A Tale of Two Murders

by Heather Redmond

  As he walked into the large room, hacking and coughing, he heard his name being called. Mr. Hogarth had his head out of his office door and beckoned him in.

  Charles wiped his streaming nose and came toward him. The room swam around him when he saw Miss Hogarth seated in a chair in front of her father’s desk. He clutched his damp handkerchief. Was she an illusion, this neat figure in a bonnet and coat? What penance would he have to pay to receive Miss Hogarth’s forgiveness?

  “Oh,” Charles groaned. Why couldn’t he be at his best in front of Miss Hogarth? “You want your cloak back, of course. I’m afraid I forgot it in my rooms. I’ll fetch it back for you.”

  Always assuming, of course, that he could get it away from Julie Saville.

  “It’s no trouble, Mr. Dickens,” Miss Hogarth said, smiling sweetly from her father’s office chair. “I think Miss Saville needs it more than I do. As you can see, I have a new cloak myself.” She pointed to a peg on the wall, where a new blue wool cloak with a cape and a velvet collar were draped. While a masculine design, it was cut down to a woman’s size.

  “How nice,” he said, and sneezed.

  “Oh, you poor man,” she said, rising.

  He watched, tunnel-visioned, as she came to him and touched his forehead. “He doesn’t have a fever,” she told her father.

  “I need to eat, that is all,” Charles said. “The water was very choppy on the way back from Greenwich.”

  “So you could go to see Beatrice Carley with me this afternoon?” she asked anxiously. “She has requested a meeting with us.”

  She moved to the desk, under her father’s watchful eye, and poured a cup of tea.

  “Where did the cloak come from?” Charles took the cup gratefully, still stuck on that point.

  She spoke while Charles drained the contents of the cup. The still-warm liquid was such a contrast to his chilled body that he could feel the heat of it going down his innards. “Lady Lugoson sent that maid Agnes over with a selection of Miss Lugoson’s wardrobe. She enclosed a note that said she’d chosen a few special remembrances for herself and Miss Carley but she thought my sisters and I might like the rest.”

  “That was very generous to you, if not to Agnes,” Charles said, remembering how plainly dressed the lady’s maid had been. Often the maid herself might have expected to gain her mistress’s wardrobe.

  “I was rather surprised to see her, to be honest,” Miss Hogarth said. “It’s been nearly a month. I wonder that she is still employed.”

  “Maybe she knows something and they are afraid of what she will say if they turn her off,” Mr. Hogarth said. “Now, Charles, why don’t I have one of the boys fetch you something to eat? That hot potato seller is usually in the street about now.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Mr. Hogarth departed, leaving them alone.

  “Can you use her wardrobe?” Charles asked, recognizing the mark of favor even if he wasn’t quite in the best state to impress the editor’s daughter.

  “Mary is slender enough. There are a few things I can let out,” she said, blushing.

  “Miss Lugoson was still just a girl,” Charles said. “The size of a child really. I picked her up, you recall.”

  “Yes, I remember. She had a great number of white dresses. So impractical.”

  “Maybe it is the style in France.”

  “I don’t know. Definitely not Edinburgh or London. Will you sit and rest? I hope Father can get you that potato. There will probably be cake at the Carleys, but we can’t count on it.”

  “If we turn up at the right time. If Mrs. Carley is at home she might have something nice. She seemed proud of her tea service.”

  “She did have lovely tea but I crave something exotic. I can’t help remembering that lovely Epiphany tart we made.”

  “Ah, the strawberry jam,” Charles said, nearly licking his lips in remembrance. “Well, it is February now. Strawberries are only a few months away.”

  “We have a strawberry patch.”

  “You must send me a note when you see them growing. There is a coffee stand near Lincoln’s Inn that has shockingly good cake. Some cream, fresh strawberries, and that cake. Nothing better for a picnic.”

  She giggled. “I will let you know.”

  He grinned back at her. “Since we are speaking of February I should tell you that it is my birthday this week.”

  “How nice,” she said.

