothed his sandy hair, and this seemed to give Phillips pause. “It’s Grimshaw, but not ‘doctor’. And London, not Plymouth. Seems your details are switched about.”
“May I know where you’re bound?” dug Phillips, relentless.
Mister Grimshaw smiled. “West.” He smiled and his lady curtsied. “We’re headed west. Eventually.” He tipped his hat in departure.