Louisa and the Missing Heiress

by Anna Maclean

“Do.” A pause as the cream was poured. The sound of heavy silver spoons clanking against teacups was reminiscent of a society afternoon.

  “May we speak about Dorothy?” I finally asked, when the silver-tinged silence grew oppressive. Agnes seemed to be sleeping.

  “What is there to say?” Mrs. Brownly sniffed. “She married against my wishes. And now she is dead. A biscuit, Miss Alcott?”

  I could not help it. My teacup rattled ever so slightly on the saucer. A mother who refuses to mourn the death of a child is a mother who has been turned to stone.

  “You did not wish her to marry Mr. Wortham?” I said, as if surprised, as if hearing this for the first time.

  “Louisa. I may still call you Louisa, may I not, though you are quite grown?” Mrs. Brownly put down her teacup and folded her hands into her lap. “Good. Louisa, let us not be overly subtle with each other. We both know what that man is. A fortune seeker. A scoundrel. What Dorothy ever saw in him—”

  “Perhaps she loved him.”

  “Loved!” Mrs. Brownly snorted. “What did that child know of the kind of love a wife owes a husband? And do not give me that look. I read your thoughts. You think me cold. I am not. I married for love, Miss Alcott. I know a thing or two about that emotion. I know that what passes as love too often is as thin as moonlight. I did not mind that Dorothy loved Preston Wortham.”

  “No?” I asked, alert.

  “No.” The mother sighed heavily. “I minded that she did not love him enough to find happiness with him.”

  “I am confused,” I admitted. “Forgive me if I have seemed judgmental. Explain, please, how you came to believe that Dot did not truly love Mr. Wortham.”

  Mrs. Brownly unfolded her hands and picked a piece of lint that had caught on the prong of the emerald setting of her wedding band. Her hands trembled. I wondered that a mother who had just lost a daughter could seem more nervous than grieving.

  “There was another, before Preston Wortham,” Mrs. Brownly said slowly, uncertain of the words and what they would convey about her daughter. “You did not know of it, because I made Dorothy promise never to speak of it, not even to her closest friends. She was too young, too inexperienced, for the affair to prosper, and it did not. But her heart was spoken for long before she met Mr. Wortham. You see now, when she announced her intention to marry Preston Wortham, why this mother’s heart did not leap for joy?”

  Dot, who in life had seemed a simple, loving creature, had become, in death, a creature of mystery. I found myself longing for the friend I had known, and now, even more, for the Dorothy I seemed not to have known.

  “Do you know this man’s name?” I asked.

  Mrs. Brownly hesitated. Her face changed; the sentiment that had softened it a moment before disappeared and left the more familiar stern lines. “This is an unsuitable conversation,” she said. “I will not discuss Dorothy’s intimate life with those not in the family. You were her friend. Think what you will. Mr. Wortham managed to convince her of impossible joy. And we all know why.”

  I said nothing. Mrs. Brownly started angrily. “He married Dorothy for her money, of course. Well, he shall see what all his contriving has achieved. He’ll not get a penny. Not him. We’ll see.”

  Mrs. Brownly smiled. “Not a penny. It was arranged before the marriage that Dorothy’s income would cease upon her death.”

  Once the initial shock passed—how this family must hate Preston Wortham!—I found this news reassuring. I had spent enough time considering the exploits of Poe’s Detective Dupin to know that a murderer usually has a motive, and that not even impetuous Preston Wortham would exchange a state of married wealth for impoverished widowerhood. I was not overly fond of Wortham, but I did not wish to live with the notion that my close friend had been murdered by her own husband. If her death was murder, as it seemed, then there had to be a different culprit.

  “Mrs. Brownly, forgive me for pursuing this train of thought, but can you think of anyone . . .”

  “Who might wish my child dead? Really, Louisa.” Mrs. Brownly clucked her tongue. “You have always had an overactive imagination. That awful red-haired constable—he is Irish; don’t try to tell me he isn’t—has already been here and asked questions. It is much to do about a simple death. She slipped and fell into the water and drowned. At least Dorothy had the manners to rise to the surface. It would have been terrible if we’d had to fire off cannon shot to raise the body. So much talk . . . I couldn’t have borne it,” Mrs. Brownly said.

  And with that final comment, a single tear did slip down Mrs. Brownly’s cheek.

