Lies That Comfort and Betray

by Rosemary Simpson

  Spreading the news, Martin decided. It was always like that when a body was found—a race to see who could inform the neighborhood first. No harm done.

  He turned his attention back to the coachman. “Now when did you say you found her?”

  “I was coming across the yard to the kitchen just after I’d taken care of the horses. I thought at first it was a bundle left out for the rag man.” Scully tried to keep his eyes from straying down to what used to be Ellen Tierney.

  “Did you see anyone hanging around who shouldn’t be?”

  “No one. I think she’s been dead for a while now.”

  “Somebody had to roll her up and leave her here.”

  Scully had been wracking his brain trying to remember if he’d locked the carriage gate into the alley. He couldn’t think why he might have forgotten. It was something he did routinely every night, hanging the key just inside the tack room door. No, he was sure the gate had been closed and secured against intruders. So how could Ellen’s body have been placed where he’d found it? The girl hadn’t wrapped herself up and lain down to die there. Shouldn’t there be more blood?

  Officer Martin took the heavy glove from his right hand and shoved it into the pocket of his coat. He couldn’t write with the thing on, and the detectives would expect him to have done something other than stand around like a clumsy big amadán. They’d ask the same questions all over again, but at least he’d have something scrawled across the pages of his notebook.

  “I think I hear them,” Jack Scully said.

  Mr. Tynan and Mr. Nolan led a plainclothes Metropolitan Police detective across the stable yard, another uniformed officer following behind. Jack thought there would probably be at least one more copper stationed out front of the house for all the neighbors to see and wonder at. The morgue wagon would raise gossip in every household along the street; Tommy had already spread the word to the MacKenzie household. It wouldn’t be long before everyone knew what had happened to Ellen.

  The master was as impeccably dressed as on every Sunday morning. He wasn’t the kind of man to let a servant’s murder interfere with what he’d planned for the day.

  “Let’s look at her now,” the detective ordered.

  Phelan, he’d said his name was, Steven Phelan. No brogue on his tongue, which meant he’d probably been born in America. “Roll her over, but gently, Officer Martin. Try not to destroy any evidence, if you can.”

  “Give us a hand, then.” Jimmy Martin squatted by Ellen’s head, gesturing for the other policeman to take the feet.

  The body settled onto its back. Ellen looked up at them, glazed eyes empty of any expression at all. She was stiffening; soon she’d be as hard as a piece of firewood.

  “Let’s get her unwrapped,” Detective Phelan directed. “She’s been beaten on the head. That’s as plain as the nose on your face, but that may not be all. We won’t wait for the morgue wagon; it may be another hour before they get here.”

  “Shouldn’t we let the priest give her the last sacrament first?” No one had noticed Joseph Nolan’s quiet approach. Like his father, he’d dressed for Sunday High Mass at Saint Patrick’s. As handsome, neat, and composed as ever, except that his lips trembled as he spoke, and he’d hidden his hands in the pockets of his black frock coat.

  “Have you sent for a priest?” Mr. Nolan asked his son.

  “I did, Da. Right away. He should be here any minute.” It was a measure of Joseph’s nerves that he called his father by the familiar Irish diminutive instead of the more formal American word.

  “We won’t wait,” Detective Phelan decided. “There’s no telling how long it will take him to get what he needs and be on his way.” He took a clasp knife from his pocket and handed it to Officer Martin. “Cut her loose. Let’s see why she’s wrapped up like that.”

  It was full morning now, the gray light of dawn lightened into weak November daylight. Scully stepped back, out of notice. No one had told him to go inside, so he’d stay as long as he could. He’d been fond of Ellen, a sweet child who’d saved carrots and apples in her apron pockets and sneaked them out to the stables for the horses. Someone had hit her across the head. That was obvious. He hoped nothing else had been done to her.

  Jimmy Martin cut through the rope that was wound around the hessian. Some people called it burlap. Detective Phelan’s knife was sharp, the blade honed to a fine razor edge.

  “Cut the hessian, too, Martin. All the way from top to bottom.”

