Death on Beacon Hill (17 page)

“It’s a
fait accompli
, old man.” Harry took a puff, blew it out. “She’s just accepted my proposal of marriage.”

“Vhat?”

“With Mr. Pratt’s blessing. So you’d best just turn ‘round and—”

“You lying dog!” Felix redoubled his efforts to free himself.

“It’s true,” Cecilia spat out. “You see? You’re wasting your time, Felix. No one wants you here.”

“Then give me back my sapphires!”

“
No!
You gave them to me. They’re mine.”

Felix, spittle flying, limbs thrashing, spewed a vituperative stream of German mixed with English. The only phrase Nell caught was “Greedy American bitch.”

With a huffy indignation reminiscent of his father, Harry said, “How dare you call my fiancée—”

“I’ll kill you, Hewitt!” Felix screamed hoarsely, then came a rather long-winded battery of German.

Will chuckled; Emily snorted with laughter.

“Do you two understand what he’s saying?” Nell asked them.

Will gestured toward Emily as if to give her the floor. She said, “He’s describing various old Germanic techniques he might employ in doing away with Harry. Some of them...” She snickered as she raised the snifter to her mouth “Well, they’re novel, to say the least.”

Felix caught one of the footmen in the nose with his fist, the other in the throat. They stumbled backward, groaning and gagging. Seizing upon the commotion, the Austrian kicked and punched his way free of his captors and launched himself, snarling and wild-eyed, at Harry.

Harry dropped his cigar and turned to run, but he wasn’t quite quick enough. Felix snatched his coat by its tails and yanked, whipping Harry’s feet out from under him. Harry covered his face as he fell. “Don’t!” Felix aimed a foot at Harry’s groin, and when Harry reached down to shield it, kicked him in the head instead.

Foster and Martin both tried to get hold of Felix, but it was like trying to capture a rabid boar with one’s bare hands. They aimed punches, but Felix just shrugged them off as he circled the writhing, moaning Harry, scouting for another place to kick.

Will strolled up to the Austrian. “
Gutenabend
, Herr Brudermann.”

Felix looked up.

Will punched him in the head. He dropped like a marionette with its strings cut.

*   *   *

“There’s something I don’t understand about what happened back there at the Pratts, with Felix,” Nell said as Will’s phaeton drew up in front of Palazzo Hewitt.

Will reined in his horses and turned to look at her. It was around midnight, but mild and dry, so he had the top down. The meager moonlight pointed up the sharp planes of his face—the straight-carved nose and lofty cheekbones, that jaw that managed to look both powerful and refined at the same time.

“You could have stepped in sooner in your brother’s defense,” she said. “A few seconds might have saved Harry from a boot to the head.” Harry, who’d suffered a gash to the forehead, had sniveled like a schoolgirl afterward, insisting that the constables be summoned to deal with Felix, which they were.

“Perhaps I thought another scar or two might improve his character,” Will said.

Nell looked down at her gloved hands, then back at Will. “If he’d never...done what he did to me, would you have reacted faster?”

He hesitated. She sensed he had some typically droll response on the tip of his tongue, but he simply looked her in the eye and said, “Yes.”

Nell nodded, looked away. The section of Tremont Street known as Colonnade Row looked so serene this time of night, with the windows of the mansions and townhouses almost completely dark and Boston Common deserted. It was even more beautiful in the winter, with snow glittering beneath the street lamps.

She’d grown to love living here. She loved Boston, and Viola, and her job, but most of all she loved Gracie.

Any whiff of scandal, and everything Nell most valued in the world, everything that made her life worth living, could be snatched away in a heartbeat. A bogus “understanding” with a gentleman was one thing, a love affair—a real love affair, furtive, clandestine—was quite another.

Nell turned toward Will, formulating in her mind what she wanted to say—or rather, didn’t want to say, but must. As she was groping for words, Will pulled the glove off his right hand. He lifted her left hand, unbuttoned her glove, and slid it off as well.

He took her hand in his much larger one and held it, nestled in her billowing skirts, warm flesh against flesh. And then he smiled at her. It was a very quiet smile. There was something melancholy about it, but something reassuring, too—deliberately so, Nell knew.

What he was telling her, without using ungainly words to do so, was
We needn’t speak of it. We shall go on as we have been.

Will tugged his glove back on, stepped down from the buggy, and came around to hand Nell down. He walked her to the Hewitts’ front door, bid her good night, returned to his phaeton and drove away.

“And this is the garden,” said Isaac Foster as he guided Nell and Will out the back door of his Acorn Street house the next morning, all three of them shielding their eyes against the sun.

A charming little place,
Orville Pratt had called it. It was charming, all right, a forty-year-old, well-kept redbrick row house on a mossy cobblestone lane. But to Nell, who’d been born in a two-room hovel, the notion of a twelve-room townhouse being considered “little” was nothing less than bizarre.

The garden was a cozy niche walled in ivy-covered brick, its air perfumed by the flowering perennials planted around its perimeter. “Those are medicinal herbs, most of them,” Foster said. “A special interest of mine. It tends to be very quiet out here, very relaxing—especially in the evening.”

“I can imagine,” Nell said.

“Beacon Hill is the ideal location for a surgeon,” Foster said. “Massachusetts General and Harvard Medical School are just a few blocks north of here.”

“I suppose, if I were practicing surgery, that might be a consideration.” Will pulled a tin of Bull Durhams out of his coat pocket and offered one to Foster.

“God, no,” Foster said. “Those things will kill you.”

“Come now,” Will said as he lit up. “They’re not as bad as all that.”

“You read my piece on pulmonary obstruction. I discussed the effects of tobacco on the lungs.”

Nell said, “There was an article about smoking in
Harper’s Weekly
a couple of years ago, but I didn’t know how much to believe.”

