“Do find those articles,” Miss Hogarth said, leaning over the table until Charles fancied he could see the dark shadow of her cleavage. “I’m fascinated.”
Gallantry forced the words from his mouth. “I will endeavor to please you,” he said. “I almost hope Miss Lugoson was murdered to keep you so intrigued.”
He did wish it in that moment, too.
“I will have to think on it,” Mr. Hogarth declared. “If others became ill, then surely it is some contaminant of the food, and nothing like murder. But Charles can investigate the matter.”
“How might the two deaths be tied together?” Miss Hogarth mused aloud. “Where did the other girl reside?”
“Not far from here. Could there be some actual person at fault for the death of these innocents, through unhygienic habits creating another catastrophe?” Charles asked. “A kitchen maid both households employed?”
Mr. Hogarth raised a finger. “Very clever, Charles. A very clever thought indeed. It seems ye have multiple paths of investigation available to ye.”
Chapter 5
The next day, Charles was scratching away at his desk, catching up on yet another theatrical review, when a boy came trotting through the newsroom and came to a stop behind him, at William Aga’s desk. Charles ignored the exchange and finished the last paragraph of his review, but was forced to put down his pen when William exclaimed behind him.
“What is it?” Charles asked.
“You will soon see. Attend one of the minor theaters with me tomorrow evening. The Garrick.”
“I always enjoy attending the theater,” Charles admitted, “but if you are assigned the review, I will beg off. I have been at the Hogarths these past two evenings, and will be up half the night as it is, working on a sketch. I’m finishing up a comic piece about the hackney-coach stand below my window.”
“No, you must come.” William stood and peered over him. “I cannot allow you to scratch away.”
Charles attempted to turn his chair around without hitting his friend’s toes. “Why? Is one of your friends having a play produced there?”
William lowered his voice mysteriously. “No, but you shall find the experience illuminating.”
“Then I had better go,” Charles said, hearing the fulsome tone of mischief. “Are the chorus girls unusually pretty?”
William chuckled. “Even better than that.”
“It will be dark soon,” Charles said. “Did you have time to find those articles about the Epiphany death for me?”
“I do apologize,” William said. “You know what a mess the Chronicle’s files are in. I promise I shall have the archivist commence the search tomorrow.”
Charles saw his chance of delighting Miss Hogarth with new information regarding his redoubtable murder case diminish. “Do you recall her name? Where she lived?”
“Not the name,” William said, unscrewing his flask. “But she lived near St. Luke’s.”
“That’s not far. These two dead girls must have lived mere streets away from each other.” Charles dipped his pen back into his ink, and pulled out one of the papers he’d used to make lists about Christiana Lugoson’s death. A very important piece of information, indeed.
* * *
The next evening, in full darkness except for the street lamps, Charles and William walked down a narrow street on the edge of the West End. The foul animal stench of many generations of men relieving themselves along the dark cobblestones had Charles breathing shallowly. When he saw the playbills glued along an old stone wall, he knew they were almost to the theater. He hadn’t been to the Garrick before. They didn’t produce quality new work; rather, they did as best they could for a lower class of patron, bits of this and that to excite and entertain an assortment of laborers, clerks, and shopgirls.
“What are we in for?” he asked, stopping in front of a crisp new playbill. He tore it from the wall and attempted to hold it to catch the brightness of the gaslight a couple of feet away.
William leaned over his shoulder. He smelled of ironing and the stew they’d dined upon in Aga’s rooms, a welcome change from the street’s effluvia. “Pantomime, farce, tragedy. A full bill.”
“I don’t see anything unusual. What is here to interest me?”
“It’s not the bill.” William rapidly blinked his eyes.
“Then what is it? Do we have time for the public house before the night begins? We might need fortification.” Charles pointed across the street. Though mist was slowly rolling in, they could still see that far.