  Ellen Tierney had probably made no more than a gurgling sound as she died. Her throat was slit so deeply it was a wonder her head stayed on at all. She lay naked in her hessian shroud, her clothing folded neatly beneath the body that someone had washed mostly free of blood. A long gash ran from beneath where her breasts had been to where she would have given birth. The skin had closed over emptiness; nothing swelled beneath the surgically neat incision—no heart, no lungs, no womb, stomach, or entrails.

  The coroner would confirm what Steven Phelan immediately suspected and knew he would have to report to Chief of Detectives Thomas Byrnes. The similarity between this murder and what had been done to Nora Kenny just two weeks ago was unmistakable. This time he didn’t see how they’d manage to keep the details out of the newspapers.

  New York City now had its own Ripper.

  CHAPTER 13

  Alice Nolan’s bedroom overlooked the house’s cobbled rear courtyard and stables. Long before Jack Scully rose to tend the horses, some noise of clandestine coming or going brought her from her knees to the window, where an innate caution kept her from drawing back the heavy drape and lace curtain. Instead, she slid behind them just far enough to see what lay below in the clear white November moonlight. Nothing at first. She wondered why she’d bothered to interrupt her prayers. Then there was movement alongside the stable where the carriage was driven out through wide wooden gates into the alley. Guarded movement. A shifting of shadows. A blackness gliding through deep grayness. She held her breath.

  The man carrying a rolled up rug over his shoulder wore a heavy overcoat and a workman’s billed cap. A scarf wound around his neck and covered the lower part of his face. She caught a gleam of reflected moonlight off his eyes, but nothing of his features. How odd that a delivery was being made at this hour; she glanced at the clock on her mantel. It was past three in the morning. She’d nearly managed to keep the all night vigil she’d set herself, not falling asleep a single time, fighting hard not to give in to wandering thoughts.

  It helped that she had fitted out one corner of her bedroom as a miniature chapel with a crucifix on the wall and a statue of the Virgin Mary beneath the dying Christ. Best of all, in Alice’s opinion, was the Spanish prie-dieu—dark wood, oiled with hundreds of years of sacred sweat and tears—that had made its way from a Barcelona convent to an antique store in Manhattan and then to her bedroom. She prayed more fervently kneeling at her prie-dieu than anywhere else.

  The man deposited the rug on the cobblestones, then looked around as if to assure himself it lay in precisely the right spot. Almost before she could be certain she had really seen him, he was gone. Alice blinked her eyes, blinked them again. She was weak from fasting, tired by lack of sleep and the effort of staying awake all night to pray, but she wasn’t imagining things, wasn’t having a vision.

  She would never have heard the sound of the gate opening if she had not been deep in interior stillness. The coachman kept all the stable doors as well greased as the oiled and polished bridles and carriage lamps. Jack Scully was his name. Before she’d given up riding as a near occasion of sin, he’d saddled her mare for her and followed behind when she rode the trails of Central Park. Always polite and respectful. With a lovely brogue. She wondered if it would be easier to become a saint if she could live out her life in Ireland. Da was so rich. She’d always called him Da when she was little. Later, when the money came pouring in, he’d insisted that both his children call him Father. Da slid off the tongue so easily; Father had a harshness about it
that had been hard to get used to.

  Jack Scully came out of the stable just before dawn broke. She heard his whistle and the light skip of his feet on the stairs from his room over the stalls, then the shifting and neighing of the horses as he poured clean water and tossed feed into their troughs. She watched him start across the yard, saw him stop, bend over the rolled up carpet, cross himself, move at a near run to the kitchen door.

  When had the lamps been lit in the basement? Light streamed out over the cobblestones. Alice wondered if she’d dozed off for a bit. When Tynan the butler climbed up the stairs from the kitchen carrying a lamp, she knew there was something unusual about the bundle in the courtyard.

  Both men, Scully and Tynan, knelt beside the rolled up rug. Both crossed themselves. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Someone was dead. That was a body there on the cobblestones, not a rug at all. And she was the only one in the house who had seen its arrival, seen the shape of the man who’d brought it.

