Death on Beacon Hill (3 page)

“I know.”

“No you don’t,”
Brady said as he spun to face her. It was the first time he’d ever raised his voice to her, and it stabbed something deep inside her, something that made her feel alarmed, uprooted. “You
can’t
know, because you didn’t
know
her.” His chin quivered; tears spilled from his eyes. “You didn’t—” The words died on a choking sob. He slumped against the brougham, the chamois fluttering to the floor, his big, work-roughened hands shielding his face.

Nell drew him into her arms, led him to the bench. “Sit. Sit, Brady.”

He was crying in earnest now, amidst muttered imprecations that she couldn’t quite make out. She handed him her handkerchief. He covered his face with it and doubled over, great, hoarse sobs heaving out of him while she patted his back and made comforting noises.

The carriage bay grew brighter during the several minutes it took Brady to pull himself together. Sunlight streamed through the east-facing windows, gleaming off the brougham.

“I’ll have to wash her again,” Brady said in a shaky, sandy-wet voice as he wiped his nose with Nell’s handkerchief. “She’ll have spotted where I didn’t wipe her down.”

“That can wait.” Nell tightened her arm around this man who’d been her bedrock, her salvation, so many times over the past five years. “Are you all right?”

Brady sighed, his elbows resting heavily on his knees. “She was my only kin, Fee was. My only kin over here. The rest of ‘em, they’re still in the old country.”  He wadded up the sodden handkerchief, dabbed his eyes, then flattened it out, frowning at the elaborately embroidered monogram in the corner. “Oh, look what I’ve done to your pretty handkerchief. I remember when Mrs. Hewitt gave you these.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“I’ll have it cleaned,” he said as he folded it up into a neat square.

“I don’t care about the handkerchief, Brady,” Nell said as she smoothed his disheveled hair. “I care about you. I feel so...” Helpless. Frightened. He
was
like her father—more of a father, certainly, than her real father had been. He’d always been there for her, rock-solid, cheerful, reliable. Every Sunday morning, before dawn, he drove her up to St. Stephen’s in the North End for early mass. They’d take one of the little gigs so that they could sit next to each other and talk. He’d offer advice, tell her jokes... Sometimes he even sang to her—hymns or drinking songs, depending on his mood. To see him undone like this... It felt as if the very earth were sliding out from beneath her feet.

Nell said, “I remember you mentioning her.” Brady rarely talked about himself, but he’d spoken with affection of “Fee,” for whom he’d found a position in service when she was orphaned in her teens; that would have been a year or two before Nell came to Boston.

“I thought she worked for the Pratts,” Nell said. Orville Pratt, one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in Boston, had a law practice with August Hewitt’s closest friend, Leo Thorpe.

Brady nodded. “She started off with them. I got her hired on as a chambermaid when her parents passed on, back in ‘sixty-three. Or rather, Mrs. Hewitt did, as a favor to me. She’s a very great lady, Mrs. Hewitt, with a good heart. You don’t find many like her up in them lofty ranks.”

“That’s for sure.”

Brady drew in a shaky breath and let it out slowly. “Fee never did take to the Pratts. Said they demanded too much of her.”

“In terms of the workload, or...?”

“That, and how they expected her to conduct herself, even on her off hours.”

“There’s nothing unusual about that,” Nell said, “especially for a family as prominent as that one.”

Frowning at the floor, Brady scrubbed a hand over his jaw. “Aye, but it rankled Fee somethin’ fierce. See, my sister and her husband, they had a more or less free and easy way about ‘em. Fee didn’t ever really learn to toe the mark. She wasn’t a bad kid, mind you, she just didn’t like havin’ to pretend she was somethin’ she wasn’t.”

Nell nodded noncommittally, all too aware of how it felt to play a role, and chagrined that this man to whom she’d grown so close had no idea who and what she’d really been in her earlier years. The only person who knew everything—the only person in Boston—was Will Hewitt.

