Murder on Black Friday

• Chapter 1
  
• Chapter 2
  
• Chapter 3
  
• Chapter 4
  
• Chapter 5
  
• Chapter 6
  
• Chapter 7
  
• Chapter 8
  
• Chapter 9
  
• Chapter 10
  
• Chapter 11
  
• Chapter 12
  
• Four Months Later
  
• An EXCERPT from Book #5
  
• Chapter 1
  
• Chapter 2
  

Author’s Note

Financial corruption and stock market panics are nothing new. In fact, the term “Black Friday” originated with the Gold Ring conspiracy of 1869, when gold was the most heavily traded market on Wall Street. About $25 million worth circulated privately in the U.S., with more than $75 million held by the Federal government.

In April of that year, speculator Jay Gould launched an ambitious scheme to corner the gold market. The idea was to buy up the nation’s private supply so that he could sell it for paper currency at his own price, thereby reaping a colossal profit. The only fly in the ointment was President Grant. If he were to get nervous about the rising price of gold, he could drive it back down by releasing some of the government’s supply, thereby foiling Gould’s plan.

Gould’s co-conspirators included colorful financier “Big Jim” Fisk and Grant’s own brother-in-law, Abel Corbin. There’s even been speculation that the United States Treasury Secretary, George S. Boutwell, was involved. The players were ready; the stage was set.

Gold started soaring in value on September 23
^rd
, which was when Gould, tipped off that Grant was onto him, quietly sold off his own holdings for an estimated $50-100 million. At 11:00 on the morning of Friday, September 24
^th
, with the Gold Exchange in pandemonium, Grant ordered $4 million in federal gold to be sold the following day. Secretary Boutwell cabled the New York treasurer with this information shortly after noon, but curiously, some investors seemed to know about it already, because the price of gold had started diving at 11:50.

“Possibly no avalanche ever swept with more terrible violence,” stated the
New York Herald
. “As the bells of Trinity pealed forth the hour of noon, the gold on the indicator [a clocklike gauge at the Exchange] stood at 160. Just a moment later, and before the echoes died away, gold fell to 138.” Within fifteen minutes, it had plummeted to $133 an ounce, inciting a nationwide financial panic.

The stock market reeled. Trading houses went bankrupt. Countless investors were ruined.

September 25, 1869: Boston

“Are you expecting someone, Mrs. Hewitt?” Nell Sweeney scooped up a spatula full of warm hide glue and spread it on the freshly stretched canvas propped on her easel.

“A bit early in the morning for callers, I should think.” Wheeling her Merlin chair away from her work in progress, a still life of autumn fruit, Viola Hewitt rummaged amid the paint tubes and turpentine-soaked rags on her worktable. “Where in Hades did I put that watch?”

“I’ll get it, Nana.” Little Gracie Hewitt leapt up from the solarium’s slate floor, on which she was chalking the shifting patterns of sunlight streaming in through the tall, leaded glass windows. Clicking open the little diamond-encrusted pocket watch, she offered it to Viola.

Nell, ever the governess, said, “Can you read the time yourself, Gracie?”

Gracie studied the watch intently.

“Where’s the little hand?” Nell asked as she ran the spatula down the drum-tight linen, skimming off the surplus glue.

“At the eight.”

“And the big hand?”

“At the thwee.”

“Three,”
Nell gently corrected; they’d been working on her diction. “So that would mean it’s...?”

“Eight, um...” Gracie screwed up her face in concentration. “Thirty?”

“Eight-fifteen,” Nell said.

“Good try, though,” Viola said in her throaty, British-inflected voice as she mixed a dab of ultramarine into the rose madder on her palette. “Nell, dear, what makes you think I’d be expecting someone at this hour? I’m not at home for callers till ten—and I’m hardly dressed for company.” Like Nell, she wore a gray, paint-spattered smocked tunic over her morning dress.

“Someone knocked at the front door,” Nell said she dipped her spatula back in the glue pot, which was snugged into a pan of hot water. “You didn’t hear it?”

“My ears are only there for show nowadays,” Viola said as footsteps shuffled toward them along the long, marble-floored central hall.

Hodges, the Hewitts’ elderly butler, appeared in the open doorway looking oddly hesitant. “So sorry to interrupt, Mrs. Hewitt. Your son is here to see you.”

“Harry? Really?” Viola’s roguish and dissolute middle son had spent the past year and a half in self-imposed exile from the family’s Tremont Street mansion. As far as Nell knew, Viola hadn’t even seen him since June, when his engagement to Cecilia Pratt was announced over dinner at her parents’ home. Of Viola’s three living sons, twenty-two-year-old Martin was the only one still at home—and the only one who still enjoyed cordial relations with his parents.

Hodges said, “It’s not Mr. Harry, ma’am. It’s...Dr. Hewitt. William.”

“Will?”
Viola gaped at Hodges, and then at Nell, who shared her astonishment.

