Murder in a mill town (31 page)

The caption read
The Late Mrs. Kimball as Lady Macbeth.

Late?
Taking a seat at the kitchen table—a slab of age-scarred pine that could seat all twenty of the Hewitt family’s servants at once, when required—Nell set down her coffee cup and unfolded the newspaper.

———

‘Life’s Drama’ Draws to a Tragic Close

For

Mrs. Virginia Kimball

———

Actress Found Shot to Death in Her Home

———

A Thrill of Horror Runs Through Boston

“You reading about that actress that got killed?” Peter, one of the Hewitts’ two young blue-liveried footmen, looked up from across the table, where he was working his way through a breakfast of cold ham, creamed chicken hash, and scones.

Nell held a finger to her lips and shot a glance toward the huge cookstove across the room, where little Gracie Hewitt stood on a stepstool to stir a pot of porridge under the supervision of Mrs. Waters, her Nana’s cook. The old bird had pitched a fit the first time Nell brought the child down to the kitchen before dawn to see how the breakfasts delivered to her nursery every morning were actually prepared. Family members didn’t mix with the household staff, and they certainly didn’t partake in household chores. It was only when Viola Hewitt herself intervened, decreeing that Gracie should be taught whatever Nell, as her nursery governess, deemed appropriate, that Mrs. Waters had grudgingly relented.

“That child is having far too much fun to pay us any mind.” Peter nodded toward the picture of Virginia Kimball. “You ever see her onstage?”

Nell shook her head as she contemplated the little line drawing. “I think she’s...I think she
was
retired.”

“I saw her in
Romeo and Juliet
when I was just a kid—not a regular performance, just a rehearsal, but they were wearing their costumes. Me and my cousin Liam, we sneaked into the Boston Theatre one afternoon and hid up in the dress circle, just to catch a glimpse of her in the flesh. We used to see her picture on playbills and the like. She was even more beautiful in person, if you can believe it, and she wasn’t any young chickabiddy back then. She must have been... Let’s see, this was the summer I turned eleven, so it was back in fifty-six, and the paper said she was forty-eight when she died, so...” His brow furrowed as he chewed over the math.

“She would have been thirty-five.” The artist who’d drawn Mrs. Kimball had captured a snap of electricity in her eyes...half madwoman, half seductress.

“About halfway through the rehearsal,” Peter continued, “I saw a little flicker of light in one of the boxes, like a match being struck. They’ve got these real fancy boxes with red velvet curtains, three levels of them, right there on the front part of the stage.”

“Proscenium boxes,” Nell said. They were the most luxurious boxes in the largest and most opulent theater in the city—maybe in the whole country. The top box on stage right was under subscription by the Hewitts.

“He’d lit a cigarette, the fella sitting in the box,” Peter said. “It was dark in there, but I could see his face every time he took a puff.” He grinned as he dunked a chunk of scone into his milky tea, a great shock of sandy hair falling into his eyes. “You’ll never guess who it was.”

“William Hewitt,” Nell said.

Peter looked up at her. “How’d you know?”

“Someone once told me Will had had a—”

“‘Will,’ is it?” Peter asked with a quizzical little quirk of his eyebrows.

“‘Dr. Hewitt,’ I meant. His mother calls him Will, so...” Nell hoped the warmth rising up her throat wouldn’t ignite into one of those scalding, tell-tale blushes, the bane of her existence. Thankfully, Peter was one of the few Hewitt retainers who actually considered her a friend; she mustn’t let herself slip like that in front of the others.

She said, “Someone once told me that Dr. Hewitt had had a brief...flirtation with Mrs. Kimball.” The eldest of the Hewitts’ four sons, Will had indulged in a weakness for actresses during his visits home from England, where he’d been brought up and educated. 

Peter chuckled as he cut a stack of ham slices into a pile of bite-sized pieces. “Looked like more than a ‘flirtation’ to me—on his part, at least. Looked to me like he was smitten but good. He had a bunch of white roses on the seat next to him—biggest bouquet I ever saw, just this mountain of flowers. And the look on his face while he watched her down there on that stage—you could tell he had it bad.”

