The Penguin Book of Victorian Women in Crime

by Michael Sims

  She had been in the habit of meeting Victor Dubois constantly when she was at Norwood, at first with his father—her French master—and afterwards alone. He was handsome, young, romantic, and they fell madly in love. He was going away for some time to an appointment abroad, and he urged her to marry him secretly. She foolishly consented, and they parted at the church, she returning to her home and he going abroad the same evening.

  She received letters from him clandestinely from time to time. Then he wrote that his father had become insane and had to be removed to a lunatic asylum, and he was returning. He had only time to see to his father’s removal and return to his appointment. She did not hear from him for a long time, and then through a friend at Norwood who knew the Dubois and their relatives she made inquiries. Victor had returned to England, and met with an accident which had injured his head severely. He had become insane and had been taken to a lunatic asylum.

  Then the poor girl resolved to keep her marriage a secret for ever, especially as her father had returned from India, and she knew how bitterly it would distress him to learn that his daughter was the wife of a madman.

  On the night of the affair Maud was in the grounds by herself. She was strolling by the lake after dinner, when she heard a sound, and the dogs began to bark. Looking up, she saw Victor Dubois scaling the wall. Fearful that the dogs would bring Peters or some one on the scene, she ran to them and silenced them, and her husband leapt down and stood by her.

  “Come away!” she said, fearing the dogs might attack him or begin to bark again, and she led him round by the lake which was out of sight of the house and the lodge.

  She forgot for the moment in her excitement that he had been mad. At first he was gentle and kind. He told her he had been ill and in an asylum, but had recently been discharged cured. Directly he regained his liberty he set out in search of his wife, and ascertained from an old Norwood acquaintance that Miss Hargreaves was now living with her father at Orley Park, near Godalming.

  Maud begged him to go away quietly, and she would write to him. He tried to take her in his arms and kiss her, but instinctively she shrank from him. Instantly he became furious. Seized with a sudden mania, he grasped her by the throat. She struggled and freed herself.

  They were at the edge of the lake. Suddenly the maniac got her by the throat again, and hurled her down into the water. She fell in up to her waist, but managed to drag herself towards the edge, but before she emerged she fell senseless—fortunately with her head on the bank just out of the water.

  The murderer, probably thinking that she was dead, must have waded out into the deep water and drowned himself.

  Before she left Orley Park Dorcas advised the Colonel to let the inquest be held without any light being thrown on the affair by him. Only he was to take care that the police received information that a man answering the description of the suicide had recently been discharged from a lunatic asylum.

  We heard later that at the inquest an official from the asylum attended, and the local jury found that Victor Dubois, a lunatic, got into the grounds in some way, and drowned himself in the lake while temporarily insane. It was suggested by the coroner that probably Miss Hargreaves, who was too unwell to attend, had not seen the man, but might have been alarmed by the sound of his footsteps, and that this would account for her fainting away near the water’s edge. At any rate, the inquest ended in a satisfactory verdict, and the Colonel shortly afterwards took his daughter abroad with him on a Continental tour for the benefit of her health.

  But of this, of course, we knew nothing on the evening after the eventful discovery, when I met Dorcas once more beneath her own roof-tree.

  Paul was delighted to have his wife back again, and she devoted herself to him, and that evening had eyes and ears for no one else—not even for her faithful “assistant.”

  GRANT ALLEN

  (1848-99)

  “The Adventure of the Cantankerous Old Lady” is not the most mysterious story in this anthology, nor does its young heroine need great detective skills. Yet it’s difficult to imagine a more concise and entertaining portrait of the late nineteenth-century New Woman than this opening story in what would become Grant Allen’s 1899 book Miss Cayley’s Adventures. It first appeared in The Strand in March 1898.

  A recent graduate of Girton, which not four decades earlier had opened its doors as Cambridge University’s first residential college for women, Lois Cayley is twenty-one, bright, well-read, and—like a number of her colleagues in this anthology—suddenly impoverished. Her friends nickname her Brownie in reference to the tricky household spirits in the folklore of northern England and Scotland. Like them, Cayley is notorious for her inexplicable ways and talent for mischief.

