Death Takes the Lead

Book 9: Gilded Age Mystery

by Rosemary Simpson

Genres: Historical Mysteries; Private Investigators

Synopsis

When a series of mysterious deaths plagues a new Scottish play, heiress and lawyer Prudence MacKenzie and her partner ex-Pinkerton Geoffrey Hunter are called in to perform an investigation at one of Broadway’s most stunning theatres . . .

DEATH TAKES THE LEAD

APRIL 1891: Prudence MacKenzie is delighted to attend a riveting rehearsal of Waif of the Highlands with her dear friend, Lydia Truitt, whose cousin, Septimus Ward, stars in the play. But the drama continues after the curtain falls, as the women overhear a ferocious argument between Septimus and the play’s famous playwright-director, Barrett Hughes.

When confronted about the dispute, Septimus reveals that he actually wrote the script, but allowed Hughes to claim authorship in return for casting Septimus’s paramour, Flora Campbell, in the lead. Septimus has come to regret the agreement and vows to reclaim authorship, even if it means the play never opens. But, days later, Prudence and Geoffrey are urgently summoned to Septimus’s boarding house, where the thespian lays dying in Lydia’s arms.

Lydia believes her cousin’s death is no accident and wants Hunter and MacKenzie Investigative Law to look into the matter, going so far as to help Prudence and Flora secure employment undercover in the play’s wardrobe department. At first, Hughes’s determination to keep the production running seems admirable, but his motives are soon called into question as Prudence hears whispers backstage about his notorious predatory behavior with young women. And when another body turns up at the theatre, it’s clear that someone is targeting the play and its company—but why?

Prudence and Geoffrey must improvise as they tread into an unfamiliar world where deceit is cultivated for entertainment and deception is celebrated as talent, to expose a darkness lurking behind the glittering stage lights. . .

Release date: November 26, 2024

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 336

Sample

The footlights weren’t usually dimmed during a rehearsal, but it didn’t matter. The magic began the moment Septimus Ward stepped onto the stage.

Tall, slender, broad-shouldered, with regular, slightly craggy features whose contours caught the glow of the flickering gaslight, he wore a full sleeved white shirt open at the throat and black trousers almost too tight to be decent. Dark blond hair gleamed golden in the shadowy theatre. Deep, sapphire-blue eyes flashed across the pit and into the farthest recesses of the house as he positioned himself to deliver his opening lines.

Prudence drew in a breath. She couldn’t help it. You didn’t often see a man as dangerously handsome as this one.

“I should have warned you,” Lydia whispered, the lilt of a conspiratorial smile in her voice.

“Yes, but can he act?” Prudence murmured. Male beauty could be striking, even seductive—Geoffrey Hunter was the first example that came to mind—but in her experience it was seldom combined with the warmth and intelligence she demanded of the opposite sex.

“Wait.” Lydia lightly tapped a gloved finger on Prudence’s arm. A fond parent showing off a talented child couldn’t have been more confident.

The deep baritone voice, pitched to reach effortlessly to the last row of orchestra seats and the uppermost balcony, was as mesmerizing as the eyes. Prudence felt Septimus Ward draw her into another world as surely as though she’d stepped through the proscenium arch into a dream. If the play itself was as appealing as the young romantic lead, audiences would flock to buy tickets. Waif of the Highlands could become the season’s newest hit.

It didn’t hold up. As scene followed scene, it became obvious that the storyline was pure melodrama. Trite, Prudence realized. A poor servant girl captures the heart of an equally poor but handsome young man, yet cannot spurn the advances of a wealthy and much older suitor. Her indigent family depends on her to rescue them from illness and near starvation. Definitely not Shakespeare, Prudence decided. Not even close.

Barrett Hughes played the part of the rich admirer. Smooth, in perfect control, he delivered every syllable in the practiced tones of an actor who’d been famous since before Prudence had been born. At least twice Septimus’s age, but so skilled at disappearing into the character he was playing that the years didn’t matter. He could and had portrayed heroes far younger than he and villains far older. His most celebrated role was that of Ebenezer Scrooge, in the stage adaptation of the novella A Christmas Carol that Charles Dickens had published in 1843. If Edwin Booth could be said to personify a tortured Hamlet, then Barrett Hughes was the world’s most infamous miser brought to life. His Scrooge interpretation was a tour de force, but it was whispered among theatre folk that Hughes despised being forever branded as an elderly, crooked-back skinflint.

