Louisa and the Missing Heiress (25 page)

“Are you still reading your books about California? I don’t see them here,” I said when I felt due praise had been rendered.

“What’s the point?” Queenie stared out the dirty, curtainless window at the swirling gray fog. “I can’t even afford the coach to Worcester, and I can’t walk to San Francisco, can I?”

“Don’t give up, Queenie. I haven’t. We’ll find a solution,” I said.

But Queenie only stared out the window and stroked her baby’s head.

By the time I arrived at Edgar Brownly’s studio, I was very determined. Too many things needed to be set to rights.

The fog had reached the consistency and color of burned pea soup, for the chill had turned to outright cold, and the thousands of chimneys in the city were sending up a fresh allowance of soot and smoke that, encountering the heavier wet mist, simply fell back down to earth.

By the Customs House the fog was especially thick, for there it combined with the salty mist of the bay, and for that I was thankful, I admitted later, for it rendered me just another vague moving object in the false twilight. The sailors leaning in the tavern doorways did not bother with their usual catcalls and whistles. The foghorn boomed and the harbor cats skittered over the cobbles and yowled. Bells clanged from the masts of rocking boats.

The same old landlady who had opened the door to me a week earlier now opened it again and smirked unpleasantly at me.

“Come to see ’im again, have you?” She cackled. “You young women are all alike. Them high-buttoned blouses don’t fool me.” She opened the door and allowed me into the hallway.

“Is Mr. Brownly at home?”

“Went out for grub. Back in a minute, I suppose. There.” She pointed into a deeper shadow. “You remember where the stairs are. I’m not walking up there with you. My knees are something bad, you know.”

No gas lamps had been lighted here; the landlady would not waste money on illumination during day hours, no matter how dark the day. The hall was all shadow and fog, for broken windows had allowed the outdoor climate to migrate indoors. The windows had not been broken during my first visit, I thought. There had been some violence here.

“I remember the way,” I told the muttering landlady. “There’s no need to accompany me. Thank you.” I gave the woman a nickel and began a slow, cautious climb upstairs to the top floor. The railing was slick with grease, the stairs littered with paper and bottles and now leaves, which had come in through the broken windows.

As the landlady had said, he was not in, but he had left his door open. That indicated he was expecting someone, and it was not I. Nevertheless, I decided to take the risk and enter and wait.

The room was as I had remembered. Canvases leaned against the walls in wild disarray, rectangles of all sizes and shapes jutting their corners at each other with no little hostility. One unfinished canvas, still on its easel and covered with a cloth, occupied the center of the room.

I lifted that cloth, and Katya Mendosa, dressed—or somewhat dressed, since the garments were few and brief—as a gypsy dancer gazed back at me. The actress’s eyes were narrowed, her mouth pouting. She looked on the verge of a complaint. It was most lifelike. While the canvases were of dubious taste, their execution displayed talent; how Mr. Brownly must have resented it when his little sister was taken to Europe to tour the galleries, and not he.

I replaced the cover and continued my inspection.

The studio, I noted now, was more prosperous than the building. Brownly had brought in a second velvet sofa and positioned it under the window since my last visit. Perhaps he, too, was already making use of Dorothy’s allowance. He had also installed a polished table with a good embroidered cloth on it, a liquor cabinet, and a big copper coal scuttle. A folding screen modestly kept from view the chamber pot and washbasin in the corner. There was a “maid’s box” next to the fireplace, with the brushes and blacklead used to tidy up hearths, so I knew that Brownly also had a woman come in for the cleaning. His taste for artistic deprivation went only so far, it would seem.

The charwoman probably came in the morning to mop and dust and lay the fire for the day, since the Brownly heir slept at home and would not need a fire in the evening.
For the most part,
I added to myself.

Carefully, moving the paintings as little as possible, I began my cautious search through them, tilting canvas-stretched frames this way and that until I again discovered the painting of Queenie. This I pulled out of its pile and leaned against an empty spot of wall. I sat gingerly on the sofa opposite it, and considered.

