Still Life With Murder (20 page)

Lying faceup on the headrest—how long had he been watching her?—he lifted a hand to point at the small scar near her left eyebrow. “That,” he said sleepily. “Who gave you that? Your father?”

“No.”

He frowned. “Not Dr. Greaves.”

“No, of course not.”

“Who, then?”

“Perhaps I had a bit too much absinthe and took a spill.”

“Into a knife?” He muscled himself into a sitting position. “That’s a knife scar.”

She touched it. It wasn’t very big, perhaps half an inch long. “How did you know that?”

“I didn’t.” Will sat back heavily and sighed. “I do now.” He lifted his cigarette tin, put it down, clawed both hands through his hair. “Look, about before, my…baiting you with that knife.
That was…” He glanced again at the little scar, looked away, scraped a hand over his bristly jaw. “You may very well have saved my life today, bringing me that paregoric and getting me out of that blasted…I had no business…” He grabbed the cigarette tin. “Anyway, I owe you an apology and a debt of thanks.”

“I appreciate that, Dr. Hewitt.” She did—yet part of her wished he hadn’t said it. His occasional courtesies, hinting as they did at the gentleman beneath the wretch, were strangely unsettling.

He nodded distractedly and lit a cigarette.

“I want to show you something.” Sorting through the contents of her chatelaine, Nell located the little velvet picture case she’d slipped in there this morning. She opened it, displaying a photographic portrait—hand-tinted by Nell—of Gracie in her best frock, and handed it to Will.

His expression softened. “Is this the child you care for? She’s lovely.”

Nell said, “She’s your daughter.”

On a gust of laughter he said, “Is that what
she
told you—my mother? Because I assure you I’ve never fathered any children. I’m careful about that sort of thing.”

“Gracie’s mother is a chambermaid who used to work for your parents,” Nell said. “Annie McIntyre.”

Will turned away and drew on his cigarette, but not before Nell detected a flicker of recognition in his eyes.

“Gracie was born nine months after your Christmas furlough in sixty-three,” Nell said. “Look at her, Dr. Hewitt. The black hair, those eyes, even her mouth. She looks just like you.”

He contemplated the picture through a haze of cigarette smoke. Nell saw it dawn in his eyes—the acknowledgment that it was true, that he’d fathered this child.

She said, “My suspicions were aroused yesterday, when you told me about…the incident with the chambermaid. I asked your
mother about it last night. She told me she’s known Gracie was yours since the night she was born.”

“Of course she’s known. That woman knows everything. Why else would she have taken in a maid’s bastard unless she knew it was her own flesh and blood?”

Nell thought back three and a half years to the stormy night of Gracie’s birth…Annie’s insistence on speaking privately with her employer, the muffled sobs, Mrs. Hewitt’s eagerness to adopt the baby.
These matters are complicated
, she’d said that night.
But we live in a world that likes to pretend such things are simple
.

“Saint August will have figured it out, too,” Will said. “He probably threw poor Annie out on her ear after that.”

“On the contrary, he recommended her to the Astors, her husband as well, and made a generous settlement on them.”

“To keep her quiet.”

“Annie was even more concerned about that than your parents. And I thought your mother acted admirably. If not for her, your own child could have ended up in an orphan asylum, or even some…some county poor house. When we spoke last night, she gave me permission to tell you about Gracie.” Nell nodded toward the photograph. “You can have that if you’d like.”

Will snapped it shut and handed it back. “You should have kept this particular revelation to yourself, Miss Sweeney.” He stabbed out his cigarette.

She slipped the case back in her bag, remembering with a pinch of guilt how Gracie, still in her night dress, had clung to her this morning as she was leaving.
Miseeney stay! Don’t go ’way again
. “You have a child, Dr. Hewitt, a perfect little daughter. How can you not care—”

“
Will
you stop making your bloody assumptions?” He grabbed the pipe and gave it a desultory sponging.

“What am I to think when you tell me you’d rather not even know she existed?” Nell demanded. “For someone who heaps such scorn upon the shallowness and venality of his class, you can be remarkably self-indulgent.”

“Self-indulgence,” he said as he set about scraping the bowl clean. “Is that what it is?”

