A Private Hotel for Gentle Ladies (7 page)

“I have no interest in meeting the lady whose dog is whelping,” said Charlotte.

“I’m not surprised. I have a great favor to ask of you,” said Harry Alcorn.

“I have no interest in being taken home.”

“That would not be the favor.”

The little maid had not come back. Should Charlotte find it alarming to be alone behind a closed door with a man she hardly knew? She did not feel alarmed.

She said, “If you would like me to try my hand at changing the climate, as I’m told there was a storm and much snow, I warn you, I may try, but I should probably fail.”

He was somber, serious. “What I would ask you for, you can succeed at, Mrs. Heath. There is a man downstairs who would like to interview a guest of mine. It is you who came to mind. You’re asked to do nothing but answer his questions honestly unless—and I apologize for the need to appear as if I insult you—you sense that the course of his questions would require you to be, shall I say, in aid of myself, circumspective.”

“Circumspective,” said Charlotte. She felt about twenty years younger, as if that were what she really was like inside, as if she were stunted, as if she were being asked again by Miss Georgeson to spell a word she was bound to get wrong. To her horror—and she gave herself no credit for having just woken up, and for everything else that had happened to her since yesterday—she could not think what circumspective could possibly mean. I am a woman of more than thirty! she thought quickly. More than thirty! This was something she’d done all her life, as taught by Miss Georgeson: whenever you doubt yourself, say your age, remind yourself of your age, and then
be
it.

Funny she should remember that and not the prayers.

“Are you asking me to have a conversation with someone that may include a lie?” said Charlotte.

“Not a lie, exactly.”

“Why, if you can tell me?”

“As a favor.”

“I’m not insulted. And who would the man be?”

“It would be,” said Harry slowly, “a member of the Boston Police.”

She held her breath for an instant to make sure he wasn’t joking. He wasn’t.

“But the maid told me, Mr. Alcorn, there’d be no one going outside today, absolutely no one, almost.”

“He walked here.”

Oh, no! Her heart thudded hard in her chest. Had he been sent by a Heath? Had Aunt Lily sent him, as preposterous as that seemed? Well, she’d not been in a good mood.

And what about Mrs. Petty? Had she bundled herself up to go out in the snow, as much as she hated snow, to a police station, bursting in to say, “Go pick up Mrs. Heath and take her into custody?”

Had she been tracked down like a criminal? Would she be placed under arrest? Could a husband have his wife arrested? Could his mother, could his father? Desertion, they called it.

This was the favor? To go quietly into custody? Politely, even?

“This is of no concern to your own situation,” said Harry. He seemed to be reading her thoughts, or maybe he’d expected her to be worried personally, given the way she’d arrived. “It’s not my business why you would have chosen to leave your home.”

“Someone who would ask another for circumspection,” she said, “might not be counted on to be entirely truthful himself. I say so as only a fact.”

“I would like to have your trust, Mrs. Heath.”

“I don’t give it lightly.”

“And you should not. It’s strictly a hotel matter.”

Charlotte looked him directly in the eyes. He had said last night he’d be her friend. She had not taken that lightly, either.

What choice did she have? It would probably be better, whatever it was, than sledding back home in the snow with a woman who was likely to be one of those matrons her mother-in-law was always planning charitable affairs with, women who wore enormous hats with flowers and feathers, and corsets of whalebone, and bustles too, and hothouse flowers in their bosoms, and belonged to organizations like Ladies Against Suffrage, because they believed that women who went to college and had money should not waste their time on things like voting, when it was better to simply tell your husband what ballot to cast and devote your attentions to the Poor, and the Temperance Movement, and Ills of Society in General. They were always talking about these things in capital letters. It would make sense that the behind-the-scenes Mrs. Moberly, as generous as she might have been to offer a ride—no, to command it—would be exactly such a person. She was probably a friend of her mother-in-law, who knew everyone.

And so Charlotte made up her mind. “May I have something to eat first, and some tea?”

“But of course. The detective inspector is in the front sitting room, and I will have a tray brought there for you, at once.”

“Then excuse me for a moment and let me brush my hair, Mr. Alcorn.”

