Lies That Comfort and Betray

by Rosemary Simpson

  “We already know that abortions were performed here,” Prudence reminded him. “There’s bound to be blood.”

  “We’ve been told they were done here.” Geoffrey deposited splinters of wood onto the clean white linen of his handkerchief. “Let’s look at these under the lamp,” he said.

  Prudence turned the wick up as high as it would go. The gas sputtered as it rose into the chimney; the light brightened, became less yellow.

  Using the tip of his knife, Geoffrey nudged apart the fragments of pulp, including samples taken from an area that could be easily cleaned, where blood couldn’t seep into the wood and escape the eye. Within moments it became obvious that there were very dark particles mixed in with shreds that were the same pale pine color as the table legs.

  “There’s an easily identifiable difference,” he said.

  “There’s no way to prove the discoloration was caused by blood.” Prudence touched one fingernail to the splinters resting on the handkerchief.

  “It’s nothing a judge would accept in a court of law,” Geoffrey agreed, “but it’s enough to make me think we’re on the right track.” He dribbled water from a half filled glass someone had left behind onto the dark splinters. The liquid that oozed out was too deeply blackish brown to be identifiable as blood.

  Prudence opened what turned out to be a closet door where an ironing board leaned against one wall and shelves held irons and baskets of thread, measuring tapes, pincushions, and the thick braid used to protect hems that brushed all day long against stone floors and uncarpeted stairs. There were thick stacks of small pieces of material saved from alterations, set aside to use for patching, she supposed. Like every other place in Slattery’s uniform and tailor shop, the closet was dust-free, organized, and contained only what one would expect to find.

  “There’s nowhere else to look down here, Geoffrey,” she said, “though I find it hard to believe abortions were performed this openly.”

  “The front door would have been locked,” he said, walking back to where the heavy black curtain hung in the doorway separating shop premises from the workroom they were searching. “The young woman would have been told not to make a sound, perhaps given a piece of wood to clench between her teeth, maybe even a dose of laudanum to calm her down. This is a neighborhood where people mind their own business. Even if some of the women knew what the Slatterys were doing, they wouldn’t have said anything.”

  “In case one of them required a similar service in the future.”

  “Exactly. And my guess is that relatively few clients ended up in charity wards with infections from which they never recovered. Either accidentally or because they knew how to take precautions, the success rate must have been high. It’s the only explanation for why they’ve been able to stay in business so long.”

  “How long do you think that’s been?” Prudence asked.

  “Big Brenda believed that Mrs. Slattery was active since right after the shop was opened. There was never a husband; she claimed to be widowed. A daughter and then Neil, who was several years younger, but probably about five or six years old when they arrived in this country.”

  “Can Brenda’s information be trusted?”

  “Gossip, rumor, maybe a grain of truth here and there. It’s all we have.”

  “I’m ready to go upstairs to where they lived.” Prudence picked up the lamp while Geoffrey folded the handkerchief carefully and put it in a trouser pocket.

  “Let me go first,” he said, one hand resting on the Army Colt .45 in its shoulder holster.

  The staircase was narrow and dark, but the walls were recently painted and free of greasy finger-or handprints. A railing had been nailed to one wall, presumably to help an aging and ailing Mrs. Slattery make her way back to the apartment at the end of a long day. A single door at the top of the stairs closed off the living quarters.

  “Is it locked?” Prudence whispered. They were the only two people on the premises, but whispering seemed more fitting than speaking aloud.

  “No.” Geoffrey turned the handle and stepped through the doorway into what Prudence’s lamp revealed to be a comfortably furnished parlor. He lit two gas wall fixtures and another lamp that sat on a three legged table beside a cushioned rocking chair. “They must have been doing very well,” he said.

  Crocheted doilies rested on the backs and arms of upholstered chairs, brightly polished brass candlesticks stood on the mantelpiece, and two baskets on either side of the fireplace held ample supplies of coal and split firewood. The kitchen was at one end of the parlor, separated from it by a sideboard that held dishes, glasses, a tray of silverware, and precisely folded napkins and tablecloths.