“Looks like a crowd tonight,” William said, after turning to face the theater. Loud conversations between patrons still outside blocked the sound of carriages on the street beyond. “I think we had better go in. We don’t want to sit in the gallery.”
Charles shuddered and pressed his hands down his pristine outer coat. “I hope we can get a box.”
They found their place in line and shuffled along, entertaining themselves with recollections of performances at the Adelphi and other favorite theaters.
“I have an idea for a theatrical piece myself,” Charles said. “I considered becoming an actor at one time, but now I think I might become a writer of plays.”
“Yes, your brand of humor might be a success. I’m sure you will find interest,” William agreed as they reached the ticket taker, a middle-aged woman wrapped in a molting brown shawl and a bonnet lined in some sort of animal fur.
After they secured a box, which would allow them to use a separate staircase and keep away from the crowd of noisy young clerks who seemed to comprise most of the audience, they went upstairs and found their seats to the right of the stage. The box had seats for six so they were quite comfortable, though they had paid dearly for the privilege.
They sat through a pantomime, then a farce. Intermittently, Charles pulled the playbill from his pocket, mentally ticking off the players and the performances. While there was some amusement to be had, and good performers among the company, he could not see what William had intended to be revealed. Eventually, after an intermission, came extracts from Shakespeare’s Richard III. From the rapturous applause from the pits, he understood this performance was the highlight of the night.
Indeed, Percy Chalke, the Garrick’s resident troupe manager, was a compellingly oily Richard. When he gave the opening speech, even Charles’s jaded flesh crawled. From there, they skipped along through the best bits, ignoring all the confusing politics and generational unrest of the War of the Roses. Though they did include Queen Margaret’s monologue, spoken in appropriately witchy tones by a girl not much more than a child, her tender years obvious despite the robes and makeup. When they came to the Lady Anne scenes, which ought to be played by a girl of tender years, a different actress appeared, a more mature lady, in a modern mourning dress and an old-fashioned veil. Her face was obscured, but her form had some thickening to it, making her look closer to forty than twenty.
They included the full exchange of the scene over the king’s bier. At first, Charles thought the female parts had been miscast, due to the ages of the characters, but the interchange rang thrillingly. Both Percy Chalke and the mature actress, Angela Acton, were excellent performers with the diction of upper-class Londoners. Charles listened to the dialogue closely.
The actress playing Lady Anne spoke her lines. “Would it were mortal poison, for thy sake!”
The actor playing Gloucester, so bent over with his assumed hunchback that his nose nearly touched the actress’s cleavage, hissed, “Never came poison from so sweet a place.”
Lady Anne spun away. “Never hung poison on a fouler toad. Out of my sight! Thou dost infect my eyes.”
Charles overturned the words that had so struck him during the scene. Was this what William had wanted him to hear? Had he meant to make Charles think of poison? Had Christiana Lugoson, assuredly a blameless innocent, been poisoned? And that other girl, too?
* * *
“Hell and damnation!” Charles cried when the playacting
had come to an end. He put his hand on William’s solid shoulder. His head ached from the smell of the gaslights by the time the players came onstage to take their bow.
“What?”
“Is that what you wanted me to think?” Charles bent to his friend’s ear. “That the dead girls were poisoned?”
The crowd cheered and called for an encore. William blinked slowly as he turned his attention from the stage to Charles. “What nonsense.”
“Then what?” Charles demanded above the roar of the pit.
William lifted his brows. “That woman playing Lady Anne.”
“What about her?” Charles flourished the playbill. “Angela Acton. Quite good, I thought. Above the usual class of actress.”
The players came back on stage in a long line, enough of their costumes removed so that the audience could see what they really looked like.
“Well, she ought to be. I have it on good authority that she is Lady Lugoson’s younger sister.”
Charles’s mouth dropped open. “You don’t say.” He stared at the players. Angela Acton, having removed the headgear that obscured some of her face, did indeed look to be about the same age as Lady Lugoson. “Did Lady Lugoson marry up?”
