Jane and the Barque of Frailty Read online

  “Is it so important?” The satiric twinkle of my Henry of old was returned once more to his eyes. “I might almost believe you in fear for your life, Jane— so ardent is your desire for instruction in politics! We might look for Lord Moira to attend the inquest into Tscholikova’s death on the morrow. Most of the Upper Ten Thousand 2 will have squeezed into the publican’s rooms before nine o’clock has tolled.”

  “Then I shall certainly accompany you,” I said swiftly, and bid him goodnight.

  I confess I was relieved to learn that my brother would be absent for the better part of next week; I had too much to accomplish in those swiftly declining days, and too little guile to manage the business without a full confession. I might expect Eliza to emerge from her sickroom the very moment her husband’s hired mare had clattered away from Sloane Street; we would all of us move in greater ease once the ignorant were absent from the house.

  For my part, I employed a quarter-hour in writing a brief missive to Sylvester Chizzlewit, Esquire, before snuffing out my candle. It should be sent round to the solicitor’s chambers no later than eight o’clock in the morning, with a discreetly-worded plea for his attendance upon me in Sloane Street. I foresaw the need of a gentleman in the coming days—one with an acute and subtle mind—and my brief acquaintance with the Chizzlewit family assured me that the youngest scion should possess such qualities.

  As for the inquest itself—I had no fear of being called as witness by the coroner, to account for my dubious brokering of a dead woman’s jewels. Bill Skroggs had assured me that the magistrate would permit no mention of the curious theft to be introduced at the proceedings. Death alone was the panel’s province; Lord Castlereagh’s subtle investigations into a murder were a matter of stealth, to be conducted in the shadows.

  THE BOW STREET MAGISTRATE’S OFFICE SITS DIrectly opposite the Theatre Royal, where Monday evening I had obtained my sole glimpse of Princess Tscholikova in life. It is also aptly located hard by a publick house: the Brown Bear, capably run by one Steptoe Harding. On these premises the Runners are wont to rest their weary limbs at the close of the day, and trade tales of the ardours of crime, under the influence of a can of ale or a measure of Blue Ruin. This morning, however, as Henry and I made our way towards Covent Garden, the narrow passage of Bow Street was clogged with carriage traffick that all but prohibited entry to the Bear. It was as my brother had predicted: the cream of London Society had come to learn why a Russian princess had breathed her last on Lord Castlereagh’s doorstep.

  It was but half-past eight o’clock in the morning, and the inquest was not to be opened until the hour of ten; yet already seats were claimed towards the front of the publican’s main taproom, and the knot of persons by the door was five deep, all of them discoursing at the top of their lungs on every subject from movements in the Peninsula to a nobleman’s losses in one of the more fashionable gambling hells. Most of the interested parties were gentlemen: some of their faces I recognised. None were of Henry’s intimate circle—indeed, these were the Great of London Society: Lord Alvanley, who was extremely wealthy and deplorably intimate with the Prince Regent; Earl Grey, who might hope to lead a government in time, if the Regent deigned to remember his Whiggish friends; Henry, Lord Holland—another Whig, but one for whom I held an indescribable fondness, as having been the object of Lord Harold Trowbridge’s trust and esteem for thirty years at least. I have no acquaintance with Lord Holland or his fashionable lady; I shall never dine among the twenty or thirty Select who are summoned nightly to take potluck at Holland House; but I shall always bear him a depth of affection, for having supported Lord Harold in his darkest days.

  The scene should have been offensive, were it not so benignly familiar: a crowd of elegant clubmen conversing at their ease in the Brown Bear, while beyond the door of the publick room, the body of Princess Tscholikova must even then await the scrutiny of the coroner’s panel: blue and cold, her neck ravaged by a knife or a razor, the remains already giving off a putrid smell at the passage of four days’ time. I felt a wild impulse to go to her—to protect this unknown woman from the callous riot of hunting and pugilism, on-dits and cockfights, the formation of governments and Perceval’s discomfiture … I thought to look for Earl Moira, in the hope that I might profit from this interval in furthering acquaintance—but as Henry squeezed politely past a gentleman who must, who could only be the ambitious Tory minister, George Canning, I glimpsed the Comte d’Entraigues.

