Still Life With Murder (17 page)

Hearing a little
hmph
of laughter, Nell turned to find Will studying her through drowsy eyes. “I must say I’m surprised to see a proper little thing like you without a hat,” he said. “Or, indeed, with your hair in such agreeable disarray.”

Nell raised a hand to the curlicues springing loose from her chenille-netted hair, momentarily puzzled by the absence of the brown velvet bonnet she’d donned that morning—puzzled and dismayed. Only a certain kind of woman went about hatless.
“Oh…it came off when you…”
When you hurled me into that wall
. “That is, it must have fallen off back at the—”

“When I what?”

She hesitated. “You weren’t yourself. It wasn’t your fault.”

He stared at her a moment; she thought he was going to say something, but he turned away with a grimace and slammed a fist on the roof of the cab. “Pull over!”

CHAPTER SEVEN

S
TEAM GUSTED FROM THE HORSES
’ nostrils as the driver reined them in at the corner of Harrison and Beach, their hooves clattering on the uneven bricks.

“What? No.” She tugged at Will’s sleeve as he unfolded himself from his seat, but he wrested himself free with a force that hurled her back.

Staggering to the edge of the street, he dropped to his knees, his back heaving. By the time Nell made it to his side, what little his stomach had held was in the gutter.

The driver eyed him with distaste. “Is he drunk?”

“No,” Nell said as she helped Will to his feet. “Just ill.”

The fellow looked skeptical; given Will’s appearance, she could hardly blame him. He raised his reins as if to take off. “I don’t need some sot making a mess of my—”

“He won’t,” she promised as she guided Will back to the cab. “He’s done being sick. We’ll pay you double.”

The driver looked on warily as Nell wrestled Will back into the leather seat, where he crumpled with a series of ragged coughs. He grunted in evident pain as the cab lurched forward, his body racked with tremors. “Give me the paregoric.”

“I’m afraid to,” she said, grabbing her chatelaine as he reached for it. “You’ve had so much already.”

“Which I’ve just thrown up, in case it escaped your notice.”

“Yes, but—”

Seizing her wrists painfully to pry her hands off the bag, he tore open its flap and fished out the bottle. He drained it in one
long swallow, wiped his mouth with the back of a trembling hand and returned the empty bottle to her.

She watched as he settled back into the seat, dragging a hand through his lank hair. He closed his eyes, breathing in great, harsh lungfuls of air.

“Does it help?” she asked.

“It’s not enough, by a long shot.” He sounded winded, and looked half-dead, which she supposed he was. “But it will…get me where I need to go.” He regarded her with quiet curiosity. “How did you know to bring it?”

“Once, back during the war—it was the summer of sixty-three, I think—Dr. Greaves was summoned by a family whose son had been discharged from an Army hospital with a chest wound. I went with him. Tommy was the boy’s name—that’s all he was, really, just a boy, nineteen at the most. At first they’d thought it was his wound acting up, then they began to suspect appendicitis, because of the abdominal pain. By the time we got there, Tommy could barely breathe, and he was convulsing so badly they’d had to tie him to his bed. He kept screaming for his pills, but he’d run out. His parents got new ones from the druggist, but they were the wrong kind.”

Will sank deeper into the seat, rasping both hands over his face; his eyes were red-rimmed, as if he hadn’t slept in days. “All those opium pills I dispensed in field hospitals—thousands of them, great, rattling floods of them…I often wondered what would happen when some of those lads got home. But when you saw a man’s leg off…and I sawed them off by the score after every battle, sometimes by the hundreds, arms as well…Minié balls expand when they hit bone, smash it to bits. Nine minutes per leg—that’s all it took me. When you do that to a man, you’ve got to give him
something
, something that works. Say what you will about opium, it kills pain like nothing else. One minute they’re screaming and sobbing and thrashing, and the next…” His
expression grew oddly contemplative; he almost smiled. “Blessed oblivion.” He looked at Nell. “I take it your Dr. Greaves correctly diagnosed the boy’s affliction?”

