Laetitia Rodd and the Case of the Wandering Scholar
Page 30
‘And my time is somewhat limited,’ said Mr Arden wryly. ‘I can’t ask them to come back tomorrow.’
We both rose; he took my hand and I could not speak.
‘Don’t be afraid for me,’ said Mr Arden, smiling. ‘As I said to you once before, when the truth is properly revealed it is always beautiful.’
He was hanged at eight o’clock the next morning, at Newgate, with a great crowd waiting outside.
Mr Flint stayed with him until the very last, for the two men had struck up a friendship during the trial. ‘He didn’t tremble, he didn’t flinch,’ he told me afterwards. ‘He was calm and courteous as ever – a model of courage, even as he stood with a sack over his head and the noose around his neck!’
In his will, Mr Arden left his gold watch to Patrick Flint. To me he left a handsomely bound edition of Rights of Man (a touch of ‘gallows humour’ here), and he also sent a very generous sum of money to Cousin Wilfred at the Mission in Plymouth.
‘And would you believe it,’ said Mr Blackbeard, who dropped in at Well Walk especially to tell us, ‘he left a whacking great donation to the Police Widows and Orphans – I don’t think I ever chased a better villain!’
The light has begun to fade, and I am too old and generally decrepit to write by just one small lamp. Never mind; I have set down my story, and will give these pages to my dearest niece Tishy – now grown into a wife and mother, and still my pride and joy.
‘I had better read it first, Aunty,’ she told me the other day, ‘before my fearsome husband picks it to pieces and argues over every detail!’
This made me smile, for her fearsome husband is none other than Patrick Flint. He married the dear girl upon her nineteenth birthday (my brother nearly drowned us all in champagne), and he has lately become a judge – with clean cuffs and a full quotient of sleeve-buttons. I hear him above me in the schoolroom at this moment, playing a rowdy game with his children.
My life in this house is never quiet, and Tishy marvels that I don’t mind it, but the noise of happy children is the music of heaven. And these days I can sleep through anything.
Afterword
This novel is set in 1851, two years before Matthew Arnold published ‘The Scholar Gipsy’. Arnold was – like my character Joshua Welland – inspired by the story of the poor Oxford scholar in Joseph Glanvill’s The Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661), and his beautiful poem is a great sigh of nostalgia for a simpler age. His scholar is immortal because he lives according to the ancient rhythms of the passing seasons, outside the pressures of the modern world.
The character of Daniel Arden was inspired by Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s novel, Eugene Aram (1832), in which he recast the real-life murderer Aram as a kind of romantic hero who killed in order to get himself the education he craved. If he killed someone ‘worthless’, and then used his knowledge to do good, did he deserve to be hanged? Yes, obviously – but the novel is interesting for its awareness of a seemingly intractable inequality, where ‘every door is barred with gold, and opens but to golden keys’, as Alfred Tennyson wrote in his 1835 poem, ‘Locksley Hall’.
Mrs Bentley is based upon a real woman, wife of the Hampstead postman, who let lodgings to John Keats. She really did live in Well Walk with a noisy swarm of red-headed boys, and I have always liked her for her kindness to the poet and his two brothers. She deserves to be more than a footnote.
The goings-on at Swinford are entirely fictional, but inspired by John Henry Newman’s ‘monastic’ community at Littlemore, just outside Oxford.
Endless thanks are owed to my parents, Basil and Betty Saunders, who gave me the best possible upbringing for a writer by stuffing their house with books, books, books and allowing me to spend untold hours reading them all beside the gas fire.
And many thanks to everyone who has helped me with this book – Caradoc King, Alexandra Pringle, Alison Hennessey, Marcus Berkmann, Amanda Craig – and my beloved family, Bill, Charlotte, Louisa, Etta, Ewan, Ed, Tom, George, Elsa, Claudia and Max.
Note on the Author
KATE SAUNDERS is an author and journalist. She has worked for The Times, Sunday Times, Sunday Express, Daily Telegraph and Cosmopolitan amongst others, and has contributed to BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour and Start the Week. She has written numerous books for adults and children, including the bestselling Night Shall Overtake Us, and her follow on to E Nesbit’s Five Children and It stories, Five Children on the Western Front, which won the Costa Children’s Book Award in 2014. The Secrets of Wishtide, the first book in the ‘Laetitia Rodd Mysteries’, was published by Bloomsbury in 2016. She lives in London.
Also available by Kate Saunders
The Secrets of Wishtide
'A Dickensian glow pervades this immensely satisfying novel. Hugely enjoyable’ James Runcie, author of 'The Grantchester Mysteries'
Mrs Laetitia Rodd is the impoverished widow of an Archdeacon, living modestly in Hampstead with her landlady Mrs Bentley. She is also a private detective of the utmost discretion. In winter 1850, her brother Frederick, a criminal barrister, introduces her to Sir James Calderstone, a wealthy and powerful industrialist who asks Mrs Rodd to investigate the background of an ‘unsuitable’ woman his son intends to marry – a match he is determined to prevent.
In the guise of governess, she travels to the family seat, Wishtide, deep in the frozen Lincolnshire countryside, where she soon discovers that the Calderstones have more to hide than most. As their secrets unfold, the case takes an unpleasant turn when a man is found dead outside a tavern. Mrs Rodd’s keen eyes and astute wits are taxed as never before in her search for the truth – which carries her from elite drawing rooms to London’s notorious inns and its steaming laundry houses.
Dickensian in its scope and characters, The Secrets of Wishtide brings nineteenth-century society vividly to life and illuminates the effect of Victorian morality on women’s lives. Introducing an irresistible new detective, the first book in the Laetitia Rodd Mystery series will enthral and delight.
‘A skill and charm of its own, as well as compassion and conviction’ Sunday Times
‘A skillful and deeply moving piece of work: poignant, beautifully judged, not a crass pastiche but a respectful homage’ Guardian
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First published in Great Britain 2019
This electronic edition published in 2019 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Copyright © Kate Saunders, 2019
Kate Saunders has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work
For legal purposes the Afterword here constitutes an extension of this copyright page
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ISBN: HB: 978-1-4088-6689-4; TPB: 978-1-5266-1111-6; eBook: 978-1-4088-6691-7
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