Murder in the North End

by P. B. Ryan

  “Och, but he’s a handsome fella,” whispered Eileen.

  “He’s married,” Nell said. “And he’s older than he seems.”

  The first time Nell had seen Dr. Greaves, she was struck by his resemblance to a statue of St. Francis of Assisi in front of St. Catherine’s, her parish church. Born with patrician good looks, expressive eyes, and that ready smile, he was further blessed by being one of those lucky men who didn’t seem to age much in their middle years. His light brown hair had but a whisper of gray at the temples, and he still moved like a man in his twenties.

  “Is he nice?” Gracie panted, switching to a dog paddle to keep up with Nell as she waded toward shore.

  “He is very nice.”

  “Can I meet him?”

  “Can you?”

  “May I?” asked the child with a put-upon roll of the eyes.

  “You have met him. You just don’t remember.”

  “I’d like to meet him again.”

  Nell paused at the edge of the bay to wring out the sodden, knee-length skirt of her bathing costume as Dr. Greaves crossed the sandy stretch of beach. She looked up to find him taking in her attire—the puffy cap, black wool sailor dress, matching pantaloons, and lace-up slippers—with a contemplative smile that made her cheeks bloom with heat.

  “Oh, do stop gaping at me,” she said through a flutter of embarrassed laughter.

  “Is that any way to greet an old friend?”

  Old friend. Curious, Nell thought, that Dr. Greaves should refer to himself that way. Much as they’d cared for each other, they’d never been friends, precisely; certainly she’d never thought of them as such.

  “And I wasn’t gaping,” he said. “I was admiring.” Before Nell could summon a reply to that, he turned to greet Gracie and Eileen with a bow. “Ladies. So sorry to intrude upon you unannounced like this, but the butler told me you were out here, and that I should just come on back.”

  “Quite right,” Nell said. “Grace Hewitt, Eileen Tierney, may I present Dr. Cyril Greaves, a physician from East Falmouth.” To Dr. Greaves, she said, “Miss Tierney helps me to look after Gracie, with whom you are already acquainted.”

  “I’m most pleased to see you again, Miss Hewitt,” said Dr. Greaves.

  “And I you,” said Gracie, the consummate little Brahmin lady in her short white bathing dress and damp braids.

  The child’s decorous reply drew an impressed grin from Dr. Greaves. “I must say, that is a much more mannerly salutation than the red-faced squalls with which you greeted me the first time we met.”

  “Dr. Greaves is the physician who took you out of your mommy’s tummy,” Nell told Gracie.

  “With Miss Sweeney’s help,” he said. “I couldn’t have done it without her.” A gracious statement, indeed, for it was he and he alone who had saved both Gracie’s life and that of her mother, a chambermaid named Annie McIntyre, by means of a deft and timely Cesarean section that storm-ravaged night six years ago. Meeting Nell’s gaze, he said, “I should never have let her go.”

  Looking up at Nell, eyes wide, Gracie said, “You were there when I was born?”

  She hesitated. Dr. Greaves winced, evidently realizing he’d just revealed something that Nell, in an effort to forestall Gracie’s incessant questions about her parentage, had kept to herself. With the cat out of the bag, Nell nodded and said, “I was Dr. Greaves’s assistant for four years. Then, after you arrived and Nana decided to adopt you, she asked me if I would come to Boston to be your nursery governess.”

  But not before questioning Dr. Greaves, in a conversation overheard by Nell, as to her suitability to care for and tutor a young girl. She’s of good character and chaste habits, I take it? His response had been reassuring, if purposefully vague. There’d been no hint—thank God, because Nell had desperately wanted the position—of her disreputable past, nor of the fact that she’d been sharing the lonely doctor’s bed for three of the four years in which she’d lived under his roof.

  From a good family, is she? Mrs. Hewitt had asked him.

  They were from the old country, ma’am. Both gone now, first him and then the mother, when Nell was just a child.

  And there’s no other family?

  She had a number of younger siblings—that’s how she learned to care for children. Disease took most of them—cholera, diphtheria—but one brother lived to adulthood. She assumes he’s still alive, but it’s been years since she’s seen him. James—she calls him Jamie.

