Sisters in Crime E-Book

Metta Fuller

• Herausgeber: Peter Owen Publishers
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 446

Beschreibung

Many of the leading writers of crime fiction are women - Agatha Christie, Ruth Rendell et al - but it still comes as a surprise to many that the first full-length detective novel was by one Metta Fuller whose The Dead Letter, under the alias Seeley Regester, appeared as far back as 1866, predating Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone by two years. In fact. women writers were instrumental in developing the new genre of detective fiction. This anthology selects stories from the late Victorian and Edwardian era including one of the Violet Strange stories by Anna Katharine Green, known as the "mother of the detective novel'; one of the Loveday Brooke stories by Catherine Pirkis, featuring an early private woman detective and a story by the Australian writer Mary Fortune who had written over 500 detective novels by the time Edward VII came to the throne. . . An absorbing collection belonging on the bookshelf of any serious crime fan.

Leseprobe

Praise for The Darker Sex (ed. Mike Ashley)

‘A magnificent and terribly readable collection’ – BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour

‘Editor Ashley does his usual fine job in selecting and introducing the eleven entries in a reprint anthology sure to appeal to fans of both Victorian fiction and ghost stories.’ – Publishers Weekly

Praise for The Dreaming Sex (ed. Mike Ashley)

‘Tales by some of the most imaginative female genre writers of the Victorian era’ – Sci-Fi magazine

‘A very interesting collection … a useful and entertaining addition to the library of the genre’s prehistory … deserves some considerable attention’ – Foundation, the journal of the Science-Fiction Foundation

THE FIGURE STILL WENT IN FRONT OF ME …

from ‘The Warder of the Door’ by L.T. Meade

SISTERS IN CRIME

While many of the leading exponents of modern detective fiction throughout the twentieth century and beyond have been women, it is perhaps less well known that women writers were instrumental in developing the genre in its early years. Sisters in Crime is a fascinating collection of such stories from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that exemplifies this through the works of Mary E. Braddon, Ellen Wood, Harriet E. Prescott, Mary Fortune, Anna Katharine Green, Elizabeth Corbett, Mary E. Wilkins, C.L. Pirkis, Arabella Kenealy, L.T. Meade, Lucy G. Moberly and Carolyn Wells.

A companion volume to his acclaimed The Darker Sex: Tales of the Supernatural and Macabre by Victorian Women Writers and The Dreaming Sex: Early Tales of Scientific Imagination by Women, Mike Ashley’s latest collection of rare early examples of women’s fiction should be an essential addition to the bookshelves of any serious fan of the development of crime writing.

SOURCES AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Stories

‘Levison’s Victim’ by Mary E. Braddon, first published in Belgravia, January 1870

‘Going Through the Tunnel’ by Mrs Henry Wood, first published in The Argosy, February 1869

‘Mr Furbush’ by Harriet E. Prescott, first published in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, April 1865

‘Traces of Crime’ by Mary Fortune, first published in Australian Journal, 2 December 1865

‘The House of Clocks’ by Anna Katharine Green, first published in The Golden Slipper (Putnam, 1915)

‘The Polish Refugee’ by Elizabeth Corbett, first published in Secrets of a Private Enquiry Office (Routledge, 1891)

‘The Long Arm’ by Mary Wilkins Freeman, first published in Chapman’s Magazine, August 1895

‘The Redhill Sisterhood’ by C.L. Pirkis, first published in The Ludgate, April 1893

‘The Villa of Simpkins’ by Arabella Kenealy, first published in The Ludgate, August 1896

‘The Warder of the Door’ by L.T. Meade, first published in Cassell’s Family Magazine, July 1897

‘The Tragedy of a Doll’ by Lucy G. Moberly, first published in The Lady’s Magazine, October 1903

‘A Point of Testimony’ by Carolyn Wells, first published in Adventure, October 1911

Pictures

From ‘The Redhill Sisterhood’, Bernard Higham (The Ludgate, April 1893)

From ‘The Villa of Simpkins’, R. Savage (The Ludgate, August 1896)

From ‘The Warder of the Door’, John H. Bacon (Cassell’s Family Magazine, July 1897)

CONTENTS

Introduction

Mary E. Braddon

Levison’s Victim

Ellen Wood

Going Through the Tunnel

Harriet E. Prescott

Mr Furbush

Mary Fortune

Traces of Crime

Anna Katharine Green

The House of Clocks

Elizabeth Corbett

The Polish Refugee

Mary E. Wilkins

The Long Arm

C.L. Pirkas

The Redhill Sisterhood

Arabella Kenealy

The Villa of Simpkins

L.T. Meade

The Warder of the Door

Lucy G. Moberly

The Tragedy of a Doll

Carolyn Wells

A Point of Testimony

INTRODUCTION

In my previous two anthologies in this series, The Darker Sex (2009) and The Dreaming Sex (2010), I presented examples of works by women writers that contributed to the development and popularization of the supernatural story and science fiction respectively. For this third volume I have turned to crime and mystery fiction.

Women have long been regarded as major contributors and innovators when it comes to crime fiction – one has only to think of Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, P.D. James, Ruth Rendell, Patricia Cornwell, Sara Paretsky, Kathy Reichs (and on and on and on) to show what a force women are in the field. But their forebears do not always get the same recognition. When charting the growth of crime fiction during the Victorian period the names of Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens and, of course, Arthur Conan Doyle will come readily to mind, but among women writers perhaps only Mary E. Braddon will get a grudging recognition, as will Anna Katharine Green, who is, at least, called the ‘mother of the detective novel’.