“You knew who he was?” Nell asked. “You were just a boy. This was long before you came to work for the Hewitts, and back before the war, Dr. Hewitt only spent a few weeks out of every year in Boston. There were acquaintances of his parents who didn’t even know he existed.” Bizarre, considering the family’s position in Boston society, but Will had always nurtured a contempt for that world, and avoided it during his school holidays. And, too, he’d been at odds with the family patriarch, the venerable August Hewitt, since early childhood—hence his exile to England, where relatives had shunted the young firebrand from boarding school to boarding school, and finally to Oxford. It wasn’t until he took his fate in his own hands, defying his father to study medicine at the University of Edinburgh, that he began to feel as if he had a place in the world, a role, a purpose. Then came the war, and all that changed.

“Oh, I didn’t recognize him at the time,” Peter said, “but he stuck in my memory, what with that shiny black hair and those fine clothes, and...I don’t know. He had an air about him, the air of an older gentleman, a gentleman of the world, even though he couldn’t have been much more than” –Peter shrugged as he forked up some hash— “mid twenties?”

“He would have been twenty-one.”

“I remember thinking he looked like a young prince, except for the cigarette. I’d only ever seen ruffians and laborers smoke them—men like my pa and his mates. So, between his looks and the cigarette—oh, and that limey accent—I didn’t have any trouble recognizing him when I came to work here a few years later, even with him in his uniform.”

Will had returned to the states when war was declared to offer his medical services to the Union Army. Of the other three Hewitt sons, the next eldest, Robbie, was the only one to volunteer. Harry, the third son and as selfish a lout as ever drew a breath, had made excuses to stay home, and Martin was simply too young.

Viola Hewitt had once shown Nell a photograph taken of her two eldest sons after their enlistment in the Fortieth Massachusetts Mounted Infantry. Will and Robbie had struck dashing figures in their blue, brass-buttoned frock coats and slouch hats—especially the tall, angular Will, who wore an officer’s saber belted over a maroon sash, his status as a battle surgeon having earned him the rank of major. Robbie, who’d mustered in as a sergeant, had achieved a captaincy by February of ‘64, when both brothers were captured at the Battle of Olustee and condemned to the Confederacy’s notorious Andersonville prison camp—a hell on earth that claimed Robbie’s life and left Will grievously wounded, both in body and in soul.

“Miseeney, look!” Gracie clambered down from her stool with a bowl in her chubby little hands, feet tangling in her adult-sized apron as she scurried across the room. “I made it. It has waisins and honey in it. Twy it!”

Nell ate the offered spoonful with a great show of relish. “Oh, that’s really good, sweetie. That’s some of the best porridge I’ve ever had. You’re turning into quite the cook.” She reinforced the compliment with a hug, whereupon the child returned to her stool and Nell to her conversation.

“You noticed Dr. Hewitt’s accent?” she said. “Did he speak to you?”

Peter shook his head as he chewed. “Not to me—to her, after the rehearsal was over and they were practicing their curtain calls. He stood up and applauded and called out to her. ‘Brava, Mrs. Kimball, well done,’ something like that. Then he tossed the flowers down, and they landed right at her feet. I thought she’d pick them up, but she just smiled and said, ‘I prefer orchids, Doc. A clever boy like you might have found that out.’”

Nell winced, recalling what she’d been told about Will’s futile pursuit of Virginia Kimball—how there was an Italian count who’d bought her a house on Beacon Hill and the skeins of diamond necklaces that were her trademark. That hadn’t stopped her from teasing and tormenting Will until the count was due for a visit, whereupon she’d told the smitten young surgeon to “run off like a good boy and quit pestering me.”

Peter said, “The thing that surprised us, Liam and me, was that she had a little bit of a southern accent. When she was acting, she sounded real, you know, hoity-toity. Almost English, like. Anyway, she just left the roses where they were lying and swept offstage with her costume billowing and folks scrambling after her like a litter of puppies. And I thought, that fella might be a prince, but she’s a queen—and she knows it.”

“Yes, I imagine she did,” Nell murmured as she turned her attention to the newspaper article.

