The Flower Woman's Child

By Glenn Kershaw

London, England. The year is 1890, and Captain Sir Geoffrey Branxton, invalided out of the army due to a shoulder wound, finds himself no better occupation than to lower the level of the whisky decanter of his friend, Doctor Richard Argyle, while laying recumbent on the man’s couch.
That is until Countess Claritty Harkwood-Wallace hustles into Dr Argyle’s rooms like a storm front. In her wake, a mother desperately seeing help to find her vanished child. Frustrated with a disinterested police force, Claritty prevails on Dr Argyle for help. But it is a reluctant Geoffrey Branxton who sets out on the strangest adventure of his life.
An Adventure that could affect the very destiny of mankind.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Glenn Kershaw
• Release date: Mar 24, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215007099

Glenn Kershaw

I was born in England, and my family emigrated to Australia when I was ten. I’ve been an electrician, a para-professional Engineering Officer and a Manager. For the last seven years, I’ve volunteered with the Rural Fire Service and have the rank of deputy captain.I have a wonderful wife, three great kids and two grandsons who are my world.At heart, I am and have always been a writer, and to improve my skills, I have studied creative writing at Technical and Further Education College (TAFE) and at the university level acquiring statements of attainment from TAFE, certificate, undergraduate and Master’s degrees from the University of Technology Sydney and Macquarie University.I’ve enjoyed seeing my short stories published in the England Review, the University of Technology Sydney Writers’ Anthology and Macquarie University’s literary journal, The Quarry (twice), and the student magazine, Grapeshot. In addition, online journals such as StylusLit, Australian Reader, and AntipodeanSF.One of my short stories was previously longlisted for the Lane Cove Literary Award here in Australia.I self-published two novels on Amazon and Smashwords, The Flower Woman’s Child and The Winning of the Woman, with a new SF Novel, For the Journey is Long, and Our Lonely World is Lost, recently published on Smashwords

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The Flower Woman’s Child

Being an Adventure of

Countess Claritty Harkwood-Wallace

and

Captain Sir Geoffrey Braxton

By Glenn A Kershaw

Copyright 2023 Glenn Kershaw

Published by Glenn Kershaw at Smashwords

Smashwords Edition License Notes

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 enjoyment only, then please return to Smashwords.com or your favourite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Glenn A. Kershaw asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

Published by Glenn A. Kershaw.

All characters are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely accidental.

Photo by supplied curtesy of www.PxHere.com.

Artwork by Glenn A. Kershaw using GIMP Software.

https://www.gimp.org

Table of Contents

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Other Works

Dedication

I’d like to dedicate The Flower Woman’s Child to my daughters Bronwyn and Amber, my son Ryan, my grandsons Arlo and Toby, and especially to my wife, Trish.

They are the reason and the purpose of my life. To me they represent the light that shines the brightest.

Chapter One

It was a warm summer’s night, as I recall, early in the season after a delightful meal at Talbot’s and an invigorating evening at the Theatre Royal, with the magical notes of Puccini to carry us away from the present troubles of the world, that Claritty and I found ourselves once more in our London digs in the year 1912. As you may know, once Claritty accepted my hand, I took it upon myself to sell my flat and all its memories and together, we purchased a more suitable residence to house ourselves for those times when our adventures inexorably drew us back to London.

Tonight, I reclined in what was so often my position prior to my marriage on the chaise lounge. Actually, my long-suffering friend Dr Richard Argyle’s lounge in his establishment, with the Times in my hands and the rumour of war on my lips while Claritty, laying as though she were a mannequin dumped by some negligent window dresser on the deep armchair that was now her favourite, drew out a melancholy air from the strings of her cello. Life would be so much more tranquil and certainly more harmonious if my dear wife would learn to play the dammed thing. A woman of many, many talents. Music, sadly, was not one of them. The cello was her father’s, so I believe, and, as she often informed me, this artless scraping helped her with the process of thinking.

However, tonight she dragged from it such torturous cries that our housekeeper, dear old Mrs Bay, her complaints ringing loud in my ears, and her notice formally handed in, had dashed from our house never to return. Till the morning, that is.

The direction of this particular ‘musical’ piece was so unusual that I chanced to raise my head above the top of the lounge to catch a glimpse of her. I noted that while her fingers danced across the strings with all their well-remembered, if unskilled, dexterity, the bow was drawn with confidence as always. They were, in fact, alone in their work, for her eyes told me her mind was elsewhere.

I should, perhaps, explain the circumstances that brought us once more back to London from the estate. The reader will recall that Claritty and I had vocally informed all and sundry that our days of gadding about the empire solving this or that little mystery were well and truly finished with. In the future, we could be found at home determined to place all our energy on the upkeep and modernisation of the family estate Claritty had inherited. I, for one, was resolved to be a country man.

Yet, we were frequently recalled from our self-imposed ‘Retirement’ and back to London to pierce the veil of some simple riddle that had left those of a Governmental capacity and the official police lost and running about in circles. The solving of these puzzles had become, for us, something of a hobby. With the children off to Cambridge and Oxford, respectively, we found ourselves seeking out more peaceful endeavours. And Claritty, having missed out on the pleasures of the bedroom in her youth, was all the keener to make up for lost time. Indeed, I consider myself a man of the world and red-blooded to boot, but I was always glad of these respites to gather my strength. With the dark clouds that were even now gathering across Europe, forcing a weary England to re-arm, a desperate government had called on our services once again.

