Rose Campion and the Christmas Mystery

  Prologue

  The little door, set within the imposing wooden gates of Holloway prison, swung open, its hinges wheezing as if in complaint.

  “’Ere you go, Duchess. Freedom. Enjoy it,” said a ginger-whiskered prison warder, nodding his head towards the frozen city, still grey with sleep.

  The woman stepped over the threshold and paused, huddled on the cobbles just a couple of steps beyond the small door. A ragged shawl covered her head. A few flecks of snow floated in the air. The warder eyed her curiously.

  “Don’t tell me you’re reluctant to leave us, Duchess. What with everyone saying the only way you’d ever leave ’Olloway was in a box, I’d ’ave thought you’d scarper sharp, before thems who decide realise they made a mistake and banged you up again.”

  The woman didn’t move. The warder’s eyes narrowed. “Maybe it’s true what they say. The Duchess is a broken woman, her power vanished. Just a shell picked clean by the scavengers.” The warder spat towards the huddled figure and slammed the door shut with a smug smile, as if he was locking her out of Eden itself.

  The woman waited a moment, and then raised her head and straightened her back. She let the ragged, spittle-covered shawl drop to the frosted ground and stood, ramrod straight, suddenly a tall imposing figure. She lifted her face to the thin rays of sun struggling to pierce a sky bloated with snow. The distant sound of hooves, flinty on cobbles, approached. The woman smiled, her eyes hard. A horse and carriage trotted into view. The carriage stopped and the driver bowed his head as if in respect. The carriage door opened and a man emerged, dapper in a frock coat and shoes that shone like polished sixpences.

  “Duchess,” he said with a low bow.

  “You’re late, Mr T,” snapped the Duchess impatiently.

  The man coughed nervously and nodded towards the interior of the carriage. “Someone has come to meet you, Duchess. I tried to prevent him, but…”

  His voice quavered and trailed off, as if he feared her reaction. Like the imperious old Queen, Victoria, the Duchess – whose nickname reflected her status as criminal royalty, rather than any connections to the aristocracy – was not fond of surprises. She raised an eyebrow in question.

  Mr T lowered his voice and whispered.

  “The Cobra.”

  The Duchess’s eyes brightened with interest. The Cobra was the nickname for Ambrose Skelly. Skelly had long been the king of London’s criminal underworld. His nickname came about because those of his enemies who lived to tell the tale frequently said that an encounter with him felt like being mesmerised by a snake. It was a skill he had learned from his father, who, in the days before chloroform, had worked for a surgeon and was charged with calming the patients whose operations were conducted while they were still fully conscious.

  The Cobra had been thought untouchable. But, two months previously, his closest associates – including his own brother, eager to take over the Cobra’s criminal empire for himself – had betrayed him to the police, providing the evidence that would ensure he was locked up for at least fifty years. The Cobra had evaded the police when they had tried to arrest him, and he had been on the run ever since. Although he was much younger than the Duchess, still only in his mid-thirties, they were old adversaries, with a genuine respect for each other.

  The Duchess settled herself into the carriage with only a curt nod to the slender, handsome man with dark hair and delicate features, who sat well back on the opposite seat, clearly eager to avoid being spotted by anyone peering in. The Duchess stamped her foot twice and the carriage lurched forward across the rutted, icy road.

  “What do you want, Ambrose?” asked the Duchess briskly.

  “I want us to work together, Duchess,” said the Cobra, smiling.

  The Duchess’s eyes glittered, her smile as thin as a snake’s. “Don’t you mean that you need my help, Ambrose? From what I hear you are a dead man walking. Hunted by the police and betrayed by your own flesh and bone. It can’t be nice to be the hunted rather than the hunter. I could hand you in myself. I hear there is a handsome reward on your head.”

  Ambrose’s eyes were wary but his smile was confident, showing a flash of surprisingly white teeth. “But you won’t, will you, Duchess,” he said leaning over and taking her hand and kissing it. He leaned further in and murmured. “For old time’s sake.”

  The Duchess removed her hand. “Ambrose, you mistake me for a woman with a heart.”

