Murder on Black Friday (7 page)

“I imply no judgments,” Tanner said as he sorted through the papers—a train schedule, a dinner invitation, an old tintype... “The Almighty made them both the way they are, and I daresay He loves them equally. But there’s no denying they’re polar opposites. Miriam took after her father. Noah was always a strong believer in personal responsibility and self-reliance.”

Will said, “If Miss Bassett, the elder Miss Bassett, is so insular, I’m surprised that she enlisted your help just now.”

“As am I,” Tanner said. “Surprised, but pleased. We are, after all, betrothed. It would be a sad thing, indeed, if she felt she could never turn to me.” He flipped quickly through the last few items in his hand—a folded-up map, some postcards, and a yellowed newspaper clipping that made him shake his head dolefully; it was Lucy Bassett’s obituary. “That’s it, then,” he said as he set about returning the little piles to the slots from which he’d extracted them.

“No luck?” Nell asked, even as she wondered what it was he’d been looking for.

“Not in this section here,” he said, indicating the cubbies. “They’re all personal papers—correspondence, memorabilia... Very little related to business or financial matters, and certainly nothing about his gold transactions.”

His gold transactions?
Papa almost never talked about such matters with the family.
It had been a vague response—intentionally so, it would seem, to a direct question about whether Noah Bassett had bought gold.
He’d been melancholic for years,
she’d told them, by way of explaining his suicide.
Perhaps the general atmosphere of despair yesterday sent him over the edge—so many men losing everything.
“Circumspection” was one thing. It would appear she’d deliberately steered them away from the notion that her father had killed himself in despair over the gold crash. But why?

With a glance at Will, Nell asked the minister, “Was Mr. Bassett very heavily invested in gold, do you know?”

“I don’t, actually. He never spoke of such things to me. Filthy lucre, and all that.”

“Since his business papers are missing,” Will said, “wouldn’t you imagine Mr. Munro has them?”

Tanner stilled, regarding Will with a kind of guarded puzzlement. “You know about Munro?”

“That he advised Mr. Bassett on his investments?” Will said. “Yes, we know.”

“He counseled quite a few gentlemen on such matters,” said Nell, not wanting it to get back to Miriam that Becky had let slip this connection between the two dead men. “Word gets ‘round.”

Tanner let out an amused little “hmph” as he leaned over to lift a pile of papers from the floor onto the desk. “She doesn’t think anyone knows. She doesn’t
want
anyone to know.”

“Because of his...private life?” Will asked. “Or did she consider him a gutter-blood because he wasn’t born into his fortune?”

“She’s no high-hat,” Tanner said as he started skimming the papers and setting them aside, “but she does hold to fairly high standards of conduct, so I suspect it’s the former, though I couldn’t say for sure. She’s never liked to talk about him. It seemed to trouble her that he had
anything
to do with the family, but especially that he was...” He cut himself off, his brow furrowed.

“That he was what?” Will asked.

“Er, that he was...” Tanner shook his head without looking up. “Sorry, must have lost my train of thought. Reading and talking at the same time, you know.”

Clergymen
ough
t to be bad liars, Nell thought. Otherwise, what business did they have calling themselves men of God?

“So now that both men are dead,” Will said, “Miss Bassett means to eradicate the association altogether.”

Tanner frowned as he riffled through a file. “I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say that.”

Nell said, “She sent you to find evidence of her father’s investments because she knew they would connect him to Mr. Munro, thus reflecting badly on the family. My guess is she wants to hide those papers where no one will ever find them—or destroy them.” Perhaps, Nell speculated, the Bassetts’ dire financial straights these past few years had made Miriam all the more determined to maintain the family’s upstanding reputation—hence the need to erase the roguish Philip Munro from the picture.

“It’s almost certainly what she intended,” Will said. “But Munro must have held onto those papers, seeing as he was acting as Mr. Bassett’s agent or advisor or what have you. I’d like to take a look at them and see for myself how badly the gold failure affected Bassett’s financial picture. All I need is a solid motive for suicide, and then I can move on to Munro himself—which I venture to say will prove a good deal thornier.”

