The Bachelor Girl's Guide to Murder

by Rachel McMillan

  Ray moved to 14-F. They were shoulder to shoulder, face to face. He inched closer and their noses just touched.

  “Hello,” Jem whispered.

  “You’re awfully, awfully beautiful. Sei molto bella.”

  Jem wasn’t sure she needed to learn Italian. If he kept saying those things in that voice, she doubted she’d need a translation.

  The funny thing about happily-ever-after moments, Jem thought, is that they never aligned with what one’s mind had concocted in years of dream-weaving. But then the heart catches up with the head, urges one to hold on, slow down, and make it last as long as possible.

  Ray kissed her. He kissed away her white picket fences and matching dishes. He kissed away the cello music she had selected for the wedding ceremony. All she wanted was to be near him and hear every thought that entered his head before he even had time to scrawl it into his journal, even before he had the opportunity to filter it into English.

  “You have to open your lips,” he said, delightfully frustrated. “I can’t work with this.”

  She squeaked. “How am I already bad at this?”

  “It’s still a big improvement from last time,” he said, his breathing uneven on her cheek. “And you’re just learning.”

  “You’re going to teach me?”

  He let his eyes brush over her face as if painting a picture. “Something like that.”

  “I wore you down,” she said triumphantly as she paused to catch her breath.

  “To absolutely nothing.”

  “But it was worth it, wouldn’t you say?”

  He wasn’t sure. But change coursed through him, starting to take the stubbornness and fear in stride, replacing both with a conviction that obliterated the differences between them. He knew he was being selfish, even as his mind thought ahead to the million ways he would try to change the world for her. And he knew she deserved better. “Yes it was worth it,” he finally said before leaning in for another kiss.

  She opened her lips under his for just a moment, but then she pulled back, her eyes bright as she looked at him. “I suppose you know what this means.”

  “What does this mean?” he asked cautiously.

  “The first man I kiss is the man I will marry, remember?” She cocked her eyebrow, and a slight flush colored her cheeks. “And I’ve kissed you twice.”

  Ray tried to swallow the clammy feeling in his throat. “The first one doesn’t count,” he said slowly.

  “But this one does.”

  “Jemima Watts.” He stared into her face, which was all starlight and expectation. “Are you asking a man to marry you?”

  “Yes,” she said brazenly. “I am asking you to marry me.”

  “Then yes,” he said before he could run it through his mind or even blink. He patted his pocket. “I don’t have a ring.”

  “I suppose it isn’t customary when the woman proposes to you.”

  He pulled out his father’s watch. The only possession that mattered to him. He pressed it into her hand. Like a token or a promise. A past and a future, all ticking along underneath battered bronze and worn edges and rusty chain.

  Then he turned her so she could see the whole of the theatre in flowers, painted pastorals, and pastels. “I told you your first real kiss should be in a garden.”

  EPILOGUE

  Merinda Herringford turned from side to side in front of the mirror, admiring her new bobbed curls. All the girls in Paris were wearing it this way, she had read. It was the Bohemian style. She rocked back and forth on her heels, then plopped on the settee. Cracker jacks, the house was quiet. She and Jem had settled so nicely into the clockwork of their lives, and now the woman had the misfortune to be getting married! Merinda could just as easily think of separating from Jem as she could of sawing off her right hand.

  She turned to the empty chair in the sitting room and said again what she’d said when Jem had last sat in it. “We haven’t finished yet, Jem! We jumped one hurdle. But the Morality Squad is as insufferable as ever, and as long as Tertius Monague is in office, women and immigrants will be exploited the city over.”

  Merinda paused, and in her mind she could see and hear Jem’s reply. “We never anticipated we could fix it with one sweeping gesture. It will take more than just us.”

  “You’ll be too distracted,” Merinda had whined. “You’ll be consumed with laundry and that man and babies!” It couldn’t be over… it simply couldn’t be.

  “Cabbagetown isn’t the other side of the world,” Jem had assured her.

  But Merinda felt—then and now—that it was indeed a world away. “Someday,” she told the empty chair, “we will be back in the game.”

  Mrs. Malone stood in the doorway. “I hesitate to interrupt your… conversation,” she said, “but Jasper Forth is here.”

  Merinda flounced her curls. “Very well. Show him in.”

  Jasper came into the parlor and Mrs. Malone went for tea and scones.

  “My purgatory has ended!” Jasper was happy.

  “Whatever do you mean?” Merinda said, sitting and indicating that he should do the same.

  Jasper wore a broad-striped casual jacket, checkered trousers, and two-toned shoes. He sat on the sofa and put his hat in his lap. “As of Monday, I can return to my post.”

