A Tale of Two Murders Read online

  A Tale of Two Murders

  HEATHER REDMOND

  KENSINGTON BOOKS

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Cast of Characters

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Acknowledgments

  BOOK CLUB READING GUIDE for A Tale of Two Murders

  KENSINGTON BOOKS are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  119 West 40th Street

  New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2018 by Heather Redmond

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  Kensington and the K logo Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018932842

  ISBN: 978-1-4967-1715-3

  eISBN-13: 978-1-4967-1718-4

  eISBN-10: 1-4967-1718-X

  For Andy

  Cast of Characters

  Charles Dickens* A journalist

  Kate Hogarth* The daughter of George Hogarth, Charles’s editor at the Evening Chronicle

  Fred Dickens* Charles’s younger brother and roommate

  Mr. George Hogarth* Charles’s editor at the newspaper, and Kate’s father

  Mrs. Georgina

  Hogarth* Kate’s mother

  Mary Hogarth* Kate’s younger sister

  William Aga Charles’s fellow journalist at the Evening Chronicle

  Lady Lugoson Baroness and mother of the victim

  Lord Theodore

  Lugoson Baron and brother of the victim

  The late Lord Lugoson Deceased

  Christiana Lugoson The victim

  Marie Rueff Deceased. Another victim?

  Angela Acton Lady Lugoson’s sister, an actress

  Percy Chalke Angela’s partner, an actor

  Julie Saville A young actress and assistant to Miss Acton

  Mrs. Ellen Carley Whig hostess and neighbor of the Lugoson family

  Mr. Eustace Carley Member of Parliament, married to Ellen Carley

  Beatrice Carley Christiana’s best friend, and daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Carley

  Bertram Carley A handsome young man, son of the Carleys

  Lady Holland* A famed hostess

  Mrs. Marian Decker A wealthy Whig patroness

  Émile Dubois A dance master

  Horatio Durant A young man of wealth and connection

  *Real historical figures

  The water of the fountain ran, the swift river ran, the day ran

  into evening, so much life in the city ran into death according

  to rule, time and tide waited for no man . . .

  Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, Chapter 13

  It has been observed, and I am apt to believe it is an

  observation which will generally be found true, that before a

  terrible truth comes to light, there are certain murmuring

  whispers fly before it, and prepare the minds of men for the

  reception of the truth itself.

  William Harrison Ainsworth, Rookwood

  Chapter 1

  Brompton, outside of London, January 6, 1835

  “Epiphany is truly the best of times,” Charles Dickens exclaimed as his hostess carried a beautiful jam tart over from the sideboard. The enormous dessert, decorated traditionally for the holiday with star-shaped pastry and thirteen different-colored kinds of jam marking the six points, enticed with fruit and sugar scents.

  Mrs. Hogarth’s large family applauded as she set her creation in the center of the dining table, on top of an embroidered cloth depicting the Three Kings visiting the Christ child. Candlelight glittered over the egg-wash pastry, making Charles’s mouth water, despite the tasty meal of roast, potatoes, and cabbage they had already finished. At the head of the table, George Hogarth hefted a clean knife, almost slicing off his bushy side whiskers.

  “No, sir, it is the worst,” teased his daughter, pretty Kate Hogarth, seated at Charles’s side. “For, Father must bring home guests with whom we have to share my mother’s lovely tart.”

  “You shall have your favorite jam,” Charles promised, staring into the bright blue eyes of the nineteen-year-old daughter of the house. He’d been talking business with the coeditor of his newspaper all through the meal, but his eye kept alighting upon this fair maiden, despite the dozen other adults and children in the room. “Which one is it?”

  “Gooseberry,” she said with a blush. “But you must have your first choice. Why, you are Father’s guest.”

  “I am only a new employee of the Evening Chronicle,” declared Charles, “scarcely worth noticing.”

  “Fie,” George Hogarth said, settling his free hand across his waistcoat. “Ye are our most promising journalist. To be so accomplished at a mere twenty-two years of age. Gives me hope, my lad.”

  “How exciting,” Kate Hogarth said, eyes sparkling. “You must tell us what you’ve been writing about, Mr. Dickens.”

  When the initial sounds of approval from her children had diminished, the matriarch, Mrs. Hogarth, a decade younger than her graying husband, slid the tart down the table to him. Charles regaled them with the tale of a recent parliamentary debate he had reported upon, complete with a falling-down drunk Member of Parliament, a sneezing man-at-arms, and a speech that went on for three hours, until one poor elderly statesman, napping away, fell off the bench, after snoring so loudly that half the crowd was in hysterics.

  By the time he had finished his tale, Miss Hogarth had clutched his sleeve to keep herself upright through her convulsive giggles. He was proud of his tailcoat with its black velvet collar. His gaze moved between her fingers, sliding on the new fabric, and the toothsome sight of the pie being sliced.

  He turned guiltily toward his host, his dining companion on the opposite side. His stares were improper, but such a tempting morsel had never yet been set before a young man on the rise.

