A bucket of ashes Page 3

  “God, help me,” she whispered, and walked back to the great hall on legs that felt as if they were made of India rubber.

  Viola was sitting with the letter in her hand, watching Nell gravely; Clancy, sitting next to her, bore a similar expression. “Are you quite all right?”

  Nell nodded, although, of course, she was anything but. “It’s the heat,” she said dully as she wiped her forehead with the back of her arm. “This blasted heat.”

  “And this letter, I should think. From your reaction... It’s true, I take it.”

  Nell sank to her knees in front of Viola, her strength utterly sapped by the double volley of bad news in such a brief period of time. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Hewitt,” she said in a watery voice. “I’m sorry. I... I never meant to deceive you. That is, I never wanted to. I hated it, I always hated it. But I just... I knew I couldn’t be Gracie’s governess if I was married, especially to a... to someone like Duncan.”

  “Does Will know?” Viola asked. All she knew about Nell and Will was that they’d developed a friendship based on common interests, not the least of which was Gracie. When people had started whispering about the amount of time they were spending together, they pretended to be engaged in order to protect Nell’s reputation. Viola knew about the bogus engagement, as did her husband.

  “He knows,” Nell said. “And Dr. Greaves. And, of course, Father Gannon at St. Stephen’s. And Father Donnelly at St. Catherine’s in East Falmouth. He was my confessor before I moved to Boston. No one other than them.”

  Viola sat back in her chair, nodding pensively, her gaze on the letter.

  “Mrs. Hewitt...” Nell said, swallowing down the urge to burst into tears. Viola, with her classic British restraint, disdained emotional outbursts. “Gracie means everything to me. I couldn’t give her up. I’d rather die.”

  Viola stared at Nell, and then her expression softened, and she said, “Oh, Nell. Oh, my dear.” Leaning down, she stroked Nell’s cheek with her cool, soft hand. “You think I’m going to dismiss you? How poorly you know me.”

  “But... Mr. Hewitt, when he reads that letter...”

  Through a little gust of laughter, Viola said, “Mr. Hewitt is never going to read this letter.”

  She spun her chair around, plucked a match safe off a console table, and wheeled over to the fireplace. Scraping aside the summer screen of stained glass, she tossed the letter and envelope onto the empty grate, lit a match, and threw it in. Within about two minutes, all that was left of Charlie Skinner’s damning “missive” were some flakes of black, papery ash.

  “Here, let me get that,” Nell said as Viola went to replace the heavy screen. Pulling it back over the hearth, she said, “I... I don’t know how to thank you, Mrs. Hewitt. I am sorry for having misled you, dreadfully sorry.”

  “Well, I mean, obviously I would have preferred that you’d been candid with me, but looking back, it wasn’t really outright deception. I assumed from the beginning that you were unwed. You simply never corrected me.”

  “You’re being generous, Mrs. Hewitt. I did call myself Miss Sweeney. I’d stopped calling myself ‘Mrs.’ ever since Duncan... well, ever since he went to prison. I’ve worried for six years about what would happen if it became known that I was married to a convict. I’m truly humbled by your kindness and your understanding.”

  “Do sit down, my dear. You’re so very pale.”

  Mindful of her damp clothes, Nell sat on the edge of the hearth.

  “I ought to be understanding,” Viola said. “I’ve a skeleton rattling ‘round in my own closet, after all.”

  Nell was one of two people, Mr. Hewitt being the other, who knew that at the time of the Hewitts’ wedding, Viola was some five months pregnant by the French painter Emil Touchette. During a calculatedly lengthy European honeymoon, Viola gave birth to Will, whom August had never been able to accept as his own, despite his well-meaning assurances to that effect when he proposed to Viola.

  “But to be quite frank,” Viola continued, “had I known about Duncan six years ago, I can’t say it wouldn’t have given me pause, not just because your husband was in prison, but because you had a husband. I was concerned about your attention being divided while Gracie was young. As it turned out,” she said with a wry smile, “your husband’s imprisonment ensured that you were able to devote yourself fully to Gracie.”

