A bucket of ashes (2 page)

“So that’s the famous Falconwood boathouse, eh?” asked Dr. Greaves as they neared it. They say it’s the grandest on the Cape. Mr. Hewitt sails, I take it?”

“Not anymore,” said Nell, knowing that Dr. Greaves hadn’t come here to talk about the boathouse, and wondering why he was stalling; he wasn’t the type of man to beat about the bush. “Martin, the youngest son, takes one of the shells out a couple of times a day when he’s here, as long as the weather’s amenable. He’s out there right now.”

“Martin, he was the pious one, yes?”

Nell nodded. “He’s a minister at King’s Chapel now. His first sermon was right before I left Boston, and it was brilliant. I can’t remember when I’ve been so moved.”

“A devout Catholic like you, attending a Unitarian service? That must be good for an extra few eons in purgatory.”

“Actually... I’ve been attending services at King’s Chapel for some time now.”

Dr. Greaves stopped in his tracks at the side of the house where the dock began. “You’re joking.”

“Now you really
are
gaping at me.”

“
You?
A
Protestant
?”

“It’s a long story.”

Dr. Greaves gestured toward the sixty foot dock, which terminated in a large raised platform set up with lounging furniture, and offered his arm. “Shall we?” As he escorted her down the narrow plank walkway, he said, “The other son was more of a rogue, as I recall. Squirmed out of joining the Army during the war... Henry?”

“Yes, but they call him Harry, and ‘rogue’ is a very polite term for what he is. He’s not the only other Hewitt son, though. There’s the eldest, William.”

“But I thought William died at Andersonville, during the war, he and the next eldest, Robert. I’m sure that’s what we were told that night we delivered Gracie.”

“Robbie died. Will escaped, but it took him years to reunite with his family.” Not that he was ever ‘reunited,’ precisely, with the rigid and judgmental August Hewitt, who couldn’t bear the sight of him—or of Nell, for that matter.

“William—he was the one who earned his medical degree at Edinburgh?”

“Yes, he was brought up with relatives in England, but he came back here when war was declared and enlisted in the Union Army as a battle surgeon.”

“Did he establish a practice after the war?”

Nell chose her words carefully, lest Dr. Greaves conclude, as had August Hewitt, that Will was a reprobate of the first order. “He hasn’t practiced medicine since then—although he treated Eileen for her clubfoot last year.”

“Your assistant? She doesn’t have a clubfoot.”

“Not anymore. Will arranged for a famous orthopedic surgeon from New York to come to Boston and operate on her.”

Dr. Greaves snapped his fingers. “
That’s
where I know her from. Louis Albert Sayre was the surgeon—brilliant man. I watched that operation in the surgical theater at Massachusetts General.”

Nell was going to say something about his professional dedication in coming all the way up to Boston from the Cape when she recalled that he made that trip every week or two to visit his beloved wife, Charlotte, who’d been a psychiatric patient at Mass General since well before the war.

“Eileen does wear special, custom-made boots,” Nell said, “but she hardly limps anymore. Will was very pleased with the outcome.”

“If he hasn’t been practicing medicine since the war,” Dr. Greaves asked, “what
has
he been doing?”

Gambling and weaning himself off opiates.
“He taught medical jurisprudence at Harvard one semester,” she said. “His closest friend, Isaac Foster, is assistant dean of the medical school, and he’s issued Will a standing offer of a full professorship so that he can develop a forensics curriculum, but there’s a catch. Will would have to sign a five-year contract, and he’s... not comfortable with that kind of commitment.”

“Not comfortable with a full professorship at Harvard Medical School?” Dr. Greaves asked incredulously.

Stepping up onto the platform, Nell turned to look out over the water, her arms wrapped around herself. “Will is a... complicated man. And, too, he’d had another offer. President Grant wrote him recently, when France and Prussia started mobilizing for war. Our ambassador to France, Elihu Washburne, was asking for a good field surgeon. The president had met Will several times during the war, and he came away with a very high opinion of him.”

