Winter at Death's Hotel

Copyright © 2013 by Kenneth Cameron

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The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious and used fictitiously. Apart from well-known historical figures, any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

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First published in 2011 in Great Britain by Orion Books, an imprint of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd, a Hachette UK Company.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cameron, Kenneth M.

Winter at Death's Hotel : a novel / Kenneth Cameron.

pages cm

(paperback : alk. paper) 1. Doyle, Arthur Conan, 1859-1930—Fiction. 2. Authors' spouses—Fiction. 3. Serial murders—Fiction. 4. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. 5. New York—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3553.A4335W56 2013

813'.54—dc23

2013010793

Front Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Back Cover

New York City, January 1896

The New Britannic was one of New York's smaller and finer hotels—the city's finest, in fact, it would have insisted, although people who judged by flash and size would have said otherwise. The very best service and tone, the hotel management asserted—service and tone and taste.
Good
taste, of course, the best taste, matched by hotels like the Criterion in London, as the service and tone were perhaps matched by Brown's.

Most certainly, if you were English and of a certain sort, you stayed at the New Britannic when you were in New York. Of a
certain
sort: not new money, not great peerages, not political power; rather, achievement and reserve and even fame—but of course, no notoriety.

The bronze front doors opened into a paneled space with narrow beams overhead, pillars that rose at intervals of fifteen feet to Egyptian capitals in dark oak. Bronze chandeliers reached down, all electric; real imitation Aubusson stretched away to the mahogany Reception. Around the periphery, straight chairs, heavily carved, not very sittable; toward the center, leather chairs meant to look and be more comfortable; an occasional dark table, a lamp—again electric, of course. Sitting in a leather chair toward the periphery but facing the doors was a man in a dark suit and dark necktie and a very high collar, his face square, a little heavy, displeased; on his upper lip a mustache and a faint sneer of skepticism.

The group coming through the doors was small, only three people but with a lot of luggage, so that it took two “boys” to carry it. The man was noticeable, the two women not: he was tall, heavy, self-confident, dressed in London tailoring and London shoes and a London hat, with a London overcoat, a sprinkle of snow on the shoulders. He strode past the dark man in the leather chair—never noticed him, in fact—and went straight to Reception and said in an oddly high-pitched but loud voice, “I am Arthur Conan Doyle.”

“Of course, sir!” The eminence at Reception, still young but very grand, sounded both impressed and regal.

“Cook's have reserved a suite of rooms.”

“
Yes
, sir.” Said as if some question had been raised about what Cook's had done. He moved a register a fraction of an inch forward, followed it with an inkwell and a pen. “If you would just sign, Mr. Conan Doyle…”

“
Doyle.
‘Conan' is not the patronymic.”

“Ah. Mr.
Doyle
.”

Doyle wore pince-nez, which he touched with a finger as he bent over the register as if he feared losing them. Pen in hand, he read up a column of the names of those who had registered before him. His lips moved, slightly shaking the walrus mustache on the upper one. He occasionally made a joke, in fact, about his looking like a walrus because of his girth and that mustache, although inwardly he cringed at the idea that anybody would make the comparison but he.

“Our other guests at the moment,” the young man said, “include Mr. Henry Irving. Mr. Irving is doing a season at the Lyceum Theatre. And two of the principals of his company are with us, as well.
And
Mr. William Cody!”

Doyle looked up at him. “I
know
Mr. Irving.” Indeed, he had written a play for Irving. “I
don't
know a Cody.”

“Of the Wild West. They're completing an engagement at Madison Square Garden.” He waved a hand, pointing vaguely at Madison Square Garden a block away.

Doyle sniffed. “You seem to have a superabundance of show people.”

“Oh—oh, and we have General Sammartino of Argentina. And Mr. Cyrus Bickle of American Steel. And Miss Marie Corelli, the English novelist!”

A somewhat dour stare suggested that Doyle didn't think of Marie Corelli as a novelist. Or perhaps not as English. He said, “I was assured by Cook's that this would be a quiet, entirely respectable hotel suitable to British sensibilities.”

