Louisa and the Crystal Gazer (25 page)

We held our breaths and watched.

Please, I prayed to that beneficent being who watched over my family. And other families, I reminded myself. Other people want this as much as you, probably deserve it even more. Please, I said again. For sweet Lizzie. I had been dancing with joy a moment before. Now, watching Jim’s hand flail in the jar, reaching, I felt heavy as lead, as if pressed to earth by an invisible hand.

Jim’s fingers found one of the little papers. He grasped it between thumb and forefinger and brought his large hand out of that little jar.

“Do the honors, Jim,” said Mr. Crowell, who looked as tense as I felt.

Jim, still grinning, unfolded the paper. His eyes moved back and forth. It seemed to take him forever to read the name.

“Miss Elizabeth Alcott,” he finally announced.

Reader, I know we all wish to present a dignified, serious aspect of ourselves to a world that often judges harshly what it deems frivolous; but there are moments in life when one must jump for joy without further thought to reputation or judgment from others. I jumped for joy. So did elderly Mr. Crowell.

“I myself will write to Signor Massimo and ask for the first appointment time,” said that fine man, after waltzing me about his store a bit. “Before Christmas or after, Miss Alcott? And don’t be surprised if he serves a lunch for Lizzie. Noodles. I’ve had them myself. Not as hearty as a roast beef and slippery on the fork, but tasty, tasty.”

“Ask for the lessons to begin immediately!” I said.

Congratulations were offered by the other eleven, at least
most of them, although some skulked out without a word, irked to have lost those coveted lessons with Signor Massimo.

Sylvia hugged me over and over, for she loved Lizzie almost as much as I did and that sad hour we had spent in the cemetery made us both thankful for the riches we shared in life: the love of those close to us.

“Are you going to tell Lizzie today, or wait?” Sylvia asked.

“She must wait awhile, yet,” I said. “I have another errand, one more, and need your company for another hour.”

“Where to this time, Louy? Is there a present you forgot to pick up?”

“No gift. But a visit. To a brother.”

“I don’t understand. How can Mrs. Phips’s brother be involved with Mrs. Percy’s death? It is still her death that interests you, is it not?”

“Of course. More than ever. Someday, Sylvia, I will tell you Mr. Emerson’s theory of the universal mind. For now, let me say that there is an invisible connection between all beings, and sometimes those connections become visible. Mrs. Crowell gave us the next step in this investigation, without even intending to.”

“What if he won’t receive us?” asked Sylvia. “Then what?”

We bumped, literally, into Amelia Snodgrass coming down Charles Street. Her arms were full of bags and boxes and she was in very good spirits. She wore a bright blue day gown with a red cape over it, and a red-and-white-striped bow on her hat.

“Miss Alcott! Miss Shattuck!” she exclaimed joyfully. “How good to see you!”

She seemed to be quite a different person.

“She’s
awfully pleased about something,” Sylvia whispered to me.

“I’m happy to see you in such high spirits,” I said, a question in my voice.

“Ah. You wonder why. This terrible business with Mrs. Percy is just about over, don’t you think? His accomplice is in jail and soon he himself will stand trial.” There was a cruel gleam of satisfaction in her eye.

“You refer to Suzie Dear,” I guessed.

“Yes, of course. And to that snake Eddie Nichols. Constable Cobban says he has been seen in Worcester and will be arrested by the Cleveland men any minute. Will he hang, do you think?” she asked eagerly.

I was, as you may guess, shocked by this extreme change in her feelings for the man; though he was a cad, she had once felt tenderly for him, I was certain.

“Let us be honest with each other,” I began.

“Let us, Miss Alcott,” she agreed, no longer smiling, “since if you spread any ill report of me, I’ll have your father barred from every decent parlor in Boston.”

“You don’t have that power,” I said, uncertain. Perhaps she did. “Even so, I would like to know this: Were you and Mr. Nichols more than friendly acquaintances? Did he steal the pearl necklace?”

“Yes. And yes. I was badly used by Mrs. Percy and her stepbrother. He betrayed me, and now he will pay. Louisa—may I call you Louisa?—Wilmot and I have decided not to wait the full year of mourning. We are to be married after the New Year. And then we shall go to Venice.”

“My congratulations,” I said.

“I will send you a card from Italy, since you are never likely to see the place yourself. Seamstresses can hardly afford to travel abroad.”