It had been almost six years since the Hewitts’ eldest son had set foot in this house. Even during his youth, Will had been more of an occasional visitor than a member of the family, having been shunted off to England when he was Gracie’s age to be reared by indifferent relatives and educated in a succession of boarding schools—thus inaugurating three decades of semi-estrangement from Viola and August Hewitt. Will’s coolness toward his mother had begun to thaw a bit this past spring, before the Hewitts and their staff left for their summer home on Cape Cod, and Will for Europe. As for the stern and venerable August, Nell doubted he and Will would ever exchange a civil word again.

Nell listened to Will’s approaching footsteps as she buttered the canvas with glue and scraped away the excess, thinking she would have known his unhurried, long-legged stride anywhere. She tried to draw a deep breath, but her stays hindered that, which made her feel like a ninny for wearing so many pointless layers of clothing under this blasted smock frock that hid everything anyway, making her look like some great, fat, ugly, repulsive farmwife. It didn’t help that her hastily coiled chignon was held in place with two paint-crusted hog’s hair filbert brushes.

The footsteps stopped.

Nell turned, spatula dripping, to find Will standing just outside the doorway in a handsome black morning coat and fawn trousers, top hat in hand, inky hair smartly combed, smiling at her. She’d seen him only twice since she’d been back from the Cape, all too briefly both times. In the past, he would sometimes join Nell and Gracie for their afternoon outings in the Common and Public Garden—when he was in Boston, and not off playing faro and
vingt-et-un
for outrageous stakes in some exotic and dangerous city. But now that he was teaching, he had a good deal less free time during the day.

“Mother.” He bowed to Viola, straightening only partially as he ducked into the sun-washed solarium. “What a remarkable display of industry for so early in the morning.”

“Almost unseemly, I know,” Viola said.

“My thoughts precisely.”

Every time Nell saw Will and his mother together, she was struck by their similarities, not just in appearance—the height, the dramatic coloring—but in their manner of speech. Although Will’s accent was stronger than that of Viola, who’d spent the past thirty-two years in Boston, they both spoke with the refined nuances of the British upper classes. Even when Will had been an embittered, soul-weary opium addict, he’d always sounded like a gentleman—and usually acted like one, too, despite his best efforts to turn his back on the “hollow, gold-plated world” he’d been born into.

“Nell.” He bowed, smiling that coolly intimate smile that he never seemed to use with anyone else.

“Good to see you, Will.”

“Uncle Will!” Gracie launched herself into Will’s arms as he crouched to gather her up.

He groaned with mock effort as he lifted her high, taking care not to let her head bump the ceiling. “By Jove, you’re taller every time I see you—a raven-haired beanpole, just like your nana.” To Viola, he said, “She’s the spitting image of you.”

Gracie made an exaggeratedly bemused face, as if “Uncle Will” had said something ludicrous. “Nana’s not my weal mommy. She picked me out special ‘cause she always wanted a little girl, and she never had one, but now she has me. I’m dopted, wight, Nana?”

“A
dopted. Yes, that’s right, darling.” Viola met her son’s eyes for a weighty moment before looking away to set her palette on the worktable.

Will, suddenly sobered, kissed the child’s forehead and set her down. “I knew that. I was just teasing.”

He glanced at Nell, who offered a weak smile as she knelt to wipe up the glue that had dripped onto the floor from her neglected spatula. Setting his hat aside, Will hitched up his trousers and crouched down, a bit stiffly because of the old bullet wound in his leg. “Here.” He took the rag from her hand and set about cleaning up the mess himself. “Watching you scrub a floor is like seeing a lovely little mourning dove on a trash heap.”

Having always thought of mourning doves as gray and ordinary, Nell wasn’t entirely sure how to take that.

“Uncle Will, guess what?” Gracie asked excitedly. “Tomowwow’s my birthday, and the next day I get to go on a twain and a steamship.”

“You do?”

“The twain goes to, um...” The child looked to her nana for a prompt.

“Bristol, Rhode Island,” Viola said.

“Bwistol, Wode Island, only it’s not weally an island, and then we get on a steamship called the Pwovidence that looks like a palace inside.”

“The Providence, eh? You’re going to New York, then, I take it?”

Viola said, “Your father and I are taking Gracie on a birthday visit to your Great-Aunt Hewitt in Gramercy Park. We’ll be gone a week.”

“Really?” There was a note of genuine surprise in Will’s response, and Nell knew why. August Hewitt had never made any secret of the fact that he found Gracie’s presence in his home as vexing as that of the upstart Irish nursery governess entrusted with her care. On his instructions, the child took all her meals, except for holiday dinners, with Nell in the third floor nursery, and he never spent very long in the same room with Gracie before ordering her removed. For him to consent to a weeklong trip with the child was remarkable.

Viola said, “Aunt Hewitt commanded us to visit when she found out Gracie was turning five. She wrote and said she was afraid she’d die without ever having met her. I wrote back that I was more than willing, that it was your father she had to convince. She sent him a letter. I didn’t read it, but that evening over supper, he suggested the trip. We’re bringing Nurse Parrish along to look after Gracie.”

“Nurse Parrish?” Will said dubiously. “She must be ninety by now. Can she still travel?”