AMELIA BUTTERWORTH MYSTERIES: That Affair Next Door + Lost Man's Lane: A Second Episode in the Life of Amelia Butterworth + The Circular Study E-Book
Anna Katharine Green
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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Sprache: Englisch
In the engaging collection of Amelia Butterworth Mysteries, Anna Katharine Green presents three captivating novels that deftly blend Victorian sensibilities with the nascent detective genre. Green's meticulous prose and intricate plotting elevate her storytelling, creating richly detailed narratives that explore the social nuances of her time. Each tale follows the astute amateur sleuth, Amelia Butterworth, whose keen observations and unyielding determination place her at the forefront of solving perplexing mysteries, addressing themes of morality and societal constraints that mirror the complexities of late 19th-century America. Anna Katharine Green emerged as a pioneering figure in the realm of mystery literature, often credited for establishing the conventions of the detective genre. A passionate advocate for women's intellectual capabilities, Green's works reflect her curiosity about crime and its societal implications. Her personal experiences, intertwined with the shifting perceptions of women during her era, undoubtedly influenced the creation of Amelia Butterworth'—a character who combines intelligence and independence while navigating a male-dominated world. Readers drawn to keenly crafted mysteries with strong, multifaceted protagonists will find themselves captivated by Green's Amelia Butterworth Mysteries. With each page turn, the blend of suspense and social commentary invites profound reflection and exploration of gender roles, making these stories not only enjoyable but essential reading for fans of early detective fiction. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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AMELIA BUTTERWORTH MYSTERIES: That Affair Next Door + Lost Man's Lane: A Second Episode in the Life of Amelia Butterworth + The Circular Study
Table of Contents
Introduction
This single-author collection gathers Anna Katharine Green’s complete Amelia Butterworth trilogy: That Affair Next Door (1897), Lost Man’s Lane: A Second Episode in the Life of Amelia Butterworth (1898), and The Circular Study (1900). Composed at the close of the nineteenth century, these novels introduced a memorable society sleuth whose keen insight and unflinching curiosity illuminate mysteries threaded through drawing rooms, brownstones, and quieter suburban byways. Bringing the three works together emphasizes their continuity of character, method, and milieu, allowing readers to follow Butterworth’s investigations in the order they first appeared and to appreciate Green’s careful development of a distinctive strain of American detective fiction.
The contents are three full-length novels of detective fiction. Each narrative is a self-contained mystery plotted around a central crime and the systematic pursuit of facts, motives, and means. While the cases differ, they share recurring figures, notably Amelia Butterworth and Detective Ebenezer Gryce of New York, whose parallel methods and occasional collaborations shape the inquiries. There are no short stories, essays, or ancillary texts here, only the complete trilogy of novels as originally published in book form. Readers encounter classic elements of the mystery genre: puzzling circumstances, timed revelations, and the disciplined sifting of testimony, timelines, objects, and place.
Taken together, the novels present unifying themes that extend beyond their individual puzzles. Green explores the intersection of private life and public scrutiny, showing how crime unsettles the codes of propriety governing late nineteenth century households. She places a discerning woman at the center of detection, foregrounding observation, patience, and social intelligence as tools equal to official procedure. The stories examine class expectations, neighborhood intimacy, and the evidentiary value of seemingly trivial habits. Throughout, moral complexity is handled without sensationalism; wrong turns and false impressions yield to measured reasoning. The trilogy thereby invites readers to test appearances against behavior and traceable cause.
Stylistically, Green balances atmosphere with logic. Her chapters maintain forward motion while pausing for the close reading of rooms, letters, footsteps, and routine. Clue placement is deliberate, encouraging active engagement without overt manipulation. Dialogue is crisp and purposeful, advancing inquiry and character rather than ornament. Butterworth’s forthright presence and Gryce’s seasoned professionalism offer distinct approaches to evidence, creating a productive tension between amateur perspective and institutional experience. Settings, urban streets, well-appointed parlors, and quietly fraught lanes, are rendered with specificity that grounds each deduction. The result is a sustained tone of intelligent suspense that rewards attention to detail and sequence.
Historically, these works occupy an important place in the development of American detective fiction. Anna Katharine Green was a pioneering figure in the genre, and Amelia Butterworth stands among her most notable creations. The trilogy demonstrates how American settings and manners could host intricately structured mysteries, expanding a field then dominated by British and French models. Readers today can trace continuities between Green’s emphasis on material clues and later traditions of puzzle-driven storytelling. Equally, the novels preserve a vivid portrait of Gilded Age New York and its environs, using crime as a lens on social custom, mobility, and the boundaries of decorum.
Each novel begins from an arresting but grounded premise. That Affair Next Door opens when an unexpected death disrupts the calm of a neighboring house, drawing Butterworth into close quarters with official inquiry. Lost Man’s Lane widens the scope to a secluded roadway where unsettling events and whispers unsettle a community’s sense of safety. The Circular Study presents a case of exceptional intricacy in an unusual household, demanding sustained attention to circumstance and character. Across them, Green calibrates surprise to plausibility, keeping the reader near the scene, near the evidence, and attuned to how ordinary habits conceal or reveal decisive facts.
Presenting the trilogy in a single volume serves both newcomers and returning readers. It restores the publication sequence, highlights recurring motifs and relationships, and underscores the coherence of Amelia Butterworth’s methods across varied settings. Read consecutively, the novels showcase Green’s command of pacing, her restraint in unveiling motives, and her insistence that careful looking is an ethical as well as intellectual act. As a collected experience, the set offers a complete view of this character’s career within Green’s oeuvre, while standing as an enduring example of precise, character-informed mystery writing from a formative period in the genre’s history.
Historical Context
Anna Katharine Green (1846–1935), born in Brooklyn, New York, emerged as a foundational figure in American detective fiction with The Leavenworth Case (1878), which introduced NYPD detective Ebenezer Gryce. Drawing on the legal expertise of her father, the attorney James Wilson Green, she built a career noted for procedural detail and intricate plotting. After marrying actor and future Arts and Crafts designer Charles Rohlfs in 1884, she settled in Buffalo. In the late 1890s she inaugurated her celebrated society sleuth, Amelia Butterworth, in That Affair Next Door (1897), followed by Lost Man’s Lane (1898) and The Circular Study (1900), blending domestic settings with metropolitan policing during a period of intense urban and cultural transformation.