  Nell had let out the breath she’d been holding, weak with relief and gratitude that he hadn’t mentioned Duncan. The rest of it was damning enough, but if Viola had known about Duncan, there would have been no question of hiring her.

  Naturally, Viola had told Nell when she offered her the position, I would prefer that you remain unwed while Grace is young, in order to devote your full attention to her. And, of course, your conduct and reputation must be above reproach—you’re responsible for the upbringing of a young girl, after all. But I can’t think you’d let me down in that regard.

  If Nell had managed, these past six years, to live up to Viola’s expectations, it was only by perpetuating a lie of omission to a woman she’d come to regard as a surrogate mother. As far as Viola knew—then and now—Miss Nell Sweeney was a virtuous Irish Catholic girl from a working class background who was good with children. There’d been so much Nell had been obliged to keep hidden all these years, lest she risk the loss of her position, her wonderful new life, and most unthinkable of all, Gracie.

  “Miseeny?” Gracie was tugging at her skirt. “Did you?”

  “Did I what, sweetie?”

  “Know my mommy? My weal mommy? Real,” she added, correcting herself before Nell could.

  “I had never met her before that night,” Nell answered truthfully.

  “Did you?” she asked Dr. Greaves.

  He shook his head. “I’m sorry, no.”

  Nell said, “Gracie, you know what Nana says. She’ll tell you about your mommy as a birthday present when you turn twelve.”

  Although the child was equally curious about her father, there had been, at his insistence, no such promise to reveal his identity. Recently Gracie had overheard Mrs. Mott, the housekeeper, say that she’d been “sired by a Hewitt,” and had pressed Nell as to what that meant. In response, Nell had uttered the only outright lie she’d ever told the child: “‘Sired’ means adopted. Mrs. Mott was talking about Nana’s having picked you out special because she’d always wanted a little girl.”

  Eileen, adept at changing the subject when it veered down this particular path, said to Dr. Greaves, “You’d be the one, then, that taught Miss Sweeney nursing.”

  “More than just nursing,” Nell said. “He taught me arithmetic, French, history, music, comportment... I didn’t even know how to write a proper letter till Dr. Greaves got hold of me.” He’d been her Pygmalion, she his grateful Galatea.

  “Nell had an extraordinarily quick mind,” Dr. Greaves told Eileen. Eyeing the delicate, flaxen-haired nineteen-year-old with keen interest, he said, “Forgive me, Miss Tierney, but have we met?”

  “I don’t figger we could of, sir. I only been in this country two years, and I never set foot on the Cape till this summer.”

  “You look familiar, but perhaps I’m just confusing you with someone else.” Dr. Greaves turned to Nell. “I, er, wonder if I might have a word with you.” He glanced at Gracie and Eileen. “Perhaps we could take a walk?”

  “You go ahead, Miss Sweeney,” said Eileen. “I’ll take Gracie back to the house and get her washed up and fed.”

  Nell and Dr. Greaves strolled in silence along the beach toward a handsome edifice adjacent the Hewitts’ private dock, built half on land and half on stone pilings in the water. Like the estate’s main house, it was cedar-shingled, with slate-roofed gables, a turret, and a veranda overlooking the bay, from which stairs descended to the dock. The ground level, which was open to the bay and fitted out with two boat slips, housed a small
sailboat, a rowboat, a canoe, and a pair of sleek shells. Above that was a guest suite.

  “So that’s the famous Falconwood boathouse, eh?” asked Dr. Greaves as they neared it. They say it’s the grandest on the Cape. Mr. Hewitt sails, I take it?”

  “Not anymore,” said Nell, knowing that Dr. Greaves hadn’t come here to talk about the boathouse, and wondering why he was stalling; he wasn’t the type of man to beat about the bush. “Martin, the youngest son, takes one of the shells out a couple of times a day when he’s here, as long as the weather’s amenable. He’s out there right now.”

  “Martin, he was the pious one, yes?”

  Nell nodded. “He’s a minister at King’s Chapel now. His first sermon was right before I left Boston, and it was brilliant. I can’t remember when I’ve been so moved.”

  “A devout Catholic like you, attending a Unitarian service? That must be good for an extra few eons in purgatory.”

  “Actually... I’ve been attending services at King’s Chapel for some time now.”

