All Bedlam Courses Past (part two hundred eighteen)

All Bedlam Courses Past

Chapter Eight

Things Relative

(part two hundred eighteen)

Still, if he liked, he could settle in Cookesville, eke a writing income from Well-Being, from the Vanguard, if he would be her employee and Fannie’s. Or take other work, at Rutherford’s, Nachfolger’s, Wesleyan-Chamberlain, the railroad…the new electric power company? Pedestrian for Weem, and riddled with the influence of Walter A. Gremot.

But if she liked, she could abandon common sense, freedom, property, status, become what women made of themselves, when they became helpmeets.

She wouldn’t; and Weem didn’t ask. Still, the joke would fall flat.

“I’m on the lookout for Monaghan, if that’s what you want me to be.”

He scratched his head, and labored his point. “It’s circumstantial. You can’t imagine another person fits, or there’s any other way to work it. You remember that foreign money. Bought justice is no unheard-of in Chicago…Seven Stars has to figure if it was a crime, they want the public to know it, not their fault. The authorities went too fast out of the gate, is what I’d bet, going for the indictment.”

“Have I spoiled you, taking you to the races?”

“Ha! But see how it is. They needed permission from Demrose to search his house. So those letters were a load off Monaghan’s mind. That the suspect…the bereaved…had forgotten them, maybe. Read through what you’ve got, and think about that teasing, if the joke ever touched on marriage. Or money.”

She gave the morning to Ebrach, hashing what could be hashed only in his private study. “You knew Manfred better than I did. He told me Dr. Crowninshield gave him his start, after he’d written. A college, somewhere in England…”

“Clare Hall, Cambridge, Dr. Crowninshield’s alma mater, Clare merely, Mr. Demrose’s.”

“Fine. And they had a sort of circular letter? With places wanted, people wanted. Are you going to call him Mr. Demrose?”

“In accordance with his wishes.”

“His father was alive and got after him, to get himself hired with his education.”

“Yes… My old secretary was not, by temperament, of our world, if I divine you correctly.”

“But did you and Manfred delve at all? He was so bland, but so itchy with it. You would have diagnosed that as an influence. A bland spirit’s.”

He laughed, his mild one for her unserious phrasings…and said it anyway. “Hail to thee, bland spirit. A flaccid personality acts to the spirit world as an invitation. That is how one becomes fatally indecisive, and unmotivated. Ryan-Neville, as he was, had no interest in ousting them.”

“How was he at Alarica, with Regina?”

230

Bedlam

All Bedlam Courses Past (part two hundred nineteen)

(2025, Stephanie Foster)