by Robin Paige
Death at Bishops Keep
( Sir Charles Sheridan - 1 )
Robin Paige
Robin Paige
Death at Bishops Keep
1
"I am in just the mood for a ghostly tale, a scene of mystery, a startling revelation, and where snail I loot for an obliging magician to gratify me?"
"Here!"
— LOUISA MAY ALCOTT, "The Fate of the Forrests"
Kate Ardleigh glanced warily over her shoulder. The late-summer night was black as the pit and stormy, lighted by the intermittent blue-white glare of lightning flashes. The wind skittered like a mad thing through Manhattan's nearly empty streets, twisting Kate's sensible skirt about her ankles and flapping the chestnut vendor's sign. It was precisely the sort of wild night on which Felix Farmore had kidnapped Pearl St. John, in Kate's second story, "Missing Pearl, Or The Lost Heiress." And it was in just such a shadowy street that Felix had apprehended Pearl and borne her off to her fate.
But the figure that Kate saw behind the passing two-horse omnibus was nothing like the fictitious Farmore. It was quite real, and familiar, too, for she had seen it yesterday as well. She quickened her pace, lifting her skirt to avoid a pile of horse droppings and ducking behind a brewery wagon piled with wooden kegs. He (for Kate was quite certain that it was
a man, stout and bowler-hatted) had followed her yesterday. And this evening, he had followed her ever since she had left the Fifth Avenue offices of the Frank Leslie Publishing House, where she had finally procured payment for ' 'Missing Pearl." She fisted her gloved hands in the pockets of her trim-fitting jacket and drew her brows together, her apprehension mixed with more than a little annoyance.
In point of fact, Kate would not have been abroad on the streets on a Tuesday evening, a good hour after the closing of the shops, if Mr. Bothwell Coxford, a haughty, self-important assistant editor of Frank Leslie's Popular Monthly, had not kept her waiting for the greater part of the afternoon. It was only as the electric lamps were being lighted that a clerk had brought her a bank draft for $225, an amount that would permit her to pay Mrs. Murchison the rent and see her comfortably situated until she had finished her next serial story, which she had tentatively titled "Amber's Amulet, Or The Conspiracy of Death." The money was worth walking a total of forty blocks to fetch, even if the wild night threatened rain.
Kate gave another furtive glance over her shoulder and quickened her step. The shadow had gained ground and was closing fast. Most women would have been frightened to death in such a circumstance, but Kate, independent and self-sufficient, was not given to fright. She stepped decisively around the corner and into the pale halo that encircled the street lamp in front of the Ninth Street Police Station.
The station's stone staircase descended solidly to the pavement and a reassuring light glowed behind the frosted glass door. It was here that her uncle, Sean O'Malley, served as detective sergeant. Uncle Sean was probably at home, presiding over pot roast and potatoes with Aunt Maureen and the two youngest O'Malleys. But inside the station Kate could hear the thunderous voice of Inspector Duggan, the night sergeant, bawling into the recently installed telephone in a voice loud enough to be heard in Brooklyn. If she were to confront the shadowy figure, she had best do it here, where a loud scream would summon reinforcements.
Kate slipped into the shadow of the stairs and waited, holding her breath, until Bowler-Hat turned the corner. He hesi-. tated, stroking his handlebar mustache as he searched the empty street. Then she stepped out and accosted him with greater boldness than she felt, speaking in a firm, unfaltering voice.
"Please be good enough, sir," she said, lifting her chin, "to tell me why you are following me."
Bowler-Hat's mustache twitched and his beefy face registered surprise, alarm, and chagrin, in that order. He hunched his shoulders and shifted his feet uncomfortably, his garments exuding the smoky seasoning of cigars and garlic. Then he collected himself, straightened his shoulders, and cleared his throat.
"You mistake me, madam," he said with great dignity. "I am not following-"
"Stuff and nonsense," Kate snapped. She stamped her foot. "Do you take me for a fool? You, sir, have been trailing a half block behind me ever since I left Fifth Avenue. What is more, you were following me yesterday-and rather clumsily, I must say. Now, do you wish to tell me why you are being such an annoyance, or do you prefer to yield that information to"-she pointed at the brightly lighted door- "Inspector Duggan?"
