MURDER AT BERTRAM'S BOWER

by Cynthia Peale

  At last he came to the end of it, and he fell silent. I have failed her, he thought. She asked my assistance, and instead—

  “I owe you a debt of thanks,” she said softly.

  “Not at all. I merely tried to help.”

  “And you did. It is not your fault that things turned out rather differently than either of us expected.”

  Abruptly she rose and went to the hearth, where a sea-coal fire simmered with a steady warmth. After a moment he realized, with a stab of dismay, that she was weeping. At once he was on his feet and at her side, and then, without knowing how it happened, she was in his arms and sobbing against his shoulder. He felt her shuddering, trembling body all down the length of his own, and he realized with another sharp little stab that she was uncorseted.

  Holding her was unlike anything he’d ever experienced. For a long moment, as he rested his cheek against her glorious hair, he breathed in her scent—some heavy, sensuous scent that no proper Boston lady would wear—and he murmured to her he didn’t know what, anything to ease her grief, her very real heartbreak.

  Gradually her sobs quieted, and after a moment more she pulled away from him a little, but without leaving his embrace entirely. With no embarrassment she gave him a small, tremulous smile. He reminded himself that she was accustomed to displaying all kinds of emotion to perfect strangers, all the time. He reminded himself that she had a string of lovers, a supply of men eager to be where he was now, with her in his arms.

  None of that mattered. What mattered at this moment was that he must leave her, and he had no idea when he might see her again.

  Could he ask her to call at Louisburg Square? No. Impossible. Caroline would never—

  “I must go,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “I am sorry if I—”

  She shook her head, dismissing any apology he might have made. She stepped back, free of his embrace, and his empty arms dropped to his sides. “You were kind to come, Mr. Ames.”

  Kind. Was that what he wanted to be to her?

  “It was—I felt that I—” He cleared his throat, trying to recover his equilibrium. Having her stand so near, with the memory of her in his arms, was an assault on his senses that made it difficult to think.

  “Will you stay in touch with me?” she said.

  In touch. What did that mean? “Yes, of course.”

  “Thank you.” She held out her hand, sending him on his way. In her eyes he thought he saw not sorrow, not pain at what he’d had to tell her, but a curious kind of understanding. Beyond understanding. Sympathy, he thought as he went out into the cold once more, heading home. Not for Agatha Montgomery, but for him.

  Yes. Sympathy—and something even more than that. Why? Because she knew how he felt about her? He didn’t know that himself. Because she knew he was in danger of falling in love with her?

  She was right. He was in danger of that. And now at last he realized what he’d seen as she’d said good-bye to him: not understanding, not sympathy. What he’d seen in her beautiful eyes—and how the realization galled him!—had been pity.

  Wincing at the pain in his knee, MacKenzie heaved himself up from his chair, seized the poker, and stirred up the coals in the hearth. He heard the grandmother clock in the hall strike the half hour: three-thirty, nearly dusk. When he turned to speak to his companion, he saw that she was gazing up at him, and because of what they’d recently endured together, because of the fate they’d narrowly escaped, it seemed to him that in her face he saw some feeling for him that had not been there, or at least not so strongly, before their harrowing adventure last night. Affection? Perhaps. Or, at the very least, a comforting kind of trust.

  She is still afraid, he thought. But surely they were done with it now; she need fear nothing more.

  Until early that morning, and all the long night before, they had had chaos: curious neighbors, swarming police, medical teams, ambulances, hordes of reporters tipped off to a sensational story.

  But now at last they were at peace. Ames had gone out and had not yet returned. He was all right, he’d said; he merely wanted an hour or so of quiet. Caroline agreed: quiet was what she wanted, too, more than anything.

  “Would you like tea, Doctor?” she asked.

  “If you would,” he replied. “Shall I ring?”

  “Please.”

  The household might have been severely discommoded because of Margaret’s absence, but their neighbor across the square, Dr. Warren, had kindly sent one of his servants to assist.