  “Yes. I will be twenty-three on Saturday. I thought to have a little flare-up in my rooms. Now that I have a maid, however, temporary, I ought to be able to not embarrass myself.” He shivered, wishing he was tucked between his blankets at home.

  “Can Miss Saville cook?”

  “Oh, we’ll bring in food,” he said. “I hope she knows how to clean. She’s got to earn her way somehow, until she finds another theater job.”

  “What will that take?” Her tone had gone frosty.

  He had to do something. Glancing behind him, he made sure the door was very nearly shut. He leaned forward, intimately, and spoke into her ear, making sure his warm breath fell on the delicate shell. “Speaking to managers. I’m sure most of them will know of her. She has quite a following from the pit. Also, Monsieur Rueff gave her one of his daughter’s dresses yesterday. He said they were practically twins, and it had come after she died.”

  She shivered. “He didn’t return it to the dressmaker?”

  He shook his head, feeling her hair against his nose. “Maybe he had forgotten it. After all, it was still there after a year.”

  “I imagine an actress can impersonate a great number of people,” she said thoughtfully, turning toward him, so that his nose brushed her cheek.

  They were so close now. He could feel her breath, too, but he gamely kept the conversation going. “I don’t know that Julie would have met the Rueffs, but of course she knows the type. I told her to act like Miss Lugoson, but she even used a French accent. Shocking really. I wanted to be an actor myself when I was young, but her natural talent far supersedes mine.”

  Miss Hogarth started to ask another question, but then one of the boys popped in with a bundle of potato wrapped in newsprint. Charles stepped away so quickly that the room spun. Miss Hogarth poured out the rest of the tea, cold now, and Charles wolfed down his food.

  Her cheeks were quite pink when she finally dared look his way a couple of minutes later. “Are you better?”

  “Quite restored,” he assured her. “I’m not even sneezing.”

  “Your skin is hot,” she said.

  “Being near you makes it so,” he returned.

  “Mr. Dickens,” she whispered. “You’re being very forward.”

  “You aren’t stopping me.”

  Mr. Hogarth returned before she could respond. “I have a hackney waiting outside.” He took his daughter’s new cloak from the peg as she stood, and he draped it over her shoulders.

  “Thank you. I will write my article when I return,” Charles assured him.

  * * *

  Miss Hogarth sat very close to him in the carriage. Her new cloak didn’t smell like her yet. The scent of rosemary and cedar clung to the wool as it brushed against his arm.

  “Do you think my mother should have accepted the clothes, when we suspect Lady Lugoson of having killed Miss Lugoson?” she asked, plucking at the fabric.

  “There are so many other possibilities, no less Horatio Durant,” he said, wishing her fingers were plucking at him instead. “I think the question is more whether Miss Lugoson herself would want you to have them. The answer to that, I think, is yes. You tended her in her final illness more than Miss Carley or Lady Lugoson did.”

  “I didn’t have the sense that either of them knew what to do,” Miss Hogarth admitted. “Thank you for setting my mind at ease, Mr. Dickens.”

  The carriage stopped in front of the Carley home in London and the driver said he would wait nearby.

  “I’m to go home right after this interview,” she said. “But I’ll take yo
u back to the office first. I’m sorry you still have to write your article.”

  “It’s fine. I’m used to working hard. It is how I have moved ahead in life, and will go even further.” Also, he didn’t want to spend any more time around Julie than necessary. She was all kinds of trouble. He had to resign himself to the fact that, with free rein and no one home, she could find and pocket what little money and valuables he had.

  “I know, Mr. Dickens. You have a very good reputation.” She nodded at him.

  “I want you to understand me,” he said in a low voice.

  Outside the carriage he heard the driver shout something to the horses and the conveyance lurched before stopping again. “We’d better go,” said Miss Hogarth.

  * * *

  The Carleys’ butler showed them in, but instead of taking them to the main reception room, brought them to the first floor and showed them into a small room, furnished as a girl’s sitting room. The walls were hung with rose-and-ivy wallpaper and the furnishings were plush and undersized. A large dollhouse rested on a table angled across a corner of the room.

