The Murder of Mary Russell E-Book

Laurie R. King

• Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Serie: Mary Russell & Sherlock Holmes
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 561

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Mary Russell is well used to dark secrets - her own, and those of her famous partner and husband, Sherlock Holmes. Trust is a thing slowly given, but over the course of a decade together, the two have forged an indissoluble bond. But what of the other person Mary Russell has opened her heart to, that third member of the Holmes household: Mrs Hudson? Blood on the floor, a token on the mantelpiece, the smell of gunshot in the air: all point directly at Clara Hudson - or rather, at Clarissa, the woman she was before Baker Street. The key to Russell's sacrifice lies in Mrs Hudson's past, and to uncover the crime, a frantic Sherlock Holmes must put aside his anguish and push deep into his housekeeper's secrets, to a time before her disguise was assumed, before her crimes were buried away. There is death here, and murder, and trust betrayed.

Leseprobe

THE MURDER OF MARY RUSSELL

LAURIE R. KING

For my sister, Lynn Difley, who devotes her life to encouraging white-haired folk to find their strength

… a young seaman of the name of Hudson …

‘Bless you, sir, I know where all my old friends are,’ said the fellow with a sinister smile.

‘“The game is up. Hudson has told all. Fly for your life.”’

– ‘The Adventure of the Gloria Scott’ by Arthur Conan Doyle

CONTENTS

TITLE PAGEDEDICATIONEPIGRAPHPART ONECHAPTER ONECHAPTER TWOPART TWOCHAPTER THREECHAPTER FOURCHAPTER FIVECHAPTER SIXCHAPTER SEVENCHAPTER EIGHTCHAPTER NINECHAPTER TENCHAPTER ELEVENCHAPTER TWELVECHAPTER THIRTEENCHAPTER FOURTEENCHAPTER FIFTEENCHAPTER SIXTEENCHAPTER SEVENTEENCHAPTER EIGHTEENCHAPTER NINETEENCHAPTER TWENTYCHAPTER TWENTY-ONECHAPTER TWENTY-TWOCHAPTER TWENTY-THREECHAPTER TWENTY-FOURCHAPTER TWENTY-FIVECHAPTER TWENTY-SIXCHAPTER TWENTY-SEVENPART THREECHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHTPART FOURCHAPTER TWENTY-NINECHAPTER THIRTYCHAPTER THIRTY-ONECHAPTER THIRTY-TWOCHAPTER THIRTY-THREECHAPTER THIRTY-FOURPART FIVECHAPTER THIRTY-FIVECHAPTER THIRTY-SIXCHAPTER THIRTY-SEVENCHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHTCHAPTER THIRTY-NINECHAPTER FORTYCHAPTER FORTY-ONECHAPTER FORTY-TWOCHAPTER FORTY-THREECHAPTER FORTY-FOURCHAPTER FORTY-FIVEPART SIXCHAPTER FORTY-SIXNOTESACKNOWLEDGEMENTSBY LAURIE R. KINGCOPYRIGHT

PART ONE

Sussex 13th May 1995

CHAPTER ONE

9:15 a.m.

IRONY COMES IN MANY flavours, sweet to bitter. The harshest irony I ever tasted was this: when I was interrupted that spring morning, I felt only relief.

But then, tyres on wet gravel sound nothing like the crack of doom.

The noise caught me in the midst of an attack on the post overflowing my desk in Sussex. Since dawn, I’d been elbow-deep in five months’ worth of pleas, adverts, requests for information now out of date, proposals of joint ventures similarly belated, legal and scholarly papers in need of review, and a thin handful of actual letters from friends near and far. I wanted nothing more than to haul the lot outside and set a match to it.

When I heard the noise, I assumed it was Mrs Hudson, returning for some forgotten element of her morning’s trip to Eastbourne. However, the tyres sounded more tentative than Patrick’s hand on the wheel (Patrick Mason was my farm manager and our housekeeper’s occasional driver). Nor did the approaching engine sound familiar. A taxi bringing Holmes, perhaps, finished with his unspecified tasks for his brother, Mycroft? I hadn’t seen my husband since he’d left Oxford, two weeks before.

But a glance through the library window showed an unfamiliar car with London number plates and a solitary figure considerably smaller than Sherlock Holmes. The driver circled anticlockwise, coming to a halt before the house.

I headed to the door with a light heart: unarguable proof that Mary Russell had no talent for reading the future.

I stepped from the front door into the roofed portico beyond, stopping as the fickle morning sunshine gave way to another quick shower. The driver’s door opened, but he hesitated, seeing not just the rain, but me. He’d expected someone else.

‘May I help you?’ I called.

‘Er, the Holmeses?’

‘This is the place,’ I confirmed. The shower grew stronger, spattering down the drive, and although the day was warm enough, I had no wish to change out of wet clothes. I turned to rummage through the odd population of canes, sticks and tools in the corner of the entryway, but before I could locate an umbrella that functioned, the car door slammed and footsteps hurried across the stones. I let go of the handle and gave the visitor some room under the shelter.

He was a short, stocky man in his forties, wearing a new black overcoat, an old brown suit and a cloth driving cap that he now pulled off, snapping it clear of drops before arranging it back over his blonde hair. His brief question had been insufficient to betray an accent, but it had to be either Australian or South African – his pale blue eyes positively blazed out of sun-darkened skin, and his suit had a distinctly colonial air to it. I had just chosen Australia when his greeting confirmed it.

‘G’day, ma’am. Nice place you got here.’

With that greeting, I finally raised a mental eyebrow.

A person’s first words can reveal a great deal more than the speaker’s origins. The closer one sticks to the traditional forms – Good day, madam, terribly sorry to bother you but … or a chatty variation such as, Dreadful weather for May, ma’am, please don’t come any further into it, I just … – the smoother the transition into a stranger’s life. But Nice place you got here, coupled with a blithe spattering of drops across the entry tiles and a grin that showed too many teeth? The man was out to sell me something.

Had I actually been working that morning – had I not been so grateful for any interruption at all – I might simply have taken another step back and shut the door in his face. Might not even have gone out at all, for that matter, thus setting events off in a very different direction. But with nothing more compelling than a stack of mail to draw me, that self-assured grin made for a nice little challenge.