Mrs. Virginia Kimball, First Lady of the Boston Stage, has been wrenched from the world by an act of unspeakable violence. Yesterday at approximately 4 o’clock in the afternoon, Mr. Maximilian Thurston, a playwright of some note in this city, arrived at the Mt. Vernon St. home of Mrs. Kimball, his neighbor and longtime acquaintance, for the pot of tea which it was their daily custom to share at that hour. Upon knocking twice and receiving no answer, Mr. Thurston opened the door and called out, “Virginia! Are you home?” The fretful visitor searched the ground floor of the townhouse, and upon finding no one about, proceeded upstairs, only to encounter a scene of the most gruesome and lamentable nature.

Mrs. Kimball lay in the open doorway of her bedroom, the bodice of her walking dress soaked with blood. On the floor nearby rested a Remington pocket pistol, which Mr. Thurston recognized as belonging to the actress. Although mortally wounded, she yet retained the spark of life, enough so to clasp Mr. Thurston’s hand before expiring in his arms. He was to receive a second shock upon discovering, on the floor at the foot of Mrs. Kimball’s bed, the lifeless body of her young maid, Fiona Gannon, who had been shot in the head.

Already there are many rumors afloat relative to this tragic affair, which is perhaps to be expected, given the notoriety of the deceased and the circumstances of her demise. One such rumor, the veracity of which has yet to be determined, is that Miss Gannon was found clutching a number of her late mistress’s famous diamond necklaces. Parties have been dispatched by the authorities to the scene of the murder, and a coroner’s inquest will be held this afternoon, which will doubtless shed further light upon this sad affair.

Mrs. Kimball had no known next of kin, the details of her life prior to her arrival in this city some twenty years past being shrouded in mystery. For this reason, her personal attorney, Mr. Orville Pratt of Pratt and Thorpe, has taken on the melancholic duty of making his late client’s final arrangements. Mrs. Kimball is to be interred in Roxbury’s Forest Hills Cemetery following private funeral services at the Arlington Street Church tomorrow, the 3rd of June, at ten o’clock in the morning, the Reverend Dr. Ezra Gannett to officiate. It is Mr. Pratt’s intention to mark the grave with a handsome tombstone. He believes Mrs. Kimball to have been 48 years old at the time of her passing, although her precise age, like so many other details of her life, will doubtless remain a matter of speculation for some time.

“They’re burying her tomorrow?” Nell pushed the paper away from her, as if that would make it all less real, less horrible. “A bit hasty, isn’t it?”

“Maybe it’s a Unitarian thing,” Peter said as he wiped up the last of his hash with a chunk of scone. “That’s a Unitarian church they’re holding her funeral at.”

All Nell knew about Unitarianism was that staunchly devout August Hewitt was in the habit of accusing his youngest son, Martin, a Harvard divinity student, of leanings in that direction. So opposed was Mr. Hewitt to any whiff of liberality in his Sunday services that he’d recently severed his relationship with King’s Chapel, which he and Viola had attended for some thirty-two years, in favor of the resolutely Congregationalist Park Street Church. His wife’s continued allegiance to the nominally Episcopalian King’s Chapel, which he considered “secretly Unitarian,” rankled him—it didn’t look right, he said, for a couple of their standing to attend different churches—but Viola Hewitt had always made her own decisions, and that wasn’t about to change any time soon. For Nell, who’d never been able to sort out the differences between the various Protestant denominations, the rift was perplexing at best.

“It just strikes me as a little unseemly to hold a funeral two days after the death,” she said. “There’s hardly any time to notify the people who knew her, let them know what happened and when the funeral will be held so they can pay their last respects.”

A grunt of laughter drew Nell’s attention to the service stairs, which Peter’s fellow footman, the darker, heavier Dennis, was descending. “You really think anyone in this town would want to be seen paying their last respects to the likes of her?”

Following Dennis down the stairs was the parlormaid Mary Agnes Dolan, busily tucking her great froth of red hair—wild as spun copper—into her white ruffled maid’s cap. She and Dennis grabbed plates and set about filling them up at the cookstove.