A Slash of Emerald

Book 2: Dr. Julia Lewis Mystery

by Patrice McDonough

Genres: Historical Mysteries

Synopsis

In a riveting new novel in a Victorian-set mystery series brimming with authentic atmosphere, Doctor Julia Lewis, Scotland Yard’s first female medical examiner, and her partner, Detective Inspector Richard Tennant, investigate a string of murders in the art world.

London, 1867: Among the genteel young ladies of London society, painting is a perfectly acceptable pastime—but a woman who dares to pursue art as a profession is another prospect, indeed. Dr. Julia Lewis, familiar with the disrespect afforded women in untraditional careers, is hardly surprised when Scotland Yard shows little interest in complaints made by her friend, Mary Allingham, about a break-in at her art studio. Mary is just one of many “lady painters” being targeted by vandals.
 
Painters’ sitters are vanishing, too—women viewed by some as dispensable outcasts. Inspector Richard Tennant, however, takes the attacks seriously, suspecting they’re linked to the poison-pen letters received by additional members of the Allingham family. For Julia, the issue is complicated by Tennant’s previous relationship with Mary’s sister-in-law, Louisa, and by her own surprising reaction to that entanglement.
 
But when someone close to them commits suicide and a young woman turns up dead, the case can no longer be so easily ignored by ‘respectable’ society. Layer after layer, Julia and Tennant scrape away the facts of the case like paint from a canvas. What emerges is a somber picture of vice, depravity, and deception stretching from London’s East End to the Far East—with a killer at its center, determined to get away with one last, grisly murder . . . 

Release date: February 25, 2025

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 336

Sample

January 1867

Dr. Julia Lewis eyed the morning’s post and a stack of earlier unanswered letters.

Her recent wrestling match with a killer and plunge into Regent’s Canal had kept the postman busy. Most of her friends and acquaintances—and a surprising number of strangers—had written to wish her well.

Over the past few days, letters of a different sort had arrived at her grandfather’s Finsbury Circus town house. A small item in the Sunday Telegraph had mentioned Julia’s addition to the list of Scotland Yard’s medical examiners, the first woman to be named.

One writer asked, “Have you learned nothing from your ordeal? Women belong in the domestic sphere as God intended. Remember, only the quick work of the men of Scotland Yard saved you from drowning.”

Julia tossed the letter aside. As if I need reminding. On that fog-shrouded day, the killer meant for her to die. Instead, she’d been granted a second chance.

Julia abandoned her pen and pushed back the chestnut strands that had fallen from her hairpins. Her fingertips brushed the bandage on her neck. Had the knife slashed an inch to the left, her story would have had a different ending. She’d been lucky.

Restless, Julia drifted around the drawing room, taking in the blue-and-white tiles surrounding the fireplace and the light spilling between starched, white curtains. But domesticity wasn’t the life she’d chosen, and two weeks of empty mornings and afternoon naps had bored her silly. It was past time she returned to her medical clinic in Whitechapel.

If some think that’s unnatural, to hell with them.

Julia looked up with curiosity and relief at a knock. Muffled voices and footsteps followed.

Mrs. Ogilvie opened the door. “Inspector Tennant is here to see you, Doctor Julie.”

The housekeeper stood back, and the tall, dark-haired detective with the erect bearing of a former army officer entered the room.

“Richard,” Julia said, smiling. She glanced at the clock on the mantel. “Not yet noon. It’s much too early for a social call.” Her eyes dropped. “And you’ve held on to your hat. Does Scotland Yard beckon so soon?”

“Quite right. I see you haven’t lost a step.”

“This is a pleasure.”

“I hope you’ll still think so after we talk.”

“Hmm . . . sounds ominous.” Julia patted the armrest of a chair by the fireplace and sat in its twin.

Tennant settled in and fixed her with his grave and steady gaze. “How are you?”

“Recovered.” She touched the bandage.

“Do you feel ready to—”

“More than ready.”

“I wonder if your grandfather agrees.”