All this Lydia whispered in bits and pieces as the drama onstage unfolded. Like many famous actors of his generation, she told Prudence, Barrett Hughes owned and managed his own troupe. He wrote, produced, and directed many of the plays in which he starred, Highlands being the most recent among them. He had a reputation for merciless criticism that sometimes reduced his performers to tears—male and female alike.

Despite frequent interruptions, the lack of costumes and abbreviated sets, and some of the actors not being off book yet, Prudence was easily persuaded that Waif of the Highlands’ histrionic style and its exaggerated rags-to-riches storyline were likely to guarantee good box office. The critics were almost certain to pan it, but as long as Hughes and his company played to a full house every night, they could claim the columnists were tasteless boors not worthy of more than a moment’s attention.

When Flora Campbell took center stage to sing, Prudence exchanged a quick glance with Lydia. They’d come to see Septimus Ward perform, but it was the equally blond and bewitching Flora who would enthrall theatregoers and steal the show from everyone else, Septimus and Barrett Hughes included.

As Prudence watched and listened, she realized that Flora personified the waiflike qualities the play’s title promised. Thin as insubstantial smoke, the bright silvery gold of her hair and the pale blue of her eyes captured every beam of light on the stage. As the lyrics poured from her throat, her fellow actors and even the stagehands stood motionless, momentarily lifted out of themselves, transfixed by the look of the girl and the liquid syllables floating in the air. It wasn’t an operatic voice, nor one that would fill every inch of breathable air like that of the queen of Broadway theatre, Lillian Russell. Flora’s gift was a sweet sound that spoke of home, hearth, and the innocence of youth.

Flora’s character would break every theatregoer’s heart, Prudence decided, and Flora herself was destined to become New York City’s next theatrical sensation. She was Eleanora Duse at her most emotionally natural, Sarah Bernhardt languishing in love and death in La Dame aux Camélias. Septimus and Flora’s scenes together created moments of enchanting sadness and doomed love. Time stood still as the star-crossed lovers agonized their way to tragedy and loss.

And this was only a rehearsal.

Waif of the Highlands was so different from anything Prudence had ever seen or read about in the theatre column of the Times that she wondered what the critics would label it. Categorizing new work was the first job of every pundit. Once a tag had been affixed to a play or a book, it was almost impossible to escape it. Highlands was a melodrama by plot and dialogue, but surprisingly well written, eschewing many of the clichés of the genre. Flora sang, and so did Septimus, but no one else did and there wasn’t a chorus lurking in the background. So it clearly wasn’t a musical. Something entirely new, deserving of a special designation. Bound to spawn imitators if successful.

“Do you mind waiting, Prudence?” Lydia asked as the last of the director’s notes were given to the actors assembled onstage near the gas footlights. “I’d like you to meet Septimus.”

“Not at all. I told Kincaid I’d find my own way home, so no one is expecting me.”

“Geoffrey?”

“He’s taken some rare time off. Declared yesterday that the office would be closed today and sent Josiah home early. I think he’s had news from North Carolina that needs privacy and uninterrupted time to digest.”

“His father?”

“Possibly. Colonel Hunter wasn’t wounded in the war, but he hasn’t been what Geoffrey calls a whole man since the surrender. Bitter, angry, so estranged from his son that they haven’t corresponded for years.”

“His is not the only family to have broken apart because of the fighting.”

“Slavery, you mean.”

Women weren’t encouraged to discuss intellectually weighty topics, but neither Prudence nor Lydia had much patience for the rhetoric of retired generals and politicians. Lydia lived and worked with a man who’d given his eyes and the best years of his life to his country. Prudence was the child of a judge who’d taught his daughter that America had gone to war with itself over whether dark-skinned men and women could or should be bought and sold by paler-skinned owners. Slavery and its soul-destroying ramifications was a topic neither of them chose to avoid. Today, however, they were interrupted.

