Louisa and the Missing Heiress (29 page)

“A tramp has been arrested,” I told Sylvia, who did not read the daily papers. “He was sleeping homeless by one of the piers, and the day before Dorothy’s murder he had been inebriated and made a commotion of some sort. So now the Boston police have arrested him and charged him with murder.”

“Hanging seems an unfair punishment for being homeless and prone to tipple,” Sylvia agreed.

“It grows worse. Constable Cobban is beginning an investigation into a new case,” I said, rising from my chaise longue. “A prostitute who was murdered on Wharf Street.”

“Isn’t that near Edgar Brownly’s studio?”

“It is. But don’t get your hopes up.” I smiled ruefully; strange concept to have one’s hopes rise at the thought that an acquaintance is a murderer. “There are many artists’ studios in that area, many brothels and taverns, and from what the constable has gathered so far, the poor girl was not particular in her choice of clients. Mr. Brownly, if he knew the girl, would have been one of dozens, I understand.”

I sighed again and jammed my hands into my pockets. “No. What this means is not more intelligence about Dorothy’s death, but simply that Constable Cobban has given up and begun a new investigation, and a person innocent of the crime of murder may be hanged. I have this feeling, Sylvia, that he is withholding something from me, something important. Whenever Dottie’s name is mentioned, his eyes get very hard. And I don’t know why.” We both stared, perplexed, out the window for a long while. The gardener passed by again, his arms empty this time. Where had the pussywillows gone? Perhaps into his own wife’s sitting room. I hoped so. Sylvia’s mother could afford a roomful of orchids; the gardener’s wife should at least enjoy pussywillows.

“Shall we choose our dresses now?” Sylvia asked, trying to distract me. “Wear the pink dress,” she said, leading me upstairs to her rooms. We were of the same size, and when necessary I, who could not afford fancy outfits, borrowed frocks.

“The green, if you don’t mind,” I answered thoughtfully. “Pink seems a bit lighthearted for me today.”

Sylvia rummaged through the piles of lace and silk laid out on her bed, searching for the green satin. “Do you think Preston might come, Louisa? He did come to your house for supper so soon after Dorothy’s death. Mother is so fearful that he might attend, after all, and ruin her evening.”

“Forgive me if this sounds a criticism, but you know your mother tends to flights of fancy. He is not particularly sensitive, but I don’t think Mr. Wortham would appear at an event where he is blatantly unwanted. I suspect he wishes a little privacy at the moment, for despite his many faults he does seem to have had some affection for Dorothy. Are you wearing that? Oh, how lovely, Sylvia.”

She held up a white dress embroidered with yellow roses. “Yes, I’m wearing this. And I shall powder. What a scandal there would be if we both went downstairs with powder on our faces!”

“Poor Dorothy would be shocked, too. She had that perfect peaches-and-cream complexion. . . .”

“And that lovely, full figure,” Sylvia added. “She never had to sew flounces inside her dresses to fill them out, the way I did. Poor Dottie . . .”

That was, I recalled later, the very last time we put a
poor
before Dorothy’s name. After that evening I would be free to remember Dorothy as sweet, as shy, as gentle and loyal; as all the good things she was before she had been made into a victim. My one final question and the all-important answer would occur to me in the middle of a fandango.

THE GUESTS BEGAN arriving at five, as was the custom. We would dance for a couple hours, have a buffet supper at seven, and then dance more until ten, or until the last guest disappeared, which was often much later if the champagne and fruit punch were particularly good. Parties required stamina in those days.

Even I admitted to stirrings of enthusiasm as the girls in their glittering party frocks and dancing shoes, and the young man in their evening suits of black jackets with tails to their knees and jaunty bows at the throat, arrived. There was something quite pleasant about seeing girls dressed in their prettiest gowns, with their swansdown boas draped over bare shoulders, or in the case of poor Jennie O’Connel, a thin scarf of possum, and their satin skirts hitched up to show red petticoats. The young men, awed and often bamboozled by such blatant displays of feminine charms, put into practice their oft-rehearsed best manners, some of which even verged on gallantry. When young Robert Baldwin, only a very distant cousin of the piano family, arrived, he left his top hat on a moment too long, and, blushing red with embarrassment, he actually went back out and rang a second time at the bell to repeal that faux pas.

