 
## The Melancholy Scion

A Lizzie Borden, Girl Detective   
Mini-Mystery #4

Richard Behrens

NINE MUSES BOOKS  
Copyright © 2015

Smashwords Edition
Published by Nine Muses Books at Smashwords

Copyright © 2015 Richard Behrens  
All Rights Reserved

A Lizzie Borden, Girl Detective Mini-Mystery #4

www.lizziebordengirldetective.com  
www.ninemusesbooks.com

Cover illustration: Lizzie Cameo by Marc Reed  
www.marcreed.com

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This story first appeared in The Literary Hatchet.   
Reprinted by permission of PearTree Press

Nine Muses Books  
New England, USA
August 1927. Fall River, Massachusetts.

# 1. Pressed In Lavender

For Lizzie Borden, Andre de Camp will always be the Poet.

In all her sixty-six years on earth, she had never been known to pay such reverence, silent or otherwise, to any member of the male sex, whether to applaud virtue or to praise physical elegance. But Andre de Camp, scion of a wealthy French family that had relocated to Fall River in the summer of 1877, a tall, brooding, and decidedly handsome bachelor of nineteen years, the product of private civilized education, brilliant and concisely intelligent, fastidious in his manly dress, and precise in his manners, held a special place in Lizzie's estimation of the masculine half of humanity.

She first glimpsed him at a mid-summer charity event in the church hall of the First Congregational. Standing with his illustrious family—the father wearing proudly a decorated uniform, the mother and sister posed upright with pious concentration—Andre bowed his head towards Lizzie, just once, as if in humble supplication before a higher power. The gesture sent a chill through Lizzie's being.

She quickly became impressed with how the de Camp men were so very different from the money-driven barons who banked her city, the uncultured industrialists who would never design a cathedral or build an opera hall lest they consider it "a foolish dollar spent." Andre de Camp may have been spawned from that same society class, yet he brought with it all the cultured elegance of Paris and the dark mysteries of the southern Languedoc, far-off locales that Lizzie had admired, through sepia photographs of mountainous regions with lush outcroppings and deep-veined soil, a land she thought had existed only in her dreams.

Andre was a graceful aristocratic youth who, like herself, was more comfortable with the personal passions and the aesthetics of every day life than with the complexities of commerce. She saw in him not the proud Marshals and Presidents of France's dusty past, nor the great Sun Kings in their splendid palace, but the simple shepherds from the paintings of Poussin, the noble musketeers of Dumas, and the provincial people of the tales of Flaubert. He embodied in his presence all the excitement, adventure, and beauty that she had admired in the great French paintings and novels that made their way to various Fall River parlors for her cultural edification. In her opinion, he far outpaced in every manner the collective men of his generation.

But for the rest of her days she would never speak his name aloud. Even as an aging woman of the Hill, secluded in her summer bedroom in the rambling Maplecroft, her manse and hermitage, alone as she looked back upon a dark and hidden life, she would only speak of Andre as the Poet, and then briefly, and then only to a chauffeur or a domestic who was not of her generation, who would never have heard of the de Camp family, or would never repeat her words to anyone in town who may have known them, and then only when she was caught off guard with some seizure of nostalgia for a Fall River that had once been and now was no more.

But when the glimmer came in her aging eyes, and she spoke of the Poet, when she made oblique references to faces and places now lost to time and memory, when she hinted that once she had loved and felt within her breast a singular passion the likes of which had never been repeated, it was the summer of 1877 and the Case of the Melancholy Scion where her thoughts took her. Back to a time before she was the secluded spinster on the Hill, before she sat alone in church because no fellow citizens would occupy the pews adjoining hers, before she was accused of that terrible crime whose shadow she would never escape; back when she was young and fresh and alive, to the time when she walked the streets of Fall River with Andre de Camp, who also was young and fresh and alive, and who, despite her unwillingness to let her heart be so directly touched, had truly loved her.

Back when she was Lizzie Borden, Girl Detective.

# 2. Unsettling Revelations

1877. Fall River. South Main Street. Andrew Jackson Borden took his pre-dinner constitutional starting from the front of his quaint Greek revival house on Second Street towards the tonsorial parlor, the post office, and the apothecary to respectively get a shave, check for his mail, and to inquire about the gastro-esophageal disruption pills his wife Abby needed for her burning chest pains. Threading his way through the narrow streets, surrounded by the bustle of pedestrian traffic, the whinnying of nags, the clattering of buggies, and the hawking of the fish mongers, Andrew turned to survey the town that had given him birth and had nurtured him through his rise to prosperity.

So many real estate properties, he thought to himself. So many empty lots. If only I could possess them all, to have that locus of power over the domestic and commercial fate of every individual in Fall River. He allowed himself this one pure moment of magnitude, imagining an inflated likeness of himself that lay unrealized by his business colleagues, and then, with a wistful grin that barely moved the edge of his mouth, pushed on towards the barber for his weekly trimming.

At that very moment, a short, squat man with a bulbous nose and bristling mustache stopped in front of Andrew, ungraciously blocking his path.

"You're A. J. Borden, I believe!"

Andrew lifted his chin proudly. "I do have that honor."

The man's mouth made a strange mumbling motion and, before Andrew could take refuge in flight, his assailant bellowed an almost incomprehensible "Feeeyaaaah!" and a shapeless wad of saliva came flying across the distance between them, landing with sickening thwack on Andrew's cheek.

"Here's for your thievery and your damned Ullsworth!" the man shouted in the wake of his violating payload. "Take a rest in one of your own flimsy coffins, why don't you? Hang ye be to Arcady!" Then the man was gone, leaving Andrew to wipe away his indignity with a hastily drawn handkerchief.

Ullsworth? Andrew pondered as a few passers-by giggled and pointed. Could that be the family he had driven from the Annawan Street property? Better for them, they couldn't afford the rent, not on the cloth doffing salary that Tobias Ullsworth had settled for after the end of his whaling career. The wife and seven children were much better off as wards of the city, where at least they could be assured that they would be fed every day. But who had been his attacker? And what connection could he have with this Ullsworth? Surely, it took a dedicated passion to accost and insult a prominent citizen in broad daylight before gawking pedestrians.

Andrew turned to head home but was surprised to see his young daughter Lizzie standing on the street corner in a pretty pink and white striped fantail skirt, fresh from La Mode Illustre, topped off with a cunning chip hat laden with silk pansies perched high aloft her curly hair. She was positioned by a lamppost with a far twinkle in her wide blue-gray eyes.

"Daughter," Andrew said, pointing in the direction of the fleeing assailant. "I am afraid you had to witness my unexplained ignominy."

"Father," Lizzie said, her voice thinner than usual. "I did not see anything, for I am adrift in a waking reverie."

"You are indeed adrift. I don't think that I have ever seen you in such ponderous daydreaming. What distracts you from your daily duties?"

"I have been to the charity event this very hour on Saturday past."

"Yes, indeed. You accompanied Mrs. Borden and me. Emma, I believe, was home with a complaint."

"And at the Church I had occasion to see the party of Frenchmen who have recently joined our community from abroad."

Borden nodded, his mouth clenched. Rubbing his unshaven cheek, he explained, "The de Camp clan . . . mighty proud people. They bought the Durfee Estate and are in the process of establishing an import-export concern. The Comte de Rennes, the father, is an enterprising gentleman, albeit a bit taken with lofty matters such as art and music, subjects not quite befitting a man of his industrious character."

"They are highly cultured then," Lizzie said, her eyes widening. "Oh Father, do tell me that they are versed in all matters of aesthetics. Poetries, romans-a-clef, sonnets and concertos, painting, and architecture. Tell me that young Andre can dance to a rondo as easily as he can recite Shakespearian soliloquies, that as a family they have that spark of creativity within that transcends the ordinary particulars of our daily labors and occupations."

Andrew heaved an unpleasant grunt. "If you mean do they listen to operatic clap trap, or read the ramblings of word mongers, then yes, Daughter. They are aesthetes."

Lizzie smiled, her face reddening in the afternoon sunlight. "I am glad of it. Young Andre has caught my fancy, but I think you must tell not a one about my feelings."

Andrew struggled to process this evidence of his daughter's awakening womanhood. He knew in the past that boys had distracted her, but she always maintained a short temper and a feigned indifference, perhaps to avoid complications. And she had socialized with strange, undeveloped male specimens like Homer Thesinger the Boy Inventor, who presented himself more as a child despite his recent attainment of a height of six feet. But Andre, the handsome youth who had been introduced as Jacques de Camp's scion, was altogether different. He was stern and determined, calm and centered. He was also two years Lizzie's elder, and seemed strong enough to conquer her coquettish behavior if such was his will. No, this would not do. The de Camp boy must be denied access to Lizzie, by any means necessary.

"Daughter," Andrew said, his mouth tightening against the emerging words, "need I remind you that the Comte is a Roman Catholic? They attend Mass at St. Anne's, don't you know?"

"Father," Lizzie smirked. "By now you should know that when it comes to spiritual matters, I ascribe the choice of worship to each and every man's conscience. Besides, I am told that the Comte has a Protestant mother."

"Yes," he grumbled. "Well, what then would you say if I told you that there is much scandal surrounding young Andre?"

"Scandal?" Her eyes peered purposefully, trying to discern his meaning. "Whatever could you mean?"

"Much has been discovered about the family since their appearance in town. I have already heard word from my fellow stockholders at the Mill, who make it their business to investigate the background of newly-arrived immigrants, that Jacques de Camp, the father of your beloved boy, has cleanly sailed through their careful scrutiny; but I fear to say that young Andre has not fared as well. The boy is known . . . " Andrew paused for dramatic effect, " . . . he is known to frequent Houses of Assignation. He is a Sporting Boy."

Lizzie felt a fluttering in her head even before she could digest her father's statements. "Assig . . . " she muttered. "Sporting . . . " then lifted a hand to her forehead to began her downward spiral towards the sidewalk. Andrew leapt forward and caught her in his arms. Her eyes were shifting violently back and forth under her lids.

A man in a bowler hat, with trim muttonchops, emerged from the moving traffic of pedestrians and offered his services. "Is this young lady a'right?" he asked. "I am a doctor. Ah, Mr. Borden! I see Lizzie has taken ill."

Andrew recognized his Second Street neighbor, Dr. Seabury Bowen, and watched breathlessly while the doctor brought a cracked tablet to her nostrils. She groaned, showing signs of life.

"Will she live?" asked Andrew grimly.

"Examine her pallor," said the doctor, pointing. "She has merely fainted. Nothing more."

Andrew scratched at his beard. "I suppose you'll be wanting some copper for your hack observation, Seabury."

"I am in your service," the doctor said, trying to haul Lizzie to her feet and tip his bowler simultaneously. "No coin required. Let us just get the poor girl home."

Andrew hesitated, assessing Dr. Bowen carefully. "You do not mean to clap me with a summation upon our arrival? I will not honor it!"

Dr. Bowen took a patient breath. "You need not fear any trickery from me. I am concerned only for the girl's health."

Andrew huffed. "Be about your business, man. It is a harsh day when I confront an honest doctor. I will tolerate your aid for my Lizzie's sake. Spring to it, man!"

As he helped Dr. Bowen carry Lizzie the two short blocks to their home on Second Street, Andrew pondered Lizzie's reactions to the revelations about the de Camp boy. He felt a brief pang of guilt over distressing his daughter to the point of fainting.

"But my actions were all correct," he rationalized. "No good could come out of Andre de Camp. Not for my daughter!"

# 3. A Desperate Visitor

Lizzie awoke in her cramped bedroom on the second floor of the Borden's modest house. Fully clothed and reclining on her bed, her forehead beaded with sweat, she struggled to make sense of the tolling of the church bell. The small walls and their flowered paper caved in on her as she fought for her breath.

"Lizzie Andrew!" came a sharp cry.

Springing to her feet, she felt a disorienting rush of blood to her head as she nearly fell back onto the mattress. Her shoulders were caught fast by two hands that emerged from below a thin and chinless face that was now coming into focus. Lizzie's elder sibling, Emma, was standing before her, a frown upon her brow.

"My Sister," Emma sighed. "Sometimes I fear that you have the falling sickness."

"No, Sister," Lizzie said, bringing the back of her hand to her forehead. "It is Fall River that has the falling sickness!"

Emma waggled her head as if trying to dislodge a disturbed thought. "I have ceased to attempt understanding of your inane ramblings. One would think that you had been secretly dropped on your head when you were a child."

"Would that the act were repeated to clear my mind of these worries."

A flash of recognition came across Emma's face. "You are pursuing your consulting services again. I swear by all the heavens, Lizzie, how many times must you nearly be murdered before you abandon this folly. Pay more attention to your proper duties."

"Emma," Lizzie said earnestly, "I have heard this day that our town is host to Sporting Boys. And where there is Sporting Boys . . . " Her eyes took a quick dart about the room, " . . . there are Fancy Girls."

"If such matters go on in this town," Emma said with a shrug, "it is the province of the law to sort it out and the mandate of the Almighty above to judge their sins. For now, all we can do is suffer our mundane tasks upon the earth."

"Mundane tasks?" Lizzie suppressed a spontaneous chuckle.

"Yes, mundane. Mrs. Borden has some paper wrappers for us to address. And I believe there is a buggy to bring to Swansea Farm. Do you not remember that today is Wednesday? Now be downstairs in a few moments, composed, and alert." Emma darted from the room, more frustrated than concerned. Lizzie stood alone, staring into space, thinking.

After changing her down street ensemble for a cotton calico and stout tie oxfords, clothing more suitable for scrambling after eggs in a chicken coop, Lizzie came down the front stairs of the house to find her stepmother, Abby Borden, by the front door. Abby was a plump woman of forty-nine, with a dour and haggard face, as if she had spent the better part of a lifetime trying to feign cheerfulness with little reward.

"I am glad to see you well," Abby said cursorily, handing her a stack of paper wrappers. "Mr. Borden is hiding in his room fearing Dr. Bowen's summation. One day that father of yours shall be the death of us."

From the sitting room door emerged Doctor Bowen, his warm eyes twinkling above his mutton-chopped mustache. "Miss Lizzie," he said, nodding his chin respectfully. "I trust you are feeling much better?"

"Very fine. I have never felt better. Are you the doctor who aided me in my time of distress?"

"I have that honor. Even I, a poor medical man, attempting to establish himself with such modest resources, am happy to be of service to the great Lizzie Borden, Girl Detective of Fall River."

Abby groaned, her hands fleeing into her apron. "What nonsense! Girl Detective indeed!"

"Your daughter is quite an accomplished woman, Mrs. Borden. I am pleased to see her fine and healthy. Now it is for her father I fear. He seems to be in a state of apoplexy, as if something is weighing upon his mind. He muttered about a man who accosted him in the street."

"I believe Father mentioned something about it," Lizzie said, "but I do not think that I remember."

Abby sighed. "Your father does indeed have many enemies since he has elevated his station in life. No doubt many of them wish him harm."