“A field surgeon? But we’re not allied with France in that war. We’re entirely neutral.”

“Mr. Washburne isn’t, and he’s resolved to remain in Paris and do what he can to aid France, never mind that it’s utter bedlam there now. Will accepted the position.”

“Why would any American in his right mind risk life and limb in a fight that isn’t ours, that isn’t even particularly righteous? It’s just so much chest-beating between Napoleon and Wilhelm.”

“He had his reasons,” said Nell, thinking of the letter Will had left on her pillow the night before he took ship, three and a half weeks ago.
You will wonder why I’ve chosen this course, rather than the more comfortable alternative of teaching at Harvard. We have reached a juncture in the path of our acquaintance, you and I, from whence we cannot continue as before, strolling along side by side with no particular destination in mind, at least none of which we dare speak....

“Is he to remain in Paris,” asked Dr. Greaves, “or provide medical service in the field?”

“The latter. Last week he cabled me from Paris to say that he would be leaving the next day to serve Napoleon’s army.”
Am to join Marshal MacMahon’s I Corps near Wissembourg on German border and remain with them for duration of war. Unable to write for some time, perhaps months. Please do not worry, and ask same of Mother and Martin.

“He cabled
you
?”

“We’ve... become friendly over the past couple of years.”

Dr. Greaves was studying her in that all too insightful way of his. “When is he to return?”

“Not until the war ends. He told me it could be months from now, or—” Her throat closed up around the word “years.”

“Ah.”

“What was it that you wanted to talk to me about, Dr. Greaves?”

He nodded toward a pair of wicker rocking chairs. “Let’s sit.”

She lowered herself into the chair he held steady for her, and then he turned the other chair to face hers. He sat forward with his elbows on his knees and expelled a lingering sigh. “A young woman was brought to me this morning for medical treatment. A girl, really—nineteen, but a young nineteen. Claire Gilmartin is her name. She lives with her widowed mother on the outskirts of East Falmouth. They have a little cranberry farm on Mill Pond. You remember Mill Pond, just to the west of the village?”

“Of course,” said Nell, rocking absently.

“Claire had grown hoarse and developed a wheezing cough that morning, with dark sputum. She seemed a bit mentally confused as well, but that may have just been her way. There was no mystery as to the cause of her malady. One of their outbuildings—they called it a cranberry shed—had burned down the night before last, and Claire had been trapped in it for a little while before she managed to escape.”

“This happened, what—thirty-six hours before, and she’d only just started coughing this morning?”

“The symptoms of smoke inhalation can take that long to develop. In any event, it appears that a man unknown to them had gotten caught in the fire and died. Yesterday, when the ashes and debris were cleared away, his remains were removed and taken to Falmouth for assessment by the county coroner. According to Mrs. Gilmartin, he was one of those two men the police have been looking for, the ones who shot that woman in the beach house.”

“I’m sorry,” Nell said. “I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about. We’re really rather isolated here.”

“You don’t read the
Barnstable Patriot,
I see. Do you get the Boston papers, or do without altogether when you’re summering here?”

“Mr. Hewitt brings the Boston papers when he comes down for the weekends, but we get the
New York Herald
every day, and that’s what I’ve been reading. It comes on the train from New York. Brady, the Hewitts’ driver, goes to Falmouth and gets it.”

“Every day? That’s almost an hour’s drive each way.”

“It’s because of the war, and Will being over there. Mrs. Hewitt wants to keep apprised of all the new developments—as do I, of course.”

“Understandable—as is your lack of interest in local doings, I suppose, given that you’re only here for summer relaxation. But to those of us who live here year-round, the Cunningham incident was big news. It happened a couple of weeks ago. Susannah Cunningham was shot dead by burglars in her home—one of those huge new summer palaces in Falmouth Heights.”

“How awful.”

