Another tour I enjoyed while in Newport was of Fort Adams, the largest fort of its kind in the United States. The details about the fort were gathered during the tour, including those of the listening tunnels. I have taken some license with the positioning of those tunnels, but the cramped, dark, damp nature described is taken from my own experience.
I also moved the construction of The Elms up a year. Although plans for the house were under way in 1898, building began in 1899 and the house was completed in 1901. Because of owner Edward Berwind’s fascination with technology, The Elms was among the first houses in America wired for electricity with no backup source of power. With this in mind, I created the tensions between the electrical and gas workers. It isn’t hard to imagine that the prospect of a new technology supplanting an existing one would have led to conflict.
The tableau vivant, or “living picture,” which in the story features Miss Cleo Cooper-Smith as Cleopatra, had become a popular form of entertainment at Gilded Age social events. Often depicting notable paintings, sculptures, or historic events, the participants dressed in elaborate costumes, took up position, and remained silent and unmoving while their audience sat and inspected each element of the setting.
The New York tenement collapse described in the story is fictional, but newspapers of the time are rife with similar occurrences. Housing for the poor was substandard and dangerous, with such matters as safety, sanitation, and ventilation all but ignored by builders, who routinely cut corners to save project money. It wasn’t until the turn of the century that standards began to be established and safety codes enforced.
The Five Points Gang existed in the 1890s and comprised some 1500 members. A gang known for brutal violence, they engaged in robbery, racketeering, and prostitution; used legitimate businesses as fronts for their crimes; illegally influenced elections; and maintained ties to Tammany Hall politics. Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, and other prominent twentieth century gangsters had their start in the Five Points Gang. The star tattoo, however, is my own invention.
Gilded Age journalist Nellie Bly exceeded all expectations for women of her time in becoming an investigative reporter. Two of her most notable achievements were having herself committed to the Blackwell Island, New York, mental institution to report on the appalling conditions there, and traveling around the world, unaccompanied, in seventy-two days, beating the fictional eighty-day record of Jules Verne’s character, Phileas Fogg. Despite being an independent and daring young woman, it remained Nellie’s goal in life to wed a rich man, and in 1895 she did just that, marrying industrialist Robert Seaman. Seaman was forty years older than Nellie, but by all accounts theirs was a happy marriage based on mutual respect.
A word about Beatrice Goelet. I became aware of her existence after stumbling across her portrait painted by John Singer Sargent when she was about five years old. The real Beatrice, daughter of Robert and Harriette Goelet, would actually have been thirteen in 1898. Sadly, she died of pneumonia only a few years later. I was so captivated by Sargent’s expressive portrait of the beautiful little girl, I couldn’t help but give her a key role in the story. I decided to make her about three years old, an age at which most children are easily distracted from traumatic events and unlikely to be permanently scarred by them. The painting is among my favorites of Sargent’s work.
Murder at Ochre Court Page 27
