A Death of No Importance--A Novel Read online

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  And finally, for my father

  Acknowledgments

  The first thank-you goes to my agent, Victoria Skurnick, who said this book was worth finishing. I asked her to always tell me the truth—and she does, making me laugh anyway. A sharper eye and a better heart do not exist in publishing.

  Deep and sincere gratitude to the women of the Queens mystery writers group: Radha Vatsal, Laura Joh Rowland, Nancy Bilyeau, Shizuka Otake, Jen Kitses, and Triss Stein. I have also been blessed by the generosity and humor of my early writing colleagues, E. R. Frank, Carolyn Mackler, Wendy Mass, and Rachel Vail.

  To my editor, Elizabeth Lacks: Real editors are hard to find. You are one of them. Thank you. Also thank you to the wonderful team at St. Martin’s: Martin Quinn, Sarah Schoof, Allison Ziegler, Devan Norman, India Cooper, and Laura Dragonette.

  Thank you, New York Public Library—where else will someone take your questions about the number of telephones in 1910 New York seriously, even joyfully? Thank you, New York Times, and your astonishing archives.

  Thank you to Griffin Weiss, who goes to the library and eats ice cream with me afterward. And to Josh Weiss because without him, none of this would be possible or much fun.

  Among the many books consulted for this novel:

  The Gangs of New York by Herbert Asbury

  Serving Women: Household Service in Nineteenth-Century America by Faye E. Dudden

  Gilded City: Scandal and Sensation in Turn-of-the-Century New York by M. H. Dunlop

  City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790–1920 by Timothy J. Gilfoyle

  When the Astors Owned New York: Blue Bloods and Grand Hotels in a Gilded Age by Justin Kaplan

  Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York by Luc Sante

  The Triangle Fire by Leon Stein

  An Introduction from the Author

  “I will tell it.…”

  With these words, Jane Prescott introduced herself to me more than a decade ago. I was in the middle of writing another book, so I thought, If this lady doesn’t tell me what she has to say, she can just vanish back into the character ether. But … she persisted. This woman had a secret she had kept for more than a hundred years, and she wasn’t going away until I wrote down the whole story.

  I knew a few things about Jane Prescott from the beginning. She was tactful, which hinted at a career where tact was essential. She was not contemporary; her tone was too careful, too precise, for modern times. But she didn’t exist in the mists of the distant past; this was a twentieth-century woman.

  But not a famous woman and not a wealthy woman. I don’t believe in past lives, but if I have lived before, it wasn’t as a great artist or a queen or a celebrated mistress. Other people might have been Cleopatra, I would have been the asp wrangler. A foot soldier for Napoleon, script girl at the Globe. This isn’t metaphysical modesty; I’ve always been fascinated by what servants see and hear. And as I thought about Jane’s story, I very much liked the idea that one of these “little people” from the past would know the truth about a famous crime, precisely because nobody noticed them.

  When in the past—that was an issue. I needed a time when servants were common. But I also wanted a time of change, where mobility was possible even for women without vast financial resources. And I wanted a period that would reflect some of our modern anxieties. That brought me to Gilded Age America. Then as now, there was enormous inequality. Immigration meant that labor was cheap—almost disposable. Labor was starting to fight back, at times violently. Two presidents were assassinated during the Gilded Age. In one of the key events of A Death of No Importance, the Los Angeles Times Building is bombed. At his trial, one of the bombers, J. B. McNamara, said, “You see? The whole damn world believes in dynamite.” An era of dynamite and diamonds felt like the perfect era to start Jane’s story.

  There was never a question of where I would set Jane’s story. I have lived all my life in New York City, and I still walk the city like a tourist, fascinated by the energy, the personalities, and the history. My childhood neighborhood has been taken over by Rite Aids and Starbucks. But if you go to my old building on Eighty-fourth Street, you’ll see the plaque that commemorates Edgar Allan Poe’s creation of “The Raven” on that site. Writing this series has taken me to what’s left of the Five Points (not much) to the grand mansions of Fifth Avenue to the last ungentrified bits of Little Italy and Chinatown. It’s wonderful to look up at a handsome old building and think, Jane might have been there. Or an ugly new one and think, Oh, she would have hated that.

