Poppy
Authors: M.C. Beaton
M. C. Beaton
is the author of the hugely successful Agatha Raisin and Hamish Macbeth series, as well as a quartet of Edwardian murder mysteries featuring heroine Lady Rose Summer, the Travelling Matchmaker, Six Sisters, House for the Season, School for Manners and Poor Relation Regency romance series, and a stand-alone murder mystery,
The Skeleton in the Closet
– all published by Constable & Robinson. She left a full-time career in journalism to turn to writing, and now divides her time between the Cotswolds and Paris. Visit
www.agatharaisin.com
for more, or follow M. C. Beaton on Twitter:
@mc_beaton
.
Titles by M. C. Beaton
The Poor Relation
Lady Fortescue Steps Out • Miss Tonks Turns to Crime • Mrs Budley Falls from Grace
Sir Philip‘s Folly • Colonel Sandhurst to the Rescue • Back in Society
A House for the Season
The Miser of Mayfair • Plain Jane • The Wicked Godmother
Rake‘s Progress • The Adventuress • Rainbird‘s Revenge
The Six Sisters
Minerva • The Taming of Annabelle • Deirdre and Desire
Daphne • Diana the Huntress • Frederica in Fashion
Edwardian Murder Mysteries
Snobbery with Violence • Hasty Death • Sick of Shadows
Our Lady of Pain
The Travelling Matchmaker
Emily Goes to Exeter • Belinda Goes to Bath • Penelope Goes to Portsmouth
Beatrice Goes to Brighton • Deborah Goes to Dover • Yvonne Goes to York
Agatha Raisin
Agatha Raisin and the Quiche of Death • Agatha Raisin and the Vicious Vet
Agatha Raisin and the Potted Gardener • Agatha Raisin and the Walkers of Dembley
Agatha Raisin and the Murderous Marriage • Agatha Raisin and the Terrible Tourist
Agatha Raisin and the Wellspring of Death • Agatha Raisin and the Wizard of Evesham
Agatha Raisin and the Witch of Wyckhadden
Agatha Raisin and the Fairies of Fryfam • Agatha Raisin and the Love from Hell
Agatha Raisin and the Day the Floods Came
Agatha Raisin and the Curious Curate • Agatha Raisin and the Haunted House
Agatha Raisin and the Deadly Dance • Agatha Raisin and the Perfect Paragon
Agatha Raisin and Love, Lies and Liquor
Agatha Raisin and Kissing Christmas Goodbye
Agatha Raisin and a Spoonful of Poison • Agatha Raisin: There Goes the Bride
Agatha Raisin and the Busy Body • Agatha Raisin: As the Pig Turns
Agatha Raisin: Hiss and Hers • Agatha Raisin and the Christmas Crumble
Hamish Macbeth
Death of a Gossip • Death of a Cad • Death of an Outsider
Death of a Perfect Wife • Death of a Hussy • Death of a Snob
Death of a Prankster • Death of a Glutton • Death of a Travelling Man
Death of a Charming Man • Death of a Nag • Death of a Macho Man
Death of a Dentist • Death of a Scriptwriter • Death of an Addict
A Highland Christmas • Death of a Dustman • Death of a Celebrity
Death of a Village • Death of a Poison Pen • Death of a Bore
Death of a Dreamer • Death of a Maid • Death of a Gentle Lady
Death of a Witch • Death of a Valentine • Death of a Sweep
Death of a Kingfisher • Death of Yesterday
The Skeleton in the Closet
Also available
The Agatha Raisin Companion
M. C. Beaton
Constable & Robinson Ltd.
55–56 Russell Square
London WC1B 4HP
First electronic edition published 2011
by RosettaBooks LLC, New York
First published in the UK by Canvas,
an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd., 2013
Copyright © M. C. Beaton, 1982
The right of M. C. Beaton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.
A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-1-47210-125-9 (ebook)
For Kathryn Falk, with love
CHAPTER ONE
It would have been easy to feel sorry for Penelope Smith, because she lived in quite terrible surroundings. But Penelope—pronounced Penny-lope by her family—was not in the least sorry for herself. At the age of seventeen she showed signs of having inherited all her dead mother’s stoicism, chirpy cheerfulness, and optimism. She had also inherited her mother’s blond beauty, which, although dimmed by dirt and dreary circumstances, occasionally flashed through in all its splendor after her twice-yearly bath.
Penelope lived in Bermondsey, under the shadow of London Bridge Station, in a thin, mean brick house lodged tightly in the company of other equally thin, mean brick houses in a long dark street called Cutler’s Fields. With her lived her noisy and drunken father, Bert, and her two small sisters, Emily and Josie. Emily was four and Josie ten. The late Mrs. Smith had departed this world after seeing Emily safely into it, and Penelope’s mourning for her mother was the only thing that dampened her sunny spirits.