  “More tea, Louisa?” she asked when she had recovered herself.

  “No, thank you. May I ask, though, what will happen now to Dorothy’s portion of the estate?”

  “Why, it will go to Edgar, of course.”

  Edgar. Who had arrived late to the second tea party, out of breath and with damp trouser cuffs, though there had been no rain that day.

  “Perhaps I will take one more cup of tea, if you don’t mind, if I have not overstayed my welcome.” I persisted. “Mrs. Brownly, Edgar and Dorothy were quite fond of each other, weren’t they?”

  “Oh, they simply doted on each other.” And the mother’s tone of voice and inability to meet my candid gaze indicated that even she could not credit that exaggeration.

  THICK, OMINOUS CLOUDS scudded over Boston, and the smell of fish and salt water insinuated all the way up to Beacon Hill, forced sideways and through town rather than up and away because of the lowering sky. I walked brisky, my chin high, my stride so long that my hooped skirts must have swung like a pealing fire bell, announcing disaster. Edgar inherits. Edgar inherits, I repeated, and my steps kept time to that refrain.

  When I returned to my little home on Pinckney Street I found my homestead reduced to chaos.

  One of the schoolchildren, little Walter Campbell, who’d always been a rascal and would always be a rascal, had let loose a pet mouse into the parlor, and then had gone home, leaving the thing behind. The little creature had reappeared on a plate of biscuits set out to tide my father over till supper.

  Abba was by nature gentle and unflappable, but one creature she could not abide was a mouse, not even the sweet kind that sit on the plate rim and beseech with soft brown eyes. She was chasing after it rather hotly with a broom, my father was chasing after her, reminding her that it was one of God’s creatures and not to be harmed, and Lizzie was chasing after him, for Father had ordered one of the boarders out of the house, after catching him talking alone with Lizzie in the upstairs hall. May was jumping up and down and cheering for the mouse.

  The bold boarder, one Mr. Alexander Hall, a Harvard divinity student, leaned in the doorway watching the whole circus and scratching his head, trying to find the correct words of apology for having insulted Mr. Alcott’s home and sensing that perhaps this was not the best time to initiate a serious discourse.

  I studied the strange choreography taking place in the front parlor for several seconds as I took off my coat, discerned the several problems immediately at hand, and set about correcting them, even before removing my flapping hemisphere hat. A piece of cheese was procured and placed in a corner. Lizzie was given a pot and told to put it over the mouse as soon as it reappeared. Father would then slip the morning newspaper under the pot and remove both cooking vessel and God’s creature to the backyard, probably near the refuse bin, where it might feast to its little mousy heart’s content on carrot peels.

  I sent Mr. Hall to Trevelyan’s Pipe Shop for some Cuban blend for Father’s pipe. It was the one gift guaranteed to soothe him, and I knew that for all his surreptitious ogling of pretty Lizzie, Mr. Hall was a respectable young man and an irreplaceable boarder. He made no noise, rarely ate in, never, ever wanted his meal on a tray, and always paid on time. As for little Walter Campbell, his pockets would be searched from hence, to prevent the carrying of any other contraband into the Alcott schoolroom/parlor.

  Peace restored, we made ourselves com
fortable in the worn furniture of the little room and had a good laugh at ourselves. Abba was dusty, Lizzie was blushing, and Father couldn’t remember why he had been so harsh with young Mr. Hall, nor how he came to be holding a mouse in his palm. May was sweet-talking the little brown creature and threatening to turn it into a pet. My hat flopped before my eyes and I swept it off my head and into the corner with a flourish.

  “I cannot abide that hat. From now on I will wear caps and cloches,” I said.

  “I never liked it,” agreed Father, now looking somewhat less stately since he and the trembling mouse were eye-to-eye in steady contemplation of each other. “Hats should never hide the windows to the soul. It was of the soul I was writing before this domestic crisis called my attention elsewhere. Louisa, you will remember in Pilgrim’s Progress that fine moment when the pilgrim first senses the divinity of his own—”

  “Bronson, take the mouse outdoors,” Abba said sternly.

  “Ah, yes, the mouse . . .” And he ambled back into his study, still eye-to-eye with the creature.

  “Another sentence left unfinished by Father,” May crooned.

