The Penny Dreadful Curse

by Anna Lord

  “How can you deny such a list exists?” challenged Dr Watson. “It stands to reason that you must have such a list, otherwise how would you pay your authors?”

  “I will reiterate again. It is a matter of confidentiality and trust. I refer to my authors by whatever name they choose to give me. I do not ask for particulars such as birth certificate, occupation, address or circumstance. If I happen to recognise them, I keep that recognition to myself. They come in personally, every three to six months, depending on prior agreement, and receive their royalties direct from my own hand. It is always on a Sunday morn when most folks in York are at church and the streets are quiet. Privacy is paramount, you see. That is my way, always has been and always will be. I started out that way and that is how I mean to go on.”

  “You’re an atheist?” posed Dr Watson in a non-judgemental tone, aware that the numbers of disbelievers was growing, though most were not so open about their views.

  “Not at all! I am a Jew. Now –”

  “Do you not wish to see the murderer of the authors you say you know personally brought to justice?” interrupted the Countess. “Five authoresses so far and who knows if that may be the end of it.”

  Mr Panglossian sighed heavily and gestured toward the large Georgian window that framed him in a fiat of grey light. His hand was like a slab of meat and his five fat fingers like pork sausages mounted on skewers. “I do not wish to sound callous or disrespectful of the dead, Countess, but the world outside that window is full of undiscovered talent. The world is not short of dreadful authors waiting for their chance to be published. As one author is struck from our list another is waiting in the wings to take their place. Now, if there is nothing more I can help you with, my secretary, Mr Thrypp, will show you out.”

  “Thank you for your time,” Dr Watson offered stiffly, moving to the door where the Countess caught him by the arm.

  “Oh, Dr Watson,” she trilled, a glint in her eye – always a sign that she had something up her stylish sleeve – “did you not profess a desire to see the modern printing presses of Panglossian Publishing as we travelled to York yesterday.” She turned to the Jewish publisher. “I’m sure you are aware, Mr Panglossian, that you are in the presence of the eminent author Dr John Watson, chronicler of the adventures of the world famous detective, Mr Sherlock Holmes. He is apt to hide his light under a bushel but let me assure you of his renown in London’s literary circles. Why, just the other day the doctor received a letter from the Prince of Wales, professing how much he enjoyed his detective novels. And,” here she lowered her voice as if imparting a great secret, “he is on the lookout for a modern publisher, someone who is in tune with his creative disposition and who understands the importance of confidentiality. And can you believe he has never even seen a modern printing press in action! Remarkable, is it not!”

  “Well! I had no idea I was in such exalted company! I will be honoured to show you around personally, if you will follow me.”

  They stepped into the outer office.

  “Thrypp,” the publisher advised curtly, “I will be giving Dr Watson and Countess Volodymyrovna a tour of our new printing presses. See to it that there is some morning tea on hand upon our return. Some buttered crumpets to go with the Souchong. And refill the decanter of sherry while you are at it. It is almost empty.”

  The Countess had deliberately left her reticule in Mr Panglossian’s office. They had reached the basement where the new presses hummed and whirred and clanged when she suddenly remembered it was missing. Mr Panglossian offered to send someone to fetch the little bag for her but she insisted on doing it herself and suggested he continue the tour of the new presses that Dr Watson was so keen to see. She remembered the way, she assured him, and would rejoin them momentarily.

  Splendid! Mr Thrypp was not at his post. She presumed he was busy brewing Souchong and buttering crumpets. As soon as she was back in the office of Mr Panglossian she raced to the right-hand armoire and began checking the names of the manuscripts awaiting publication. Most of the names she was already familiar with, and of those, only one nom de plume came close to matching BB. It was Baroness du Bois, author of Crimson Cavalier. Disappointed, she was about to rejoin her sleuthing companion when she decided to look at the rejects as well. And it was here that she struck gold. Sitting on top of the miserable pile was a small booklet separated into months of the year. Someone, presumably Mr Thrypp, had very efficiently recorded the authors’ names, the dates the manuscripts had been submitted, and the titles.

  A quick scan revealed that someone known as Baron Brasenose submitted at least one and sometimes two manuscripts each month. BB! The Baron penned stories about knights and dragons and damsels in distress.

  A further scan revealed the name Roman Acle. This unfortunate author had the dubious honour of submitting the greatest number of rejected manuscripts this calendar year. He had at least two and sometimes three manuscripts rejected every single month. In April he had four rejections. The Countess replaced the booklet on the stack of rejects and began ferreting through the manuscripts, trying to find those belonging to Baron Brasenose and Roman Acle. There were none belonging to the former but several belonging to the latter. She had them in her hands and was wondering how she was going to smuggle them out unnoticed when she heard a voice.

  “Well, well, what have we here?”

  Startled, she whirled round and dropped the rejects belonging to Mr Acle. They fanned out in an arc on the floor. She expected to see the efficient Mr Thrypp with a tea tray in his hands, but the man in the doorway was imposingly tall and scrutinising her in a way that would have been quite unnerving had she been less vain. She recognized him instantly from his distinctive, coarse, grizzled, grey, bushy beard.

