by Emily Organ
The report’s conclusion was that the bombs at Praed Street and Charing Cross had been malicious acts that could be linked to similar bombings on account of their ‘savage disregard for life’. It seemed the Fenians were behind the campaign, although this was yet to be proven.
I slowly tidied my papers into my handbag, a troublesome process with only one functioning arm, and then got up to fetch my coat and hat from the cloakroom. I was due to meet Eliza for lunch.
As I walked towards the door, a man strode in wearing a familiar bowler hat and a dark overcoat.
“James!” I exclaimed. “This is a surprise.”
He greeted me with a wide smile and I noticed that his eyes matched the blue of his tie.
“How are you, Penny? How’s the arm?”
“Getting better, thank you. And how is your arm?”
“Recovering well.”
We grinned at each other with our matching slings.
After the altercation with Mary, James and I had both been admitted to the Royal London Hospital. I hadn’t seen as much of him as I would have liked since we had been discharged, but I had heard that he was busy with a new case.
“What brings you here?” I asked.
“I came to say my goodbyes. I have been asked to work on a case up north in Manchester for a while.”
He must have noticed my face fall.
“Not for too long,” he added, “and I will need to be in London some days during Mary Colehill’s trial. Quite a lot of my time will be spent on the London and North Western Railway. Do you think you will attend the trial?”
“I can’t say that I plan to sit through it all, but I will attend on some days, out of interest. Edgar will do the reporting on it. I hear Sebastian is already trying to secure a life sentence instead of the death penalty.”
“That is understandable. And hopefully she will confess to everything, which would make the life sentence more probable. You look as though you are ready to go somewhere.”
“I am due to have lunch with my sister. I’m meeting her outside.”
“I shall walk out with you.”
We walked down the steps of the British Museum and I found myself wishing that James didn’t have to go away to Manchester. I wondered whether we would ever have an opportunity to work on a case together again.
“You are one of the easiest detectives at the Yard to work with,” I said. “Until you came along, I had been forced to work with Cullen and a rather odd man with a deformed ear.”
“Inspector Royden?”
“Yes, that was him. I wonder what happened to his ear.”
“I heard he was savaged by a dog when he was a child.”
“Oh dear. That explains the skin as well.”
“The scarring?”
“Yes. Oh! Here comes my sister.”
We reached the bottom step and watched Eliza stride towards us from the gate in the railings.
“Well, it was a pleasure working with you, Penny.”
James turned to me and held out his free hand. I shook it and his hand felt strong and warm around mine.
We regarded each other for a moment, shaking hands for longer than was usual or necessary.
“Enjoy Manchester,” I said.
Eliza was almost upon us.
“It will be an experience, that’s for sure.” James grimaced. “It hasn’t gone down well with the future Mrs Blakely, though, as it means the wedding will have to be put back.”
“Oh no, for how long?”
“Not too long. How nice to see you again, Mrs Billington-Grieg.” James and Eliza were already acquainted, having frequently met at my hospital bedside.
“Hello, Inspector Blakely.”
“I don’t mean to be rude, but I must go. I have a train to catch.”
“Going anywhere nice?”
“Manchester.”
“Lovely.” Eliza beamed.
“Goodbye, James,” I said.
He gave me a small wave and walked away. I watched him leave and wondered why my throat felt so tight and uncomfortable.
“You were rather attached to him, weren’t you, Penelope?” said Eliza.
“He is a kind person,” I said, blinking back a tear.
“He is a charming gentleman.” Eliza took my left arm. “And talking of nice people,” she continued, “I must tell you all about the dinner I had last night with Mrs Conway, the wife of your newspaper’s proprietor, and a host of other fine people from the National Society for Women’s Suffrage. We may not have published the article in the Morning Express yet, but you have helped me enormously in making connections.”
“That’s wonderful news, Ellie!”
We walked out into the street and I glanced fondly at the Museum Tavern across the road.
“No, Penelope, not the pub. We are dining at The Holborn Restaurant, remember?”
I smiled and allowed Eliza to march me off down the street.
The End
Historical Note
Women journalists in the nineteenth century were not as scarce as people may think. In fact they were numerous enough by 1898 for Arnold Bennett to write Journalism for Women: A Practical Guide in which he was keen to raise the standard of women’s journalism:-
“The women-journalists as a body have faults... They seem to me to be traceable either to an imperfect development of the sense of order, or to a certain lack of self-control.”
Eliza Linton became the first salaried female journalist in Britain when she began writing for the Morning Chronicle in 1851. She was a prolific writer and contributor to periodicals for many years including Charles Dickens’ magazine Household Words. George Eliot – her real name was Mary Anne Evans - is most famous for novels such as Middlemarch, however she also became assistant editor of The Westminster Review in 1852.
In the United States Margaret Fuller became the New York Tribune’s first female editor in 1846. Intrepid journalist Nellie Bly worked in Mexico as a foreign correspondent for the Pittsburgh Despatch in the 1880s before writing for New York World and feigning insanity to go undercover and investigate reports of brutality at a New York asylum. Later, in 1889-90, she became a household name by setting a world record for travelling around the globe in seventy-two days.
