Title: Ladies in Distress, Part 1/4
Author: Sherry Thornburg
Author's Email: Thornburgs77 a gmail
Feedback: Yes, please
Permission to Archive: Privately only, with notice to me and where it is.
Category: Suspense
Rating/Warning: T
Main Characters: Sir Jonathan Chatsworth and Phileas and Rebecca Fogg
Disclaimer: SAJV and original characters copywrite Tailsman/Promark/etc., no infringement is intended.
Summary: Sir Jonathan Chatsworth discovers an old friend's wife taken advantage of by a conman. When he discovers the man's repeated villainy against women includes domestic and international espionage, he takes up the cause, enlisting Phileas and Rebecca. Their cat-and-mouse chase delves into the plight of women in Victorian society and explores Rebecca's relationships with Phileas and Chatsworth. This is a novel-length story.
Chapter 1
Sir Jonathan Chatsworth entered his club for dinner with an old friend, Daniel Tomlinson. He walked through the halls to the dining room, making an unexceptional impression on those around him. Sir Jonathan was a middle-aged bachelor with thinning but still light brown hair and a thickening figure. A course suffered by the men of his family at his age, no matter how active one tried to be. Even so, he ate lightly these days so as not to help it along. He dressed well, but was conservative, and did nothing to stand out. Overall, he was dead average, an unofficial requirement of his profession.
Where Sir Jonathan shined was in his choice of careers. From the start, this younger son had decided politics was for him. Young Jonathan had studied law and started working his way up the political chain through a friend of his father. A mere eight years later, he was a well-known political veteran. He never sought public office, but had established himself behind the scenes, learning how government bureaucracy worked and how to make it work for him. In his most private dreams, there was a wish to run for public office, maybe even for the Office of Prime Minister, if it came to pass.
But then he met Sir Boniface Fogg.
The head of the Secret Service had been an imposingly brilliant man. When Sir Boniface had entered his office, Chatsworth had thought he would ask for help to drive some state security policy. He was often asked for such help, but never had he expected to be asked to change the tracks of his career.
Becoming Sir Boniface's political liaison boosted his clout. In return, Chatsworth repaid his new benefactor with consummate deliberation. It had been a good association earning him a knighthood in time and making Sir Jonathan a major force in state security.
He had never aspired to become head of the service; not really. That was to go to Sir Boniface's eldest son. Government positions, like professional practices and family businesses, were often passed down.
Musing about his successes invariably recalled less pleasant memories, such as the revered Sir Boniface's eldest son. Just thinking of the name made his thin lips press together in consternation.
Sir Jonathan considered Phileas Fogg a younger, slightly less imposing version of the father. He was tall, handsome, and had all the advantages and arrogance of an eldest son. His public persona was exactly what one expected of a privileged elder son, a spoiled dandy. A disreputable fop who gambled, chased women, and drank his life aimlessly away. Professionally, however, the man was very much the opposite. Chatsworth had to give him his due; Phileas Fogg had been a superb, even brilliant agent. He could out-fence, out-shoot, and out- investigate any other.
I should have found a way to work with him, but I took an instant dislike to him from the moment we met. It could have been birth order envy, or perhaps the fact that Phileas was a little too perfect and knew it. The younger man, in my eyes, was too arrogant by half and had a piercing gaze that laid one bear to the bone. It could also have been the way Phileas made no secret that he differed with his father about taking a career politician into the fold.
Our acidic rivalry sharpened in response to Sir Boniface's management style. He expected absolute perfection of his agents and employees. While he had acknowledged accomplishment in strangers, he always found his sons wanting.
I still remember watching Sir Boniface drill both Phileas and his younger son Erasmus. They had it harder than any other agent. They had been required to hold to a higher standard of deportment, went on tougher missions, and Sir Jonathan suspected they were tasked with some of the darker duties of state security, Phileas specifically. In my disdain, I mistook true disapproval for his training methods. The father's constant critics of his son's efforts became a tool against Phileas. When he made some backhanded remark about my soft status as desk clerk, I shot back with whatever slight his father had recently treated him to.
Sir Jonathan sighed. Youthful nonsense. Had Phileas taken the seat, I'd have been tossed to the curb forthwith, and should have been. Took me years in Sir Boniface's shoes before admitting to that foolishness.
Then disaster struck the service.
The Fogg brothers had been sent into Prussia on a mission gone horribly wrong. The younger son was killed and lost. The elder came home broken in body and spirit. Rumors flew about father and son clashing in titan form. Phileas Fogg formally resigned from the service, never to return. And I was given the position of heir apparent.
