Taking the High Road

by Morris Fenris

  But by then Bridget had returned, carrying a tray of various items collected from the housekeeper’s pharmaceutical cupboard: a small basin of steaming water, what looked like a couple of napkins, and an open jar of something quite pungent.

  “Lookahere, I ain’t no victim to be experimented on,” he complained, scrunching forward to make an escape. “You got your own—”

  “Be quiet and sit still,” said Cecelia quite pleasantly, with another one of those smiles. She pushed him back into his chair. Meekly, John went quiet and sat still.

  The hot water for cleansing, into which some herb had been steeped, drew a hiss of protest from the victim who was being experimented on. Then a healing salve gently applied. Last a soft cotton bandage wrapped over and around the wounded knuckles, several times, and tied.

  Once finished, John carefully flexed his hand, for ease of movement, and smiled. “Ah.”

  “Better, yes?”

  “Better, yes. Thank you, Miss Powell.”

  Meanwhile, Gabe had shambled back to his favorite seat. “You might need a touch of somethin’ stronger in your tea, Mr. Yancey. May I?”

  “Uh—well, I reckon I wouldn’t turn it down, if you were so inclined.”

  Whiskey can give even the weakest man courage, and John Yancey, Pinkerton agent, was far from being a weak man. At the moment, fine bourbon mixed in with tea and a little sugar, he just appreciated the taste.

  “So. You were startin’ to tell us the reason you stopped by tonight,” Gabe prodded after a few sociable minutes.

  The medical crisis dealt with, Bridget had returned to her sewing; under the lamplight, her needle flashed in and out of the fabric, thread after colored thread, like a genie weaving its spell. Cecelia was once more presiding over her tea tray, settled back into her own chair with cup in hand to concentrate on whatever their guest was about to disclose.

  “You mighta done some guessin’ as to my bein’ here,” began John. “But I ain’t the man you think I am.”

  “A hustler, livin’ a life of crime,” Gabe hazarded, half-smiling.

  Reflective though he was, John pulled up a half-smile in return. Just enough to lighten a somber expression and brooding dark eyes. “Not unless I’ve got me a doppelgänger. No, sir, not a hustler. But I’ve chased down a few.”

  Questioning looks from around the room centered upon its guest.

  “I’m a Pinkerton agent, based in Boston. And I was hired by Noah Harper to find his half-sister, Miss Cecelia Powell, who had skipped town with part of his inheritance and fled to California.”

  “The hell you say!”

  “Surely you jest!”

  “But that’s crazy talkin’!”

  Disturbed by where this was leading, but willing to give their visitor temporary benefit of the doubt, Gabe leaned forward, elbows splayed on knees, to impale John on a gimlet-eyed stare. “All right, then, son, tell us all of it. No bustin’ in, now, girls; let the man have his say.”

  So say he did. Tactfully, but thoroughly, John laid out the facts. His first meeting with Noah Harper at the Boston office, and the story he’d heard. His investigation around and about town to collect whatever details possible. His journey to California, some months later, at the behest of his client, hard on the trail of a conniving wench almost sure to be found criminal.

  “The longer I stayed here in San Francisco,” he continued, uncomfortably aware that he was treading on shaky ground, “the more good I found out about you, Miss Powell. How you’d started an academy for girls, most of ’em too poor even to pay tuition. How many causes you’d donated to. How well you were liked and respected, by anybody you dealt with.”

  The exceptional opinions offered by so many far outweighed the derogatory opinion of one. John had begun to wonder about the reasoning from a man he had never entirely trusted.

  “I’d been led to believe by your half-brother that you were—uh—some sort of a—uh—a fallen woman,” John confessed frankly. He, too, was leaning forward, with both hands linked together between his knees. Almost a pose of penitence.

  He was honor-bound to forward all information about Cecelia to his client: same name, living arrangements, address; the whole thing. That should have been the end of it. Missing girl found, case solved, and invoice paid.

  But then Noah himself had arrived in town. And immediately set out to cause trouble.

  “My comin’ to your school that day was no accident, Miss Powell.” Regret and a hint of misery crackled in John’s voice and set his jaw muscles like iron. “I’d heard he was here. I wanted to warn you. But I—goddammit, I got here too late—!”