The tragedy of the SS Princess Alice is sadly not fiction. The accident is still Britain’s worst ever public transport disaster. The Princess Alice was a pleasure steamer which collided with the coal carrier SS Bywell on the River Thames near Woolwich in September 1878. The loss of life is believed to have been between 600 and 650 with exact numbers of how many survived and died remaining vague. About a dozen victims were never identified.
The Fenians were part of the Irish Republican Brotherhood based in the United States and began an armed uprising against British rule in Ireland in the 1860s. They bombed Clerkenwell Prison in 1867 in a failed attempt to free one of their members. The Fenians began their dynamite campaign in Britain in the 1880s and not only targeted London but also Chester, Liverpool, Glasgow and Salford. Miraculously no one was killed or suffered severe injury when the train at Praed Street Station (now Paddington underground station for the district and circle lines) was blown up on 30th October 1883. More attacks continued in London until 1885 when financial support for the campaign began to wane.
The West London Women’s Society is fictional but a representation of the local women’s rights groups which were being established in the nineteenth century. By the 1880s both sides of the Atlantic saw organisations such as the National Society for Women’s Suffrage and the American Women’s Suffrage Association growing from strength to strength. The Rational Dress Society was formed in 1881 in response to the cumbersome clothing which women wore. With pastimes such as cycling and tennis becoming more popular, women found themselves restricted by corsets and heavy petticoats and skirts. Dress reform was controversial for a long time with Lady Harberton refused entry for lunch at a hotel in Ockham, Surrey in 1899, for wearing baggy knickerbockers.
> I have used a combination of fictional and actual locations in Limelight. Here are some of the actual ones:
The iconic circular reading room at the British Museum was in use from 1857 until 1997. During that time it was also used as a filming location and has been referenced in many works of fiction. When the British Library moved to a new location in 1997, the reading room was restored and subsequently used for exhibition space but it has been closed since 2014 while the British Museum decides on its future. When I visited the museum last year I asked staff what the plans were for its future and whether it was possible to sneak a look inside. They told me they didn’t know what the future plans were and no I wasn’t allowed inside – and neither were they!
The Museum Tavern, where Penny and James enjoy a drink, is a well-preserved Victorian pub opposite the Brutish Museum. Although a pub was first built here in the eighteenth century much of the current pub (including its name) dates back to 1855. Celebrity drinkers here are said to have included Arthur Conan Doyle and Karl Marx.
Publishing began in Fleet Street in the 1500s and by the twentieth century the street was the hub of the British press. However newspapers began moving away in the 1980s to bigger premises. Nowadays just a few publishers remain in Fleet Street but the many pubs and bars once frequented by journalists – including the pub Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese - are still popular with city workers.
Highgate Cemetery was laid out in the 1830s at a time when London was running low on space to bury its dead. The cemetery is famous for its funerary architecture and the tombs of well-known people such as Karl Marx, George Eliot and Douglas Adams. Neglected after the Second World War, much of it is now overgrown and it’s a fascinating, atmospheric place with a host of ghost stories attached to it. Such is the interest in the cemetery that guided tours are run each day. Kensal Green Cemetery also opened in the 1830s and is an impressive place to visit; as well as being the fictional resting place of Lizzie Dixie it’s also the burial place of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Wilkie Collins and William Makepeace Thackeray.
Joseph Taylor is fictional but Astley’s Amphitheatre was real and located south of Westminster Bridge. It opened in the 1770s and was built by Philip Astley who is considered to be the father of the modern circus. The amphitheatre has featured in a lot of fiction and was rebuilt a number of times before finally being demolished in the 1890s. Part of today’s St Thomas’s Hospital now stands over it.
Sebastian Colehill’s Theatre Royal in Drury Lane is showing the musical Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as I write this. The first theatre was built on the site in the 1660s and the current building is the fourth one and opened in 1812. The ghosts of Charles Macklin and Joey Grimaldi – which worry Penny during her visits – are said to haunt the theatre. The Victorians loved their ghost stories as you know!
Penny Green lives in Milton Street in Cripplegate which was one of the areas worst hit by bombing during the Blitz in the Second World War and few original streets remain. Milton Street was known as Grub Street in the eighteenth century and famous as a home to impoverished writers at the time. The street had a long association with writers and was home to Anthony Trollope among many others. A small stretch of Milton Street remains but the 1960s Barbican development has been built over the bombed remains.
My research for Limelight has come from sources too numerous to list in detail, but the following books have been very useful: A Brief History of Life in Victorian Britain by Michael Patterson, London in the Nineteenth Century by Jerry White, London in 1880 by Herbert Fry, London a Travel Guide through Time by Dr Matthew Green, Women of the Press in Nineteenth-Century Britain by Barbara Onslow, A Very British Murder by Lucy Worsley, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale, Journalism for Women: A Practical Guide by Arnold Bennett and Seventy Years a Showman by Lord George Sanger.
