All Bedlam Courses Past (part two hundred)

All Bedlam Courses Past

Chapter Eight

Things Relative

(part two hundred)

“There was an irregularity,” Phelan said, drawing emphasis from the word was.

“Well, Regina talked a great deal. There were times I would listen with half an ear. She wanted her father’s name honored—that was Demrose. That was why Demrose. They were going to adopt a son to inherit the name. But that went on, that scheme, for I don’t know how many years. She got distracted…”

Élucide looked at Monaghan’s face, at the balance struck there between impish and sympathetic. A face to pull you aside; to say, this is between the two of us, you and I.

“It’s gossipy, but I’ll tell you. She got distracted thinking she could have a baby of her own.”

“And so they had been married since the late part of 1881,” Phelan said, finding the fact in his memorandum book. “This trouble over the child, it did not grow to a contention?”

“What,” Ebrach asked, “does the daughter say?”

“I will read to you a bit of what she says.” The lawyer bent to his briefcase and grunted upright, to table a portfolio. He made a show of riffling, but the papers he drew were flagged with metal tabs. “No, not even Daddy ever fought with her, argued I guess, but you know, she didn’t respond (here I have an underline, as Miss Buckley made a point of the word) to what was being said to her, so what was the good of disagreeing?”

“Is that all?” Élucide asked.

“No, Miss. There were of course a number of questions, there have been, both asked by Mr. Monaghan shipboard and Mr. Monaghan or his sergeant Mr. Shute, at the city address…”

“No, Mr. Phelan, I mean, did she say that about Regina and not soften it, after? You don’t speak ill of the dead, isn’t that the case? With most people.”

“Miss Buckley, now,” Monaghan said. “How would you describe her? The two of you are of an age…but not able to be friends?”

“I’m older than Myra. But we wouldn’t have been friends, I wasn’t close to the Buckleys. I had a sort of standing invitation to visit because I’d got pulled in.”

“Explain, if you please,” said Phelan.

She explained none of the Honoré saga, only that a relative had been arriving by train at Nashville, that she had invited Manfred into Mr. Rutherford’s car, as Mr. Rutherford was her Uncle George and would have said…

Weem broke in: “Now, if you’d like the outside-party view of RN, I was along myself.”

“As, you say, family friend. And Mr. Ryan-Neville was by way of a fellow traveler, Nashville bound?”

The more, the merrier. Élucide gave Weem a tap to the wrist that Monaghan could enjoy as he liked. “Mr. Phelan, Mr. Monaghan would like to know, what was Manfred to me, that Mr. Thacker needed to play decoy? And the answer is, Manfred and I were bored together, in Cookesville, in those days, and he was my confidant. I’d have taken him as an escort—and I didn’t need an escort—but my father fixed things differently. Manfred told me anything he had in mind, and what he had in mind was to marry Regina Buckley. He’d got tipped to her by a patient we used to have here…”

212

Bedlam

All Bedlam Courses Past (part two hundred one)

(2025, Stephanie Foster)