Jane and the Canterbury Tale Read online

I was too suspicious; I chided myself for a fanciful mind. No doubt Mr. Moore engaged in legitimate business—Harriot had said the correspondence and parcels were carried by East Indiamen, as how else should they travel? I had done Mr. Moore an injustice; I had been too hasty in judgement. He indulged, merely, in a speculator’s investments—attempting, perhaps, to secure that expensive future for his little son.

  Or, a voice said unbidden in my mind, had he been paying Curzon Fiske to stay out of England—and remain dead to all his relations?

  “I suppose Mr. Moore is apprenticing to become a Nabob,” I said lightly. “Perhaps he has been trading in rubies, against the day that little George requires a crack regiment. His correspondence with India has been active some years, I collect?”

  “He certainly did not undertake it when first we were married,” Harriot returned in a troubled tone, “and indeed, we contrived to live in much greater comfort, without the worry of duns at the door! I dread to think, Jane, that it is our hopeful family that has driven Mr. Moore to speculate, if speculation it is! Certainly he did not do so before Eleanor and little Harriot were born.”

  And the girls had come into this world quite recently, in fact—within the past four years. Both were deemed too young to accompany their parents on this visit to Godmersham, and remained at the vicarage in East Peckham.

  The correspondence had commenced within the past four years. Within, therefore, the interval of Fiske’s exile.

  “I have pleaded with Mr. Moore for long and long to divulge the whole,” Harriot was saying in her gentle voice. “But he becomes cold and grave when I tax him for the truth. I could bear anything, Jane, no matter how dreadful—but not coldness!”

  I thought of George Moore’s rigid looks during our carriage ride home, and shivered. He was a cold-hearted fellow, indeed; but cold enough to shoot a man who had returned to Canterbury, despite the fortune paid out to keep him in the Indies? Nothing could be easier than that Moore should slip out of his bedchamber at Godmersham in the dead of night, and meet with Fiske on the old Pilgrim’s path beyond the Stour. Perhaps he had already known that Fiske would be present—without recourse to notes or tamarind seeds.

  “And have the Indiamen brought any letters in recent months,” I enquired, “or has there lately been a period of drought?”

  “I had hoped the business was entirely at an end, indeed,” Harriot confided, “for there had been nothing for the longest while. But then my hopes were dashed, at no less than two letters arriving on the same day, but a few weeks since! Mr. Moore was much preoccupied by them, and shut himself up in his book room, so that I was seized with anxiety that the charitable work had gone awry—but then he emerged, and would say only that we must certainly go to Godmersham for a fortnight’s visit, and dance at Chilham Castle. So the intelligence received cannot have been so very dreadful, after all, do not you think, dear Jane?”

  It seemed fantastic—it must be so.

  As fantastic as the idea of George Moore deliberately stealing his old friend James Wildman’s gun—and leaving it to be discovered in St. Lawrence churchyard.

  I glanced from the temple in the distant direction of Bentigh, and the side-path where the corpse had been discovered—and was so surprized as to discover two figures on horseback, cantering spiritedly along the Stour. One was certainly Fanny, in her becoming new riding habit of military cut—and the other, a whipcord figure in black and dove grey, with a high-crowned beaver on his dark locks. Julian Thane. He had succeeded in luring Fanny out-of-doors on a Sunday, in defiance of the funereal calm that obtained within Godmersham; and from her animated looks, his success was complete. I recollected the letter on the silver salver, and was frankly glad I had not elected to pry. Fanny deserves more adventure than she has opportunity of obtaining.

  “Jane,” Harriot repeated. “Are you tired?”

  I turned resolutely away from the dashing pair by the riverbank. Harriot, thankfully, had not observed them. I should not like to consider of Mr. Moore’s strictures that evening on the subject of Sunday riding. “Only a little chilled, my dear. I am wanting a good fire and my comfortable chair in the library. Shall we turn back?”

  Tho’ I said nothing to Harriot, I felt I must speak soon with Edward. He knew these people—this collection of genteel, comfortable, and secretive whist players—far better than I, and should more readily divine what lay hidden in their hearts. Without his privileged knowledge I merely groped through darkened halls. When the stakes were murder and the consequences death, one took care how one trod.

