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    The Melancholy Scion: A Lizzie Borden, Girl Detective Mini-Mystery
    The Melancholy Scion: A Lizzie Borden, Girl Detective Mini-Mystery
    The Melancholy Scion: A Lizzie Borden, Girl Detective Mini-Mystery
    Ebook104 pages1 hour

    The Melancholy Scion: A Lizzie Borden, Girl Detective Mini-Mystery

    By Richard Behrens

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Introducing Miss Lizzie Borden of Fall River, Massachusetts, a most excellent girl detective and the most remarkable young woman ever to take on the criminal underworld. Many years before her infamous arrest and trial for the murders of her father and stepmother, Lizzie Borden pursued a career as a private consulting detective as chronicled in this clever and imaginative series of short stories. When Andre de Camp, the Melancholy Scion of Fall River, joins Lizzie Borden the Girl Detective in search of a stolen industrial document, the fate of Eastern Europe rests in their hands. Can they outwit master spies to advert a world war? Who are the Sporting Boys? And what is the Arcady Society? This is Lizzie’s most exciting and romantic adventure yet!

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRichard Behrens
    Release dateFeb 14, 2015
    ISBN9781311504890
    The Melancholy Scion: A Lizzie Borden, Girl Detective Mini-Mystery
    Author

    Richard Behrens

    Richard Behrens is the co-founder of Nine Muses Books and author of the Lizzie Borden, Girl Detective series of mysteries. He is a contributor to The Hatchet: A Journal of Lizzie Borden and Victorian Studies as well as The Literary Hatchet, both available from PearTree Press. He is a regular lecturer on eccentric Victorian women and silent film comedy and often gets confused about what century he lives in. A native New Yorker, now living in New England, Richard is working on several more Lizzie Borden, Girl Detective mysteries including two novels: The Minuscule Monk (2015) and The Wilmarth Immovables (2016).

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    • 3/5
      Nancy Drew meets Lizzie Borden. With loads and loads of self-awareness, tongue firmly in cheek. This was super cute and fun.

    Book preview

    The Melancholy Scion - Richard Behrens

    MelancholyScion.jpg

    The Melancholy Scion

    A Lizzie Borden, Girl Detective

    Mini-Mystery #4

    Richard Behrens

    6935.png

    NINE MUSES BOOKS

    Copyright © 2015

    Smashwords Edition

    Published by Nine Muses Books at Smashwords

    Copyright © 2015 Richard Behrens

    All Rights Reserved

    A Lizzie Borden, Girl Detective Mini-Mystery #4

    www.lizziebordengirldetective.com

    www.ninemusesbooks.com

    Cover illustration: Lizzie Cameo by Marc Reed

    www.marcreed.com

    This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment

    only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

    This story first appeared in The Literary Hatchet.

    Reprinted by permission of PearTree Press

    Nine Muses Books

    New England, USA

    August 1927. Fall River, Massachusetts.

    1. Pressed In Lavender

    For Lizzie Borden, Andre de Camp will always be the Poet.

    In all her sixty-six years on earth, she had never been known to pay such reverence, silent or otherwise, to any member of the male sex, whether to applaud virtue or to praise physical elegance. But Andre de Camp, scion of a wealthy French family that had relocated to Fall River in the summer of 1877, a tall, brooding, and decidedly handsome bachelor of nineteen years, the product of private civilized education, brilliant and concisely intelligent, fastidious in his manly dress, and precise in his manners, held a special place in Lizzie’s estimation of the masculine half of humanity.

    She first glimpsed him at a mid-summer charity event in the church hall of the First Congregational. Standing with his illustrious family—the father wearing proudly a decorated uniform, the mother and sister posed upright with pious concentration—Andre bowed his head towards Lizzie, just once, as if in humble supplication before a higher power. The gesture sent a chill through Lizzie’s being.