“Fee hated service,” Brady said. “She wanted to open a notions shop.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, she was savin’ her money for it—what little she made. They paid her a buck and a half a week. God knows how long it would have taken her, but she was real keen on the idea. She’d always loved...fripperies and trifles and such. Ribbons and laces...gloves, parasols, bonnets... Bonnets, especially, she was forever goin’ on about them. She aimed to sell yard goods, too, I think, and writing paper and the like. Other things. She used to go on and on about it. I can’t remember it all. I reckon I wasn’t really listening, on account of I didn’t think anything would ever come of it.” He closed his eyes, rubbed his face.

“When did she start working for Virginia Kimball?” Nell asked.

Brady turned the damp handkerchief over and over in his hands. “Just three weeks ago. I met her sometimes at Pearson’s on Sunday afternoons for a spot of tea. It was the first Sunday in May that she told me Mrs. Kimball had hired her away from the Pratts.”

“As a chambermaid?” Nell asked.

“A maid of all work. There weren’t no other servants, just her.”

“Oh, dear.”

“Yeah, I warned her what she was in for. I said if she thought the Pratts overworked her, just wait till she had to do it all. But she said it was worth it, on account of she’d get to do the work of a lady’s maid, which was good experience for her notions shop, and also ‘cause Mrs. Kimball was gonna pay her two dollars a week, so she figured she’d be gettin’ the shop that much sooner. Oh, and she’d get her own bedroom. She’d always hated havin’ to bunk in the Pratts’ attic with all them other girls. I told her it wasn’t worth it in the long run. I begged her to go back to the Pratts, if they’d have her. One of the daughters had helped her get the job with Mrs. Kimball, and—”

“One of the Pratt girls?” Nell asked. “Cecilia?”

“Nah, the other one, the one that spent all that time in Europe.”

“Emily.”

“Emily, that’s right. I said maybe Miss Emily could put in a good word with her parents, and if that didn’t work, I’d try to get Mrs. Hewitt to help, but Fee wouldn’t hear of it.” He shook his head, looking weary, grayish.

“It was that important to you?” Nell asked.

“It wasn’t just the work she’d have to do, it was...who she’d be workin’ for.”

“An actress.”

“It didn’t sit well with me, Fee associatin’ with that sort. I felt an obligation, don’t you know, to my late sister, to look after Fee and make sure she stayed on the straight and narrow. And now look what’s happened.” His voice started faltering. “She gets a bullet in the—” He pressed the handkerchief to his mouth, his eyes welling. “And they think she...they think she was a thief and a murderess. Forevermore, that’s how she’s gonna be known. Mother of God, how did things ever come to such a pass?”

Banding an arm around Brady, Nell said, “There’s going to be an inquest today. I’m sure, if your niece is innocent of—”

“She
is
innocent. I told you—she could never have done such a thing.”

“Yes, I know. I misspoke.” Trying, despite her doubts, to sound reassuring, she said, “The inquest jury will sort through the facts, and when they realize it wasn’t an attempted robbery, they’ll clear Fee’s name.”

“It’s already been sullied right there on page one, underneath a headline a blind man could read. How are they ever gonna clear it? And why should they? To them, she was just some no-account Irish serving girl. You know what they think of us. You know the names they call us. We’re vermin to them, foreign riff-raff. It won’t even occur to them to question Fee’s guilt—you mark my words.”

Nell didn’t know how to respond to that, given that he was probably right.

Shaking his head, a truculent thrust to his jaw, Brady said, “In the twenty some odd years I’ve lived in this city, nothing has changed for our kind. Seems like the more of us that come over, the worse it gets for us. The Board of Aldermen, the City Council, the constables, they’re all out to keep us down. Sometimes I wonder why I didn’t just stay in the old country.”

“Because there was nothing to eat,” she reminded him with a gentle pat on the back. “And you’re wrong, actually. There are a few councilmen with Irish names, and at least one police detective that I know of.”

“An Irish copper? Now I’ve heard everything.”

“His name is Colin Cook,” she said. “They hired him to police Fort Hill.”

“Got a mick to keep the other micks in line, eh?”

“Exactly. He’s been promoted, though. He works in the new Detectives’ Bureau at City Hall now. He handles cases all over the city.”

“A detective, no less.” Brady turned toward her, a glimmer in his eye that made him look, for the first time this morning, almost like his old self. “How well do you know this fella?”

