by Emily Organ
“Shall we?” suggested Francis, gesturing toward a path which led away from the lake.
“Of course.” I smiled, my heart thudding in my chest.
“I can’t say that I enjoy such conversations,” said Francis, “but sometimes they’re quite necessary. I’ll try to get to the point as quickly as I can.”
What would my reply be? Would I be making a big mistake if I said yes? Would it be polite to ask him to allow me time to consider his proposal?
Either way, I knew that I couldn’t turn him down with a simple no. He had given me plenty of time to prepare for this moment, yet I felt less prepared than ever.
“I hope you haven’t forgotten our conversation in the hansom cab that evening following our dinner with Mr Fox-Stirling,” continued Francis.
“Of course not.”
“As I look back on it now I feel rather embarrassed that my words were so direct, but I stood by them then and I stand by them now.”
“Thank you, Francis, I’m grateful to you for expressing yourself so honestly that evening. You shouldn’t feel embarrassed, and I should like to say in return that I —”
Francis held up his hand. “Please don’t consider me rude in interrupting you, Penny, only I’m finding this conversation rather difficult, and it’s taken me a little while to ready myself for it. Would you mind hearing what I have to say before you respond?”
“Of course.” I smiled, feeling some sympathy for him. I wanted to make it as easy for him as possible.
Did this mean I was ready to accept his proposal?
He stopped beside a beautifully scented rose bush and took a deep breath.
“I should like to remind you, Penny, how much I care about you. Please remember that.”
“Of course, Francis.”
“Good, because that is very important to me. The strength of my feelings for you has caused me to make a decision.” He scratched his chin. “I must take action, and I hope you will feel pleased about it.”
“I hope so.” I looked into his green eyes and realised I was holding my breath.
“I plan to travel to South America in search of your father, Penny.”
I continued to hold my breath, unsure as to whether I had heard him correctly. “But you can’t!” My voice sounded strained.
“Can’t?”
“You want to look for my father?”
He nodded.
“But it’s dangerous!”
“I don’t care, Penny. I am anxious to find him.”
“You wish to leave London? Leave the country?”
“I will have to if I’m to look for your father.”
“But I never thought you would want to. I thought —”
“Thought what? Did you think I had planned to say something different?”
I nodded, and a rush of embarrassment washed over me.
“For a time I thought I would, but I have come to realise that it wouldn’t be the right thing for me to do. I tried to convince myself that you were blameless when Inspector Blakely kissed you, but in truth I think you wanted it to happen.”
A surge of heat rushed to my face. “So you’re leaving?”
“I wish to do something interesting and rewarding. I have no desire to spend the rest of my days in a library hoping that one day you might agree to marry me.”
“But I haven’t known you for long, Francis. Maybe a little more time —”
“It’s not a question of time, Penny. You’re in love with Inspector Blakely, and I cannot compete with him for your affection. I don’t know what will happen once the chap is married; perhaps your feelings for him will change. But even if they did and you wished to marry me I would always know that I was your second choice.”
“You deserve better,” I said, my voice choked with emotion.
“You’ve told me that before, and I have come to believe that you are right. I wish to marry someone who loves me just as I love her.”
“I hope you find her, Francis.”
“So do I, Penny.”
The End
Historical Note
The opium trade has a long and complicated history and I hope that my attempts to summarise it here aren’t too clumsy.
Opium was a popular medicinal and recreational drug in China for centuries. Britain first became involved in the late 18th century when its East India Company saw an opportunity to make money. By this time, opium had been criminalised in China but this didn’t stop the British who cultivated the drug in their colony, India, and created a complex trade arrangement which saw opium being smuggled into China. The situation escalated into the two Opium Wars in the 1840s and 1850s which concluded with a treaty favourable to the British and other foreign traders.
In the latter half of the 19th century British-controlled India processed opium from the vast poppy fields of Bengal and Malwa and sold the drug to China. This trade was not without its opponents, including the British Prime Minister William Gladstone; critics viewed the trade as an exploitation of opium addicts’ misery. The trade continued because the revenue was so lucrative. On August 6th 1884 the Globe newspaper reported that Britain’s annual revenue from the opium trade that year would be over £9 million – today this equates to just over £1 billion / $1.3 billion (according to the Bank of England’s inflation calculator).