He moved to open the door, shaking his head. “There is no time. I’ve kept him waiting long enough, and Moaxley is hovering down there, quite near him, which, I assure you, is not a wise idea for too long, as Moaxley in his very person invites suspicion, not that he was ever in trouble with the law, not seriously.”

“What sort of interview will this be?”

“Oh, general. I expect he will ask you general things.”

“Because something is under suspicion?” She tried to think what. There was an innkeeper outside town, a friend of her father-in-law, who was under suspicion with some sort of investigators, due to some type of financial fraud. Was it something like that? Her father-in-law had testified in court as a character voucher. Maybe it was something like that, or something in the building. A restaurant Hays had told her about had been in trouble for failing to pay the men who put in their electricity. The Beechmont had not been wired, but it could have been something similar.

Another thought struck her. Oh, no! The antimony! The Gersons! Had they been
caught
? She was one of the conspirators! She’d been seen in the bakery sleigh! Had the criminal cooking pots floated up to the top of the pond? Had someone found them?

No, wait, the pond was frozen. The case was closed. It was the Colonel’s case anyway, not Boston’s. This was Boston.

“I’ve only been here the one night,” she said, “and late at that, and we can’t forget I was brought upstairs in such a way that, I’m not embarrassed to remind you, I do not even know.”

“Moaxley carried you.”

“I’ll remember to thank him. But I would like your promise that no one else needs to know about that.”

“We’ve already forgotten it. You’re thought to have walked up the stairs in the normal manner, I assure you.”

“All right, then.”

“I’m in your debt, Mrs. Heath.”

Charlotte felt a rising, wonderful sort of tension, a wonderful clenching. It had been so very long since her body felt taut like this, taut and excited, all though her, the way it felt out riding, in that exquisite, grand moment when a fallen tree must be suddenly hurdled, or a stream must be jumped, as both her horses hated putting their legs into water, especially when it was cold, and would rather, like her, go airborne. She allowed Harry to see the full expression of her face as she took his arm. A detective inspector!

They went out in the hall, into a hush that was deep and enveloping and would have been eerie if she didn’t have more than thirty years of winters behind her. She recognized the feel of the inside of a house waiting out a blizzard, hunkered down in a great deal of snow. The gas lamps were on with a glow that was much more yellow than usual.

No one was about. The doors were all closed, eight rooms to a floor. Her mother-in-law had told her that the way to distinguish a house of real distinction from a house that would only pretend to have it was to look at the staircases of the upper floors—that is, in a private house—where invited guests wouldn’t venture. If they were only for show, the upper stairs would be narrow, uncarpeted, and of less-than-high-quality wood. This had once been a private house.

All the stairways were as wide and generous as what you saw when you first walked inside, and the pale green carpet looked hardly used, as if people walked on it with their shoes off. Hays had told her that when he’d traveled to Italy—before he married her—he’d seen palaces, three hundred years old, with interior staircases, all marble, built amazingly wide, in gentle, low-stepped inclinations, going up maybe ten or eleven stories, like marble steps a midget could walk with no effort, or a child, and these were for the horses. Why should a duke or a prince climb his stairs when he could ride? Servants had followed to clean up the droppings. “That’s vanity and laziness and corruption in its essence,” Hays had said.

His sympathies were with the servants, as if there weren’t any people in America who spent their whole lives going around picking up manure from other people’s animals. “Horseback inside!” He’d been shocked. She hadn’t told him how much she would have liked to try it, even though it would be very bad on the horses. Did they have a special type of shoe, to be able to handle the marble? Hays had laughed when she asked that question.

“Good morning, ma’am.” Moaxley, near the bottom landing, gave the impression of a man whose knees don’t quite unbend. He seemed always to be just in the act of standing up from a chair, which probably came from swelled, worn-out joints (like the head groom back home and the Irish maids’ father). This earned him Charlotte’s full, immediate sympathies.

“Thank you for seeing to it I got to my room last night, Mr. Moaxley.”

“My pleasure, ma’am.” Maybe if his nose weren’t so awkwardly misshapen, if his face didn’t look so fixed into a scowl, and if his eyes weren’t so pinkened in the whites—permanently, not just from a night of heavy drinking—he wouldn’t have seemed so daunting, like a gargoyle in the wall of a cathedral. He wasn’t wearing the dark cloak, just a simple house suit, ordinary. His upper body was barrellike, powerful, like a boxer’s.