The day that was to change her life did not have an auspicious beginning. First of all her father, who had managed to remain sober for all of three months, had fallen from grace in a very dramatic way, drinking hot gin at the Pig and Crumpet until it came out of his ears, figuratively speaking, and out of everywhere else, literally speaking. He had had a noisy encounter during the night with several green snakes and two avenging angels, and Penelope had had to call in the help of the neighbors to hold him down. By the time he had collapsed into a smelly and exhausted sleep, Penelope had heard the worst of it—her father had lost his well-paying bricklaying job, since his foreman also patronized the Pig and Crumpet, and Mr. Smith had told the foreman in no uncertain terms where to lay his bricks.
As Penelope sliced bread for breakfast and poured milk for her two little sisters, she realized she would have to find work. Now, her father had sworn to take his belt to her if she ever demeaned herself by taking a job. Although Bert Smith lived amongst some of the worst squalor London had to offer, he had all the grandiosity of the truly drunk and pretended his daughters were young ladies.
But Penelope had quickly learned the ways of her father and knew his latest bout would be followed by a hangover, remorse, and maudlin guilt and that he would be in no position to argue.
Penelope’s mind was busy as she prepared her sisters for school. Bert Smith had insisted on an education for his girls, and there was at least that to be said for him should he ever get as far as the recording angel. Josie and Emily were pale and silent. They had not had much sleep because of the drama of their papa’s delirium tremens, and they were frightened he would awake before they could escape from the house. Unlike Penelope the younger girls favored their father, being small and dark and wiry.
Both young ones waited with bated breath while Penelope went quietly up the stairs to her father’s bedroom to rifle his pockets for any money that might be left.
The house was very small, consisting of a front parlor—never used—a back kitchen, and two small bedrooms up a rickety flight of stairs.
Penelope soon returned and shepherded the small girls out into the dark and freezing cold. Winter held London in its grip. One woke up in darkness and lived in darkness all day, as clouds covered the heavens and thick smoke belched from millions of chimneys. Hoarfrost sparkled on the railings and pavements of Cutler’s Fields.
“Look!” cried Penelope. “Innit wunnerful? Like dyamonds!” But her sisters felt too scared to open their mouths. Their home was not yet far enough behind them.
“Come along, duckies. Cheer up!” said Penelope, putting an arm around each shawled shoulder and doing a little dance with her old cracked boots on the frosty pavement. “Tell yer wot… I’ll sing yer a song I ’eard.” Releasing the girls’ shoulders, she struck an attitude and started to sing in a voice as clear as a lark:
“She was poor, but she was honest,
Victim of the squire’s whim:
First he loved her, then he left her,
And she lost her honest name.”
One by one, like wary animals, the neighbors ventured out of their houses into the damp, sour squares of earth that passed for gardens, drawn by Penelope’s singing. Her little sisters forgot their fears as they listened to the well-known comic ballad.
Oblivious of her small audience, Penelope caroled on for the sheer joy of it.
One by one they joined in until it seemed as if everyone in dreary Cutler’s Fields was roaring out the last verse:
“It’s the same the whole world over,
It’s the poor wot gets the blame,
It’s the rich that gets the pleasure,
Isn’t it a bleedin’ shame?”
There was a spattering of applause, and Penelope grinned and swirled her dirty patched skirts in a curtsy.
“You otter be on the styge,” wheezed old Mrs. Jenkins, nearly falling on her face as she tried to lean on her nonexistent gate, forgetting in the glory of the moment that her husband had sold it to the scrap dealer only the week before. “Luverly, your voice is. Luverly.”
“’Ere, Penny-lope,” called Mr. Barker, the rag-and-bone man. “’Ere’s yesterday’s pyper, and innit they says something abaht wantin’ Lewis girls.”
“’Ave a look at it,” begged Mrs. Tyson, a thin, anemic housewife carrying her fourteenth offspring in her shawl. “You could be a Lewis girl, Pen, you really could.”
“I’ll look at it later,” said Penelope, laughing, taking the paper and tucking it under her arm. “I’ve gotter get the girls off to school.”
Waving to the neighbors, she swung off down the road, keeping up a brisk trot until the parish school loomed up through the black, sooty air.
“Run along, ducks,” she said, giving Emily and Josie a kiss each. “Now don’t you worry. Pa’ll be like lambs when you gets ’ome. And me? Well, I may have a job, that’s wot.”
“Oh,” breathed Josie, round-eyed. “Are you goin’ on the stage, then?”
“Maybe,” said Penelope, laughing. “Off with you!”
She waited until the two girls had been swallowed up in the darkness of the school entrance and turned around and ran home, dancing and skipping through the cold air.
She stopped at the Post Office, which also served as bakery, sweet shop, haberdasher, and general grocer and bought a small brown paper bag of coal with a little of the money she had found in her father’s pockets.
Penelope decided to treat herself to a fire. Just a little one. She would save the rest of the coal to warm the girls when they came home from school.
Once the fire was lit and a few stale tea leaves at the bottom of the caddy were coaxed into something resembling a brew, Penelope opened the
Morning Bugle
that Mr. Barker had given her and turned to the advertisements.