“We pride ourselves at the New Britannic on our Britishness, Mr. Doyle. We go out of our way to come up to British standards. And as for quiet, this is the quietest hotel in New York. It was
built
to be quiet.” He pushed a pamphlet across the desk:
How
the
City's Quietest Hotel Was Constructed along the Most Modern Lines.

Doyle sniffed again. “We shall be here only a few days, anyway. I am embarking on a lecture tour of the United States.” He signed the register—“Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Conan Doyle and maid.” He hid pretty well his profound annoyance that he couldn't add “and valet,” as his man had got sick on the crossing and had been held for quarantine at Immigration. It left Arthur Conan Doyle—
the
Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the stunning novels and short stories about Sherlock Holmes,
the
Sherlock Holmes—about to begin an exhausting tour with no support except a wife and a lady's maid. Not that his wife wasn't a great help, a huge help, of course. Nobody knew his shirts as she did.

The personage behind the desk nodded to a uniformed inferior, handed over a key, and murmured something about a hydraulic elevator, then smiled and said, “Lift.”

Doyle looked at the woman, looked at the lift, sighed, and said, “Come along, Louisa.”

***

If asked, she'd have said she adored her husband, and she'd have added “of course.” That expression often invites an implied “but,” but she'd never have intended such a thing. She
did
adore him. She was aware of what she called his whims and his eccentricities, but he was a man and so entitled to them; besides, he was a suddenly and phenomenally successful author, also her first and only lover and the father of her two children. When he said, “Come along, Louisa,” she came along. Her eyes, however, did not stop flicking about the hotel lobby as if she were memorizing it. Those eyes were small, blue, shielded by spectacles; the rest of her was slightly plump, a bit settled about the hips and bosom—no doubt about her having had children. Her clothes were expensive and correct and no more than two or three years behind the fashion, as they needed to be to be thought really
proper
. And Arthur didn't like what he called “faddish” clothing, by which he meant noticeable, and which she called “cheap.”

Still, those blue eyes searched the big space as avidly as the eyes of a woman studying a roomful of other women's clothes. She had taken in the man in the dark suit at once, decided he was a hotel detective (she knew that Americans had such things), decided that that was slightly thrilling, filed it away. Now, as she turned to follow her husband, her eyes went to the bronze doors, through which were coming a pretty young woman with wonderful copper-colored hair and a good-looking young man. The woman looked nervous, the man pleased and as sleek as a wet seal. Louisa Doyle saw him trade a look with the hotel detective; something passed between them; the couple came on. (
How
interesting
, she thought,
he's fixed it with the detective and they're having an illicit liaison!
) The woman was chattering—nerves, Mrs. Doyle thought; she's never done this before—her voice gratingly American, quite astonishing, really. How they got those nasal sounds, she couldn't imagine. She must try it when she was alone. And what had happened to the letter G in their participles and gerunds? Thrown overboard to lighten ship so that they could talk as fast as they did?

The copper-haired woman's eyes touched Louisa's, started away but came back, and the two women looked at each other, and suddenly the young woman smiled as if she and Louisa were sharing a wonderful secret. As if they were sisters. The woman looked momentarily radiant, happy (
in
love
, Louisa thought,
oh, my dear
), and then she swept past, still chattering in a whisper to the handsome man.

Louisa Doyle smiled her small, tentative smile. It all pleased her very much. New York had already rewarded her with a small thrill and something to write home about. How nice.

“Come along, Ethel,” she said to her maid.

***

The rooms were precisely what she'd hoped for, more for Arthur's sake than her own; he was particular to a fault (“too fussy to live,” her mother had said). Both rooms had windows looking down on Twenty-Third Street; the sitting room had a small fireplace, the bedroom a bed large enough for anything they might get up to. Arthur could be surprisingly athletic for so large a man; of course, he still played football occasionally. And cricket. Cook's had suggested that the new American fashion was two matching beds, but she had refused, blushing, using the Italian term
lette
matrimoniale
to buffer her embarrassment as she insisted on one bed for the two of them.

A woman friend in their young married days had told her quite a daring joke about marriage and what Arthur called S-E-X: If a newly married couple for their first year put a bean into a jar for every time they made love, and if at the beginning of the second year they took a bean
out
of the jar each time they made love for all the rest of their married life, they'd never empty the jar. That had sounded cynical and depressing to Louisa and still did: she believed that she and Arthur were still, after years, putting beans
into
the jar.

