Read Online Death on Beacon Hill by P.B. RYAN - Free Book Online

disrespect; Mr. Thurston was a playwright, after all, and artistic types tended to flout convention.
    He lifted the gold monocle hanging from a chain around his neck, fitted it to his right eye, smoothed out his notes, and cleared his throat. “‘Doubt thou the stars are fire,’” he read in a pseudo-British accent commonplace among Boston’s cultural elite. “‘Doubt that the sun doth move. Doubt truth to be a liar... But never doubt I love.’”
    Looking up, he said, “So Hamlet wrote to his fair Ophelia. As he revered his lady love, so I revered my dear...” Thurston’s voice faltered. He paused, eyes shimmering, and drew in a tremulous breath. “My dear, dear Virginia. I daresay she captivated me from the moment I first laid eyes upon her, some twenty-one years ago.
    “It was at the Howard Athenaeum, shortly after it had been rebuilt, when it was still quite luxurious, you know. We were casting my play
Merry Misadventure
, which some of you may recall, and an unknown young actress, new to Boston, had come out to audition for the ingénue role. At first, I was loath to even let her read, having been told that she was dark-haired, for I’d written the character as very fair. But no sooner did Virginia Kimball walk onto the stage that afternoon than I knew I had my Gwendolyn....”
    Mr. Thurston continued in that vein for quite some time, delivering what amounted to a résumé of Virginia Kimball’s acting career, with particular emphasis on plays authored by him, supplemented with personal observations and anecdotes. Some years ago, he said, having grown weary of the footlights and the ceaseless public attention, Mrs. Kimball retired from the stage to devote herself to gardening and good works.
    “For that benign, peaceable life to have been cut short in such a manner...” Mr. Thurston shook his head. “I shan’t ever understand it. My only consolation is that the First Lady of the Boston Stage played her final scene in the manner of a tragic heroine. Somehow I suspect she would have found a certain measure of satisfaction in that. I shall try to do the same. As the grieving Laertes said of his late, beloved sister, ‘Too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia, And therefore I forbid my tears.’”
    Mr. Thurston folded up his notes and slid them back into his coat, removed his monocle, lifted his cane, and descended the altar. But instead of returning immediately to his seat, he paused by the coffin, kissed his fingertips, and touched them to the glass over Virginia Kimball’s face.
    “Lay her in the earth,” he said in a hoarse, shaky voice, “and from her fair and unpolluted flesh may violets spring.”
    Slipping the violets out of his lapel, he placed them on the spot he’d touched. “Sweets to the sweet. Farewell, Virginia.”
    He looked up and scanned the mourners until his gaze lit on Orville Pratt. His eyes, bright with unshed tears, iced over with a naked virulence that sucked the air out of Nell’s lungs. Winifred Pratt turned to look at her husband, who appeared to be staring not at Mr. Thurston, but straight ahead. Something like contempt crept into Thurston’s expression before he finally turned away and walked slowly back to his seat.
    The entire episode had lasted two, perhaps three seconds. It had felt like an hour.
    *   *   *
    It was about ten minutes later, while the choir was plodding through a particularly long and lugubrious hymn, that Nell noticed movement in the gallery overhead. She looked up to see Will walking toward the back of the church.
    His gait was slightly rigid, thanks to the old bullet wound in his leg, but much improved from the terrible limp that had plagued him last Autumn and Winter, after he’d stopped injecting morphine. Perhaps his body was finally accustoming itself to the lack of opiates, or perhaps it was simply a function of the warmer weather; most likely a bit of both.
    Nell waited a few moments after he ducked into the stairwell, and then she