10. From SheWhoScrawls: Mr. Hudson?

(I was excited for this one! There's a lot of theories out here about Mr. Hudson).

A tale in four possibilities.

1. Florida

Louise Reid was twenty-one years old and far from home. Across an entire ocean, in fact, in the suffocating, humid heat of Florida. Her husband had not been home for three days, and most likely, he was in an opium haze, or maybe he was just sweating scotch. Louise didn't have the energy to worry after him anymore. After the miscarriage, she had been guiltily grateful, for it was just a day before that she'd learned the extent of his criminal ties.

"God in Heaven, Franklin," she'd said. "You can't trust those people. We must return to England."

"Americans know about boats, dear," he'd said testily, and fearing his fists, she'd quieted.

She found out about the arrests from the papers, of all things. Her husband, in jail for a double murder of two opium-addicted women. The evidence seemed ironclad. Maybe he'd been framed, maybe he'd been trying to get out after all. Maybe he'd killed them in cold blood.

She booked passage home and left in a gray dawn, and changed her name to Martha, her middle name, and took the her mother's maiden name, Hudson. Louise Reid died in Florida.

2. The Deep Blue

Frank was on furlough, and Martha Hudson planned to make each moment count. She showed him the modest two-story they'd put their savings into, and how neatly she'd arranged the bottom level for them. She cooked all this favorites, and they went on daily strolls through the city, talking and talking and leaning into one another.

"You're such a beauty, darling," Frank said. "How I long to see you when I'm at sea. The ocean is so mercurial. It steadies me to remember my faithful wife at home."

"Thank you, my dear," Martha said. "I cannot wait for your service to conclude. What will we do, when we can be together for more than a few days?"

"Fill up that apartment with little Hudsons," he smirked. "And I suppose I'll have to find work. What do you see me doing?"

"No reason to stay from the water," she said. "Heaven knows they need fisherman and workers at docks. As long as the ocean stops taking you so far from me."

It was only a few months later the ocean took him farther than she could ever follow.

3. Frailness

"Damn it all," Frank coughed.

"Will you please let me call the physician?" Martha said, exasperated. "Or are you going to let that cough kill you?"

"It won't," he snorted, wrongly.

4. White Lies

Martha Hudson was forty years old and unmarried when her father passed away, and being a liberal man, he left a sizable trust to his eldest daughter. She went to Scotland for long enough to help her mother and sister arrange the services and pay debts, and then she returned to London to quit her teaching job. She took her money and bought a small two-floor flat, and when the nosy realtor, a clear traditionalist, asked after her husband, she lied: "Oh, he's recently passed. It was always his dream for us to be landlords, but I suppose it's just me now."

And so a husband she'd never sought became part of the fabric of her story: Martha Hudson, widow.