“No, it’s all true, about the cancer and heart disease,” Foster said. “I consulted on that article.”

“I’m afraid I’m still a bit skeptical,” Will said.

“That’s because you’re a nicotine addict, and addicts believe what they want to believe.”

Will didn’t like hearing that; Nell could tell by his expression. After having conquered his dependence on opium and morphine, it had to sting to still be characterized as an addict.

With an amused glance at Nell, Foster said, “If you won’t quit for the good of your health, you might consider it for the sake of your future marital happiness. No lady likes to be kissed by a man whose mouth tastes like an unswept hearth. Am I right, Miss Sweeney?”

When she hesitated, he said, “Forgive me. That was presumptuous.”

“No, actually, you’re quite right,” she said. “Or so I’ve heard.”

Foster slapped Will on the back. “If you know what’s good for you, you’ll quit before the wedding.”

“I’ll take it under advisement,” Will said with a sardonic little look in Nell’s direction.

“So, Hewitt, if it’s not too forward of me to inquire...” Foster began. “You’d mentioned being a nomad last night, yet here you are looking at houses and” –he darted a glance toward Nell— “thinking about settling down. Yet you have no plans to resume your medical career?”

Will took a thoughtful draw on his cigarette. “The war pretty much sapped my interest in surgery, if you must know. There are just so many limbs a man can hack off before he never wants to see another bonesaw.”

“Yet you performed an autopsy just last Autumn,” Foster said.

“Ah, yes—Bridie Sullivan,” Will said. “That was an unusual circumstance. My mother had asked Miss Sweeney to look into the disappearance of a young lady, who, as it turned out, had been murdered. Determining the cause of death was a bit thorny, but I rather enjoyed the challenge. The forensic applications of medicine have fascinated me since Edinburgh.”

“There’s a renowned expert on that subject who teaches there,” Foster said. “Gavin Cuthbert. His articles in the journals are riveting. You didn’t, by any chance, study under him?”

“Extensively. In fact, I assisted him in his research on determining time of death, and he helped me to get an article on medical jurisprudence published in
The Lancet
.”

“I read that article,” Foster said. “Well done, old man. Quite engrossing, really. Were you planning to teach or practice medicine, or both?”

“Both, but it was the teaching I was most interested in, because affiliation with a medical school would have afforded me more opportunities for research. Of course, my plans got sidetracked when the war broke out. I couldn’t shake the research habit, though. I took hundreds of pages of notes on the conditions of battlefield casualties. I was going to send the notebook to Dr. Cuthbert, but it was confiscated when the Rebs took me prisoner.”

“Where were you held?”

“Andersonville.”

Foster grimaced. Everyone knew about Andersonville; they’d all seen the shocking photographs of malnourished prisoners with their hollow eyes and skeletal bodies, and the appalling outdoor pen in which they’d been crammed.

“Is it true that General Grant called you the finest battle surgeon in the Union Army?” Foster asked.

Will blew out a stream of smoke. “Where did you hear that?”

“Your mother told me last night.”

“It’s true,” Nell said.

“Seems a pity for such talent to go to waste,” Foster said.

“I’m sure there are more than enough promising young men in your clinical medicine classes so that I won’t be missed.”

“There are a few with real promise,” Foster conceded, “but unfortunately, even Harvard has its limitations in terms of curriculum. For instance, we don’t offer a single course in your particular area of expertise.”

“Medical jurisprudence?”

Foster smiled. “Did I happen to mention I’m being considered for the position of assistant dean of the medical school?”

Will squinted at Foster through a haze of smoke as he held his cigarette to his lips.

“If I were to be granted that position,” Foster said, “and if I were to happen upon a qualified candidate to teach such a course, I would make him a very attractive offer. He’d start out as just an adjunct professor, of course, same as I did, but it goes without saying he’d have access to research facilities, assistants...”

“I wish you luck in finding someone,” Will said.

“Hewitt...” Foster began. “Will...”

“Say, didn’t Virginia Kimball live around here?” Will asked. In fact, he and Nell already knew exactly where Mrs. Kimball had lived in relation to Dr. Foster.

Foster paused for a moment, as if thrown not just by the change in subject, but by the question itself. “Why, yes, as a matter of fact. Her house is on Mount Vernon, but it backs up to Acorn.”

“You mean, one of those garden walls on the other side of the street is hers?” Nell asked. “Which one?”

“The, uh, the one directly across from me, actually.”

“With the red door?” The brick wall in question had an unmarked, crimson-painted door in it.

“Yes, that’s right. That’s...that’s actually how I knew it was her house, because she’d leave it open occasionally when she was working in her garden.”

Will stared up at the house as he smoked. “Darling,” he said to Nell, “do you think you ought to take another look at that big third floor bedroom? I was thinking it might make a good nursery, but you’d be the best judge of that.”

“Oh. Yes. Of course,” Nell said as she retreated back inside the house. On the way here, Will had suggested that Isaac Foster might be more candid about his relationship, if any, with Virginia Kimball out of earshot of Nell.

Instead of heading upstairs, Nell ducked into a pleasantly masculine little library at the rear of the house with windows that looked out onto the garden. Hugging the bookcase-lined wall to avoid being seen from outside, the wide-open windows being curtained only with hanging plants, Nell positioned herself so that she could hear every word the two men said to each other.

Will was explaining to Foster why he’d broached the subject of Mrs. Kimball. “...It was years ago. I was young and...easily incited to passion. And Mrs. Kimball...”

“You needn’t tell
me
, old man.”

The two men let out chuckly little groans that communicated better than words the extent of Virginia Kimball’s sexual magnetism.

“I fancied myself in love with her,” Will said. “I would have given anything if she’d favored me—anything. But there was this Italian count...”