Mr. Ridley: A Whipping Society Novel Read online

  Mr. Ridley

  A Whipping Society Novel

  Delilah Marvelle

  Contents

  Title Page

  PLEASE READ

  Glossary of Terms

  PROLOGUE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  The Whipping Society Saga

  For those who live in the shadows.

  Your day of light will come.

  My dearest Reader,

  Unlike most historical romances that feature a hero and heroine whose journey and love for each other ends at a mere one book, I am extending a unique invitation for you to join in on a much bigger love story.

  * * *

  When Ridley and Jemdanee first appeared to me, and their pages started to go beyond what two books could hold, I realized they needed three books. This begins The Whipping Society Saga.

  * * *

  While I will ensure each full length book ends without dangling your hearts too far over the edge of impatience, please come to this book and those to follow as you would to an episode of your favorite TV show. Many questions will be answered, others not. Each book will be wrapped up in its own way, but obviously….for there to be more, not everything can be resolved.

  * * *

  Please note this is still very much a historical romance, simply done on a three book scale. It’s my hope you enjoy spending an unusual amount of time with Ridley and Jemdanee as each book brings them to closer to the people they must become to embrace what awaits them: true love. I thank you for being a reader.

  Much love,

  Delilah Marvelle

  GLOSSARY OF TERMS:

  Arrey -- Expression of surprise in Hindi. Like ‘Hey!’

  Bhang lassi -- a drink made of yogurt or milk, spices, rose water and cannabis (weed).

  Bidi -- Indian cigarette made from tobacco rolled in an ebony tree leaf.

  Blackamoor -- offensive term for a dark skinned person.

  Challo -- ‘Let us go’ in Hindi.

  Chowkidar – guard in Hindi.

  Coca/Limestone combination -- prior to the first known extraction and isolation of “cocaine” from coca leaves back in 1859, crushed limestone was used to draw out the “high” from coca leaves. The coca leaf by itself gives the user a heightened effect of modern caffeine.

  Écritoire -- a piece of furniture used for writing.

  Goonda -- thug or miscreant in Hindi.

  Haan -- Yes in Hindi.

  Ici – There or Right Here in French

  Ipecacuaha -- the dried root of a shrubby South American plant.

  Ipomoea Alba -- Known as a moon flower given the white flowers only bloom by the light of the moon at night and close when sunlight touches it. Native to tropical and subtropical regions of the New World.

  Phaujee -- Soldier or male constable in Hindi.

  Jee – A formal response to a yes or in answer to a question in Hindi.

  Kali -- Known also as Kalika, a Hindu goddess.

  Kancha – a favorite game for many young boys in India using marbles.

  Katar -- a type of dagger that sits on the knuckles originating from the Indian subcontinent.

  Knee Splitter – two spiked wood blocks placed in back and in front of the knee. When turned, they destroy the kneecaps. Originally used during the Inquisition.

  Laudanum – an alcoholic based solution or morphine/opium used for pain.

  Maa -- mother in Hindi.

  Memsahib -- a white foreign woman of high social status living in India.

  Nahin -- No in Hindi.

  Pita -- father in Hindi.

  Rhus acuminata – A sumac similar to poison oak. Grows in China, Bhutan, India and Nepal.

  Saali – expression of disgust, derogatory in Hindi.

  Sahib -- An Urdu honorific as a term of respect that is the English equivalent of ‘Sir’.

  Sepoy -- an Indian soldier serving under British or European orders.

  Shiva -- One of the principle deities of Hinduism.

  Shrew’s Fiddle -- 2 pieces of wood or steel for the neck and wrists that is locked with a hinge. Originally used in the middle ages to punish women caught bickering or brawling.

  Sonti -- a rice-based Indian alcoholic beverage similar to sake.

  Spilanthes -- Spilanthes Acmella (known as the Toothache Plant, Paracress). In history, its medicinal usage was related to pain relieving properties.

  Ullu ke patha -- Son of an owl or idiot in Hindi.

  Yeh lo, saaph ho gaya -- ‘Here, it is clean’ in Hindi.

  * * *

  HISTORICAL CHARACTERS:

  Eugène François Vidocq – Born in France, July 24, 1775, died in Paris, May 11, 1857. Considered to be the father of modern criminology. He is regarded as being the first private detective in history. After leading a life of crime, he converted his acquired skills as a delinquent to assist police in capturing men like himself. Countless writers in history modeled characters after him. Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables (1862) featured a reformed criminal Valjean and Inspector Javert, are both modeled after Vidocq. Other works he inspired include Moby Dick by Herman Melville, Great Expectations by Charles Dickens and the very first detective created in fiction by Edgar Allen Poe, C. Auguste Dupin in The Murders in Rue Morgue (1841). Surprised that it wasn’t Sherlock Holmes? Edgar Allen Poe beat Conan Doyle to the quill by almost 46 years! This is why I gave Ridley a raven. It’s my homage to Edgar Allen Poe whose brilliant detective, Dupin, is never given the homage he deserves.

