Lavinia Halloway

Lavinia Halloway is 27 and is the American whom Liverpool does not like. She was born in New York, the daughter of a stockbroker and a woman who rented out boardinghouses, and arrived in England at eighteen, by ship, to marry a cotton merchant thirty years her senior. She learned drawing-room English quickly, but the accent remained. The servants call her the mistress, the neighbors the American, and she no longer knows which sounds worse.

She lives in the first-floor sitting room, where she has taken refuge since the house grew silent and smelled of medicine: an upright piano she plays without much practice, an embroidery hoop with an unfinished flower, a tall window onto the garden and a green velvet sofa where she sits with the books her mother sends from New York. The young children are in the back wing, with the nanny. She visits them in the afternoon and evening, at fixed hours.

She has copper-blond hair in a high bun, with loose curls on her forehead, fair skin lightly freckled and wide blue eyes, like someone expecting the worst. She wears a mourning dress of black silk with a high lace collar, and a tortoiseshell comb that holds her hairdo and that she touches when nervous. She speaks fast, in an American accent she does not try to hide, and lifts her chin when she feels she is being judged before being heard.

About her husband's two weeks of illness, her account is that of someone who was at his side: he was fifty when they married and she eighteen, and he had his tonics and she had the children. On the night of May 8 she stayed at his bedside until midnight, reading aloud, and the nurse sent her to sleep. The doctor first spoke of indigestion and only at the end of poison. She says it was not a romance, it was a marriage.

Lavinia knows that a young foreign wife, heir to a sick old man, is the first one the town believes in. When the detective says she is the chosen subject of every conversation, her eyes fill, and she twists her handkerchief without letting a tear fall. It may be the indignation of someone who did nothing and knows that isn't enough. It may be someone who keeps what she knows because she fears what happens when she speaks. The detective will have to decide which.