  Charles felt uncomfortable, though Miss Hogarth had a small smile on her face as she examined an inexpert charcoal drawing of a handsome boy with a sulky expression.

  “I don’t think he wanted to sit for the artist,” she said.

  Charles stared dully at a white-painted rocking pony with what looked like a real horse’s mane, in the opposite corner from the dollhouse. In between, a small fireplace blazed away, overheating the room. He reached for his handkerchief but he must have left it in his coat. Instead he sniffed and looked around for books, but all he found was an old Bible on the tea table.

  A maid they hadn’t seen before brought in a floral tea service. Pretty iced cakes were set on a matching plate.

  “That ought to please you,” Miss Hogarth said. “Shall I pour?”

  Before he could answer, Miss Carley appeared at the door. She clutched a handkerchief and her eyes were reddened. Her dress had a mismatched floral ruffle at the bottom, as if it had been lengthened from a dress belonging to a shorter girl. “Oh, Mr. Dickens,” she cried, rushing toward him, mousy sausage curls fluttering like oversize dog ears. She had a nasal voice, as if pushing all the sound she generated through her nose.

  He stepped back in alarm, but she bumped into him, then dropped her handkerchief and grabbed his hands before he could set her aside.

  “Tell me you were with him at the last,” Miss Carley moaned.

  He smelled something hot on her breath and suspected she’d stretched her fingers around a decanter of sherry. Pulling away, he said, “Mr. Durant, do you mean?”

  “My poor Horatio,” she groaned, extending every “O” to nearly comedic effect. Her hands went to her draping lacy collar, which seemed to be an attempt to make over an old dress of some equally unfortunate cousin, much larger in the bosom.

  The way the sound reverberated made Charles’s forehead hurt. Her voice assaulted his skull.

  “First Miss Lugoson, and now Mr. Durant,” Miss Hogarth said, a calculating expression coming over her face. “You must be quite bereft.”

  “A new Romeo and Juliet,” Miss Carley said in dramatic tones, reaching for and squeezing Charles’s hands so tightly that his flesh pressed uncomfortably against his skin. “How sorry I feel for them, poor lambs.”

  In the face of so much discomfort, his body rebelled. He sneezed harshly, not having even the control of his hands to block it. Wrenching away, he bent down to pick up her handkerchief and used it to blot his nose, deciding it was the lesser crime compared to letting something noxious hang off his nose.

  “Oh, all the trauma has made you ill,” Miss Carley cried.

  “Indeed,” he agreed. “You do understand how Mr. Durant died, do you not?”

  She shook her head. “Of grief?”

  “Or guilt,” he suggested. “It was a scene to indicate self-harm, Miss Carley.”

  Her skin went blotchy. “Will there be an inquiry?”

  “When we were there, there was no indication that the police were being called in to investigate, as should probably have been done, if he had been murdered, and someone made it look otherwise.”

  “How would that have been possible?” Miss Hogarth asked, collapsing onto an overstuffed chair.

  “If he’d been drugged first, someone could have done the rest. I had plenty of time to think about it on the way to Greenwich and back,” Charles explained. “Not that I know for sure.”

  “Should you go to the police?” Miss Hogarth asked.

  Miss Carley began to sob, huge, gulping noises that seemed to take the air out of the room. Already overheated, Charles saw the roses on the wall spin. He sat down abruptly on a small, lyre-back chair, his knees folding to his waist.

  Miss Hogarth glanced between the two of them. She pulled out her handkerchief but then seemed to think better of it, probably because Charles had already borrowed it.

  “Might you ring your maid for more handkerchiefs?” she asked Miss Carley. When the girl just sobbed harder, Miss Hogarth used the bellpull herself. “Does your mother know how distressed you are?”

  “I cannot believe someone would have murdered sweet Mr. Durant. But why would he have harmed himself?” Miss Carley gasped, reaching for her collar again, and pulling the fabric away from her throat. “He had me to live for. I could have mended his poor broken heart.”