  Dr. Greaves stopped in his tracks at the side of the house where the dock began. “You’re joking.”

  “Now you really are gaping at me.”

  “You? A Protestant?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  Dr. Greaves gestured toward the sixty foot dock, which terminated in a large raised platform set up with lounging furniture, and offered his arm. “Shall we?” As he escorted her down the narrow plank walkway, he said, “The other son was more of a rogue, as I recall. Squirmed out of joining the Army during the war... Henry?”

  “Yes, but they call him Harry, and ‘rogue’ is a very polite term for what he is. He’s not the only other Hewitt son, though. There’s the eldest, William.”

  “But I thought William died at Andersonville, during the war, he and the next eldest, Robert. I’m sure that’s what we were told that night we delivered Gracie.”

  “Robbie died. Will escaped, but it took him years to reunite with his family.” Not that he was ever ‘reunited,’ precisely, with the rigid and judgmental August Hewitt, who couldn’t bear the sight of him—or of Nell, for that matter.

  “William—he was the one who earned his medical degree at Edinburgh?”

  “Yes, he was brought up with relatives in England, but he came back here when war was declared and enlisted in the Union Army as a battle surgeon.”

  “Did he establish a practice after the war?”

  Nell chose her words carefully, lest Dr. Greaves conclude, as had August Hewitt, that Will was a reprobate of the first order. “He hasn’t practiced medicine since then—although he treated Eileen for her clubfoot last year.”

  “Your assistant? She doesn’t have a clubfoot.”

  “Not anymore. Will arranged for a famous orthopedic surgeon from New York to come to Boston and operate on her.”

  Dr. Greaves snapped his fingers. “That’s where I know her from. Louis Albert Sayre was the surgeon—brilliant man. I watched that operation in the surgical theater at Massachusetts General.”

  Nell was going to say something about his professional dedication in coming all the way up to Boston from the Cape when she recalled that he made that trip every week or two to visit his beloved wife, Charlotte, who’d been a psychiatric patient at Mass General since well before the war.

  “Eileen does wear special, custom-made boots,” Nell said, “but she hardly limps anymore. Will was very pleased with the outcome.”

  “If he hasn’t been practicing medicine since the war,” Dr. Greaves asked, “what has he been doing?”

  Gambling and weaning himself off opiates. “He taught medical jurisprudence at Harvard one semester,” she said. “His closest friend, Isaac Foster, is assistant dean of the medical school, and he’s issued Will a standing offer of a full professorship so that he can develop a forensics curriculum, but there’s a catch. Will would have to sign a five-year contract, and he’s... not comfortable with that kind of commitment.”

  “Not comfortable with a full professorship at Harvard Medical School?” Dr. Greaves asked incredulously.

  Stepping up onto the platform, Nell turned to look out over the water, her arms wrapped around herself. “Will is a... complicated man. And, too, he’d had another offer. President Grant wrote him recently, when France and Prussia started mobilizing for war. Our ambassador to France, Elihu Washburne, was asking for a good field surgeon. The president had met Will several times during the war, and he came away with a very high opinion of him.”

  “A field surgeon? But we’re not allied with France in that war. We’re entirely neutral.”

  “Mr. Washburne isn’t, and he’s resolved to remain in Paris and do what he can to aid France, never mind that it’s utter bedlam there now. Will accepted the position.”

  “Why would any American in his right mind risk life and limb in a fight that isn’t ours, that isn’t even particularly righteous? It’s just so much chest-beating between Napoleon and Wilhelm.”

  “He had his reasons,” said Nell, thinking of the letter Will had left on her pillow the night before he took ship, three and a half weeks ago. You will wonder why I’ve chosen this course, rather than the more comfortable alternative of teaching at Harvard. We have reached a juncture in the path of our acquaintance, you and I, from whence we cannot continue as before, strolling along side by side with no particular destination in mind, at least none of which we dare speak....

  “Is he to remain in Paris,” asked Dr. Greaves, “or provide medical service in the field?”

  “The latter. Last week he cabled me from Paris to say that he would be leaving the next day to serve Napoleon’s army.” Am to join Marshal MacMahon’s I Corps near Wissembourg on German border and remain with them for duration of war. Unable to write for some time, perhaps months. Please do not worry, and ask same of Mother and Martin.