“Well enough to consider him a friend.”

“A detective, that’s not like a regular constable. They’re the ones to look into robberies and killings and such.”

“Yes, but Cook is only one of eight or ten detectives in that bureau. I’ll be happy to speak to him for you—I gather that’s what you’re getting at—but he may not know much more than you or I. And there’s no reason to think he could clear your niece’s name.”

“I’ll clear it myself, but first I need to find out what really happened. This Cook, he’ll have to know
something
.”

Nell offered Brady as reassuring a smile as she could muster up. “I’ll go to City Hall tonight and talk to him.”

Brady’s face fell. “You’ve got to wait till tonight?”

“I’ve got Gracie to take care of. Anyway, Detective Cook isn’t there in the daytime. He works four to midnight.” She patted Brady’s hand. “A few hours won’t make any difference. In the meantime, try not to dwell on it too much.”

He squeezed her hand, his eyes damp. “She looked a little like you. Not quite as pretty, I reckon, but pretty enough, with the same rusty-brown hair. You’re a fine young lady, Miss Sweeney, an angel. You’re doin’ the good Lord’s work, clearin’ my Fee’s name.”

If she
could
clear it. How would Brady take it, Nell wondered, if it turned out Fiona Gannon was just as guilty as she seemed?

“Wish I could help you, Miss Sweeney, I surely do,” said Detective Cook that evening after Nell had filled him in on the reason for her visit. “But Chief Kurtz assigned that case to Charlie Skinner. I got nothin’ to do with it.”

Cook, leaning back in his chair with his feet on his desk, held his palms up to underscore his point. He had gigantic hands, in perfect proportion to the rest of his hulking frame. A black Irishman who’d come to this country, like Brady and so many others, during The Hunger back in the late forties, Colin Cook had a deep-chested voice seasoned with just a hint of a brogue. Brady’s accent was much stronger, probably because he’d been an adult when he left Ireland; Cook would have been but a youth. As for Nell, she’d been but a year old, right before the famine. Her speech bore no trace of the old country, and over the past few years it had acquired the cultivated intonations of the class in which she’d found her home.

Nell said, “I don’t suppose you attended the inquest this afternoon.”

“It was before my shift started, and if you think they pay me enough to come in during my off hours for cases that aren’t mine...”

“Surely you must have heard something after you came to work this evening.” Nell sat forward in her chair, gloved hands gripping the edge of his big, cluttered desk. “Isn’t there some overlap in the shifts? This is an important case—the whole city’s talking about it. You must have heard
something
.”

“What I heard was that it was an open and shut case of robbery and murder by the maid.” Grunting, the detective lowered his big feet to the floor and straightened his rumpled sack coat. “Sorry—I know it’s not what you want to hear, but that’s how the inquest shook out.”

Trying to master her disappointment, Nell asked, “Did Detective Skinner happen to share any of the details with you?”

Cook snorted as he reached for his teacup. “All Charlie Skinner ever shares with me is how he can’t stand the sight of us uppity micks that steal good jobs from real Americans by playing the bootkisser to Chief Kurtz.”

It was pretty much what the Hewitts’ servants thought of her, Nell mused—that she’d somehow tricked Viola into hiring her for a position ludicrously far above her station. “Try as I might,” Nell told the detective, “I can’t imagine the likes of you puckering up to anybody’s shoeleather, even that of the Chief of Police.”

Cook chuckled as he sipped his tea. “Sure you won’t have some of this?”

She shook her head. “It would keep me from sleeping tonight.” Though she’d probably lie awake anyway, trying to figure out how to tell Brady that his dead niece had been officially branded a thief and murderess.

Cook said, “Skinner and his pals—which is to say just about every detective here—they won’t so much as give me the time of day. Same goes for the rest of ‘em  in this office—the deputy chief, clerk, truant officers, superintendents... No, that’s not true. The Superintendent of Pawnbrokers is all right—fella by the name of Ebenezer Shute. Him and me used to share a pint now and then, before I married Mrs. Cook and went off the drink. But I hardly ever see him anymore, ‘cause he works days.”