"I believe it was an English bard," Dr. Bowen added, "who described the King that must wear the crown as having an uneasy head. Sleep comes dear to such a man."

"Amen," Abby concluded. "Now, Lizzie you have chores to run. Emma's in the barn, harnessing the rig. I suspect she'll call for you shortly."

Dr. Bowen removed his bowler from the standing rack, bid the ladies good afternoon, and took his leave. Abby bolted up the door after him.

"There are some doctors in this town who are decent at heart, Mrs. Borden," Lizzie said smugly. "Don't let Father begrudge such a man."

"To your chores!" Abby quipped. "Don't dally, there's much to be done. It is Wednesday you know!"

Lizzie took the wrappers and entered the kitchen where the stove was ablaze and some papers were already burning. Staring into the grate, Lizzie could see that they were legal documents touching upon property estates. For a brief moment, Lizzie thought she could discern the name Ullsworth on one of the papers. Something flickered in the back of her memory. Something she had heard while drinking her Ayers' sarsaparilla at the fountain with her friends, something about a whaling man who had vanished and his indigent wife and children. She was about to reach in and try to salvage the paper when she sensed a fluttering in the air behind her. Spinning about, Lizzie was facing her stepmother who stood with her hands thrust into her apron, a look of astonishment on her face.

"Lizzie Andrew," Abby said, her voice humbled. "There is a gentleman to see you. I do believe he is a gentleman despite his garish appearance. Although I doubt your father would ever allow such a person into his home."

"Garish? Is he fancied up like a saloon performer?"

"No, he is . . . well, perhaps you'd best see for yourself."

Lizzie came back to the parlor to find a very tall man standing by the piano. He was jowly and broad, covered in a red brocade of fine military threads, his feet planted firmly on the carpet, his strong arms bent behind his back. A domino mask obscured his eyes and nose, and a broad cape flowed like a theatrical curtain behind him. His mustaches extended below the mask and stood firm and proud, like they were testifying a profound "Yes" to the vagaries of life. And while his mustaches were displaying defiance against darkness, his jutting chin was mastering the art of adjuration, with an opulence that spoke of an abandoned country and a melancholy exile. Here was a man who radiated forceful, masculine energy. Lizzie felt self-secure enough to stand firm before him, and to extend her hand without diverting her eyes from his piercing gaze.

He performed the briefest of smiles. "Miss Lizzie Borden, the Girl Detective."

Lizzie held out her hand and he gently pressed his lips to it. "Forgive my forgery of identity," he continued, "for I have a high position in this town's industry and I must keep it secret, even from you, my potential consultant."

"I am intrigued." Lizzie waved towards the pillowed sofa. "Please have a seat and explain to me how I can be of service."

"I prefer to stand," the strange visitor exclaimed. "It provides extra labor for the legs, but my circumstance is such that at a moment's notice I must spring like a lion for shelter. I cannot be too safe."

"I see," said Lizzie, occupying the sofa with a coquettish descent. "Please explain to me how I can be of service to you."

He executed a hasty cough, his mustaches quivering, and then he began: "I represent a rather large number of Fall River business men, many of whom are aware of my identity but none of whom know that I am consulting with you. Besides yourself, your most polite mother, and the coachman who is in my private employ, no one knows of my visit here today."

"That is Mrs. Borden," Lizzie corrected him, nodding towards the door that Abby was, no doubt, pressing her ear against. "She is not my mother." Lizzie raised her voice to proclaim, "My mother is dead."

"Ah, I see. You must forgive my faux pas."

"No offense taken, Mr. . . . uh . . . "

"You may call me Chace. Yes, that name would be suitable. Now, I may resume with the narrative of my situation. I am in communication with a number of European concerns that are investigating the Fall River market, primarily interested in buying up stock in industry here. Some of those concerns have ties with the royal families of Eastern Europe. As you may know, there is quite a fuss going on abroad due to the conflicts with the Ottomans over the Slavic lands. England and France are quite busy with their espionage and intrigue, both of them taking sides one way or the other with the Russians over this terrible conflict in Bulgaria. The Russian army has crossed the Danube and is laying siege as we speak to the city of Plevna. The death toll is mounting, and there are those who wish to see a hasty end to this campaign."

Lizzie nodded. "I read the Fall River Herald on a daily basis, Mr. Chace, while I heat my irons. I have perused some editorials about the affair with the Turks."

"Then you are aware that Europe is now a powder keg waiting for a match to fall upon it. And when that happens, there will be a conflagration such as the world has never before seen."

Lizzie sighed, meditating upon the foolish games of powerful men and all their silly armies and conflicts. "There does seem to be quite a large amount of consternation. I can imagine the outcome of such an imbroglio. But what has this to do with anything I can help you with?"

Chace rocked on his heels. "A Russian noble of some reputation has bought up large amounts of textile stock in order to raise funds for a private army to fight the Turks. I was to be the liaison between the Russian and a certain European government. He has sent an agent, an inventor, to speak on behalf of Russian industry."

"What could this Russian possibly have to offer the foreign government that could be so valuable?" asked Lizzie. "And why Fall River?"

The eyes under the domino mask darted from side to side as if scanning the room for spies. "The Russian inventor has laid out the plans for a new self-acting Mule which, when it was combined with the Hayes and Drumpet Throstle Spinner and put into production at his test plant in Moscow, quadrupled his yarn output and tripled his pick per yard. We intend to sell this patent for the self-acting Mule to the highest bidder in Fall River while retaining a commission on each yard spun using the technology. This particular Mule will revolutionize the entire industry. The first manufacturer who adopts it will become wealthy beyond his imagination and the Russian shall have his privately-funded army to fight the Turks and raise the siege of Plevna."

Lizzie shrugged. "Personally, I prefer the simple pleasure of a summer's afternoon eating pears in the yard, but I can see that when money and power are involved, men would do anything to exploit the common mill worker."

"Yes, it is very true. But if Herr Marx should have his way . . . well . . . " Mr. Chace raised a handkerchief to his sweating brow. "That is a story for another time." He stared in reverie at the far wall, his mind lost in some anguished internal debate.

"So you tell me that this Russian is in Fall River with the plans for his invention?" Lizzie asked, picking up the thread of conversation.

"Yes, but there is one particular person who he did not count on. His plans have been stolen!"

Lizzie raised her hand to her mouth. "Stolen!" she repeated.

"Yes, there has been perfidy of the most sinister kind. This Monday last at ten in the evening, while the Russian inventor was asleep in his hotel, a scoundrel entered the premises and stole the plans."

"Did he not have them locked up somewhere for safe-keeping?"

"Ah, that is the embarrassing part. He had ingeniously stowed the plans inside a medical . . . uh . . . how do you Americans say it? a pessary? that he inserted into a chamber of his own anatomy. Modesty forbids me to locate the particular chamber in which the pessary was stowed."

"I see," said Lizzie, blushing slightly. "I believe it is a suppository you are referring to."

"Mais oui! Yes, indeed. A pessary! The fiend put him to sleep with liquid ether administered with a cloth over his nose, and then went to work extracting the container."

"Such a hiding place would not easily be accessed," Lizzie sighed. "But when a man is unconscious, all sorts of violations are possible."

"Yes, that is exactly what I said to the foreign government. But they did not find such comments amusing. They told me I had twenty-four hours to find the plans, and that if I did not produce them before the arranged time for the meeting with the mill owners on Friday afternoon, I shall be removed immediately from my position as liaison. In such a case, I shall return home a ruined man, all my investments cancelled, and my prospects in America reduced to nothing. Hence the desperation with which I approach you."

"Time must be of the essence," Lizzie suggested.

"More than you can imagine, Miss Borden," Chace confirmed. "Even more at stake than my own reputation is the fate of Europe. If the patent negotiations break down with the Russians, the balance of power will shift to those nations backing the Ottomans. All the stresses and tensions that are holding Europe in check will unravel and there will be a violent and bloody war amongst the nations. Shall I say, a world war, to coin a phrase."

The tall, mysterious man paused for dramatic effect. Out in the street, a nearby church was tolling the hour. The clopping of horse hooves and the crying of the fishmongers lingered in the room. A darkness came over Mr. Chace's masked face as he waited for her to respond.

Lizzie took a deep breath. "But why come to me?" she asked. "I am merely the youngest daughter of a furniture salesman. I have no particular aptitude in dealing with industrial politics, far less military wars abroad."

"But you are Lizzie Borden the Girl Detective! Amongst the board members of the leading mills, you are notorious for bringing down Livermore, the mill owner who killed his own plant manager. You have shown fortitude, intellect, and powers of detection that some consider uncanny. I come to you as my last hope to save not only my paltry self, but to help maintain the balance of power in Europe."

"Yes," Lizzie shrugged. "I did perform quite well during the Case of the Purloined Curio, and I was commended by no less than the Mayor himself for the Adventure of the Antiquated Blunderbuss, but I still don't agree that you have to hide from me, Monsieur Jacques de Camp, Comte de Rennes!"

"Zut alors!" came the bellowing reply from the sturdy giant. His cheeks went slack, and his hands fell to his sides. "I am undone! How did you know?"

"Simplicity itself," Lizzie proclaimed. "You are doing an appreciable imitation of an American accent, but there are certain nuances in your nasality that bespeak of a French origin. Further, your mustache is of a particular cut that I have seen only in Daguerreotypes of gentlemen from the hills around Carcassonne in the Languedoc. And I do believe I see embossed on your forefinger's ring the characteristic coat of arms for the Merovingian lineage, long since vanished from the Franco-Monarchial scene, but forever bound with honor and respect within the de Camp line, which I have studied at my local lending library, exhausting its modest resources on the topic.

"As for all your tales of Russian and Turkish conflicts, one need not go further than the few scraps of articles that can be read while heating flats for a grand session of handkerchief-ironing to know that England is attempting to stop the Russians from going to war against the Ottomans, while France is wholeheartedly backing the Russians' campaign. Further, the French government has recently investigated land grants in the Taunton River area for possible development of mills that would be run by France's own interests. One cannot put all these facts together without deducing from them that you are indeed a French investor recently imported into Fall River, and the only French investor that fits that description I know of is Jacques de Camp, who I have scrutinized at a charity event this Saturday past, and who has the same hair styling as you, not to mention the same mustache, jowls, and green-gray eyes. The domino mask and the perfected American accent did not fool me one jot, for I am a Girl Detective!"

De Camp was thunderstruck. His mustache puffed with his cheeks. "How extraordinary," he roared, his French accent becoming more apparent. "And in one so young! How can you doubt your abilities after such a display? The Russians are almost assured that their precious self-acting Mule plans will be retrieved. My commendations!"

He bowed low, almost to the ground.

Upon his upsweep, Lizzie said with a wry smile, "How delightful that a cultivated man of such stature should bow to me, a poor little girl in such a modest little house." She laughed and raised her hands to her mouth. "Oh dear, that is precious! Well, Monsieur le Comte, you may relax and remove your disguise. How may I be of assistance to you in this very strange affair?"

With all pretense tossed to the winds, the French aristocrat, with a sweeping gesture, removed the mask to reveal a rugged, if not handsome, face and deeply intelligent eyes. "I want you to find the Mule plans," he announced.

"But where do I begin? The thief must be miles from Fall River by now."

"No, I believe him still to be in this city. The only clue we have is this signet that was left behind at the scene of the theft, presumably by accident." De Camp lifted up a ring that glimmered in the sunlight shafting through the parlor window. Lizzie took it for inspection and saw a crimson letter "A" centered on the ring's face.

"I have not seen this before," Lizzie said, a shudder coming over her.

"I have. It is the sign of a secret society that operates right here in town. The Arcady Society. I'm not quite sure what their objectives are, but it seems likely that they are nihilists whose only goal is to topple the Tsar from power and bring about a worker state in Russia. They have a vested interest in preventing the Russian expansion into the Crimea and God alone knows what their plans are for Fall River."

"And this ring is a symbol of their Brotherhood?"

"Yes, the letter "A" is a symbol of the sudden violence that will erupt when the common man is ready to rise above his masters. They are, no doubt, influenced by Bakunin and his lot. I do believe elements of their society, inspired by the successful assassination of your President Lincoln in 1865, are planning the same fate for the Tsar. They are aware that my mission in Fall River is an obscure but crucial step in the Tsar's plan to reinforce his military victories."

Lizzie curled her fingers around the ring and sighed. "I find this all most fascinating," she said. "I would most heartily love to work on the case."

"I can reward you handsomely. Money is not an object. My purse is open for your use."

"No need. My consulting services are done purely for the good of all people everywhere. I have no material needs to compensate. I do, however, have a few questions regarding the robbery. How big is this container?"

"About the size of a peach pit. The plans, which have been printed on delicate tissue paper, are folded very tightly. But recall, Miss Borden, that the plans may no longer be in the pessary."

"I am aware of that. Of what material is it made?"

"Solid iron, embossed with the Romanov coat of arms, and with a hinge that opens unto its cavity."

"This Russian inventor, from where does he hail?"

"St. Petersburg. He has been sent straight by the Tsar himself to secure the contracts with the Fall River businessmen."

"Where did the theft take place?"

"At the Hotel Wilbur, not more than ten minutes walk from this very house."

"Do the textile men know of the unfortunate robbery?"

"Mon Dieu! That would mean disaster. They are currently under the impression that we will be presenting the plans for the self-acting Mule by this time Friday morning."

"That is most unfortunate. This ring that you found in the hotel room of the Russian, was it simply lying on the floor? I find it unusual that a ring can so conveniently slip off an intruder's finger."

"Ah," de Camp said, screwing up his eyes as if trying to find the exact words. "The ring was not exactly lying on the floor. It had fallen off inside the Russian during the process of extracting the pessary."

"Oh," Lizzie said with a shudder.

"Yes," de Camp sighed. "Please do not ask for details, I am not used to discussing such matters with a young lady. Needless to say, the Russian is mortified beyond words and for security purposes has been sequestered in a safe place far from this town."

"We shall save the details for another day," Lizzie agreed. "I would like to see the hotel room where the Russian was assailed."

"By all means. Be at the Hotel Wilbur this very afternoon. I must exercise discretion and disappear from the scene. So you shall rendezvous with my son, Andre, who will represent me in this matter. Report to the lobby of the Wilbur at three on the clock."

Lizzie's chest tightened. "I don't believe I have had the honor to meet your son."

"Andre is a fine garcon, just turned nineteen. He has a bit of a fiery disposition and he is very strong in his opinion about foreign affairs. We often clash over such matters, but he is loyal to our famille Languedocienne. The bloodlines run very deep and he is a proud scion."

Lizzie rose to her feet. "I shall meet your son then at three at the Wilbur Hotel."

"Three o'clock!" The Comte de Rennes bowed once more, tucked on his domino mask, and ushered himself towards the front hallway. "A bientot," he said wistfully.

From up the hallway came Emma's thin voice. "Lizzie, I have rigged up the buggy, with no help from you, thank you!" She appeared in the parlor, dressed in a flowery hat, just as the Comte spun on his axis. Emma had barely caught a darting glimpse of the man in the cape and the mask, when she let out with a bellowing shriek. All the color drained from her face and her hands raced towards her face.