That stung.

“Good day, Louisa. Sylvia.” Miss Snodgrass, bearing her Christmas boxes, made her way down the sidewalk.

“I think if Eddie Nichols broke her heart, it was a rather temporary situation,” said Sylvia, watching Miss Snodgrass’s slender back grow smaller in the distance.

“I wonder,” I said, “how far she would go for her revenge against him. And I wonder if she has yet told Mr. Wilmot Green that she cannot be married in her heirloom necklace.”

I
T WAS, AS
Mrs. Crowell had indicated, a very dilapidated house that Emily’s brother occupied, one of those sad abodes all too obviously inhabited by one who has turned his back on his fellow creatures, on all that is living and joyous. Once it had been a grand, even splendiferous domicile, but houses, like people, fall derelict if they fail to receive love and a certain amount of attention.

If anyone, I thought, knocking on that ancient, paint-flaking door, is in need of speaking with the dead, it is this house’s inhabitant.

“What do you want?” An elderly woman, judging from her apron and cap a servant, opened the creaking door only halfway. She did not smile.

“To see Mr. Grayling,” I said. “Please.”

“He don’t receive.” She started to close the door but I put my boot in the frame, preventing her. To do this I had to move around an urn of dried and withered marigolds left
over from the summer, and their brown leaves crackled in protest.

“Please,” I repeated. “It is about his sister, Emily, Mrs. Phips.”

A man in a frayed silk dressing gown stepped into view. He was about sixty, with thin white hair sweeping unkempt to his shoulders, and spectacles slipping down his narrow nose. He wore a French military jacket over his nightshirt, and a three-cornered hat.

“May we come in, just for a moment?” I asked. The wind was blowing, and both Sylvia and I shivered from the cold.

We were allowed in, but barely, restrained to the threshold with the still-open door at our backs and the wind howling, and before us the dark, cold hall. I longed for a sitting room with a warm hearth. Mr. Grayling hopped from foot to foot, as children do, alternately grinning and frowning at us as he asked the purpose of our interruption of his day.

“The soldiers are lined up for the Battle of Waterloo,” he said with a glower. “Do you think Napoleon will wait?” He clutched one of the little lead soldiers in his hand.

Sylvia stood very close at my side, saying nothing.

“Mrs. Percy is dead,” I said, trying to think of a way to begin my questions. “Did you know?”

“No, I did not. Haven’t read a newspaper in years. But if Mrs. Percy is gone, good, I say. And none too soon,” replied he, grinning madly. “Are you here just to tell me that? Who are you?”

“Miss Louisa May Alcott. And my friend, Miss Sylvia Shattuck.”

I extended my hand. He did not take it. “Was Mrs. Percy a friend of your sister’s?” I asked.

He shook his shaggy head. “No. They never even met. But Mrs. Percy came asking questions about her a few months ago. Good-bye.” He began to push us gently toward the still-open door.

“I should love to see the battle scene,” I said.

“Truly? Then come in, come in.”

The Battle of Waterloo took up the entire floor of the front parlor. All of the furniture had been taken out and the rug rolled up, so that Napoleon and his brigades, led by Grouchy, Vandamme, and Gerard in their tricornered hats, faced off across Blucher’s Prussian army with their plumed helmets. I picked up one of the little soldiers to admire the fine detailing of the uniform.

“Put Ponsonby back down!” ordered Mr. Grayling, trembling with emotion. “Be useful, and if you must touch, bring up some of those cavalry. They are lagging behind.” He saluted, as if he had just given an order in the field.

I crouched on the floor, trying to keep my heavy skirts from tipping over a regiment or two, and brought up the cavalry.

“Fine, fine.” Mr. Grayling chuckled. “Napoleon will have a surprise or two this day.”

“Mr. Grayling, what do you know of relations between your sister and Mrs. Percy?”

“Weren’t no such thing,” he said, tenderly brushing a mote of dust from a cunningly crafted figure of the well-known Marshal Ney. “After Emily’s funeral Mrs. Percy came and asked questions and implied she was a good friend of William
Phips, knew about him in China, the old days. I had a sense of what she meant by
friend
. Mr. Phips was a disloyal husband. Over and over. He was a bounder, and those things often go together. Bring up more cavalry, quickly.”

