Murder on Washington Square by Victoria Thompson Page B

The old woman was incredulous. “What kind of a woman was she?”
    “The kind who gets murdered in Washington Square in the middle of the night,” Sarah said baldly.
    “Oh, my poor Nelson!” she wailed. “What has he done?”
    Sarah wished she could answer “nothing,” but instead she took the old woman in her arms and offered what comfort she could.
     
    “So when Anna told me about . . . about the child . . . I . . . I . . .”
    Frank signed impatiently. Nelson was making the whole sordid story even worse with his delicacy. He wasn’t sure why Nelson should care about protecting Anna Blake’s good name now that she was dead, but he supposed that’s what a gentleman might do.
    “What did you do?” he prompted with more patience than he felt.
    “I . . . You aren’t going to like this part,” he warned nervously.
    Frank hadn’t liked any of it so far. Ellsworth had pretty much given him more than enough reason to suspect him of murdering Anna Blake. Broughan would’ve had him locked in a cell down at The Tombs by now. “Tell me anyway,” he said, not bothering to sound patient.
    “I . . . Well, naturally, when Anna told me there might be a child, I . . . I went to Mrs. Brandt.”
    “You what ?” Frank nearly shouted.
    Ellsworth flinched. “She’s a midwife,” he reminded Frank unnecessarily. “I thought . . . Well, Anna was an innocent girl. How could she be sure? I don’t know much about these things, but I do know . . . I mean, I’ve heard my friends talk. The ones who are married. Sometimes a woman thinks . . . but then she finds out she’s wrong. I would’ve married her either way, of course,” he added hastily, “but she was so frightened. And she had this idea that she wasn’t good enough for me, or at least that’s what she said. I know, it doesn’t make any sense,” he said to Frank’s skepticism, “but I thought maybe she just couldn’t stand the thought of being married to a man like me. I’m not very exciting or romantic. Not at all the sort of man a young woman would be interested in.”
    Frank was hardly listening to his protests because something suddenly didn’t make any sense at all. “She didn’t want to marry you? Even after you’d seduced her?”
    A pained expression twisted his face. “I can’t blame her, of course, and as much as I would have gladly taken her as my wife, I didn’t want to force her. If she married me and then found out there wasn’t a . . . a necessity for it, well, she’d hate me, don’t you think? How could I live with myself?”
    “So you told Mrs. Brandt your problem. What did she do?” Frank prodded, hoping that if he heard more, the story would start to make sense again.
    “She accompanied me to Anna’s rooming house. I thought perhaps she could . . . well, make sure of Anna’s condition.”
    Ellsworth was right. Frank really didn’t like this part. “And did she?”
    “She didn’t have a chance. Anna was terribly upset when I introduced her. She thought . . .”
    “She thought what?” Frank was very much afraid he was going to have to get rough with Ellsworth after all, just to hurry things along.
    “I know this will sound ridiculous to you, but Anna thought that Mrs. Brandt and I were . . . romantically involved.”
    Frank did think it sounded ridiculous. “Why would she think that?”
    “I told you, she’s very innocent,” Nelson said, unconsciously using the present tense. “She couldn’t imagine any other reason why another woman would have accompanied me there. And nothing I said would reassure her, so Mrs. Brandt didn’t get to speak with her at all.”
    “If this woman didn’t marry you, what was she going to do?” Frank asked, wondering if Sarah Brandt had been as suspicious of this story as Frank was becoming.
    “She . . . well, you understand her parents were dead. Her mother had just passed away, of course, and she had no one to turn to.”
    Which was a very good reason to marry someone like Nelson,