  Cecelia gasped. Despite her determination not to interrupt this recital, yet she was compelled to protest, “You knew! You knew all along who he was, and what damage he might do!”

  “I did,” he muttered, shifting position in his chair as if something hard and sharp were poking him in the backside. “But that wasn’t the time or place talk about it. You were—well, forgive me, Miss Powell, but you were pretty much a wreck at that point. I just wanted to get you home, where you could be taken care of.”

  “Now, hush, Cecie, and let him finish,” advised Gabe, running roughshod over her indignant sniff of “A wreck!”

  Matters had come to a head today.

  “I happened to be in the Hotel Alexandria dinin’ room when Josiah Kingsley and his mother joined Noah Harper for lunch.”

  Now even Gabe must break in. “Jumpin’ Jiminy! So that’s where all this came from! Damn, they’re two of a pair, these good-for-nothin’ reprobates—both sides of the same coin. Sorry, Mr. Yancey. Go on now, I’ll try to keep my mouth shut.”

  John described not only the meal, the gossipy diners, and the conversation, but, a bit shame-faced, his sham crony-ism with Noah at the bar. All leading up to their confrontation in the alley.

  “Ha! I knew it!” Gabe pounced with delight. “I knew what caused them gashes on your hand. And I was right, wasn’t I? You beat that sorry son-of-a-bitch to a pulp.”

  Grimacing with distaste, John studied the soft white bandage wrapped so carefully and so gently in place, protective, convalescent, and sent a troubled glance across the room. “Let’s just say I don’t think he’ll be botherin’ you any more, Miss Powell. I think he’s had—uh—a Come to Jesus moment.”

  Heaven could be no more brilliant than the blaze of blue in her eyes. “Thank you, Mr. Yancey. You’ve done me a great service, and I appreciate it. I don’t know how I could ever repay you.”

  “Can I talk now, Uncle Gabe?” Bridget wanted to know. “Is it finally my turn? Good. B’cause you need to be hearin’ Miss Cecie’s side of all this, Mr. Yancey. Fine and dandy to be safeguardin’ as you were, but there’s truth t’be told, as well.”

  “She’s right,” agreed Cecelia, pulling her skirts to one side to cross her ankles. And very neat, very trim little ankles they were, too, John noticed without trying to notice. “What Noah disclosed to you is fact, Mr. Yancey: I was born in a bawdy house, which was owned by my mother, the madam. But, of course, life is not made up of black and white, is it? There are a thousand shades of gray to every situation.”

  Her saga of childhood in Boston and adolescence across the seas, all under the auspice of her parents’ scandalous behavior, neither surprised him, disgusted him, nor outraged him. Whatever hardships or ordeals she had endured, the result was this fine example of a capable, caring young woman.

  “So then I don’t have to bother myself puttin’ you under arrest,” John pointed out, with a quirk to his lips.

  “Oh, I sincerely hope not! No, Mr. Yancey, my father bequeathed to me the controlling interest in that gold mine conglomerate, The Catherine Syndicate—my middle name. All very legal and proper, in a will which Gabe prepared and endorsed.”

  “Along with two witnesses,” Gabe threw that in, as an addendum.

  “”Well, I’m almighty relieved to have cleared up. Sure wouldn’t wanna be haulin’ you off in irons. That jailhouse would n
ever be the same.”

  “I’d like to meet up with that Noah myself,” Bridget grumbled. “I’d put my boot into his ribs, see if I wouldn’t.”

  Comforted, the old lawyer leaned back with his hands locked behind his head. “And if you didn’t, I suspect that beau of yours would.”

  With a peal of laughter, she scooted over to her own chair. “All I’d need do is say the word. Max would be delighted to take down a bully. Especially one botherin’ Miss Cecie.”

  Before John could respond to the scramble of comments that had suddenly burst forth, from wall to wall and back again, a knock sounded at the glass-fronted main entry: once, then once more. In the sudden silence that followed, the interruption had the effect of a thunderbolt.

  The drawing room assemblage waited, listening, to the soft tap of footsteps as Mrs. Liang approached, the opening of the door, a murmur of her voice, and the closing of the door. From there, it needed only a few more steps from the vestibule on.

