Tussaud
Page 30
‘It has certainly proved a most enlightening affair. But now you must go.’ Marie set her face in resolution. It would not benefit to let feelings gather momentum and run awry.
‘Where?’ Harriet smoothed her hair down and brushed out her skirt. Marie saw that the storm of emotion had passed and she was ready for the next course of action. Very good.
‘My shop in Paris. You can stay there for the time being. Take the money that Cavendish brought to Baker Street for Elanor’s release – he gave it up willingly, and I’m sure would be happy for you to have it now. My husband will not trouble you, as he cares nothing for me or the business. Besides, he returned to his own village long ago.’ Marie was giving her a chance to escape. To start a new life. She hoped Harriet would take it.
‘Your husband will agree to this?’
‘He will agree to anything I propose as long as he has money, which I will send him once I sell these.’ She stroked the fine gold chain she now wore around her neck that held Pinetti’s collection of beautiful rings. She could keep them for sentimental value, but what practical use was sentiment?
‘And what of your plans then?’
Yes, the future. How swiftly it arrived. ‘I will take Antoinette with me,’ said Marie. ‘She is not the same as Elanor, but she is … enough. I can open my own show, then pay for my sons to finish their studies and have them join me in the business if they desire.’ How wonderful that their future was now assured, and not dependant upon her stupid husband. She smiled. Her husband would be furious that she, and now her sons, were not under his power anymore.
‘What of the valet?’ said the maid with hesitation.
‘Who knows? Forget what has gone before. You can have a fresh start.’
‘Yes,’ said the maid reluctantly, looking at Marie as if she wanted to ask more. ‘I’m ready, but how to move Elanor when —’
Marie pressed the fingertip on Elanor’s right hand, letting herself imagine once more, as Elanor stood up, that the wax automaton had really come to life. It was so very hard to say goodbye to her but her consuming need to seek solace and company in her creations was over. ‘She can walk, if you hold her hand steady enough.’ Harriet met Marie’s eyes, and the look that passed between them held within it a mutual understanding.
Harriet then took Elanor’s right hand firmly in her own, and they walked to the tower door. ‘And what about His Grace? What will happen to him?’
‘He has taken to his bed, and I have just sent for his physician.
I think, perhaps, this swoon will be his last.’ ‘Won’t he ask for the valet?’
‘It’s all a dream to him now, including Elanor.’ It seemed Cavendish, like herself in the past, may still be caught between fancies and reality.
‘But I must thank you properly for your assistance. In reading all the mail, advising me of the contents – especially Philidor’s correspondence with Dr Gribble – planting the key to Elanor’s cavern in my workshop. I only have one question – why did you keep moving the portrait of the duke’s father?’
Harriet looked at Marie steadily. ‘I never touched that portrait. Why would I?’
They gazed at each other for a moment.
‘Strange indeed,’ said Marie.
‘And you smelling those flowers stranger still.’
‘I do not know what to make of either abnormality. Perhaps the spirit of Elanor aided us to become three women working to combat the three gentlemen. But I think it best if we pry no further.’
Marie locked the tower door and followed Harriet and Elanor as they descended the stairs. She watched as they exited by the back door, passed the well in the courtyard and stepped into the waiting carriage.
As it pulled away, Marie reflected on her most recent idea for a head to add to her Chamber of Horrors. It would be based on the death mask of the valet, who Wednesday night, before she saw to Philidor and Cavendish, had drowned in the well she was now leaning against. He had arranged to meet her there to pass over the will for her to copy but that was not his only intent. For he had then tried to press himself upon her in such a way that he overbalanced and fell. The finality of his demise was unfortunate, but his illusion he could ravish her without resistance was, in the end, the real killer. She would ensure his body was found in due course.
She sniffed the broken lavender heads she had picked earlier from the garden. Yes, it may not have been dangerous for the valet to betray a madman or a magician, but trying to best this madame in a game of wits had proved lethal. This daughter of an executioner would, after much running, now finally make her living from death.
It was time to send for the guillotine.
EPILOGUE
MURDER ENQUIRY
The recent murder of an unidentified gentleman at Baker Street remains a mystery. While the landlady, Mrs Druce, claims the murderer was the infamous stage magician Philidor, her mental capacity has fallen into question and her assertions it is him are doubtful. Investigators conjecture that a third person, a woman, was there that night and witnessed the event, and they are appealing to her to come forward.
Philidor was hospitalised with a gunshot wound but made a full recovery only to be recently arrested and charged with drunkenness, thievery and public disgrace after attempting to steal a man’s watch, and then, once caught, defending his actions by declaring he was the victim in an elaborate plot to relieve him of his money and that supposedly a living wax automaton had been part of it all. Those readers who recall Philidor from his shows in London and at Welbeck Abbey know that Antoinette, as she was called, was most impressive. However, it seems her maker has fallen on hard times – and perhaps fallen out with Antoinette. He remains in gaol awaiting sentence.