“Mr. Ward is in with Mr. Hughes.” The theatre’s doorman had approached quickly and quietly as a stagehand extinguished all the gas footlights except one. The stage stood dim and empty, lonely looking, the only sounds a shuffle of departing footsteps and far-off conversations as the actors filed out into the alleyway through the stage door. “I don’t think he’ll be long, Miss Truitt.” He sketched a quick bow in Prudence’s direction.

“Bobby knew Septimus’s mother. And mine, too,” Lydia explained. “Septimus anticipated half an hour. Isn’t that what you said?”

“I did. But from what I could hear outside Mr. Hughes’s office, he’ll be out in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.”

“They’re arguing?”

“Going at it hammer and tongs.”

“Do you have any idea what it’s about?”

“I don’t like to say. None of us knows for sure, but there’s been bad blood between them from the beginning.”

“It can’t be easy to work in an atmosphere like that,” Lydia said.

“You know I’ve been around theatre folk all my life,” the doorman said. “Thought about becoming an actor myself, once upon a time. Players aren’t like other people. They don’t live inside their skins like the rest of us do.”

“What does that mean?” Prudence asked, fascinated by discovering another world she hadn’t dreamed existed.

“They’re touchy and twitchy. Looking around all the time to see if anyone’s watching them. Performing a role even when they’re not onstage. They might hide some of their feelings, but never for long. Actors are volcanoes, like those Italian places that are always erupting. Vesuvius and that Etna one.” Bobby shook his head as though they were a lost cause. Actors.

“Hughes or my cousin?” Lydia asked.

“Both of them, I’d say. Whatever they’re fighting about, one’s as bad as the other.”

“I wonder if that’s why he asked me to wait. He said there was something he wanted to talk about.”

“I think I heard a door slam,” Prudence said.

“I’ll be on my way then.” The doorman faded toward the lobby.

Barrett Hughes charged across the stage like an angry bull. He shouted something that neither Prudence nor Lydia could make out, then stopped in midstride to stare into the wings he’d just exited. When no one answered or appeared out of the darkness to confront him, he flung one arm above his head in a gesture worthy of Scrooge at his “Bah! Humbug!” best, and disappeared, banging the heavy metal stage door behind him.

Moments later Septimus Ward came striding up the aisle in their direction, his handsome face grim. Features stony and bleak.

“That was quite a performance Hughes just gave us,” Lydia greeted him.

“I wish that’s all it was, but he won’t budge an inch, the bastard. He thinks I’ll cave, but he’s wrong. I want what rightfully belongs to me and I’ll do whatever I have to in order to get it. No papers were signed. It’s his word against mine.”

“This is Prudence MacKenzie,” Lydia said, gesturing toward the silent woman beside her. “She’s the one I told you about. We’ve worked together on some of her private inquiry cases. She’s an attorney now, too.”

“Miss MacKenzie, I apologize for my language.” The actor in Septimus switched into a more self-controlled persona. “I’m sorry you had to see and hear that.”

“Perhaps it would help if you told us what the quarrel is about,” Prudence said.

“We could go somewhere for tea,” Lydia suggested. “I think we’re about to be asked to leave, anyway.”

A stagehand had appeared to turn off the last remaining footlight and make sure the ghost light was lit. He jingled the ring of keys he was carrying and gestured toward the back of the house. “I’m locking up, Mr. Ward,” he called. “Bobby said he’d keep the lobby door open for a few more minutes.”

Septimus waved his thanks. “I could use something stronger than tea,” he said.

“There’s a saloon around the corner that has a ladies’ lounge. Walsh’s Tavern,” Lydia said. She caught the look of surprise on Prudence’s face and smiled. “Don’t be too shocked. It’s mostly respectable lower middle-class working women. We’ll stand out a bit, but the bartender knows Septimus. He won’t turn us away.”

By which, Prudence decided, she meant they wouldn’t be mistaken for prostitutes trolling for business.

Walsh himself ushered Septimus and his two lady companions into the comfortable snug he called The Back Room. A tall, corpulent, red-nosed man with scant wisps of gray hair left atop his head, he cultivated the custom of the actors in the theatre district, allowing them to run up tabs when no one else trusted them to honor the debt. Eventually.