  “He was not marriage-minded,” Charles said, seeing that her throat was reddened where the lace had scratched her. “I am sorry, Miss Carley, but he wanted to establish himself first. Perhaps the road he had to climb seemed too great in his distress. He had just lost his mother, too.”

  “No,” she said, suddenly calm. She blinked hard, dispelling tears. “I think someone killed poor Horatio, like you said. Someone is killing all my friends.”

  “Your friends,” Charles said slowly, trying to focus. “Why? Lady Lugoson is certain her sister killed your friend. What connection did Horatio have to the Garrick Theater?”

  “None. Horatio had no connection to the theater,” Miss Carley said. “He preferred the opera, though he hadn’t had a box since his mother died.”

  “Financial difficulties?” Miss Hogarth said, glancing at Charles.

  “He had an excellent future in front of him,” Miss Carley said, beginning to cry again. Her lace was entirely askew by now. “I’d have been a good wife to him.”

  “Had you spoken since Miss Lugoson died?”

  “Of course not,” she snapped, before resuming her sobs. “But once I was out, this spring, we’d have seen each other.”

  “So you have no idea what has been going on since the last time you saw him, which was when?” Charles asked.

  “New Year’s Day,” she said. “My parents had a card party.”

  “Which means you never saw the illness that kept him in bed around Epiphany.”

  She paused. “No. It seems I’ve been kept from many of the little details of his life.”

  “Any other form of communication?”

  She hiccupped. “No.”

  The maid reappeared and Miss Hogarth asked for handkerchiefs. By the time they arrived, Miss Carley seemed drained, though Charles felt better after eating a couple of the iced cakes.

  “We have learned that Marie Rueff knew your family,” he said, remembering another point he had wanted closure on. “We saw it in her letters.”

  Miss Carley blew her nose in unladylike fashion after snatching a handkerchief. “Yes? I suppose so, but I didn’t know her much at all. She had a heavy accent. I never could understand her. Since she had no mother we never called.”

  “But she did come here?” Charles persisted.

  Miss Carley waved the damp piece of cloth. “I think her father had business with mine, or wanted something. I can only remember seeing her a couple of times. She was very quiet.”

  “Any impressions?” Miss Hogarth asked.

  Miss Carley’s nostrils flared. “Beaut
iful, but in a young way. A round face. Very French.”

  “Red hair?” Charles guessed, thinking of Julie Saville.

  “Yes.” Miss Carley nodded. “Red gold.”

  “Pointed chin?” he inquired.

  “I don’t remember. My brother said she looked interesting and I should speak to her, but it was too hard.” Miss Carley began to fiddle with her lace again.

  * * *

  When Charles and Miss Hogarth escaped the house and were back in the hackney, he said, “I can’t imagine Horatio and Miss Lugoson having much of a future. She wanted to be an actress and he didn’t even like the theater. That makes no sense.”

  “No wonder he wasn’t interested in marriage to her.”

  He chewed on his lower lip. “He probably never even met Angela Acton.”

  “It could have been a suicide,” she suggested.

  “Over Miss Lugoson?” Charles scoffed. “No.”

  Her fingers danced lightly over his sleeve. “I see your point. But that suicide note?”

  “‘I miss her. I’m sorry,’” Charles said. “The only ‘her’ is obviously Miss Lugoson. None of it makes sense.”

  “If he was the young man in Miss Rueff’s life, he’d probably have killed himself last year, when he lost access to her after the failed elopement.”

  He leaned forward so he could look more fully into Miss Hogarth’s face. “We have no idea who that young man was.”

  “I meant to ask Miss Carley more about that,” Miss Hogarth said. “Do you think her brother could have been Miss Rueff’s runaway lover?”

  “We don’t know anything about him,” Charles mused. “I shall send a letter to him. Assuming he lives at his family’s home.”

  “How old is he?”

  “I don’t even know that. He can’t be much older than twenty, given’s his mother’s presumable age. Bertram Carley might be a dead end, or be very useful. It is impossible to know.”

  Miss Hogarth’s lips flattened. “All we have are three dead bodies. Two girls who died the same way a year apart, and one young man, who died suspiciously, and who no one really cares about.”