Slack Your Rope, Hangman

Mar 22, 2015 00:13

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 I've cleaned it up a bit, mostly smoothing out some of the dialogue and historical references, and making sure it's as much in line with the book as possible (I'd forgotten that the Dyers lived above them, not below, and that Sylvia ( Read more... )

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sonetka April 21 2015, 04:45:50 UTC
Excellent and very depressingly realistic AU (arsenic-eating being very bad for the long-term health) though I'm pretty sure there's a glancing reference to Urquhart's trial near the beginning of HHC -- either Umpelty or Glaisher (I can never remember which is which) says something about Peter having testified at the trial and that it was a pretty piece of business, along with something about like "Not but what Scotland Yard wouldn't have got the right man in the end," which wouldn't have meant a whole lot to Harriet if she'd been covered in quicklime by the time it happened. I spent a lot of tangential time while writing my fic reading about 1920s and 1930s capital cases and in this case, I think both Urquhart and Harriet would have been at real risk since poisoners weren't looked on too kindly -- the premeditation element, probably, and it was seen as being particularly cruel -- especially since most poisonings were done for gain. (By the way, have you ever read "A Pin To See The Peepshow"? It could be a great source for a Harriet-in-prison fic, and if the author's research is correct -- and she was writing at the time and I have no reason to think she didn't research -- Harriet's time in remand would have been spent in SHARED ACCOMMODATIONS with up to twelve other women; basically the dorm from hell. No wonder she was so willing to see Peter every day, even with his insistence on proposing -- at least with him she had comparative privacy for a while!)

Re the other conversational thread -- the diciness of arsenical symptoms definitely means there's a really bare possibility of pinning it on Vaughan, but he'd be having to bet on at least six hours passing (the last time they ate together was at lunch, and dinner chez Urquhart didn't start until 8) which was a real statistical outlier even for someone who hadn't eaten. And I agree that Urquhart wasn't trying to pin anything on Harriet -- since Philip died just after Mrs. Wrayburn's latest relapse, Urquhart was clearly desperate to get him out of the way as soon as possible; the coffee-date with Harriet was probably a welcome cover but not necessary ("They won't discover this, but if they do it'll be impossible to prove which one of us did it.") I can't realistically imagine any scenario in which Urquhart knew that she had been buying arsenic. Even if Philip mentioned that her latest book was about arsenic, she didn't start her poison-hunting expeditions until a few months after their breakup. It's barely possible that he told Urquhart at some point that Harriet liked to be careful about verifying things for her novels and Urquhart drew his own conclusions, but it's such a stretch that I can't imagine he was counting on her having provably bought the stuff. He was probably quite surprised when she was arrested.

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