Jane and the Twelve Days of Christmas: Being a Jane Austen Mystery Read online

  “I do not suspect her of being in the pay of Buonaparte’s confederates,” West added quietly. “She can have had no need to kill for the Treaty, when her husband was its chief negotiator.”

  “What about young Edward, then?” Chute slapped his thighs and winced as the pain of gout took him. “Needs a bit of the ready—is willing to sell his uncle’s state secrets to meet his obligations—falls into the clutches of the French—?”

  “And when his sister refused to help him, killed John Gage,” West concluded. “There would be an added incentive, in that Mary Gambier’s expectations of inheritance should become her brother’s, upon her death.”

  I shook my head. “Even if we accept Edward Gambier was capable of murdering his sister, how was it effected? Would Mary Gambier take a mortal dose of laudanum from her brother’s hands, if she suspected him of killing Lieutenant Gage?”

  “That is true. She was no fool,” Chute muttered. “And she gave no sign of mistrusting Gambier. In the hours after Gage’s death, Edward had been her chief support.”

  I recalled them seated together at dinner, Edward leaning attentively towards his sister. “What if the dose was introduced into her food?” I suggested, “and the bottle left by the body in the Chapel, to suggest self-murder?”

  “That would be clever, indeed,” said Raphael West. “The fatal drug might have been placed in her coffee, while in the Saloon—and the addition of sugar would mask any difference in taste.”

  “By Jove,” Chute exclaimed. “That is the way to go about it, sir. You might almost have killed her yourself!”

  West glanced at me—a sober, earnest look—and failed to turn the jest.

  He knows, I thought, that I cannot trust him.

  “Lady Gambier poured out,” I said colourlessly. “Miss Gambier sat by her aunt and retired early to bed that evening.” I did not remind the gentlemen of the scene between my brother’s wife and the dead lady; scorn and rage were the last that any of us had known of Mary Gambier.

  “If the laudanum was in her coffee, she may have begun to feel a drugged weariness,” West observed.

  “And yet she was most active,” I countered. “My young niece, Caroline, sat up much of the night of Mary Gambier’s death—alarmed by footsteps in the nursery wing corridor. The child was afraid Lieutenant Gage’s ghost was abroad.”

  “That corridor leads to a back stair,” William Chute said. “It descends to the Chapel.”

  “And given that Caroline was disturbed by footsteps,” I mused, “and Miss Gambier perhaps already insensible—is it not possible that her killer chose the nursery passage to convey her body to the Chapel floor? In the middle of the night, he should not like to carry her through the Staircase Hall. He might meet any one of us.”

  “Villain,” Chute said bitterly. “It does not bear thinking of. That helpless girl, dragged limp from her bed—and none of us able to save her. When I consider what I shelter in my house—that even now a killer breaks bread with my wife and child—”

  “If only we could divine the mystery of the charade,” I said in frustration. “I am sure it is the clew to everything, and Lady Gambier will never reveal it. The secret will go with Mary to her grave.”

  But our conversation was at an end. The horses were pulling up, and the footman jumping down from the rear of the carriage. We had arrived at the Angel Inn, Basingstoke.

  I WILL NOT TROUBLE to relate the particulars of the inquest—how the publick room of the inn had been given over to a considerable crowd of curious onlookers; how the jury was empanelled, or by whom; how the Coroner appeared, in all the dignity of a wig newly-purchased for the Christmas season and ennobled by his judicial dignities, when in the common way he was merely Mr. Stout, the Basingstoke surgeon. We have all been treated to similar scenes before. When the six men of the jury had been sent into a side parlour to view Lieutenant Gage’s body, and had returned affirming that they understood he had been dead some days, and had lost his life to a broken neck, Mr. Chute was called to give an account of St. Stephen’s Day. Lieutenant Gage’s arrival was considered; his farewells the following morn; the return of his riderless horse, and the discovery of his body.

  “You did not summon a doctor, sir, when Deceased was found?” the Coroner enquired.

  “It was impossible, due to the condition of the roads. They had not then been cleared of snow, and the thaw was only just setting in.”

  “You found the corpse at half-past eleven o’clock in the morning, or thereabouts, by your best estimation—and Deceased had quitted The Vyne some forty minutes or so before. Was the body still warm when you discovered it?”

