by P. B. Ryan
He bundled himself in the blanket again and leaned back against the wall, coughing tiredly as he puffed on the cigarette, his face sheened with perspiration.
“Are you sick?” Nell asked.
“Not strictly speaking.”
“It’s been my observation that surgeons are ill-equipped to diagnose themselves.”
“If I were still a surgeon, I suppose that might be a consideration.”
“You’re not a surgeon anymore?”
“Christ, look at me!”
Rattled by his vehemence—and by the blasphemy, which her ears were unused to of late—Nell turned and busied herself righting the bench. She sat, smoothing her skirts just to have something to do with her hands.
“As I said, Miss Sweeney, when one is hopeless at something, the wisest course is to just give it up. Better for all concerned.”
She decided to redirect the conversation to her reasons for coming here. “Your mother really is very distraught over your arrest, Dr. Hewitt. She sent me here to...well, among other things, to find out what actually happened last night.”
He regarded her balefully. “If I didn’t tell the men who did this to me—” he pointed to his face “—why on earth would I tell you?”
“For your mother’s sake?”
A harsh burst of laughter precipitated another coughing fit. “You will have to do much, much better than that, Miss Sweeney.”
Why, oh why couldn’t Viola have found someone else to do this? Changing tack, Nell said, “She intends to hire an attorney to represent you.”
“A singularly idiotic notion.”
“I beg your pardon?”
He covered another yawn with the hand holding the cigarette, which was quivering, she noticed. “Why waste the fellow’s time?”
“A rather nihilistic outlook, considering your life is at stake.”
“Nihilistic?” Dr. Hewitt regarded her with amused incredulity. “Where the devil does a girl like you learn about nihilism?”
Nell sat a little straighter, spine and corset stays aligned in stiff indignation. “It isn’t only surgeons who learn to read, Dr. Hewitt. The writings of the German philosopher Heinrich Jacobi—”
“Yes, I’m familiar with his work—it was assigned to me when I was reading philosophy at Oxford. What I’m wondering is why you read it.”
“The physician I was apprenticed to—the one who trained me in nursing—he took it upon himself to tutor me in various disciplines.”
“Did he, now.” Before Nell could ponder what he meant by that, he said, “What’s this fellow’s name? I know most of the physicians in the city, at least by reputation.”
“He lives on Cape Cod, near your parents’ summer cottage in Waquoit. His name is Cyril Greaves.”
“Is that where you’re from, then? Waquoit?”
“Near there—East Falmouth. Dr. Hewitt, I didn’t come here to talk about myself.”
“Yet I find you suddenly fascinating, given your unexpected dimensions, and I’ve been so frightfully bored. Was he an older man, this Dr. Greaves, or...”
“Forty-four when I left his employ.”
“Not that old, then. How long were you apprenticed to him?”
“Four years, starting when I was eighteen.”
“And before that?”
Nell lifted the Bible from the bench next to her and placed it on her lap like a talisman, all too aware of how defensive she looked. “I’m afraid I don’t really see the point of—”
“Indulge me. I’ve been quite starved for conversation in this place.” He took a thoughtful pull on his cigarette. “You had a family, presumably. Parents? Brothers and sisters? What did your father do?”
What didn’t he do? “He worked on the docks, mostly—cutting fish, unloading ships, that sort of thing.”
“A day laborer, was he?” The lowest of the low, taking whatever job was available for whatever pittance was offered.
“That’s right,” Nell answered with a carefully neutral expression.
“A hard life, I daresay.”
“You’ve no idea.” Nell had the disquieting sense, as he questioned her, that he was slipping an exploratory scalpel into her mind, her memories, her very self—a dangerous proposition, given what he might unearth if he ventured deeply enough. Too much was at stake—far too much—for her to permit that.
