The Crimson Inkwell
Page 2
She was six years my younger, and I adored her. The tendrils that threatened old maidenhood were just starting to tighten their grip on her. She had just passed through the uncomfortable stages of teenage vanity and human mortality. One moment, she believed herself to be the catch of all London, let alone Dawnhurst. The next, she was convinced no one would ever marry her.
I feared the latter, though I wasn’t without hope. After all, she was blessed with the family beauty. Where I struggled to tame my hair into a messy bun or remember whether a crinoline was on its way in or out of fashion, she could have lectured at length on the subject. She didn’t profess vain knowledge either. One of my father’s parting gifts to her was a dress he spent way too much money on that she didn’t yet fit into. It hung in her bedroom. I believed myself capable of saying, objectively, Anna was beautiful.
I had heard rumors, though, that some men found her boisterous and unseemly. Though she was now twenty, one might be convinced she was still sixteen after talking with her at a party, and though many men might turn a blind eye in exchange for a pretty face, Anna sought out courtiers less shallow than that.
She had settled on Jacob Rigby, a gentleman of eighteen years, apprenticed to his father as a barrister. He was a respectable man, though a less respectable match. The difference in their ages might not matter in twenty years, but now it hinted at scandal. Fortunately, her social immaturity saved her from disclosing that she was his senior to all but those who asked directly. It hardly seemed fair for her. After all, Byron was much older than I was, but society didn’t seem to care if it went the other way.
Still, things were promising between the two of them. But whether it was the disparity in their ages or her rumored immaturity, something about the way Jacob treated my sister gave off a fickle impression.
Perhaps this explained her unapologetic flop on our bed. I gave her some water and helped her change into a nightgown, while biting back comments about it not being called a mid-morning gown. I loved her dearly, my sister, but could not fathom why she bothered getting dressed to go out if she was just going to lament in bed.
“You don’t understand fashion and beauty like I do,” she said to me, her voice heavy with drama. “Feeling beauty on the outside is enough to change how you feel on the inside.”
“I see it’s worked marvelously in your case,” I replied.
“Oh, you’re right! I’ve wasted the entire morning!”
She was pretending to be asleep by the time I left.
As engrossing as it was, I couldn’t spare much more time fretting over my sister. We had agreed that her interests were best served trying to find a husband, and the burden of the daily bills would be left to me. I couldn’t imagine Anna lasting long working in a factory or hawking wares on the street. She was no good at cooking or mending, and she often lost her train of thought in daydreaming. One day long ago, as I tried to share my passion for the classics with her, she threw up her hands and exclaimed she had no interest in writing or reading. She was literate—I made sure of that— but she could not stand reading as a pastime or even to improve her education.
You might say she was born to be a wife. If I were my sister, I don’t know how I’d survive. Some children were a solid mix of their two parents. The rest of us take after one or the other. She was my mother. I was my father.
We had a paltry inheritance left to us by our hard-working father. We tried to stretch it out as thin as cheesecloth, but in the end, without getting married myself, I knew I’d be responsible for Anna. I worked odd jobs where I could, once as a delivery girl, once as a factory girl, once in a kitchen. I even had a stroke of luck working as a governess for a wealthier family that lived near the river. It was a wonderful job, except that the child was a spoiled demon. I was let go promptly when the mistress of the house discovered I was the daughter of a factory worker. Something about impropriety and her child learning improper morals.
Then I met Byron, and he actually gave my writing a shot. My first wage at Langley’s felt like fresh water. We weren’t starving by any stretch, but it was a signal of different times. Ironic. When I finally found a job writing, I also finally found a man.
I left our humble home and stewed over possible solutions to speed along Anna’s not-so-scandalous affair with Jacob until I was well on my way to the old precinct, located on the very edge of my promise to my editor.
If Byron wanted better leads and better stories, why not start where the trouble ends? The Dawnhurst Police Force.
