The girl hastily withdrew and closed the doors behind her with an unseemly bang.
Mrs. Blackwell winced, then turned an obviously insincere smile on Sarah. “I didn’t know you were coming today, Mrs. Brandt.”
“I was in the neighborhood,” Sarah lied brazenly, somehow managing to tear her interested gaze from the young man. “I thought I’d stop in and check on you. You must be feeling very well, however. I was sure I’d cautioned you about getting up too soon, so I’m a little surprised to see you up and entertaining visitors.” She smiled expectantly at the young man, awaiting an introduction.
Had Mrs. Blackwell been more sophisticated, she would have known she could snub Sarah and send her on her way without that introduction. Sarah was, after all, just hired help and here without an invitation at that. But the young woman was either unfamiliar with the more subtle nuances of social etiquette, or she was simply too kind to snub someone who had been so helpful to her, no matter how annoying her presence might be at the moment.
Although she was plainly reluctant to do so, she said, “Mrs. Brandt, this is Mr. Dudley. He ... he’s an old friend of mine ... from home. Mrs. Brandt is my midwife,” she hastily added to Dudley.
“I’m very pleased to meet you, Mr. Dudley,” Sarah said, giving him her best smile.
He didn’t return it. He was still too flustered. If Mrs. Blackwell was unsophisticated, he was artless. He managed only to bob his head in acknowledgment. His face was still extremely red. Even redder than his hair.
“I’m sorry to have interrupted your reunion,” Sarah said. “You must have a lot to catch up on.” She should, of course, have offered to leave at this point, but instead, she sat down uninvited. Mrs. Blackwell apparently had no idea how to rid herself of an unwelcome guest, and Sarah was going to take shameless advantage of this to find out exactly who Mr. Dudley was and if he could possibly be responsible for the color of the Blackwell baby’s hair. “How long will you be in town, Mr. Dudley?” she asked innocently.
Dudley sat down beside Letitia again, but this time he left a respectable distance between them. “I ... well, that is...” He gave Letitia a desperate glance.
“Mr. Dudley actually lives in the city now,” she replied for him, her voice brittle with strain. “We ... that is, I ... I mean ...” This time she gave him a desperate glance.
“I saw the notice about Dr. Blackwell’s death,” he said too loudly, with the confidence of one who has, at just the right moment, invented the perfect excuse for something. “I thought it my duty to call on Letitia ... uh, Mrs. Blackwell. To express my condolences, that is.”
“How very kind of you,” Sarah assured him, pretending to believe his every word. “I’m sure Mrs. Blackwell appreciates seeing a familiar face at this sad time.”
“I know I shouldn’t have gotten up,” Letitia said anxiously, “but I felt I had to receive Mr. Dudley.”
“Of course you did,” Sarah said obligingly. “I know you’ll be very careful not to exert yourself too much for at least another week.”
“Is Mrs. Blackwell’s health in danger?” Dudley asked with a worried frown. “Because you may be assured I would never do anything to harm her.”
“I’m certain of that,” Sarah said with false sincerity. “Mrs. Blackwell is the best judge of how well she feels, and I’m sure she will feel better for having seen you, since you were such close friends. Tell me, Mr. Dudley, what brought you to the city?”
“I ... Well, I thought being here would be good for me,” he said uncertainly, glancing at Letitia once more, as if for guidance.
Plainly, there was more to the story.
“I suppose your family has a business here and wanted you to take your place in it,” she guessed, even though she’d already ascertained that he could not possibly be of the same social class as the Symingtons, unless he’d fallen on very hard times indeed. His clothes were cheap and ill-fitting, the crease in his pants betraying that they had been bought ready-made off a store shelf.
“Oh, no, I don’t ...” He glanced at Letitia again.
She finally took up the challenge. “Mr. Dudley is a very educated man, but the only suitable position he could find was as a schoolmaster until he came to the city,” she explained, giving him a reassuring smile. “Here he has a chance to better himself that he never had in a small country town.”