  Grant Allen was a friend of everyone from Charles Darwin to Arthur Conan Doyle, who completed Hilda Wade after Allen dictated a draft of the last chapter from his deathbed. Wade’s motivation as a detective is to solve and revenge her father’s death; Lois Cayley is simply seeking adventure and a job. A versatile writer, Allen wrote scientific and philosophical books such as Evolutionist at Large, Story of the Plants, The Evolution of the Idea of God, and Physiological Aesthetics, but he also wrote many popular novels and story collections, including The White Man’s Foot and The Desire of the Eyes. Two of his novels appeared under female pen names. His time-travel novel, The British Barbarians, appeared in 1895, the same year as H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine. In his own time, the progressive Allen was notorious for a different novel from that productive year: The Woman Who Did, about a young woman who decides to openly have a child out of wedlock. However, he is remembered now mostly for one of the great characters of Victorian crime fiction, Colonel Clay, the ingenious con artist who robs the same millionaire twelve times in the clever and stylish 1897 story cycle An African Millionaire.

  Allen’s diverse interests reflected his cosmopolitan life. Born in Ontario to an Irish father and a Scottish-French-Canadian mother, raised partly in the United States, he attended college in England and France and then taught in Jamaica before settling in London to write. Allen was a friend of Herbert Spencer, the British polymath who, five years after Darwin’s Origin of Species, coined the term survival of the fittest; Allen wrote a perceptive critique of Spencer. His mind always seems to be playing over a topic, whether in his brief biography of Charles Darwin in the English Worthies series or in this tale of a high-spirited young woman testing herself in the world.

  THE ADVENTURE OF THE CANTANKEROUS OLD LADY

  On the day when I found myself with twopence in my pocket, I naturally made up my mind to go round the world.

  It was my stepfather’s death that drove me to it. I had never seen my stepfather. Indeed, I never even thought of him as anything more than Colonel Watts-Morgan. I owed him nothing, except my poverty. He married my dear mother when I was a girl at school in Switzerland; and he proceeded to spend her little fortune, left at her sole disposal by my father’s will, in paying his gambling debts. After that, he carried my dear mother off to Burma; and when he and the climate between them had succeeded in killing her, he made up for his appropriations at the cheapest rate by allowing me just enough to send me to Girton. So, when the Colonel died, in the year I was leaving college, I did not think it necessary to go into mourning for him. Especially as he chose the precise moment when my allowance was due, and bequeathed me nothing but his consolidated liabilities.

  “Of course you will teach,” said Elsie Petheridge, when I explained my affairs to her. “There is a good demand just now for high-school teachers.”

  I looked at her, aghast. “Teach! Elsie,” I cried. (I had come up to town to settle her in at her unfurnished lodgings.) “Did you say teach? That’s just like you dear good schoolmistresses! You go to Cambridge, and get examined till the heart and life have been examined out of you; then you say to yourselves at the end of it all, “Let me see; what am I good for now? I’m just about fit to go away and examine other people!” That’s what our Principal would c
all “a vicious circle”—if one could ever admit there was anything vicious at all about you, dear. No, Elsie, I do not propose to teach. Nature did not cut me out for a high-school teacher. I couldn’t swallow a poker if I tried for weeks. Pokers don’t agree with me. Between ourselves, I am a bit of a rebel.”

  “You are, Brownie,” she answered, pausing in her papering, with her sleeves rolled up—they called me “Brownie,” partly because of my dark complexion, but partly because they could never understand me. “We all knew that long ago.”

  I laid down the paste-brush and mused.

  “Do you remember, Elsie,” I said, staring hard at the paperboard, “when I first went to Girton, how all you girls wore your hair quite straight, in neat smooth coils, plaited up at the back about the size of a pancake; and how of a sudden I burst in upon you, like a tropical hurricane, and demoralised you; and how, after three days of me, some of the dear innocents began with awe to cut themselves artless fringes, while others went out in fear and trembling and surreptitiously purchased a pair of curling-tongs? I was a bomb-shell in your midst in those days; why, you yourself were almost afraid at first to speak to me.”

