Aunt Adeline offers an insightful balance to this feminist critique of Victorian society in a conversation with Charlotte.
Of course if we all spoke together we could persuade men, or even force them — but we never do speak together. How often have you seen half a dozen women agree and band together for a cause, let alone half a million? … Men, on the other hand, work fairly well together, imagining themselves the protectors and providers of the nation, obliged to do everything they can to preserve the situation precisely as it is — in their control — on the assumption that they know best what is right for us … And there are only too many women who are happy to assist them, since the status quo suits them very well also.
But Emily’s concern is not the plight of womanhood but her own boredom, and she solves this by working undercover as a lady’s maid in the household where Robert York was found dead three years earlier. This is a politically sensitive ‘cold case’ that Pitt has been called in to investigate. In October 1884, York was found beaten around the head after a household burglary. The case was left unsolved, and the few items stolen have never appeared on the black market. There has always been a lurking suspicion that York’s death might have had something to do with his highly confidential work at the Foreign Office. Secret papers associated with him have gone missing, and now that his widow, Veronica, is set to marry Julian Danver, another Foreign Office employee doing classified work, the York burglary must be reinvestigated so the wedding can go ahead.
During his pursuit of a woman dressed all in cerise, whose appearance at the Yorks’ on the night of the murder is a crucial clue, Pitt is discovered at a sordid London address leaning over a prostitute who has had her throat cut open. Suddenly he is arrested and finds himself locked up in one of England’s most notorious prisons, charged with murder.
His name is all over the daily papers, and Charlotte and the children must endure the best and the worst of humanity. There is the awful, shaming public abuse, and acts of pure kindness: the man who brings her a bag of herrings and refuses payment; the bundle of sticks left on the doorstep; and the coal bags that seem just a little fuller. The prison door swings shut behind Pitt with a force that reverberated in Anne’s memory. This ‘great cold place whose massive walls were like misery set in stone’ was part of her own experience. She knew the dripping condensation that makes ‘even the inner corridors feel cold and sour. Everywhere was the smell of human sweat and stale air.’
The story Anne tells of the prisoner Raeburn is one of her own memories from Auckland’s Mt Eden Prison. In the pitch blackness of his seeping cell, Pitt can hear Raeburn crying. He is a simple-minded, aimless man whose misfortune is to be wrongly accused of taking a jailer’s watch. When the jailer will not accept his word, he is placed in solitary confinement. Terrified of being alone, he has no thoughts to fill his head or the void of despair over not being believed. His indignant screams become babble and then silence, as he slips from anger to madness then death in Bedlam, the infamous asylum for the insane.
Raeburn is promiscuous and a thief; his only value in the world is his boast that he will not lie, regardless of the circumstances. Now someone does not believe him. Anne’s real-life Raeburn was an ignorant and purposeless woman inmate at Mt Eden. She was accused of stealing and was not believed, and Anne, as a teenager, heard her shouts and felt the agony of her despair. ‘The incident marked Pitt deeply. He willed himself to forget it, but Raeburn’s cries repeated themselves in his head and his imagination filled in the picture of the man’s shallow droop-eyed face, witless with fear, stained with weeping.’
In Silence in Hanover Close, Anne unlocks this personal, very raw prison experience to bring immediacy to Pitt’s time in prison. From this point on, the books reveal a new degree of sympathy for Pitt and an unprecedented authenticity to his experiences, and to the isolation of Emily at home in her high-class comfort or as she lies on her plank-like maid’s bed: ‘She rolled over, burying her face in the frozen pillow, and cried herself to sleep.’