  “Barely. It had been lying some minutes in a drift of snow.”

  The Coroner allowed Chute to step down, so that the true drama of the proceeding might occur—which, to my mind, was the testimony of Raphael West and myself. It was our evidence which must turn the inquest from a common enquiry into a fall from a horse, to an exploration of murder.

  West was required to take his oath first. He did so with his usual self-containment and faint air of boredom. I was well-enough acquainted with the man now to know that his countenance looked most weary when his attention was most acute. He produced his notebook and explained the sketches he had made. The Coroner summed up his conclusions.

  “And so you would insist that the horse fell—and the rider landed—in places other than where the body was found?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  A faint murmur of speculation fanned through the crowd.

  The Coroner knit his brows. “Are you suggesting the injury to Deceased’s neck was so trifling that he was able to raise himself and change his position—tho’ serious enough that he then expired? For if so, Mr. West, I must say that all my long years of bone-setting are against you. Deceased’s neck was broken right through.”

  “I do not suggest it.” Impossible for West to say outright what his evidence shewed; that was for the Coroner to conclude.

  “Then I take it, sir, you would imply that Deceased’s neck was broken after he fell from the horse—and not by the fall itself.”

  “From the disturbance in the snow, I can think nothing else.”

  “We cannot know, other than from this sketch, that you did see such a disturbance,” the Coroner retorted. “The snow has since melted. This may be all artist’s invention.”

  “Another guest at The Vyne was witness to my sketching. You will find her signature appended on the obverse of that paper.”

  The Coroner looked for my name; found it; and Raphael West was invited to stand down. It was then my turn to speak.

  I told the jury of my walk to the scene of Lieutenant Gage’s death, and of finding Raphael West at work there. I affirmed that the snow was unbroken from the place where the horse was brought down, to the Sherborne St. John road.

  “Brought down,” the Coroner repeated. “Surely you mean fell?”

  “I do not,” I said firmly, and told him of my discovery of the entrapping wire. “I then observed footprints in the snow, leading from the trees to the door of the ice house.”

  “Suggesting that whoever laid the wire, retreated there for shelter?”

  “That is possible.”

  “Or waited there, with the object of breaking Lieutenant Gage’s neck, when once his horse was brought down?”

  “That is also possible.”

  “Did you look within the ice house?”

  “I did, with Mr. Raphael West. We found it empty.”

  Mr. Chute was then recalled, and told how he had been informed of our discoveries, and had subsequently notified Lord Bolton.

  “Do you know of any reason why Lieutenant Gage should be killed, Mr. Chute, on your grounds?” the Coroner enquired in his silkiest manner.

  “He carried an important Government dispatch,” Chute said, “which is now missing.”

  Another ripple of interest from the crowd.

  The Coroner brought down his gavel, and adjourned the proceeding fo
r an interval, so that the jury might partake of the Angel’s ale, and Mr. Stout might organise his thoughts.

  “I have secured a private parlour upstairs, Miss Austen, so that we might enjoy a nuncheon in peace.”

  “You are very good, sir.” My shivering breakfast with Cook had been of so unsatisfying a nature that I was quite ready to admire the rabbit and leek pie, Cheshire cheese, and baked apples the landlord, Mr. Fitch, had sent up for us. Mr. Chute invited Lord Bolton to join us, and that mild young man informed us he was now the father of a son. Lady Bolton was doing admirably.

  We listened to him talk of his wife’s superb temperament—her treating a lying-in as tho’ it were no more than having the headache; her undiminished beauty; and what young Harry had said when told that he had another brother. Nothing—not even the matter of a double-murder in his preserve—could divert his lordship from his stream of relief and self-congratulation. William Chute was just refilling Lord Bolton’s glass with claret, and raising his own to the health of the infant, when there came a knock on the parlour door.

  It was Fitch, the Angel’s innkeeper.

  “Begging your pardon,” he said with a nod to all of us as he stooped deprecatingly in the doorway, a second figure behind him, “but this lady is wishful of having speech with you, sirs, and when she told me her name, I thought it best to come straight to Lord Bolton.”

