Death and the Runaways

Book 3: Mary Shelley Mystery

by Heather Redmond

Genres: Historical Mysteries; International Crime & Mystery; Mystery

Synopsis

Two years before she would conceive of Frankenstein, sixteen-year-old Mary Godwin becomes captivated by the grim murder of a pregnant shopgirl and the disappearance of her stepbrother, involving her stepsister Jane “Claire” Clairmont and the seductive poet Percy Bysshe Shelley to solve the crime . . .

London, June 1814: On a day out in Hyde Park to celebrate the peace treaty with France, Mary and Jane are less than charmed by their brother Charles’s courtship with a girl from the local cheese shop. When Miss Winnet Davies is not swooning from the heat, she’s imploring Charles to buy her a pretty dress. But he hasn’t a tuppence—nor have they, as their father, philosopher William Godwin, is facing the prospect of debtor’s prison.

When a constable arrives at the Godwin home the following day, looking for Charles, Mary and Jane learn that the lifeless body of Miss Davies was found hanging from a tree branch and an examination revealed she was with child. Their stepbrother has gone missing.

Inclined toward morbidity, Mary assumes he too is dead, but her stepmother admonishes her and insists the sisters find their brother. Before they can search, a terrifying Bow Street Runner named Fisher calls and announces his intention to court Mary. Even if she wasn’t passionately infatuated with married poet and radical Percy Shelley, she is horrified by the massive Bow Street Runner’s plan.

Despite this, to find their brother and clear his name, Mary and Jane alternately enlist the help of the experienced and intimidating Fisher and Shelley himself, who is as enticed by the opportunity to be close to Mary as he is intrigued by the mystery. But the unfortunate shopgirl is only the first to die, and soon the sisters and Shelley face a merciless quarry who will do anything to silence them. . .

Release date: July 29, 2025

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 320

Sample

London, Monday, June 20, 1814

Hyde Park’s summer heat had tormented us for more than two hours by the time the artillery’s royal gun salute began to sound twenty-one times, announcing the arrival of the Prince Regent and his party. Mary and I were attempting to keep ourselves cool among the trees, while listening to our fellow bystanders’ discussions about the Definitive Treaty of Peace with France, but my brother Charles and his lady friend gamely tilted their straw brims against the heat and leaned against the fences, doing their own inspection of the troops within our eyeline.

While smoke puffed over us, graying the blue sky and covering the scents of earth and grass with that of gunpowder, I daydreamed a bit about traveling to places we’d heard so much about but couldn’t visit. Now the war with France over. When would our adventures begin? My thoughts were interrupted by cannon fire, and then a band began to play “God Save the King.” All our brave soldiers in their colored coats and white breeches did complicated things with their guns. Charles, in front of me, didn’t move a muscle, so drawn was he to the manly display, but the sharp-nosed young lady with him, who looked vaguely familiar, though I couldn’t place her, plucked at his arm and spoke in his ear, restless in the heat.

I had not known my older brother was courting. Charles had never been of much interest to me, at least not since my mother had married William Godwin and I’d acquired Mary, just six months older, as a stepsister. Charles’s taste in females had apparently settled on the neat-as-a-pin type. Carefully constructed light brown curls danced around her temples, a straw bonnet hiding the evidence of whether her hair was naturally curly or not. Her sprigged muslin gown hugged her body more tightly than what I might have chosen, but it set off her straight, boyish figure well.

Over the rustling of leaves, I heard someone say fourteen thousand troops and officers had combined on the vast, hot fields of Hyde Park today. The twenty-six hundred horses underneath officers and cavalrymen, which our neighbor had reported on previously, made themselves evident to my nostrils.

I counted off the third volley of cannon fire. Next to me, Mary held her hands over her bonnet, looking cross from the wave of percussive sound. Even that expression could not diminish the fairy beauty of her face, so different from my darker skin and eyes. I pulled a twig from her fine red-gold hair, then turned back to the field. Enthusiasm did not exactly bubble forth from my breast, either, since we had seen the royal party at the theater recently. Distinguished personages had been in London for quite a while now, and they had hangers-on, some of whom I knew to be dangerous.

