The Lost Constitution

by William Martin

  Gilbert had visions for the future, too. And he knew that Perkins was right about the mill. There were better places to put capital. But could he help Perkins kill the business that his own great-grandfather had built from a single-wheel gristmill to two-hundred-loom behemoth? Another gin and tonic did not provide the answer.

  Afterward, Bunson drove him to the ferry landing, but they arrived too late.

  Bunson said there were ten guest rooms at the Perkins Cottage, but Gilbert preferred to be dropped at the Newport Hotel. Though he did not offer a reason, he sensed that Bunson understood. There was too much tension in that big house, and it would surely hang like a residue on the morning. A quiet night with a book and a soft bed would be just the thing.

  ROSEMARY RYAN HAD the late shift, so she sat in the kitchen, turning the pages of the Saturday Evening Post, waiting to be summoned by one of the bells. There was a pull cord in each bedroom, each cord strung through the walls to a row of bells in the kitchen, each bell labeled with the name of a bedroom.

  She hoped that Mr. Perkins would satisfy himself with the large glass of port and chunk of Stilton that he had Bunson carry up around ten. If a bell rang, let it be the missus. Better yet would be no bells, no running to answer a summons, no yes ma’am, be right back with a slice of cake and a glass of warm milk to help you sleep….

  Rosemary thought of her grandmother, fighting to raise a child with a hard-drinking husband, organizing mill girls in places like Lawrence and Lowell, places where people fought for a few extra pennies in their paychecks, for a few more shreds of dignity. And here was Rosemary, waiting on people who expected to be pampered, praised, and presented, even late at night, with the best face a girl could offer.

  Around ten thirty, there were loud voices and doors slamming somewhere above. Rosemary ignored them. The bells were strung for a reason. It was not her job to investigate sounds that came from the private parts of the house.

  When a bell rang soon after, she thanked the Lord that it was Mrs. Perkins.

  A few moments later, Rosemary knocked softly: “You sent for me, ma’am?”

  Mrs. Perkins was sitting in a boudoir chair. She wore a robe. She had taken her hair out of its roll and let it drop down over her shoulders. “I want to meet Maud Wood Park. So I’m going with you.”

  Rosemary was thrilled. “I was hoping you would. But Mr. Magnus—”

  “—is a tyrant. The women of this house will rise up against him, all classes … you and I and … we’ll invite your mother, too.” And the smile that she offered was as genuine as her hair was luxuriant.

  “Yes, ma’am. It will be a day to remember.”

  HOW COULD A girl sleep?

  Rosemary had managed, in just a few weeks of service, to upset the balance of the great house, foment rebellion, and make her presence felt. If that was not enough to keep her awake, her room was breathless and stiflingly hot.

  She sat on the edge of the bed and took off her shoes.

  She did not think that her nightly ablutions, followed by five Our Fathers and ten pages of Willa Cather, would relax her. Had she been in Boston, she might have sneaked out to see her friends. The girls gathered at the all-night restaurant under the el. The boys played craps on the corners. There were stories to hear, cigarettes to smoke, and places where kids could find something strong to drink or perhaps shadows where they could find each other.

  But here … the wall vibrated with the sound of her mother’s snoring in the next room, and the other maids resented Rosemary because she was a favorite not only of Mrs. Perkins but of Bunson, too, and the butler’s favorite could find life quite easy, because the butler ran the house. So Rosemary decided to go for a walk by herself.

  She took off her apron and crest. Then she un-clipped her stockings and rolled them down and pulled them off. Her whole being felt cooler, and she was tempted to take off her bloomers, too. Why not? No one would see her. No one would know. And it would be … delicious.

  As she went quietly down the back staircase, she heard more raised voices in the family quarters, more slamming doors, angry footfalls on the main staircase.

  The kitchen was silent, except for the drip-drip-drip in the icebox and the ticking of the clock, the tyrannical clock by which Rosemary’s mother lived her life. But no more of those thoughts. Just a brisk walk, then peaceful sleep.