The Amelia Butterworth novels unfold against the backdrop of the Gilded Age’s New York City, a landscape reshaped by rapid modernization. Edison’s Pearl Street Station brought electric light in 1882; telephones spread into affluent homes after the first Manhattan exchange opened in 1878. Elevated railways and expanding streetcar lines knit neighborhoods to rising uptown districts and nearby suburbs, while brownstone rows staged rituals of calling cards, parlor visits, and carefully observed etiquette. Policing was under reform: the Lexow Committee (1894–1895) exposed NYPD corruption, and Theodore Roosevelt’s tenure as Police Commissioner (1895–1897) championed professionalism, giving plausibility to Green’s depiction of methodical detection intersecting with genteel households and their closely guarded secrets.
Green’s late‑century success coincided with a booming transatlantic market for crime fiction shaped by copyright and the press. The International Copyright Act of 1891 strengthened American authors’ rights, enabling more reliable income from clothbound editions and reprints. Newspapers led by Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst cultivated sensational reportage in the 1890s, priming readers for intricate investigations and courtroom drama. Green drew on precedents from Edgar Allan Poe and Wilkie Collins, while competing with Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories (first appearing in 1887; The Strand in 1891). Her New York‑centered, legally precise narratives helped consolidate an American tradition distinct from British models, favoring procedure, testimony, and spatial puzzles.
The figure of the unmarried, observant gentlewoman—Amelia Butterworth—speaks to the era’s contested gender norms. The 1890s saw the rise of the “New Woman,” women’s clubs such as Sorosis (founded in New York in 1868), and coordinated suffrage efforts through the National American Woman Suffrage Association (formed 1890). Yet social codes still constrained female mobility. Green placed an authoritative, respectable woman inside drawing rooms, boarding houses, and suburban parlors, using the ritual of social calls to gather intelligence. Her sleuth works within etiquette rather than against it, showing how domestic competence, neighborhood networks, and moral authority could rival official power—anticipating later traditions of female detection while remaining legible to middle‑class readers.
Class formation and suburbanization framed both the anxieties and the opportunities of Green’s mysteries. Manhattan’s elite clustered along Fifth Avenue and in new uptown enclaves, while immigrant working‑class communities expanded on the Lower East Side and in tenement districts. Commuter railways from Grand Central Depot (opened 1871) linked the city to Westchester and Long Island, making outlying lanes and country houses plausible settings for genteel households—and unsettling disappearances. The press amplified sensational crimes during the same years that the Spanish–American War (1898) dominated headlines, training readers to parse testimony, rumor, and conflicting narratives. Green’s plots exploit the thresholds between public and private spaces where servants, tradespeople, and neighbors intersect with guarded respectability.
Green’s procedural emphasis reflects changes in American legal and forensic practice. New York City still relied on elected coroners and public inquests in the 1890s; the Office of Chief Medical Examiner would replace that system only in 1918. Investigators increasingly referenced physical traces, handwriting, and careful scene documentation, while the Bertillon anthropometric system was being implemented in American jurisdictions by the late 1890s and fingerprints would gain dominance in the following decade. The Pinkerton National Detective Agency, active since 1850, popularized the idea of methodical detection, but Green anchored expertise inside municipal structures via Gryce while letting Butterworth’s social knowledge test official hypotheses, mirroring contemporary debates over science, professionalism, and lay observation.
Green’s Buffalo years connected her fiction to broader American artistic and industrial currents. The city’s manufacturing base and rail networks made it a conduit for books and periodicals, while the Pan‑American Exposition of 1901—site of President William McKinley’s assassination—symbolized both technological optimism and modern unease. Charles Rohlfs’s emergence as a leading Arts and Crafts furniture designer in the late 1890s foregrounded ideals of craftsmanship, proportion, and functional beauty. Green’s plotting often shows similar artisanal care, arranging rooms, objects, and movements like joinery. Family life—she had three children—coexisted with a disciplined literary output, situating her within a network of middle‑class creators whose work bridged domestic spaces and public markets.
Green’s late‑century cycle also refined a collaborative structure that influenced later crime fiction. Veteran detective Ebenezer Gryce anchors institutional memory; Amelia Butterworth supplies social access and interpretive nuance; and, by 1900, the energetic younger operative Caleb Sweetwater enters the orbit (notably in The Circular Study). This intergenerational, mixed‑method ensemble foreshadows twentieth‑century partnerships between police and skilled amateurs. The trilogy’s publication dates—That Affair Next Door (1897), Lost Man’s Lane (1898), and The Circular Study (1900)—span the hinge from Gilded Age spectacle to Progressive Era reform. Their enduring appeal rests on how Green converts contemporary infrastructures—law, media, manners—into engines of mystery, producing a distinctly American grammar of detection.
Synopsis (Selection)
That Affair Next Door
After witnessing a late-night visit to the vacant house next door, observant society spinster Amelia Butterworth becomes a key witness when a woman’s body is found inside; working warily with Detective Ebenezer Gryce, she unpicks timelines, identities, and genteel secrets to reveal the crime behind a respectable façade.
Lost Man's Lane: A Second Episode in the Life of Amelia Butterworth
Called to a suburban community haunted by unexplained disappearances along a shadowed lane, Amelia embeds herself among its households, testing alibis and local lore while coordinating with Gryce to trace a pattern that exposes a hidden threat close to home.
The Circular Study
A corpse discovered in a circular study draws Amelia and Gryce into a web of cryptic papers, odd domestic routines, and conflicting identities, compelling them to reconstruct the victim’s movements and motives without alerting a watchful adversary.
