by P. B. Ryan
Laying the coat on the foot of the bed, Nell fumbled in her chatelaine—the small bag bulging with its contents today—for the little bottle she’d brought with her. “Mr. Touchette, can you sit up?”
She touched his arm; he flinched. “Take me!” he cried hoarsely. “I’ll do it! I’ll do it, you bastard!”
Nell edged closer with the bottle—warily, given his delirium. “I have something to make you—”
“Christ, no.” He shuddered convulsively, his eyes glazed and watery. “No, no, no... I would have done it. I would have.”
“Mr. Touchette. William. Listen to me. I’ve got—”
“Damn you to Hell,” he rasped, “So help me God, I’ll make you pay for—”
“Will.” She touched his arm.
He flung her aside with one fierce sweep of his arm. Nell yelped as her head struck the wall, thrusting her hat down over her eyes. She tore it off to find Reichert looming over Will, snarling, “You dog. Is that how you treat a lady who’s trying to help you?”
“No!” she cried as he slammed his club into Will’s stomach. Will groaned and curled into a ball, retching violently but bringing nothing up; Nell suspected he hadn’t eaten since his arrest. “Don’t! He doesn’t know what he’s doing.”
“Animals, the lot of ‘em,” Reichert muttered, shaking his head.
“Here.” Sitting on the edge of the bed, she uncorked the bottle. “This will make you feel—”
“It’ll kill me.” Struggling to a sitting position, he backed away from her. “Stockade Creek’s full of typhoid.”
Stockade Creek? “It’s medicine, not water. Here.” Curling one hand around the back of his rigid neck to hold his head still, she brought the open bottle close to his nose. “See?”
He stopped fighting her as the distinctive scents of camphor and aniseed wafted from the open bottle, which contained an opium tincture familiar to just about everybody who’d ever sought relief from a bad cough or a bout of diarrhea.
Will’s rheumy gaze met hers for a fleeting moment. There was recognition, surprise, and unless she was very much mistaken, a glimmer of gratitude in his expression as he wrapped his hand around hers and tilted the bottle to his mouth.
“Stop!” she exclaimed as he gulped its contents. “You’ll kill yourself, taking that much!” Prying his fingers open, she loosened his surprisingly strong grip and wrested the bottle away, appalled to find he’d half-emptied it.
He sank back against the wall, eyes closed, dragging in wheezy breaths that grew gradually slower and less erratic, until she couldn’t hear them at all anymore.
Reichert leaned over him, prodded his shoulder. “Is he...?”
“William?” she said anxiously. “Will?”
There was no response.
“This don’t look good,” Reichert said. “What was that stuff?”
“Oh, God,” Nell whispered. Had she just helped William Hewitt to commit suicide? “Will? Will?” She patted his face.
He stirred, his breath coming in stertorous little hitches that alarmed her until she realized he was chuckling. “I’d have to drink a quart of paregoric to do myself any harm—or much good, for that matter.” He raked both palsied hands through his hair.
Oh, thank God. “I know it’s not very strong, but it was all I could find at home.” It was laudanum she’d been looking for as she’d rummaged in vain through the Hewitts’ medicine cupboard; the most popular opiated tonic on the market, laudanum contained more than twice as much morphine as paregoric.
“It’ll do,” he said, reaching for the bottle, “assuming I get enough of it.”
“No!” Nell stood, tucking the bottle securely in her bag. “You’ve had too much already, and I need to get you out of this place. Here, put this on.” She shook out the fine, double-breasted black frock coat and helped him into it. It was a cast-off of his father’s that Viola had intended to donate to charity. Mr. Hewitt had them made on Savile Row in London; they all looked exactly alike.
“I’ll show you out the back way,” Reichert told her as Will rose awkwardly to his feet, holding onto the wall for support. “So’s you don’t have to run that gauntlet again.”
Will’s progress out of the building and across the yard to the brick wall surrounding the prison was slow and erratic, with Nell supporting him most of the way. Not only was he woozy, but there was that limp of his to contend with. Despite his leanness, he felt heavy and unwieldy, frequently stumbling and having a hard time regaining his feet. It called to mind all those black, frigid nights Nell had had to walk her father home from Dougal’s Tavern, with him swaying and lurching and crooning his mournful “Kathleen, Mavourneen.”