“I wrote Lord Lugoson’s obituary when he died. Lady Lugoson was Sarah Acton before her marriage,” William said. “A second wife. Her husband was some twenty-five years older, but he didn’t have children from his first marriage.”
Charles perused the rest of the players. Without her widow’s veil and crown, and the false beak of a nose besides, the girl playing Queen Margaret was indeed a lass of about fifteen, with carrot-red hair and a pointed, animated face, and behaved nothing like blond Angela Acton. Their manner was opposite, Acton cool and composed, the girl grinning like it was the first time she’d heard a crowd’s applause. “Was Lady Lugoson on the stage?” he asked.
“No, the Actons were wool traders, very prosperous. I think Angela has come down in the world a bit and Lady Lugoson went up, courtesy of a large dowry.”
“What happened to Angela’s dowry?”
“She has never married, but I believe she owns this theater. Or at least that is the rumor.”
So her dowry might have gone to this building, or even been the building from the start. “She and this Percy Chalke must be aligned in some fashion.”
“Precisely.”
“Julie!” went up a shout from the pit. Several young men cheered as the redheaded girl blushed.
“Methinks the Acton-Lugoson family might be more colorful than I might have surmised,” Charles mused, as Percy Chalke pointed his players offstage. The girl Julie tripped on a bit of scenery, then twirled gracefully out of a near fall. The pit roared.
“That means nothing in regard to the girl’s death,” William said, chuckling at the girl’s antics.
“Of course not. It’s probably just coincidence that my dead girl and your dead girl died the same night a year apart in the same general neighborhood.”
“No doubt.”
Julie paused at the stage’s end. The lads in the pit shouted again. She kicked up a heel in her overlong costume dress, tossed her head, and walked off to the thunder of the pit’s approval.
“I did think about who the servants might have been. Could a cook from the dead girl’s house have gone to Lugoson House?”
“Are you so certain that anything is suspicious about either death?” William asked.
“Both girls were the picture of health, and then were dead within a day. Surely no young girl ought to die so mysteriously.” Charles listened to the catcalls of the lads below, and thought of how neither girl would ever receive the attentions of a youth like the actress Julie just had, how that special light they brought to the world had been so cruelly extinguished.
“It does happen,” William chastised. “We cannot see the dishumor lurking inside the mortal form.”
Charles grunted. “I feel I must keep investigating Miss Lugoson’s death. My reporter’s instincts are tingling.”
“So you will write to someone at Lugoson House about the servants?”
He shifted on his chair, ready to leave the theater and return home to his comfortable, warm bed. “Yes, and speak to Miss Lugoson’s doctors.”
William nodded. “It always troubles me when things are not quite as they seem.”
Charles detected snobbery in his fellow reporter. “Meaning the family is not as high in the instep as I thought?”
“The impression of Lugoson House is so ancient, yet the family honor rests on one spindly fifteen-year-old boy, the son of a wool merchant’s daughter, no less. And Lady Lugoson seems so very elevated with her beautiful diction and reform leanings, yet she has a sister likely living in sin with an actor.”
“Something is outside of the norm, but then most families have their black sheep and certain secrets.” An image of Charles’s father flashed into his head, and the embarrassments and privations that had ended his childhood and damaged his education.
“You have the instincts of a dramatist,” William said. “And therefore may see connections and intrigue where there are none. However,” he continued.
“What?”
“You may, in your feverish imaginings, find material for a new sketch,” William said. “After all, I read your draft of your Mr. Watkins Tottle short story. You made him a suicide. Why not write a story about a possible murder next?”
* * *
On Friday morning, Charles and his younger brother Fred ate together, a meal of bread and butter at a small table in front of the parlor fire in their rooms. He poked through his mail, and found a note from Mrs. Hogarth, inviting him to attend St. Luke’s with her family on Sunday morning.
“Good news?” his brother asked, seeing his satisfaction.
