I nearly felt Ethan beside me, telling me I couldn’t single-handedly right all the world’s wrongs. I had tried to do right by Andrew Gwynn; indeed, I had given love every opportunity to stay golden in his eyes, as I wished it had stayed golden in mine.
I prayed silently as we neared Seventh Avenue that Andrew would not despise me for my blatant and uncalled-for dabbling in his private affairs.
At least he would find out the truth from someone who cared enough about him and the virtue of love to have wanted to protect them both.
When the hansom pulled to a stop, I paid the driver and stepped out, trying to gather strength from the beat of the city as it pulsed around me. The Greenwich City Tailor Shop was one of several small businesses arranged like children’s building blocks in a long row. The paint on the shop’s window frames and door was cracked and peeling, but the panes of glass were freshly scrubbed. On the other side of the window I could see two wooden tailor forms, one with a completed suit coat hanging on it, and the other bare. There was a long wooden counter and behind that, the back of a man’s head—surely Andrew’s—as he bent over a sewing machine. I could smell the wool and gabardine and linen even before I opened the door, steeled myself, and went inside.
The tinkling of the bell on the door startled me and I wanted to hush it so that I could stand there for a moment before launching into my confession. But the bell had alerted him and he turned to me. The courage I had summoned as I had opened the door now seemed to evaporate with the dissipating trills of the bell. As Andrew’s face filled the doorway, I reached into my pocketbook to touch the letter, to remind myself again why I was there.
And then he spoke to me. “May I help you?”
For a shimmering second I could almost believe it had all been a dream, that it was March again, I had only just arrived in Manhattan, and nothing bad had happened to any of us. Andrew didn’t know me and I didn’t know him. That was why he didn’t recognize me. It had all been a dream.
But then I realized as I opened my mouth to speak that the man in front of me wasn’t Andrew. It was a man who looked very much like him.
His brother.
“May I help you, miss?” he said again.
“Nigel.” The name came from remembered conversations while Andrew had lain riddled with fever and loss, and I had cooled his brow.
“Yes. Do I know you?”
“I’m . . . I am a nurse at Ellis Island. I have some news for your brother, Andrew. I was his nurse when he was a patient at the hospital there.”
“Oh. He’s not here at the moment, I’m afraid.”
I was about to ask him how long Andrew might be gone when the door behind me opened and the tinkling bell announced someone else was stepping into the store.
I turned to see whether perhaps it was Andrew, but that was not who it was.
“Good afternoon, Miss Wood.” Chester Hartwell tipped his hat and smiled at me, as polite and genteel as a table host.
Thirty-Four
I should have guessed Chester Hartwell had planned to follow me from the moment he met me in the great hall. He had come to the hospital not to ask questions of Mrs. Crowley, but because he had trailed me there. And he had waited in the hospital reception area as long as it might take an ordinary woman like me to change out of a uniform into street clothes and get to the ferry house. He had concluded his hopeful questioning at the hospital, thanked Mrs. Crowley and Ethan no doubt, and then made his way to the ferry house to see whether I was among those waiting for the next boat.
Of course he had seen me without my seeing him.
He saw me get into the hansom and so he got in one. He followed me to Chambers Street and saw that I’d paid my driver to wait for me. So he waited. And when I came out alone some fifteen minutes later and got back in the carriage, he instructed his driver to again follow me.
Right to the tailor shop.
He had watched from the street as I went in. Seen through the window that I was talking to a man who surely met the description of Andrew Gwynn he’d been given.
And then he had come in, ready to pounce.
A great sense of defeat fell over me, thick and cold.
“I’m afraid I’m a little lost here,” Nigel said.
“Allow me to explain, Mr. Gwynn. You are Mr. Gwynn, aren’t you?”
“Yes, but who are you?”
My voice seemed to have been encased in stone and I couldn’t summon the energy to smash the granite.
“I’m Chester Hartwell. I’m a private detective.” He produced a business card and handed it to Nigel.
And I could say nothing.
“Is there something I can do for you, Mr. Hartwell?” Nigel said politely. His accent was just like Andrew’s. Soft and melodic. My own voice seemed light-years away from me.
“There is, indeed. You see, I’m under the employ of Angus Ravenhouse. I’m sure you’ve heard of him.” Nigel’s blank stare made Hartwell laugh. “Let’s not play games, Mr. Gwynn. It’s far too late for games.”
“I’m afraid I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.” Nigel’s polite tone was so much like Andrew’s. It gave me the strength to throw myself into the conversation. I knew that once I did, I would change its course.
“You’re talking to the wrong man!” I exclaimed. “This is Nigel Gwynn, not Andrew.”
Mr. Hartwell needed only a moment to process this information. “Then I shall wait to speak with the right man.”
“What is going on?” Nigel said, his courteous tone giving way to concern. “I’d like to know. Especially if it involves my brother.”
“Yes, Miss Wood. We’d all like to know. I’m sure the authorities might like to know, too.” Hartwell smiled effortlessly, as if threats of calling in the cops were something he said as easily as his own name.
