Jane and the Man of the Cloth Read online

  “How very extraordinary,” Cassandra murmured.

  I turned to agree with her; and found she was absorbed in examining a fragment of shell. “The whorls and chambers of this bit of stuff—this sea-creature’s home—are as fully a work of art as any Italian sculpture. How wonderful is Nature!”

  Put out of temper with both my companions, I left the water’s edge and wandered aimlessly back towards the fossil site. I was required to stop, however, and glance about to find my way; Charmouth beach at such an hour was crowded with pleasure-seekers, attempting the waters in bathing machines, or walking with some difficulty through the heavy drift of sand. I raised a hand to my brow and narrowed my eyes, the better to find a familiar face—and stopped short in my survey, upon sighting what could only be an overturned skiff drawn up on the shingle, quite barnacled and scraped about its exterior, as from heavy use. What paint remained upon its wood, however, was a rich, deep green.

  I approached it slowly, my pulse at fever pitch, the thought of the ring at the end of the Cobb my only consideration . Was this the very vessel that had borne the unfortunate Bill Tibbit and his gallows to the stone pier’s end? At the skiff’s side, I dropped to my knees in the sand, heedless of my muslin, and studied it soberly. Several long scratches were cut deeply into the wood—the result, perhaps, of bobbing against the Gobb in the dead of night, though they might have been acquired in any number of ways.

  “Miss Austen,” came a voice at my elbow; and I jumped.

  “Mr. Sidmouth!”

  “Should you like to take a turn upon the waves?”

  I attempted a smile. “I confess, it is not my favoured pursuit, though I am of a Naval family.”

  He bent and patted the boat’s sturdy prow, from which an anchor, small but mortally sharp, protruded. “La Gascogne could never do you harm,” he said. “She is Lyme-built, and has performed many a useful service.”

  “You know the boat, then?” I enquired, its very name having the power to rob me of all complaisance.

  “These ten years, at least,” he replied with a smile. “When a local fishing family had no further use for her, I took her under the Grange’s wing, and seaworthy she has proved. You are certain you do not wish to take a turn? A pair of stout fellows at the oars, and we should be beyond the surf in a thrice.”

  “My apologies, Mr. Sidmouth,” I said, rising with effort, the image of the gibbet before my eyes, “but I fear my stomach is not equal to a ride in such a vessel.”

  “AND DID YOU ENJOY YOUR FIRST DAY ABROAD, MISS AUSTEN?” Captain Fielding enquired, as his stout ponies jogged up the road from Charmouth. Given the lateness of the hour, we had determined to forgo a pleasure drive, and turn instead towards the Captain’s house, there to take tea and a tour of his gardens, of which he was quite proud. “I trust you are not overly fatigued?”

  “I must confess to feeling a little exhausted/’ Cassandra said faindy from her seat opposite. Captain Fielding had settled himself at my side in the open carriage, while Lucy Armstrong held the place next to my sister. Fielding’s coachman, Jar vis, sat alone high upon the box; and I felt a twinge of consciousness at the thought of an earlier ride in a barouche-landau, and a more precarious seating. Mr. Sidmouth had parted from us some hours since—to avoid meeting Captain Fielding, I suspected, though the Gentleman Venturer of High Down claimed only pressing business about the farm.

  “So much sun, and good food, and cheerful company, xvill prove tiring, I own,” the Captain said, with a broad smile on his weathered face. “We are quite surfeited with schemes of pleasure, are we not? Your uncle, Miss Armstrong, is the chief culprit, I fear, in all our cases of exhaustion.’ ‘Miss Armstrong dimpled prettily at this, but Cassandra seemed to find even so little effort as a smile beyond her powers, as I observed in some dismay. The Captain studied my sister an instant, and must have surmised the same. “We shall not tax you much further, Miss Austen,” he told Cassandra, “merely to charge you to enjoy the splendour of the countryside hereabouts, and that, in silence.”

  And indeed, Captain Fielding could not have spoken with greater justice. The waving golden-green of the high downs in early September was a spectacle to behold; even so late in the day, with shafts of sunlight stretching warm and long towards the sea, haymakers were abroad in the fields, and the picturesque was completed by the introduction in the distance of the occasional hay-wain and stout horse, blowing at the chaff and the flies. To our left, as we progressed northwest, was the grey-blue edge of the cliffs, dropping precipitately to the sea; and then the sea itself, curling and re-forming ceaselessly against the rocks.

