The Widow of Rose House Page 2

  “Disgusting, isn’t it?” the younger Denton said, leaning across the table. Sam looked back in confusion, but it seemed the man was indeed addressing him.

  “What is?”

  “The Webster woman,” he said. “Should have stayed in Paris. They tolerate behavior like that over there, you know.”

  Sam frowned, wondering how important it was to try to catch the threads of this conversation or if he could simply ignore it and go back to looking at the woman in red. Just as he had decided to do so, Denton the elder joined in.

  “I’m sorry you’ve had to see that, gentlemen,” he said, but his eyes, glued on the woman they were apparently discussing, didn’t look sorry at all. They looked hungry. Sam’s frown deepened as he wondered whether his own expression looked like that.

  “Err, what’s this?” Henry asked, in his best cat-herding voice.

  “Mrs. Webster,” the son said. “Over there, in the red.”

  Henry looked over blankly. “Who?”

  “Surely you’ve heard of Alva Webster,” the old man said. “Even in Indiana—”

  “Ohio,” Henry said.

  “You must get the papers. She’s been plastered all over them for the last eighteen months, at least—”

  “Longer, I’d say—”

  “Orgies, affairs, all kinds of goings-on, and that was before her husband died. God knows what she’s been doing since. I heard—”

  “We don’t really have much time to read the newspapers,” Henry explained hurriedly, cutting Sam off before he could say anything and sending him a sideways look that aspired to be both stern and soothing. “Now about those municipal contracts—”

  “I heard she bought the de Boers’ old estate,” the son said, “the one up the river.”

  Denton senior paused in the midst of taking a drink, setting his glass back down and frowning. “Liefdehuis?”

  His son nodded. “Sounds like she means to stay in the States,” he said. “Who knows why. She can’t imagine anyone will acknowledge her.”

  “You’re acknowledging her enough right now,” Sam said.

  “What?” Denton junior said.

  “Right now. She’s all you can talk about. Seems to me you’re getting a fair amount of pleasure out of it, too.” He felt protective of the woman in red. She didn’t deserve to have the Dentons of the world salivating over her, no matter who she was.

  “Mr. Denton, the municipal contracts,” Henry said, smoothing over the jagged silence that followed.

  “Err, yes,” Denton the elder said, turning away from Sam in puzzlement. “We have excellent contacts in New York, Philadelphia—”

  “I heard it’s haunted,” Denton the younger said.

  Sam’s gathering indignation paused. “Haunted?”

  “Oh lord,” Henry muttered. “Mr. Denton, you were saying that you have business relationships in—”

  “Shh,” Sam said, flapping his hand in Henry’s general direction.

  Denton senior seemed to waver between wanting to focus on the money talk and wanting to tell a juicy story, and the juicy story won. “It’s a pretty gory tale, actually,” he said.

  Henry smiled brightly. “I really think we should finish talking about the contracts—”

  Sam stared Henry down and then nodded across the table. “Go on.”

  “Umm.” The old man looked at Henry again, his face confused. Henry sighed.

  “Professor Moore is very interested in folklore,” he said, apparently resigning himself. That wasn’t an accurate description at all, but it seemed to clear up Denton’s confusion, so Sam let it go.

  “Well, I don’t know all the details,” Denton began. “It was a bit before my time—although I’ll bet it’s hard for you youngsters to believe that there ever was a time before my time!”

  “Yes, yes,” Sam said. “The story.”

  “Well, the rumor is that sometime in the twenties—this was still when the de Boers owned the house, you understand—the family was having an enormous house party. At the time they were very well connected—of course, the next generation lost everything, had it all in Ohio Life, more fools they, but that wasn’t until ’57—so they invited the cream of New York society up to the house for the weekend. It was going to be the party of the decade.”

  He paused as their waiter set new drinks down on the table and made gentle inquiries about the state of the meal. Sam flipped his napkin over and started writing down the details of the story.

  Denton took a long draught of his whiskey. “Where was I?”

