Death on Beacon Hill (14 page)

*   *   *

The subject of conversation among the ladies, once they’d retired to Winifred’s pink and lavender sitting room to allow the gentlemen their cigars and brandy, swiftly homed in on Emily Pratt’s eccentric taste in clothes. Emily’s presence in the room did not deter her mother from characterizing her style of dress as “frumpy,” “ugly,” and “guaranteed to send gentlemen running in the opposite direction.”

Cecilia, unsurprisingly, took her mother’s side. Viola, familiar with the so-called “aesthetic dress” movement because of her interest in art and things European, came to Emily’s defense. Nell, who remained quietly neutral, wasn’t entirely sure of Vera’s position on the matter, since she couldn’t seem to get a word in edgewise.

Vera’s poorly fitted satin gown had a ruffle of a slightly different green attached to the bottom, suggesting that it had been restructured—perhaps by Vera herself—to accommodate her height. Recalling what Cecilia had said earlier about her mother wanting her to pass some shawls on to Vera, Nell wondered if the poorly altered gown had at one time been Winifred’s.

“The thing I really can’t fathom,” Cecilia told her sister as she freshened up her sherry, “is how you can bring yourself to leave the house without a corset on. I’d just as soon walk outside stark naked.”

“Darling, really,” Winifred huffed as she plucked two chocolate bon bons from the tray in front of her, her inebriation embarrassingly obvious now.

“Oh, Mamá, don’t be such a priss,” Cecilia chided. “You know what I mean, and you agree with me. Just yesterday you were telling me how proud you were that I’d gotten my waist down to nineteen inches. I’m aiming for seventeen by the wedding,” she told the assembled ladies.

“Have you and Harry set a date?” Viola asked.

“We’ll do that as soon as I figure out how long it will take me to lose those two inches,” Cecilia said.

“Long engagements are best, anyway,” Winifred decreed.

Vera nodded in agreement. “A year at—”

“Two,” Winifred said. “A year isn’t enough time for young people to really get acquainted, Vera. You’d know that if you’d ever had a beau.”

“In two years,” Cecilia mused, “I could get it down to sixteen, maybe less.”

“Are you sure that’s such a good idea?” Viola asked. “I’ve heard about livers being damaged from tight-lacing.”

“Oh, the liver.” Winifred said with a flippant little wave. “It doesn’t really do anything. I mean, just look at it the next time you have a piece of it on your plate. It’s just this
lump
.”

“Tight-lacing is beneficial to the constitution,” Cecilia said. “It promotes proper posture and stirs the circulation. And no male can resist a tiny waist. No normal male. Frankly, I wouldn’t want anything to do with a gentleman who was drawn to
that
.” She cocked her head toward her sister’s gown. “I’d wonder if he was, you know...one of them.”

Emily, who’d fallen silent a while back, pushed herself to her feet with a groan and lifted her glass of sherry. “If you ladies will excuse me,” she said as she turned away, “my intact liver and I are going out back for a smoke.”

After Emily left, Winifred tsk-tsked about her elder daughter’s shocking new habit, for which she blamed Vera. “Where were you when she started smoking
cigarettes
? I tell you, she’s going to die an old maid, and there doesn’t seem to be a thing I can do about it. She was always a hopeless bluestocking, even when she was little. Bookish, solitary...”

“Well, yes,” Vera began hesitantly, “but don’t you think she—”

“I think she’d better smarten up and start following her sister’s example before she’s completely unmarriageable. One spinster is quite enough for any family to have to support, I should think.”

Vera sat back and looked at her lap, her lips tight, color rushing up her throat like a fast-rising tide.

“We tried to do right by her,” Winifred lamented while gathering up a fat little handful of bon bons. “She had lessons in dancing and comportment, but none of it seemed to take. When she left for Europe, I thought, ‘Thank God. She’ll be in London for the Spring social season. She might find a husband, maybe even someone with a title.’ But then she and Vera embarked on this absurd odyssey of theirs, and...”