AMELIA BUTTERWORTH MYSTERIES: That Affair Next Door + Lost Man's Lane: A Second Episode in the Life of Amelia Butterworth + The Circular Study
That Affair Next Door
Book I. Miss Butterworth’s Window
Chapter I. A Discovery
I am not an inquisitive woman, but when, in the middle of a certain warm night in September, I heard a carriage draw up at the adjoining house and stop, I could not resist the temptation of leaving my bed and taking a peep through the curtains of my window.
First: because the house was empty, or supposed to be so, the family still being, as I had every reason to believe, in Europe; and secondly: because, not being inquisitive, I often miss in my lonely and single life much that it would be both interesting and profitable for me to know.
Luckily I made no such mistake this evening. I rose and looked out, and though I was far from realizing it at the time, took, by so doing, my first step in a course of inquiry which has ended——
But it is too soon to speak of the end. Rather let me tell you what I saw when I parted the curtains of my window in Gramercy Park, on the night of September 17, 1895.
Not much at first glance, only a common hack drawn up at the neighboring curb-stone. The lamp which is supposed to light our part of the block is some rods away on the opposite side of the street, so that I obtained but a shadowy glimpse of a young man and woman standing below me on the pavement. I could see, however, that the woman—and not the man—was putting money into the driver’s hand. The next moment they were on the stoop of this long-closed house, and the coach rolled off.
It was dark, as I have said, and I did not recognize the young people,—at least their figures were not familiar to me; but when, in another instant, I heard the click of a night-key, and saw them, after a rather tedious fumbling at the lock, disappear from the stoop, I took it for granted that the gentleman was Mr. Van Burnam’s eldest son Franklin, and the lady some relative of the family; though why this, its most punctilious member, should bring a guest at so late an hour into a house devoid of everything necessary to make the least exacting visitor comfortable, was a mystery that I retired to bed to meditate upon.
I did not succeed in solving it, however, and after some ten minutes had elapsed, I was settling myself again to sleep when I was re-aroused by a fresh sound from the quarter mentioned. The door I had so lately heard shut, opened again, and though I had to rush for it, I succeeded in getting to my window in time to catch a glimpse of the departing figure of the young man hurrying away towards Broadway. The young woman was not with him, and as I realized that he had left her behind him in the great, empty house, without apparent light and certainly without any companion, I began to question if this was like Franklin Van Burnam. Was it not more in keeping with the recklessness of his more easy-natured and less reliable brother, Howard, who, some two or three years back, had married a young wife of no very satisfactory antecedents, and who, as I had heard, had been ostracized by the family in consequence?
Whichever of the two it was, he had certainly shown but little consideration for his companion, and thus thinking, I fell off to sleep just as the clock struck the half hour after midnight.
Next morning as soon as modesty would permit me to approach the window, I surveyed the neighboring house minutely. Not a blind was open, nor a shutter displaced. As I am an early riser, this did not disturb me at the time, but when after breakfast I looked again and still failed to detect any evidences of life in the great barren front beside me, I began to feel uneasy. But I did nothing till noon, when going into my rear garden and observing that the back windows of the Van Burnam house were as closely shuttered as the front, I became so anxious that I stopped the next policeman I saw going by, and telling him my suspicions, urged him to ring the bell.
No answer followed the summons.
“There is no one here,” said he.
“Ring again!” I begged.
And he rang again but with no better result.
“Don’t you see that the house is shut up?” he grumbled. “We have had orders to watch the place, but none to take the watch off.”
“There is a young woman inside,” I insisted. “The more I think over last night’s occurrence, the more I am convinced that the matter should be looked into.”
He shrugged his shoulders and was moving away when we both observed a common-looking woman standing in front looking at us. She had a bundle in her hand, and her face, unnaturally ruddy though it was, had a scared look which was all the more remarkable from the fact that it was one of those wooden-like countenances which under ordinary circumstances are capable of but little expression. She was not a stranger to me; that is, I had seen her before in or about the house in which we were at that moment so interested; and not stopping to put any curb on my excitement, I rushed down to the pavement and accosted her.
“Who are you?” I asked. “Do you work for the Van Burnams, and do you know who the lady was who came here last night?”
The poor woman, either startled by my sudden address or by my manner which may have been a little sharp, gave a quick bound backward, and was only deterred by the near presence of the policeman from attempting flight. As it was, she stood her ground, though the fiery flush, which made her face so noticeable, deepened till her cheeks and brow were scarlet.
“I am the scrub-woman,” she protested. “I have come to open the windows and air the house,”—ignoring my last question.
“Is the family coming home?” the policeman asked.
“I don’t know; I think so,” was her weak reply.
“Have you the keys?” I now demanded, seeing her fumbling in her pocket.
She did not answer; a sly look displaced the anxious one she had hitherto displayed, and she turned away.
“I don’t see what business it is of the neighbors,” she muttered, throwing me a dissatisfied scowl over her shoulder.
“If you’ve got the keys, we will go in and see that things are all right,” said the policeman, stopping her with a light touch.
She trembled; I saw that she trembled, and naturally became excited. Something was wrong in the Van Burnam mansion, and I was going to be present at its discovery. But her next words cut my hopes short.
“I have no objection to your going in,” she said to the policeman, “but I will not give up my keys to her. What right has she in our house any way.” And I thought I heard her murmur something about a meddlesome old maid.
The look which I received from the policeman convinced me that my ears had not played me false.
“The lady’s right,” he declared; and pushing by me quite disrespectfully, he led the way to the basement door, into which he and the so-called cleaner presently disappeared.
I waited in front. I felt it to be my duty to do so. The various passers-by stopped an instant to stare at me before proceeding on their way, but I did not flinch from my post. Not till I had heard that the young woman whom I had seen enter these doors at midnight was well, and that her delay in opening the windows was entirely due to fashionable laziness, would I feel justified in returning to my own home and its affairs. But it took patience and some courage to remain there. Several minutes elapsed before I perceived the shutters in the third story open, and a still longer time before a window on the second floor flew up and the policeman looked out, only to meet my inquiring gaze and rapidly disappear again.
Meantime three or four persons had stopped on the walk near me, the nucleus of a crowd which would not be long in collecting, and I was beginning to feel I was paying dearly for my virtuous resolution, when the front door burst violently open and we caught sight of the trembling form and shocked face of the scrub-woman.
