Still Life With Murder (30 page)

“Of course.” She sat next to him, not too close, and watched him unwrap the brown paper, revealing a little cobalt blue bottle. “What’s that?”

“Black Drop.” He held the bottle so she could read the label, engraved
JOSEPH MAYNARD & CO.
across the top. Handwritten beneath that in blue ink was:

Vinegar of Opium
1.5% Morphine
Dosage: 5 - 10 drops
2 oz
.

Uncorking the bottle, he said, “It’s the strongest opiated tonic I know of. I’ve run out of gong, you see, and it’ll be late tonight before I can get back to Deng Bao’s for more.” Tilting the bottle to his mouth, he shook out a rapid stream of reddish brown elixir—far more than ten drops.

“Should you be taking so much?” she asked.

He chuckled drunkenly, his head lolling back as he recorked the bottle. “I shouldn’t be taking it at all.”

“You might consider—”

“Shh.” Shifting sideways on the bench, he pressed his gloved fingertips to her mouth, his half-closed eyes as glassy as if they, too, were sheathed in ice. “Five minutes of peace, Miss Sweeney. That’s all I ask.”

Exactly five minutes later, she said, “You’re a slave to that stuff. A man like you shouldn’t be a slave to anything.”

He opened his eyes, muttering “Jesus” under his breath when he saw her snapping her pendant watch shut. “I’d forgotten what
a damnable shrew you turn into when I indulge this particular appetite. Don’t you worry about seeming unsophisticated?”

“Is Mathilde Cloutier unsophisticated? She cast you out of her home because of opium.”

“It wasn’t the opium,” he said through a yawn. “She always finds some excuse to stage one of her little melodramas when her current protector is due to return.”

“You know about Edmund?”

“Is that his name?” Will tucked the bottle back in his pocket. “She isn’t normally so forthcoming with strangers. You seem to have a way of drawing people out.”

“It doesn’t bother you…sharing a woman with another man?”

He laughed drowsily as he opened a Bull Durham tin. “How else could she afford to live in the Pelham? Do you mind?” he asked, sliding out a cigarette.

“No, of course not, but don’t let the police catch you smoking in a public park.” A true gentlemen wouldn’t ask; he would simply refrain. But it was a nod in the direction of courtesy, and a meaningful one, given that he’d never hesitated to smoke in her presence before without asking permission.

He lit the cigarette and took a deep, tranquil draw. “I’m certainly in no position to keep Mattie in the style she deserves, even if I were so inclined—which I’m not. Why take on the care and feeding of such an exotic specimen when I can simply swoop in from time to time, disport myself for a few days or weeks, then fly away free and unencumbered? The arrangement suits her as well, and don’t think for a moment that I’m the only diversion she seeks when the cat’s away.”

They both fell silent for a minute. Nell wasn’t always good about holding her tongue, as Dr. Greaves had often pointed out. Yet even she knew better than to question whether William Hewitt was actually capable of “disporting” himself with any
woman, given the apparent effect of all that opium on his body.
She’s miffed because I can’t rouse to her…

He leaned forward, elbows on knees, the cigarette hanging limply between his fingers. That he had discerned her train of thought became clear when he said, hesitantly, “The thing one must understand about this drug…Once it gets its talons into you, you don’t even care about the rest of it.”

“The rest of…?”

“One’s needs, one’s desires…” He glanced at her, then away. “All those hungers that demanded appeasing in one’s former life fade into insignificance before the poppy. To smoke a bowl of opium is to… transport oneself, body and soul. The very ritual of cooking up a dose will make me drunk with anticipation. And when I finally take that smoke into my lungs, and it seeps into my mind and my body and works its magic…the flood of pleasure can rival the best orgasm.”

Nell was rendered truly speechless. No man, even the two with whom she’d shared her bed, had ever used the word “orgasm” in her presence.

“Physical passions become secondary,” he said, sitting back as he exhaled a lungful of smoke. “As for emotional passions, well… they are certainly more controllable.”

Something about that statement sounded familiar. When she realized why, she couldn’t help observing, with a mischievous smile, “Wouldn’t your father be pleased that you’ve finally learned to command your passions.”

