“Joseph was just singing to Hillegond’s memory,” said Maud, and she gestured toward the Ruggiero mural of Hillegond seated at the same pianoforte at which Maud now sat, Hilly in the obvious midst of supernal music. Quinn looked at the opposite wall, to find the matching mural of Petrus Staats totally covered with a tapestry of a brilliantly white unicorn on a field of golden flowers.
“I’m glad to see Hilly out in the open again,” said Quinn. “But why is Petrus still out of sight?”
“Gordon covered them both so they wouldn’t haunt him,” said Maud, “but I had him uncover Hillegond. I couldn’t stand her being completely gone.”
“You did well,” said Quinn. “And where is the master of the house today?”
“At the foundry,” said Maud.
“I thought you were down south dodging musket balls,” Moran said to Quinn.
Quinn regarded Moran’s large, flashing, and breakable teeth, then put his sack on the table in front of his chair.
“I gave that up,” said Quinn.
“You’re right to come back here,” said Moran. “I love this place.”
“We all love this place and we love one another, don’t we, Joseph?” said Maud.
“Love lasts forever,” said Moran, staring at the portrait. “I loved Hilly.”
“Who didn’t love Hilly?” said Quinn.
“The fiend who murdered her,” said Maud.
“Ah now, that’s a truth,” said Moran. “Bad enough to kill one woman. An act of passion, perhaps. But to turn on Matty.”
“Murderers have their logic,” said Maud.
“Who is the killer?” asked Quinn.
“Ah,” said Will Canaday. “There’s a question.”
“Finnerty,” said Moran. “Ambrose Finnerty.”
“Joseph brought him to Albany,” said Maud.
“I saw him in Boston,” said Moran. “I never heard a more stirring orator.”
“He’s in the penitentiary,” said Will. “He claims innocence and says he’s an ex-priest, but nobody can find the truth of that yet. He traveled with a woman and babe, his wife and child, oh yes. But she’s a known cyprian who says she’s a nun and that Finnerty, her confessor, plugged her up with child in the convent. She loved him all the same, and he her, and they knew the world was good and the church wasn’t. So they went into theater with their peculiar love of God, and their hatred of all true priests and Catholics. And may the rightful Jesus and all his saints stand strong between us and the likes of such faith.”
“The Catholics have a lot to answer for,” said Moran.
“As do the heathens and Hottentots,” said Will.
“Finnerty could sing, too,” said Moran.
“Bawdy songs about religion,” said Maud.
“He kissed and fondled his wife onstage,” said Will. “In their nun’s and priest’s costumes.”
“It was very effective,” said Moran. “We filled the house twice a night for three weeks at thirty-five cents a ticket. Think of it.”
“Hillegond was in bed,” said Maud, “reading Gordon’s play about Dido. Joseph was going to produce that at his theater, too, with some help from Hillegond, weren’t you, Joseph?”
“I had hopes,” said Moran.
“She was wearing her rose-colored nightdress,” said Maud, “and her worsted stockings, too, because there was a chill in the air. And her silver earrings. She would never be caught without her earrings, even in sleep. It was near midnight when she looked up from her book and heard the step outside her door.”
“How do you know she looked up from her book?” Quinn asked.
“I have my ways.”
Quinn nodded and opened his satchel. He took out his bronze disk with the angry face. Was it a fat man with a round tongue? Was it a walrus? Was it a bespectacled woman screaming? Quinn put the disk on the table in front of him.
“What is that?” Moran asked him.
“It’s a thing of a kind. A round sort of thing,” said Quinn.
“I can see that.”
“Quinn puts tubers on it,” said Will.
“Hillegond,” said Maud, “had come to the part of the play where Dido pleads with Aeneas to stay in Carthage with her, but he says he cannot. I’m so sick of self-sacrificing women, immolated by love.”
“How do you know where she was in the play?” Moran asked.
“There are things one knows,” said Maud.
She stood up from the pianoforte bench, walked across the room with regal poise, and sat in a cushioned chair that gave her a vision of both Hillegond’s portrait and her own listeners. Quinn rotated his disk so that its face had proper perspective on Maud. He did not know why he did this but he did it. Why should I have to know why I do what I do? he said to himself.
“Finnerty was intriguing to Hillegond,” said Will from his own plush bench. “She invited him to dinner one night to hear his full story and he admits they had a dalliance.”
“More than a dalliance, I’d say,” said Moran.
“They found her jade ring in Finnerty’s rooms,” said Will. “That’s what did him in.”
“He said she gave it to him,” said Moran. “But there’s no proof. His wife said he was with her that night, but that’s a wife talking.”
“Hillegond took fright at the footstep,” said Maud, “for it was heavier than it should have been. But when the door opened and she saw him she gave him a smile. ‘Ah love,’ she said to him. ‘Look at you, sneakin’ around like a nighthawk.’ ” “You even know the words she used,” said Moran.
“It’s quite remarkable what I know,” said Maud.
“You used to do that sort of thing all the time,” said Moran.
“She made her living at it,” said Quinn.
“She moved sideways on the bed to let him sit beside her,” said Maud. “He kissed her gently on the forehead, then on the lips — not a real kiss, which she expected — and then he took off her spectacles and kissed her on the eyes. When he had closed both her eyes with his kisses he put the garrote around her neck and tightened it. She flailed but she wasn’t strong. She was big, but age had drained her and she soon stopped her struggle. He continued twisting the garrote and pulled her off the bed with it. Her feet knocked over the ewer pitcher with the tulips on it.”
“A pair of owls are roosting in Hillegond’s room,” said Will.
“I would like to see that,” said Quinn.
“They’d be asleep now,” said Moran. “Owls sleep in the daytime.”
“Even so,” said Quinn.
“I see no reason not to see them, even if they’re asleep,” said Maud, who stood up from her bench and led the way out of the music room. Quinn put his disk into his sack.
“Are you coming, Joseph?” Maud asked at the foot of the stairs.
“What is the point of looking at owls?”
“Indeed there is none,” said Will.
“But they must be a sight to see,” said Quinn.
“They’re quite beautiful,” said Maud.
“I have no objection,” said Moran.
And so up the great staircase they went to Hillegond’s room, whose six windows offered a view of the river and the sunrise, and where the pair of owls were asleep on the valance above the glass doors to Hillegond’s balcony. The room was a vista of peace and order. Murder was nowhere to be seen, though the aroma of villainy hung in a vapor alongside the lushly canopied bed, and all four visitors to the room walked ’round it.
They stood by the glass doors and stared up at the sleeping owls, which were two feet tall, one a bit taller, being female. The birds were both solidly pale gray, great soft puffs of matching and matchless beauty, both feathered to their talons and sleeping side by side, facing into the room with closed eyes.