  “Look!” Miss Armstrong cried. “A cutter! And a fast one indeed! It might almost be racing the ship behind.”

  “I fear that it is.” Captain Fielding spoke grimly. “Jarvis! Pull up!”

  The barouche rolled to a gentle stop with the coachman’s “Whoa, there, Jezebel. Whoa, Shadrach,” and we four turned, as if possessed of one head, to gaze at the horizon.

  The cutter was, as its name suggests, a fast little ship of light build and sleek lines; it clove through the waves like a knife through warm butter, making the most of a stiff breeze. Behind it came a heavier brig, flying the ensign of the Royal Navy—and that the one pursued the other, we little doubted.

  “They would apprehend it,” Lucy Armstrong said, with all the wonder of nineteen. “Whatever for?”

  “Wait but a moment,” Fielding replied, “and you shall see something curious.”

  The cutter was nearing the distant end of the Cobb, and the Navy brig was well back; it looked as though the lead vessel should triumph. And then it came round, and almost to a halt in the waters west of the Cobb, and a frenzy of activity on the main deck could be observed.9

  “They are jettisoning the cargo,” Cassandra said qui-edy. “It must be contraband.”

  “Exactly.” Captain Fielding’s voice held only satisfaction.

  “Smugglers!” Miss Armstrong cried, her face alight. So even she was prey to the romance of the age. Her aunt could not approve it; but happily, we were spared Miss Crawford’s strictures.

  “What a fearful loss this must be, for the captain of that cutter,” I observed.

  “Loss? That is very unlikely,” Captain Fielding replied. “They will have marked the place in Poker’s Pool where the casks went down—indeed, they may even have buoyed them just below the surface—and will in due course retrieve them in the dead of night, in smaller boats. Provided, of course, the captain is not impressed.”10

  “Why even attempt a landing in broad daylight?” my sister enquired. “It seems the worst sort of folly.”

  “Lyme has been known as an hospitable port,” Captain Fielding said drily. “The local Revenue men and dragoons are so well-supplied with French brandy—of the sort that is very hard to come by—that more often than not, they are elsewhere engaged when the contraband arrives. Only one of your Revenue men is worth his salt— Mr. Roy Cavendish, the local Customs man—but his duties are too numerous, and his territory too broad, for the effective policing of Lyme. 1 cannot tell you how many afternoons I have watched waggons come in a long line to the shingle below the Cobb, their horses standing in surf up to their flanks, on purpose to fetch the smugglers’ shameful cargoes and bear them into the deep recesses of the Pinny,11 and thence to the Dorchester road, and Bath, and London beyond. But of late Cavendish has been quite pressing in his charge to apprehend such cheats of the Crown’s revenues. What you see before you, ladies, is a miscalculation on the part of our Gentlemen of the Night. They did not hear of the Royal Navy’s sudden interest in their trade. The brig looks to be the Renegade. I imagine she has been chasing that cutter all the way from Boulogne.”

  “Jane!” Cassandra cried. “Our brother is even now engaged in blockading that very port Is it credible a smuggling ship could penetrate where so much active vigilance holds sway?”

  “There are many methods for winning blindness from one’s countrymen,” Captain Fielding b
roke in. “I regret to say it—my years of service in the Blue would urge me to prevaricate—but the truth of the matter is that many who were once in the service of the Crown form the chief part of the smugglers’ bands. Who better dian a sailor, accustomed to privation and endurance in the worst of seas, to pilot a ship into enemy territory? Who better than a soldier, accustomed to long marches, to carrv a barrel of brandy slung from each shoulder several miles through the Pinny to safety? And who better than either, to suborn old friends in strategic places, with the gift of a length of silk or a botde of rarest cognac?”

  “I am all amazement,” Cassandra said, with averted eyes. “It is my custom to believe those who serve in the Royal Navy to be among the most honourable of men,”

  “And in the main, they are, I grant you,” Captain Fielding said gently. “Certainly I could not suggest that your own brothers would be so easily corrupted, Miss Austen. I speak but in the general way, and of the common lot— the ordinary man-at-arms, who cannot look to rise to an officer’s rank, and achieve great fortune. One night’s despicable work on behalf of such a one as the Reverend could suffice to feed a family for a week.”