“Small bit of slightly unfortunate weather, I would say.” He turned to Harry. Reporting on events was obviously something he did, hundreds of times a week, or even a day, automatically and naturally. “The lady with the pups on the way has left in spite of being warned against it, so I sent along that girl what we hired last month for the washroom and told her stay the night, or as long as the snow goes, and she’ll be fetched when we get to it, and she didn’t mind and thought it a holiday. The back way’s shut in with the drifting but the coal’ll hold up a couple days. Rooms’re all watered, they’ve all got their pitchers and washbowls, with what we had, and the gentleman with the questions—”

Moaxley casually pointed a thumb down the hall. His eyes narrowed. “Is getting fidgety, like.”

“Has he tried to wander around?” said Harry.

“Not a chance. Seems he’s playing by the book, so to speak. Official-like.”

“Then we’ll do the same.”

On the wall—Charlotte saw it in passing—was the framed photograph Mrs. Petty had mentioned in one of her letters, the former Mrs. Petty who’d been her friend. It was exactly as she had said, a wedding photo of a pale young Harry Alcorn, in white linen, against a blurry gray-white background, like fog or mist above a lake, and beside him was a bride in such a gauzy swirl of a gown, it seemed she wore nothing but a mixture of pure white smoke and fog and cloud. No corset; you could tell. The white silky wide-brimmed hat on her head obscured her face, as if casting shadows the camera hadn’t quite picked up.

“Lucy,” said Harry Alcorn. “My wife.”

“I should like to meet her.”

“She does not receive.”

Charlotte looked at him. “But I should like to, all the same.”

He only smiled, tightly, professionally. “I’ll be right out here in the hall,” said Moaxley quickly, “should you want me for any assistance.”

Charlotte paused, as this seemed a good enough time to be making requests of her host. “I would like to see Mrs. Petty’s children, as well.”

“They’re not here. But I’m sure we can arrange something.”

And stepping in front of her, Harry Alcorn opened the door of the sitting room, gave her a light pat on the arm, and saw her into a small room with white walls filled with pictures—the same sort of watercolors as her room upstairs—boats, wagons, a trolley car, a goat cart, a sled propped up against a barn with weeds growing all around it, a high-wheeled bicycle on its side in a dusty road, a baby’s perambulator in tall pale grass. Every one of them contained an astonishing stillness, an inertness; you had the idea that these were things that would never move again. The windows here were not quite as frost-coated as upstairs, but were dripping with melting ice, with heaps of snow piled up against them, and they seemed to be paintings, too. Charlotte wondered why it was that in the galleries and the Boston Museum she had never taken the trouble to look at pictures the way she found herself looking at these. It was the first time she had really paid attention.

So it took her eyes a moment to fix on the tall lanky man of about her own age who stood with his back to the fire, his legs outstretched, as if every fiber of his clothing and body had been soaked and partially frozen. He’d been preoccupied with warming his hands.

Their eyes met, and Charlotte cried, “Dickie! Oh, my! Dickie!”

“Charlotte Kemple! Why, hello, Charlotte, is it really you?”

“It’s Heath now.”

“Ah, so you married him.”

“I did. Dickie Lang! And they told me a police inspector was here! I think I’ve been played a joke on, but it’s lovely to see you.”

He came toward her, and she took hold of both his hands and squeezed them, and would have kissed his cheek if she hadn’t suddenly realized it might be inappropriate.

The last time she’d seen Dickie Lang he was fifteen years old and was being put into the back of a wagon to be transported to a hospital. “I’ve changed since you knew me, but not that much,” he said. He wore no uniform, he carried no weapon (that she could see), but she realized that he was very much an officer.

He’d been a factory boy, in a horrible, foul-smelling tannery, just down the road from Miss Georgeson’s, in the center of the Blackstone Valley, where the hills were lovely, the fields were wide, the creeks were frothy and lively, the river was mighty and beautiful, the waterfalls were strong and inspiring, the outlying woods were lush and almost magical, and all these things did not add up to one moment of pleasure if you were sent into one of the factories at the age of eight, and expected to remain there until you turned your face to a wall and stopped eating, at the age of sixty or seventy, and found it a blessing to get to die—which was pretty much the way he’d once put it to her.