I didn’t tell her that Ned had been awfully keen to come to visit her and luckily had not been allowed to do so. I’d make sure I was here when his workday was over.
It took what seemed like an eternity to ride the train all the way down the length of Manhattan and then the trolley across the bridge, but at last I was standing outside the dilapidated wooden house. I opened the front door and went down a long, dark passage to the door at the back. I tapped and a face peered out. “Yes?” she demanded in the darkness. “I don’t know you. What do you want?”
“Are you Ned Tate’s mother?”
“What if I am?’
“I’m a friend of his and I wanted to ask you a couple of questions,” I said.
“All right, come in then.” She gave me a half smile. “He was here on Sunday with his lady friend, you know. Always comes to visit me on Sundays, like clockwork. Such a good boy, he is. So faithful to his poor mother.”
We had entered a dreadful, dingy apartment. It was dark, it smelled of drains and boiled cabbage, and it was furnished in the most threadbare manner. It was hard to picture the fastidious Ned growing up here. As my eyes accustomed themselves to the darkness I was able to study Ned’s mother. She looked like an old, old woman. Her front teeth were missing, her face was sunken, her hair was gray, and yet she couldn’t have been more than fifty at the most.
“Would you like a cup of coffee, honey?” she asked.
“No, thank you, I can’t stay long,” I said. “I came to see you because I need to set something straight. It’s about Ned’s father.”
“What about him?”
As I looked around the room my eyes fastened on a photograph on the mantelpiece—a lovely young woman in a scanty costume. She was holding a tray of cigars and smiling coyly. And beside it a picture of a handsome, dark-eyed child, looking angelic in lace petticoats and holding a dove.
“Did you tell Ned who his father was?” I asked.
“Not in so many words,” she said, then she winked. “Between us women, I was never rightly sure which one his father was, if you get my meaning.”
“So you never told Ned that his father’s name was Bradley?”
“Oh, that’s what he’s been telling you, has he?” She gave me the coy look that I recognized from the photograph. “Well, I might have hinted. He was a strange child, you know. Born with big ideas. He kept pestering me to tell him about his father and the longer I kept quiet the grander his ideas became. Then one day I took him to Central Park for a treat and this open carriage passed us. What’s more, the toff in the carriage was looking straight at us and I could tell that he recognized me. Well, I recognized him too, right enough. He’d been one of my customers and I’d sold him more than cigars, if you get my meaning. Well, like I said, my Ned always was a sharp little thing. He noticed that Mr. Bradley looking at us, so he got it into his head that that was his father. I didn’t want to disillusion him. Could have been, of course.” She gave me a knowing, toothless grin. “Has he been spouting off about his father, then? Always did like to talk big, my Ned. I said to him, you want to watch that. Pride comes before a fall.”
“Did the Bradleys have a little girl in the carriage with them?”
“They did. A lovely little thing she was. Like a little angel. I think Ned was smitten with her too.”
I pictured the little boy, watching that passing carriage in Central Park and then coming back to this hellhole, and felt a momentary pang of sympathy for Ned Tate. Then of course I remembered Emily, who lay dying, and any scrap of sympathy vanished.
“Thank you, Mrs. Tate, you’ve been very helpful,” I said. I reached into my purse to give her money, but her defiant, proud stare stopped me.
“Nothing to thank me for, honey,” she said in her scratchy voice. “What did you want to know all this for?”
“For his sweetheart, Emily,” I said, not wanting to hurt her with the truth. “She was curious about Ned’s father and he would never speak of him.”
“Oh, I see. Well, she would be, wouldn’t she, if she’s thinking of marrying him. I told him, boy, you could do a lot worse than this one. Got a good head on her shoulders, she has, and anyone can see she’s a lady.”
I thought of Ned, bringing Emily home as his sweetheart when he had already given her the preparation that was going to kill her. And I looked at this broken wreck of a woman who had obviously done everything she could to make sure her son was raised with an education and prospects. It would break her heart when she learned the truth.