“She’s dead!” she cried, “she’s dead! Murder!” and would have said more had not the policeman pulled her back, with a growl which sounded very much like a suppressed oath.
He would have shut the door upon me had I not been quicker than lightning. As it was, I got in before it slammed, and happily too; for just at that moment the house-cleaner, who had grown paler every instant, fell in a heap in the entry, and the policeman, who was not the man I would want about me in any trouble, seemed somewhat embarrassed by this new emergency, and let me lift the poor thing up and drag her farther into the hall.
She had fainted, and should have had something done for her, but anxious though I always am to be of help where help is needed, I had no sooner got within range of the parlor door with my burden, than I beheld a sight so terrifying that I involuntarily let the poor woman slip from my arms to the floor.
In the darkness of a dim corner (for the room had no light save that which came through the doorway where I stood) lay the form of a woman under a fallen piece of furniture. Her skirts and distended arms alone were visible; but no one who saw the rigid outlines of her limbs could doubt for a moment that she was dead.
At a sight so dreadful, and, in spite of all my apprehensions, so unexpected, I felt a sensation of sickness which in another moment might have ended in my fainting also, if I had not realized that it would never do for me to lose my wits in the presence of a man who had none too many of his own. So I shook off my momentary weakness, and turning to the policeman, who was hesitating between the unconscious figure of the woman outside the door and the dead form of the one within I cried sharply:
“Come, man, to business! The woman inside there is dead, but this one is living. Fetch me a pitcher of water from below if you can, and then go for whatever assistance you need. I’ll wait here and bring this woman to. She is a strong one, and it won’t take long.”
“You’ll stay here alone with that——” he began.
But I stopped him with a look of disdain.
“Of course I will stay here; why not? Is there anything in the dead to be afraid of?[1q] Save me from the living, and I undertake to save myself from the dead.”
But his face had grown very suspicious.
“You go for the water,” he cried. “And see here! Just call out for some one to telephone to Police Headquarters for the Coroner and a detective. I don’t quit this room till one or the other of them comes.”
Smiling at a caution so very ill-timed, but abiding by my invariable rule of never arguing with a man unless I see some way of getting the better of him, I did what he bade me, though I hated dreadfully to leave the spot and its woful mystery, even for so short a time as was required.
“Run up to the second story,” he called out, as I passed by the prostrate figure of the cleaner. “Tell them what you want from the window, or we will have the whole street in here.”
So I ran up-stairs,—I had always wished to visit this house, but had never been encouraged to do so by the Misses Van Burnam,—and making my way into the front room, the door of which stood wide open, I rushed to the window and hailed the crowd, which by this time extended far out beyond the curb-stone.
“An officer!” I called out, “a police officer! An accident has occurred and the man in charge here wants the Coroner and a detective from Police Headquarters.”
“Who’s hurt?” “Is it a man?” “Is it a woman?” shouted up one or two; and “Let us in!” shouted others; but the sight of a boy rushing off to meet an advancing policeman satisfied me that help would soon be forthcoming, so I drew in my head and looked about me for the next necessity—water.
I was in a lady’s bed-chamber, probably that of the eldest Miss Van Burnam; but it was a bed-chamber which had not been occupied for some months, and naturally it lacked the very articles which would have been of assistance to me in the present emergency. No eau de Cologne on the bureau, no camphor on the mantel-shelf. But there was water in the pipes (something I had hardly hoped for), and a mug on the wash-stand; so I filled the mug and ran with it to the door, stumbling, as I did so, over some small object which I presently perceived to be a little round pin-cushion. Picking it up, for I hate anything like disorder, I placed it on a table near by, and continued on my way.
The woman was still lying at the foot of the stairs. I dashed the water in her face and she immediately came to.
Sitting up, she was about to open her lips when she checked herself; a fact which struck me as odd, though I did not allow my surprise to become apparent.
Meantime I stole a glance into the parlor. The officer was standing where I had left him, looking down on the prostrate figure before him.
There was no sign of feeling in his heavy countenance, and he had not opened a shutter, nor, so far as I could see, disarranged an object in the room.
The mysterious character of the whole affair fascinated me in spite of myself, and leaving the now fully aroused woman in the hall, I was half-way across the parlor floor when the latter stopped me with a shrill cry:
“Don’t leave me! I have never seen anything before so horrible. The poor dear! The poor dear! Why don’t he take those dreadful things off her?”
She alluded not only to the piece of furniture which had fallen upon the prostrate woman, and which can best be described as a cabinet with closets below and shelves above, but to the various articles of bric-à-brac which had tumbled from the shelves, and which now lay in broken pieces about her.
“He will do so; they will do so very soon,” I replied. “He is waiting for some one with more authority than himself; for the Coroner, if you know what that means.”
“But what if she’s alive! Those things will crush her. Let us take them off. I’ll help. I’m not too weak to help.”
“Do you know who this person is?” I asked, for her voice had more feeling in it than I thought natural to the occasion, dreadful as it was.
“I?” she repeated, her weak eyelids quivering for a moment as she tried to sustain my scrutiny. “How should I know? I came in with the policeman and haven’t been any nearer than I now be. What makes you think I know anything about her? I’m only the scrub-woman, and don’t even know the names of the family.”
“I thought you seemed so very anxious,” I explained, suspicious of her suspiciousness, which was of so sly and emphatic a character that it changed her whole bearing from one of fear to one of cunning in a moment.
“And who wouldn’t feel the like of that for a poor creature lying crushed under a heap of broken crockery!”
Crockery! those Japanese vases worth hundreds of dollars! that ormulu clock and those Dresden figures which must have been more than a couple of centuries old!
“It’s a poor sense of duty that keeps a man standing dumb and staring like that, when with a lift of his hand he could show us the like of her pretty face, and if it’s dead she be or alive.”
As this burst of indignation was natural enough and not altogether uncalled for from the standpoint of humanity, I gave the woman a nod of approval, and wished I were a man myself that I might lift the heavy cabinet or whatever it was that lay upon the poor creature before us. But not being a man, and not judging it wise to irritate the one representative of that sex then present, I made no remark, but only took a few steps farther into the room, followed, as it afterwards appeared, by the scrub-woman.