“You like to think you’re so different from the rest of them, but you’re not. You’re just another…” how had Detective Cook put it? “…rich young bounder who takes what he wants when he wants it, and never mind the havoc it wreaks on the lives of others. It was left to Annie McIntyre to deal with the consequences of your… ‘indiscretion.’ She told your mother she’d intended to keep quiet about your having fathered the baby and just try to find a good home for her after she was born. She felt your mother had done her a great kindness in being so understanding about the pregnancy, and that it would ill repay her to reveal to the world that her own son was responsible. But when she found out she’d need a Caesarean, she was afraid she’d die and the baby would end up—”

“She had a
Caesarean
?” He looked genuinely shaken.

Nell nodded. “The baby was transverse. It was lucky for Annie—and Gracie as well—that Dr. Greaves was there.”

Will was rubbing his eyes with the hand that held the cigarette. He sighed and shook his head. “You may not credit it, Miss Sweeney, but I’m sorry for Annie’s anguish, and for any part I may have played in causing it.”

Steeling herself against the grudging sympathy she felt for him, Nell said, “I should say you played quite a significant part.”

“Not that it’s any of your affair, but this wasn’t some tawdry melodrama wherein the innocent serving wench is ravished by the…what was it?…rich young bounder. If you want to know the truth, and not some dime novel version of it, it was…” He ran his thumb thoughtfully over the pipe bowl, as if to gauge how good a
job he’d done cleaning it. “It was Christmas morning,” he said in a subdued voice. “I’d gone to the butler’s pantry for some brandy to help me bear up under the festivities and found her in there on the floor, weeping.”

“Annie?”

Will nodded as he leaned back against the wall. “At the time, I didn’t even know her name. I was hardly ever there, remember. I asked her what was wrong. She told me she missed her husband, who’d been off with the Eleventh Regiment since March. She’d been hoping he could be furloughed for Christmas, as Robbie and I were, but he wasn’t. I offered some poor words of comfort—I’m not really very good at that sort of thing. She pulled herself together and returned to her chores. That night, I heard a soft knock on my door as I was falling asleep.”

“It was her?” Nell asked.

Will nodded, gazing in an unfocused way at the pipe in his hand. “It wasn’t the lovemaking she wanted, not really. That was the price.”

“The price for what?”

“For what comes after. Being held, feeling someone else’s heartbeat, knowing that there’s someone in whose arms one can fall asleep. I suppose I knew that was all she really…needed. She needed it, but I let her pay for it anyway. I’d been too long at war. I had needs of my own.” He glanced at Nell and looked away, rubbing the back of his neck. “And, in case you’re wondering, Miss Sweeney, I did wear a French letter. It had grown brittle from disuse. It broke.”

Nell’s cheeks grew warm.

“I’ve made you blush again,” he said, sounding amused. “You really are rather conventional after all. Or is it my mention of the French letter? Are you outraged on religious grounds?”

“Not…outraged.”

“Discomfited, then. Your priests disapprove.”

“As do yours,” she pointed out.

“I have no priests.”

“Then I’m sorry for you.”

He seemed to ruminate on that as he tapped ash from the pipe into the stone bowl. “Curious that my mother would choose someone like you as her…Well, you’re obviously more to her than either a governess
or
a companion. This is, after all, a rather challenging and delicate mission she’s sent you on. ‘Trusted retainer’—how’s that for a title?”

“I’m quite content with ‘governess.’”

“You would say that. It’s the right thing to say, and you’re good at that—saying the right thing, doing what’s expected, acting the part of the straightlaced little governess. You’d get a standing ovation at the Howard Athenaeum.”

“That’s actually quite insulting, Dr. Hewitt.”

“Perhaps, but that doesn’t make it untrue. You’re not altogether what you seem. That’s what I meant when I said I was surprised my mother employed you, even just as a governess. She’s quite a perceptive woman, despite her faults, and I find it hard to believe she doesn’t at least suspect your true nature.”

