Mansions Of The Dead (30 page)

“ ‘Darkling I listen; and, for many a time:/I have been half in love with easeful Death,/Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,/To take into the air my quiet breath;/Now more than ever seems it rich to die,/To cease upon the midnight with no pain,/While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad/In such an ecstasy!/Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—/To thy high requiem become a sod.’ “

“ ‘Ode to a Nightingale?’ ” To her credit, she didn’t look at all surprised. Quinn decided that she must be used to people who randomly quoted poetry as they stood in cemeteries.

“Yeah.”

“I always wondered what a darkling is. Who is it who writes about the darkling thrush, Hardy, right?”

“I think it just means that he’s listening to the nightingale’s song in the dark.” He wasn’t sure, but it was what he’d always thought.

Sweeney looked off into the distance. “Yeah, I think you’re right. I never liked ‘Ode to a Nightingale.’ I find the idea of easeful death disturbing. It shouldn’t be easy. It should be a fight, you should go out kicking and screaming. ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ and all that.”

“I think you can only think that if life is something good to you. There are people who have such a tough time, who are in so much pain or whatever, that death can only be a relief.”

“Well, that’s how old Keats felt,” Sweeney said. “Wasn’t his brother dying of consumption or something when he wrote it?”

“I don’t know,” Quinn said honestly. “I don’t know a lot about it. I just know I like it.”

Sweeney studied him for a moment and he found that her strange green eyes were more gray in the spring light.

“Were you an English major in college?”

“Nah,” he said. “Criminal justice. I should have done English. Always liked poetry and stuff. I was thinking I might take a class sometime. Night school.”

“You should. They have continuing ed. at the university.”

A breeze came up and he was cold all of a sudden. “Yeah, I don’t know. Might be hard with the baby and all that.”

Sweeney didn’t say anything. She just watched him with those strange green eyes.

“Well, I’m going to go ahead and tell my friend to do the test,” he said, to break the silence, and they began walking back toward their cars. “Now he just has to find out if it’s been too long. But he should let us know in a few days, a week at the most.”

“Okay,” she said. “Thanks.”

“You can wait until then, right? You’re not going to go off and do anything crazy.”

“What do you mean? What would I do?”

Quinn laughed. “I shudder to think.”

She hesitated a moment and then said, “Well, I might do some looking into the will and the birth records. Is that okay?”

“Yeah. Just let me know what you find.”

“Okay.” She looked up at him and said, “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“What do you think happened to Brad.”

“If I knew that,” he said, smiling, “I wouldn’t be standing here quoting poetry to you.”

SWEENEY WAS UNCERTAIN ABOUT
what to do next.

Quinn had told her not to go off and do any hunting around until he got back to her about the jewelry. But he had said she could look into the will and, by extension, she figured it was okay to keep looking into the jewelry. Because it wasn’t just about Brad, was it? If Edmund Putnam had been illegitimate and the date on the gravestone had been changed while the mourning brooch had the right one, well, that was significant, not just for history and for the Putnam family, but for Sweeney’s own work on mourning jewelry.

Either way, it made sense for her to keep looking into it. She wouldn’t know about the DNA until Quinn called, but she could go ahead with trying to find out how the subterfuge might have been accomplished. She tried to put herself back into the mind-set of the 1860s, to imagine what Belinda might have done.

This early Mrs. Putnam had found herself a young widow, and sometime in those few months after her husband’s death, she had met someone else. Sweeney took out the postcard of Belinda’s portrait that she’d purchased in the museum gift shop. Belinda stared out coolly, her eyes serious and her pretty face set in a determined expression.

She tried to put herself in Belinda’s shoes. What would she do if she
found herself with a husband in the ground three months and a baby on the way?

Sweeney remembered reading that, in colonial times, some huge percentage of babies were born less than nine months after their parents were married. She even remembered that there was implicit approval of a young couple sleeping together before they were married and waiting to see if the woman got pregnant in order to make sure she was fertile. People referred to the babies as premature and let the neighbors talk.

But this was the other way around. You couldn’t pretend that a baby had gestated for eleven or twelve months. So what would you do?

The only option would be to say that the baby had been born earlier than it had. But you couldn’t do that, could you? People would see that you were still pregnant and they would wonder where the baby was.

Unless . . . unless you went away somewhere and sent a letter home saying that the baby had been born. You would have to hope that the baby was big for its age and that when you eventually returned home, no one would question your story.

She found a few references to Belinda’s life in Henrietta’s book and a couple of other histories of the family, but they were all in relation to her charitable activities and were from a much later period of her life.

“Belinda Putnam, the widow of one of Boston’s most prominent businessmen Charles D. Putnam, established a charitable home for unwed mothers called the Hatty Hope Home, which caused great consternation among the city’s ruling elite,” Henrietta’s account went. “But Belinda Putnam was a determined woman who felt strongly about her causes and wanted to make sure that unfortunate girls who had been cast out from their families had a place they could go. She taught them various arts and crafts and when their babies were born she arranged for their adoption among the wealthy classes of the city.”

Sweeney read the passage over again. It seemed to support her theory about Belinda Putnam. If she had had her own experience of being an unwed mother, however well it had turned out for her, perhaps that’s what had given her the feeling for the poor young girls in such dire straits.

In the second book, there was a reference to the fact that Charles Putnam had been on the board of directors of Mount Auburn Cemetery. That was interesting. Sweeney hadn’t known that the Putnams had had a formal connection with Mount Auburn. But of course, most of the city’s prominent families had been associated with it in some way or another.