"Emma!" Lizzie said, just as startled. But it was too late. Lizzie's older sister had bolted for the front stairs and was stomping upwards towards the safety of her bedroom, making strange whimpering noises.

"I am profoundly apologetic," de Camp said, with a nod towards Lizzie. "If I had known . . . "

"It's all correct, Monsieur le Comte," Lizzie said. "Emma is used to far worse."

Lizzie stared at him through the window of the parlor as he descended to his waiting carriage in the street. She sighed, thinking of the boy she most dreaded, and most wanted to meet.

#  4. The Sporting Boys

The Wilbur Hotel was up North Main at Granite Street. Lizzie managed to get there without a buggy, arriving just before three, as a work team was unloading water barrels from a horse-drawn cart. A large banner straddling the main entrance boasted of the hotel's finer qualities:

FALL RIVER'S WILBUR HOTEL

An Ordinary of Most Excellent Attributes

Today: The Boston Barkeep Furniture   
Corporation Conclave

Displays of Stools and Mirrors by Master Craftsmen

Fine lodging for transients and permanents

Beer, oysters, and horse-keeping

Elocution lessons by Professor Joseph Maple, Esq.   
of New Bedford

Rooms Available

Restaurant Attached – Victuals At Most Excellent Prices

King Darius Wilbur, Proprietor

Samuel Samways, Bar Keep

The lobby was bustling with an influx of folk from as far as Providence, Boston, and even from the wilds of northern New Hampshire, for the Wilbur was playing host that weekend to a convention of saloon-furniture salesmen. They paraded around the lobby, these men of varnished wood and beveled mirrors, their top hats nestled in their forearms, their mustaches glistening with wax, and their rattling wives beside them. In the center of the lobby was a large casket, presumably filled with beer, and a burly bartender in a bleached cloth smock was handing out samples in hardwood mugs.

Lizzie was surprised to see her father wandering the crowd, not particularly connected to anyone, but occasionally giving a grim nod to a passing gentleman. He twitched imperceptibly as his daughter appeared before him, planting her parasol firmly between her feet.

"Father, I did not think that you took an interest in the latest fashions in bar stools?"

Andrew twisted up his brows. "I am merely memorizing the faces. They are competition, you know. But what brings you to the Wilbur, Daughter? Certainly you have not been seized with the desire to sample Master Samways' Home-made Hops?"

"No, Father. I am on a case."

"Ah! I sincerely hope that you are being paid well for your troubles. A penny worked for is a penny in the pocket. I wouldn't have it any other way."

Lizzie smiled as the nearby town hall tolled three o'clock. A thin beardless bellboy in a small hotel jacket approached Lizzie.

"Miss Borden?" he asked in a voice crackling with adolescence as if he were growing upwards before her very eyes. He handed her a note that she unfolded. Noticing her father staring at her intently, she reached into her purse and pulled out a coin that she tossed to the grinning bellboy.

"Here you are, my hard working lad—a penny from my pocket." He hopped away merrily as Andrew scowled at her wasteful habit.

"Room 209," she read, and then bade her father adieu with a tilt of her head. She headed for the staircase, leaving Andrew Borden fish-mouthed.

"My own daughter, not yet eighteen," he stammered. "Unescorted to an upstairs room. What more horrors can this modern world bring?"

As Andrew turned to leave, he spied in the corner of the lobby three young boys dressed in lean, long broad coats, watch chains, and high boots, laughing and spitting their cigar smoke into the choked air. Two of them were fitted out in bowler hats, and the tall, lanky leader in the middle was balanced under a high opera hat that served to exaggerate his height. Here were the Sporting Boys of Fall River, grinning and roaring with chummy ostentation. Andrew noticed that as Lizzie ascended the staircase, the Boys were poking each other and pointing in her direction, their eyes filled with boyish leers. They were commenting upon Lizzie's elegantly draped posterior as it sashayed up the staircase, much to their amusement.

Their thin leader pumped his legs up and down as if he were a strutting rooster. "B'hoys!" he chortled. "Need we neglect Miss Lizzie Borden of Second Street and the fine young hams she's leaving behind for our viewing pleasure?"

The Boys roared. "Get out me tape measure, my skenchbacks!" one of them shouted. "My, what gazing stock!"

"She'd make a good Bowery G'al at dragging time! I mind you!" the leader shouted.

Andrew bit his lips and took a few awkward strides across the lobby to where the Sporting Boys were posturing, staring them down as their laughter subsided. The leader in the opera hat patted his chest.

"Andrew Borden, I believe," he said proudly.

"Who may you be?" Andrew bellowed. "Your countenance is vaguely familiar."

The boy tipped his hat and grinned. "Frank Rivers, how may I be of service?"

"I have heard of you, Rivers," Andrew growled. "You and your associates here are mere sensualists. But I'm not afraid of your secret language and your fancy airs, and I am appalled by your rendezvous with women of fallen characters. Your libertine antics may go over in fancy cities, but not in Fall River: this town is full of respectable folk! Be gone immediately and take your rabble with you!"

The smile on River's face was defiant. He tossed a side-glance to his two companions who seemed to be hovering around his facial expressions looking for guidance, and then he plastered down his soap locks, stepped forward, and leaned in towards Andrew's sinking eyes. "No time for curtain lectures, I have a right to be in this public place," he said wickedly. "I paid my coins for a room, and so did my B'hoys here. And don't go apple bonking our fuzzle talk. We adopted it right from Paradise Square in Manhattan Island and it's proper for all my skenchbacks."

Andrew raised a straining fist. "No matter where you obtained your wicked speech, I cannot allow your vulgar remarks touching my daughter."

The thin wobbly-eyed boy next to Frank Rivers stepped forward. "Hi hi, cousin! Ol' Frank here won't be remarking anything touching your daughter before he can remark on anything worth touching."

Andrew's head went hot and he shook a curled fist. "Don't go near my Lizzie or . . . " His eyes turned red with anger as he bellowed, "Or I'll twist off your heads!"

Then, having expended his courage and energy, Andrew seemed to vanish into the air, only to reform at the center of the lobby, heading towards the street. Frank Rivers turned to his chuckling companions and smirked. "Lam him, B'hoys!" he howled. "I am trembling in my boots!"

At his lead, they broke into laughter as Andrew disappeared between the endless displays of bar stools and spittoons.

# 5. Deductions & Romance

At the top of the staircase, Lizzie found herself looking down the end of a long hallway that stretched southward between two parallel rows of doors. Halfway down, a man in a dark brown suit sat on a stool slanting backwards, humming wistfully to himself. As Lizzie alighted onto the landing, he straightened up, then scrambled to his feet, and respectfully removed his hat. He was a large bear of a man, middle-aged and paunchy. A drooping mustache obscured his mouth. He wore a long dark-brown greatcoat that seemed unseasonal and was stained with the dust of the road.

"Miss," he said, blinking at her.

"Are you the detective from Pinkertons?" Lizzie asked.

"Pinkerton, Miss," he said proudly.

"I don't believe I catch your meaning."

"The name's Pinkerton, Miss. Fred Pinkerton of Pinkerton Brothers Private Security Firm."

"I see, your name does ensure confidence," Lizzie said, chuckling slightly into her gloved hand.

"The French boy is waiting," he announced.

On the door paneling behind him were the gilt numbers 209. With a soft touch, Lizzie pushed the door open and stepped inside.

The room was dark and stuffy. Only a scant few beams of sunlight slanting through the closed shutters enabled her to make out that a shadowy man was standing in the corner. At first, she considered her situation to be one of immediate danger, alone in a hotel room with a stranger who had not yet identified himself. After all, this was the room where the Russian inventor had been scandalized. But, trusting in the delicacy of the moment, she swung the door shut behind her.

The shadow moved into a shaft of sunlight and Lizzie recognized immediately the bespoken Saville Row suit jacket, the youthful attempt at a military mustache, the twinkling eyes. Even the West Indies Bay Rhum that danced in the air between them whispered the name and title: Andre Louis Jacques de Camp, the Vicomte de Rennes.

"I know you," she said, remembering her father's ominous words about Andre's Sporting Boy life style. Why would the Comte send her into such a dangerous position?

"I know you too, Lizbeth Andrew Borden," Andre said with a slight merriment. "I assure you that there is no danger here. Be at ease and join me in solving this wretchedly-complicated and ever-deepening puzzle."

Lizzie's breathing came more easily. His voice was fine and equally well mannered. This comforted her. "The name is Lizzie," she corrected him.

"Then Lizzie shall it be." He pointed towards the brass bed and the carpeted floor. "Mais bien sur, this is indeed a strange field upon which we are now treading. Here we have a room where a crime took place. A man was assaulted and something was stolen from him. What do you see in this room, Lizzie Borden? What scenarios can you deduce from the remains that Monsieur Tchakorov left behind?"

With a daring flourish, Andre drew back the shutters and let the bright sunlight flood the room. Lizzie was suddenly overwhelmed with an intense amount of detail. She paused, put fingers to her chin, and peered about. Then, while Andre stood at attention with a wry smile, she perambulated the length and breadth of it, peering into corners, examining surfaces, bending her knees to see beneath the furniture. She picked up nothing, but examined everything, maneuvering her body to change her line of sight before cuspidors, bedposts, cabinets, and the writing desk. She sat in a chair, smelled a bouquet of flowers in a vase on the desktop, cast a winking eye at some framed pictures on the mantle, waved her fingers over a clump of charred wood in the fireplace, and pressed her shoes heavily against randomly-selected floor boards. She nosed through the clothing laying on the rumpled bed sheets and the heaps of linen lying on the floor. A pile of papers in the wastebasket occupied her attention for several moments. Lastly, she inspected a painting that hung upon the southern wall, a copy of a rustic scene by Poussin of several shepherds gathered about a stone tomb. The painting stared back at her with an unsettling feeling of mutual fascination.

She came back to the center of the room and stood proudly before Andre. "I have comprised a scenario," she proclaimed. "For your amusement I shall state it."

Andre gave her a permissible wave of his hand.

"I did not know the name of the Russian until you just uttered it," she said. "But I can say with confidence that he is a proud man from a wealthy family that has recently come upon hard times. He was forced into the business of selling mill technology by the unfortunate death of his wife which has left him with two small children to support."

Andre stared blankly at her. "Proceed," he said.

"He was in this room for two days before his unfortunate assault. During that time, he indulged in real estate speculation. No doubt he felt that migrating to America and bringing his children to Fall River would provide them with a future that cannot be realized in Tsarist Russia. He also sees Fall River as an excellent town for his new bride-to-be since her career as an equestrian acrobat has come to a very tragic end."

"Excellent," Andre said with a reserved smile. "I can't imagine how you perceived many of the details in that portrait, but I did witness you examining the postcard upon the dressing table from the Louise Soullier Circus with the inscription from Marie confessing in French her deepest love and the prospects that await her in America."

Lizzie nodded towards the dresser. "Moreover, the clothing that you had laid upon the bed and the charming but sad bouquet of flowers on the writing desk have provided me the opportunity to reconstruct his recent past. As for the clothing, the fine quality of the suit shows a man of some means, but it has in the past year been washed so often its colors have faded, showing a recent down turning of his luck, no doubt happening simultaneously with the passing of his dear wife."

"What does the bouquet tell you?"

"Through a correspondence course with the Ophelia Society of Boston, I have had the opportunity to study the fine art of floriography. After completing the Home Guide To The Secret Language of Flowers Within Parlors and Sitting Rooms, I had trained my eye to perceive the elegant messages that were being scripted within various floral arrangements. Tchakorov, being from St. Petersburg, takes a very romantic European approach to this art. In this bouquet, he has blended together crimson tea roses that show a melancholy loss, something that he has vowed never to forget. The presence of the scarlet nasturtiums led me to believe that there was a military death, perhaps a brother in the Bulgarian campaign, but the nasturtium also symbolizes patriotism, perhaps reflecting a period after the profound loss where he attempted to regain his emotional composure through world affairs. The pheasant's eye and blue periwinkles that are so mournfully laced at the corners show a sorrowful remembrance, that his feelings once so potent and devastating were mellowing into a sublime melancholy. The white poppies whisper of a striving for forgetfulness, a moving on, so to speak."

"So far," Andre confirmed, "this is 'all correct' as you Americans are so fond of saying. What about the equestrian bride-to-be?"

"Ah, the full-blown white rose in the center that blooms above the rest speaks loudly of a return of hope and the dawning of a new happiness after a long sojourn in a wilderness, no doubt a wilderness of an emotional nature. One can only guess that Tchakorov has felt a new love dawn. The enthusiastic postcard from the French horse woman that bespeaks of a life together in America confirms all my floriographic interpretations."

"And the real estate speculation?" Andre asked.

"The caked mud on his boots is peculiar to a lot that is being developed just around the corner from Annawan Street, one that Mister Southard Miller has put up for sale. Near this lot is a tobacco shop that sells the Louisiana Perique that has a moist vinegary smell, the same smell that hangs so pungent in the air about us. No doubt the property came to his attention on one of his trips to obtain his treasured tobacco and he managed to get access to the property through the builder's agent."

"He may have been strolling for relaxation and entered the property out of mere curiosity."

"Ah, but his beloved Marie claims that she will be very happy in America. There are also the three books on the bureau, clearly obtained from the City Hall lending library, one of them a French-English lexicon, another a picture book of famous horses of North America, and the last a treatise on the domestication of the recently-married couple by Professor Horatio Tiverton of Swansea. Finally, his waste basket contains papers where he has been practicing his English letters, writing out phrases like, 'My dear sir, which way are the horse stables' and 'What are the most excellent children's schools in this neighborhood?' This shows me clearly that he was contemplating the rebuilding of his family with the French equestrian woman and his orphaned children right here in Fall River."

Andre clapped his hands in rhythm to a hearty laugh. "I can tell you with great confidence, Lizbeth—and may I be permitted to call you Lizbeth, it is far more suited to your dignity and grace—that your portrait of le monsieur russe is perfection itself, a small gem of analytical reasoning that does you very proud. But, alas, such details are despairing when it comes to solving this riddle. For here we have a room where no intruder entered before the infamous deed, and no intruder exited. It is as if the Russian were attacked by une fantome of his own imagination."

"I don't understand," Lizzie frowned.

"Behold the testimony of the security agent." Andre went to the door and rapped three times in quick succession. A moment later, the large mustachioed man from the corridor entered awkwardly with a glacial pace, nodding respectfully at Andre and Lizzie in turn.

"Miss," he said.

"Mr. Pinkerton, I have a few questions about the evening before last," Lizzie stated. "I believe you were on duty when this deplorable theft occurred. Would you mind relating your version of the affair?"

He rubbed his chin as if trying to stir memory. "I'm not a man of very many words," he said, "but I can oblige if it will help bring about a conclusion."