  Mrs. Theresa ‘Elizabeth’ Berkley -- Died in London, England in September of 1836 (year of birth and age unknown). She was a British dominatrix who owned a high-class flagellation brothel at 28 Charlotte Street. There is no source pointing to an actual name of the brothel or any depiction of what she herself might have looked like, only that she was ‘attractive’ with a strong ‘disposition’. She earned a sizable fortune by becoming the Michelangelo of torture devices and designing contraptions for men and women who derived pleasure from pain.

  * * *

  The ‘Berkley Horse’, as an example, was designed by her in 1828 to be able to flog a man’s backside whilst another could pleasure his front side. Bald-cunted Polly and Ebony Bet are actual names of two women that worked for her. After Mrs. Berkley’s death, she left a valued estate of £100,000 (today’s sum of approximately $3 million!). She bequeathed it to her brother who was a missionary man in Australia. When he realized how his own sister had earned her substantial fortune (for the naughty thing never told him…), he refused to take a farthing of it, relinquishing his rights. The entire estate went to the Crown.

  PROLOGUE

  London, England - 1810

  A tale without a fairy.

  Sometime between the hour of one and four in the morning, a frayed slipper was left on the marble stair of an opulent house.

  The heel was covered in blood.

  So was the massive bedchamber, where gilded mirrors had been smashed and ornate furniture overturned, revealing an endless maze of rare books and a blood-smeared floor.

  It was there the constables found renown philanthropist Bartholomew Edgar Ridley lying in a pool of blood that fingered out in endless streams, soaking parchments as old as the Crusades. His nude body had been cleaved with an axe, pieces of him flung as far as the ceiling.

  Nothing had been taken. Not even a wad of bank notes left on the écritoire.

  Yet tucked
into the gore of Mr. Ridley’s broken sternum was the feather of a black raven.

  Its macabre meaning was examined by many but understood by none.

  Whatever truth was lost by the gruesome broadsides everyone now sought to purchase for halfpence on the street, it did not change the tragic events now known as The Black Raven Murder.

  Mr. Ridley’s twelve-year-old son was all that remained. His head had been bludgeoned and his body stuffed into a trunk whose lock had to be smashed to get to him. Miraculously, he survived.

  His French-born mother, who had been separated from his father, rushed to be at his side.

  From that moment forth, Evan Oswald Ridley became London’s greatest preoccupation.

  Bystanders and journalists crowded at the gates of his mother’s abode shouting endless questions about the gruesome murder and what the boy did or did not see.

  Little is known about Evan after that.

  Some insist the incident had deranged him, forcing him into Bedlam. Others claim he was sent to France to reside with his mother’s cousin, a ‘police spy’ known as Eugéne Vidocq.

  What is known is that many years later, an estate lawyer delivered a sizable stack of documents to this unusual young man living in Paris who had inherited an equally unusual legacy. An astounding collection of rare books worth over a quarter of a million stuffed into a massive house, which had been locked up since the murder, now belonged to Evan Oswald Ridley.

  To the horror of polite society, he returned to London and moved into the abandoned house.

  It was there, at 221 Basil Street, Ridley became the whisper of every woman’s fantasy and every criminal’s living nightmare.

  Chapter 1

  London, England – July 1830, late evening, Millbank Prison overlooking the Thames

  This rot of an English prison reminded her of the forty-three nights she had once spent beneath a manure cart as an orphan in Calcutta. With the exception, of course, that she was only on day three of her imprisonment in a country that was not her own.

  Aside from the stone walls and the roaches and the thick, murky substance dripping from the low ceiling reeking of human sewage, what made her incarceration doubly intolerable was that every last one of these blue coats treated her like a buffalo in need of intelligence.

  Last she knew, she was the only female back in India to have THE prominent and highly-educated Parsee, Limazah, navigate her through the world of botany. All of it enthusiastically and generously paid for by her guardian, Dr. Peter William Watkins.

  Phytology was a field dominated by men, yet one she could snap her fingers at both above and below her head to provide answers half of them needed a book for.

  She, and no other, had an extensive collection of flora from over sixty-three countries that filled over thirteen massive greenhouses with specimen most of these warders had never even heard of. All of it labelled. All of it categorized by its classification and taxonomy like books in a massive library on a shelf that never ended.

  That alone ought to be respected.

  She had already briskly informed the sour-breathed British authorities more than twice that she was a proper lady and they ought to remove their hands if they knew what was good for them. Never mind the prostitutes, goat herders and shoals of hawkers she'd grown up with as a child who would have probably laughed hard enough to rattle the lice right out of their hovels.

  She refused to incriminate herself by admitting that ten years earlier, her curtain of black hair had to be shaved to the scalp to permit regrowth without intractable knots and that her malnourished and filthy body had to be scrubbed and fed and fed by Dr. ‘pita’ Watkins.

  She was proof that no life was expendable, no life was hopeless.

  It took her ten years to perfect the reading, writing, and speaking of the English language.

  It took her ten years to perfect mimicking the prim, pert-nosed memsahibs surrounding her.

  That wasn’t to say she had forgotten her past.

  Far from it. Prior to traveling into London, she still snuck out late at night to smoke bidis, played kancha for money with sepoys, floated naked in the river watching vast copper-colored skies smear into dawn, and took pleasure in kissing countless young, Persian merchants who considered her blue eyes exotic.

