Jane and His Lordship's Legacy Page 12

  “I have heard your name everywhere, Mith Authten,” she said without warmth. “You are quite the talk of the village—indeed, of every habitation for mileth around. We are not accuthtomed, in our retired country way, to ladieth condethending to vithit a coroner’th inquetht; but I thuppothe, when the lady in quethtion hath actually thtumbled over the body, that we mutht be prepared for anything.”

  “My brother did say that he met with you in Alton yesterday,” Miss Beckford observed, “and I thought it most courageous of you to attend, my dear. The notice of a member of the Squire’s family must be a great comfort in a death of this kind, and shall be felt as it ought, among the lower orders. May I present Mr. John-Knight Hinton, also of Chawton Lodge?”

  My slight poet of the cut indirect was arrayed this evening in primrose knee breeches, a white satin waistcoat, and a black evening coat with stiffly-padded shoulders. His snowy cravat was of so intricate a construction that it bewildered the eye, and a quizzing glass dangled from a fine gold chain about his neck. Mr. Hinton clearly prided himself on his ability to ape the most current London fashion, and his magnificence might have turned the head of many a green girl; but to my more practised gaze, Julian Thrace’s neat elegance—or even Major Spence’s quiet rectitude—more clearly proclaimed the gentleman.

  He raised his quizzing glass, surveyed me impudently, and scraped a bow.

  “I have already had a glimpse of Mr. Hinton,” I told Miss Beckford with a smile, “at yesterday’s inquest, and again today in Alton. What was your opinion of the tragic business, sir?”

  “I thought it very singular that such grievous trouble should arise in so peaceful and respectable a place,” Mr. Hinton returned. “Indeed, I may say that I was ashamed the shades of Chawton must be so polluted.”

  “And yet you could not keep away from the coroner’s panel,” Miss Beckford observed astringently. “I suppose it is of a piece with your usual sporting amusements. Mr. Hinton is quite a slave to the Corinthian Set, Miss Austen. There is not a prizefight or a cock pit within thirty miles that is unknown to him.”3

  “Indeed?” I murmured with an air of surprise. “From your appearance, Mr. Hinton—so much the Sprig of Fashion!—I should have thought you aspired to the Dandy Set.”

  The gentleman dropped his quizzing glass as tho’ struck to the quick.

  “I observe Mr. Papillon is arrived,” Miss Beckford supplied quickly. “If you will excuse me—”

  She moved off, with a nod for Mr. Hinton that flavoured strongly of contempt; but the gentleman did not seize the opportunity to follow her, as I might have expected. Miss Beckford was as a fly he swept aside with a careless hand.

  “Violence is quite foreign to those who truly love this country, Miss Austen; and certain it is that a corpse should never have been discovered in Widow Seward’s cottage,” Mr. Hinton observed. “But she was most truly the lady in all respects. I need hardly add that the presence of Dyer’s labourers would not have been necessary prior to her forcible eviction. She saw no reason to complain of the cottage’s arrangements.”

  His implication was clear: we Austens had brought this trouble upon the village ourselves, and we Austens alone must bear the burden of its disgrace. I flushed in the sudden heat of anger—which discomposure was undoubtedly Mr. Hinton’s object—but any words I might have uttered were overborne. The bell was rung, the ladies’ hands disposed among the gentlemen—and we were all sent in to dinner.

  Letter from Lord Harold Trowbridge to Charles, Earl Grey, dated 2 June 1791, one leaf quarto, laid; no watermark; signed Trowbridge under a black wax seal bearing imprint of Wilborough arms; marked, Personelle, Par Chassure Exprès, in red ink.

  (British Museum, Wilborough Papers, Austen bequest)

  Rue de Varennes, Paris

  My dear Charles—

  I thank you for your last, and am most happy to know that you perceive a change in the political fortunes of our party in coming months. If the Duke of Devonshire will lend his weight where weight is necessary, anything may happen; and your good angel, my beloved Georgiana, may yet effect the necessary push. Canis will not act, as we know to our misfortune, and the Duchess does not will it; but her affection for yourself and her high courage shall see us all through.

