The Penny Green series Box Set

by Emily Organ

  “I suppose so.”

  I wondered if he felt as saddened by this as I did. I watched him take his pipe out of his pocket.

  “Has the future Mrs Blakely not discovered your little habit yet?”

  “Not yet.” He gave me a clandestine wink.

  “I won’t tell her,” I said with a smile.

  James laughed. “You’ve never met her!”

  “No, I haven’t, and I don’t suppose I’m likely to either. Perhaps I will someday, who knows?” My words stalled as I toyed with the idea that I might be invited to the wedding.

  I was trying to say goodbye to him, and yet I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

  “I should say good luck with the wedding preparations,” I continued, “and I hope that your special day goes well.” I felt a lump rise into my throat.

  “The wedding’s not until September, Penny!” James grinned and rested his hand on my arm. “I sincerely hope that we will work together again before then.”

  We held each other’s gaze until we heard the footsteps of Inspector Fenton approaching.

  “I hope so too, James.”

  The End

  Historical Note

  St Giles Rookery occupied an area of London which is now part of modern day Holborn, Covent Garden and the theatre district in London’s West End. It was already becoming an overcrowded poverty stricken area in the seventeenth century and by the first half of the nineteenth century it was one of the worst slums in Britain. William Hogarth immortalised the area’s lawlessness and depravity in a series of etchings, one of the best known being Gin Lane.

  By the late nineteenth century Victorian social reform and philanthropy had gained strong momentum and attempts were made to clear and rebuild London’s slums. Areas such as St Giles attracted many from the middle-classes who either wished to help the inhabitants or tour the poverty stricken streets out of curiosity. Evangelical missionaries began establishing themselves in slum districts from the 1830s onwards and by the end of the nineteenth century there were hundreds of missionaries helping slum dwellers with practical needs as well as spiritual.

  The church of St Giles-in-the-Fields was rebuilt in the eighteenth century and still stands today. Seven Dials has retained its layout and character despite some redevelopment, and Neal Street is a popular shopping street in the Covent Garden area. Neal’s Yard, famous for the organic beauty company which uses its name, provides a good idea of how the narrow crooked streets would have once looked. Although these days the buildings are brightly coloured and house trendy eateries and boutiques.

  I’ve read some interesting contemporary accounts of London’s slums. The Bitter Cry of Outcast London is a harrowing read written by a clergyman, Andrew Mearns, in 1883. It created a sensation at the time and helped pave the way towards housing legislation. Dottings of a Dosser documents the depressing adventures of a nineteen year old journalist, Howard Goldsmid, who went undercover and stayed in the very worst of London’s lodging houses in 1886. Lodging houses – or ‘dosshouses’ – provided shelter for homeless people who were able to find a few pence to stay the night. Many dosshouses were overcrowded, unsanitary and run by unscrupulous landlords.

  The houses at 23 and 24 Leinster Gardens had to be demolished in the 1860s to make way for a train tunnel connecting Paddington and Bayswater. The facades of the two houses were reconstructed and behind them is a section of railway line which was left open to allow the steam engines to vent off. The facades are extremely convincing and have featured in a number of hoaxes over the years as well as being a filming location.

  Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese pub was a favourite with Fleet Street journalists for many years. The newspapers and journalists have since moved out of the area but the pub is still popular and retains its seventeenth century charm and cellars which date from the thirteenth century. The gloomy, warren-like pub has counted literary figures such as Dickens, Conan Doyle and Tennyson among its regulars.

  Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey was built by the London Necropolis Company in the 1850s when the capital was running out of space to bury its dead. At the time of its opening, the cemetery was the largest in the world. The London Necropolis Railway ran funeral trains from Cemetery Station, just behind Waterloo Station, down to Brookwood – a journey of about thirty miles. The mourners travelled in the passenger carriages and the coffins were carried in a separate windowless carriage. The train stopped at two halts in the cemetery: the North station for non-conformist burials and the South station for Anglican burials. The railway ceased operation after its London station was bombed in WWII, a commemorative piece of railway track remains at Brookwood Cemetery.