  He did not observe me; indeed, I am certain the Comte believed himself ignored. He was standing at Canning’s elbow, like an acolyte or a servant; his hands clasped behind his back, his head humbly bowed. I remembered something Henry had said: that Canning and d’Entraigues were intimate once, until la belle cocotte, Julia Radcliffe, had divided them. It did not appear as tho’ they were divided now.

  It was possible the Comte d’Entraigues would offer the cut indirect to so insignificant a person as his despised wife’s acquaintance, regardless of the fact that we had met only two days before in Hyde Park— but as I gazed at his raddled countenance, I perceived that the piercing eyes were studying an image behind me. I turned, and saw the sleek black head of the nobleman who had peered from the carriage window through the rain of yesterday morning: the Russian Prince who must be Tscholikova’s brother.

  He wore black, as did all those in his party—two gentlemen and a figure I recognised as the maid Druschka. All four might have been alone in the room, for all the notice they gave the curious. I did not wish to betray a vulgar interest, and looked instead for my brother.

  Henry was already surging forward to claim a pair of seats at the middle of the room. He had no reason to find a foreign grandee of particular note; his attention was drawn, rather, to the suddenly paralysed clubmen behind us. They stood as tho’ cast in stone, all their eyes riveted upon a single figure as he paused in the now empty doorway: a tall man, with a pronounced nose and penetrating eyes, and the disordered locks of a fashionable exquisite: Robert, Lord Castlereagh, the dread object of a dead woman’s love.

  1 General Sir John Moore was killed in the British evacuation from Corunna in January 1809.—Editor’s note.

  2 The Upper Ten Thousand were the aristocracy of England; the haut ton.—Editor’s note.

  Chapter 12

  Dead. Letters

  Friday, 26 April 1811, cont.

  ∼

  SIR NATHANIEL CONANT IS MAGISTRATE AT THE Bow Street office, and it was he who brought the publick room of the Brown Bear to order.

  “Gentlemen,” he sonorously intoned, pounding with the flat of his hand on a scarred oak table, “gentlemen … and ladies, silence if you please. The enquiry into the shocking and lamentable death of Princess Evgenia Tscholikova in the early hours of Tuesday last, is now called to order—Thomas Whitpeace, coroner for the districts of Covent Garden and Queen Square, presiding.”

  I settled myself in the seat Henry had procured for me, aware that the better part of the fashionable bucks arrayed in the doorway would be forced to stand for the duration of the proceedings. But Robert, Lord Castlereagh, ignored the crush of gawkers and strode regally to the very front of the room, where a scarlet-faced individual promptly offered his own seat to the former member of the Cabinet. His lordship looked neither to left nor right, and might have been alone in the assembly for all the notice he gave his fellows—including particularly George Canning, and the old French nobleman who lingered in his shadow. Castlereagh was exquisitely dressed in a coat of dark green superfine that even I could judge was cut by one of the first tailors of the day—Weston, perhaps, whose quiet elegance should exactly suit his lordship—and kerseymere breeches. His boots shone; but it was his lordship’s bearing that inevitably drew the eye.

  “I must say, Henry,” I whispered to my brother, “he is exceedingly handsome, even for one well past his first youth. Such compelling dark eyes! Such a sensitive line to the mouth! And the turn of countenance, tho’ haughty enough, is not unpleasing. It sugge
sts a high courage—which must serve his lordship well in such a place.”

  “I should give a good deal to learn his knack of tying a cravat,” Henry returned. “He wears the trône d’amour, Jane. You will observe the creases to be sublime—and requiring no absurdity in the collar-points to achieve the first stare of fashion. His lordship disdains the dandy set, being rather a Corinthian in his tastes—that is to say, that he prides himself on matters of sport. His ability to drive four-in-hand, his patronage of the Fives Court, his precision at Manton’s with a pistol … ”

  My brother’s confidences died away. Castlereagh’s talent for marking his targets was already too well known.

  He was followed at perhaps a half-pace by a gentleman in the neat dress of a political servant. But here all resemblance to the common herd must end—the gentleman’s countenance called to mind the angels; his form, the Greeks. A paragon of beauty, where most men might prefer to be called handsome—and I noted more than one indrawn breath, of surprise and admiration, as his figure made its way in Castlereagh’s wake.

