Jane and the Madness of Lord Byron jam-10 Read online

  “Are further researches to be undertaken? Does the magistrate mean to learn the truth of Miss Twining’s death?” I enquired.

  “Not at all,” Mona scoffed. “It is as I predicted; Sir Harding shall be content to say that persons unknown killed the girl, and have done.”

  “I cannot agree, my love,” Swithin objected. “Indeed, I think Old HardCross intends to charge Byron regardless of the inquest’s judgement. It is within his office, you know, provided he can recruit his proofs, and present them along with Byron at the next Assizes.”

  “The magistrate is a fool if he believes Byron should be witless enough to leave Miss Twining’s body in his own rooms. Good God,” Desdemona said bitterly, “had he indeed drowned the poor child, as all of Brighton supposes, he had merely to leave her lying on the shingle! For what possible purpose should he have taken a hammock from his own yacht, and sewn her into it like a lost seaman, in order to carry her to his bed?”

  “The hammock was indeed Byron’s?” I repeated, startled.

  “Yes,” Henry supplied. “The word Giaour, you will recall, was embroidered on the canvas—and as you correctly divined, that is the name of Byron’s boat. It is a Turkish word, apparently, meaning infidel, or heathen … or … some such. Sir Harding would have it the hammock alone indicts his lordship.”

  “Nonsense!” Desdemona cried. “Does any murderer leave his calling-card on the body?”

  “Sir Harding can think of nobody else to blame, my dear,” her husband soothed. “This adjournment is a lull in the battle merely, with further salvos to come.”

  “But what did Lord Byron say, that so persuaded the jury of his innocence?” I demanded.

  “It was his valet, rather than Byron himself, who moved them,” Henry supplied. “The man is Brighton born and bred. Byron employs him only when he chances to descend upon the town for a bit of sailing; and with little in the nature of loyalty due to such an indifferent master, the valet—one Chaunce by name—was readily credited by his fellows on the panel. He declared that Byron returned to the Arms at a quarter to one in the morning, well before Miss Twining is known to have quitted the Assembly with Lady Caroline Lamb, which may be put at one o’clock; and that his lordship demanded that his bags be packed. He paid his shot with the innkeeper while Chaunce collected his traps. Chaunce and Byron then quitted the Arms for Mr. Scrope Davies’s house, Davies affirming that he had waited in the publick rooms and escorted Byron and his man to his own lodgings. At no point was Byron out of sight of either of his fellows—he cannot then have effected murder.”

  “Did Mr. Davies say when they achieved his lodgings?” I asked swiftly.

  “He would put it at perhaps a quarter to two in the morning. He and Byron sat up drinking Port, and talking over the regrettable behaviour of Lady Caroline Lamb. I’m told that Byron declared he fled the King’s Arms in order to avoid Lady Caro—he was certain she would attempt to breach his rooms that night, as she is forever doing. The two gentlemen sought their beds at three o’clock. Byron was up again at eight, mounted and riding north for London. All this he told the coroner, under oath.”

  “I suppose he might have killed Miss Twining between three and eight, with no one the wiser,” I said thoughtfully, “but how was the deed effected? Is Mr. Davies to be relied upon?”

  “I daresay Davies would sell his own mother to get Byron off,” Swithin confided. “They’ve been friends for ages.”

  “Would he, indeed?” Desdemona turned on her husband swiftly. “Even in a matter of murder? This is not a debt of honour Davies stands security for, Charles!—None of your vowels offered over the faro table at White’s! Even so frippery a fellow as Scrope must apprehend the gravity of the case.”

  “More reason to stand buff, if his friend is in danger of hanging—”

  “I do not understand,” Mona said petulantly, “why Byron should be suspected at all. It is distinctly tiresome! Simply because the corpse lay in a room he once inhabited!”

  “The mere fact of Miss Twining having been killed outside that room must materially lessen Byron’s security,” I said. “His lordship’s assertion that he quitted the Arms at such-and-such an hour, and Mr. Davies’s statement that his friend spent the whole of the night in his lodgings, are worth little, given that Miss Twining did not die in Byron’s room at the Arms—she was only found there, much later. It might as well have been Lord Byron, as anybody, who drowned her and left her body in his bed for safekeeping.”