  “That, too, is an incomplete sentence,” I said. “Go back to your lesson, May.”

  “Do I have to?” complained the child, and Abba and I responded, “Yes!” in unison.

  I went to my mother and hugged her.

  “It was awful with Mrs. Brownly.” I sighed. “She barely wept. A single tear, that was all. She was afraid of the talk.” I looked at my mother, at the small parlor with its ragged furnishings, thought of the vegetable meals, the worn linen, the long workdays, and the damp-bottomed schoolchildren . . . all precious to me, since they were part of a destiny that had saved me from having a father who died of apoplexy because another daughter was born to him, or a mother who calmly poured tea and said of that daughter’s death, “It is a great loss. . . . Cream or lemon?”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Heir Is Taken Unawares

  THE NEXT DAY, Tuesday, after my schoolchildren had been dismissed, I decided to pay a call on the Brownly heir, Edgar, he of the gobbled fish sandwiches.

  This was a trickier business than that of the day before, since Edgar Brownly spent most of his time at a little studio he rented near the Customs House, and Boston society frowned upon single maidens paying visits to unwed men in their studios. The way to get about that difficulty was to invite Sylvia to join the occasion, and to have her bring someone as chaperon. To avoid gossip, Sylvia chose not the usual vicar but Father Nolan, a Roman Catholic priest we had met during our social work.

  We made a strange sight, two young ladies with a blackfrocked priest in tow, making our way through the narrow, dingy streets of that part of Boston, where sailors leaned in doorways and dockhands trudged to and fro carrying barrels and sacks on their well-developed shoulders. I enjoyed it, especially since I had exiled the hated hemisphere hat and wore a little cloche I had found in my grandmother’s trunk, and the smaller, simpler hat no longer obscured my vision but allowed me full sight of the world as it unveiled itself before my curious eyes. It also allowed the world to fully see me. We received looks and even a few catcalls, though Father Nolan glared like a guardian dragon at any young men who looked too long.

  Mr. Brownly’s little studio was the top floor of an old warehouse. Stray cats glowered from the inky corners of the stairwell, and there was a smell of absinthe and beer, but the building overlooked the harbor, so naturally Sylvia and I expected that Mr. Brownly’s paintings would be of that picturesque motif. When the shuffling landlady had shown us up the stairs and into the suite with a heavily accented, “You wait here. Mr. Brownly be back soon,” our misperception was quickly corrected.

  The studio door swung open onto a quite unexpected scene. It was absolutely, uncontestably Bohemian, a room of plain, almost shabby furnishings, uncurtained windows, wine bottles lined up on an unclothed table, and rumpled sheets avalanching off a settee that also seemed to function as a daybed. A pair of black stockings, hastily removed and abandoned and then forgotten, it would seem, snaked out from under said moth-eaten and suspiciously stained settee.

  “Oh, dear Mother in heaven,” muttered Father Nolan, turning beet red and making a quick sign of the cross as he looked about. The studio was filled with canvases in various stages of completion, each with the same theme: a nude woman. “Extremely nude,” I commented aloud. “No wonder Mr. Brownly preferred to set up his studio outside the family home. Imagine what the maids would think.”

  “Can you imagine if Mrs. Brownly wandered in, expecting to see pastoral scenery or waterscapes of Boston Harbor?” Sylvia asked, grinning.

  “Mother in heaven,” Father Nolan repeated, moving closer to a particularly large, almost life-size canvas of a coy peasant girl dressed in a scrap of gauze strategically draped to call attention to that portion of the anatomy that it failed to hide.

  “The background of poplars and the ruined castle is, I admit, well drawn and colored,” I commented. “See how the brushstrokes of ocher mimic the shadows cast by a strong Italian sun at high noon.” But elderly Father Nolan studied not the background but the model who, at a certain angle, could be said to leer at the viewer.

  “Perhaps we should sit over by the window and wait for Mr. Brownly,” Sylvia suggested, gently taking her priest by the elbow and steering him away from that particular painting. His color was beginning to look unhealthy.

  “Yes,” he said. “We shall sit and wait for this sinner and see if he might not be brought to redemption.”

  “Father,” I said kindly but firmly, “we are not here to redeem, but to offer condolences. Please remember that.”

  “And to ask questions,” Sylvia amended.