  “And who, Henry, is that?” I murmured.

  “Charles Malverley—third son of the Earl of Tanborough. He is devilish astute in the upper works, I understand—serves his lordship as private secretary. Ambitious, and a great favourite with gentlemen and ladies alike.”

  At that moment, a communicating door from the far side of the publick room opened, and a man I judged to be Thomas Whitpeace paced swiftly towards the coroner’s chair. He was diminutive and spry, a balding man of middle years blessed with the bright eyes of a bird; and I observed him survey the august crowd with a slightly satiric look.

  He cleared his throat, well aware of the devices of theatre—and there it was again, I thought: the sensation of being played to, in a grotesque drama whose ending was beyond my knowledge. Whitpeace offered no welcome, no recognition that this was an inquest quite out of the ordinary way—but announced the names of the panel without further ado. These appeared to be men of trade for the most part— citizens of the neighbourhood surrounding Covent Garden, and thus purveyors of market goods, or the labour that sustained them: wheelwrights, carters, a butcher, and a poulterer. Several looked decidedly ill-at-ease; but one, a squat, red-haired individual with powerful arms, glared contemptuously at the lot of us. Samuel Hays was a smithy, and foreman of the panel, and hewas not to be put out of countenance by a deal of ton swells, up to every grig.

  I was interested to see whether the man’s expression altered after he was conducted, along with his fellows, to view the Princess’s decaying corpse— which must have been placed in the room Thomas Whitpeace had just quitted—but upon his return Hays appeared, if anything, more defiant than ever. He was alone in this; the rest of his panel looked quite green.

  “Let it be known that Deceased is one Princess Evgenia Tscholikova, so named and recognised by two persons here present who have sworn before the magistrate as to Deceased’s identity. We are to consider,” Thomas Whitpeace said quietly into the well of expectant faces, “in what manner Deceased came by her death, in the early hours of Tuesday, the twenty-third of April, 1811—whether by mishap, by malice aforethought, or by her own hand. The coroner calls Druschka Molova!”

  A stir filled the closely-packed room as the black-clad figure of the maid moved heavily towards Thomas Whitpeace. She kept her eyes trained on the floor, and was followed by one of the men who had accompanied the Russian Prince.

  “I am Count Kronsky,” this personage said, with a dramatic bow and clicking of his heels, “and I will speak for the maid, as she does not understand the English.”

  His own accent was so impenetrable that the coroner had to request him to say his piece again, before comprehending it, Druschka following the exchange all the while. When it came to the swearing of the oath, the maid refused, as being contrary to her Orthodox faith; and at length, exasperated by the complexities of multilingual persuasion, the coroner proceeded to his questions.

  The story that unfolded was a simple one. Druschka had been raised from a child on the estates of the Pirov family, and was employed as the Princess’s personal maid at the time Evgenia turned fifteen, and was presented to the Tsar’s court. At the Princess’s wedding—which occurred when Tscholikova was seventeen—Druschka had accompanied her mistress to the home of her husband; and from thence she had journeyed to Vienna, later to Paris, and lastly, to London. The maid’s fierce loyalty and love for the dead woman was transparent, even through the voice of her interpreter.

  “On the night in question,” Mr. Whitpeace said, “you last saw your mistress … when?”

  At eight o’clock, Count Kronsky relayed, when the Princess had entered a hackney bound for Covent Garden.

  “She did not return home that evening?”

  No indeed, tho’ Druschka had waited faithfully in the hall from midnight onwards, intent upon undressing her mistress and seeing her to bed. She had still been sitting in the hall of the house in Hans Place when the Runner had come from Bow Street, and taken her to view her mistress’s corpse.

  The coroner had only one further question to put—and this was of so curious a nature, as to give rise to speculation among the audience. He held aloft a fragment of porcelain, perhaps as large as a man’s hand, jaggedly broken, and asked whether the maid recognised it.

  The elderly Russian turned the fragment over in her fingers, her lined face crumpling. She gave way to racking sobs, quite horrible to hear—and no further communication was possible. Count Kronsky spoke sharply in his native tongue, and seemed on the point of striking Druschka; but Mr. Whitpeace ordered him to let the maid stand down.

  As she did so, she raised a streaming countenance and said in guttural English, “It is milady’s.”