  “Party of the decade,” Sam repeated.

  “Right. So Friday night, after everyone had arrived and gathered downstairs for the opening party, suddenly they discover all the doors of the house have been locked. They’re trapped. They can’t get out.”

  “There being no windows on the entire floor,” Henry murmured into his glass of water. Sam scowled at him.

  “So they’re panicking, and before they know it, smoke starts to come down from the top floor, and a man appears, wielding an axe. Turns out he was a radical from one of the nearby towns and he’d gotten it into his head to behead the aristocracy, just like they did in France a few decades earlier.”

  He took another drink and set his glass down dramatically on the table. “Murdered three people that night,” he said. “Before the fire got him. The servants got the family out through the basement, see, and locked the doors behind them, so he was the one that was trapped. Burned himself alive, in the end. They say he walks the halls of Liefdehuis still, looking for more aristocrats to murder.”

  Sam nodded as he finished writing down the story. “Classic,” he said. “Follows a lot of traditional story points. A dead murderer, hungry for blood. Excellent.”

  “Wonderful,” Henry said. “What a delightful tale, Mr. Denton. Now that we’ve all had such a nice break, I wonder if we could turn back to—”

  “You said it’s this Mrs. Webster who owns the house?” Sam said, standing. “What a fortuitous circumstance.”

  “Yes,” the old man agreed. “Although no one’s kept it for more than—I say, Professor Moore—”

  Sam was already several strides away from the table by the time Henry caught up.

  “Sam, don’t do it. Not right now.”

  “But that doesn’t make any sense,” Sam pointed out, quite reasonably. Henry could be a little shortsighted from time to time, but his willingness to handle the entirety of the business and administrative tasks more than made up for that. “We’re here, she’s here, and she just bought a house with a surprisingly modern ghost story—when was the last time you heard one that originated in the last fifty years? It sounds like the perfect test case for my theories.”

  “A letter,” Henry said, leading him back to the table. “That’s the way to do it. A letter, introducing yourself, laying out your proposal, discussing how much you’d be willing to pay. You can’t accost the poor woman in the middle of a restaurant. It’s not done.”

  Sam looked at the woman again and was forced to admit his scientific theories about the afterlife were only half the reason he wanted to approach her. He was just preparing to acquiesce when she and her companion stood up from the table and turned to leave.

  “There,” he said, breaking away. “She’s not in the middle of the restaurant anymore.”

  He hurried after her.

  * * *

  Alva stood on the city sidewalk and sucked in a deep, triumphant gulp of air. The clock had just struck ten—the middle of the evening by New York City standards—and she was surrounded by elegantly dressed men escorting women dripping diamonds and rolled up tightly in furs. A few feet from her, the street was busy with carriages. She could smell the city: The damp fog, the sharp tang of refuse, the high floral notes of perfumed women. Horse dung.

  Had she missed it? She wasn’t sure, although she knew she missed the steep, tangled streets of Montmartre already. But it was America that held her future now, even as it held her past. For
a second her triumph was tempered by the remembrance of the thin envelope in her pocket, a few brief lines from her mother’s secretary, thanking her for her interest in visiting and regretting that Mrs. Rensselaer would be unable to see her. Alva knew her mother, likely even now sitting down to a stiff dinner with her husband and twelve of their closest friends fifty blocks away, did indeed feel regret. She just suspected it was about giving birth to her at all.

  The restaurant door opened behind her, and, recalled to the moment, she signaled to the boy hailing cabs to find her one.

  “Excuse me,” a deep voice said. “Mrs. Webster?”

  Oh, for heaven’s sake. Couldn’t she stand outside for one minute without some intrepid lothario assuming she must be waiting for him? In the less than seventy-two hours she’d been back in the States, she’d been propositioned eleven times. Twice by friends of her father’s.

  She glanced over her shoulder at the man, receiving an instant impression of big, though he stood mostly in the shadows. “I don’t know you,” she said, her voice flat. “Go home to your wife.”

