The Angel of Hever Castle: A City of Mystery Christmas Novella

  The Angel of

  Hever Castle

  A City of Mystery Novella

  By Kim Wright

  Chapter One

  “This business of bringing trees inside of houses is, without question, the most bizarre holiday custom I have ever encountered,” Trevor Welles said, as he watched the others resolutely wedging candles into an enormous spruce. The tree was standing not in the sensible location of a forest or field, but rather in the drawing room of his friend Geraldine Bainbridge’s London home. She persisted in calling it a “Christmas tree,” a term Trevor could only assume was synonymous with “imminent disaster.”

  “Hush yourself,” Geraldine said, standing back to survey her handiwork. “It’s a German tradition that the Queen has brought to Windsor, and that makes it quite good enough for me.”

  “Yes, Trevor,” said Emma Kelly, calling down from a ladder which was being held by Geraldine’s butler Gage. Judging by his glum expression, Gage was in full agreement with Trevor about the advisability of this particular project. “Surely you don’t question the judgment of Victoria herself.”

  “The Queen has squadrons of servants standing watch all night to make sure Windsor doesn’t go up in flames,” Trevor muttered, but experience had taught him it was an utter waste of time to argue with either Geraldine or Emma. Geraldine was elderly, rich, and quite accustomed to getting her way in all matters both great and small and, although younger by decades and no stranger to grief or poverty, her employed companion Emma shared many of the same personality traits as her mistress. Stubbornness was the most prominent among them.

  “The ladies are quite right, Welles,” said a muffled voice coming through the branches, for Trevor’s fellow detective Rayley Abrams had taken on the task of affixing candles to the back of the tree and was nearly trapped between the greenery and the wall. “If you allowed yourself to relax and get a bit more into the holiday spirit, you’d see that it’s perfectly lovely.”

  “Your participation in this lunacy is the strangest note of all, Abrams.”

  “What’s your point?” Rayley asked, emerging from his green cocoon with a grin and knocking stray spruce needles from his clothing. “That a Jew can’t enjoy a good bonfire?”

  Trevor chuckled and settled back on the settee. They were a smaller-than-usual group on this particular evening. The Thursday Night Murder Games Club, an informal amusement of the recently-formed forensics unit of Scotland Yard, met regularly in Geraldine’s elegant home – although perhaps not so regularly as their title suggested. Trevor and Rayley, who were both full detectives within the Yard, were the official members of the Club, along with Davy Mabrey, a bobby who had been assigned to the unit on a permanent basis. Geraldine’s nephew Tom, a medical student serving as the group’s coroner, and Emma, who filled the role of translator and linguist, were the unofficial members, while Geraldine stepped in as the group’s hostess, guardian angel, and chief financier. It was an arrangement that suited them all admirably well.

  But in this week approaching Christmas, Davy was taking a few well-earned days of personal leave and Tom had decamped to his family’s country estate, which meant only Trevor, Rayley, Emma, and Geraldine would sit around the evening table. Although he was fond of the two younger men, Trevor had to admit that it was a pleasant variation to have a party of four. The room was so quiet that he could hear the sound of Emma humming something pleasant. A scrap of a holiday carol, no doubt.

  “You see, gentlemen,” she said, having attached the final candle to the top of the tree and daintily descending the ladder. “When the candles are lit, it is meant to bring to mind the image of stars twinkling through the tree branches. That sight was the inspiration for the carol Silent Night.”

  “I don’t know the tune,” Rayley admitted, sinking down beside Trevor on the settee and reaching for his pipe. “Is that what you were humming?”

  But before she could answer, there was a knock at the door. Not the leisurely knock of a social visitor, but a rapping that was persistent, almost frantic, and Trevor instinctively tensed, his hand gripping the base of his brandy glass. Gage abandoned the ladder and went to the door and a moment later Geraldine’s friend Tess Arborton dashed into the room, clearly in agitation. She had not relinquished her wrap to Gage, but rather stood dripping and trembling before them, peering out from beneath the brim of her feathered hat.