Reichert escorted them through the front gate and returned to his post, leaving them on bustling Charles Street, blinking against the glare of sunlight off yesterday’s snow. Will slumped against an iron horse trough, a wavering hand shielding his eyes. Hatless, collarless and grimy, with a pale, bruised face and two days’ growth of beard, Dr. William Hewitt looked every bit the quintessential derelict; a casual passerby would assume the elegant coat was stolen.
He doubled over, fingers digging into his stomach, groaning a cloud of vapor into the frosty air.
“Are you all right?” she asked. “Dr. Hew—”
“I told you not to come,” he gasped, gripping the trough with rigid hands. “You should have listened to me.”
Was it that he hadn’t wanted her to see him like this, ailing and humbled? Or had he been trying to protect her from an experience he knew she would find disturbing, even sickening? Was it pride or a deeply buried chivalry that had motivated him? The latter was not impossible. A man might be capable of murder, yet harbor a perverse spark of nobility in his breast, as she knew all too well. Such men were the most dangerous of all.
Nell spied an empty Hansom Cab half-hidden behind a streetcar rumbling through the graying slush of Charles Street, and hailed it. “Come,” she urged, gesturing for Will. “I’m to see you home.”
“I’ve no money for a cab,” he said as the compact black coach drew up in front of them. “The Station Two gendarmes cleaned me out quite thoroughly, I’m afraid.”
“They stole your money? The police?”
“My money, my watch, my cigarette case... Let’s see...coat, vest...oh, yes, my sleeve buttons...”
“They stole your coat and vest? Are you sure they didn’t just set them aside to use as evidence?”
He shook his head. “One of them tried them on and said his wife was good at getting bloodstains out. I left my hat and overcoat at Flynn’s. No doubt they’ve been filched by now.”
Shaking her head, Nell prodded him toward the waiting vehicle as its driver, seated high up behind the open-fronted cab, tipped his hat to her. She said, “Don’t worry about the money. Where are you staying?”
“Not far from here. You needn’t come.”
“Your mother insists. She wants to know where you live and to be assured that you’ve gotten there safely.”
Despite Will’s condition, he gestured for Nell to enter the cab first and supported her elbow as she stepped up into it, settling herself at the far end of the tufted leather seat. No sooner had he climbed in beside her than he slumped down, wrapped his arms around himself and closed his eyes. He was shivering, but she suspected it was more from the opium sickness than from the cold. The paregoric had eased his misery only marginally, it would seem.
“Where to?” the driver asked.
“Dr. Hewitt.” Nell shook his shoulder. “You need to give the driver an address.”
“What did you mean,” he asked blearily, “don’t worry about the money?”
She withdrew a fat envelope from her bag and handed it to him. “There’s about two-hundred dollars there, I think—what was left over from the Pawner’s Bank after paying your way out of jail. Your mother wanted you to have it.”
He sat up straight, thumbing through the bills.
“You folks want me to take you someplace
?” the driver asked. “If not, I’d appreciate it if you’d—”
“Corner of Tyler and Kneeland,” Will answered, stuffing the money in his trouser pocket. The driver flicked his reins. Turning to Nell as the cab started rattling down the street, Will said, “Tell Lady Viola I’ll pay her back as soon as the cards start falling my way.”
“Is that how you’ve been supporting yourself?” Nell asked.
“I assumed you knew.” A shudder coursed through him; he rubbed his arms.
“Here in Boston, or...”
He shook his head. “There are gaming hells aplenty in other, less troublesome cities—New York, Shanghai, San Francisco...”
Shanghai?
“I’d been steering clear of London and Boston—too many people one wouldn’t care to run into...post mortem, as it were.” Ruefully he added, “But then I followed a high-stakes faro game here a couple of weeks ago, much against my better judgment. Thought I could keep to the shadows, win a pocketful of rocks and slip away quietly. Should have listened to my gut, eh?”
He gave her a mild little smile that disconcerted her, inasmuch as it seemed to suggest some sort of understanding between them, not to mention his presumption that she sympathized with his plight: arrest for murder.