  A breeze rustled the trees and rolled over the lawn, cooling her bare legs, caressing them, filling her with … something.

  She could not help but wonder what the nuns would say if they knew she was enjoying something so … sensually.

  The night was intimate and enormous at the same time, an enveloping darkness arced over with an infinity of stars.

  She felt something stir in her stomach and lower, in her loins, a yearning in her spirit that made her tingle and—she could not deny it—made her wet.

  She opened the gate and stepped onto the Cliff Walk. The breeze embraced her and the darkness was like a drug pouring into her.

  Several of the great houses were illuminated. But most of the lights were burning in upstairs rooms. Somewhere someone was playing a piano. She could not recognize the piece but it was beautiful. Was it coming from the Breakers?

  No matter. Those who were awake would not be for long. Only she would be awake, she and the wind and the lover she imagined walking with her, for only a lover could make more of this moment.

  The ocean rolled against the cliff below.

  Up ahead, shadows were hurrying toward her. She stopped, pulled herself against the parapet wall that kept people from falling onto the rocks. What was it? Who?

  A man and two huge beasts.

  That strange warm feeling in her loins went cold. Yearning turned to fear.

  But it was only the butler John Snitterfield, walking the wolfhounds. He stopped, as startled by her shadow as she was by his. He squinted at the gray Perkins uniform. “Does Bunson give permission for his girls to leave the house at all hours?”

  “Ah … yes, sir.

  He grunted, shook his head, moved on into the darkness.

  And on she went in the other direction, rapt again in the wonder of the night. Even the lights of the great mansions seemed feeble and insignificant as the blackness of sky and sea absorbed them.

  When she came to the Forty Steps, she stopped and looked east into the night. Then she looked down at the white foaming waves below. Each time one of them rolled against the rocks, it pushed a breeze up the steps, up the cliff, up her legs, so that her dress billowed and she felt the beat of some life source pulsing out there in the dark.

  She was drawn down the steps, down in the starlight that glistened on the sea spume coating each step, down closer to that life source.

  And when she was halfway down, alone in the deep darkness, she hiked up her dress, up past her calves, up over her knees, up until she felt naked, exposed to nature, to the dark, in her lover’s hands.

  “That’s what I like to see.”

  She was so startled by the voice behind her that she almost fell.

  She dropped her dress and turned. Above her was a shape, a black silhouette against the star-silvered sky.

  “Who is it?”

  The figure came toward her. “I’ve been watching that pretty bum of yours. Not just tonight. No. I’ve been watching it day and night for weeks.”

  “Mr. Magnus, you shouldn’t say such things.” Even in the salt air, she could smell gin. “You shouldn’t be following a girl when she takes a walk.”

  He came closer and smiled, his teeth and the whites of his eyes shining. “I wasn’t following, but we’re well met.”

  She tried to step around him and get back up to the Cliff Walk. “Excuse me, sir. I must be up early.”

  But he was a step above her and towered over her. “I’ll give you the morning off.” Then he leaned forward to kiss her.

  She pulled away and almost stumbled.

  He took a step down.

  “Please, Mr. Magnus, please
don’t.” Her eyes searched beyond him for the shadow of someone else.

  “There’s no one up there,” he said. “Scream and the waves will just swallow it.”

  He grabbed her arm with one hand and with the other, he grabbed a fistful of her dress and bunched it up, up, up, lifting it as she had just done, up past her calves, over her knees, up toward her crotch. “Just give me a look. Let me see your sweet little—”

  “Mr. Magnus, I’ll tell your wife.”

  And the one hand stopped moving, but the other squeezed harder on her arm to hold her in place. “You think my wife is your ally?”

  “Please, sir. You’re hurting me.”

  “You think you can go to Boston and bring her along to your suffragist rally.”

  Rosemary pulled back, but he was strong and held her fast, and he had placed a forearm in such a way as to protect the growth in his trousers.