  “Tess, dear, what a pleasant surprise,” Geraldine said, with a quizzical frown. “Will you join us for dinner? We were just about to go in.”

  “I cannot have dinner,” Tess said, her eyes darting wildly around the room as if it were a preposterous suggestion. As if, in fact, she might never eat again. “I am sorry to come upon you without notice and in such a ridiculous state, but I didn’t know where else to turn. My daughter is missing.”

  “Missing?” Geraldine echoed, as Emma turned to pour their sudden guest a glass of sherry.

  “Well, not missing entirely, for I know where she is,” Tess said, pulling off her hat and wiping drops of water from her cheeks. It was unclear if they were the result of tears or melting snowflakes. “But she shouldn’t be there, not at all, and if a young girl is somewhere she has no business being, isn’t that the same as being missing entirely?”

  It was a bewildering question, but fortunately Emma was quick with the sherry, so they all had a moment to compose themselves while Tess gulped it.

  “Are her children gone with her?” Trevor inquired, for he knew Tess’s daughter had given birth to twins a year earlier. The event had played an accidental but pivotal role into the Yard’s investigation of the infamous case of Jack the Ripper.

  “Children?” Tess said in bewilderment, but she allowed Emma to take her wrap from her and Geraldine to escort her gently but firmly to a seat by the fire. “Oh no,” she said finally, once she realized what he was asking. “You are speaking of my elder daughter, my Marjorie. She’s exactly where one would expect her to be, at home with her husband and her boys. It’s my younger girl, Anne, who has fled. I shouldn’t have come,” she repeated, looking around the room as tears began rising again, perhaps triggered by the mere act of saying Anne’s name aloud. “But Gerry, I knew you had friends of the sort who might…”

  “Of course,” said Geraldine. “Rayley and Trevor shall find your dear Anne.”

  “Trevor and Rayley shall help look for your dear Anne,” Trevor amended, for Geraldine was prone to be a bit rash in her promises. Her confidence in them was a fine thing, but he didn’t wish to offer this clearly shaken woman false hope. “But you say you know where she is already? Perhaps if you started again and told us the story in a more… logical fashion.”

  Tess nodded and sighed, making a Herculean effort to control her nerves. She sipped her sherry, gazed for a few moments at the half-decorated tree, and finally managed to present an admirably linear recounting of recent events. Her youngest daughter Anne, just seventeen, was to have her debut in the spring and in anticipation of the event Tess had commissioned an artist to paint the girl’s portrait. The man, who went by the suspiciously affected name of LaRusse Frederick Chapman, came with the highest recommendations and, in fact, his early sketches of Anne had shown great promise. But he turned out to have what Tess described as “bohemian tendencies” and apparently at some point in the process of painting her portrait, he had furthermore managed to seduce the girl. The two of them had now disappeared south, into the countryside of Kent.

  And here Tess paused to withdrawn a letter from her pocket, one scribbled by Anne before her departure, telling her mother she was in love, that LaRusse h
ad declared her to be his perfect muse, and that the two of them were traveling to Hever Castle to join an artist colony there. There was a bit of the obligatory girlish nonsense about how this LaRusse was “her preordained fate,” along with a warning that she would not, under any circumstances, be persuaded from his side. At the bottom of the note the girl had written in large block letters: DO NOT FOLLOW ME, MAMA. I MEAN IT.

  “What do you make of this last bit?” Trevor asked quietly, before passing the letter to Rayley. But, to his surprise, it was Tess who answered the question.

  “I believe the last line is a subconscious admission that Anne wishes to be followed,” Tess said. “That she may have been having doubts on some level even as she penned the note. She went out the window,” she added, with an ironic twist of her mouth. “Climbed down the side of the chimney, at least according to our neighbors, which is quite the grand gesture when you consider that she simply could have walked out the front door. She was hardly kept a prisoner.”

  “So you suspect this is more an act of youthful rebellion rather than a true determination to be with this man,” Trevor said, privately pleased that Tess was seeing the situation so clearly.

