Louisa and the Missing Heiress (17 page)

“You are a clever girl. More clever than you realize,” I told Sylvia.

“So you think our Dorothy had a broken heart, Louisa? And yet she married Preston. Hmmm. Another motive.”

“And what is that, Sylvia?”

“Jealousy. Preston found out that she had had an earlier romance.”

I considered Sylvia and patiently said, “Perhaps his mistress can tell us more.”

“Oh, Preston is a cad. To throw wonderful Dottie away for . . . for a woman like Katya Mendosa. Do you think he meant to abandon Dottie? But then he would lose her allowance. Murder does seem a solution,” Sylvia said with renewed concern.

“No,” I said emphatically. I had studied with great care the voluminous literature on the question of marriage. It seemed harder to find a novel that did not contain a mistress than one that did. “Often when a married man takes a mistress he creates a kind of equilibrium in his life. One woman supplies the heirs, the domestic comfort. The other supplies . . . adventure, I suppose. He grows dependent on both, as if he needs two women to create a whole. No, to my mind the mistress does not provide additional motive. But even so, it will turn a jury against him. As common as affairs of that nature are, society plays deaf and dumb to the erring husband only as long as that husband errs in private. Once it is a public matter—and Mr. Wortham’s face has been on the front page for several days now—once it is public, society has no choice but to disavow and punish the culprit. Though it seems to me that hanging a man for infidelity may be extreme.”

Sylvia sniffed. “It seems modern husbands have adopted a fashion of murdering their wives. I suspect you share my views and that you are also planning to be a spinster!”

“For a while at least,” I agreed. “Perhaps a long while. How can one raise children and care for a home and husband, and write books? Of course, there’s always Miss Alfreda Thorney to remind one of the miseries of spinsterhood. There must be a third way, Sylvia. A woman must be independent of others and learn to provide for herself.”

“There’s the rub. Are we all to go into service to earn our keep?”

I groaned. “Never again, anything but that!”

“We will find other ways,” Sylvia promised.

I gave her a strong hug, though she was not prone to such shows of affection. “But now, my dear Sylvia, I must return home. I’ve left the schoolchildren alone with Abba far too long and they will exhaust her.”

We turned back, arm in arm, and passed the Smokers’ Circle one last time. The man I had studied glared at us, and I realized his interest had not been of a friendly nature.

“He recognizes me as Bronson Alcott’s daughter,” I said loudly enough for him and the rest of the Smokers’ Circle to hear. “And he himself is a despicable supporter of slavery. Afternoon, Mr. Crawford. The mill running at profit? Cheap cotton is good for the ledger, isn’t it? But not much longer, I hope.”

“Go home to your scrubbing and keep out of my way,” the man growled. “Cheeky abolitionists.” He flicked his cigarette to the ground and crushed it under his boot heel with a leer that suggested he wished abolitionists were similarly situated. The other men in the Smokers’ Circle moved away from him. Slavery was still the law of the land, but it was an increasingly unpopular law, in Boston, at least.

“I think what shocks me the most in this awful affair is discovering that Dorothy’s family owns Southern property and slaves,” I said, turning my back to him once again.

Sylvia tried to cheer me. “Can you imagine how Edgar Brownly must have bristled over her meddling in the finances? A woman not only discussing business, but insisting on having her way. Louy, I just had the strangest thought. Poor Preston has already lost two fortunes at his young age. His father’s when he was disinherited after that summer of debauchery, and Dorothy’s. He would have lost a third fortune, had Dottie lived and forced the sale of the plantation. Poor Preston,” Sylvia repeated, for one can feel a bit of sympathy for the wasted dreams even of a murderer. “What now, Louisa? What further questions do we ask, and of whom?”

I smiled and hummed a little.

“Will you come with me to the theater tonight, Sylvia? Katya Mendosa is singing the lead in
A Girl of the West
.”

ACCORDING TO THE popular press, Katya Mendosa had arrived in Boston three years earlier after a highly successful tour of the Western states that had rivaled, in publicity if not reviews, Jenny Lind’s first American tour. Miss Mendosa had been born in Seville, Spain, or Havana, Cuba, in 1832 or 1836, depending on her mood, and she had a dark, exotic beauty that sent young men swooning. What she did not have was a voice, and her engagements were typically short, but always played to full houses, since her gowns plunged lower than any other actress’s, and when she danced she contrived to keep her skirts above her knees for the entirety of the dance.