  “Detective Constable Jasper Forth once more!” she said. “Congratulations!”

  “Thank you.”

  “And now you will be Toronto’s most effective detective, of course, seeing as you are backed by the deductive prowess of Herringford and Watts.”

  “Don’t you mean Herringford and DeLuca?” Jasper asked pointedly.

  “Herringford and Watts. I’ve already had the signs made. Besides, our clientele expects the same names they see in the Hog.”

  He scoffed again. “And how will that play out, Merinda? You’re going to rouse Jem at all hours—a respectable married woman—to trail after you in trousers?”

  “Respectable married woman?” Merinda laughed. “Listen to you.”

  “Life will change, Merinda. You don’t want to be left behind.”

  She ignored him, opting for a different thread of conversation. “I really ought to thank you,” she said.

  “To thank me?” Jasper repeated, astonished.

  “Yes,” she said, her eyes on her hands. “I know it would have been easy for you to take what we learned at the Danforth racetrack and try and get your job back. But you maintained our confidentiality, and that allowed Herringford and Watts to solve our first major crime.”

  Jasper cleared his throat. “Yes, well. There are more important things than mysteries.” He reached into his coat pocket and extracted an envelope. “But I didn’t come here to be thanked. I found something that might be of interest to you.”

  He handed over the envelope, and Merinda removed and unfolded a slip of paper: No great idea in its beginning can ever be within the law. How can it be within the law? The law is stationary. The law is fixed. The law is a chain that binds us all.

  “Interesting,” she said. “Though odd, coming from an officer of the law.”

  “It’s a quotation from Emma Goldman. The radical anarchist.”

  “Emma Goldman,” Merinda repeated, looking even more interested.

  “She’ll be in Toronto next month. She’s been causing quite a stir in the States. Keeps getting arrested, locked up, and tossed over here where she’s safe. She was here several years ago, raising money for some society of hers.”

  “And you thought I’d be likely to go hear her speak?” Merinda asked.

  “Emma Goldman never appears anywhere without both bringing and summoning a corps of anarchists.” He looked at her appreciatively. “Merinda Herringford, I predict we are soon to have a bit of a revolution on our hands.”

  Merinda clapped. “Do you really think so, Jasper? Do you really?”

  “I don’t think you should be so happy about it.”

  “Cracker jacks!” Merinda said merrily. “A radical revolutio
n! Imagine.” She stretched her legs in front of the fire and crossed them at the ankles. “Demonstrations in the streets. The city on fire!” She threw a glance in the direction of the circled names on her blackboard, her mind churning with ideas for reform. “As I told you, Jasper, the adventure is only just beginning.”

  “It is?”

  Merinda sprang from her chair, took his face in her hands, and kissed him hard on the cheek.

  Jasper sputtered and blinked and then leaned toward her hopefully.

  She was so excited she kissed his other cheek. “It is, Jasper! It is!”

  Dear Jemima,

  Your mother and I learned recently of your marriage to an immigrant Papist.

  If we hadn’t already cut you off completely, we would be doing so now.

  We can merely speculate what we possibly did to inspire such wayward behavior in our only daughter.

  We will pray for you and hope that you spare us a thought now and then.

  In their new semi-detached house in Cabbagetown, Jem kept the telegram near. During the daylight she kept it in her pocket. At night, it was in her memory as she squeezed her eyes shut in the starlight-spattered room.

  One night, as moonlight latticed the curtains she had sewn and hung in their small bedroom, she heard a persistent tapping and jolted awake.

  She didn’t notice that Ray, too, was awake: black eyes staring above him, mind obsessed with a slight crack in the ceiling.

  While Ray feigned sleep, Jem folded her legs over the side of the bed, crept to the window, and through the curtain made out a figure under the starlight.

  It was Merinda, of course, waving hard and fast for her to hurry up.

  Jem tiptoed to the wardrobe and pulled out trousers and a cotton shirt that she slid over her nightgown, its folds soon tucked in and safely constricted by a belt she pulled tight. She stepped into her scuffed, rubber-soled shoes. She twisted her hair into a braid, wondering how she would hide it now that she didn’t have the costume trunk and its variety of headgear. Then she remembered she didn’t need it—she had something better.

  She slipped quietly to the mismatched table adjacent her bed where a worn old bowler sat with a frayed rim. Ray wouldn’t miss it before tomorrow.

  She didn’t see his eyes flutter open to watch her shadow tiptoe out. Nor did she hear him when he rose a moment later to shut the door behind her.

  “A missing pocket-watch,” Ray heard through the slightly ajar window. Merinda was explaining the specifics of the case.

  “A pocket watch!” Jem laughed. “You woke me up for a pocket watch?”