He stared at her for a moment, then burst out laughing. She laughed, too. It felt good, if strange, to share this moment with him, even if he
was
drunk on opium. She couldn’t remember having seen him laugh before—really laugh, like this.

Will shook his head. “So all it took for me to finally live up to his standards was a steady ingestion of narcotics. Wish I’d known that when I was a boy.”

Nell sobered, envisioning the photograph of Will at four, with his slick-combed hair, big eyes and guileless smile…and that arm curled so protectively over the golden baby boy on his mother’s lap… the doomed Robbie. Little William had been doomed himself, in a way, not long after that photograph was made.
He begged me not to send him away…. He screamed and sobbed all the way up the gangway
.

“I know why you resent your mother as you do,” Nell said. “I think you should know that she deeply regrets having sent you to live in England.”

“Is that what she told you?” he asked. “She always did have a knack for saying the right thing.”

“She was weeping when she told me about it. All she can talk about is how this is really all her fault—what’s become of you, this arrest. She’s consumed by guilt, views herself as a terrible mother.”

“As I’ve said before, she’s nothing if not perceptive.”

“Jest if you must, Dr. Hewitt, but she’s in pain for you, and she really does want to help you. It’s not easy for her. She’s displayed a great deal of cleverness—and nerve—in defying your father without his catching on.”

“I daresay you’ve displayed more. I’ve known Saint August to sack a kitchen maid for popping too many cherries into her mouth while she was making a pie. You’re taking quite a chance, doing Lady Viola’s legwork for her—and brainwork, I might add. If my father finds out what you’ve been up to, you’ll be right back to wherever you were before my mother took you under her wing—or worse. You do realize that.”

“One does what one must,” she answered evenly, though she’d lain awake just last night, fretting over that very thing. It was the prospect of losing Gracie, more than anything else, that she truly dreaded. “There’s something I’ve been wondering,” she said, eager to change the subject. “Why did you give a false name to the police when they arrested you?”

His shoulders rose as he brought the cigarette to his mouth. “The Hewitts are one of the oldest families in Boston—in the
country
. It would have been on the front page of every newspaper from here to San Francisco if someone of that name were accused of murder. Why invite the press to make an already grotesque situation even more lurid and complicated?”

“You did it to protect your family,” she realized with quiet astonishment.

“I did it so as not to put myself at the center of some unseemly spectacle.”

She smiled. “You must care about them a little.”

“I care about my privacy, but believe what you like.” Dropping his cigarette butt, he ground it beneath the heel of his shoe. “Do you still have that photograph?” he asked, glancing at the slight bulge of her chatelaine bag beneath her coat. “The one you showed me the other day?”

“That picture of Gracie? No, I…No. I can bring it next time I see you.”

“Don’t.”

“But you wanted to—”

“I just wanted to know if you had it. I was curious as to whether you carried it around with you. Struck me as something you might do.”

“I keep it on my night table.”

He nodded thoughtfully. “You…care for her, I take it. I mean, not just as your charge, but…”

“I love her,” Nell said, “as if she were my own daughter.”

He looked at her, seemed about to say something, looked away.

“You should meet her,” Nell said.

“Good Lord! And here I’ve been thinking you’re such a sensible woman.”

“Why not?”

“You have to ask? Look at me!”

She shrugged. “You look like a perfect gentleman today.”

“You’ve got a strange definition of ‘perfect,’” he said, underscoring that observation by helping himself to a second, if smaller, dose of Black Drop.

“Yes, well…”

“Let’s walk some more, shall we?” Rising, he handed her up from the bench. His gait was, if not flawless, certainly less halting than before. “Present appearances notwithstanding, I happen to be a professional gambler and opium fiend who will almost certainly hang for murder before the year is through. Hardly what any little girl would want in a father. Far better if she never learns of my existence.”

“You’re much more than those things, Dr. Hewitt. Didn’t General Grant once call you the best battle surgeon in the Union Army? Jack Thorpe praised your skill and fearlessness—he told me you saved countless lives.”