She said, “Let me save us some time here, if I may. I had a family. They’re gone now. The details are really none of your concern. I’m sorry if you’re bored because you’ve ended up here after taking your wonderful life with all of its blessings and tossing it in the trash bin. That was your choice to make, though, and I hardly think it should now be my responsibility to provide jailhouse entertainment for you at the expense of my privacy.”
Sticking the cigarette in his mouth, Dr. Hewitt clapped listlessly. “What a very impassioned speech, Miss Sweeney. Have you ever considered the stage as a vocation?”
She looked away, disgusted.
“No? I suppose I’m not surprised. Actresses have to be willing to bare their souls—and somewhat more than that, from time to time.” His gaze skimmed down to the knifelike toes of her black morocco boots, just visible beneath the hem of her skirt, and back up. “If there was ever a woman buttoned up more snugly than you, I’ve yet to meet her.”
“Must you keep turning the conversation back to me?” she asked.
“And yet I sense, if you loosened just one or two of those buttons, the most extraordinary revelations would burst forth. That’s the last thing you want, though, isn’t it? To be exposed. It terrifies you.”
“As I said,” Nell continued tightly, “your mother plans on hiring a lawyer to—”
“Go away.” Sitting up, he hurled the cigarette into the bowl of gruel, where it sizzled, and tugged his blanket more tightly around himself. “Just go away, if that’s all you can prattle on about. And tell Lady Viola to abandon this foolish notion of getting a lawyer. Some people are meant to hang.”
“Guilty people are meant to hang.”
“Precisely.” Sweat trickled into his eyes; he wiped it away with the blanket. “Not that I’m too keen on that particular method of execution. I saw six men hanged at the same time once. It took a full ten minutes for them to stop writhing. One of them broke his neck, but he still struggled. Hellish way to go. I wouldn’t mind a firing squad—or perhaps a syringe full of morphine. Quick, fairly painless...”
“Are you saying you killed that man?”
“Boorishly put, Miss Sweeney. You’re cleverer than that.”
“Your mother believes in your innocence, Dr. Hewitt.”
“Why, for God’s sake?”
“Because you’re her son,” Nell said quietly. “Because she loves you. Why else would she have sent me here?”
He laughed wheezily, and without humor. “Because she’s addicted to philanthropic projects—it helps to ease her remorse over her lack of a soul. Trust me when I tell you that woman is incapable of maternal love. You think you know my parents, Miss Sweeney, but you really have no idea.”
Rising from the bench, Nell retrieved Viola’s letter from the petit-point chatelaine bag hanging from her waistband—a practical alternative to a mesh reticule—and reached through the bars to hand it to Dr. Hewitt. “She asked me to give this to you.”
“Still using the violet ink, I see.” Turning the envelope over, he rubbed his thumb across the dab of sealing wax. “She always did like to do things handsomely.” He crushed the letter in his fist and tossed it into the chamber pot.
Gasping in outrage, Nell clutched the iron bars that separated them. “Your mother wept as she wrote that,” she said with jittery fury, feeling close to tears herself on Viola’s behalf. “She sobbed. And you just...” She shook her head, appalled at the sight of the crumpled-up letter in the stoneware pot. “Then again, I don’t know what else I would expect from a man who would walk away from his own family—his own mother—at Christmas, without even saying good
bye. Not to mention letting them think you’ve been dead all this time. It’s you who’ve lost your soul, Dr. Hewitt, and I pity you for it, but I despise you, too, for bringing this grief upon a woman who’s shown you nothing but a mother’s true, heartfelt love. Perhaps you really do deserve to hang.”
Uncoiling from the cot, he closed the distance between them with one long stride, the blanket slipping to the floor. Tempted to back away, Nell held her ground, hands fisted around the bars, not flinching from his gaze. For a moment he just stared down at her with his bloodied shirt and battered face, eyes seething, a hard thrust to his jaw. Reaching inside his coat, he produced a match, which he scraped across one of the iron bars; it flamed with a crackling hiss.
“You were told to keep your distance,” he said softly.