The Van Burnam parlors are separated by an open arch. It was to the right of this arch and in the corner opposite the doorway that the dead woman lay. Using my eyes, now that I was somewhat accustomed to the semi-darkness enveloping us, I noticed two or three facts which had hitherto escaped me. One was, that she lay on her back with her feet pointing towards the hall door, and another, that nowhere in the room, save in her immediate vicinity, were there to be seen any signs of struggle or disorder. All was as set and proper as in my own parlor when it has been undisturbed for any length of time by guests; and though I could not see far into the rooms beyond, they were to all appearance in an equally orderly condition.
Meanwhile the cleaner was trying to account for the overturned cabinet.
“Poor dear! poor dear! she must have pulled it over on herself! But however did she get into the house? And what was she doing in this great empty place?”
The policeman, to whom these remarks had evidently been addressed, growled out some unintelligible reply, and in her perplexity the woman turned towards me.
But what could I say to her? I had my own private knowledge of the matter, but she was not one to confide in, so I stoically shook my head. Doubly disappointed, the poor thing shrank back, after looking first at the policeman and then at me in an odd, appealing way, difficult to understand. Then her eyes fell again on the dead girl at her feet, and being nearer now than before, she evidently saw something that startled her, for she sank on her knees with a little cry and began examining the girl’s skirts.
“What are you looking at there?” growled the policeman. “Get up, can’t you! No one but the Coroner has right to lay hand on anything here.”
“I’m doing no harm,” the woman protested, in an odd, shaking voice. “I only wanted to see what the poor thing had on. Some blue stuff, isn’t it?” she asked me.
“Blue serge,” I answered; “store-made, but very good; must have come from Altman’s or Stern’s.”
“I—I’m not used to sights like this,” stammered the scrub-woman, stumbling awkwardly to her feet, and looking as if her few remaining wits had followed the rest on an endless vacation. “I—I think I shall have to go home.” But she did not move.
“The poor dear’s young, isn’t she?” she presently insinuated, with an odd catch in her voice that gave to the question an air of hesitation and doubt.
“I think she is younger than either you or myself,” I deigned to reply. “Her narrow pointed shoes show she has not reached the years of discretion.”
“Yes, yes, so they do!” ejaculated the cleaner, eagerly—too eagerly for perfect ingenuousness. “That’s why I said ‘Poor dear!’ and spoke of her pretty face. I am sorry for young folks when they get into trouble, aint you? You and me might lie here and no one be much the worse for it, but a sweet lady like this——”
This was not very flattering to me, but I was prevented from rebuking her by a prolonged shout from the stoop without, as a rush was made against the front door, followed by a shrill peal of the bell.
“Man from Headquarters,” stolidly announced the policeman. “Open the door, ma’am; or step back into the further hall if you want me to do it.”
Such rudeness was uncalled for; but considering myself too important a witness to show feeling, I swallowed my indignation and proceeded with all my native dignity to the front door.
Chapter II. Questions
As I did so, I could catch the murmur of the crowd outside as it seethed forward at the first intimation of the door being opened; but my attention was not so distracted by it, loud as it sounded after the quiet of the shut-up house, that I failed to notice that the door had not been locked by the gentleman leaving the night before, and that, consequently, only the night latch was on. With a turn of the knob it opened, showing me the mob of shouting boys and the forms of two gentlemen awaiting admittance on the door-step. I frowned at the mob and smiled on the gentlemen, one of whom was portly and easy-going in appearance, and the other spare, with a touch of severity in his aspect. But for some reason these gentlemen did not seem to appreciate the honor I had done them, for they both gave me a displeased glance, which was so odd and unsympathetic in its character that I bridled a little, though I soon returned to my natural manner. Did they realize at the first glance that I was destined to prove a thorn in the sides of every one connected with this matter, for days to come?
“Are you the woman who called from the window?” asked the larger of the two, whose business here I found it difficult at first to determine.
“I am,” was my perfectly self-possessed reply. “I live next door and my presence here is due to the anxious interest I always take in my neighbors. I had reason to think that all was not as it should be in this house, and I was right. Look in the parlor, sirs.”
They were already as far as the threshold of that room and needed no further encouragement to enter. The heavier man went first and the other followed, and you may be sure I was not far behind. The sight meeting our eyes was ghastly enough, as you know; but these men were evidently accustomed to ghastly sights, for they showed but little emotion.
“I thought this house was empty,” observed the second gentleman, who was evidently a doctor.
“So it was till last night,” I put in; and was about to tell my story, when I felt my skirts jerked.
Turning, I found that this warning had come from the cleaner who stood close beside me.
“What do you want?” I asked, not understanding her and having nothing to conceal.
“I?” she faltered, with a frightened air. “Nothing, ma’am, nothing.”
“Then don’t interrupt me,” I harshly admonished her, annoyed at an interference that tended to throw suspicion upon my candor. “This woman came here to scrub and clean,” I now explained; “it was by means of the key she carried that we were enabled to get into the house. I never spoke to her till a half hour ago.”
At which, with a display of subtlety I was far from expecting in one of her appearance, she let her emotions take a fresh direction, and pointing towards the dead woman, she impetuously cried:
“But the poor child there! Aint you going to take those things off of her? It’s wicked to leave her under all that stuff. Suppose there was life in her!”
“Oh! there’s no hope of that,” muttered the doctor, lifting one of the hands, and letting it fall again.
“Still—” he cast a side look at his companion, who gave him a meaning nod—“it might be well enough to lift this cabinet sufficiently for me to lay my hand on her heart.”
They accordingly did this; and the doctor, leaning down, placed his hand over the poor bruised breast.
“No life,” he murmured. “She has been dead some hours. Do you think we had better release the head?” he went on, glancing up at the portly man at his side.
But the latter, who was rapidly growing serious, made a slight protest with his finger, and turning to me, inquired, with sudden authority:
“What did you mean when you said that the house had been empty till last night?”
