Louisa and the Missing Heiress (33 page)

“Thank God,” she said. And then, “Digby? I would never have thought.”

“Good night, Constable,” I said, holding my hand out to him. “Thank you for your help. Now file your report and make sure Jenkins is safe.”

“Good night, Miss Alcott. Louisa . . .”

Abba gave him a sharp glance for that intimate use of my given name. He backed out the door and disappeared into the night.

“SYLVIA, WHAT DO you think of our Dorothy now?”

It was a week later, and Abba had finally allowed me to resume my much-missed walks. The sun was shining, and spring seemed truly, finally, on its way. We were back at the Smokers’ Circle and I was discreetly studying the men and the gray clouds of smoke they blew.

“That she was braver than I ever suspected. What she went through . . .”

“Yes. And for love of Wortham.”

“The world is a strange place, isn’t it, Louisa?”

“It is. Strange, and too often unjust. Sometimes, though, there is justice, Sylvia. Divine justice.” For Digby had not been captured, yet he had been stopped. In his hurried flight he had pressed a hired cab to an unsafe speed, and had been overturned on the road leading south, to New York. He probably had planned to board a ship there under an assumed name and make his escape back to Europe, where he had first noticed the young American heiress, Dorothy Brownly, unwed at that time and plainly pregnant.

Digby’s body had been crushed in the accident. His traveling valise had been filled with gold and silver coins, Brownly and Wortham wealth both, mixed together. His traveling companion, Katya Mendosa, was only slightly injured. I had visited her in the hospital the day she received the good news that the family was not going to press charges against her.

“ ’Ardly out of charity,” she had snipped, her Latin accent completely gone and the Irish brogue thick as soup. “They just don’t want it in the papers.”

Her child was with her that day, a pretty little girl with Wortham’s dark eyes and long limbs. She had the brown complexion of a child raised in the country, probably in a humble foster home. I was happy to see mother and child reunited, even if some of the money that enabled the reunion was ill-gotten.

“I have to admit that in this case, as in many, divine justice is better than the man-made variety,” Sylvia said. “Think of what the trial would be like, when all those secrets would come to light, all those old wounds would be reopened.”

Mrs. Brownly certainly seemed relieved that the matter was concluded without a trial.

“She is still protecting Dorothy’s reputation,” I said. “For Agnes’s sake, if not her own. Justice is not always about punishment, but about ending a reign of terror,” I mused that day. “If only we could convince the plantation owners of that.”

We had just visited Agnes earlier that morning and played a rousing game of blindman’s buff with her, for her congestion was finally passing and she was in good health again. With the blindfold over her eyes, twirling about, hands before her, she had reminded us so much of Dorothy as a child that we had both shed a tear. But they had been happy tears, for it seemed we had not completely lost our friend.

“I should have seen it sooner,” I said, walking with my hands clasped behind my back. I had brushed my hair lower than usual over my forehead to hide the plaster over the blue-and-red gash left by the candlestick, and I had spent an amusing hour with my schoolchildren, making up stories about how I had acquired that injury.

I sniffed contentedly at the spring air. “All the signs were there years ago. Dorothy’s personality change, her sudden maturity and preoccupation, even the way her figure changed. Motherhood was the only explanation. And I completely overlooked it.”

“What mystifies me is how Preston could have overlooked it,” Sylvia said. “I suppose that as the very self-involved person he is, all those signs you noticed he would not have noticed simply because he did not wish to. He visited me this morning, you know. He is leaving Boston. Can’t say that I blame him. He has not exactly been warmly welcomed in society. Going west, I believe, upon the advice of Horace Greeley.”

Preston Wortham had made the front lines of the morning edition one last time, the day before, as his innocence in the murder of his wife had been declared.

“Is Mr. Wortham taking Agnes with him?” I asked, thinking then of the child I had come to know and love, and of Sylvia’s cousin, who had broken off all his social connections except those of immediate family.

“No. He has agreed to leave her with Mrs. Brownly for the time being. She requested that, and he readily agreed. Fatherhood will not suit him, especially without Dorothy to prop him up.”

“Someday Agnes will have to know,” I said. “She needs to know what a wonderful person her mother was, how brave.”