    She quickly became impressed with how the de Camp men were so very different from the money-driven barons who banked her city, the uncultured industrialists who would never design a cathedral or build an opera hall lest they consider it a foolish dollar spent. Andre de Camp may have been spawned from that same society class, yet he brought with it all the cultured elegance of Paris and the dark mysteries of the southern Languedoc, far-off locales that Lizzie had admired, through sepia photographs of mountainous regions with lush outcroppings and deep-veined soil, a land she thought had existed only in her dreams.

    Andre was a graceful aristocratic youth who, like herself, was more comfortable with the personal passions and the aesthetics of every day life than with the complexities of commerce. She saw in him not the proud Marshals and Presidents of France’s dusty past, nor the great Sun Kings in their splendid palace, but the simple shepherds from the paintings of Poussin, the noble musketeers of Dumas, and the provincial people of the tales of Flaubert. He embodied in his presence all the excitement, adventure, and beauty that she had admired in the great French paintings and novels that made their way to various Fall River parlors for her cultural edification. In her opinion, he far outpaced in every manner the collective men of his generation.

    But for the rest of her days she would never speak his name aloud. Even as an aging woman of the Hill, secluded in her summer bedroom in the rambling Maplecroft, her manse and hermitage, alone as she looked back upon a dark and hidden life, she would only speak of Andre as the Poet, and then briefly, and then only to a chauffeur or a domestic who was not of her generation, who would never have heard of the de Camp family, or would never repeat her words to anyone in town who may have known them, and then only when she was caught off guard with some seizure of nostalgia for a Fall River that had once been and now was no more.

    But when the glimmer came in her aging eyes, and she spoke of the Poet, when she made oblique references to faces and places now lost to time and memory, when she hinted that once she had loved and felt within her breast a singular passion the likes of which had never been repeated, it was the summer of 1877 and the Case of the Melancholy Scion where her thoughts took her. Back to a time before she was the secluded spinster on the Hill, before she sat alone in church because no fellow citizens would occupy the pews adjoining hers, before she was accused of that terrible crime whose shadow she would never escape; back when she was young and fresh and alive, to the time when she walked the streets of Fall River with Andre de Camp, who also was young and fresh and alive, and who, despite her unwillingness to let her heart be so directly touched, had truly loved her.

    Back when she was Lizzie Borden, Girl Detective.

    2. Unsettling Revelations

    1877. Fall River. South Main Street. Andrew Jackson Borden took his pre-dinner constitutional starting from the front of his quaint Greek revival house on Second Street towards the tonsorial parlor, the post office, and the apothecary to respectively get a shave, check for his mail, and to inquire about the gastro-esophageal disruption pills his wife Abby needed for her burning chest pains. Threading his way through the narrow streets, surrounded by the bustle of pedestrian traffic, the whinnying of nags, the clattering of buggies, and the hawking of the fish mongers, Andrew turned to survey the town that had given him birth and had nurtured him through his rise to prosperity.

    So many real estate properties, he thought to himself. So many empty lots. If only I could possess them all, to have that locus of power over the domestic and commercial fate of every individual in Fall River. He allowed himself this one pure moment of magnitude, imagining an inflated likeness of himself that lay unrealized by his business colleagues, and then, with a wistful grin that barely moved the edge of his mouth, pushed on towards the barber for his weekly trimming.

    At that very moment, a short, squat man with a bulbous nose and bristling mustache stopped in front of Andrew, ungraciously blocking his path.

    You’re A. J. Borden, I believe!

    Andrew lifted his chin proudly. I do have that honor.

    The man’s mouth made a strange mumbling motion and, before Andrew could take refuge in flight, his assailant bellowed an almost incomprehensible Feeeyaaaah! and a shapeless wad of saliva came flying across the distance between them, landing with sickening thwack on Andrew’s cheek.

    Here’s for your thievery and your damned Ullsworth! the man shouted in the wake of his violating payload. Take a rest in one of your own flimsy coffins, why don’t you? Hang ye be to Arcady! Then the man was gone, leaving Andrew to wipe away his indignity with a hastily drawn handkerchief.

    Ullsworth? Andrew pondered as a few passers-by giggled and pointed. Could that be the family he

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