by Mary Braddon
His visit was but a flying one. The night train was to take him across country to Liverpool, whence he was to start the following day for South America. This was kept, however, a profound secret from the crowd, which might else have insisted on giving him a second ovation. It was not very quickly dispersed, this enthusiastic throng. It lingered for a long time under the windows of the hotel. It drank a great deal of bottled ale and London porter in the bar round the corner by the stable-yard; and it steadfastly refused to go away until it had had Richard out upon the balcony several times, and had given him a great many more tumultuous greetings. When it had quite exhausted Richard (our hero looking pale from over-excitement) it took to Mr. Darley as vice-hero, and would have carried him round the town with one of the bands of music, had he not prudently declined that offer. It was so bent on doing something, that at last, when it did consent to go away, it went into the Marketplace and had a fight—not from any pugilistic or vindictive feeling, but from the simple necessity of finishing the evening somehow.
There is no possibility of sitting down to dinner till after dark. But at last the shutters are closed and the curtains are drawn by the obsequious waiters; the dinner-table is spread with glittering plate and snowy linen; the landlord himself brings in the soup and uncorks the sherry, and the little party draws round the social board. Why should we break in upon that happy group? With the wife he loves, the mother whose devotion has survived every trial, the friend whose aid has brought about his restoration to freedom and society, with ample wealth wherefrom to reward all who have served him in his adversity, what more has Richard to wish for?
A close carriage conveys the little party to the station; and by the twelve o’clock train they leave Slopperton, some of them perhaps never to visit it again.
The next day a much larger party is assembled on board the Oronoko, a vessel lying off Liverpool, and about to sail for South America. Richard is there, his wife and mother still by his side; and there are several others whom we know grouped about the deck. Mr. Peters is there. He has come to bid farewell to the young man in whose fortunes and misfortunes he has taken so warm and unfailing an interest. He is a man of independent property now, thanks to Richard, who thinks the hundred-a-year settled on him a very small reward for his devotion—but he is very melancholy at parting with the master he has so loved.
“I think, sir,” he says on his fingers, “I shall marry Kuppins, and give my mind to the education of the ‘fondling.’ He’ll be a great man, sir, if he lives; for his heart, boy as he is, is all in his profession. Would you believe it, sir, that child bellowed for three mortal hours because his father committed suicide, and disappointed the boy of seein’ him hung? That’s what I calls a love of business, and no mistake.”
On the other side of the deck there is a little group which Richard presently joins. A lady and gentleman and a little boy are standing there; and, at a short distance from them, a grave-looking man with dark-blue spectacles, and a servant—a Lascar.
There is a peculiar style about the gentleman, on whose arm the lady leans, that bespeaks him to the most casual observer to be a military man, in spite of his plain dress and loose greatcoat. And the lady on his arm, that dark classic face, is not one to be easily forgotten. It is Valerie de Cevennes, who leans on the arm of her first and beloved husband, Gaston de Lancy. If I have said little of this meeting—of this restoration of the only man she ever loved, which has been to her as a resurrection of the dead—it is because there are some joys which, from their very intensity, are too painful and too sacred for many words. He was restored to her. She had never murdered him. The potion given her by Blurosset was a very powerful opiate, which had produced a sleep resembling death in all its outward symptoms. Through the influence of the chemist the report of the death was spread abroad. The truth, except to Gaston’s most devoted friends, had never been revealed. But the blow had been too much for him; and when he was told by whom his death had been attempted, he fell into a fever, which lasted for many months, during which period his reason was entirely lost, and from which he was only rescued by the devotion of the chemist—a devotion on Blurosset’s part which, perhaps, had proceeded as much from love of the science he studied as of the man he saved. Recovering at last, Gaston de Lancy found that the glorious voice which had been his fortune was entirely gone. What was there for him to do? He enlisted in the East India Company’s6 service; rose through the Sikh campaign7 with a rapidity which astonished the bravest of his compeers. There was a romance about his story that made him a hero in his regiment. He was known to have plenty of money—to have had no earthly reason for enlisting; but he told them he would rise, as his father had done before him, in the wars of the Empire, by merit alone, and he had kept his word. The French ensign, the lieutenant, the captain—in each rising grade he had been alike beloved, alike admired, as a shining example of reckless courage and military genius.