  I dined with Jouvel in the country near Versailles last evening, and he begs to be remembered to you. He has a very pretty daughter of but fifteen, and were I in the habit of carrying off girls half my age, I should be sorely tempted; but as it is, I must direct my energies elsewhere. I am charged with no less, and the stakes—as we used to say at Brooks’s—are murderously high.

  You will be pleased to know that the difficulties attendant upon Revolutionary fervour that you and I foresaw, in Cornwall this spring, are already anticipated among our friends on this side of the Channel. I stand ready to ship any number of “wine casks” and “horses of racing blood” in the small vessels you have promised to have ready off Marseille, and have found a likely lad to help me in the transport. His name is Geoffrey Sidmouth, and he is tied by blood to any number of people we esteem and value; he is a handy fellow with the management of ships, and is in good heart. I will send word when the need arises; I hope it may not for some time, but I fear that my hope is false.

  I remain, my dear Charles—

  Trowbridge

  Chapter 12

  The Devil in the Cards

  6 July 1809, cont.

  ~

  AS EVENING PARTIES GO, OURS WAS MORE GENERALLY unequal in its composition than most. We were treated to Miss Benn’s simplicities and vague utterances, which had the appalling habit of falling directly into such lapses in the conversation as must make them the most apparent. Lady Imogen Vansittart, on the other hand, deigned to speak to no one not of her intimate party and at her end of the table—that is to say, no one other than Major Spence or Mr. Thrace; while Henry, who was positioned at the table’s centre, spent the better part of the evening attempting to catch the conversation proceeding above him, while evading the notice of those conversing below.

  The Prowtings were divided between volubility and silence, with Catherine—who was placed next to Mr. Hinton—staring painfully and self-consciously at her plate. I several times observed Mr. Hinton to speak to her in a low and urgent tone, but she repulsed the gentleman’s attempts at conversation. Her earnest gaze was more often fixed upon Julian Thrace, but what attention he could spare from Lady Imogen was entirely claimed by Ann Prowting, who had been placed at the Beau’s left hand.

  Ann’s devoted efforts at new-dressing her hair had certainly achieved a degree of novelty: the girl’s golden curls were gathered in a rakish knot over one ear, with a few tender wisps straggling to her nape. A quantity of white shoulder was exposed, as was an ample décolleté; and I might almost have suspected Ann of dampening her shift beneath the white muslin gown, in order that the thin fabric should cling to her limbs. She sat opposite to Henry, but succeeded in ignoring my brother completely. With a Julian Thrace at hand, who could spare a thought for an aging banker?

  The young man who aspired to an earldom was the picture of easiness. Thrace could flirt with Ann Prowting, reduce a quail to bones with graceful fingers, listen to Lady Imogen with every appearance of interest, and address an amusing story to his host. Had I yearned to converse with him, I was placed at a disadvantage. My seat was towards the lower end of the table, next to Mr. Prowting; but I was able to observe the Beau’s artful swoops from one conversational plane to another, and decided that it was all very well done.

  He had claimed my attention first by declaring, with affecting candour, that he had never before found an occasion to witness a coroner’s inquest—and had discovered the experience to be infinitely diverting.

  “As a man raised for much of my life on the Continent,” Thrace explained to the table in general, “I am not so familiar as I should like with the conventions of English justice. To observe your yeoman class, displayed on a hard wooden bench and endeavouring to do their
utmost in consideration of the Departed, was as instructive as a treatise on philosophy should be. I admired the succinctness and learning of Mr. Munro, the subtlety with which he asked his questions, and the respect with which he treated high and low alike.”

  “I wonder,” the exquisite Mr. Hinton replied with a curl of his lip, “that you can reap so much benefit from so vulgar an episode. I could only endure the two hours I spent in the George, by resolving never to be found there again!”

  Mr. Thrace smiled at the gentleman. “But perhaps, sir, you had not the peculiar interest I felt in the man’s demise. When I consider that had I left Middleton but five minutes earlier that evening, I might have saved the labourer’s life—or, heaven forbid!—met a similar fate at the hands of his murderer, I could not be otherwise than compelled by the coroner’s proceeding.”

