Murder in the North End (19 page)

“I see,” Nell said quietly.

“
But luck was on Chloe’s side—that, and she’s one smart, determined lady. Her divorce finally came through, and after Colin returned from the war, she married him. I understand she made him stop drinking first, but you can hardly blame her for that.”

“Hardly,” Nell agreed, recalling Duncan’s drunken rages, and the scars she’d wear for days afterward.

O’Donagh said, “It was after we shipped Danny away that Colin more or less fell out with the Brotherhood. He’d shot one of our own, and some of the boyos weren’t all that that sure it’d been called for. Not that he hadn’t needed to be stopped, but with a bullet? There were whispers that Colin had been sweet on Mary before that, and just itching for an excuse to get Danny out of the way, but I never did believe that. It wasn’t Colin’s way. He’s always been one for doing the right thing and choosing the right path—the godly path. Almost became a priest once, did you know that?”

“Mrs. Cook told us,” Nell said.

“Was that the only reason for Cook’s rift with the Brotherhood?” Will asked. “His shooting Daniel Duffy?”

“Well, Colin and I never did see eye to eye on the best way to do get things done,” O’Donagh said. “I’m a pragmatic man. I do whatever it takes. Colin...well, he’s a man of honor. He does the right thing, and the right thing only. Sooner or later, the two of us were bound to part ways, but I’m happy to say we didn’t part enemies.”

“But did you part friends?” she asked.

O’Donagh laced his fingers over his chest and sighed. “No, Miss Sweeney, I can’t rightly call us friends anymore. Truth is, when we pass each other on the street, we nod and walk on by. I know what he thinks of me and the Brotherhood nowadays, and there’s no forgetting who he works for now, and where his loyalties lie. I can’t imagine we’ll ever be on the same side again, fighting for the same cause. But back when we did, in the old country...” O’Donagh smiled wistfully, looking beyond them to a different time, a different land. “There was no man on God’s green earth I would rather have had by my side than Colin Cook.”

*   *   *

“Wait here,” Will told the driver as he handed Nell out of a hack a discreet block and a half away from his parents’ house around noon. “I’ll be back in ten minutes, and then I’ll be going to the Somerset Club.” 

“Do you really think this is necessary?” Nell asked as Will took her arm to walk her to the house. “It’s midday, the sun is shining. I very much doubt that I’ll be accosted by Skinner or his evil minions between here and Colonnade Row.”

“I doubt it, too,” he said, “but it is not, unfortunately, out of the question. There’s also the issue of the house itself. What if someone broke in this morning while we were out, and is lurking in there, waiting to pounce?”

“And what do you think the chances are of that?” she challenged.

“What do you think the chances are of my concentrating on anything other than your welfare if I don’t look through the house first and make sure there’s no danger to you?”

Nell followed Will through the house as he made a swift but thorough search of every room, closet, pantry, W.C., stairwell, alcove, nook, and cranny. He tarried for a minute in his room, or rather, Gracie’s room, in order to fetch some money with which to bribe his way into the Somerset Club in the unlikely event that his pedigree alone didn’t do the trick.

Nell leaned on the door jamb, watching Will’s reflection in a monumental, gilt-framed mirror as he unbuckled the old alligator satchel that held his gambling cash. He was almost cruelly handsome, with that height, those intense eyes, that lean, masculine grace.

Very early this morning, after lying awake in bed for some time listening to Will’s somnolent breathing, Nell had risen and padded silently to the doorway separating the two rooms. The sanguine glow of dawn sifting through the curtains had imparted an otherworldly radiance to the sheet-draped furnishings, making them look like a range of snow-covered mountains. On the carpeted floor next to the bed lay the pair of white linen drawers he’d shucked off upon retiring for the night.

The frothy lace curtains surrounding Gracie’s canopy bed had been tied back, revealing Will lying facedown with the sheet tangled around one long leg. The exposed leg, the right one, was the one with the deep, ragged scar puckering the quadriceps—from a bullet he’d removed himself shortly before his escape from Andersonville.