  “I love her as if she were my own. For the longest time, I thought I’d never...” Careful. Viola was tolerant and indulgent, remarkably so, but there would be a limit to how much even she could accept. “I thought I’d never have a child to love and care for, but now I have Gracie, as she means the world to me.”

  “You needn’t discuss this if you don’t want to,” Viola said. “It’s really none of my affair, after all, but I can’t help but wonder why a fine young woman such as yourself would, well...”

  “Get involved with the criminal?” With a cheerless smile, Nell said, “Don’t think I haven’t asked myself that same question many times. The thing is, I didn’t realize what he was when I first met him. My... my brother Jamie introduced us. He brought Duncan around to the poor house to meet me, and—”

  “Poor house?” said Viola, obviously aghast.

  Nell lowered her gaze to her hands, twisting the hem of her bathing dress as if to wring it out. “The Barnstable County Poor House. I hadn’t wanted you to know. I felt... well, I was ashamed, of course, but I was also worried that if you knew how I’d grown up, you’d consider me unsuitable to be a governess.”

  “I don’t judge people by their backgrounds, but by who they are—though I must say, you’re having turned out so well after enduring such an upbringing speaks well for your character. Did you live there for your entire childhood?”

  Nell shook her head. “Only from the age of eleven. Before that, I lived in East Falmouth. My father was a day laborer on the docks, when he was working. But he was a drunk, and he abandoned us. A year later my mother died of cholera, along with one of my sisters and two of my brothers.”

  “Oh, Nell.”

  “Another sister had died three years before—some lung ailment, I’m not really sure what it was. So that left Jamie and Tess and me. Jamie was a year and a half younger than I, and Tess was just an infant, a newborn. We were sent to the poor house, which was...” Nell shook her head, her eyes closed. “You can’t imagine.”

  “I’ve done charity work in those places, remember? I can imagine all too well.”

  “At least I had Tess to take care of, and that gave me the sense that God had a plan for me, that I wasn’t just a charity case, that I was doing something worthwhile. She was the sweetest little thing, Tess, with big, dark eyes, just like Gracie. But, um...” Nell took a deep, shaky breath. “She died of diphtheria when she was just shy of her fourth birthday.”

  Viola closed her eyes with a pained expression.

  Nell looked away from her so as to stifle her urge to weep. “Jamie ran off then, said he had enough of being a ward of the state, and that he was going to make his own way from now on, never mind he was just twelve. I was tempted to leave, too, but a girl my age on her own... I’d seen enough unwed mothers come and go through those doors to know how it would have turned out.”

  “A wise decision, I should think. The better of two evils.”

  “Jamie used to sneak back in to visit me, and one day a couple of years later, when I was sixteen, he brought Duncan, who was eighteen at the time. I was at a low point then, despondent, listless. I had been ever since I lost Tess, because I blamed myself for not having been able to save her. Duncan... he was like this shining god, beautiful, charming, utterly magnetic. He made me feel beautiful. He made me feel worthwhile. And he gave me a way to escape from the poor house without ending up walking the streets. He asked me to marry him just a month and a half after meeting me. I was thrilled. I thought my trials were over,” she said, a bitter edge creeping into her voice.

  “I take it he wasn’t the savior you’d thought he wou
ld be.”

  “He wasn’t—isn’t—a monster, but he was just a small-time thief, like Jamie.” And like her, eventually, though it had been Duncan who’d coerced her into it. “And he was an ugly drunk, very ugly.”

  It was clear from Viola’s expression that she knew what Nell meant by that.

  “We’d been married about two years when I found out he’d robbed a jewelry store at gunpoint and brutalized the owner, and that the police were looking for him. I’d had enough. I told him I was leaving him. He... he attacked me, savagely. He used a knife on me.”

  Viola flinched. “That little scar near your eyebrow...”

  “That’s the least of it. The rest are in places no one can see.” Except for Will, who’d seen them for the first time that night before he left for France last month. Stay, she’d whispered as he’d lain in her bed, having come there to soothe her despair, and his, over his imminent departure for a war that might keep them apart for years, or even forever.

  He hesitated, knowing, as Nell did, that this would be opening a door that could never be closed. But then he crushed her to him with trembling arms, and it was so painfully sweet, so fierce, so tender, so perfect, that the very memory of it made her heart quiver in her chest, her eyes sting hotly.