Hunkering down in his corner of the seat, Will folded his arms, crossed his legs and closed his eyes. He fell utterly still and remained so, despite the jouncing of their vehicle as it wove and dodged among the horse cars, carriages, carts and pedestrians jostling each other in the narrow cobblestone lanes of Beacon Hill. As they rounded the King’s Chapel Burial Ground, quaint brick row houses gave way to elegant granite buildings with canopied shops at ground level: S.A. KING, Photographist; A.B. CHILD, Dentist; EMIL F. NOLTE, Hairdresser; C.F. POTTER, Ladies’ Boots. The shopfronts grew humbler as the main business district gave way to the South Cove, their windows devoid of awnings, their signs—COAL, FISH, JUNK, IRON FENCES, BACON, LUMBER—crudely lettered. Even when the modern granite-block roadbed retrogressed to archaic brick, causing the cab to jiggle maddeningly, the man beside her did not stir.
Hearing a little hmph of laughter, Nell turned to find Will studying her through drowsy eyes. “I must say I’m surprised to see a proper little thing like you without a hat,” he said. “Or, indeed, with your hair in such agreeable disarray.”
Nell raised a hand to the curlicues springing loose from her chenille-netted hair, momentarily puzzled by the absence of the brown velvet bonnet she’d donned that morning—puzzled and dismayed. Only a certain kind of woman went about hatless. “Oh...it came off when you...” When you hurled me into that wall. “That is, it must have fallen off back at the—”
“When I what?”
She hesitated. “You weren’t yourself. It wasn’t your fault.”
He stared at her a moment; she thought he was going to say something, but he turned away with a grimace and slammed a fist on the roof of the cab. “Pull over!”
Chapter 7
Steam gusted from the horses’ nostrils as the driver reined them in at the corner of Harrison and Beach, their hooves clattering on the uneven bricks.
“What? No.” She tugged at Will’s sleeve as he unfolded himself from his seat, but he wrested himself free with a force that hurled her back.
Staggering to the edge of the street, he dropped to his knees, his back heaving. By the time Nell made it to his side, what little his stomach had held was in the gutter.
The driver eyed him with distaste. “Is he drunk?”
“No,” Nell said as she helped Will to his feet. “Just ill.”
The fellow looked skeptical; given Will’s appearance, she could hardly blame him. He raised his reins as if to take off. “I don’t need some sot making a mess of my—”
“He won’t,” she promised as she guided Will back to the cab. “He’s done being sick. We’ll pay you double.”
The driver looked on warily as Nell wrestled Will back into the leather seat, where he crumpled with a series of ragged coughs. He grunted in evident pain as the cab lurched forward, his body racked with tremors. “Give me the paregoric.”
“I’m afraid to,” she said, grabbing her chatelaine as he reached for it. “You’ve had so much already.”
“Which I’ve just thrown up, in case it escaped your notice.”
“Yes, but—”
Seizing her wrists painfully to pry her hands off the bag, he tore open its flap and fished out the bottle. He drained it in one long swallow, wiped his mouth with the back of a trembling hand and returned the empty bottle to her.
She watched as he settled back into the seat, dragging a hand through his lank hair. He closed his eyes, breathing in great, harsh lungfuls of air.
“Does it help?” she asked.
“It’s not enough, by a long shot.” He sounded winded, and looked half-dead, which she supposed he was. “But it will...get me where I need to go.” He regarded her with quiet curiosity. “How did you know to bring it?”
“Once, back during the war—it was the summer of sixty-three, I think—Dr. Greaves was summoned by a family whose son had been discharged from an Army hospital with a chest wound. I went with him. Tommy was the boy’s name—that’s all he was, really, just a boy, nineteen at the most. At first they’d thought it was his wound acting up, then they began to suspect appendicitis, because of the abdominal pain. By the time we got there, Tommy could barely breathe, and he was convulsing so badly they’d had to tie him to his bed. He kept screaming for his pills, but he’d run out. His parents got new ones from the druggist, but they were the wrong kind.”