  “But it is all absurd, from beginning to end!” Desdemona protested. “Why should Byron kill Catherine Twining? He was passionately attached to her! Moreover, how could he possibly have carried that dripping hammock upstairs, under the eyes of the whole publick house, in the middle of the night? Do you not think it appears as tho’ the murderer—whoever he might be—hated Lord Byron, and meant for suspicion to turn upon him?”

  “That is what the jury believed,” Henry said.

  “But not the magistrate,” Swithin countered. “Absent Byron, all of Brighton is subject to suspicion—and when presented with such a bewildering array, Old HardCross is sure to take comfort in the obvious. He shall prefer to arrest the one man he may name.”

  Being too well acquainted with the limited understanding and general indolence of the magistracy, who are appointed more for their connexions than their zeal, I could not find it in me to argue with the Earl. Moreover, I saw a certain cunning in the very implausibility of Byron’s guilt—a cunning of which I suspected him perfectly capable.

  “By ostentatiously paying his shot and quitting the King’s Arms at an unlikely hour,” I mused, “his lordship may have deliberately established his absence in the eyes of all observers, precisely to avail himself of those same rooms only hours later. He may depend upon the world exclaiming: ‘Byron was long gone when the girl was killed! Byron should never place his victim in his own bed!’ He may be clever enough to incriminate himself, if I may so express it, in order to convince us all of his innocence.”

  There was a pause as the whole party digested this bit of reasoning. Then Mona said, “What a terrible and penetrating mind you own, my dear Jane. I should not like to live too long with such thoughts as yours; they cannot be comfortable. But you have not heard the most diverting thing of all—I have had it from almost every lip in town, tho’ none were present at the panel—how swiftly a delicious on-dit does fly about, to be sure! You will never guess who forced an entry to the inquest!”

  “Lady Oxford?”

  “She is not yet arrived, else I am certain she should be impatient to meet with you—I have assured her of your good offices on Byron’s behalf.”

  “But, Mona—!” I cried, shocked; never had I said my slightest office was devoted to his lordship.

  “You have agreed to discover the truth,” she said, shrugging; “and while we may be aware that the truth could run counter to Byron’s interests—Lady Oxford need not know it. It was Caro Lamb who descended upon Mr. Frogmore and Sir Harding!—Dressed in cloth-of-gold, for all the world like Lady Macbeth, excepting only a bloody blade raised high above her head. I am sure she may have been walking in her sleep, or in the grip of a fit at the very least—by all accounts, her looks bordered on the deranged.”

  “I had it from Scrope Davies himself,” Henry said with a grin, “at Raggett’s Club not an hour since, that Byron nearly tore his hair when her ladyship invaded the inquest—thrusting back the door with an audible clang, pacing ceremoniously down the aisle between the chairs, calling out in agitation to Mr. Frogmore that she must be heard, for tho’ he would not stay even to save her from the sea, she would not wish Genius to perish under the heel of the rabble.”

  “Good God,” I murmured.

  “Byron, I’m told, called her ladyship a carrion bird not content with hounding him to death, but that she must come and feast upon his bones. He was on the point of quitting the inquest entirely, which should have been most improper and prejudicial to the jury’s judgement, had friend S
crope not constrained him.”

  “And Lady Caroline?” I asked eagerly. “Did she explain her excessive interest in Catherine Twining?”

  Mona’s eyes narrowed, and she leaned towards us all conspiratorially. “Caro would have it she wished to warn the dear child against Lord Byron—that his lordship was mad, bad, and dangerous to know, as she put it. You may imagine the sensation her words produced!”

  “I wonder he was not taken in charge immediately!” I observed. “But did Lady Caroline state at what hour Miss Twining arrived at the Pavilion?”

