The Briar Club

by Kate Quinn

For all the women in my life who make up my Briar Club, the ones who bring each other food and wine and counsel whenever it’s needed. The ones who wouldn’t bat an eyelash at a corpse on the floor. You know who you are.

Thanksgiving 1954 Washington, D.C. If these walls could talk. Well, they may not be talking, but they are certainly listening. And watching.

Murder. Murder here in the heart of sleepy white-picket-fence Washington, D.C.! And on Thanksgiving, too. Not that the house is terribly surprised by that; it’s held enough holidays to know that when you throw all that family together and mix with too much rum punch and buried resentment, blood is bound to be shed sometimes. But the scene that erupted tonight and splashed gore from the threshold to the attic . . . Goodness, but it’s a doozy. There’s a corpse on the floor of the second attic apartment, spilling a lake of blood from a throat cut nearly to the bone.

The house flutters its curtains, rattles a door or two, takes another peek into the murder scene on the top floor. The green walls of that particular apartment are painted over with a vast, intricate flowered vine, but you’d be hard-pressed to tell what kind of flowers under the blood splatter. This was a very enthusiastic murder, the house muses. Not one moment’s hesitation from the hand swinging that blade.

Briarwood House doesn’t like Mrs. Nilsson. Hasn’t liked her since she first crossed the threshold as a bride, complaining before she’d even shaken the rice out of her hair that the halls were too narrow (My halls! Too narrow!), and still doesn’t like her twenty years down the road. No one else in this kitchen does, either, the house knows perfectly well. People aren’t that hard to read.

“The

The body was found in the fourth-floor apartment, the one with green walls.” The detective is looking down at his notes, so he misses his first clue: the tense glances that pas...

Or would suspects be a better word? the house wonders. Because it knows something the detective doesn’t. The killer...

“Can you tell us who rents that top-floor apartment, Mrs. Nilsson?” the detective persists, oblivious. The landlady gives another sniff, and the house settle...

June 1950

Dear Kitty, Does the name “Briarwood House” sound auspicious? We shall see! I wish you were here. —Grace

If that went down and the feds came sniffing, the word on the street would point to the shadowy figure across the way. You want the long and short, you talk to the shamus at Briarwood House. Nothing gets past Pistol Pete. And then Pete would rise, flicking his cigarette and straightening his battered trilby . . . But instead a woman had walked right up to him while he was tacking down a screen, and he’d nearly dropped his hammer on her ribbon-laced espadrille.

I’m Pete,” he added hastily. “Pete Nilsson.”

“You’re quite the man of information, aren’t you?” Mrs. Grace took out a pack of Lucky Strikes and shook one out. “My mother doesn’t allow smoking,” Pete couldn’t help saying. “I know.” Calmly, Mrs. Grace struck a match, lit up, took a long inhale of smoke, and blew it out the open window. “What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her.” “My mother knows everything,” Pete said feelingly. You could never hear her coming; in those house slippers she could pop out of the shadows like a jack-in-the-box. Always when you’ve left your coat on the floor, or are just thinking about putting your feet on the sofa, Pete had heard one of the boarders say.

“I make it a policy never to believe more than a third of what men tell me,”

“Your mother says that to justify the fact that she isn’t being fair to you,” Mrs. Grace said calmly. “Which is mostly what people mean when they say ‘life isn’t fair.’ It isn’t, which is why people should endeavor to be more fair to one another, not less.”

So . . . Swedish meatballs. We’re throwing a dinner party, and you’re the chef.” Pete blinked. “I have a casserole to heat up downstairs.” “What kind?” “Tuna, potato chip, and mushroom soup.” Fast and cheap, one of his mother’s specialties. Mrs. Grace stared, those sleepy golden-brown eyes opening up all the way. “Pete. The Founding Fathers did not create this great nation of ours so that we could let them down by combining canned tuna with instant mushroom soup. That is not a casserole, that is a war crime. Go downstairs and dump it in the trash this instant, and bring Lina back up. Tonight you’re both eating Swedish meatballs—if you can show us how it can be done on a hot plate.”

But he did remember how to make Swedish meatballs—hadn’t he watched Dad do it every Thursday night for years? Start with a finely minced onion, he could hear Dad saying.

Slowly, Pete picked up a knife, clumsily chopping up the onion and then some garlic. Mom didn’t use any spices but salt and pepper—“That’s for foreigners,” she’d sniff—but Farmor had sworn by garlic, or so Dad said.