  Bloody hell, he’d said as he lowered her night shift off her left shoulder, revealing the nine-inch scar that crawled in a pale ribbon from the outer edge of her collarbone down the side of her breast. Touching his lips to it, he’d whispered, I wish to God I’d met you before he did. I wish... I wish...

  I know. Me, too.

  “If you don’t mind my saying so,” Viola said, Duncan sounds like a monster, having done that to you.”

  “And yet he also made a very noble sacrifice once that probably saved my life. But as grateful as I am for that, I can never forget what he took from me. You see, I was with child when Duncan... did that to me. I miscarried. It was an incomplete miscarriage, but I didn’t realize that until I was reeling with fever from the infection. My landlady brought me to Dr. Greaves. He saved my life and took me in. I owe him a great deal.”

  Nell considered and swiftly rejected the notion of admitting to Viola the full extent of her relationship with Cyril Greaves. Gratitude had drawn her to his bed the first time, but after that it had been about other things—comfort, affection, their mutual loneliness. Although of different religions, they’d shared the same values, including a respect for the sanctity of marital vows—ironic, given that they were both married, albeit to spouses with whom they knew they would never again cohabit. During the three years they’d slept together, Nell had refused, on religious grounds, to let him use a French letter, despite which she had never conceived. She’d taken this as proof—they both had—that she’d been rendered barren by the infection that had ravaged her after the miscarriage.

  “I like Cyril,” Viola said.

  “He’s a very likable man.”

  “Duncan was convicted and sent to prison, I take it?”

  “For thirty years.”

  “I don’t suppose you’ve considered divorce. Even with the stigma, it strikes me as a more acceptable prospect than spending the rest of your life bound in wedlock to someone like that.”

  “When I was a practicing Catholic,” Nell said, “it was a futile option. The only reason to divorce Duncan would have been to remarry, and if I’d done that, I would have been excommunicated.”

  “But now?” Viola said.

  “I went to speak to Duncan last month. That was the purpose of my trip to the prison, the one Skinner wrote about. I told Duncan I wanted a divorce, and he flew into a rage. He says I’m all he’s got, and that a marriage in the Church can never be undone. He threatened to write to you and Mr. Hewitt and tell you about our marriage if I went forward with the divorce. I was afraid if he did that, Mr. Hewitt would insist on dismissing me even if you felt otherwise. In a choice between getting that divorce and losing Gracie... well, I had no choice.”

  “Right, well, it would appear that Mr. Skinner has beaten Duncan to the punch as regards the tell-all letter, and as you can see, your position with us is in no jeopardy.”

  “Only because you happened to see Skinner’s letter before Mr. Hewitt did. If Duncan writes, who’s to say—”

  “I shall make an effort to get to the mail before Mr. Hewitt does. It shouldn’t be too difficult, even after we return to Boston—he’s at India Wharf or the mill six days a week. So you see?” Viola spread her hands, smiling. “There’s nothing to stop you petitioning for a divorce, if that’s what you really want.”

  “It is,” she said. “Desperately. I know it’s a grueling and expensive process, but I’ll do whatever I have to do. And I’ve saved a good deal of money over the years. I’m hopeful it will be enough to—”

  “I’ll pay for it,” Viola said with a careless wave of her hand. “You shouldn’t have to—”

  “I’m paying for it, Mrs. Hewitt. It’s a kind offer, but I think you’ve done enough for me, and I have quite a bit saved up, almost five thousand dollars.”

  With a startled little laugh, Viola said, “How on earth did you manage to put away that much?”

  “Given that I don’t have to pay for housing or food, it really wasn’t very difficult. I’m not in the habit of spending money, so I just put it in the bank instead, and let it earn interest. Do you think five thousand will cover the legal fees?”

  “I should certainly hope so. As for it being a grueling process, you’re right, it can take a very long time and a great deal of effort—or not. Do you recall my friend Libby Wentworth from church? She was granted her divorce decree within days of filing the petition.”

  “Within days?”

  “It should come as no surprise to you that in the matter of divorce, as in so many other things, wealth and influence can go far toward smoothing the way. There are strings that can be pulled, corners that can be cut...”