  “Yes, but that doesn’t mean she will gladly return – not with me and not with any emissary I might send,” Tess said. “Anne is of a certain temperament. She says she intends to be her own person. She says this quite often, whether anyone asks her or not.”

  “Quite,” said Trevor, who felt an unexpected flicker of sympathy for the girl. Her mother was a known bluestocking – well educated and, like the others in Geraldine’s social circle, an avowed supporter of liberal causes, including votes for women. Her older sister was a paragon of a different sort. Marjorie’s own spectacularly successful debut had resulted in the match of the season, a lavish wedding which linked her to a rising young barrister from one of the best families in London. This coup was followed a year later by the triumphant birth of not one, but two, sons - the perfect “heir and spare” that dynasties demanded. It would be hard for a young girl to claim her turf in such a family, and her long-deceased father was not there to support her. Perhaps become the muse of a bohemian artist was the best way she could think of to distinguish herself.

  “Hever Castle,” Rayley mused. “That was the family home of Anne Boleyn, was it not? One of Henry VIII’s beheaded wives?”

  “Yes,” said Emma, who read incessantly and was thus the natural scholar of the group. “But the Boleyns lost the family estate when Anne fell from favor…and then the property reverted back to the Crown. It is considered a minor castle, and the Crown has so many. I doubt anyone pays it much mind.”

  Tess nodded vigorously. “According to LaRusse, who talked as much as he painted, it is an abandoned place which has been overtaken by artists of every sort. They are aiming to establish some sort of utopian society there. You can imagine it, somewhat like one of those farms managed by the transcendentalists in America where everyone shares everything and all is…free.” Her voice faltered a bit on the last word, no doubt thinking that while communal property and social equality were radical enough notions, what really made these colonies notorious was their reputation for “free love.” The rumor was that they were sexual playgrounds, where the bohemians swapped partners as casually as respectable people might change their clothes. Trevor was afraid that the idea might set off a spasm of fresh weeping, but Tess regained her composure and looked directly at him, saying “So will you please go there? At least ensure that Anne is safe and well? And if you could possibly find a way to persuade her to come back…”

  Trevor raised an eyebrow as Tess’s voice trailed off. “You said she would resist your interference, including any emissary you might send.”

  Emma broke in. “So it would seem that Anne must not know who you are. Not friends of Geraldine’s, and thus there at her mother’s behest, and certainly not detectives from Scotland Yard.”

  Geraldine clapped her hands. “Quite right.”

  “You are suggesting that we travel incognito?” Rayley asked, a slight smile playing around his thin lips.

  “Posing as artists yourself, perhaps” Emma said. “Or writers or musicians or whatever you please.”

  “A marvelous idea,” Tess said, with another vigorous nod. “According to LaRusse, creative people of all types come to Hever and simply take up there, staying for as long as they please and living off the property. It is surrounded by farmlands and I take it that they simply…glean.” Her fingers ran nervously over her empty sherry glass. “You are all probably thinking that I have been a proper fool in this matter. And I did indeed hear rumors about LaRusse before I commissioned the portrait, but I dismissed them as mere gossip. London society is so quick to condemn anyone who dares to be unique.”

  “That is true enough,” said Geraldine, rising herself to refill Tess’s glass for Emma was staring pensively into the fire, almost as if she had gone into a trance, and Gage had disappeared into the dining room, where he was clanging plates and cutlery with pointed vigor, reminding them all that the dinner hour had approached and he hated to serve his food late. “But it is one thing for a man to have radical notions, and quite another for him to steal a young girl from her home.”

  “He is so much older than Anne,” Tess said hollowly. “I believe he might even be married, although heaven knows where or who his wife might be. I simply never foresaw any of this.”