“Come in,” Mrs. Grace called. “We need someone to combine the beef and the pork. Just do whatever Pete tells you.” “Your servant, sir.” Nora grinned, padding into the room in her stocking feet, and Pete’s heart did a flip-flop. Joe squeezed out into the hall to make room, taking up the guitar he’d stashed on the landing, and started strumming something that sounded like Gershwin’s “Summertime.”

Mrs. Fliss’s English voice floated up. “And what’s that smell?” By now Nora was combining the spiced meat with the soaked bread under Pete’s shy direction, and somehow the room was full.

“I thought you didn’t like Arlene,” Pete whispered, rolling ground meat into balls and adding them to the sizzling skillet, and Mrs. Grace just whispered back, “A successful dinner party needs just one person all the others loathe, Pete—it gives everyone something to unite against.” Pete found himself grinning when Arlene broke off sniping about house rules and moaned, “What is that smell? I can’t have red meat, not on my new regime—” “Diets might be good for the waistline but not for the temperament,” Grace advised. “Eat the red meat, sugar pie.” “Well, maybe just this once . . .”

Ancient Mrs. Reka Muller stumped up bearing a bottle of schnapps, and Mrs. Grace opened a little tray of watercolor paints and began dabbing blue flowers rather carelessly onto the sketched vine, which now stretched the whole length of the room. “There now, don’t you feel pretty?”

Maybe it wasn’t the most natural of crowds—none of the women except Mrs. Grace looked entirely easy with one another; Mrs. Muller’s face could have soured milk; Arlene and Claire were crabbing at each other—but the air popped and snapped the way the atmosphere at Briarwood House rarely did. It jived, full of the smell of the Nilsson family Thursday-night meatballs.

Pete blushed, slipping out onto the landing where Joe Reiss was still noodling about on his guitar. “I thought you played saxophone?” Pete ventured. “Sax, guitar, clarinet, I play everything.” He finished up with some kind of fancy run. “Always tenor sax for the Amber Club.”

There was the usual list of Do This, Do That from his mother—weed the garden, sweep the front stoop, mop the kitchen, wax the banisters—but he had something else to do first. Something he’d been putting off. Taking a deep breath, he pulled up at the hall table with a fresh sheet of paper and wrote: Dear Dad, I won’t be writing to you anymore. I guess you aren’t interested in hearing from me, since you don’t write back. I wish you’d come home, but I guess you aren’t interested in doing that either. Thirteen’s a little young to start being the man of the house, but that doesn’t mean I can’t do it. It’s not fair, but I can do it. I’m not alone here. Pete tried to think what else to write, but there didn’t really seem to be anything else to say. So he signed his letter and sealed it, wrote the New Jersey address out for what he figured was the last time, and put it out for mailing. His heart was thumping like he’d just run a fast block, but he also felt oddly, grimly satisfied. He didn’t know what to feel. He just knew that he was finished with it. “Peeeeeeeeete—” Lina ran out of the kitchen with oven gloves on her hands and something on a baking sheet billowing smoke. “What did I dooooooo?” Pete inspected the scorched lumps. “Lina-kins, I don’t think peanut butter cookies need to be broiled.” “I thought it would make them done faster,” she wailed. “Why are you making cookies, anyway?” She scuffed one foot along the floor. “I volunteered to bring them for Sunday school, becaus...

“Lina-kins,” he said, jutting his jaw at an angle that was hopefully resolute and Musketeer-ish. “Mix up another batch and turn the oven down to three fifty.” He had no idea if that was the correct temperature or not. Why didn’t they have a proper cookbook like houses were supposed to have, with the smiling lady on the cover? Betty Somebody. “We’re going to make perfect peanut butter cookies if it takes us all day. And while they cook we’ll practice your reading,” he bargained, seizing the opportunity. “Because if you can’t read recipes, how are you going to learn to bake?”