He’d once dreamed of declaiming Shakespeare in London’s great theatres. But Walsh had been born a dirt-poor Irishman condemned to emigrate and work with his hands to keep from starving. He never forgot his love affair with the stage, so when he scraped together enough money to open a tavern, the second dream of his life, he located it where every seat at the bar and every square table on the floor would be peopled by theatre folk. “The best in the world,” he was often heard to say.

“You’ll have a double whiskey, I think,” he told Septimus, whipping a rag across the table he’d selected for them in the otherwise empty lounge. “And the ladies will have my finest sherry.”

He brought the generous-sized drinks, set them down, and studied Septimus for a moment. A good bartender was as adept as a priest at reading a man’s face. “I’ll maybe close the lounge for a while. So as to give ye a bit of privacy.”

“I’d appreciate it,” Septimus said. He held out a fisted hand.

“Don’t even think of it,” Walsh said. “Your money’s no good here today.”

“Slàinte Mhath,” Septimus said, raising his glass as Walsh closed The Back Room door behind him and turned the sign on it from OPEN to CLOSED.

“Cheers,” Lydia replied, sipping what was a very good sherry.

Prudence lifted her glass and nodded, guessing that what she’d heard Septimus say was a Scottish toast she’d never be able to pronounce.

“Barrett Hughes didn’t write Waif of the Highlands,” Septimus said. “I did.”

“Start at the beginning,” Prudence said.

“If she represents you,” Lydia put in, “everything you tell her is confidential.”

“I don’t need a mouthpiece.” Septimus followed half his double whiskey with a swallow of beer chaser. “No offense intended, Miss MacKenzie.”

Lydia started to protest, but Prudence shook her head. He was a strange one, her friend’s cousin. Classically handsome features, voice like black silk, a presence that commanded attention. But she sensed that he wasn’t a formally educated man, and wondered if away from the exotic setting of the theatre he would be out of his element. The only other time she’d heard mouthpiece used to refer to a member of the legal profession was on the streets of Five Points near the Quaker mission where she sometimes volunteered. It might not be precisely gutter slang, but it was close.

“Flora and I were touring in the same vaudeville company,” Septimus began, swirling the tumbler of whiskey in precise circles on the table. “Her family’s like ours, Lydia. They’re all players. Singers, dancers, jugglers, sketch artists, comedians. Flora was the only one of them who had a hunger for something bigger and more legitimate than vaudeville. She wants to be another Lillie Langtry.”

“Why Lillie Langtry?”

“Langtry’s tour came through Chicago while we were playing there. Flora couldn’t talk about anything else for weeks.” A trace of ancestral Scots crept into his voice as the whiskey and the beer chaser began to make themselves felt. “She wanted to try for a spot in Lillie’s company, but she couldn’t get an audition. The company manager turned her down flat.”

“What do Flora and Lillie Langtry have to do with your writing Waif of the Highlands?” Lydia asked. A quick glance at Prudence confirmed that both women suspected what the answer would be, but they needed to hear Septimus say it.

“I was already creating most of the comedy sketches for our troupe, and I’d tried my hand at longer pieces, too. They weren’t half-bad, some of them.”

Another round of drinks had appeared on the table with nothing more than a click of the snug’s door and a swish of Walsh’s white apron to mark his brief presence.

“So you wrote a play to make Flora famous?” Lydia emptied one of the sherry glasses lined up in front of her as Septimus stared at his second double whiskey.

“She didn’t ask me to,” he said. “It wasn’t like that.”

“What was it like?” Prudence prodded softly. One foot below the table discreetly urged Lydia to say nothing else about Flora. Not yet.

“I’d had an idea for a long time, but I hadn’t been able to put it into words,” Septimus said. He seemed to be drifting away as he eased into the telling. “It was about two young Scots immigrants who fell in love but were forced apart by a wealthy man’s obsession for the girl. She was beautiful and very poor. Her family—parents, younger brothers, and sisters— would die of starvation if she didn’t give herself to this man. So she did.”

“And the songs?”