"There will most certainly be a conclusion, Monsieur Pinkerton," Andre said assuredly. "By your leave . . . "

"Well, it was before all this bar stool nonsense. Hardly anyone was occupying this second floor but them Sporting Boys that make all the commotion a'nights with their Fancy Girls about. I was at my post at ten o'clock. I remember one of the girls yelling down the hall that her gentlemen caller needed a bowl of hot water. Then all the doors were shut and everything was quiet. King Darius had turned down the lamps and you could hear all that slumbered snoring along the corridor."

"Fall River descending into twilight," Lizzie said softly.

"Yes, Miss. And that's when I do confess a profound lapse of character. I'm almost a'feared to lose my commission if I relate what I have to tell."

"You need not, I can guess. You were imbibing."

"At my post, it is true. The intent was to keep the fire going inside me, because the dark night in a hotel corridor can be mighty cold, despite the summer. I'm not a vain man, but this drinking is one act I do fear the judgment upon—especially considering its sequel."

Andre raised an assuring hand. "You need not fear prosecution since my father did determine that the whiskey was drugged."

"Drugged it was. After just a few sips, I felt myself slipping off. But I'm a stubborn man as well. I fought it all the way. On the exterior, you might have just witnessed a big oaf of a man snoring in his boots. But from the interior angle, I was wrestling with mighty demons. And I do declare, Miss, I won the battle. I forced myself awake."

"How long was your interval?"

"I can't rightly say, but it seemed enough for someone to have filched the key in my jacket pocket, and then slip by me into this here room to do his immoral deed. When I realized what had been done I got to my feet, roared almighty hellfire, and ripped this door nearly off its hinges to find the Russian fellow lying on the floor with his southern exposure aiming out as bare as a babe's."

"Did you raise an alarm to the desk clerk?"

"Immediately, Miss! I figured the footpad was on his way out the front of the hotel so I bounded down the steps."

"Are there any other steps down to the lobby?"

"None, Miss. Those are the only ones from the second floor, and I blocked it with my girth the whole time. Then King Darius called the constabulary and I went upside to help preserve the Russian fellow's dignity."

"How long before the police came?"

"About three minutes by my reckoning. And they filled this room. They knew this was an international affair, although none of us, including myself, knows the truth behind it. Something about foreign wars. I don't rightly care about those crazy tangles as long as my pay is regular; I keep my nose out of it. Leave it to the fancy politicos."

"How long were the police here?"

"About an hour, and then my brother Fred came to relieve me."

"Your brother's name is also Fred?"

"My daddy did have a hankering for that name. And when we came out twins, it seemed only right to consider us as one unit."

"I see. So Fred your brother took the second watch?"

"Right so, and we have alternated since at twelve-hour intervals. I told Fred to keep a right smart watch and to take no drink in fear it would mean the death of his ambitions."

"What about the Russian? Where was he taken?"

Andre answered, "Where no one can get at him. Needless to say, he does not wish to be interrogated. You can learn nothing from him for he remembers nothing, but has a distinct soreness that may take some time to overcome."

Lizzie nodded. "I understand. Mr. Pinkerton, are you absolutely sure you saw no one leave this room?"

"None, Miss. Unless the fiend slipped out before I had awoken myself. But no one downstairs saw any man excepting myself come down those stairs. It's as if the assailant appeared from thin air and vanished into likewise."

"And the desk clerk, he saw no one go up shortly before the striking of ten?"

"No one," Andre added. "It seems as if the Russian's attacker was a passing shadow of no substance."

Pinkerton huffed. "No shadow could have taken the key from my pocket or pulled the Russian fellow off his bed to separate him from his night pants. There was flesh and blood involved, I assure you of that."

Lizzie put her two forefingers to her chin and drew in a deep breath. She glanced about the room, carefully examining the walls, and then before her silent observers, walked up and down, counting her steps. After a few perambulations she turned to Pinkerton and said sternly, "I must ask you to stand guard over this room at all costs, to make sure that no one enters or leaves without your awareness."

His mustache dipped with his face in agreement. "I shall, Miss. Excepting at various times of the day or night I may be my own brother. We do take turns, and being that collectively we look like one person staring into a mirror, no one really cares if we swap out to give each other a chance to catch some snores, you understand."

"Understood," she concluded and then darted for the door, exiting into the hallway. Andre followed her out to find her walking a straight line along the corridor, pausing before each door. Then she turned about and came back, carefully putting one foot before the other.

"Curious," she said, leaning over to make sure the security guard had not followed them into the hallway. "Does he know about the pessary?"

"Not a bit."

"Does he know about the Arcady ring?"

"Even less."

"Good," Lizzie said with a nod. "Let's keep it that way. What do you know about this ring?"

"It is the signet of the Arcady Society. According to the locals that I have interrogated, it is the secret club of the Sporting Boys. Despite my father's fears that they are anarchists and assassins, I believe it merely to be a small group of rowdy youths who sample the opiates of the Orient and women of low character with equal impunity."

Lizzie furrowed her brow. "The same Sporting Boys who were present here at the time of the affair?"

"The same. Do you wish to talk to them yourself?"

"No, for now I'd like to see the desk clerk, this King Darius that everyone is talking about. He may hold an important key to this puzzle."

"I believe he is in the lobby tending to the Conclave." Andre pushed past her and led her down the steps towards the lobby.

# 6. A Stately Forgery

King Darius Wilbur was a man buried under burdensome mustaches that demanded far more energy and labor to keep in their pristine state than any one man could be expected to produce. Nonetheless, he wore his whiskers proudly and gave one the impression, as one talked to him, that his head was in the midst of being swallowed. Lizzie, facing him directly across the main desk of the Wilbur's lobby, experiencing the full impact of his face in the slanting sunlight, found herself visually lost in his whiskers' magnificence. It had been observed by many that the Wilbur hotel, a recently-prospering concern, was growing in exponential proportion to King Darius' facial masterpiece and that local speculators feared that the further expansion of his business would result in the complete structural collapse of his head, which was itself already buried under the weight of his facial hair. Beyond this peculiar trait, he was jovial enough, and he seemed eager to provide Lizzie with information.

"I am quite alarmed," he confessed, "that such intrigue would go on under my roof. I did not think that the Russian would be at such risk in my own establishment. I dare say, I now do."

"And you saw no one go up those stairs at ten on the clock, or slightly before?"

His eyes hovered together near his nose. "No, Miss Borden, I was on my nightly watch, being mindful of that Rivers boy and his shameless carryings on with the harlot Miss Jewett. They've been keeping company here for quite some time, and always in the same room. God's teeth, but I dare say Rivers was enraged when the Russian fellow came to town."

"Rivers? Why would he be upset about the Russian?"

"Because he took his room, he did."

Lizzie leaned forward, quite drawn in by his statement. "You are telling me that Room 209 is usually occupied by Frank Rivers and his Fancy Girl?"

The mustaches bobbed with the face. "Dare say, I do! And it was a mighty strange manner in which it transpired. I had the Russian fellow booked by order of the French Count into a right proper room, one that hadn't been darkened in spirit by these nattering sons of nabobs. I had him in the Commonwealth Suite and was prepared to dandy him up with all sorts of linens and soaps, but at the last minute a messenger boy comes from the Commons House. Seems like there was a mix-up, a right proper one, and personages unknown have insisted that the Russian be lodged into 209. Who was I to question it? I thought to myself, I did. The letter came decorated with all of these city seals. I don't know this fellow's business, but if a French Count is involved and orders come from the Commons House, then who am I, Darius Wilbur, who possess nothing but an humble Ordinary of quality and stupefying face brushes, to question the properly embossed seals and signatures?"

"Do you have the letter?" Lizzie asked anxiously.

King Darius poked his face about under the desk, pulling up some boxes and peering into some sliding drawers. "God's wounds but I know it's here somewhere." His eyes brightened and he brought up a folded paper. After snapping it open, he handed it to Lizzie, who took one quick glance at it, then handed it dismissively back.

"It's a forgery," she observed. "It's not from the Commons House. Look at it closely: tan, mere butcher paper. And the signature says Larson E. Whipsnade. Who do you know in this city with the name Whipsnade."

King Darius's mustaches were trembling as if they had their own nervous system. "I feel the fool, I do. Like if God has a fool all His own, it would be me."

Andre took the paper from Lizzie and let out with a small chuckle. "Tchakorov was being set up for thievery. They needed him in that room."

Lizzie peered up at the ceiling, measuring with her eyes. "Mr. Wilbur," she asked, stepping back to get a cleaner view of the expansive molding. "Would you say that Room 209 is just about . . . .there! Right near that fancy plaster cornucopia coming forth from the ceiling above?"

"Sounds about right."

"And how many feet would you say between that cornucopia and the fancy swirls by the southern face?"

"Looks to be about two or three feet, no more or less. But I can't reckon without climbing up there with a mason's rule."

"Is there another room between 209 and the southern face?"

"Not that I know of, but I do believe there's crawl spaces all over the building. That's where the Weirds reside."

"The Weirds?" Andre asked, puzzled.

"Ah, pay no attention to my fired imagination. It's a folly of my besotted brain. Too much mustache wax, I presume. But there are strange noises a'nights, especially since the Russian fellow's been pinched. From my post, I hear the thumping and the cursing."

"Cursing?"

"More like the wailing of a lost spirit. I can't bring myself to go searching the corridors. Perhaps the night watch Fred would be able to tell you. Perhaps it's some suicide from long ago who's up there wandering to find his closure."

"Not being a spiritualist," Lizzie announced, "I would sooner think it was just an intruder walking about."

"But the guests are all accounted for, they are!" Darius said. "Believe you me!"

Andre produced a small calling card that had a light trace of perfume. "King Darius, you have given us valuable information."

"Right so," the bewhiskered manager beamed. "When you decipher any of its meaning, let me know what it was that I did tell you, for I'll be danged if it makes sense to me right now."

"We will. And if anything of interest comes up, here is my card. Do not hesitate to contact me at this address."

Darius took the card just as a horde of furniture men stormed the desk, all demanding their telegrams and directions to the nearest saloons. As Lizzie and Andre stepped to the side, he noticed that her eyes were glued to the ceiling, her lips moving silently as if she were performing a calculation.

"You think there's an extra room," Andre said. "But you can clearly see from the corridor that 209 is at the southern end of the building."

She took her gaze from the ceiling. "Oh Andre, this is foul play indeed. For now we have to prepare ourselves for a most unpleasant encounter. Bring me to the Sporting Boys."

Andre directed her towards the dining room from where bellowed forth a loud strain of youthful, impetuous voices.

#  7. Lizzie Gets Fuzzled

Frank Rivers and his Sporting Boys were having their mid-afternoon cigars in the dining room behind the Wilbur's lobby. They sat at their usual table along the western wall before large paned windows, Frank with his tall opera hat flanked by two bowler-hatted youths, looking like a chimney rising above two slag heaps. A flustered waiter was racing back and forth bringing them victuals while they stamped their firemen boots and howled racy ballads.

A furniture salesman at a nearby table, distracted by the boys' obnoxious hoots, boldly shouted, "Please be quiet! Decent people are trying to digest!"

"Cheese it, B'hoys!" Frank said to his crew. "They're envious of us crapulous folk who live by our own morality tables. But I say, stockjobbers be they!"

The salesman huffed and nervously went back to his coffee just as Lizzie Borden and Andre de Camp entered the hall. As if on cue, the Sporting Boys quieted down, stifling their laughs and straightening their legs under their table.

"Frank Rivers," Andre said with a bow. "Miss Borden and I require a few moments of your time, if you would allow."

"Hi, hi!" the Sporting Boy proclaimed. "It would be our honor to host such a fine lady and her dandified beau at our table. Chas and Buster here won't mind, won't you my gutterbloods?"

"Nay," Buster explained. "Ladies of quality are always welcome to take maw-wallop with us. Especially one of our kinfolk."

"I did not fail to recognize my reprobate cousin," Lizzie said reluctantly. "Buster Borden."

Rivers raised his cane and waved it delicately towards the two chairs opposite him and his gang. As Lizzie and Andre took their seats, Rivers stuffed his cigar in his mouth, and removed his hat to reveal garishly plastered soap locks running down the sides of his scalp. He spat a wad of saliva into his hand and ran his palm along the glistening locks. As he replaced his hat, Lizzie felt a displeasing stirring in her stomach.

"Have a go at us, Lizzie Borden of Second Street," Frank said. "If we're colt's tooth enough for you."

"I could judge that a bit more for myself if I knew what 'colt's tooth' was," Lizzie said smiling. "But for the moment, I'd like to bring your attention to the evening before last."

Chas let out with a rude laugh. "That's the night the Ivan sizer got bully-whacked in the renterfuge."

Frank grimaced. "Now, now, my skenchback, don't go quanking out our guests with our fuzzle talk. For in her gumbling through, she may take beastly interpretations. Miss Lizzie, renterfuge is the room I keep with my prancing pony. I got tumbled by that mustached jarkman who runs this hovel. One day I'll divorce him from his facial for that bumwush."

"He gave the Russian your room," Lizzie said plainly. "The room you frequent with your whore, Sarah Jewett."

Frank jumped in his seat and glanced about. "Don't go speaking it plain-like, there's bound to be a bit of scandal-brothing by local malifuffs."

Andre leaned in close to Lizzie. "From the German words mal meaning 'speech' and pfuffen meaning 'to blow'. Literally, someone who blows speech. I suspect he fears gossip."

"My," Frank chortled. "You are indeed bent upon deciphering us, ain't you?"

"Yes, Frank Rivers, we are," Lizzie said, her patience wearing thin. "You can hide behind all your fuzzle talk, but you can't get away from suspicion. And when a crime is committed within yards of your sleeping quarters, indeed within a room to which you have a key, your account is of great interest."

A shadow fell across Frank's face as a cloud interrupts the sunlight. "You want to know the unfarded truth," he said calmly, "unmistified by false beauties. Well, I'll be the first to admit I'm a scoundrel of a carpet-knight. Many a Fancy Girl has fallen under my glamour. But that doesn't make me a pocket-filcher. One may hazard from my fuzzle talk and sporting ways that I don't have a gall of bitterness within me, that I would just as soon steal the metal from my dying grandmother's teeth for a few tankards and a romp with a tweeny maid. Yes, I have my own morality tables that I draw upon, but I do have my limits. And I don't go bully-whacking gentlemen even if they are Ivan sizers. I don't go filching and I don't play hunt-the-whistle, and I don't send any old rake juggler off to Fiddler's Green for lampoons."

"What do you know about that night?" Lizzie said ignoring his obscurity. "What did you hear and see that touches upon this affair?"

"That Pinkerton flonker," Frank spat. "He was guzzled and fell to sonorating. We heard his guzzle moans and then the next we heard he was all in a twee over it and went stomping to the jarkman. Next we know the badgers are all about and there's talk of this Ivan sizer being glorged."

"Yeah," said Chas. "Glorged by the insensible. You ever hear such gruff?"

"So who you got testifying? Drunkard pinks and bully-whacking ghosts?" Frank asked with a gentle nod to his gutterbloods. "You ever hear such mulch before?"