  Ultimately, these are Jane Prescott’s stories. I’m just the typist. I hope you enjoy spending time with her as much as I do.

  In or about December, 1910, human character changed.

  —VIRGINIA WOOLF

  You see? The whole damn world believes in dynamite.

  —J. B. MCNAMARA, CONVICTED IN THE 1910 BOMBING OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BUILDING

  1

  I will tell it. I will tell it badly, forgetting things that are important and remembering things that never happened. In that, this narrative will be no different than any other. Only the specifics of what is forgotten and remembered will distinguish it as mine.

  Why tell it at all, then—a story already so well known, concerning, as it does, wealthy families, a handsome couple, and murder?

  Because the story you have heard is wrong. The headlines you’ve seen, the editorials bemoaning the sorry state of our modern world—all sincere and well intentioned. But since they did not know the truth of the matter, all quite beside the point.

  Many decades have passed. There is no one now living who experienced that particular horror—except for myself. And who am I to claim to know the truth behind what may have been the first of the many Crimes of the Century?

  Nobody. Less than nobody.

  I was Charlotte Benchley’s maid.

  But before you dismiss my tale as a gain-inspired fantasy of a woman seeking brief, cheap fame, let me say something. It is the life’s work of some to pay attention to things others wish to ignore. If it is your job to make sure the silver is clean, you must have a sharp eye for tarnish. If the sheets are to be smooth and straight, you must first find the wrinkles. In the matter of the Benchleys and the Newsomes, I saw the tarnish, the wrinkles, and the dirt.

  If it is your opinion that a maid does not possess the capacity to understand these things, then there is no reason to read on.

  But if your view is otherwise, please, continue.

  * * *

  At the time of the events that so enthralled the country, I had been with the Benchleys for a year. My former employer had died, leaving the bulk of her fortune to charity—and me without a job.

  It was a time for funerals. The city had only recently stopped mourning the aristocratic Mrs. Astor when it became necessary to don t
he crêpe for my employer, Mrs. Armslow, who was connected by birth or marriage to the finest families in the city. In England, the rakish Edward VII was ailing. Leopold of Belgium had died. Earlier that year, the Apache chief Geronimo died in a prisoner of war camp at the age of nearly ninety. According to the newspapers, he had remained “one of the lowest and most cruel savages of the American continent,” merely biding his time in captivity until he could return to the warpath.

  After the memorial, Mrs. Armslow’s niece, Mrs. Ogden Tyler, sought me out. Coming from a less affluent wing of the family, Mrs. Tyler had a democratic streak. Laying a light, friendly hand on my arm, she said, “Now you’ll think me a perfect ghoul, but I must ask: have you found a new position?”

  When I shook my head, she said, “Well, here’s what you must do. A dear friend of mine, a Mrs. Benchley, has just moved here from Scarsdale of all places, and she is quite desperate. Her husband invented—or is it patented?—an engine. An engine part. Or was it something to do with rifles? At any rate, whatever it is, the government wants it. The point being: oodles of money, but not the first notion of how to live. Live properly, I mean. What to wear, who to hire, what to serve. The poor woman has two daughters, as I do, and so I thought to myself, how can I help? And the very first thing that came to my mind? Jane. Jane’s so clever, I said to myself. So clever and so discreet. Dear Jane, you’re just what the Benchleys need. Won’t you see them?”

  When I arrived at the Benchley home in May of 1910, I came with the best recommendation an employee can have: the failure of all who preceded me. The Benchleys had taken up residence in a five-story town house on Fifth Avenue. Located on Forty-ninth Street, it was perilously close to the commercial district. But Mrs. Tyler had avoided the bullying ostentation of some of the newer millionaires and steered them to a house that was reassuringly modest—by millionaire standards at least.

