M.C. Beaton
Sick of Shadows
Edwardian Murder Mystery #3
2010, EN
Captain Harry Cathcart and Lady Rose Summer have entered into an engagement of convenience-convenient for Rose, who wants to avoid being sent to India with all the other failed debutantes. Despite her considerable good looks, Rose’s sharp intellect and radical ideas have served to repel her would be suitors. Rose’s parents, unaware of the deception, are hardly thrilled that their only child is marrying a man in trade, but Harry comes from a good family, and at the very least, they hope he will keep their troublesome daughter out of mischief.
Unfortunately, even a pretend engagement cannot save Rose from trouble. Bored with endless parties, teas, and balls, she befriends Dolly Tremaine, a beautiful young girl newly arrived from the country and overwhelmed by the demands of the Season. Rose is delighted to have a protégée but their friendship is cut tragically short when Dolly is found floating in a river. Harry is summoned immediately to help solve the mystery of Dolly’s death, and to keep Rose from being the murderer’s next victim.
∨ Sick of Shadows ∧
One
“I am half sick of shadows,” said
The Lady of Shalott.
– ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON
The aristocracy lived in a closed world protected by a shell of wealth and title, as hard and as glittering as a Fabergé egg. The vast outside world of England where people could die of starvation barely caused a ripple in their complacency.
Then, horror upon horrors, the unthinkable happened. A Liberal government was elected, proposing old-age pensions and health insurance and other benefits for the lower classes. They further proposed eight-hour days, workers’ compensation, free school meals and free medical services. Even that aristocrat, young Churchill, had turned Liberal and was saying, “We want to draw the line below which we will not allow persons to live and labour.”
With a few exceptions, the aristocracy closed ranks as never before. The old idea that the House of Commons was an assembly of gentlemen had passed.
Admittedly these winds of change were at first regarded as irritating draughts, such as were caused when a lazy footman had left the door of the drawing-room open. But with the newspapers heralding the reforms every morning, high cultured voices could be heard exclaiming over the grilled kidneys at breakfast tables. “Who is going to pay for all this? Us, of course.”
Many blamed the fact that free elementary education had been introduced in 1870. The lower classes should not have been taught to think for themselves.
So the aristocracy hung grimly onto the snobberies and rules of society which kept the hoi polloi outside.
But the Earl and Countess of Hadfield felt that the enemy was within the gates in the form of their daughter, Lady Rose Summer, who had cheered the result of the election. At first they thought she had reformed. She had become engaged to Captain Harry Cathcart. Admittedly it could be said that the captain was in trade because he ran his own detective agency, but he came from a good family and had enough money to support their daughter in the style to which she was accustomed.
Nonetheless the couple showed no sign of setting a date for the wedding, nor, for that matter, did they see much of each other.
Rose’s parents did not know that her engagement was one of convenience, thought up by the captain to prevent Rose being shipped off to India with the other failed débutantes.
Then Rose had made a companion out of Daisy Levine, a former chorus girl whom she had first elevated to the position of maid and then to that of companion.
Rose, with her thick brown hair, delicate complexion and large blue eyes, was still considered a great beauty, but she repelled men with her encyclopaedic knowledge and radical ideas.
Her parents would have been amazed, however, if they had guessed that Rose went to considerable pains to please them. She suffered seemingly endless days of parties and teas and calls and balls, all of which bored her, but she felt she owed her parents some dutiful behaviour for having failed at her first Season and cost them a great deal of money.
One evening in late spring, Rose and Daisy were preparing to attend yet another ball. Rose was relieved because on this one rare occasion the captain had promised to escort her. This would be at least one evening free from the pitying looks and sniggers of the débutantes who kept asking slyly where her fiancé was.
It was an even more boring life for her companion, Daisy. Daisy, like Rose, was barely twenty, and yet she was not expected to dance and was condemned to sit and watch with the other companions.
And then, half an hour before they were all due to depart for the Duke of Freemount’s ball, Harry Cathcart telephoned to say that an urgent case had come up and he could not be there. Folding her lips into a thin line, Lady Polly, Rose’s mother, asked the earl’s secretary to telephone Sir Peter Petrey to come immediately and escort Rose. Peter was a willowy effete young man who specialized in filling in at dinner parties when someone had cancelled at the last minute and escorting ladies to balls whose escorts had failed to turn up. He was handsome with thick fair hair and a lightly tanned face.
Lady Polly suppressed a sigh when she saw him. Why couldn’t Rose have picked someone like that? The unworldly Lady Polly did not know that Peter had no sexual interest in women at all, her lack of knowledge in sexual matters being hardly surprising in this Edwardian era where an eminent surgeon had declared that no lady should ever enjoy sex – only sluts did that.
“Where is the wretched man?” asked Peter as he led Rose up the grand staircase at the Freemounts’ town house.
“Working, I suppose,” said Rose.
“My dear, a beauty like you should never have involved yourself with a chap in trade. There, now. That was too, too wicked of me. But were you mine, I would never leave your side.”
Rose’s companion had put her mistress wise to Sir Peter and so Rose smiled amiably and accepted the compliment. She often toyed with the idea of marrying Peter. It would be an arranged marriage, of course, but that way she would have her own household and be spared the labour of producing a child every year.
Rose curtsied to her hosts and entered the ballroom. “With Peter again,” she heard the duchess say loudly. “Too sad.”
Her voice carried. With so many of the aristocracy hard of hearing because of blasting away at birds and beasts with their shotguns, the duchess, like so many, spoke in a high clipped staccato voice which carried right cross the ballroom.
Rose usually derived some comfort from being the most beautiful lady in the ballroom. But that evening, she was eclipsed.
A new arrival to society was pirouetting around the floor on the arm of a besotted guardsman. She had masses of thick blonde hair woven with tiny white roses. Unlike Rose’s slim figure, hers was of the fashionable hourglass variety, with a generous white bosom displayed by the low cut of her evening gown. Her eyes were enormous in her heart-shaped face and of a deep brown, which contrasted seductively with her fair hair and perfect skin.
Daisy, sitting next to an elderly dowager, Countess Slerely, whispered, “Who’s the new beauty?”
The countess raised her lorgnette and then lowered it. “Oh, that. That is Miss Dolly Tremaine. Her father is only a rector. She really has nothing more than her looks to recommend her. I’m afraid she’ll have to marry someone very old. All the young men want money. Where is Lady Rose’s fiancé?”
“Coming later,” lied Daisy.