  Ambrose put his head on one side, his eyes watchful.

  “I know you are a practical woman, and we can be useful to each other. I need your brains and help to evade capture and to raise enough money to leave the country and start again. You are in need of ready cash to rebuild your empire. It has crumbled while you’ve been behind bars. You still have a few loyal acolytes like Mr T here, but I hear your intelligence network is destroyed. You are not the power you once were, Duchess.”

  “Well, that makes two of us, Ambrose,” she replied tartly.

  The Duchess settled back comfortably in the carriage and surveyed the street outside, her eyes greedy for the sights and sounds of London that she had been denied for so long. The city was waking up. Cafes were opening their doors, hoping to attract the sleepy-eyed seamstresses, porters and clerks who hurried past, shivering on their way to work. A muffin man was competing for custom with one of the coffee and bread-and-butter stalls. Hawkers were shouting their wares, offering everything from pots and pans to tiny birds in cages.

  After a short silence, the Duchess continued. “If I were inclined to help you, what can you offer me?”

  “Information. Useful information. Plenty of it. I still have connections in the higher reaches of society – more than one in the very heart of the aristocracy.” The Duchess was silent again, patiently waiting for him to offer up a little nugget of information.

  “The Easingford Emeralds. Edward Easingford will be bringing them to London very soon.”

  “Edward Easingford?” said the Duchess thoughtfully. “The one with connections to Campion’s Palace of Variety and Wonders, where my double-dealing son met his end?”

  Ambrose nodded. “Yes. The emeralds are worth a small fortune – enough to set us both up in our own ways. Several times over. If we could find a way to get our hands on them.”

  Ambrose smiled. He could see from the sparkle in her eyes that he had piqued the Duchess’s interest.

  A small boy, selling newspapers, was shouting over the din as the carriage moved through the narrow streets, into the heart of the city. The carriage rolled past the Alhambra and ground to a halt outside the Empire Theatre of Varieties in Leicester Square. It was immediately surrounded by chestnut sellers and hawkers with trays of sheep trotters and hot green peas. The Duchess batted them away with her hand, as if dismissing tiresome flies.

  Outside the Alhambra a man was pasting that coming night’s bill on to the wall – a list promising marvels and wonders, including George the Talking Pig, the Flying Fongoli Brothers, and Luella, “the beautiful girl acrobat and human cannonball”. The Duchess suddenly sat up a little straighter. Her gaze was directed towards another poster on the music-hall wall, informing the public of the arrival later that week of Madame Elenora de Valentina. “Direct from New York! The famed hypnotist and Wonder of the Age! Her mind rules the world!”

  The Duchess was silent for so long that Ambrose wondered whether she had fallen asleep, when suddenly she spoke.

  “Mr T, put your head in the stage door and enquire when Miss de Valentina is expected to be arriving and where. Oh, and find out if she was booked unseen or if anyone from the hall has actually met her. Use a little bribery if you must.”

  Mr T left the coa
ch. The Duchess appeared to be engrossed in watching the elephants, who were being given their breakfast outside the theatre. More flakes of snow began to fall, dancing like moths around the animals’ huge ears.

  Presently, Mr T returned. “She arrives on Wednesday at Euston on the boat train. The act was booked unseen.”

  The Duchess smiled. “Perfect. We will arrange a welcoming party for little Nell Valentine – or whatever she’s calling herself these days.”

  “Do you know her, Duchess?” asked Ambrose.

  “I may be mistaken, but I believe I do. But it is of no consequence, whether it is the same woman or not. She serves my purpose now.” She smiled at the Cobra.

  “I think we can do business, Ambrose. I have a plan.”

  He leaned forward eagerly to hear.

  The Duchess’s eyes turned dark and she hissed in his face. “We will work together, and you will follow my instructions. But I warn you, Ambrose – if you try to double-cross me, I will have your guts for garters.”