“Oh, yes. He tried giving him some laudanum, which was all he had with him, but by that time, it was too late—he couldn’t keep anything down. If Dr. Greaves had had a hypodermic syringe and some morphine…but he didn’t used to carry that sort of thing with him. He does now.”

“The boy died?”

“Horribly. I hadn’t known that could happen. I mean, I knew it was possible to die from too large a dose of opium. There’s always a warning,” she said, squinting at the small type on the label on the empty paregoric bottle. “Same with laudanum or Godfrey’s Cordial or Atkinson’s Infants Preservative or any of the pills or powders. But it had never occurred to me that one could die from being used to it and then not having it.”

“One can if one’s dependence is profound enough.”

Like yours?
she wanted to ask. Will’s condition, when she’d first encountered him today, had seemed every bit as dire as Tommy’s.

“Opium withdrawal can produce respiratory distress, as you’ve witnessed,” he continued, sounding an awful lot like Dr. Greaves instructing Nell in the medical arts, “and in the worst cases, cessation of heart function. But more often than not, it’s just a week or so of…unpleasantness.”

An understatement if ever Nell had heard one. “Have you ever gone through it?” she asked. “I mean, all the way through it?”

“Dear God, why would I want to?” He sat up as the cab pulled to the curb at the corner of Tyler and Kneeland. “This is my destination. I’ll pay the driver to take you back to Colonnade Row.”

“Your mother expects me to see you inside,” Nell said as she gathered her skirts.

“I don’t recommend it, but suit yourself.”

Nell looked around as Will helped her down from the cab and paid the driver his double fare. This was a block of unassuming shops similar to those they had passed on the way, except that one—the one Will headed toward, with Nell on his heels—bore signs written in Chinese rather than English. There was a display of Oriental curios in its front window, along with open crates of turnips, rice, oranges and limes.

Walking into this bizarre little grocery store, to the glassy tinkle of chimes, was like stepping out of Boston and into Hong Kong or Shanghai—or rather, into Hong Kong
and
Shanghai all compressed into one small shop, for it was a veritable riot of clutter and color. For Nell, who prided herself on her ability to imprint upon her memory all aspects of a place or person, it represented the ultimate challenge. Floor to ceiling shelves held a dazzling array of Chinese-labeled jars, crocks, bundles and boxes, every inch of remaining wall space being occupied by Oriental artwork, banners and placards inked in baffling rows of calligraphy. Paper lanterns of every configuration dangled from the ceiling, along with clusters of herbs, garlic, onions and what appeared to be desiccated fowl of some sort. Snugged together atop lacquered chests were trays packed with figs, ginger, sticky-dark sweetmeats and various obscure varieties of produce, including some peculiar little nuggets wrapped in leaves.

“Betel nuts,” Will said when he noticed her looking at them. Pointing to other trays with a still-trembling hand, he said, “Sugar cane…salted bamboo shoots…”

“People eat these things?”

“
I
eat these things. There’s a whole, vast world beyond Boston, Miss Sweeney.”

Nell nodded, dazed by the alien surroundings, the strange, foreign smells. A slight movement in the back of the shop caught
her eye. It was an old man—so old he looked mummified—wearing a gray smock like a stableman’s, loose trousers and a brimless black cap over his single braid. Nell had never seen a Chinaman before, not in person. He sat quietly in a darkened corner, next to a counter bearing a scale, a dented tin lockbox and a pistol. He nodded unsmilingly to Will, his gaze lighting on the blackened eye and split lip.

“Good day, Deng Bao.” Will dipped his head while gripping a counter for support.

The old man grunted something, his voice dry as ground bones.

“Hsiang yen?”
Will raised two fingers to his lips and inhaled.

Deng Bao aimed a quaking finger at a shelf. Will foraged among cigar boxes and pouches of tobacco, sighing in relief when he came up with an exotically decorated tin labeled
Turkish Orientals
, which he pocketed. He paid the proprietor, who made change from his lockbox, handing him a box of matches along with the coins.