Wouldn’t one think that life with Sherlock Holmes would have taught me all about the perils of boredom? And overconfidence? But like a fool, I felt only relief at this holiday from envelopes. ‘My husband is not here at the moment.’

Another young woman might have said those words apologetically, or perhaps nervously. I merely stated them as fact. He gave me a quick glance, head to toe, taking in my short but decidedly unfashionable haircut, my complete lack of make-up, the old shirt I wore (one of Holmes’ with its sleeves rolled up), and the trousers on my legs. He reacted with a degree more sensitivity than I might have expected. His posture subsided, his bare grin gave way to something more polite, and he removed his hat again, this time a gesture of respect rather than convenience. Even his words reflected the change.

‘Sorry, ma’am, but it’s not him I’m looking for. I wonder … does Mrs Hudson live here? Mrs Clari—Clara Hudson?’

‘She does, but—’

His right hand shot out at me. ‘Then you must be the missus. Mary Russell? You look just like she described you!’

I stifled my arm’s automatic impulse – to catch that outstretched hand and whirl him against the wall – and instead permitted him to grab me and pump away, grinning into my face. Still a salesman.

After four shakes I took back my hand. ‘Sir,’ I began.

‘Is she here? My mother?’

If he’d squatted down to tip me head over heels, he could not have astonished me more. Mother??

He saw my reaction, and gave a sort of smacking-of-the-forehead gesture. ‘What am I thinking? Guess I’m a little excited. My name is Samuel – Samuel Hudson. Great ta meetcha,’ and the hand came out again to seize mine.

Mother?

Of all the mysteries that are love, maternal love may be the most basic. My own mother had died when I was fourteen. A few months later, with the raw instincts of a barnyard chick imprinting its affections on the first available surrogate, my bereft heart had claimed Mrs Hudson for its own. I had known her for ten years now, lived with her for more than four, and she was as close to a mother as I would ever again have.

I knew of course that she had a son in Australia – or rather, she had a ‘nephew’ whom her sister claimed as her own. Glimpses of an older person’s complex and unspoken history can be startling, even when one’s main source of comparison is a dedicated Bohemian like Sherlock Holmes. Perhaps especially in that case: Mrs Hudson had always been a point of solid dependability amidst the anarchy that surrounded Holmes.

Motherhood is more than a biological state. Yes, I knew – well, suspected – about her past, but I had never conducted the close investigation I might have with a stranger, and definitely never asked Holmes if Mrs Hudson had been married before giving over the child to be raised. I admit that a few weeks into our acquaintance, when it dawned on me that the nephew might in fact be a son, my first reaction was an adolescent giggle over the idea of Mrs Hudson as a fallen woman. My second reaction was curiosity. Oddly, Holmes refused to say anything about the matter. It took a while before I realised that his blatant unconcern was the only way he could grant his poor housekeeper (as if she wasn’t so much more than housekeeper!) some degree of privacy.

Once I saw this, I followed his lead. I made no further attempts to rifle her possessions or read the letters from Australia – written largely by her sister (who had died, some nine months before this) although Mrs Hudson’s interest clearly lay more in the news about their shared son. To judge by the sighs and a general air of distraction after each letter’s arrival, it was not an easy relationship. In fact, her ‘nephew’ seemed to be something of a ne’er-do-well, but since she never asked for assistance or advice, we could only politely ignore her unspoken woes.

Until now, when he stood on our doorstep.

Assuming this was Samuel Hudson.

Would most young women accept such a claim without question? Perhaps. And perhaps most young women would be justified in their naive acceptance. However, I was married to Sherlock Holmes, had known him only a few hours longer than I’d known Mrs Hudson, and the basic fact of life with Holmes was: the world is filled with enemies.

So, I would not permit this person to meet Mrs Hudson without a thorough vetting.

All of this reflection and decision took me approximately three of the fellow’s handshakes. I bared my teeth to make a grin at least the equal of his, and drew back to welcome him inside (which had the added benefit of removing my hand from his).

‘She’s away for the morning,’ I told him, ‘I’m not sure exactly when she’ll be back. However, I can probably manage to make you a cup of tea in her absence. Unless you’d rather have coffee?’

‘A cuppa would go down a treat,’ he said, then to clarify: ‘Tea, thanks.’

I closed the door against the cool air and led him into the main room, our idiosyncratic combination of sitting room, library and dining room. The south wall, to my right, had a table in the bay window, where we took our meals; the east wall held laden bookshelves and French doors to the terrace; on the north lay a wide fireplace with chairs and a settee, along with the entrance to the kitchen. Holmes’ observation beehive, set into the wall beside the bay window, was behind its cover.

‘Whadda great room,’ the visitor enthused.

I bit off my tart response – I’m sorry, it’s not for sale – and instead turned the topic onto a more pertinent track. ‘Not to be rude, but I don’t suppose you have any sort of identification? You don’t look much like her.’ Mrs Hudson’s grey hair had once been brown, not blonde, and her dark eyes were nothing like this man’s bright blue. Even if the fellow had been born ‘Samuel Hudson’, it was a common enough surname. He might be some lunatic with a Sherlock Holmes mania built around a minor coincidence.

If so, this would not be the first fantasist to waltz into our lives, although the odds were mounting in his favour: he was certainly from Australia, and he knew not only our names, but where we lived. Still, the thought of that hand clamping down over Mrs Hudson’s beloved palm …

(I recount these details to show that I was not entirely oblivious to the world around me. Just not attentive enough.)

‘Nah, guess I don’t,’ he said, running a hand over his visage. ‘That’s probably why I never doubted who my mother was – Mum and I both have my granddad’s looks, or so I’m told. Identification, is it? I didn’t bring my passport, didn’t expect – ah, what about these?’ His fingers came out of an inner pocket with a photograph and a golden chain. He handed me the first.