  Rose Campion gave another bow to the cheering audience, up on its feet and roaring its delight. Then she ran off stage and skidded straight into a large wooden box. It was cramped backstage at Campion’s Palace of Varieties and Wonders, the music hall where Rose had been found abandoned as a baby by Thomas Campion. Thomas had given Rose his name and a home. The box was taking up more than its fair share of the space available.

  “Ouch!” squeaked Rose crossly, as she hopped on one leg holding her shin, and then she turned, a wide smile pasted across her face despite the pain, and ran back on stage into the bright lights to acknowledge the cheers of the crowd. The show had to go on, even if Rose could feel the blood trickling down her leg. She curtseyed deeply and then exited again, as the music swelled and the ballet girls ran on from the other side of the stage and began an exuberant high-kicking routine.

  “Here,” said Effie, handing Rose a not entirely pristine handkerchief, which she appeared to have been using to grease the backstage pulleys. “That should stem the worst of the bleeding.” Effie grinned. “It went well, Rosie. They lapped it up. Them limericks you’ve written are something different. Very witty. We should use some of them in the pantomime, if Thomas ever makes up his mind what title we’re going to do this year. But for now, I reckon you’ve got a real hit on your hands. Thomas’ll be ever so proud when he sees it. You should have let him come tonight.”

  “I just wanted to do it for the first time without him there, in case I made an idiot of myself. Besides, he needed to go and visit Pru and her poor sick mum,” said Rose, perching on the edge of the box and dabbing at the gash in her leg. She looked thoughtful. “I enjoyed it, but it’s not nearly as fun as doing the bicycle turn with Rory. We were so close to having a completely new act ready, and then she suddenly abandoned it and swanned off to Silver Square with Edward to play at being lords and ladies. I don’t understand the two of them. I thought they were done with all that being-a-toff stuff.”

  The fact that Aurora – or Rory, as she was known by her friends – was the daughter of a lord, and sometimes mixed in aristocratic circles, was a source of tension between her and Rose, who couldn’t understand why anyone would want to waste time in Mayfair drawing rooms when they could spend every minute in the warm, welcoming, riotous fug of Campion’s. Aurora and her father Edward – an actor who had unexpectedly discovered that he was the rightful heir to a title, a London house and a country estate – said that they wanted nothing more than to be permanently based at Campion’s. But they kept being drawn back into the orbit of London’s high society. Aurora and Edward were still getting to know each other, having been parted since Rory was a tiny baby, and sometimes Rose thought it was like watching two well-meaning strangers trying to dance together and tripping over each other’s feet.

  “They’ll be back soon enough, Rosie,” said Effie soothingly. “Rory and Eddie will return in plenty of time for rehearsals for the panto. They’re only staying at Silver Square because Grace has come to London to buy her trousseau for her wedding to that Sir Godfrey Caskins. If she’s marrying a gentleman she can hardly stay here at Campion’s. Toffs like him wouldn’t think it was proper. They say he’s got pots of money. There was a big article in The Times about him. Apparently he does good everywhere he goes. I’ve met plenty of them do-gooders, and they’re always very la-di-dah.”

  Rose was certain that Grace, a former aerial contortionist and widow of Edward’s cousin, would have much preferred to spend her time at Campion’s, rather than playing cards in Silver Square with elderly aristocrats, but Edward had insisted that Grace would want a glimpse into London society after months of being alone in Yorkshire, with only her little son Freddie for company.

  Edward had expressed his concern to Rory that Grace might not be marrying Sir Godfrey because she really loved him, but because she was lonely and wanted for company. But Rory had told Rose and Effie that she thought that was unlikely, because while Godfrey Caskins may be saintly, he was also one of the most boring men she had ever met.

  Rose sighed. “I do so miss Rory.”

  “Well,” said Effie good-humouredly, “until Rory returns, you’ll just have to make do with me.”

  Rose grinned. It was never a hardship spending time with Effie. An orphan who at one time had been set to work as a pickpocket against her will, Effie was as much like a sister to Rose as Aurora. It felt odd being two when they were normally three. Rose thought it was like having a limb missing.

  “Come on, Effie, we better shift this box. If we leave it here there’ll be a bloodbath when the ballet girls all try and exit the stage.” She looked at the mysterious box with curiosity. “What’s in it, anyway? And who does it belong to?”

