dated January sixth. ‘Violeta Landon Fitzgerald departed this world on this day at the hour of six. She suffered greatly in the last months of her time on this earth. This suffering, sir, is on your hands. May God forgive you for I shall not.
“‘On her deathbed, she related to me all that occurred in those last days of August in the year 1774. She confessed her sins to me, the sins of a young girl, and yours, sir. She suffered and died wishing for the home of her birth and her blood, and for the embrace of family refused her. I will not forget nor will any of my blood. You have your riches and hold them dearer than her life. You will not see her again, nor meet with her in Heaven. For your actions you are damned, as are all the Landons who spring from you.’”
She set the last letter with the others. “I agree with him.”
“By all accounts Edwin Landon and his father were hard men, uncompromising.”
“I’d say these letters bear that out.”
“And more. We don’t know if Edwin responded, or what he wrote if he did, but it’s clear both he and Violeta ‘sinned’ in August of 1774. Five months after the Calypso wrecked on Whiskey Beach. We need to search for information on James Fitzgerald. We need a date of birth.”
“You think she was pregnant when she left, or was disowned.”
“I think that’s the kind of sin men like Roger and Edwin Landon would condemn. And I think, given the times, their rise in society, in status, in business, a daughter pregnant with the child of someone less, someone outside the law? Untenable.”
He walked back to her, studied the letter again, the signature. “James would have been a common name, a popular one. Sons are often named for fathers.”
“You think her lover, the seaman from the Calypso, was James Fitzgerald?”
“No. I think her lover was Nathanial James Broome, and he survived the wreck of his ship, along with Esmeralda’s Dowry.”
“Broome’s middle name was James?”
“Yeah. Whoever Fitzgerald was, I’m betting she was pregnant when she married him.”
“Broome might have run off with her, changed his name.”
Eli ran a hand down her hair absently, remembering how she’d given the doomed schoolteacher and long-ago Landon a happy ending.
“I don’t think so. The man was a pirate, fairly notorious. I don’t see him settling down quietly in Cambridge, raising a son who becomes a clerk. And he’d never have let the Landons have the dowry. Edwin killed him, that’s how I see it. Killed him, took the dowry, tossed his sister out.”
“For money? At the bottom of it, they cast her out, erased her, for money?”
“She took for a lover a known brigand. A killer, a thief, a man who would certainly have been hanged if caught. The Landons are accumulating wealth, social prestige and some political power. Now their daughter, whom they’d have married to the son of another wealthy family, is ruined. They may be ruined as well if it becomes known that they harbored or had knowledge of a wanted man being harbored. She, the situation, her condition needed to be dealt with.”
“Dealt with? Dealt with?”
“I’m not agreeing with what was done, I’m outlining their position and probable actions.”
“Lawyer Landon. No, he wouldn’t be one of my favorite people.”
“Lawyer Landon’s just stating their case, the case of men of that era, that mind-set. Daughters were property, Abra. It wasn’t right, but it’s history. Now instead of being an asset, she was a liability.”
“I don’t think I can listen to this.”
“Get a grip on yourself,” he suggested when she pushed to her feet. “I’m talking about the late eighteenth century.”
“You sound like you’re okay with it.”
“It’s history, and the only way I can try to get a clear picture is to think logically and not emotionally.”
“I like emotion better.”
“You’re good at it.” So, they’d use that, too, he decided. Both emotion and logic. “Okay, what does your emotion tell you happened?”
“That Roger Landon was a selfish, unfeeling bastard, and his son, Edwin, a heartless son of a bitch. They had no right to throw away a life the way they threw away Violeta’s. And it’s not just history. It’s people.”
“Abra, you realize we’re arguing about someone who died nearly two hundred years ago?”
“And your point?”
He rubbed his hands over his face. “Why don’t we say this? We’ve reached the same basic conclusion. Part of that conclusion is Roger and Edwin Landon were coldhearted, hard-minded, opportunistic bastards.”