  BUT ALL THOUGHTS OF GAMESTERS AND THEIR CHARITABLE missions were momentarily fled upon my return home. Edward had returned from Chilham, and brought a letter for me—from Adelaide MacCallister.

  Chilham Castle,

  24 October 1813

  My dear Miss Austen,

  Words cannot express my gratitude for your kindness yesterday. I do not think I could have borne another moment in that dreadful room—and had you not intervened, and your brother condescended to escort me from the place—I must surely have been overcome. If only the matter were not merely suspended, but put behind us all! To live in the present degree of apprehension is a kind of purgatory, unlike any I have known since the first days of my late husband’s flight. The friendship and concern of all at Godmersham, however, may encourage me to be equal to anything. Do I ask too much, or may I call upon you tomorrow? I confess it would be a pleasure to escape the confines of this house for a little.

  Yours, etc.

  Adelaide MacCallister

  I studied this missive thoughtfully, perusing it several times, and was so abstracted as to remain unresponsive when my brother taxed me for an account of its contents.

  “I beg your pardon,” I said at length, when Edward had thrice pronounced my name. “Pray cast your eye over this note I have just received from Chilham.”

  He took the single sheet of hot-pressed paper, and had only to glance at the hand before his eyes narrowed.

  “Jane,” he said softly.

  I glanced around the Great Hall; we were surrounded by little groups of Godmersham’s intimates, all conversing before parting at the stairs to dress for dinner.

  “Do not speak until we may be private,” I murmured.

  For I had seen what Edward had seen. The sloping, copperplate script of my letter was indistinguishable from that on the blood-stained scrap of paper discovered in Curzon Fiske’s breast pocket.

  Adelaide MacCallister, it seemed, had set the fatal hour of meeting on the Pilgrim’s Way.

  1 Although Jane’s letters to Cassandra during this two-month visit to Godmersham say nothing of Curzon Fiske’s murder, no doubt due to Cassandra’s disapproval of Jane’s unseemly interest in detection, she does refer to the Moore family’s circumstances by directly quoting Fanny’s words on the subject. See Letter 95, dated November 5, 1813, in Jane Austen’s Letters (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), Deirdre Le Faye, editor. —Editor’s note.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  A Magistrate’s Duty

  “O lord! The lady I love has now forsworn me,

  Condemned me, innocent, to death.”

  GEOFFREY CHAUCER, “THE LANDOWNER’S TALE”

  24 OCTOBER 1813, CONT.

  “I HAVE BEEN A FOOL,” EDWARD SAID, AS HE CLOSED THE door of his book room firmly on the world and took up his preferred position near the fire. “I procured a sample of every fellow’s handwriting at Chilham Castle during our visit Friday—from the venerable Wildman and his son, to the gallant Captain and his batman—not excepting Julian Thane or the butler Twitch—and found my match nowhere. But I did not undertake to seize a piece of women’s notepaper, with so much as an inventory of linen scrawled upon it—and here Mrs. MacCallister delivers herself into my hands!”

  “Is a mere letter so damning?” I faltered. “And is the similarity in the script so conclusive?”

  “You have the evidence of your own eyes, Jane! Would you deny that the fist is exact in
every respect to that of the note discovered upon the body?”

  “I cannot.”

  “And, too, there is the fact of the tamarind seed. It was Adelaide MacCallister who received the pouch full of them on her wedding night.”

  “—received it of an unknown sailor purporting to be a baronet, not Curzon Fiske!”

  “I should dearly love to learn the connexion between those two men, for there undoubtedly is one—but Myrrh will reveal nothing until his solicitor is come.” My brother began to pace before the hearth, his countenance suffused with varying emotions—anger, frustration, despair. “Do you believe it so impossible that a lady, but a few hours newly-married, should resort to violence against the shameful evidence of bigamy?”

  “No, but—”

  “Why defend Adelaide MacCallister, Jane, when you know her for an Adventuress of old? She possesses the sort of high courage and daring—not to mention an utter lack of principle, if her past way of life is to be credited—that should stop at nothing!”