Merchant families grew wealthy from the opium trade including the Baring and Rothschild families in the UK and the Astor and Forbes families in the US. President Franklin D Roosevelt’s grandfather, Warren Delano, was another merchant who made his money in the opium trade. Increasing condemnation of the trade led to Britain officially ceasing it in 1917. However, as recently as 1939 it was reported that British-controlled India was still exporting some opium to China ‘to treat animals and to cure malaria.’ Mahatma Gandhi campaigned against the trade in India and the country won its independence from Britain in 1947. By the 1950s Chairman Mao had eradicated much of the opium trade in China, although legal and illegal opiate use remains a problem there as it does around the rest of the globe.
The Ghazipur opium factory in Uttar Pradesh, India, was established in 1820 by the East India Company and is still functioning today processing opium for alkaloid products in the pharmaceutical industry. Rudyard Kipling visited the factory in 1888 and wrote about it in an essay which was a useful resource for me.
In the 19th century, opium dens could be found in large cities where the Chinese community settled outside China and in locations where there was a population keen to use the drug. In London’s Limehouse many frequenters of the opium dens were sailors and travellers passing through the docks close by. Charles Dickens visited an opium den in Limehouse and used it as a location in his final, unfinished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
The East India Club in St James’s Square was founded in 1849 principally for men who were connected with the East India Company. It still occupies the same building in St James’s Square today, having merged with other clubs over the years. Membership is by nomination and election and women are still not permitted.
The India Office was located in what are now the Foreign Office buildings in Whitehall. Noted for their architecture and spectacular interior, these government buildings were built in the 1860s and still house the Foreign Office today. The buildings are open to the public once a year.
The police station on Commercial Street was once part of Whitechapel H Division. It was this division which investigated four of the five Jack the Ripper murders in 1888 (the other one being in the City of London). The investigating officers were based at Commercial Street police station. The building still stands today and had an extra storey added to it in the early 1900s. A police station no more, it’s now residential and is called Burhan Uddin House.
Euston Arch was an enormous sandstone structure which stood in front of Euston station from 1837 until 1962. It was demolished as part of the station’s redevelopment, to the upset of many. The broken up pieces of the arch were used to line the bottom of a
canal in East London and the gates are in the National Railway Museum in York. A number of pieces were raised from the canal in 2009 and plans are being discussed to have the arch rebuilt as part of an upgrade of Euston station in 2026.
Change Alley, sometimes known as Exchange Alley, is a narrow street in the heart of the City of London. In the 17th century it was home to Jonathan’s Coffee House where the prices of stocks and commodities were first published – a forerunner of the stock exchange.
If Curse of the Poppy is the first Penny Green book you’ve read, then you may find the following historical background interesting. It’s compiled from the historical notes published in the previous books in the series:
Women journalists in the nineteenth century were not as scarce as people may think. In fact they were numerous enough by 1898 for Arnold Bennett to write Journalism for Women: A Practical Guide in which he was keen to raise the standard of women’s journalism:-
“The women-journalists as a body have faults… They seem to me to be traceable either to an imperfect development of the sense of order, or to a certain lack of self-control.”
Eliza Linton became the first salaried female journalist in Britain when she began writing for the Morning Chronicle in 1851. She was a prolific writer and contributor to periodicals for many years including Charles Dickens’ magazine Household Words. George Eliot – her real name was Mary Anne Evans - is most famous for novels such as Middlemarch, however she also became assistant editor of The Westminster Review in 1852.
In the United States Margaret Fuller became the New York Tribune’s first female editor in 1846. Intrepid journalist Nellie Bly worked in Mexico as a foreign correspondent for the Pittsburgh Despatch in the 1880s before writing for New York World and feigning insanity to go undercover and investigate reports of brutality at a New York asylum. Later, in 1889-90, she became a household name by setting a world record for travelling around the globe in seventy two days.
The iconic circular Reading Room at the British Museum was in use from 1857 until 1997. During that time it was also used a filming location and has been referenced in many works of fiction. The Reading Room has been closed since 2014 but it’s recently been announced that it will reopen and display some of the museum’s permanent collections. It could be a while yet until we’re able to step inside it but I’m looking forward to it!