It showed two women and an infant. The women sat in the formal pose required of a slow shutter speed, although it had been taken in a garden, not a studio – a private garden, most likely, since neither wore a hat. The infant was as unformed as any small human, little more than pale hair and layers of cloth. The woman holding him was blonde, with light-coloured eyes, and I thought – as I had from the first time I’d seen this photograph, years before – that there was something odd about the way the woman’s hands clutched the baby, thrusting him at the camera rather than cuddling him to her. Her features, too, had some faint air of hidden meaning, a triumph almost, that made one very aware of the empty hands of the woman at her side.

The other woman, taller, straight of back and dark of hair and eye, looked into the camera with a gaze of sad acceptance. Even if I had not recognised this woman’s features, I would have known her by that expression: I see what you are up to, it said, but I love you anyway.

Heaven knows she’d had plenty of opportunities to look at me that way, over the years.

I handed the photograph back to Samuel Hudson. ‘She has a copy of that.’ I did not add, Hers is worn down to the paper from ten thousand touches of her finger. My mother had used that very gesture, on the mezuzah at our door.

‘Well, that’s me,’ he said. ‘With my mother and aunt – although until just a few months ago, I thought the two went the other way around.’

I glanced up sharply at the bitter edge in his voice, to see his other piece of evidence dangling from thumb and forefinger: a gold chain strung through a hole drilled in an old half-sovereign coin.

‘Does she still wear hers?’ he asked.

The chain looked too bright and the gold of the pendant less worn than I remembered, but the necklace definitely caught my attention. I’d never seen it around Mrs Hudson’s neck, but I recognised it as the flash of gold I’d first spotted years before, tucked in the bottom of her incongruously large and ornate jewellery box. I might have taken no notice, at the time, but for the casual haste with which she had flipped something over it.

‘No, she doesn’t wear one like that,’ I told him.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I guess she’ll remember it anyway.’ He gave it a polish on his coat-tails, held it up in admiration, then set off on a circuit of the room, pausing on his way to drop the chain over the jackknife Holmes always left on the mantelpiece. I watched with increasing unease as he surveyed the walls, peered at the books on the shelves, poked an obtrusive finger through the clutter of papers and oddments on the table under the window. I was sorry I’d invited him in. And I changed my mind about letting him cool his heels here until she returned.

I would give him a polite cup of tea, and I would get rid of him. Let Mrs Hudson meet him on her own terms.

‘Tea,’ I said. ‘Just let me put on the kettle. How long have you been in England? I hope your trip went well – that you weren’t caught in those storms I read about last month?’

As I moved in the direction of the kitchen, I became aware of two things. First, I wanted badly to be alone, just for a minute, so I could try to beat my thoughts into order. (Mother? Mother! Though nothing like her. Shouldn’t I be pleased? Does that make him my sort-of… brother? But—) Second and even more peculiar, while my mouth was making conversation, my body wanted nothing to do with him. I was edging away towards the kitchen door because I did not want to turn my back on this man.

What was going on? I knew of no wrongdoing on his part, other than making his mother sigh. Still, I kept retreating backwards, making conversation as I went – too bad he’d hit a rainy day because the view from Beachy Head was glorious. Where did he live in Australia? Was he staying in Sussex or just down from London for the day?

Sydney, came the reply (which I knew) and only for the day (a relief, although he hadn’t come far that morning: the car bonnet was shiny, not hot enough to steam away the rain). At that point, my heels touched wood, so I ducked through the door and let it close, to stand with my hands resting on the old, well-scrubbed wooden table. I took a deep breath, then another.

I, better than most, had reason to understand that when one does not face up to events, they return – with a vengeance. My mother’s death and my desperate adoption of Mrs Hudson in her place might be facts of a distant past – but only until a situation came along to upend matters.

Well, that situation had arrived. Mrs Hudson was not my mother. Mrs Hudson was getting old, and deserved a full relationship with her son – her actual child – before she died. That he was a touch smarmy for my taste had nothing to do with matters.

After a moment, I scrubbed my damp palms down my shirt front and picked up the kettle. (The new whistling tea kettle that I gave herfor her birthday, just last – Oh, get a hold of yourself, Russell!) I filled it, shoved the whistle in place, and set its broad bottom over the flame. I would not hurry. Samuel Hudson might push through the door at any moment, to invade his mother’s private realm, but he had the right to invade. This was his mother’s home. If she were here, she would permit him inside. Therefore, so would I.

But I was relieved when he did not follow me.

Kettle on, two cups on a tray, anything else a hostess ought to do? A plate of something hospitable, perhaps? I searched through the tins where she stored her baked goods, and found a startling array of biscuits, sponges, and tea cakes – ah, yes: we were having a party on Saturday. I hesitated between her sultana biscuits and a loaf with strips of lemon peel on the top. Which would an Australian salesman prefer? Perhaps I should ask.

‘Mrs—your mother has made sultana biscuits and a lemon loaf. Which would you—?’

My voice strangled to a halt as I stepped into the sitting room and looked into the working end of a revolver.

Behind the gun stood a man with murder in his eyes.

CHAPTER TWO

12.40 p.m.

MRS CLARA HUDSONCAME home through the kitchen door, as always. She placed her laden basket on the scrubbed worktable, then paused to sniff the air, wondering – but an armful of parcels was struggling in the doorway behind her, and she hurried to take some of it.

‘Thank you, Patrick,’ she said. ‘I’m glad you talked me into going this morning – the produce would have been picked over, and you were right, it cleared up beautifully. Would you put those in the pantry? Thank you, dear.’

‘Don’t know why you needed to buy taters,’ he grumbled. ‘Ours’ll be ready in a couple of weeks.’

‘Yes, but I wanted to make my potato salad for Mary’s garden party. Her friend Veronica is particularly fond of it.’

‘Weather should go fine by Saturday, at any rate.’

‘That’s what the papers say. Well, thank—’

‘Oh, Mrs Hudson,’ he said, in a different voice. ‘I’m sorry.’

She turned and saw Patrick’s muscular back in the doorway to her rooms, squatting to pick up something from the floor. She moved around the worktable, and saw that the final survivor of her mother’s treasured porcelain had leapt from its little shelf and shattered against the slates. Fetching the hand-broom and scoop, she took the pieces from Patrick’s broad hand and dropped them unceremoniously in.