His face was turned toward Nell. Tendrils of hair hung over his eyes, and his mouth was half open, imparting an almost childlike aura, in striking contrast to his sinewy, ravaged body. She’d had to fight the urge to go over and brush the hair off his forehead. He would have awakened, had she done that, lying naked in bed with her standing over him in her night shift. Touching him. Unthinkable.

Unthinkable.

“Nell? Don’t you think so?”

“Um...I’m sorry. I’ve been...”

“Don’t you think, if and when this case goes to trial, that the prosecution will have a field day with Cook’s past? Having served as lieutenant to the likes of Brian O’Donagh was bad enough, but he actually shot a man for mistreating a woman, which may be exactly what happened Monday night.”

Nell looked at him sharply.

“According to the D.A.,” he hastily amended, meeting her gaze in the mirror with a pacifying smile.

“I knew Chloe wasn’t telling us everything yesterday,” Nell said. “She gave us to believe she hadn’t really known Cook when he first came to Boston from Pennsylvania, said they’d met through ‘mutual acquaintances.’”

“Not so much lies as equivocation,” Will said. “She didn’t want us to know that her husband shot Daniel Duffy for fear that we’d reach the conclusion any jury is likely to reach—that if Colin Cook is capable of shooting one woman-beater, he’s capable of shooting another.”

“Do you think he did it, Will?” she asked.

Turning to face her, he said, “I respect you far too much to lie and tell you I think it’s impossible.”

A helpless little whimper rose in her throat. “I hate this.”

“I know,” he said softly as he came to stand next to her, closing a hand over her arm. “Colin Cook is a lucky man, to have a friend like you. As am I.”

*   *   *

Nell watched from her bedroom window as Will walked the block and a half to his waiting hackney and climbed into it.

She kept her gaze on the carriage until it was out of sight, and then, having reached a decision, she went downstairs and hailed a hack. “Charlestown State Prison,” she told the driver.

“No,” Duncan said.

“Duncan—”

“No!”
He slammed both hands down on the scarred wooden table in the middle of the prison’s little visitors’ room, sending tremors not just through the table, but through Nell, sitting at the opposite end. Duncan’s aquamarine eyes, the most striking feature of his devilishly handsome face, caught fire in a stripe of sunlight from the nearby window. “You’re my wife.”

“Duncan, we haven’t lived as man and wife for ten—”

“That don’t matter! How could that matter? We were married in the Church. The Church made us man and wife, and it can’t ever be undone. Never!”

Nell had half-hoped, during the two years since she’d last seen Duncan, that his attachment to her would have lessened a bit. Clearly, that had been wishful thinking. 

Struggling to keep her voice even, she said, “It can’t be undone in the eyes of the Church, perhaps, but it can in a court of law. It won’t be easy. The Hewitts mustn’t find out. As you know, I’ve kept my marriage a secret from then, so I’ll have to keep my divorce a secret, as well. It’ll be all the more difficult if you contest it. It could take a great deal of time to secure a divorce decree, years perhaps, and it might cost every cent I’ve saved working for the Hewitts. But it’s something I have to do.”

“Why?” he demanded. “You fixin’ on getting’ hitched again?”

“I have no such plans.”

“It’s
him,
ain’t it? The son. The doctor.”

“I told you,” she said, cursing the uncanny insight, at least when it came to her, that had helped him to wield such absolute control over her in the beginning. “I have no such—”

“You bangin’ him?”

“No.” She shook her head in weary frustration. “Duncan, please. Just look at this from my point of view. Even if my marriage to you still felt...like a marriage, even if I still considered myself your wife, would you honestly expect me to wait twenty more years for you? That’s how long you’ve got left on your sentence, with no possibility of parole.”

“I coulda gotten paroled,” he reminded her. “It was all set up. If I hadn’t busted outa here two years ago, I’d be a free man already. I did it for you, to keep you from getting killed, and now you just want to toss me out with the trash?”