  Count Kronsky put a short and brutal question, received his answer, and said, “This porcelain box once held the Princess’s jewels.”

  If a flush suffused my entire body at this, my discomfiture was lost in the general murmur of interest that swept o’er the publick house at the Russian’s words. Henry, being too captivated by the drama, paid no heed to my momentary lapse of composure.

  “I now call one Joshua Bends,” Whitpeace said, “watchman of the Berkeley Square district, to be duly sworn.”

  Joshua Bends was an elderly person, much afflicted with rheumatism, and so nearly bent double that I wondered how he managed to sit in the narrow wooden box that served the charleys for shelter. He placed a palsied right hand on the coroner’s Bible and spoke his oath from a toothless mouth; and when he turned to face the room, I detected the hallmark of senility in his bleared and ill-focused eyes.

  “How did you come to be present in Berkeley Square on the morning in question?”

  “Hey?” Joshua Bends muttered, his hand cupped around his ear. “What’s that, Yer Honour?”

  Mr. Whitpeace repeated his query with commendable patience; and Bends lisped through his toothless mouth, “Doing me work, Yer Honour, as is expected. Allus walks right round the square I do, and calls out the hour, as regular as church bells. I’ve been charley in the square coming on thirteen year, and there’s some as says I’m like to die in my box, I am—but I hope as the Good Lord preserves me from the sort o’ death that there Princess had. Pale as snow she was, in a crumpled heap on the paving-stones, and me thinking she was in a dead faint, until my boot slipped in the deal o’ blood she’d lost in dying.”

  Mr. Whitpeace made a moue of irritation—his witness had got well beyond him—and said abruptly, “Let us begin as is proper, with the first hour of your labour, my good man. When did you relieve your colleague in the watchman’s box near Berkeley Square?”

  “At midnight, same as allus. I clapped old Amos Small on the shoulder and woke him from a sound sleep, I did, and sent him off home to his daughter’s. The bells of St. George’s had just called out the hour. I’m a prompt man. I don’t like to keep a fellow waiting, even if he do be asleep.”

  “And so you took up your place in the box n
ear Berkeley Square as close to midnight as makes no odds,” the coroner underlined. “Did you make note of the carriage and foot traffick that passed during your watch?”

  “Not partickular,” Bends said, once the question had been repeated in order to satisfy his indifferent ears. “I may have seen a deal o’ carriages, in and around the square, but as to most of ’em—they lets their cargo off at the door, and pulls to the stable yard. I don’t pay no mind. There’s allus a gentleman or two on foot, but they comes nearer to dawn, from they hells and clubs in Pall Mall, and the gentlemen is allus jug-bitten—et of Hull cheese—bless ’em.”

  When asked to explain this descent into the vernacular, the good Bends explained that he meant drunk as a wheelbarrow.

  “Did you not observe one equipage, at least, to pull up before No. 45, Berkeley Square, and discharge its occupants?” Mr. Whitpeace enquired.

  “That’d be his lordship’s residence,” Bends said, with an eye cast shiftily at Castlereagh. “Happen I did see his lordship’s coach at a stand afore No. 45.”

  “At what time was this?”

  “Nigh on one o’clock, by the bells. They rang out but a notion afore the coach came clattering over the stones and pulled-to.”

  “And did you observe anyone to quit the coach?”

  “I saw her ladyship step down from the carriage, and a gentleman I took to be his lordship,” Bends said carefully.

  “Took to be his lordship? Are you suggesting Lady Castlereagh was accompanied into her house in the small hours of morning by a gentleman not her husband?” Mr. Whitpeace enquired smoothly.

  The foreman, Samuel Hays, let out a hoot of laughter; and Lord Castlereagh half-rose from his chair, as tho’ to fling a protest—or perhaps a glove— in the offending blacksmith’s face. A hand from Charles Malverley, however, eased his lordship back into his chair; tho’ I observed his entire form to stiffen with outrage.

  “I can tell a lady from a hundred paces,” Bends volunteered affably, “from her way o’ dressing the hair and carrying herself—and Lady Castlereagh is allus so outlandish in her modes, I’d never mistake. Known for it, she is—makes a point of drawing notice to herself. It’s her way o’ cutting a dash, I reckon.”