Chapter 3
Nell’s heart thudded in her ears as she considered the prospect of her skirts bursting into flame, and what to do about that if it happened. She didn’t step back, though, nor did her gaze waver from his.
He looked away first, at the burning match, and then again at Nell. “You are a cool one, when you want to be.” Turning, he tossed the match into the chamber pot. The letter ignited. Nell lowered her head and closed her eyes as it burned, the smoke stinging her nostrils.
“It was a two-week furlough,” he said quietly, with little remaining of his former rancor.
Nell opened her eyes to find him leaning a shoulder against the bars, thumbs tucked in his leather braces, his gaze on the floor.
“Robbie and I arrived home the morning of December twenty-fourth—Christmas Eve. I made it through that day and the next without too much familial melodrama, but on the day after Christmas, I was, shall we say, discovered in an indiscretion. A minor thing, really, or it would have been, had it not been that monster of morality August Hewitt who discovered it.”
“Indiscretion?”
“He came into my room that morning to wake me for a shooting party and found a pair of ladies’ drawers on the floor next to my bed.”
He glanced at her, no doubt wondering if he’d shocked her, or perhaps hoping he had. Nell kept her expression bland and refused to step back, although he was unnervingly close, mere inches away. From this vantage point, she could see how he shivered, despite the sweat that soaked him.
“He went into one of his quiet, cold rages about my having smuggled a woman into the house. In fact, he was crediting me with initiative where none existed, since the woman in question had merely slipped down the service stairs during the night. Of course, if I’d told him that, he’d have sacked the poor wench on the spot and tossed her into the street like so much rubbish. Not quite what she deserved just for having had the poor judgment to favor the likes of me.”
“She was one of the house staff?” Nell asked.
“A chambermaid—my first and only, if you can believe it. Some men are enchanted by those white, ruffled aprons, but they were never quite my cup of tea. Of course, as far as Saint August was concerned, it may as well have been my hundredth offense as my first. He ordered me out of the house forthwith, but not before informing me, rather starchily, that his precious Robbie would never have done such a thing. He was right. Robbie was a good son, a good man. He was the only one of us who was worth anything—except perhaps for young Martin. He had possibilities. Harry was always...” he shook his head “...a bit too much like me, I’m afraid. My fault, to some extent.”
“Why do you say that?”
Dr. Hewitt rasped a hand over his unshaven jaw, his gaze still trained on the floor. “I never had very much time for him, during my visits home. He was three years younger than Robbie—six years younger than me—so taking him along on our...evening adventures was out of the question, although he begged to be included. And, too, I saw something of myself in him—those of us with an appetite for sin always recognize it in others—and I didn’t like what I saw. I could have offered him counsel, of course—led him away from that treacherous path I knew so well. But I was too preoccupied, too disgusted by him, and by myself, to offer him any meaningful guidance. So he continued down that road with only himself for a guide.”
“He may not have a guide,” Nell observed, “but he does have rescuers—rather too many of them, if you ask me. Perhaps if he’d had to answer for his sins now and again, he would have learned to avoid them.”
“Spoken like a true daughter of Rome.”
She bristled.
“Your quiet indignity is most impressive, Miss Sweeney, but you’re squandering it. I don’t single out your faith for special scorn. They’re all the same to me.” His expression grew wistful. “Robbie was devout. Not like Martin, but he believed. He used to crouch down in our little hole at Andersonville and pray. Yet still he was taken, at the age of twenty-five, and in a way that no man should have to...” He shook his head, his eyes gleaming. “But in my more philosophical moments, I’ve thought perhaps it was almost a blessing. He’ll always be young, always good. He won’t ever be ruined by that hollow, gold-plated world we were born into.”
With a grim smile, he added, “For that matter, neither will I. I was supposed to set up a medical practice here in Boston after the war—something on Beacon Hill, perhaps. My only regret is that I’ll have to wait months before that little appointment with the hangman. May as well just get it over with, all things considered.”