  “Miss Powell, a message has just been delivered, to your personal attention,” the housekeeper reported, extending a heavy cream-colored envelope, sealed with a blob of red wax.

  For just an instant, Cecelia stared down at what she was being offered. This couldn’t be good. In fact, at this hour, it could be very very bad.

  “Well, go on, honey, open it and tell us what it says,” Gabe urged. “No point stallin’, no matter what comes of it.”

  Slowly, she reached for the unused butter knife on the tea tray to slit open the flap. A folded paper, also heavily cream-colored, lay inside. She read the note. Her eyes widened, her breath hitched, and she read it again, while life and the world paused.

  Her usual reaction to shock or mistrust came, John was beginning to realize, as a leaching away of all color to stark white, so that only the brilliant patches of rose-pink showed on her cheekbones. The pallor, and the dazed, disbelieving gape of her eyes as she finally looked up, wrung at his heart.

  “Miss Powell,” he said quietly. “What is it?”

  Her gaze moved from a blank stare at nothing toward him. “It seems I’ve been—disengaged,” she managed, holding up the note between thumb and forefinger as if the very touch could somehow breed contamination.

  “Whaddya mean, sugar?”

  “It’s bad news, Miss Cecie?”

  A shift of focus from one to the other, the two who loved her most—this cherished surrogate family—and the stranger who had so inexplicably and deeply involved himself in her predicaments over the past two days. “Well. I guess that depends. Josiah—or, mostly likely, his mother—has decided that I would not make a very suitable wife. Therefore he is—he is—um—uncommitting himself to our relationship. I have been—freed—to seek another—match…”

  Stunned silence for a few minutes, while everyone absorbed this new and startling turn of affairs. When Cecelia blindly set down her empty cup, the pretty china rattled atop its saucer in cadence with her trembling hand.

  Bridget tossed aside her stitchery to rush over and kneel sympathetically beside her friend “Oh, please, Miss Cecie, don’t take on so,” she pleaded. “I never thought much of that Kingsley fellow anyway, him bein’ so snooty and all, and—”

  “And you were beginnin’ to have doubts about a future with him, anyway,” Gabe harrumphed his own opinion. “I must admit, he never seemed like the sorta man I woulda chosen for you, honey. Too wishy-washy when it came to that mother of his, if you ask me. Besides—”

  “Besides, you’re far and away too good for the likes of him,” came the next line of the refrain.

  “Forever delvin’ into your finances, and—”

  “And wantin’ to know how much money you had, and what the accounts were, and—”

  “And tellin’ you the school would have to close after you were married, because him—”

  “—and his mother—”

  “—never wanted you workin’ outside the house. Unladylike, they said.”

  “Bold as brass, they said.”

  By now, John’s head was spinning, and not due to any backlash from the meager dollop of bourbon in his tea, either. As his gaze lifted to collide with Cecelia’s, across the room, he realized that she must be feeling a similar effect. But—by God. Was that a spark of amusement he was seeing in her eyes?

  “Not gonna go throw yourself off a bridge somewhere, Miss Powell?” he asked whimsically, acting upon that spark.

  She shook her head.

  “Nor hunt up a hangin’ tree?”

  Another small shake. And this time he knew, he just knew, that the little indentations at each corner of her mouth betokened mirth, held firmly in check. This was a woman to be reckoned with.

  “Well, then,” said John, with a shrug, “he failed, didn’t he?”

  “Whaddya mean, he failed?” Gabe demanded. “Our little Cecie’s heart is near cracked in two, and it’s—”

  “Not so much that I can tell. It’s pretty obvious he’s hopin’ for that, your—uh—your former intended. He’d be very happy if you went into a decline because of his treatment, if you took to your bed and never got up again. But you ain’t about to do that, are you, Miss Powell?”

  How could he understand her so well, this man whose intrusion into her life was of such short duration? Her dignity, her pride, her spirit, her independence—of course she wouldn’t let meek, mediocre Josiah Kingsley gain the upper hand! Break their engagement, would he? Be damned to him. She was only sorry she hadn’t broken it first!