Interstitial Thanksgiving 1954 Washington, D.C. Briarwood House remembers the moment Grace March dabbed that first painted flower on the green wall of Apartment 4B. There now, she’d asked, don’t you feel pretty? No one had asked the house a question in such a long time. It had taken a rusty moment to shake off the decades of inattention, stretch a bit through long-settled foundations, squint at that attic wall which had been bilious green since 1900 when those same foundations had been poured, but which no one—not one person in all the decades since—had ever tried to decorate. Yes, the house had thought in some wonder, examining the wall vine. Yes, I do feel pretty. And had made a point of paying attention ever since, whenever it felt the friendly tickle of that paintbrush in Grace’s hand. That was the moment at which, you might say, the house began to wake up. Just like people, houses go to sleep if bored, and things had been boring at Briarwood House for so long—nothing for the last decade but bleach and the stale smell of Campbell’s soup and the trudge of dispirited feet, and what house worth its baseboards and chimney bricks is going to stay invested in that? But things had started getting interesting again, sounding interesting, smelling interesting. The house hadn’t realized how much it missed smells, proper smells like Swedish meatballs and peanut butter cookies. You can’t call yourself a proper home without the regular smell of good food . . .

The smell currently making its way through Briarwood House is blood.

No one can say Briarwood is boring anymore, the house thinks with a certain flip of its curtains as the police prepare at last to move the body from the crime scene.

“Which one of them do you like for it?” the detective’s partner asks, and the house settles in to hear the answer. “One of the men,” the detective replies. “Victim’s throat was slashed from the front. Killer’s eyes and victim’s eyes locked together at the moment of death, that’s a certain kind of murderer. That kind of throat-slitting—most women don’t got it in ’em.”

Briarwood House is laughing so hard now, it has to calm the light bulbs and chandelier down or else people will think there’s a poltergeist.

Eyes lingering longest on the stocky dark-haired man leaning against the sink, the only person watching the detective back. The things I could tell you about that one, the house thinks.

“You know who he is, right?” the detective’s partner mumbles. The stocky dark-haired man lights up a Lucky Strike, still not removing his calm gaze from the two policemen. The detective lowers his voice to a whisper. “How long has someone like that been coming here?” First time? The house thinks, sending a chime through the dining room chandelier again. Four years ago, end of ’50. And wasn’t that a night to remember!

November 1950

Grace continued, rubbing Nora’s cuff between her fingers. For a small-town Iowa widow, she had a very sharp eye for clothes. “Coming to dinner tonight?” “Wouldn’t miss it.” Nora’s usual supper was a cup of soup heated on her hot plate; part of the aforementioned scrimping. Thursday dinners were the best meal Nora had all week, may all the saints bless Grace March and her Thursday night Briar Club.

If anyone listened, all they’d hear was Sammy Kaye singing “Harbor Lights.”

Xavier’s Corned Beef Hash 1 can corned beef hash, or leftovers from a corned beef and potato hash dinner 2 eggs Place the hash in a skillet and heat thoroughly over medium heat. Make two indentations in the hash, fill each with an egg, and cook until the eggs are set to desired doneness. Enjoy in bed with a lover, with plenty of extra napkins, while listening to “Goodnight, Irene” by Gordon Jenkins and The Weavers

“Our people all spoke different languages and maybe still do; we look different; we live in every possible location from cities to towns, mountains to plains. But”—she waved at the Bill of Rights, including its sister documents off in the Library of Congress—“this unites us. A government established for an articulated principle, not tribal allegiances or lines drawn on a map.”

“We can always do better,” Nora said. “These papers acknowledged from the beginning that we weren’t good enough yet. ‘A more perfect union’—it’s right there in our foundations that we aren’t perfect, that we have more to strive for.” She grinned. “I know, I know. I sound preachy. But isn’t it fascinating, when you really think about it? Most kingdoms or nations just say, ‘we rule because we’re strongest’ or ‘we rule because a god threw a thunderbolt and willed it so.’ We’re the country who said, ‘Here we are; let’s live by these principles and keep getting better at living up to them.’”

Joe Reiss and his bandmates were already lilting a sultry rendition of “I Wish I Didn’t Love You So.”

“Communism is the stupidest system on the planet.” Xavier refilled his coffee. “It ignores the biggest urge people got, which is that they want to build something. First for them, then for their kids. Ignore that urge, you’ll get in trouble fast. Maybe Communism is perfect on paper to some economist, but it doesn’t account for the fact that humanity thrives on imperfection.”

“Did I tell you I have a new man in my life?” Grace turned to the window, raising the sash. “He’s a bit of a loner, but he should be in the mood to drop by now . . . Yes, here he is.” A bony ginger cat came winding along the ledge outside and through the window, flowing down to the floor in one practiced jump. “Doilies Nilsson will skin you,” Nora warned. “No pets allowed.” “But this house needs a pet. All houses do, if they’re to become real homes.”