“He certainly does,” Sarah agreed, managing not to react to the word “schoolmaster.” As she had suspected from the moment she saw him, Mr. Dudley was Letitia’s former lover, and he was very clearly still involved with her. Sarah couldn’t wait to inform Malloy that she’d already found the redheaded father of Letitia’s child. And, of course, an excellent suspect in Dr. Blackwell’s murder. On the other hand, Dudley’s reappearance pretty well proved Mr. Symington hadn’t had Letitia’s lover killed, thereby eliminating a good reason to consider Letitia’s father as a suspect. She had so wanted him to be the killer. “What kind of employment have you found here, Mr. Dudley?”
“Oh, I’m just ... I’m a clerk at a bank at the moment,” he said.
“But he has excellent prospects,” Letitia quickly explained. The glance she gave him could only be called adoring.
Sarah tried to see what might have attracted her to Dudley in the first place. He was, as she had already noted, very ordinary looking. Unlike most redheads, he didn’t have freckles, which was one thing in his favor. But his skin was pale, almost pasty, and his eyes were a washed-out blue. His hair was striking in color, but he wore it slicked down against his head in an unflattering style. His arms and legs were long and bony, and he seemed not to know exactly what to do with them. Perhaps he was utterly charming when he hadn’t been caught by a stranger in his mistress’s parlor, but Sarah couldn’t imagine it. On the other hand, his very ingenuousness might have been what attracted Letitia, since most of the men of her class would have been overbearing and arrogant and probably overwhelming to a girl as retiring as she had probably been.
Sarah had been taught from birth how to conduct a meaningless and socially acceptable conversation, and she called upon those skills now. She chatted about the weather and the neighborhood and the city in general, asking Mr. Dudley what he thought about this or that, and of course he never had an opinion. Finally, she accomplished her mission, which was to make him understand that she wasn’t leaving before he did.
“I ... I suppose I should be going,” he said in defeat after what seemed an age to Sarah. Letitia looked stricken.
She glanced at Sarah, probably wishing her in Hades, but her social skills had not included training in how to handle someone as rudely determined as Sarah. “I ... I hope you’ll be able to call again soon,” she said to him at last, her eyes suspiciously moist.
“Oh, certainly,” he quickly assured her. “I...I’ll make a point of it.”
She gave him her hand. “Thank you for coming. It was so very nice to see you. To see a familiar face, that is,” she amended, remembering Sarah’s presence.
He had to swallow before he could say, “It was very nice to see you, too. I hope I haven’t hindered your recovery in any way.”
“Oh, no! In fact, I’m sure you’ve helped it tremendously!”
Sarah somehow managed not to choke. “It was lovely meeting you, Mr. Dudley,” she said in an effort to get him going. “Perhaps we’ll encounter each other again.”
“I ...I’d like that,” he said without conviction, releasing Letitia’s hand with obvious reluctance.
“I’ll ring for the maid to see you out,” Letitia said. “Mrs. Brandt, will you be leaving, too?” she added almost hopefully.
Sarah smiled serenely. “I’d like to speak with you privately, if you don’t mind. I need to find out how you’re feeling.”
Letitia frowned. She wasn’t very adept at concealing her true emotions, and now she wanted Sarah even farther away than Hades. They sat in uncomfortable silence until the maid appeared in the doorway, and Dudley took his leave again.
It was painful to watch the two of them unable to say what they wanted to say because of Sarah’s presence, but she steeled herself to the ordeal. When at last the door had closed behind him, she turned to Mrs. Blackwell.
“He seems like a very nice young man,” Sarah ventured, and Mrs. Blackwell burst into tears.
Sarah hurried to her side. “I was afraid that entertaining a visitor might be too much of a strain for you,” she said, searching for her handkerchief.
Before she could find it, Letitia pulled one from her sleeve and began to weep into it. “You don’t understand!” she insisted.
“Oh, I believe I do,” Sarah said. “You’ve known Mr. Dudley for several years, haven’t you?”
Letitia cried harder.
“You obviously care deeply for one another. Anyone could see it in the way you look at each other, which makes me suspect that Mr. Dudley was the young man with whom you attempted to elope the night you were injured.”
Letitia’s head came up. Her lovely eyes were full of unshed tears, but she had been shocked into horrified silence. “Who told you that?” she whispered.
“You know how servants gossip,” Sarah excused herself.
“They couldn’t ... He’s never been to the house before! They’ve never even set eyes on him!”