  “The Reverend?” Cassandra looked her puzzlement.

  “I am forgetting,” Captain Fielding exclaimed. “We were deprived of your loveliness last evening, and you of our conversation.”

  “The Reverend is a smuggling chief,” Lucy Armstrong supplied. “His identity remains one of Lyme’s greatest secrets. The very cutter below us may well be one of his boats.”

  We gazed once more at the sea, and observed the Navy vessel come alongside the cutter, which, having abandoned its cargo, now stood off Lyme some little distance with an affectation of innocence; in an instant, the little boat was boarded; and a search of her holds no doubt begun. To my surprise, I found myself wishing her good fortune and Godspeed, and that the officers of His Majesty’s ship Renegade might find nothing to her detriment. Then abrupdy I shook off such fancies, appalled at my want of moral sense. How should it be, that our hearts leap at the sight of anything graceful, fast, and daring, and turn away from the stolid predictability of the tried and narrow way? Only Eve, clutching at her apple, might have the answer.

  WE DROVE ON IN A MOMENT, THOUGH MORE THAN ONE OF US craned a neck backwards to observe the progress of events on the cutter’s deck; but though we espied the boat itself, the actions of its men were veiled from our sight, and the conclusion of such a story must await another day. Cassandra’s eyes were closed, and her pallor such as gave rise to concern in my breast; but believing her to be resting, I chose not to disturb her with unnecessary enquiries. Turning instead to Captain Fielding, I thought to pursue a nearer interest, by probing his dislike of Mr. Sidmouth.

  “I had understood you to tell me, Captain Fielding, that Mr. Sidmouth’s relations in France were all deceased, and that Mademoiselle LeFevre represents the sole surviving leaf of the family’s foreign branch.”

  “I believe that to be the case,” he replied.

  “And yet my sister Eliza finds that Mr. Sidmouth goes often to France—or did so, before the outbreak of the latest hostilities. Having been long a resident of that unfortunate country herself, she was delighted to meet with a gendeman capable of offering the latest intelligence regarding Parisian society, something for which she is always longing.”

  “I am happy to learn that Mr. Sidmouth was capable of offering anything that could be described as pleasing,” the Captain rejoined soberly. “That he was engaged in conversing with a lady—and a lady of the world, as everything about your brother’s wife proclaims her to be—must speak for itself. Sidmouth’s charm is always most lively in the company of the fair sex.”

  “You are aware, then, of his travel?” I persisted.

  “I am. It has been many months since I have regarded it with anything but dismay.”

  “Dismay!” I cried, with a look for Lucy Armstrong, whose eyes were cast down upon her folded hands. Her cheeks were remarkably rosy for one so apparendy indifferent to our conversation.

  “Indeed.” Captain Fielding appeared to hesitate, as if debating within himself; and then the desire to relate his anxieties won out over the impulse towards discretion. “I have reason to believe, Miss Austen, that Geoffrey Sidmouth is engaged in business of a most unscrupulous nature; that he ventures to Paris on behalf of certain nefarious interests whose result you saw only moments ago; that he is, in fact, none other than the reprehensible Reverend of whom the world speaks with such a strange mixture of repugnance and admiration.”

  “Mr. Sidmouth! The very Reverend!”

  “It cannot be,” Cassandra said, with some urgency in her tone. Her eyelids had fluttered wide, and two spots of colour burned in her cheeks. “Mr. Sidmouth retains every aspect of the gendeman. I cannot believe so good a man as he proved himself to me, in my time of need, to be so lost to the expectations of society—of duty—indeed, of every moral purpose!”

  “I wish that I could share your approbation,” Captain Fielding said. He spoke gendy to Cassandra, as was his wont, but his blue eyes were cold and hard in his tanned face. I understood, in gazing at him then, what it must have been to answer his commands on a surging deck in the midst of battle. “I have watched his movements for some time. The trips to France are but a part of it; to this, I would add the strangeness of waggons coming and going at the Grange at all hours of the night; the appearance of bands of men who shelter in its barns for a few days only, and then are seen no more; the constant traffic along the cliffs, in the foulest of weather; and the habitual walks of Mademoiselle LeFevre.”