“Perhaps when we’re done here,” Nell said, “We should pay a call on Mr. Munro’s sister.”

“We,”
Will said with a little half-smile. “I quite like the sound of that.” She must have looked flustered, because he added, “You’ve proven yourself quite adept in matters of deduction, and there’s something about you that makes people want to open up to you. That’s all I meant.”

She looked away, cheeks warming. “So I assumed.”

Still smiling, but in a slightly lower voice, he said, “Watch those assumptions, Cornelia, lest you be taken in by so much dissembling blather.”

Not wanting him to see how his teasing had affected her, she turned away pointedly and said, “Dr. Tanner, I don’t suppose you found a note from Mr. Bassett on his desk, or in one of those little slots. You know—a final goodbye? Some statement as to why he was taking his life?”

Tanner shook his head as he set the file aside and picked up another. “Nothing like that, and I doubt very much he’d have shoved it in one of these drawers—what would have been the point? Did you ask Miss Bassett if she found anything like that?”

Nell nodded. “She didn’t.” Or so she claimed.

*   *   *

When they left the study, the maid Eileen was still on her hands and knees, but she’d stopped scrubbing and was gathering up the soiled rags.

“All done for now?” Will asked her.

“Got to go down to the kitchen and git some hotch-potch soup started fer dinner,” she said in a soft, high-pitched voice. She was young, indeed, a waifish adolescent no more than a year or two off the boat, judging from her accent. Bracing a hand on the edge of the bed, she started pushing herself up.

Will offered her his hand. She gaped at it. Had no gentleman ever helped this poor girl to her feet?

“Allow me,” he said.

“Och, ye don’t want to be touchin’ me, sir. I got poor Mr. Bassett’s blood all over me hands.”

“My own hands were covered with his blood just last night,” lifting her gently to her feet despite her protestations. “I’m the surgeon who examined his body after it was brought to the hospital.”

The girl couldn’t disguise her revulsion. “Ya cut up dead folks fer a livin’? Faith, I won’t never grouse about me job agin.”

Having gained her feet, Eileen smoothed down her humble skirts, which were hemmed above the ankle for practicality. Her left foot was shod in an ordinary, if shabby boot, but her right... It didn’t even look like a foot, misshapen as it was, a bulging stump encased in wood and leather.

That was when Nell realized why the maid look so familiar to her. “I say,” Nell asked her, “do you attend mass at St. Stephen’s—early Sunday mass?”

“Aye.” That wasn’t surprising; it was very much an Irish church.

Nell said, “I’ve seen you there.” It was the girl’s unwieldy, off-kilter gait that always drew Nell’s attention—and pity—when the parishioners, many of them servants, lined up to receive communion. The poor girl had always struck Nell as far too young and sweet-looking to be saddled with such an affliction. “Your name is Eileen, is it not?” Nell asked.

The girl nodded. “Eileen Tierney.”

“I’m Nell Sweeney, and this is Dr. William Hewitt.”

Will bowed. Eileen, clearly unused to such gallantries, nodded timorously.

Nell said, “Miss Bassett tells us you were with her when she found her father’s body yesterday afternoon.”

She nodded morosely. “Aye, and a more terrible thing I never seen.”

“What, exactly, did you see?” Will asked.

“Mr. Bassett layin’ right here wid his hands in this tub, blood everywheres. Miss Bassett, she starts wailin’ like a banshee.”

“Did she do anything?” Nell asked.

“Just sank to her knees in that doorway there, bawlin’ and screamin’. Miss Becky, she come runnin’ up from downstairs. Takes one look at her da layin’ there and heads straight for the jakes, like maybe she’s fixin’ to be sick.”

“What did
you
do?”

“Nothin’ at first—figgered it weren’t my place—but then I seen the two of ‘em wasn’t gonna be good fer much, so I lifted me skirts and come on in and...well, once I got a look at his face, I knew he was dead and no doubt about it. He kilt himself.” She executed a solemn sign of the cross. “Howly Father have mercy on him. It’s a mortal sin, that is.”

