Still life with murder Read online

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  April 1868

  An EXCERPT from Book #2

  “P.B. Ryan makes a stunning debut with Still Life With Murder, bringing Nineteenth Century Boston alive, from its teeming slums to the mansions on Boston Common, and populating it with a vivid and memorable cast of characters. The fascinating heroine, Nell Sweeney, immediately engages the reader and I couldn't put the book down until I discovered the truth along with her. I can’t wait for the next installment.” —Bestselling author Victoria Thompson

  STILL LIFE WITH MURDER

  Book #1 in P.B. Ryan’s historical mystery series featuring governess Nell Sweeney

  Nominated for the Mary Higgins Clark Award

  Patricia Ryan writing as P. B. Ryan

  Copyright © 2003 Patricia Ryan. All rights reserved. With the exception of quotes used in reviews, this book may not be reproduced or used in whole or in part by any means existing without written permission from the author.

  Originally published by Berkley Prime Crime, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. as Book #1 of The Gilded Age Mysteries

  For my agent, Nancy Yost, who’s represented me for over a decade and a half...and we’re still speaking to each other! Nancy’s business smarts and good humor are what make us work, and for that I’m supremely grateful. Many thanks to Martha Bushko for knowing how to polish a novel without grinding away the good parts—a gem among editors. Thanks also to the warm and generous Susan Uttal for more than thirty years of unwavering friendship, and most recently for her enthusiastic service as my personal Boston tour guide. Finally, my deepest appreciation to Nick Dichario, Kathryn Shay, Tim Wright, my Evil Twin Pamela Burford, and my husband Richard Ryan for taking the time to read and sometimes re-read this manuscript as it took shape. Your insights were valuable, your encouragement and support priceless. This book, and the experience of writing it, wouldn’t have been the same without you.

  Prologue

  A guiltie conscience is a worme that bites and neuer ceaseth.

  Nicholas Ling, Politeuphuia, 1597

  September 1864

  Cape Cod, Massachusetts

  “It’s going to be a bad one.” Dr. Greaves said it so quietly that Nell, sitting across from him in the Hewitts’ glossy black brougham, almost didn’t hear him.

  Nell squeaked an end of her paisley shawl across the foggy side window. Trees writhed against a purpling sky as they rumbled past; raindrops spattered the glass. “The storm, do you mean? Or...” She eyed the flat mahogany surgical kit on the seat next to him, the cracked leather doctor’s satchel by his feet.

  “The delivery,” he said. “And the storm. Both.” Lightning fluttered across his face, making him look, for one jolting moment, strangely old. She’d never thought of him that way, despite being half his age. Cyril Greaves remained lean in his middle years, and was taking his time in turning gray. And then there were those benevolent eyes, that ready smile.

  He wasn’t smiling this evening.

  “There must be something terribly amiss for them to have sent that fellow to East Falmouth for me.” Dr. Greaves cocked his head toward the brougham’s front window, through which the Hewitts’ coachman, who’d introduced himself as Brady, was just visible as a smear of black hunched over the reins. “Families like the Hewitts don’t bother with physicians for mere chambermaids. Not for routine births, anyway. It’s only when disaster strikes that they fetch one, and by then it’s usually too late.”

  All too true. How Nell dreaded the difficult calls—especially when something went wrong with a birth.

  Crossing his arms, Dr. Greaves stared out at the passing countryside as it grew yet murkier and more turbulent. A white-hot rivulet crackled down from the heavens; thunder rattled the carriage. Nell turned to gaze out the other side window, thinking she might draw this landscape tomorrow if she wasn’t too tired after her chores. No, she’d paint it, on a sheet of Dr. Greaves’s best writing paper, in ink—great, bruising stains of it, black for the trees and a near-black wash for the sky.

  Brady halted his team at a massive iron gate, which was hauled open for them by two men in Macintoshes. Snapping the reins, he drove the brougham past a shingle-sided gatehouse and up a long, undulating roadway. Nell had all but decided this couldn’t possibly be the Hewitts’ estate; there was just too much of it. But then a pulse of lightning illuminated a building in the distance—a huge, sprawling edifice adorned with turrets and a hodgepodge of steep gambrel roofs.