  Plant hunting became an increasingly commercial enterprise as the nineteenth century progressed. Victorians were fascinated by exotic plants and, if they were wealthy enough, they had their own glasshouses built to show them off. Plant hunters were employed by Kew Gardens, companies such as Veitch Nurseries or wealthy individuals to seek out exotic specimens in places such as South America and the Himalayas. These plant hunters took great personal risks to collect their plants and some perished on their travels. The Travels and Adventures of an Orchid Hunter by Albert Millican is worth a read. Written in 1891 it documents his journeys in Colombia and demonstrates how plant hunting became little short of pillaging. Some areas he travelled to had already lost their orchids to plant hunters and Millican himself spent several months felling 4,000 trees to collect 10,000 plants. Even after all this plundering many of the orchids didn’t survive the trip across the Atlantic to Britain. Plant hunters were not always welcome: Millican had arrows fired at him as he navigated rivers, had his camp attacked one night and was eventually killed during a fight in a Colombian tavern.

  My research for The Rookery 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 and Journalism for Women: A Practical Guide by Arnold Bennett, Dottings of a Dosser by Howard Goldsmid, Travels and Adventures of an Orchid Hunter by Albert Millican, The Bitter Cry of Outcast London by Andrew Mearns, The Complete History of Jack the Ripper by Philip Sugden and The Necropolis Railway by Andrew Martin.

  THE MAID’S SECRET

  Penny Green Mystery Book 3

  Chapter 1

  London, 1884

  “Mr John Morrison?” I asked.

  The tall, dark-skinned man beside me nodded, and I wrote his name down in my notebook. John looked to be about twenty. His brow was crumpled and he kept loosening his necktie, as though it would help him breathe.

  “I’m supposed to be at work,” he said.

  “I’m sure your employer will understand on a day like today,” I replied.

  “I don’t know about that.” He pulled at his tie again.

  “Elizabeth Wiggins was your sister?” I asked.

  “Yes.” His voice cracked with emotion.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. “Thank you for agreeing to talk to me. I know this must be extremely difficult for you.”

  We were standing on Gonsalva Road in Battersea: a drab street lined on both sides by cramped, brown-brick houses. Number sixteen looked just like all the others, aside from the police officer trying to keep onlookers away from the front door. A light drizzle fell, leaving small sparkling raindrops on my woollen jacket. Trains rumbled along the viaduct behind the houses, and the damp pages of my notebook tore beneath my pencil.

  A small crowd had filled the street. Men stood with hands in their pockets and dirty-faced children chased each other around, while women holding babies shouted at them.

  “What can you tell me about your sister?” I asked. “What sort of person was she?”

  John wiped his brow wi
th his hand. “I can’t get used to that word was. I can’t believe she’s not here no more. I only saw her yesterday! She’s kind-hearted, like. She’d do anything for anyone. She worked north of the river ’til she lost her job. She’s a hard worker, she is. I’ll miss her. My wife and son’ll miss her too.”

  He quickly rubbed the tears from his eyes to prevent me from seeing them.

  “And what of your brother-in-law?” I asked. “Had he ever harmed Elizabeth before?”

  “No. I don’t think he did, anyway. She never told me so. The policeman told me he was drunk. He didn’t usually drink much. Mrs O’Donnell says she heard shouting. They must have argued, I suppose. Elizabeth would’ve been angry on account of him being drunk. She didn’t like drinkers, our Elizabeth. Because of our father, that is. Me and her saw what drink does to a family. He must have lost his temper with her. He wouldn’t normally have done it, but it was the drink. And now…” John wiped his hand over his face. “He’s ruined everything!”

  I wrote down what he had told me in shorthand. “The police are holding him now. He’ll face trial,” I said.

  “And so he should! I hope he hangs!”