Sometimes it seemed Fred was a mirror image of himself. Same chin, though his brother’s was dimpled, same thick eyebrows and wavy dark hair frothing out from a widow’s peak at the center of his expressive forehead. His nose was developing differently, though, losing the soft form of childhood. It seemed to be planning to hook decisively at the tip. What character difference did that augur? “It seems the Hogarths approve of me. I’m to see them again in two days.”
“The family of a journalist is much less proud than that of a banker.”
“But Mr. Hogarth is also a lawyer,” Charles said, not enjoying the reminder of his past romantic failure, three years of wasted effort courting a banker’s daughter. “And an intimate of Sir Walter Scott.”
“Everything you desire is contained in his life story,” Fred joked. “You must have his daughter to wife.”
“I don’t know,” Charles mused, setting down his letter opener. “Maria Beadnell broke my heart, and Kate Hogarth can be flirtatious. She could be toying with my affections, as Miss Beadnell did.”
“Or she might genuinely like you,” Fred insisted. “You’ve only just met her, and Miss Beadnell took three years to break your heart.”
“I would not let the situation stretch out as it did then. No, the Hogarths like me more than the Beadnells ever did. They might be better than some of our relatives, but I’m ambitious enough to transcend Father’s difficulties, and Mr. Hogarth likes me very well.”
“You’ll make your decision quickly?” Fred asked.
“Yes, I have steady work. Four years have passed. No lady I’m courting will ever have cause to call me a boy again.”
His brother poked at the crumbs on his plate. “What is your plan for the day?”
“I need to write a couple of letters, then attend a meeting, and then go to the office and write about the meeting,” Charles said. “To school for you.”
Fred made a monstrous face, all bulging eyes and thrust-out tongue, as Charles rose. His writing box was on the mantelpiece since he did not yet possess a desk. He wrote a note to Mrs. Hogarth, accepting her kind offer, then moved on to Lady Lugoson, begging her pardon but asking if he could know the names of her servants so he could do some chec
king on them. After asking Fred to post both items, he found his top hat and coat, and went out into the chilly January day.
* * *
On Saturday, Charles and Fred walked to George Street, where Charles had housed his mother and siblings after his father’s most recent arrest for debt. The suite of rooms was near the Adelphi Theater, chosen by Charles so that his older sister Fanny could be close to her singing engagements, which brought needed money into the household. Mr. Dickens had fled out to the hamlet of North End, past Hampstead, to avoid his creditors, upon his release late the previous year.
Fred sneezed. Charles tilted his younger brother’s hat so that the rain dripped to the pavement instead of down his collar. “Do you think Mother finished our laundry?” Fred asked.
“If she had time to dry it. I need to engage a laundress at the inn and spare her the trouble. She’s already doing the laundry for five. That’s hard in the limited space she has.” The thought of laundresses made Charles wince. When he reflected that his father was staying with a woman in that lowly trade, it made him all the more determined to distance himself from his father’s failures and make sure he succeeded in his endeavors, whatever the future might hold. Poverty and disease held back so many. He must stay strong and avoid disaster.
“Do you think there will be cake at this party?” Fred asked.
“I don’t know. The vicar’s mother is turning seventy. Do elderly people want cake?” Charles asked.
“I hope so,” Fred said in an outraged voice.
Mrs. Dickens met them at the door to her apartment. “Hello, hello, my dears!” She’d just turned forty-five, but her dark curls were still nearly free of silver strands, and her long nose remained the same as Charles remembered from earliest childhood. A pleasant, engaging woman always ready to socialize, the corners of her mouth were wreathed with laugh lines, emphasizing her narrow jaw. Never one to mope, she wore three strings of bright beads and a secondhand gown of russet silk. She kissed Charles on the cheek first, then Fred as Charles passed through the door.
Inside, Charles could hear his youngest sister Letitia, a pretty eighteen-year-old, fretting about her shoes again as she sat on the cottage piano bench.
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