But despite the gaiety of the scene, I could not give myself over to joy.

I stood solemnly in the reception line, a pale, grave young woman in a borrowed green frock, plainly preoccupied with decidedly unmerry thoughts. I had dreamed of Dorothy again the night before, of Dorothy in her blue-and-white-striped sport dress and carrying her tennis racket. “You have looked, but you have not seen. See me!” my friend had pleaded. “Louisa, look and see me!”

What was it Dorothy wanted me to see?

“Perhaps,” Sylvia suggested, “it was just a dream with no significance.”

“Perhaps.” I sighed without conviction. “But I have overlooked something. I know I have. There is a strange atmosphere to this evening, Sylvie. I feel it in my bones. Something will happen.”

“No more carriages trying to trample us,” Sylvia said hopefully. “No more suspicious French bonbons, though Mother suspects all things French.”

I had a dance card tied around my wrist with a pink ribbon, as did all the unwed women, but it did not interest me. I did not carefully hold my hand and wrist in midair so as not to crush the card, as did the others, and when a young man asked to put his name down for a waltz I had already lost my little silver pencil.

But when the rooms grew crowded and warm and soft with candlelight, when the band began with a lively rendition of “Buffalo Girls,” some of the preoccupation began to lift from my brow. My spirits lifted. My foot tapped and I could not stop it.

By six all the guests had arrived and been greeted, and Sylvia and I were free to dance. There had been some tense moments during those greetings, especially when Mrs. Milton and her daughter arrived and pointedly refused to acknowledge me, for by that time gossip had me running half-clad in the street, chasing Edgar Brownly, who refused to embrace me, rather than merely leaving his studio with my hat off.

Sylvia smoothed over that awkward moment by announcing, in confidential tones yet loudly enough to be heard, that I was wearing that lovely garnet brooch that Margaret Fuller’s family had given me. And since Margaret Fuller upon her death had been a countess, and since Mrs. Milton was a name-dropper of the worst kind, that reminder of my proximity to nobility ended the problem and the gossip.

Robbie Baldwin asked for the waltz—Annie Potter glared in fury—and I was whirled away. Sylvia did not see me much for the rest of the evening, not until suppertime, when we shared a bench as we ate shrimp and oysters and cucumber salad. The window had been opened slightly and I thoughtfully nibbled shrimp as I watched the first spring moths singe their wings in the candle flames. One fell onto my slipper and I bent forward to pick it up, but the insect was dead.

I was breathless, for I had danced often, despite my injured knee.

“The evening is a success,” I pronounced without enthusiasm. “Your mother will be so pleased. Have you danced, Sylvia?”

“I have. My toes will testify to that, since I danced with a young man by the name of Christopher Holt, from New York City, who has not yet learned left from right. What he lacks in skill he makes up for in enthusiasm. In fact, if a boy with black hair and black eyes and a jacket too short in the sleeves approaches, you are not, under any circumstance, to relinquish your place on this bench next to me. Promise.”

“Dorothy would have enjoyed this so much. Will none of my dearest friends be lucky in love?” I whispered wistfully. The band had been ordered to play calmer tunes during supper for the sake of everyone’s digestion, and the sad strains of “I Dream of Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair” now floated through the air. “Perhaps Dorothy was too loyal.”

“Have you tried the strawberries, Louy? Do take a plate. But why do you say Dorothy was extreme in her loyalty?” Sylvia said.

“I’m not hungry anymore. Not even for strawberries, though I can’t imagine how your mother obtained them, and in such quantity. Money is an amazing thing, Sylvia, in its limitless ability to obtain anything from strawberries to husbands. I speak of Dorothy’s loyalty to Mr. Wortham, of course. Despite everything, she seems to have stayed by him. I want so much to ask her why, but I must figure it out for myself.”

The black-eyed boy who had outgrown his evening jacket had spied us and was approaching. Quickly we fled back into the candlelit ballroom.

At ten o’clock, after the supper table had been laid waste and the musicians were replaying the tunes of the first hour, just as the first matrons were preparing to leave, we realized the unknown event that we had awaited was upon us.