One of the highlights of 1987 for Anne was a trip in May to Guernsey. ‘Absolutely beautiful place,’ she wrote to Meg Davis on the back of a postcard. ‘Woods full of winter flowers can hardly put your feet down for them … Longing to do some writing.’48 The plotting, characterization or writing of the next book was never far from her mind, and her breaks from writing were not long. She was now receiving regular invitations to talk, not just on her North American sojourns but in Britain as well. After her return from Guernsey, Anne addressed an enthusiastic audience in Oxford. She mentioned the Mormon Church, but it was writing that she discussed at length. Meg wrote to her about it in July:
Certainly I thought you made excellent sense about writing in general. (And I don’t think I’ve ever told you how flattered and touched I am by your remarks about agents.) You must still be on a high from it all. So well done, on all fronts. Every success has been so dearly bought, you certainly deserve to have a few ships come in soon!49
Meanwhile, Meg was doing her bit to stir some favourable winds in Anne’s direction. Close to the end of 1987 she contacted Ernest Hecht at Souvenir Publishing to see if he would be interested in handling the British paperback rights for the Pitt series.
The first two books were published … in 1979 and 1980 and are now long out of print; they are the only ones to have appeared in the UK. The first three books have also been published by Mondadori. Unfortunately, St Martin’s Press control the UK rights, so any deal would have to be done with them.50
Meg began working on a scheme. Initially she approached Ballantine, Anne’s paperback publisher: ‘would they like to be Anne’s primary publisher?’51 The company’s distribution network was bigger, and it might be able to handle a greater volume of Pitt stories. But Ballantine was buying so many paperback rights from St Martin’s that it did not want to rock the boat.
After pondering the problem, Meg went back to Anne with the only solution she could see: they needed to create an entirely new series, specifically for Ballantine. ‘And providentially Anne had this thing in a cupboard that was The Face of a Stranger — really, really great premise, one of the best premises I have ever read.’52 Anne had been down this path before, in 1984 with the Digby and Ridgeway series that Hope Dellon had refused to publish. Since then, the concept for Monk, a new series detective who is a recovering amnesiac, had developed as a consequence of conversations with Meg and her own maturing experience as a writer. The big difference to the outcome this time was that editor Leona Nevler and Ballantine were willing to take a risk. In fact, they were very keen indeed.
Meg remembers Anne’s original idea had been that, at the end of the first book, Monk discovers that:
he did in fact commit the murder, and so he has got to go underground, and then as an underground private investigator he can take hopeless cases and sort them out by other means, which is actually a very interesting format premise.53
Responses to Silence in Hanover Close began to filter through from the middle of 1988. Publishers Weekly, reviewing it in June, praised its ‘totally surprising yet wonderfully plausible finale’. The Pasadena Star-News called it ‘her strongest book thus far’, while Marilyn Stasio, a newly arrived crime columnist for the New York Times, described it as a ‘fine-mannered shocker’. She acknowledged the merit of Anne’s ethical ideas in a potentially amoral genre:
Although the period detail in these stories always comes decorously draped around the solid bones of a good, gory crime, both atmosphere and event serve as support for the author’s main purpose: to dramatize some social injustice calculated to prick the Pitts’ (and the reader’s) sense of moral outrage.54
That year, too, Anne was the subject of an article published in the Alfred Hitchcock Magazine. Mary Cannon praised her capacity for luscious Victorian detailing: ‘I guess that there’s as much ink given to descriptions of room decorations and ladies’ gowns as there is to cataloguing Scotland Yard’s methods.’55
News about Anne�
�s Mormon novel, evolving as rapidly as Meg could manage it into an adventure odyssey, was not so good. They had already discussed Anne’s choice of titles for her historical novels. Her Pitts were pretty safe because they were addresses around London. The historical novels, however, were a minefield of possibility. Meg explained that ‘Thou With Clean Hands’ might not have the same uplifting connotations for everyone, and she was not at all certain, either, about ‘My Eagle Comes’. To the initiated it was ‘a quotation from some Promethean poem of GK Chesterton’,56 but it had awkward associations and was about as far from being catchy as you could get.
