Properly working a case together
Aug. 21st, 2025 08:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shallownessMiss Scarlet and the Duke - 2.5 Quarter to Midnight
Slightly different format, in that we followed the Duke on his way to work of a morning. He found his boss in his office, offering him a promotion…in Glasgow. He asked for time to think about it. When Eliza found out, she was so over it, because she’d seen this happen before, and William always turned the promotion down after a few days of angsting, because he was settled in London. He was nettled by the whole settled thing, and all the subsequent teasing, lashing out at times. Eliza would eventually put it more softly, as his being content or fulfilled, not a lack of ambition.
Eliza and Moses were working on investigating potential suitors for Hetty, and not really finding any skeletons in their closets. Their problem was that Hetty wanted to marry for love or not marry at all, and Eliza was running out of excuses to her client. As soon as Hetty declared she was going to talk to the accountant to find out if she had enough money to set up her own establishment, you knew where it was going. The accountant was dead, clearly murdered.
But the scene of the crime tickled Eliza’s memory, and by the time the police had arrived, she’d remembered it was just like a scene in a detective novel, by one Samuel Bedbrooke. She wheedled William into hiring her to work on the case, arguing that Hetty or her aunt would if he didn’t, and so they were working together a lot, with Eliza having the initial advantage of having read the book.
In which this murder scene was actually the second, so they went looking and found out that Bedbrooke’s publisher had also been murdered. (But nobody had noticed!?) Bedbrooke was dismissive when interviewed, but there were holes in his story, and they found out that he was in financial difficulties, and closer to the accountant than he'd claimed.
Eliza was a bit more astute about figuring things out, and towards the end was worried that real life would follow the plot in that the fictional author had killed themselves. But Bedbrooke was fine. Which confirmed Eliza’s theory, and she and William turned up just in time to stop Bedbrooke’s sister (a strict looking spinster who had always seemed more sensible than her brother) from killing herself. In an exposition dump, we learned that she’d rewritten her brother’s terrible manuscript, it had got published and been a success under his name, and the publisher and accountant were all agreed that the novels should come out under Samuel’s name (because women writers didn’t sell according to them.) The deal was that at least she’d be financially secure, except she’d recently learned that she wasn’t, because her brother had expensive tastes, like an actress he’d showered with jewels, luxurious furniture and a house in Knightsbridge he couldn’t afford. (Wouldn’t she get executed by the state, though?)
After another scene of William’s morning routine, he told his boss that he was declining the promotion. In response, (I saw this coming) he was told he’d be out of the job then, because the chief constable wasn’t happy about Fitz, who is imprinting so hard on William that I expect him to call him ‘father’ at some point. The Duke’s advice to try to get on with other detectives had ended up with Fitz getting beaten up this episode. Oh dear.
Slightly different format, in that we followed the Duke on his way to work of a morning. He found his boss in his office, offering him a promotion…in Glasgow. He asked for time to think about it. When Eliza found out, she was so over it, because she’d seen this happen before, and William always turned the promotion down after a few days of angsting, because he was settled in London. He was nettled by the whole settled thing, and all the subsequent teasing, lashing out at times. Eliza would eventually put it more softly, as his being content or fulfilled, not a lack of ambition.
Eliza and Moses were working on investigating potential suitors for Hetty, and not really finding any skeletons in their closets. Their problem was that Hetty wanted to marry for love or not marry at all, and Eliza was running out of excuses to her client. As soon as Hetty declared she was going to talk to the accountant to find out if she had enough money to set up her own establishment, you knew where it was going. The accountant was dead, clearly murdered.
But the scene of the crime tickled Eliza’s memory, and by the time the police had arrived, she’d remembered it was just like a scene in a detective novel, by one Samuel Bedbrooke. She wheedled William into hiring her to work on the case, arguing that Hetty or her aunt would if he didn’t, and so they were working together a lot, with Eliza having the initial advantage of having read the book.
In which this murder scene was actually the second, so they went looking and found out that Bedbrooke’s publisher had also been murdered. (But nobody had noticed!?) Bedbrooke was dismissive when interviewed, but there were holes in his story, and they found out that he was in financial difficulties, and closer to the accountant than he'd claimed.
Eliza was a bit more astute about figuring things out, and towards the end was worried that real life would follow the plot in that the fictional author had killed themselves. But Bedbrooke was fine. Which confirmed Eliza’s theory, and she and William turned up just in time to stop Bedbrooke’s sister (a strict looking spinster who had always seemed more sensible than her brother) from killing herself. In an exposition dump, we learned that she’d rewritten her brother’s terrible manuscript, it had got published and been a success under his name, and the publisher and accountant were all agreed that the novels should come out under Samuel’s name (because women writers didn’t sell according to them.) The deal was that at least she’d be financially secure, except she’d recently learned that she wasn’t, because her brother had expensive tastes, like an actress he’d showered with jewels, luxurious furniture and a house in Knightsbridge he couldn’t afford. (Wouldn’t she get executed by the state, though?)
After another scene of William’s morning routine, he told his boss that he was declining the promotion. In response, (I saw this coming) he was told he’d be out of the job then, because the chief constable wasn’t happy about Fitz, who is imprinting so hard on William that I expect him to call him ‘father’ at some point. The Duke’s advice to try to get on with other detectives had ended up with Fitz getting beaten up this episode. Oh dear.