Nell closed her eyes, drawing a deep, steadying breath as her throat began to tighten. “Duncan, you know I’ll always be grateful for that sacrifice, deeply, sincerely grateful. I’ll never forget it.”

She opened her eyes to find that sea-blue gaze searching hers, as if to capture some remnant of the affection they’d once shared for each other. Wresting her gaze from his, she stared through the barred window at the sun-washed courtyard and the two barnlike stone shops in which the prisoners made themselves useful to society. A pair of uniformed guards stood some distance away under a shade tree, smoking cigarettes. One of them was the guard who’d told her he’d be standing watch out in the hallway in case she needed anything.

No, she would never forget Duncan’s selflessness in giving up his freedom to protect her; how could she?

But neither, unfortunately, could she ever forget the rages, the beatings, and that last, ferocious attack and ensuing miscarriage, which she’d barely survived. If not for Dr. Cyril Greaves, she wouldn’t be sitting here now, trying to wheedle cooperation out of Duncan.

Dr. Greaves hadn’t merely saved her life after infection had ravaged her womb. He’d taken her in, trained her in nursing, taught her history and French, how to appreciate opera and art and literature, how to write a letter and comport herself, and so much more. When she’d finally gone to his bed, she’d gone willingly, gratefully. He’d not only saved her, but remade her, so that when Viola Hewitt realized she needed a governess for her adopted infant, Nell was a natural choice.

Every evening, upon retiring, Nell whispered her thanks to God for having brought Gracie into her life. Without the little girl she’d come to think of as her own, she couldn’t imagine how empty she would feel, looking ahead to decades of childlessness. She’d always wanted babies, even when she was little more than a baby herself. “You were born to do that,” Nell’s mother would say as she watched her daughter cuddle and feed and diaper the homemade rag doll that eventually disintegrated, despite dozens of mendings, from a surfeit of constant nurturing. But by then she had Tess, the baby sister whose care had fallen to her when cholera claimed their mother and most of their siblings. Little Tess, her darling, sweet, impish little Tess, had succumbed herself to diphtheria in the Barnstable County Poor House when she was just three years old, leaving Nell lost and bereft...until Duncan.

Nell’s mum was right; she
had
been born to be a mother. It was the one thing she’d always yearned for, the one bone-deep, primal drive that she’d ever felt. It was, in a word, her destiny—a destiny Duncan Sweeney stole from her in his last vicious, snarling, inexcusable assault.

It
had
been inexcusable, no matter what the priests said about pardon and absolution. “Forgive us our trespasses,” Nell prayed every morning, “as we forgive those who trespass against us.” And she meant it. With one single exception.

“If you’ll never forget what I did for you,” Duncan said, “givin’ up my parole and all that, how can you want to divorce me?”

Still gazing out the window, she said softly, “There’s a lot I can’t forget, Duncan.”

You gonna leave me, Nell? Huh? You want to leave? You can leave when I’m done with you.
She forced herself to relive it—the punches and kicks, the sting of the knife, the horror as he ripped open her basque and threw up her skirts.
I’m gonna make it hurt,
he’d growled. And it had. It had hurt her horribly.

It had killed their baby.

“I’m sorry, Nell,” he said in a voice raw with feeling. “I can’t ever make it up to you, what I took from you, but I’ve changed. You know I have.”

I’ve changed, Nell. I’m gonna stop drinkin’. I’ll make it up to you. I’ll be different from now on...

God, I’m sorry, Nell. Please give me another chance, please, I’m beggin’ you, just one...

You don’t deserve me, but I love you so much. I don’t know what I’d do without you. Just one more chance...

It was the booze. I’m really stopping this time. I won’t happen again. You’ll see...

“Nell...darlin’. Say somethin’,” he implored. “Please.”

“I...I’m asking for your help so that I can move on with my life,” she said. “If I can petition for the divorce in both our names, instead of you fighting it, there’s a much better chance of it being granted, and it won’t take nearly as much time or—”