A tremor of fear started to blossom inside me, growing in intensity as seconds ticked by. Truth is truth, Ethan had said, but sometimes the truth was ugly. Truth itself was not beautiful or hideous. It was like change, neither good nor bad. And there was nothing I could do to make beautiful what Lily had done to Andrew, what Angus done to Lily, what the fire had done to me.
I looked down at Lily’s scarf around my neck and I saw the tattered threads where I had removed the key. And I thought of the letter she had written that I held in my handbag. A letter that spoke of what she had done but also what she had suffered.
And I realized that while I couldn’t beautify what was ugly, I could hide the hideous under the cover of mercy.
What is mercy for if not to cloak ugliness?
I had the power to do it.
Everything that had happened until then had led up to that moment. I turned to Nigel. “When is Andrew expected to return?”
“Soon. What is all this about?”
“Will you lock up the shop for a few minutes? Please? This is important.”
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Mr. Hartwell raise an eyebrow. He wasn’t expecting me to take charge. I was surprising him. And he didn’t like it.
“I’d say it’s more than just important—” he began, but I cut him off. I would cede no more power to him.
“You will be silent, Mr. Hartwell.” I turned back to Nigel. “Will you please close the shop for just a little while, Mr. Gwynn?”
Nigel Gwynn walked over to the store’s entrance, locked it, and pulled down the shade. When he came back to us, he motioned to chairs that someone might sit in while waiting to be fitted for a suit. We sat.
“What is all this about?” he asked.
I drew in my breath. Where to begin?
“It’s about your brother marrying someone who was already married and stealing a necklace,” Hartwell said confidently.
The words sounded so ridiculous that I marveled that they had struck fear in me only a short time earlier. “You are incredibly
misinformed, Mr. Hartwell. And may I remind you that I have the information you seek. I know everything you want to know, so I suggest you be quiet.”
“Miss Wood, please, what is all this?” Nigel entreated me.
I pointed to Hartwell. “This man will tell you that only days before he sailed, your brother falsely married a woman who was already married, that the two of them conspired to steal a necklace belonging to this woman’s husband, and that Andrew somehow had something to do with her death on the ship that brought them here. None of it is true. And I have the proof.”
Hartwell was absolutely silent next to me.
I pulled out the letter and certificate from my handbag. I opened the certificate and showed it to them both.
“Andrew had no idea Lily was already married. She didn’t tell him. But she was planning to tell him by letter the day they arrived at your tailor shop. That’s why she had this. But she never made it to America. She contracted scarlet fever on the ship and died before reaching New York.
“When your brother was admitted to the hospital he was numb with grief over losing his wife. I had recently lost someone, too, so I was especially aware of how difficult that day was for him. When I asked whether there was anything I could do for him, he asked me to retrieve your father’s pattern book from his trunk in the baggage room. I would’ve told him that wasn’t possible but I felt such sympathy for him, I told him I would try. When I found his and Lily’s luggage in the baggage room, I thought the smaller of the two was his. It wasn’t. The smaller one was hers; I knew that as soon as I opened it. I would’ve just closed the lid but I saw she had a book of Keats’s poetry in her trunk. And it looked like a well-loved volume, so whether I should have or shouldn’t have, I decided I would take the little poetry book to Andrew. I thought it might comfort him to have something of hers. I didn’t know that the book had been your mother’s. Nor that Lily had taken it from Andrew’s trunk and put it in hers so that when he opened the trunk in New York after she disappeared, he would find it. And he’d see what was inside.”
I unfolded the letter. “I didn’t mean to read it. It fell out of the poetry book along with the certificate. When I saw what was written on the certificate, I confess I could not help but read it.”
I cleared my throat and began to read the letter slowly, line by line. When I was finished neither man said a word.
“Andrew still doesn’t know about this letter, Mr. Gwynn,” I continued. “I hadn’t the heart to tell him. There were times when I wanted to. Times when I thought I should. And the day he left, I thought I had.” I touched the scarf around my neck. “This scarf was Lily’s. I’d offered to wash it for him so that it would be free of disease when he left. On the day he was to be discharged I put the letter and the certificate inside the scarf and wrapped it in tissue so that he would find them later. But he left the scarf, wrapped, as a thank-you gift to me when I was away from the ward. And the note he included led me to believe he truly was better off not knowing. He still believes in the sacred beauty of love, Mr. Gwynn. Of all the things I have trifled with, I very much do not want to trifle with that.”
“And the necklace?” Hartwell asked.
“I know where Lily put the necklace, and since that is all you care about, I will see that you leave with it, provided Mr. Gwynn here doesn’t think we should do otherwise.”
Nigel shook his head. “I hardly know what to make of any of this. If what you’re saying is true—”
“It’s all true,” I assured him.
“Then this necklace is not mine or my brother’s to lay claim to.”
“But I am telling you this, Mr. Hartwell.” I went on. “You will leave New York, and you and your employer will not trouble the Gwynn family again. You will say nothing to Andrew Gwynn about this—not now and not ever—and if you or Mr. Ravenhouse does, I will let the British police have this letter. They might find of interest Lily’s accusation that her father was defrauded by Mr. Ravenhouse. Do we have an understanding?”