As for Catherine Pirkis or Mary Fortune or Arabella Kenealy or Lucy Moberly – who remembers them? Yet their roles in popularizing the genre are every bit as important. Mary Fortune was the most prolific writer of crime stories during the Victorian period, but because her work appeared only in Australian newspapers she has long been forgotten.

So for this anthology I have brought together just a few of these excellent writers. There are many more – I could have filled this book ten times over without repeating any authors. All of the stories feature a crime or a mystery, and many of them are also detective stories. What struck me in putting together this collection is that the women rose as equally to the challenge as men in creating fascinating puzzles and bizarre mysteries, but they added an extra depth of character. You will find believable people in these stories who understand the problems of others and are determined to fight injustice. That is because many of these writers had experienced their own sufferings and privations and had struggled to survive against long odds.

All the stories are, of course, written in the style of their day, and it is interesting to compare the earliest, from 1865 with the most recent (!) from 1915. The stories are presented more or less in chronological order so that you can follow the development of the field, and I have provided backgrounds on all of the authors in an introduction to each story. You will find a far more relaxing style compared with much of today’s fiction. These are stories to curl up with and wind down to at the end of the day. And they are a remarkable window on the past. So prepare to be transported to those wonderful gaslit days of mystery and escape the present, just for a while.

Mike AshleyMay 2013

Mary E. Braddon

LEVISON’S VICTIM

Mary E. Braddon (1835–1915) was one of the most popular and bestselling novelists of the Victorian period, as well as one of the most notorious. After a challenging childhood – raised and educated by her mother after her father deserted them and going on to the stage in her early twenties to support her mother – Braddon found, by 1860, her gift for writing. After several short stories and a blood-and-thunder novel Three Times Dead (1860) she struck gold with Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), which became the sensation of the decade. It tells of an attractive but devious woman who, though now respectably married, discovers that her first husband (who had previously deserted her) is still alive and likely to cause problems, so she attempts to murder him. Braddon followed this with the equally sensational Aurora Floyd (1863), with more bigamy and murder. The popularity of her work – and she would go on to write over eighty novels – allowed her to survive public reaction to her own sensational life which, in Victorian England, would have ruined a lesser woman. Braddon had moved in with and had children by her publisher, John Maxwell, who was still married, though his wife was in an Irish asylum for the insane. Braddon married Maxwell only after his wife died in 1874.

The following story was written during a particularly difficult time. Her mother and sister had died within a month of each other at the end of 1868, and soon after Braddon gave birth to a daughter and fell into a state of both physical and nervous collapse, aggravated by puerperal fever. She had by then written twenty novels in less than ten years and had been editing the magazine Belgravia. This story, which was published in Belgravia in January 1870, with its profound sense of loss and recovery, may well have helped her get over her depression.

Levison’s Victim

‘HAVE YOU SEEN Horace Wynward?’

‘No. You don’t mean to say that he is here?’

‘He is indeed. I saw him last night; and I think I never saw a man so much changed in so short a time.’

‘For the worse?’

‘Infinitely for the worse. I should scarcely have recognized him but for that peculiar look in his eyes, which I dare say you remember.’

‘Yes; deep-set grey eyes, with an earnest penetrating look that seems to read one’s most hidden thoughts. I’m very sorry to hear of this change in him. We were at Oxford together, you know, and his place is near my father’s in Buckinghamshire. We have been fast friends for a long time; but I lost sight of him about two years ago, before I went on my Spanish rambles, and I’ve heard nothing of him since. Do you think he has been leading a dissipated life – going the pace a little too violently?’

‘I don’t know what he has been doing; but I fancy he must have been travelling during the last year or two, for I’ve never come across him in London.’

‘Did you speak to him last night?’

‘No; I wanted very much to get hold of him for a few minutes’ chat but couldn’t manage it. It was in one of the gambling-rooms I saw him, on the opposite side of the table. The room was crowded. He was standing looking on at the game over the heads of the players. You know how tall he is, and what a conspicuous figure anywhere. I saw him one minute, and in the next he had disappeared. I left the rooms in search of him, but he was not to be seen anywhere.’

‘I shall try and hunt him up tomorrow. He must be stopping at one of the hotels. There can’t be much difficulty in finding him.’

The speakers were two young Englishmen; the scene a lamplit grove of trees outside the Kursaal of a German spa. The elder, George Theobald, was a barrister of the Inner Temple; the younger, Francis Lorrimore, was the son and heir of a Buckinghamshire squire, and a gentleman at large.

‘What was the change that struck you so painfully, George?’ Lorrimore asked between the puffs of his cigar. ‘You couldn’t have seen much of Wynward in that look across the gaming-table.’

‘I saw quite enough. His face has a worn, haggard expression, he looks like a man who never sleeps; and there’s a fierceness about the eyes – a contraction of the brows, a kind of restless searching look – as if he were on the watch for someone or something. In short, the poor fellow seemed to me altogether queer – the sort of man one would expect to hear of as being shut up in a madhouse, or committing suicide, or something bad of that kind.’

‘I shall certainly hunt him out, George.’