At that moment, Inspector Duggan was heard to shout into the phone, "Well, then, and a good night to you, too, sir," and to bellow for Corporal Peters, "on the double, dammit!"
His jaw tightening, Bowler-Hat's glance darted from Kate to the lighted door and back again. He hesitated, clearly perceiving that he was in a tight place.
"As you wish," he said sourly. Reaching into the pocket of his tweed coat, he produced a leather card case and handed her a card. "If you will appear at this address on Friday morning at ten, you will be told what you wish to know."
Kate turned the thin gray card to the light. On it was printed, in bold letters, the name Rodney P. Kellerman, and beneath that, Pinkerton's Detective Agency, New York Office, with an address on Second Avenue.
Kate's eyes widened. A private detective! What amazing
good fortune! But she did not allow her delight to creep into her voice.
"Pinkerton's?" she asked with cold formality. "And what, pray tell, does Pinkerton's require of me?"
But Rodney P. Kellerman did not appear inclined to answer. He touched his fingers to the brim of his bowler. ' 'Friday at ten, madam," he said, and marched stiffly around the corner.
It began to rain.
2
"In the late nineteenth century the most popular form of narrative was the penny-dreadful (or shilling shocker, as it was called in England). Some of the tales were written, pseudonymously, by resourceful women who insisted on making a living for themselves."
— SUSAN BLAKE, "With Her Own Pen"
1 lutching Rodney P. Kellerman's card in a cold fist, Kate V^Ardleigh returned to her bleak third-floor room in Mrs. Murchison's boarding house on Mayberry Street. It was a lodging she had taken only four months before, after the sudden death of her employer, Mrs. Winifred P. Schreiber, whose secretary-companion she had been since leaving Mrs. Daw-son's employ in 1889, five years before. Kate could have (and probably should have, she told herself) sought immediate
reemployment. Mrs. Schreiber's lawyer would have been glad to give her the highest recommendation, as would Mrs. Daw-son, whose three children-dreadful brats! — she had tutored. As she was now a skilled typist (an art she had learned at Mrs. Schreiber's request), she might have sought clerical employment, as well as work as a governess or a companion.
Or she could have returned to her childhood home with her Aunt and Uncle O'Malley, where she would have been greatly welcome. Kate's British father, Thomas Ardleigh, had died before her birth and her Irish mother, Aileen, had similarly succumbed when she was five. The O'Malleys, warmly capacious in their Irish affections, had been mother and father to her, and their six children had been her brothers and sisters. She was deeply attached to them. But while she visited often, returning to live with them would have seemed an admission that she was not capable of making her own way in the world.
Or finally (in Kate's view, it really was a last resort) she could have married. While she was not a conventionally pretty woman, a few men-those not afraid of a strong woman-had been attracted by the intensity of her personality and the depth of her self-composure. She had rejected the attentions of several men, of whom she might have been decently fond if she had made the effort. But she had not. ' 'Decently fond" was not fond
enough. Spinsterhood, whatever fear it might strike in the hearts of ordinary women, held no terrors for Kate. She had something else to do, and she intended to do it as long as she could afford private lodgings, lamp oil, paper, and ink-and perhaps, on some glorious day, a typewriter. She intended to be a writer.
Her efforts, under the pseudonym of Beryl Bardwell, had already met with a modest success. "The Rosicrucian's Ruby" and "Missing Pearl" had caught the fancy of Frank Leslie, whose Popular Monthly was hawked by every train boy on every railway in the country. Although he had required her upon revision to spice up her tales with a few more sensational passages than she thought altogether tasteful, the stories had been quickly accepted, and almost as quickly paid for-almost, for she had had to fetch the second payment herself, and wait for it, to boot.