The Museum Tavern, where Penny and James enjoy a drink, is a well-preserved Victorian pub opposite the British Museum. Although a pub was first built here in the eighteenth century much of the current pub (including its name) dates back to 1855. Celebrity drinkers here are said to have included Arthur Conan Doyle and Karl Marx.
Publishing began in Fleet Street in the 1500s and by the twentieth century the street was the hub of the British press. However newspapers began moving away in the 1980s to bigger premises. Nowadays just a few publishers remain in Fleet Street but the many pubs and bars once frequented by journalists – including the pub Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese - are still popular with city workers.
Penny Green lives in Milton Street in Cripplegate which was one of the areas worst hit by bombing during the Blitz in the Second World War and few original streets remain. Milton Street was known as Grub Street in the eighteenth century and was famous as a home to impoverished writers at the time. The street had a long association with writers and was home to Anthony Trollope among many others. A small stretch of Milton Street remains but the 1960s Barbican development has been built over the bombed remains.
Plant hunting became an increasingly commercial enterprise as the nineteenth century progressed. Victorians were fascinated by exotic plants and, if they were wealthy enough, they had their own glasshouses built to show them off. Plant hunters were employed by Kew Gardens, companies such as Veitch Nurseries or wealthy individuals to seek out exotic specimens in places such as South America and the Himalayas. These plant hunters took great personal risks to collect their plants and some perished on their travels. The Travels and Adventures of an Orchid Hunter by Albert Millican is worth a read. Written in 1891 it documents his journeys in Colombia and demonstrates how plant hunting became little short of pillaging. Some areas he travelled to had already lost their orchids to plant hunters and Millican himself spent several months felling 4,000 trees to collect 10,000 plants. Even after all this plundering many of the orchids didn’t survive the trip across the Atlantic to Britain. Plant hunters were not always welcome: Millican had arrows fired at him as he navigated rivers, had his camp attacked one night and was eventually killed during a fight in a Colombian tavern.
My research for The Penny Green series has come from sources too numerous to list in detail, but the following books have been very useful: A Brief History of Life in Victorian Britain by Michael Patterson, London in the Nineteenth Century by Jerry White, London in 1880 by Herbert Fry, London a Travel Guide through Time by Dr Matthew Green, Women of the Press in Nineteenth-Century Britain by Barbara Onslow, A Very British Murder by Lucy Worsley, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale, Journalism for Women: A Practical Guide by Arnold Bennett and Seventy Years a Showman by Lord George Sanger, Dottings of a Dosser by Howard Goldsmid, Travels and Adventures of an Orchid Hunter by Albert Millican, The Bitter Cry of Outcast London by Andrew Mearns, The Complete History of Jack the Ripper by Philip Sugden, The Necropolis Railway by Andrew Martin, The Diaries of Hannah Cullwick, Victorian Maidservant edited by Liz Stanley, Mrs Woolf & the Servants by Alison Light, Revelations of a Lady Detective by William Stephens Hayward, A is for Arsenic by Kathryn Harkup, In an Opium Factory by Rudyard Kipling, Drugging a Nation: The Story of China and the Opium Curse by Samuel Merwin and Confessions of an Opium Eater by Thomas de Quincy. The British Newspaper Archive is also an invaluable resource.
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News reporter Penny Green is committed to her job. But should she impose on a grieving widow?
The brutal murder of a doctor has shocked 1880s London and Fleet Street is clamouring for news. Penny has orders from her editor to get the story all the papers want.
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The Runaway Girl Series
Also by Emily Organ. A series of three historical thrillers set in Medieval London.
Book 1: Runaway Girl
A missing girl. The treacherous streets of Medieval London. Only one woman is brave enough to try and bring her home.
Book 2: Forgotten Child
Her husband took a fatal secret to the grave. Two friends are murdered. She has only one chance to stop the killing.
Book 3: Sins of the Father
An enemy returns. And this time he has her fooled. If he gets his own way then a little girl will never be seen again.
Available as separate books or a three book box set. Find out more at emilyorgan.co.uk/books
Copyright © 2018 by Emily Organ
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Edited by Joy Tibbs
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