A bucket of ashes (5 page)

On the one hand, this pregnancy was a godsend; on the other, a disaster. Once Nell started showing, she would be ruined. As sympathetic as Viola might be, the notion of a woman carrying an illegitimate child having the care of a young girl was unthinkable. A chambermaid like Annie McIntyre, who could be kept away from public view while her inconvenient pregnancy came to term, was one thing, a governess quite another. Mr. Hewitt and society at large would be outraged.

Nell’s only hope, assuming she
could
secure a divorce, and quickly, was a hasty marriage. If Will were here, she had little doubt that he would offer to do the right thing. Even when he was at his lowest, with opium seething in his veins and a nihilistic disinterest in whether he lived or died, William Hewitt had always been a gentleman with a gentleman’s instincts, especially as regarded women. Although, as Will’s wife, Nell would no longer be Gracie’s governess, she would be married to Gracie’s father; Viola would be her mother-in-law. She would have as much access to the child as she liked. And she would have retained her precious, hard won reputation.

It would remain to be seen, of course, how satisfying she would find such a marriage. Would Will stop gambling and roaming and settle down?
Could
he settle down?

Such speculation was, of course, purely academic, given that Will wasn’t here. He was very far away and completely incommunicado, with no plans to return to Boston any time soon. Even if the divorce came through, Nell was likely to end up ruined. It was a crushing dilemma, and one for which she had no solution.

Don’t surrender to this,
she counseled herself for the hundredth time since realizing she was with child.
You can’t help yourself—or your baby—if you let this situation overwhelm you.

Nell finished her bath and dried off. As she was buttoning her dressing gown, her gaze lit on the miniature clawfoot porcelain bathtub where the Hewitt boys had been bathed when they were infants, and where Nell had bathed Gracie her initial summer here at Falconwood after she’d been appointed the child’s governess. Nell had gasped with delight the first time she’d seen that darling little tub. Of all the luxurious trappings at Falconwood, it had been, and still was, her favorite. How excited little Gracie used to get when it was bath time; how she used to coo and splash and shriek with laughter. Nell used to imagine having her own baby, and a tub like that in which to bathe him.

And of course, a husband with whom to share him.

Nell touched her forehead, saying,
“In nomine Patris,”
before remembering that she was a Protestant now, more or less, and Protestants didn’t make the sign of the cross.

She hesitated, then made it anyway, just for good measure. “Jesus, son of David, have pity on me,” she whispered. “I may have sinned to get this baby, but don’t punish him for that. Don’t let him be fatherless. And don’t let me lose Gracie, I beg you.” She started to say, “Amen” before realizing she wasn’t quite done.

Summoning up the words she’d said over the bodies of her brothers and sisters, her mother, and far too many others over the years, she said, “Absolve, we beseech Thee, O Lord, the soul of thy servant James Murphy, whether he be my brother or not, that being dead to this world he may live to Thee, and whatever sins he may have committed in this life through human frailty, do Thou of Thy most merciful goodness forgive. Through our Lord Jesus Christ Thy Son who with Thee liveth and reigneth in the unity of the Holy Ghost, world without end. Amen.”

You’re his sister?” asked Chief Constable Phineas Bryce skeptically.

“If you’re wondering why I’m not in mourning,” said Nell with a glance down at her pewter silk day dress, “I’m holding off on that until I’m sure that the James Murphy who died in that fire was, indeed, my brother.”

“Actually,” said the thickset, steely-haired constable, “I was wondering how a fella called Murphy could have a sister named Sweeney. It is
Miss
Sweeney, isn’t it?”

Nell hadn’t even thought about that. Dr. Greaves—
Cyril
—sitting next to Nell in front of the constable’s big, paper-strewn desk, evidently had. “Miss Sweeney is Mr. Murphy’s stepsister,” he said. Nell was surprised that the principled Cyril Greaves could utter such a facile lie so smoothly.

“If it was a different James Murphy who died in that fire,” Nell said, “I shall be on my way.”

Chief Bryce got up and retrieved a small pasteboard box and a hefty volume from a bookcase. He opened the box and handed it across to Nell, saying, “These here are the personal effects salvaged from Murphy’s remains by the coroner, Mr. Leatherby, before the autopsy Monday night—except for the key to the Cunningham house, which was in his pocket. That’s how we know for sure he was one of the men that burgled the place and shot the wife.”