Perfect the rooms were, then, with a perfect bed, and she wished they might stay there longer than a few days before the railways would whisk them off to exciting places named Erie and Buffalo and Milwaukee. But Arthur's career came first.

“I hope
you
have a nice room, Ethel?”

“Oh, very nice, ma'am.” Ethel was unfastening the hooks and eyes at the back of Louisa's bodice. “In the back and upstairs, but quite nice.” The boned bodice was gray velvet with a high collar and gray piping, dull silver beads next to the piping—all quite tasteful, and in fact one of her favorites.

“You must be tired, Ethel. Heaven knows I am. All that hurly-burly of the dock! And no man to help you oversee the luggage.”

“Mr. Doyle helped, ma'am.”

“Well, of course, but…” She meant no manservant to help; Arthur was, after all, the man in charge, the
general
, as it were, of the campaign that had had to fight its way from the dock to this very pleasant hotel. “I do hope that Masters will be released from quarantine quite soon.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“The bustle, please, Ethel.”

The dress had a separate bustle, very dark red wool, almost a brown, the actual bustle
quite
small but with folds of the wool falling to the floor. When it was off, Louisa reached into the opening in the skirt, just where her right buttock began, and undid the ties there, first reaching into the pocket that hung below the opening and taking out her notebook, her pencil, and her beaded change purse. “I'm always forgetting these things.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

Ethel gathered up the skirt as Louisa stepped out of it, leaving her in her gray silk petticoat and corset, also silk, boned, decorated around the top and over the breasts with ecru lace. “Undo me, please, Ethel.” Ethel was folding the skirt; she laid it on the bed, then undid the corset.

Louisa sighed with pleasure as it came off. “Don't you
despise
corsets, Ethel? I simply loathe them. It must be lovely to live in the South Seas where they wear practically nothing at all.”

“Oh, madame.” Said rather perfunctorily.

“Oh!” Louisa stretched. She untied the side fastening of the petticoat and let it fall, leaving her, rather daringly, in form-fitting combinations. She wanted to say,
It's a good thing Arthur can't see me now
, by which she meant it was a too-bad thing, as Arthur would have been excited and they'd have made love. Arthur, however, was out walking, “getting the lay of the land,” as he put it. At any rate, she couldn't say such a thing to her maid, so she said, “Who helps you with your fastenings and corset and all, Ethel?” She meant, corsets were the devil to get in and out of, so did the maids help each other?

“I do myself, ma'am.”

Louisa saw her in a mirror. Ethel was blushing. She supposed it was the idea of having help in undressing, perhaps the idea of a man's helping. Ethel was plain, in fact quite homely—“homely as a mud fence,” Louisa had heard a man say of a woman once, though she'd never seen a fence made of mud. And at forty, surely Ethel was far past any dreams of men. Surely. Not that Louisa was any raving beauty herself—not enough chin, rather too little nose, too—but she had never thought of herself as
plain.

“I can fend for myself now, Ethel. You go and have a nap.”

“You should have a nap, ma'am; remember you've been ill.”

Louisa was supposed to have had tuberculosis, but she didn't acknowledge it and didn't accept the diagnosis and hated the idea. She'd had a stay in Switzerland because Arthur had insisted. She thought it was all nonsense. “I'm quite fit now, Ethel.”

“I'll just hang these things up, then, ma'am.” One of the steamer trunks was open and sitting on its end; a cave full of clothes was visible. As Ethel hung her dress in it, Louisa moved about the handsome room in her combinations. She tried the bed, found it gratifyingly firm but bouncy; she stood by a window and looked down on the tops of carriages and people's hats. New York City! She had been told that New York was terrifically energetic and quick, full of people perpetually on the run. London seemed to her about as much city as the world could want or need. Could New York be bigger? Quicker, noisier, grittier? London had had its underground for decades; what did New York have? Something called “the El,” trains that ran along next to people's windows, which she would hate, she knew. The idea of people looking in her windows, looking into her
life,
appalled her.