Death and the Sisters

Book 1: Mary Shelley Mystery

by Heather Redmond

Genres: Biographical; Historical Mysteries; Female Sleuths

Synopsis

London, 1814: Mary Godwin and her stepsister Jane Clairmont, both sixteen, possess quick minds bolstered by an unconventional upbringing, and have little regard for the rules. Mary, whose mother famously advocated for women's rights, rejects the two paths that seem open to her—that of an assistant in her father's bookshop, or an ordinary wife. Though quieter and more reserved than Jane, Mary's imagination is keen, and she longs for real-world adventures.



One evening, an opportunity arrives in the form of a dinner guest, Percy Bysshe Shelley. At twenty-one, Shelley is already a renowned poet and radical. Mary finds their visitor handsome and compelling, but it is later that evening that events take a truly intriguing turn. When Mary comes downstairs in search of a book, she finds a man face down on the floor—with a knife in his back.



The dead man, it seems, was a former classmate of Shelley's, and had lately become a personal and professional rival. What was he doing in the Godwins' home? Mary, Jane, and Shelley are all drawn to learn the truth behind the tragedy, especially as each discovery seems to hint at a tangled web that includes many in Shelley's closest circle. But as the attraction between Mary and the married poet intensifies, it sparks a rivalry between the sisters, even as it kindles the creative fire within . . .

Release date: September 26, 2023

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 320

Sample

London, Thursday, May 5, 1814

“I’m calling my tale Isabella, the Penitent; or, The Bandit Novice of Dundee,” my stepsister Mary explained, tucking the notebook she’d brought back from Scotland under her pillow.

“I wish I had your talent for writing.” Fanny, my elder stepsister, seated on the edge of the mattress, bit off the end of the thread from the hem she’d just repaired. Mary’s shift fixed, a trade for the story she’d just read us. “You’re going to be as famous as Mother and Papa someday.”

“It’s just one scene, really,” I pointed out from the end of the bed, irritated by the excessive praise always attached to Mary and her parentage. How could my mamma, mere translator Mary Jane Godwin, compare with their late mother, the famed philosopher and writer Mary Wollstonecraft? “Where is the rest of the story?”

“I don’t know yet.” Mary tapped her pencil stub ostentatiously against her cheek. “I have to decide if Fernando is the villain, or Diego. One has to be the hero.”

“They could both be villains,” Fanny said, her pockmarked cheeks flushing. Her skin was pale like Mary’s, but not in the same ethereal way, though she was only nineteen, three years older than us. She neatened her sewing box and closed the lid.

Fanny rarely left Skinner Street. Not a healthful environment, it showed on all of us. Fanny, pale; Mamma, fat; Papa, old before his time; and Mary, suffering with bad skin and pains. Of my half brothers, Charles stayed away as much as possible, not wanting to run the business he’d been educated for at great expense, and Willy was a petulant child. The doctor had been so worried about Mary that she’d been more away than at home these past years. Even I’d been sent to boarding school when we had the money.

“They could both be the heroes. She can love them both, and they can fight over her.” I winked at Fanny. “Isabella can explore love with both of them. She isn’t tied to outdated morality and the demands of a dead faith.”

“She’s literally a nun in training,” Mary said, frowning at me. “Hundreds of years ago.”

I ran my hands over the soft blanket on her bed. “Your mother and Papa had to have come up with the ideas they presented in their books from somewhere. Maybe atheism and free love were the style in Scotland hundreds of years ago.”

Fanny shushed me, spittle landing on the edge of her lip. “Mary Wollstonecraft? William Godwin? Geniuses don’t need some style from hundreds of years ago to find their ideas. They read and think and, well, write.” She threw up her hands.

“I wasn’t being disrespectful,” I insisted. “That Percy Bysshe Shelley insists community is the way to move forward.”

Mary’s lips, not full, but charming in their shape and blooming color nonetheless, curved. “This Mr. Shelley does not know Papa as well as he thinks, despite being his devoted disciple. Papa is not a social being at all. He believes in philosophizing alone.”