  Her breath came out in an astonished little gust.

  Dr. Greaves smiled at last; she often made him smile, but rarely when she meant to. “They call this place Falconwood. The Hewitts spend about six weeks here every summer, usually mid-July to the end of August. I wonder why they’re still here.”

  “Six weeks? This...castle is for one family to live in for six weeks?”

  “The Hewitts call it a cottage,” he said, “but it’s got over twenty rooms. Those in back look out on Waquoit Bay. The boathouse is larger than most people’s homes.”

  Nell stared at the mansion as they neared it, at the scores of warmly lit windows, picturing the two-room hovel she’d shared with her entire family for the first eleven years of her life.

  Her expression must have reflected her thoughts. “Nell,” Dr. Greaves said softly. “You, of all people, should know that life isn’t fair. And yet, somehow, you always manage to muscle through. Most people follow the path wherever it leads them. Others hack their own way through the brush and always seem to end up on higher ground. You’re of the second sort.”

  The clattering of horses’ hooves drew her attention back to the house, which they were circling on a paved path. Like the gatehouse, it was sided in shingles that had weathered to a silvery gray.

  “The Hewitts have been summering on the Cape for about twenty years,” said Dr. Greaves as he gathered up his satchel and surgical kit. “Not the most fashionable vacation spot, but I understand they like the solitude. Their main house is in Boston, on a Brahmin enclave they call Colonnade Row—that’s a section of Tremont Street built up with mansions that make Falconwood look like a gardener’s shed.”

  “Brahmin?”

  “The first families of Boston—the venerable old bluebloods.” Dr. Greaves answered even the most uninformed query without smirking or seeming surprised at one’s ignorance. Nell had learned a lifetime’s worth in her four years with him. “They tend to worship at the altar of high culture, and August Hewitt is no exception, though he’s unusually sanctimonious for that breed. The wife’s English, I think—Violet. No, Viola. There are some sons. The local girls would swoon for days whenever one of them showed up in town. They haven’t been round the past few summers—except for the youngest. I see him at church every Sunday, along with his father. Perhaps the rest are off fighting Johnny Reb.”

  The carriage shuddered to a stop on a flagstone court behind the house, near an attached leaded-glass greenhouse with a domed roof. Passing the reins to a waiting groom, Brady unfurled the biggest black umbrella Nell had ever seen, opened the brougham’s door and handed her down. “I’d best be takin’ you folks in through the greenhouse,” he said in a wheezy Irish brogue, raising his voice to be heard over the drumming rain. “The drive’s flooded out up ahead. Watch that puddle, miss.”

  Taking a lantern from the brougham, the coachman gestured them toward an imposing arched entryway. Nell followed him through the unlit greenhouse, which she’d expected to be filled with plants, but which instead housed...

  Paintings? She gawked as she wove through a forest of canvases propped on easels, each executed in loose, vibrant brush strokes. Some were seascapes featuring picturesque Waquoit Bay, and there were one or two still lifes, but most were of people—not posing formally, but lounging in opulent surroundings, exquisitely attired; jewels glinted, silks shimmered. They materialized out of the darkness, these sublime apparitions, only to dissolve back into it as the coachman’s lantern swung past. The lamplight shifted and swayed just enough to make it seem as if they were inclining their heads ever so slightly toward Nell, eyes alight, mildly curious, before looking away.

  The women dazzled, but it was the young men whom Nell found most arresting. There were perhaps three who had been painted repeatedly, golden creatures with luminous skin and expressions of languid ease. A particularly large canvas, which stood half-finished near the back wall, depicted two of them. One, an adolescent with hair the color of champagne and quiet, watchful eyes, sat tucked into one end of a maroon settee, while his brother—for surely these were two of the Hewitt sons—sprawled in elegant repose across the other. This older one’s hair was a slightly darker blond, his smile more careless. Collar loose, tie undone, he had both arms draped across the back of the settee, a brandy snifter cupped lightly in one hand.