I had strong memories of the station. My father had occasionally run with a troublesome lot. Before he turned ill, he would often come down to talk friends out of arrests for public drunkenness and other such unforgivable crimes. There was one stodgy police lieutenant, by now made sergeant, who might remember me as a girl. That became less likely each passing year.
I had promised Byron I wouldn’t go in search of leads. He was worried about me heading into seedy areas of Dawnhurst. But, what harm was there in a woman going to visit an old family friend at the local police station in the mid-morning? And if a story came out of it, so be it.
I walked through the town. We were undeniably into autumn now. The cobblestone streets were littered with dead or dying leaves from the trees that lined the walks. The station was just on the west side of the river, not a far walk from Langley’s, actually. The city likely could have used its presence more in the east, but the wealthy wanted to feel secure, and after all, they paid the greater part of the taxes. So they said.
I knew the city well, now having lived on both sides of the river. In fact, the boundaries of the city were the boundaries of my life. I had never traveled beyond them. My everyday life was wrapped up inside of it, and I liked it that way. Familiar monuments called to me from all corners. A large clock tower stood tall to the north—it hadn’t rung in many years, but it still felt like a herald. On the southeast strip, close to the river was the church in which my parents married. I hadn’t been there in years. In fact, my last time there had been around when the tower stopped chiming. My parents were buried in the attached graveyard.
But, what made Dawnhurst exciting to me was that, everywhere you went, there were peddlers or newsstands hawking the city’s most recent publications in a great contest over pocket change and the Golden Inkwell. You could often find stray papers, discarded a day or week before, lining the gutters. The city hadn’t always been like this. When I was a girl, I don’t remember so many people reading, but something in the last twenty years had set the city on fire with journalism and literature.
I walked into the police station, past its blue, brightly painted, and sturdy front door. Inside, the hard-working daylight coming through the barred front and back windows of the building mingled with illumination from the occasional, gas lamp on the wall or desks in the darker areas of the station. A stringy looking fellow with bright red hair sat at the front counter. Behind him, I could see the commotion of a city police station. If I closed my eyes, it sounded almost like a buzzing beehive. Rows of desks sat in haphazard lines toward the back of the large room. Officers bustled in and out, brandishing batons and donning their hats while roughly barking familiar jabs at their compatriots on the way out the door. I received not a few sidelong glances. Some made me feel violated, others belittled, all of them out of place.
The red-haired fellow was hard at work on an impossibly large stack of papers and didn’t seem to notice any of the commotion around him.
“Excuse me,” I said, after clearing my throat.
“Who’s missing?” The clerk didn’t look up.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Missing persons will file with Ms. Turner down the hall.”
“I’m not here to report a missing person,” I replied. This was enough to give the clerk at least a moment’s pause. He glanced his terrier of a face up at me and squinted one eye in the lamplight.
“Has your husband beat you?”
“I’m not married. I’m looki
ng for Sergeant George Cooper.”
“Sarge, you’ve got a visitor!” he bellowed down the hallway behind him before turning back to me. “Right down the hallway, Miss. He’ll be happy to have a visitor that isn’t a felon. I guess, assuming you’re not here to turn yourself in… You aren’t uh, you know, soliciting wares and suddenly discovered religion if you catch my meaning?”
This I did not grace with a verbal response. Instead, I leveled my eyes at him the way I used to as governess of an impish child, took off my gloves menacingly, and started down the hall.
“Please have a seat,” said whom I presumed to be the Ms. Turner the clerk had mentioned. She wore a tweed skirt and vest, and her hair was done up into what was once a bun. She too was busy in paperwork, pounding away furiously at a typewriter. I brushed off a filthy chair and waited. I watched Ms. Turner for some time, wondering what pathway may have brought her to this desk. She appeared older than me. It’s difficult to guess the age of women around the middle of their lives, but the gentle lines around her eyes hinted to me that she was now closer to forty than thirty. I noticed no wedding ring.
