Death on Beacon Hill (30 page)

“Really?” Will said. “Munro’s more than ten years older than Harry.”

“They were both bachelors, though, and of like temperament, and after Harry moved out of the house, they lived only two or three blocks apart in the Back Bay. And if you want to know the truth, I do believe there was a fair amount of hero worship involved. I’m told Harry idolized Mr. Munro.”

“Even more than he idolizes himself?” Will said aridly.

Viola said, “Actually, yes. Mr. Munro was older and even richer than Harry, a self-made, charismatic man about town. Handsome, roguish, athletic...and something of a rakehell, which must have appealed enormously to Harry.” She shook her head. “It’s just so hard to believe. Philip Munro, of all people.”

“Why does it surprise you so?” Will asked.

“Well, he was...
Philip Munro
. He was just so...on top of it all, so confident—to the point of arrogance, but one can hardly blame him. He was indecently rich, you know. New money—his father had been a schoolteacher in Brookline—but it was money nonetheless, and in this city, that counts for something.”

“So does lineage,” Will said. “Was he truly accepted by the old guard? Did they let him into the Somerset Club?  Did they whisper behind his back?”

“Well...” Viola appeared to ponder the question. “Boston isn’t quite as bad as New York, where you’ve got to be a sixth generation Knickerbocker before they’ll even acknowledge one’s existence. Still, there
is
a caste system here, and although they admire achievements, especially as regards business endeavors, I’m afraid it’s pedigree that counts in the long run.”

It was always
they
when Viola discussed Boston society, not
we.
Having retained many of the
bohème
ideals of her youth, she’d never truly felt at home in her husband’s world of wealth and propriety.

“No, they never invited him into the Somerset,” Viola continued. “And there were whispers, to be sure, but they weren’t so much about his lack of breeding as about, well, the way he conducted his private life—although the one was generally blamed for the other.”

“If Munro’s private life was anything like Harry’s,” Will observed, “I don’t doubt he raised a few eyebrows. Especially given his age. Thirty-nine might seem young to you, ma’am, but it strikes me as a bit long in the tooth to be larking about with reprobates like Harry on drunken night sprees and the like.”

“Philip Munro was a firebrand, there’s no denying that,” Viola said. “They say he brought that same sense of daring and recklessness to his business transactions, did insanely risky things, yet he always came out on top.”

“What sort of business did he engage in?” Will asked.

“I believe it had to do with the stock market, mostly, though I confess I’m at a loss as to exactly what it was he did. Those sorts of things—stocks, commodities—they’re utterly foreign to me. Your father disapproved of him, said he wasn’t so much a businessman as a gambler. What was it he called him? A ‘nouveau riche raider.’ Oh, and he had connections, you know—friends in New York and Washington, important, powerful men, the kind who share information and help one another out. I understand he dined with President Grant, he and some of his financier friends, when the president came to Boston in June for the Peace Jubilee.”

“That can’t have hurt his business,” Will said.

“Oh, he made buckets of money, and his money made more money. Before long the men here in Boston who’d once snickered at him were lining up at his door for advice on how to do the same thing—not your father, of course, but most of the others. His
back
door, mind you. No respectable gentleman wanted to be connected too closely to the likes of Philip Munro.”

“Mustn’t be seen paying a call on the man,” Will said, “but they didn’t mind handing over their purses?”

Viola smiled. “Yes, but you see, they handed them over empty and got them back full. Mr. Munro wasn’t afraid of money, or vaguely ashamed of it, the way the rest of them are. He bought and sold and connived and speculated as if it were all a game and he could invent and reinvent the rules as he went along.”

“Did he always win?” Will asked.

“Often enough to keep some of the most powerful men in Boston in his thrall.”

“Was he in league with those Goldbugs, do you know?” Will meant Jay Gould and his cronies, whose greedy machinations had forced President Grant to sell off some of the government’s supply in order to lower its price, resulting in yesterday’s devastating market collapse. Gould was by far the most notorious Wall Street raider alive, and now the most loathed. Anyone who’d owned gold at noon yesterday, when its value plummeted—and that was a great many people—took a cruel beating. Thousands of investors were left in complete financial ruin.

Viola said, “I don’t think anyone was ever really privy to what he bought and sold, just that he made mountains of money doing it. If he
was
a gold speculator, let’s hope he didn’t talk Harry into getting involved in it.”

“You didn’t mind Harry befriending a blighter like Munro?” Will asked.

“That question,” Viola said with a sardonic smile, “implies that I enjoy some measure of influence over what Harry does and with whom. Of course I disapproved of Mr. Munro—not because of his background, needless to say, but because of his behavior. But he’s the reason your brother started playing cricket at the Peabody Club up in Cambridge, which I was actually quite pleased about. I thought it might, oh you know, be good for Harry to get a bit of fresh air and exercise. I’m surprised he never asked you to come along.”

Choosing his words with obvious care, Will said, “Harry and I don’t see very much of each other.” Not since the thorough beating Will dealt his brother last year after learning of Harry’s absinthe-fueled attempt to force himself on Nell—something Viola would never, God willing, find out about.

“Harry will take this
very
hard,” Viola murmured, staring out the window at her little English-style garden, all tangled and leggy, the way it got every year at the end of the summer, no matter how hard Viola worked on it. “How did he die?” she asked without turning from the window.

