Louisa and the Missing Heiress

by Anna Maclean

  Where were Cobban and Sylvia? Why didn’t they hurry?

  My silk skirt rustled in a sudden draft and I pressed closer to the wall. A door had been closed somewhere. I peered into the darkness, and as I shifted my weight a board creaked underfoot, the same board that had creaked under my foot in the hallway. He had closed the front door, locking me in.

  I stood statue-still again, waiting. Another board creaked, closer.

  “I know you’re here.” I spoke into the darkness, forcing my voice to be steady. “Let us talk and make an end of this. It is over. You can do no more harm to that family. You must leave them in peace now.”

  “It is indeed over,” a man’s voice whispered in the darkness. “I don’t hope you expect gratitude from me, Miss Alcott.”

  “Redemption is yet possible. Evil can be turned away,” I whispered, for I knew he was very close, and coming closer. Yet another board creaked and I heard the stiff leather crackle of his polished shoes, smelled the rich fragrance of imported French cologne.

  “Redemption!” He stepped in front of me, looming, a figure darker than the darkness of night because of his black suit, and I realized too late that the wall that had protected my back now entrapped me. I was too far from the front door; I would never reach it in time.

  I raised my hand and the candlestick it held, attempting a defense.

  Effortlessly, as though I were no more than a child playing with forbidden toys, he forced the candlestick from my grasp. I felt his fingers, gloved, powerful, strong enough to circle my throat, to strangle Dorothy’s throat, the windpipe broken . . . that hand closed over my own, taking me prisoner.

  “Redemption,” he repeated, stepping close enough now that even in the darkness I could see his face.

  He raised the candlestick.

  “No,” I said. He still held the candlestick in midair, poised to strike me down, and I knew a blow of that heavy silver against my head could be lethal. How to stop him? Not physically. No, think, I instructed myself. His nature. What is his nature? Vanity. He is vain and proud.

  “You were so clever,” I said quietly. “You had so many people fooled and terrified for so long. You had such power over them.”

  The hand holding the candlestick lowered an inch. “It could have gone on longer,” he said after a moment. “Why did you interfere? I warned you.”

  “Why Dorothy?” I asked.

  “She was an opportunity. A good businessman never misses an opportunity.” The candlestick came within inches of my head, but crashed into the wood paneling behind my right ear. I felt the cold breeze of it, heard the wood splinter, but knew he hadn’t missed. He hadn’t meant to hit me. He wanted to strike me down, but was unable, for the moment, at least. Why? Because for the first time he could talk freely? Perhaps I was simply not a good business opportunity. Perhaps his nature, for all his crime, was not yet thoroughly calcified, and murder came harder to him than he expected.

  I sensed an opportunity for life, for escape. Talk. Words.

  “You followed me . . . that night in the street . . .” I said, keeping my voice as calm as possible, trying to draw him out.

  “I apologize for the push. Very bad manners, I know. But necessary. You ask so many questions, Miss Alcott.” He wrenched the candlestick out of the wood paneling and raised it once again. His black-clothed arm was silhouetted in the darkness, his mourning coat darker than the night itself. And the very hand that had killed Dorothy was now raised against me. The silver candlestick gleamed.

  “Tell me about Dorothy, about Mrs. Wortham,” I said. “Tell me how you knew.”

  “I suspect you already know all there is to know about Mrs. Wortham, and what happened that day,” he said. The candlestick was still raised, ready to strike.

  “Tell me anyway,” I said. “I’m sure there are things I have overlooked.”

  “You think me a fool,” he sneered. “You and your kind have looked down your noses at me for far too long. But I have a long journey ahead of me, so I must excuse myself, Miss Alcott.”

  His nature—vain, but also with a strong sense of practicality. The night was disappearing, and the day must find him elsewhere.

  The candlestick finished the arc of its swing and I saw that this time it would not land in the wood paneling. My vision filled with exploding red, and then black. My last thought was that he would get away. We hadn’t been in time.

  TEN MINUTES LATER, Sylvia, Cobban, and Jenkins found me crumpled on the parlor floor of the empty Wortham mansion. Fog-thinned moonlight glistened on a trickle of red running down my forehead and over my left cheek. My hands were ice-cold, but something was tickling my nose.

  “She’s breathing,” Cobban said, taking away the feather with which he had ascertained that fact. In the confusion of throbbing but renewed consciousness I wondered if he always carried a feather in his pocket for just such a reason, and how strange the life of a constable must be.

  Cobban, aided by Jenkins, carried me to the cloth-draped couch and chafed my wrists while Sylvia fetched a vial of salts from her reticule and held it under my nose. I sneezed fiercely and flailed at the air.

  “No, no,” Cobban said gently, holding my wrists to restrain me, “you are safe, Miss Alcott; you are with friends.”

  “Have you got him?” I asked, staring about wild-eyed. “Is he here?”

  “Don’t move so quickly,” Constable Cobban said. “Lie back down, Miss Alcott, or you’ll faint.”

  “I don’t faint,” I protested. “Not unless someone thwacks me on the head. Have you stopped him?”

  Jenkins cleared his throat. “If you mean the gent that rushed down the street past us and almost knocked me over, why then no, we don’t have him, miss.”

  “We didn’t think to grab him. We were just thinking of you,” Sylvia said somewhat apologetically.

  I sighed heavily and lay back down, rubbing my forehead. “Gone,” I said. “Why didn’t you go after him?”

  “Don’t worry,” Cobban said. “He won’t get far. We’ll send telegrams to all the stations and ports with his description, and Wortham will be in custody by tomorrow evening.”

  “Wortham?” I sat up again.

  At that very moment we heard a groaning rise from somewhere deep in the back rooms of the house.

  Cobban cocked his head to one side, listening.

  “Isn’t it Preston whom we must pursue?” Sylvia asked, thoroughly confused.

  “That is Wortham you hear now,” I said with weary patience. “It is Digby who has made good his escape.”

  “Digby?” said Cobban, Jenkins, and Sylvia in unison.

  I held my head and rubbed at the lump on my forehead. “Of course. Jenkins, you must report this immediately to the night watch, and give the officers a description of Wortham’s manservant, Digby. Tall, black-haired, dark-eyed. He will, again, be wearing Wortham’s own hat and coat. He has a penchant for borrowing his employer’s items of clothing. He may be traveling with a female companion.”

  And so Jenkins went off again into the night to make a report, as a confused Sylvia and Constable Cobban helped me search the mansion.

  We found Wortham locked in the back pantry. He was bound and gagged and was more in need of smelling salts than I, for even after he was released from his ropes his teeth chattered with fear.

  “Oh, Mr. Wortham.” I sighed, stroking back the hair from his forehead. He, like I, had a bleeding gash on the side of his head and a black eye as well, and bruises about the mouth.

  Preston grinned ruefully, relief lightening the pain of his injuries. “You don’t know the worst of it. He was going to murder me; I have no doubt of it. But then he heard a noise—you, Miss Alcott—so he left me for the moment. You saved my life.”

  “Digby,” Cobban said, still piecing it together. “Of course. He would have murdered you, I have no doubt, had not Miss Alcott arrived and provided a distraction. Though I do wish you had waited for me,” Cobban said, frowning.

  “I couldn’t.
I knew he was about to fly and there was no time to lose.”

  “Digby?” Sylvia repeated.

  “Yes,” I said. “All the signs were there; it just took me time to see them. Who else is better situated to blackmail someone than a trusted employee?”

  “I need not ask what he was blackmailing you about, considering your reputation.” Cobban looked harshly at Wortham.

  “No. You need not ask. Especially not in front of ladies. But to murder Dorothy just to further terrorize me . . . Wasn’t it enough that he forced me to take him into service, into my very household, where he went through my income with an ease even I could not manage? But why murder Dorothy?”

  “You really do not know,” I said, shaking my head.

  “No. But something in your voice tells me I will need the swooning couch in a moment.” Wortham’s battered face grew yet more somber.

  “Be brave, Mr. Wortham,” I said. “You suspected it yourself. There was another person in Dorothy’s life, and Digby was blackmailing her.”

  Wortham grew so pale the blood on his forehead seemed black against the whiteness of his skin. He drew his lips into a tight, furious line and was unable to speak. He was the very image of that dreadful dime-novel terror, the jealous husband who discovers his wife has loved another. For a moment he looked truly capable of murder.

  I pressed forward, eager now to say all that needed to be said, all that had been kept in darkness, all that had harmed this family so terribly.

  “That other person was a child, Mr. Wortham. Dorothy had a child. Digby had been blackmailing her as well, and her mother, Mrs. Brownly. He murdered Dorothy because she was going to tell the father about her past and bring the child into her home. The blackmail would end.”

  “A child?” he said.

  “Mr. Wortham, the child was your own. Agnes.” There. I had said aloud what had been kept hidden for six years. A deep sense of relief washed over me. I sensed that Dorothy would have been pleased.

  “Mine?” he asked, stunned.

  “Yours. From that summer in Newport. Did you really think that, once in love, Dorothy would ever be disloyal, or forget that love? There was no other man coming between you, only a little girl whose mother had been forbidden to acknowledge her.”

  Wortham looked faint . . . as would any man who learned he has a six-year-old daughter, not a six-year-old sister-in-law.

  “My child,” he repeated in a kind of stupor.

  WE LEFT WORTHAM in his emptied mansion. The news of his child had overpowered his physical pains and agitation. “A child,” he kept repeating to himself, running his fingers through his hair.

  With Jenkins off to file a report, Sylvia and I had no choice but to walk home, despite our exhaustion and my bloody gash. Cobban offered to escort us, and since it was late and I was dizzy, I accepted his offer.

  “That makes it a different matter altogether,” he admitted with an apologetic smile as we closed the door behind us and went again into the night. “Wortham was the father and she married him.”

  But I remembered what he had said earlier that evening, that cutting comment about “a woman like that.”

  “Indeed,” I said somewhat coolly. “Does Dorothy meet your standards now, Constable?”

  He blushed fiery red and mumbled that perhaps he was harsh in his statements about young Mrs. Wortham’s character, but I was still concerned with a more immediate matter.

  “Do you think Jenkins has arrived at the station yet?” I asked, sorry now that I had not gone along with him and unwilling to admit that my head injury was causing me some distress. I could walk only with assistance.

  “Most likely. As soon as you are safely home, I’ll go to the station and file my own report. We’ll find Digby. Don’t worry,” Cobban said.

  Abba was a light sleeper, well used to late-night knocks on the door. She sighed and shook her head under its crooked, old-fashioned lace nightcap and went to fetch a bundle of gauze for my wounds. On the hall table was the basket of food and clothing prepared for the “travelers” and I hoped Cobban would not remark upon them. He did not, or at least pretended not to see them.

  “Is it over yet, Louisa?” Abba asked. “You can’t take much more, I fear.”

  “It is almost over. Now we can only wait and see if Digby is caught.”

  “Thank God,” she said. And then, “Digby? I would never have thought.”

  “Good night, Constable,” I said, holding my hand out to him. “Thank you for your help. Now file your report and make sure Jenkins is safe.”

  “Good night, Miss Alcott. Louisa . . .”

  Abba gave him a sharp glance for that intimate use of my given name. He backed out the door and disappeared into the night.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The Business Concludes

  “SYLVIA, WHAT DO you think of our Dorothy now?”

  It was a week later, and Abba had finally allowed me to resume my much-missed walks. The sun was shining, and spring seemed truly, finally, on its way. We were back at the Smokers’ Circle and I was discreetly studying the men and the gray clouds of smoke they blew.

  “That she was braver than I ever suspected. What she went through . . .”

  “Yes. And for love of Wortham.”

  “The world is a strange place, isn’t it, Louisa?”

  “It is. Strange, and too often unjust. Sometimes, though, there is justice, Sylvia. Divine justice.” For Digby had not been captured, yet he had been stopped. In his hurried flight he had pressed a hired cab to an unsafe speed, and had been overturned on the road leading south, to New York. He probably had planned to board a ship there under an assumed name and make his escape back to Europe, where he had first noticed the young American heiress, Dorothy Brownly, unwed at that time and plainly pregnant.

  Digby’s body had been crushed in the accident. His traveling valise had been filled with gold and silver coins, Brownly and Wortham wealth both, mixed together. His traveling companion, Katya Mendosa, was only slightly injured. I had visited her in the hospital the day she received the good news that the family was not going to press charges against her.

  “ ’Ardly out of charity,” she had snipped, her Latin accent completely gone and the Irish brogue thick as soup. “They just don’t want it in the papers.”

  Her child was with her that day, a pretty little girl with Wortham’s dark eyes and long limbs. She had the brown complexion of a child raised in the country, probably in a humble foster home. I was happy to see mother and child reunited, even if some of the money that enabled the reunion was ill-gotten.

  “I have to admit that in this case, as in many, divine justice is better than the man-made variety,” Sylvia said. “Think of what the trial would be like, when all those secrets would come to light, all those old wounds would be reopened.”

  Mrs. Brownly certainly seemed relieved that the matter was concluded without a trial.

  “She is still protecting Dorothy’s reputation,” I said. “For Agnes’s sake, if not her own. Justice is not always about punishment, but about ending a reign of terror,” I mused that day. “If only we could convince the plantation owners of that.”

  We had just visited Agnes earlier that morning and played a rousing game of blindman’s buff with her, for her congestion was finally passing and she was in good health again. With the blindfold over her eyes, twirling about, hands before her, she had reminded us so much of Dorothy as a child that we had both shed a tear. But they had been happy tears, for it seemed we had not completely lost our friend.

  “I should have seen it sooner,” I said, walking with my hands clasped behind my back. I had brushed my hair lower than usual over my forehead to hide the plaster over the blue-and-red gash left by the candlestick, and I had spent an amusing hour with my schoolchildren, making up stories about how I had acquired that injury.

  I sniffed contentedly at the spring air. “All the signs were there years ago. Dorothy’s personality change, her sudden maturity and preoccupati
on, even the way her figure changed. Motherhood was the only explanation. And I completely overlooked it.”

  “What mystifies me is how Preston could have overlooked it,” Sylvia said. “I suppose that as the very self-involved person he is, all those signs you noticed he would not have noticed simply because he did not wish to. He visited me this morning, you know. He is leaving Boston. Can’t say that I blame him. He has not exactly been warmly welcomed in society. Going west, I believe, upon the advice of Horace Greeley.”

  Preston Wortham had made the front lines of the morning edition one last time, the day before, as his innocence in the murder of his wife had been declared.

  “Is Mr. Wortham taking Agnes with him?” I asked, thinking then of the child I had come to know and love, and of Sylvia’s cousin, who had broken off all his social connections except those of immediate family.

  “No. He has agreed to leave her with Mrs. Brownly for the time being. She requested that, and he readily agreed. Fatherhood will not suit him, especially without Dorothy to prop him up.”

  “Someday Agnes will have to know,” I said. “She needs to know what a wonderful person her mother was, how brave.”

  “Yes. But I need to know, Louy. How did you decide upon Digby as the blackmailer and murderer?”

  I smiled. “Little things at first. His shoes were much too expensive for a valet’s. That was the first aspect of Digby that made me consider. Vanity is not uncommon in gentlemen’s gentlemen, but to have the financial resources to act on that vanity . . . that is rare. And he had a strange effect on Wortham, and Miss Alfreda seemed absolutely afraid of him. I suspect she somehow had discovered his identity and he had been blackmailing her as well.”

  “Miss Alfreda?” Sylvia asked, more than a little surprised. “Whatever for?”

  “Sylvia, she has not always been old. I suspect as a young woman she had her share of indiscretions and incautious moments . . . perhaps even more than her share, since she seems to read only romances. She has lived, and not always wisely, I’m sure, and she does have that penchant for pocketing expensive little items when she thinks no one is looking. The day I went to Wortham’s house to fetch his wardrobe items, she was just leaving, remember. Perhaps she had gone to plead with Digby to relinquish his hold over her, to give up whatever old letters or personal history he used for blackmail.”