The Murder of Mary Russell (9 page)

C
larissa had been disappointed to learn that they would sail west rather than ride the infamous gales of the Roaring Forties, but after a squall their first week out that shredded the mainsail and left bruises down her arms, her wish for adventure faded. A week later, following three days of storm behind tight-sealed portholes while titanic waves crashed over the decks and water poured through the saloon lights, she was positively grateful.

She was even more grateful for her sturdy inner parts: when the entire ship was heaving into their respective pots, including many of the crew, Clarissa stumbled across the rolling decks, laughing at the impossibility of straightforward motion. Even her father kept to his bunk—although that was drink rather than illness: numbing himself against the remembered horrors of the open sea.

The first week of October, one hundred two days after leaving Sydney, the cloud-like shapes on the horizon grew firm and became land. The Channel breeze grew fitful, with a constant scramble up and down the ratlines and adjustments to the rigging first on one side, then the other. Clarissa retreated to the least-occupied corner of the poop deck, her attention on the dark outline approaching with such agonising slowness. What would this unfamiliar country bring her, she wondered? And how much would it permit her to shape her own future?

Closer they crept. Night fell. In the morning, her father appeared, though the shore was no closer. But just as Clarissa was thinking that she would go mad with the waiting, a passing steam tug answered their hail, taking them in tow and delivering them to the harbour with no more fuss than that.

The Hudsons had chosen to disembark in Plymouth, rather than risk spending days tacking first up the Channel, then up the Thames. The wind (which had picked up as soon as they no longer needed it) offered the crew an exciting glimpse of Clarissa's ankles as they handed her into the small boat, but since they had been gentlemen (more or less) despite her being the only female passenger under the age of fifty, she took her time in smoothing down her skirts.

She then gave two of the sailors a further thrill by leaning heavily on their arms as she set foot on solid ground for the first time in over three months. Her merry laugh was joined by all within earshot, and she gingerly set off with outstretched hands up the rough boards towards land.

Clarissa and her father spent two nights in Plymouth, which gave him time to get over his hangover, her time to regain her balance, and them both a chance to retrieve garments unstained by travel and free of the sticky salt air. While her father struggled to write a blandly uninformative letter to Alicia (adding it to the dozen or more he'd written from the ship), Clarissa went walking. When she returned to the hotel, she dug out her smallest bustle and wrestled with its wire, flattening it even more until it approximated those she had observed on Plymouth's more fashionable ladies: silhouettes here were almost flat, compared to Sydney.

On the third day, when they boarded the train for London, Clarissa Hudson betrayed no vestige of Australia in voice, dress, or manner.

London was, she had to admit, the mother lode for a confidence man—or woman. Especially woman. Clarissa's passage through Paddington station, her travel through these incredibly narrow and crowded streets, the stroll across their hotel's lobby, all held promise that here, nuggets lay gleaming and ripe for the plucking, and would require but the most meagre of efforts. The gentry would simply beg to be swindled—and as for the foreign visitors…

But she kept her fingers to herself, and left her gaze down so as not to attract attention: there were bigger goals here than the odd purse or note-case.

The Season, when the Names and would-be Names of the British Empire would gather in London, ran from midwinter until midsummer—which in this topsy-turvy northern hemisphere was December through June. Parliament was in session then, but politics was only the excuse for an endless series of coming-out balls, intimate dinners for thirty, afternoon salons, improving lectures, and charity events that benefitted the sorts of people one hoped never actually to lay eyes upon. Once the hunting season ended in the spring, the whirl would really get under way.

Clarissa had known, before she so much as boarded the ship in Sydney, that her chief task in infiltrating London would be to find a position into which Society could put her. In England, her father's bad teeth and working-class manners would be of little use to the partnership, but even with Clarissa's skills, she would be an outsider, unknown to this small, tight, suspicious, and supercilious community. She could all too easily end up pressing her face to the bars, a laughing-stock behind the other ladies' fans.

The traditional solution here, she had discovered, was a sponsor: a woman with impeccable antecedents, accepted within this exclusive group, who as a girl had been presented at Court, whose family had held dinners and balls and all the panoply of coming-out, who might even have married—but who since then had fallen into a financial hole. The demands of keeping face made it impossible simply to sell one's possessions, fire one's servants, and move to a suburban villa. Better to starve to death in the family jewels.

Before leaving Sydney, Clarissa had come up with a name: a titled widow of sixty-three who, rumour had it, was less ill (as had been given out) than ill-supplied with the means of maintaining her wardrobe, cellars, and kitchen. Clarissa spent hours constructing the right sort of letter, on the correct kind of paper: one that demonstrated intelligence, means, good will, impeccable spelling, and decent penmanship, while trailing behind it a lack of sophistication that just begged for the firm hand of someone like Lady Penelope Breiford. She had posted it from Sydney by fast clipper, the week before she left, and made a search through the newspapers on arrival to confirm that the ship had docked, almost two weeks before.

Now, in London, the first thing Clarissa did was to have visiting cards printed, bearing the address of the hotel. As soon as they were ready, she hired a carriage to take her to Lady Breiford's home.