  “But I don’t have a wife,” the man said. He took a hesitant step towards her, leaving the shadows, and her eyebrows lifted. He looked more like a laborer than a man finishing a dinner at Delmonico’s, for all he was dressed in a suit and tie. Sort of dressed, she amended; the suit looked like it had been made for someone two inches shorter and two inches narrower across the shoulders. “Do I need a wife to talk to you? Is it a chaperone sort of thing? I have a mother, but she’s in Ohio.”

  Alva blinked. “You’re not very good at this,” she observed. “I’m not a man, but I don’t think it’s standard behavior to invoke one’s mother at a time like this.”

  They stared at each other in puzzlement. He was attractive in the sort of way she’d always imagined the heroes of western folktales to be: tall, broad shouldered, with a strong nose and a square jaw. He could stand to add barber to the list of people he needed to see, though, the one that started with tailor. Actually, looking at the way his dark blond hair fell into his eyes, she thought he’d better have it start with barber and go from there.

  “There’s been a misunderstanding,” he said finally. “Perhaps if I introduce myself—my name is Professor Samuel Moore.”

  He held out his hand. She looked at it, looked up at him, and did not extend her own. Bafflingly, he smiled at her, as though she’d done something rather clever.

  Was he really a professor? He certainly didn’t look like one, not that it mattered, because she made it a policy, these days, never to talk to strange men—

  “A professor of what?” she heard herself saying, although she was pleased it at least came out with a nice air of sarcasm and disbelief.

  “This and that,” he said, still smiling. “Engineering, mostly.”

  She looked at his rumpled clothes. Yes, she could see that, one of those men who always had a tool in one hand and a grease can in the other. She didn’t know they were giving professorships out to men like that, but why not, after all? She was as appreciative of things like trains and working carriage wheels as the next person.

  And now she’d gone and encouraged him. Stupid. “I see,” she said as coldly as she could manage. “Well, I’m not interested, so I’ll wish you good evening.”

  “But how can you know if you’re not interested?” He shook his head in confusion, still smiling at her. The smile was … impressive. “I haven’t even explained my proposition, yet.”

  “I find that if you’ve heard one proposition, you’ve heard them all,” she replied. Stop talking to him, you idiot. “They’re not as unique as men would like to believe.”

  “But—who else has approached you? Was it Langley, from Yale?” His tone turned plaintive. “How did he hear about this before me?”

  “Langley—who?”

  “Piers Langley,” he said. “No? I can’t think of anyone else reputable—look here, if you’ve been approached by anyone from that quack Santa Fe institute you should know they’re absolute frauds.”

  “Institute?” Alva said faintly. “What on earth are you talking about?”

  “Your house, of course. I hadn’t realized I was so behind on the news.” His face fell—What must it be like to let all your emotions float freely on your face?—but he nodded gravely. “If it’s Langley, though, he’s an excellent researcher, and a decent human, too.”

  “It’s not Lang—what do you want with my house?” It was her turn to sound plaintive.

  “But that’s what—” He stared at her, his brows crunched together. “Oh god. I wasn’t—I wouldn’t—”

  To her astonishment, a distinct touch of pink appeared in his cheeks. He cleared his throat.

  “I beg your pardon, ma’am. Henry warned me—that is, I shouldn’t have; my proposition is not of an intimate nature.”

  “I’m coming to understand that,” she said.

  “You thought … do men … they must—good lord.”

  She began to feel in charity with this befuddled giant. “Indeed,” she said. “I quite agree. But I must ask again—what is it you want with Liefdehuis?”

  “To study it,” he said. “One of my personal interests is in metaphysical energies, you see, and from what I’ve heard, your house may prove a most interesting case. Your ghost story is so recent, you know. I hardly ever hear one claiming to be that new—”

  He broke off as she shook her head. “You almost had me convinced that you were unlike the majority of your sex,” she said. “And now I see you are. I’m just not sure insanity is much of an improvement.”