“Oh, my,” spoke up Sylvia, who had been watching from the doorway.

“Are you certain?” I asked, pushing some of the cavalry closer to the center of the field. I tried to imagine courtly Mr. Phips and blowsy Mrs. Percy as illicit lovers, or indeed lovers of any kind, and admit that the effort was too much for my imagination. Certainly Mr. Grayling was wrong on that point; Mrs. Percy had been interested in Mr. Phips for reasons other than romance.

“I know a brute when I see one,” said Mr. Grayling, crouching before a group of foot soldiers and readjusting their alignment. “I warned Emily not to marry him. Better to live with a broken heart, since August had died. But she didn’t listen. Now August, there was a good lad. I never believed that story William told Emily, about August marrying a Chinese woman. Never believed it. Now she’s dead and Mrs. Percy is murdered, and that was a job well-done. And now, I really must concentrate on the battle. Time to be off with you.”

“Well,” said Sylvia, having little else to say after we had been shown the door and that door slammed on our backs.

“Well, indeed,” I said, somewhat stunned by this turn of events. I turned up my collar against the cold.

“Mr. Grayling doesn’t seem the type to forgive a trespass against his sister.”

“Worse,” I said, “his last statement, ‘a job well-done,’ worries
me. If he did not read the obituary, how did he know Mrs. Percy did not die a natural death? I wonder if brotherly love might extend as far as violence.” Yet, worry as I might about the strength of a brother’s passion to defend his sister from the woman he believed had wronged her, a dark light shone from the end of this tunnel: Perhaps Mr. Barnum was an innocent bystander after all.

“The situation grows ever more complicated,” Sylvia said. “Truthfully, I’m having difficulty picturing Mr. Phips straying from his marital obligation.”

“He would have been a younger man, Sylvia, and men do stray sometimes. Perhaps he attends séances because of his feelings of guilt. Isn’t that what Mrs. Percy told him? ‘I forgive you, William. I know there was another, but I forgive.’”

“Oh, Albert!” Sylvia sighed, looking ahead to dark days in her own marriage, days I hoped would never occur, for if ever a woman was meant for domestic happiness that woman was Sylvia.

“Constable Cobban seems the loyal type,” I said. “One could even say dogged in his pursuits. Don’t anticipate problems that will in all likelihood never arise,” I recommended.

We walked with haste to our own abodes, the wind howling about our ears. The drifting snow blew so fiercely we could not speak, but only gasp for breath and lean forward, into the wind. A day that had begun with such promise, with payment for work and that glorious hour of buying presents for my darlings, with Lizzie’s winning of the lottery and a friendly tea with Sylvia, was now ending very badly, with low spirits and more confusion, not less.

Martha, Auntie Bond’s housekeeper, greeted me at her
door. “You look all done in, Miss Louisa. Come sit by the fire. Your aunt is in the parlor, with her guests.”

I had forgotten she had a card party planned for that evening. “I am done in,” I agreed, sitting heavily on a bench, untying my wet boots, and leaving them there in the hall on a piece of oilcloth so that they would not stain her rugs. My toes poked out of new holes in my knit stockings. I had hours of darning ahead of me, and nothing pushed me closer to the Slough of Despond than having to mend old stockings.

A quick thumbing through the day’s mail from the tray by the door revealed no new letters from Marmee or Father, and my chest felt hollow with missing them. There was a quick note from Mrs. O’Connor, though, and this I tore open and read greedily, hoping for news of Meh-ki.

Feeling as heavy as one of Mr. Grayling’s lead soldiers, I put the note in my pocket and wondered for the hundredth time: Why had Meh-ki fled Mrs. Percy’s home in the middle of the night? What did she know about those strange events, or had she perhaps even witnessed the murder?

“What is it, dear? You are grimacing,” said Lizzie, who had come downstairs to join me in our favorite chairs in front of the blazing fire. Auntie Bond believed in old-fashioned comfort, and her chairs were plumped with feather cushions, not the new kind built around creaking springs that almost made one seasick if one shifted too quickly. I was glad for this
comfort, for the blazing hearth, for coming home to a friendly soul who would listen, for more than ever I missed Marmee—Marmee who, with her knowledge of human nature, would have made sense of all this.

“I am lost in a wood,” I told Lizzie, putting my stockinged feet perilously close to the hearth. “I cannot find the path.”