Will said, “You’re to be commended for taking the situation in hand and going in to check on Mr. Bassett.”

Eileen accepted the compliment with a shy murmur of thanks.

Nell said, “Miss Basset eventually got command of herself, I take it.”

“Aye, she calmed down some, but she never did budge from that doorway.”

“Did she...ask you to do anything?” Will asked.

The girl’s gaze shifted from Will to Nell as she clutched her apron in her hands. “I’m sure I dunno what you...”

“To look for something,” Nell prompted.

Eileen shook her head as she turned toward the door. “Weren’t nothin’ to find. I got to go start that hotch-potch.”

“You didn’t find a note?” Nell asked.

“Sorry, no,” she said as she shuffled haltingly across the room.

“Eileen.” Will stilled her with a hand on her shoulder.

“I told you,” she said. “I didn’t find—“

“Your foot,” he said. “I’d like to take a look at it.”

She stared at him.

“I’m a physician,” Will said.

“I thought you said you was a surgeon.”

“It’s the same thing. If you’ll just indulge me,” he said as he guided her to an old horsehair wing chair, “it shan’t take long, and perhaps I can even be of some help.”

“There’s no help fer it, and anyways, I can’t afford no bone butcher.” Eileen glanced at the open door and lowered her voice. “Ye know why I’m the maid of all work here, after the rest of ‘em took off? It’s ‘cause the Bassetts can’t pay nothin’ but room and board no more, and ain’t no one’ll put up with that but me. Only reason I’m still here, doin’ the work of six, is ‘cause I’m a cripple, and nobody else’ll have me.”

“Dr. Hewitt doesn’t want your money,” Nell said, “and he’s an excellent physician.”

“Don’t matter how good he is.” Eileen allowed Will to ease her into the chair, but with a wary expression, as if this were some form of trickery. What Nell knew, and Eileen didn’t, was that William Hewitt had always felt compelled to aid and protect the fairer sex, even back when he it was he, himself, who’d been most in need of saving. “I was born this way,” Eileen said. “It’s God’s will, that’s what me mum always said.”

“Is she here in Boston?” Nell asked as Will drew a matching stepstool up to the chair. Back when she’d assisted Dr. Greaves, it had been her responsibility to distract his patients with conversation so he could concentrate on his doctoring.

“Nah, Mum died when I was little. Me da saved up enough to bring us over last year, but he took sick and died on the crossing.”

“I’m sorry to hear it,” Nell said.

“Here.” Crouching down, Will lifted Eileen’s bad foot onto the stool, folded her skirt back to the knee, and studied the complicated lacings and buttons that secured her footwear—a bizarre but carefully crafted boot made of mismatched scraps of leather sewn to fit the ungainly shape beneath. “How do I, er...”

“I’ll do it.” Leaning forward, Eileen swiftly unfastened the makeshift boot and slid it off. The thick block of scarred wood that formed the sole was carved to fit her deformity and lined with sheepskin, as was the leather that surrounded the foot. Will pushed the stool right up against the chair so that Eileen’s right leg, which was slightly shorter than the left, could rest comfortably on it. Even sheathed as it was in a white woolen stocking, Nell could see that her calf was withered and her foot badly malformed.

“Would you mind taking off your stocking?” Will asked.

Eileen, chewing on her lower lip, looked from Will to Nell, and then hesitantly peeled it off. She sat unmoving, the stocking twisted in her hands, as Will scrutinized her stunted and inward-bent foot, but when he reached toward it, she recoiled, crying, “Och, murther!”

“Does it hurt?” Will asked in alarm.

“No,” she said, as if it were an idiotic question. “Ye said ye was just gonna look at it.”

“He has to touch your foot to really tell what’s wrong with it, Eileen.” Nell sat on the arm of the chair and patted the girl’s shoulder. “Hasn’t a doctor ever examined you?”

“Doctors costs money. And what’s wrong wid me is I got a clubfoot,” Eileen said. “Any fool can see that.”

“Yes,” Will said, “but there are different variations on the condition. May I?” he asked, his hand hovering over her foot.