Slack Your Rope, Hangman

[sonetka]

In The Beginning is now posted on AO3, for the benefit of castiron and, of course, all the Harriet/Philip shippers out there! I've cleaned it up a bit, mostly smoothing out some of the dialogue and historical references, and making sure it's as much in line with the book as possible (I'd forgotten that the Dyers lived above them, not below, and that Sylvia

Comments

[nineveh_uk]

I think I read somewhere-or-other that the timetable could just about work with Vaughan, if the arsenic were late, and not with alcohol etc. Whereas it is actually too soon for Harriet. So a prosecutor would have something to work with. I can accept Peter thinking that Vaughan almost certainly didn't do it, because he is genuinely devastated, but surely he'd at least investigate? After all, he might be devastated that it worked!

The inevitable public availability of Mrs Wrayburn's will is why I tend to think that Urquhart is planning death by natural causes, and that the coinciding with seeing Harriet is sheer accident (and she's see Boyes other times), so intended to reflect stress that has contributed to pre-existing illness. Because if Boyes is simply dead, how tragic, then there's no problem with the original will being read, and ending up on public record (it doesn't even need publicity, Wimsey just needs to keep an eye on Somerset House). It's only with the death being dodgy that it becomes vulnerable, but then it's very vulnerable - not least in that there's some reason that Urquhart can't fake it (like the witnesses being around), or he'd have done that in the first place, much simpler. Though I suspect that a Harriet who had spent the last 5 years in Holloway might not feel very inclined to marry Lord Peter.