MURDER AT BERTRAM'S BOWER

by Cynthia Peale

  Raising the money to run the place is hardly a detail, Ames thought.

  “You helped her draw up the rules?”

  “I did. I saw no reason why such a worthy enterprise should be deprived of Christian counsel.”

  “Of course.”

  There was an awkward little silence. The reverend looked around the room as if he were seeking some new topic of conversation. Ames cleared his throat, but the reverend did not seem to notice; now he was studying the large gold ring that he wore on the small finger of his right hand.

  That’s the end of it, Ames thought; he’ll give us nothing more. He cast about for some way to keep the conversation alive, but before he found it, the reverend spoke again.

  “You have been very kind, Mr. Ames, to trouble yourself about this wretched business.”

  “Yes, well, as I said—”

  “I understand—your sister encouraged you.”

  Caroline. “That reminds me, Reverend. Caroline is holding a dinner this evening for Nigel Chadwick—do you know him? He is a London journalist touring America to promote his latest book. I took a note from her, just now, to Miss Montgomery, inviting you both to join us this evening—if you will forgive the lateness of the invitation.”

  The reverend blinked. “Indeed? How very kind.”

  “Will you come?”

  “Why—yes. I—we—will be happy to join you.”

  But he did not look happy, MacKenzie thought; he looked puzzled.

  “Caroline thought it would do Miss Montgomery good to get away from the Bower.”

  “Yes, I imagine it might.”

  The reverend got to his feet. Now, at last, the interview was definitely over. He started toward the door, and Ames and MacKenzie followed.

  “I am sure that in a matter of days,” the reverend was saying, “the police will have brought this distressing matter to its conclusion. I have every confidence in them,” he added as they came to the vestibule. “Inspector Crippen is one of their best men, don’t you agree?”

  The front door was open to the pelting rain. Ames stepped out and rescued his umbrella from where he had left it on the porch. “Yes, I do,” he said with a small smile that Montgomery did not return. “That’s what troubles me—that Crippen is one of their best. Good day to you, sir.”

  In the herdic-phaeton, Ames let out an exasperated laugh. “A smooth customer, is he not, Doctor?”

  “The Reverend Montgomery?” MacKenzie shook his head. “Yes, indeed. But very effective for the purposes of the Bower, I imagine.”

  “Yes. I am sure he is that. They don’t run that place on a pittance, and from what Caroline tells us, they exist entirely on what he can bring in. I can just see him, making his case to a parlor full of ladies, any one of whom is wearing a piece of jewelry that would support the Bower for an entire year. Did you happen to notice the pages on his table?”

  “No.”

  Ames grunted. “I couldn’t be sure, but I thought the handwriting matched the dedication to Mary Flaherty, written in a book in her room.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. But I could hardly steal a sheet to make sure, and beyond that, I don’t know what good it does us. Or not at the moment, at any rate.”

  He fell silent, brooding. The cab made its way through the rain-drenched streets, past the Boston & Providence railroad station, down Charles Street between the Common and the Public Garden. Perhaps the reverend had been right, he thought; perhaps Crippen, for all his faults, would be able to catch the man responsible for the Bower murders. Perhaps he, Addington Ames, did not need to involve himself further.

  And yet … Caroline’s reproachful face rose up in his mind. She was right, of course. Agatha Montgomery did the city much good with her refuge for fallen women, and he and Caroline should do what they could to help her, even indirectly, to keep the place going. As it would not, if the scandal grew.

  “He was filled with helpful suggestions about a possible suspect, was he not?” MacKenzie said, jarring him out of his reverie. “Drifters, hobos, baseball enthusiasts—not to mention the typewriter salesman and the Irish lad. And yet, despite what he said, I would put my money on that dragon matron.”

  “What? The estimable Mrs. Pratt? Why do you say so?”

  “I can’t give you a particular reason. But she seemed so filled with anger, so—resentful, is that the right word?—so resentful of the girls, and particularly Mary. Do you not think it odd that a woman like that, so bristling with hostility, would seek employment in such a place?”