  “You see, you had a bicycle,” Elsie put in, smoothing the half-papered wall; “and in those days, of course, ladies didn’t bicycle. You must admit, Brownie, dear, it was a startling innovation. You terrified us so. And yet, after all, there isn’t much harm in you.”

  “I hope not,” I said devoutly. “I was before my time, that was all; at present, even a curate’s wife may blamelessly bicycle.”

  “But if you don’t teach,” Elsie went on, gazing at me with those wondering big blue eyes of hers, “whatever will you do, Brownie?” Her horizon was bounded by the scholastic circle.

  “I haven’t the faintest idea,” I answered, continuing to paste. “Only, as I can’t trespass upon your elegant hospitality for life, whatever I mean to do, I must begin doing this morning, when we’ve finished the papering. I couldn’t teach” (teaching, like mauve, is the refuge of the incompetent); “and I don’t, if possible, want to sell bonnets.”

  “As a milliner’s girl?” Elsie asked, with a face of red horror.

  “As a milliner’s girl; why not? ’Tis an honest calling. Earls’ daughters do it now. But you needn’t look so shocked. I tell you, just at present, I am not contemplating it.”

  “Then what do you contemplate?”

  I paused and reflected. “I am here in London,” I answered, gazing rapt at the ceiling; “London, whose streets are paved with gold—though it looks at first sight like muddy flagstones; London, the greatest and richest city in the world, where an adventurous soul ought surely to find some loophole for an adventure. (That piece is hung crooked, dear; we shall have to take it down again.) I devise a Plan, therefore. I submit myself to fate; or, if you prefer it, I leave my future in the hands of Providence. I shall stroll out this morning, as soon as I’ve ‘cleaned myself,’ and embrace the first stray enterprise that offers. Our Bagdad teems with enchanted carpets. Let one but float my way, and, hi, presto, I seize it. I go where glory or a modest competence waits me. I snatch at the first offer, the first hint of an opening.”

  Elsie stared at me, more aghast and more puzzled than ever. “But, how?” she asked. “Where? When? You are so strange! What will you do to find one?”

  “Put on my hat and walk out,” I answered. “Nothing could be simpler. This city bursts with enterprises and surprises. Strangers from east and west hurry through it in all directions. Omnibuses traverse it from end to end—even, I am told, to Islington and Putney; within, folk sit face to face who never saw one another before in their lives, and who may never see one another again, or, on the contrary, may pass the rest of their days together.”

  I had a lovely harangue all pat in my head, in much the same strain, on the infinite possibilities of entertaining angels unawares, in cabs, on the Underground, in the aërated bread shops; but Elsie’s widening eyes of horror pulled me up short like a hansom in Piccadilly when the inexorable upturned hand of the policeman checks it. “Oh, Brownie,” she cried, drawing back, “you don’t mean to tell me you’re going to ask the first young man you meet in an omnibus to marry you?”

  I shrieked with laughter, “Elsie,” I cried, kissing her dear yellow little head, “you are impayable. You never will learn what I mean. You don’t understand the language. No, no; I am going out, simply in search of adventure. What adventure may come, I have not at this moment the faintest conception. The fun lies in the search, the uncertainty, the toss-up of it. What is the good of being penniless—with the trifling exception of twopence—unless you are prepared to accept your position in the spirit of a masked ball at Covent Garden?”

  “I have never been to one,” Elsie put in.

  “Gracious heavens, neither have I! What on earth do you take me for? But I mean to see where fate will lead me.”

  “I may go with you?” Elsie pleaded.

  “Certainly not, my child,” I answered—she was three years older than I, so I had the right to patronise her. “That would spoil all. Your dear little face would be quite enough to scare away a timid adventure.” She knew what I meant. It was gentle and pensive, but it lacked initiative.

  So, when we had finished that wall, I popped on my best hat, and popped out by myself into Kensington Gardens.