  A storm of questions greeted this pronouncement, with Mr. Thrace throwing up his hands in protest as the ladies all demanded that he explain himself.

  “There is no mystery,” cried he. “I dined alone on Saturday with our excellent Middleton, Spence being absent from Sherborne St. John on a matter of business in Basingstoke, and Lady Imogen being as yet in London.”

  “We sat in conversation so long,” Mr. Middleton added, “that it cannot have been earlier than midnight when you quitted the house, tho’ I pressed you most earnestly to remain, and should have summoned the housemaid to make up your room, had you allowed it. But you would not put me to the trouble, and rode out directly, the moon being nearly at the full, and the road well-illumined.”

  “You noticed nothing untoward, sir, in your way back to Sherborne St. John?” Mr. Prowting asked keenly. “No mill in the roadway, as I believe these affairs are called among the sporting set?”

  “My road did not lie in the direction of the pond, if indeed the poor man met his death in that place,” Thrace explained. “I set off at a canter in the direction of Alton, and thence towards Basingstoke, and achieved Stonings by three o’clock in the morning—my hunter, Rob Roy, being a devil to go, begging the ladies’ pardon.”

  Ann Prowting here exclaimed at the beauty of Mr. Thrace’s horse, and the conversation turned more generally to the hunting field, and Mr. Chute’s mastery of the Vyne, and the particularities of certain hounds the gentlemen had known; and my attention might have wandered, but for Mr. Thrace’s enjoyment of general conversation, and his tendency to bring the attention of the whole table back to himself. Had I not observed the easiness of his manners, and the general air of modesty that attended his speech, I might have adjudged him a coxcomb, and despised him at my leisure. As it was, I merely wondered at his reverting so often to the unfortunate end of Shafto French. It is quite rare in my experience for a gentleman to concern himself with the murder of a labourer—unless, of course, he harbours some sort of guilty knowledge, or hopes to expose the same in another. I determined to make a study of Mr. Thrace, and refused a third glass of claret that my mind might be clear.

  Over the second course, a pleasurable affair of some twelve dishes, the Bond Street Beau related a roguish tale, full of incident and melodrama, concerning a necklace of rubies stolen by a British officer at the Battle of Chandernagar; a necklace of such fabled import, that it was said to have once graced the neck of Madame de Pompadour, and to be worth all of two hundred thousand pounds.1

  “I am certain the stolen jewels are to blame for that unfortunate man’s death in your cottage, Miss Austen,” affirmed he with a gleam in his eye. “I might have offered the story to the coroner yesterday morning, but from a fear of putting myself forward in such a delicate proceeding.”

  These words could not fail to alert Mr. Prowting’s attention; the magistrate was suddenly all interest. “Say your piece, man,” he instructed from his position opposite Henry. “If you know something that bears on the murder, you must disclose it to the Law!”

  “Well—” Aware that the notice of the entire table was united in his person, Mr. Thrace inclined his head towards Lady Imogen. “I had the tale from your father, the Earl—who spent some years out in India as a young man, and heard the story at its source. It seems that a fabulous necklace was stolen at sabre point from one of the gallant French defenders so routed by Clive in that illustrious battle, which occurred in the last century, I believe.”

  “Clive took Chandernagar from the French in 1757,” Major Spence supplied. “The battle secured Bengal for the English.”

  “Exactly so,” Thrace returned. “The story, as the Earl told it to me, is that an English Lieutenant seized the fabled gems from a French defender at the fort’s capitulation, and brought them to England after much intrigue and bloodshed. They were later lost on the road—somewhere near Chawton, if you will credit it.”

  Mrs. Prowting emitted a faint scream, one plump hand over her mouth, the other clutching her handkerchief.

  “It is said,” Thrace further observed, “that, hounded across land and sea unceasingly by Indian pursuers of a most deadly and subtle kind, the Lieutenant landed in Southampton and made his way by feverish degrees towards London. Coming to St. Nicholas’s Church”—this, with a bow for Mr. Papillon, Chawton’s clergyman, who was seated at the bottom of the table—“he sought refuge in the sanctuary, where the Hindu fakirs, being unmoved by Christian belief, wounded him severely. In Chawton the trail of the purloined rubies comes to an abrupt end.”

