Who Wins?; or, The Secret of Monksworth Waste
May Agnes Fleming
New York: New York Book Company, 1910
180 pages
A woman trudges by night, babe at breast, though England's bleak marshes and ghastly commons. She begs for rest at Leamington, the nearest town, but her brute of a husband is insistent on making a ship that is scheduled to depart from Plymouth the next day. Yet, upon reaching Leamington, he's drawn to the warm lights of the Vine Inn. He does decide stop – but not before blackening his wife's one unblackened eye. "I'm going in for a pot o' porter, mistress," says he; "wait
you here till I come back. The poor woman does just that. Upon her husband's return, she takes up a long, heavy, sharp-pointed stone, "deadly as a dagger," and brings it down on his head:
There was one convulsive bound, one gurgling cry, a spout of hot, red blood, and
then—
The woman turned away with sickening horror from what
lay before her. It was very still, too; there was no need to repeat the blow. She flung the stone away, took one last glance
at the sleeping child, one last, shuddering gaze at that other
still form, then turned swiftly and flitted away into the night.
Time and place shift abruptly to a crowded French vaudeville on the Surrey side of the Thames, where dark-eyed danseuse Miss Rose Adair is giving her farewell performance before returning to Paris. It's the cheapest hot ticket in all of London. A small gathering of slumming military men sit in the more expensive seats:
Very harmless young heroes, their
maiden swords still unfleshed — their maiden pistols preserving
their pristine glitter — dainty carpet knights, great in the
dance, and mighty at the mess-table. They lounged about the
boxes, amusing themselves with sarcastic criticisms on their
neighbors, while waiting for the curtain to rise.
The most envied of their circle is nineteen-year-old Lieutenant Cyril Paget Trevanion; this has less to do with his striking good looks – he has the proportions of "a muscular Apollo" – than it does with his future as Lord of Monkswood Hall, Trevanion Park, and heir to an estate with a rental income of £15,000 per annum (roughly £1,830,000 today). In the immediate, young Trevanion has caught the eye of la belle Rose... and she his. Trevanion's fellow officers see short-term fun, but no future:
"A man can not marry his
grandmother — no more can he marry a little danseuse, particularly at the innocent age of nineteen. Not but that Miss
Rose Adair is pretty enough and sparkling enough to almost
warrant such folly. Trevanion’s deucedly spooney about her,
but there’ll be no marrying, take my word for it. He comes
of a race as proud as the devil.”
What is the connection between these two disparate scenes? Who is the murderess? What happened to her baby? Will Trevanion marry Rose? Can an aristocrat and vaudevillian share a future?
And then there's the title.
Who Wins? Against whom? What's the prize?
As in all May Agnes Fleming novels, answers come in time. Who Wins?, being one of her shortest, they come more quickly and are a touch more obvious. This is not to suggest that the standard elements of a Fleming novel are lacking; murder, extreme wealth, extreme poverty, inheritance, disinheritance, secret identities, secret passages, more murder, and romance all figure.
Hermit or hag? There's always one.
In this case, it's the latter.
Much as I'm loath to use the term, I can't help but describe
Who Wins? as the most meta of the Flemings I've read to date. This has much to do with the mysterious character Angus Macgregor's occupation as a writer of popular fiction. In this scene, acquaintance Charley Chudleigh stops by for a tongue-wag:
"Busy, as usual?" he remarked, lounging in, looking inexpressibly handsome and cool in his summer suit of spotless
linen. "If I disturb the exercises, I'll go." (Macgregor, in
the deep, rose-shaded window-seat, was writing.) "Whereabouts are you? Is Lord Charlemagne Charlemount on his
knees to the lovely Lady Sleepshanks? Or is the Black Bandit
in the act of leaping from the top of the Martello Tower with
the shrieking Aureola Pasdebasque in his arms, or has Rinaldo
Binaldi, the magnificent hero of the tale, the dazzling son of
'poor but honest parents,' just been consigned to the deepest
dungeon beneath the castle moat by that black-hearted scoundrel, the gouty old Marquis of Carabas? Egad! Macgregor, you
sensation novelists are tremendous fellows, and play the very
mischief with the women's noddles. Say the word, and I'll
go; I've the greatest awe of the profession, and wouldn't interrupt a thrilling chapter for countless worlds."
I laughed aloud when reading this passage, in which the valet M François resigns his position:"Mr. Macgregor's valet may seem to have little to do with this veracious history, but Mr. Macgregor's valet was the direct means of bringing about a rapid dénouement."
Who Wins? isn't my favourite Fleming novel – that would be
The Midnight Queen –but as I'm learning there is no bad place to start reading her work.
Give Who Wins? a try if you're looking for one of her shorter reads; whether female or male, she will play with your noddle.
Trivia: Google informs that Plymouth is a 317-kilometre hike from Leamington, estimating sixty-five hours of steady walking between spa town and port city. I expect May Agnes Fleming, a New Brunswicker who never visited England, was unaware of this fact.
Object: My copy was purchased last year from a bookseller in upstate New York. Price: US$12.00. It was once owned by a man named Gerald E. Rule ("from Mother"). The title on its cover and spine drop the question mark, but the title page (above) gets things right. Likely the most recent edition, it was published as part of the New York Book Company's Famous Fiction Library. Amongst the other Canadian titles in the Famous Fiction Library, we find only Mrs Fleming's The Baronet's Bride.
Access: Lauren McMullen's invaluable "Checklist of Works by May Agnes Fleming" suggests that Who Wins? made its print debut serialized in Philadelphia Saturday Night (16 April and 23 July 1870). She records a second serialization under the title The Mystery of Mordaunt Hall, which ran anonymously from 16 July 1870 to 1 November 1870 in the London Journal. Prof McMullen notes that the names of settings and characters are altered in the latter serial.*
Prof McMullen's research suggests that Who Wins? may have first appeared as a book published by New York's Surprise Library. No date is given. The earliest edition that can be read online – New York: Munro, 1895 – is here at the Internet Archive. Those looking to purchase a copy online have two choices: a 110-year-old or so New York Book Company bind-up of The Baronet's Bride and Who Wins? (price: US$15.93) or a nearly-equally-as-old paper-covered Street & Smith edition (price: US$25.00).
I'd be torn.
No pun intended.
* The Mystery of Mordaunt Hall is not to be confused with another novel of the same title serialized in New Zealand's Thames Star (4 February-14 April 1896). It too was published anonymously.
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