  “No, John Yancey,” Cecelia affirmed clearly, with a burgeoning smile. “I’m not about to do that.” She glanced over at Gabe, still concerned and showing it, then to Bridget, still kneeling beside her chair. “I knew I’d have your love and support, whatever happened. But I’m fine, I really am. In fact—” the flutter of a laugh, “I’m actually quite relieved to have it over and done with.”

  Another “Harumph” from Gabe. “A fresh start.”

  “Although…there’s still that annoying little detail in the will.”

  John put forth an interested query. “And what detail would that be, Miss Powell?”

  “Why, nothing major. Just that—“ she essayed a what-will-you half-shrug, “—in order to receive my inheritance, my parents stipulated that I must be wed within a year of their deaths. And that year will be over in—”

  “Less than a month,” supplied Gabe unhappily.

  “Less than a month. I’m ashamed to admit, Mr. Yancey, that that deadline was part of the reason for my hasty acceptance of Josiah’s proposal. I’m not the criminal you think I am, but perhaps I’m not as—as honorable, or as ethical, either.” Grimacing a little, she sighed.

  John cleared his throat. “Dunno that I could ever see you as—as not honorable, Miss Powell. Your reasonin’ makes perfect sense t’me.”

  “Does it? Does it, really?” Another blaze of blue eyes, like bright sunshine after rain.

  “Yes, ma’am. Seems anybody woulda done the same.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Yancey. You’re very understanding.” Momentarily shelving that, she turned to the maid. “Bridge, I wonder if you would mind asking Mrs. Liang about what time we’ll be having dinner. And please ask her to set an extra plate. Mr. Yancey will be staying to eat with us. Won’t you, Mr. Yancey?”

  “Uh. Well.” Feeling as if his middle had been scooped out and tossed away, after this long and wearying confessional on all sides, the agent rose to his full height and considered. “Yes, Miss Powell, I will. I’d like that very much.”

  As Cecelia rose, with all the grace of a grand ballerina, her pretty honey-yellow skirts flowed and swooped around her. “Will you walk with me to the dining room?”

  “I’d be right proud to, ma’am.”

  “Good. And now I can return this to you.” Smiling, she handed him the monogrammed handkerchief, freshly washed and folded and ready for pocket use.

  IX

  The next day dawned, as usually sunny and clear with San Franciscan optimism, upon a
hard-won decision.

  Dinner at the Powell/Finnegan household had been an entertaining, captivating affair. The gooey richness of chocolate cake had followed several courses of good tender roast beef and fresh vegetables and spritely conversation that touched upon no topic unpleasant, personal, or upsetting.

  A professional connection between Gabe’s law office and John’s Pinkerton cases kept interest humming; besides that, Cecelia talked about hopes for the future of her academy, and Bridget’s intensifying romance with Max Shaw provided fresh fodder.

  Afterward, after a brief re-gathering in the parlor for final back-and-forth tidbits, after an even briefer sojourn on the front porch for the men to enjoy a couple of expensive cigars as an end to the evening, Gabe had hitched up his little surrey and returned John to his hotel room.

  By then, the Bay breezes had blown away what remained of the light rain, and John could park himself next to the open window to partake of the scenery below and meditate.

  John considered himself to be, not a religious man, in particular, but a spiritual one.

  Under the stern eye of his father, and occasionally a pious aunt, weekly attendance at the local church and strict observance of its holidays, fundamentals, and decrees had provided the bedrock foundation of his boyhood. Dutifully, he had absorbed gospel lessons handed down from the pulpit by their fire-and-brimstone pastor, along with teachings from various Sunday School volunteers. He grew up knowing that a vengeful God was sitting in the Judgment Seat, watching his every move, just waiting to punish him for any mischief with the flames of hell.

  Maturity painted a different picture.

  Now, he wasn’t sure about the existence of an afterworld or an underworld, or even of the Almighty, merciful or otherwise. He was quite sure of his own character, however. Thanks probably to that staunch upbringing, John possessed honor and integrity, courage and intelligence and compassion. It was to be hoped that those sterling qualities would hold some influence on the final day of justice, when the wheat got separated from the chaff.

  So John believed mainly in himself and what he might accomplish. He also believed that everything happens for a reason, and that to fight against the powers of the universe is futile. Acceptance of the inevitable is not always a bad thing.