  “Stay here for a moment. Let me check the other rooms.” He walked quickly but quietly toward closed doors that opened onto two bedrooms. “All clear,” he said, coming back into the parlor, pushing the Colt .45 deeper down into its holster. “I’ll take Slattery’s room. You search the mother’s.”

  Black dresses hung neatly in the wardrobe, pairs of shoes and boots lined up below. An umbrella leaned into one rear corner, and hatboxes sat on the single shelf. Prudence checked skirt pockets, the toes of shoes, the empty spaces beneath hat crowns. She ran a hand over the wardrobe’s floor, feeling for a secret compartment, but found nothing. In two drawers at the bottom of the wardrobe, someone had positioned perfectly folded nightgowns and undergarments. A warm, knitted shawl in stripes of black and gray hung over a ladder-back chair. The basin and chamber pot had been washed after their last use and stowed out of sight under the bed.

  Prudence sighed, then attacked the tables standing on either side of the narrow bedstead. A rosary, prayer book, and pair of gold-rimmed spectacles were the first things she found. Nestled next to them was a clean, folded handkerchief and a small bottle of Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound. Prudence opened it and sniffed. Enough alcohol to keep the herbal elements from spoiling for a long time to come. She held the prayer book upside down and fanned the pages. A shower of holy cards, commemorative funeral cards, and pieces of paper with prayers and intentions scribbled on them rained out. One folded piece of thick white paper looked official. It was Mrs. Pauline Slattery’s death certificate; she’d been gone for three months. The cause of death was pleurisy.

  Prudence ran her fingers beneath the mattress, from top to bottom of the bed and on both sides. Nothing. Hands on hips, she stood looking around her, searching for a place to hide something from the prying eyes of a son who was compulsively clean, neat, and organized. The bedroom’s single window and the mirror in the door of the wardrobe had been washed with vinegar, the bed linens crackled with starch, the floorboards and the furniture gleamed with polish.

  If I wanted to conceal something from him, where would I put it? Prudence asked herself. Her eyes raked the walls, but she’d already looked behind the few pictures hanging there. She stared at the wardrobe, willing it to give up its secrets, but nothing happened. Almost absentmindedly she tried to run a hand behind the bed’s headboard, but there wasn’t enough space. That was odd, to push a bed so close to the wall. She pulled it out an inch or so, struggling with the weight of it, then slipped her hand into the space she opened between the wall and the bedstead. Up and down, left and right.

  The envelope had been tacked just far enough in so that a swipe of the dust cloth wouldn’t reach it. Sitting on the bed, Prudence slit it open with a hatpin. Neil Slattery’s birth certificate. Born 1855 in County Cork, Ireland. Father Unknown. Bridget Slattery’s birth certificate. Born 1852 in County Limerick, Ireland. Father Unknown. Mrs. Slattery had in reality been Miss Slattery, hounded out of one county into another when she turned up pregnant and unwed. America must have seemed her only escape.

  “Prudence?” Geoffrey stood in the doorway, a carpetbag in his hand. “I’ve found something.”

  “So have I,” she said, holding out the documents to him, fingering other folded papers still in the envelope.

  “These may explain a lot.” He read
them through quickly, then returned them to her. “If his mother blamed him for being a bastard, and she made much of her living ensuring that other bastards didn’t get born, it could have eaten at him through all the years of his growing up until he became twisted enough to think he owed it to her to continue the mission. Get rid of the evidence of sin before more unwanted children could be born with the stain of bastardy.”

  “What’s that, Geoffrey?”

  “I think it’s the carpetbag Nora Kenny must have brought with her from Staten Island. It never turned up.” He gave it to Prudence, who placed it on the bed and pulled open the handles.

  She didn’t recognize any of the clothing inside, but then she’d never seen the adult Nora Kenny when she wasn’t wearing a maid’s uniform. A lawn shirtwaist settled onto her hands, as light as lace and finely embroidered with a pattern of tiny shamrocks. Surely that was Agnes Kenny’s work. Prudence had seen examples of it in her mother’s linens stored in the attic between sprigs of lavender to ward off the moths. “I think you’re right,” she said.

