Poppy Read online

  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

  Poppy

  M. C. Beaton

  Constable & Robinson Ltd.

  55–56 Russell Square

  London WC1B 4HP

  www.constablerobinson.com

  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

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  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 recordin
g 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.

  There it was, in a neat box all on its own: ONE LEWIS GIRL WANTED. AUDITIONS 11:00 A.M., WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 5. LEWIS’S. THE STRAND.

  Penelope took a deep breath. A Lewis girl.

  The Lewis girls were already famous. They were the brainchild of a Mr. Benjamin Lewis, who knew how to titillate the fancy of his audiences without offending the ladies or stooping to the vulgar level of the music hall. He put on musical comedies, all with a very thin story line, which nonetheless played to packed houses, for everyone came to see the chorus—the Lewis girls. They were hailed as the prettiest in England, with their gorgeous dresses, twirling parasols, and tiny waists.

  One had already married into the peerage.

  All at once Penelope decided to go. She knew she was pretty, because every boy in Bermondsey had told her so. She knew she could sing. She did not know that she looked dirty and ragged. She wore the same clothes and had the same hygiene as the people for miles around. In Bermondsey, temperance was next to godliness. People had enough to worry about without bothering about baths—and whoever heard of a house having a bathroom anyway?

  Penelope washed her face and hands over the piled-up dishes in the sink, skewered one of her mother’s old felt hats, which boasted a pheasant’s tail feather, on her curls, and set out for the Strand.

  It was a long walk. Over London Bridge to Cannon Street, down Cannon Street, past St. Paul’s, down Ludgate Hill and up Fleet Street, past the Law Courts, past the Temple Bar, around in front of Somerset House, and so up the Strand.

  And there at last was Lewis’s Theater, its gaslights flaring to banish some of the murk of the winter’s day.

  At first she made the mistake of entering the theater foyer and was told severely to go around to the stage door.

  After some searching she found the stage door and then gasped in dismay. A long queue of elegant young ladies stretched out down the dingy lane that ran up the side of the theater.

  Penelope’s heart sank. She became bitterly aware of the poverty of her own dress. But she could not go back. There seemed to be magic, which would not let her turn away, emanating from the very stones of the theater. So she stayed and shivered and stamped her feet as the line shuffled slowly forward.

  One by one unsuccessful applicants began to emerge from Lewis’s, the faces of some of them swollen with tears. “He’s a right tartar, that Mr. Lewis,” sobbed one to the waiting girls. “He said I looked awful and sang like a crow.”

  Again Penelope’s heart sank, but once more she found she could not leave.

  At last she found herself at the entrance to the stage door—to find her way barred by a small, stern-looking man.

  “Wot ’ave we ’ere?” he demanded with awful dignity, looking Penelope up and down. “Scrubbing woman?”

  Several of the girls, already inside and waiting on the stairs, giggled with malicious enjoyment.

  Penelope straightened her spine. All at once she remembered her last school prize-giving, where a certain Lady Bentley, a minor peeress given to good works, had come to hand out the prizes and had terrified everyone by the haughtiness of her manner. Penelope was a good mimic.

  She fixed the small man with her hard blue eyes, and in the steely, arctic tones of the upper class said loudly, “I, my good man, am Poppy Duveen. In character.” Then with one withering look she pulled her ragged shawl around her shoulders and swept past.

  “Sorry, madam,” said the stage doorkeeper hurriedly. He assumed, as Penelope had meant him to, that she was some well-known bit-part actress who had come straight from her own theater to audition at Lewis’s.

  One of the waiting girls looked at Penelope in awe. “Which theater are you playing?” she asked.


  But Penelope did not feel she could sustain the accent of Lady Bentley much longer, so she fixed her interrogator with a cold look and turned away without replying.

  “Snob,” muttered the girl sulkily.

  Mr. Benjamin Lewis leaned back wearily in his seat in the pit and stared moodily at the stage. “Next!” he yelled.

  “They’re bloody awful,” he muttered to Mr. Pettifor, his stage manager. “They’re either too common or too refeened. I want a saucy girl. I want innocence combined with come-hither. And their clothes are dreadful. No style.”

  “Well, you ain’t going to get it this morning,” grumped Mr. Pettifor. “What a lot!”

  Like quite a lot of badly dressed people, Mr. Benjamin Lewis had a sharp eye for the faults of others. He was dressed in a biscuit-colored suit, too tight at the waist and too wide about the shoulders. A ruby pin winked above the embroidered glory of his two waistcoats.

  “Oh, my Gawd!” he cried suddenly, jerked into animation. “Oh, no! Take it away. It’s some awful joke!”

  “It” was Penelope Smith, blinking in the footlights and clutching a ragged sheet of music.

  Penelope heard the loud voice and froze. She angrily shook off the hand that was trying to tug her from the stage, and marched to the front of the footlights.

  “Look ’ere!” she yelled, “Mr. Whoever-you-are. I come ’ere for to sing, and sing I will. You ain’t ’eard me yet.”

  Mr. Lewis stared amazed at the ragged defiant figure, at the blazing blue eyes, and sank back in his chair in weary defeat.

  “Oh, very well,” he shouted crossly. “Get on with it. What’s she going to treat us to?” he muttered to the small, dormouselike figure of Mr. Pettifor. “‘The Coster’s Saturday Night?’”

  “Dunno,” shrugged Mr. Pettifor. “What sewer did that one climb from, eh?”

  Penelope had handed her music to the accompanist and once again approached the footlights. She put her small work-worn hands behind her back.

  She sang.

  She had chosen one of her mother’s favorite Scottish ballads, and Robert Burns’s immortal love song rang out sweetly to the darkened boxes with their fat gilt cherubs.