Force and Fraud. Ellen Davitt
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BLURB
Outback Australia in the mid-1800s.
When rich, domineering squatter Angus McAlpin is murdered, the obvious suspect is the penniless artist, Herbert Lindsey - who wants to marry his daughter, Flora.
McAlpin may have proclaimed that Flora would marry Herbert ‘only over his dead body’ - and Herbert’s bloodstained knife and handkerchief were found near the murder scene - but the artist denies any wrongdoing.
So begins a compelling murder mystery and trial, as the heiress seeks to prove her lover’s innocence, and a country town takes sides.
Force may have killed Angus McAlpin, but fraud follows murder in a cunning plan to see Herbert Lindsey hanged - by any means necessary.
For someone else is determined to marry Flora, to obtain her property and her person; and he will stop at nothing.
Praise for Force and Fraud:
‘Stunning historical mystery. Court scene worthy of Perry Mason’ - Kerry Greenwood
INTRODUCTION
BY
DR LUCY SUSSEX
Ellen Davitt’s 1865 Force and Fraud was the first murder mystery novel published in Australia. It appeared in a popular fiction magazine, the Australian Journal, but its significance was not realised for over a century. Ellen and her husband Arthur were remembered as pioneer educationalists, the couple having been in charge of the Model School in Melbourne during the 1850s. They gained an entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, though with three major omissions: that Ellen was a writer, an exhibited artist, and sister-in-law of the famous Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope.1
Trollope has attracted various biographers; but his connection with Ellen Davitt was only discovered in the 1990s by education historian Marjorie Theobald. An earlier historian, J. Alex Allan, in his The Old Model School, described Ellen as having ‘overbearing self-esteem’.
Victor Crittenden – whose Mulini Press reprinted Force and Fraud in paperback in 1993 – commented: “Just imagine a woman in the 1850s daring to have a high opinion of herself and her capabilities”.2
Ellen Davitt was an unusual woman indeed. She was the eldest of five daughters, born to Edward and Martha Heseltine, a couple who were first cousins. The Heseltines married in London, in June 1810, when Edward was a bank clerk in Hull, Yorkshire. Ellen’s exact birthdate is unknown but she was baptised at Holy Trinity, Hull, on 4 March 1812.3
The family were then Anglicans; although by 1821, when their fourth daughter Rose (afterwards Trollope) was baptised, they had joined the dissenting Unitarian sect. Rose – as befitted the wife of a novelist whose Barchester series epitomises nineteenth-century Anglicanism – conformed to the Church of England upon marriage. Ellen went further, becoming a Roman Catholic; something which may explain her near disappearance from the family records.
Edward Heseltine was the son of a clerk, but got promoted to bank manager in Rotherham, then a market town near Sheffield. In character he could be hair-raising; as a young clerk he protested being kept late at work with exploding candles, something that could have got him sacked. His obituary notes other pranks:
During the panic of 1825 an old woman in the crowd of applicants for gold at the bank counter became very noisy. Mr Heseltine looked pleasantly at her, and said, “Hold your tongue, my good woman, we are preparing sovereigns as quickly as possible.” He had ordered a quantity to be made extremely hot. These he shot from a shovel in the old woman’s hands: down they fell on the floor. He then desired others to step forward for change; but the fever was abated by this application of heat, on the principle of homeopathy, “Like cures like”. A little time was gained by this expedient, and more substantial aid was procured.4
Martha Heseltine’s obituary listed little more than her virtues, and that her death (in late 1841) was due to injuries received in a railway accident the year before. The early years of the railway industry were hazardous. Various press accounts of this particular accident appeared, with the Sheffield and Rotherham Independent reporting the carriage in which Martha travelled derailed and turned nearly upside down. One passenger was thrown out the window and killed instantly; the others clung desperately to their seats. All were injured, including the Heseltine parents, and Miss Heseltine. Two and possibly three of the daughters had wed by this time; so if Ellen was still single she might have been present.5
Edward Heseltine remarried a year later, to Charlotte Platts. She was a daughter of the Unitarian divine and author John Platts, and younger than Ellen. This May and December marriage produced two sons.
In 1852, when Heseltine retired, aged 72, it emerged that he had helped himself to the bank’s funds. He had expensive tastes, being a dandy, and collector of art and armour. Trollope biographer Victoria Glendinning surmises he speculated on the railroads. Heseltine was a director of a small railway company, launched in 1836, the year he became bank manager. He subscribed for 20 shares at £25 each; a total expenditure of £500. Nobody seems to have enquired how he found the money; and he went on to embezzle at least £5,000, then a huge sum. For some time Heseltine played cat and mouse with the bank investigators, flitting around England whilst pleading ill-health and mental incapacity. Finally he fled to France, where he died at Le Havre in 1855. Fraud, if not force, was thus something Ellen knew from family experience.6
Ellen grew up in a family without sons, which belonged to a sect with a high regard for the intellect. She might have received a better education than most girls of her era; certainly the family valued reading, and Edward was on the committee of the Rotherham Book Society.
In an 1874 letter Ellen described herself as ‘a lady both by birth and education’ – a dubious claim, since a bank manager’s daughter was respectable rather than genteel. Additionally a lady was not expected to work for her living – as Ellen did. She wrote, on an application form of the same year, that she had:
Studied under Masters in England, spent some time in fashionable schools in Paris. The Sacre Coeur was one of them. Might have taken out a Diploma but for circumstances that prevented a longer stay in Paris [...], have [illegible] honours in History, Modern Languages, Composition and Elocution.7
Some degree of reinvention, common when people emigrated to the colonies, leaving a lowly or scandalous past behind, can be surmised here. The letter implies a French education; unlikely for a Yorkshire girl whose father, during her schooldays, was only a bank clerk.
Rotherham, where the Heseltines lived above the bank, was where most of the daughters married, including Rose, to the young Anthony Trollope. Here also Ellen may have wed. On 8 February 1836, an Ellen Heseltine married William Ashmoor. That a market town of 20,000 people could have contained two marriageable girls of that name is not impossible, but it seems unlikely.
Ashmoor, with the alternate spelling of Ashmore, was a name not uncommon in Yorkshire. Three separate William Ashmores appear in contemporary coverage in the Sheffield and Rotherham Independent. One was an old man, another a working-class villain; so the most likely candidate is an Optician, who went bankrupt in 1838.
Intriguingly, a Mrs Ellen Ashmore appeared in a Rotherham court case of September 1842. She was witness to a burglary, in which three women confronted an intruder who was armed with a poker. He struck at Ellen Ashmore, but missed. If this woman later became Ellen Davitt, then she was feisty even when young; and the realistic court scenes of Force and Fraud had a basis in experience.8
The British Census of 1841 (taken in June) provides a vignette of the Heseltine family in Rotherham: the dying Martha surrounded by her three youngest daughters, Rose, Isabella, and Mary Jane, who was married to Heseltine’s clerk Robert Edgar, with a baby. Another married daughter lived in Manchester.
Ellen is nowhere to be found; so was either out of the country, or for some reason not included in