  Geoffrey picked up the carpetbag and turned it over. On the flat bottom someone had written Property of Kenny, Staten Island. The ink was faded, but most of the letters could be made out.

  “Dear God,” Prudence sobbed, one hand covering her mouth. “She must have come here because her uniform no longer fit around the waist. She walked in and Slattery pegged her for a whore who couldn’t be allowed to bring a bastard into the world. He killed her, Geoffrey. He killed her and then performed some kind of macabre ceremony on her poor body.”

  “She might have come because she asked around and was told about a safe place to get rid of it. We won’t know until he confesses.”

  “I know,” Prudence said. “Nora would have cherished Dominic’s child. And Dominic would have seen it as his way out of the future his father insisted he live. He would have taken Nora away somewhere safe. Out West perhaps, where they could begin a new life together. Where they didn’t owe anything to anyone except each other.”

  “Let’s take these with us.” Geoffrey repacked Nora’s possessions into the carpetbag and laid the documents Prudence had found on top.

  He looked around Mrs. Slattery’s bedroom and thought that something seemed wrong, off somehow, as if the walls weren’t in the right place. But that was ridiculous. Prudence, carrying Nora’s carpetbag, was waiting for him.

  Geoffrey thought she had unerringly put her finger on exactly what had happened to her childhood friend. It must be unimaginably painful for her to remain in the place where Nora might have met her death. He’d take her home, and over restorative cups of tea they would talk their way through her grief. Prudence was fragile, he reminded himself, no matter how brave and stalwart a front she chose to wear in front of him.

  He had helped see her through a difficult time not too long ago; he would do it again.

  *

  Neil Slattery choked back sobs of frustrated anger. He had torn the apartment apart looking for the document he had known his mother must have hidden there. The birth certificate that proved him the bastard she’d so often accused him of being, the filthy thing she had tried and failed to purge from her body. It was humiliating that the MacKenzie woman had found it, and worse that it had been in so obvious a hiding place all this time. Now he’d never be able to destroy it.

  He pressed the lever that opened the panel concealing his narrow hiding place and stepped out. His mother had insisted there had to be somewhere to secrete the instruments she’d used and the record book she’d prided herself on keeping. “Who knows? One of us may have to hide there someday,” she had said, leering the gap-toothed grin that was as good as a slap in the face.

  She’d hated him. Had tried to kill him when he was no larger than her thumb. Tried again when he had stubbornly grown to be as big as her fist. She’d told him the stories of her failures so many times that they became his stories, and when she’d faltered in the retelling as she grew older, he prompted her as if he’d been there. On the outside. Mixing the herbal concoctions. Sitting in the boiling hot water. Probing with the crochet hook.

  He held the record book in his arms and cursed himself for not having gotten rid of Nora Kenny’s carpetbag. But he had a weakness. He liked to keep souvenirs. For a while. Not too long. But for a few weeks or a few months. To stroke and remember. He listened, just to be on the safe side. His mother had put great importance on protecting themselves. He had let a good fifteen minutes pass before he left the secret cupboard. Counting off the seconds and the minutes the way his mother had taught him when he’d been a small, unruly child and she’d locked him in whatever dark closet was available. “One hour. Count it off,” she’d told him. It had kept him from screaming.

  His thing hurt. He’d tied the string around it before he went to Saint Anselm’s, exactly the way she’d done so many times. It would be a terrible sin to have it grow long and hard in a church. And he was inclined that way. All bastards were. They wanted to repeat the crime of their birth, and the only way to prevent that was to knot in the seed. It hurt, it throbbed, it swelled with no possibility of release, but it kept another bastard from being created, and that’s all God and his mother wanted.

  It was time to leave. Again. For the last time.

  He knew someone down on the docks who owed him a favor.