‘It could be fixed,’ he protested. ‘I know a man—’

‘That saucer has been fixed once already, Patrick. Let’s let it die a clean death this time.’ In truth, she hadn’t much liked its first repair. She’d only put it on the shelf because Mary had gone to such trouble, and expense.

She swept the floor, surveying the area for stray shards. She found a couple under the writing desk, and absently pushed the drawer shut as she straightened from sweeping around the narrow legs.

‘It’s really fine, Patrick. Thank you again for all your help, the marketing would have taken me all day. Give Tillie my love.’

He watched her pour the bits of porcelain into the dustbin, then gave a brief tug at his hat and went out. Clara Hudson ran a damp cloth over the floor to remove their footprints, then walked back into her quarters, taking off her hat and coat, pulling on an apron. She owned four hats but a dozen or more aprons, each suiting a day’s mood and tasks – the one she chose now was cheerful but practical, with bright flowers and few ruffles. She checked her reflection (As if anyone cares what I look like!) in the small portion of the looking glass not covered by photos and mementoes. As usual, her thumb came absently out to brush the one taken in Alicia’s garden. Unlike usual, she paused there, rearranging the mementoes around the gap where the porcelain saucer had stood.

The collection looked like any old woman’s shrine to ancient history. It was not. Oh, ancient, yes – nothing here had come into being later than 1880. But it was less a shrine than a series of voices, each one speaking words of admonition.

The saucer had been from her mother’s favourite teacup, damaged survivor of a careless past; the chewed-up string dolly, to a stranger’s eyes the whimsical reminder of a loving childhood, was the work of a dangerous drunk, while the rose-coloured dress it wore had been made from a stolen silk handkerchief. And the photograph – the only photograph she owned of her blood relations? That too bore a message that her eyes alone could see: Alicia holding Samuel like a trophy; Samuel, out of focus and unshaped, waiting to be given form; she herself, wishing she could feel happy for the two of them. And out of sight, the absent figure that explained ten thousand affectionate brushes of her thumb, Billy Mudd, all seven years of him, behind the lens, watching fascinated as the sweating photographer did his work in the Sydney garden. Billy, the photograph’s secret presence …

Mrs Hudson caught herself, and made a tsk sound with her aged lips. She was secretly pleased to be rid of that dreadful saucer – the mends had haunted her. And she had no cause to feel uneasy, on a beautiful sunny Sussex afternoon with three nice busy days of party preparations before her. The past was dead, good riddance to it.

She tied her apron’s strings and returned to work. Mary must have thought about making tea, she saw, and got as far as setting cups on a tray before something distracted her. Bad as her husband, the girl was. She would appear, once she’d come to a spot in her writing – or experiment, or what-have-you – where she could be interrupted.

Mrs Hudson smiled as she unpacked the tender strawberries that had rewarded her early arrival in Eastbourne that morning. Funny, the things one was proud of in life – this life. Potato salad on a spring day; perfect berries from Mr Brace’s stall, served with the thick cream that Mrs Philpott promised to send over. Scrubbed kitchen worktables, shelves without dust, the gleam of sun on fresh-polished floors.

Trust, upheld and unbroken.

When the baskets were empty, their contents stored away, Mrs Hudson wiped her hands on the cloth and looked around, conscious again of that vague sense of wrongness. A smell, one that didn’t belong here. Leaking gas? Something going off in the pantry? She walked back and forth, but couldn’t find it, and tried to dismiss the sensation.

Tea: that was what she needed. Mary must be even more intent on her work than usual, since she had not appeared to help put away the shopping. Not likely she’d gone off for a walk in the rain – even the papers had said the sky would clear by afternoon.

The housekeeper reached for the shiny, copper, whistling kettle, only to discover that it was not only full of water, but slightly warm. She frowned. Oh, don’t tell me I walked out and left my new birthday present over the flame! Have I done this before? Is that why Mary gave me one with a whistle, so I don’t burn down the house with being absent-minded? She was not yet seventy: far too young to have her mind go soft.

She set the kettle down on the flame and stood, kneading her arthritic fingers, wondering how to find out if she’d been absent-minded without asking directly. Questions like that were difficult, with someone as sharp as Mary Russell.

She shook her head and took down the flowered teapot, laid out spoons and milk beside the cups on the tray, checked the kettle’s whistle to make sure it was firmly seated, and finally went in search of the young woman around whom she had built the last decade of her life – her already much-rebuilt life.

She did not find her.

What she found was inexplicable: the beautiful little glass lamp, fallen from the table directly into the rubbish bin; what appeared to be muddy footprints, crossing the freshly polished wood towards the front door. Her shocked gaze flew upwards – only to snag against an even greater impossibility: a slim knife, stained with red, jutting from the plaster beside the bay window.

Her breath stopped. No. One of their experiments, it had to be. A jest, some thoughtless …

Mrs Hudson forced her legs to move into the room. Two steps, three, before an even more horrifying sight came into view.

A pool of blood in two halves, some eight inches apart: one thick and as long as her arm, the other shorter and much smeared about, both beginning to go brown at the edges. Drag marks leading towards the front door. A terrible amount of blood.

And with the sight, with that scream of red across her polished floor, Mrs Hudson abruptly knew what the faint odour was, the one that had picked around the edges of her mind since the moment she walked into her kitchen.

It was the smell of gunshot.

PART TWO

Clarissa

CHAPTER THREE

CLARA HUDSON’S DARK HAIR had gone mostly grey before she realised childhood was not intended to be a continuous stream of catastrophe and turmoil. At the time, while she was living it, the constancy of hunger, discomfort, dirt, and uncertainty, with the occasional punctuation of death and fists, was simply the price of existence. One fought, one prevailed, and one hugged to oneself the rare days when an actual dinner was set upon a clean table, with a family around it. Trust was a snare, safety a delusion; together they led to blood drying upon the floor.

Clara Hudson was born Clarissa, a haughty name for a child who drew her first breath in a seedy Edinburgh room without so much as a washbasin in the corner. Her mother named her. Her father was not there to be consulted.

Clarissa’s mother, the former Sally Rickets, was not haughty – although neither had she been born in a lodgings house. Sally had once Been Better. Sally had Come From Money, although not enough of it that she could turn her back on society’s demands. As a girl, she was both clear-sighted enough to recognise the deficiencies in the mirror, and romantic enough to feel that lack of beauty would not matter if only the right man came along.