“My only ailment is acute boredom.” Julia waved around the room. “All this quiet is driving me batty.”

“Let me see . . . two weeks caged in the house. I imagine Mrs. Ogilvie and the rest of the staff share the feeling.”

“Itching for Monday when they’ll finally see the back of me.”

“Who’s been in charge in Whitechapel?”

“Nurse Clemmie. But on paper, Gregory Barnes, a young doctor from the London Hospital. He’s filling in at the clinic, thanks to Uncle Max.”

“Doctor Maximilian Franklin to the rescue.”

Julia smiled. “Useful when the hospital’s chairman is your godfather. Doctor Barnes will stay on at the clinic, working two nights a week and every other Saturday.”

“Something of a breather for you. Much earned, I’ll add.”

“Thank you.” She sat back and looked at him over tented fingers. “Now tell me. What do you want me to do that I won’t like?”

“I sought you out because . . . well, to be frank, the services of a female doctor would be useful.”

“Sounds promising so far.”

“Last night, a constable took a young woman into custody near St. James’s Park. He spotted her walking alone on Birdcage Walk and talking to a pair of privates from the Wellington Barracks. So, she was—”

“Let me guess. The copper arrested her under the Contagious Diseases Acts.”

“Correct.”

“And you want me to perform a forced medical examination on her?”

“An examination required by law.”

“Because the law presumes any unaccompanied female walking near an army barracks is a prostitute, most likely a diseased one.”

Julia stood abruptly, her chair legs scraping the parquet floor. She crossed to the window and pushed the curtain aside. A wrought-iron fence edged her front garden, enclosing it from the foot traffic beyond. Sunlight caught the gilded pickets, a golden barricade pointing skyward. Anger radiated like a burn.

“Would any constable question my right to walk Finsbury Circus at dusk?”

Tennant stood. “Of course not, but—”

Julia dropped the curtain and turned. “But working women hurrying home in the evening? That’s another story.”

“Julia, don’t pretend you don’t understand the problem. Venereal illnesses are epidemic in the army. Parliament has raised questions about the readiness of our forces.”

“And passes laws that omit the forced examination of males.”

Tennant sighed. “Must we make this another argument about the many ways the world treats men and women unequally?”

“When Scotland Yard hires its first female copper, and they arrest the male partners of the women they exploit, then I’ll stop arguing with you.”

“Doctor Lewis, a job needs to be done. Will you do it?”

“I . . . I don’t think I can be a party to it.”

“For God’s sake, Julia.”

She threw out a hand. “I’m not the only one who thinks forced examinations are medical rape. I signed a petition to repeal the wretched acts. How can I—”

“You can stand on a soapbox on Hyde Park Corner, picket Parliament, or write to the queen, for all I care.”

“But—”

“If you don’t examine this young woman, the divisional inspector will call in a doctor who will. He may be less considerate of the girl’s feelings than you. Is that what you want?”

“Of course not.” Julia dropped onto her desk chair. She plucked a pencil from the desktop and tapped it distractedly on the blotter.

“The girl had a crown and six shillings in her pocket. It’s quite a sum for a hatmaker from Aldgate. She claims she works part-time as an artist’s model and was heading home to her bed.” Tennant shrugged. “She may be lying, but I’m inclined to believe her.”

Julia looked up. “Why did they call you? Prostitution is too commonplace a crime to involve the Detective Department.”

“I was at the station house on another matter. When I suggested a female doctor, the divisional inspector’s first response was . . . let’s say he wasn’t keen.”

“You surprise me.”

“If you want to know, he questioned your credentials. And he’s impatient to get the girl out of his station house. So, the longer we argue—”

“I’ll do it, Richard.” Julia stood. “Of course I will. The poor girl . . . where is she?”

“King Street police station.”

“Julia half smiled. “Shall I bring my medical registry certificate to convince this inspector person?”

“Division Inspector Evans, and documents won’t be necessary.”

“I’ll get my bag. My Aunt Caroline expects me for tea, so I’ll take a cab from King Street to Sussex Terrace when we’re finished.”