“Yes. But I need to know, Louy. How did you decide upon Digby as the blackmailer and murderer?”

I smiled. “Little things at first. His shoes were much too expensive for a valet’s. That was the first aspect of Digby that made me consider. Vanity is not uncommon in gentlemen’s gentlemen, but to have the financial resources to act on that vanity . . . that is rare. And he had a strange effect on Wortham, and Miss Alfreda seemed absolutely afraid of him. I suspect she somehow had discovered his identity and he had been blackmailing her as well.”

“Miss Alfreda?” Sylvia asked, more than a little surprised. “Whatever for?”

“Sylvia, she has not always been old. I suspect as a young woman she had her share of indiscretions and incautious moments . . . perhaps even more than her share, since she seems to read only romances. She has lived, and not always wisely, I’m sure, and she does have that penchant for pocketing expensive little items when she thinks no one is looking. The day I went to Wortham’s house to fetch his wardrobe items, she was just leaving, remember. Perhaps she had gone to plead with Digby to relinquish his hold over her, to give up whatever old letters or personal history he used for blackmail.”

Sylvia fell silent. She seemed perplexed by the notion of Alfreda Thorney as young and passionate. I continued.

“And then the Worthams and the Brownlys seemed, for all their wealth, to be having difficulty with their finances,” I continued. “That sofa that Mrs. Brownly could not re-cover, the moth holes in her curtains . . .”

“And Dorothy and Preston quarreled over money that day of the tea party. He criticized her for hat shopping or some such thing.”

“Yes. When she came in wearing a different costume, and was confused that we were there. I suspect Digby had purposely told her the wrong date and time for the tea party, to make the lady of the house look unstable. That was also the day that Agnes fell into the water and Dorothy rescued her, so, of course, the clothes she had left the house in would have been sodden, unwearable. She had changed into an older costume stored at her mother’s house. And that was why Dot smelled of cherry cough syrup that day and why there was no money in her purse; she hired a carriage to take Agnes home and stopped at a pharmacy on the way.

“Agnes’s accident terrified her,” I continued. “It made up her mind that she was going to tell Mr. Wortham about the child, his child, that she would end Digby’s reign of terror. Dorothy was going to defy her family and convention. She had had enough of deceit. Digby had sensed the change in her, and followed her the next day.”

“But didn’t he realize that with Dorothy dead his secret income source would come to an end?”

“No. He could still blackmail Mrs. Brownly, who would not want Boston to know of Dorothy’s illegitimate child. He could still blackmail—and threaten—Preston Wortham.”

“For his many sins?”

“For murder. Digby purposely wore Mr. Wortham’s coat the day of the murder, in case he was seen. I strongly suspect it was Digby who sent the anonymous letter accusing Wortham, and then the second one, exonerating him. It was his way of saying, ‘I have complete power over you.’ ”

“He was a villain, a true villain,” Sylvia said in awe. “You have taken notes, haven’t you, Louisa?”

“Evil is misused genius,” I answered. “Digby was fond of reading the society pages, it seemed. That was how he found employment with Mr. Wortham: when the engagement was announced. He had already been blackmailing Dorothy and Mrs. Brownly for years. Achieving a position in Wortham’s household completed his web of control. If only that intelligence had been put to good use!”

“I’m still not quite certain how you knew it was he,” Sylvia said, twirling a curl that had escaped her bonnet. “Surely shoes are not enough to incriminate.”

“It was that chance remark that Mr. Mapp made. Poor Mr. Mapp. He told us he had seen Digby in Rome the year that Dorothy was there with her mother. Remember?”

“Now I do. Though I didn’t remark it at the time. I must pay closer attention to your conversations in the future, Louisa. And speaking of poor Mr. Mapp, I may assume that the poisoned bonbons were a gift from Digby, not Preston or Dorothy?” Sylvia said. “He suspected that you suspected, or were getting close. But if he was also a skilled poisoner, why did he murder Dorothy in such violent manner? Why not a quiet case of undetected poisoning?”