  “Indeed, you are too severe upon her, Edward,” I protested. “You leap from conjecture and common gossip to an indictment of the lady’s character, when in fact you know little of her life, or the sufferings she may have endured at Fiske’s hands. She was the merest child when she married him, and by all accounts was forced to survive by her wits. It does not absolutely follow that she is become a murderess as well.”

  “I fear in this instance your tender heart betrays you,” my brother retorted. “It is always the way of a woman to take another woman’s part, and to believe the gentler sex incapable of the most ruthless acts—”

  I opened my mouth to object, for I had known a number of murderous females in the course of my life, but Edward forestalled me.

  “The return of Curzon Fiske placed in jeopardy every triumph Adelaide had strived to achieve—renewed respectability, an upright husband who cherished her, and the right to move in the highest circles through that husband’s attachment to Wellington’s staff. Consider what she should lose, Jane, if Fiske claimed his marital precedence!”

  “She had every reason to abhor Fiske’s return—but you cannot prove, Edward, that she put a bullet through the man’s heart!”

  “I need not prove it,” he said steadily. “I need merely to place the strongest possible motive—and means—and opportunity before the Assizes, Jane, and allow Justice to run its course. To do otherwise, as First Magistrate, should be a sad dereliction of my duty.”

  “Edward!”

  “I am in possession of unequivocal evidence.” He fluttered Adelaide’s letter before my eyes, every fibre of his being taut with anger. “Mrs. MacCallister set the fateful hour of Fiske’s death—her own hand bears witness to it. He should not have been waiting longer on the Pilgrim’s Way, once the Captain and young Thane had paid him off, unless he expected a fairer visitation that night.”

  There was little I could say in reply. Julian Thane’s own words must rise in memory; for when I had told him of the silken pouch, he apprehended immediately that it had come to his sister on her wedding night as a summons from the Dead. Fiske sends you his calling card, he had exclaimed as he whirled upon Adelaide—and she had dismissed the pouch as irrelevant.

  In this, she had certainly uttered a falsehood. The tamarind seeds had spoken one name aloud in her heart—and her hand alone must have twisted a seed in the note she had written to Fiske, establishing the time and place of meeting. Indeed, she had wilfully prevaricated from the moment of the corpse’s discovery, and allowed others to bear the brunt of suspicion. And there remained the troubling fact of young James Wildman’s pistol, discarded so innocently among the tombstones of St. Lawrence churchyard for Mr. Sherer to find.…

  I met Edward’s gaze. “If what you believe is true, Mrs. MacCallister has exposed every gentleman of her acquaintance to the gravest suspicions of murder, rather than admit to communication with her dead husband. If she is innocent of murder, however many assignations she may have kept, fear for her own safety might prompt such behaviour.”

  “—Or the desire to preserve her present happiness, urged her to silence a man the world already believed to be dead,” my brother returned.

  “We cannot know what demands he then made, or how he threatened her security, when they spoke on the Pilgrim’s Way.”

  “We cannot know that they spoke at all!” Edward burst out. “A man impatient for his beloved wife need only clasp her at once to his heart—and receive the fatal ball.”

  The powder burns on Fiske’s coat made Edward’s phantasy all too probable.

  “But do you believe that Mrs. MacCallister should then incriminate her cousin James—the kindest of men, and her playfellow from old?” I demanded. “Impossible!”

  “I should think it preferable to hanging her brother or husband—and theirs must be the only other pistols readily available to the lady in her midnight hour of need. No, Jane—a Wildman gun would have to serve, and there were plenty lying about in the Castle gun room. I have only to learn whether the note was delivered to Fiske by Julian Thane or Adelaide’s maid—assuming the latter knew where Fiske was to be found—and the thing is clear.”

  “Fiddle! Make her your murderer if you will, Edward, but the case will not serve once you consider the pistol! She might have restored it to the gun room in all innocence, once Fiske was dead. Nobody should have connected James’s gun, in its velvet-lined box, with the murder. No—whoever killed Fiske meant for James to be blamed. That is the material point. Fiske’s murderer hated young James Beckford Wildman, and wished to see him hang! Until you may tell me why Adelaide should do so, I shall not credit her guilt!”

  “What you chuse to believe, my dear, is your own affair—but it cannot influence the evidence. Or the nature of my duty.”