The arrest of the soi-disant8 Count de Marolles had brought Richard Marwood and Gaston de Lancy into contact. Both sufferers from the consummate perfidy of one man, they became acquainted, and, ere long, friends. Some part of Gaston’s story was told to Richard and his young wife, Isabella; but it is needless to say, that the dark past in which Valerie was concerned remained a secret in the breast of her husband, of Laurent Blurosset, and herself. The father clasped his son to his heart, and opened his arms to receive the wife whom he had pardoned long ago, and whose years of terrible agony had atoned for the wildly-attempted crime of her youth.
On Richard and Gaston becoming fast friends, it had been agreed between them that Richard should join De Lancy and his wife in South America; where, far from the scenes which association had made painful to both, they might commence a new existence. Valerie, once more mistress of that immense fortune of which De Marolles had so long had the command, was enabled to bestow it on the husband of her choice. The bank was closed in a manner satisfactory to all whose interests had been connected with it. The cashier, who was no other than the lively gentleman who had assisted in De Marolles’s attempted escape, was arrested on a charge of embezzlement, and made to disgorge the money he had abstracted.
The Marquis de Cevennes elevated his delicately-arched eyebrows on reading an abridged account of the trial of his son, and his subsequent suicide; but the elegant Parisian did not go into mourning for this unfortunate scion of his aristocratic house; and indeed, it is doubtful if five minutes after he had thrown aside the journal he had any sensation whatever about the painful circumstances therein related. He expressed the same gentlemanly surprise upon being informed of the marriage of his niece with Captain Lansdown, late of the East India Company’s service, and of her approaching departure with her husband for her South American estates. He sent her his blessing and a breakfast-service; with the portraits of Louis the Well-beloved, Madame du Barry,9 Choiseul,10 and D’Aiguillon,11 painted on the cups, in oval medallions, on a background of turquoise, packed in a casket of buhl lined with white velvet; and, I dare say, he dismissed his niece and her troubles from his recollection quite as easily as he despatched this elegant present to the railway which was to convey it to its destination.
The bell rings; the friends of the passengers drop down the side of the vessel into the little Liverpool steamer. There are Mr. Peters and Gus Darley waving their hats in the distance. Farewell, old and faithful friends, farewell; but surely not for ever. Isabella sinks sobbing on her husband’s shoulder. Valerie looks with those deep unfathomable eyes out towards the blue horizon-line that bounds the far-away to which they go.
“There, Gaston, we shall forget——”
“Never your long sufferings, my Valerie,” he murmurs, as he presses the little hand resting on his arm; “those shall never be forgotten.”
“And the horror of that dreadful night, Gaston——”
“Was the madness of a love which thought itself wronged, Valerie; we can forgive every wrong which springs from the depth of such a love.”
Sprea
d thy white wings, oh, ship! The shadows melt away into that purple distance. I see in that far South two happy homes; glistening white-walled villas, half buried in the luxuriant verdure of that lovely climate. I hear the voices of the children in the dark orange-groves, where the scented blossoms fall into the marble basin of the fountain. I see Richard reclining in an easy-chair, under the veranda, half hidden by the trailing jasmines that shroud it from the evening sunshine, smoking the long cherry-stemmed pipe which his wife has filled for him. Gaston paces, with his sharp military step, up and down the terrace at their feet, stopping as he passes by to lay a caressing hand on the dark curls of the son he loves. And Valerie—she leans against the slender pillar of the porch, round which the scented yellow roses are twined, and watches, with earnest eyes, the husband of her earliest choice. Oh, happy shadows! Few in this work-a-day world so fortunate as you who win in your prime of life the fulfilment of the dear dream of your youth!