  She should have never agreed to leave India.

  “Move along,” the British warder bellowed.

  To ensure she remained calm through whatever interrogation lay ahead, Jemdanee steadied her breaths and dug into a strength far mightier than despair.

  She dug out what few did in their darkest hour: hope and humor.

  A hope to make it to another day and humor to ensure she didn’t cry.

  “Rattle those chains already,” the warder called, rolling his hand. “Move!”

  In an attempt to maintain her pace, Jemdanee grudgingly trudged onward against the substantial weight of the chains, clinking and staggering forward as she maneuvered down the lantern-lit stone corridor that led to the custodian office.

  It was a ridiculous amount of chains. She was only five feet in height and eight stone.

  “I am not an animal, goonda,” she pointed out, in case the warder had any doubt. “I am the legal ward of Army surgeon Dr. Watkins who has worked under the jurisdiction of the Crown since eighteen hundred and fourteen. Do you have any idea how far his reach lies? He once removed a bullet from the Field Marshal’s own chest on the same riverbank where crocodiles gather for amusement. No small feat given open wounds invite the wild to indulge, and yet I was there delivering gauze and tonics into his blood-soaked hands given no other man would. Together, we saved his life. I doubt you ever saved anyone.”

  The warder snapped toward her, his bulbous features reddening.

  She decided to desist lest he backhand her. “That was uncalled for. I apologize and will say no more. You are merely doing what you are paid to do and I can and will respect that.”

  He grunted and waved her on.

  The iron manacles burned her chafed wrists as the iron bar strapped against her corseted waist strained her shoulders and forearms with too many chains, clanging against every movement.

  Jemdanee bore each thick, weighing ring with whatever panache she could.

  Somehow, barely minutes after arriving into the elbowing crowds of London three days earlier, she had accidentally been separated from Dr. Watkins. Carpet bag in hand, she had hurried over to a display window full of bonnets, chuckling at how ridiculous it was of women to wear bouquets on their heads as if women were vases, then gaped at all of the people and the looming buildings without any regard to where she was going and…lost sight of Peter.

  She couldn’t remember the street of the hotel they were supposed to be lodging in, so she did what any intelligent person would do. She breezed into a magistrate building known as ‘Scotland Yard’ and had asked for assistance in locating the hotel.

  The bindi spangle must have scared them.

  Not one, not two, but three constables rifled through her belongings and demanded to know about the strange jars, copper instruments, and unknown substances that included a variety of rare indigenous seeds. Without any documentation (for Peter had it…), one of the constables grabbed her by the neck.

  She had the bruises to prove it.

  The ullu ke patha even charged her with indecent exposure for wearing a sari. They might as well have accused her of witchcraft.

  The custodian room opened, revealing lanterns in the darkness. “Go in,” the warder announced.

  It was late and all of the other prisoners were sleeping.

  It was the only warning she needed.

  Much like she always did, she used the weapon of conversation for the purpose of civilized advancement, despite the chains weighing her wrists. “I do not believe we were ever properly introduced. I abide by the name of Miss Jemdanee Lillian Watkins. ‘Tis a very fine British name that miraculously found my soul at the age of eight. Though my guardian will argue as to its meani
ng, Wat is a Buddhist temple and kins is an expression of an endearment. It reminds me to live up to its noble worth, despite my not being a Buddhist at all. And you are...?”

  The warder dragged in a snot and then spit, eyeing her. “Jeremiah Samuel Flank. Flank. Like the arse of a horse I’ve yet to own given the governor ain’t payin’ me enough. Now be you done flirtin’, blackie?”

  Blackie? If she used the chains to choke him, Peter would probably do more than take the keys to her greenhouses. He’d burn them all down. “You seem like a very reasonable gentleman, Mr. Flank.”

  “Oh, I be that and more.” His breath reeked of calves’ foot jelly. “I be the most reasonable gent you’ll ever meet on this side of the river.”

  Either he was being sarcastic or this was going very well. “Given I am only familiar with British customs through my guardian and what I have seen back in Calcutta, might I—”

  “Move the braid already!” The warder grabbed the back of her neck and shoved her in. “Damn blackamoor be flirtin’ with me.”

  Stumbling into the windowless room lit by lanterns, the warder slammed the door shut.

  A grumbling breath escaped her.

  She’d sooner flirt with a crocodile and fold both arms around its scale-ridden neck.

  Unlike the other female prisoners kept in the north-west tower of Millbank, whose shouts she could hear through the stone walls on the hour like peacocks, she had never been one to scream. Too many nights spent alone on the streets of Calcutta had long cured her of that. She’d seen men do things to each other that made this British prison look like a festival decorated with silk banners.

  Jemdanee paused realizing…she wasn’t alone.

  A gentleman leaned over the custodian’s desk paging through a ledger. A satchel was set beside him. He disregarded the chair he stood beside, displaying an imposing height of over six feet. He continued to intently page through the ledger, spreading his knee-high black boots into a domineering, long-legged stance that announced she was now under his jurisdiction.