“Just what I said, sir. It was empty till about midnight, when two persons——” Again I felt my dress twitched, this time very cautiously. What did the woman want? Not daring to give her a look, for these men were only too ready to detect harm in everything I did, I gently drew my skirt away and took a step aside, going on as if no interruption had occurred. “Did I say persons? I should have said a man and a woman drove up to the house and entered. I saw them from my window.”
“You did?” murmured my interlocutor, whom I had by this time decided to be a detective. “And this is the woman, I suppose?” he proceeded, pointing to the poor creature lying before us.
“Why, yes, of course. Who else can she be? I did not see the lady’s face last night, but she was young and light on her feet, and ran up the stoop gaily.”
“And the man? Where is the man? I don’t see him here.”
“I am not surprised at that. He went very soon after he came, not ten minutes after, I should say. That is what alarmed me and caused me to have the house investigated. It did not seem natural or like any of the Van Burnams to leave a woman to spend the night in so large a house alone.”
“You know the Van Burnams?”
“Not well. But that don’t signify. I know what report says of them; they are gentlemen.”
“But Mr. Van Burnam is in Europe.”
“He has two sons.”
“Living here?”
“No; the unmarried one spends his nights at Long Branch, and the other is with his wife somewhere in Connecticut.”
“How did the young couple you saw get in last night? Was there any one here to admit them?”
“No; the gentleman had a key.”
“Ah, he had a key.”
The tone in which this was said recurred to me afterwards, but at the moment I was much more impressed by a peculiar sound I heard behind me, something between a gasp and a click in the throat, which came I knew from the scrub-woman, and which, odd and contradictory as it may appear, struck me as an expression of satisfaction, though what there was in my admission to give satisfaction to this poor creature I could not conjecture. Moving so as to get a glimpse of her face, I went on with the grim self-possession natural to my character:
“And when he came out he walked briskly away. The carriage had not waited for him.”
“Ah!” again muttered the gentleman, picking up one of the broken pieces of china which lay haphazard about the floor, while I studied the cleaner’s face, which, to my amazement, gave evidences of a confusion of emotions most unaccountable to me.
Mr. Gryce may have noticed this too, for he immediately addressed her, though he continued to look at the broken piece of china in his hand.
“And how come you to be cleaning the house?” he asked. “Is the family coming home?”
“They are, sir,” she answered, hiding her emotion with great skill the moment she perceived attention directed to herself, and speaking with a sudden volubility that made us all stare. “They are expected any day. I didn’t know it till yesterday—was it yesterday? No, the day before—when young Mr. Franklin—he is the oldest son, sir, and a very nice man, a very nice man—sent me word by letter that I was to get the house ready. It isn’t the first time I have done it for them, sir, and as soon as I could get the basement key from the agent, I came here, and worked all day yesterday, washing up the floors and dusting. I should have been at them again this morning if my husband hadn’t been sick. But I had to go to the infirmary for medicine, and it was noon when I got here, and then I found this lady standing outside with a policeman, a very nice lady, a very nice lady indeed, sir, I pay my respects to her”—and she actually dropped me a curtsey like a peasant woman in a play—“and they took my key from me, and the policeman opens the door, and he and me go upstairs and into all the rooms, and when we come to this one——”
She was getting so excited as to be hardly intelligible. Stopping herself with a jerk, she fumbled nervously with her apron, while I asked myself how she could have been at work in this house the day before without my knowing it. Suddenly I remembered that I was ill in the morning and busy in the afternoon at the Orphan Asylum, and somewhat relieved at finding so excellent an excuse for my ignorance, I looked up to see if the detective had noticed anything odd in this woman’s behavior. Presumably he had, but having more experience than myself with the susceptibility of ignorant persons in the presence of danger and distress, he attached less importance to it than I did, for which I was secretly glad, without exactly knowing my reasons for being so.
“You will be wanted as a witness by the Coroner’s jury,” he now remarked to her, looking as if he were addressing the piece of china he was turning over in his hand. “Now, no nonsense!” he protested, as she commenced to tremble and plead. “You were the first one to see this dead woman, and you must be on hand to say so. As I cannot tell you when the inquest will be held, you had better stay around till the Coroner comes. He’ll be here soon. You, and this other woman too.”
By other woman he meant me, Miss Butterworth, of Colonial ancestry and no inconsiderable importance in the social world. But though I did not relish this careless association of myself with this poor scrub-woman, I was careful to show no displeasure, for I reasoned that as witnesses we were equal before the law, and that it was solely in this light he regarded us.
There was something in the manner of both these gentlemen which convinced me that while my presence was considered desirable in the house, it was not especially wanted in the room. I was therefore moving reluctantly away, when I felt a slight but peremptory touch on the arm, and turning, saw the detective at my side, still studying his piece of china.
He was, as I have said, of portly build and benevolent aspect; a fatherly-looking man, and not at all the person one would be likely to associate with the police. Yet he could take the lead very naturally, and when he spoke, I felt bound to answer him.
“Will you be so good, madam, as to relate over again, what you saw from your window last night? I am likely to have charge of this matter, and would be pleased to hear all you may have to say concerning it.”
“My name is Butterworth,” I politely intimated.
“And my name is Gryce.”
“A detective?”
“The same.”
“You must think this matter very serious,” I ventured.
“Death by violence is always serious.”
“You must regard this death as something more than an accident, I mean.”
His smile seemed to say: “You will not know to-day how I regard it.”
“And you will not know to-day what I think of it either,” was my inward rejoinder, but I said nothing aloud, for the man was seventy-five if he was a day, and I have been taught respect for age, and have practised the same for fifty years and more.
I must have shown what was passing in my mind, and he must have seen it reflected on the polished surface of the porcelain he was contemplating, for his lips showed the shadow of a smile sufficiently sarcastic for me to see that he was far from being as easy-natured as his countenance indicated.
“Come, come,” said he, “there is the Coroner now. Say what you have to say, like the straightforward, honest woman you appear.”
“I don’t like compliments,” I snapped out. Indeed, they have always been obnoxious to me. As if there was any merit in being honest and straightforward, or any distinction in being told so!