Tennant smiled faintly. “We won’t keep Lady Aldridge waiting. I wouldn’t dare.” He put his hand out and stopped Julia before she went through the door. “She’s young, and she looked frightened. Her name is Annie O’Neill.”

Mary Allingham was late. Her bonnet’s sapphire ribbons streamed behind her as she flew along the paths by the boating lake of Regent’s Park. She was tall, fair, light on her feet, and waved to the Regent’s Park groundskeeper who’d doffed his cap. Mary felt as sunny as the cloudless afternoon.

And why not? Mary knew she was singularly blessed. Although she’d lost her parents while still in the cradle, she’d come of age with a generous income and an older brother too amiable and indolent to check her independence. At twenty-three, she was clever enough to understand her good fortune and sensible enough not to let it go to her head. Men lost theirs in her company, something she’d understood since she was fifteen. But to Mary, her golden good looks were like her money, invested in the funds at five percent: not an object of pride or vanity but an asset she’d be a fool to deny.

The groundskeeper returned to his work. Mary watched him lift and drop his iron mallet with a resounding crack. Birds flocked to the water he’d freed from the ice. She stopped at the end of a path, shielding her eyes from the low January sun, tracking a swan’s graceful flight and landing. Each beating wing rose to form a perfect V, the bird gliding until its webbed feet skimmed the ice, sliding to a stop.

Fifty yards from shore, about twenty stick-wielding men chased and passed a slippery disk. One hockey player followed the puck to the pond’s edge, digging in his blades to stop, nearly colliding with the mallet-wielding groundskeeper. When the skater stepped back to push off, his boot broke through. He pulled out his foot, shook off the water, and skated away. Mary caught the parkkeeper’s eye and smiled. He gave her a salute and resumed breaking the ice at the lake’s edge.

Mary picked up her pace and spotted her sister-in-law standing by a bench along the south shore. She was easy to find. Louisa was as tall as Mary but more amply shaped and held herself like a queen. Her abundant auburn hair spread like wings under her cobalt hat, gathering at the back in a braided chignon at the nape of her neck. When she turned her head to peer down the pathway, her hair caught fire in the slanting sunlight. Mary smiled at Louisa’s indifference to the admiring glance of a passing gentleman.

“Here I am,” Mary called, coming from the opposite direction.

“You’re late, my dear,” Louisa said, sounding worried.

“Sorry, sorry, sorry.”

Mary dropped her skates and sat. She looked across the lake, distracted by the winter landscape. She was a painter and had an artist’s eye for nature’s beauties. Mary’s fingers itched for a pencil to sketch a birch tree’s curling white bark and capture winter-bare branches like black lace against the sky.

Louisa eyed her sister-in-law. “Have you changed your mind?”

Mary smiled at her hopeful tone. “Not at all.” She bent and fiddled with her skates.

“My dear, suppose you fall?”

“I wore my best lace petticoat just in case my skirts fly.” She scanned the skaters. “I don’t see Charles. Has he grown bored already and given up?”

Her brother’s recent enthusiasm for the sport surprised Mary. He’d rarely done anything more strenuous than amble through a picture gallery. But Charles, being Charles, had no objection to her company that afternoon.

Mary spotted her tall brother etching lazy figure eights into the ice. Charles looked up and waved. Then, in a burst of energy, he tossed the end of his scarlet scarf over his shoulder and skated to the lake’s edge, turning the inside of his blade into the ice, sending flakes flying. He doffed his fawn houndstooth cap in a sweeping bow.

“Ladies, no applause, please.”

“You’ve been practicing,” Mary said.

“And you’re late—but what else is new?”

“Does your business partner know you’re playing truant?”

“Allingham and Allen can do without me for a day.” Charles turned to Louisa. “My dear, I hope you’re not dissuading Mary from skating today.”

Louisa swept her muff across the lake. “I don’t see a single lady out on the ice.”