“That’s debatable, as far as I’m concerned. He was found on the front steps of his house on Marlborough Street, beneath the open window of his office on the fourth floor. It seems fairly clear that he fell that distance, but there are no witnesses. He’s got an unwed sister who lives with him, but I’m told she was napping when it happened, and none of the servants actually saw him fall. He was pretty badly smashed up, but in a way that makes me doubt that he died from the fall itself.”

“I wan out of chalk.” Gracie was standing over her artwork, a stub of chalk in her hand, squirming in a way that instantly put Nell on the alert. “Can I have some more?”

Viola, who was within grabbing distance of Gracie, pulled her close and whispered something in her ear.

“No,” the child insisted with an adamant shake of her head. “I don’t need to.”

“I think you do.”

Crossing one leg over the other, Gracie said, “I just need another piece of chalk so I can finish.”

“First the W.C.,” Nell said as she reached for the child. “Then I’ll fetch you some more chalk.”

“I’ll take her,” said Viola as she crossed the room, wheels rattling over the slate. “You’d best finish sizing that canvas before the glue dries up. Come along, Gracie.”

“But I don’t—“

“We’ll stop at the kitchen afterward and have Mrs. Waters make you a nice cup of hot cocoa.”

Gracie dropped the chalk and hurried after her nana. “Can I wide on your lap?” she asked as she followed Viola into the hall. “Can I? Please?”

“Can
you?” Viola challenged.

“May
I?” she implored, while dancing that little telltale dance. “Please, Nana?”

“Er...perhaps on the way back.”

Will smiled as he watched them retreat down the hall. There was amusement in his eyes, and pride, and a hint of wonderment at the child he’d created quite by chance one lonely night with a pretty young chambermaid during his last visit to his family.

It had been a Christmas furlough from his service as a Union Army battle surgeon in December of 1863, shortly before he was captured and imprisoned at Andersonville, along with his brother Robbie. After the hellish prison camp claimed Robbie’s life, Will escaped and, wounded inside and out, and allowed his family to think was dead for years while he lost himself in a numbing haze of opium smoke and cards.

“What the devil is that stuff, anyway?” Will asked as Nell dipped up another spatula full of warm, gelatinous glue.

“Rabbit skin glue. Canvases have to be sized with this and then primed with gesso before one can paint on them.”

“She makes you prepare her canvases? And on a Saturday? I thought you had Saturdays off.”

“I do,” Nell said as she smeared and scraped. “This is
my
canvas, for a painting I’m planning of Martin and some of his divinity school friends rowing on the Charles River.”

“Which ones are yours?” he asked, scanning the solarium-turned-studio. The only painting he’d ever seen of hers was the portrait of Gracie that she gave him for his birthday in July, which hung over the fireplace in the little library of his Acorn Street house. It captured Gracie’s winsome charm, which was why she’d wanted Will to have it, but it was sketchier than her usual work, because she’d been trying to suggest movement as the child played with her dolls.

Nell guided him around the room, pointing out paintings on easels, leaning against walls, and stored in drying racks—portraits and street scenes, mostly, a few interiors.

“Nell, I’m...awestruck,” he said after he’d viewed them all. “Your handling of light is incredible. These paintings—they glow from within. Why have you never shown me these before?”

“You’ve never been to the house before—not since I’ve lived here.” Nell turned back to the canvas she was sizing as her face suffused with heat.

“Are you blushing?” There was amusement in his voice as he came up behind her. He liked to make her redden, then tease her about it, and it wasn’t hard, with her coloring. Although she wasn’t quite a redhead, her hair being a sort of rust-stained brown, she was cursed with the volatile complexion of that breed—pale, translucent skin that sizzled at the drop of an innuendo.

“You are, aren’t you?” he asked.

“No.” There was something about blushing with pride from Will’s praise that made her feel particularly exposed, as if that which lay in the deepest recesses of her heart were emblazoned in scarlet all over her face for the entire world to see.

“I think you are.” He was standing so close that his legs rustled the silk faille skirt beneath her smock frock. “What the devil...?”

Her scalp tickled as he slid one of the filbert brushes out of the twist of hair at her nape, loosening it. “Ah, the ever practical Miseeney,” he chuckled.

“You’re making it come undone,” Nell said over her shoulder, the movement causing the chignon to unfurl heavily down her back. She bent to retrieve the second brush as it clattered onto the slate.

“I’ve got it,” Will said as he stooped to pick it up, bracing a hand on his bad leg.

Nell glanced back over her shoulder, reaching for the brushes.

“Allow me.” Slipping the brushes into his coat pocket, he shook out the rope of hair and slowly combed his fingers through it, sending little shivers of pleasure into her scalp.

“You know how to put a lady’s hair up?” she asked, heavy-lidded from the gentle pulling and tugging.

“I know quite a few things I probably shouldn’t.”

About the Author

Patricia Ryan, aka P.B. Ryan, has written more than two dozen novels, which have garnered rave reviews and been published in over twenty countries. A RITA winner and four-time nominee, she is also the recipient of two
Romantic Times
Awards and a Mary Higgins Clark Award nomination for the first book in the Nell Sweeney historical mystery series,
Still Life With Murder
. Pat’s Evil Twin, Pamela Burford, is also a published romance novelist. Visit Pat’s website at
http://www.patricia-ryan.com
.