I felt an almost immediate kinship to Ms. Turner. It wasn’t a large stretch to imagine that I was looking at myself in ten years, pounding away at a typewriter, perhaps trying to publish works of my own in my spare time outside of my professional duties.
I have Byron now. I had to remind myself about my fiancé so often. How silly. Even when I was here on his bidding, for his publication no less.
“I wasn’t drinking on the job, sir!” I heard a man’s raised voice through the sergeant’s door.
Ms. Turner slowly looked up at me. “They all say that.”
The door swung wide open, and I was struck by what I could only assume was the model for a police force figurine. The man had an acutely trim waistline that stretched up into a broad chest and shoulders. His hair was combed impeccably, as if each strand dared not stray from its assigned position. His eyes, alert and lively, were peculiarly warm for being steely grey. His brow furrowed, and his neatly trimmed policeman’s mustache curved downward into a disconcerting frown.
He swept through the office door and stood erect, as though he was at a self-called attention. Behind him, the large Sergeant George Cooper, a man whom I could only describe as a younger, meaner looking Father Christmas, filled the doorway.
“I don’t want outlandish stories, Lieutenant. I want arrests. I want brigands behind bars. I want young do-it-alls like you to stop trying to turn every little case into the next apocalypse,” Sergeant Cooper stammered. He was only mostly red in the face.
The young lieutenant stood and, though he looked thoroughly unamused, took the tongue lashing admirably.
“You’ve got a visitor,” butted in Ms. Turner. Sergeant Cooper looked at me, and his expression instantly melted into a rehearsed sympathy.
“Ma’am, my deepest apologies,” he said, putting his hand on his heart. “Do you have a missing person to report?”
“No,” I stuttered. “I’m here… do you get a lot of missing persons?”
“Most of the women we see in here are reporting a missing husband or, regrettably, a missing child,” he replied.
“I’m sorry to hear that. But, and, well, I’m not sure how to put this exactly. I’m here from Langley’s Miscellany, and I—”
Before I could finish my sentence, the warm expression on Sergeant Cooper’s face melted away.
“You’re a reporter. Thank you, Miss, but the door’s over there.” He turned and retreated back into his office. I stuck my foot in the door, which was more painful than I thought it might be.
“I don’t want to be a bother. I’m just curious about the latest. I don’t mean to fabricate anything or inflate your efforts. I just—”
“You just want to be first to know about the dreadful muck the police force deals with each day.”
“Well, yes,” I replied.
“Like I said, Miss, the door is over there. I have a lot to do.” He put on a pair of spectacles and sat down at his desk. I felt a burn creep up my cheeks. It was one thing to be denied, another to be rejected right in front of a woman I had suddenly come to admire and a deeply handsome police lieutenant. The propriety!
“Please, you knew my father,” I said. He looked up at me over his spectacles. They were comically small for his large face. “Gerald Winthrop.”
“Jerry Winthrop?” the sergeant said with a laugh. “Devils blind me. You were the scrap of a thing always hiding in the corner, thinking we couldn’t see you.”
I nodded. He barked out a triumphant laugh.
“Your father was a hell of a man! Always sticking his nose in places it didn’t belong. Any mate of his in trouble, he’d be here before a spit trying to talk their way out it.” He stared into the air as if he could see my father in the office presently. “How is Jerry doing? I got into more arguments with him. He could take a yelling and deal it out in turn. If only my lieutenants had half the backbone. We exchanged words like lads in a fistfight.
“Well, I hope you got the last word in then,” I said. His countenance dropped sharply.
“You don’t mean—how’d it happen?”
“Fever. Or something like that. I never did get a straight answer from the doctors.” I hated doctors. A fair majority of them might as well be bunkmates with critics.
“Doctors are thieves,” the sergeant said.