"So what do you think occurred that night?" Lizzie asked.

"This is my reconstruction: the big office pinks had some malifluffs trinkling on the Ivan and knew his habits. So they waited till after dragging time and all the b'hoys and g'hals be in their stables for billy winks, then they pulled a filch party on the old pink and the sizer. They got more than one maw-hole to climb in since the b'hoys like to viz their sport." He held up his left hand, the thumb and forefinger tips pressed together, poked his eye through the ring, and grinned. "Who doesn't like to viz a bit of the acrobatics?"

Lizzie was taken aback by his garish gesture. "But you didn't answer my question," she added. "What did you hear and see?"

Frank leaned forward, his eyebrows pressing together. "I was strumming a'loft at the time and wasn't quite paying apple bonkers to an Ivan and a pink who was sonorating a half hallway apart from my stable. Despite what you may hazard in your think hole, my ears ain't quite that big and my eye stalks ain't that protruded. So you got a bit of a problem distance-wise."

There was a long pause while Frank Rivers and Lizzie Borden sat locked in a frozen state, their eyes pressed together over the space between them. Then Lizzie broke the moment with a small crooked smile. "I think I've had enough information, Mr. Rivers. I take my leave knowing that the prostitute Sarah Jewett is safe in the custody of a boy who considers her a 'prancing pony,' and names the hour she is taken to her 'stable' as 'dragging time,' and that courtship and courtesy must take a holiday to 'billy winks.' I only hope that when I am of age to take a husband, he would use less flowery imagery to portray his affections for me."

Frank touched his cane handle to his forehead. "Pleased to have educated you, Miss Lizzie. Since I was flonked from high school, I'm glad we can still understand each other."

Lizzie and Andre got to their feet. As they were leaving the dining hall, they could hear the snorts and sneers behind them. The flustered waiter was just entering with a full silver tray of maw-wallop.

"What did you divine from that parody of a conversation?" Andre asked Lizzie as they slowly strolled across the Wilbur's lobby.

Lizzie laughed nervously, "It is comforting to know that he draws the line at playing 'hunt-the-whistle.' I was beginning to fear for the female population of Bristol County."

Andre gave a dismissive wave. "They are mere pretenders. Just wealthy children who are too lazy to adopt their father's enterprises. They fashion their life styles after the New York City street gangs who haunt Five Points and the Bowery. There is much suspicion here."

"Not necessarily," Lizzie added dramatically. "I don't suppose you noticed his left hand. When the sunlight hit at the right angle, I could clearly see the skin on his fingers."

Andre clicked his fingers. "The Arcady Ring. I did not even think to look."

Lizzie reached into her purse and brought forth the signet that she held up for Andre's perusal. "Your father let me have it. I was thinking of producing it for Mr. River's astonishment, but felt best to keep it discreet. Nonetheless, there was no discoloration upon his fingers. I do not believe this to be his ring."

Andre stared at it, his jaw clenched.

"Does something strike you?" Lizzie asked.

"No," he said, rubbing his temple. "Only a headache. Shall we promenade down street? It is a striking August day, and I would very much like to know you better, Miss Lizbeth Borden."

#  8. "Lizbeth of Light"

As the sun sank behind the gently rolling hills of Swansea, beyond the river and the moving barges of bale, Lizzie and Andre walked along the dockside by the Troy Manufactory buildings. Already, stars were beginning to appear in the firmament as the sun lowered beyond the horizon.

"I am sorry," Lizzie said humbly, "that I am so flustered. Whenever I see those youths, their futures filled with promise and possibility, their family offering them resources and capital, instead turn towards a wasteful life of mere libertinage and sensuality, I cannot feel but despair for the next generation."

"I believe," Andre said, "Frank Rivers is a nephew to Wellington Rivers, the paper mill tycoon. Needless to say, he has been disinherited. The boy is living upon the good graces of an aunt who is too old and senile to know what he is doing with her money. I still declare that he is our most likely suspect. It would explain why no one saw the thief come or go from the lobby. Rivers would have had to merely slip back into his room after the robbery, thus giving the impression that the thief had vanished into thin air."

"I cannot be fully sure, but the real thief took great care to put suspicion on Rivers and his boys. The ring was so placed to further that suspicion."

Andre shrugged indifferently. "What about the Pinkertons? Although my father puts enormous trust in them, there is no working man that cannot be bought if the price is high enough."

"No man is above perfidy," Lizzie agreed. "But my instincts tell me that the real culprit has yet to reveal his face to us. Such a pity, since your father needs a conclusion by the day after tomorrow."

Andre stopped and stared upwards into the darkening horizon. "My father," he sighed. "For him, it is all about money, I believe. Don't listen to his nonsense about the balance of power in Europe and anarchists lurking in the shadows. The man is merely concerned for his own stock portfolio."

"Is that such a crime?" Lizzie asked.

Andre was about to answer but then he pointed towards a twinkling star. "When I look upon that sky," he mused, "I realize we are but dust, mere motes of dust, compared to the vast wheels of creation. As a small boy, I would walk by twilight in the hills by Rennes-La-Chateau, past the old castles and the haunted graveyards, and watch the stars appear one by one, like celestial candles on some vast birthday cake. Then I would lie on my back in the midst of the field and let the great spiral move about me. I would fix my gaze on one particular star and throughout the night notice how it would spin about as if on the rim of a perfect wheel. And I would feel as if I were pinned to the center, and that all of creation was whirling about me. At moments like those, my father and all his fortune would seem so inconsequential, like a forgotten dream that once had so much importance, but now is just a shard of memory."

Lizzie watched his face closely as he spoke. "You certainly have your thoughts lifted above the daily affairs," she answered. "I did not think a man of your means and title would think of anything but commerce and management of property."

"Perhaps it is the soil of my native land," he said. "There is mystery in its deep veins. It makes one yearn for something beyond the thin veil of daily sorrows. I am at heart a poet."

Lizzie sighed. "You are so very different from any man I have ever known. Your father, too, is of such grand stature, possessing such a singular morality and poetic vision. So unlike my father who never had a title, and whose wealth is so small compared with your family's grand fortune. My father stands in relation to your father as we all do to the big wheel you point out in the sky. There is hierarchy indeed in this vast creation."

Andre's voice grew thin and modest. "But, Lizbeth, I see those stars reflected in your eyes. So by mirroring the light from above, you are becoming one with it. And then the modest Lizbeth who feels so unimportant is now the most exquisite being that exists."

Lizzie blushed. "I wouldn't go so far. I'm just a girl from a small family. There's nothing special about me."

"But we are all stars," Andre announced, lifting up a hand towards the heavens. "We twinkle on the great wheel of life, and we all move together in a perfect circle. I have written a poem to that effect. I call my composition, 'Lizbeth of Light.'"

A smile curled on her lips. "Why, that's my name." He nodded in the affirmative and began his recital:

I call these bold words to draw your breath

And to drum a beat on your warm heart.

I call upon life and its handmaiden death

To give our child its earthborn start.

This child formed from the air betwixt us

That takes a first cry from the sorrows of life;

From the darkness of spirit that surrounds us,

But mews a bold Yes in the face of the strife.

Against gray evening, the dawn weaves its charm

And something billows on the horizon's lip.

'Tis the hope and the beauty and the inner calm

That we have won and must never let slip.

So if verse be the beating pulse that fashions

A heart that shall sing strong and bright,

Let me sing on through the daybreak that passes

Across my eternal Lizbeth of Light.

A paralyzed silence fell between them. Andre stood by Lizzie's side, his shoulder barely touching her. She could feel his heat through the fabric, and a chill transported along the length of her trembling body.

"When did you compose this poem?" Lizzie asked, her face turning red.

"After seeing you at your church this Saturday past."

"I did not think that you had noticed me."

"I asked my father who you may be and he answered, 'That is Andrew J. Borden's younger daughter. She is a clever, wise, and commanding girl. She runs her own consulting business and has trapped several wrong-doers and corrected many harms to common people. She is indeed a flower of a girl in the midst of a rough crop.' And then I knew that I had found the one girl in Fall River in whom I could find a trustworthy soul."

"I am flattered indeed," Lizzie blushed. She was about to say more but could not find the words.

"Do you believe, Lizbeth Borden," Andre asked, "that perhaps our ancestors, on the lush fields of Carcassonne, enjoyed each other's company as we are enjoying ourselves on this most enchanted evening?"

She was stunned, standing frozen without speech, fearing to breathe.

"Perhaps they did," Andre continued. "And perhaps they partook of the dark blood of the soil, tasting together the richness of the earth into which they were born, and into which they shall pass. Perhaps a Bourdon and a Duchamps lay together under the mysterious stars and held their hands as I hold yours."

And she felt a soft fluttering about her fingers, and then they were pressed together. Lizzie stiffened and found that she was no longer breathing, which embarrassed her, and Andre smiled. "You have nothing to fear," he said peacefully. "I am a perfect gentilhomme." And he lifted her palm into the air and took a slight bow in her direction.

"There is beauty in you," she said in a bare whisper. Inwardly she blessed the darkness for hiding her blushes.

In the long distance, the wail of a bale barge sang across the cloudy darkness like a leviathan of the deep calling for its home waters. The hanging lamps only lightly illuminated Andre's face, but she could see his deep eyes sparkling with the river below as the moonlight reflected upwards towards the pier.

There were never eyes more beautiful, she thought, nor a face so noble.

Lizzie pressed her free hand to her cheek to catch her tears.

"You are not a Sporting Boy at all, my dear Andre," she said. "You are a melancholy soul of light."

# 9. A Sudden Revelation

At breakfast the next morning, Andrew Jackson Borden sat with his family at his dining room table nibbling on some left-over codfish balls, his bead-like eyes staring towards the distance to the wallpaper as if he were contemplating the insensible. Abby Borden, seated near him, inhaling a cup of coffee and chewing gustily on a molasses cookie, seemed afraid to draw his attention towards the present moment, while Emma stirred restlessly upon some difficult secret that was bubbling inside her, causing her to shift her posture every few moments, a gesture accompanied by uncomfortable sighs. Lizzie, like her father, sat in a grim trance, her utensil barely grazing her dish. Only the Irish maid showed signs of animation, flittering in and out of the kitchen with the various courses of their breakfast.

"What is this gloom that descends on us today?" asked Abby finally. "It is like being seated at a funeral viewing. My dear Andrew, where is your mind wandering?"

"What?" he said, his eyes jerking back to the immediate. "My apologies, Mrs. Borden. I was trying to remember Tobias Ullsworth. I cannot imagine what ill tidings he harbors towards me."

"Ullsworth?" Abby frowned. "That's the cloth doffer that you evicted for non-payment of rent. I can't imagine what glad tidings he would harbor towards you. I told you that being so strict with him over one month's rent was not good for your reputation."

"I was merely protecting my property rights," Andrew said with a start. "That Ullsworth was particularly unsavory." He slurped at his stew, staining his beard. "I cannot abide slackards and lay-abouts."

"That slackard," shouted Emma, rising to her feet, "has disappeared from the face of the earth!"

There was a harsh moment of silence broken by Lizzie coughing delicately into her hand. "It's true, Father," Emma continued. "I have heard word from my contacts down street that Tobias Ullsworth has vanished. Last Monday morning he was seen wandering down by the Durfee Mill and at noon his boots were found by the side of the Quequechan. His wife and her seven children are living in a state of despondent impecuniousness."

"They should have considered themselves fortunate when they let the place!" Andrew sputtered. "It is not my concern."

"Heartless man," said Emma bitterly. "You don't know their fortunes, both before they let from you, and after their cruel eviction. You don't know the vagaries that have befallen them."

"I do know," Andrew said pointing a spoon towards his elder daughter, "that I have been fined by the bank for late payment of the mortgage. Ullsworth doesn't give a fig for that, nor should I care a fig for his dilemma."

"The man is dead!" Emma howled, and then fled towards the door, her hands moving towards her face. She collided with the maid who was entering with a tray of molasses cookies. "Out of my way, Maggie." she shouted, and a moment later her feet were heard clomping up the front stairs. Flustered, the maid ran back into the kitchen.

Abby patted the table with her palms. "Well, Andrew," she said solemnly, "you have certainly topped the program this time. I have never heard such disregard for another man's plight."

"Bah. I have my rights. Landlords have rights."

"But you have no poetry," Lizzie said suddenly.

"Eh? What?" Andrew asked blinking. "What kind of nonsense do you speak?"

"You see no lights in my eyes," Lizzie announced. "You see no great wheel in the sky. There is only one letter separating your name from his, but the other differences are vast and deep. His blood runs with rich French wine, yours with barroom sawdust!"

Andrew looked towards Abby as if trying to find an anchor of sanity. "My daughter is speaking like the inmates at the Taunton Asylum."

Abby's face went slack. "I believe I know what Lizzie is saying," she said grimly.

"Ah, you are all insane," Andrew stammered. "No one knows the humiliation I felt! Spit at me in the street he did! In front of my own people! In front of my own daughter! Told me to go be hanged in Arcady, whatever the devil that means!"

Lizzie froze, her eyes widening. "What did you say?" asked Lizzie.

"He told me be hanged in Arcady. I suppose he thinks I would travel all the way to Greece to dangle myself from some fruit tree."

Lizzie bolted to her feet, her arms shaking. "Who was this man? Do you not know? Oh, Father! I must know who he was."

"Tall, mustache and beard, spectacles. I don't care one jot who he is, as long as he keeps his spittle away from my brow!"

Lizzie ran from her table, leaving behind a full bowl of codfish. She pushed her way violently past the Maggie, who stood in the doorway staring at the remaining Bordens sitting silently at their table along the northern wall.

"For the love of Mike," she said merrily, "did your daughters not get seized by some turned milk? You're a right queer family, I declare!"

#  10. A Clue In The Midden Heap

The horse yard behind the Wilbur was filled with the whinnying and musty smells of the clientele's beastly transports. The stable doors were wide open and the rank odors overwhelmed Andre, forcing him to hold a fine-clothed handkerchief to his nose and swirl the air with his walking stick as if attempting to dispel rank spirits. Lizzie's mysterious note had asked him to meet her back there at noon, and the eager anticipation that she had solved some part of the affair kept him at attention down wind of the stables' midden heap.

Lizzie appeared as if from the cabinet of a stage magician, her face bright and cheery, with a calm and ease that had not existed in her the day before. Andre greeted her with a slight kiss to the back of her hand.

"Lizbeth," he said, which made her smile.

"I have good news," she announced. "Another piece of this puzzle has fallen into place, and I am ready to test a hypothesis."

"I was hoping as such." Andre gestured towards the back door of the hotel. "Shall we?"

As they started towards the olfactory safety of the Wilbur's interior, Lizzie's eyes narrowed in on the large and distasteful midden heap upon which a dirty young girl in a patchwork dress clamored with an iron hook, digging into the tangled mass. The girl looked up with ferocity in her hungry face.

"Biddy Doren, if I am not mistaken," Lizzie exclaimed. "What are you doing far from Bishop Street? And digging in filth, no less."