Romance and realism make for a volatile mix. In Sally’s case, the mix gave rise to a painful shyness, driving Sally to the shelves of the circulating library and turning her wit to blushing awkwardness at any social gathering. Wit she had, along with glossy brown hair, skill with the needle, and an odd gift for mimicry (witnessed by few outside her family), but as her twentieth birthday loomed, Sally’s heart went unclaimed. Another girl might have sighed and put away romantic dreams in favour of some youth with sour breath but good prospects. Sally raised her chin and declared that she would seek employment.

In the best tradition of the novels she adored, she took a job as a governess, hiding even from herself the secret conviction that she would thereby meet a mysterious and intended mate. Instead, she met Jimmy Hudson.

Sally’s employers moved from Edinburgh to London in the autumn of 1852, to be close to the father’s expanding business interests. It was a lonely position, that of governess: too grand for the servants, too low for the family. Some nights, Sally felt very far from home.

But Sally did her best by her two young charges, seven-year-old Albert and his little sister Faith. She taught them their lessons and manners, entertained them (and occasionally coaxed them into obedience) with improvised plays, and took them for walks in this vast, filthy, fascinating, and crowded city from which an empire was ruled. Twice in the spring of 1853, Victoria herself rode past in a grand carriage. The second time, the Queen gave the children a nod.

That summer, young Bertie (four years younger than his namesake, the Prince of Wales) was given a model sailing boat for his birthday. Sally’s walks with her charges grew more cumbersome, as the great wicker perambulator that she already had problems wrestling along the streets now had a boat perched across it. One scorching August day, the little boat came to grief on some weeds in the Round Pond. Bertie began to wail, his sister (who was working on a new tooth) threw in her screams, and with increasing desperation (Bertie’s mother had made it clear that the young master was not to ruin any more clothing) Sally looked around for some urchin she could pay to fetch the craft. In vain.

Then out of nowhere, a young man appeared. He stripped off his jacket, kicked his shoes onto the path, and waded out for the diminutive yacht.

The figure that climbed from the water, trailing mud and waterweeds from a pair of irretrievably soiled trousers, was no lady’s idea of young Lochinvar. The man – boy, really – was small and wiry, with an odd amble to his walk that suggested a bad leg and rather less white to his teeth than a hero ought to have. But his straw-coloured hair was thick and his grin was friendly, and although the boldness in his cornflower-blue eyes would normally have alarmed her, the young man did no more than tug his hat at the governess before turning his attentions to her charge.

‘Captain, sir, I believe your ship has come to grief. May I make a suggestion or two, to keep it from happening again?’

He and young Bertie bent over the ship, instantly deep in the arcane subtleties of jibs, mizzens, wind direction, and the placement of ballast. After a bit, Sally moved little Faith into the shade and got her settled with a hard biscuit.

Sally watched as the two males returned the boat to the water. It tipped for a moment, then found the wind and took off, neat as could be. Bertie ran along the pathway in pursuit. His rescuer watched for a moment, then retrieved his jacket and shoes, bringing them over to the bench where she sat.

‘Thank ye,’ she said. ‘I couldna’ think how I was going t’explain another set of spoilt trews to the lad’s mother.’

‘Happy to help,’ he said. He sat at the other end of the bench to put on his shoes. He smelt, she noticed, of sun and baking linen, not of the tobacco that permeated the pores of most young men. Pleased, Sally allowed her eyes a surreptitious glance, noticing first the bracelet of intricately knotted string he wore around his wrist, then further down, the state of his stockings.

‘Och, sir, but look at ye! I shall pay for the launderin’.’

‘Wouldn’t think of it,’ he said.

‘I insist.’

‘Then you’ll have to strip them off me yourself,’ he said. She went instantly scarlet. He laughed.

Now, another man with that same exchange, and Sally would have wrapped her dignity around her and taken her leave. But the laugh had been a nice one, neither cruel nor forward. The sort of tease a brother might have made. The stranger finished tying his laces, brushed ineffectually at his sodden trouser legs, and restored his hat to his head.

‘Sir,’ she found herself saying, ‘I dinna even know your name. Whom shall I tell young Albert it was, that came to his rescue?’

He paused in the act of rising and swivelled on the wooden slats, as if seeing her for the first time. After a moment, he doffed his hat and smiled – and if she felt a pulse of alarm, it was small and far away, lost beneath the twinkle in his eyes. ‘James Hudson, at your service.’

‘Well, I thank ye, Mr Hudson. My name is Rickets. Sally Rickets.’

‘You’re from Scotland, Miss Rickets?’

‘That I am. Edinburgh.’ She made a noise like a clearing of the throat, then continued in accents considerably closer to those of London town. ‘It will take me a good long time to lose the accent, I fear.’

‘Oh, don’t do that, the real you is charming.’ She blushed again, less furiously. Mr Hudson’s head tipped to one side. ‘So tell me, Miss Rickets. Do you make it a habit to bring your young captain here?’

Up to then, she had not.

The rest of the afternoon passed in a flash. He bought the children a sherbet from a passing vendor, and a lemonade for her. He told them stories, outrageous tales of sea creatures and exotic places; some of them might even have been true. At some point he absent-mindedly drew a tangle of waxed thread from a pocket and set about knotting it in patterns, as another man might fiddle with a pipe or gold watch. When Bertie came back to the bench, grubby though unruined and pleased with his skills, he demanded to know what his new hero was doing, and was shown the lower portion of a miniature lanyard. An hour later, the child had the finished object in his hand.

From that day on, Kensington Gardens became a regular part of the week. Often, Jim Hudson was there. And more often than not, Sunday afternoons, Sally’s half-day of freedom, were spent in his company.

Within the month, she wore a delicately knotted bracelet around her left wrist.

