The Dead Duke, His Secret Wife and the Missing Corpse by Piu Marie Eatwell Read Free Book Online

ladies’ fashion and millinery, and occupying several houses in the north-west corner of Soho Square. The impressive queue of splendid carriages drawing up at the bazaar’s doors at the height of the ‘season’ was proof of its prestige. The Pantheon Bazaar was newer and flashier. Formerly a place of eighteenth-century public entertainment – whose site is now occupied by Marks and Spencer’s ‘Oxford Street Pantheon’ branch – it was, in Victorian times, a shopping complex. Converted from an old Oxford Street theatre that had fallen on hard times, its entrance, by way of a statue-adorned vestibule, gave way to a picture gallery on the first floor (the pictures being, by general acknowledgment, of rather indifferent merit), flanked by a bird-filled con-servatory of hothouse plants and a shop selling children’s toys, knick-knacks, trinkets, photograph albums and other ephemera. The combination of toys and trinkets with the presence of wildlife inevitably acted as a magnet for London’s young ladies, governesses and their charges, leading to the bazaar also being frequented by a certain type of dissolute flâneur or lounger – that is, a London gentleman at least as interested in the bazaar’s clients as in its wares. Then there was the bazaar known as the Pantechnicon: a splendid establishment in Belgravia that sold larger items of furniture and horse-drawn vehicles, stocking everything from the dress carriage to the light gig.
    The Baker Street Bazaar was a direct rival of the Pantechnicon. Originally a market for horses, this bazaar had, by the 1830s, become a forum for a hotchpotch variety of goods: everything from carriages, harnesses and horse-furniture to stoves and ‘furnishing ironmongery’ could be acquired there. It was also the initial home of Madame Tussaud’s waxworks, before it relocated to Marylebone Road in 1883.
    Once at the Baker Street Bazaar, the humble furniture salesman of obscure origins rose through the ranks with astonishing swiftness. By the 1850s Thomas Charles Druce was a partner in the business, earning a small fortune. But he was a man of abstemious habits. He travelled unostentatiously,driving to and from his office in a discreet brougham. He dined just once a day, at midday, on a plain meal of fish or chicken (the sight of red meat was abhorrent to him). He did not smoke, and had an aversion to wine. His dress, however, was distinctive. He typically wore a high hat and old-fashioned collar, and had a particular fondness for wigs, which he had fitted by the fashionable London wig-makers, Truefitt & Co. of Bond Street. Sometimes he wore a rose or flower in his buttonhole. Sporting an impressively large, bushy beard and sideburns, with a sallow complexion and a slightly jaundiced appearance, T. C. Druce cut a formidable figure as he strode about his business in the bustling precincts of Baker Street. An immensely hard worker, he imposed the same demands on his staff as he did on himself: he was stern and overbearing towards his employees, and brooked no contradiction or argument. He had a habit of turning up when least expected, entering the shop via one of the underground passages that ran from the mews at the rear, and surprising his unsuspecting employees. ‘The old man’, one of his sons was later to remark, ‘had an eye that could see right through you.’ Around his office, which was separate from the shop, there were red curtains. If these were open, the shop staff knew they might approach him. If they were drawn, no one could do so, however urgent the reason.
    At some point in the 1840s, Druce took up with a beautiful young girl called Annie May, over thirty years his junior. It was whispered that the couple did not marry for many years, despite Annie bearing him several children. The rumours were enough for the Druces to be ostracized by polite society. This may have been exactly what old T. C. Druce wanted,for he never showed much inclination for genteel company. Much,