Meg had sent off editorial notes for ‘My Eagle Comes’, but Anne’s changes seemed barely to resemble the recommendations Meg had made. A colleague found Meg in a pub close to MBA, tearfully taking in what had arrived. She knew that ‘a good book comes from a happy author’,57 but she could barely contain her frustration. Anne would have to make the alterations and somehow feel pleased about them. ‘Sorry Anne — it has to be tighter!’ she wrote in a note when she got back to the office.
Please, before you go any further, have another look at this. Do ring me if you want to talk it over. But we both know how important this one is, and I think we can save a lot of time and effort on your part if we get the structure right first. With lots of love Meg Davis.58
There was so much going on with the Pitt and new Monk series that Anne had no time to feel disappointed or negative about Meg’s response. It would be another 18 months before she managed to return the manuscript after taking on board Meg’s comments. During 1988 and the beginning of 1989, she worked compulsively to complete Bethlehem Road, and wrote The Face of a Stranger, the first book in the Monk series.
Bethlehem Road was her tenth Pitt novel, so the characters and her approach were familiar territory, but it was familiar, too, in its resonances with her own life. Pitt is woken by a rapping at his door; it is five past one in the morning. Less than half an hour later he is standing at the south end of Westminster Bridge, where, gaping at him, is the gashed throat of a gentleman tied to a lamppost by his white scarf. Sir Lockwood Hamilton, MP, has been discovered by prostitute Hetty Milner as she touts for business and finds ‘her prospective client [is] a corpse’. More wealthy theatre-goers are killed in a similar manner, and their corpses left on Westminster Bridge, before the murderer is revealed. But, as in previous Pitt novels, the murders unfold against a particular social backdrop. This time it is the women’s suffrage movement.
Charlotte finds herself at a suffrage meeting:
It was the first time she had been part of such an assembly … Most had no thought beyond the wild and previously undreamed of possibility that women might actually vote … [I]t was their faces that interested Charlotte most, the fleeting expressions chasing across them as they listened to the ideas that almost all society found revolutionary, unnatural, and either ridiculous or dangerous.
Two people caught up this hideous investigation are Africa Dowell and Florence Ivory. Africa is sheltering Florence in her home, and perhaps in another time and place they might have been a same-sex couple, but here in strait-laced English society, where Queen Victoria has determined that lesbians do not exist, they are almost certainly not. Their friendship, however, is profound, and Africa shares Florence’s grief at the loss of her child as if the loss were her own.
When Florence left an unhappy marriage, the lawyer and now Westminster Bridge murder victim Vyvyan Etheridge swore he would help her gain custody of her daughter, Pansy. After a spot of hobnobbing at the club, however, Vyvyan is persuaded by his colleagues not to help. ‘He allowed them to take my child and give her to her autocratic and loveless father. I am not even permitted to see her,’ the distraught Florence explains to Pitt. She reminds readers that it has been just four years since the legislation was passed that recognized women as independent human beings, not their husbands’ chattels.
But the most poignant bad marriage in this book is that of Naomi and Garnet Royce. Pitt discovers letters between Naomi and her friend Lizzie, who is a member of a non-conformist sect, remarkably like that of the Church of Latter-day Saints. Naomi becomes involved with Lizzie’s church, and their letters reveal that Garnet is completely opposed to his wife’s participation. He tells her she must stay in her room until she relinquishes her blasphemous beliefs. ‘I told him I will,’ Naomi writes to Lizzie, ‘but I shall not eat until he permits me to choose for myself, by the light of my own conscience, what faith I will follow.’ It becomes a battle of wills, which ends in Naomi starving herself to death. The theme of a woman of integrity standing up against hypocrisy and corrupt authority is one that Anne would return to often.
To cover up his awful crime Garnet has Naomi’s maid Elsie Draper, the only witness to his brutality, thrown into Bedlam. He knows no one will believe the word of a madwoman. The spine-chilling dénouement comes when Charlotte goes alone to threaten to expose Garnet by publishing Naomi’s correspondence in a book about the church, and he follows her home. At the end of Bethlehem Road, things have changed for the Pitts. Emily is remarried. Her handsome new husband, Jack Radley, is one of the guests she met at the house party where George was murdered. As well, Charlotte and Emily’s mother, Caroline Ellison, has been widowed. She is now in her mid-fifties, still eligible ‘and wearing her widowhood with vigor and a new and rather daring sense of freedom’.