‘It would be only a kindness to do so, old fellow, as you and he have been intimate. Stay!’ exclaimed Mr Theobald, pointing suddenly to a figure in the distance. ‘Do you see that tall man under the trees yonder? I’ve a notion it’s the very man we’re talking of.’

They rose from the bench on which they had been sitting smoking their cigars for the last half-hour, and walked in the direction of the tall figure pacing slowly under the pine trees. There was no mistaking that muscular frame – six feet two, if an inch – and the peculiar carriage of the head. Frank Lorrimore touched his friend lightly on the shoulder, and he turned around suddenly and faced the two young men, staring at them blankly without a sign of recognition.

Yes, it was indeed a haggard face, with a latent fierceness in the deep-set grey eyes overshadowed by strongly marked black brows, but a face which, seen at its best, must needs have been very handsome.

‘Wynward,’ said Frank, ‘don’t you know me?’

Lorrimore held out both his hands. Wynward took one of them slowly, looking at him like a man suddenly awakened from sleep.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I know you well enough now, Frank, but you startled me just this moment. I was thinking. How well you’re looking, old fellow! What, you here, too, Theobald?’

‘Yes; I saw you in the rooms last night,’ answered Theobald as they shook hands, ‘but you were gone before I could get a chance of speaking to you. Where are you staying?’

‘At the Hotel des Étrangers. I shall be off tomorrow.’

‘Don’t run away in such a hurry, Horace,’ said Frank. ‘It looks as if you wanted to cut us.’

‘I’m not very good company just now; you’d scarcely care to see much of me.’

‘You are not looking very well, Horace, certainly. Have you been ill?’

‘No, I am never ill; I am made of iron, you know.’

‘But there’s something wrong, I’m afraid.’

‘There is something wrong, but nothing that sympathy or friendship can mend.’

‘Don’t say that, my dear fellow. Come to breakfast with me tomorrow and tell me your troubles.’

‘It’s a common story enough; I shall only bore you.’

‘I think you ought to know me better than that.’

‘Well, I’ll come, if you like,’ Horace Wynward answered in a softer tone. ‘I’m not very much given to confide in friendship, but you were once a kind of younger brother of mine, Frank. Yes, I’ll come. How long have you been here?’

‘I only came yesterday. I am at the Couronne d’Or, where I discovered my friend Theobald, happily for me, at the table d’hôte. I am going back to Buckinghamshire next week. Have you been at Crofton lately?’

‘No. Crofton has been shut up for the last two years. The old housekeeper is there, of course, and there are men to keep the gardens in order – I shouldn’t like the idea of my mother’s flower-garden being neglected – but I doubt if I shall ever live at Crofton.’

‘Not when you marry, Horace?’

‘Marry? Yes, when that event occurs I may change my mind,’ he answered with a scornful laugh.

‘Ah, Horace, I see there is a woman at the bottom of your trouble!’

Wynward took no notice of this remark and began to talk of indifferent subjects.

The three young men walked for some time under the pines, smoking and talking in a fragmentary manner. Horace Wynward had an absent-minded way, which was not calculated to promote a lively style of conversation; but the others indulged his humour and did not demand much from him. It was late when they shook hands and separated.

‘At ten o’clock tomorrow, Horace?’ said Frank.

‘I shall be with you at ten. Good-night.’

* * *

Mr Lorrimore ordered an excellent breakfast, and a little before ten o’clock awaited his friend in a pretty sitting-room overlooking the gardens of the hotel. He had been dreaming of Horace all night and was thinking of him as he walked up and down the room waiting his arrival. As the little clock on the mantelpiece struck the hour, Mr Wynward was announced. His clothes were dusty, and he had a tired look even at that early hour. Frank welcomed him heartily.

‘You look as if you had been walking, Horace,’ he said, as they sat down to breakfast.

‘I have been on the hills since five o’clock this morning.’

‘So early?’

‘Yes; I am a bad sleeper. It is better to walk than to lie tossing about hour after hour, thinking the same thoughts with maddening repetition.’

‘My dear boy, you will make yourself ill with this kind of life.’

‘Don’t I tell you that I am never ill? I never had a day’s illness in my life. I suppose when I die I shall go down at a shot – apoplexy or heart disease. Men of my build generally do.’

‘I hope you may have a long life.’

‘Yes, a long life of emptiness.’

‘Why shouldn’t it be a useful, happy life, Horace?’

‘Because it was shipwrecked two years ago. I set sail for a given port, Frank, with a fair wind in my favour; and my ship went down in sight of land, on a summer’s day, without a moment’s warning. I can’t rig another boat and make for another harbour as some men can. All my world’s wealth was adventured in this one argosy. That sounds tall talk, doesn’t it? but you see there is such a thing as passion in the world, and I’ve so much faith in your sympathy that I’m not ashamed to tell you what a fool I have been – and still am. You were such a romantic fellow five years ago, Frank, and I used to laugh at your sentimental notions.’

‘Yes, I was obliged to stand a good deal of ridicule from you.’