  I was admitted to the house not by the housekeeper or the butler, but a stout woman I later discovered to be the cook. She led me up the backstairs of the house to the main hallway. As I waited, I looked down corridors and into adjoining rooms to get the measure of the house. Each room was stuffed from floor to ceiling. Persian rugs covered the floors in profusion. A frieze above the entry depicted a scene from the Bayeux Tapestry, King Harold pierced through the eye. A jumble of curios crowded every surface. Vases from China and Turkey jostled with leather-bound books and Greek statuary. A sphinx and a china pug dog peered at me from the mantel. The sitting room resembled a tent, the windows lost behind an avalanche of drapery. A museum collection of paintings and portraits hung on the walls. An English tea set rested precariously on a French ottoman. A variety of gilded mirrors reflected and extended the chaos.

  The neglect hinted at by Mrs. Tyler was obvious. The mirrors were dull, the rugs stained. Dust was everywhere. Coffee cups and used ashtrays sat unattended on the mantel. The coffee drinkers were of two different temperaments: one, careless, had left the spoon in the half-filled cup; the other, fastidious, had carefully arranged the cup back in its saucer and placed the spoon beside it. The smoker, I guessed, had been a visitor. The brand of cigar was far too exotic for the Benchleys as described by Mrs. Tyler, and clearly the staff was not used to emptying ashtrays. Muddy, discarded shoes—well made, but poorly tended—lay at the fireplace and something that looked disturbingly like animal feces lurked by an armchair.

  A copy of this morning’s Times lay on a table next to a chair that was some distance from the others; from the depression in the cushion, I guessed the man of the house sat there. A bookmark was stuck three pages into a copy of Middlemarch. Mary Roberts Rinehart’s thriller When a Man Marries was spread-eagled on top.

  Hearing the thud of footsteps on the stairs, I stepped back into the hallway, and saw Mrs. Alfred Benchley.

  Mrs. Benchley, formerly Miss Caroline Shaw, was a plump, anxious woman. Her tea gown was hopelessly old-fashioned: mustard yellow with lace panels on the collar that looked as if someone had slapped napkins on her shoulders. The dark brown sash had not been properly tied. A careless laundress had shriveled the ruffles at the sleeves. The pins in her hair had not been fixed at the right angle, and the back was in danger of collapsing. In the grandeur of the house, she seemed a country cousin visiting her city relations, who sigh and count the days until “dear Caroline’s” departure.

  “I do apologize,” she said breathlessly. “Did someone let you in? Oh, yes, of course they did. Shall we speak in the sitting room?”

  Sweeping into the sitting room, she remarked over her shoulder, “We are in a complete muddle. I know everyone says it, but it is so hard to find good help. I’m told girls no longer seek domestic employment; they prefer to work in shops or those dreadful factories.”

  It was not the first time I had heard the complaint. Mrs. Armslow and her acquaintances had also lamented the ungrateful refusal of the lower classes to employ themselves meeting the needs of their betters. Houses that used to have sixteen or more servants now made do with twelve or even nine.

  I said, “It’s not every young woman who finds her purpose in service to others.”

  “My friend Mrs. Tyler says wonderful things about you. She’s been so helpful getting us settled in New York. I don’t know what we’d do without her. I understand you worked for Lavinia Armslow.” I nodded. “And before Mrs. Armslow?”

  “Before Mrs. Armslow, I worked for my uncle, the Reverend Prescott. He…”

  I hesitated. My uncle ran a home for women who once sold themselves, but wished to find different employment. Until they could, and until those who profited from their labors got tired of looking for them, they stayed at the refuge.

  Mrs. Armslow chose to devote a small part of her vast fortune to my uncle’s cause. Once a year, she would visit in order to survey the souls in the process of salvation. During one visit, when I was fourteen, Mrs. Armslow questioned the wisdom of raising an impressionable girl among so many fallen women and offered me a position. My future would be secured and my morals protected.