  “But you heard what Caroline said, and the reverend also. Mrs. Pratt does her job and does it well. Besides which, she claimed to be at her religious meeting on Sunday night. Do we know if she was at the Bower on Monday, when the second girl was killed? I agree with you, Doctor. The woman is hardly a sympathetic figure. Whether that makes her a murderess, I doubt we can say.”

  At Beacon Street, the herdic suddenly lurched as the driver took his opportunity and whipped his horse across, along Charles Street to Mt. Vernon. Rapidly, they went up the hill and came into Louisburg Square, and then they were home; a tall, redbrick, swell-front town house, with lavender-glass windows and a shiny black front door, fanlight above it and a brass door knocker in the shape of a humpbacked sea serpent—a reminder of the origins of the Ames family fortune, rather depleted now, when Ames’s grandfather had been one of the foremost China traders in the city.

  Ames paid the driver and they mounted the small flight of granite steps, scraped their boots on the iron boot-scraper beside the door, and went in. The odor of spicy pea soup greeted them, and in the next moment Caroline appeared from the dining room.

  “Addington! I am so glad you’re home. Margaret is just serving lunch. And this came.” She held a small yellow envelope: a telegram.

  Hanging his cape on the hall tree, Ames took the telegram and opened it as he went into the dining room.

  “Well?” she said, seating herself at her place at the table and ladling out his bowl of soup. “What is it? Something to do with Agatha?”

  “I don’t think so.” He read it again, just to be sure. And it was only a few words after all:

  Can you call this afternoon stop.

  Serena Vincent

  Serena Vincent.

  He tucked the telegram into his breast pocket and waited until his hands were steady before he lifted his soup spoon. Suddenly, the dreary day had brightened, a fact that had nothing to do with the weather.

  “What is it, Addington? Or is it something personal?”

  The soup was thick and hot, one of his favorites. “It is Mrs. Vincent. She wants to see me this afternoon.”

  Instantly Caroline froze. MacKenzie understood her reaction. She was wary of Mrs. Vincent: a notorious—and very beautiful—actress who had once, some years earlier, been a member of the Ameses’ social circle. But she’d been caught out in an adulterous affair and disgraced, divorced by her husband, her name never mentioned again in proper Boston households. Instead of having the decency to commit suicide, or at the very least to move away, she’d stayed on in the city and made a successful career for herself on the stage. Only last fall, after not having seen her for some years, the Ameses had made her acquaintance once more.

  “Why?” she said, more sharply than she had intended.

  “I have no idea. I assume that I will discover why when I go to see her.”

  Caroline forced herself to change the subject. “How did your morning go at the Bower, Addington?”

  He shrugged. “Not as badly as it could have, I imagine.” And he told her of their interviews with Matron Pratt and Agatha Montgomery.

  “You saw Mary’s room! I am surprised that Agatha let you do that.”

  “Yes, well, perhaps she is more upset than we know. At any rate, there was nothing helpful to be seen there. And then the reverend came—”

  “He did? How did he seem?”

  Ames glanced at MacKenzie. “What would you say, Doctor? He didn’t
strike me as being terribly distraught.”

  “No,” MacKenzie agreed. “But then, all these men of the cloth are disciplined to hide their feelings, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Hmmm.” Ames thought about it. “Perhaps. At any rate, he assured us that Inspector Crippen and the police are perfectly capable of apprehending the man responsible for the murder of the Bower’s girls, and he has every faith that they will.”

  Caroline made a little moue of distaste. “Do you mean he asked you not to involve yourself?”

  “Yes. I would say he asked exactly that.”

  “But you won’t stop—”

  “No. Not yet, at any rate.”

  “Did you deliver the invitation to dinner?”

  “Yes. They will come.”

  Ames wiped his mouth with his napkin and pushed back his chair. Serena Vincent, he thought. He was eager to be out of the house and on his way to see her. More eager, perhaps, than was prudent.

  “Can I be of assistance to you this afternoon, Miss Ames?” MacKenzie asked.

  “Oh—no, I don’t think so. But thank you.”

  Ames paused. “In that case, Doctor, perhaps you would like to hunt up Verna Kent? A girl who was expelled from the Bower last week,” he explained to Caroline, “and who threatened to harm Mary Flaherty.”