  “What would ye like, Charles?” asked Mrs. Hogarth.

  “One of the red ones, please,” he enthused. “Miss Hogarth would love the green.”

  “Same as her mother,” Mr. Hogarth said comfortably. “She does make an excellent gooseberry.”

  “Did you have a good Christmas, Mr. Dickens?” Miss Hogarth asked. Her Scottish accent was less pronounced than that of her parents. “Did you see your family?”

  Charles took his plate of tart. The red jam was tucked inside a triangle of pastry. “My father is out beyond Hampstead, but the rest of the family is nearby. My brother Fred lives with me, in fact. I’m to supervise his education. My mother has her hands full with my two sisters and the two youngest, both boys.”

  “How nice to have family with ye,” Mr. Hogarth said, as a child, perhaps four years old, climbed into his lap and burped loudl
y. “How old is Fred?”

  “Fourteen.” Charles grinned. “We had an excellent meal for my mother’s birthday just before Christmas. But mostly I worked through the Twelve Days. I write for more than one newspaper, and since I am not a family man, it seemed best to take all the work I could, and relieve those with little children at home.”

  “Very decent of ye, sir,” Mrs. Hogarth said, from the opposite end of the table, where she bounced a babe with enormous dark eyes on her knee. “But I am so glad ye could be with us tonight.”

  “Thank you for having me,” Charles said, before turning irresistibly to the girl at his side. “Tell me, Miss Hogarth, when did you come here from Edinburgh?”

  “About four years ago,” she said. “I don’t seem to have lost any of the Scottish in my voice.”

  “I find it charming,” Charles declared. “It is easy to see that your family is a musical one, with the sweet tones of your voice and those of your sisters.”

  “We should have music when we are finished,” Mr. Hogarth said, removing the child from his leg and finishing his dividing of the tart. “But you have a long walk home, I know.”

  “Where do you live?” Miss Hogarth asked, as her father passed out the final plates.

  Charles watched the tart spread across the table. He had nothing like this in his bachelor lodgings, and his mother didn’t have the money to prepare such treats either, with her husband on the run from his financial difficulties. “I live in Holborn, at Furnival’s Inn. It’s a quiet, rather gloomy place, nothing like here, with all the gardens and orchards surrounding your house. We live in close contact with our fellow man.”

  “As do we,” Miss Hogarth said, pulling at a red ribbon that had come untied on the sleeve of her green dress. “See how many brothers and sisters I have?”

  “My family is not small either,” Charles said. “But how wholesome is it to feed your family from your own plot?”

  “That is why I can make such lovely jam,” Mrs. Hogarth said. “With Kate’s help, of course.”

  Her daughter’s lips curved with her mother’s praise, but then her eyebrows went up and her mouth rounded into shocked surprise.

  Charles heard the disturbance as well. It came from outside the snug house. “What was that?” He swiveled around toward the heavily curtained windows.

  “Sounded like a scream.” Mr. Hogarth set down his knife and rose.

  He, Charles, and Miss Hogarth went to the window. Mr. Hogarth tied back one side of the winter-weight curtain so they could see. Charles cupped his eyes with his hands, trying to peer into the gloom, but mist had risen, undulating over the fallow vegetable beds. He couldn’t see anything but the ghostly branches of distant, leafless apple trees, waving in the breeze.

  Another scream. Miss Hogarth jumped and shivered.

  “Who lives in the next house?” Charles asked.

  Mr. Hogarth frowned. “It’s a fine mansion. Lady Lugoson, a baron’s widow, returned from France with her two children a few months ago.”

  “A widow alone?” Charles’s voice sharpened. These houses were spread apart. Any amount of mischief might take place with no one noticing.

  Mr. Hogarth nodded, his expression concerned.

  “We must go to them,” Miss Hogarth said, with an admirable sense of purpose.

  “Mrs. Hogarth, will you light us a couple of lanterns?” her father suggested.

  “Of course.” Mrs. Hogarth tucked a stray lock of brown hair behind her ear and hurried away.

  The younger children chattered as Charles and Miss Hogarth went to find his outer coat and her mantle. She pulled off her evening slippers, and he stealthily admired her small, narrow feet in the moment it took her to find her boots and pull them on. How perfectly made she was, and how far above him. This girl had never experienced a moment’s want, never had a father in debtor’s prison or seen her brothers forced out of their education into warehouse jobs.

  Charles recognized Mr. Hogarth’s coat on a hook, along with their hats, and brought them back to the dining room. As soon as Mrs. Hogarth had delivered the lit lanterns, they walked through the green baize door leading to the kitchen, startling a young kitchen maid, and made their way out of the door closest to the garden.

  Across the field floated more cries, dampened and spread by the mist. “Are they being murdered?” cried Miss Hogarth.

  “I can differentiate between three different females,” her father said.

  Charles knew the man was a musical genius and trusted in his abilities. “Are they in pain?”