Inside the box were a belt buckle, a gold coin, fragment of handkerchief linen, a pocket knife, a tortoiseshell comb, and a pair of spectacles with cracked lenses, all scorched.

“Jamie doesn’t wear eyeglasses,” Nell said. At first glance, she took the coin for a five dollar piece, given its size and the eagle and shield imprinted on it. Finding it odd that a half-eagle should be nestled in this box rather than in the pocket of one of Chief Bryce’s “boys,” Nell lifted it to examine more closely. It appeared to be made not of gold, but of brass, with the legend
WAR OF 1861
along the upper edge, in which a hole had been punched.

“That’s an identification tag,” Cyril said. “Turn it over.”

Nell did so, finding, in lieu of the liberty head she would have expected, a flat disk stamped with lettering.

JA
S
MURPHY.

C
O
. E.

9
^TH
REG. INF.

MASS. VOL.

BOSTON.

Cyril said, “It was always a challenge, during the war, trying to identify the dead. If a soldier was getting ready to go into battle, he might buy one of these from the sutler who sold them their provisions, and wear it around his neck—just in case. Some veterans hold on to them as good luck tokens, or mementoes.”

“He’d been wearing it on a string around his neck,” Bryce said. “Course, the string mostly burned away.”

“I doubt very much that the man this belonged to was my brother,” Nell said, returning it to the box. “Jamie isn’t the type to have enlisted.”

“Even with all the patriotic fervor at the time?” Cyril asked.

“It wouldn’t have affected him,” she said. “He’s irresponsible, devil may care.”

“How old was he the last time you saw him, Nell?”

“Fifteen.”

“Well, then, isn’t it possible he—”

“You didn’t know him,” she said. “He was such... such a child. A real charmer, but he never cared about anything except getting something for nothing. Getting money without working for it, getting girls to...” She glanced at Chief Bryce, thumbing through the big leatherbound volume. “Grant him their favors without offering so much as a pair of glass ear bobs.”

“This should settle it,” said Chief Bryce as he leafed through the book, with its thick, strangely stiff pages. “This here’s our ‘Rogues’ Gallery.’ It’s pictures of the hard tickets we’ve put away these past few years, the worst of the lot, anyway. Some of them we just tore out of the
Police Gazette,
but we’ve got a fella in town that owns a photograph parlor, and we pay him to makes photographs of the bad pennies, the ones we keep arresting over and over. James Murphy was one of them.”

He thumped the open book down on the desk facing Nell and Cyril. The page on the right was inked with handwritten notes. That on the left was a folio with an oval cutout bordered in gold that served to frame a photograph of a blond, bespectacled young man in a rumpled jacket and limp bow tie.

Nell heard a despairing moan as the air rushed from her lungs. She sat forward for a better view of the photograph, which had a slightly washed-out look to it except for the  eyes, those crystalline eyes that had always managed to look both guileless and devilish at the same time. “No,” she whispered.

“That’s not him?” Bryce said.

“No, I think it is,” Cyril said quietly.

Nell tried to pull the book toward her in order to see it better, but it was heavy. Cyril lifted it and held it at an angle over her lap. Scrawled in a bottom corner of the photograph was
Mar. ‘69
, which was more than ten years after the last time Nell had seen him. Jamie’s boyish face had grown sinewy; whiskers glinted on his jaw. His right eyebrow was bisected by a faint scar coursing diagonally across his forehead, disappearing into a shock of unkempt cornsilk hair.

Nell whispered his name, shaking her head. “I thought... I thought it couldn’t be him. I didn’t want it to be him.”

“I know,” Cyril said. “I’m sorry, Nell.”

The notes on the right-hand page were written in several different hands:

James Killian Murphy

b. Feb. 12, 1844 ~ Murphy is Five Feet 11 inches tall, slim built, fair hair, blonde complexion, blue eyes, clean-shaven with short side whiskers, high forehead with knife scar. Wears spectacles. May seek employment as laborer or dockhand.