  On a folding table nearby sat a palette crusted with dried oil paints, a jar of brushes, a wadded-up rag; some preliminary sketches were tacked to the easel’s crossbar. Nell detected only the faintest whiff of linseed oil and turpentine; she would have expected the smell to be stronger. r />
  “That’s the one I see at church.” Dr. Greaves pointed to the younger brother.

  “Aye, that’s young Master Martin. He’s right pious.” Gesturing them through a multipaned door into the house, Brady winked at Nell and whispered, “For an Episcopalian.”

  Nell winked back. She didn’t think she looked particularly Irish, but those from the old country always knew.

  “I’m to hand you over to Mrs. Mott, the housekeeper,” the coachman said as he led them into a dim, cavernous kitchen, where he pulled a bell cord. Cocking his head toward a lamplit hallway, he said, “They’ve got Annie down there in the cook’s room. That’s Annie McIntyre, the girl what’s havin’ the baby. She sleeps up on the top floor, ordinarily, with the rest of the maids. But when her time come, Mrs. Hewitt, she said to put her down here where it’s more cozy and private-like.”

  There materialized before them an old woman who looked to have been rendered in hard pencil on smooth vellum, so devoid of color was she: pale bespectacled face, scraped-back gray hair, unadorned black dress with a heavily laden key ring dangling from her belt, hands like carved bone clasped at her waist.

  “Evenin’, Mrs. Mott,” Brady said. “I’m to go fetch Father Donnelly now. When you’re ready for me to take you back, Doc, just—”

  “We’ll find you, Brady. Thank you.”

  “This way.” Mrs. Mott turned and led them down a hallway, at the end of which slumped a young woman in a black dress with white collar, cuffs and apron. Red hair frizzed out from beneath her cap—not just a rusty brown, like Nell’s, but a smoldering, red-hot red. She eyed them while gnawing on a thumbnail.

  Pausing at a closed door halfway down the hall, Mrs. Mott turned to the maid. “Mary Agnes, shouldn’t you be turning down beds?”

  “Mrs. Bouchard wants me here in case I’m needed.”

  “You don’t answer to Mrs. Bouchard, though, do you? You answer to me. For pity’s sake, girl, stop chewing on that—”

  “Oh, God.” From behind the door came a woman’s ragged moan. “Oh, God. Oh, Jesus.” She was young, her voice high and thready. Another woman started to say something, but her words were drowned out by a wail that trailed off into whimpers. Mrs. Mott shrank back from the door. Mary Agnes looked at the ceiling as she started back in on the thumbnail.

  Dr. Greaves knocked. “It’s, Cyril Greaves, the doctor. May I—”

  The door swung open. “Thank the Lord.” Stepping aside for them was a solidly built Negro lady with a great copper bowl of a face and hair like hoar frost on gray moss. “My name is Mrs. Bouchard,” she said in a sonorous voice seasoned with a peculiar accent, not quite southern and not quite French. “I’m Mrs. Hewitt’s nurse. She asked me to help.”

  “Yes, thank you.” If Dr. Greaves shared Nell’s curiosity as to why Mrs. Hewitt should employ a nurse, he gave no hint of it. Nell followed him into the room, noticing as she turned to close the door that Mrs. Mott was already halfway down the hall, her tread as silent as if she were barefooted, although Nell couldn’t imagine that was the case.

  Leaning over the narrow bed, Dr. Greaves felt the forehead of the young woman lying in it, a heavily pregnant, china-doll blonde with big, panicky eyes. “How are you holding up, Annie?”

  “N-not so good,” she panted. “Something’s wrong.”

  Mrs. Bouchard said, “The baby’s lying transverse, Doctor. Hasn’t budged through fourteen hours of labor.” It wasn’t a servant’s uniform the nurse wore, but rather a severely unadorned black dress that looked to have been dyed from some other color. Her only jewelry was a small enameled watch pinned to her bosom. Was the household in mourning for some reason? Nell, in her faded blue basque and plaid skirt—hand-me-downs from Dr. Greaves’s niece—felt suddenly rather shabby and conspicuous.