  “She has the right,” said Rosemary defiantly, “and so do I.”

  “You have no rights unless I say so. Nor does your mother. If you go to Boston, I might decide she hasn’t raised you properly. I might have to fire her.”

  “No.”

  “But—” He grabbed her face and turned it toward him and pressed his lips against hers and jammed his tongue into her mouth.

  She thought about biting it, but fighting back now would only enrage him. If she could only get up the steps …

  “There. That’s better.” Now he stepped down so that they were both on the same level.

  With her shoulder she tried to wipe the spittle of him from her mouth.

  Then his hand was at the front of her dress again, bunching it up. And his fingers were probing at her, tugging at her hairs, pushing against her tenderness.

  The blackness of night, which had felt so sensuous, so embracing, which had made her feel so much at one with the universe, had turned terrifying.

  “I’ll let you go to Boston,” he said, “and take my wife, too, and infect her with all your suffragist ideas, on one condition.” And he pushed his middle finger into her.

  She cried out in pain and tried to pull away, so he clamped a hand at her bottom and jammed his finger even harder, and the force of it, on those steps, caused them both to stumble.

  He let her go. She felt a ripping pain as his finger pulled out of her.

  She lost her footing and was suddenly falling, her body banging, rock riser after riser, first striking her nose, then the back of her skull, then the back of her neck, which took all sensation and an instant later, all consciousness, so that she did not know that she struck the rocks at the bottom, then kept falling toward those waves below.

  As for Magnus Perkins, he fell with the luck of a drunk. He landed on his ass. The bruise at the base of his spine, which would keep him from sitting comfortably for days, was well hidden.

  A WEEK LATER, an old man made his way down from the White Mountains, down by train to Portland, down by ferry to Boston, down into the Boston subway.

  He did not doubt that he lived in an age of wonders. Since his boyhood, men had learned to fly, to move along roads in carriages powered by liquid pumped from the ground, to talk through wires strung across the landscape, to send signals through the air from ship to shore or from one transmitter to hundreds of homes. But nothing amazed him more than a rattling, roaring subway train that ran on electricity, that picked him up at North Station and whisked him through a tunnel, then up, out of the darkness, up into the bright July daylight, up onto tracks that seemed to teeter two stories in the air.

  He got off at Dover Street and found his way to Gloucester Place, a dead end of five-story wooden tenements.

  The kids on the corner looked at him suspiciously. Then they looked at the leather map case in his hands. He clutched it tighter.

  He knew that the influenza had hit hard on these streets. There were shuttered storefronts, families without breadwinners, too many kids without mothers to watch over them. The epidemic had entered the country through Boston the previous fall and had killed more people than all the bullets in the Great War.

  He climbed the steps of number 9 to the top floor and knocked.

  Maureen Ryan opened the door. She was wearing a house dress that hung on her as if on a wooden peg. Perspiration plastered her hair in little ringlets to the sides of her head. But he could see it in her bone structure. She was his. She was his daughter.

  “You got my wire?” asked George.

  Her eyes went to the table. There was the yellow Western Union envelope. “I almost wrote you and told you not to come.”

  “I’m so sorry for your loss,” he said.

  “It’s your loss, too,” she said without recrimination. “She was a beautiful girl.”

  “I wish I’d known her. I liked her spirit.”

  Maureen asked if he wanted tea or water. “I keep nothin’ stronger. It don’t agree with some who live here.” She gestured to a picture on the table: a man in a conductor’s uniform and a young woman. “Now that his pregnant wife been taken by the flu, my son don’t have much to come home for. So he stays out, drinkin’.”

  “I’m sorry for that loss, too.”

  “My daughter-in-law took sick. Poor Mrs. Tracy from next door, she come to help, got sick and died the very same night. My daughter-in-law died next mornin’.”

  “God’s ways are past knowing,” said George.