The girl lowered her iron hook and stood erect. "The man said there's gold in here."

"The man? What man?"

"The man with the funny hat. He told me that I can stop my mommy being hungry if I can find her some gold." She held up an egg-shaped item that gleamed in the sunlight. "He found this and threw it at me. He told me there's more in there if I were dog enough to scrounge for it!"

"Bastarde!" Andre whispered. He reached forward and took the small ball that the girl was holding. It was the size of a walnut and looked like it had been forged roughly from tin. A small, hinged top swung open to reveal a folded piece of paper inside. Lizzie reached in and grabbed it, eagerly unfolding the paper. In childish scrawl it read:

HANG BE YE TO ARCADY

ANDREW J. BORDEN

Without a moment's hesitation, she stepped back into the center of the horse yard and started scanning the tall back wall of the hotel, examining each and every window and small opening.

"You believe it was tossed from above?" Andre asked.

"I have been a fool! Of course! The pessary did not leave with the thief. It is still in the hotel."

"But this is good news. That means there is a chance of finding it."

"I wonder," she said, with a curious twinkle in her eye.

Lizzie unbuckled her purse and reached in, pulling out a large silver coin, and held it forth to the small girl. "Perhaps this can help with your mother's hunger." The girl stepped forward cautiously and snatched the coin, her fingers trembling as they wrapped around its circumference.

"Now run along and let your mother have the coin," Lizzie ordered. The girl sped from the courtyard, dust rising behind her.

Lizzie held the tin pessary in her hand and peered intently at the back wall of the hotel. "This is far more than I could have hoped for. Yes, I think I know what to do. Andre, I must ask you to tell your father that I have solved the case. But you must gather together the following people: the Comte de Rennes, Fred and Fred Pinkerton, King Darius Wilbur, Deputy Sheriff Wixon of Bristol County, and Dr. Seabury Bowen."

"A doctor?"

"Unless I am horribly mistaken, I believe we may have need of a medical man for a delicate procedure."

"I trust your instinct, Lizzie Borden, Girl Detective. Andre de Camp is at your service." And he gracefully withdrew from the courtyard, leaving Lizzie to ponder her thoughts over the odorous midden heap of Biddy Doren.

#  11. The Weird in the Wall

An hour later, a small coterie gathered in the lobby of the Wilbur, clustered about their host, King Darius Wilbur, who twirled his mustaches furiously. The Comte de Rennes, clearly uncomfortable with such a public appearance, glanced about with suspicion as if he expected a bomb-hurtling anarchist to be behind every pillar post. One of the Fred Pinkertons stood like a stone sentinel with his hanging whiskers and dusty bowler. Deputy Sheriff Wixon of Bristol County, looking very mystified, tipped his cap to Lizzie Borden and asked politely, "I don't know what this is all about, but I bet it's a pretty how-dee-do."

Lizzie laughed. "It is very simple, Deputy Wixon. The Comte de Rennes has had something stolen from him, and now we are going to retrieve it. I shall want you to arrest the culprit."

"Then you have found it!" the Comte said with bated breath. "Mon Dieu! You must tell me where it is without delay!"

"I am waiting for one more personage in our little drama, a man whose role may turn out to be of great importance. Ah, I see Andre, your jeune fils, has indeed located the good Doctor Seabury Bowen."

Andre and Dr. Bowen came in through the front door, the expression on the doctor's face betraying as much confusion as the deputy. "I have been informed you require my services." He asked politely, "Is someone ill?"

"That is yet to be seen," Lizzie announced, then waved a gloved hand towards the stairway to the upper floor. "Gentlemen?"

A few moments later, they had all regrouped outside of Room 209 where the other Fred Pinkerton, dressed in the same brown greatcoat and bowler hat as his twin, stood by his wooden chair at attention. King Darius peered at him with puzzlement. "Are you you?" he asked, "Or are you your brother?"

"I'm the other one," he replied.

The entire crowd moved into the room that was exactly as Lizzie had last seen it the previous afternoon, down to the flower bouquet on the writing desk and the French circus postcard on the dressing table.

"Gentlemen," she said, clapping her hands. "We are now in a room where four evenings ago, a robbery of great ignominy has taken place. A Russian inventor has had a possession stolen from him as he lay unconscious, the victim of etherization. For the last twenty-four hours, I have been greatly puzzled over this theft. For the thief did not seem to have entered or exited the room, or at least that was the impression of the good Fred Pinkertons and King Darius Wilbur, all three of whom I consider to be men of impeccable reputation and honesty. It vexed me greatly how the thief made his escape, and I have torturously pondered every possible solution. Then it occurred to me that perhaps the thief never made his escape at all. Perhaps—and I beg your indulgence for a moment—he is still here."

Everyone in the room shouted out with surprise, glancing suspiciously at their neighbor. Lizzie raised her hands to quiet them down. "And I am not suggesting that any one present in this room is the culprit."

"But it seems impossible," King Darius exclaimed. "Do you suspect supernatural agencies? I have heard the Weirds and their hideous calls in the night, I did."

"Nay, Mr. Wilbur, one need not resort to supernatural explanations. I will demonstrate the source of your nocturnal weirding calls." She reached into her purse and produced several slips of paper on which were handwritten phrases of varying lengths. She began to distribute them to her perplexed guests, keeping one for herself. Then she turned and faced the southern wall. The Poussin painting of the rustic shepherds about their tomb now seemed a bit crooked in the stark noon light. Everyone faced the wall with her.

"I may be wrong about this," she said. "But there is no other solution. Will everyone please be so kind as to read out the phrases on the paper I have given each of you? Read the phrase with a voice pursuing dramatic emotional ranges, like an actor upon a stage."

The Comte de Rennes looked down at his assigned script. "But this is madness. What manner of words are these?"

"Trust me," Lizzie said.

Everyone stood staring at her, so she pumped her hand in the air and demonstrated in a loud and boisterous outburst. "It's a spouter boys! Off the bow sprit! Crank the boom lines!"

After an awkward pause, the rest of the men followed her example in loud theatrical voices as if they meant to be heard by a far-flung balcony of patrons.

"Abandon the house boys!"

"Come on, ye green-skulled dolts! Make fire-flies to the booms!"

"Ignite the blubber works! There's a goodly trough of oil to be had!"

"The winds are crossing swords, o me hearties!"

"Far to starboard the spermaceti awaits!"

"Harpooners to the boats! There she blows!"

For a few moments, the men in the room raised this mighty cacophony so much so that they began to hear feet stamping and the sound of alarm in the hallway outside. As their fortitude and boisterous cries started to wind down, Lizzie egged them on. "Keep at it! Don't mind the innocents! We're almost there!"

Andre felt absurd and was the first one to stop. Just as he was about to protest and quiet the others, there was a horrific cracking noise, and the entire wall before which they stood started to shake. The Poussin painting crashed to the floor, revealing more rose-flowered wallpaper, but dead in the center of the faint rectangle, where the color had been preserved from sunlight, was a curious peephole, like a tiny eye in the middle of a rose petal. Then a thin crack appeared along the edges of a long painted vine, and there was the creak of rusty hinges. Before everyone's startled eyes, a large section of the wall was pushing outwards. There was now a door where previously there had been no door, and it was swinging towards them to uncover a man-sized opening behind.

The figure that bounded from the newly-exposed orifice was thin, grimy, and dressed in filthy rags. His hair was wild, his eyes aglow with some feral madness. His whiskers flared out at insane angles and his cheeks puffed as he pumped his dirty bare feet against the wooden floorboards. He tried to race towards the door, but Deputy Wixon stepped forward and grabbed him.

"Lord salvage me!" the man was shouting in a creaky voice. "The spermaceti is spouting and I'm below decks! Where be my harpoon boys?! Spring, my lads! Spring!"

"How? What's this?" Wixon asked incredulously, holding fast to the man's jacket tails. "Confound it, but it's our missing man!"

"May I introduce," Lizzie said, breaking out with a prideful laugh, "Mr. Tobias Ullsworth of Annawan Street. Deputy Wixon, I believe this is the man who has been missing for three days now?"

"Mon Dieu, je ne comprend!" The Comte de Rennes shouted, twirling his mustache. He stepped forward and peered into the wall cavity. Inside was a tiny nest, about four feet by three feet, barely enough for a man to lie down in. Its back wall was exposed wood, through which could be heard the sounds of animals in the stable yard. On the floorboards lay a filthy pallet and a kerosene lamp next to which rested a plate covered with insects, which had devoured what little morsels of potato and beans had been there to sustain the prisoner.

"You mean he's been in there?" Wixon asked, staring at the crazed man in his grasp.

King Darius let out with a howl that was both amused and offended. "Indeed he has! That's the Sporting Hole I heard slip from the skenchback Buster. Their way of spying on their Fancy Girls. I wouldn't have believed it, but there it is as evidence. And in my own ordinary, much to my chagrin."

"Frank Rivers," said Andre triumphantly. "This is proof conclusive. Shall we arrest that rogue?"

"No," Lizzie said. "We need to hear from the thief himself."

"Let go my arm so I can scratch my beard," Ullsworth shrieked. "I'm all a'crawling with critters!" Wixon released his grip, trusting that his charge wouldn't bolt for freedom, as the man savagely attacked his own facial hair like they were bursting into flames. "Oh, Flukes and Blubber! I ain't been so infested since I last went a'whaling! Damn that Rivers! Promised me to send my children to school with their betters! Promised me that Tobias will never have to go to sea or work the cloth again! But he wanted me to swap the egg, he did. Give him a tin forgery, he said and let Borden take the blame! I say, let him rot in his own blubber works! Damn that Rivers!"

Lizzie nodded in silent agreement. "Wellington Rivers, the bank manager and paper merchant, is the mastermind behind this affair?" she asked directly to the hairy face before her.

Ullsworth snarled. "Aye, the ruffian! I'll savage his head, I will. He'll not suffer more in all his days!"

Andre raised an enlightened finger. "I suspected as such. Rivers must be in the employ of the British. They wish to prevent the Bulgarian expansion. Perhaps they hope to raise the siege of Plevna! Wellington Rivers is their puppet!"

King Darius snapped his fingers. "Aha!" he exclaimed. "And this Wellington Rivers was the investor behind this hotel. During the construction, he must have personally customized Room 209 for his nephew Frank's lurid frolics. Dare say, that's it!"

Ullsworth focused his blood shot eyes on the Pinkerton Brothers who stood glaring at him with blank faces. "Galloping ghosts! Now he's split in two he is! I waited all these days for him to go away, now he's split in two!"

One of the Freds smirked, "That split happened a long time ago, my friend."

"But this is all getting us nowhere! Where is the pessary?" Jacques de Camp shouted. "Where are the plans for the self-acting Mule?"

Lizzie smiled and pointed a finger at Ullsworth whose face was now bloated with red swells. "Doctor Bowen," she said, "I believe if you examine Mr. Ullsworth you will find what you are looking for." She leaned over and whispered a word into Bowen's ear, after which a strange gloom passed over the good doctor's face.

"I will do what I can do," he said resignedly, and then pulled Ullsworth across the floor and into the hole in the wall. The wallpapered doorway slammed shut and for a few uncomfortable moments, the occupants of Room 209 were treated to a symphony of howls and curses, giant whoops and prayers to various North Atlantic whales and their Leviathan god. Then, after what seemed like an eternity, the doorway opened once more and Ullsworth appeared, more disheveled than before, holding up his belt-less pants so they wouldn't plummet to his heels. He stepped forward carefully with jack-knifing legs giving the appearance that he was walking over gravel.

"Flukes and Blubber!" he bellowed, fleeing back to Deputy Wixon as if the sheriff were some form of safe port in an otherwise hostile ocean. At that moment, the Deputy took out some metallic wristlets to bind the whale man's hands.

Dr. Bowen appeared back in the room with his jacket removed and one sleeve rolled up past the elbow. In his hand he held a shiny metallic egg about an inch in diameter. He held it aloft with delicacy.

"Careful," he said. "It must be washed."

"The pessary!" the Comte de Rennes roared and raced forward to toss both his arms about the befuddled doctor who collapsed like a boneless fish between the Frenchman's mighty timber-like arms.

Lizzie stepped before Ullsworth who quaked in his gumboots. "Aye lassie, you may think me a filthy and despicable codger," he groaned, "but I had my reasons."

"Your family is starving," she said in a sad, whispery voice. "After my father evicted you, you had no choice but to take up River's offer. You have been twice betrayed."

A sparkle came into the man's desperate eyes. "Here's a girl who speaks righteous! You tell 'em!" He tugged at his shackles. "You describe how a man's beloved wife and children can be tossed into the street like so much offal! It's not a sane world, is it? Locked up in a disgusting hole for three days! I was told what would be done to my lads and lassies if I gave up the game, so I hid. For many days now, I hid and saw the sun go up and down through that accursed broken board. My life has been darkness and horse dung, I tell ye! And not even a place to empty my slops. You can imagine what I'm going to say to Rivers the next time I sees him! Yes, I'll walk right up to his fancy house and knock on the door, and when his high and mighty butler comes to toss me by the seat of my pants, I'll let loose my slops all over his European carpets! You'll see how he stands up to that! Yes, Mr. Rivers! Send me to do some bottom's up surgery on a poor defenseless Cossack! We'll see! Who'll now take care of ol' Tobias Ullsworth's poor starving lads and lassies?"

Lizzie gave a slight nod and the barest trace of a smile.

"Justice shall be done," she promised, and startled the old whaler by taking his hands in hers. For a fleeting moment, there was a shared intimacy between them, the whaler's eyes turned watery, then a single tear was born at the edge of his left lid.

# 12. A Plot Revealed

Lizzie Borden held court at the same table in the Wilbur's dining room as had been occupied the day before by Frank Rivers and his two skenchbacks. Bar keep Sam Samways, late of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, provided some hops and spirits for the men while Lizzie drank a fresh cup of Orange Pekoe. The Comte and Vicomte de Rennes sat together, a large mountain and his smaller, thinner copy, flanked by the two Pinkerton Brothers, Fred and Fred, who resembled each other in both countenance and attire down to the last link on their watch chains. Deputy Sheriff Wixon was nursing a beer, having decided that being off duty was a much better position to be in than having to file all sorts of complicated reports, or explain to his superiors that he had solved a theft while making no arrests. Doctor Bowen was off tending to the physically ailing Ullsworth whom they had promised to both morally reform and restore to prime health, respectively. For those present, the relief of recovering the plans for the self-acting Mule had unleashed a wave of merriment that manifested much laughter and friendly banter.

"Lizzie, you must tell us what led you to discover the whaleman Ullsworth in the wall?" requested King Darius, his mustaches bristling.