Mamma and Papa had hoped many of these deep-pocketed, consequential people would enter the doors at our Skinner Street bookshop or, even better, take tea with us in our private rooms. But it had been weeks since we’d had a visit from anyone with the funds and idealism that might send coins dropping into the outstretched hands of my mother and stepfather. That they desperately needed the coins had kept us out of sorts. Papa had been extricated from the grasping hands of the moneylenders only by merest circumstance, and we were all waiting for the next disaster.

Mary’s hands dropped to her waist when the cannons stopped sometime later, the royals having progressed down the endless lines of men, reviewing the troops. Plumes waved merrily above the smoke as the personages rode along the field. They were little more than stick figures to me. Stick figures with money, which I desperately wanted to figure out how to liberate from their pockets. Drums and music still played over the sounds of the horses’ equipment, keeping our attention on the field.

My avaricious thoughts were interrupted by newer sounds. I looked up, then turned as branches cracked, leaves fell, and a boy cried out.

An older man pulled the spindly lad from the bush under an oak tree and roughly dusted the back of his coat. “Did ye break any bones, Jimmy?”

The boy, half a dozen years younger than me, shook his head. One glance at the man’s face made him hang his head low.

The man glanced around, his expression calming as he saw so many gazes looking in his direction. “Don’t climb that tree again,” he cautioned. “Have some sense, lad. The upper branches are weak.”

The boy bit his lip, then nodded.

I turned back when Mary sneezed.

“The smoke is so thick I can’t see the trees on the other side,” she complained. “Why did we come today? I have such a headache.”

“I thought you could write a scene like this for your novel Isabella, the Penitent; or, The Bandit Novice of Dundee,” I explained, mentioning her manuscript in progress. Her heroine was named after Isabella Baxter, Mary’s friend who lived in Scotland. Mary wanted to be a writer like Papa and her late mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, and I aimed to encourage her. I liked it when she read to us. “It can’t all be chasing mummies and lovemaking.”

She began to argue with me on that point, but her voice squeaked into a cough. Giving up on speech, she threw up her hands and went to stand next to Charles. I stayed in the shade.

Two foreign crowned heads rode by, along with a crowd of men in the uniforms of their home militaries. I recognized the rulers as Emperor Alexander of Russia and King Frederick William of Prussia, who was accompanied by his two handsome young sons, but Mary merely brushed off the dust graying her white skirt and didn’t look up. I counted to amuse myself. More than three hundred men were in the royal party, all of them with full pockets. Any one of them had the power to save us at Skinner Street. I didn’t want Papa to have to go to the sponging house, then debtors’ prison.

When the shouts of onlookers to the royals died down, I heard the young lady with Charles suggest he find her some lemonade. He turned and saw me. I knew by his wild expression that he didn’t have so much as a tuppence with him. Neither did I. He had been educated expensively for his role in the family business, unlike me, but he wasn’t paid much for his time in the warehouse, and I wasn’t paid at all for my work in the shop. He’d have to find a way to court without spending anything, but I didn’t know who would want him. I suspected Miss Neat as a Pin wouldn’t stay for long. She already looked almost as disgruntled as Mary.

In fact, while I watched, Charles’s companion suddenly swayed. Clutching her belly, she crumpled. He swore, crying, “Miss Davies, Miss Davies,” and grabbed her under the arms. Mary had been paying more attention than I expected. She snaked her arm around the girl’s waist, and they helped her down to the packed dirt so she could lean against the fence.

An older woman clicked her false teeth, then came toward Miss Davies with a bottle. The woman helped Miss Davies drink until some of her color had been restored. She drank so greedily from the bottle that water dotted her prominent nose.

The serene weather and warm sun did not help with the dust. Miss Davies coughed from her low vantage point. She reached into the pocket of her apron and pulled out a bundle and handed it to the older woman, who unwrapped it and nodded, then returned to her party, leaving the bottle with Miss Davies.

I glanced curiously at the object and saw it was a small round of cheese. I admired Miss Davies for having taken matters into her own hands. I knew who she was now, a shopgirl at the local cheese shop, who was familiarly called Winnet by the owners, a married couple.