  “Perhaps a few.” I grinned. “We need not ask, however, why it is that his landlady so freely gives admittance to all who seek entrance here. ‘All’ being young women. It would also explain the very strange look she gave our guardian.”

  “Sweet Mother, indeed,” agreed Father Nolan. “Do you think she thinks . . .” And he grew silent, unable to complete either sentence or thought.

  Sylvia and Father Nolan settled uncomfortably to wait, since Mr. Brownly had equipped his studio with some plush chairs and footrests, in addition to the settee on which Sylvia refused to sit, having seen it—and its activities—in several of the canvases. I, however, prowled about, hands behind my back, stepping over palettes and paint tubes, my eyes moving this way and that. I stopped before one canvas and frowned. I lifted a hand as if to touch the painting, and then stepped back in dismay.

  “Louisa?” Sylvia asked, noting my increasingly somber demeanor, but just then footsteps were heard coming up the stairs, Edgar Brownly, puffing and panting, and between stentorian gasps singing a music-hall song whose lyrics could not be repeated at a family gathering.

  Mr. Brownly yanked the door open and merrily called out a name . . . Katarina, or Katya, I couldn’t tell which, for the ending of that greeting was gulped down when he saw us. He stood there on the threshold, wide-eyed and trembling and looking much as a rabbit does when the gardener bears down on it, hoe in hand.

  “Are you going to tell Mother?” were the very first words the thirty-year-old Mr. Brownly uttered.

  I glided forth and offered my hand as well as a warm, conspiratorial smile. Diplomacy was the key to good detective work.

  “Do forgive this intrusion. We come to extend our condolences on the loss of your sister,” I said.

  Edgar Brownly wiped his profusely sweating brow and sat in the first empty chair at hand.

  “Dot,” he said. “Oh, yes. Dot.” He seemed not overly grieved.

  “It must be painful, losing a beloved sister,” I tried again.

  “Oh, yes. Very painful,” Edgar Brownly agreed. He might have been talking about the weather. Poor Dot, I thought again, watching how coldly Edgar Brownly discussed her death. How few people seemed to have actually loved her. Had there been a flaw in her nature I had not seen? Or had sh
e simply been one of those unfortunate few, deserving yet rarely receiving affection? I began to regret my decision to come.

  “Of course, your fortune will be enhanced by the diminution of the number of sisters to be seen to financially,” I added smoothly, getting to the point.

  “Not at all,” he protested. “That bounder Mr. Wortham will receive Dot’s share. I profit not at all by Dot’s death.” In that moment Edgar reminded me of troublesome little Walter Campbell, who, shuffling his feet and with hands held behind his back, would utter the baldest lies to avoid blame.

  “That is not your mother’s knowledge of the situation,” I gently corrected. “Mr. Wortham is cut off from Dot’s inheritance.”

  “Mother told you that, did she? Oh, yes, now I remember. There was an agreement,” Edgar mumbled sheepishly.

  I decided to become somewhat more aggressive in my line of questioning.

  “Mr. Brownly, you had no great love for your sister, much to profit from her death, and you might also be described as a man of . . . singular morality.” I looked about the studio. “One might wonder if the loss of a sister was a goal you actively sought.”

  Edgar Brownly turned red. He breathed with wheezing difficulty. His eyes popped, much as had Father Nolan’s when first looking about at the pictures. Then breeding showed. Money does not purchase contentment, but it does provide a certain composure in difficult situations, such as when one has been accused of murdering one’s sister. Mr. Brownly straightened his ascot, leaned back in his chair to allow his compressed lungs more access, and smiled with equanimity.

  “Dear Dot’s death was an unfortunate accident. Miss Alcott, you have been reading romances, I suspect,” he said. It was my turn to blush, for I was not merely reading romances but also writing them, though the Brownlys knew nought of that.

  “The postmortem suggested foul play,” I persisted.

  “Did it? Well, I suggest they reconsider their findings. There will probably follow a request for money from the family, and then, lo and behold, whatever quack performed that unwarranted desecration upon Dorothy will change his mind.” Mr. Brownly sighed heavily. “Wealth is a burden, Miss Alcott. The world spends much of its time trying to rob you of it . . . as Dorothy discovered, I’m certain. How is Mr. Wortham? Weepy and guilt-ridden?”