THE ROOKERY
Penny Green Mystery Book 2
Chapter 1
London, 1884
My dearest Penny,
I feel certain that you would adore Bogota. The cool, rarefied air here is a welcome respite from the oppressive heat of the lowlands. The city sits on a plateau that is eight thousand feet above the level of the sea and I arrived here after a four-day mule ride from the port of Honda on the River Magdalena.
The many pretty villas here would delight you, draped as they are in bougainvillea, jasmine and ipomoea of startling blue. The parks are a joy to explore with their palm trees, fountains and statues, and there is an impressive cathedral in La Plaza de Bolivar, a museum and an observatory close by. The library contains fifty thousand volumes—
“This is the most recent map we have of Colombia, Miss Green,” whispered the reading room clerk.
I folded away my father’s letter as the clerk grinned and unrolled the map across my desk. He was a sandy-haired man with spectacles. New to his job, he appeared eager to please.
“I do apologise,” he continued. “There’s not enough room on these desks to view all of it.”
“Thank you. I can see the River Magdalena now.” I traced its winding route from the Caribbean Sea down to the eastern branch of the Andes with my finger. “And here’s Honda. I can see now how my father would have made the journey to Bogota. Thank you, Mr Edwards.”
The electric lights flickered.
“Oh dear,” said Mr Edwards, glancing around. “I hope they remain lit. They went out last week and we had to ask everyone to leave as it was too dingy to work.”
I looked up at the great dome above our heads. The pallid daylight filtering through the arched windows wouldn’t provide enough light to read by.
“How are you finding the book?” He was referring to An Historical, Geographical and Topographical Description of the United States of Colombia, which lay somewhere beneath the map.
“It’s rather detailed, but it will be useful when I find the relevant information in it.”
“Of course. Your father’s letters must contain some fascinating accounts.”
“They do, as do his diaries. This is the first time I’ve collected everything together. My mother and sister have given me what they had, and the British Museum’s natural history department also has some papers of his. I’m going to put everything he wrote together in a book.”
“What an excellent idea, Miss Green. Your father is no longer alive?” His brow furrowed, as though he felt uncomfortable asking the question.
“We don’t think so. He went missing almost nine years ago in Amazonia, which is an extensive area, as you can imagine. I’ve learnt that his final travels were in Colombia, on the edge of the Amazon jungle. I read through many of his papers shortly after he died, but I remember so little from them. Perhaps it was because I was still mourning.” I felt my throat tighten. “But now I am ready to read everything through again, and I should like to remember him by putting it all into the book.”
“It’s a sad story, but what a marvellous way to keep the memory of your father alive. What was his name?”
“Frederick Brinsley Green.”
“I shall look forward to reading your book about him.” He grinned again and I grew concerned that he might expect the book to be something of a masterpiece.
“It will take me rather a long time to write, so I’m afraid you may need to wait a few years yet. And it will only be of interest to someone who wishes to read about plant hunting in South America.”
“That might appeal to more people than you realise, Miss Green! I’m always keen to learn about new topics.”
“I shall keep you informed of my progress.”
“Please do.”
I glanced at the reading room clock. “Goodness, look at the time. I’m going to miss my deadline.” I jumped up out of my seat. “Thank you for your help, Mr Edwards.”
“It’s my pleasure. Let me help you pack your papers away. It can’t be at all easy with one arm in a sling. How did you injure yourself?”
“I fell off an excitable pony in Hyde Park.”
It was
the same lie I had told everyone who was unaware of my involvement in the Lizzie Dixie case the previous autumn.
“Oh dear. I do hope you make a quick recovery, Miss Green. I have never got on well with ponies myself.” He gathered up my father’s diaries and letters into a neat pile.
“Me neither!” I opened my carpet bag and clumsily shovelled the diaries and papers inside it. “I should never have got on one in the first place! That’ll teach me.”
The bright flowers, scented shrubs and splashing fountains of Bogota continued to fill my mind as I stepped over the filthy ice heaps on Museum Street. The light was leaving the January sky for the day and I had heard that more snow was on its way. People bustled past me with their heads bent low and their collars turned up. A boy in a thin jacket was busy sweeping a crossing at the top of Drury Lane as a nearby clock chimed four.
I stopped to tighten my bonnet underneath my chin, holding my bag in my weaker hand as I did so. A cold wind brought flakes of ice with it, and I looked forward to warming myself in my lodgings that evening with a bowl of pea soup.
A boy knocked into me without warning. The forceful shove left me crumpled on the cold pavement with the breath knocked from me and my spectacles lying a short distance away. A lady in a fur-trimmed coat picked them up.
“Madam! Are you all right?”
I got to my feet and looked around for my carpet bag.
It was gone.
A broad young man in a shabby overcoat patted me on the shoulder. “I’ll get ’im,” he said, before chasing off after the boy.
I put my spectacles on and watched the man break into a run. Ahead of him, a lean youth ran across the road, dodging the horses and carriages as he went. In his hand was my bag.