"In the late nineteenth century the most popular form of narrative was the penny-dreadful (or shilling shocker, as it was called in England). Some of the tales were written, pseudonymously, by resourceful women who insisted on making a living for themselves."
1 lutching Rodney P. Kellerman's card in a cold fist, Kate V^Ardleigh returned to her bleak third-floor room in Mrs. Murchison's boarding house on Mayberry Street. It was a lodging she had taken only four months before, after the sudden death of her employer, Mrs. Winifred P. Schreiber, whose secretary-companion she had been since leaving Mrs. Daw-son's employ in 1889, five years before. Kate could have (and probably should have, she told herself) sought immediate
reemployment. Mrs. Schreiber's lawyer would have been glad to give her the highest recommendation, as would Mrs. Daw-son, whose three children-dreadful brats! — she had tutored. As she was now a skilled typist (an art she had learned at Mrs. Schreiber's request), she might have sought clerical employment, as well as work as a governess or a companion.
Or she could have returned to her childhood home with her Aunt and Uncle O'Malley, where she would have been greatly welcome. Kate's British father, Thomas Ardleigh, had died before her birth and her Irish mother, Aileen, had similarly succumbed when she was five. The O'Malleys, warmly capacious in their Irish affections, had been mother and father to her, and their six children had been her brothers and sisters. She was deeply attached to them. But while she visited often, returning to live with them would have seemed an admission that she was not capable of making her own way in the world.
Or finally (in Kate's view, it really was a last resort) she could have married. While she was not a conventionally pretty woman, a few men-those not afraid of a strong woman-had been attracted by the intensity of her personality and the depth of her self-composure. She had rejected the attentions of several men, of whom she might have been decently fond if she had made the effort. But she had not. ' 'Decently fond" was not fond enough. Spinsterhood, whatever fear it might strike in the hearts of ordinary women, held no terrors for Kate. She had something else to do, and she intended to do it as long as she could afford private lodgings, lamp oil, paper, and ink-and perhaps, on some glorious day, a typewriter. She intended to be a writer.
Her efforts, under the pseudonym of Beryl Bardwell, had already met with a modest success. "The Rosicrucian's Ruby" and "Missing Pearl" had caught the fancy of Frank Leslie, whose Popular Monthly was hawked by every train boy on every railway in the country. Although he had required her upon revision to spice up her tales with a few more sensational passages than she thought altogether tasteful, the stories had been quickly accepted, and almost as quickly paid for-almost, for she had had to fetch the second payment herself, and wait for it, to boot.
But what was nearly as gratifying as the money was the fact that readers were inundating the publisher with a flood tide of requests for more Beryl Bardwell stories, a tide that lifted Kate's spirits as well as raising the Monthly's revenues. Kate felt on the way to supporting herself by her pen, as long as she could manage to scribble for five or six hours daily without interruption. This was why she had not sought immediate reemployment upon the death of Mrs. Winifred P. Schreiber. If she continued to be successful, she might soon be able to afford the $3.50 per month that was required for the rental of a Remington Standard at The Typewriter Exchange at 10 Barclay Street.
But Beryl Bardwell's literary triumphs were not without their complications. The chief difficulty, Kate reflected as she propped Mr. Kellerman's card against the oil lamp and unbuttoned her wet jacket, was the public's unquenchable thirst for ever more lurid sensation.
Kate's original design had been to write tidy domestic dramas to which she could append her own name, like those of Louisa May Alcott. She had even offered three or four of that sort to publishers, but to no avail. One had sniffed, "Morals, my dear Miss Ardleigh, do not sell. The public wants sensation. Exotic murder and its detection make an excellent story. Try your hand at something like that, and we should be glad to look at it."
Hence, as only the most thrilling story seemed to satisfy the public taste, Kate determined that hers would be shocking, hair-raising, breathtaking adventures, each one set in an exotic setting and peopled with satisfyingly sinister villains. If her success were to be measured by her readers' responses, she had indeed achieved her goal. But the effort, she acknowledged ruefully as she faced her third such thriller, was beginning to wear. She was getting rather tired of writing sensational shockers.
If, however, Beryl Bardwell's effort was the price of Kate Ardleigh's freedom and independence in a world where such commodities were not commonly available to women, Kate was more than willing to pay the price. She read as many penny-dreadfuls as she could, and she had taken to studying
the mysteries of Wilkie Collins and Conan Doyle, although she did not agree with Mr. Holmes's disparaging assessment of women, and Dr. Watson seemed unfortunately sycophantic. But Sherlock was no more. Conan Doyle had recently sent his detective off a cliff, no doubt because he was weary of concocting plots that were sufficiently labyrinthian to trap the reader while providing a way out for the detective. Kate was left with such thrilling American detectives as Cap Collier, whose violent adventures had been popular for over a decade in Mr. George Munro's action-packed dime novels.
In truth, Kate was not happy with these models. Her natural inclination was more to the violence of the heart betrayed than to violent action. But Mr. Coxford reported that Mr. Leslie wished for yet more suspenseful action in her stories, and for more dramatic detail. To that end, she was in the habit of mining every fragment of her rather limited experience for plot, setting, and character. That was why she had felt so much delight to discover that she was the object of attention of Rodney P. Kellerman, of Pinkerton's.
So while the storm wore itself out against her window, Kate sat by the oil lamp, dipped her pen, and began to record in a rapid copperplate hand every detail of the evening, down to the odor of cigars and garlic that had enveloped Mr. Kell-erman's stout and tweedy self like a savory shroud.