A nerve-racking change, getting the full force of the man's training style directed at me. Going on missions with veteran agents and being found lacking in every aspect. "Well," Sir Boniface said after dishing out a vocal thundering, "I didn't hire you for your battle prowess. Do what you do best, then, but learn what our agents face."
My saddest, most frightening day was when he died so suddenly. But I walked into his office and single-mindedly dedicated myself to every aspect of the service. Only now am I getting comfortable in the position. Still have a lot to learn, and to that end, my meeting this evening.
There he is. "Daniel," Sir Jonathan called out.
Daniel Tomlinson turned and gave Sir Jonathan a ready smile. He stepped forward and shook his hand. "I was surprised by your invitation."
Sir Jonathan smiled. "It has been too long, for sure, much too long and I suppose we have much to talk about, but my motives are also business. Your research has been brought to my attention, and I was hoping you would interpret some of it. If it can improve investigative work, I am highly interested.
"Ah," Daniel said. "I would be glad to explain it to you, but I doubt it would make pleasant conversation over our meal. Let's go to my home when we are fed, and I shall show you how it applies."
Sir Jonathan a Daniel rode in his closed coach back to the doctor's home in a once fashionable part of London. Doctors usually lived in the part of town where they practiced and his old friend practiced out here, in a clinic for the poor in the better end of town once known as Cheap Side. Daniel's research afforded him a good living to feed his body and comforts, and the indigent clinic fed his soul's need to help humanity. It also afforded Daniel the steady stream of mayhem required to test his theories.
Dr. Daniel Tomlinson, according to his background report, had started out his medical career in a fine, upstanding hospital, which Chatsworth already knew, but he had later become fascinated with the investigative science of discovering clues to crimes from the victim's own body and surrounding effects. He had been working with the London Police and had been noticed by Scotland Yard authorities recently. That had brought him to the attention of the Secret Service, which had a friendly but standing rivalry with the Yard over who implemented the best new methods successfully.
It was a comfortable old home, one of the larger in the neighborhood. Daniel's parlor was sparsely but tastefully appointed. The dark woods and leather upholstery, along with the absence of feminizing effects, branded it a bachelor's home.
Daniel started by explaining gun and finger printing: how the barrel of a gun scarred bullets in the same way every time and how the swirls in the tips of fingers were individual to the person and a positive identifying mark. "These are not accepted methods for investigations as yet," he said. "It is still a debated science, but I have faith their merits will be recognized in time."
By the time the doctor was finished, Chatsworth understood how useful they could be.
Daniel then moved on to other studies. He explained his ideas on gaining a description of a suspect through shoe prints in mud, just as hunters did with animals. He said it could leave tells of a person's sex, height, and weight. "The thrust of a knife into a body will also tell such things." He said, and enthusiastically explained in full gory detail, giving Sir Jonathan a queasy feeling, wondering if his old friend wasn't getting macabre in his research.
Before Daniel could get any further into those subjects, the dissertation was interrupted by noises at the back of the house. Pounding and cries outside at the clinic entrance boomed across the house. Violent rapping came to the front door too. Daniel got up and asked his guest to excuse him.
Through the open door of the parlor, Chatsworth heard a woman screaming and another talking fast and franticly, trying to be heard over the other's wailing. That and the pounding of feet on floorboards combined to make it all an unintelligible babble.
Sir Jonathan did not need to hear more to know his friend's duty would keep him busy. As the interview was essentially over, he took up his hat and cane and prepared to leave his friend to his late-night work.
That will require entering the mayhem of the clinic to let Daniel know I'm leaving.
Bracing himself against whatever the situation was, Sir Jonathan headed for the clinic door.
Through the door, Sir Jonathan saw Daniel in deep conversation. He nodded a quick goodbye to his friend on the way to the chair lined back hall by the outer door that made a waiting room.
When he turned into the small hall, he came face to face with a frenzied woman being dragged into the clinic by a young man of about nineteen. He stepped back to let them pass, but stopped cold in shock. I know that woman's face. He had never seen it in this contorted form before, but the woman being dragged inside was Katrina McTavish, without a doubt. She had been the wife of another doctor friend from years before.
Mrs. McTavish was wearing a blue traveling dress with a matching jacket a few years past fashionable. The jacket was torn at one shoulder and the buttons at the throat were undone. The skirt was a mess from the hem up to knee level, as if she had hiked through water and mud. Her hair was a tangle of blonde curls, half in and half out of their pins. But it was her face that startled him the most. She was panicked, tear-stained and terrified.