“I sawed off countless legs,” he said, “and if the cut wasn’t too close to the hip, they had a better than even chance of making it. Any corner butcher worth his salt could have done as well. Jack wasn’t at Andersonville, Miss Sweeney. He doesn’t know how pathetically useless I became there. I was surrounded by filth and contagion, with no medications, no tools—except for my folding bistoury, which I’d hidden in the hem of my trousers. Not that it helped much. Four out of every ten men who walked into that place were buried there, and I did little to improve on those statistics.”

“Jack told me you allowed yourself to be captured in order to take care of the wounded men.”

“It was Robbie I was mostly concerned with.” He lit a cigarette and blew a plume of smoke into the frosty sky, stained lavender now that the sun had dipped below the horizon. “The others weren’t so bad off, but Robbie had taken a Minié ball just above his right elbow, and it had ruptured everything—bone, soft
tissue, arteries…I didn’t dare move him. I put off the decision to amputate as long as I could, but I finally did it, while our regiment was retreating. The other men had to hold him down, because there was no chloroform, but he hardly made a sound, just gritted his teeth and took it. He held his screams in for me so I could do what I had to do without…” He shook his head, adding hoarsely, “So I could get through it.”

“My God,” Nell whispered. “I didn’t know he’d lost an arm— and under such circumstances. Your mother didn’t tell me.”

“I don’t suppose she knows. No reason she should.”

No reason she should know, Nell wondered, or no reason Nell should tell her? “I won’t mention it,” she said.

He nodded stiffly as he drew on his cigarette.

Interesting. “It’s a credit to your skills that Robbie survived at a place like Andersonville after something like that.”

“It helped that it was February, and cold, which tends to keep certain types of infection at bay. I remember, it was snowing when we got there. I’d never realized it snowed so far south. The men with no shelter lay curled up on the ground, thousands of them, their bones showing through their clothes, no blankets…”

“Did
you
have shelter?”

“I dug a hole for Robbie and me—not a real hole, because the ground was half-frozen, just a sort of depression in the earth, but it was ours alone. Two raiders tried to take it over, but—”

“Raiders?”

“The Andersonville Raiders. They were a gang of prisoners who’d banded together to steal what they could from the rest of us, and they didn’t stop at murder. The two who went after our hole had clubs, but I had my bistoury. I got one of them in the throat when he raised his club over Robbie’s head—big blond fellow, looked like a Viking. They left us alone after that.”

Got him in the throat?
“Did he die? The one you…?”

“I imagine so. That was the last I saw of him, in any event. We rounded up the rest of the raiders in July and put them on trial. The commandant let us hang the ringleaders.”

“Ah—when we first met, at the police station, you told me you’d seen six men hanged at once.”

“I often wish I hadn’t.”

“The commandant himself was executed after the war, wasn’t he? What was his name? Something German, I think.”

“He was Swiss. Henry Wirz. I saw him hanged. He died as hard as those raiders. Took a long time for him to stop struggling.”

“Jack Thorpe was part of the legal team that prosecuted him. But he probably told you that.”

“Yes.” He smiled indulgently as he stamped out his cigarette. “I gather it was an attempt on his part to make up for having let Robbie and me go to Andersonville without him. He always did have a painfully earnest streak.” Will dosed himself with a few more drops from the little blue bottle.

Nell said, “Wirz was hanged in November of sixty-five. You were in Washington then?”

He nodded as he shoved the cork back in the bottle, his eyes heavy-lidded. “I got there just in time for the victory parade along Pennsylvania Avenue at the end of May. Stuck around for a few months, till I felt like myself again. It had taken me the better part of a year just to make my way back north after I got out of Andersonville.”

“That long?”

“Eight or nine months, anyway. Let’s see, I escaped August ninth, the day after Robbie was killed, then I spent the next—”

“Killed?” Nell stopped in her tracks. “It wasn’t dysentery?”

He stilled, his back to her for a moment, before turning and regarding her gravely, if a little blearily, given all the Black Drop he’d consumed. “No, Miss Sweeney. It wasn’t dysentery.”

“Then how did…” It came to her then. “He was trying to escape, too, wasn’t he? You were going to get out together, on August eighth, but he was killed. That’s when you were shot.”

“Oh, that busy little mind of yours.” He stuck his hands in his coat pockets, smiling as if at a precocious child. “And then?”

“I suppose you…Oh. You had a bullet in your leg.”