AFTERWORD
Chris Willis
The Trail of the Serpent is probably the first British detective novel. When Mary Elizabeth Braddon wrote it in 1860, detective fiction barely existed. There were many novels and stage melodramas about crime, but these usually focused on the exploits of the criminal rather than the process of detection.1 In America, Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” (1842), “The Gold Bug” (1843), and “The Purloined Letter” (1845) laid down many of the conventions of the detective genre, but few British writers followed Poe’s example. Dickens’s Bleak House (1853) included a police detective, Inspector Bucket, who solves a murder, but this is a minor part of a complex story.2 Wilkie Collins’s short story “The Diary of Anne Rodway” (1859) featured English fiction’s first female detective—a milliner who investigates the death of her friend and brings the killer to justice. But there were no detective novels as such. The nearest thing was the semiautobiographical “casebook” genre, such as the bestselling fictionalized memoirs of French police chief Eugène Vidocq, published in 1828–29.3 Vidocq’s work was an influence on Poe4 as well as on Braddon, who mentions him in The Trail of the Serpent (p. 364). English equivalents included Scenes in the Life of a Bow Street Runner (1827) by “Richmond” and Recollections of a Detective Police Officer (c. 1856) by “Waters” (a pseudonym of journalist William Russell), both of which recounted cases investigated by official detectives.
Braddon’s achievement was to take the conventions of popular novels, casebooks, and stage melodrama and fuse them into a detective novel. Working-class policeman Peters has strong similarities with the hard-working detectives of the casebooks. Jabez North was modeled on the type of criminal featured in melodrama—an evil mastermind with no redeeming features. The plot of The Trail of the Serpent has strong similarities with popular melodramas such as Charles Reade’s adaptation of the French drama The Courier of Lyons, which Braddon mentions on p. 394. In both texts, a man is wrongly convicted of murder, and his friends work to clear him. This has been one of the staple plots of detective fiction ever since. In The Trail of the Serpent, this plot has two parallel threads: North’s criminal career and Peters’s detective work. As North rises higher in the world, the pursuit intensifies and the reader becomes aware that Peters will inevitably track him down. Unlike many later detective stories, The Trail of the Serpent is not so much a whodunnit as a “howdunnit.” The murderer’s identity is clear from the start. The interest lies in the process of detection: How will enough evidence be found to convince the police to bring North to justice?
The growth of detective fiction in the U.K. has strong links with the development of the detective police force. Until the 1840s, there were no police detectives in Britain. The Detective Branch of London’s Metropolitan Police was established on August 15, 1842. This was a plainclothes force of permanent official police detectives, based at Scotland Yard and headed by Inspector Nicholas Pearce. For many years the Metropolitan Police remained the only force with a specialist detective branch, hence the custom of “calling in Scotland Yard” to investigate murders that baffled the local police. After a series of high-profile mid-century murder cases, the public gradually became more interested in the work of the detectives, creating a market for detective fiction.
When The Trail of the Serpent was released in book form in 1861, it became a bestseller, and other authors soon realized that detective fiction was a highly marketable commodity. Twentieth-century critic R. F. Stewart credits “Miss Braddon and her monstrous regiment of imitators” with inventing a genre in which crime is “at the heart of a story.”5 The most successful of these novels was Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone. Like The Trail of the Serpent, it features a police detective and is centered on a crime. Collins borrowed one of Braddon’s cleverest character inventions—the juvenile detective. Braddon’s “Sloshy” is a forerunner of The Moonstone’s boy detective “Gooseberry,” and both can be seen as influences on Conan Doyle, who famously equipped Holmes with a whole set of juvenile colleagues known as the “Baker Street Irregulars” in The Sign of Four (1890). By the mid-1860s, the crime fiction genre was becoming well established, largely thanks to Braddon and Collins. In 1864, the Westminster Review commented that “If it be good to stimulate our predatory instincts … while we trace the dodgings and doublings of an accomplished scoundrel matched with an adroit detective, then let all praise be given to Miss Braddon.”6
