I waited for him to react to this but he sat there as if carved from stone.
“Now, I don’t know if she was just honest by nature or she knew that the darker-skinned baby would never pass as yours or”—I looked at his face and made a stab at the truth—“that you couldn’t father a child of your own?”
He flushed beet-red again.
“Anyway, she told you the truth. You were enraged, but you couldn’t throw her out and risk the scandal, or risk losing her money. She might have run off with Antonio but he died tragically and fortuitously by falling off a bridge. So now she was at your mercy, wasn’t she? You acted the forgiving and magnanimous husband. You would keep her, but you weren’t going to keep the child. She pleaded and at last you cooked up a scheme. You sent her away to the West Coast and when she returned she brought the child of relatives who had conveniently died in China. Is this how it went so far, Mr. Lynch?”
Again he sat staring past me.
“But you never forgave her, did you? You made it clear that you’d hold it over her for the rest of her days and make her life a misery. The birth, plus her grief over the loss of her love, had weakened her. She never regained her strength and she died of a broken heart. And you never forgave Emily either just for being born. You showed her not one ounce of love or affection and turned her out at the first possible moment.”
“And how did you come up with this preposterous idea?” he sputtered.
“I suppose the germ of the idea was planted when I heard about Lydia’s character—so bright and fun-loving but married to you, described as a dour old skinflint by one person I spoke to. And the mention of the handsome Italian gardener who was sweet on her, and his convenient death, and the rumor that she had been sent out west because she had contracted consumption. A healthy, vibrant young lady, living in comparative isolation—how would she have contracted this foul disease? But what gave it away was the name she chose. Boswell. Her name was Johnson, you see.”
“And?”
“Boswell’s Life of Johnson is a very famous book. She was quite a scholar, according to her old headmistress.”
There was a long pause, during which I was conscious of the slow tock-tock of the grandfather clock in the corner.
“May I ask your purpose in this?” he said at last. “It goes rather beyond writing a book on Chinese missionaries, I take it?”
“It does indeed. I did this on behalf of my friend Emily. I am a detective, Mr. Lynch. I felt she deserved to know the truth. She also deserves some of her mother’s money, and yours, as a child born in wedlock, to a married woman.”
He looked at me and smirked. “You’d never be able to prove any of this rubbish.”
“But I think I would, Mr. Lynch. I believe I could easily produce the doctor in Williamstown who confirmed her pregnancy, or the friend to whom she confided the truth. No woman keeps her pregnancy completely secret, you know. And if necessary I could retrace her steps out west and find the place where she gave birth to the child and where, presumably, a birth certificate has been filed. I might also find a witness who saw you follow Antonio home from the bar that night and push him off the bridge.”
I looked up and our eyes met. “And the buggy,” I went on as this thought crystallized in my head. “You might also have tampered with the buggy that killed her parents . . .”
He rose to his feet then and came toward me. He was a big man, powerful for all his flabbiness. “In which case you are a very foolish young woman to come here and find yourself alone with a murderer, aren’t you?”
Of course, I hadn’t considered this. I had been saying these things as they popped into my head—putting together the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle as I spoke. One of my major failings. “Not at all,” I said, in what I hoped was a jaunty manner. “I have just now left Emily Boswell, or should one say Emily Lynch, with instructions to call for me in half an hour. If I fail to appear, she will most certainly go for the police.”