“He went to see the Shelleys, though,” I said. “In Wales.”

“And didn’t find them,” Fanny said with a giggle. “Oh, you’ll see, Mary. Shelley, as you must call him, is terribly handsome, with a pretty wife, but I don’t think she’s coming tonight.”

“What does handsome have to do with anything?” Mary asked, picking at the tip of her pencil.

“When you’re rich, you can be careless,” Fanny said. “And when you are handsome, you can ruin everything around you.”

“La.” I laughed at her. “Which of us will be known as a philosopher?”

I heard Mamma’s voice then, calling us down to the dinner table. We’d been sent upstairs to dress. Must not embarrass ourselves in front of the Godwin family benefactor, this rich Shelley, who had promised to take care of Papa since he was such a disciple of the great man.

We collected our younger brother from his room and went down the creaking stairs. Fanny admonished Willy not to run his hands along the walls. They were damp, and the divots from his fingers were starting to show. Plus, during the drier months, the plaster tended to flake off.

In the dining room, where we did most of our entertaining, the walls were papered and dried daily, so they didn’t look as bad. Papa had been angry about the expense of the paper, festooned in classical style with columns, grapes, and vine leaves, but Mamma had insisted we needed a room fit for guests. Papa didn’t mind accepting the compliments for the redecoration.

They were already in the room, Papa and Shelley. He greeted Fanny and me, very friendly, but spluttered a bit when Papa introduced Mary. She didn’t seem to notice but looked at him under her lashes after we’d all seated ourselves.

Mamma practiced service à la francaise, of course. Papa ignored us as Thérèse, our cook, and the kitchen maid brought in the dishes and placed them in the center of the table, but Shelley’s eyes often drifted in Mary’s direction. I was bored and merely wanted to get through the meal and back upstairs, where hopefully, I could talk Mary into choosing Diego as the hero so she would continue the story.

I noticed the peonies we had picked on my birthday last week were sadly faded now, despite the sugar I’d added to the water. They filled the air with the scent of decay, almost overpowering the burnt stew. I didn’t know why Mamma hadn’t tossed the bouquet; Mary and I had been busy minding our bookshop downstairs all day.

Mary glanced at the wilted blooms, the flowers drooping over the chipped jug, then glanced at me sideways. I knew that expression. Judgment, as always. I jumped up from the table, ignoring my mother’s hiss, and grabbed the jug. Mary laughed as I opened the window and tossed the flowers onto the pavement below. It couldn’t make the street smell any worse. We were across the street from Newgate Prison, after all.

The last public hanging, just out of eyeshot from our front windows, had been over a month ago, but at Smithfield Market nearby, the gutters ran red with animal blood most days.

Time passed, with a discussion of Napoleon that went over my head and floated away without me learning anything.

Shelley delicately pushed his stew aside. “ ‘Man forsook the path of nature, and sacrificed the purity and happiness of his being to unnatural appetites.’ ”

Mary’s eyes went bright. “You are so right.” She quoted lines from his poem Queen Mab back at him:

Mary pushed her bowl away with an air of triumph.

Shrugging, I pushed my dish away, as well. “What shall we eat instead?”

Shelley’s brown curls danced around his high-colored cheeks as he tilted a plate of sliced bread toward me. The underside of his blue velvet coat sleeve nearly slid through the butter. He would not have cared, I suspected, unlike many gentlemen.

“‘Man is of soul and body, form’d for deeds of high resolve, ’ ” Mary said, quoting again, and took a piece of bread.

“I am flattered by your recollection of my work,” Shelley said, taking the next slice.

He started to pull the plate back, perhaps to offer it to Willy, but I stopped him with my fingers on the edge. “Me too.”

His look slid from me to Mary again. Who could blame him? The pallid, injured girl she’d been when she first went to Scotland two years ago had returned with blooming cheeks, spun spiderwebs of golden hair, and limpid hazel eyes. It was no wonder she’d already had one Scottish marriage proposal, which Papa had turned down.