Her true nature? Nell couldn’t even fathom how to respond to that. “I…I don’t know what you…mean to imply, but—”

“I only meant,” he said mildly, “that there are facets to you that aren’t apparent until one…lifts you up and turns you round in the sunlight.” He smiled. “You’re just a bit too quick-witted beneath all those tiny little buttons, a bit too tough and canny and wise for your years. You remind me of all those young soldiers who started out as pink-cheeked youths and ended up…” He lifted the horn box and the spindle. “Well, the ones who lived might still look the same on the outside, but in here—” he tapped his bloodstained chest with the tip of the spindle “—they’ve changed. They’ve seen things, done things, that boys like them should never have seen and done. They’ve been cast into Hell and survived to crawl out
again, but you don’t go through something like that without ending up singed. Which is to say wiser but sadder. You’re like them.”

He didn’t wait for a response, but commenced the laborious ritual of cooking and kneading of the opium.

Even half-intoxicated, William Hewitt was far too incisive for comfort. There seemed to be no way Nell could keep him from scratching open glimpses of her miserable past. If his mother was perceptive, he was doubly so. It was a quality that must have served him well in the practice of medicine.

“What would possess a person like you to enslave yourself to this drug?” she asked.

“The same thing that possessed your doomed Tommy.”

“Pain? Were you injured?”

“Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed the bum leg.”

“I assumed it was from the beating the police dealt you.”

“That didn’t help—one of them took a baton to my legs—but it’s an old bullet wound, actually.”

“From the war? I thought surgeons weren’t supposed to be fired upon.”

“I wasn’t—not in battle.”

“When, then? At Andersonville?”

“This conversation is becoming tedious,” he said as he gathered the gummy little mass on the tip of the spindle.

“It
was
at Andersonville,” she said, the bits and pieces coming together in her mind. “You escaped, didn’t you? That’s when you were shot.”

He lay on his side, snugging his head into the
chum tow
.

“Why would they have reported you as dead?” she asked. “They said you had dysentery.”

“I did. We all did. I didn’t die of it, though.”

“Obviously.”

“I died during a thunderstorm in the middle of the night.” He seated the dab of opium in the bowl, leaned over the lamp and brought the pipe to his mouth, flames twitching in his heavy-lidded eyes. “I died facedown in the mud.”

“I
DON
’
T UNDERSTAND
,” N
ELL SAID
as Will roused into wakefulness after a particularly long period of insensibility.

He groaned, draping an arm over his head. “You do know how to ruin a perfectly good stupor.”

“You’re obviously still alive.”

“Christ, but you’re literal. Perhaps I
should
hold you down and force a smoking pistol into your mouth. A little gong might do you a world of good.”

“As it’s done for you?”

He sat up, reaching for his cigarettes. “I don’t limp after a couple of bowls.”

“You don’t appear to do much of anything else, either. A man like you, with your background, your education…” She shook her head. “You don’t belong here.”

“Do stop hiding behind that kneejerk respectability, Miss Sweeney—at least with me. I’m growing weary of it.”

“Go home, Dr. Hewitt,” she said with feeling.

“No, I think you’re the one who should go home, Miss Sweeney.” He lit the cigarette, flicked the match into the little stone dish and settled against the wall. “Go back to Palazzo Hewitt. I daresay you
do
belong there.”

“Your mother made me promise to take you home.”

“She would understand your not wanting to remain in this den of sin while I gradually smoke myself into oblivion, which could take a while.”

She would, at that. “All right, just…tell me where you’re staying, at least, so she has some way to get in touch with you.”

He expelled a heavy sigh. “Very well, if it’ll buy me a little peace. I’ve got a room at the Belmont.”

“Where is that?”

“My mother knows it.”

“Be careful, Dr. Hewitt. If the police find out you’re frequenting places like this while you’re out on bail, you’ll be thrown right back in the Charles Street Prison, and you’ll stay there until your trial.”

“If you don’t tell them, I won’t.”

When Nell rose to leave, Will insisted on walking her downstairs and out to the street, where he hailed a hack that had just turned onto Tyler from Kneeland. His limp had, indeed, all but disappeared; no wonder he’d become so enamored of opium.

“Dr. Hewitt,” she began as the old blue-curtained carriage drew up.

“Yes.”

“Did you really buy that girl in Shanghai?”

“I did.”

“How…how old was she?”

“Thirteen, but she looked older, and she was very beautiful. If I hadn’t snapped her up, someone else would have beaten me to it.” Will greeted the hack driver and handed him some money. “The lady is going to Colonnade Row.”