"As soon as I saw the tin pessary in the midden heap," Lizzie proclaimed, "everything was absurdly simple. The message within the tin was an insult hurled at a man in the back alley from a broken plank in the outer wall of Ullsworth's hiding place. At that moment, I knew that the plans had not only never left the hotel grounds, but no doubt were still in the room from whence they had been stolen. How that could be, when the entire room had been thoroughly searched, was still a mystery to me. But, there was also this unnamed man, no doubt working for Wellington Rivers, who verbally and physically abused Andrew Jackson Borden on the street yesterday morning, believing my father to have been behind the betrayal. Yet his assault upon Mr. Borden provided the vital clue." Lizzie produced the folded paper from her purse and held it up for all to read. "Hang ye be to Arcady!"

"The whale ship Arcady!" Fred Pinkerton the Elder said with a start. "Sailed out of New Bedford in August of 1875, went down with all hands except for one whaler who returned in disgrace to Fall River to work as a cloth doffer to feed seven children."

"Tobais Ullsworth," Fred Pinkerton the Younger continued. "Vanished this Monday last and not seen in physical form again until he emerged from a hotel wall this very afternoon, turned into a lunatic by his long ordeal."

"The man who wailed in the night," King Darius said bemusedly. "The Weird in the wall. Never again shall I ever suspect supernatural agencies when there is always a perfectly rational explanation. Indeed I won't!"

"It all does hang together," said Lizzie. "Wellington Rivers, President of the Tiverton-Rivers Paper Mill and co-chairman of the Fall River First National Bank, was suspected of sabotaging the whale ship Arcady to collect on insurance. It was his holding company that was found culpable in the sinking of the ship due to a faulty manufacturing of its hull planking, a finding that was buried under graft and corruption and never became public knowledge. Only insiders like my Father, who did not judge the man, and even admired him for his thrift, knew the circumstances. Tobias Ullsworth must have felt the need for vengeance against the man who destroyed his life."

"And Rivers," the Comte de Rennes added, "was unsuccessfully attempting to buy up stock in a certain unnamed textile mill that I was to negotiate a technological contract with, one that would seal the fate of the Crimea. Being a paper pulper, Rivers was looked down upon by those men of cloth who run the looms and spindles of Fall River. He would have the perfect motive to steal the plans. He would have been able to open his own textile mill and triple his wealth with his exclusive use of a revolutionary new type of Mule."

"Not to mention," Andre said triumphantly, "he wanted to cast the shadow of suspicion on his nephew Frank who had taken to the Sporting Boy life, and had so disgraced the family name."

Deputy Sheriff Wixon breathed a deep sigh. "I am hearing all that you folks are saying, but I have a pretty predicament here. I can't just march into River's Paper Mill and arrest him, don't you know? What crime has the man committed that we can prove? Ullsworth can only be charged with breaking and entering, and his ramblings about Rivers will be dismissed by folk who would sooner believe a man of wealth than a common cloth doffer."

"I'm afraid Wellington Rivers is untouchable," Lizzie mused. "His only punishment shall be his failure to procure the pessary."

"And what about Frank Rivers?" King Darius asked with an evil twitch in his eye. "I can ban his gang and their libertine ways from under my roof, but they shall continue to roam the streets of Fall River, spreading their sensualist philosophy, and provoking our finest women into lives of wanton decline."

The Comte de Rennes stood to his feet. "The Rivers boy and his scurrilous gang shall be dealt with accordingly. Perhaps I can persuade some local men of substance to form a committee to abolish this social issue of Sporting Boys and their Fancy Girls once and for all. Why Lizzie, I shall even recommend that your father be appointed as a committee member since he has confessed to me in confidence his outrage at these acts of youthful folly."

"I thank you on behalf of Mr. Borden," Lizzie said. "I'm sure he would be most eager to join your committee."

"More appropriately," the Comte said, bowing politely in Lizzie's direction, "I must thank you, Lizzie Andrew Borden, on behalf of the French government, as well as the Royal Tsar of Russia, for the recovery of our most valuable industrial asset. I will apply to my superiors for a special rate of compensation for you and your entire family, which will come from the sale of the self-acting Mule technology."

"Merci," Lizzie said, winking at Andre who smiled back at her.

Fred Pinkerton the Younger shrugged. "If you fancy folk would only have told us simple folk about all these Russian intrigues, foreign wars, and golden eggs from the very beginning, perhaps the Pinkerton Brothers would have been of more use. Perhaps we could have shared in the glorious wealth of this Mule, whatever the blazes it be!"

Lizzie laughed. "Have no fear, Fred and Fred. Payment for your services shall be paid liberally from my family's profits. And young Biddy Doren, the poor girl with the consumptive mother on Bishop Street, shall have a trust set up for her from the Lizzie Andrew Borden Trust Fund for Destitute Children, as shall all seven sons and daughters of the lamentable Tobias Ullsworth. Nor shall I forget the orphaned children of Tchakorov, the poor Russian inventor, or his lovely new equestrian bride, who yet need the funds to travel to America. I shall donate my entire share of the Mule plans to that effect."

"Here, here!" King Darius said, snapping his fingers in the direction of the corpulent Samways, motioning for a round of rice beer. "Let us all congratulate Fall River's most excellent Girl Detective!"

When the drinks had been brought, all cheered and raised their tankards to Lizzie Borden. "Hooray for Lizzie!" they shouted as one.

Lizzie sat smiling against the whitewash of the tall dining hall windows, her hands cupped around her warm mug of coffee, being that she was of the temperance and did not drink spirits.

The bellhop from the front desk appeared holding a letter stick that he extended across the table to Lizzie. She jumped in fright at its appearance before her nose, snatching the note while the bellhop receded back to the lobby. She read the hastily-written words and then nodded to her assembled friends.

"You must forgive me, but a Mr. Butterworth of the Saloon Furnishing Corporation of Keene, New Hampshire is requiring my presence in the horse yard. I suspect he wants to engage me as a liaison between him and my father's business. Excuse me."

Everyone continued to banter and drink as Lizzie stepped from the room and disappeared into the lobby. Andre, his instincts inclined toward her protection, eyed her through the dining hall windows as she turned a corner, her hat bobbing, and disappeared behind the building.

After a few more minutes of jubilant table banter, King Darius twirled his mustaches, a sign that he was perplexed. "Strange," he muttered. "Mr. Butterworth was representing a furnishing concern in Boston. I think that he did leave early this morning."

"Butterworth?" Andre asked, lifting himself from his seat.

"Exactly," Fred Pinkerton the Elder added. The man's face leapt into animated life. "By Jupiter, he did leave this morning! I carried his baggage to the waiting coach!"

"Zounds!" Andre howled, and reached behind his chair for his slender walking stick. Before anyone could comment, Andre had bounded away from the table and was sprinting towards the door of the dining hall, his cane swirling before him.

#  13. Kidnapped!

Upon entering the stable yard, Lizzie immediately sensed an unusual quiet; only the sounds of traffic and pedestrians from the street side of the tall hotel broke the stillness, but within the yard itself there was a strange calm. Her instincts told her to run, that a horse yard was no place for a furniture salesman to meet with a lady of quality. She had encountered fake notes before, why had her instincts failed her on this occasion?

"Butterworth!" she shouted, hoping that her voice would reach her friends through the dining hall window.

"I'll give you your worth of butter," came a familiar sneer. Out from behind a lumber shack came a gaunt figure balanced under an opera hat, swaggering in stocky fireman boots. "Don't be all in a twee, my dear. This ain't no dragging time, I have arranged for safe transport to a place where you can fuzzle with a man of great import."

Frank Rivers raised his arms above his hat and upon this cue, the roar of a thumping horse broke the yard's stillness. Before Lizzie could form any estimation of her predicament, a large barouche had entered the yard from the street, but unlike any barouche that she had seen before. It was an imposing four-wheeled high flyer pulled by a feverish white quarter horse, its nostrils blazing with wind. The bellowed hood formed a self-enclosed space over the carriage seats and draped black curtains hung down from exposed protruding dowels to conceal those who sat within. A pair of hands holding leather reins emerged from the curtain that cascaded over the outside box seat to control the quarter horse that thundered before it. The barouche very quickly overtook Lizzie as she spun to make her escape. Frank Rivers had raced forward to grab her, and the flailing arms of Sporting Boys emerged from the hidden recesses of the concealed cabin to pull her up towards the gaping curtains.

"Mercy!" Lizzie cried, her body flush with panic. Before she knew it, she was inside the shaky cabin surrounded by Chas and Buster, their faces convulsed in vulgar leers. The barouche was bouncing up and down with ridiculous exaggeration as she struggled. Surely, she reasoned, anyone witnessing this from outside would think it peculiar and raise an alarm. All she had to do was to keep up her fight, keep the cabin rocking, and a policeman was surely bound to demand an inspection.

Frank Rivers popped through the curtain like he had been swinging on a vine, his hat missing from his head and his soap lock grease dripping down his cheeks. "Quiet, my lamb," he said. "I am playing mere strumpet usher this afternoon. There's a man on the Hill. Yea, he's got reason to maw-wallop with you. Snaggle her to me, he said. And so we snaggle you."

"I'm going to scream," Lizzie said. She could feel the barouche starting to move into the traffic of North Main. Knowing that her chances to salvage her situation were rapidly diminishing, she broke one arm free from Buster's grip and lashed out at Frank Rivers, her fingernails, which had been grown to a fashionable length, tore across his cheek, slipping off his sweat and soap lock. "Gaaaah!" he cried, raising a palm to his slashed flesh that had started to ooze blood. "You boggled dolly! You monster!"

"You're the monster," she said defiantly, and feeling the barouche gallop into full speed down North Main Street, she spat in his face.

"For that," he said, wiping at his nose, "you will know a grand rib roasting."

Lizzie closed her eyes, expecting the worst, but was immediately surprised to feel the entire balance of the carriage lean backwards, as if it were tumbling over. Sunlight splashed her face, and she opened her eyes to see the vast expanse of the afternoon sky flanked by the moving tops of buildings. Some one, or some thing, was pulling back the collapsible half-hood above her, ripping it aside as if it were made of tissue paper, and the draped curtains to her left and right were falling to the street. All the grips holding her into her imprisoned posture were loosened. She fell back as the barouche tipped and for a brief moment, she saw Andre de Camp, stripped to his shift sleeves, locked in a tangle with Frank Rivers against the clouds, then all was a spiral towards the ground and she felt the hard road beneath slamming her knees and elbows.

Rolling over to prevent her face from hitting the dirt, she saw the broken pieces of the barouche and a sad image of the collapsed quarter horse lifting its whinnying head upwards. It took but a moment for her to realize that Andre de Camp had chased the vehicle of her abduction and had overrun it on foot. Somehow, he had managed to get on board and rip apart, seemingly with his bare hands, the collapsible hood, at the same time knocking the Sporting Boys off the vehicle. She caught a brief glimpse of Chas and Buster racing down the street, limping and screaming, until they crashed into a solid wall of Pinkerton Brothers.

"Apple bonkers!" Chas cried.

"Fancy some friendly fuzzle!" Buster said in a panic.

"Let bygones be made," Chas pleaded. "No rib roasting for us, my skenchbacks!"

Within seconds, the Freds had chosen their respective targets and the two Sporting Boys were air bound, hurled, and twirled under. They fell like lifeless lumps to the ground, where heavy workman boots assaulted them. Much to their humiliation, a crowd was now gathering on both sides of the street, full of respectable men and women in their fine dresses and suits, all of whom were cheering on the melee.

Then Lizzie saw Andre and Frank Rivers standing arm's length apart from one another in front of the barouche's shattered carriage, their feet in angry boxing stances, their hands up, curling into fists.

The startled crowd was now frozen in suspense as the two boys circled about an invisible center between them. A woman screamed, another fainted, dogs were barking, a gentleman cried out that someone should call the police. Far in the distance came the screeching of birds as they flew their indifferent path against the clouds. The entire scene was suspended in space as if it were part of some famous painting, as if Andre and Frank were two titans wrestling in some mythical moment that existed outside of time.

"You think you know this stockjobber!" Frank Rivers snarled, and Lizzie realized to her horror that he was talking to her. "Not in a sloven's year! Let him tell you the truth! Hang ye be to Arcady!" Then he lashed forward violently, his arms swinging in graceful and powerful arcs.

Andre stepped into the punches and reached for Frank's soap locks. At first his grip slipped right off then, but in that instant he managed to disorient the Sporting Boy. Lashing out again, he seized the locks like they were horns on a rampaging bull and pulled with all the full force of his physical being.

"Yoiks!" Frank Rivers cried, then sped forward, pulled by his own hair. Andre brought a knee up into the boy's abdomen, which brought another exclamation, one that could not be represented by any word, and then Frank Rivers was limp and defenseless. Andre spun him about and kicked him full in the seat of his trousers, sending him in a comical arc over the stunned quarter horse. Frank Rivers hit the ground with a graceless thud, his face landing in some equine feces that his own animal had treasured the street with, and then lay disturbingly still, the only sounds being a very thin and listless muttering of some random fuzzle talk: "Glorged I be . . . gored to the bumwush . . . all in a twee, my skenchback . . . " And then he was silent.

Lizzie forced herself to her feet, which turned out to be the easy part. Staying upright was a task she started feeling was beyond her capacity. Her pulled muscles dragged her downward as a frightful state of shock began to pass over her startled body. Andre stood before her, his face covered in dirt, his shirt torn, his body still braced for action, not exhausted or weakened but strong and virile.

Warm waves spread downward from her head into her limbs, a delayed reaction to the fear, the anxiety, the deathly grip that had been a hold of her body ever since her ordeal had begun. But she was held together by the sight of her brave soldier, her beautiful Vicomte, drenched in sweat, heaving with fear for her safety. Her feelings were very shameful, but in Andre's presence she couldn't but surrender to them.

She ran forward and into his arms, her face trembling, her tears staining her cheeks, her arms grabbing desperately at him, begging to be embraced.

For a moment, there was warm comfort, like she was falling through soft down in a summer's breeze with no physical pain, no fear, no danger. Her reverie was broken only by a startled yelp that dispelled the waking dream. "Lizzie Andrew!" She lifted her eyes from Andre's shoulder to see her sister Emma in an afternoon dress at the periphery of the startled crowd, her face aghast, her hands raised to her ovaled mouth.

"It is all correct, Emma," Lizzie said, not even loud enough for her sister to hear, "Andre is my skenchback."

Then she fell into blackness, her last impression being Andre's arms catching her as she plummeted.

# 14. Justice & Lost Love

The conclusion to the affair held little comfort for Lizzie's shattered heart. Despite the justice that had been executed and the financial reward reaped by the suffering innocents who had been involved directly and indirectly in the affair, there was still the small matter of the signet ring with the scarlet "A" embossed upon it.

All else was neatly concluded. The treasured plans for the proposed textile technology were returned to the Comte de Rennes. A few months later, a new textile mill owned and operated by a Russian industrialist became operational along the banks of the Quequechan, to much ballyhoo and a titanic flood of profits due to the introduction of a new self-acting Mule that increased production and the pick of the yarn. All who held stock in the venture, including Lizzie Andrew Borden and her father Andrew Jackson Borden, had more money flow into their accounts than they previously could have dreamed. Lizzie, in turn, donated all her proceeds to a charitable fund for destitute children. The Doren woman in Bishop Street was able to find a proper home for her small child Biddy, who Lizzie saw every Saturday afternoon thereafter for iced cream down street, and who eventually matured into a fine young woman, the first in her family to study at a university. In later years, Lizzie heard that Biddy Doren wrote serialized novels about social issues that gave Upton Sinclair a run for his money in the literary market place.