  CHAPTER 33

  When Father Kearns proposed a farewell dinner for Father Mark Brennan, transferred unexpectedly to Boston, and wasn’t that a shame, Mrs. Healy could find no good excuse for refusing to cook it. All she could do, because it was good riddance to him as far as she was concerned, was keep to the strict abstinence rules of the Church.

  Brennan was leaving on the Saturday before Christmas, which meant fish on the Friday night of the dinner, so she’d bake a bony big cod for the three priests, and serve it up surrounded by mounds of boiled potatoes, boiled carrots, and boiled turnips. With grated horseradish on the side, hot enough to bring tears to the eyes and set the nose running. It was a meal beloved by the pastor, tolerated by his assistant, and decidedly not Father Brennan’s favorite. Mrs. Healy had served it on many a Friday night. She’d seen the way Father Brennan took small helpings and moved them around on his plate, contriving to eat very little while seeming to consume enough so as not to give offense. Father Mahoney, bless his ignorant stomach, would think it a fine sendoff.

  The potatoes were kept in a great bin in the cellar to prevent them sprouting more than was decently edible, the carrots and turnips buried in sand. It had been Father Kearns’s idea to buy the rectory’s staples in bulk to save money, though Mrs. Healy still went out to the shops every day. She enjoyed gossiping with the women who were buying supplies for family dinners. The rectory could be so dead quiet and gloomy during the day that she’d go out even when there wasn’t anything to get.

  For the last couple of days she’d taken jars of hot tea and slices of bread sopped in drippings over to Kevin Carney and Blossom, though she hadn’t the foggiest notion why the two of them were still camped out in the alley across from Saint Anselm’s now that all the fuss was over. Still, she supposed it never hurt to have one of Billy McGlory’s runners keeping an eye out for you.

  She’d picked up the cod early in the morning, always best to get it fresh before it sat out too long. You could trust the Fulton Fish Market, but what was lovely in the morning could start to stink by midafternoon. Worse in the summer, but you had to be careful in winter, too.

  The rectory was quieter than usual this afternoon, even though all three of the priests were in. Father Mahoney had gone off to his bedroom to lie down for a bit, Father Kearns was making entries in the big ledgers that had been haphazardly kept until he arrived, and Father Brennan was seeing to the last of his packing. Not that he had more than two suitcases, which was about right for a priest, but he could fuss over the smallest thing, like a handkerchief not ironed and folded with a sharp enough crease.

  Having them all out of her way and busy on t
heir own suited Mrs. Healy just fine. Basket in hand, she made her careful way down the cellar steps after the potatoes, carrots, turnips, and horseradish root, thinking through what she had to do next. She liked to plan out a task so there’d be no surprises and plenty of time to get it done right. Peel the potatoes and put them to soak in salted water, scrub the dirt off the carrots and turnips, but leave the peels on. They were good for the bowels. She’d grate the horseradish and mix it into some dried mustard powder moistened with a few tablespoons of porter. Do it early so her eyes wouldn’t still be red from the fumes when she served the dinner. She wouldn’t want Father Brennan to think she was cut up over his leaving.

  The smell she’d noticed down there was getting stronger. She’d have to mention it to Jerry Brophy. Strictly speaking, he was only supposed to take care of the church, but the man was such a fool for cleaning that he happily took on whatever extra jobs she could find for him around the rectory. He loved scrubbing floors. Maybe that was the problem. Something spilled that was starting to rot in the crevices between the flagstones that kept the cellar cool. Not as cold as outdoors, of course, but far from as warm as the floors above. Maybe she could sniff it out.

  She’d look a real gorm if anyone saw her snuffling like a dog around the shelves where the Mason jars stood in perfect rows. Nothing there she could see, though the smell did seem a bit stronger. Not a stench yet but definitely enough to make her want to pinch her nose. The bins for the root vegetables had an earthy scent, not the slightest bit objectionable. Mrs. Healy couldn’t understand it. The farther she got from the Mason jars, over by the coal chute and the furnace, the fainter the odor, but she could have sworn she’d looked carefully at every shelf to see if a jar might have cracked and leaked its contents.