The boy who had fallen laughed loudly behind me. I turned back to him and saw that a young man with sunken cheeks had come around the tree. That round of cheese would benefit him more than the comfortable lady who had offered the bottle. He, after he had some attention on him, pulled a deck of red-and-green abstract design-backed cards from a bag he carried, then shuffled them with theatrical flourishes. They looked like a deck I had seen the French émigrés playing with at the Polygon when we lived there.

Mary joined me in the shade, and we both gazed upon the magician, drawn toward the unfolding drama of the cards. His expressive, bony face, capped by lank, dark locks, matched his body, though his clothes looked quite new and maintained for someone who probably made little coin.

“Choose any eight cards,” the magician invited, moving the cards with lightning speed through his fingers.

The boy fell back, but his older male companion stepped up. “What’s the trick?” he growled.

“No trick, no trick. One penny to play,” the magician said with a broad grin that exposed his crooked lower teeth, all huddled together in that narrow jaw.

“How do I win?” the man asked.

I clutched Mary’s arm, excited. I hoped the magician would lure the man in.

“If I can trick you out of a card, you’ll have tuppence. But it’s one penny to play.” The magician let the cards fall like a waterfall through his fingers.

The boy squeezed the older man’s arm, urging him on. The man tugged on his graying beard; then his hand went under his coat. He produced a penny and set it on a waist-high branch, his fingers leaving it only slowly.

Quick as a blink, the penny vanished, replaced by the cards, spread across the branch.

“Count them if you like,” the magician said. “All fifty-two are there, gentlemen and ladies, but we only use eight for this experiment.”

“Which eight?” the man asked, more eager now that he’d committed his penny.

“Your choice, sir. Pick them out. Then we’ll see if I can make it disappear.”

“I’m a carpenter, son. Good with my hands,” the man growled.

The magician nodded solemnly and sucked in his lower lip before saying, “Very good, sir. Eight, any that you choose, sir. Let’s not keep your audience waiting. They want to see if they can beat me, too.”

“I’ll beat you myself if you cheat,” said a rough-looking individual on my other side.

The magician laughed merrily. It seemed very practiced, an act he’d perfected.

The man chose his eight, and soon they were spread out on the branch, the others having vanished. The magician flipped the eight into his palm; then the cards flashed as he shuffled them until they were back on the branch, facedown.

“Pick one,” the magician invited. “Show your boy, or the crowd, but don’t show me, no, sir.”

The man put his hands over the cards, then hesitated, looking like a fortune teller himself. Finally, he plucked up his choice and turned it over under the boy’s nose. They nodded at each other.

“We’ll lose it in the cards,” the magician said. He deftly flipped the remaining seven into his hand, then held them out. “Push it in, sir, and don’t let me see.”

I watched breathlessly as he shuffled the eight cards again. Here would be where the trick came in, but I’d probably never see it.

“I have no idea where the card is now,” the magician said in a breezy tone. He started flipping up cards. “Is this yours? Is this?” He kept going until there were four and the man had nodded.

“I’m going to give these to you to protect,” the magician said, all business now. “Place them between your palms, sir, just like so.”

“I’ll give them to the boy to hold,” the man said gruffly.

The boy grinned and held out his palm. The magician placed the flat package of four cards on his hand, and the boy clapped his other hand like a clamshell over the cards.

The magician set the last four cards together on the branch. “Let’s see what happens!” He muttered something in Latin, I thought, then passed his hand over the cards and snapped his fingers.

His little crowd pushed forward, closing in on the branch, as the magician turned over his pile.

“That’s my card!” the man said. “How did you get it?”

The boy cried out and opened his hands. Three cards fell to the ground. He sniffed hard, tears welling up in his eyes. “I didn’t let go, Grandfather, I swear!”

“I know you didn’t.” The old man squared his shoulders. “Well done, sir. You hornswoggled me good and proper.”

The magician nodded and held out his hand for the cards. The boy picked them up from the dirt and handed them over. The magician sighed and pulled out a handkerchief to wipe off the dust.

“Let’s go again,” another man said. A lady clung to him, some years older than us, avarice in her eyes. “I’ll bet I can beat you.”

Mary loosened her arm from mine and turned. I looked back and saw my brother had his finger in Winnet Davies’s face. What was going on?

I stepped forward to hear Miss Davies’s rather shrill words.

“I would do anything for a pretty dress,” she said.