  “My uncle administers a home where fallen women who seek a better life may stay in safety,” I told Mrs. Benchley.

  Mrs. Benchley nodded. “I imagine it’s terribly difficult for these women to return to any kind of respectable life. And when you think so many were forced into it, even kidnapped—”

  She paused, eager for colorful stories of white slavery and innocent country girls seduced into vice. I asked, “Is it you who requires a maid, Mrs. Benchley?”

  “Me?” Her mind still on prostitutes, it took Mrs. Benchley a moment. “Oh, no. I have my own dear Maude, she’s been with us for ages—Matchless Maude, I call her—and the girls need someone more their own age. But they’re very different girls, and finding one person to suit both has been so difficult. I had thought, Well, we’ll simply get two, but my husband doesn’t see why they can’t make do with one, and when Alfred doesn’t see something, it’s…” Nervous, she rubbed one hand over the other. “So, you see…”

  “Yes,” I assured her. “Your daughters require a maid.”

  With a sigh, she dropped her hands to her lap. “Oh, you do understand. And you speak English. They say the Irish do, but I can never make it out. Oh—you’re not Irish, are you?”

  “No, ma’am, from Scotland. When I was three.”

  Beaming, she said, “Well, that’s fine. Shall we speak with the young ladies?”

  As I followed her up the stairs, she said, “We’ll see Charlotte first. She made her debut a month ago. Oh, it was marvelous, hundreds of people.”

  One of whom was Mrs. Gibbes, a friend of Mrs. Armslow’s, who described the event as “a pageant of vulgarity,” although she allowed “the girl was a pretty little thing.”

  Mrs. Benchley said, “Again, I must credit Mrs. Tyler; she told us who the best caterers were, where to get the flowers, who we must invite, and not invite, which is apparently just as important.”

  I wondered if there had been financial remuneration for Mrs. Tyler�
��s helpfulness. She would not be the first lady of great name but small wealth to accept a fee for such guidance.

  We were interrupted by a scream from down the hall. Mrs. Benchley hurried to the next door and flung it open. Coming up behind her, I saw a beautiful, airy room that looked directly onto the avenue. In the center of the room, a lovely girl stood in her chemise, fists clenched, glaring down at a bundle of light blue cloth heaped about her ankles. A sullen older woman in an ill-fitting maid’s uniform stood at a safe distance.

  “Whatever’s the matter, Charlotte?” asked Mrs. Benchley.

  “It’s…” She waved a dismissive hand at the maid. “She’s completely hopeless. She hasn’t got the first idea what to do.”

  Small wonder. The bundle of cloth was a hobble skirt. It had only recently become all the rage among the fashionable set. A tight, narrow column of fabric, it obliged women to take tiny, awkward steps; in the words of its creator, Paul Poiret, it “freed the bust and shackled the legs.” This made it difficult to put on, as one could lose balance as the skirt clutched tighter and tighter around the body.

  This, it seemed, was my cue.

  “If I may,” I said, stepping into the room. “Mrs. Armslow’s granddaughter had a skirt similar to this.” Kneeling beside Charlotte Benchley, I said to the older woman, who I guessed was the Matchless Maude, “Could you bring that chair here? Miss Benchley, if you would hold on? Thank you.”

  Taking the skirt carefully with the tips of my fingers, I eased it over Miss Benchley’s legs. A matching jacket was added. Miss Benchley surveyed herself in the mirror as I adjusted her hair and placed the hat. In some ways, she would be a pleasure to dress. She was not above seventeen years old, blessed with a natural hourglass figure, a slender waist, and graceful arms. Her fair hair was fine, but her smile, when she bestowed it, was beguiling. She had a look favored in that day, a childish prettiness, round in the cheek and bosom, with wide, admiring eyes. A girl not quite out of the schoolroom. If she knew how to give a man a look that hinted she might know a little of what happened outside of schoolrooms, then blush straightaway when he answered her look, so much the better. Charlotte Benchley, as I discovered, knew very well how to give that look.