‘Let those laugh who win. It was in my last long vacation that I went to read at a quiet little village on the Sussex coast, with a retired tutor, an eccentric old fellow, but a miracle of learning. He had three daughters, the eldest of them, to my mind, the loveliest girl that ever the sun shone upon. I’m not going to make a long story of it. I think it was a case of love at first sight. I know that before I had been a week in the humdrum sea-coast village I was over head and ears in love with Laura Daventry; and at the end of a month I was happy in the belief that my love was returned. She was the dearest, brightest of girls, with a sunshiny disposition that won her friends in every direction, and a man must have had a dull soul who could have withstood the charm of her society. I was free to make my own choice, rich enough to marry a penniless girl, and before I went back to Oxford I made her an offer. It was accepted, and I returned to the university the happiest of men.’

He drank a cup of coffee and rose from the table to walk up and down the room.

‘Well, Frank, you would imagine that nothing could arise to interfere with our happiness after this. In worldly circumstances I was what would be considered an excellent match for Miss Daventry, and I had every reason to believe that she loved me. She was very young, not quite eighteen, and I was the first man who had ever proposed to her. I left her with the most entire confidence in her good faith, and to this hour I believe in her.’

There was a pause, and then he went on again.

‘We corresponded, of course. Laura’s letters were charming, and I had no greater delight than in receiving and replying to them. I had promised her to work hard for my degree, and for her sake I kept my promise and won it. My first thought was to carry her the news of my success; and directly the examinations were over I ran down to Sussex. I found the cottage empty. Mr Daventry was in London; the two younger girls had gone to Devonshire, to an aunt who kept a school there. About Miss Daventry the neighbours could give me no positive information. She had left a few days before her father, but no one knew where she had gone. When I pressed them more closely they told me that it was rumoured in the village that she had gone away to be married. A gentleman from the Spanish colonies, a Mr Levison, had been staying at the cottage for some weeks and had disappeared about the same time as Miss Laura.’

‘And you believe that she had eloped with him?’

‘To this day I am ignorant as to the manner of her leaving. Her last letters were only a week old. She had told me of this Mr Levison’s residence in their household. He was a wealthy merchant, a distant relation of her father’s, and was staying in Sussex for his health. This was all she had said of him. Of their approaching departure she had not given me the slightest hint. No one in the village could tell me Mr Daventry’s London address. The cottage, a furnished one, had been given up to the landlord and every debt paid. I went to the post office, but the people there had received no directions as to the forwarding of letters, nor had any come as yet for Mr Daventry.’

‘The girls in Devonshire – you applied to them, I suppose?’

‘I did, but they could tell me nothing. I wrote to Emily, the elder girl, begging her to send me her sister’s address. She answered my letter immediately. Laura had left home with her father’s full knowledge and consent, she said, but had not told her sisters where she was going. She had seemed very unhappy. The whole affair had been sudden, and her father had also appeared much distressed in mind. This was all I could ascertain. I put an advertisement in The Times addressed to Mr Daventry, begging him to let me know his whereabouts, but nothing came of it. I employed a man to hunt London for him, and hunted myself, but without avail. I wasted months in this futile search, now on one false track, now on another.’

‘And you have long ago given up all hope, I suppose?’ Lorrimore said as Wynward paused, walking up and down the room with a moody face.

‘Given up all hope of seeing Laura Levison alive? Yes; but not of tracking her destroyer.’

‘Laura Levison! Then you think she married the Spanish merchant?’

‘I am sure of it. I had been more than six months on the look-out for Mr Daventry, and had begun to despair of finding him, when the man I employed came to me and told me that he had found the registry of a marriage between Michael Levison and Laura Daventry at an obscure church in the City, where he had occasion to make researches for another client. The date of the marriage was within a few days of Laura’s departure from Sussex.’

‘Strange!’

‘Yes, strange that a woman could be so fickle, you would say. I felt convinced that there had been something more than girlish inconstancy at work in this business – some motive power, strong enough to induce this girl to sacrifice herself in a loveless marriage. I was confirmed in this belief when, within a very short time of the discovery of the registry, I came suddenly upon old Daventry in the street. He would willingly have avoided me, but I insisted on a conversation with him, and he reluctantly allowed me to accompany him to his lodging, a wretched place in Southwark. He was very ill, with the stamp of death upon his face, and had a craven look that convinced me it was to him I was indebted for my sorrow. I told him that I knew of his daughter’s marriage, when and where it had taken place and boldly accused him of having brought it about.’

‘How did he take your accusation?’

‘Like a beaten hound. He whimpered piteously and told me that the marriage had been no wish of his. But Levison had possession of secrets which made him the veriest slave. Little by little I wrung from him the nature of these secrets. They related to forged bills of exchange in which the old man had made free with his kinsman’s name. It was a transaction of many years ago; but Levison had used this power in order to induce Laura to marry him, and the girl, to save her father from disgrace and ruin, as she believed, had consented to become his wife. Levison had promised to do great things for the old man but had left England immediately after his marriage without settling a shilling on his father-in-law. It was altogether a dastardly business: the girl had been sacrificed to her father’s weakness and folly. I asked him why he had not appealed to me, who could no doubt have extricated him from his difficulty, but he could give me no clear answer. He evidently had an overpowering dread of Michael Levison. I left him, utterly disgusted with his imbecility and selfishness; but, for Laura’s sake, I took care that he wanted for nothing during the remainder of his life. He did not trouble me long.’

‘And Mrs Levison?’