  Hardly daring to breathe for fear they’d somehow sense her, Alice eased away from the draped window, back into the semidarkness of her bedroom. She knelt again at the prie-dieu, lowering her face into her hands. Her body began to shake, but there were no tears.

  She was too frightened to cry.

  *

  “Wake up, Lillian.” Francis Nolan laid his heavy butcher’s hand on his wife’s shoulder, shaking her as hard as he dared.

  The damn woman dosed herself with patent medicines every night; she rolled beneath his grip like a fat drunk. Which she was. No matter what the quacks called their tonics, it was the same as pouring whiskey down your gullet. Eventually you passed out. By this time in the morning she ought to have slept off most of it. She ought to be coming out of its depths. “Wake up, Lillian.”

  “I haven’t overslept, have I, Frank?” Her eyelids felt sticky and hot, her mouth dry and furry. It wasn’t like her husband to come into her room uninvited.

  “There’s trouble downstairs, Lillian. You need to deal with it.”

  “Me? What kind of trouble?” She struggled to sit up, twisted behind her to pummel the pillows against the high oak headboard of her bed, and reached for the glass on the bedside table.

  “No, not that.” Francis Nolan swept the glass from his wife’s hand. “Plain water,” he said, rinsing the sticky traces of opium tincture into the wash basin, pouring clean water from the pitcher beside it. “Here, drink this.”

  “You don’t have to be so brusque, Frank. No matter what’s happened, I’ll have Tynan sort it out, whatever it is. He’s very good at keeping order among the staff.”

  “One of the damn maids is dead.”

  She stared at her husband openmouthed, droplets of water dribbling down her chin. “How can that be, Frank? How can that be?” The first thing she thought of was a clumsy knitting needle abortion because that’s how so many of them reacted when they got caught. Fear and panic drove common sense right out of their ignorant heads. “Was it Ellen?” She was walking out with a policeman, walking out being a euphemism for God knew what liberties a man could persuade a girl to allow him. Jesus, Mary and Joseph. The scandal of it.

  “Get up and get dressed, Lillian. See to Alice. The police are here.”

  “Was it Ellen?”

  “Yes, it was Ellen.” He crossed himself the way Catholics always do when the name of someone dead is spoken, a gesture that had no meaning at all when Francis Nolan made it. He’d been well taught as a boy; some things stuck no matter how far a man traveled from his roots.

  Lillian’s hand flew through the air in swift imitation, the cross sketched on forehead, heart, and shoulders, fingers barely touching bare skin and nightgown. She reached out for him when he started to stand up from where he had been sitting on the side of her bed. “How, Frank? Tell me what happened. Alice will ask questions. You know what she’s like.”

  His daughter had been the joy of Francis Nolan’s life when she was born, a perfect little female creature who would always love him with every fiber of her being, never really leave him even though she would marry and give him the gift of grandchildren. Over the years she’d grown into his heart’s despair until now he could barely stand to look at her. He’d never allow her to be a nun, no matter how hard or how long she pleaded. The Church had tried to steal both his children from him, but he’d not permitted Joseph to become a priest and he wouldn’t allow Alice to enter the Visitation community in Brooklyn. What good was it to fight your way to wealth if your damned offspring turned their backs on it?

  “We don’t know yet what happened. Scully found the body in the yard when he was crossing from the stables to the kitchen. Rolled up in hessian like a rug.”

  Lillian stared at him uncomprehendingly.

  “Burlap, they call it. Coffee beans and tobacco are shipped in sacks made of hessian.”

  “Sackcloth, Frank. Sackcloth and ashes.”

  “For God’s sake, Lillian.”

  “Does she have ashes on her forehead?”

  “She’s been beaten on the head. I didn’t look to see if there were smudges.” He shook off his wife’s grip and stood up. “It’s not Ash Wednesday, Lillian. Get up and see to Alice.”

  “Whatever Ellen did to get herself killed, it can’t have anything to do with us. You said she was outside the house when it happened.”

