The Secret of Greylands Read online

  Annie Haynes

  The Secret of Greylands

  “There’s no dirty trick he wouldn’t play—it’s my belief that he wouldn’t even stop at murder!”

  Her husband unmasked as a scoundrel, Lady Cynthia Letchingham seeks refuge at her cousin Hannah’s north-country home Greylands. But on Cynthia’s arrival, she finds Hannah an invalid, having recently suffered a mysterious paralysis; the house is devoid of servants, and Hannah’s husband, charming and sinister by turns, keeps watch over everything and everyone. Only the presence of charming Sybil Hammond and a darkly handsome neighbour relieve the atmosphere for Cynthia – but then a dark red stain appears mysteriously on the sleeve of her coat…

  What has really happened to Hannah, and the other entangled mysteries along the way, make The Secret of Greylands (1924) an absorbing golden age crime novel matching Wilkie Collins’ high Victorian gothic to the agility of early jazz age fiction. This new edition, the first in over eighty years, features an introduction by crime fiction historian Curtis Evans.

  “Not only a crime story of merit, but also a novel which will interest readers to whom mystery for its own sake has little appeal.” Nation

  “Full of thrills and unexpected developments.” Star

  “A most skilfully written detective story and the mystery is carried through quite brilliantly.” Clarion

  “A capital story— highly ingenious.” Truth

  The Mystery of the Missing Author

  Annie Haynes and Her Golden Age Detective Fiction

  The psychological enigma of Agatha Christie’s notorious 1926 vanishing has continued to intrigue Golden Age mystery fans to the present day. The Queen of Crime’s eleven-day disappearing act is nothing, however, compared to the decades-long disappearance, in terms of public awareness, of between-the-wars mystery writer Annie Haynes (1865-1929), author of a series of detective novels published between 1923 and 1930 by Agatha Christie’s original English publisher, The Bodley Head. Haynes’s books went out of print in the early Thirties, not long after her death in 1929, and her reputation among classic detective fiction readers, high in her lifetime, did not so much decline as dematerialize. When, in 2013, I first wrote a piece about Annie Haynes’ work, I knew of only two other living persons besides myself who had read any of her books. Happily, Dean Street Press once again has come to the rescue of classic mystery fans seeking genre gems from the Golden Age, and is republishing all Haynes’ mystery novels. Now that her crime fiction is coming back into print, the question naturally arises: Who Was Annie Haynes? Solving the mystery of this forgotten author’s lost life has taken leg work by literary sleuths on two continents (my thanks for their assistance to Carl Woodings and Peter Harris).

  Until recent research uncovered new information about Annie Haynes, almost nothing about her was publicly known besides the fact of her authorship of twelve mysteries during the Golden Age of detective fiction. Now we know that she led an altogether intriguing life, too soon cut short by disability and death, which took her from the isolation of the rural English Midlands in the nineteenth century to the cultural high life of Edwardian London. Haynes was born in 1865 in the Leicestershire town of Ashby-de-la-Zouch, the first child of ironmonger Edwin Haynes and Jane (Henderson) Haynes, daughter of Montgomery Henderson, longtime superintendent of the gardens at nearby Coleorton Hall, seat of the Beaumont baronets. After her father left his family, young Annie resided with her grandparents at the gardener’s cottage at Coleorton Hall, along with her mother and younger brother. Here Annie doubtlessly obtained an acquaintance with the ways of the country gentry that would serve her well in her career as a genre fiction writer.

  We currently know nothing else of Annie Haynes’ life in Leicestershire, where she still resided (with her mother) in 1901, but by 1908, when Haynes was in her early forties, she was living in London with Ada Heather-Bigg (1855-1944) at the Heather-Bigg family home, located halfway between Paddington Station and Hyde Park at 14 Radnor Place, London. One of three daughters of Henry Heather-Bigg, a noted pioneer in the development of orthopedics and artificial limbs, Ada Heather-Bigg was a prominent Victorian and Edwardian era feminist and social reformer. In the 1911 British census entry for 14 Radnor Place, Heather-Bigg, a “philanthropist and journalist,” is listed as the head of the household and Annie Haynes, a “novelist,” as a “visitor,” but in fact Haynes would remain there with Ada Heather-Bigg until Haynes’ death in 1929.

  Haynes’ relationship with Ada Heather-Bigg introduced the aspiring author to important social sets in England’s great metropolis. Though not a novelist herself, Heather-Bigg was an important figure in the city’s intellectual milieu, a well-connected feminist activist of great energy and passion who believed strongly in the idea of women attaining economic independence through remunerative employment. With Ada Heather-Bigg behind her, Annie Haynes’s writing career had powerful backing indeed. Although in the 1911 census Heather-Bigg listed Haynes’ occupation as “novelist,” it appears that Haynes did not publish any novels in book form prior to 1923, the year that saw the appearance of The Bungalow Mystery, which Haynes dedicated to Heather-Bigg. However, Haynes was a prolific producer of newspaper serial novels during the second decade of the twentieth century, penning such works as Lady Carew’s Secret, Footprints of Fate, A Pawn of Chance, The Manor Tragedy and many others.