  “Her name?” his lordship repeated. “What is it, man?”

  Fitch glanced almost slyly over his shoulder, big with news; but the woman he guarded pushed abruptly past him, and strode into the room. She had a child of two or three on her hip.

  “I am Amy Gage,” she said defiantly. “John Gage’s widow.”

  9 Gambling at Watier’s was for high stakes and ruinously expensive, among the gentlemen’s clubs of Pall Mall.—Editor’s note.

  20

  THE WOMAN IN THE CASE

  Friday, 30th December 1814

  Steventon Parsonage, cont’d.

  If this interval of confusion and violence during the Christmas season has taught me anything, it is to value the essential goodness of William Chute—a man I had been much disposed to regard as little more than a rough country squire, of scant education and commonplace gifts. I had been wont, in the past, to deplore the throwing away of such a woman as Eliza Chute upon a man who preferred an hour with his pack of hounds in the stables, to one of studied discourse in his ancestral Saloon. But I was moved to admiration and warmth by the alacrity with which he dismissed the interested innkeeper and ushered Mrs. Gage to a chair by the fire, chucked her boy beneath the chin, and offered both a share of our nuncheon. He succeeded in turning an awkward and uncertain moment to one of easiness; and I perceived that this was a habit acquired as much from his long years of service in Parliament as his standing in Sherborne St. John.

  Having seen Mrs. Gage settled in her chair and her child supplied with baked apple, however, Chute’s shrewd brain turned to more critical matters.

  “I forget my manners,” he said handsomely. “You will allow me to make you acquainted with Miss Austen—she has lately been a guest at The Vyne—with Mr. West, and with Lord Bolton, our Justice of the Peace.”

  She inclined her head to all of us, but said only, “You’re the lady as was called to evidence. And the gentleman as made the drawings.” Her speech, like her dress, was not refined; her skin was coarse and her teeth indifferent. A plain face and an ageing one; but I could trace in it the remnants of prettiness, and her figure was buxom. As a young girl, Amy Gage had probably been a coquette. Knowing something of the Navy, I suspected the Lieutenant had wooed his landlady’s daughter, while posted in Sheerness or Deal.

  “You will not be offended, I hope,” Chute continued, “when I tell you that we had no notion of your existence, and thus could not inform you of your husband’s death. How did you come to learn of it, Mrs. Gage?”

  “The news is all over Portsmouth,” she said. “How the Admiral’s messenger was killed in performing his dooty. I went to the Port Commander and asked him straight. He told me there was to be a ’quest—he’d had it from the Admiralty Signals. He gave me coach fare to Basingstoke.”

  “Have you accommodation?” Chute enquired.

  Amy Gage shrugged. “I’ll shift somewhere for the night. But what’s to become of me then, I’d like to know, and the boy? I’ve hardly enough blunt to give Jack a decent burial! How we’ll live now he’s gone, there’s no telling.”

  “He will have a Naval pension, surely?” I suggested.

  “On a lieutenant’s pay? No better than a beggar’s portion,” she retorted contemptuously. “If he’d made Master or Post—but he couldn’t get a ship, now Boney’s gone to ground. No, it won’t do. I’ll put the child on the parish, I will, and go into Service.”

  It was plain from the trend of the woman’s words that John Gage’s death in itself was barely a source of grief. Shocked as I was at the fact of his having possessed a wife—when his attachment to Mary Gambier, and hers to him, had been quite clear—I felt a twinge of sympathy for the dead man. It seemed a reproach to his memory that his loss was measured only in pounds and pence.

  “Provided you may prove the truth of your marriage to Lieutenant Gage,” William Chute said smoothly, “you may discover there is a sum in keeping for you—having died as he did in the service of the Crown.”

  This was nonsense, as I very well knew. Every Naval officer dies in service to the Crown, whether he be on shore or at the Antipodes, for he holds the King’s commission. But I perceived that Chute was angling for intelligence, and hoped the promise of coin might win it.

  “I wear his ring, don’t I?” Mrs. Gage said defiantly. “It’s a fine thing when a respectable widow is made to feel no better than a strumpet. Ask Gambier if I’m John Gage’s wife!”