Sept. 15, 1959, robbed livery driver Julius Finch of a pouch of bank notes belonging to Falmouth Nat’l Bank. Sentenced Nov. ‘59 to 18 months hard labor, Plymth. Hse. of Corr.

Dec. 4, 1864, robbed Yarmouth-Woods Hole stage with accomplice David Quinn, both sentenced to 3 years hard labor, Plymouth House of Corrections.

Mar. 27, 1869, attmpt’d theft of ladies reticule from coat hook in Babbitt’s Choc. Shop, East Falmth, sent. in May of that yr. to 8 mo’s Plymth. Hse. of Corr.

July 19, 1870, with accomplice murdered Susannah Cunningham of Boston, aged 37 yrs., in course of armed burglary at Cunningham summer home at 175 Grand Ave., Falmouth Heights. Burned to death while a fugitive from justice July 31, 1870, aged 26 yrs.

Nell re-read the last entry with a kind of woozy horror.
Murdered Susannah Cunningham of Boston, aged 37 yrs.... Burned to death...

“The accomplice is still in hiding?” Cyril asked the constable.

Bryce nodded. “Davey Quinn, that’s who we think it is, on account of him and Murphy been pulling holdups together for years, and I’ve never known either one of them to team up with anybody else. My boys have been putting up placards with Quinn’s picture on them, and we’ve had some nibbles that make us think he might still be on the Cape—which is the last place he should be, seeing as he’s a wanted man here, but you’d be surprised, some of the dumb things some of these pugs do. Quinn, he’s not only dumb, he’s a hothead. Your brother was the voice of reason in that particular partnership, and the brains, too—but even he stayed on the Cape. There’s no accounting, but then, who knows the way their minds work, these gutter prowlers.”

“Which one actually shot Mrs. Cunningham?” Nell asked. “My brother or this Davey Quinn?”

“We don’t know, but it’s not really important. Under the law, if somebody gets killed during the course of a crime, all the hoods involved are guilty of felony murder, and they’ll all hang. It doesn’t matter who actually pulled the trigger.”

It mattered to Nell. It mattered very greatly. She said, “I’m afraid I know very little about this crime, Constable. What can you tell me about it?”

Sitting back in his chair, Bryce laced his fingers over his burly chest. “It happened Tuesday, July nineteenth, around dawn. The cook was the only one awake at that hour, ‘cause she had to start the coffee and what-not. So, she’s in her room on the second floor of the carriage house, getting dressed—that’s where the servants bunk, the carriage house—and she hears a scream from the main house that she knows has to be Mrs. Cunningham, on account of she was the only one who’d slept there that night.”

“Her husband wasn’t there?” asked Cyril. “Does he just come down from Boston on weekends?”

“Nah, he’s been there the whole summer, along with the wife. He likes to sail—got a forty-foot sloop he’s real proud of. He calls it the ‘Oh, Susannah,’ after his wife. It’s his pride and joy, and the envy of all his neighbors in Falmouth Heights. But he’d gotten called away to New York on business—he’s in shipping. He’d left the day before, and he was due back at the end of the week. And they didn’t have any kids, so it was just the missus in the house.”

Cyril said, “I’m surprised he left her there all alone while he was gone.”

“He didn’t mean to,” Bryce said. “She was supposed to spend that week at her sister’s place on Martha’s Vineyard, but a bad storm blew in over Vineyard Sound that afternoon, and they had to cancel the ferry.”

“So the cook heard a scream,” Nell said.

“Closely followed by a gunshot. She looked out the window and saw two men run out of the house and drive off in a wagon that was parked out back, but it wasn’t light enough yet for her to make out their faces. She woke up the driver and the butler, and the three of them went into the house and found Mrs. Cunningham laying there in the entrance to the library with a bullet hole smack in the middle of her forehead and the carpet soaked with blood. They sent for us, and me and a couple of the boys had a look around. From what we could tell, the only thing that had been disturbed was one of those display cabinets, a big one, about five feet square and two feet deep, made out of mahogany and plate glass. Inside, there’s this whole collection of antique nautical instruments—sextants, quadrants, chronometers, compasses... There’s even a three hundred-year-old, what do you call it, aster, astro...”