The Penguin Book of Victorian Women in Crime

by Michael Sims

  The squire had the ruins carefully examined, and two thousand ounces of gold and silver plate, melted into shapelessness of course, were taken out of the rubbish.

  From this fact it is pretty evident that the key No. 13, found upon the poor, unhappy, ill-bred, and neglected boy, was the “Open Sesamè” to the treasure which was afterwards taken from the ruins—perhaps worth £4000, gold and silver together.

  Beyond question he had stolen the key from the butler, gone into a plot with his confederates—and the whole had resulted in his death and the conflagration of Petleighcote, one of the oldest, most picturesque, and it must be admitted dampest seats in the midland counties.

  And, indeed, I may add that I found out who was the “tall gentleman with the auburn whiskers and the twitching of the face”; I discovered who was the short gentleman with no whiskers at all; and finally I have seen the young lady (she was very beautiful) called Frederica, and for whose innocent sake I have no doubt the unhappy young man acted as he did.

  As for me, I carried the case no further.

  I had no desire to do so—had I had, I doubt if I possessed any further evidence than would have sufficed to bring me into ridicule.

  I left the case where it stood.

  C. L. PIRKIS

  (1841-1910)

  The astute and courageous Loveday Brooke seems to have been the first female detective created by a female author. For this and other reasons, Catherine Louisa Pirkis’s character stands out among the characters in this anthology. “Emerging at a historical moment when understandings of women, criminality, and law enforcement were rapidly changing in Britain,” writes scholar Elizabeth Carolyn Miller, “Pirkis’s stories offer an interpretation of these intersecting cultural shifts that is surprisingly different from that of her contemporaries.”

  Throughout the series, Brooke is a respected professional investigator. Unlike Mrs. Paschal, she doesn’t act subservient in order to curry favor with her superior; frequently Brooke verbally spars with her boss, Ebenezer Dyer. She is socially mobile, moving constantly between train and cab, princess and housemaid, village and city. Occasionally she must walk alone at night unaccompanied by a man, which instantly places her in the suspect category of a likely prostitute. Unlike, say, Hugh Weir about Madelyn Mack, Pirkis doesn’t claim that her heroine is blessed with ultrafeminine charms and intuition to offset her allegedly masculine job. In fact, she is pointedly described as “neither handsome nor ugly.” Perhaps most significant of all, she doesn’t wind up married in the last story.

  Pirkis’s was the era of criminologist Cesare Lombroso, who argued that criminal inclinations resulted from hereditary atavism that was literally visible in features such as large chins and fleshy lips; and of sexologist Havelock Ellis, who insisted that female criminals exhibit a degenerate abundance of body hair and other masculine traits, as well as “pathological” sexual organs. (Elizabeth Carolyn Miller explores these background issues in detail in her article cited in Further Reading.) Pirkis resists both trendy and traditional notions of appearance; her characters defy Victorian categories such as the beautiful damsel and the roughneck immigrant.

  She also demonstrates a more sympathetic and clearheaded view of class relations than many of her contemporaries. Pirkis doesn’t merely disguise Brooke as a servant; she knows that doing so almost affords Brooke a cloak of invisibility as she spies for clues behind the scenes. Pirkis was fully aware of the irony that a society in which well-connected women were not permitted to work was built upon the unseen backroom labor of less privileged women. Again and again, when theft or violence disturbs the Victorian home, suspicion turns toward the servants—especially if they also embody another suspect group: foreigners. Each year the Victorian legal system prosecuted a great many offenders in the separate category of “larceny by servants.”

  C. L. Pirkis published several romantic melodramas, including a lead story in All the Year Round, the weekly periodical that Charles Dickens launched after he bailed out of Household Words because of conflicts with its publisher. By the time that Pirkis appeared in its pages, it was published by Dickens’s eldest son, Charles Jr. Pirkis published her first book in 1877 and wrote thirteen more, including In a World of His Own and Disappeared from Her Home. The Loveday Brooke stories were gathered into her last book. She retired from fiction writing in 1894. Three years earlier, she had cofounded—with her husband, retired naval officer Fred E. Pirkis—the organization to which she devoted much of her time until her death in 1910: the National Canine Defence League. This hugely influential animal-welfare group is still active and in 2003 renamed itself the Dogs Trust. The NCDL campaigned against vivisection, abuse, muzzling, and later even the use of dogs such as Laika in early space exploration. Not surprisingly, in Loveday Brooke stories animal abuse is a clue to other kinds of brutality.