  “John Morrison!” a voice called out from behind me. I turned to see Tom Clifford from The Holborn Gazette approaching with his pencil and notebook. His jaw moved up and down as he chewed on a piece of tobacco.

  “How old was your sister?”

  “I’m not speaking to no more reporters now,” said John tremulously. “I have to get back to me wife. She’s in a delicate state, she is.”

  “Of course,” I said. “Thank you for your time, Mr Morrison.”

  “Only speakin’ to Miss Green, are yer?” Tom Clifford taunted as John walked away.

  “Leave him be,” I said. “His sister has just been murdered.”

  “What did ’e tell you?”

  “That’s none of your business!”

  Tom Clifford spat out a globule of tobacco. “You won’t of got much from the likes of ’im. What can you say about a battered wife? Husband comes home in a foul temper, husband beats wife, wife dies, and husband gets hanged for it. Happens every week. What we need is another killer like we had in St Giles. How’s about that, Miss Green? It’s a bit more exciting, ain’t it? Sells newspapers, that kinda thing.”

  “It’s not about excitement, Mr Clifford. We’re reporting on real people’s lives. I don’t wish to report on murders in order to sensationalise them. I do it to pay my respects to the victims. Mrs Wiggins should be remembered.”

  Tom Clifford cackled. “You ’ave a nobler cause than the rest of us, don’t yer, Miss Green?”

  I ignored him and noted down the date and time at the top of my page: Tuesday, 4th March, 1884. Ten o’clock.

  I folded my notebook closed, put it into my carpet bag and took out my umbrella, while Tom Clifford walked over to the police officer and began questioning him.

  Reporting on domestic tragedies such as these was upsetting. The death of a woman at the hands of her partner should have been avoidable, and sadly it happened far too often.

  I wiped the raindrops from my spectacles, opened my umbrella and walked down to Wandsworth Road, where I could take the horse tram up to Westminster Bridge.

  Chapter 2

  The typewriter was situated in the corner of the newsroom in the offices of the Morning Express newspaper. I sat myself in front of the machine beside a narrow dirty window which looked out onto Fleet Street. If I had cared to peer through the grime, I would have been able to see the upper section of a letter ‘N’, which formed part of the large iron signage across the facade of our building.

  “You’re not about to start making an infernal racket on that contraption, are you, Miss Green?” asked my colleague, Edgar Fish. He was a young man with small, glinting eyes and a thin, mousey-brown moustache. “Can’t it wait ’til later? My head hurts.”

  “As a result of the beer in Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese yesterday evening, or of Mrs Fish scolding you when you returned home?” laughed another reporter, Frederick Potter, who was portly and curly-haired.

  “Neither, thank you, Potter. And I don’t appreciate the slur. I have a headache because I’ve been working too hard.”

  Frederick was still roaring with laughter when the editor, Mr Sherman, strode into the room. Edgar swiftly removed the pencil from behind his ear and began scribbling on a piece of paper in front of him.

  Mr Sherman removed the pipe from beneath his thick black moustache. “What’s so funny, Potter?” His shirt sleeves were rolled up and he wore a grey serge waistcoat. His slickly oiled hair was parted to one side.

  “Nothing, sir.”

  “Good. Well it seems Downing Street has finally realised that Sir Hercules Robinson is a man worth listening to,” said Mr Sherman. “Now he can resume his duties as high commissioner in South Africa with the government’s full support. Fish, you’ll need to be at the Empire Club this evening to hear his address.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “It will be interesting to hear the details surrounding Sir Robinson’s uniform system of frontier policy.”

  “It will, sir, yes,” replied Edgar, sounding unsure of himself.

  “You haven’t any idea what I’m referring to, have you, Fish?”

  “Well, I do sir, I—”

  “It will put an end to the clashes between the Europeans and the natives. May I suggest that you take yourself off to the reading room sharpish and read up on the topic? You don’t want to end up looking a fool this evening.”

  “Too late for that!” laughed Frederick.

  “What was that, Potter?”

  “Nothing, sir.”