  6

  Mr Charles Dicksen

  “You must be Panglossian’s new secretary,” he said, sizing up the elegant cut of her cloth and the sparklers on her fingers. “A huge improvement on that weedy dullard, Thrypp. I’m Mr Charles Dicksen and you are…”

  “Countess Varvara Volodymyrovna.” Her exotic, aristocratic, multi-syllabic name never failed to impress. It rendered most people mute for a few seconds, some for as long as a minute. He recovered his wits quicker than most.

  “Well, well, the titan of publishing has certainly stepped up in the world,” he praised obliquely. “If the penny-pinching mountebank ever sacks you make sure you come straight to me. Here is my card.”

  Mr Dicksen was immaculately attired in frock coat, silk vest, silk cravat, top hat and trousers with a razor-sharp crease that looked lethal. His calling card came with the faint scent of roses.

  “Gladhill.” She smiled luminously. “Quelle jolie!”

  “Ah! You speak French. You will be wasted here. Panglossian is a contradiction in terms – a Jewish Philistine. If you work for me your accomplishments will be recognized and rewarded.”

  She slipped his card into her beaded reticule. “Je suis désolée. I am sorry to disabuse you, Mr Dicksen, but I am not Mr Thrypp’s replacement. I am paying a visit to Mr Panglossian with my travelling companion, Dr John Watson, who is being given a tour of the new printing presses as we speak and will return any moment for morning tea. My feminine curiosity got the better of me when I returned for my reticule and I’m afraid I simply had to take a peek inside the armoire at the manuscripts.” She bent down to collect what she had spilled.

  He crouched beside her, his knee brushing up against her thigh. “These are the rejects,” he sneered at a glance. “Roman Acle is an illiterate buffoon. He drives poor Panglossian mad with his submissions. Every story suffers from the same fatal flaw that all failed writers share.”

  “And that is?”

  “Lack of voice.” He straightened up and indicated the other armoire with a tilt of his hirsute glory. “In yonder cupboard you will see what I mean if you peruse the manuscripts that have won favour with the wily Jew of York. They strike a chord with the reader. They are not works of art. They are not original. They
are not grammatical. They are not even very clever. But they have that vital ingredient - voice.” He swung himself into the nearest leather wing chair with remarkable sinuosity and crossed one knee over the other with elastic elegance. “Now, did I hear you correctly? Did you say: Dr John Watson?”

  Carefully, she replaced the rejected manuscripts in the armoire and folded herself with equal elegance into the adjacent wing chair. “You have heard of him?”

  “Certainly! I have read all of his work. A prodigious output. The prose suffers from verbosity. A touch over-written. The main character is incredibly pompous but his innate cleverness saves him from becoming a frightful prig. Dr Watson comes across as slow-witted. I wondered if that was perhaps a literary conceit. I am keen to meet him face to face and see for myself if he is really as stupid as he seems. All in all, his stories are quite entertaining if you are after something that will not prove too taxing to the brain. Did you just describe him as your travelling companion? So, does that mean –”

  The remainder of his conjecture was cut off by the arrival of Mr Thrypp, clutching an unopened bottle of Spanish sherry. Hot on his heels came two under-secretaries carting trays laden with tiered plates of buttered crumpets and all the accoutrements necessary for that quaint English ritual known as morning tea which no-one revered more than a foreigner.

  Mr Thrypp seemed momentarily flustered. “Oh, Mr Dicksen, I, er, I wasn’t expecting you until half past eleven. Mr Panglossian is occupied at present.”

  “Yes, yes, stop blathering on, Thrypp. You remind me of my wife. I decided to come early and just as well I did. I have had the pleasure of acquainting myself with the exquisite Countess Volodymyrovna and quite soon I will get to meet Dr John Watson and enjoy one of Panglossian’s crumpet extravaganzas. Is that a new amontillado? Pour two glasses before you adulterate its virginal sweetness with the dregs of that sour oloroso in the decanter.”

  They watched as the acolyte procured two tiny red crystal glasses from inside the sideboard and measured out a thimbleful of libation. Mr Dicksen sneered at the miserly offering but refrained from comment when the Countess forced his concentration.

  “I heard an unfamiliar term this morning by way of conversation with an old bookseller,” she said, “and it has baffled me ever since. I think you might be the perfect person to enlighten me, Mr Dicksen. What is mudlarking?”

  He gave an uncensored laugh of genuine amusement, full and throaty. “I do like a lady who takes me by surprise! Mudlarking! There’s a term one does not expect to hear fall from the lips of a foreign Countess. To be a mudlark is to scour the banks of rivers for anything that might prove valuable – lumps of coal, buttons, buckles, rags, pennies and so forth. It is generally undertaken by young starvelings who have no other means of earning a living. Mudlarking is a precarious and pitiful existence.”

  “And can you tell me about the Fish Pond?”

  “I presume you refer to the King’s Fishpond – the latter being one word – it is a man-made swamp to the east of the city, bordered by Fossgate and Walmgate. In 1068 or thereabouts William the Bastard or one of his sycophants decided it would be a good idea to divert the River Foss to create a moat for York Castle. The surrounding area soon flooded. It created a fishing pool for subsequent monarchs. It is marshy ground, rife with razor-sharp sedge, deep in some parts, shallow in others, favoured by mudlarks for the valuable items it can sometimes yield. I presume you have a reason for asking?”