  It’s interesting to note that Brooke’s quietly subversive adventures appeared in the Ludgate Monthly. Founded only two years earlier, Ludgate called itself a “family magazine,” which meant that proper young women could read it without blushing; magazine publishers were beginning to target market to female readers. Pirkis published six Brooke stories between February and July 1893 in consecutive issues of the Ludgate Monthly. A couple of months after the sixth Brooke story, the magazine joined the new trend of emphasizing visuals and renamed itself The Ludgate Illustrated Magazine. It was under this new title that it published a seventh Brooke outing in March 1894. At the same time, Hutchinson & Company published all seven stories in a collection entitled The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective, with ink-and-wash drawings by the unaccountably popular illustrator Bernard Higham. The first story was “The Black Bag Left on a Door-Step,” from which comes the opening description of Brooke below. “Drawn Daggers” was the fifth published adventure and appeared fifth in the collection. Unlike many Victorian detective series, the Brooke stories were not a novel-like cycle that built toward a unifying denouement. Each stood alone, like the cases of Sherlock Holmes.

  DRAWN DAGGERS

  Loveday Brooke, at this period of her career, was a little over thirty years of age, and could be best described in a series of negations.

  She was not tall, she was not short; she was not dark, she was not fair; she was neither handsome nor ugly. Her features were altogether nondescript; her one noticeable trait was a habit she had, when absorbed in thought, of dropping her eyelids over her eyes till only a line of eyeball showed, and she appeared to be looking out at the world through a slit, instead of through a window.

  Her dress was invariably black, and was almost Quaker-like in its neat primness.

  Some five or six years previously, by a jerk of Fortune’s wheel, Loveday had been thrown upon the world penniless and all but friendless. Marketable accomplishments she had found she had none, so she had forthwith defied convention, and had chosen for herself a career that had cut her off sharply from her former associates and her position in society. For five or six years she drudged away patiently in the lower walks of her profession; then chance, or, to speak more precisely, an intricate criminal case, threw her in the way of the experienced head of the flourishing detective agency in Lynch Court. He quickly enough found out the stuff she was made of, and threw her in the way of better-class work—work, indeed, that brought increase of pay and of reputation alike to him and to Loveday.

  Ebenezer Dyer was not, as a rule, given to enthusiasm; but he would at times wax eloquent over Miss Brooke’s qualifications for the profession she had chosen.

  “Too much of a lady, do you say?” he would say to anyone who chanced to call in question those qualifications. “I don’t care twopence-halfpenny whether she is or is not a lady. I only know she is the most sensible and practical woman I ever met. In the first place, she has the faculty—so rare among women—of carrying out orders to the very letter: in the second place, she has a clear, shrewd brain, unhampered by any hard-and-fast theories; thirdly, and most important item of all, she has so much common s
ense that it amounts to genius—positively to genius, sir.”

  “I admit that the dagger business is something of a puzzle to me, but as for the lost necklace—well, I should have thought a child would have understood that,” said Mr. Dyer irritably. “When a young lady loses a valuable article of jewellery and wishes to hush the matter up, the explanation is obvious.”

  “Sometimes,” answered Miss Brooke calmly, “the explanation that is obvious is the one to be rejected, not accepted.”

  Off and on these two had been, so to speak, “jangling” a good deal that morning. Perhaps the fact was in part to be attributed to the biting east wind which had set Loveday’s eyes watering with the gritty dust, as she had made her way to Lynch Court, and which was, at the present moment, sending the smoke, in aggravating gusts, down the chimney into Mr. Dyer’s face. Thus it was, however. On the various topics that had chanced to come up for discussion that morning between Mr. Dyer and his colleague, they had each taken up, as if by design, diametrically opposite points of view.

  His temper altogether gave way now.

  “If,” he said, bringing his hand down with emphasis on his writing table, “you lay it down as a principle that the obvious is to be rejected in favour of the abstruse, you’ll soon find yourself launched in the predicament of having to prove that two apples added to two other apples do not make four. But there, if you don’t choose to see things from my point of view, that is no reason why you should lose your temper!”