The reader will, of course, be aware of the arrest of the Master Spy, Herr Stocke, and the breakup of his spy ring that had infiltrated to the very highest levels of government and which was so ably reported in the Times. What was not laid before the public’s eye was the significant role my wife and, to a lesser extent, I myself, played in the affair, which, for reasons of national interest, must remain unrecognised.

As you know, from time to time, I have put pen to paper and scribbled down some of our more interesting cases for the enlightenment of the general public. However, the details of that case must remain a secret till the passing of a certain peer of the realm who, even now, is at the forefront of public opinion. Claritty has asked me to speak no more of this matter, and for the love of her, I will happily comply.

We, therefore, found ourselves as free agents, if only for a short time, and living at our London home once more.

Claritty’s working upon the cello abruptly ceased, and she was silent for so long a time I was once again driven to raise my head to see her darling face staring thoughtfully out of the window.

‘I think it is time,’ she said, her eyes focused on some distant object out there in the great expanse of London, ‘to tell that story.’

Chapter Two

The winter of 1890 was cold in a bitter, parsimonious way, with a biting wind that whistled around the chimney pots and down the fireplaces, dashing about the hansom cabs and the legs of the men and women forced out by necessity into the weather. A wind that howled like a tortured beast from the heart of the moors drove all joy from the heart and was followed by a constant chilling rain that hammered at the soul.

As a rule, I loved the life of London: the mixture of races from all over the Empire, their strange tongues (occasionally, I caught a hint of Pushto and was instantly taken back to the ragged, dry and dusty hills and mountains of Afghanistan. Or, rarer still, a smattering of Afrikaans that made me unconsciously touch my shoulder). The exotic scents of their cooking that flavoured the air and took me away from the grim mornings and dark evenings. I found the denizens of this fair metropolis an endless source of fascination and sought them out much as a young buck might chase after an equally young lady. I loved the many restaurants, the theatres and the siren call of the opera. In those days, the air of London was filled with fog, smoke, soot and excitement.

But the winter had turned the city, to my mind at least, into a sour old man. On each of the female passers-by in the street, there appeared to be a tinge of black soot to their cheeks and foreheads making the ladies appear prematurely old and tired. The men seemed to be forever dusting off their own layer of dust, their faces grim and angry.

Everything one touched, banister, doorknob, teacup, felt sticky to the touch, and the air was always damp. The shortened days were often dark from the thick bank of low clouds or the smog that brooded over the city, while the nights were as black as Hades and equally uninviting.

I found myself driven indoors by the inclement weather, feeling the cold sneak past the defences of jacket and cloak, seeping into the innermost marrow of my bones. As was often the case, my shoulder, which had been shattered by a sniper’s bullet while an army officer in South Africa, had come to trouble me again.

‘Can you find no better employment at your own lodgings?’ my dear friend and comrade from my army days, Dr Richard Argyle, asked of me.

I couldn’t, in all fairness, blame him for the frostiness of his back as he worked or the coldness of his tone. All afternoon I had lain prone on his lounge, rattling the Times, harrumphing behind the broadsheet at this or that in the news. I was captured by the fact that the first railway in the Transvaal between Boksburg and Braamfontein in Johannesburg was reported to be opened this coming March. I was lost for some minutes in contemplation, in memory of my days there while in the service of the army. My only other occupation that afternoon was to lower the level of Richard’s whisky decanter.

Richard, on the other hand, was gainfully employed at his writing desk, updating and annotating his lectures for the coming term. His students, I fear, would soon be given the benefit of his drone. While an excellent dentist, I’m sure, and a fine companion when we shared a tent on the plains of the Transvaal, he was such a boring lecturer, I have heard, that his students would rather fail the course and attempt another teacher the following year if they but had the choice. I felt sorry for them that they did not.

So, Richard struggled mightily with this work while my constant stream of comments, remarks and varied complaints about what I took from the paper made concentration for him all the more difficult.

‘You have some sort of engagement in mind, Richard?’ I asked.

My eyes were lured back to the decanter, and while I had visited violence and ruin upon it, there was still nearly a quarter of the dark liquid. Thus, I refilled my glass. At the ‘tink’ of the stopper going home, Richard said, ‘You have your degree. Can you make nothing of it?’

In truth, I had something of a degree and from Oxford too. Though what use it was other than to cover a stain on the wall in my living room, I cannot say. I will admit that since leaving the army, or more correctly since the army left me, I have been at a loss to find a place to pitch my tent, to find some meaningful occupation to fill my days.

‘No,’ I said and emptied my glass a full half measure.

This living room was large enough, rectangular in shape, gloomy and full of shadows. In part, this was due to the choice of rooms with a window facing the afternoon sun, requiring the curtains be drawn after lunch.

The room contained a three-seater lounge and two matching chairs, set facing the roaring fire in the shorter wall so that seated guests had their backs to the window and the cold outside. The single doorway was set midway through the long wall so that as one entered, the sight of