“I wrote them, too. Words and music both.” He smiled and picked up the glass of whiskey. “Vaudevillians wear many hats, Miss MacKenzie. There’s a wealth of unsuspected talent behind the soft shoe dancing and the slapstick.”

“How did the play make it to Broadway?” Prudence’s fingers itched for the pen and notebook in her reticule, but she was afraid Septimus would shut down if she took notes. She’d have to rely on her good memory and past experience questioning witnesses to remember what he said.

“It nearly didn’t. By the time I finished the last scene, well over a year after I’d started, we’d completed one tour and moved on to another. I worked on Highlands every night after the show and well into the morning hours. There were times I couldn’t have told you the name of the town or the theatre where we were playing, but I had to keep supplying new sketches and routines because that’s what you do in vaudeville. If an audience doesn’t laugh at something, the act gets pulled and replaced with something or someone else. The pace can be brutal, and there’s no mercy shown to a performer who can’t hold his own on stage.”

“I had no idea,” Prudence murmured.

“No outsider can imagine what it’s like,” Septimus said. “They put a star on the dressing room door when you’ve made it into the big time. That’s every actor’s dream, that star. He’ll do just about anything to get it.

“About six months ago Flora and I got booked into Tony Pastor’s Theatre on Fourteenth Street. It was a change from traveling like gypsies from town to town, and Flora thought it could be the break she’d been angling for. Her family was dead set against it because Tony didn’t need the whole troupe. He had to replace a singer who was growing a belly, if you know what I mean.”

Pregnant. There were polite euphemisms to avoid directly mentioning a condition never willingly acknowledged in public, but Prudence had learned to prefer directness of expression. At least in the privacy of her own mind.

“He needed a soprano and a tenor because that’s what his audience expected. We were it.”

“You never told me you were a song and dance man,” Lydia said.

Septimus shrugged. “All we Scots are fierce dancers. You know that. I can’t sing the leads in Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas like Durward Lely, but I’m not at all bad at ballads.”

Two double whiskeys had taken the edge off his anger. Prudence thought he might be one of those men who waxed eloquent under the influence, much easier to deal with than the vicious street brawlers and wife beaters whose savage tempers were fueled by drink.

“So you left the troupe you’d been with and took your act to Tony Pastor’s,” she reminded him. She’d ask Lydia later who Durward Lely was. A tenor, presumably Scots. Did all theatre people measure themselves against other performers?

“Flora and I weren’t married, so we had to take rooms in separate boardinghouses,” Septimus explained. “Tony likes his players to keep up appearances.”

“His theatre is in the same building where Tammany has its headquarters.” Lydia was never sure how much Prudence knew about the lives of ordinary New Yorkers and the city in which they lived.

“Turns out Flora was right about getting a break there. Barrett Hughes was in the audience one night. He’s a notorious womanizer and it’s common gossip that the older he gets, the younger he likes his partners to be.” A trace of bitterness crept back into Septimus’s voice. “Keep them coming,” he said to Walsh, who had stuck his head through the doorway to check on how they were doing.

“Don’t you think you’ve had enough?” Lydia asked, reaching out to touch the hand that had curled itself around an empty glass.

“Not yet, I haven’t. Not by a long shot.” This time, when Walsh placed a full glass on the table, Septimus spilled a few drops as he raised it to his lips.

“He wined and dined her, but Flora was just the latest in a long line of casual conquests. Until she told him about Waif of the Highlands. Hughes was looking for a vehicle to add to this season’s repertory, and he knew he needed to transition from Scrooge to handsome, cultivated, rich older man parts. He can’t attempt young romantic leads anymore without risking being laughed off the stage and pilloried in the reviews. It’s just a fact of the profession. The lighting’s gotten better over the years since the switch from candles to gas, and audiences want believability.”

“What happened?” Lydia asked.

“We struck a deal. He’d take writer’s credit for Highlands, as well as producing and directing it. Play the starring role of the rich older suitor, of course, which I agreed to considerably beef up. Flora would play the young servant girl. He said it would make her a star overnight.”

“Who suggested you play the young man she really loved?”

“I did. I insisted on its being part of the agreement. Or else I’d take the script to someone else. I didn’t have anywhere to go, no contacts with other producers and directors, no favors I could call in, but Hughes didn’t know that. He agreed. Said I’d be a star, too.”