  “Mr. Hawke wishes to see you, sir,” said a clerk, at that moment entering the room.

  It was a fortunate diversion. Whatever might be the differences of opinion in which these two might indulge in private, they were careful never to parade those differences before their clients.

  Mr. Dyer’s irritability vanished in a moment.

  “Show the gentleman in,” he said to the clerk. Then he turned to Loveday. “This is the Rev. Anthony Hawke, the gentleman at whose house I told you that Miss Monroe is staying temporarily. He is a clergyman of the Church of England, but gave up his living some twenty years ago when he married a wealthy lady. Miss Monroe has been sent over to his guardianship from Pekin by her father, Sir George Monroe, in order to get her out of the way of a troublesome and undesirable suitor.”

  The last sentence was added in a low and hurried tone, for Mr. Hawke was at that moment entering the room.

  He was a man close upon sixty years of age, white-haired, clean shaven, with a full, round face, to which a small nose imparted a somewhat infantine expression. His manner of greeting was urbane but slightly flurried and nervous. He gave Loveday the impression of being an easy-going, happy-tempered man who, for the moment, was unusually disturbed and perplexed.

  He glanced uneasily at Loveday. Mr. Dyer hastened to explain that this was the lady by whose aid he hoped to get to the bottom of the matter now under consideration.

  “In that case there can be no objection to my showing you this,” said Mr. Hawke; “it came by post this morning. You see my enemy still pursues me.”

  As he spoke he took from his pocket a big, square envelope, from which he drew a large-sized sheet of paper.

  On this sheet of paper were roughly drawn, in ink, two daggers, about six inches in length, with remarkably pointed blades.

  Mr. Dyer looked at the sketch with interest.

  “We will compare this drawing and its envelope with those you previously received,” he said, opening a drawer of his writing-table and taking thence a precisely similar envelope. On the sheet of paper, however, that this envelope enclosed, there was drawn one dagger only.

  He placed both envelopes and their enclosures side by side, and in silence compared them. Then, without a word, he handed them to Miss Brooke, who, taking a glass from her pocket, subjected them to a similar careful and minute scrutiny.

  Both envelopes were of precisely the same make, and were each addressed to Mr. Hawke’s London address in a round, school-boyish, copy-book sort of hand—the hand so easy to write and so difficult to being home to any writer on account of its want of individuality. Each envelope likewise bore a Cork and a London postmark.

  The sheet of paper, however, that the first envelope enclosed bore the sketch of one dagger only.

  Loveday laid down her glass.

  “The envelopes,” she said, “have, undoubtedly, been addressed by the same person, but these last two daggers have not been drawn by the hand that drew the first. Dagger number one was, evidently, drawn by a timid, uncertain and inartistic hand—see how the lines wave and how they have been patched here and there. The person who drew the other daggers, I should say, could do better work; the outline, though rugged, is bold and free. I should like to take these sketches home with me and compare them again at my leisure.”

  “Ah, I felt sure what your opinion would be!” said Mr. Dyer complacently.

  Mr. Hawke seemed much disturbed.

  “Good gracious!” he ejaculated; “you don’t mean to say I have two enemies pursuing me in this fashion! What does it mean? Can it be—is it possible, do you think, that these things have been sent to me by the members of some Secret Society in Ireland—under error, of course—mistaking me for someone else? They can’t be meant for me; I have never, in my whole life, been mixed up with any political agitation of any sort.”

  Mr. Dyer shook his head. “Members of secret societies generally make pretty sure of their ground before they send out missives of this kind,” he said. “I have never heard of such an error being made. I think, too, we mustn’t build any theories on the Irish postmark; the letters may have been posted in Cork for the whole and sole purpose of drawing off attention from some other quarter.”

  “Will you mind telling me a little about the loss of the necklace?” here said Loveday, bringing the conversation suddenly round from the daggers to the diamonds.