“Lady?” Charles stretched out the word, raising his voice in a comical question. “You expect our Mary to do the ladylike thing?” A grin split the fair hairs of his trim beard and mustache. “I have the answer.” He edged up the incline sideways and grabbed his wife’s hand. “Come, my dear, you must set the precedent. Slide along with me. Never mind your boots. I’ll hold you up.”

“No, Charles. Certainly not.” Louisa tried to back away.

He laughed and pulled her to him, holding her for a moment. Then he kissed her, released her, and regained the ice, skating away. Louisa looked pink, but a smile played on her lips, and her dark eyes shone.

Charles called to his sister over his shoulder, “Don’t be all day.”

Mary fitted her skates over her boots and adjusted the straps. Then she pulled on her mittens, stood, and swayed. She clutched at Louisa’s arm for temporary support, took a step, and her right skate fell off. She refastened it. It slipped off a second time, followed by the left.

“My dear, they simply don’t fit.” Louisa looked over her shoulder at the rental kiosk. “Can you exchange them for another pair?”

Mary gathered them up and dumped them on the bench. “They were the smallest size they had. That prig of a clerk will be happy to see me back, tail between my legs. ‘We don’t carry skates for ladies, madam.’ I wanted to throw them at him.”

Mary looked out at the crowd on the lake. Then she dropped on the bench in defeat and leaned over to retie a bootlace that had come undone.

“Don’t you get sick of it, Lou?” Mary said, tugging at the lace. “Everything women can’t do—the blank busyness of our days. We’re never allowed to stretch or look around. The world slaps blinders on us and sends us down a narrow path.”

“You manage to go your way well enough,” Louisa said.

Mary looked up, surprised, feeling the sting in the remark.

Louisa moved Mary’s skates and sat next to her. More mildly, she said, “Besides, once you’re married, and you have your own house and a husband to look after—”

“And become nothing but a broodmare. Good for spawning his heirs.”

Too late, Mary wanted to bite back her words. For ten years, her sister-in-law had tried and failed to carry a pregnancy to term. Her third miscarriage in the fall had brought Mary home from Paris. She wondered if Louisa’s heart would always beat for a child or if the yearning would die away.

Mary contemplated her sister-in-law behind lowered lids. It had been more than ten years since Charles had fiddled with the focus of his opera glasses and brought dark-eyed, flame-haired Louisa Upton into view. He claimed he never heard another note of the performance.

Is Charles happy with his prize? Mary wondered. Louisa didn’t share the family passion for art and had little to add when the conversation turned to painting. As the years passed, her brother had less and less to say to his wife. Yet Louisa was an intelligent woman who was widely read and fluent in French. Mary envied her skill while she was living in Paris. Her sister-in-law should have married into a family of novelists, not painters.

Louisa’s great tragedy was the empty nursery, but Mary didn’t think it mattered much to Charles. None, one, or a brood of ten, it was all the same to her amiable brother. He was impossible to disappoint or provoke.

And yet . . .

Since Mary’s return from Paris, she’d sensed something amiss with her brother. She looked up and sought his figure on the lake. Charles circled, retracing the same small loop, his hands clasped in the small of his back. Even from a distance, Mary saw his change in mood. It was as if the noonday sun had vanished in an eclipse. She read dejection in the slope of his shoulders, his bowed head, his gaze fixed on the ice.

“Lou . . . is something wrong with Charles?”

Louisa gripped her hand. “You’ve noticed it, too?”

“What’s troubling him?”

“I wish I knew. Charles is away most evenings, dining at that club of his. And it’s been months since he—” Louisa flushed and looked away.

Oh dear, Mary thought. She was trying to think of something to say when a splintering crack shot across the park.

Louisa gasped. “What was that?”

The sun-splashed afternoon collapsed in a confusion of shouts and screams.

Tennant held the door, and Julia entered the police station ahead of him. She felt as if a photographer had set off his flash powder, freezing an image in place. A pair of constables fell silent and stared. The sergeant perched on a high stool behind the duty desk halted over his ledger, pen poised. Julia straightened her spine and approached a wiry, hatchet-faced man in a police inspector’s tunic. He frowned at his open pocket watch.