  “My dear lady,” Chute said swiftly, “I offered no insult. It is customary, before bounties such as I mentioned are paid out, to ensure that the recipients are legally entitled to them. The claims, for instance of your husband’s other relatives—an aged mother, perhaps?—must be weighed against your own.”

  With a sharp movement, Amy Gage turned to Lord Bolton. “Listen on him! Jack was alone in the world, until he found me. But you fine folk with your words and your laws will cheat me out of my due. It’s the old story, as is seen all over Portsmouth—good men die, and their kin are turned out like slops from the bilge.”

  “Mrs. Gage—” Lord Bolton began, in consternation, but Raphael West forestalled him.

  “When did you last see your husband, ma’am?” he asked quietly.

  “Christmas Eve. He didn’t ought to have come, being meant for London and the Admiralty—ought to have taken the packet out of Ostend, into Kent. But Gambier was wishful Jack should see her la’ship. Give her his letters. So Jack took a Navy cruiser to Portsmouth instead.”

  “Had he been absent from you long?”

  “He’s never home more than one night together,” she said simply. “Spends all his time in Gambier’s service. The child don’t hardly know him. But that’s all right. Jack made sure we had enough to live on. I don’t know how we’ll make do, now he’s gone.”

  West ignored this reversion to a burning subject. “He left you Christmas morning?”

  “Still dark, it was. And no word since. I didn’t think nothing of that—until Sally at the Bosun’s Whistle told me about the ’quest, and I went to the Port Commander.”

  The Bosun’s Whistle was a Portsmouth publick house.

  “This Sally,” I broke in. “She knew to come to you? Tho’ your husband was so lately returned, and so briefly? She was aware, I collect, that he was bound for the north on Admiralty business?”

  Of a sudden, Mrs. Gage looked less sure of herself. Her gaze shifted from mine; her hands worked at her little boy’s jacket. “No harm in raising a pint of bitter on a cold winter’s night. Or passing the time o’day with a friend.”

  I glanced at Raphael West. A French cypher of Chute’
s correspondence had been found on a man seized in a Portsmouth tavern. Was it the Bosun’s Whistle?

  He gave no sign. “Did your husband tell you where he was bound, on the Admiral’s private business?”

  “I know now,” she said darkly. “Bound for his death, he was. What I want to know is, was his purse on him? Or did the fellow who did for him, take his coin too?”

  There was an instant of appalled silence. Then William Chute said drily, “I shall instruct the Coroner, Mr. Stout, to deliver over your husband’s effects, ma’am, once the inquest is done. If you wish to bury him, you may even have his body.”

  “Not I,” she returned indifferently. “That’s the Navy’s affair. He did ought to be tossed over the rail in his hammock. Jack’d like to meet Davy Jones, and no expence about it.”

  I thought of Mary Gambier on her knees before the Lieutenant’s bier, and felt a wretched chill in my heart.

  Mrs. Gage rose from her chair and snatched the child back onto her hip. The little boy’s face was liberally smeared with baked apple; he buried it stickily in his mother’s shoulder. She strode up to William Chute.

  “You write to the Admiral and tell ’im how we’re left. Tell him I mean to put Jack’s boy on the parish. If he wants me, he’ll find me in Portsmouth—until I can bear the charge of lodgings no longer!”

  THE REMAINDER OF THE inquest held no surprizes for me. The Coroner’s panel was summoned from its enjoyment of Mr. Fitch’s barrels, and required to listen to Mr. Stout’s guidance. Lord Bolton was respectfully asked if he had anything further to add—as Justice of the Peace for the Basingstoke locality—and he gave it as his opinion that further facts might yet come to light in the Lieutenant’s death. With such clear direction from the established authorities, the six worthies of the jury retired to ruminate among themselves; and within very few minutes, pronounced a verdict of murder, by person or persons unknown.

  The day being already far advanced, Mr. Chute was anxious to summon his coachman and have the carriage brought round from the Angel’s yard. As Mr. West and I hurried from the publick room where the inquest had been held, I observed Lord Bolton approach Amy Gage. He reached into his coat and produced a notecase. No doubt the sight of that little boy brought to mind his own wife and child—delivered into far different circumstances this Christmas.