I frowned. No one in our household was buying pretty dresses right now. Mary’s expression matched my own.

I suspected the relationship wouldn’t last long, but she didn’t seem like a good match for our household in any case. We were a family of thinkers, readers. Our entertainment was our little brother, Willy, giving speeches that Mary wrote from his cut-down pulpit, not the careless delights that a cheesemonger might enjoy.

Mary’s expression pinched as the girl’s tone became increasingly whiny.

“Why on earth do you think she expects Charles to buy her a dress?” I asked. “That is utterly inappropriate even if they had been courting for some time.”

Mary shrugged. “I cannot say.”

“You must have an idea.” Behind me, the magician’s patter began again. Someone else must have offered up their penny.

“Maybe he damaged her gown in some fashion,” Mary said, passing her hand over her eyes.

“Are you not well?” I asked. “Don’t you want to discuss how to turn Miss Davies into a villainess for your book? A mad abbess, perhaps, or an innkeeper in collusion with Diego, the mummy master?”

“I have a pain behind my eyes. The sun is most bright, and the dust is terrible.” She squeezed her eyes closed.

“I expect there is nothing much more to see,” I said. “If you do not want to watch the thousands march away.”

She yawned. “I snuck out last night, and I am feeling the effects.”

“Without me?” I asked.

She smiled. “Shelley invited me to see his friends at Old Bond Street.”

“Without me?” I repeated stupidly. The anarchist poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was my friend, too. Why wasn’t I included? I wanted to pinch Mary for sneaking out and not bringing me along.

“They are publishers,” she said. “I must meet such people if I’m to sell Isabella, the Penitent one day.”

“You have to finish writing it first,” I snapped. “Did you have too much wine?”

She nodded, then licked the side of her mouth, as if still tasting it.

I considered her. “You do look a little green.” I glanced past her to Charles, who was throwing up his hands, intent on Miss Davies. “Oh, well. Let’s go home without Charles.”

Mary nodded, wincing. “I don’t want to listen to them argue all the way home.”

I sat up the next morning when a stray ray of sunlight snaked between the curtains. It was Tuesday, but it felt like a holiday after the events in Hyde Park all day and night yesterday. We’d taken our youngest brother, Willy, to see the mock Battle of Trafalgar on the Serpentine at 8:00 p.m. When I went to the window, I saw the street was very quiet, but then all of London had been celebrating the night before.

After putting on my wrapper and tying garters over fresh stockings, I tiptoed down to the parlor to do my vocal warm-up exercises without disturbing the house. Mamma didn’t have the coin for my singing lessons anymore, but I was determined to keep from losing progress. I knew it would be a challenge with no pianoforte in the house, but at least I could sing, and my pitch was good.

Once I had rehearsed for forty minutes, I went back up and took my clothing into Mary’s room so she could help me dress. She was not there, however. My fingers tingled as I forced down my outrage. Had she sneaked out with Shelley again?

I knew she had not gone out since I woke. Only one door connected the entire building to the outside world, and it was in the small front hall between the parlor and the bookshop.

I went back down, then took the steps to the basement to have Polly, our kitchen maid, help me dress. She had the fire going already. Mary, by all rights, should be in the kitchen, as well. Mamma had assigned Mary to manage the cooking once she fired our cook a couple of months ago, but she was not very keen on it.

“Where is your sister?” Polly asked as she pulled the drawstrings at the back of my gown closed.

“I don’t know,” I admitted.

“I’ll need help with the breakfast,” Polly said. “There aren’t enough hands to do the work here. Your parents expect breakfast on the table as soon as you’ve opened the bookshop.”

My ears perked up as I heard light footsteps on the stairs, followed by a heavier tread. Mary appeared in the doorway a few moments later, holding a basket. Behind her came our friend Shelley, always welcome at Skinner Street because he had promised to support Papa in his old age, due to being his disciple in the anarchist philosophies of Papa’s bright youth some twenty years earlier.

Shelley, the grandson of a baronet, stood tall and broad shouldered, though he didn’t eat enough to fill out his rangy frame. He had wavy sandy brown hair and large blue eyes that drew a person in. His fingers were habitually ink-stained, since he was quite the poet, and his overall demeanor positively bubbled with energy and ideas.