  “I need to speak to Purves, the parliamentary reporter, but he’s not here again. Ah, Miss Green!”

  I jumped at the sound of my name. Until that moment I had hoped Mr Sherman wouldn’t spot me in the corner of the room.

  “Stop typewriting. You’re required in my office. Mr Conway wishes to see you.”

  The mention of the proprietor’s name provoked a sharp intake of breath from Edgar. My heart began to pound wildly in my chest.

  “May I ask why?” I replied, tentatively rising from my seat and smoothing out my skirts.

  “All will be explained. Come along, now. Mr Conway is a busy man.”

  I followed the editor to his office and tried to recall which of my recent articles was most likely to have upset the owner of the Morning Express.

  Perhaps someone had made a complaint about me.

  My mouth felt dry as we walked into Mr Sherman’s office. The room smelled of pipe smoke and had greasy, yellowing walls. A gas lamp hung down from a long chain over the desk, where the piles of books and papers were stacked high. Mr Sherman had worked in this room, at the helm of the Morning Express, for almost ten years.

  Mr Conway sat in a low chair with his legs spread apart to allow room for his large stomach. His trousers, jacket and waistcoat were of a baggy brown tweed, and he had a fine head of wavy grey hair accompanied by long, bushy side-whiskers.

  “Miss Green.” He slowly moved his great bulk out of the chair and stood up. He nodded at me and looked me up and down before gesturing toward the two empty chairs next to him. “Please do sit.”

  He slumped back down again, the chair creaking under his weight. I sat down cautiously and wondered for whom the third chair had been reserved. Mr Sherman took a seat behind his desk.

  “Have you told Miss Green what we want her to do yet, William?” wheezed Mr Conway.

  “Not yet, sir.”

  “Well, don’t you think you’d better?”

  “Certainly, sir.”

  The proprietor breathed noisily through his nose as the editor began his explanation.

  “Have you heard of an Alexander Glenville, Miss Green?” asked Mr Sherman.

  “I’m afraid I haven’t.”

  “He owns the Blundell’s vinegar factory in Vauxhall, and has just bought a second factory in Bermondsey.”

 
“I have heard of Blundell’s.”

  “There’s been heavy criticism of his manufacturing methods for some time. Workers are required to work long hours in his factories, and there has been a high volume of accidents there. It’s rumoured that Glenville has children under the age of ten working at Blundell & Co.”

  “Which is a contravention of the factory code,” Mr Conway interjected.

  “Last year he lowered wages at the factory, and the workers who protested about the move lost their employment,” continued Mr Sherman. “The social reformer Dorothea Heale has published some articles about Blundell’s. Last year she attempted to help the workers form a committee that could stand up to Glenville, but her efforts came to nothing. Rumour has it she was warned off.”

  “Threatened?” I asked.

  “Something of that nature.”

  “I don’t like the sound of Alexander Glenville,” I said.

  “He’s a loathsome chap,” said Mr Conway. “And he’s a cripple, to boot.”

  “He has one arm missing,” said Mr Sherman. “Does that render him a cripple? The chap can still walk.”

  Mr Conway dismissed this last remark with a wave of his hand. “Glenville has friends in high places,” he wheezed. “The factory in Bermondsey belonged to a good friend of mine, Mr Albert Archdale. Archdale’s Vinegar was established one hundred years ago in Shoreditch, and Albert took over the factory from his father. Somehow, this Glenville chap has bought the place from him, and not for a fair sum either. It has ended poor Albert’s fortunes for good. When I saw him last at the Garrick Club, he could barely put a sentence together. A family business lies in ruins.”

  “There are many more rumours,” added Mr Sherman. “There are numerous alleged frauds and conspiracies.”

  “He keeps a tight circle of friends,” said Mr Conway. “He’s a secretive chap, so you won’t see him at any of the London clubs. It’s said he has plans for a cartel. Albert wouldn’t play ball, and that’s why Archdale’s was seized from him.”