“Did you sign a contract?” Prudence asked.

“Nothing in writing. A handshake.”

“So only the three of you know that Barrett Hughes isn’t the author of Waif of the Highlands?” Prudence had to be sure she’d gotten it right, that Septimus hadn’t left out anything essential to the telling of his story.

“And now you and Lydia.” He drank down half the third double whiskey. Followed it with more of the beer chaser.

“What was the argument about?” Lydia asked. Septimus was as close to being drunk as she’d ever seen him. They had to get the rest of the story before he changed his mind or became incapable of telling it.

“I told Hughes I wanted my author’s credit back. I could see he was right. Highlands may not be a piece of classical drama, but it’ll be a big box office success. Melodrama with a song everyone will be humming as they walk out of the theatre. The scenes I’d written came alive during rehearsals. Hughes realized it, too. Long before I did.”

“What was his reaction?” Prudence asked.

“He laughed. Said a deal was a deal, and I ought to know better than to try to change the terms we’d shaken hands on.”

“Was that all?” From what the doorman had described, there had to have been more. Going at it hammer and tongs.

“He threatened I’d never work in the theatre or vaudeville again. Not for as long as I lived. Worse. He said if I didn’t stick to the agreement we had, he’d close the show before it opened. He’d fix it so Flora never got another break. Ever. He’d see her selling herself on a street corner before anyone would allow her to set foot in a theatre again. He could do it, Miss MacKenzie. Barrett Hughes is a force to be reckoned with. His name is as well-known in the profession as Edwin Booth’s.”

“Aren’t you exaggerating a little?” Lydia asked. “One man can’t have that much power.”

“You’ve never been a part of backstage,” Septimus said. “Maybe you’ve heard the stories, but you haven’t lived them. You haven’t experienced what it’s like.”

“Does Flora know about the confrontation with Hughes?” Prudence was determined to stick to what she considered the pertinent facts of what could shape up to be an interesting case. If Septimus decided to hire her after all.

“She’d already left the theatre. And I didn’t tell her what I planned to do.”

“Why not?” Lydia asked. “It affects her as much as it does you. More perhaps.”

Head down, staring into his empty whiskey glass, Septimus mumbled something incomprehensible. His cheeks stained red. The knuckles of his clenched fists paled.

“But Flora knows that you’re the author of Waif of the Highlands,” Prudence insisted, her litigator’s mind already picturing the delicate blond actress on the witness stand, tearfully assuring a jury under oath that Septimus Ward’s work had been stolen from him. There wouldn’t be a dry eye or disbelieving spectator in the courtroom.

“You wrote it for her,” Lydia reminded him. “Presumably you shared what you were working on as you went along, shaping the play to her talents, perhaps even incorporating whatever suggestions she made.”

“She saw the handwritten script,” Septimus said. “Many times. We used to run lines with each other when a scene didn’t want to play right.”

“Would you call her a cowriter then?” Prudence asked. It was important to get the details clear from the beginning. Her father had always insisted that an attorney could never afford to be ambushed in midtrial.

“No. The writing was mine. Every word of it. Flora had ideas, but they were all about adding lines and business to the character she was going to portray. Nothing that had anything to do with the overall plot or structure of the play itself.” Septimus looked up from his whiskey, caught Lydia’s eye, and pushed away the empty glass. “Maybe I have had enough.”

“What next?” Lydia asked.

“I’m not sure. I can’t be the reason the play doesn’t open. It wouldn’t be fair to Flora.”

Prudence and Lydia exchanged looks. He’s in love with her, poor fool.

“Did Hughes leave open any possibility of negotiation?” Prudence knew that in the heat of anger it might not seem like it, but often there remained a thread of reconciliation that could be teased out of the worst disagreements. It was up to her to find it.

“It’s my play. I wrote it,” Septimus said.

“Yes, but would either you or Hughes consider billing yourselves as coauthors? Would that smooth things over enough for the production to continue? Perhaps open a door for future collaboration?” It was a long shot, but negotiation was made up of feints and starts, suggestions and potentialities. Prudence knew . . .