“The burglars got away, albeit empty-handed, and the Falmouth constabulary has spent the past two weeks searching for them. There’d been some evidence that they were still in the area, in hiding.”

“One of them in the Gilmartins’ barn,” Nell said.

Dr. Greaves nodded. “The body was identified last night. Mrs. Gilmartin told me his name and said it would be in the
Patriot
today. It comes out on Thursdays normally, but they’re issuing an extra. I didn’t want you to read about it without being prepared.” Dr. Greaves gentled his voice, his expression bleak. “I hate to have to tell you this. She said his name was James Murphy.”

Nell stopped rocking. She stared at Dr. Greaves.

“I’m so sorry, Nell.” He reached over to squeeze her hand.

“How... how do they know it was him if he’d... if he’d been burned? Wouldn’t he have been...?”

“I don’t know. I only know what Mrs. Gilmartin told me.”

“Are you sure it was Jamie?” She asked. “Murphy is such a common name. So is James.”

“I suppose,” he said, but she could tell he was humoring her. “Have you been in touch with your brother at all these past...?”

“No, not since he was sent to prison for robbing that livery driver in ‘fifty-nine. The first time I came to visit him, he told me not to come again, that he didn’t want any visitors, even me. I did come again, but he wouldn’t see me. I wrote to him after Duncan was arrested, to let him know what had happened, and that I was living at your house, but he never wrote back. Of course, he wasn’t much for writing, but I think he could have managed a short note—something.”

“How long was his sentence, again?”

“Eighteen months. I thought perhaps he would look me up after he was released, but he didn’t. I began to worry that perhaps he’d been killed by another prisoner, or caught some disease in there, so I wrote to the superintendent of the Plymouth House of Corrections—remember? You helped me to compose the letter.”

“Oh yes, I remember.”

“He wrote back saying that Jamie had been released in May of ‘sixty-one. I never heard from him again. He was fed up with me and my preaching about how he should live his life. Who could blame him, especially considering how I was living mine at the time. A classic case of the pot calling the kettle black.” Nell had often wondered, this past decade, what had become of the ne’er-do-well younger brother who was her last remaining sibling, the rest having succumbed before they’d made it to adolescence. Jamie’s most likely fate, she’d supposed, would have been another prison term. She’d thought that was the worst it would come to.

“Nell?”

Nell realized she’d been staring dully at the opposite shore. She should be crying, she should be consumed with grief, but she had the most curious sensation of being wrapped in cotton wool. The brick wall of respectability she’d built around herself since moving to Boston had served to insulate her from a past tainted by poverty and pestilence and vice, a past of which Jamie had been an integral part. In the interest of self-preservation, she’d cultivated an emotional distance from everything she’d been and done during the first eighteen years of her life, everyone she’d known—even her own brother. Now, it was as if someone were taking a sledgehammer to that protective wall, trying to bash a hole in it.

Gripping the arms of her chair, she went to rise from it, forgetting that it was a rocking chair. It swayed, and she with it, the blood draining from her head so fast that she nearly keeled over. No doubt she would have, had Dr. Greaves not caught her up and eased her back down onto the chair.

“Relax,” he said, pressing gently on her head to lower it. “That’s right. Take deep breaths.”

“I’m all right,” she said, feeling starved for air. “I just... it’s just this blasted heat.”

“And this awful news, I should imagine.”

“Yes, of course,” she said.

“We’ll stay here till you’ve got your bearings,” he said, “and then I’ll walk you back to the house.”

*   *   *

“Do you remember the first time you saw this house, that night we came here to deliver Gracie?” asked Dr. Greaves as he escorted Nell by the arm onto the back porch, one of four ringing the palatial house. She knew that the purpose of his patter, which he’d kept up during the walk from the beach to the house, was to keep her mind off Jamie. It was the same trick he used, and had taught her to use, to keep patients calm. “You called it a castle. You couldn’t believe the Hewitts only spent six weeks a year here.”