‘The old man told me that the Levisons had gone to Switzerland. I followed post-haste and traced them from place to place, closely questioning the people at all the hotels. The accounts I heard were by no means encouraging. The lady did not seem happy. The gentleman looked old enough to be her father and was peevish and fretful in his manner, never letting his wife out of his sight and evidently suffering agonies of jealousy on account of the admiration which her beauty won for her from every one they met. I traced them stage by stage, through Switzerland into Italy, and then suddenly lost the track. I concluded that they had returned to England by some other route, but all my attempts to discover traces of their return were useless. Neither by land nor by sea passage could I hear of the yellow-faced trader and his beautiful young wife. They were not a couple to be overlooked easily; and this puzzled me. Disheartened and dispirited, I halted in Paris where I spent a couple of months in hopeless idleness – a state of utter stagnation from which I was aroused abruptly by a communication from my agent, a private detective, a very clever fellow in his way and well in with the police of civilized Europe. He sent me a cutting from a German newspaper which described the discovery of a corpse in the Tyrol. It was supposed, from the style of the dress, to be the body of an Englishwoman, but no indication of a name or address had been found to give a clue to identity. Whether the dead woman had been the victim of foul play, or whether she had met her death from an accidental fall, no one had been able to decide. The body had been found at the bottom of a mountain gorge, the face disfigured by the fall from the height above. Had the victim been a native of the district it might have been easily supposed that she had lost her footing on the mountain path; but that a stranger should have travelled alone by so unfrequented a route seemed highly improbable. The spot at which the body was found lay within a mile of a small village; but it was a place rarely visited by travellers of any description.’

‘Had your agent any reason to identify this woman with Mrs Levison?’

‘None, except the fact that Mrs Levison was missing and his natural habit of suspecting the very worst. The paragraph was nearly a month old when it reached me. I set off at once for the place named, saw the village authorities and visited the Englishwoman’s grave. They showed me the dress she had worn: a black silk, very simply made. Her face had been too much disfigured by the fall and the passage of time that had occurred before the finding of the body for my informants to give me any minute description of her appearance. They could only tell me that her hair was dark auburn, the colour of Laura’s, thick and long, and that her figure was that of a young woman.

‘After exhausting every possible enquiry, I pushed on to the next village and there received confirmation of my worst fears. A gentleman and his wife – the man of foreign appearance but talking English, the woman young and beautiful – had stopped for a night at the chief inn of the place and had left the next morning without a guide. The gentleman, who spoke German perfectly, told the landlady that his travelling carriage and servants were to meet him at the nearest stage on the home journey. He knew every inch of the country and wished to walk across the mountain in order to show his wife a prospect which had struck him particularly upon his last expedition a few years before. The landlady remembered that, just before setting out, he asked his wife some question about her watch, took it from her to regulate it and then, after some peevish exclamation about her carelessness in leaving it unwound, put it into his waistcoat pocket. The lady was very pale and quiet and seemed unhappy. The description which the landlady gave me was only too like the woman I was looking for.’

‘And you believe there had been foul play?’

‘As certainly as I believe in my own existence. This man Levison had grown tired of a wife whose affection had never been his; nay, more, I have reason to know that his unresting jealousy had intensified into a kind of hatred of her some time before the end. From the village in the Tyrol, which they left together on the bright October morning, I tracked their footsteps stage by stage back to the point at which I had lost them on the Italian frontier. In the course of my wanderings I met with a young Austrian officer who had seen them at Milan and had ventured to pay the lady some harmless attentions. He told me that he had never seen anything so appalling as Levison’s jealousy; not an open fury but a concentrated silent rage, which gave an almost devilish expression to the man’s parchment face. He watched his wife like a lynx and did not allow her a moment’s freedom from his presence. Everyone who met them pitied the beautiful girlish wife, whose misery was so evident; every one loathed her tyrant. I found that the story of the servants and the travelling carriage was a lie. The Levisons had been attended by no servants at any of the hotels where I heard of them and had travelled always in public or in hired vehicles. The ultimate result of my enquiries left me little doubt that the dead woman was Laura Levison; and from that hour to this I have been employed, more or less, in the endeavour to find the man who murdered her.’

‘And you have not been able to discover his whereabouts?’ asked Frank Lorrimore.

‘Not yet. I am looking for him.’

‘A useless quest, Horace. What would be the result of your finding him? You have no proof to offer of his guilt. You would not take the law into your own hands?’

‘By the Heaven above me, I would!’ answered the other, fiercely. ‘I would shoot that man down with as little compunction as I would kill a mad dog.’

‘I hope you may never meet him,’ said Frank solemnly.

Horace Wynward gave a short impatient sigh and paced the room for some time in silence. His share in the breakfast had been a mere pretence. He had emptied his coffee-cup but had eaten nothing.

‘I am going back to London this afternoon, Frank.’

‘On the hunt for this man?’

‘Yes. My agent sent me a description of a man calling himself Lewis, a bill-discounter, who has lately set up an office in the City and whom I believe to be Michael Levison.’

* * *

The office occupied by Mr Lewis, the bill-discounter, was a dismal enough place, consisting of a second floor in a narrow alley called St Guinevere’s Lane. Horace Wynward presented himself at this office about a week after his arrival in London, in the character of a gentleman in difficulties.

He found Mr Lewis exactly the kind of man he expected to see: a man of about fifty with small crafty black eyes shining out of a sallow visage that was as dull and lifeless as a parchment mask, thin lips and a heavy jaw and bony chin that betokened no small amount of power for evil.