Charles Putnam had written a letter in 1863, a few months before his death, expressing concern about the rapid expansion of the cemetery. The book told her that the cemetery was full of laborers that year, many of them recently arrived from Ireland or other countries and that those who were not off fighting the war were put to work building new roads and improving the cemetery grounds. Putnam’s letter was reprinted: “Sirs. I cannot see the benefit to any of us in frenetic expansion. Soon the cemetery will become a tourist attraction and will be full of people looking upon the graves as curiosities. There will be no rest for the poor dead entombed within the gates, no rest for the poor bereaved visiting those graves.”

Charles Putnam had lost his fight. The cemetery had gone on to expand greatly in the years after his death.

Sweeney sat back in her chair, her eyes tired from reading. She hadn’t learned much. So what if Belinda Putnam had had an affair after her husband’s death? Who was she to go revealing it to the world? She was kidding herself that she was interested in the jewelry. When it came right down to it, it was the connection to Brad’s death that really intrigued her. But why would someone kill Brad to prevent news of the illegitimate birth getting out? It had to be that there was some kind of incentive to do so. It had to be that if Edmund was illegitimate, then his inheritance had been gotten by fraudulent means.

It depended on the will, she realized. If Charles Putnam had left his property to Belinda, assuming that he didn’t have an heir, then it didn’t matter who Edmund Putnam’s father was because Belinda had acquired the fortune honestly and had passed it down to her son honestly. But if the will was in favor of someone else, and had been voided because
Charles Putnam ended up having a legitimate heir, then the legitimacy was the most important point.

What would Belinda have done? She would have had to go to the lawyer and claim that she didn’t realize she was pregnant when her husband made his will.

There was only one thing to do. She had to see the will.

Sweeney had always loved the Massachusetts Archives. The repository of public records was located on the UMass Boston campus on Columbia Point, and as she got out of her car, she caught a whiff of the thick, salty air rolling in off Dorchester Bay. A jet flew low, heading for Logan.

The next Monday morning, she signed in at the front desk and then went through to the big library room where the microfilm records were kept. The probate documents were indexed in black leather books, stamped with gold letters reading “Index to Probate Records,” and Sweeney found the Suffok County records, flipping through the stiff pages laced with black print until she found the entry for Charles D. Putnam.

She had done probate record research before and she remembered that you had to get a reference number and then check the microfilm indexes to find out where the will in question was. She fitted the roll of film into one of the clunky old manual viewers, found Charles Putnam, and copied down the volume and page numbers for his will. There were a number of other probate documents indexed too and she wrote down those numbers in case she needed them later.

The will, once she’d found it toward the middle of another roll of microfilm, had been copied over by some anonymous clerk in a restrainedly embellished hand.

Sweeney got out a notebook and the pencil they’d given her at the front desk, excited about reading Charles Putnam’s words for herself.

“In the name of God Amen, I Charles D. Putnam of the City of Boston, being in good bodily health and of sound and disposing mind
and memory, but calling to mind the uncertainty of human life and being desirous of settling my worldly affairs while I have the strength and capacity to do so, make and publish this my last will and testament.”

Winding the film back to the first page of his entry, she checked to see when he had written it: 1861. Two years before his death.

“I commend my mortal being to Him who gave it,” the will continued. “And my body to the earth and as to the property, real, personal and mixed, I devise, bequeath, and dispose thereof. To my beloved wife Belinda, I give and bequeath all my household furniture, and all provisions I may have at the time of my decease for her use during her natural life. I further give and devise to my said wife for during her natural life, tenancy of the lot of land and buildings on Beacon Hill in the City of Boston, and after her decease, to be distributed to my brother, James F. Putnam.”

She read on and found what she was looking for. “Should a natural male heir be born to my wife and myself, said property, along with all my other worldly goods, will be distributed to said male heir upon my death.”

It was pretty straightforward. Charles Putnam had made the will not knowing he would ever have a child, but allowing that if he did produce a male heir, the money and real estate would go to the child rather than to his brother. To the child, not Belinda.

It was a bit mean to his wife, slightly unusual, but not out of the realm of possibility. People back then had strange ideas about women and Charles Putnam must have believed his wife incapable of managing her own money.

But the child had changed everything. The child had virtually secured the family fortune for Belinda Putnam. A young woman still when she’d had her son, Belinda Putnam had gone on to live for a number of years—and do a lot of good with the money her husband had left behind.

It had been a gamble. If the child had been a girl, the subterfuge would all have been for nothing. But necessary just the same, Sweeney reminded herself, if Belinda Putnam was trying to avoid a Scarlet Letter scenario.

She took some notes on the will, rewound the microfilm, and then thought of something. How had Belinda falsified the birth record for her son? She would have had to file a birth record. Had she filed a false one?

The answer was easy to find in the green cloth-covered indexes of birth records. Belinda hadn’t falsified the record. There wasn’t any record of Edmund Putnam having been born in Boston, in 1863 or anytime else.

Bill Landseer had been Sweeney’s father’s lawyer and, after his death, the executor of his estate. He had been something of a bohemian in his twenties and he and Sweeney’s father had shared an apartment—and a girlfriend, Bill always said—for three crazy years when Paul St. George was establishing himself as an artist and Bill was fending off his family’s suggestions that he become a lawyer.