Death, Diamonds, and Deception

by Rosemary Simpson

  “The stake I’m talking about isn’t owned by the Homestake Mining Company. It’s considerably south of Deadwood, in a region that’s only been lightly prospected. But I’m of the conviction that there’s as much gold in the southern Black Hills as there is up north. And it’s not placer gold, either. It’s deep in the rock, Mr. Whitley, very deep. But so was the original Homestake mine. They figured out how to get the gold out, and so can we. It’ll take capital, engineers, equipment, and guts. I can hire the engineers, buy the machinery, and supply the on-site grit. What I need from you—or somebody else if you don’t want to be richer than Commodore Vanderbilt—is the cash money to bankroll the operation.”

  Collins placed a dark gray rock on the white tablecloth. About the size of a child’s fist, it was stippled with streaks of gold that gleamed in the dining room’s gaslights. It looked, Morgan thought, like a piece torn from one of his mother’s gold-embroidered satin gowns from House of Worth. Folded and molded around a heavy weight. He traced a thread of bright yellow with a hesitant forefinger, forgetting the beef growing cold on his plate. This was magic.

  “How much money are we talking about, Mr. Collins?” Tiny grains of the precious yellow metal attached themselves to his skin, like a dusting of fine powder.

  The sum his luncheon companion named was staggering, but not entirely out of Morgan’s reach. If he cashed in the securities he managed in his mother’s name, he could just make it. All of the issues were solid, income-producing stocks originally purchased by William with his new wife’s legacy from her first husband. Largely untouched for years—until very recently—the principal had quietly mushroomed from a respectable to an enviable fortune.

  Somewhat depleted, it was true, to meet Morgan’s debts before the shame of them surfaced, but still an amount not to be despised. The problem was in selling them off without attracting the attention of any of the brokers in the firm who had a habit of looking over one another’s shoulders, especially his stepfather. Under the circumstances, he thought it better not to involve Everett in any phase of the deal. Wiser to tell him that he’d found Mr. Collins’s offer an undesirable risk. As busy as Everett was, he’d soon turn his attention elsewhere, forget that he’d ever been interested in what the South Dakota gold miner had to sell in the first place. That he’d ever arranged this lunch meeting he hadn’t been able to attend.

  “I’ll need to see more proof than this,” Morgan said, though the ore sample was both mesmerizing and convincing.

  “I have maps,” Collins replied, “assay reports, engineering specs, projections for how much tonnage we can expect to remove and process the first year, the second, and so on. It’s a sure thing, Mr. Whitley. You won’t be sorry you decided to come in with me.”

  “I suppose you should call me by my Christian name,” Morgan said, extending his hand across the table, “since we’re about to become partners if the paperwork checks out.”

  “You won’t regret it, Morgan,” Collins repeated, retrieving the scintillating bit of mineral that had proved captivating and irresistible.

  “I know I won’t. When can you have the contracts drawn up?”

  “Just as soon as you’re ready to fulfill your end of the bargain.”

  “I’ll have the cash money available by the end of the week,” Morgan promised.

  “And I’ll open a bank account for you to deposit it in,” Collins said. He raised his glass to toast the new working relationship, noting as he did so that his latest business associate drank their mutual health and wealth in water.

  Collins figured Morgan Whitley would soon be needing something a lot stronger.

  * * *

  It took a full ten days before Morgan realized he’d been had. Scammed. Swindled. Bamboozled. Robbed blind.

  Almost more than he dreaded having to tell his mother what he had done, he was terrified of what William’s reaction would be. So panicked by the inevitability of repudiation that he didn’t dare allow himself to consider the specifics. Except to remember that his stepfather had already put him on a six-month leash. He had been promised the direst of consequences if he failed to meet William’s demands. And fail he had. Spectacularly.

  Except that he was still sober.

  Which he proceeded to remedy. Quickly and disastrously.