Constable Cobban was announced by a very startled doorman.

Cobban, blushing and looking extraordinarily uncomfortable, was in the same plaid suit in which he seemed to make all of his appearances. It was a handsome enough suit for ready-made, but Sylvia sighed when she saw him, and I knew what she was thinking: No woman could ever really love a man who had but one suit to his name. He stood in the doorway, lit from behind like garden statuary at twilight, twisting his hat about in his hands and looking furtive.

“Who is that extraordinary young man?” Sylvia’s mother asked. The band was playing a lively cotillion and only the hardiest dancers remained on the ballroom floor. Sylvia had finally asked her mother, as courtesy required, to sit with us and have a cup of punch. “Did you invite him, dear?”

“No, Mother.”

“Oh, perhaps it is Preston Wortham’s driver! Is he here? Is that terrible man here?” She fanned herself so vigorously that the feathers of her boa stirred like palm fronds in a storm.

“I don’t see him, Mother. Stay calm.” Sylvia gave me a sidelong glance. “I will discover this visitor’s purpose and then ask him to leave.”

She did no such thing. She gave his coat to a servant and brought him a glass of champagne, which he refused.

“I’m not here for pleasure,” he said, and then blushed. “Not that I don’t take pleasure in your acquaintance . . . I mean . . .”

With the constable’s entrance, the atmosphere of the evening changed. Whereas before it had felt slow, like swimming underwater, now it sped up and felt out of control, like a horse that will not be reined in. I felt the change and looked up to see Constable Cobban’s eyes staring directly into my own.

I felt the faintest thrill of fear. The time had come; I felt it in my bones. The final revelation would be made, and I would know Dorothy’s story, as surely as if I had told it myself. Somehow this young man had become twisted in the coils of this tragedy, and it was only through him that the truth would be revealed. But I was no longer certain I should know. This inability to let go of the errors of the past could destroy, I thought.

But in that fatal moment, when Constable Cobban and I gazed at each other, truth seemed the only possible good. The cotillion was followed by a slower two-step, and Cobban shyly approached me. I left my little group and gave him my hand so that he could lead me onto the dance floor. The card dangling from the ribbons on my wrist tangled in his fingers; when he did grasp my hand it was with too strong a grip. I cleared my throat, and he relaxed his hold somewhat.

“We meet again,” was all he could think of to say. He nervously tried to pat his ginger curls flatter. They sprang back up, forming a kind of halo around his head, a most bizarre effect for a young man hardly worthy of canonization.

“As you seem to have planned, Constable Cobban,” I answered with a gentle smile, “since you have not mentioned any urgent business. You have come for the dancing?”

“No. Yes. I mean . . .”

“Let us be friends, shall we?” And I meant just that, though he would not realize it till later.

“I would like that,” he said.

As Mr. Cobban was of the school of dancing theory that counts aloud to the music, conversation was somewhat limited. I decided we should sit out the rest of the dance at a table in the card room. The entire party would soon be gossiping about me, since I was walking hand in hand with a young man in a checkered suit, so we might as well sit in the very eye of the storm. Mrs. Milton, fortunately, had already left by that time.

“That evening, two weeks ago . . . when I saw you, and you had fallen into the road . . .”

“I was pushed,” I corrected softly. “Evil is omnipresent, Mr. Cobban. You may temporarily lock part of it behind bars, but another part will always walk freely among us. And perhaps the worst part is the unseen, the unknown.”

“You always rise to his defense. One would think—”

I interrupted him. “I never defend crime, not even when it is sanctioned by our own government, Mr. Cobban. If I argue that evil may not stop at Mr. Wortham’s front door, I am simply stating a truth as I reason it.”

My admonishment made him blush, for he was not fool enough to overlook another fact. “Well,” he admitted. “I have been thinking about that evening, that if you didn’t trip into the road then you were pushed, and that maybe it wasn’t a simple pickpocket who pushed you.”

“That idea had also occurred to me.”

“And I think you have been useful in this case, and I don’t wish you to think me ungrateful, but it is time for you to leave well enough alone,” he finished in a rush. “If anything should happen to you, Miss Alcott . . .”