Will pointed to a curtained doorway in the corner behind Deng Bao, and then to the ceiling. “We go upstairs?”

The old man scrutinized Nell, taking in her elegant though soiled costume with a studied lack of expression. Pointing to Will and then to the doorway, he nodded and spoke a few cordial-sounding words in his native tongue. But his tone sharpened when he returned his attention to Nell. He held up his palm as if to say, “She stays here.”

Will startled Nell by curling an arm around her waist and drawing her close.
“Jinu,”
he said.

The old man’s wiry eyebrows twitched upward. He scrutinized her for a long moment, his gaze lingering for some reason on her disheveled hair. Finally he gave one quick little nod and gestured toward the doorway.

“Come, before he changes his mind again.” Guiding her with a hand on her back, Will urged Nell through the heavy draperies—several layers of them—that hung over the door. “I’d best go first.”

“What was that all about?” Nell asked as she followed him up a creaky staircase. She breathed in a sweet, sooty aroma from above. It reminded her of roasting hazelnuts, but wasn’t. Burnt treacle? Not that, either.

“He probably suspected you were just here to gawk—or even worse, preach,” Will said, pausing halfway up to catch his breath. “You look too respectable.”

“I didn’t know that was possible.”

“Obviously,” he grunted, clutching the banister hand over hand until he reached the top step and another curtained-off doorway.

“What did you say to convince him to let me come up?” she asked.

“I told him you were a whore.”

“What?”
She gaped at him in outrage.
“Why?”

“Because,” he said mildly as he held the curtains aside for her, “only whores come to places like this.”

The room Nell stepped into—a sort of reception parlor apparently, fashioned from the second-floor landing—was downright austere compared to the shop beneath them. The walls and floor were unpainted, the only furniture a small table behind which sat another Chinaman, albeit a good deal younger than the shopkeeper, and sporting a moustache and spectacles. Although traditionally garbed from the neck down, in a yellow-sleeved scarlet smock with frog closures, his headgear consisted of a rather rumpled black pork pie hat.

Spread out on the table before him were perhaps two dozen little glass spirit lamps, which he was filling from a jug of oil.
Nell caught a whiff of something that reminded her of a cake the Hewitts’ cook liked to make; coconut?

“You’re back!” The Chinaman leapt to his feet, arms outstretched, his smile fading as he took in Will’s cuts and bruises. “What happen you?”

“My own fault, Zhou Chiang. Had a bit too much absinthe and took a spill.”

“Absinthe! Vile green piss!” Zhou Chiang’s sour expression morphed into a smile as he turned to Nell. “Who this?”

“My keeper.”

“Welcome, Miss Keeper,” greeted the Chinaman with a little duck of his head; not a full bow, and the pork pie stayed put.
Only whores come to places like this
. He gestured toward an open doorway, through which Nell could see four men—three white and one Chinese—sitting in a fog of cigar smoke around a table lit by a mammoth and ornate paper lantern. “Poker today.” He made a shuffling motion with his hands, winking conspiratorially at Will. “Rich suckers. You play? Win big.”

“Not today, old man. Got the
yen-yen
.” Will held out a quivering hand.

“We fix that.” Zhou Chiang crossed to a closed door on the other side of the landing and swung it open.
“Lau!”
he barked, motioning Will and Nell into the dimly lit room. An adolescent Chinese boy dashed over to them, murmuring assent in response to Zhou Chiang’s unintelligible commands.

The door closed behind them; Nell felt her stomach tighten. The room in which she found herself was large, and lined on three sides with wide, double-tiered wooden bunks covered with straw matting. None of the top bunks was occupied, but several shadowy figures reclined on the bottom. A handful of flickering little lamps provided the only light in the dusky room. The air was sultry, thick and permeated with that scorched sweetness she’d first detected in the stairwell.

The boy called Lau cocked his hand toward Nell in a “give me” gesture.

Nell looked toward Will, who said, “He wants to hang up your coat. Let him. It gets awfully close in here.” He shucked off his own coat and handed it to Lau, who hung it on a peg.