  “She could not be certain—never looks at clocks—does not keep a timepiece by her—thought it was close to one o’clock, but should never swear to the hour—and in general, suggested such ennui at the question that one wonders how she kept from falling into a doze—or so my sources assure me. As to the manner of Miss Twining’s departure—I am told that Lady Caroline was shockingly vague. She supposed the girl was shown out by a footman. She supposed a chair was found for her. At that juncture a lackey from the stables stood up to claim that he had seen a young lady, dark-haired and dressed in white muslin, hastening towards the Steyne alone, in the middle of the night. He could not immediately swear to the time, but when urged by the coroner to consider the matter, thought it was perhaps a few minutes after the Regent’s great stable clock chimed the three-quarter-hour.”

  “And Byron reached his friend Davies’s house, in the company of two witnesses—the selfsame friend and a valet—at a quarter to two,” I observed. “They must have just missed Catherine Twining on the paving!”

  “But you forget, Miss Austen,” the Earl interjected. “Whatever may have been her intention of crossing the Steyne, she did not meet her death there. Something—or someone—persuaded her to turn back towards the shingle, where she was undoubtedly drowned.”

  I had a sudden idea of Catherine in the night—weary, bewildered, and quite alone—catching sight of the gentleman she most feared, Lord Byron, striding along the paving opposite the Steyne. And cowering back into the shadows of the Marine Pavilion’s grounds, from a dread of meeting him at such an hour …

  “What do you make of Lady Caroline’s behaviour?” Henry asked curiously.

  Mona shrugged. “Not even the murder of an acquaintance, it would seem, may penetrate her absorption in herself. She is the most selfish creature ever born, you know; the entire world might suffer violent death, and she should go on existing in one of her fevered dreams.”

  “Does she wish Lord Byron to hang?—Her words suggest calumny, at the very least, if not a desire to sway the jury against him,” I said.

  “Her object was perjury.” Lord Swithin stretched his long legs before him, one beautifully polished boot crossed over the other. “Having disposed of Miss Twining by the happy expedients of imaginary footmen and chairs, Caro would insist, in an elevated accent, that Lord Byron was in her rooms at the Pavilion for the remainder of the night in question—and that she would die rather than alter a word of her testimony, tho’ the sacrifice to her reputation must be complete.”

  I raised my brows. “Then either she or Mr. Davies is lying. Let us hope, for Byron’s sake, that Lady Caroline may not be believed. Did the magistrate credit the idea of his lordship passing Miss Twining on her way out the Pavilion door, he might certainly find an opportunity to prove Byron drowned the child, as a sort of Attic sacrifice to Lady Caro!”

  “I do not think Sir Harding Cross credited her ladyship’s assertions. He thanked her for her testimony, then quietly ordered her withdrawn from the room. She went, I am told, rather as Anne Boleyn went to the axe, with her head high and her arms grasped by two bashful constables.”

  “It is all a sort of play to Caro,” Desdemona said; “it comes from growing up among the Devonshire House Set; they could none of them be serious. But tell me, Jane: What do you propose to do in this matter? How shall you set about your researches? How may Swithin and I be of service?”

  “Lady Oxford is even now on her road to Brighton?” I asked.

  “We expect her by four o’clock. Should you like to dine with us?”

  “Far better, before she is arrived in Brighton, to speak to Byron himself.” I glanced at the Earl of Swithin. “Can it be managed, sir, do you think?”

  He threw me an engaging smile. “Nothing could be easier, my dear Miss Austen. If I know Byron, he went directly from the inquest to Scrope Davies’s rooms, to drown his sorrows in brandy! Davies has long been an acquaintance of mine—we may certainly pay him a call!”

  Chapter 17 The Poet

  WEDNESDAY, 12 MAY 1813

  BRIGHTON, CONT.

  MR. SCROPE DAVIES, I AM TOLD, IS POSSESSED OF A complex character. Indeed, if I may believe the Earl of Swithin, who knows Davies best, he is singularly equipped to serve as Lord Byron’s intimate, being possessed of a mind brilliant enough to win him a scholarship at King’s College, Cambridge—but too indolent to long remain there. It was at Cambridge he formed his acquaintance with Byron; and being, like Byron, of impoverished background, the two were continually borrowing money of each other. Davies is a gambler, and a familiar among the denizens of Crockford’s and White’s; a dandy who counts Mr. Beau Brummell among his friends, he is known for his immaculate dress and his existence on a pecuniary knife’s-edge.