  * * *

  An early January snow mixed with sleet had begun falling when Morgan tumbled out of a hansom cab in front of the De Vries mansion well after midnight. This stretch of Fifth Avenue was deserted, but candles and gaslight glowed behind curtained and draped windows, casting pale rectangles onto the icy sidewalks. The absence of carriages wheeling down the cobblestoned street meant that the second Assembly Ball of the season was still in full swing at Delmonico’s. He could almost taste the extravagant late supper of lobster and champagne, smell the flowers and the greenery. He and Aubrey had whirled white-clad debutantes across that same dance floor at the first Assembly Ball only a month ago.

  So much had happened since then. Nothing would ever be the same.

  He had only the vaguest idea what time it was, but he knew the empty street meant he could avoid for a few more hours having to explain himself to his mother and stepfather.

  He’d lost his overcoat sometime during the night. And his hat and gloves. The butler was sure to remark on that, and by morning every servant in the house would know that Mrs. De Vries’s son had come home in a disreputable and disheveled state. Morgan fumbled in his pockets, which he’d emptied of coins to pay the cab driver. No wallet, no handkerchief, no key to the front door. The gold watch and chain that usually hung across his waistcoat were gone. He couldn’t remember much of the early evening and nothing of the frantically desperate hours that followed.

  He’d had blackouts before. Gotten used to them. Shrugged them off as easily as he’d absorbed the useless bichloride of gold that had been shot into his veins four times a day when he’d still had hope of saving himself. What a joke. What a horrible, dispiriting, depressing, painfully useless experience that had been.

  Never again. No second chance at the Keeley Institute. No Swiss clinic.

  He’d take the scathing rebuke William was sure to deliver and then get on with things. Go out west somewhere. San Francisco maybe. Consign New York and its humiliating memories to a past he’d spend the rest of his life forgetting. Why not the gold fields after all? He pictured himself clad in heavy canvas pants and rubber boots, swishing a flat tin plate around in the icy waters of a mountain stream. Surrounded by a host of other desperate men, hard drinkers and reckless gamblers all of them. And each one with a story of how he’d been cheated out of a mine that would have made him rich. It might not be a long life, but at least it would be one of his own choosing.

  Morgan climbed the four steps of the De Vries mansion. His leather-soled shoes slipped on the accumulating ice; he gripped the iron railing so as not to fall. A dim light showed faintly through the row of small windows that ran horizontally across the top of the front door. The butler, his father’s valet, and his mother’s lady’s maid would be drinking tea in the servants’ hall, waiting to attend to their employers’ every need before sinking into their own attic beds.

  Leonard Abbott used to perform those same services for him on the many nights when he was so drunk he wasn’t able to unbutton his shirt or remove his shoes. Poor Leonard. He’d disappeared. Or died. Morgan couldn’t remember which. Something awful had happened.

  He rang the bell, and when he didn’t hear footsteps on the other side of the door, rang it again. It chimed in the foyer and in the servants’ hall, so where was the damned butler? How long was he expected to wait outside like this, shivering as the snow and ice pellets melted on his hair and shoulders? Damn the man! He’d go around to the kitchen entrance and bang on that door, wake him up as he sat fast asleep by the fire. God, it was cold out here!

  Morgan stumbled down the stairs to the narrow paved walkway that girdled the mansion below the level of the sidewalk. The windows that should h
ave been throwing light onto his path were dark. One hand outstretched against the stone wall to keep him steady and upright, he fumbled his way slowly toward where he thought he remembered delivery men brought baskets of kitchen provisions. He’d seen them often enough when he’d chosen to alight from the family’s carriage in the stables before trying to steal into the house unnoticed. He breathed a sigh of relief when his hands located wood and a doorknob. The breath came out of his lungs in streams of white vapor.

  No one answered the bell. No light flickered when he beat on the door until his fists left bloody smudges on the painted wood. He couldn’t see the blood, but he could feel the pain and the wetness. He howled a bellow of despair.