  After they were alone once more, MacKenzie carefully lowered himself into his chair. His knee was throbbing; he could only imagine what Dr. Warren would say to him about it.

  Although it was growing dark, he had not wanted to turn up the gas. He liked sitting in this shadowy room with Caroline Ames. He liked knowing that when he spoke, she was there to answer him. That in the normal routine of their lives, when he went out, she would be there to greet him on his return.

  Suddenly he shuddered, thinking of what had happened in this room last night: Agatha Montgomery in a murderous fury, wielding her knife.

  “Are you cold, Doctor?” Caroline asked.

  “No. Not—not cold.” He searched for the words to tell her what he felt, but they eluded him.

  The pocket doors slid open, and Ames stood there, surveying the quiet domestic scene. MacKenzie, just at that moment, would not have dreamed of asking where he’d been, but he could guess. She will cause you to suffer, my friend, he thought but did not say, and then, for fear his thoughts showed on his face, he looked away.

  Ames turned up the gas a little and took his accustomed place by the hearth, one slim, booted foot resting on the brass fender. “I must send to the hospital to see how the reverend does,” he said.

  “And if he lives—?” asked MacKenzie.

  “If he lives, I suppose he will tell his story to Crippen. Whether he will be believed is another matter.”

  “I wonder what he will say about the account books,” MacKenzie ventured.

  “What can he say? At the very least, the man is a thief—and a blackguard.” Ames’s long, lean face drew down into lines of disgust. He felt dirty even thinking about the reverend, never mind talking about him.

  “Poor Agatha,” Caroline murmured. She caught MacKenzie’s eye and added, “I know, Doctor. I know what she did. But she was driven to it.”

  “She lived in a fantasy world,” Ames said sharply. “She believed in something that bore no relation to reality.”

  “She loved him,” Caroline said. And when both men looked at her sharply, she raised her chin and added, “Well, she did.”

  “Unwisely—and far too well,” Ames said. “And until she turned against him, she would have been willing to allow an innocent lad to be hanged for murders he did not commit.”

  “Yes,” she replied softly. “I know.”

  So much for Miss Montgomery’s putative sainthood, thought Ames. Serena Vincent’s face rose in his mind, and with an almost physical effort, he banished it.

  They heard the front door knocker, and when the borrowed servant did not answer, Ames went himself. They heard him in the vestibule welcoming the caller, and Caroline could tell from the sound of his genuine pleasure that it was not Inspector Crippen. Thank goodness, she thought. She did not feel strong enough, just yet, to deal with him.

  In another moment, Ames ushered in Desmond Delahanty.

  “Miss Ames—Doctor—what a time of it, yes?”

  As usual, he was hatless, his hair windblown, his long blue muffler wrapped around his neck.

  “Mr. Delahanty, how good to see you,” Caroline said, giving him her hand. “What news?”

  “Well, the lad’s free, and that’s something.”

  Delahanty shook hands and then went to the fire to warm himself. “And it took them a good long time to do it, mind you. I went down to the Tombs myself to speak for him. You wouldn’t believe the paperwork they had to go through just to release a
n innocent boy.”

  Their tea came then, and the men helped themselves to Sally Lunn and lace cookies while Caroline poured. Then Delahanty, perched on the edge of the sofa, looked around at them and they knew that not all his news was good.

  “What else, Desmond?” asked Ames.

  “The Reverend Montgomery died just after noon.”

  “Ah.” Ames realized he was disappointed that the reverend had so easily escaped the law. “Hardly surprising, considering his wounds.”

  Good riddance, thought MacKenzie, and yet he found Delahanty’s news somewhat disturbing. Despite his aching knee, he heaved himself up once more and went to stand at the lavender-glass bow window. It was dusk; the streetlamps had just come on. In the oval behind the high iron fence, the purplish trees thrashed in the wind, and a few snowflakes whirled in the lamplight. Across the square, he could see lights in the houses opposite—a comforting sight, the blessed tranquillity of ordinary lives.