  “God’s are, but man’s ain’t. A man killed my baby. A man who followed her along the Cliff Walk and smelled of gin, and—”

  “—my son was seen following her along the Cliff Walk and stopping at the Forty Steps that very day. That’s what I’ve come to speak to you about.”

  “What is there to speak of?”

  George handed her the map case. “This was what your daughter wanted to see.”

  Maureen looked at it, as if it had no meaning for her.

  “I should have showed it to her. My son should have. After all … you’re family.”

  “My family is my hard-drinkin’ train conductor, who just about now”—she looked at the clock—”is punchin’ tickets on the Portland to Boston express.”

  “Well, this might help somehow.” He gestured to the map case. “It’s my most prized possession, and I want you to have it. In memory of your daughter. In memory of what she believed in.”

  “I’m a cook. I’ll go back to work soon as I’m up to it. What will I do with this?”

  “Put it in a safety deposit box. Sell it so your son can start a new life. But”—George hesitated, looked down at the case, then looked Maureen in the eye—”I’m hoping that you’ll not sell it for a time, at least until the police stop askin’ questions about Gilbert and that night in Newport. They think he did it.”

  “Do you?”

  “He was in his hotel when it happened. So … I’m giving you his greatest birthright, giving it to you as your inheritance. In exchange, I’m asking you to say nothing bad about my son.”

  Maureen looked at the map case. “So you’re buyin’ me off?”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  “Well, I don’t believe it was him. And I’ll say as much when I go back to Newport. The Perkinses done the decent thing and give me a week off. But I expect I’ll talk to the police again. And I’ll speak the truth.” She offered the map case to him. “So you can keep this.”

  “No,” he said. “You grew up without me. I owe you somethin’. Let it be this.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  “THE NEWPORT NEWSPAPER FOLLOWED Rosemary Ryan’s death for a while, but she was just a maid, so they ran out of energy,” said Antoine. “Too many polo matches to cover.”

  “How did you get the old Newport papers?” asked Peter Fallon.

  “Orson’s staying in Newport with some lady booksellers, the Common Cliffwalkers. I called him.”

  “Good boy.”

  “Hey, boss. Don’t call me boy. Hurts my image with the homebodies.”

  “Noted. What else do you have?”

&nbs
p; “Get this: Orson says the only suspect the Newport paper ever identified was Gilbert Amory.”

  “That’s it.” Peter would have shouted, but he didn’t want the girls to hear. He was drinking port by the woodstove while Kate and Kelly cleaned up in the kitchen. He could see them from where he sat, so he knew they weren’t listening on the land line, but there was no reason to trust them yet.

  “What?” said Antoine. “What’s it?”

  “The place where the story crosses the bridge. There’s always a bridge,” said Peter. “Always somebody who carries you into the twentieth century.”

  “Gilbert Amory?”

  “Yeah. He must carry it to Michael Ryan. Ryan carries it to us.”

  “Or at least to Portland,” said Antoine. “Why do you think Bloom told you Ryan’s name?”

  “Beats me,” said Peter. “He could have told us anything. Maybe he thinks we’ll lead him to it. Or maybe he’s sick of his partner browbeating him.”

  “It could be politics,” said Antoine. “He thinks one way. Doherty thinks another.”

  “Could be, but whatever it is, it’s about Evangeline now.” Peter took a sip of port to wash down his emotion. No time for emotion. Time for focus.

  “So …,” said Antoine after a bit.

  Peter cleared his throat. “Any e-mails from Charles Bishop this afternoon?”

  “Not the last time I checked.”

  “Shoot him this, under my name: ‘It’s Thursday night. World Series Sunday. You promised material two days ago. Are you in or out?’ “

  “Why not call him?”

  “He may not field his own phone calls. But I bet he reads his own e-mails. So send it. I don’t want to be leaving electronic footprints on any computers around here.”

  “Where are you leaving your footprints in the morning?”

  “Newport.”

  “Newport? They didn’t take Evangeline to Newport.”

  “There’s a man there named Clinton Jarvis—”