“He didn’t steal everything. She had that warehouse full of goods,” Charles said.
“What about her investments?” Miss Jaggers cried. “Why was she living in his rooms, his two small rooms, if he had not stolen everything her husband had built over a lifetime? What good were plate and furnishings in that tiny space?”
Charles winced. She had a point.
“He is dead now. How do you make him pay?” Kate asked.
Miss Jaggers smiled coldly. “I am his heiress.”
“So Mr. Nickerson said.” Charles lifted his brows. “How did that happen?”
“He wrote a will,” she said, then smiled. On her lovely face, the smile should have been angelic, but even so, it had a hint of the devil in it.
“Did he repent?” Charles asked sarcastically. “Or did you or Mr. Nickerson forge his signature?”
She sneered. Prince Moss took her arm, sending the message that she had his support. “I won’t discuss the details.”
“How do we know you didn’t kill your foster mother?” Charles said. “We have only the word of a desperate man.”
She pursed her lips. It didn’t create wrinkles around her youthful mouth. “I have not the strength to do what he did to her.”
“You are not without friends,” Charles said. “Mr. Moss. Your cousin, Mr. Nickerson.”
“He was a sick old man,” Miss Jaggers said in the tone of a governess encouraging a slow student. “Mr. Nickerson had to purchase medicine frequently.” Her lips curved.
“He bought the laudanum,” Charles whispered. “What was in it that night?”
Miss Jaggers’s smile widened.
Charles remembered that Prince Moss farmed. He suspected the boy had known what to add to laudanum to make a man go mad.
“You have done a terrible thing,” Kate gasped.
Miss Jaggers clicked her tongue. “The will is sound. The courts move slowly, too slowly to trouble me any. Mr. Moss and I will liquidate all the properties and emigrate. You will never see us again, Mr. Dickens. Surely we have been through enough. Let us continue our lives in peace.” Her nose went up as she glanced around the room, which was full of newspapermen.
Charles knew Miss Jaggers hadn’t killed Mr. Ferazzi outright, nor had Prince Moss, but nonetheless, this was a girl who was capable of forgery, possibly even of poisoning. Why had she not lawfully fought in the courts what she claimed Mr. Ferazzi had done to her inheritance, instead of mimicking his own bad actions?
Miss Jaggers, her head high, turned away, pulling Prince Moss with her.
“Don’t go with her,” Charles said to the lad. “Stay in England and continue with your farming. You may still be able to put yourself on a sound path.”
“I love her,” the lad said simply.
“Please don’t sell the smithy out from under the Jones family. Show them some compassion,” Charles said.
Miss Jaggers did not look back.
“I think you should ask these people to leave,” Charles, frustrated, said to Mr. Hogarth. “For myself, I will be having a conversation with the coroner and the police.”
Prince Moss said nothing, merely walked away, his love next to him. No one stopped them, and the room remained silent.
When they were gone, Kate asked Charles, “Was justice served?”
“She became a criminal to save her fortune. She knew Miss Haverstock was vulnerable, and she did nothing to protect her foster mother, only cared for her own interests. I hope she goes away and stays away.” Charles sighed and took Kate’s hand, then squeezed it.
The room of people crowded around them, discussing the appearance of Miss Jaggers. Charles found himself next to Lady Lugoson. “What did you think?” he asked Julie Aga’s beautiful aunt.
“Beauty does not preclude evil,” she said. “I suspect her difficulties twisted her mind. But she is the rightful heir if Mr. Ferazzi did as claimed.”
Charles nodded. Kate walked up to them. He kissed her cheek. “In order to spend time with a better sort of person, I suggest we avoid crime in the future,” he said.
Kate laughed. “The world is complex enough to amuse both of us unavoidably, Mr. Dickens. And you know how I love a mystery.”
“Is the mystery solved?” Lady Lugoson asked. “I understand there is a half-dismantled fireplace. My niece Julie mentioned it.”
“Didn’t she and William finish the excavation?” Charles asked. “I was gone most of the night, what with Mr. Ferazzi’s death.”
“No,” Lady Lugoson said. “They stayed overnight at my house.”