  MacKenzie nodded with what he hoped was sufficient enthusiasm. “Yes, of course.”

  Margaret appeared in the doorway. “Cook says to come, miss. The boy from S. S. Pierce hasn’t delivered the order, an’ the aspic isn’t takin’ right either.”

  As Caroline rose and hurried out to see to this latest domestic crisis, Ames said to MacKenzie, “We are well away from here, Doctor. I wish you luck.”

  And I you, MacKenzie thought.

  At Serena Vincent’s fashionable apartment hotel on Berkeley Street, the concierge, forewarned, ushered Ames in and directed him to the elevator. As the uniformed operator clanged shut the door, Ames realized that he was sweating a little, and his heart was beating fast.

  Stop it, he told himself as the brass and mahogany cage rose slowly upward. She is an actress: beyond the pale. The fact that her husband had been far too old for her, and, worse, a mean and vicious man; the fact that her punishment—banishment from Boston Society—had turned into a kind of victory for her; the fact that since he’d met her the previous autumn she had lived in his dreams—all of those facts were irrelevant. No woman could be an actress and still be thought of as decent. By rights, he should think of her only with contempt.

  But that was not the way he thought of her: not at all. He was honest enough to admit it, to himself if to no one else. The last time he’d seen her, in the fall, she’d been jailed in the Tombs, dressed in prison garb which did nothing to lessen the impact of her stunning beauty. He remembered how he’d briefly put his hand on her shoulder and felt her warmth through the cheap, flimsy cloth.

  The elevator stopped, the door clanged open, and he stepped out into the thickly carpeted hall. He was admitted by the maid, a middle-aged woman who, as he knew, was more duenna than maid. She took his hat and gloves and Inverness cape, and then she showed him into the parlor, where Serena Vincent awaited him.

  She rose as he entered. She was tall for a woman, some years younger than himself—about thirty, he thought—with auburn hair and wide, greenish eyes set in a stunningly beautiful face. He realized with a little pang that he’d forgotten just how beautiful she was, and how could he have done that? She wore some kind of tea gown of grayish-green silk, with—apparently—no corset or, indeed, undergarments of any kind to encase her voluptuous figure.

  “Mr. Ames,” she said, advancing and giving him her hand. He caught a whiff of her scent—something French, no doubt. “How kind of you to come.”

  Her voice was low, with a husky, sensuous undertone, but as he knew, she could project it seemingly without effort to the last row of the second balcony.

  “Not at all,” he said. He was relieved to hear that his own voice sounded steady, reassuringly normal.

  A small Yorkshire terrier on a silk pillow by the fire lifted its head and growled softly at the intruder, but at a word from its mistress it subsided.

  She motioned him to a chair and took a seat opposite on a brocade settee. He was conscious of not knowing what to do with his hands; he still heard his heart pounding in his breast, and he wondered if she could hear it too.

  “I have read in the newspapers about the trouble over at Bertram’s Bower,” she began. She spoke with grave formality, as if the moment of closeness—intimacy, almost—between them in the Tombs had never happened.

  “Ah.” So it was not some personal thing, then, that she’d wanted him for. He felt a small stab of disappointment.

  “And since you were so helpful to me last fall, I thought perhaps, since it is Inspector Crippen who is in charge of the investigation—”

  She didn’t need to say more. It was Crippen who had arrested her—mistakenly—for the murder of the infamous Colonel William d’Arcy Mann.

  “I understand.” He smiled at her. Looking at her was like looking at some glorious work of art created by an artist who specialized in sensuous femininity.

  “I wonder if you do.” She did not return his smile. “You are familiar with my story, are you not?”

  Her story. Did he want to hear that? “Yes, but—”

  “I married foolishly, too young. Then I took a lover—yes, I admit it, I have always admitted it. And then my husband divorced me.”

  “I don’t see—you needn’t go into it—”

  “Ah, but I must, Mr. Ames. You see, when my husband banished me, it was without a penny. I had no money of my own. My own family would not have me back, not after the disgrace I had brought upon them. I was literally without a soul in the world to turn to. I had no place to live, no way to survive.”