But what was nearly as gratifying as the money was the fact that readers were inundating the publisher with a flood tide of requests for more Beryl Bardwell stories, a tide that lifted Kate's spirits as well as raising the Monthly's revenues. Kate felt on the way to supporting herself by her pen, as long as she could manage to scribble for five or six hours daily without interruption. This was why she had not sought immediate reemployment upon the death of Mrs. Winifred P. Schreiber. If she continued to be successful, she might soon be able to afford the $3.50 per month that was required for the rental of a Remington Standard at The Typewriter Exchange at 10 Barclay Street.
But Beryl Bardwell's literary triumphs were not without their complications. The chief difficulty, Kate reflected as she propped Mr. Kellerman's card against the oil lamp and unbuttoned her wet jacket, was the public's unquenchable thirst for ever more lurid sensation.
Kate's original design had been to write tidy domestic dramas to which she could append her own name, like those of Louisa May Alcott. She had even offered three or four of that sort to publishers, but to no avail. One had sniffed, "Morals, my dear Miss Ardleigh, do not sell. The public wants sensation. Exotic murder and its detection make an excellent story. Try your hand at something like that, and we should be glad to look at it."
Hence, as only the most thrilling story seemed to satisfy the public taste, Kate determined that hers would be shocking, hair-raising, breathtaking adventures, each one set in an exotic setting and peopled with satisfyingly sinister villains. If her success were to be measured by her readers' responses, she had indeed achieved her goal. But the effort, she acknowledged ruefully as she faced her third such thriller, was beginning to wear. She was getting rather tired of writing sensational shockers.
If, however, Beryl Bardwell's effort was the price of Kate Ardleigh's freedom and independence in a world where such commodities were not commonly available to women, Kate was more than willing to pay the price. She read as many penny-dreadfuls as she could, and she had taken to studying
the mysteries of Wilkie Collins and Conan Doyle, although she did not agree with Mr. Holmes's disparaging assessment of women, and Dr. Watson seemed unfortunately sycophantic. But Sherlock was no more. Conan Doyle had recently sent his detective off a cliff, no doubt because he was weary of concocting plots that were sufficiently labyrinthian to trap the reader while providing a way out for the detective. Kate was left with such thrilling American detectives as Cap Collier, whose violent adventures had been popular for over a decade in Mr. George Munro's action-packed dime novels.
In truth, Kate was not happy with these models. Her natural inclination was more to the violence of the heart betrayed than to violent action. But Mr. Coxford reported that Mr. Leslie wished for yet more suspenseful action in her stories, and for more dramatic detail. To that end, she was in the habit of mining every fragment of her rather limited experience for plot, setting, and character. That was why she had felt so much delight to discover that she was the object of attention of Rodney P. Kellerman, of Pinkerton's.
So while the storm wore itself out against her window, Kate sat by the oil lamp, dipped her pen, and began to record in a rapid copperplate hand every detail of the evening, down to the odor of cigars and garlic that had enveloped Mr. Kell-erman's stout and tweedy self like a savory shroud.
3
"What astonishing news you have brought me! A long-lost relative, a sea-voyage, a manor abroad! It is so extraordinary a narrative that I can hardly credit it!"
"Ah, yes. But the tale is not such a simple one, my dear. There is yet a great deal more to be learned."
— ANONYMOUS "A Mother's Plot," 1887
Rodney P. KeHerman glanced at his gold-plated pocket watch and pulled a sheaf of papers from a drawer of the desk that Pinkerton's provided him. Five minutes later there was a knock at the office door and a boy in a yellow-and-green plaid waistcoat opened it wide enough to admit his shoulders and a head of unruly hair.
"Young lady t' see you, sir," he said.
"Show her in, please," Mr. Kellerman said, resolving that this interview should be conducted with far greater dignity on his part than the last.
The young woman who entered and took the chair on the other side of the desk was, according to the information he had gathered, an orphan raised by her mother's family, at present unemployed, and a spinster. What's more, she was likely to remain so, in Mr. Kellerman's opinion, because she was already nearing the end of her twenty-fifth year.
