book about as tangyas a suet pudding, a sleeping pill of a book. She lifted the heavy volume into her lap and began to flip the pages, reading paragraphs at random.
Prominent inhabitants of Kensington in the eighteenth century … Kensington as a village … political history of the royal borough … the planning of Kensington Gardens … merchant princes included … a notorious Mr. Price, hanged for the theft of a whippet.… Flipping a page after reading about the fate of Mr. Price, Julia saw a heading which read “Crime, Ghosts and Hauntings.” At first she turned over several pages, not trusting herself to read such a chapter, but her curiosity was too great, and she went back to the heading and began to read.
At first she found nothing more exciting than had been the lists of prominent Kensington aldermen and merchants; the author had tracked down a number of conventional haunted-house anecdotes and set them down in colorless straightforward style. The ghost of a headless nun in a “manorial” building on Lexham Gardens; two sisters who had killed themselves in adjoining houses on Pembroke Place and had been seen crossing the gardens, hand in hand, by moonlight; the Edwardes Square “paterfamilias” of 1912 who had been possessed by the spirit of his mad great-grandfather and taken to dressing in the extravagant style of a century before and had finally murdered his children; Julia read all of these stories with a dulled interest.
Then a sentence and a street name burst from the text.
One of the most vexed and troubling of all Kensington murders [Julia read] was that of the case of Heather and Olivia Rudge, of 25 Ilchester Place. One of the last women to be sentenced to death in England, Heather Rudge, an American, had purchased the house on Ilchester Place from thearchitect, who had built it for himself in 1927 but in two years wished to move, due to family troubles; at the time, Mrs. Rudge, who was separated from her husband, had a reputation as a brilliant, rather reckless hostess, and was considered by many inhabitants of her social world as “fast.” [Eda Rolph implied a fondness for handsome younger men and wealthy businessmen from the City.] One contemporary, the author of several mild books of verse and a once-popular series of theological novels, described her as possessing “a small, vivid, distinctly alarming face in which beauty and avidity fatally conjoined.
Vanitas
indeed: yet we found in her a helter-skelter charm.” The birth of a daughter, Olivia, twelve years after the purchase of the Ilchester Place house, occurred in wartime, and so did little to affect her already damaged career as a hostess—the morals of a rich, aging playgirl whose greatest notoriety had passed six or seven years before interested only a few.
The parties continued, at intervals and with considerably less splendor than previously, and then ceased altogether; little was heard of the Rudges until 1950. In that year, the nine-year-old Olivia Rudge was mentioned in connection with the death by suffocation in Holland Park of a four-year-old child, Geoffrey Braden of Abbotsbury Close. Olivia Rudge and what the popular press briefly referred to as the “Holland Park Child Terror Mob”—a group of ten or twelve children apparently led by Olivia—had been seen tormenting young Braden on the day before his death. The following morning, Olivia and several others, according to a park attendant, had again pursued young Braden and abused him. The attendant had chased away the gang of older children and advised young Braden to go home; when he had returned to that area of the park, he had found the boy’s body lying in a shadowed placebeside a wall. Public and police interest shifted from the gang of children when it was learned that young Braden had been sexually injured before his death; and subsequently a vagrant was hanged for his murder.
Two months following the execution of the vagrant, Heather Rudge
Prominent inhabitants of Kensington in the eighteenth century … Kensington as a village … political history of the royal borough … the planning of Kensington Gardens … merchant princes included … a notorious Mr. Price, hanged for the theft of a whippet.… Flipping a page after reading about the fate of Mr. Price, Julia saw a heading which read “Crime, Ghosts and Hauntings.” At first she turned over several pages, not trusting herself to read such a chapter, but her curiosity was too great, and she went back to the heading and began to read.
At first she found nothing more exciting than had been the lists of prominent Kensington aldermen and merchants; the author had tracked down a number of conventional haunted-house anecdotes and set them down in colorless straightforward style. The ghost of a headless nun in a “manorial” building on Lexham Gardens; two sisters who had killed themselves in adjoining houses on Pembroke Place and had been seen crossing the gardens, hand in hand, by moonlight; the Edwardes Square “paterfamilias” of 1912 who had been possessed by the spirit of his mad great-grandfather and taken to dressing in the extravagant style of a century before and had finally murdered his children; Julia read all of these stories with a dulled interest.
Then a sentence and a street name burst from the text.
One of the most vexed and troubling of all Kensington murders [Julia read] was that of the case of Heather and Olivia Rudge, of 25 Ilchester Place. One of the last women to be sentenced to death in England, Heather Rudge, an American, had purchased the house on Ilchester Place from thearchitect, who had built it for himself in 1927 but in two years wished to move, due to family troubles; at the time, Mrs. Rudge, who was separated from her husband, had a reputation as a brilliant, rather reckless hostess, and was considered by many inhabitants of her social world as “fast.” [Eda Rolph implied a fondness for handsome younger men and wealthy businessmen from the City.] One contemporary, the author of several mild books of verse and a once-popular series of theological novels, described her as possessing “a small, vivid, distinctly alarming face in which beauty and avidity fatally conjoined.
Vanitas
indeed: yet we found in her a helter-skelter charm.” The birth of a daughter, Olivia, twelve years after the purchase of the Ilchester Place house, occurred in wartime, and so did little to affect her already damaged career as a hostess—the morals of a rich, aging playgirl whose greatest notoriety had passed six or seven years before interested only a few.
The parties continued, at intervals and with considerably less splendor than previously, and then ceased altogether; little was heard of the Rudges until 1950. In that year, the nine-year-old Olivia Rudge was mentioned in connection with the death by suffocation in Holland Park of a four-year-old child, Geoffrey Braden of Abbotsbury Close. Olivia Rudge and what the popular press briefly referred to as the “Holland Park Child Terror Mob”—a group of ten or twelve children apparently led by Olivia—had been seen tormenting young Braden on the day before his death. The following morning, Olivia and several others, according to a park attendant, had again pursued young Braden and abused him. The attendant had chased away the gang of older children and advised young Braden to go home; when he had returned to that area of the park, he had found the boy’s body lying in a shadowed placebeside a wall. Public and police interest shifted from the gang of children when it was learned that young Braden had been sexually injured before his death; and subsequently a vagrant was hanged for his murder.
Two months following the execution of the vagrant, Heather Rudge
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