Tobias Ullsworth, his health and wits fully recovered, was set up in a proper apartment and, much to her father's disconcerted grumbles, given a job as a clerk at Borden and Almy's furniture concern where he had responsibilities ranging from managing inventory to swaying customers' buying instincts towards certain preferred items. The more difficult concession that Andrew had to make was to allow Ullsworth to hang the copy of Poussin's "The Shepherds of Arcady" that had been salvaged from Room 209, the most enduring symbol of his long ordeal, on the store's back wall over a field of rose-colored wallpaper.

Frank Rivers and the Sporting Boys were arrested and brought up on charges of kidnapping and assault, plus the theft of a barouche from a carriage yard in Tiverton. Wellington Rivers attempted to persuade anyone who would listen that his nephew Frank had been under the spell of a charlatan mesmerist named MacAlister Mundi, and so, Rivers contended, could not be held accountable for his deeds. However, Lizzie came round to Rivers office one afternoon, spending no more than one half-hour sequestered privately with the paper tycoon, after which all claims of his nephew's innocence were inexplicably dropped. Rivers produced one statement to the local newspaper in which he said, "Frank is indeed of bastard stock from a degraded branch of the family. My sister found him on the steps of a local saloon wrapped in fish paper. I cannot with clear conscience defend his kind."

After serving a spell in prison, Frank Rivers, along with his Bedford Street B'hoys, effectively disappeared from New England altogether. It was rumored that years later Chas and Buster were hanged at the Tombs, the large police dungeon in New York near Paradise Square, where they had been charged with "crimes of innumerable unpalatabilities." It was believed that Frank Rivers became the notorious Bowery Boy Twangler who terrorized the women of Mulberry Street in the late 1880s, writing taunting letters to the police with phrases like, "I am only at my lick-for-leather for the last was for colt's tooth. The next one shall be a grand rib roasting!" but that could have been mere coincidence. The Twangler was ultimately caught and lynched by a vigilante mob, but the photographs then taken by the New York Herald of his corpse in an upright coffin are no longer extant.

As for Andre de Camp, Lizzie saw him on a Tuesday afternoon one week after the affair in her home. For several days, her father had prevented the two from meeting, for he was seized with a sudden suspicion of the boy's intentions towards his daughter, and also embarrassed by the publicity that the public beatings had drawn to the Bordens and the de Camps. Disregarding the fact that Andre had quite possibly saved his daughter's life, Andrew bolted shut his home and stayed indoors during his normal business hours, just to make sure that Lizzie sat in her room all day, alone and despondent. He was hoping that some sense could be driven into the French boy who still, despite the father's precautions, insisted on calling at the Borden home every day at noon.

By the seventh day, Lizzie had howled at her father to let him in, and Andrew reluctantly consented. "Ten minutes," he said. "I give you ten minutes with the boy and then you are to forget you ever knew him."

She found Andre in the parlor, standing near the piano. He looked as dashing and well-kept as always, his facial scuffs a mere phantom of the past. His eyes brightened when he saw Lizzie cross the floor. He moved forward to embrace her but she held her body back. She was giving the impression that there was an invisible line between them beyond which he was not allowed to cross.

"It is madness that we are kept apart so," he said, tears forming in his eyes.

"No," she said, her face cold and blank. "It is best."

"Mais mon Dieu, what can you mean?"

"I know you have the best of intentions, and I do believe, Andre de Camp, that you love me. I have never doubted it. And I have committed your poem 'Lizbeth of Light' to precious memory. But I can never let you any closer than you are now. Perhaps not even this. We shall see each other in church, we shall see each other at the board meetings for the textile concern, but outside of indifferent and necessary encounters, we shall never talk again. Never, do you understand?"

A dark shadow passed over his face. "Pourquoi?" he asked.

"Because you lied to me. You deceived me. In your attempt to save your father's reputation, you tampered with the truth. That was your ring that was found in the poor whaleman. The 'A' on the signet stood for Andre, not Arcady. It was you upon which Wellington Rivers was attempting to cast suspicion. In your clever machinations, you conceived of this Arcady society, an anarchist cabal targeting Fall River, to divert suspicion from your own guilt in the affair."

His mouth trembled as he struggled to find the words. "I was only trying to retrieve the pessary. I didn't think that my father's obsession with this Arcady Society was of any consequence. In France he saw them lurking everywhere, and here in the wild land of America he is even more fearful."

"I do not even believe that this society even exists." Lizzie's face went dark as she contemplated something even more unthinkable. "Or perhaps you are the Arcady Society. Perhaps you have attempted to bring this French strain of political unrest to our ordered community. Perhaps Rivers was trying to wipe out this pestilent breed of revolutionary activity before it could get a foothold in our town." She paused, trying to read the shifting shadows on his face. "Or perhaps I shall never know the truth. Andre de Camp holds many secrets, and this secret society that bears his initial is his best kept."

"I wish I could tell you the truth," he said, puffing up his chest. "But I am bound by oaths. If you only knew, Lizzie Borden. If you only knew."

"It is best," she replied, "that I never know. For the past seven days, I have tormented myself over this decision, and I must now reveal that I choose not to have anything to do with you. I care not if the Arcady Society is a mere figment of everyone's suspicions and you are blameless. But after your painful lie, I can never trust you again."

He lowered his eyes towards his feet. Somewhere in the distance, a fruit peddler was hawking his wares, and a bale barge blew its horn across the deep waters of the Taunton.

"I am sorry," he said solemnly, "that you feel that way."

"But I shall never forget your kindness," she said assuredly. "And I shall never forget your poem. And I shall never forget the melancholy scion who once upon a time did indeed have love for me."

Andre nodded, forcing back his anguish. He stared at her for a moment and then spoke very lyrically: " 'Tis the hope and the beauty and the inner calm/That we have won and must never let slip.' "

She moved slightly towards him, as if she were ready to embrace, but then stopped. "Yes," she said. " 'Never let slip.' And I never shall."

"I cannot live without you," he said languidly.

Her eyes widened as red blemished her face.

"Oh, yes you can!" she replied angrily, and left the room as quick as a whirling tornado.

On her way to the staircase, she met with her father who stood broad-shouldered, his chin jutting forward, a look of triumph on his countenance. "What did I tell you," he said smugly. "The boy is obviously a liar and a . . . "

"Say nothing more, Father," she cautioned him. "Do not talk to me for three weeks or I shall twist off your head!"

# 15. Andre-Lude

It was not the last time that she would meet with Andre de Camp, le Vicomte de Rennes. Their paths were to cross again in several more of her cases, most notably the Adventure of the Phantom Thespian and the Strange Affair of the Hottentot Venus. And it was only a matter of time before she had cracked the code of the dreaded Arcady Society and discovered Andre's true role. In a strange tender way, he was eventually redeemed, but she would never again open up her heart to him as she had done the night that she first heard the words to "Lizbeth of Light."

Indeed, for all these long and sad years, Lizbeth Andrew Borden kept the words to the poem in a locket about her neck. It stayed with her throughout many an adventure, kept her company at night in the cruel days of her incarceration, provided inner strength when all around was darkness. And occasionally, when pressed by the rare Fall River resident who was old enough to remember the Comte de Rennes and his daring son and the summer of 1877, she found herself transported back again to that time indelibly marked upon her by Andre's lyricism. As the sun descended over French Street, and the sloping shadows amidst the elms reminded her of the faded evenings of yesterday, all she could do was to sigh and stare into empty space, perhaps inwardly numbering the years to see if it were even indeed possible that he could still be alive and upon the earth, and remark with confident melancholy:

"This coming summer I shall be sixty-seven, which means that he too is not yet seventy. Perhaps there is a chance of walking by the river with him once more, and remembering. To see that Great Wheel in the sky and wonder . . . and wonder . . . for we are but passing shadows and shall soon be gone. To see him once more, before no more. Yes.

"I am a woman who has lived two lives, one full of accomplishment and service to my fellow man, the other shrouded in mist and infamy. The children in the street tell my story in rhyme, yes, but with great pain to my heart. That cursed doggerel is known throughout the world, but 'Lizbeth of Light' is locked away, never to be seen by any but myself, upon a midnight, in the dark, and with a dagger of shame and regret piercing my being. Why will the cruel lies live on while the truth of the Poet's words must remain in an unquiet grave? They will march with me to Oak Grove, in the end, and be lost forever to all but my eternal heart.

"The Poet really did find a hope and a beauty that he wanted to share with me. I turned my back upon it, and perhaps that was the gravest mistake of my life. But I have never let it slip. I have held it right here, in this locket, for all these lonely years.

"Perhaps it would be nice to see him again. Very nice indeed. Yes.

"For I was very fond of him when I was a Girl Detective."
About the Author

Richard Behrens is the co-founder of Nine Muses Books and author of the Lizzie Borden, Girl Detective series of mysteries. He is a contributor to The Hatchet: A Journal of Lizzie Borden and Victorian Studies as well as The Literary Hatchet, both available from PearTree Press. He is a regular lecturer on eccentric Victorian women and silent film comedy and often gets confused about what century he lives in. A native New Yorker now living in New England, Richard is working on several more Lizzie Borden, Girl Detective mysteries including two novels: The Minuscule Monk (2015) and The Wilmarth Immovables (2016) as well as a new short story collection.

Website: http://www.ninemusesbooks.com  
Blog: http://www.lizziebordengirldetective.com

Twitter: https://twitter.com/lizziebordengd  
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LizzieBordenGirlDetective

Series Profile: https://www.smashwords.com/books/byseries/18895

Author profile: https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/ninemusesbooks
More Lizzie Borden, Girl Detective   
Stories by Richard Behrens

Available from Nine Muses Books

Lizzie Mini #1: The Agitated Elocutionist

Lizzie Mini #2: The Forlorn Maggie

Lizzie Mini #3: The Purloined Curio

Lizzie Mini #4: The Melancholy Scion

Lizzie Mini #5: The Sculling Boat

Coming Soon from Nine Muses Books

Lizzie Mini #6: The Calamitous Catamount

Lizzie Mini #7: The Perpetual Engineer

Lizzie Borden, Girl Detective:

The Minuscule Monk (2015)

Lizzie Borden: Girl Detective:

The Wilmarth Immovables (2016)

Available from PearTress Press

Lizzie Borden, Girl Detective (2010)

also available as e-book on Smashwords

includes:

The Forlorn Maggie

The Purloined Curio

The Exhausted Amenuensis

The Traumatized Metallurgist

The Melancholy Scion
Available Summer 2015 on Smashwords  
from Nine Muses Books

THE MINUSCULE MONK (2015, Nine Muses Books)

Miss Lizzie Borden of Fall River, Massachusetts is a girl detective and the most remarkable young woman in Victorian New England. Many years before her infamous arrest and trial for the 1892 murders of her father and stepmother, she pursued a career as a private consulting detective. The Miniscule Monk chronicles a most singular episode in that hidden history.

When a dead body mysteriously appears in the basement of her father's furniture store, 17 year-old Lizzie Andrew Borden immediately takes on the case. Accompanied by an eccentric millionaire who campaigns to extend the vote to animals; a Boston terrier trained to sniff out crooked politicians; and a boy detective who believes the entire universe to be inside his own head, Lizzie follows a trail of taxidermy tools and Civil War bushwhackers to the Miniscule Monk, a legendary gunslinger whose mummified body will bring a punter's pot to anyone who can deliver it to the New York gangster who has been posting a bounty on the Monk for decades. With such high stakes, everyone has a motive for murder, yet everyone seems innocent. Or perhaps, as Lizzie suspects after attending a dinner party with non-existent food and meeting a horse that has turned into its opposite, none of it is even real.

Lizzie Borden the Girl Detective of Fall River is at her most spirited in The Miniscule Monk, a comic mystery that paints a portrait of Fall River at the height of its splendor and its most infamous citizen at the start of her most excellent career.
Now Available on Smashwords  
from PearTree Press

LIZZIE BORDEN: GIRL DETECTIVE (2010, PearTree Press)

Introducing Miss Lizzie Borden of Fall River, Massachusetts, a most excellent girl detective and the most remarkable young woman ever to take on the criminal underworld in late 19th century New England.

Many years before her infamous arrest and trial for the murders of her father and stepmother, Lizzie Borden pursued a career as a private consulting detective and matches wits with a crooked spiritualist, a corrupt and murderous textile tycoon, a secret society of anarchist assassins, rowdy and deadly sporting boys, a crazed and vengeful mutineer, an industrial saboteur, and a dangerously unhinged math professor—none of whom are ever exactly what they seem to be.

In these five early tales of mystery and adventure, Lizzie Borden is joined by her stubborn and stingy father Andrew; her jealous and weak-chinned sister Emma; her trusted companion Homer Thesinger the Boy Inventor; and the melancholy French scion Andre De Camp. Together, they explore Fall River's dark side through a landscape that is industrial, Victorian, and distinctly American.

You have met Lizzie Borden before, but never like this!

Includes the following stories:

The Forlorn Maggie

The Purloined Curio

The Exhausted Amanuensis

The Traumatized Metallurgist

The Melancholy Scion
PRAISE FOR LIZZIE BORDEN: GIRL DETECTIVE

"Lizzie Borden: Girl Detective, is clever and appealing. Every story brings the reader to the streets and characters of Fall River as if you were there with them and of course Lizzie Borden. Congratulations to Richard Behrens for his Victorian creativity and imagination."

Len Rebello, Author of Lizzie Borden: Past & Present

"In Lizzie Borden: Girl Detective Richard Behrens skillfully captures the essence of historic Fall River, bringing the city to life through the adventures of the youthful, intrepid sleuth, Lizzie Borden. The fictional Lizzie is an absolutely delightful character; she is fearlessly cunning, charismatic, and thoroughly enchanting! A must read for all those intrigued by Fall River history, mystery and, of course, Lizzie Borden."

Michael Martins, Curator of the Fall River History Society / Co-Author of Parallel Lives: A Social History of Lizzie A. Borden and Her Fall River

"This is a fun read and you'll see Lizzie in a whole new light. It is well written and has lots of unique historical details that make it feel very rich and authentic."

Jill Dalton, writer/performer of Lizzie Borden Live!

"This is Lizzie Borden as you never imagined her; lively, intrepid and clever as a budding detective on the hunt! The stories are a magic carpet ride to another time – old Fall River in all its glory. The settings, the clothing, the language all showcase a young Lizzie Borden against a background of mystery and intrigue with some twists and turns along the way. Move over Nancy Drew, and make room for Miss Lizzie, Girl Detective- so much fun, it's nearly criminal! "

Shelley Dziedzic, Editor of Lizzie Borden: Warps and Wefts