  Ah, but I can easily imagine his whole pattern, Trevor thought. He has undoubtedly gone from girl to girl for years, declaring each one to be his muse. Muse. That’s a proper load of rubbish. They’re more likely meant for his amusement, I should think. He seduces and then abandons them and the girls either disappear from society entirely or their parents go to great lengths to hide their disgrace. Thus his victims collude to conceal his true nature, and that’s how the wretch has continued to get commissions to paint the daughters of London’s better families.

  When Trevor pulled away from his thoughts, Tess was looking hopefully at the settee where he and Rayley were sitting. “You shall help me? It shouldn’t be more than two or three days of inconvenience. Just long enough to ensure my daughter is well.”

  “I like the idea,” Rayley said.

  “I don’t,” Trevor said, with a snort. “You wish us to put on painter’s smocks and cavort around the snowy countryside stealing food like a bunch of gypsies?”

  “Don’t be silly, Trevor,” Geraldine said. “It hasn’t snowed all season.”

  “And we must do something,” Emma said, her own tone as sharp as Geraldine’s was mild. “Men who prey on women cannot be allowed…” Her voice trailed off and she jerked her small pale chin, using both hands to push her hair from her face. Everyone in the room knew what Emma was thinking about – her sister Mary, who had been the last victim of Jack the Ripper. While LaRusse was no Ripper, Trevor silently conceded that Emma had a point. Threats to young women lurked everywhere and, having failed to capture Jack, Trevor supposed that he and his team were doomed to chase his shadow for the rest of their careers.

  “Think of it as one of our experiments, Welles,” Rayley said. “You and I were bemoaning just last week, were we not, that neither of us has ever had the slightest experience in working undercover or assuming a false identity? This is our perfect chance.”

  “What I recall about last week’s discussion of the matter,” Trevor said drily, “is that we mocked those officers who were so eager to play charades. That we compared them to children at a masquerade party.”

  It was true. He and Rayley had laughed uproariously at a photograph of the celebrated Murder Squad of Scotland Yard, all of whom had embraced the mania for investigative disguise with a passion. In the photograph, the eight detectives had sat proudly posed in the costumes they had created for their undercover work: Cat whiskers and eyepatches and uneven boots designed to give them a ludicrously exaggerated limp. These so-called disguises, Rayley and Trevor had concluded, had the primary effect of making
sure everyone you passed in the street stopped and stared. Thus they were abject failures when it came to the true goal of undercover work, which was to blend in, to do nothing to draw the eye.

  “I agree with you that costumes and props can quickly become foolish,” Rayley said, “but we are not gluing on a set of whiskers, we are affecting an entire new identity. It strikes me as a marvelous challenge, right up there with mastering the latest forensic techniques. And, just as Mrs. Arborton says, the task shouldn’t be difficult. Who knows, the luster may have worn off the adventure already for Anne, and we may easily be able to persuade her to return to London with us. We shall be back by Christmas, I have no doubt of it.”

  Tess smiled. “This is exactly what I hoped you would say.” Then she hesitated. “I have brought one other thing,” she said. “It was left in Anne’s room and it shows, I believe, the ultimate use LaRusse intends for her, as his muse…and as his…I left it by the door as I came in.”

  “I shall get it,” Emma said, springing to her feet and thinking that if she was unable to travel to Hever, which sounded quite glamorous, at least she could do research back in London. If LaRusse made a habit of seducing his portrait models, there were probably any number of other ruined lives in his wake, for it was Emma’s experience that men who enjoyed debasing women, rarely stopped with debasing merely one. Who knows, she thought as she approached the cloakroom, there may be more pieces of the story lurking here in London than out in the farmlands of Kent.

  She quickly found the package Tess must have meant and returned to the drawing room with a tube in her hand, a long thin affair of the sort an architect might use to transport his drawings. She handed it to Tess, who withdrew a rolled paper from its depths and then suddenly looked around the circle and said “Must I be here for this part?”

  “Of course not, darling,” said Geraldine. “But I insist you stay for supper. Come, let us go tell Gage to lay another plate and as we dine we shall conspire, all of us, to create the identities Rayley and Trevor shall assume for their journey.”