Queenie stared back at me out of huge, lustrous green eyes. Her bristling black hair fell partially over her shoulders, and aside from that avalanche of hair, she was as naked as the day she was born. The child—she was barely fourteen when this was painted, I estimated—reclined languorously on a sofa, the same sofa on which I now sat. Brownly had outfitted her with a ruby ring and many strands of pearls around her slender neck. Probably his mother’s. How had Queenie, a child of the streets, felt wearing those jewels, reclining on that sofa . . . and wearing nothing else? How, for that matter, had Mr. Brownly convinced her to pose so? Money alone wouldn’t be enough, not for Queenie, who, while she struggled to give birth to her first child, had still clutched a blanket modestly over her belly and legs.

I felt my eyes narrow, my jaw grow tense. I looked very closely at the painting, nose-to-nose. The pupils of Queenie’s eyes were dilated. Her fingers were loosely curled as if she half slept, despite those wide-open eyes, and the tilt of her head also suggested sleepiness. Laudanum. Brownly had given her opium.

I heard footsteps then, and, leaving the painting where it was, I sat back down, this time in the chair by the table, not on the sofa. As upset as I was, I remembered that ladies, if caught alone in a room with a gentleman, never sit on the sofa, since that could be construed as an invitation to intimacy. Of course, I wasn’t really alone with a gentleman; I was alone with Edgar Brownly, the child seducer, the drugger of women . . . the murderer?

He fumbled with the unlocked door and finally kicked it open. His red moon face was obscured by an armload of groceries, bottles and loaves of bread sticking out of net bags, so he did not see me at first. He was humming a tune from
Girl of the Golden West
.

Stooping with apparent effort and exhaling the sound that sails make when the wind suddenly abandons them, he placed his parcels on a side table. He stood, removed his hat, and turned around. He saw me sitting there, waiting, watching.

He sputtered with dismay for a few moments before finally being able to pronounce, “Miss Alcott! What in blazes are you doing here?”

“The door was open, and the landlady said I might come in,” I answered mildly. “I was hoping we might talk for a few moments.”

“Most inconvenient!” He turned in a circle the way street dogs do when they have been cornered and have no escape. He could not very well flee his own loft, however, so he decided to take off his greatcoat, hang it on the oak coat tree from whence also dangled an umbrella and his painting smock, and brave the lioness in his own den.

“You are . . . you are not a lady,” he sputtered, taking some time to come up with even that mild insult. “You . . . you . . . are masculine in your thinking!” And he meant that as a great insult, indeed, though I could not take it as such.

He sputtered and ineffectually insulted me for several more minutes, scratched his head, started to say things and then paused before words formed themselves, and finally sat on the sofa, looking as if he would weep with frustration.

“I will be gone in just a few minutes,” I said firmly. “But I do wish to speak with you about Dorothy.”

“Dorothy.” He pouted. “It is always about Dorothy. It has always been about Dorothy. Will she never stop plaguing me?”

“Mr. Brownly, your sister is dead. Surely she can bother you no longer.”

His pout disappeared. “Humph. Yes, of course. I mean, we grieve for her; we all do.”

“Was there ill will between you and Dorothy? Sisters can be a nuisance,” I commented in my gentlest voice.

Slow as he was, Edgar Brownly was beginning to follow my line of thinking. “Ill will? No. Of course not. At least, no more than naturally occurs between an older brother who is saddled with the responsibility of overseeing a family of females, and the much younger sister who refuses to take on any responsibility at all. I love my sisters, Miss Alcott. All of them. I have dedicated my life to their well-being.”

“Of course you have,” I agreed. “Your mother must be quite proud of you, and grateful, I suspect, for your . . . sacrifices. I see a little spirit stove over there, Mr. Brownly. Could I make you a cup of tea? It is such a damp day.”

To myself, I invoked a little prayer to Abba, asking for guidance from the woman whose insights into human nature had already taught me so much. What would encourage Edgar Brownly to talk openly? Temper could make him forget his manners and his aloofness. Most liable to stir his temper: that perpetual, deep rivalry between brother and sister, that dire competition for a mother’s love.

“Tea would be welcome, Miss Alcott. Thank you . . . Mother. Grateful. I suppose.” And he made a little snort, the way children do when they wish for a box of toy soldiers for Christmas and receive instead a book of improving sermons.

