William, despite the February early morning, did not wear his coat, gloves, or hat. Still, he did not seem to feel the chill of the hour. He offered Charles a madcap grin. “I have proposed to Julie and we will wed as soon as the banns can be called.”
“Congratulations,” Charles said heartily, offering his hand. He and William shook. Though he thought he could pull his exhausted friend over in one swift motion, the handshake was firm. “You should return to your rooms and warm yourself. I would go with you to celebrate, but I have to catch the coach.”
“Mr. Hogarth kindly allowed me a day away from my duties to speak to Lady Lugoson,” William told him. “I need to bathe and dress and then go back to Brompton to make arrangements both for Julie to be removed to Lugoson House and for the dowry.”
“You’ll see the rector at St. Luke’s?” Charles reached for his muffler and began to unwind it to hand to his friend but William shook his head.
“That is a good plan. Julie can claim to be a parishioner since she did just move into the area a few nights ago.”
Charles moved toward the steps as a laundress came up them, holding a bundle of clean linen. “Does Julie understand who she is?”
The woman put her head down and angled past them. “No,” William said. “She is still dizzy. Her eyes don’t quite focus. It is one thing to assure her I want to be her life protector, and another to explain all the details.”
He’d have to take William to his rooms, or risk the man freezing to death outside. Grateful that he had not yet heard the bell marking the hour, he took his friend’s arm with his free hand and pulled him down the corridor, following the scent of clean fabric. “She needs to know, in order to grieve properly. Why, she lost two sisters.”
“I’m well aware,” William said. “But you saw her. She needs time.”
Privately, Charles disagreed. Julie had seemed quite sensible on the sofa at the Carleys’ house, and that was right after returning to consciousness. But it would now be William’s duty to guard and protect his young bride, and he hoped his friend would not think it a poor bargain.
“What will you do about her mother?”
“With any hope, she has gone to the provinces,” William said as they reached his door. “Time will tell if Julie and Miss Acton have a relationship or not, or if they even should.”
“It is to her credit that Julie was never abandoned,” Charles said. “Her aunt is providing for her. If only these women could have protected the other two girls.”
“I feel sorry for Beatrice Carley as well,” William said, pulling his key from his pocket. “There is not much hope for a girl with a mad mother, but I can, at least, save Julie.”
“And make her a mother?”
William grinned. “Time will tell.”
For himself, Charles would prefer a girl whom he could trust in all things, a girl of refinement to balance her gambler’s heart. For all women gambled on the men they chose, and their children either reaped the benefit or paid the price.
As William waved and opened his door, Charles clambered down the steps toward the street. He could not help thinking of the delights of a wife at home, if not one with Julie’s nonexistent domestic capabilities.
Kate Hogarth, however, would make a wonderful companion. With that quick mind, those sterling domestic skills, that pretty face, what a pleasure their marriage could be. He whistled merrily as he reached the road, swinging his carpetbag at his side as he walked past a stream of carters, readying their wares for the day ahead.
He’d uncovered the truth behind the deaths of three young people. His experiences were exciting enough to turn into a novel. Though he had too much imagination to ever take anything directly from life.
An hour later, as he sat inside the stagecoach taking him to yet another parliamentary meeting, he pulled out a pencil stub and a scrap of paper. He decided to write his sister Fanny, to order his thoughts after everything that had transpired. “Dearest,” he wrote, holding his paper over his satchel to keep it steady in the jolting coach. “I’m going to set down a tale of two murders, and the sad death of a promising young man. . . .”
Acknowledgments
Thank you to my father, David Hiestand, for allowing me to use yet another family name as my new pen name. We’re not entirely sure who his grandfather “Redmond” was since his appearance in family history only lasted two months, but that just makes Heather Redmond a more appropriately mysterious name!
Thank you to my beta readers Judy DiCanio, Ransom Stevens, Julie Mulhern, and Madeline Pruett. Many people read early drafts of the first few chapters in their various incarnations, including Delle Jacobs, Eilis Flynn, Mary Jo Hiestand, David Hiestand, Stand Hiestand, Peter Sentfleben, and my agent, Laurie McLean at Fuse Literary. Thanks so much to Peter and my Kensington editor, Elizabeth May, for championing this book.
The works of Charles Dickens have stimulated fiction of mine over the years, but I never thought I’d be using his actual life in a novel. Not that I think he was ever an amateur sleuth. My plot is entirely fictitious as is most everyone in the book, though I did attempt to be faithful to Dickens’s career and lifestyle as I understood it to be in his early twenties. More and more, as I did my research, I found myself inspired by his wife, Catherine Hogarth Dickens, and I hope I did her credit. Much information about her has vanished, but I imagined her at age nineteen based on what little I could find in letters and biography. Any mistakes or fabrications are my own, and made with reverence. Thank you to the biographers Lillian Nayder, Claire Tomalin, Michael Slater, and Hilary Macaskill, among others, for their works on the subject. I sincerely appreciate the efforts of Dickens-related institutions and the Dickens family for keeping this history alive.
BOOK CLUB READING GUIDE for A Tale of Two Murders
1. Charles Dickens’s novel A Tale of Two Cities inspired aspects of this novel. What similarities are shared between these two books? Does reading this book make you want to read or reread the classic Dickens novel?
2. What did you know about Charles Dickens before reading this novel? Is it hard to picture him as a young man before he became the international celebrity, and the tired middle-aged man he appears to be in the extant photos? Based on Charles as described in this novel, are you surprised he became such a great and enduring success?
3. What do you think of 1830s courtship as described in this novel? Is it strange to you that Charles and Kate don’t call each other by their first names? That there is almost no physical contact between them? Do you think love and trust can grow when a couple is so rarely alone together? Would you pursue a romantic partner who lived five miles away if you had to walk through winter weather each way to get to them?
4. What do you think of Kate’s challenge to Charles? “Give me a mystery, Mr. Dickens, and a solution, and I will follow you into places I should not.” Do you think a woman of Kate’s time might really have said something like this?
5. Do you think Kate and Charles have an equal partnership? In a time when men primarily found friendships with one another, do you think Kate really would have been able to share an interest in mysteries with her significant other?
6. Given how Christiana Lugoson died, would you have suspected murder from the start?
7. The author left some aspects of Charles’s relationship with Lady Lugoson up to the reader’s imagination. What do you think their relationship was?
8. Julie Saville is a character who complicates Charles’s life. What did you think about how he handled her? Did you think Mr. Hogarth’s concerns were appropriate?
9. In the 1830s, there was quite a bit of take-out dining as many Londoners didn’t have kitchens as we think of them today. Water was also not available directly into many homes. How would these things affect your daily life?
10. Some of the characters in this novel are real, like Lady Holland and John Black. What kind of research interests do you have after reading this novel? Will you do further reading to discover who and what was
real?
11. Which of the supporting characters are you hoping to see in the next books in this series?
12. According to Wikipedia, “A genius is a person who displays exceptional intellectual ability, creative productivity, universality in genres or originality, typically to a degree that is associated with the achievement of new advances in a domain of knowledge.” Do you think Charles Dickens meets the criteria? Why or why not?
A Tale of Two Murders Page 31