I bit into my dry slice of bread. Mother tried to keep an elegant table, but she simply wasn’t elegant and always fell short somewhere.

Mary and I were sixteen and positively dying to be anywhere but here, but Papa had insisted we be at home. Neither of us wanted to be shopgirls, which was all Mamma desired for us, so she didn’t have to mind the bookshop herself. She still fancied herself a French-to-English translator, like she’d been before marrying Papa.

Papa and Shelley launched into a spirited discussion about the peace talks that were shortly to begin in France. My mother interrupted occasionally, spouting little phrases in French that added nothing to the stimulating conversation. Our French was very good since we used to live in the Polygon, a collection of thirty-two houses around a garden square, positively teeming with French émigrés.

Papa turned to our visit earlier in the day with Mr. Constable, who published Sir Walter Scott. He and Shelley discussed the Encyclopædia Britannica while my thoughts wandered. Would Mary accept a new Scottish proposal if it came? Would I ever see her again if she returned to Dundee? I had no interest in Scotland, but given the opportunity to go to Switzerland, I would be first in line. Mamma said I was half Swiss.

Finally, Papa pushed back his bowl and rose, making a shooing motion with his arm. “I’ll speak to Shelley alone now.”

My mother went pink with outrage. My father smiled genially at her. “I’m certain you need to close up the office, Mrs. Godwin.”

Mary gave Shelley a sidelong glance, then rose, putting her arm around Willy.

I followed them out of the room, the floor squeaking and settling beneath us. Sneaking about was close to impossible in this ill-built house. Our steps on the staircase rattled the entire house. Papa paid no rent on the place since the ownership was in dispute, but as a result, no one maintained it, either, leaving us in a precarious situation.

“Change into your nightshirt,” Mary told Willy after pulling it from a peg on the wall and handing it to him.

I picked up his water jug and went downstairs to refill it, trying to keep my footsteps quiet. Papa was attempting to negotiate funds from Shelley, who was heir to a deliciously wealthy family. As a disciple of my father, he had promised to care for the family financially, but as he had little readily available, he had to raise the money by some kind of complicated process I didn’t understand.

When I returned with the water, Mary and Willy were sitting on the bed. Mary’s slender arms were weaving the air as she sang:

I rolled my eyes. “More Burns?”

Willy stuck out his tongue at me. He had reached the age where he wanted to hear about nothing but soldiers and brave deeds of yore. I battled a stew stain on Willy’s waistcoat while Mary finished the song. Her voice did not have my skill, but she overcame her weaknesses with the power of her recitation.

Fanny poked her head in. Mary stopped so our eldest sister could give Willy a kiss.

“I see why you were in love with Shelley now,” she told Fanny.

Fanny’s painfully plain face went pink. “That was a long time ago.”

“I was too little then to notice him,” I said.

“I don’t remember meeting him,” Mary said.

“Your Scottish friend Christy Baxter did.” Fanny pulled up Willy’s sheet. “I think you were ill from the return trip.”

“I usually am,” Mary said ruefully. She swept the filaments of her hair off her cheeks. “He does have the most piercing eyes.”

“Just like you.” Fanny’s voice was soft. “I like that he worships Mother.”

I rolled my eyes. I could admit my mother was an embarrassment, but no one ever sainted the living, right? Mary Wollstonecraft was my spiritual mother, in any case, even if I couldn’t claim her flesh as my own. I would have experiences and adventures, just as she had. Fanny had not inherited any of the Wollstonecraft fire, though she, like Mary, had traveled more than I had.

“What?” I suddenly realized all three of them were staring at me.

“You stamped your foot, Jane,” Willy said.

I shrugged. “I was thinking I’d like to travel.”

“That’s all very well,” Fanny said, “but if you stomp about, the entire house will shake, and Mamma will come.”

All four of us shuddered at that and giggled.

“Mrs. Shelley is very pretty,” Fanny said conversationally.

“I don’t like how she dresses,” I said in a tone of dismissal. “I’m glad she stayed in Bath this visit.”