  “He cabled you?”

  “We’ve... become friendly over the past couple of years.”

  Dr. Greaves was studying her in that all too insightful way of his. “When is he to return?”

  “Not until the war ends. He told me it could be months from now, or—” Her throat closed up around the word “years.”

  “Ah.”

  “What was it that you wanted to talk to me about, Dr. Greaves?”

  He nodded toward a pair of wicker rocking chairs. “Let’s sit.”

  She lowered herself into the chair he held steady for her, and then he turned the other chair to face hers. He sat forward with his elbows on his knees and expelled a lingering sigh. “A young woman was brought to me this morning for medical treatment. A girl, really—nineteen, but a young nineteen. Claire Gilmartin is her name. She lives with her widowed mother on the outskirts of East Falmouth. They have a little cranberry farm on Mill Pond. You remember Mill Pond, just to the west of the village?”

  “Of course,” said Nell, rocking absently.

  “Claire had grown hoarse and developed a wheezing cough that morning, with dark sputum. She seemed a bit mentally confused as well, but that may have just been her way. There was no mystery as to the cause of her malady. One of their outbuildings—they called it a cranberry shed—had burned down the night before last, and Claire had been trapped in it for a little while before she managed to escape.”

  “This happened, what—thirty-six hours before, and she’d only just started coughing this morning?”

  “The symptoms of smoke inhalation can take that long to develop. In any event, it appears that a man unknown to them had gotten caught in the fire and died. Yesterday, when the ashes and debris were cleared away, his remains were removed and taken to Falmouth for assessment by the county coroner. According to Mrs. Gilmartin, he was one of those two men the police have been looking for, the ones who shot that woman in the beach house.”

  “I’m sorry,” Nell said. “I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about. We’re really rather isolated here.”

  “You don’t read the Barnstable Patriot, I see. Do y
ou get the Boston papers, or do without altogether when you’re summering here?”

  “Mr. Hewitt brings the Boston papers when he comes down for the weekends, but we get the New York Herald every day, and that’s what I’ve been reading. It comes on the train from New York. Brady, the Hewitts’ driver, goes to Falmouth and gets it.”

  “Every day? That’s almost an hour’s drive each way.”

  “It’s because of the war, and Will being over there. Mrs. Hewitt wants to keep apprised of all the new developments—as do I, of course.”

  “Understandable—as is your lack of interest in local doings, I suppose, given that you’re only here for summer relaxation. But to those of us who live here year-round, the Cunningham incident was big news. It happened a couple of weeks ago. Susannah Cunningham was shot dead by burglars in her home—one of those huge new summer palaces in Falmouth Heights.”

  “How awful.”

  “The burglars got away, albeit empty-handed, and the Falmouth constabulary has spent the past two weeks searching for them. There’d been some evidence that they were still in the area, in hiding.”

  “One of them in the Gilmartins’ barn,” Nell said.

  Dr. Greaves nodded. “The body was identified last night. Mrs. Gilmartin told me his name and said it would be in the Patriot today. It comes out on Thursdays normally, but they’re issuing an extra. I didn’t want you to read about it without being prepared.” Dr. Greaves gentled his voice, his expression bleak. “I hate to have to tell you this. She said his name was James Murphy.”

  Nell stopped rocking. She stared at Dr. Greaves.

  “I’m so sorry, Nell.” He reached over to squeeze her hand.

  “How... how do they know it was him if he’d... if he’d been burned? Wouldn’t he have been...?”

  “I don’t know. I only know what Mrs. Gilmartin told me.”

  “Are you sure it was Jamie?” She asked. “Murphy is such a common name. So is James.”

  “I suppose,” he said, but she could tell he was humoring her. “Have you been in touch with your brother at all these past...?”

  “No, not since he was sent to prison for robbing that livery driver in ‘fifty-nine. The first time I came to visit him, he told me not to come again, that he didn’t want any visitors, even me. I did come again, but he wouldn’t see me. I wrote to him after Duncan was arrested, to let him know what had happened, and that I was living at your house, but he never wrote back. Of course, he wasn’t much for writing, but I think he could have managed a short note—something.”