  “I don’t know what’s in it, but I know it’s for that Desiree, or whatever she calls herself,” said O’Leary, who happened to be passing. The elderly actor was employed as the Campion’s stage-door keeper – a job that his fondness for brandy made him quite ill-suited to carry out with any efficiency. But he was as much a part of Campion’s as the gilt mirrors and gas lamps.

  The way he sniffed made it clear what he thought about Desiree, the star dancer who had been packing out Campion’s for weeks with her dance of the seven veils. Desiree – real name Ivy Puddlewick – was as popular with the Campion’s punters as she was unpopular with the Campion’s staff and other performers.

  When she had first arrived at Campion’s, everyone had felt sorry for Ivy, who, like far too many ballet girls in music halls and theatres across the land, had had the misfortune to be badly burned while performing. Her costume had caught alight on the gas lamps while dancing at a hall on the Walworth Road. Ivy had been one of the lucky ones – she didn’t die, but her neck and chin were badly scarred. She had turned terrible adversity to her advantage, coming up with a new act in which she billed herself as “the greatest sensation since Salome” and performed a dance in which the lower half of her face remained covered even after she had removed her other veils. It was a wily trick that highlighted the soulful expressiveness of her sad, dark eyes, which she liberally outlined with burned cork. But success had gone to Ivy’s head. She had turned into something of a monster – refusing to share a dressing room and treating everyone at Campion’s as if they were the dirt on the underside of her boots.

  Thomas, who hated such behaviour, had been on the verge of not renewing Ivy’s weekly contract, when his other star turn, Prudence Smith, whose stage name was the far more alluring Belle Canterbury, had taken time off again to nurse her invalid mother, Giovanna. Mrs Smith, a tiny bird-like woman, Italian by birth, had been at death’s door for at least ten years, but so far had always remained on the right side of it. Pru joked that her ma would outlive them all.

  With Belle Canterbury – her major competition – absent, Desiree became more popular than ever. Every night a queue of young men gathered around the Campion’s stage door, clutching bouquets and hoping for a private audience with Desiree. Their hopes were almost always d
ashed. Ivy was smart enough to realise that the success of her act was enhanced by cultivating an air of mystery. Rose had noticed that lately Ivy had taken to wearing a pair of diamond earrings, which rather suggested she had an affluent admirer – but if she did, she was keeping him a secret.

  Approaches from Dottie Collins – billed as “the Queen of the Swells”, who did a very successful comic song and dance routine – and Hopkin and Dent, a pair of illusionists who took it in turns to stroll around the stage with the other’s disembodied head under their arms, had failed to dislodge Ivy from the top of the Campion’s bill.

  “I suspect the only thing that will do it is death,” said Lottie, the lead ballet girl, one afternoon, after Ivy had been particularly vile. “But she can’t be more than twenty-two, so we may have a very long wait,” she added gloomily.

  Rose peered through one of several small holes punched into the side of the mysterious box. But the interior was far too dark for her to see anything. The music from the orchestra indicated that the dance routine was reaching its climax.

  “Come on, Effie. It’s now or never if we’re going to move this box. We can haul it into Ivy’s dressing room, and then it’s her problem, not ours.” Rose and Effie each took a side of the box and lifted it a few inches off the ground. Immediately there was a strange noise from within. The girls dropped the box in surprise.

  “It’s alive!” shrieked Effie. “It’s a snake!”

  Rose shook her head. “Snakes definitely don’t growl.” She fixed an eye to one of the holes and looked down into the box. Two yellow eyes glared back at her.

  “It’s a cat,” said Rose excitedly. “Somebody has given Ivy a cat.”

  “Poor puss,” said Effie with sympathy. “I don’t think being owned by Ivy would be much fun. I saw her aim a kick at Ophelia the other day.” Ophelia was the Campion’s cat, who treated the music hall as if it was her own personal fiefdom. At this very moment she was curled up at the far side of the stage, watching the ballet girls dance, and purring contentedly.