Chester Hartwell nodded once. “Where is it?”
I unwound Lily’s scarf. The necklace circled my neck, its gems warm on my skin.
• • •
BEFORE he allowed Hartwell to leave, Nigel insisted that he sign a statement that he’d received the necklace in question. It took a moment for Hartwell to agree, but in the end he did as Nigel asked. I signed it as witness and so did Nigel. Nigel then folded that piece of paper and tucked it into his pants pocket.
Hartwell tipped his hat and turned from us. He left the shop without a word.
Nigel and I watched him board a trolley and take off down Seventh Avenue.
When he was gone, I turned to Nigel and offered him the letter and the certificate. “I don’t know what to do with these. I keep thinking I do. I don’t.”
He stared at them for a moment. “Why didn’t you put them back in her trunk after you found them?”
“I tried to. When I went back to the baggage room Lily’s trunk had been taken to the incinerator. The luggage of all those who had succumbed to the fever on that ship was confiscated and burned.”
“You could have given them to Andrew.”
“Could I? Could you? Could you have looked at your grieving brother, sick and separated from everything that mattered to him, and given him that letter?”
He did not answer me, and we were quiet for a moment.
“What made you do all this?” he finally said.
I knew the answer. It came quickly to my lips.
“I did it for love.”
Nigel’s eyes widened. “You’re in love . . . with my brother?”
For a moment I wanted to believe there was a way that I might love Andrew Gwynn purely and without pretense, and that he could love me, but how could that be? I could never share with him the terrible thing I knew, nor my own part in shielding him from it. How could I love a man completely to whom I could not bare my soul? My hand went instinctively to my neck, where the scarf rested against my skin now that the necklace was gone. Peeling myself away from the fire, from Edward, from the island included this: releasing Andrew Gwynn from that part of my being that wanted to rescue him and keep him close.
“I did it for love’s sake,” I finally said. “Someday you might think Andrew will need to see that letter. But I pray that day never comes. I truly do. Mercy would keep him from ever learning what he cannot change and what would change nothing. I saw hope in your brother’s eyes when he left the island, Mr. Gwynn. He still believes in love. Even though it cost him.”
Nigel Gwynn stared at the papers in my hand. “They’d be ash now if Andrew hadn’t asked for the pattern book, yes?”
“Yes.”
Again he stared at the papers, willing them, it seemed, to speak of what should be done with them. “I see hope in his eyes too,” he finally said. “Every day a little more.”
Nigel Gwynn took the papers from me. Then he reached behind the counter and drew out a pair of shears.
• • •
I left the tailor shop a few minutes later. Nigel asked whether I would like to leave my address with him should Andrew wish to contact me or in case Chester Hartwell showed up again. But I shook my head. Chester Hartwell would not be returning.
“Are you sure?” Nigel pressed. He knew I had bound myself to his brother and was now choosing to loosen the strings.
“I am.”
Nigel kindly offered to hail a carriage for me, but I declined and stepped onto the busy street alone.
For a moment I stood there watching life zoom and saunter past me, in all its severity and magnificence. I was shedding my skin, becoming raw and new. Everything that had kept me bound to the island was sloughing away with each brave step I was taking.
As I stood there, familiarizing myself with my renaissance, I knew there was one thing left I needed to do. Wanted to do.
&
nbsp; I boarded the next trolley headed in the direction of Chambers Street.
We had gone no farther than two blocks when I saw Andrew Gwynn walking down Seventh Avenue with a bolt of cloth on his shoulder. The trolley was slowing in traffic and for a moment our eyes met. Instinctively I raised my hand to the window glass that separated us. At first his stare was that of a stranger. It took him a second to embrace the notion that in that moment, his two worlds had collided—the sad life he knew on Ellis with me and the hopeful one he was building here with his brother. Then his eyes burned with recognition. The trolley began to accelerate and he seemed to vacillate between running after me and continuing on his way back to the shop. I kept my hand to the glass, and smiled at him, feeling tears sliding down my cheeks unchecked and landing on Lily’s scarf. And then he raised his hand to me, waved once, and lowered it slowly. He did not run after me. I turned to face the back window as we passed so that I could continue to watch him. He stood facing the trolley with his hands on the bolt of cloth until I could no longer see him in the distance.
Thirty-Five
TARYN
Manhattan
September 2011
I had always assumed I had lost Mrs. Stauer’s scarf in the maelstrom of my escape on September eleventh. The most I had ever hoped for was that I might find its closest match. It hadn’t occurred to me that the florist might have had it all this time. I hadn’t thought to try to contact him; nor could I have done so. Until the photograph had turned up I hadn’t even known Mick’s last name; nor could I remember which florist employed him.
As I stood with the phone to my ear, the words “I have your scarf” echoed in my head. I couldn’t believe that the scarf was no longer lost to me. In all the years I had spent looking for its match, I had never fully considered how I might feel when I found it. Here now was not just its match, but the scarf itself, safe in the hands of the very person who had used it to pull me back from the rim of hell.
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