Clarissa sat in the carriage while the hired groom bore her card to the door. She looked straight ahead, chin up, face relaxed, only the grip of her hands on her bag betraying nerves. The groom had been instructed not to wait, merely to deposit the card on the butler's tray and come away. They returned to the hotel.

Now for the hard part: the waiting.

Her father, meanwhile, went off to address negotiations of his own; namely, those ancient and festering debts owed the crime boss known as The Bishop. Twenty-two years before, when a housemaid's confession led to many arrests and the flight of James and Sally Hudson to Falmouth and beyond, The Bishop had been nearly sixty. A man of great physical strength and unwavering vision (even now, at eighty), he had built a criminal fiefdom with a hard hand but an even one. Typical of him had been a willingness to extend a loan to a young man with a dangerously ill wife, buying his services thereby. Also typical of him was the way he greeted that Prodigal's long-delayed return: he allowed his son to beat some of the interest payments out of James Hudson's skin.

But he only allowed the beating to go so far—although the younger Bishop was more than willing to finish the job. The son had been the apprentice lad on Hudson's house-breaking gang, and nurtured bitter memories of the arrest, the hard interrogation, and the two decades of paternal blame that followed. When James Hudson was shown into The Bishop's throne room—a literal throne, with red velvet cushions—he found the son pacing back and forth behind the old man like a dog on a chain. And like a dog, he attacked the moment The Bishop loosed him.

It took the old man's Demander a while to pull the younger man off Hudson, but The Bishop was above all a practical man: the dead have trouble paying their debts.

The amount required to mollify The Bishop made Clarissa blanch even more than the state of her father's face. Still, the debts were paid, both monetary and in honour, leaving Hudson free (once his injuries had faded) to stroll the boulevards and befriend those nouveau members of Society who found him amusing: the sorts of targets he and Clarissa would require to build back their fortunes.

In the meantime, Clarissa waited. She was fitted for six gowns and three hats, finding an adequate tailor for her father as well. She arranged for a maid and a carriage, took many rides through Hyde Park, and fretted.

Lady Breiford's response came on the fifth day, in the form of a thin, elderly man in faded livery. He was standing at the corner of the lobby when Clarissa came in from a nerve-driven stroll around the busy streets. The instant she spotted him, she wanted to run up and throw her arms around him.

Naturally, she did nothing of the sort. She continued her stroll across the Axminster carpeting, waiting for one of the hotel staff to draw her attention to the messenger.

She permitted the liveried figure to approach, accepted the envelope he proffered, gave him a gracious nod, and swept on. But once in the privacy of her room, she closed her eyes, as near to prayer as Clarissa Hudson knew, before looking inside: there, in an ageing lady's perfect copperplate hand, was a date, with an invitation to call. The Australian in her nearly whooped in triumph: Clarissa Hudson had a toe inside the door of London Society.

The Sydney rumours proved correct, and—as with most people who claimed an utter disinterest in something as crude as money—Lady Breiford's eyes betrayed a gleam at the thick packet Clarissa laid absently on the table during her brief first visit. After much negotiation, all of it under the pretence of no negotiation at all, a sum was agreed upon, responsibilities made clear.

Lady Breiford could not get Clarissa presented in Court: that degree of respectability brought too great a risk of exposure, and in any event, Clarissa was a bit old. And because there was only so much Clarissa could do to turn Hudson into a gentleman, he would linger in the background as an “uncle,” at least until Clarissa herself was established. In this first Season, Clarissa's position would be exotic-but-acceptable rather than strictly one-of-us: Lady Breiford's honorary niece, an Antipodean treasure. Beyond that, Clarissa's success would rest on her own ability to charm.

With Lady Breiford at her back, and occasionally at her side (dressed in “gifts” from her young protégée), Clarissa was seen at all the right places during the autumn: lectures at the Royal Academy, shops in exclusive districts, slow carriages through Hyde Park, drinking tea at certain milliners that were as much salon as sellers of hats. Outfits and accessories poured into her rooms, readying her for the task of four to six changes of clothing each day. When 1877 began and the Season got under way, she had a handful of invitations. Those rapidly expanded to fill the mantelpiece. Clarissa Hudson was ushered into Society without so much as a ripple.

That first Season was exhausting, invigorating, challenging—and ruinously expensive until its very end, when the Marks were distracted by preparations to leave Town for country estates or foreign lands, freeing the Hudsons to cut a methodical swath through their carefully chosen and prepared targets. It proved a good thing that Hudson had made good his old debts: in April, they had been forced to borrow money. But by late August, The Bishop was well repaid.

Clarissa's first London Season was a resounding success, if for rather different reasons than most girls would claim.

In September, the Hudsons adjourned to the Continent, working their way through Paris, Berlin, and Rome, moving ever on to fresh pastures. Venice proved surprisingly lucrative, there being a community of wealthy Americans in residence. From there, a flirtatious conversation in a railway car brought the new casino in Monaco to their attention. They spent Christmas in Monte Carlo, convincing three different men that she was a wealthy heiress who just needed a bit of financial assistance…and came home to London very happy indeed.