  “I had heard, from sources I should judge unimpeachable,” said our own particular banker, Henry, as we quitted the Castle, “that Davies stood surety for a significant loan—nearly five thousand pounds—when Byron was but a minor; which sum was not repaid for nearly six years. The duns so hounded Davies he was said to contemplate suicide; he was subject to arrest, and petitioned for the arrears in interest; and all the while, his lordship was abroad—enjoying the exotic climes that should inspire him to write Childe Harold. In this we find the measure of the gentleman’s loyalty—poor Davies has every reason to hate Lord Byron; and yet the two remain friends.”

  There it was again; the word hate. If one were intent upon exonerating the poet, one might well begin by examining those who should wish to see him hanged. Cuckolded husbands, ladies spurned, and friends upon whom he presumed too much. “Mr. Davies was not arrested for debt, however?”

  It was the Earl who answered me. “Byron mortgaged his birthright—Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire—last year; perhaps then he discharged his debt to poor Davies. The gentleman has been patience itself; not even the destruction of his peace may diminish his regard for Byron. He is even named as one of the Executors of his lordship’s Estate.”

  It was not until we were arrived at Mr. Davies’s door that I understood he lived in Church Street—and, moreover, had taken a house directly opposite General Twining’s, where we had let down Catherine only a few days previous. The sudden knowledge of Byron’s proximity to his alleged victim brought me up short—any sort of meeting, in the dead of night, should have been possible. The poet might have been watching Catherine for weeks past, under the cover of his friendship for Mr. Davies! He might have stood, in the wee hours of Tuesday morning, at an upper-storey window and observed the poor girl’s solitary progress towards her home. He might have intercepted her. Avowals of time and place, the witness of friends, were as nothing, once the position of both households was observed. I must pay a call of condolence soon on General Twining—and learn what I could of that fatal night.

  Henry, I am certain, was alive to the possibilities in Mr. Davies chusing to live in Church Street; he gave me a significant look as the Earl pulled his friend’s bell.

  Davies’s man opened the door, and would have denied his master to our party, but that Swithin commanded the fellow to convey his card within. A few moments of uneasiness followed; and then the man reappeared, to usher us blandly upstairs.

  We found a mingled party of gentlemen: Mr. Scrope Davies, tall and lean and impeccably dressed, his cravat a marvel of neat complexity; his forehead broad, his hairline receding, and his countenance mottled as befitted a hard drinker. I judged him to be in his late
twenties, older than Byron but younger than some of the company that had repaired to his house. The gentleman named Hodge—last met at the Countess of Swithin’s the previous evening—was bent over a table with his inevitable pair of dice; but on this occasion he cast against an actual partner, a harsh-featured and sandy-haired fellow in his fifth decade, I should judge, who stared at Desdemona and me with pugnacious contempt. In him I recognised the Bow Street Runner glimpsed on the box of the constables’ carriage; Byron’s personal guard. A fourth fellow leaned against a bookshelf, tenderly tuning the strings of a violin; he did not so much as glance at us as we entered the room, but persisted in humming a scrap of Beethoven to himself.

  Sprawled on the sopha, his dark locks disarranged, his waistcoat loosened, and his cravat untied—was George Gordon, Lord Byron.

  I suppose I ought to pause at this moment to record my impressions of so celebrated a man; and so I have paused, and lifted my pen from the page of this journal as I sit writing tonight in my bedchamber at the Castle. I have allowed my eyes to stare at the candle-flame, wavering in the draughts from the sea. I stared so long that my vision blurred, and cast phantasms on the walls; I shook my head to clear it. I would prefer to be able to dismiss Lord Byron as an ill-mannered and disreputable pup, a spoiled boy possessed of more arrogance than wit, an insolent darling of the haut ton unworthy of any respectable woman’s notice. But I cannot. Our tête-à-tête worked upon me strangely, and I have yet to reconcile my warring opinions of him. Perhaps the interval of reflection—a thorough consideration of my interview with the poet—will bring welcome clarity. The mere summoning of his person to mind is enough to cause tumult in the breast—an inward clamour, tho’ the Castle is peaceful enough this evening.