Tennant said, “Inspector Evans, this is Doctor Lewis.”

He snapped the case shut and nodded. “Let’s get this over with.”

Thirty minutes later, Evans stood aside as a constable led the teary Annie O’Neill back to a holding cell. Tennant closed an oak door marked PRISONERS ONLY behind her.

Evans folded his arms and looked at Julia. “Well, Doctor?”

“Well, Inspector . . . I’ve just examined London’s only virgin prostitute.” Julia turned her back and finished rolling a set of instruments into a linen cloth.

Evans swallowed. His Adam’s apple bobbed over his stiff collar. “You’re sure?”

“Quite sure. Annie O’Neill is virgo intacta and certainly free of venereal disease.” Julia stowed the bundle in her medical bag and snapped it shut. “Annie O’Neill is no more a streetwalker than I.”

“Given the circumstances, we—”

“She said she’d been sitting for an artist. An inquiry at the studio would have spared her this ordeal.”

The ruddy-faced duty sergeant snorted from behind his desk. “What would that have told us? Dropping her knickers for art? Bollocks. These models are no better than—”

“Better than what, Sergeant?”

“Everyone knows what they get up to, and that’s a fact.”

Julia’s hand itched to slap the sneer off his face. “Annie O’Neill hasn’t ‘gotten up to’ much. That’s a fact, too.”

At least Inspector Evans looked chastened. “The entrance to the Cockpit Steps leads to an alley that’s notorious for . . . fleeting encounters.”

“Just what the soldiers had in mind, no doubt,” Julia said. “But Annie was simply exercising her right as a British subject to walk along a pavement.”

“Rights,” the sergeant spat out the word. “She knows the law,” he snapped. “Or she should.”

“Annie informed the policeman that the soldiers harassed her. She told them to ‘hop it,’ but the constable arrested her, not them.”

The sergeant crossed his arms. “Lady, do you think we believe every fairy tale floated by a tart?”

“It’s Doctor, and Annie O’Neill isn’t a tart, is she, Sergeant?”

Tennant followed a fuming Julia out the door to King Street and waited with her for a cab. He cleared his throat. “I’m sorry, Julia. I wouldn’t tolerate such impudence from my subordinate.”

“The girl deserves an apology, not me. I doubt one will be forthcoming.”

“I’ll stay until they release Miss O’Neill and see that she gets home safely to her flat in Aldgate.”

A cab slowed at the inspector’s signal and stopped. Tennant opened the hansom’s doors and stood back for Julia. He said to the cabbie, “Sussex Terrace, number . . .” Tennant looked at Julia. “What is Lady Aldridge’s street number?”

“Twenty-four,” she said, taking her seat.

Tennant closed the doors, and the hansom jerked forward.

Pandemonium had shattered the placid afternoon at Regent’s Park.

It rose in a tumult of terror and despair: the screams of onlookers at the water’s edge, the desperate cries for help from the lake, the rescuers’ commands to “give way, let us through,” and the shouted names of loved ones sinking beneath the surface.

Within minutes, the skaters near the shore had made it to safety, but over a hundred souls farther out had plunged into the water. Then the rush of skaters from the center pitched scores of additional people into the lake. Desperate victims clung to the edges of ice floes. Others threw themselves flat onto larger sections and waved frantically for rescue.

The Humane Society’s icemen went to work immediately. They flung ropes to desperate men bobbing in the water. They rammed wheeled ladders between the chunks of ice and rolled them in as far as they could. Several icemen braved the water, pulling skaters to safety, buoyed by their cork life belts. Others recruited bystanders to help carry skiffs from the boathouse by the lake’s western shore. They launched them with difficulty, oarlocks clanking, bows dinging ice blocks, progress blocked by the jagged floes.

Within twenty minutes, many had saved themselves. Bystanders had pulled out the skaters within easy reach, but scores still struggled in the water.