And also because she was not the sort who gave herself graces. He glanced at her face as she settled herself and took off her gray knitted gloves. It was a strong face with a too-resolute mouth, heavy brows, and a decisive chin. The eyes were of an intense hazel-green that seemed to see a great deal, the nose was amply dappled with gingery freckles, and the cheeks bore no trace of the paint that some young women, even of the better class, affected. The thick auburn hair, richly highlighted with russet, had escaped from the combs meant to subjugate it, and disheveled locks straggled untidily over her white collar. The costume, a sturdy brown wool suit with plain brown buttons, lacked feminine decoration, except for a bit of cream lace at the wrists and throat.
An unprepossessing person, Mr. Kellerman concluded, and altogether unfeminine, although if he had been truthful, he might have conceded that his judgment was somewhat colored by his chagrin at having allowed her to catch him out so handily on Tuesday night last. That he had been discovered at his work by this observant young woman still greatly nettled him, although, to his credit, he had followed her unseen and done his detecting undetected for the better part of the preceding week. He had watched her, for instance, when she went to seek employment with the publisher, Frank Leslie, whose offices she had visited on Tuesday, and he thought to use that bit of knowledge to his advantage.
"You said you would tell me why you were following me," Miss Ardleigh began with asperity. Her voice, as he had noted in their earlier meeting, was deep and rich, a husky contralto. "I am curious to learn who made it worth your while to go to such effort."
As she folded her hands in her lap, Mr. Kellerman observed that the forefinger of the right hand was ink-stained. One would have thought, he remarked critically to himself, that she would have scrubbed away this telltale badge of her previous secretarial engagement. It reinforced his belief that such a person was likely to remain an old maid. A woman who cared about improving her marriage prospects would surely eradicate this tattletale mark of her spinsterhood.
Mr. Kellerman withdrew his attention from Miss Ardleigh's unfortunate hands. "I shall inform you," he replied. He spread out the sheaf of papers and arranged them precisely. ' 'I am in receipt of a letter from your aunt, Miss Sa-brina Ardleigh, of-"
"My aunt?" Miss Ardleigh's hazel eyes, which now appeared to be flecked with a deeper green, fastened on his. "Mr. Kellerman," she said firmly, "I have no such relation."
"My dear Miss Ardleigh," Mr. Kellerman said with exaggerated patience, "we will never get to the bottom of this if you persist in interrupting me." He moved the top paper a quarter of an inch. "May I resume, please?"
The young woman's mouth tightened. She nodded imperceptibly.
"M
iss Sabrina Ardleigh, of Bishop's Keep, Essex, England," he continued, "contacted me several weeks ago through her British solicitors, the firm of Edgecombe, Har-court, and Harcourt. Miss Ardleigh identified herself as an aunt of yourself, the sister of one Thomas Ardleigh, whom public record shows to have been your father. She wished me to discover whether at the present time you might be a suitable secretary and companion to her. Having made the necessary inquiries, I have conveyed to Mr. Winston Edgecombe, the firm's senior partner and her personal representative, my judgment that, upon a trial basis, you would indeed be suitable for such employment."
"Employment!" Miss Ardleigh exclaimed in a tone of restrained surprise. "In England?"
Mr. Kellerman ignored the interruption. "Mrs. Schreiber, your most recent employer, left ample testimony to your intelligence and integrity and to your competence as an amanuensis. She was apparently much impressed by the fact that you acquired German in order to assist her with her letters and to read to her, and by your skill in manipulating a typewriter. That, at least, is her attorney's recollection. Upon my inquiry, your previous employer, Mrs. Isabella Dawson, certified to me that you were able and industrious in your care of her children"-he cleared his throat-"although not, in Mrs. Dawson's words, 'a natural-born lover of babes.' "
He paused. Miss Ardleigh's head was bowed, her eyes
fixed on her laced fingers. "Do you have any question to this point?"
Miss Ardleigh looked up. "Mrs. Schreiber's attorney and Mrs. Dawson-these are the sum of your inquiries?''
Feeling somewhat surprised by the question, Mr. Keller-man countered with a prudent one of his own. "Are there positions I have overlooked-other than your efforts to find secretarial employment with the publishing firm of Frank Leslie?"