  I rose and approached the hearth, where my brother stood brooding over the flames, his booted foot on the fender. “You mean to charge Adelaide MacCallister with murder?”

  He glanced up at me. “I must.”

  “But if she may offer an explanation for her note’s presence in Fiske’s pocket—”

  My brother’s looks hardened. “The lady has lied to me, Jane, throughout the whole of this business. I cannot now credit any story she might chuse to tell. Surely you must see that!”

  “I see only that I shall have to prove you wrong, Edward.”

  “I wish you may,” he said.

  And drove off to bring misery to Chilham Castle.

  KNOWING WHAT I DID OF EVENTS THE ENTIRE HOUSEHOLD was as yet in ignorance of, I did not submit to dining with the Moores and Fanny and my young nephews on this last Sunday before their return to Oxford. I pled a head-ache, and retreated to my bedchamber to write to my sister Cassandra. I made little progress, however—to fill my page with amusing nothings on the exploits of the nursery set, or the design of Fanny’s newest cap, or young Edward’s success with the harriers, could not serve to distract me from an acute awareness of the scene that must be unfolding at Chilham even now. Perhaps I ought to have accompanied Edward—I might have been some comfort to Mrs. Wildman in her trouble at least—but I knew myself for a coward. A note of thanks to me had thrown a rope about Adelaide MacCallister’s neck; and having delivered it to the Magistrate, I stood in the guise of traitor. The distress of all her relations should justly make them hate me.

  At length I tore the letter to Cassandra in twain and tossed it on the fire. It lay smouldering atop the logs, the wood being too damp to burn cleanly; smoke billowed in gusts as it nosed its way up the chimney. The hazy scrim between my eyes and the fire seemed to mock my effort to penetrate Curzon Fiske’s death; nothing about the affair stood in sharp relief. It was all a smoke of falsehood and omission, of motives obscured, tales only partially told, and passions suppressed. Except for one fact: James Wildman’s pistol had been left with purpose in St. Lawrence churchyard. Edward might dismiss that fact; but I clung to it as a drowning man will to the length of rope that might save him.

  I
drew another piece of foolscap towards me, thrust my pen into the ink, and wrote, Why destroy James Wildman?

  He was an amiable young man; his temper was invariably cool; tho’ handsome enough for a country neighbourhood, he had not incited the young men of his acquaintance to violent envy either through the mastery of sport or success in affairs of the heart; in short, James Beckford Wildman was far too unobjectionable for a pointed hatred.

  I wrote: Personal emnity or jealousy—springing from events or passions unknown to me? If I considered of Julian Thane in this, I may be pardoned—neither of James’s sisters should be likely to kill Fiske merely to throw blame upon her brother. Besides, I could not see either the complaisant Charlotte or the scornful Louisa venturing out-of-doors in the dead of night.

  I wrote: The fatal whist-party, and the nature of the betting three years since? It was possible that some quarrel among the cardplayers, embroiling James, had revived with Fiske’s return—but how had any of them known of Fiske’s return, before discovering his body Thursday morning?

  I wrote: Financial expectations?

  James was, after all, the heir of his house—and stood to come into twenty thousand a year! It was a fortune great enough to figure even in London. He had no brothers; how should the elder Mr. Wildman’s fortune be left, and who should benefit, should his heir predecease him—by hanging? The elder Mr. Wildman had a brother, one Thomas, whose sons were respectable young men of easy fortune; but the idea that either should have been upon the Pilgrim’s Way at dead of night, in order to murder Curzon Fiske and destroy his cousin’s prospects, seemed too improbable a notion to pursue. They should inherit their own father’s wealth in time; and as it was fully as substantial as our Mr. Wildman’s, deriving from the same family holdings in Jamaica, I could not find in James’s cousins the slightest reason to incriminate and supplant him.

  I sighed, and set down my pen. My thoughts were in a sad tangle. I required a greater knowledge of the Wildman family—and James in particular—than a few intimate dinners, balls, or the exchange of visits could provide. Had Edward stayed his magisterial hand, I might have paid a visit to Chilham Castle on the morrow, and forced a tête-à-tête with James himself—but the awkwardness attendant upon such a visit now, ensured that I should meet with a united silence. I could learn nothing in that quarter. And so I must apply to others.