  Haynes’ twelve Golden Age mystery novels, which appeared in a tremendous burst of creative endeavor between 1923 and 1930, like the author’s serial novels retain, in stripped-down form, the emotionally heady air of the nineteenth-century triple-decker sensation novel, with genteel settings, shocking secrets, stormy passions and eternal love all at the fore, yet they also have the fleetness of Jazz Age detective fiction. Both in their social milieu and narrative pace Annie Haynes’ detective novels bear considerable resemblance to contemporary works by Agatha Christie; and it is interesting to note in this regard that Annie Haynes and Agatha Christie were the only female mystery writers published by The Bodley Head, one of the more notable English mystery imprints in the early Golden Age. “A very remarkable feature of recent detective fiction,” observed the Illustrated London News in 1923, “is the skill displayed by women in this branch of story-telling. Isabel Ostrander, Carolyn Wells, Annie Haynes and last, but very far from least, Agatha Christie, are contesting the laurels of Sherlock Holmes’ creator with a great spirit, ingenuity and success.” Since Ostrander and Wells were American authors, this left Annie Haynes, in the estimation of the Illustrated London News, as the main British female competitor to Agatha Christie. (Dorothy L. Sayers, who, like Haynes, published her debut mystery novel in 1923, goes unmentioned.) Similarly, in 1925 The Sketch wryly noted that “[t]ired men, trotting home at the end of an imperfect day, have been known to pop into the library and ask for an Annie Haynes. They have not made a mistake in the street number. It is not a cocktail they are asking for…”

  Twenties critical opinion adjudged that Annie Haynes’ criminous concoctions held appeal not only for puzzle fiends impressed with the “considerable craftsmanship” of their plots (quoting from the Sunday Times review of The Bungalow Mystery), but also for more general readers attracted to their purely literary qualities. “Not only a crime story of merit, but also a novel which will interest readers to whom mystery for its own sake has little appeal,” avowed The Nation of Haynes’ The Secret of Greylands, while the New Statesman declared of The Witness on the Roof that “Miss Haynes has a sense of character; her people are vivid and not the usual puppets of detective fiction.” Similarly, the Bookman deemed the characters in Haynes’ The Abbey Court Murder “much truer to life than is the case in many sensational stories” and The Spectator concluded of The Crime at Tattenham Corner, �
�Excellent as a detective tale, the book also is a charming novel.”

  Sadly, Haynes’ triumph as a detective novelist proved short lived. Around 1914, about the time of the outbreak of the Great War, Haynes had been stricken with debilitating rheumatoid arthritis that left her in constant pain and hastened her death from heart failure in 1929, when she was only 63. Haynes wrote several of her detective novels on fine days in Kensington Gardens, where she was wheeled from 14 Radnor Place in a bath chair, but in her last years she was able only to travel from her bedroom to her study. All of this was an especially hard blow for a woman who had once been intensely energetic and quite physically active.

  In a foreword to The Crystal Beads Murder, the second of Haynes’ two posthumously published mysteries, Ada Heather-Bigg noted that Haynes’ difficult daily physical struggle “was materially lightened by the warmth of friendships” with other authors and by the “sympathetic and friendly relations between her and her publishers.” In this latter instance Haynes’ experience rather differed from that of her sister Bodleian, Agatha Christie, who left The Bodley Head on account of what she deemed an iniquitous contract that took unjust advantage of a naive young author. Christie moved, along with her landmark detective novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), to Collins and never looked back, enjoying ever greater success with the passing years.

  At the time Christie crossed over to Collins, Annie Haynes had only a few years of life left. After she died at 14 Radnor Place on 30 March 1929, it was reported in the press that “many people well-known in the literary world” attended the author’s funeral at St. Michaels and All Angels Church, Paddington, where her sermon was delivered by the eloquent vicar, Paul Nichols, brother of the writer Beverley Nichols and dedicatee of Haynes’ mystery novel The Master of the Priory; yet by the time of her companion Ada Heather-Bigg’s death in 1944, Haynes and her once highly-praised mysteries were forgotten. (Contrastingly, Ada Heather-Bigg’s name survives today in the University College of London’s Ada Heather-Bigg Prize in Economics.) Only three of Haynes’ novels were ever published in the United States, and she passed away less than a year before the formation of the Detection Club, missing any chance of being invited to join this august body of distinguished British detective novelists. Fortunately, we have today entered, when it comes to classic mystery, a period of rediscovery and revival, giving a reading audience a chance once again, after over eighty years, to savor the detective fiction fare of Annie Haynes. Bon appétit!

  Curtis Evans

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page/About the Book

  Introduction by Curtis Evans

  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

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  About the Author

  Also by Annie Haynes

  The Blue Diamond – Title Page

  The Blue Diamond – Chapter One

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  “GLASTWICK? Next stopping-place, miss! We ought to be there in twenty minutes.”