“I am Miss Butterworth, and not in the habit of being spoken to as if I were a simple countrywoman,” I objected. “But I will repeat what I saw last night, as it is no secret, and the telling of it won’t hurt me and may help you.”
Accordingly I went over the whole story, and was much more loquacious than I had intended to be, his manner was so insinuating and his inquiries so pertinent. But one topic we both failed to broach, and that was the peculiar manner of the scrub-woman. Perhaps it had not struck him as peculiar and perhaps it should not have struck me so, but in the silence which was preserved on the subject I felt I had acquired an advantage over him, which might lead to consequences of no small importance. Would I have felt thus or congratulated myself quite so much upon my fancied superiority, if I had known he was the man who managed the Leavenworth case, and who in his early years had experienced that very wonderful adventure on the staircase of the Heart’s Delight? Perhaps I would; for though I have had no adventures, I feel capable of them, and as for any peculiar acumen he may have shown in his long and eventful career, why that is a quality which others may share with him, as I hope to be able to prove before finishing these pages.
Chapter III. Amelia Discovers Herself
There is a small room at the extremity of the Van Burnam mansion. In this I took refuge after my interview with Mr. Gryce. As I picked out the chair which best suited me and settled myself for a comfortable communion with my own thoughts, I was astonished to find how much I was enjoying myself, notwithstanding the thousand and one duties awaiting me on the other side of the party-wall.
Even this very solitude was welcome, for it gave me an opportunity to consider matters. I had not known up to this very hour that I had any special gifts. My father, who was a shrewd man of the old New England type, said more times than I am years old (which was not saying it as often as some may think) that Araminta (the name I was christened by, and the name you will find in the Bible record, though I sign myself Amelia, and insist upon being addressed as Amelia, being, as I hope, a sensible woman and not the piece of antiquated sentimentality suggested by the former cognomen)—that Araminta would live to make her mark; though in what capacity he never informed me, being, as I have observed, a shrewd man, and thus not likely to thoughtlessly commit himself.
I now know he was right; my pretensions dating from the moment I found that this affair, at first glance so simple, and at the next so complicated, had aroused in me a fever of investigation which no reasoning could allay. Though I had other and more personal matters on my mind, my thoughts would rest nowhere but on the details of this tragedy; and having, as I thought, noticed some few facts in connection with it, from which conclusions might be drawn, I amused myself with jotting them down on the back of a disputed grocer’s bill I happened to find in my pocket.
Valueless as explaining this tragedy, being founded upon insufficient evidence, they may be interesting as showing the workings of my mind even at this early stage of the matter. They were drawn up under three heads.
First, was the death of this young woman an accident?
Second, was it a suicide?
Third, was it a murder?
Under the first head I wrote:
My reasons for not thinking it an accident.
1. If it had been an accident and she had pulled the cabinet over upon herself, she would have been found with her feet pointing towards the wall where the cabinet had stood.
(But her feet were towards the door and her head under the cabinet.)
2. The decent, even precise, arrangement of the clothing about her feet, which precludes any theory involving accident.
Under the second:
Reason for not thinking it suicide.
She could not have been found in the position observed without having lain down on the floor while living and then pulled the shelves down upon herself.
(A theory obviously too improbable to be considered.)
Under the third:
Reason for not thinking it murder.
She would need to have been held down on the floor while the cabinet was being pulled over on her; something which the quiet aspect of the hands and feet made appear impossible.
To this I added:
Reasons for accepting the theory of murder.
1. The fact that she did not go into the house alone; that a man entered with her, remained ten minutes, and then came out again and disappeared up the street with every appearance of haste and an anxious desire to leave the spot.
2. The front door, which he had unlocked on entering, was not locked by him on his departure, the catch doing the locking. Yet, though he could have re-entered so easily, he had shown no disposition to return.
3. The arrangement of the skirts, which show the touch of a careful hand after death.
Nothing clear, you see. I was doubtful of all; and yet my suspicions tended most toward murder.
I had eaten my luncheon before interfering in this matter, which was fortunate for me, as it was three o’clock before I was summoned to meet the Coroner, of whose arrival I had been conscious some time before.
He was in the front parlor where the dead girl lay, and as I took my way thither I felt the same sensations of faintness which had so nearly overcome me on the previous occasion. But I mastered them, and was quite myself before I crossed the threshold.
There were several gentlemen present, but of them all I only noticed two, one of whom I took to be the Coroner, while the other was my late interlocutor, Mr. Gryce. From the animation observable in the latter, I gathered that the case was growing in interest from the detective standpoint.
“Ah, and is this the witness?” asked the Coroner, as I stepped into the room.
“I am Miss Butterworth,” was my calm reply. “Amelia Butterworth. Living next door and present at the discovery of this poor murdered body.”
“Murdered,” he repeated. “Why do you say murdered?”
For reply I drew from my pocket the bill on which I had scribbled my conclusions in regard to this matter.
“Read this,” said I.
Evidently astonished, he took the paper from my hand, and, after some curious glances in my direction, condescended to do as I requested. The result was an odd but grudging look of admiration directed towards myself and a quick passing over of the paper to the detective.
The latter, who had exchanged his bit of broken china for a very much used and tooth-marked lead-pencil, frowned with a whimsical air at the latter before he put it in his pocket. Then he read my hurried scrawl.
“Two Richmonds in the field!” commented the Coroner, with a sly chuckle. “I am afraid I shall have to yield to their allied forces. Miss Butterworth, the cabinet is about to be raised; do you feel as if you could endure the sight?”
“I can stand anything where the cause of justice is involved,” I replied.
“Very well, then, sit down, if you please. When the whole body is visible I will call you.”
And stepping forward he gave orders to have the clock and broken china removed from about the body.
As the former was laid away on one end of the mantel some one observed:
“What a valuable witness that clock might have been had it been running when the shelves fell!”
But the fact was so patent that it had not been in motion for months that no one even answered; and Mr. Gryce did not so much as look towards it. But then we had all seen that the hands stood at three minutes to five.