Mr Wynward presented himself under his own name. On hearing which the bill-discounter looked up at him suddenly with an exclamation of surprise.

‘You know my name?’ said Horace.

‘Yes. I have heard your name before. I thought you were a rich man.’

‘I have a good estate, but I have been rather imprudent and am short of ready money. Where and when did you hear my name, Mr Lewis?’

‘I don’t remember that. The name sounds familiar to me, that is all.’

‘But you have heard of me as a rich man, you say?’

‘I had an impression to that effect. But the circumstances under which I heard the name have quite escaped my memory.’

Horace pushed the question no further. He played his cards very carefully, leading the usurer to believe that he had secured a profitable prey. The preliminaries of a loan were discussed but nothing fully settled. Before leaving the money-lender’s office Horace Wynward invited Mr Lewis to dine with him at his lodgings in the neighbourhood of Piccadilly on the following evening. After a few minutes’ reflection Lewis accepted the invitation.

He made his appearance at the appointed hour, dressed in a suit of shabby black in which his sallow complexion looked more than usually parchment-like and ghastly. The door was opened by Horace Wynward in person, and the money-lender was surprised to find himself in an almost empty house.

In the hall and on the staircase there were no signs of occupation whatever; but, in the dining-room, to which Horace immediately ushered his guest, there was a table ready laid for dinner, a couple of chairs and a dumb-waiter loaded with the appliances of the meal. The dishes and sauce tureens were on a hot plate in the fender. The room was dimly lighted by four wax candles in a tarnished candelabrum.

Mr Lewis, the money-lender, looked around him with a shudder; there was something sinister in the aspect of the room.

‘It’s rather a dreary-looking place, I’m afraid,’ said Horace Wynward. ‘I’ve only just taken the house, you see, and have had in a few sticks of hired furniture to keep me going till I make arrangements with an upholsterer. But you’ll excuse all shortcomings, I’m sure – bachelor fare, you know.’

‘I thought you said you were in lodgings, Mr Wynward.’

‘Did I?’ asked the other, absently. ‘A mere slip of the tongue. I took this house on lease a week ago and am going to furnish it as soon as I am in funds.’

‘And are you positively alone here?’ enquired Mr Lewis, rather suspiciously.

‘Well, very nearly so. There is a charwoman somewhere in the depths below, as deaf as a post and almost as useless. But you needn’t be frightened about your dinner; I ordered it in from a confectioner in Piccadilly. We must wait upon ourselves, you know, in a free and easy way, for that dirty old woman would take away our appetites.’

He lifted the cover of the soup tureen as he spoke. The visitor seated himself at the table with rather a nervous air and glanced more than once in the direction of the shutters, which were closely fastened with heavy bars. He began to think there was something alarmingly eccentric in the conduct and manner of his host, and was inclined to repent having accepted the invitation, profitable as his new client promised to be.

The dinner was excellent, the wines of the finest quality; and, after drinking somewhat freely, Mr Lewis began to be better reconciled to his position. He was a little disconcerted, however, on perceiving that his host scarcely touched either the viands or the wine, and that those deep-set grey eyes were lifted every now and then to his face with a strangely observant look. When dinner was over, Mr Wynward heaped the dishes on the dumb-waiter, wheeled it into the next room with his own hands and came back to his seat at the table opposite the billdiscounter, who sat meditatively sipping his claret.

Horace filled his glass but remained for some time silent, without once lifting it to his lips. His companion watched him nervously, every moment more impressed with the belief that there was something wrong in his new client’s mind and bent on making a speedy escape. He finished his claret, looked at his watch and rose hastily.

‘I think I must wish you good-night, Mr Wynward. I am a man of early habits and have some distance to go. My lodgings are at Brompton, nearly an hour’s ride from here.’

‘Stay,’ said Horace. ‘We have not begun business yet. It’s only nine o’clock. I want an hour’s quiet talk with you, Mr Levison.’

The bill-discounter’s face changed. It was almost impossible for that pallid mask of parchment to grow paler, but a sudden ghastliness came over the man’s evil countenance.

‘My name is Lewis,’ he said, with an artificial grin.

‘Lewis, or Levison. Men of your trade have as many names as they please. When you were travelling in Switzerland two years ago your name was Levison; when you married Laura Daventry your name was Levison.’

‘You are under some absurd mistake, sir. The name of Levison is strange to me.’

‘Is the name of Daventry strange to you, too? You recognized my name yesterday. When you first heard it, I was a happy man, Michael Levison. The blight upon me is your work. Oh, I know you well enough and am provided with ample means for your identification. I have followed you step by step upon your travels – tracked you to the inn from which you set out one October morning nearly a year ago with a companion who was never seen alive by mortal eyes after that date. You are a good German scholar, Mr Levison. Read that.’

Horace Wynward took out of his pocket-book the paragraph cut from the German paper and laid it before his visitor. The bill-discounter pushed it away after a hasty glance at its contents.

‘What has this to do with me?’ he asked.