  Cynthia Letchingham shivered as she sat back in the corner of her third-class railway carriage. She felt a sudden shrinking from the end of this journey of hers. After all, she wondered if she had made a mistake in coming? Then, for the hundredth time, she told herself that she could have done nothing else. But, as she mechanically watched the dreary northern country through which they were passing, her eyes filled with tears—she felt so young, so friendless, so alone. At last she took a letter from her hand-bag. The envelope was soiled and creased as if with much carrying about, and was addressed to Miss Cynthia Densham, in an old woman’s shaking writing.

  The mist before Cynthia’s eyes thickened as she looked at it. Alas, she who had been yesterday morning Cynthia Densham was now Cynthia Letchingham, a woman flying from the man she dreaded most on earth—her husband!

  She drew out the letter from its envelope and glanced over it once more:

  GREYLANDS

  GLASTWICK

  NORTHUMBERLAND.

  DEAR CYNTHIA,

  I expect you have forgotten me. It is many years since we met, but I know you have heard your father speak of his Cousin Hannah, and I could not let this momentous occasion in your life pass without a word from me. In a very few days you will receive my wedding gift. It is one that perhaps you will think little enough of now, but at any rate it will give you what I myself prize above all things, a certain independence of your husband—a refuge to which you can turn in time of trouble. I can assure you...

  Here the letter broke off abruptly and began lower down the page in a strangely different strain.

  Oh, Cynthia, come to me! If you can only spare a day or two from your preparations for your wedding, come. I have tried to bear it in silence to the end, but I am old and weak and frightened — so frightened! For your father’s sake, come and help me, Cynthia.

  Your cousin,

  HANNAH GILLMAN.

  Cynthia read it over again; she felt the same thrill of amazement as when she first saw this extraordinary epistle. What could be wrong with her cousin, Lady Hannah Gillman?

  At any rate, Lady Hannah lived in a country-house far away from London; she had begged Cynthia to come to her, and to the best of the girl’s belief her husband had never heard of the old lady. Greylands seemed to Cynthia the only refuge to which she could go in her present sore straits.

  She slipped the letter back into its envelope and opened her bag to put it away. As she did so, she caught sight of another letter folded away in the corner—a letter, the very look of which drove the blood from her cheeks and moistened her forehead with sickly fear. And yet it did not look such a terrifying affair—just a very short note, undated, with no address. It began abruptly:

  I have seen the announcement of your approaching marriage to Lord Letchingham; I must make one effort to save you from such certain unhappiness. Lord Letchingham is the man whose name I refused to give your mother—the man who deceived me by a false marriage and left me to a life of shame and misery. Now that you know the truth you must do as you think fit. Only for the value of the love we bore one another in the old days have I broken the silence I had hoped to maintain to the end.

  Your heart-broken friend,

  ALICE WINTHROP.

  If it had only reached its destination two hours earlier! But already Cynthia Densham was Lady Letchingham when she received it.

  And then she had not taken it on trust. She had taxed her newly-made husband with being Alice Winthrop’s betrayer. The very memory of the scene that followed was terrible and, seizing her first chance of escape, she had fled from her husband and, remembering her Cousin Hannah’s letter, had determined to appeal to her for refuge. But now that the actual moment was at hand she was beginning to feel nervous, and to wonder uncertainly what kind of a reception her Cousin Hannah would give her. Quite possibly she thought, she might have changed her mind about wishing to see her; in any case, she would certainly not expect to see her now, and she asked herself for the hundredth time whether she had done wisely in coming to Greylands for refuge.

  She knew but little of her Cousin Hannah, as she had been taught to call her. That Lady Hannah Gillman, the daughter of an impoverished Irish peer, was her father’s cousin Cynthia knew; and she had sometimes fancied that in their youth there had
been some closer and warmer tie. The girl remembered still how, when she was a child, on one of her rare visits her Cousin Hannah had been left alone with her, and she had never forgotten how she had been caught up and the passionate kisses mingled with bitter tears that had been pressed upon her cheeks.

  After her father’s death, however, the acquaintance had ceased; without the matter being put into so many words, Cynthia had gathered that her mother did not care for Hannah Hammond, as Lady Hannah was then. For many years, on her birthday, an expensive present had come for Cynthia from her father’s cousin, with a few brief lines expressing the donor’s best wishes for the occasion; that and Cynthia’s letter of thanks had been the only communication between them.

  Through a mutual relative, however, Mrs Densham and her daughter had heard that a large fortune had been left to Lady Hannah, and that she had virtually adopted the orphan son of her only sister, who had married a Scotch baronet and died fifteen years afterwards, predeceasing her husband, and leaving this one child, in regard to whom Lady Hannah now took his mother’s place.

  Then, quite casually, just before Mrs Densham’s death, Cynthia had heard that there had been a quarrel, that young Sir Donald Farquhar had gone to seek his fortune ranching in British Columbia, and that Lady Hannah was left alone. She would have had no difficulty in obtaining another heir among her numerous connexions; and her relatives were still speculating as to upon whom her choice would fall when they were thunderstruck to receive the announcement of her marriage with a man considerably younger than herself, whom she had met while staying in a pension at Brussels. She had not suffered any hint of her intention to get abroad until the wedding was an accomplished fact, and indignation and remonstrance were alike useless.