Knots of onlookers kept watch from the shore over selected victims. From time to time, a moaning wail went up as the skater in their sights slipped from a floe and vanished. When a top-hatted gentleman sank under the water, someone cried, “Look, he’s gone, poor soul.” Only his hat remained floating on the surface.

An old barrow-woman wrapped in tattered shawls rocked on the ground, keening, her basket of bright oranges at her side. “Jack, Jack,” she moaned. “Dear God, will no one save him?” Her husband was beyond help. The onlookers watched the old chestnut seller slip off the edge of a floe. His wheeled, coal-fired brazier tumbled in after him, sinking amid the hissing steam.

Mary and Louisa stood among the desperate, watching loved ones struggle to survive. Charles was up to his neck in freezing water, clinging to a section of ice about thirty yards from them.

Louisa sobbed, “Charles, Charles.” She clutched her sister-in-law’s arm. “Mary, what can we do?”

Nearby, an exhausted iceman stumbled up the bank and fell to his knees. Someone untangled the rope that bound him to the man he’d saved. Then two others took the sodden, freezing pair away to the Humane Society’s tent to be warmed.

Mary rushed forward and seized the discarded coil. She raised its looped end over her head.

“Twenty pounds to anyone willing to rescue that man in the deerstalker cap.” She pointed to her struggling brother. “And two pounds each to the first three men who’ll volunteer to pull them in.”

A burly man shrugged off his jacket, grabbed the other end of the rope, and tossed it to his friend. Mary handed him the looped coil; he slipped it over his head and shoulders. Another man broke from the crowd, spit into hands the size of boxing gloves, and grasped the line with his meaty fists.

Julia knew something was wrong the moment her cab turned into Sussex Terrace.

Crowds streamed across the Outer Circle roadway, heading toward the park. When her rattling hansom stopped at her aunt’s town house, Julia heard a muted din rumbling in the distance. Her aunt’s front door opened while she paid off the cabbie, and the butler and footman struggled down the steps holding the handles of a large wicker basket.

“What’s happening?”

“The ice in the park,” the butler said. “It was rotten and gave way. Hundreds of skaters fell into the lake. Lady Aldridge is sending blankets and warm clothing.”

Julia’s Aunt Caroline appeared in the doorway. “And there’s a call for doctors, my dear.”

Julia and her aunt’s servants rushed to the swamped relief station. The Humane Society had equipped it to treat the minor accidents that washed up on any given day. But that afternoon, the catastrophe surged like a tsunami, overwhelming its resources.

As Julia arrived, a soaked, shivering man pushed through the canvas flap and headed for the brazier. A burly laborer followed, backing through the opening, holding an unconscious skater under his armpits. His partner supported the victim’s legs. Julia pointed to an empty cot. “Strip off his coat and lay him on his stomach.”

A flame-haired woman of about thirty, visibly distraught, clutched the hand of a younger woman. “He’ll be all right, won’t he, Mary?”

“Of course he will.” The fair-haired girl caught Julia’s eye, looking less confident than she sounded.

“Perhaps if your companion took that seat,” Julia said, smiling reassuringly, and nodded at a chair. Then she leaned over the bearded skater. She judged him to be a fit man in his early thirties, and that was all to the good. Julia applied her stethoscope and listened. “His lungs are clear, and he’s breathing without difficulty.”

“Oh, thank God,” the older woman said with a shuddery sigh.

“And his color is good.” Julia straightened up. “Let’s make him more comfortable, shall we?” With the fair-haired girl’s help, she stripped off his sodden socks and tugged on dry ones from her aunt’s basket. Then Julia covered him with a blanket.

“May I have another?” The young woman nodded at the pile of blankets. “That shivering gentleman by the fire saved my brother.” Julia handed her a blanket, and the girl draped it over the man’s shoulders.

The older woman dragged her chair close to the cot. She raked tangled curls from the man’s brow and stroked his cheek, murmuring, “Charles. Dear, dear Charles.” The frost that clung to . . .