We all doted on him. My oldest stepsister, in fact, twenty-year-old Fanny, had been sent away to Wales to work as an unpaid governess due to her unrequited love for Shelley, a married man. Fanny’s loss had caused great difficulties in our household, but our parents saw the punishment of the unwanted exile as just. If nothing else, her honor was being protected.

I didn’t see what use honor was, however. We were not young ladies of the nobility. We didn’t even believe in marriage. Such things were artifacts of the church and the government and had no place in our lives.

“What do you have?” I asked Mary.

“Sour gooseberries.” Already dressed, she wore her favorite tartan dress, which she’d made during her time in Dundee, Scotland. I hated the loud fabric, but she liked to look original.

Shelley certainly didn’t seem to dislike it. His gaze on her was frankly admiring.

“What good are those when I have breakfast to get on the table and you aren’t here to help?” Polly demanded peevishly.

Mary frowned at her. “The good is that they are free. We can make jam or a tart with them. Shelley saw some bushes with ripe fruit a few blocks north of here, and we had to get them before the squalid children did.”

I pulled the basket off her arm. “That’s all very well, but, Shelley, you need to leave. It’s too early for you to be here. Don’t cause a scandal.”

Shelley laughed. “I can do no wrong in dear Godwin’s eyes.”

“Do you want to work in the bookshop with me this morning?” I demanded, setting the basket on the scarred wood worktable.

Shelley mimicked writing in a ledger, then laughed. “Your mamma would not like it, for I would sell seditious pamphlets to infants.”

“It’s going to be a dreadful day with the heat,” I said, knowing he wasn’t joking. He’d turn the children of the upper classes into atheists if he had access to them. “Mary, hurry up and help Polly. I’ll wake Willy.”

“Why do either?” Shelley asked, then quoted from a poem I knew well. “ ‘Come forth into the light of things, let nature be your teacher.’ ”

“Don’t Wordsworth at us,” I snapped. “You don’t even like his poetry, and if you aren’t intimidated by Papa, Mamma is another story.”

“I’ll make you a cup of Papa’s special coffee,” Mary offered.

I threw up my hands and went upstairs. Mary had the sense of a goose where it came to Shelley. She ought to be happy to hang about St. Sepulchre, where the curate, who set a fine table, was desperate to court her. Not that I believed in marriage, but at least it would get her out of the house, one less mouth to feed. Maybe I’d have my singing lessons back if she were gone.

Upstairs, I did not hear Charles snoring as usual when I walked by. I went into Willy’s room, where the air was heavy with the onion-scented smells of the eleven-year-old boy on this summer morning. After I opened the curtains, I pulled back his covers and tossed his shirt, trousers, and waistcoat at him.

“Hurry up, sleepyhead.”

Willy stuck his tongue out at me.

I made a face. “Clean your teeth before you come down. Your tongue is white.” I flounced out of the room, then decided to make Charles get up. He should be more eager to get to the warehouse to earn his daily bread if he was courting so seriously that the girl was asking him for dresses.

When I opened the door, however, I didn’t hear him breathing. I opened the curtains and looked at his unused bed, the coverlet was pulled up over the pillow. Not only was he not here, but it didn’t look like he’d slept here, either. No body smells, no dirty clothes.

I shrugged and went downstairs. I’d found myself becoming quite efficient in the weeks since Fanny had been sent away. She’d been the early riser who kept the household running. I didn’t like housekeeping, but it was better than cooking.

In the bookshop I hadn’t been able to see how breakfast went for Polly, but she seemed calm enough as she placed small glass cups of gooseberry fool in front of each of us at the end of luncheon.

“The fruits of our labor?” Shelley inquired.

Papa looked confused, and my eyebrows elevated. I did not think Shelley should push his luck so far, wealthy or not, but Papa’s expression relaxed the second he dipped his spoon in and took a bite of the cream, egg, and sugar-infused fruit. Mamma merely emptied her cup and asked for more. Mary said nothing but looked serene.

Polly bobbed a curtsy and dashed out. She had no fear of the children of the household, but Mamma was another issue. She slapped and pinched.

“We were speaking about alchemy,” Papa said to Shelley, his spoon forgotten in his half-eaten cup.