She shrugged and popped another lump of chocolate into her mouth, chewed it once or twice and swallowed it down, evidently nearly whole. “Now she’s back, even worse than before. Those godawful dresses—if one can even call them that. And she won’t go calling with me, or make friends with the better class of young ladies. Do you know whom she befriended while she was still here, working for us? That Fiona Gannon. A chambermaid, and not just any chambermaid—a thief and murderess!”

Nell shook her head in commiseration, then leaned toward Winifred and whispered, “I say, Mrs. Pratt, would you mind telling me where I might find the necessary?”

*   *   *

Luckily, the bath-room was located at the rear of the house, so Nell didn’t attract any suspicion when she headed in that direction. Instead of going into it, however, she located a pair of French doors and went outside.

The sun had set while they’d eaten dinner, and there wasn’t much of a moon, so the Pratts’ private courtyard was lit only by a haze of yellow lamplight glowing through the windows and French doors. Emily was lounging in a chair surrounded by potted trees, her bare feet crossed on an ottoman, her glass of sherry in one hand, a cigarette in the other. She raised it to her mouth, its orange-hot tip glowing brighter as she drew on it. On a stream of smoke, she asked, “Are you really a governess?”

“Yes.”

Emily gestured toward a nearby chair—cast iron with striped cushions—and scraped the ottoman over so they could share it. Nell sat, kicked off her beaded evening slippers and put her feet up, waving away the silver cigarette case Emily flipped open.

“Do you like it?” Emily asked. “Being a governess?”

“I do. I love Gracie as if she were my own. And I’m very fond of Mrs. Hewitt.”

“I’ve always liked her.” Emily laid her head back, her eyes half-closed, her smile wistful. “When I was little, I used to imagine that she was my mother.”

Unsure how to ease into the subject, Nell simply said, “After you left, your mother mentioned that you’d been friendly with that maid who’s supposed to have murdered Mrs. Kimball.”

Emily turned her head to look at Nell. “Supposed to have?”

“An inquest isn’t a trial. I don’t really consider her convicted. She was the niece of a friend of mine, you see, and—”

“Brady? The Hewitts’ driver?”

“Yes.”

“She spoke of him often. God knows what he must be feeling right now.”

“He’s incredibly distraught. He speaks of her as if she were just this sweet young girl, but the newspapers paint her as a monster.”

“I know.” Emily handed Nell her glass of sherry; Nell took a sip and gave it back. “All I can say is I...took to her. She wasn’t afraid to let her personality show, which set her apart from most domestic servants—especially my parents’—and she had ambition. Did you know she wanted to open a notions shop?”

“Brady mentioned that.”

“We got along,” Emily said as she swirled the sherry in its glass. “We confided in each other. I was just so grateful to have someone in this house I could talk to.”

“You’ll forgive me if it seems a little strange that a lady of your station would befriend a chambermaid.”

“‘A lady of my station,’” Emily chuckled. “Ah, yes, I’m such an exalted creature.” She fell silent for a minute. “One thing I learned from my travels is that we’re all very much alike under the skin—and that those systems that divide us and keep us separate are entirely artificial. I’ve learned to trust my instincts above all. And my instincts told me that Fiona Gannon was worthy of my friendship.” More gravely, she added, “Perhaps my instincts misled me, but I still don’t regret having followed them. The one thing I liked about H.P.B., the only thing, really, was her egalitarianism. She told us about having made friends with a servant’s child when she was young. So had I—the daughter of our cook.”

“How did your parents react to that?” Nell asked.

“They fired the cook.” Emily sipped her sherry and handed it back to Nell. “Do you wonder why I couldn’t wait to get away from here? The moment the war was over, it was all I could think about.”

“If you thought so little of Madame Blavatsky,” Nell asked, “why did you travel with her?”