“I have thought of it,” I said, no longer smiling, no longer feeling contented. The world held such a burden of evil made manifest in different personalities, different natures. “Digby couldn’t be certain that only Dorothy would eat the sweets. Perhaps Preston would, as well. And then his blackmail income from that source would have ended. He was diabolical. It didn’t matter to him that my family might have shared the tin of marzipan, and died. It is quite difficult to think about, that part. I endangered Abba and Father and my sisters.”

My beloved family in danger! It didn’t bear thinking about. May, of course, had been thrilled by this proximity to danger, when I had revealed all of these events to my other family members. Lizzie shook her head, disbelieving. Father lectured me soundly, and then congratulated me on my successful application of reason to a series of mysterious events. Abba hugged me, and gave me a basket of stockings to mend.

“And what of Katya Mendosa, Louy? How did you connect her with Digby?”

“Her fragrance, attar of roses, which I smelled in Wortham’s parlor the day after Preston had been incarcerated, the day there was a woman upstairs and Digby seemed so distracted. Her shawl, too, the same shawl in the parlor and in her dressing room. Sylvia, have you yet figured out her true name?”

“True name?”

“Sylvia, you must stop repeating. Katya was Marie Brennen. Yes, the maid whom Wortham seduced and got dismissed. She’d had a child and he had sent her money all these years, but apparently that wasn’t enough to appease Marie Brennen. She was the one who pointed out Wortham’s engagement when it appeared in the papers. She pointed out the blackmail opportunity to Digby, for who better than Marie Brennen knew all the trouble that Wortham had caused that summer in Newport?”

“Marie Brennen? How did Preston not know? He seduced the same woman twice?”

“I suspect the second time she seduced him, as part of the blackmail scheme. Women change considerably in six years, Sylvia. Look at the difference six years made in Dorothy. Miss Brennen colored her hair, adopted a false Latin accent, grew taller and heavier. She grew from a girl to a woman, and Preston did not recognize her. Remember, too, if we can believe him, that after that summer in Newport, after his engagement, he spent only one evening with Marie, who was by then known as Katya.”

“Well,” Sylvia said, thinking and trying to digest all this, “I am glad, then, that she was able to fetch her child back home to her. It would seem that Miss Brennen has had her revenge.”

“It would seem,” I agreed, not completely saddened.

We walked in silence for some time, admiring the new tips of pale green growth on the oak trees, the noisily honking geese overhead, the sheer exuberance of the season. Dorothy had loved the spring. Someday we would tell Agnes how one spring day in Concord her mother had stripped off shoes and stockings to wade in a little stream, how she had climbed a tree in her best dress and torn it . . . how lovely she had been at fifteen, when she had first fallen in love. . . . There would be so much to tell little Agnes.

“As poor and unhappy as Queenie is, at least she has been able to keep her child,” Sylvia mused.

“It is a compensation for all her suffering,” I agreed.

“What will happen to Queenie, do you think?”

I stopped in my tracks, and I’m sure Sylvia saw the hint of mischief in my smile. “Haven’t I told you?” I said, knowing full well I hadn’t. “Edgar has agreed to endow Queenie with enough money to leave Boston and set up a boardinghouse in San Francisco.”

Sylvia pondered this for a long moment, attempting to borrow some of my own methods of logic. “He is not generous by nature,” Sylvia decided. “Therefore, someone else helped him come to this decision.”

“Perhaps.” I began to whistle, a habit Abba had never been able to break me of.

“Ah,” Sylvia guessed. “You have reached an agreement with him. He will pay; you will not tell his mother.”

“We had a discussion; that is all. If he made incorrect assumptions, I did not see it as my duty to enlighten him. He will be furious, eventually, when he learns his mother already knows about his studio, his art, his models. He will be furious to learn that he suspected me of a blackmail I could not commit.” My pleasure in the fine spring day returned. “But he does not know yet.
‘Honi soit qui mal y pense.’
Shame on him who thinks evil.”

“So both Preston and Queenie are going west,” Sylvia said as we completed our circuit of the Smokers’ Circle.

The Common was crowded with beribboned, ringleted children and nurses running after them, watching over them. Robins sang in the tree branches, and ducklings paraded after their proud duck mothers. My lethargy of late winter had lifted, and I filled page after page with blood and thunder during my late-evening and early-morning writing hours.