Kate clapped her hands. “Oh, Mr. Dickens! We must take a look.”
“But your parents’ party,” he protested.
“We’ll take the Agas with us to chaperone. Come, we have only an hour or so of light left.”
Lady Lugoson shook her head in maternal tenderness. “You must please your lady, Mr. Dickens.”
He inclined his head and thanked her; then he and Kate went to round up the Agas. Fifteen minutes later they were walking down the Hogarths’ front path, and ten minutes after that, the foursome climbed the stairs up to Miss Haverstock’s former rooms.
“What do you think it will be?” Julie asked. “Gold coins? Jewelry?”
“Religious artifacts,” William suggested. “A gold menorah.”
“The lost Ark of the Covenant,” Kate said.
“How about we hope for the Holy Grail?” Charles said sarcastically. “Come now. It will just be some deeds or shares or something like that.”
“So unromantic,” Kate chided him.
“We’ll know soon enough,” William said, pushing open the door.
The foursome went to the fireplace and took turns glancing into the space.
“This must be an older building than I realized,” William said. “The fireplace is really rather enormous.”
“Which one of us is going to reach our hand in?” Charles asked. “I do think I found the hidey-hole when I pulled out that last brick.”
“I’ll do it!” Julie squeezed past the other three and ducked into the fireplace. She dropped her shawl into her husband’s hands and pushed her arm, bare in her summer evening gown, into the hole. Her first reaction was unladylike in the extreme. She swore like a sailor as the rough bricks scraped her flesh.
Charles began to laugh as she rooted around in the hole he’d made, a comical expression on her freckled face. Then her eyebrows lifted and her arm pulled back, her hand clutching a narrow, long box.
“Metal,” Charles said.
“Too small to be much of anything,” William said, his forehead scrunched as he concentrated on the item in his wife’s palm.
“Shall I open it?” Julie asked. Her fingers played with an edge of the box before anyone could respond. “No keyhole. Oh look. There’s a latch.”
The trio crowded around her as she stepped out of the fireplace and walked toward the window. Her fine, gauzy green skirt caught on the stacked bricks, but she paid it no mind, simply lifted the box to the available light and pulled the latch over the knob holding it in place.
“Five shillings on gold,” William called.
“Tuppence on silver.” Kate laughed.
Charles kept his counsel as he trained his gaze on the box.
Julie gave a little cry when she peeked at the contents. She reached into the box and lifted something toward the light, then sniffed.
“What is it?” Kate asked.
“A lock of baby hair,” Julie said softly. “Tied with a faded ribbon.”
Charles stared at the wisp of fine black hair. The strands were held together by a scrap of what had probably been a red ribbon.
“Miss Jaggers’s hair?” William guessed.
“No,” Charles said. “Hers would not have been black.”
“I think Miss Haverstock and her husband lost a child,” Julie said softly. “Poor woman. That must have made her relationship with Miss Jaggers all the more precious.”
“Mr. Ferazzi indicated
as much,” Charles said. “Is there anything else?”
Julie handed him the memento and reached back into the box. “I feel cloth.” She scrunched up her face and lifted a round of waxed cloth.
While she held it, Charles unwrapped the cloth. Inside were papers. A little brittle but still able to be spread out.
William leaned over them. “Deeds,” he said. “I’ll bet this is evidence of the property Mr. Ferazzi stole from the Haverstock family. If Miss Jaggers had been patient, all would have come to light in the end.”
“The original tale of Goldy was a sad one,” Charles said. “And the ending isn’t much better.”
“No,” William agreed. “But I don’t imagine the courts will rule in favor of anyone but Miss Jaggers in the end.”
“A generation from now,” Charles said sarcastically. “When they manage to process the case. I hope Miss Jaggers does emigrate and we never hear of her again.”
Kate patted his cheek.
“I wonder if all of this will allow us to get out of our rental agreements early,” Charles mused. “And get me back on track with my wedding savings.”
Kate squeezed his arm. “I’m glad our wedding is foremost in your thoughts again, Charles. For that reason alone, I’m willing to forgo crime for the rest of the year.”