  Dr. Greaves whipped off his frock coat and handed it to Nell, who laid it, along with her shawl and bonnet, on a chair in the corner of the small, tidy room. Rolling up his shirt sleeves, he nodded toward a wash basin in the corner. “Is that water clean?” he asked Mrs. Bouchard.

  “I boiled it.”

  “Annie,” he said as he soaped and rinsed his hands, “I’m going to have to examine you, but it shouldn’t hurt. This nice young lady—” he nodded to Nell as she turned back the bedcovers from the bottom up “—is Nell Sweeney, my assistant. She’s about your age, I should think.”

  “Let me guess.” Nell smiled at Annie as she sat on the bed next to her. “You’re...twenty?”

  “Twenty-two.”

  “Exactly my age, then.”

  Annie grimaced, her head thrown back. “No...” she groaned.

  “Ride it out,” Nell softly urged, holding her hand and smoothing damp tendrils of hair off her face. “This will all be over soon, and then you’ll have a lovely baby to—”

  “Oh, God...oh, God.” The girl cried out hoarsely during the contraction, trembled as it subsided; she was clearly exhausted.

  Noticing Annie’s wedding ring, Nell said, “Tell me about your husband.” She’d learned not to ask Where is your husband? in case he was lying in a grave near some far-off battlefield.

  “He...he...” Annie hitched in a breath and glanced down at Dr. Greaves, who must have begun his examination.

  “Annie, look at me,” Nell said gently. “What’s his name?”

  “M-Michael. Only...” Annie swallowed. “Only everybody calls him M-Mac, on account of his last name—McIntyre.”

  “He’s one of our drivers,” offered Mrs. Bouchard as she straightened a stack of clean sheets on the dresser. “Or was, till he signed up with the Boston Volunteers.”

  “The Eleventh R-regiment,” Annie managed.

  Mrs. Bouchard said, “He lost a leg at Spotsylvania in May. Been in the hospital since then, but he wrote to say he’s coming home next month.”

  “Then you’ll be seeing him soon!” Nell said.

  Annie’s head whipped back and forth on the pillow. “I’ll be dead. Something’s wrong.”

  Dr. Greaves said, “Annie, I’m not going to lie to you. Something is wrong. But it’s nothing I can’t fix. Nell.” He gestured for her to stand. “I want to show you this so you’ll know it next time we run across it. See how wide her abdomen is from side to side?”

  She let him position her hands on either side of Annie’s distended belly, over her linen chemise.

  “Feel that?” Dr. Greaves asked. “The head’s on one side, buttocks on the other—the worst position a baby can be in for delivery. Cord’s prolapsed, too.” Folding the bedcovers back down, he asked Mrs. Bouchard, “How long since her water broke?”

  “Around dawn, just as she was going into labor.”

  “I’ll need to operate as soon as we can gets things set—”

  “Operate!” Mrs. Bouchard exclaimed.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Annie moaned. “You’re going to cut it out of me? I am going to die!”

  “Annie.” Dr. Greaves turned her face toward him. “If you try to deliver this baby normally, your womb will very likely rupture, and you will assuredly die. Or the baby will. I’ll use chloroform. You’ll sleep through the whole thing.”

  “But, Doctor...” Mrs. Bouchard cast him a look that said she knew exactly what happened to women who underwent Caesareans.

  “I’ve had excellent success with this procedure,” Dr. Greaves assured her. “The secret lies in suturing the uterine wall. And no, it doesn’t cause infection to leave the stitches in, so long as you keep things clean. Do you have any experience with surgery, Mrs. Bouchard?”

  Her chin shot up. “My father was a surgeon in New Orleans. I assisted him for twenty years, through hundreds of operations. I won’t faint dead away, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “Good—you and Nell can both help me, then.”

  “‘Excellent success,’” Annie said. “W-what does that mean? Some of them still die, right? The mothers? When you do this operation?”

  Dr. Greaves’s hesitation was telling. “It’s your only hope, child. And you’re young and strong. There’s no reason to think you won’t make it, and...well, the baby almost always does.”

  “Do it,” she rasped. “But first I need to speak to...” She mewed in pain as another contraction mounted. “Send for...”