  I am told I ought to have been terribly alarmed at the straits in which I found myself—a girl of twenty-one, alone in the world, and only twopence short of penniless, without a friend to protect, a relation to counsel her. (I don’t count Aunt Susan, who lurked in ladylike indigence at Blackheath, and whose counsel, like her tracts, was given away too profusely to everybody to allow of one’s placing any very high value upon it.) But, as a matter of fact, I must admit I was not in the least alarmed. Nature had endowed me with a profusion of crisp black hair, and plenty of high spirits. If my eyes had been like Elsie’s—that liquid blue which looks out upon life with mingled pity and amazement—I might have felt as a girl ought to feel under such conditions; but having large dark eyes, with a bit of a twinkle in them, and being as well able to pilot a bicycle as any girl of my acquaintance, I have inherited or acquired an outlook on the world which distinctly leans rather towards cheeriness than despondency. I croak with difficulty. So I accepted my plight as an amusing experience, affording full scope for the congenial exercise of courage and ingenuity.

  How boundless are the opportunities of Kensington Gardens—the Round Pond, the winding Serpentine, the mysterious seclusion of the Dutch brick Palace! Genii swarm there. One jostles possibilities. It is a land of romance, bounded on the north by the Abyss of Bayswater, and on the south by the Amphitheatre of the Albert Hall. But for a centre of adventure I choose the Long Walk; it beckoned me somewhat as the North-West Passage beckoned my seafaring ancestors—the buccaneering mariners of Elizabethan Devon. I sat down on a chair at the foot of an old elm with a poetic hollow, prosaically filled by a utilitarian plate of galvanised iron. Two ancient ladies were seated on the other side already—very grand-looking dames, with the haughty and exclusive ugliness of the English aristocracy in its later stages. For frank hideousness, commend me to the noble dowager. They were talking confidentially as I sat down; the trifling episode of my approach did not suffice to stem the full stream of their conversation. The great ignore the intrusion of their inferiors.

  “Yes, it’s a terrible nuisance,” the eldest and ugliest of the two observed—she was a high-born lady, with a distinctly cantankerous cast of countenance. She had a Roman nose, and her skin was wrinkled like a wilted apple; she wore coffee-coloured point-lace in her bonnet, with a complexion to match. “But what could I do, my dear? I simply couldn’t put up with such insolence. So I looked her straight back in the face—oh, she quailed, I can tell you; and I said to her, in my iciest voice—you know how icy I can be when occasion demands it”—the second old lady nodded an ungrudging assent, as if perfectly prepared to admit her friend’s rare gift of iciness�
�“I said to her, ‘Célestine, you can take your month’s wages, and half an hour to get out of this house.’ And she dropped me a deep reverence, and she answered: “Oui, madame; merci beaucoup, madame; je ne desire pas mieux, madame.” And out she flounced. So there was the end of it.”

  “Still, you go to Schlangenbad on Monday?”

  “That’s the point. On Monday. If it weren’t for the journey, I should have been glad enough to be rid of the minx. I’m glad as it is, indeed; for a more insolent, upstanding, independent, answer-you-back-again young woman, with a sneer of her own, I never saw, Amelia—but I must get to Schlangenbad. Now, there the difficulty comes in. On the one hand, if I engage a maid in London, I have the choice of two evils. Either I must take a trapesing English girl—and I know by experience that an English girl on the Continent is a vast deal worse than no maid at all: you have to wait upon her, instead of her waiting upon you; she gets seasick on the crossing, and when she reaches France or Germany, she hates the meals, and she detests the hotel servants, and she can’t speak the language, so that she’s always calling you in to interpret for her in her private differences with the fille-de-chambre and the landlord; or else I must pick up a French maid in London, and I know equally by experience that the French maids one engages in London are invariably dishonest—more dishonest than the rest even; they’ve come here because they have no character to speak of elsewhere, and they think you aren’t likely to write and enquire of their last mistress in Toulouse or St. Petersburg. Then, again, on the other hand, I can’t wait to get a Gretchen, an unsophisticated little Gretchen of the Taunus at Schlangenbad—I suppose there are unsophisticated girls in Germany still—made in Germany—they don’t make ’em any longer in England, I’m sure—like everything else, the trade in rustic innocence has been driven from the country. I can’t wait to get a Gretchen, as I should like to do, of course, because I simply daren’t undertake to cross the Channel alone and go all that long journey by Ostend or Calais, Brussels and Cologne, to Schlangenbad.”