  “Mademoiselle LeFevre?” Lucy Armstrong said, in a tone of bewilderment.

  “Mademoiselle LeFevre,” Captain Fielding rejoined. The barouche tilted suddenly, in turning into a private avenue of well-grown trees, and I looked up to find we were come very nearly to the end of our drive. “She is given to walking, as all of Lyme has observed, along the cliffs in her bright red cloak, and on particular afternoons.”

  “There can be nothing singular in a lady’s taking exercise, ” I objected, as the barouche rolled to a halt before Captain Fielding’s door, “nor in the fact of a scarlet wrap, when one is speaking of Lyme.”12

  “There can—and there is—when the lady’s constitutionals are followed without fail by the landing of a smuggling ship along the beaches that same night. I am convinced her red cloak is a signal; she wears it for the benefit of the Reverend’s cutters, lying offshore, and straining at their sea-glasses for a glimpse of scarlet. At times when the dragoons are particularly active—when they feel, for the sake of propriety, a need to assume an attitude of vigilance, and stand about the town as if ready to arrest us all—I have observed Miss Seraphine to remain within doors for whole days together.”

  The Captain eased his game leg out of the barouche with the coachman Jarvis’s assistance, and, once steady upon the ground, turned to hand down first Miss Armstrong and then my sister. “Having seen the cutter running offshore today, I find it in me to wonder, indeed, if Mr. Sidmouth’s presence at Mr. Crawford’s fossil pits was entirely without design. From such a point, one might have an unimpeded view of all sea traffic; he could combine a pleasure party with scrupulous observance of his cargo’s fortunes.”

  “But he departed before the cutter appeared,” Lucy Armstrong argued. Captain Fielding merely bowed, and gestured her towards the open door, where a housemaid stood ready to usher her within. Cassandra followed, with the faintest of smiles. Her gait was unsteady, as though she moved under the influence of a fearful headache. My heart misgave me as I watched; but Captain Fielding’s hand was outstretched to receive my own, and I returned to the subject uppermost in my thoughts.

  “You have indeed been an avid observer of all Mr. Sidmouth’s movements,” I said, as I grasped the Captain’s gloved fingers and found the carriage step. “I would venture to say that even your place of abode is not without design. With no other object than the closest scrutiny, can you have cho
sen to settle in a house not a half-mile from High Down Grange. For no other reason than to calculate his ruin, can you have chosen a neighbour so abhorrent to you.”

  How my heart reacted to this knowledge of Captain Fielding’s design, I cannot say. I confess to a confusion of emotions—some all in admiration of his penetration and bravery, and others, having more to do with Geoffrey Sidmouth, that were marked by regret. But I could not deny the calculation of Fielding’s words, and the careful study behind them; I myself had spent two nights at High Down Grange, and had seen the red-cloaked girl with a lanthorn bobbing along the cliffs. What had Mr. Sidmouth said to Seraphine, in those few phrases of French? Something about the men, and the dogs, and the bay. And the name of the botde-green boat on the beach—IM Gascogne. Presumably a cargo was expected the very night of our precipitate arrival—hence the hostility with which we were met, and the stable boy’s levelled blunderbuss. Seraphine LeFevre was undoubtedly dispatched to divert the men and their wares to another place of hiding, for the length of our unfortunate stay.

  “You are possessed of a singular understanding,” Captain Fielding said, his eyes intent upon my face. We stood thus a moment in the drive while Jarvis remounted the box. “But then, I have allowed myself an unwonted frankness in your company. It may be that our minds are formed for such effortless meeting.”

  “I am happy to learn that you are not entirely languishing in retirement, Captain Fielding” I rejoined, deflecting his gallantry with a smile. “Indeed, I think you are possibly the most active former Naval officer I have ever met.”

  He threw back his blond head and laughed. “You have found me out, Miss Austen. I am, indeed, as yet employed—though on behalf of His Majesty’s revenues rather than his seamen. I shall have the Reverend yet— and when I do, I shall be very much surprised if he is not Geoffrey Sidmouth.”