  To her surprise, he smiled again. “You’re not the only one who thinks so,” he said. The embarrassment had left his face; he was quite relaxed once more. A man who apologizes for a proposition and grins at an insult, Alva thought. Where did you come from, Professor Moore?

  “And I’ll admit there’s no conclusive evidence yet,” he continued, “but what I have collected looks extremely promising. Certainly promising enough to warrant extensive study.”

  A hint of cold pierced her thoughts. Firmly, she banished it.

  “You’re talking about ghosts,” she said.

  “Maybe,” he replied. “Or I could be studying some kind of alien intelligence that just happens to concentrate in areas corresponding to local folklore.”

  “Alien intelligence.”

  “Invisible alien intelligence,” he clarified. “At least invisible to the naked human eye. But ‘ghost’ is probably the easiest term.”

  “Really.”

  “People tend to go a bit strange when you talk to them about invisible alien intelligences,” he confided. “Which is odd, when you think about it, because why are the shades of one’s dead ancestors any less unsettling?”

  She found herself nodding before the rest of her wits caught up with her. “No,” she said, not because the word corresponded with any particular question, but because she had the feeling the only way to survive here was to stick to very black-and-white words. His nuances were both compelling and sticky. “I’m afraid I won’t give you access. I don’t believe in ghosts, and I’m about to start several months’ worth of building work.”

  “Don’t decide yet,” he begged. “I’m willing to pay you for the privilege, and I promise I won’t be in the way … although there is rather a lot of equipment, so I suppose—”

  The boy hailing cabs caught her eye and gestured as a hansom pulled up beside him.

  “That’s mine,” she said. “I’m sorry I can’t help you. Good evening.”

  “Wait!” he said. “I’ll—I’ll send you a letter. Henry said that was the way to do it—I’ll write you and explain more.”

  “It won’t help,” she said as the cab boy helped her into the carriage. “I’m sorry. Good-bye, Professor Moore.”

  Finally, he sighed acceptance and raised his hand. “Good evening, Mrs. Webster.”

  As the cab pulled away from the sidewalk, though, she looked back at him, to find him sta
ring after her with his hands shoved in his pockets and that apparently irrepressible grin back in place. An uncomfortable lightness expanded in her chest as she watched him standing head-and-shoulders taller than the passersby around him, looking back at her as though he would be perfectly happy never to look at anything else ever again.

  What couldn’t I get, if I could look at people like that? she thought, and settled grumpily back against her seat.

  CHAPTER TWO

  New York City, February 17, 1875

  Sam took one look at the tidy brownstone, with its immaculate steps and delicate lace curtains, and retreated to the bottom of the stairs to scrape his boots more carefully. The mud clung, so he shrugged and sat down on the first step to unlace them.

  His thoughts wandered to his most recent fascination: the scandalous Mrs. Webster. She hadn’t seemed particularly scandalous when he’d met her—she’d seemed smart, and strong, and … wary. He’d discovered why the next morning when he’d started into the newspaper archives at the Astor Library. He’d meant to focus on her house, but his curiosity about the woman had overwhelmed him, and it wasn’t as though she was hard to find.

  Two years ago, with no instigating incident Sam could find, Alva Webster had jumped from the society column of the Parisian papers (“Mr. and Mrs. Webster hosted several American friends at a select dinner party…”) to the pages of scandal sheets across Europe. Her name was dragged from salacious headline to salacious headline; thinly sourced stories about extravagant orgies and titillating affairs. Ten months later, her husband, whom she had not been living with at the time, had been murdered by ruffians in Monte Carlo. This poured oil onto an already roaring fire, and Mrs. Webster was promoted again, from scandal sheets to front page news. The papers had even breathlessly reported when she’d begun wearing lavender three months after the murder, a sartorial decision which was apparently very shocking for reasons Sam didn’t quite grasp.

  He got one boot unlaced and frowned down at it. Did it always take that long to unlace a shoe? He removed his watch and set it on the step next to him before he began the next one.