There is also a dawning appreciation in the police force of Pitt’s special talents as a detective. His superior, Micah Drummond, promises him a promotion at the end of the case. It means more money and authority, and less legwork, but the high-minded, hands-on Pitt is not sure this is the right combination for him.
One of the few breaks Anne took from her writing was a trip in September 1988 to Scotland with Meg MacDonald and some American friends. They drove all the way from Suffolk in Anne’s car, which, according to Meg, ‘went on elastic, chewing gum and glue, and water more than petrol’.59 They stayed in a cottage at Ardnamurchan Point, the most westerly part of the whole British Isles, a wild, lonely, windy place with stunning views of rugged rocks and turbulent seas.
Anne had promised to take Meg to visit her hometown of Invergordon, on the east coast of Scotland. ‘But she had a cold, which gave her a foul temper and she was in a foul mood. She said she couldn’t possibly take me. So I was pretty angry … because I was so looking forward to it,’ Meg recalls. Eventually, though, Meg ‘managed to persuade [Anne] and she loved it. We got into the car and it was lovely.’60
Leaving their American friends at the cottage, they set off along the treacherously narrow but beautiful single-lane road out of Ardnamurchan. At one of the road’s sharpest bends they came across a car with its front wheels over a sheer drop. The stunned driver had cornered too fast and was still sitting in his vehicle. They stopped, got a rope out of the boot, attached it to the back of each car and Anne pulled him off the edge. The rest of their trip through the majestic Scottish Highlands was long but less eventful. They stayed overnight in Invergordon, and the next day Anne pushed her friend around the town in a wheelchair. Meg suffers from congenital dysplasia of the hip, which had gone undiagnosed when she was young and so was not properly treated. Sometimes she needs a stick to walk, and on occasions a wheelchair.
Invergordon is a port town in the area of Easter Ross. Its deep northern harbour has made it the place of huge petroleum tanks, towering oil rigs, an aluminium smelter, and, from before the Second World War, a base for naval boats and, more recently, cruise ships. But this is in stark contrast to the primal splendour of the landscape and the quaint old town, which seems hewn directly out of grey stone and slate. Meg had been longing to return to Scotland and now felt compelled to come back, so they went to see a real estate agent in the main street. They were told that a woman who might be able to help would be in again in the morning, but when the morning came Meg ‘chickened out’. It was Anne who persuaded her, saying: ‘No, no, no, we’ll go anyway. We’ll go. We’ll go.’
&nb
sp; So [Anne] pushed me in and we talked to the woman. And she said: ‘Oh, hang on a sec’, and she went through her drawer, and she said: ‘Look there’s this little cottage. I’ve never seen this cottage … It’s been on the books for a while and I’ve no idea what it’s like. Would you like to see it?’61
When they said yes, the real estate agent drove them to Milton, a tiny market centre built around a green with a mercat cross, 6.5 kilometres north-east of Invergordon. Meg fell in love with the little stone cottage, the middle of three in a row, and it was cheap, although £13,000 was still a lot of money for her to find. Meg wanted to buy it there and then, but she needed a deposit. ‘[So] Anne rang her father up and he wired a thousand-pound deposit straight into the bank.’62 After signing the forms they returned to Ardnamurchan Point to pick up their American friends, then drove back to Suffolk.
Once home, Meg dropped her bombshell, telling the children she was going back to live in Scotland. ‘My daughter, who was seventeen going on eighteen, said: “You can’t do that, Mum. If you abandon your children, you get put in prison.” They were pretty cross about me leaving.’ She very nearly changed her mind and ‘gave up my dream’, but in the end was determined.
The Search for Anne Perry Page 8