  And then they set off into the night.

  Toronto was cloaked in stillness. An owl hooted and a raccoon’s fleeting footfall skittered across their path. A blonde girl in a bowler hat leaned into her companion and spun an excited tale of radical revolutionaries and a city that was their own, even as they wound its dark street.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  There are no factual figures in The Bachelor Girl’s Guide to Murder—even M.C. Wheaton and Dorothea Fairfax are figments of my imagination—and I took several historical liberties in creating Jem and Merinda’s world.

  While the Globe and Mail and the Tely were daily papers in Toronto, the only accurate thing about their representation here are their names. The Hogtown Herald is a complete fiction.

  The King Edward Hotel and St. James Cathedral are just some of the real places I used, though their owners and the events therein are completely fictional. Perhaps the most imaginative liberty was taken with the Elgin and Winter Garden Theatres, which didn’t open until 1913 and whose proprietor, Frederick Loewe, was absolutely not a criminal. If you ever have the opportunity to visit, you will see why I wanted to make it a part of my fictional landscape.

  My favorite historical fiction inspires my interest in a period and setting through capturing an essence of the long-ago world. Thus, I did try to capture the essence that was the transient city of Toronto in the early 1900s. It saw a remarkable wave of immigrants crossing over the Bridge of Sighs, many scraping by in St. John’s Ward and many the victims of poor working conditions, flophouses, and unfair wages.

  The Morality Squad is also a figment of my imagination, although women’s courts and arrests for female incorrigibility are a sadly true part of Toronto’s history. The Ontario Female Refuge’s Act of 1897 made sure that anyone at all could charge a woman aged sixteen to thirty-five with charges of idleness, dissolution, and incorrigibility. Prison stints and incarceration at the notorious Mercer Reformatory in Toronto were believed to be the cure for everything from pickpocketing to familial estrangement and suspected immorality.

  Social reform and political change were very much hot topics—as they continue to be today. Toronto remains one of the most multicultural cities in the world.

  The book Toronto’s Girl Problem: The Perils and Pleasures of the City, by Carolyn Strange, sheds some light on the prejudice awaiting single working women moving to the city in the Edwardian age. Bachelor Girl, by Besty Israel, provided an interesting look at the history of unmarried women throughout history. If you would like to learn more about some of the books and websites I consulted (and take a glimpse at some of the many wonderful photographs preserved from Edwardian Toronto), please visit my website at www.a-fair-substitute-for-heaven.blogspot.com. The Toronto Reference Library, with their amazing archives and materials (and their attached Balzac’s coffee location), were influential in the creation of this world.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Rachel McMillan is a keen history enthusiast and a lifelong bibliophile. When not writing or reading, she can most often be found drinking tea and watching British miniseries. Rachel lives in bustling Toronto, where she works in educational publishing and pursues her passion for art, literature, music, and theater.

  OTHER BOOKS BY RACHEL MCMILLAN

  A Singular and Whimsical Problem

  Christmas, 1910. Merinda Herringford and Jem Watts would be enjoying the season a lot more if they weren’t forced to do their own laundry and cooking. Just as they are adapting to their trusty housekeeper’s ill-timed vacation, they are confronted by the strangest mystery they’ve encountered since they started their private investigation firm.

  In this bonus e-only novella, what begins as the search for a missing cat leads to a rabble-rousing suffragette and the disappearance of several young women from St. Jerome’s Reformatory for Incorrigible Females. From the women’s courts of City Hall to Toronto’s seedy docks and into the cold heart of the underground shipping industry, this will be the most exciting Christmas the girls have had yet…if they can stay alive long enough to enjoy it.

  A Lesson in Love and Murder

  The legacy of literary icon Sherlock Holmes is alive and well in 1912 Canada, where best friends Merinda Herringford and Jem Watts continue to develop their skills as consulting detectives.

  The city of Toronto has been thrown into upheaval by the arrival of radical anarchist Emma Goldman. Amid this political chaos, Benny Citrone of the Royal North-West Mounted Police arrives at Merinda and Jem’s flat, requesting assistance in locating his runaway cousin—a man with a deadly talent.

  While Merinda eagerly accepts the case, she finds herself constantly butting heads—and hearts—with Benny. Meanwhile, Jem has her own hands full with a husband who is distracted by his sister’s problems but still determined to keep Jem out of harm’s way.

  As Merinda and Jem close in on the danger they’ve tracked from Toronto to Chicago, will they also be able to resolve the troubles threatening their future happiness before it’s too late?

  Independence, love, and lives are at stake in A Lesson in Love and Murder, the gripping second installment of the Herringford and Watts Mysteries series.