  And yet—

  “Will the Bower continue, do you think?” Delahanty asked.

  “I don’t know,” Caroline replied. They heard the sadness in her voice. “Agatha was its heart and soul.”

  “It is a very worthy cause. Surely some other dedicated female might be found to keep it going.”

  “Yes.” Caroline thought of the Bower’s girls, of Liza and Katy. She would talk to Edward and Imogen Boylston, she thought, and perhaps—“Perhaps,” she said.

  MacKenzie looked back at the little group in the parlor. The firelight illuminated the men in their dark clothing, edging them with light; it gilded Caroline’s hair and played over her face, her dress. It was like a painting, he thought: The Angel of the Hearth.

  His Angel?

  Perhaps. With luck—and time.

  He left the window and went back to her, back to the warmth and the light, and she turned up her face to smile at him. And then, gladdening his heart, she gave him her hand, and eagerly he grasped it.

  A gust of wind blew down the chimney, causing a shower of sparks. The thaw was past; winter had come again.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  “Boston,” wrote an anonymous commentator in 1879, “in spite of the organized efforts of thoughtful and good people, and the annual expenditure of large sums of money, has its full share of unrelieved suffering and want.”

  In an age without modern-day “safety nets,” the Victorian impulse for doing good, in Boston as elsewhere, found many outlets. Most of them were bluntly, even crudely named: orphanages, workhouses and almshouses, lunatic asylums, homes for “aged females” and “children of the destitute,” and, as in Murder at Bertram’s Bower, refuges for “fallen women.”

  There really was such a place in Boston in the late nineteenth century, a “bower” in the South End.

  Today we might ask, “Fallen? From what? Into what?”

  From virtue into sin, the Victorians would have replied. And for them, sin, particularly women’s sin, was almost always sexual. In that age, so similar to and yet so different from our own, women were ruled by a social code far more constricting than the corsets that crushed their bodies into unnatural shapes to please the eyes of men. High on the pedestals where men put them and tried to keep them, women perched so precariously that one slip could cause them to fall into a chasm of ostracism and shame.

  To our somewhat jaded modern sensibilities, the Victorian code of conduct for women, both written and unwritten, seems faintly ridiculous, not to say inhumane. But it ruled the lives of women then, as well they knew, and they violated it at their peril.

  As for Jack the Ripper, the most famous criminal of all time: He haunts us still. The faceless, nameless killer stalking his female victims in London’s nighttime streets is the very image of terror. Despite more than a century of sleuthing both amateur and professional, he is still a mystery. Who was he? Why did he kill in such a dreadful, bloody way? Why did he stop? What happened to him? Probably, now, we will never know.

  One thing we do know, however, is that Scotland Yard believed he might have escaped to America; they even sent a man here to search for him. And so I took that intriguing possibility, together with the fact of a home for “fallen women” in Boston’s South End, and combined them to make this tale.

  What if …? I thought.

  What if, indeed?

  —Cynthia Peale

  For

  Katherine

  Also by Cynthia Peale

  THE DEATH OF COLONEL MANN

  THE WHITE CROW

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Cynthia Peale is the pseudonym of Nancy Zaroulis, author of Call the Darkness Light and The Last Waltz, among other successful novels. She lives outside Boston, and is currently at work on the fourth book in her Beacon Hill Mystery series.

  Please turn the page for

  an exclusive advance preview

  THE WHITE CROW

  A BEACON HILL MYSTERY BY

  CYNTHIA PEALE

  In a darkened room in a house on Lime Street, on the flat of Beacon Hill, Caroline Ames sat at a table clasping the hand of her friend, Dr. John Alexander MacKenzie, and tried to speak to her mother, who had been dead for a year and a half.

  There were six other querants in the room. The medium, Mrs. Evangeline Sidgwick, was in deep trance. Her control, a temperamental entity named Roland, had spoken some minutes before in answer to a question—not Caroline’s—but since then he had been silent for what seemed a very long time.

  Caroline shifted in her chair. Her back itched just below her waistline, but her corset made the place impossible to scratch. The room was very warm—too warm, the windows closed and the curtains drawn against the bright May afternoon—and filled with a scent she could not identify: some heavy, musky odor that smelled the way she imagined incense might smell.

  As if in answer to her movement, Dr. MacKenzie squeezed her hand. Impulsively she squeezed back. Improper, she knew, but she didn’t care. Dr. MacKenzie, over these last months, had proved to be the best friend she’d ever had, and she realized that she had grown perhaps too fond of him. What would she do if he decided to move on, to return to his position as a surgeon with the army in the West? Well, she would worry about that when it happened. For now—and particularly now, at this moment—he was here, with her, and that was all that mattered.

  It had been a daring thing, to come here this afternoon. She’d had to swear Dr. MacKenzie to silence, make him promise not to tell Addington where they were going. Addington—her older brother, the guardian of her life—disapproved of mediums. Very probably he would have forbidden her to attend this séance today. In which case, she’d have had to engage in a deception even more blatant than the one she’d devised. We are going to walk in the Public Garden, she’d told him, such a lovely day, the first really good spring day we’ve had. He’d accepted it and gone about his business.

  And now here she was, and after all her maneuvering, she’d failed. Her mother hadn’t come through.

  Dear Mama. Where was she? Was she happy? Busy about her work, up there in the ether or Heaven or wherever she lived, now that she had passed over? Surely she’d gone to Heaven, Caroline thought, where all good souls went.

  She blinked back her sudden tears. Her mother’s death had left a terrible emptiness in Caroline’s life that hadn’t eased until Dr. MacKenzie had come to board. She hadn’t missed her mother so much, these last months, and she knew that the doctor’s presence in the Ames household was largely responsible for that.

  But still, when the opportunity had presented itself to attend one of Mrs. Sidgwick’s séances, she had been unable to resist. Mrs. Sidgwick was reputed to be the best medium in Boston, and Caroline had heard intriguing, even astonishing reports of her abilities to contact loved ones who had left the earthly plane. Meeting her for the first time today, she’d been surprised, for the medium was a small, modestly dressed woman, soft-spoken, even seeming rather shy, nothing about her to make one suspect she had such extraordinary powers.

  B
ut despite her powers, she—or, rather, her control, that irascible “Roland”—hadn’t managed to reach the late Mrs. Ames.

  Other spirits, yes. Many of the people here today had had the satisfaction of speaking to their loved ones. Before the séance had begun, they’d gathered in this room and had gotten to know each other a bit. That nice Mrs. Ellis, for instance, an elderly widow who said she’d been trying for years to reach her son, killed at Gettysburg. He’d come through for her loud and clear, with fulsome assurances that he was doing splendidly, no pain, no sorrow, living in harmony with the hundreds—thousands—of other spirits like himself, no bodily ills, choirs of angels.…

  And Miss Price, a fortyish spinster, here to contact her brother who had died years ago when they were children. Miss Price was still weeping now—weeping from happiness, they all understood—a full half hour after Roland had relayed her brother’s message. Essentially it had been the same message as that of Mrs. Ellis’s son: a happy existence on that ethereal plane, no troubles.

  And Mr. Theophilus Clay, poor man, here with his daughter, both of them trying to reach the late Mrs. Clay, who had died, Caroline knew, a very painful death.

  Although “poor man” was hardly the way to describe Theophilus Clay, Caroline thought, since he was not only one of the wealthiest men in Boston but also one of the most generous and therefore loved, a liberal philanthropist widely known for his good works. So he was rich in friendship as well as money, and not to be pitied.

  Still. All the money and all the friends in the world couldn’t bring his wife back to him, could they?

  Clay sat on Caroline’s left. He’d clenched her hand tightly as he’d asked his questions and Mrs. Clay had answered them through Roland. She’d told him her agony had ceased and she was happier now than she’d ever been.