  The amazing thing was, he thought, that she said these things so calmly, only the shadow of remembered pain in her eyes to show that she spoke of her own disgrace, and not, say, that of some heroine in some play.

  “It was Agatha Montgomery who took me in,” she went on. “Does that surprise you?”

  “Yes.” It did, very much.

  “It shouldn’t. I was as destitute as any of the girls she finds on the streets. I very likely would have been on the streets myself if she hadn’t helped me.”

  She paused, remembering. Then: “It was a day toward the end of March. Just after lunch. I knew my husband had learned of my—indiscretion—but I didn’t know the end would come so quickly. He handed me my hat and cloak, and a small valise with some clean undergarments and—always with an eye for detail—a bar of lye soap. He took me by the arm and literally pushed me out of the house. I remember that I stood on the doorstep, looking up and down Marlborough Street and wondering if I should throw myself under the wheels of the Green Trolley that was just passing by.”

  She reached for an enameled box on the table beside her and took out a long, thin brown cigarette. “Do you smoke, Mr. Ames?”

  “No, thank you.”

  But he sprang to his feet to light it for her with a match from a silver matchbox.

  She inhaled deeply a few times, seemingly lost in thought. Then she went on: “But even at that blackest moment of my life, suicide did not appeal to me. So … for the last time, I walked down the front steps of that house where I had been so unhappy. I walked and walked—I don’t remember where. At last I found myself in front of a pawnshop over on Tremont Street in the South End. I realized that I did not have a dollar to my name, but I did have—I was wearing a pearl brooch. I went into the shop. The proprietor took my brooch and gave me ten dollars for it—can you imagine? It was a fine piece, worth much more. But it was ten dollars more than I’d had before, so I accepted it. I suppose I was still in a state of shock, too dazed to bargain with him for a better price. I found a rooming house that did not look too disreputable, and I took a room. For twenty-four hours I sat in that room, contemplating the wr
eckage of my life. At last I got up, I went out, and I found a café where I had a bowl of soup and a piece of bread—ten cents, coffee included.” Her mouth twisted in a bitter smile at the memory.

  “As I was leaving, a woman came in. She was tall, ugly, very determined-looking. Yes—Miss Montgomery. She must have seen something in my face that led her to speak to me. She did not recoil when she learned who I was, as if merely to speak to me would soil her beyond redemption. She had heard of my scandal, of course—everyone in Boston had heard of it—but she did not judge me. She offered me a place to live—at Bertram’s Bower, yes. Do not look so surprised, Mr. Ames. It was a warm bed, a safe place, a place where I could gather my wits about me and think how to start my life over again, as I needed to do.”

  “But—” He thought of the sad, defeated girls he’d seen that morning; he could not picture a woman like Serena Vincent among them. “How did you fit into the population there?”

  “I didn’t—not very well. The matron—this was before Mrs. Pratt—was a kindly woman, far too lax with the girls. So I was able to avoid the classes in reading and sewing, which in any case I hardly needed. I stayed in my room, mostly, for the brief time I was there. Miss Montgomery often came to talk to me. She helped me to see that I was, after all, a child of God like everyone else, and that even though I had transgressed, I was young, I could make something of my life.”

  She stubbed out her cigarette in a china dish, and then she met his eyes with a somber look. “I wonder, Mr. Ames, if you could understand me if I tell you that Agatha Montgomery is a kind of saint.”

  Saints were papist things, not part of his own upbringing, which had been Unitarian.

  “She is a truly Christian woman,” Mrs. Vincent went on, “a rare soul. She labors day after day with the outcasts of this world, with girls who would never be admitted to the decent homes of the city, not even as servants. She gives herself to them, she slaves for them, she rescues them from a life that is worse than death. I know she is hardly an attractive woman. Many people would call her unladylike, unfeminine. She is too driven to be ladylike. All people with a true mission in life are like that, I think—heedless of surface appearances, of the niceties of so-called polite society. She doesn’t care what the world says about her, because she has her work to do, and she will do it, come what may.”