Hudson was a sailor who’d grown tired of the life. He’d gone to sea at the age of thirteen, sent by his father in part for the money, but also to get the lad away from a doting mother who petted and spoilt her only child. Seven years later, a docking in Portsmouth coincided with his twentieth birthday and a growing conviction that life might hold other, less arduous possibilities for a man of brains and determination. He was full of himself, was Jimmy Hudson, quick of wit and of temper, a curly-haired, blue-eyed charmer who had learnt to conceal from his fellows the sure belief of his superior nature. Critics might say James Hudson felt the world owed him life on a silver platter. Himself, he said that the world was there for the taking.

It never occurred to the innocent governess that a young sailor’s natural habitat lay not in afternoons beside the Serpentine, idling amongst the idle classes. Even less did she pause to wonder what Jimmy Hudson saw in her, an unbeautiful woman two years older and an inch taller than he. If she’d been home, around friends and family, there might have been someone to ask the question – but by the time Sally had friends around her, it was too late. She had fallen for him, this rogue with the lovely hair and the careless, crooked grin, head over heels. And although there was some doubt in her own mind about whether her virtue would survive to a wedding, in the end – to her pride and his astonishment – it did. For the rogue had taken a tumble of his own, into the dark brown eyes of a shy and awkward Scottish girl, and he gave her a ring and a name before he gave her a baby.

What he did not give her was the full truth about how he earned a living.

Their son was born, early and ill-formed, on a cool spring morning five months and three days after their wedding vows. Mother and father held their tiny blue-skinned child, they heard its thin cries dwindle and cease, they watched the life leave it. Hudson went out and got drunk. Two days later, he came home to find his wife delirious with fever.

If James Hudson had been as hard-plated as he imagined, matters would have been simple. He’d have bathed his wife’s face and held her hand and watched her die, before going on with his life. But Sally was his one weakness, his hidden truth, the one whose belief made him real.

He panicked.

London in 1854 was a city of gangs, from those in Parliament to those of the blackest rookeries. Jim Hudson’s habitual gang was in the middle of those extremes, a widespread corporation of criminal activity under the absolute rule of a man known as The Bishop. The Bishop was ruthless, but fair – and smart. He knew that sometimes the fist was called for, but that sometimes a hand outstretched, especially if it had money in it, could be a powerful way to buy a man’s loyalty.

The Bishop listened to his desperate underling. He thought about young Hudson’s history, his past usefulness in matters related to shipping and the passage of valuables through the docks, and he considered the young man’s future potential. In the end, he nodded. Agreement was reached. Doctors were sent – good doctors, not stinking blood-letters with gin on their breath and filth around their fingernails. A nurse came. Sally walked the edges of life for a week, two … and then backed away from the eternal cliff.

By which time Hudson owed The Bishop a considerable debt.

In the spring of 1854, Britain went to war with Russia over the Crimean Peninsula. During the summer, ten thousand Londoners died from cholera. In the autumn, James Hudson moved from a dockland informer into one of The Bishop’s burglary gangs.

He was small, strong, and as a sailor, easy with heights even in the dark. His job was to enter the house through windows left unlatched by a paid-off servant, letting his partners inside. One of those partners was a man he’d known for months, a wiry, foul-mouthed, and cheerful cracksman in his forties. The other, Hudson was less happy about: a lad of fourteen who was new to the job, although he had lived in crime all his life. The Bishop’s son – his only son – was there to learn his father’s trade from the inside, and a less compliant apprentice would have been difficult to find. Nobody who worked with the surly and self-important lad enjoyed the experience, but Jimmy and his cracksman learnt how to make him feel important without risking the job. And the boy was bright enough, if one could talk him around his tendency to hit first and think later.

Hudson did not tell Sally what he was doing, or how much they owed The Bishop, merely that he’d need to work the occasional night. Sally could be disapproving, at times, and love her or not, that Scots righteousness of hers could wear on a man’s nerves. How did she expect him to make a living? Would she rather he went to sea, to be gone for months on end?

By the spring of 1855, Hudson and his partners were entering two or three houses a month. The season being fully underway meant that family jewels had been retrieved from bank vaults for the ladies’ throats, and since maids knew well where the necklaces and tiaras were kept …

Still, even with The Bishop’s iron fist in control, it was just a matter of time before someone got careless. On April 27th, a lady’s maid was arrested. She talked. The dominos of The Bishop’s organisation began to tumble – not that the man himself was in danger of arrest: The Bishop owned enough policemen to deflect an armful of warrants, and to free his son from worse crimes than house-breaking. Still, the lower levels of his network began to file into Newgate Prison.

James Hudson was tucking into his dinner when news reached him that the cracksman had been taken. Within the hour, he was pulling Sally from their tiny house, pushing her and a pair of trunks into a hired cart, and hushing her protests, not with a fist (though he was tempted) but with a sharp word and a promise that he would tell her all, later.

London was too hot for this upper-storey man. Edinburgh would be a risk, since everyone knew where Hudson’s wife hailed from. Plymouth or Southampton were tempting, but surely the first places anyone might look for a sailor. Instead, the young couple’s flight continued west.

On the first of May, Sally and Jim came to Falmouth, a small but active port town on the coast of Cornwall. They stored their trunks and walked through the streets until they found rooms bright enough to bear and cheap enough to afford. There, on the straw mattress behind the closed door, Hudson sat down with his wife at last. He took Sally’s hand, and told her exactly why they’d had to flee.

When she took back her hand and got to her feet, he thought she was about to leave him. Half of him wished she would. But the fact that her illness had driven them to this gave Sally pause.

She stood for a long time at the little window, her spine rigid and unreadable. However, the longer she stood, the better his chances, so he sat, waiting, until she called him daft and an idjit and a list of other names. But she was there, and so Hudson swallowed his pride and his retorts (She’d lost the baby; she’d gone and got sick!) to hang his head and agree that yes, he was a fool and yes, he should have told her. He said yes, too, when she laid down the law and said that he would have nought more to do with crime. That they would work like decent folk and pay back the debt by honest means, no matter how long it took.

Hudson knew the chances of buying their way back into The Bishop’s good graces were nil. But he said nothing. She came to sit beside him on the rough bed. When she slipped her hand into his, it was enough to be going on.