  “No particular reason,” she deflected. “I am an ardent student of geography and history and I like to know about the places I am visiting. All knowledge fascinates me.”

  Mr Thrypp had finished decanting the amontillado and was standing to attention, looking hopefully at the famous author.

  Mr Dicksen caught him out of the corner of his incisive eye and expelled an exasperated breath. “What is it now, Thrypp? Are you an ardent student of geography and history too?” he parlayed sarcastically.

  “No, sir, er, yes, what I mean is, yes, I am interested in such things, but that is not what I want to say, sir, er, what I want to say is that I heard some bad news this morning when I was in Coppergate buying some crumpets from Ye Olde Crumpet Shoppe, some news that is related to you, er, not directly, but indirectly, which I thought you may be interested to hear, sir.”

  “Oh, get on with it, Thrypp, and stop blathering like the idiot you are. You are beginning to remind me of my wife.”

  “Well, sir, there was a death this morning in the Shambles. A lad was murdered and strung up on a meat hook.”

  “That is unfortunate, Thrypp, but what the deuce has it got to do with me, directly or indirectly?”

  “Well, sir, the lad who was killed was the one who comes by here each month to take a parcel to Gladhill.”

  “Really, Thrypp, you exceed yourself this morning regarding stuff and nonsense. The fact that an errand boy who occasionally carries a parcel from Panglossian to Gladhill gets himself killed is neither directly nor indirectly related to me. It is like saying the bargeman who brings the paper from Hull upon which is printed one of my books has a wife whose third cousin died from a paper cut whilst reading Bleak Hall is related to me. In that roundabout way we are all of us connected to one another in the great sphere of life, the infinite plane of existence, the eternal ebb and flow in the tide of the affairs of men, ergo, the death of one relates to all, me, you, the Countess and the rest. That the death was tragic is not in dispute but I cannot be expected to mourn all mankind in his passing except in a general way, as I do in my books, sympathetically and eloquently.”

  Mr Thrypp had reddened from the tip of his collar to the bald spot on the top of his head. “Yes, sir, but, well, there was a parcel wrapped in brown paper and tied with string on the corner of my desk last night for the lad to transport to Gladhill, sir, to you, and it has gone as it should have gone this morning so I was just wondering, sir, where it might now be now that the lad is, er, dead.”

  “Ah! I see the point you are getting at, Thrypp, if only you could get there sooner rather than later. The parcel is neither here nor there. No, no, it is of no import whatsoever. It was a chapter that I deemed Panglossian might want to view and which he was merely returning back to me. I have a copy of the very same chapter in my private study. Be so good as to top up my teeny-tiny thimble, Thrypp.” The author turned to the Countess. “Another mouthful of sherry for you, my dear lady?”

  She nodded. “Does Mr Panglossian edit all of your books?”

  “Heaven forbid! He edits none of them! The man is a damn good publisher but a creative nincompoop! I would not let him near my work with a bargepole! I edit all my own stuff!”

  “But you sent him a chapter to view?”

  Mr Dicksen smiled strangely as he downed his second sherry. “Ah! Yes! So I did! Well, it was a chapter describing some Jews and their religious rituals. I wanted to make sure to get the details right. Readers are extremely pernickety about that sort of thing. I swear some of them read books simply to spot errors. They care more whether a Jacobean fireplace is distinct from an Elizabethan fireplace than that the heroine is chaste or the villain gets his comeuppance. It is a perverse world we writers inhabit.”

  At this point Mr Panglossian and Dr Watson reappeared. Mr Dicksen sprang forth like a jack-in-the-box, rushed across the room and clasped the doctor by the hand.

  “Let me shake the hand of a fellow author I have long respected,” he trumpeted loudly, shaking the hand up and down ferociously. “I stand in your shadow, sir. I am a fervent admirer. I am Mr Charles Dicksen. You have possibly heard of me?”

  “Oh, most assuredly,” mumbled Dr Watson, overwhelmed and thoroughly shaken. “Your fame and talent are well known throughout the land. I am humbled by your praise.”

  “We authors must learn to take such praise with good grace. It is water off a duck’s back to me now. You will soon become accustomed to it as I have.” He dropped the doctor’s hand abruptly and turned to his publisher. “Thrypp informs m
e that the little courier of yours is dead.”

  Mr Panglossian looked blank. “What courier?”

  “The poor lad who sometimes runs errands between here and Gladhill - you know the one I mean,” he prompted impatiently through clenched teeth. “I sent you a chapter to peruse the other month and he was apparently returning it this morning when he was unfortunately strung up on a meat hook in the Shambles by some brute. Tragic! Terrible! Life is stranger than fiction, as I so often remind my wife! Isn’t that right, Panglossian?”

  Mr Panglossian seemed momentarily stunned. He stared dully at the famous author without actually seeing him before blinking several times and coming to his senses, jerking a fat finger at his hapless secretary. “Where is the Souchong, Thrypp? Don’t just stand there, man, bring it in.”