Sylvia had ascertained those details—and hurriedly whispered them to me as we entered the theater—from the various young men of her mother’s acquaintance who appeared at the family dinner table, often looking pale and sickly from too many “late evenings,” as they discreetly called them. One such young man in particular, she informed me, seemed especially well acquainted with the known facts of Miss Mendosa’s life—Johnnie Charles, heir of the Charles wagon-wheel-factory fortune.

Johnnie stood to inherit his father’s wealth, but those who knew him had long ago come to the realization that Johnnie most certainly would not inherit his father’s industriousness or cunning. Earlier that same evening he had sat at Sylvia’s table, his pale face floating among the candles like an apparition, his black evening clothes looking slightly rumpled and dusty so that one could in good conscience come to the conclusion that he had not yet changed from the previous evening’s party.

“So, Louisa, I gathered up my courage and simply asked Johnnie if he knew Miss Mendosa.”

“And?” I asked, wondering what the end of this story would be.

“He had had much too much to drink and appeared maudlin and sad when her name was mentioned. He had a faraway look in his eyes and he said again and again, almost as an entreaty, ‘Katya! Katya Mendosa.’ ”

“Well,” I said, hoping Sylvia would finish her story before the play began, but trying not to be too impatient, “what did he tell you about Miss Mendosa?”

“Of all things, he announced, ‘I know the vixen.’ Apparently Miss Mendosa, as they say, ‘stood him up’ last week for an engagement with another man.”

Next to me, my father shifted uncomfortably in his chair. I knew he disapproved of gossip and disliked being our chaperon, so I patted his arm reassuringly. Then I turned back to Sylvia and the matter at hand. “Who is her new beau?” I whispered.

“You already know. Edgar Brownly! I almost laughed, but then I remembered our visit to his studio and the paintings we found. But, Louisa, I must also tell you what Johnnie said to me about Preston.”

“What?” I asked, becoming convinced Sylvia was enjoying leading me on too much. This sort of storytelling, I thought, was more infuriating than amusing!

“Johnnie told me the men at the club had come round to Preston. When he first married Dot, they were convinced it was a match for money. But in the past few months, as Johnnie and the others came to know Preston, they realized he was tremendously in love with Dot. He was so taken with her the men realized it had to be a love match and money had nothing to do with it—they thought it was tragic that she died, as Preston would be a grief-stricken disaster without her.”

“I heard the same at the Athenaeum,” Father said, indicating that as much as he disapproved of gossip he could not resist it himself.

Dressed in an old-fashioned black cutaway coat and cravat, Father looked decidedly out of place in his music-hall chair, but he had been recruited as chaperon for the evening, since young women could not appear out at night without a male escort without losing their good names. I had persuaded him to serve that role, although he, the philosopher, claimed to loathe the theater. I thought it telling, however, that whenever Father arranged one of his schools, he always included singing and dancing in the curriculum.

I was flushed with excitement, and not just because I loved the theater and few other things in this world could bring me out of my grief like an evening on red plush chairs, before a stage, with the greenish limelight casting its strange shadows. The theater was filled with a dozen different perfumes and the tinkle of women’s clinking bracelets; there was a tension in the air as if a storm were brewing: a storm of passion onstage.

Tonight would be different from other theater nights, though. Tonight, after the performance, I might very well have an interview with the mistress of a murderer.

“Strange, though, about Mr. Wortham. And very, very sad,” I said in response to the reported gossip of that husband. His grief certainly had been hidden when I had seen him in jail. “So he had been talking at his club about how much he loved his wife. And then she died.”

“Would that count as a character testimony?” Sylvia asked.

“Depends on the jury, I suppose. One could assume one of two things. Either he loved Dorothy, as he claimed. Or he was speaking of his love for her, hoping a jury would accept club gossip as character testimony after . . .”

“After murdering her.” Sylvia sighed. “It is all such a confusing mess.”