Sarah didn’t remind her that her maid had known him well. “But you have been seeing him elsewhere, haven’t you?”
“No! Certainly not! That would be immoral. I’m a married woman. I mean I
was!
I
was
a married woman. Now, of course, I’m a widow, and it’s perfectly proper for an old friend to call—”
“Mrs. Blackwell,” Sarah said, out of patience, “you don’t have to make excuses to me. I have no wish to judge you. But it’s obvious that you must have been seeing Mr. Dudley. He most certainly is the father of your child.”
She gasped in feigned outrage. “How can you even suggest such a thing? He couldn’t be. I haven’t seen him in years! You heard him, he only saw the notice of Edmund’s death in the paper and came to offer his condolences.”
Her porcelain cheeks were splotched with red now, and her eyes were wild. She wasn’t a pretty liar.
“I’m not the only one who will suspect that he’s the baby’s father,” Sarah said. “One look at your child ... I assume your father knows what Dudley looks like. He’ll guess immediately.”
This time Letitia practically wailed, sobbing uncontrollably into her now-soggy handkerchief.
Although she could not condone adultery, Sarah also couldn’t bear to see such misery, and Letitia was her patient. She took the weeping woman into her arms. “There now, there’s nothing you can do about the past. You can only do something about the future.”
This made Letitia cry even harder, but Sarah patted and soothed, and after a few moments, with no encouragement at all, Letitia began to bare her soul.
“We never meant for it to happen,” she insisted between sobs. “Peter left after the accident. My father had him discharged from his job, and he had no choice but to leave town. He found work here in the city, and we never saw each other again until ... until I was already married to Edmund.”
“That must have been a shock, seeing him again,” Sarah suggested tentatively, worried about saying the wrong thing and stopping the flow of confidences.
“He came ... he came to one of Edmund’s lectures. He’d seen my name on the poster, and he came to see me. Just to find out how I was,” Letitia added, and Sarah nodded her comprehension. “You have to understand, I was hurt when we ... You see, Peter and I eloped one night. I knew my father would never allow us to marry, so what else could we do? But my horse stumbled in the darkness, and I was horribly hurt.”
“So your father ran Peter out of town, and then Dr. Blackwell came to cure you,” Sarah said, hurrying the story along. She already knew this part.
“But Peter saw my name on the poster, and he just wanted to make sure I was well. He still loved me, you see, and he hadn’t been able to make any inquiries about me without drawing my father’s attention to him. He only wanted to make sure I had recovered!”
Sarah nodded again. “Of course he did.”
“When I saw him in the audience, I almost fainted. I could hardly finish my speech. He told me later that’s when he knew I still loved him. I was desperate to see him privately, but I had no idea how to find him. But I didn’t have to worry about that because he was able to find me.”
“I’m sure that wasn’t too difficult. Dr. Blackwell was famous.”
Letitia ignored the mention of her dead husband. “Peter sent me a note and asked me to meet him somewhere. He just wanted to talk to me, to find out if I had forgiven him. He’d felt so guilty for leaving me and for having caused my accident. Or at least he always blamed himself, even though it wasn’t really his fault.”
“And so you met him. Weren’t you worried about being seen?”
“Of course! That’s why we ...”
“Why you what?” Sarah asked when she hesitated.
“I couldn’t risk Edmund finding out, and it was the only place we could meet without being seen,” she said defensively.
“And where was that?”
“The ... Mr. Fong’s establishment,” she admitted reluctantly.
“An opium den?” Sarah asked in surprise.
“They’re very discreet,” Letitia insisted.
“I’m sure they are,” Sarah said.
“After that ...” Letitia began, but her voice broke again.
“I know you must have been very lonely and unhappy,” Sarah said, remembering what the nurse had told her. “I understand that Dr. Blackwell was very busy and was hardly ever at home.”
“It wasn’t that. He just never loved me,” she informed Sarah indignantly. “Not at all! He only married me so that I would have to keep speaking at his lectures.”
“He told you that?” Sarah asked in surprise.
“Not in so many words, but I’m not completely stupid. It was obvious. He never even ... after the first few months he didn’t ... I had my own room, you see, and he didn’t ever come to visit me ...”