I had been asked to sit down, but I found this impossible. Side by side with the detective, I viewed the replacing of that heavy piece of furniture against the wall, and the slow disclosure of the upper part of the body which had so long lain hidden.
That I did not give way is a proof that my father’s prophecy was not without some reasonable foundation; for the sight was one to try the stoutest nerves, as well as to awaken the compassion of the hardest heart.
The Coroner, meeting my eye, pointed at the poor creature inquiringly.
“Is this the woman you saw enter here last night?”
I glanced down at her dress, noted the short summer cape tied to the neck with an elaborate bow of ribbon, and nodded my head.
“I remember the cape,” said I. “But where is her hat? She wore one. Let me see if I can describe it.” Closing my eyes I endeavored to recall the dim silhouette of her figure as she stood passing up the change to the driver; and was so far successful that I was ready to announce at the next moment that her hat presented the effect of a soft felt with one feather or one bow of ribbon standing upright from the side of the crown.
“Then the identity of this woman with the one you saw enter here last night is established,” remarked the detective, stooping down and drawing from under the poor girl’s body a hat, sufficiently like the one I had just described, to satisfy everybody that it was the same.
“As if there could be any doubt,” I began.
But the Coroner, explaining that it was a mere formality, motioned me to stand aside in favor of the doctor, who seemed anxious to approach nearer the spot where the dead woman lay. This I was about to do when a sudden thought struck me, and I reached out my hand for the hat.
“Let me look at it for a moment,” said I.
Mr. Gryce at once handed it over, and I took a good look at it inside and out.
“It is pretty badly crushed,” I observed, “and does not present a very fresh appearance, but for all that it has been worn but once.”
“How do you know?” questioned the Coroner.
“Let the other Richmond inform you,” was my grimly uttered reply, as I gave it again into the detective’s hand.
There was a murmur about me, whether of amusement or displeasure, I made no effort to decide. I was finding out something for myself, and I did not care what they thought of me.
“Neither has she worn this dress long,” I continued; “but that is not true of the shoes. They are not old, but they have been acquainted with the pavement, and that is more than can be said of the hem of this gown. There are no gloves on her hands; a few minutes elapsed then before the assault; long enough for her to take them off.”
“Smart woman!” whispered a voice in my ear; a half-admiring, half-sarcastic voice that I had no difficulty in ascribing to Mr. Gryce. “But are you sure she wore any? Did you notice that her hand was gloved when she came into the house?”
“No,” I answered, frankly; “but so well-dressed a woman would not enter a house like this, without gloves.”
“It was a warm night,” some one suggested.
“I don’t care. You will find her gloves as you have her hat; and you will find them with the fingers turned inside out, just as she drew them from her hand. So much I will concede to the warmth of the weather.”
“Like these, for instance,” broke in a quiet voice.
Startled, for a hand had appeared over my shoulder dangling a pair of gloves before my eyes, I cried out, somewhat too triumphantly I own:
“Yes, yes, just like those! Did you pick them up here? Are they hers?”
“You say that this is the way hers should look.”
“And I repeat it.”
“Then allow me to pay you my compliments. These were picked up here.”
“But where?” I cried. “I thought I had looked this carpet well over.”
He smiled, not at me but at the gloves, and the thought crossed me that he felt as if something more than the gloves was being turned inside out. I therefore pursed my mouth, and determined to stand more on my guard.
“It is of no consequence,” I assured him; “all such matters will come out at the inquest.”
Mr. Gryce nodded, and put the gloves back in his pocket. With them he seemed to pocket some of his geniality and patience.
“All these facts have been gone over before you came in,” said he, which statement I beg to consider as open to doubt.
The doctor, who had hardly moved a muscle during all this colloquy, now rose from his kneeling position beside the girl’s head.
“I shall have to ask the presence of another physician,” said he. “Will you send for one from your office, Coroner Dahl?”
At which I stepped back and the Coroner stepped forward, saying, however, as he passed me:
“The inquest will be held day after to-morrow in my office. Hold yourself in readiness to be present. I regard you as one of my chief witnesses.”
I assured him I would be on hand, and, obeying a gesture of his finger, retreated from the room; but I did not yet leave the house. A straight, slim man, with a very small head but a very bright eye, was leaning on the newel-post in the front hall, and when he saw me, started up so alertly I perceived that he had business with me, and so waited for him to speak.
“You are Miss Butterworth?” he inquired.
“I am, sir.”
“And I am a reporter from the New York World. Will you allow me——”
Why did he stop? I had merely looked at him. But he did stop, and that is saying considerable for a reporter from the New York World.
“I certainly am willing to tell you what I have told every one else,” I interposed, considering it better not to make an enemy of so judicious a young man; and seeing him brighten up at this, I thereupon related all I considered desirable for the general public to know.
I was about passing on, when, reflecting that one good turn deserves another, I paused and asked him if he thought they would leave the dead girl in that house all night.
He answered that he did not think they would. That a telegram had been sent some time before to young Mr. Van Burnam, and that they were only awaiting his arrival to remove her.
“Do you mean Howard?” I asked.
“Is he the elder one?”
“No.”
“It is the elder one they have summoned; the one who has been staying at Long Branch.”
“How can they expect him then so soon?”
“Because he is in the city. It seems the old gentleman is going to return on the New York, and as she is due here to-day, Franklin Van Burnam has come to New York to meet him.”
“Humph!” thought I, “lively times are in prospect,” and for the first time I remembered my dinner and the orders which had not been given about some curtains which were to have been hung that day, and all the other reasons I had for being at home.
I must have shown my feelings, much as I pride myself upon my impassibility upon all occasions, for he immediately held out his arm, with an offer to pilot me through the crowd to my own house; and I was about to accept it when the door-bell rang so sharply that we involuntarily stopped.
“A fresh witness or a telegram for the Coroner,” whispered the reporter in my ear.
I tried to look indifferent, and doubtless made out pretty well, for he added, after a sly look in my face:
“You do not care to stay any longer?”
I made no reply, but I think he was impressed by my dignity. Could he not see that it would be the height of ill-manners for me to rush out in the face of any one coming in?