Mary curled a lock of her hair around her finger. “Shelley though. I like height in a man, and sensibility. Did you hear how rapturously he described Bath?”

“He is nothing like Papa, for all that he claims to be a disciple,” I agreed.

“Papa is old,” Willy said.

“He is bent over by all the writing he does, poor thing.” Fanny ran her fingers down Willy’s discarded socks, feeling for spots where the wool needed reinforcing. She tucked one into her apron.

Mary’s gaze slid over her workmanlike attire. “I don’t think Shelley will grow old and bent. His spirit will keep him upright and strong.”

I snorted. “Who cares, as long as his lips stay full and soft, right?”

“Jane!” Fanny cried, though still in that soft tone she never rose out of, no matter the provocation.

“He is very attractive,” Mary agreed, “but his best quality is his mind.”

Mary, Jane, and Fanny perched on Willy’s bed while Jane sang a ballad she had heard on the streets about Jack Sheppard, that famous criminal who had escaped from Newgate.

She had a lovely singing voice. When Jane finished the tragic tale with the folk hero’s hanging at Tyburn, she had tears in her eyes. Fanny had gone very pale. Mary worried about her stoic older sister much more than she did about dramatic Jane. She leaned over and squeezed Fanny’s cold hand.

“Go to bed, dearest. Mamma has made you work much too hard today.”

Fanny smiled. “It was worth it, to see Shelley enjoying the bread I baked.”

“Be careful,” Jane warned. “Papa won’t like too much sighing over the poet. Besides, what is wrong with bread from a bakery?”

Fanny stood, though her eyes stayed downcast.

“I think you daydream as much as I do,” Mary observed.

“Can you blame me?” Fanny asked. “This is not the life Mother wanted for us.”

“I hate that woman for making us leave the Polygon,” Mary agreed. “Sometimes I think I will die for the sight of a healthy tree and a patch of green grass underneath.”

As if in answer to her words, the sounds of drunken male singing grew as men passed by the house. Though the juncture of Skinner Street and Snow Hill was a neighborhood of prisons, warehouses, and manufacturers, people lived above their businesses like the Godwin clan did.

“Some nights, we can even hear the prisoners wailing,” Mary said aloud, twitching back the curtains to glance into the road.

“I never can,” Willy piped from his bed.

“Haps when I hear them, it’s the voices of the dead,” Mary said. “Rather than the living who are locked behind those walls now.”

Willy sat up in bed as if propelled, marionette-style, by strings. “Do you think so?”

Fanny blew out the candle. Mary took the hint and smoothed the curtains, still winter wool.

“I’ll write down my thoughts and read them to you,” Mary assured her brother. She caressed his cheek, then followed Fanny out. Jane came last.

The floor rattled as the front door opened and closed. Fanny took Mary’s hand and pulled her upstairs into Jane’s bedchamber, a narrow room that spanned the length of the house, so they could see the poet moving into the street.

“I wonder where he is staying,” Fanny said.

“Somewhere grander than this,” Mary told her.

Curiously, Shelley didn’t wear a hat. He slouched into the street, and his long, lean, loose-limbed stride ate up the cobbles as he grew smaller and vanished into the darkness.

“A fine figure of a man,” Fanny said, her nose touching the window and leaving a mark.

Mary agreed but didn’t say so, enjoying the peaceful respite before Jane appeared. Fanny fussed around the room, straightening the clothes on their stepsister’s pegs, until she came in.

“Come, Mary.” Jane flopped onto her bed. “Tell us a story about the prisoner ghosts wailing.”

“I’ll have to think it up,” Mary said and then began to quote. “ ‘This relation is Matter of Fact, and attended with such Circumstances as may induce any Reasonable Man to believe it.’ ”

“What’s that?” Jane asked. The floor creaked as she kicked off her slippers and knocked them to the floor.

“Defoe, I think,” Mary said, already considering the form of her story. If only Mother had written such fanciful tales, to give her ideas on how to construct them. “I’ll consult his works in the bookshop for further inspiration. It seems like quite a good start to a ghost story.”