“I’m very sorry for your loss, Miss,” said a clear voice behind me. They were the first words the lieutenant said to me. The purity in his voice took me off guard. After losing my father, I’d heard “I’m sorry for your loss” time and time again. In nearly every case, it was mere etiquette, obligation, and passing fancy, as though someone might check a box of a tidy little list somewhere by saying the appropriate thing. This man, whom I barely knew, sounded arrestingly sincere.
I turned toward him, and he bowed slightly. Behind him, Ms. Turner slid into focus with two very inquisitive eyebrows.
“Yes, well, this is Lieutenant Edward Thomas. He’s our resident… bleeding heart and imaginist,” Sergeant Cooper said. Edward extended a hand.
“It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance,” I said. His eyes were smothering. I couldn’t seem to escape them. He had no shyness about looking a stranger squarely in the face, that’s for certain.
“The pleasure is mine,” I managed. “Imaginist?” I inquired of the sergeant.
“No doubt in it. In fact, Lieutenant Thomas may be exactly what you’re looking for,” he said with a coy smile.
“I’m engaged,” I spit out.
Sergeant Cooper erupted into an ungraciously loud belly laugh. I noticed Ms. Turner turn her face down to suppress a giggle as well. Edward flushed.
“I’m sure you are. I meant for the stories you’ve been looking for,” Cooper said. I immediately felt feverish as itchy perspiration appeared on the small of my back. Luella Winthrop. Gift with words, I have.
“He has a story for me then?” I muttered, eager to move on.
“Aye. Lieutenant Thomas here claims to have seen a ghost!”
CHAPTER THREE
Domestic Comforts
MY WALK HOME was caught up in a furious brainstorm, interrupted only by a quick stop by a seamstress to pick up a scarf I had ordered for Anna. We had gone walking recently, and she had gawked over it, insisting that it brought out the color of her eyes. I loved surprising Anna with little gifts. She rewarded me with the best reactions whenever I gave her a present, but I was so distracted I almost purchased the scarf in black! That black would not bring out the color of her eyes; even I could understand that.
By the time I arrived on Harbor Street where we lived, I could hardly have recounted how I got there or how many times cabs or hansoms had barked at me to get out of the road. I was too busy going over the details of Lieutenant Thomas’ story. Sergeant Cooper was right—he may have been exactly what I was looking for.
In that professional sort of way.
A real police officer convinced he had seen a supernatural phenomenon! And, he was so convinced he was willing to risk his name on it, even when challenged by his superiors. He and Sergeant Cooper had requested that the name Edward Thomas not be included in any story, but there were plenty of ways around that. The Handsome Constable might not do the trick, as it would at once appear too womanly and likely tip off readers that a woman, or perhaps a man of a different nature, stood behind my pen name, Travis Blakely. The effect would be the same in either scenario: lost readers. No, this story wanted something objective but vague, something concrete enough to give readers the confidence he was a real member of the force, yet ambiguous enough so as not to betray his identity.
Maybe it was the gas street lights just now heralding in the first of night, but it suddenly seemed that writing was just an exercise in shadow dancing.
Steely Grey, perhaps, or Officer Steely Grey?
I could almost see Brutus’s face now. He’d pucker his chubby little face and squint hard at the writing, scrutinizing it over and over again, but even he would have to admit the story was compelling. It was hard not to run away with my imagination, seeing leafy boughs where only a bit of seed lay. Still, this could be my chance to rise above the din of Dawnhurst’s obsession with the printed page. Every week, it seemed another weekly or monthly magazine was circulating the city. The readers were voracious, especially on the west side of the river. At dinner parties or out on the town, if you hadn’t the most recent such and such from Mr. So and So, you had just about nothing to talk about with anyone. To be a Mr. So and So! It could be a ticket to the top. The possibilities made me delirious.
I was so distracted, I practically ran into the carriage parked out front of my flat. I laughed at myself for a moment, happy to be so engaged in a story that reality had slipped from me. Work of this kind brings such euphoria, such a departure from the elements, gravity even.