‘A great deal, Mr Levison. The hapless woman described in that paragraph was once your wife: Laura Daventry, the girl I loved and who returned my love; the girl whom you basely stole from me by trading on her natural affection for a weak, unworthy father and whose life you made wretched until it was foully ended by your own cruel hand. If I had stood behind you upon that lonely mountain pathway in the Tyrol and had seen you hurl your victim to destruction I could not be more convinced than I am that your hand did the deed; but such crimes as these are difficult – in this case perhaps impossible – to prove, and I fear you will escape the gallows. There are other circumstances in your life, however, more easily brought to light; and by the aid of a clever detective I have made myself master of some curious secrets in your past existence. I know the name you bore some fifteen years ago, before you settled in Trinidad as a merchant. You were at that time called Michael Lucas, and you fled from this country with a large sum of money embezzled from your employers, Messrs Hardwell and Oliphant, sugar-brokers in Nicholas Lane. You have been “wanted” a long time, Mr Levison; but you would most likely have gone scot-free to the end had I not set my agent to hunt you and your antecedents.’

Michael Levison rose from his seat hastily, trembling in every limb. Horace rose at the same moment, and the two men stood face to face – one the very image of craven fear, the other cool and self-possessed.

‘This is a tissue of lies!’ gasped Levison, wiping his lips nervously with a handkerchief that fluttered in his tremulous fingers. ‘Have you brought me here to insult me with this madman’s talk?’

‘I have brought you here to your doom. There was a time when I thought that if you and I ever stood face to face I should shoot you down like a dog, but I have changed my mind. Such carrion dogs as you are not worth the stain of blood upon an honest man’s hand. It is useless to tell you how I loved the girl you murdered. Your savage nature would not comprehend any but the basest and most selfish passion. Don’t stir another step – I have a loaded revolver within reach and shall make an end of you if you attempt to quit this room. The police are on the watch for you outside, and you will leave this place for a jail. Hark! what is that?’

It was the sound of a footstep on the stairs outside, a woman’s light footstep, and the rustling of a silk dress. The dining-room door was ajar, and the sounds were distinctly audible in the empty house. Michael Levison made for the door, availing himself of this momentary diversion, with some vague hope of escape; but, within a few paces of the threshold, he recoiled suddenly with a hoarse gasping cry.

The door was pushed wide open by a light hand, and a figure stood upon the threshold – a girlish figure dressed in black silk, a pale sad face framed by dark auburn hair.

‘The dead returned to life!’ cried Levison. ‘Hide her, hide her! I can’t face her! Let me go!’

He made for the other door, leading into the inner room, but found it locked, and then sank cowering down into a chair, covering his eyes with his skinny hands. The girl came softly into the room and stood by Horace Wynward.

‘You have forgotten me, Mr Levison,’ she said, ‘and you take me for my sister’s ghost. I was always like her, and they say I have grown more so within the last two years. We had a letter from you a month ago, posted from Trinidad, telling us that my sister Laura was well and happy there with you; yet you mistake me for the shadow of the dead!’

The frightened wretch did not look up. He had not yet recovered from the shock produced by his sister-in-law’s sudden appearance. The handkerchief which he held to his lips was stained with blood. Horace Wynward went quietly to the outer door and opened it, returning presently with two men who came softly into the room and approached Levison. He made no attempt to resist them as they slipped a pair of handcuffs on his bony wrists and led him away. There was a cab standing outside, ready to convey him to prison.

Emily Daventry sank into a chair as he was taken from the room.

‘Oh, Mr Wynward,’ she said, ‘I think there can be little doubt of my sister’s wretched fate. The experiment which you proposed has succeeded only too well.’

Horace had been down to Devonshire to question the two girls about their sister. He had been struck by Emily’s likeness to his lost love and had persuaded her aunt to bring her up to London in order to identify Levison by her means and to test the effect which her appearance might produce upon the nerves of the suspected assassin.

The police were furnished with a complicated mass of evidence against Levison in his character of clerk, merchant and bill-discounter, but the business was of a nature that entailed much delay, and after several adjourned examinations the prisoner fell desperately ill of heart disease from which he had suffered for years but which grew much worse during his imprisonment. Finding his death certain, he sent for Horace Wynward and to him confessed his crime, boasting of his wife’s death with a fiendish delight in the deed, which he called an act of vengeance against his rival.

‘I knew you well enough when you came home, Horace Wynward,’ he said, ‘and I thought it would be my happy lot to compass your ruin. You trapped me, but to the last you have the worst of it. The girl you loved is dead. She dared to tell me that she loved you; defied my anger; told me that she had sold herself to me to save her father from disgrace and confessed that she hated me and had always hated me. From that hour she was doomed. Her white face was a constant reproach to me. I was goaded to madness by her tears. She used to mutter your name in her sleep. I wonder I did not cut her throat as she lay there with the name upon her lips. But I must have swung for that. So I was patient and waited until I could have her alone with me upon the mountains. It was only a push, and she was gone. I came home alone, free from the worry and fever of her presence – except in my dreams. She has haunted those ever since, with her pale face – yes, by Heaven, I have hardly known what it is to sleep, from that hour to this, without seeing her white face and hearing the one long shriek that went up to the sky as she fell.’

He died within a few days of this interview and before his trial could take place. Time, that heals almost all griefs, brought peace by and by to Horace Wynward. He furnished the house in Mayfair and for some time led a misanthropical life there; but on paying a second visit to Devonshire, where the two Daventry girls lived their simple industrious life in their aunt’s school, he discovered that Emily’s likeness to her sister made her very dear to him, and in the following year he brought a mistress to Crofton in the person of that young lady. Together they paid a mournful visit to that lonely spot in the Tyrol where Laura Levison had perished and stayed there while a white marble cross was erected above her grave.