Mary placed her slippers next to Jane’s and walked down in her stocking feet, hugging the wall so as not to set off the worst of the creaking stairs. If Mamma heard her, she’d be set to mending something. Her stepmother never thought about the cost of candles when she could make her daughters work themselves into exhaustion after dark.

The bookshop’s interior door hung open. Very odd, as Mamma was particular about making sure that the smells of domestic life, particularly cooking odors, did not damage the books.

Mary shrugged, glad she had come downstairs, because if Mamma had been the first to notice, she’d have no doubt blamed Mary. She lit the lantern kept in readiness for customers who wanted to browse in the dark corners.

While she knew exactly where Defoe was kept, she first went to a back corner of the shop and dropped to her knees, then pulled out a much-loved volume that Mamma kept in stock because she knew that it sold, even though it was anything but highbrow or philosophical. Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest. Feeling a little breathless, like a Gothic heroine about to swoon, she opened the book to her favorite page. With the lantern held over the engraving, she examined the bare legs of the man removing a blindfolded girl from a house.

She bit her lip as she looked over the engraved musculature, feeling a familiar shiver dance up through her body. Did Shelley have legs so magnificent? He certainly possessed the broad shoulders and narrow waist of the figure on the page. She set down the lantern when it shook in her hand.

“Oh, to see a form like that,” she whispered to herself. None of her Scottish suitors had possessed a body she wanted to caress. As such, none of them had enticed so much as a kiss from her. After a last heated glance, she closed the book and tucked it away again.

The next shelves were in front of the bow windows. The Juvenile Library was shelved there, at the perfect height for children. Works of historical merit were on the other side. Mary rose.

Her foot twisted as she took the first step. She grabbed for the edge of the bookcase with one hand, the other gripping the lantern tightly. Her fingers were trembling by the time she righted herself. She reached down and swiped at her foot. Something sticky coated her fingers. What was on the floor?

“Honestly,” she muttered to herself. More cleaning. She set the lantern on the bookcase and walked past the windows. Slatted lines from the shutters were illuminated by the oil lamp that burned all night at the corner of the road.

Distracted by the sudden reflected light, she tripped again. “Blast,” she cried.

When she tried to take another step forward, her way was blocked by something solid. Confused, she prodded it with her foot. It felt warm, dry, and slightly yielding. She backed up to take the lantern in her hand again, then cupped the side of it with her hand to keep the illumination from the road. When she reached the mass again, she held the lantern out over the floor.

Her mouth dropped open when she saw what lay in front of her. A man, like something out of a painting of the French Revolution, was sprawled on the floor. Facedown. She swept the lantern over his body. Her hand shook as she saw first one knife, then another.

The first was impaled in his back. The other, in the mysterious recesses between his legs.

“Faith!” Wobbly, Mary blinked hard, then forced herself to kneel down beside the sprawled figure, to touch the man’s hand.

Still warm. She squeezed it, feeling that strange sensation of callused male flesh under hers, then dropped the hand. What was she doing? Molesting a corpse?

She scooted back, her eyes closed, then opened them again, feeling her lips tremble at the sight of the dark blue velvet coat, the dark stain around the knife gleaming wetly in the light. She knew that coat. Shelley! That fine figure of a man, ended so cruelly. They had just seen him leave not twenty minutes earlier. Had he been accosted in the street and dumped here?

“I could have loved such a being.” Tears sprang to her eyes, and she let them fall, keenly feeling her sensibility. Hadn’t he said he was a new father? And his poor young wife, not even twenty yet, a widow.

“Mary?”

Drat that Jane. Could she not offer up a moment’s solitude to anyone?

Her stepsister’s footsteps came closer, along with the bobbing of a candle flame.

“Don’t come any closer,” Mary warned. She set the lantern down.

Ignoring her, Jane came down the space between the bookshelves and turned in the nook in front of the windows.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

Mary scrambled to her feet, hoping to block her sister’s view. The candle wavered as Jane took in the scene. She gasped loudly.