  “Distress, certainly.” Mr. Hogarth pulled a stout walking stick away from the stone wall.

  Charles and Miss Hogarth followed the older man as he walked around vegetable beds and pools of rainwater, mist nipping at their ankles. Only Miss Hogarth had appropriate footwear, though Charles, with necessary economy, had shoes suitable for long walks. The polish he’d painstakingly applied the previous evening would never survive this damp walk.

  They reached the edge of the garden and moved into the orchard, all dirt underfoot, encrusted with the decaying leaves of fruit trees.

  “May I?” Charles asked, pointing at a branch just barely attached to an apple tree.

  Mr. Hogarth coughed and nodded. “Of course. I should have thought more of weapons.”

  “Oh, Father,” Miss Hogarth exclaimed. “Surely we don’t need any.”

  Charles tore the branch from the tree. As long as his arm, it might hold up in a fight. When he saw another branch a few feet away, already on the ground, he handed it to her.

  “Goodness,” she said, her eyes wide. But she took it, stout-hearted, and carried the makeshift weapon the rest of the way.

  When they had moved past the orchard mists, light from the mansion came into view. They stepped into a formal garden from the Hogarths’ apple grove. A gravel path was set among boxed hedges. Charles tried to imagine the shape of them, wishing he could see from an overhead perspective.

  He had viewed the front of the house earlier as he’d walked by with Mr. Hogarth, and had examined it carefully, always cataloguing information he might be able to use in an article. The house, formed in the shape of an E, had been built in the Elizabethan age, though it had been added on and modified over the years with stone. In excellent condition, it spoke of wealth if not taste.

  Now, however, they walked onto a paved terrace along the side of the house. Through glass-paned doors they could see a number of people moving around frantically in the room beyond, black-dressed maids carrying towels, footmen in formal evening livery moving toward a fixed point out of sight. Charles viewed the modern carpet and pale apple-green paint, though the newer, robust furnishings were mixed in with late Georgian pieces from the turn of the century. Mr. Hogarth opened one of the French doors.

  On a sofa, Charles saw a richly dressed elderly lady, seated next to a bespectacled gentleman about ten years younger.

  The middle-aged gentleman peered over his glasses and offered a polite “Good evening.”

  Chapter 2

  After all the screaming they had heard, the polite, German-accented phrase seemed utterly out of place.

  As Mr. Hogarth greeted the man, Charles was distracted by a raised voice. In front of a second fireplace lay a young girl, perhaps a couple of years younger than Miss Hogarth. Her head rocked from side to side, as if she was coming out of a faint. Towels covered something on the floor next to her, and he could smell ill-favored scents wafting from that part of the room. The girl must have been sick before collapsing.

  Miss Hogarth put her hand to her nose as the odor assaulted her senses.

  A slender woman, about a decade older than Charles, knelt at the girl’s side. She matched the drawing room paint in her dropped-shoulder gown of white silk embroidered with green leaves, but as she moved, he saw her skirt was marked with cinders at the knees. Her hands gestured above the girl, as if imploring her to rise.

  Two female companions stood by the woman, one in a dinner dre
ss that was out of style, its ruffled skirt a dead giveaway for fashion of the previous decade, the color an unflattering shade of yellow. The woman on the right, who had the familial look of an adolescent girl Charles’s gaze had passed over in the middle of the room, made more of a concession to fashion and feminine appeal in her dress, with a lower-cut bodice and tightly fit waistline.

  Given the tableau, he expected the woman kneeling was the baron’s widow. The girl, now blinking her eyes, had blond hair the shade of angels’ wings. Along the wall to the right of the fireplace leaned a boy in mid-adolescence, looking more confused than anxious. The kneeling lady was also blond and Charles recognized that the slanted nostrils of her nose matched the boy’s. This then, was likely to be young Lord Lugoson, for some reason not away at school.

  Miss Hogarth did not pause but, admirably, went straight to the kneeling woman after setting her stick against the wall. “My lady, I am Miss Hogarth from next door. We heard the screams from our house.”

  As the woman lifted her gaze and blinked at Miss Hogarth, Charles noted her wide-spaced gray eyes and high cheekbones, along with an elfin chin. A lovely lady, he suspected she would not be a widow long.

  In contrast, the other two women were a bit older, with skin just starting to sag at the jawline and under the chin. The less fashionable of them seemed to be in a near faint herself, but the other watched two footmen closely as they stepped to the head and feet of the young girl. The maids they had seen through the terrace doors had already vanished.

  “Can you rise, Miss Lugoson?” Miss Hogarth asked. “Or do you need these men to help you?”

  “Oh, she mustn’t try herself,” Lady Lugoson said. “She fainted dead away.” She gestured vaguely toward the towels.

  “Hit the floor before anyone could catch her.” Young Lord Lugoson spoke in tones of admiration. His limbs looked too spindly to carry the minimal weight of the girl.