  “The girl’s skull has been bashed in, Lillian. She’s had whatever she was carrying inside her cut out, and her body’s been dumped in our stable yard like a carcass from the abattoir. I don’t know what it means and I don’t care. I want the matter dealt with, put away. They can find the man who did it to her or not. It makes no difference to me. She brought it on herself. Girls like that always do.”

  He watched tears well up in his wife’s eyes, followed their tracks down her plump cheeks. Lillian’s moods were wide swinging and unpredictable. It would cause more hard feelings later, but Francis picked up the small brown bottle from her bedside table and put it into his pocket. He needed her to be clearheaded. After Mass at Saint Patrick’s, after Sunday dinner, he’d give it back to her.

  If he hurried the police along, there was no reason why the rest of this Sunday should be different from any other Sunday.

  *

  Father Brennan knelt beside the dead girl whose glorious red hair was smeared with blood and bits of other things. Not glowing like sunset over water now, her hair had stiffened beneath her, clumped into bundles blackened with old blood. Whether the soul had taken its leave or lingered for a while, as some believed, the ritual was the same. The priest would anoint Ellen’s eyes, ears, nostrils, lips, hands, and feet, repeating with the applications of holy oil the rite of forgiveness of sins committed through each of the senses. He looked up at Detective Phelan, waiting for his nod to begin.

  “Just the forehead, Father.” Steven Phelan had seen the sacrament performed so many times he could probably have done it himself. Maybe even gotten most of the Latin right. In urgent cases, the Church taught that one anointing was enough. Ellen Tierney was no longer an urgent case as far as her life was concerned, but there was a pressing need to get her body into the morgue wagon and out of sight of Sunday morning worshippers on their way to church. Not to mention the crowd of reporters who were bound to descend on the site of the latest horror. Chief of Detectives Thomas Byrnes’ edict against answering any questions from the press was still in force. Nothing but the name of the victim. And he meant it.

  “In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spíritus Sancti. Amen.” Father Brennan replaced the vial of blessed oil in the satchel he carried with him on visits to the sick and dying, a gift from his parents at his ordination. He could still picture the awe on their faces when he laid his hands on their heads to confer his first priestly blessing. How many blessings had he bestowed since that day? Far too many to count. He looked again at the girl lying on the cobblestones, marveling at the beauty of the undamaged portions of her face, aching for the pain she must have suffered, rejoicing that whatever foulness she had e
mbraced was now washed clean in the embrace of the Divine Saviour. Perhaps you had to be a priest to believe that many people, especially women, were better off dead than alive.

  “Will you come inside?” Joseph Nolan asked. “My father has gone in to wake up my mother and sister. I’m sure they’ll need your comfort, and the servants as well, of course.”

  “Had Ellen been working here long?” They’d offer him a cup of hot coffee and perhaps a decent breakfast. Father Brennan could taste the goodness in his mouth, but he’d have to refuse. He had Mass still to say at St. Anselm’s; the fast that began at midnight didn’t end until the Eucharist was taken. No exception this morning; he wasn’t elderly and he wasn’t sick. Illness of the spirit didn’t count.

  “You’ll have to ask my mother or the housekeeper. I don’t keep track of servants’ comings and goings,” Joseph lied. He remembered his first sight of Ellen Tierney and nearly every occasion afterwards, always the mad thumping of his racing heart, the painful swelling he turned away or sat down to conceal.

  It wasn’t only Ellen. He’d had sinful, throbbingly erotic dreams about every maid who’d ever worked in the house. Young women of his own class didn’t affect him that way; their cold correctness and unapproachable distance kept him in check. He never knew what to say to them, but he didn’t have to make polite conversation with a servant.

  “I only ask because if she’s been with the family for a while she’ll have a close friend or two among the other servants.”

  “Mrs. Flynn will answer your questions, Father.” Joseph could sense the impatience of the police detective. As politely as he could, he steered the priest toward the kitchen door. Five minutes with the housekeeper, a quick word and a hasty blessing for the servants, and then upstairs. His father had given explicit instructions.