  “I think,” interposed Mr. Dyers, turning towards her, “that the episode of the drawn daggers—drawn in a double sense—should be treated entirely on its own merits, considered as a thing apart from the loss of the necklace. I am inclined to believe that when we have gone a little further into the matter we shall find that each circumstance belongs to a different group of facts. After all, it is possible that these daggers may have been sent by way of a joke—a rather foolish one, I admit—by some harum-scarum fellow bent on causing a sensation.”

  Mr. Hawke’s face brightened.

  “Ah! now, do you think so—really think so?” he ejaculated. “It would lift such a load from my mind if you could bring the thing home, in this way, to some practical joker. There are a lot of such fellows knocking about the world. Why, now I come to think of it, my nephew, Jack, who is a good deal with us just now, and is not quite so steady a fellow as I should like him to be, must have a good many such scamps among his acquaintances.”

  “A good many such scamps among his acquaintances,” echoed Loveday; “that certainly gives plausibility to Mr. Dyer’s supposition. At the same time, I think we are bound to look at the other side of the case, and admit the possibility of these daggers being sent in right-down sober earnest by persons concerned in the robbery, with the intention of intimidating you and preventing full investigation of the matter. If this be so, it will not signify which thread we take up and follow. If we find the sender of the daggers we are safe to come upon the thief; or, if we follow up and find the thief, the sender of the daggers will not be far off.”

  Mr. Hawke’s face fell once more.

  “It’s an uncomfortable position to be in,” he said slowly. “I suppose, whoever they are, they will do the regulation thing, and next time will send an instalment of three daggers, in which case I may consider myself a doomed man. It did not occur to me before, but I remember now that I did not receive the first dagger until after I had spoken very strongly to Mrs. Hawke, before the servants, about my wish to set the police to work. I told her I felt bound, in honour to Sir George, to do so, as the necklace had been lost under my roof.”


  “Did Mrs. Hawke object to your calling in the aid of the police?” asked Loveday.

  “Yes, most strongly. She entirely supported Miss Monroe in her wish to take no steps in the matter. Indeed, I should not have come round as I did last night to Mr. Dyer, if my wife had not been suddenly summoned from home by the serious illness of her sister. At least,” he corrected himself with a little attempt at self-assertion, “my coming to him might have been a little delayed. I hope you understand, Mr. Dyer; I do not mean to imply that I am not master in my own house.”

  “Oh, quite so, quite so,” responded Mr. Dyer. “Did Mrs. Hawke or Miss Monroe give any reasons for not wishing you to move in the matter?”

  “All told, I should think they gave about a hundred reasons—I can’t remember them all. For one thing, Miss Monroe said it might necessitate her appearing in the police courts, a thing she would not consent to do; and she certainly did not consider the necklace was worth the fuss I was making over it. And that necklace, sir, has been valued at over nine hundred pounds, and has come down to the young lady from her mother.”

  “And Mrs. Hawke?”

  “Mrs. Hawke supported Miss Monroe in her views in her presence. But privately to me afterwards, she gave other reasons for not wishing the police called in. Girls, she said, were always careless with their jewellery, she might have lost the necklace in Pekin, and never have brought it to England at all.”

  “Quite so,” said Mr. Dyer. “I think I understood you to say that no one had seen the necklace since Miss Monroe’s arrival in England. Also, I believe it was she who first discovered it to be missing?”

  “Yes. Sir George, when he wrote apprising me of his daughter’s visit, added a postscript to his letter, saying that his daughter was bringing her necklace with her and that he would feel greatly obliged if I would have it deposited with as little delay as possible at my bankers’, where it could be easily got at if required. I spoke to Miss Monroe about doing this two or three times, but she did not seem at all inclined to comply with her father’s wishes. Then my wife took the matter in hand—Mrs. Hawke, I must tell you, has a very firm, resolute manner—she told Miss Monroe plainly that she would not have the responsibility of those diamonds in the house, and insisted that there and then they should be sent off to the bankers. Upon this Miss Monroe went up to her room, and presently returned, saying that her necklace had disappeared. She herself, she said, had placed it in her jewel-case and the jewel-case in her wardrobe, when her boxes were unpacked. The jewel-case was in the wardrobe right enough, and no other article of jewellery appeared to have been disturbed, but the little padded niche in which the necklace had been deposited was empty. My wife and her maid went upstairs immediately, and searched every corner of the room, but, I’m sorry to say, without any result.”