  Damn his unfeeling, uncaring stepfather! Damn him to hell for all eternity! Before leaving with Lena for the Assembly Ball, William must have ordered the servants not to admit his wife’s son to the residence that had been his home since he was six years old. Not to respond to the peal of doorbells or to frantic pounding. Somehow William had learned about the gold mine disaster, tried his stepson in absentia, and decreed the punishment he had many times threatened but never executed. Until tonight. Tomorrow every parlor in the city would be atwitter with speculation about why Morgan Whitley had not appeared at last night’s ball. What had become of the once promising young man about town? He doubted anyone would guess the truth.

  The stables. They were warm with the heat of horses’ bodies and there was always clean hay in the stalls. He’d hidden there before, sneaking past early rising servants and into his bed at dawn with no one the wiser. He would sleep off this numbing cold and the liquor he had consumed, then face down his stepfather in the morning. Bid farewell to his mother, cash in what little remained of the inheritance he had once thought he would never run through, and be on his way. Knock the dust and dirt of New York off his shoes. Start over again. Show them what he could make of himself without the constant nagging and nitpicking.

  But the stable doors were locked, too. And no lights went on in the grooms’ quarters above when he kicked at the sliding wooden door until his shoe fell off and disappeared into the dark.

  Inside the house, William De Vries stood without moving in the pitch black of the stairway that curved gracefully above the black and white marble tiles of the foyer. He listened to the peal of the doorbells, the pounding, the shambling footsteps as Morgan made his way toward the rear courtyard. More bells, more pounding, until at last all was silence.

  Then he went up to his wife’s bedroom, watched her for a moment as she breathed softly and dreamlessly from deep in a laudanum sleep. She hadn’t wanted to go to the Assembly Ball without Morgan, but William had insisted. Had himself fastened the magnificent Marie Antoinette necklace around her slender neck. Not all of its diamonds could be traced back to the hoard of Crown jewels the French government had sold to Tiffany, but all of them were at least genuine again.

  She had cut a magnificent figure at the ball, as she always did. His beautiful but barren Lena. And when he suggested that they leave before the cotillion and the supper, she had agreed without protest. Not until they were home had he explained to her what Morgan had done and what his punishment must be. That henceforth she would live a life devoid of his presence and without contact of any kind. Everett would become the son she should have given her husband. But didn’t. When she had cried herself into hysteria, he held a glass of laudanum-laced sherry to her lips. She needed sleep, he’d told her, and she’d nodded, giving in the way she always did.

  As William climbed into his bed that night, he thought he heard a whimpering from the darkness outside. It didn’t last long and he was asleep before it ceased.

  CHAPTER 19

  Morgan Whitley’s published obituary was a masterpiece of understatement. He was the son of the late Jacob Whitley and Lena Bergen Whitley De Vries and stepson of William De Vries, financier. He had attended Harvard University and was employed at the time of his death in the banking and investment field. The cause of death was pneumonia. Interment in the Whitley family plot of Trinity Church Cemetery in Washington Heights.

  “This says nothing about who he really was,” Prudence mourned, handing the clipping she had brought with her from home to Josiah. He, in turn, would file it in the folder where he had already placed all of the reports generated by William De Vries’s original commission to investigate the theft of his wife’s diamonds

  “There’s a viewing scheduled for tomorrow morning,” Josiah noted, flipping through the firm’s appointment book. They rarely scheduled client consultations on Saturdays, but Josiah insisted on documenting how the partners spent their time every day except Sunday.

  “My aunt and I will be attending,” Prudence said, watching him block off the hours she would be unavailable.

  “Lady Rotherton?” Josiah exclaimed.

  “She’s known William since she was a debutante,” Prudence informed him. “And while Morgan wasn’t his son, he was the child of William’s wife.”

  “Not to mention having lived in the De Vries household since he was six years old,” Geoffrey added sharply. He’d been in an increasingly foul mood ever since he’d endorsed William’s check and sent Josiah off to the bank to deposit it. Case closed.