“What,” Jane asked, “is that?”

“Knives,” Mary said. “Murder has been done here.”

“What?” Jane repeated, some frantic power coming into her voice. “Papa?”

“No,” Mary said, grabbing the candleholder before the candle dropped. “Shelley.”

She saw what was going to happen and held up her other hand, hoping to forestall it. But she failed, and Jane, coming closer, screamed. Mary bent under the onslaught and grabbed her sister’s hand.

“Hush,” she begged, pulling her away. “We have to tell Papa before the watch comes.”

Though Jane resisted, Mary pulled her through the bookshop, then forced her to sit on the steps and hold the candle while she went back for the lantern. She set it on the table in the hall.

“Stay here,” she commanded.

“But,” Jane whispered. “But the body.”

“Papa will know what to do.”

“But the watch.”

“Papa should call them, not us. Do you want him surprised?”

“The bookshop,” Jane said next.

“Yes, it’s very bad,” Mary agreed.

“It isn’t S-Shelley,” Jane stuttered. “He just left.”

Mary pulled the handkerchief from her sleeve and tucked it into Jane’s unresisting hand. “It must be,” she said. “Who else? Cry quietly, please.” Hoping her sister obeyed, she picked up her skirts and ran up the steps to her father’s library.

Her father was not at his desk, though a candle still burned under her mother’s portrait. Mary blew a kiss to the serene figure. The painting included her, since her mother had been in an expectant condition when Opie painted her. Loathe to do so, she blew out the candle. Her father never thought of the expense. As always, the family was mired in debt.

She went up past the next floor, which contained the schoolroom, and to the third, where the boys and their parents had their rooms. The arm that had given her so much trouble these past years twinged as she knocked. She suppressed the feeling, not wanting the old troubles to return. Older now, surely, she had some control over her body?

Mamma opened the door, holding a candle, still dressed in brown silk, which creased and pulled over her porcine curves.

“Mamma,” Mary said, “I need Papa.”

“Whatever for, girl, at this time of night? Get to your bed. You have the shop to mind tomorrow.”

“It’s important,” Mary said. She didn’t want to explain, but she was afraid of what Jane might do if she tarried. It wouldn’t surprise her to find her stepsister supine over the body, sobbing dramatically. Jane was simply unmanageable.

Mamma huffed and turned into the room. Mary heard her father rumble; then he appeared in the doorway, hurriedly thrusting his arm into his coat. His wife helped him pull it on. Though he still dressed plainly, like the dissenting minister he had once been, fashions for men were tight.

“What is it, Mary? Is someone ill? Do I need to fetch a doctor?”

“It’s past that, Papa.”

Mamma gasped theatrically and put her arms around her husband. “Willy? My son?”

“No, ma’am,” Mary said. “Shelley is dead.”

Even in candlelight, Mary could see the color drain from her father’s withered cheeks.

The Godwinian philosophy was that anyone who needed funds was entitled to them, and her stepmother’s bad business decisions over the years had brought them to this calamity. A rotting house, a rotting business, and unpleasant lives.

Her father cleared his throat. “How dreadful.”

“It gets worse, Papa.” She paused dramatically. “He has a knife in his back and another in an indelicate place. And he’s on the bookshop floor.”

Mamma sagged against him instantly. Mary stepped forward, holding back a curse, and helped him drag her to the bed.

“We don’t have time for this,” she hissed. “Jane is downstairs. I’m afraid of what she will do.”

“Very well,” her father said.

“Nooo,” Mamma moaned predictably. “We’ll be out on the street without his aid.”

Her father’s lips tightened, but Mary tugged him away, avoiding the warped board in the hall that everyone tripped over. Her heart sank with the certainty that he thought only of Shelley’s lost money.

Down the stairs they went, not attempting to avoid the squeaky spots. Jane had not moved, uncharacteristically, though she was splayed flat across the lowest tread, one hand to her ear, the other to her chest.

“Such beauty that would make the gods weep,” she said, her voice not so different than her mother’s moaning. “A tragic end, cast up on the. . .