New York_ The Novel - Edward Rutherfurd [289]
It was three days later that Lily de Chantal came to see her. When they were alone, Lily gave her a strange look.
“I have news for you,” she said. “About Miss Clipp.”
“Oh?”
“I went to her lodgings, but she wasn’t there.”
“Still in Brooklyn?”
“I went to the hotel. She left on Monday morning. They still have her suitcase.”
“You don’t mean …?”
“They’ve been digging up quite a few bodies around the city, as you know. People caught in the blizzard, who froze to death.”
“I heard it’s close to fifty.”
“They found one up on the walkway of the Brooklyn Bridge. Had her bag. A notebook with her name in it, and other things. Nobody’s come forward looking for her, and the city authorities are busy enough as it is. They’ll bury most of the bodies tomorrow, I believe.”
“Should we do anything? I mean, we sent her to Brooklyn. It’s our fault.”
“Are you sure you want to?”
“No. But I feel terrible.”
“Really?” Lily smiled. “Ah, Hetty, you are too good for us all.”
So ended the great Dakota Blizzard. By the following week the trains were all running again, and New York was returning to normal.
On the following Wednesday, as a train was leaving that was bound all the way to Chicago, no one took particular notice when a neatly dressed lady, with dark hair and a new suitcase containing a new set of clothes, quietly boarded. Inside the car, she sat alone, with a book open on her lap. Her name was Prudence Grace.
When the train began to move, she gazed out of the window as the city slowly receded. And if anyone in the car had happened to glance in her direction as the last view of the city disappeared, they would have noticed her whisper something that might well have been a little prayer.
Then Donna Clipp sighed with satisfaction.
It had been a moment of inspiration when she’d found that body up on the Brooklyn Bridge. Dead as a doornail. Frostbitten and frozen to a block already. The woman hadn’t looked especially like her, but roughly the same age, brown hair, not too tall. Well worth a chance. It had only taken a moment or two to leave her bag with the dead woman and enough identification to give the body her name.
Then she’d forced herself on, down that long, terrible walkway, almost dead herself, but with a new and urgent reason for staying alive.
If the police ever caught up with her now, they’d find she was dead. She had a new name, a new identity. Now it was time to move on to a new city, far away. And a new life.
She was free, and it amused her. That’s why, as New York was lost to sight, she’d thought one last and final time of Frank Master and whispered: “Good-bye, you old fart.”
Old England
1896
ON A WARM June evening, in the year 1896, Mary O’Donnell, looking very grand in a long white evening dress and long white gloves, walked up the steps of her brother Sean’s house on Fifth Avenue. As the butler opened the door, she smiled at him.
But her smile masked the terrible fear that was gnawing within her. At the foot of the sweeping staircase stood her brother, looking very elegant in white tie and tails.
“Are they here?” she asked quietly.
“They’re in the drawing room,” he said, using the English term.
“How did I let you get me into this, you devil?” She tried to make it sound lighthearted.
“We’re just having dinner.”
“With a lord, for God’s sake.”
“Plenty of those where he came from.”
Mary took a deep breath. Personally, she didn’t give a damn about any English lord. But that wasn’t the point. She knew why the English lord was there, and what her family expected of her. Normally, she coped well enough with social occasions, but this would be different. Questions might be asked, questions that she dreaded.
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” she murmured.
“Chin up,” said Sean.
It was five years now since Mary had finally given in to her brother and left the employment of the Masters. And she’d only done that because she knew it was what