Willy carefully slid the cup to him, but Papa didn’t even notice.

“Indeed. I have made a study of it since my youth,” Shelley said, rather loftily for one who was twenty-one.

“Papa took me to hear Sir Humphry Davy speak a couple of years ago.” Mary set down her spoon. “He made quite an impression on me.”

“He has proven that electricity can break items into their base components,” Papa said.

“Could they be rebuilt into something different?” I asked.

Shelley chucked me under the chin. “Would you like to turn that muslin gown into silk?”

“La,” I said with a snort. “I have a silk gown already.”

The dining room door banged into the wall as Polly dashed in. Mamma looked up, no doubt hoping for her fool, but the kitchen maid didn’t have anything in her hand.

“Constable Wharton is here,” Polly said, then quicky bobbed a curtsy. “Mr. Godwin, he’d like to see you right away.”

Mamma pushed herself to her feet, then went to the wall behind the door to make sure her expensive wallpaper had not been damaged by the doorknob. She ran her hand down the wall as Papa rose.

“Did he say why?” Papa asked. “Some trouble in the neighborhood?”

“I don’t know, sir.” Polly twisted her hands in her apron. “I don’t like it.”

“I’m sure it is not your place to like it or not,” Mamma said acidly, then went through the door.

Papa followed her.

Willy finished eating Papa’s fool, then glanced around the table for any other remains of the treat, but we had all cleaned our shallow cups.

I bent my head toward Mary. “We should listen.”

She nodded and rose with more natural majesty than Mamma possessed. After leaving the males, we crept down the passage and went to the top of the stairs so we could hear voices in the front hall.

Papa had already greeted the neighborhood constable before we came into earshot. “What brings you here on a Tuesday afternoon?”

“Godwin,” the constable said. An older man, but not in his decrepit years, he had an air of authority, augmented by good relationships with the local inhabitants. “I am sorry to say, sir, but I have a summons for Charles Clairmont to appear at the inquest this afternoon for Winnet Davies’s death.”

My mouth dropped open, and I clutched Mary’s arm. She put her hand to her eyes, as if shielding herself from the news.

“Shocking,” I mouthed. Why, we had seen her only the afternoon before.

“Who is this person?” Mamma inquired in a tone that spoke to shock equal to my own.

“She works in the cheese shop down the street from you,” the constable explained.

“Why is my son being called?” she asked.

“He is a known associate of hers, Mrs. Godwin. Seen with her just yesterday, in fact.”

“Nonsense,” Mamma said. “He is not in the business of befriending shopgirls.”

“He was with her in the vicinity of Hyde Park.”

“Charles was there with his sisters, not some girl,” Mamma said. She screamed my name.

Mary held me back for a couple of beats, then released me so we could both go downstairs.

“What is this about?” Mamma demanded.

I felt very small and young all of a sudden. I glanced at Mary for support. She sighed and spoke.

“We were with Charles,” Mary said. “But Miss Davies did join us.”

“I recognized her from the cheese shop,” I added.

“When did you last see her?” the constable asked.

“We left them at the park,” I said. “Mary and I came home alone.”

The constable nodded, as if to agree that this matched his information.

“What happened to her?” Mary asked.

“Miss Davies was found dead at first light this morning at the site of the former Tyburn gallows. Hanging below a tree branch.”

“That’s three miles from here.” Papa shook his head. “How unfortunate, but Charles had nothing to do with the situation.”

The constable regarded him with watchful eyes. “She was with child, according to an examination.”

I gasped, remembering the boyish figure. Then Mamma’s voice rose. “What is going on?”

“We were all together yesterday afternoon,” I said. “She looked slim to me.”

“The doctor would know best. Did anything memorable occur?” the constable responded.

“She wanted a new dress,” Mary said. “I remember her talking about it.”

Mamma’s shoulders shook. “This has nothing to do with our household, sir. My son is just nineteen.”

“Where is Charles?” Mary asked. “Jane, you said he wasn’t here last night.”

Mamma hissed.

“His bed,” I said meekly. “Not slept in.”

Mamma glanced at me. “Keep your thoughts to yourself, girl.”

“What if Charles is dead, as well?” Mary asked. S. . .