Ellen Wood

GOING THROUGH THE TUNNEL

Though the life of Ellen Wood (1814–1887) was not as sensational as that of Mary E. Braddon, her novel East Lynne (1861) helped, with its adulterous and scheming heroine, to establish the vogue for novels of sensation. Wood may well have inspired Braddon, and it may be worth noting that one of the male villains of East Lynne has the surname Levison, which might just have inspired Braddon to choose that for her own villain. Until 1856 Ellen Wood’s life had been fairly comfortable, though curvature of the spine in her childhood had left her partially handicapped and fragile; she stood barely five feet tall and could rarely carry anything heavier than a book – though, remarkably, she bore five children. But in 1856 her husband, Henry Wood, suffered financial failure, and the family returned to England from their home in France. Ellen had started to sell stories anonymously in 1851 and now turned to writing full time to support the family, though it was not until the publication of Danesbury House in 1860 that her name became well known and, with East Lynne, her reputation and financial security assured. When not publishing anonymously she always used the name Mrs Henry Wood, even after her husband’s death in 1866. In 1867 she bought the magazine The Argosy and edited it for the rest of her life, assisted by her son Charles. For The Argosy, starting in 1868, she wrote, anonymously, a long series of stories related by Johnny Ludlow, of which the following is one. Ellen was delighted that the Ludlow series received high critical acclaim from those unaware they were the work of Mrs Henry Wood, whose other books the same critics snobbishly discredited. Ludlow himself is an orphan adopted by Squire Todhetley of Dyke Manor in Worcestershire, the county in which Ellen, then Ellen Price, had spent her childhood, and there is a quaint nostalgia in the homely recounting of these tales.

Most of the Ludlow stories, over eighty episodes of which were produced,feature some crime or mystery that either Ludlow himself or his adopted family seek to resolve. They include child abduction, blackmail, theft, disappearances, even hauntings. The following story, from the February 1869 edition of The Argosy – and included in the first of six volumes of Ludlow’s accounts – is one of the more light-hearted ones.

Going Through the Tunnel

WE HAD TO make a rush for it. And making a rush did not suit the Squire any more than it does other people who have come to an age when the body’s heavy and the breath nowhere. He reached the train, pushed head-foremost into a carriage and then remembered the tickets. ‘Bless my heart!’ he exclaimed as he jumped out again and nearly upset a lady who had a little dog in her arms and a mass of fashionable hair on her head that the Squire, in his hurry, mistook for tow.

‘Plenty of time, sir,’ said a guard who was passing. ‘Three minutes to spare.’

Instead of saying he was obliged to the man for his civility, or relieved to find the tickets might still be had, the Squire snatched out his old watch and began abusing the railway clocks for being slow. Had Tod been there he would have told him to his face that the watch was fast, braving all retort, for the Squire believed in his watch as he did in himself and would rather have been told that he could go wrong than that the watch could. But there was only me, and I wouldn’t have said it for anything.

‘Keep two back-seats there, Johnny,’ said the Squire.

I put my coat on the corner furthest from the door and the rug on the one next to it and followed him into the station. When the Squire was late in starting, he was apt to get into the greatest flurry conceivable, and the first thing I saw was himself blocking up the ticket place and undoing his pocket-book with nervous fingers. He had some loose gold about him, silver, too, but the pocket-book came to his hand first, so he pulled it out. These flurried moments of the Squire’s amused Tod beyond everything; he was so cool himself.

‘Can you change this?’ said the Squire, drawing out one from a roll of five-pound notes.

‘No, I can’t,’ was the answer in the surly tones put on by ticket clerks.

How the Squire crumpled up the note again and searched in his breeches pocket for gold and came away with the two tickets and the change, I’m sure he never knew. A crowd had gathered round, wanting to take their tickets in turn, and knowing that he was keeping them flurried him all the more. He stood at the back a moment, put the roll of notes into his case, fastened it and returned it to the breast of his overcoat, sent the change down into another pocket without counting it and went out with the tickets in hand. Not to the carriage but to stare at the big clock in front.

‘Don’t you see, Johnny? exactly four minutes and a half difference,’ he cried, holding out his watch to me. ‘It is a strange thing they can’t keep these railway clocks in order.’

‘My watch keeps good time, sir, and mine is with the railway. I think it is right.’

‘Hold your tongue, Johnny. How dare you! Right? You send your watch to be regulated the first opportunity, sir. Don’t you get into the habit of being too late or too early.’

When we finally went to the carriage there were some people in it, but our seats were left for us. Squire Todhetley sat down by the further door and settled himself and his coats and his things comfortably, which he had been too flurried to do before. Cool as a cucumber was he now the bustle was over; cool as Tod could have been. At the other door, with his face to the engine, sat a dark, gentleman-like man of forty, who had made room for us to pass as we got in. He had a large signet-ring on one hand and a lavender glove on the other. The other three seats opposite to us were vacant. Next to me sat a little man with a fresh colour and gold spectacles, who was already reading, and beyond him, in the corner, face to face with the dark man, was a lunatic. That’s to mention him politely. Of all the restless, fidgety, worrying, hot-tempered passengers that ever put themselves into a carriage to travel with people in their senses, he was the worst. In fifteen moments he had made as many darts – now after his hat-box and things above his head, now calling the guard and the porters