They both found work, he in the docks, Sally at a busy coaching inn. May went, and June. As July wore on, Hudson began to breathe again. The waxed threads reappeared, and his clever fingers resumed their darting knots: a pair of earrings took shape, in a dark red that echoed the chestnut gleams in his wife’s hair. In August, the Queen and Albert were entertained at Versailles. In September, Sebastopol fell to the British. Two weeks later, Sally told him shyly that she was pregnant again.

Ten days after that, on October the seventh, Hudson was walking down a street when he saw a familiar face: one of The Bishop’s men from London.

He ducked into an alleyway, trotting rapidly away from the docks to weave a circuitous path home, glancing over his shoulder the entire way.

He hadn’t been seen, he was pretty sure. And although Sally had left already for work, he reassured himself that the man had never met her, had no reason to know what she looked like, and they were even using different names here … Nonetheless, he poured himself a generous level of gin, standing at the window behind the thin curtains, and spent the day in an agony of nerves, convinced that Sally had been seized.

When at last he heard her feet on the stairs, the gust of relief instantly converted his fear to blind rage.

CHAPTER FOUR

HE MANAGED NOT TO hit Sally – she was pregnant, after all – but her hair tumbled down as he shook her, and the fear in her eyes made his anger flare all the hotter.

But only for an instant. He turned to splash the last of the spirits into his cup, dumping it down his throat like cold water across a fighting dog.

By the time she understood, confession had soured the gin in his gut and his fury had given way to exhaustion. He collapsed onto the side of the bed, head in hands.

‘Ah, Sally, what’re we going to do?’ he groaned.

‘Ye should go.’

‘Where? If I go back to London, I’ll be arrested. Or worse. I’ll have to let The Bishop know where he can find me. Maybe he can make use of me out here.’

‘Is …?’ Sally hesitated, then forced herself to ask. ‘Is what you did a … hanging offence?’

‘No! Nobody got hurt. But it’d be transportation for sure. And what good will I do you and the baby for seven years in Australia?’

They sat listening to the silence. After a bit, Sally straightened on her chair and took a breath. ‘What about getting work on a ship? Just for a time.’

‘What, shipping out?’

‘It needn’t be for long, just to get you away. A month, say, then get off the ship at the next port and work another ship back. You write and tell me where to meet you. I could make my way to Liverpool, or Hull – York, even, to get away from ports. Jimmy, we could be together when our son is born.’

He raised his head, fighting hope. ‘But what if you have to leave here? How would I ever find you again?’

‘My sister.’ The only person from Sally’s past who still wrote, who still loved her. The only person Sally knew she could trust, absolutely. ‘Write to Alice. She’ll always know where I am.’

They talked it up and down, but in truth, there was little choice. In the wee hours, he wrapped tender arms around her, his fingers apologising for the bruises on her shoulders. Before light, his sailor’s bag was packed, his feet carrying him towards the docks.

That very day he set sail upon the barque Gloria Scott, a heavy old tub bound for Australia with, in addition to its crew, eighteen soldiers, four warders, a doctor and a chaplain – because (the irony made him grin uncomfortably) the ship also carried thirty-eight felons wearing the chains of transportees.

Sally stood on the hill above town, wrapped in her thickest shawl, skirts tugged about by the chilly October wind, and watched her husband sail away. When the ship had faded into the Channel mists, she resolutely turned back towards the town and resumed her job at the inn.

A month later, a spurt of seven letters and a small parcel arrived all at once, posted from Gibraltar, addressed to the inn. Sally took them from the innkeeper in wonder, and carried them safely home.

The paper-wrapped parcel contained a lengthy letter, crumpled from the string, encircling an object that must have taken Jimmy every spare minute of the trip to that point. He’d made a dolly longer than her hand, with stubby extremities and a knob for a head, stuffed firm with kapok. Tens of thousands of tight little knots had gone into its making, and a great deal of thought: it even had a face of sorts, picked out in black thread, and a tuft of long black hair gathered into a plait. In a postscript, the letter said that, depending on whether the baby was a boy or a girl, Sally could cut the hair or leave it long, and sew the doll a dress or a sailor suit. She ran her fingers over the little figure’s taut waxed-linen surface, feeling her husband’s hands on every tiny bump. How many hours had this taken him? What had been going on all around him while he worked, what conversations, what kinds of men at his side? Holding it to her face, she could smell the sea and the smouldering lamps, and the tobacco the others had smoked while he worked. She could smell his life, far away.

She gave the manikin a kiss and sat it against her cup of cocoa while she sorted the envelopes by date, feeling the thickness of each, studying his writing on the outside. Then Sally Hudson dived into her husband’s words like a starving thing.

The first two letters had little to say beyond the boredom of shipboard work, the tedium of the food, and how much he missed her. The two after that had clearly been written following a ration of rum, as his wandering hand transcribed an equally meandering stream of thoughts, plans, complaints and sorrows. The next one picked up a bit, describing the odd behaviour of the chaplain and the willingness of some of the soldiers to lose money at cards. He added, as an afterthought at the bottom:

PS. I don’t suppose you’ll approve of me playing cards but when time hangs heavy I can only tie so many knots. And anyway its savings for our future my lovey.

His next letter mentioned the chaplain again, then went on to describe a troublemaker among the prisoners, an extraordinarily tall minor aristocrat named Prendergast who had defrauded a wide selection of City merchants of a stupendous amount of money. The police, it seemed, had not only been unable to find the money, they did not even know just how much it was. And Prendergast wasn’t the only rich criminal on board the Gloria Scott: almost all the transportees were convicts of a financial nature – fraud, bank theft, forgery. Some of them were so clever, Hudson wrote admiringly, it was a wonder they’d been caught.

Hudson’s final letter ended saying he planned to post the letters when the ship put into Gibraltar. However, he added, he had decided not to leave the ship himself until Cape Town. He would write her from there, to let her know when to expect him.

That letter did not come.

Weeks crawled by: Christmas, New Year’s. Her belly grew, although to her great relief, where the first time she had been constantly ill and aching, this time went without problem. If only she would hear from Jimmy, all would surely be fine.

Then in January, Sally overheard two men talking. In an inn, rumours lay as thick underfoot as the wood chips absorbing the slops, but over the following days, she heard this one from too many directions to ignore.