He scooped up the blanket, scrubbed it over his sweat-slicked face and wrapped it around himself again. Limping over to the cot, he seated himself with a grimace and lit another cigarette with unsteady hands.
“Are you going to be all right?” she asked.
“What did you say your Christian name was? Nell?”
“That’s right.”
“Short for...?”
“Cornelia.”
He drew on the cigarette and studied her as he exhaled, a haze of smoke blurring his ravaged face. “You should probably leave, Cornelia.”
She buttoned on her coat, draped her green woolen scarf over her shoulders, gathered up her Bible. “I may come back tomorrow.”
“Tuck your scarf in—it’s bitter out. And don’t come back tomorrow. You might not find me here, in any event. At some point they’ll be throwing me in the back of the Black Maria and—”
“The what?”
“It’s a closed wagon, painted black. They use it for transferring prisoners from the station houses to the Charles Street jail. They won’t let you in to see me there—you’ll be wasting your time if you try.”
“Your mother’s asked me to try to get you out of here tomorrow. She thinks she can convince a judge she knows to grant bail.”
“‘Convince’ meaning ‘bribe,’ I assume. Can she afford that out of her pin money? That’s the only way Saint August won’t find out about it.”
“I’m going to pawn some jewelry for her.”
“She’s sending you to a pawnshop?” A choking little cough escaped him.
“No, she told me about something called the Pawners’ Bank of Boston. It’s for ladies with jewelry and other high-value items. They’re honest, and they keep the rates low.”
“What will those noble Bostonians think of next?” he asked wryly. “Well, God knows she won’t miss the jewelry, and I daresay I’ll be desperate for my freedom by tomorrow.” He studied his quaking hand as he raised his cigarette to his mouth. “But tell her to send someone else for me. Not you.”
“There is no one else.”
“Then leave me be. As I have made my bed, so I must lie in it. Vous l’avez voulu, George Dandin.”
“You may have brought this on yourself, Dr. Hewitt, but I’d hardly think to compare you to a ninny like George Dandin.”
“Your Dr. Greaves found Molière worth teaching, I see.”
“I read it on my own, actually.”
Surprise lit his eyes; she found that absurdly gratifying.
As she turned to leave, he hauled himself to his feet—a nicety she wouldn’t necessarily have expected, given the circ
umstances and his apparent indifference to matters of decorum; he had, after all, smoked in front of her. With a courtly little bow, he said, “This has been a most diverting conversation, Miss Sweeney. It was worth being arrested just to pass the last half hour in your company.”
Her face prickled.
“I didn’t mean to make you blush,” he said.
“Of course you did.”
He smiled, really smiled, for the first time, and shook his head a little. Pulling the blanket more snugly around his shuddering body, he said, not unkindly, “Do go away.”
As she was stepping into the hallway, he said, “Miss Sweeney.”
She turned.
He wasn’t smiling anymore. “Don’t come back.”
o0o
“That’s her, Detective,” muttered the guard to a dark-haired hulk of a man standing near his desk as Nell walked down the hall.
The detective turned toward Nell, assessing her with the trenchant facility of a seasoned cop. He was like a bear in a gray sack coat, all mammoth shoulders and outsized head, the most prominent feature of which was a jaw that looked as if it could snap iron girders. He had a tweed overcoat slung over his shoulder, a bowler tapping absently against his leg. “You’re the one that was visiting Touchette?”
“That’s right.”
“I’m Detective Cook—Colin Cook.” He spoke with the faded brogue of someone who’d come over in late childhood, probably one step ahead of the famine. “I’ve been assigned to the Ernest Tulley murder.”
She inclined her head in response to his cursory bow, surprised to encounter an Irish detective in a police department that had only grudgingly begun admitting his kind in recent years. “How do you do, Detective?”
“I’ll do just fine once I find out why William Touchette done what he done last night.”
“If he did it.”
Cook smiled indulgently. “How long have you been contributing your services to the Society for...what is it, Prisoners and...”