SENSATIONAL SCANDAL
Mrs Druce of Baker Street has claimed that His Grace William Cavendish, 5th Duke of Portland has been masquerading as Thomas Charles, her tenant who ran the Baker Street Bazaar from her lodgings for some time. Thomas Charles, however, died last week, and she in fact attended his funeral at Highgate Cemetery, although it was a closed coffin so she did not see the body. She claims that he is not dead and that her child of six months is his, conceived one night when he visited her to ask about rent. She claims he has faked his death in order to return to living his secluded and privileged aristocratic life as well as to prevent her son from claiming his rightful inheritance. If her story is true, her boy would be the heir to the duke’s fortune, which includes the entire estate of Welbeck Abbey as well as Cavendish Square in London. Mrs Druce has applied to have the body of Thomas Charles exhumed, but her petition has not been successful.
Yesterday Mrs Druce was admitted to Bethlem under the care of Mr Gribble, the resident physician, and her child placed in the workhouse.
CASE OF MISSING GIRL RESOLVED
A body has been exhumed at Welbeck Abbey and identified as that of the girl Elanor Hemmings who disappeared sixteen years ago from the estate. His Grace William Cavendish, 5th Duke of Portland, is not under any suspicion, and investigators are emphatic that he is not to blame, instead citing a tragic accident with a gun that was mishandled.
DEATH NOTICE
His Grace William Cavendish, 5th Duke of Portland has died in his home in peaceful surroundings after languishing for considerable time with ill health. A recent fire in his underground ballroom is said to have affected him greatly and also consumed the collection of books, antiques and artefacts stored in his subterranean library. His estate, Welbeck Abbey, will be inherited by a distant cousin.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Marie Tussaud, Paul Philidor, Pinetti, Mrs Druce and His Grace William Cavendish, 5th Duke of Portland were real people connected by their love of magic, the supernatural, automatons and the intriguing setting of Baker Street (made famous by a certain nineteenth-century fictional detective). In the spirit of creativity, I tweaked some of their ages and life events in order to have them crossing paths at the right time.
Tussaud and Philidor did work together to produce the P
hantasmagoria. And Marie opened an early exhibition in London at the Baker Street Bazaar, which was the centre of a scandal involving His Grace William Cavendish, 5th Duke of Portland, his purported alter ego Thomas Charles and the landlady Druce, who did claim that her son was his illegitimate child. She insisted that Thomas Charles’s body be exhumed, claiming the coffin would be empty; it eventually was exhumed and found to contain the right body, and as a consequence she was deemed mad and placed in a lunatic asylum.
Philidor was a German stage magician, as was Pinetti. The former was inspired by the latter’s show of ‘mechanical wonders’, but Pinetti had most likely died by the time Philidor was of an age to be a rival. I thought it would be interesting to make them brothers and add another dimension to the story.
Welbeck Abbey is still standing, complete with its underground ballroom, library, tunnels, pink walls, gardens, grounds and forest. His Grace William Cavendish, 5th Duke of Portland, with all of his eccentricities and afflictions, epitomised a quote attributed to the American novelist Tom Clancy: ‘The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.’
The mantelpiece was never at Welbeck but it exists, made from a bedhead with supposed mystical powers; I learnt about it from an episode of Great British Ghosts. I believe it still stands at Ye Olde King’s Head, a pub in Chester.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Eternally thankful to Brent, for physically picking me up and putting me on the chair to write so very long ago. I couldn’t have done it, I couldn’t continue to do any of it, without you. Thank you to Thomas, whose thoughtfulness and heart of determination and courage beats in time with my own. I love you both beyond words.
A special thank you to my mum for taking me to the library and feeding my habit as a child. You introduced me to the world of imagination through books and I am forever grateful for your unconditional support and love. Thank you to my nan for the old bookshop visits after school and to my dad for a particular conversation one night. Thank you to my brother for the phone calls and for introducing me to Steven Pressfield, it changed everything. And to my dear friend, whose loyalty (and laughs) have been a constant source of solace even though we live so far away.
Much gratitude goes to Two Sugars, Two Wrens and Alfie’s for years of hospitality and extra hot water. Thank you to all the students I have taught over the years whose little questions of ‘How’s the book going Mrs Lyons-Lee?’ meant so much. Thank you also to my school for supporting me with time away from teaching in order to write.
Nigel Featherstone and Mary Cunnane have provided invaluable emotional and practical support through the Hardcopy program, as well as the opportunity to be part of a writing community. Thank you for your generosity and thank you to my writing friends and colleagues, you understand what it takes. Thank you to Mariano Tomatis, internationally renowned Italian writer and magician, whose skills and knowledge concerning all things magic and history is truly wonderful. Thank you to the fabulous and talented author H. G Parry (Hannah Parry) for taking the time out of her own writing schedule to support me. My editor Kate Goldsworthy has been incredible in her unwavering attention to detail. Finally, a huge thank you to my publisher Barry Scott of Transit Lounge, who connected with my story and understood.