I fussed with the spirit stove, lighting it and fetching a kettle of water from the large tapped barrel in the corner where Mr. Brownly washed his brushes. I poured Darjeeling into a Limoges pot and waited for the water to simmer, hoping that as the water came to a boil so would the Brownly heir. If he had murdered Dorothy, even accidentally, perhaps I could hasten the process by which he would arrive at a need to confess, or at least talk to someone about his relationship with her. My eyes swept over the dresser top, where Edgar kept the tea things. There was a tin of marzipan there. Slowly, as if it might bite, I picked up the tin and examined it. It was a duplicate of the box of bonbons that Dorothy had purchased for me.

When the tea was ready I poured in quantites of sugar and brought the cup to Mr. Brownly.

“There,” I said gently. “There. Drink your tea, and tell me about it.”

“She’s never been truly grateful, you know,” he said, pouting again. “Mother, I mean. She takes me for granted. Everything I do for her, for Edith and Sarah.”

“For Dorothy, when she was alive,” I prompted.

“Dorothy didn’t know the meaning of the word
gratitude
. She was the baby of the family for such a long time, so spoiled . . . until Agnes came. Dorothy cared nothing for family name, for position. She was the worst of the lot. Oops.” He smiled mischievously. “There I go again. Speaking ill of the dead.”

“I understand,” I whispered. I reached over to pat his hand, just as mothers do with children who have been told they will not be taken out to play that day.

And just at that moment, Katya Mendosa arrived.

As had Mr. Brownly, Mendosa carried armloads of provisions: little net bags of muffins and biscuits, a cake in a white box, a wheel of cheese. Unlike Mr. Brownly, instead of carefully depositing her burden on the nearby table, she opened her arms and simply let them fall to the floor when she saw me.

The noise they made was somewhere between that of a small avalanche and the impact of a milk cart into a brick fence. Custard cream from a zuppa inglese seeped out of the crumpled box and onto the bare floor; the cheese bounced into the corner.

“You!” Katya Mendosa shrieked, her eyes blazing to where my hand rested consolingly on Mr. Brownly’s. “You haunt me!”

“Good afternoon, Miss Mendosa,” said I, hastily removing my hand.

“Now, now,” said Mr. Brownly, rising and moving away from this raging object of his affections. “Now, now, Katya . . .”

“Don’t you ‘Katya’ me, you two-timing good-for-nothing.”

Miss Mendosa spent several moments delivering herself of a loud speech, which did little for Mr. Brownly’s peace of mind. Nor, for that matter, did it much enhance my esteem to hear myself called man-stealer, slut, and other titles from the pulp press, some of which I had used in my own blood-and-thunder stories.

My ears burning, I stayed in my chair, trying to assess the situation. It was no small task, as the noise level had risen considerably with Mendosa’s arrival. As a woman of no little logic and common sense, I was tempted to obey my instincts and flee, for there was a scent of violence in the air as strong as Katya Mendosa’s abundantly used attar of roses scent. However, as Dorothy’s friend, I knew I must stay and endure. Words were all I had to solve this mystery of what had happened to Dorothy, so words I would hear. And there was that tin of French marzipan sitting on Edgar Brownly’s dresser. I would brave the storm and stay.

Katya’s jealous-woman tirade that had begun with a melodic though thick Spanish accent took a detour somewhere in the middle, lost its soft consonants and lyrical dipthongs, and became a shrill accent that I soon recognized. It sounded like the strident voice of Mrs. Dougal’s washerwoman, who had been born in County Mayo. The exotic Katya Mendosa was an Irishwoman.

It took a full ten minutes for the diva to exhaust herself. When the shouting stopped Miss Mendosa plopped onto the sofa, wiped her perspiring brow, and began to weep.

“You see how he treats me,” she complained to me. “Not a word from him. Silent as a stone, and just as affectionate.”

I did not think it wise to point out that he had not had a chance to speak, had in fact been shouted down several times when he did try to speak. Mr. Brownly was, at that moment, on his hands and knees, fetching pieces of cheese and rolls from the floor.

“My dear, of course I am all yours, but . . .” he began, and could not finish.

La Mendosa picked up a vase and flung it at the closest glazed window. The room filled with the sound of tinkling glass falling onto the cobbles below.