“It all came back to Aunt Vera. My parents had insisted on an older companion, of course, although I would have much preferred to be on my own. But they were paying for the trip—a yearlong tour of Europe isn’t cheap—so I had no choice but to play by their rules. And I’d always gotten along better with Vera than anyone else in the family. But she was the worst traveling companion imaginable. She hated foreign cities, she hated foreign food, she hated foreigners. She got sick on ships, she got sick on trains... She wanted to come home. She whined, she begged, she wept. She was on the verge of cabling my parents and asking to cut the trip short when we went to Italy and met H.P.B.”

“Ah.”

“Vera fell under her spell within minutes of meeting her—swallowed all that Theosophy humbug without question. But that’s how Vera is, you know—meek, impressionable...utterly in the thrall of stronger personalities. She arranged for us to travel with H.P.B. and her various hangers-on, and she talked Father into paying for it. It’s hard to believe those two are brother and sister, they’re so different, but somehow, she always seems to know what to say to him.”

“She must have been very persuasive, to have convinced him to let you travel so far, for such a long time.”

“She was highly motivated,” Emily said. “Aunt Vera revered H.P.B., even after she told us about the boy she killed.”

Nell stared at Emily, not sure she’d heard right.

Emily leaned toward Nell, eyes glinting as if she were about to impart a succulent bit of gossip. “It happened when H.P.B. was a child in Russia. She was rich and spoiled, and apparently quite the handful. Her parents had her exorcised regularly.”

“Exorcised?”

“The family servants swore that she wielded a special power over the russalki. Those are Russian river nymphs—the spirits of young women who’ve drowned. H.P.B. told us over dinner one evening that when she was four years old, she took a dislike to a serf boy who’d been pestering her. She ordered the russalki to tickle him to death.”

“And you believed that?”

“Oh, heavens no, I thought it was just another of her tall tales—until we went to her hometown in Russia. I asked around and discovered that a boy was found drowned in the river on her family’s estate when she was four, and that everyone knew she was responsible. But her father was a man of influence, and Helena was already widely feared, so she got away with it. What she told us was that she felt invincible after killing that boy. She said others could learn to harness the powers of the spirits and demons, but that it took a great deal of faith and discipline—and that the word ‘disciple’ came from the word ‘discipline.’ I gave her a wide berth after that, but Vera didn’t seem at all put off. Of course, she worshipped H.P.B. She probably convinced herself it wasn’t true, that her idol could never have done something like that.”

Nell said, “I’m surprised you were willing to travel with this lady after that.”

“It was the only way I could remain overseas.” Emily expelled a plume of fragrant smoke, which drifted off into the night. “So that’s how I got to spend four years traveling the world. It was...indescribable. I felt so free, so...challenged.”

“But then your father stopped sending money last February,” Nell said.

“They’d hoped I’d find a husband overseas, someone with a pedigree who’d be willing to put up with the likes of me so long as he could get his hands on a chunk of the Pratt fortune. After four years, they finally figured out that wasn’t going to happen, and that’s when they cut off the purse strings. Coming home was like entering a prison. Vera, bless her biddable little heart, is the only person in this entire house I can talk to. An odd stick she may be, but she’s a good listener.” Emily glanced at the house and lowered her voice. “The joke’s on my parents, though, because I’m taking ship at the end of the month.”

“You are?”

“I’ve booked passage with Cunard to Liverpool. I sail on the twenty-sixth.”

“Your parents don’t know?”

Emily shook her head as she stubbed her cigarette out on the empty candy dish in her lap. “I’ll tell them at the last minute. That way, they can’t scheme to keep me home.”

“Will your Aunt Vera be coming with you?”

“No, and believe me...” Emily frowned, looked away pensively. “No. She won’t be coming. I’ve had enough of H.P.B. to last a lifetime—several lifetimes.”

Nell was trying to figure out how to ask the indelicate question of where the money for this voyage was coming from, when Emily said, “How old do you suppose Dr. Foster is?”

It took Nell took a moment to react to the conversational detour. “No more than forty, I should think. Perhaps as young as thirty-five. Why do you ask?”

Emily shrugged as she slid another cigarette from the case.