He smiled at her, then stared out the window, toward the lane that led to the smithy. The Joneses had paid a heavy price for the sorry lives of Miss Haverstock and Mr. Ferazzi. Miss Jaggers and Prince Moss were out there, trouble on the loose. Charles wondered how long they’d be able to avoid more crime, now that they had had a taste of it. He had a bad feeling that he hadn’t heard the last of either of them.
Acknowledgments
I want to thank you, dear reader, for picking up this second book in the A Dickens of a Crime series. If you haven’t read the first book, A Tale of Two Murders, yet, I hope you take the opportunity to enjoy another Dickensian adventure through pre-Victorian London. An audio version of A Tale of Two Murders has been released, and I have to give a special shout-out to Tantor Media and their wonderful production, with voice acting by Tim Campbell. Give it a listen!
I am so grateful for the book reviews you have written, and please keep them coming. I had a wonderful time doing live and online events to celebrate the first book’s release, and I am grateful to everyone who came out and spent time with me. I especially want to thank the bookstores, book clubs, Facebook groups, and libraries who hosted my presentations. VIP status goes to my parents, who attended three events!
Thank you to my beta readers Judy DiCanio, Walter McKnight, Mary Keliikoa, and Red Jameson on this project. I also wish to thank my writing group for their support: Delle Jacobs, the late Peggy Bird, who helped me with some of the Jewish material, Marilyn Hull, and Melania Tolan. Also, a special thank-you goes to my agent, Laurie McLean, at Fuse Literary, and to my Kensington editor, Elizabeth May, for their work on the series, as well as to many unsung heroes at Kensington.
I have continued to respect the life of Charles Dickens and kept him doing the work and walking the streets that he did during the timeline of my book, to the best of my knowledge. Not that I think he was ever an amateur sleuth. My plot is entirely fictitious, as is most everyone in the book. Attitudes between the sexes and toward minorities, certain sexual orientations, and so on in the pre-Victorian era were not what they are today, and I beg your indulgence when these unpleasant facts creep into the narrative.
I learned just as I began to plot this book that my maternal Jewish family lived in London for a couple of generations. My ancestors were there from the 1880s until the 1920s, not the timeline of this book, as they were refugees from Poland and Russia, but their recovered history inspired me to learn more about East London life in the nineteenth century, and I dedicate this story to them.
BOOK CLUB READING GUIDE for
Grave Expectations
1. Charles Dickens’s novel Great Expectations inspired aspects of this novel. What themes did you recognize from the classic novel? Does reading this book make you want to read or reread Dickens’s work?
2. What did you know about Charles Dickens before reading this novel? How do you think his career as a journalist informed his fiction writing?
3. Charles Dickens and Kate Hogarth are engaged by this point in my series. What do you think about the limits that are put on them during this period of their romance?
4. Charles and his parents have a difficult relationship, stemming from when his father was imprisoned due to unpaid debt and Charles had to work in a factory. How would you feel if your parents did so much damage to your education and your prospects?
5. The Dickenses are considered of a lower class than the Hogarths. What evidence did you see of this in the book?
6. Did you feel that any of the characters are stereotypical?
7. It was illegal to be homosexual during this era in England. Can you put yourself in Breese Gadfly’s shoes and imagine what his life is like?
8. What do you think of the Miss Jaggers character? Do you think she’ll return to plague Charles down the road?
9. Would you have bet on Charles Dickens as a romantic partner? Some reviewers have been disturbed upon learning the real-life story of the Charles and Kate relationship. Does that color how you read this series?
10. Some of the characters in this novel are real, like the Dickenses and the Hogarths. Are you content to leave them on the page, or do certain aspects of them fascinate you?
11. Readers may be horrified to learn that at least sometimes, according to records, bodies were left in place before inquests were completed, and were even temporary tourist attractions during this era. How does this contrast with the way murder and human bodies are treated nowadays?
12. Policing was very different in 1835. The Metropolitan Police Service didn’t have detectives yet, and there were conflicts between the coroners and the police. How would you have protected yourself and your family in the pre-Victorian era?
Grave Expectations Page 29