The transport ship Gloria Scott was lost at sea.

Sally told herself that the old barque was just late. That Jimmy had slipped away in Cape Town, that the letter telling her had been lost. Surely he would appear soon. As for the ship herself being sunk, it was not due into Sydney until February: it had just put in elsewhere along the way for supplies or repairs. Sally laid a hand on her belly, and closed her ears to the cruel whispers.

As the five-month mark crept up, Sally waited in dread for her womb to fall still, for early labour to start. But nothing of the sort happened. The baby kicked, her back ached, her belly grew.

And, she lost her job. The innkeeper said he would be pleased to have her back – she was a hard worker, a friendly face, and a step up in class from most serving maids – but the men came for a good time, not a reminder of home, so she’d have to take the next months off.

Without money, without Jimmy, the only person Sally had was her sister. So she left careful instructions with the innkeeper: what to do if someone came asking for her, and what to do if a letter arrived. She then went back to Edinburgh, her head over the heaving rails all the way. Once there, her hoarded savings bought her a few weeks in a tiny room a mile from her sister’s trim, airy house. Alice had clean windows, a garden and two servants; Sally had no carpets, a common standpipe in the yard, and a stinking lavatory at the back, two flights down.

Sally went into labour on a soft spring morning in early May. At the height of things, she chanted Jimmy’s name, over and over, even though by this time, she was certain he was dead. Alice caught her small, red, perfectly formed niece with her own clean hands, having elbowed aside those of the midwife at the last minute.

Sally gave her daughter the haughty name of Clarissa, and nursed her and loved her and cried over the poor fatherless bairn.

Six days later, a letter arrived. Much travelled, stained by damp, bearing her sister’s address.

Posted from Sydney.

There had been an uprising of the prisoners on board the Gloria Scott, Jimmy wrote, the ship taken over, some of the sailors joining in mutiny – a mutiny funded by the aristocratic rogue Jack Prendergast, who’d managed to smuggle a portion of his ill-gotten gains on board. Some of the sailors, dissatisfied with the captain and the conditions belowdecks, went along with the takeover; others drew the line at outright murder. The objectors were shoved onto a small boat with sailor’s clothes, basic provisions, and a compass and chart – but before the Gloria Scott could get underway again, a powder-barrel deep in her bowels was set alight, either deliberately or from a stray spark. The ship’s hull ripped into a million pieces, every porthole and hatch punched out, her mast uprooted. In minutes, where the barque had been was nothing but smoking wood and shredded canvas.

The rowing boat, which had been set adrift little more than an hour before, turned back to the wreckage. There among the floating spars and ravaged bodies, they found a survivor clinging to some boards. (Sally frowned absently at her husband’s emotional – one might almost say personal – description of this stunned, burnt creature.) They rescued the sailor, took on board a few more still-sealed kegs of provisions, and turned again for the distant coastline.

The explosion’s smoke-cloud rose high, however, and the coast of Africa was a well-travelled route. Sure enough, the following day another Australian-bound ship hove into view.

Nonetheless, Hudson wrote, some of the men in the boat had been participants in the initial hours of mutiny, up until murder began; others, the prisoners, had now been handed a chance at freedom. In those lonely dark hours, pulling slowly away from the drifting timbers, the survivors came to an agreement: they would say nothing of the name Gloria Scott. A new ship was conjured up from their imaginations, a story built around it. By the time the brig Hotspur plucked them from the waves, they were the survivors of the passenger ship Amelia, which had gone down with all hands apart from them.

Unlike the Gloria Scott, the Hotspur was a fast clipper, with no planned stops before Sydney Harbour. Hudson’s chances of jumping ship in Cape Town vanished. Seventy-nine days later, the Hotspur dropped anchor. The survivors of the Gloria Scott took a last meal together, then quietly scattered: some for the gold fields, others to book passage back to England. And Jim Hudson …

Sally, reading the letter four months later in Edinburgh, waited for him to say when he planned to return. She waited in vain. Instead, Hudson wrote, he had looked at Sydney, and wondered if it wouldn’t do as well as a place to wait for London’s heat to die down? In fact, Sydney would be a better hope for them both. He wanted her to come out. He had no money to send her, but surely she could borrow passage from her sister?

And by the way: had his son been born yet?

She folded the letter onto her lap, and she wept.

On Clarissa’s three-month birthday, marked by a hot spell remarkable even for August, Sally loaded a pair of hessian bags with all their worldly goods and struggled through the baking streets of Edinburgh to her sister’s house. She looked up as Alice opened the door.

‘I need you to watch Clarissa for a while.’

Alice eyed the bulging sacks and told the housemaid to put on the kettle. She took Sally and the baby into the drawing room, where the air smelt of baking horsehair. Even when Alice flung open the window, it was still stifling. Clarissa stirred, and Sally put her to the breast.

‘I’m happy to have the bairn, ye know that, but what’s in the bags?’ Alice asked.

‘It’s everything we own. And ye’ll be keeping her for more than the day. Might be weeks.’

Alice sat down abruptly. ‘Why? Dearie, whatever’s wrong?’

‘Nothing’s wrong yet, but I have to commit a felony.’

‘What?’

‘Jimmy canna come back, it’s too dangerous. I don’t know when he’ll be able to send me the money for passage. Papa won’t even speak to me, Mama will nae cross Papa, you’ve nought to spare, and even if I convince the government to send me on an assisted fare, as a domestic, I don’t have two pounds. It’d take me months of scrubbing floors to save up. The only way I can get to Australia is to be transported.’

‘I …’ Alice said faintly. ‘Transported?’

‘I have to commit a crime. And if I act rough, they’ll want to be rid of me.’

‘But … what about Clarissa?’

‘Oh, she’ll come with me – they send bairns, too. Saves the cost of the workhouse. But it might take weeks, for the trial and all, and I’ll not have my daughter in a gaol cell.’

It was a mad scheme, suitable only for a desperate woman. Sally had asked around about the law, and general opinion was that the chances of a fresh-faced young governess being transported – a punishment designed to rid a nation of troublemakers – was minuscule. She would need to stand in court a reprobate, shameless and without principles. There was one crime admirably suitable to her purpose.