However, the term “detective fiction” was not used until the 1880s.7 Novels such as Braddon’s and Collins’s were usually described as “sensation novels.” Not all of these involved detection, although their plots often centered on unsolved crimes. Struggling to find a suitable term to describe Braddon’s crime fiction, the Eclectic Review of 1868 described Braddon’s novels as “Works answering all the purposes of lengthened Police Reports.”8 In 1862, Braddon’s contemporary, the novelist Mrs. Oliphant, bemoaned the introduction of a detective element into fiction:
“We have already had specimens, as many as are desirable, of what the detective policeman can do for the enlivenment of literature; and it is into the hands of the literary detective that this school of story-telling must fall at last. He is not a collaborator whom we welcome with any pleasure into the republic of letters. His appearance is neither favourable to taste nor morals.”9
But the “literary detective” was here to stay. Readers of twentieth-century detective fiction will find many familiar elements in The Trail of the Serpent. North builds card houses as a form of stress relief, as does Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot.10 The poisoned book mentioned on p. 152 foreshadows a similar device in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (1983). North hides in a coffin as does the hero of Michael Crichton’s Victorian pastiche The Great Train Robbery (1975). Peters’s convincing disguise as an Irish laborer and Dick’s disguise as a milkman foreshadow Sherlock Holmes’s use of disguise. North plants clues on a corpse to ensure that it will be wrongly identified, a device later used by Agatha Christie in Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? (1933) and Dorothy L. Sayers in Whose Body? (1923). Both Christie and Sayers read Braddon. Sayers mentions her in her introduction to The Moonstone and Christie’s short story “Greenshaw’s Folly” features an old woman hiding her will in a copy of Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, which, she acidly comments, is far more readable than many modern novels.
One of the greatest strengths of The Trail of the Serpent is the figure of the detective. Peters is a rare creation. Even nowadays, few novels feature detectives with physical disabilities.11 In Peters, Braddon gives what is arguably one of the most positive portrayals of a disabled person in Victorian fiction. Peters is unable to speak because of a childhood illness but, paradoxically, this supposed disability gives him an extra level of ability. His use of sign language is vital to the plot, enabling him to communicate secretly with his colleagues, and to “speak” to Richard Marwood in court without the judge realizing what is going on. His enforced silence makes him all the more effective at sur
veillance because people wrongly assume that he is deaf, and speak unguardedly in front of him. A similar device was used by a later crime writer, Richard Marsh (who also wrote as Bernard Heldmann), in Judith Lee (1912). The eponymous heroine is a teacher of deaf children, who solves several crimes purely because of her ability to lip-read.
Braddon’s fiction features an interesting range of detectives. In The Black Band (1861–62) police detectives and a disreputable-looking lawyer’s clerk combine to defeat the machinations of a criminal gang. In this book, Braddon refers to police work as “that wonderful science which tracks the dark pathway of crime with such marvellous success, that we come at last to look upon the detective officer as the magician of modern life.”12 Eleanor’s Victory (1863) features one of fiction’s first (and least efficient) female detectives. Eleanor Vane haphazardly blunders her way from clue to clue, losing vital evidence on the way, and becoming so obsessed with the suspect that her long-suffering husband begins to wonder whether she is having an affair with him. A more efficient female detective is Margaret Wilmot, heroine of Henry Dunbar (1864), who proves herself more efficient than a professional male detective investigating the same crime. In the short story “George Caulfield’s Journey” (1879), a vicar turns detective when his curate is arrested for murder. To his own surprise, the vicar turns out to be what another character describes as “a genius in the art of hunting a criminal.”13 Wyllard’s Weird (1888) is a railway mystery in which a woman is killed by being thrown from a moving train. Rough Justice (1898) and His Darling Sin (1899) are detective novels featuring retired police detective John Faunce.
Braddon was at her best when writing about crime. Henry James compared her understanding of the criminal mind and the workings of conscience to that of Shakespeare, most notably Macbeth, commenting that in her and Wilkie Collins’s fiction “an admirable organization of police detectives” had replaced the “avenging deity” of Fate. He felt that the only thing which marred her work was commercialism: she sought “at any hazard to make a hit, to catch the public ear.”14 Braddon herself was well aware of this, and understood the commercial appeal of crime fiction. Fifty years after writing The Trail of the Serpent, she wrote that:
