Snobbery With Violence: An Edwardian Murder Mystery Read online

  Harry Cathcart decided to start work right away. By dint of saying he had lost money to someone in a card game and he thought that someone might be Blandon, he managed to secure his address and a description of him. Blandon’s apartment was in St. James’s Square. Harry hired a closed carriage and sat a little way across the square to get a sight of his quarry. After a long wait, Blandon emerged. Although he was a fine figure of a man, Harry disliked him on sight. His stare was too arrogant, his eyes too knowing and his mouth too fleshy. There certainly was an air of the gambler about him.

  First, Harry went to The Club and checked the betting book. There was nothing there. He frowned down at it. For the next few days, Harry tailed Sir Geoffrey. He found the man kept a mistress in Pimlico, but in these loose days would anyone consider the presence of a mistress a scandal? Perhaps Sir Geoffrey was not as rich as he was reported to be. Perhaps he was after Lady Rose for her money.

  Harry could only just afford to keep up his membership of The Club. He could not afford to belong to any of the other London clubs.

  He went back to his home and asked Becket to look out his photographic equipment, a recent hobby. Then he ordered his manservant to find him his oldest, most-worn suit, and after being helped into it, he sat down at his dressing-table and studied his face. He put pads of cotton wool inside his cheeks to plump them out and then, by dint of sabotaging a shaving brush and with a tube of spirit gum, he made himself a false moustache. Pulling an old hat down on his head, he heaved up his camera equipment and took a hackney to Brooks’s and asked to see the club secretary. His voice distorted by the cotton-wool pads in his cheeks, Harry explained he was a photographer sent by the Duke of Freemount, who wanted to mount an exhibition of photographs of London clubs to show in a marquee at his annual fête. Permission was given. Harry carefully left a few bits and pieces of photographic equipment in the secretary’s office.

  Then, when he gratefully saw the secretary had been buttonholed by a crusty old member, he murmured something about needing more magnesium for his flash and went back to the secretary’s office. He quickly searched around until he found the betting book. Quickly he scanned it and then on a page he saw that Sir Geoffrey Blandon had bet that he could obtain the favours of Lady Rose before the end of the season. Harry knew “favours” meant seduction. The bets were running at forty to one.

  “Bastard,” he muttered, and taking out a penknife, sliced out the page. He had meant to photograph it if he had found anything incriminating but realized it would take too long, and operating a plate camera in dim light might not produce any results at all. And the use of a magnesium flash in his office might bring the secretary running.

  He went back and photographed several more of the main rooms before making his retreat.

  Harry should have been happy at his success, but he wished he did not have to break such news to the earl. Lady Rose must indeed have ruined her reputation by being photographed supporting the suffragettes. She had become the subject of a common wager.

  It was the day before the duke’s ball when Harry Cathcart presented himself at the earl’s town house.

  He waited patiently in the hall while the butler took his card. While he was waiting, Lady Rose came down the stairs. She was wearing an elaborate tea-gown but her long hair was brushed down her back. Her face glowed with happiness like a lantern in the gloom of the hall. She did not acknowledge Harry because he was a stranger and she hadn’t been introduced to him. Rose passed by him and disappeared through a door at the side of the hall.

  Oh, dear, thought Harry. She is most definitely in love.

  The butler came down the stairs and instructed Harry to follow him.

  Rose picked up a book from a table in the library and made her way upstairs behind them. She wondered who the caller was. Her father was slightly deaf and his voice was loud. She was just passing the drawing-room when she heard him say, “That will be all, Brum. Leave us.” As the butler reappeared and turned to close the double doors, Rose distinctly heard her father say, “Well, found out anything about Blandon?”

  She stayed where she was, frozen to the spot. The butler looked at her curiously but went on down the stairs.

  Rose heard the low voice of the caller and then her father’s outraged shout of, “The man should be horse-whipped. My daughter’s ruined.” A frantic ringing of the bell was answered by a footman who leapt up the stairs, not even seeming to see Rose who stood there.

  “Get her ladyship. Fetch Lady Polly,” roared the earl.

  Rose went into the drawing-room. “What is wrong, Pa?”

  The earl held out a sheet of paper with trembling fingers. “Wait until your mother gets here.”

  Lady Polly, small and round like her husband, came into the room. “What is it, dear?”

  “Sit down, you and Rose,” said the earl, all his bluster and rage evaporating. “Bad business. Bad, bad business. Ladies, may I present Captain Cathcart?”

  The captain, who had risen to his feet at Rose’s entrance, bowed. “Captain, my wife, Lady Polly, and my daughter, Lady Rose. Now all sit down. Got your smelling-salts, Rose, hey?”

  “I never use smelling-salts.”

  “You might need them now. Go ahead, Cathcart, tell them what you found out.”

  Feeling rather grubby, wishing he could escape and leave the earl to break the news, Harry described what he had discovered. He started by saying, “Blandon keeps a mistress in Pimlico, a girl called Maisie Lewis.”

  He saw the shock and dismay in Rose’s eyes, followed by a defiant anger. In that moment, he knew that Rose had immediately decided that the affair with Maisie was old history.

  “The affair continues,” he said. “As Blandon had the appearance of a gambler, I decided to check the betting books. I thought I might find out something about financial difficulties, but instead found out that Blandon had bet that he could seduce Lady Rose before the end of the season.”

  The countess let out a little scream and raised a handkerchief to her lips.

  The earl held out the sheet from the betting book to Rose. She read it carefully and then said, “You must excuse me. I have things to attend to.”

  “We can’t go to the ball now!” wailed Lady Polly.

  “Sir Geoffrey does not know what we now know,” said Rose. “We should not give him that satisfaction.”

  She rose and sailed from the room, back erect, and all the love light gone from her face.

  Her mother hurried after her, leaving Harry and the earl alone.

  “Thank you,” said the earl gruffly. “Do you mind leaving now?”

  Harry rose and left the room and walked quickly down the staircase. The happiness he had felt in the success of his detective work had evaporated. He was haunted by the set, cold, bereft look in Lady Rose’s eyes.

  Rose entered the ballroom at the Duke of Freemount’s town house the following evening, hearing the chatter of clipped voices threading through the jaunty strains of a waltz. She had artificial flowers in her hair and a white satin gown embellished with white lace and worn over silk petticoats that rustled as she walked.

  She felt cold and dead. She allowed Sir Geoffrey to write his name in her dance card. He did not seem to notice any difference in her manner.

  Although the ballroom was suffocatingly hot, Rose shivered in Geoffrey’s arms as he swept her into the waltz. Footmen began to open the long windows which looked out over the Green Park and a pleasant breeze blew in. Geoffrey manoeuvred her toward those windows and then danced her out onto the terrace.

  “I want to ask you something, my love,” he whispered.

  A little hope surged in Rose’s heart that it had all just been a joke, that “favours” had meant her hand in marriage.

  “Yes, Sir Geoffrey?”

  “Tarrant’s giving a house party in a fortnight’s time,” he whispered urgently. Through the open windows, he could see Rose’s mother searching the ballroom for her daughter. “Got you an invitation. We can be together.�
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  Rose disengaged herself from his arms and stood back a pace and faced him.

  “Together? What do you mean?”

  “Well, you’re always chaperoned…”

  “I would not be allowed to accept such an invitation without a chaperone.”

  “That’s just it. I’ve got a friend who will pose as my aunt.”

  “Miss Maisie Lewis, for example?”

  He turned dark red and then mumbled, “Never heard of her.”

  Rose turned on her heel and marched straight back into the ballroom and up to the leader of the orchestra and whispered something. He looked startled but silenced the orchestra.

  Dancers stopped in mid-turn, faces turned in Rose’s direction. The recently installed electric light winked on monocles and lorgnettes.

  “I have a special announcement to make,” she shouted. “Sir Geoffrey Blandon is a cad. He has been laying bets that he can seduce me before the end of the season. Here is the proof.” She took out the page from the betting book and handed it down from the rostrum to the man nearest her. “Pass it round,” she said.

  Eyes stared at her in shock, so many eyes.

  Then she walked down the shallow steps from the rostrum and straight up to her white-faced mother. “I have the headache,” she said clearly. “I wish to go home.”

  As they stood on the steps waiting for the carriage to be brought round, the earl said dismally, “Well, that’s it, my girl. I thought we’d agreed to go on as if nothing had happened. Why d’ye think I restrained myself from confronting Blandon? You’re ruined.”

  “I? Surely it is Sir Geoffrey who is disgraced!”

  “It’s all right for a fellow. The chaps will think he’s a bit of a rogue. When he propositioned you, you should have come straight to me. I’d have told him to lay off. But to get up there and behave like a fishwife was shocking.”

  Rose fought back the tears.

  “Still, Captain Cathcart did the job. You’d best rusticate for a couple of seasons and then we’ll try again.”

  Two

  The Scotch middle or lower classes are not, as a rule, given to joking, except with their dry, sententious humour, and they rarely understand what is commonly called “chaff.” It is better to bear this in mind, as it may account for many an apparently surly manner or gruff reply.

  —MURRAY’S HANDBOOK FOR SCOTLAND (1898)

  Rose was only nineteen years old and, apart from her brief foray to support the suffragettes in their demonstration, had been protected from the world by loving, indulgent parents and by the sheer separation from ordinary life enjoyed by girls of her elevated class.

  So she was hurt and bewildered that she should be the one disgraced and not the perfidious Sir Geoffrey. As servants packed up the belongings in the town house, preparatory to the move to the country, she hid herself in the normally little-used library and tried to find solace in books. Before her love for Geoffrey, she had damned the season as being little more than a type of auction.

  But she was young, and somehow the thought that out there, beyond the stuccoed walls of the house, a whole world of enjoyment and pleasure was going on without her was galling.

  She had not made friends with any of the debutantes, despising their empty chatter, and now she regretted her own arrogance.

  Rose threw down her book. She would go and try to see Miss Tremp, her old governess, who now worked for the Barrington-Bruce family, whose town house was in Kensington.

  She did not summon her maid but went upstairs and changed into a plain tailored walking dress and a hat with a veil.

  Rose then slipped out of the house and hailed a hack. She directed the driver to the address but then realized that with her disgrace being generally known, the governess might not be allowed to see her, so instead, she lifted the trap on the roof and called to the driver to take her to Kensington Gardens instead.

  It was a fine day and she knew the nannies and governesses with older charges often walked there.

  She paid off the hack and began to walk slowly up towards the Round Pond, looking to left and right. Ladies in stiff silks moved along the walks as stately as galleons. Regimented flower-beds blazed with colour and a light breeze blew the jaunty sounds of a brass band to Rose’s ears. The sky above was blue with little wisps of cloud. A boy bowling an iron hoop raced past her, bringing memories of childhood when one could run freely, unencumbered by corsets and bustles. Rose began to think it had been silly of her to expect just to see Miss Tremp when she spotted her quarry sitting on a bench by the pond.

  Rose hurried forward and sat down next to her. “Miss Tremp!”

  “My gracious. If it isnae Lady Rose!” exclaimed the governess, surprise thickening her normally well-elocuted Scottish vowels.

  “I need your help,” said Rose. “Where are the children?”

  “Two of them, boys. They are sailing their boats in the pond, my lady, and that’ll keep them busy for some time. I heard about your sad disgrace. It was in the newspapers.”

  Rose bent her head. The newspapers had been kept from her but she should have known she would be written up in the social columns.

  “It’s so unfair!” said Rose. “Sir Geoffrey should be the one in disgrace.”

  “Gentlemen never get the blame in such circumstances. You should know that.”

  “Miss Tremp, you educated me well, and for that I will be always grateful, but I could have done with a few lessons in the ways of the world.”

  “Listen to me, my lady, I told you I approved of the vote for women. I did not tell you to demean yourself by appearing at a demonstration. And it was up to your mother, Lady Polly, to school you in the arts of society.”

  Rose could feel herself becoming angry.

  “It is an unfair world for women,” said Miss Tremp. “But you are privileged. It is your duty to your parents to marry well and then to your husband to have his children.”

  “But you said women had a right to have independence and not to be a household chattel for some man!”

  Miss Tremp flushed pink to the end of her long Scottish nose.

  “I am sure I never said such a thing.”

  Rose shook her head in bewilderment. “What am I to do?”

  “I think the next step is surely to send you to India. That is the procedure for young ladies who have failed at their season.”

  “I AM NOT GOING TO INDIA!” shouted Rose.

  The nannies on either side leaned forward.

  “Wheesht!” admonished Miss Tremp. “Ladies do not raise their voices.”

  “You are suddenly a wealth of information about what ladies do and don’t do.”

  “You would be best, my lady, to do what your parents tell you to do. Please lower your veil. I have my position to consider.”

  “Do you mean you consider me a disgrace?”

  “Unlike you, my lady, I have to earn my living. I was always of the opinion that you were a bit spoilt.”

  “Why didn’t you say so?”

  “It was not my place to do so.”

  “It was not your place to fill my head with ideas of female independence which you should surely have known I could never be allowed to follow.”

  “The day will come, my lady, when you will be grateful to me for a sound education to furnish your mind.”

  Rose stood up. She opened her mouth to deal out some final recrimination, but her shoulders sagged. She nodded her head, turned on her heel, and walked away.

  She had hoped for reassurance from Miss Tremp, for comfort, for a shared outrage at the iniquities of society.

  Miss Tremp watched the slim figure of Rose walking away and sniffed. That was the English for you. No backbone.

  Detective Superintendent Alfred Kerridge was enjoying a pint of beer before going home to his wife, Mabel, and their two children, Albert and Daisy. He had risen steadily up the ranks by dint of diligent plodding laced with amazing flights of imagination.

  He was a grey man—grey hair, grey eyes,
heavy grey moustache. He felt a tug at his elbow and looked up into the unlovely features of one of his informants, Posh Cyril.

  Posh Cyril was second footman in the Blessington-Bruces’ household. He had a criminal record for burglary of which his employers were blissfully unaware. Although he had given up a life of crime, he had become an informant. He had been very useful in finding the identity of thieves for Kerridge, for he could recognize his own kind among the servants of various aristocratic households.

  “Got something for you,” he whispered.

  Kerridge nodded and bought him a pint and then led the way to a corner table. They sat down. “What have you got?” asked Kerridge.

  “Did you read about that scandal involving Lady Rose, daughter of the Earl of Hadshire?”

  “My wife insisted on reading it out to me. Hardly a criminal matter.”

  “Ah, but Sir Geoffrey Blandon is being forced to leave the country.”

  “Shouldn’t think he’d have to do that. Thought ruining some lass’s reputation was fair game with that lot.” Kerridge detested the upper classes with every fibre of his hard-working lower middle-class soul. He was sure one day the revolution would come. One of his rosy fantasies was a world where all the roles were reversed and the aristocrats’ money would be taken from them and spread among the poor.