  “Money that can change hands?”

  “Would you balk at that?”

  “No.” Nell had far too much at stake to indulge in such qualms.

  Viola said, “Libby was represented by our mutual friend Silas Mead. Silas is one of the most powerful lawyers in Boston. They call him The Magician. I seem to recall that he and his wife have expressed an interest in this area of the Cape, what with it becoming such a fashionable summer destination now that one can get here by train. Why don’t I invite them to spend this weekend with us? They can come down on the Friday train with August and Harry and Cecilia. I’ll ask Silas to be prepared to meet with the two of us on a confidential legal matter.”

  “That would be wonderful,” Nell said. “But if Mr. Hewitt were to find out why you invited them...”

  “Silas is nothing if not discreet. If I ask him not to mention it to Mr. Hewitt, he won’t. Meanwhile, I don’t want you fretting about all this. You’ve lost your brother. That’s enough of a burden. And I want you taking care of yourself. You’ve been looking so wan lately, and I know it’s not just the heat. I think it’s because you haven’t been eating enough. I know you can’t be trying to lose weight, a slender thing like you.”

  “Hardly. I just haven’t had much of an appetite lately.”

  “That can happen in the summer.”

  Or in the initial weeks of pregnancy, thought Nell.

  * * *

  Eleven days, she mused as she washed off the bay water in the big bathroom down the hall from her third-floor bedroom. Eleven days since her monthly courses were due; it was the first time in the fourteen years she’d been getting them that they hadn’t arrived with clockwork predictability. She’d been getting funny little twinges in her abdomen, too, and her breasts were oddly sensitive.

  Laying her head back against the lip of the bathtub and closing her eyes, she cradled her lower belly with both hands, picturing the tiny, curled-up baby within—Will’s baby, planted there on the eve of his departure for France. Nell had always longed for a child of her own, ever since she was
very young. For the past ten years, she’d assumed she could never conceive. Had she thought it possible, she would have let Will “take measures to protect her,” as he had suggested that night, such measures being less distasteful to her now that she was moving away from Catholicism.

  On the one hand, this pregnancy was a godsend; on the other, a disaster. Once Nell started showing, she would be ruined. As sympathetic as Viola might be, the notion of a woman carrying an illegitimate child having the care of a young girl was unthinkable. A chambermaid like Annie McIntyre, who could be kept away from public view while her inconvenient pregnancy came to term, was one thing, a governess quite another. Mr. Hewitt and society at large would be outraged.

  Nell’s only hope, assuming she could secure a divorce, and quickly, was a hasty marriage. If Will were here, she had little doubt that he would offer to do the right thing. Even when he was at his lowest, with opium seething in his veins and a nihilistic disinterest in whether he lived or died, William Hewitt had always been a gentleman with a gentleman’s instincts, especially as regarded women. Although, as Will’s wife, Nell would no longer be Gracie’s governess, she would be married to Gracie’s father; Viola would be her mother-in-law. She would have as much access to the child as she liked. And she would have retained her precious, hard won reputation.

  It would remain to be seen, of course, how satisfying she would find such a marriage. Would Will stop gambling and roaming and settle down? Could he settle down?

  Such speculation was, of course, purely academic, given that Will wasn’t here. He was very far away and completely incommunicado, with no plans to return to Boston any time soon. Even if the divorce came through, Nell was likely to end up ruined. It was a crushing dilemma, and one for which she had no solution.

  Don’t surrender to this, she counseled herself for the hundredth time since realizing she was with child. You can’t help yourself—or your baby—if you let this situation overwhelm you.

  Nell finished her bath and dried off. As she was buttoning her dressing gown, her gaze lit on the miniature clawfoot porcelain bathtub where the Hewitt boys had been bathed when they were infants, and where Nell had bathed Gracie her initial summer here at Falconwood after she’d been appointed the child’s governess. Nell had gasped with delight the first time she’d seen that darling little tub. Of all the luxurious trappings at Falconwood, it had been, and still was, her favorite. How excited little Gracie used to get when it was bath time; how she used to coo and splash and shriek with laughter. Nell used to imagine having her own baby, and a tub like that in which to bathe him.