  “Are you thuggethting, thir, that thith thimple village ith in the unwitting pothethion of the Thpoilth of War?” enquired Miss Hinton. It was the first remark I had heard her to address to the upper end of the table; and I applauded its natural sense. She was not to be taken in by a spurious fribble, a Pink of the Ton; hers was a sober countenance, suggestive of a lady much given to reading sermons, and making Utheful Extracth.

  Mr. Thrace, his eyes on Catherine Prowting’s glowing countenance, slowly crumbled a piece of bread between his fingers. “The necklace was believed to be cursed—not simply from the manner of its possession, but from a flaw inherent in the stones themselves. Rubies, so like to blood, must draw blood to them; and so it proved in this case. The Rubies of Chandernagar destroyed each of their successive masters.”

  “For what doth it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and loothe hith Immortal Thoul?” observed Miss Hinton with complacency.

  “I had not heard this story of my father,” Lady Imogen imposed, “tho’ I know him to have moved in a very rakehell set while in India. Chandernagar, however, was some thirty years before his time on the Subcontinent.”

  “I believe the story has achieved a permanent place in the Indian firmament,” Thrace said, “due to its bloodthirstiness. No doubt your respected father learned it of an eyewitness.”

  “But surely the marauding Lieutenant was a man of parts?” Lady Imogen objected. “What are a whole company of Hindu against one hardened English soldier? Major Spence, for example, should never be parted from his treasure so easily!”

  Her liquid eyes were dark with excitement, her voice throbbing and low. I observed that while her gaze was fixed on Julian Thrace, Major Spence was observing her; as he did so, an expression of pain crossed his countenance.

  “The Lieutenant who seized them, to the ruin of their French owner, had his throat cut while he lay in that very inn which you, ma’am”—this, with a gracious acknowledgement of my mother—“have now the happy fortune to inhabit,” Thrace continued. “The wounded man dragged himself to the publick house, wounded and bleeding, seeking refuge from his pursuers. His body was discovered on the morning following—but of the rubies no trace was ever found.”

  “Perhaps this is the root of the cottage’s ill-fortune,” Mr. Hinton observed languidly. “If your story is true, Thrace, the digger of the cesspit was not the first corpse to lie there. I daresay it was the necklace that good-for-nothing ruffian French was searching for, in the depths of Mrs. Austen’s cellar.”

  “But it will not do, man!” Mr. Prowting exclaimed, and threw down his napkin. “Shafto Fre
nch was drowned, as the coroner has said. He cannot both have been treasure-hunting in the cottage cellar, and breathing his last in Chawton Pond!”

  A slightly shocked silence followed this outburst; one which the clergyman Mr. Papillon had the grace to end.

  “But in the case of the Earl’s Indian story,” he observed with a correct smile, as though improving an archbishop’s views on Ordination, “nothing is clearer. Naturally the rubies were not to be discovered. The thieving Lieutenant gave up his booty with his life, and his murderer lived ever after on the proceeds.”

  “One should suppose no such thing,” Mr. Thrace retorted, “it being attested by those who study these matters, that the stones never afterwards came onto the market. What sort of thief makes away with a considerable prize, and does not attempt to profit by it? No, no, my dear sir—the Rubies of Chandernagar are in one of two places: either hidden beneath the stones of your own St. Nicholas’s crypt, where the errant Lieutenant—already fearing for his life—placed them before receiving his deadly wound; or concealed still about the grounds of the late inn.”

  My mother’s looks were eloquent: a mixture of rapacity and uneasiness.

  “And does our home accommodate the murdered soldier as well?” I demanded lightly, “—his ghost creaking of nights upon the stairs of the cottage, crying out for vengeance?”

  “You may inform us whether it is so in the morning, Miss Austen.”

  Amidst general laughter, Lady Imogen protested, “For my part, I think it imperative that a search party be formed after dinner, as a kind of amusement, so that we might fan out across the countryside with lanthorns and dogs and discover the treasure. We might call the entertainment ‘Hunt the Necklace,’ and begin in St. Nicholas’s vestry!”