Will sank deeper into the seat, rasping both hands over his face; his eyes were red-rimmed, as if he hadn’t slept in days. “All those opium pills I dispensed in field hospitals—thousands of them, great, rattling floods of them... I often wondered what would happen when some of those lads got home. But when you saw a man’s leg off...and I sawed them off by the score after every battle, sometimes by the hundreds, arms as well... Minié balls expand when they hit bone, smash it to bits. Nine minutes per leg—that’s all it took me. When you do that to a man, you’ve got to give him something, something that works. Say what you will about opium, it kills pain like nothing else. One minute they’re screaming and sobbing and thrashing, and the next...” His expression grew oddly contemplative; he almost smiled. “Blessed oblivion.” He looked at Nell. “I take it your Dr. Greaves correctly diagnosed the boy’s affliction?”
“Oh, yes. He tried giving him some laudanum, which was all he had with him, but by that time, it was too late—he couldn’t keep anything down. If Dr. Greaves had had a hypodermic syringe and some morphine...but he didn’t used to carry that sort of thing with him. He does now.”
“The boy died?”
“Horribly. I hadn’t known that could happen. I mean, I knew it was possible to die from too large a dose of opium. There’s always a warning,” she said, squinting at the small type on the label on the empty paregoric bottle. “Same with laudanum or Godfrey’s Cordial or Atkinson’s Infants Preservative or any of the pills or powders. But it had never occurred to me that one could die from being used to it and then not having it.”
“One can if one’s dependence is profound enough.”
Like yours? she wanted to ask. Will’s condition, when she’d first encountered him today, had seemed every bit as dire as Tommy’s.
“Opium withdrawal can produce respiratory distress, as you’ve witnessed,” he continued, sounding an awful lot like Dr. Greaves instructing Nell in the medical arts, “and in the worst cases, cessation of heart function. But more often than not, it’s just a week or so of...unpleasantness.”
An understatement if ever Nell had heard one. “Have you ever gone through it?” she asked. “I mean, all the way through it?”
“Dear God, why would I want to?” He sat up as the cab pulled to the curb at the corner of Tyler and Kneeland. “This is my destination. I’ll pay the driver to take you back to Colonnade Row.”
<
br /> “Your mother expects me to see you inside,” Nell said as she gathered her skirts.
“I don’t recommend it, but suit yourself.”
Nell looked around as Will helped her down from the cab and paid the driver his double fare. This was a block of unassuming shops similar to those they had passed on the way, except that one—the one Will headed toward, with Nell on his heels—bore signs written in Chinese rather than English. There was a display of Oriental curios in its front window, along with open crates of turnips, rice, oranges and limes.
Walking into this bizarre little grocery store, to the glassy tinkle of chimes, was like stepping out of Boston and into Hong Kong or Shanghai—or rather, into Hong Kong and Shanghai all compressed into one small shop, for it was a veritable riot of clutter and color. For Nell, who prided herself on her ability to imprint upon her memory all aspects of a place or person, it represented the ultimate challenge. Floor to ceiling shelves held a dazzling array of Chinese-labeled jars, crocks, bundles and boxes, every inch of remaining wall space being occupied by Oriental artwork, banners and placards inked in baffling rows of calligraphy. Paper lanterns of every configuration dangled from the ceiling, along with clusters of herbs, garlic, onions and what appeared to be desiccated fowl of some sort. Snugged together atop lacquered chests were trays packed with figs, ginger, sticky-dark sweetmeats and various obscure varieties of produce, including some peculiar little nuggets wrapped in leaves.
“Betel nuts,” Will said when he noticed her looking at them. Pointing to other trays with a still-trembling hand, he said, “Sugar cane...salted bamboo shoots...”
“People eat these things?”
“I eat these things. There’s a whole, vast world beyond Boston, Miss Sweeney.”
Nell nodded, dazed by the alien surroundings, the strange, foreign smells. A slight movement in the back of the shop caught her eye. It was an old man—so old he looked mummified—wearing a gray smock like a stableman’s, loose trousers and a brimless black cap over his single braid. Nell had never seen a Chinaman before, not in person. He sat quietly in a darkened corner, next to a counter bearing a scale, a dented tin lockbox and a pistol. He nodded unsmilingly to Will, his gaze lighting on the blackened eye and split lip.