  But Prudence knew her partner had never truly halted the inquiry. She’d seen Amos Lang arrive at the office and closet himself with Geoffrey too many times in the past week and a half to believe Geoffrey had accepted a dismissal he would consider defeat. Though he often reminded Prudence that the work they did could not be taken personally, he was anything but detached from passionate involvement in every case they worked on.

  He just hid it well.

  “I don’t suppose De Vries will object to our presence,” Geoffrey said, instructing Josiah to add his name to Prudence’s in the appointment book.

  “As long as Ned Hayes and Amos Lang don’t show up to scan the crowd of mourners for guilty faces,” Prudence said.

  “The case is closed. Officially and unofficially,” Geoffrey insisted.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means the police department is no longer interested in what’s been going on at the De Vries home. Detective Phelan declared himself satisfied as soon as William’s bribe fell into his pocket. And we were paid in full for our services.”

  He spoke with the caustic edge to his voice that Prudence had heard many times before. It usually signaled a renewed determination to get to the bottom of whatever secret someone was trying to hide from him.

  Geoffrey had his own way of refusing to back down.

  * * *

  “You have my sincere condolences, William,” Prudence heard Lady Rotherton say, her distinctively British accent cutting through the American voices all around her.

  There was a stir of interest as the mourners realized that a dowager viscountess had appeared to pay her respects to the family of the late Morgan Whitley, a deeply disappointing son and stepson by any measure. Given the recent very private funeral of Aubrey Canfield, it was nothing short of extraordinary that a young man given to drink, gambling, and disgracing his lineage should be sent to his rest with all the ceremony usually reserved for a paragon of socially acceptable behavior.

  Lena De Vries, standing deathly pale and soldier straight beside her son’s open casket, stared down anyone who attempted to murmur a condolence laced with regret for the deplorable lifestyle that must have caused his mother so much pain. She was having none of that today. Her child was dead, and he would be remembered and buried with dignity. Beyond that she was choosing not to think.

  “William tells me that Lena insisted on all of the usual formalities,” Lady Rotherton told her niece, standing close enough so her words would not carry across the De Vries parlor. “He himself was very much against the idea of visitation and an open casket. He doesn’t think she’s strong enough to bear it.”

  “I doubt his reasons are quite so altruistic,” Prudence said. And then she stopped, unsure how much of what she had pick
ed up as she circulated through the room had also reached her aunt’s ears. Nothing of what was being gossiped about had made it into the newspapers, but it was being treated as gospel truth nonetheless, though there were several unproved theories about where and by whom the body had been found.

  One story had Morgan dead on the sidewalk in front of the De Vries mansion. Another insisted a milkman came across him in the alleyway. A third maintained that the body had been slumped against the door of the carriage house, sending the stable boy into a fit. The dead man’s overcoat, hat, scarf, and gloves were missing. One shoe had turned up buried in a snowdrift. He had obviously been set upon when too far gone in drink to be able to defend himself.

  The only thing on which the mourners saw eye to eye was that the dead man had been close enough to call for help had anyone been awake to hear him. And what was he doing wandering the streets when everyone else was dancing the night away at the second Assembly Ball of the season?

  The scintilla of scandal had tongues wagging and nimble brains scrambling to dig up old bones of outrageous behavior that the De Vries family had been anxious to leave buried. But then Morgan wasn’t really a De Vries, was he? Not even adopted, though he’d been a young child when his mother married his stepfather. Men who had seen him in the gambling casinos recalled his shockingly reckless betting behaviors, and women who had failed to interest him in their daughters clucked relievedly over their narrow escapes.

  He looked healthier in death than he had in life, Prudence decided, staring down into the satin-lined black-walnut box in which Morgan would lie until he and it rotted into nothingness. She chided herself for so doleful a thought, but couldn’t shake the feeling of angry melancholy that had put her in nearly as unpleasant a mood as Geoffrey.