“Be brave, Sylvia. We will unravel this.” And then three knocks sounded, the orchestra began playing the prelude with great gusto, and the curtain rose.

Seeing the notorious Katya Mendosa in costume and onstage was a revelation to us. Dropping a handkerchief for a certain young man to pick up and return was as flirtatious as a
bonne famille
young woman could be. But Katya Mendosa was not well-bred, unless one counted a biological inheritance that had endowed her with a strong chin, well-fleshed legs, and flashing black eyes. Her olive skin was smooth and sleek, her movements languid. She was the personification of animal magnetism as she tilted her head and winked, as she ran her hands over her arms and shoulders, embracing herself, as she kept her hips moving in circles as she walked, spinning a web with them. She wore a bodice and crinoline tied up with red bows, and nothing else, except I suspected she had padded her hair . . . and perhaps the bodice as well.

Her voice was thin and often false, striking midnote rather than on key. But few in the mostly male audience seemed to notice. She was a woman who stirred strong passions, and I jotted notes and descriptions during most of the performance. Miss Mendosa could well serve as a model and inspiration for some less acceptable female characters that would flesh out my blood-and-thunder stories.

Father appeared to sleep through most of the performance, but at select moments he would sit up in alarm, exclaim, “How large her feet are!” and then sink back into slumber, to the chagrin of various young men seated around us who were gazing anywhere but at Miss Mendosa’s red silk dancing slippers.

The operetta itself, thin as the diva’s voice, was a frothy confection of love and lust set someplace referred to simply as “the West,” though I whispered to Sylvia that they should have specified: Was it Montana, a free-soiler state; or Kansas, where slavery was supported? Not that abolition was confabulated; it was not. Instead, we were treated to various scenes of a somewhat potbellied cavalry officer alternately serenading Miss Mendosa under a balcony dubiously attached to the façade of a log cabin, or rescuing her from a handful of bandits and red-painted Indians wearing drooping feathers.

“Dreadful,” was my only comment, whispered a little loudly and often from behind my fan. It had once been my own ambition to appear onstage, till I realized that it would occupy too much time better spent on writing.

“Dreadful,” Sylvia agreed, leaning toward the stage with expectancy as one more dagger-armed bandit approached the fattish hero and shrieking heroine. It was not quite up to van Beethoven’s
Fidelio
or Wagner’s
The Flying Dutchman
. Yet what fun we had. Such is youth, I reflected, that it can mourn a dear friend, worry about a murderer, sit through four hours of staged rubbish, and have a wonderful time, because the evening is fine and there is hard cider and raisin cake at intermission.

The finale of this folksy opera culminated in a rather crowded scene of Indians (many of whom, killed in a previous scene, had miraculously risen from the dead), cowboys, cloth cows whose hindquarters did not move in unison with their front quarters, and the hero and heroine clasped in each other’s arms, singing of undying love. For some reason unknown to the audience, the stage manager had also decided to have a row of scantily clad girls waving Fourth of July sparklers parade through this melee. The audience stamped their feet with approval. Father sat stony faced, arms crossed over his chest.

When the last Indian had been shot, the last duet sung, and the applause had finally died away—and there was considerable applause, let there be no doubt about it; the theatergoing audience loved spectacle, and Miss Mendosa and her dancing Indians provided considerable spectacle—when the theater was quiet again, I rose from my seat and headed not for the exit but toward the curtained wing I knew would lead backstage, pulling Sylvia along after me.

I had enjoyed the show, but other matters now required my attention.

“Miss Mendosa is known for her temper,” I said. “Let’s see if her passion extends to the murder of rivals.”

It was difficult to think of Dorothy as anybody’s rival in anything but sweetness, and people did not compete over that quality, but Sylvia followed my thinking. If Preston had been mooning and boasting about how much he loved his wife, his former mistress might well grow impatient of such conversation and wish to do away with the topic of conversation.

“Is my company still needed?” Father complained, pulling his timepiece from his waistcoat pocket. His watch had ceased running some months ago, but he still used it to make a point. “I am not eager to make a backstage visit to this female.” People swirled around us, and it seemed that Father would end up backstage whether he wished to be or not, for it was difficult to break loose from that stream of humanity.