Jane and the Canterbury Tale Page 18

  “Indeed,” poor Harriot murmured, no more enlightened than she had been before Edward spoke. But her husband lifted his eyes from his book.

  “You refer, I take it, to the delusional seaman?”

  “I refer to Sir Davie Myrrh.”

  “—As he stiles himself!”

  “—As his solicitor assures me he has every claim to be addressed,” Edward returned with remarkable calm. “He will undoubtedly prove to be an eccentric, George, but I greatly hope he will not prove delusional. I believe he may hold the key to this entire affair.”

  “Then I wonder you took so rash a step as to arrest Mrs. MacCallister,” Mr. Moore muttered. I detected considerable rage, barely suppressed, in his tone; and was confirmed in my original conjecture regarding the clergyman. He might talk of haircuts, and affect indifference before his wife and child, but his whole mind was concentrated upon that tragic figure immured in a cell. If Edward went to Canterbury, there, too, should be George Moore, as surely as a moth sought the flame.

  I gave Harriot a swift glance, but she appeared insensible to the subtleties of her husband’s purpose. Perhaps it was safest, taken all in all, to cultivate ignorance.

  “I arrested Mrs. MacCallister, my dear George, because I had no choice,” Edward said gently. “And because I hoped, perhaps, to lull the true killer into a false sense of complacency.”

  I stared at my brother in sharp surprize—and should have pressed a further question, but that the coachman was drawing rein, and the carriage pulling to a halt. We had achieved Westgate, Canterbury—where the gaol is housed.1

  WESTGATE IS THE LAST OF THE GREAT MEDIEVAL PORTALS to the walled city. All the others—dating perhaps from Thomas à Becket’s time—have been demolished, as proving too great an impediment to coach travel. If Westgate remains, it is due in no little part to the gatehouse’s employment as the city gaol; for tho’ a large prison has been built on Canterbury’s outskirts, in Longport, it is for the internment of those already convicted and sentenced—whereas Westgate houses those not yet brought up before the Assizes. It is a dour old place suggestive of the Tudors, sitting at the point where St. Dunstan’s Street becomes St. Peter’s.

  “If you should find yourself at liberty in an hour, Jane,” Harriot confided as we stepped down from Edward’s coach, “I shall be waiting in Moffett’s Confectionary. We might pay a call upon old Mrs. Milles, you know. She is a zany, to be sure—but there is no one like her for possessing all the latest gossip. She should give us a minute history of Mrs. Scudamore’s reconciliation, I daresay.”

  Mrs. Scudamore is the wife of Edward’s apothecary and physician, who lately scandalised the neighbourhood by deserting her husband; her return to the domestic fold has only served to further outrage her neighbours, who preferred to sincerely pity Mr. Scudamore each time he called with a draught for their ailing children. Such episodes are of consuming interest to Harriot, however much her husband may deplore them; I suspected she hoped to profit from Mr. Moore’s interval with his barber, by wheedling the whole out of old Mrs. Milles.

  Such a visit might serve, at least, to fill my letter to Cassandra; for of the latest murder I had told her not a syllable. Her conviction that I deliberately cultivated the macabre was growing with each passing year, and I had no wish to confirm her prejudice.

  “I shall find you if I am able, Harriot,” I said, and turned to where Edward waited, in the shadows beneath the ancient gate.

  A CONSTABLE STOOD GUARD BY THE HEAVY OAK DOOR; AND when its bolts were drawn back, and the portal thrust open, the passage was discovered to be flagged in stone. Oil lamps hung on great hooks set into the wall, and lent a flaring light to the low-ceilinged way, which had no windows; it was narrow enough that we were forced to step in single-file, Edward preceding me. The flickering light of the lanthorns threw his figure in grotesque relief upon the walls; my own bonnet, with its stiff poke, appeared as a sort of silhouetted coal scuttle, bobbing in his wake.

  We were led, as I had suspected, to the Chief Warden’s room—and if my hopes for the cleanliness of the floor were dashed, my expectation of a fire in the grate was not. The atmosphere of the place being both damp and mouldy, I positioned myself near the warmth as unobtrusively as I might, while Edward performed the necessary introductions.

  “Warden Stoke—this is my sister, Miss Austen, who has been kind enough to lend me her company.”

  “Pleasure, ma’am,” the fellow returned, tho’ without evidencing much of that sentiment. He stared at me pugnaciously from under beetling black brows, his dark eyes fairly snapping. “I hope you don’t think to make a Fashionable Tour, such as the Great are in the habit of doing up at Lunnon; we’re no Newgate here, for the entertainment of them as think gaol is a mischief and a lark! We want none of your Penal Reformers, neither, being accustomed to go our own road and no complaint from any as bear hearing. There’s precious little accommodation for gentlefolk in Westgate, saving Your Honour, and none at all for fine ladies; but it is not for me to question the Magistrate, ha! ha!, the questions being all on the other side, seemingly.”

  “We wish to speak with Sir Davie Myrrh,” Edward said, as tho’ this peroration had gone unheard and unheeded. “His solicitor—one Burbage, I believe—is lately arrived from Temple Bar?”

  “He is that, and awaiting Your Honour’s pleasure,” Stoke returned. “I’ve only to send word to the Little Inn, and he’ll step round in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.”

  “Then do so.”

  The warden scraped a bow, and striding to his door, bellowed to one unseen, “Hie, there—you lummox Jack! Stir your shanks and fetch the Lunnon man for His Honour!”

  I caught a glimpse of a wizened urchin in nankeen breeches scuttling along the stone passage, his pointed face set in a grimace; then Stoke heaved-to the door.

  “My sister’s brat,” he said bitterly. “Seven-months’ child, and a trifle touched in his upper works.”

  There being no possible reply, Edward and I turned our attention to the fire. It was smoking badly; and I began to wish that we might have conducted our interview with Sir Davie’s solicitor in the comfort of the Little Inn’s private parlour, with a trifling nuncheon laid out upon the board. But that would be to play into the solicitor’s hands—it was not his relation of events that we preferred, but his client’s. As Sir Davie could not go to the Little Inn, the Little Inn must come to Sir Davie.

  At length our impatience was rewarded with the clang of the outer door’s bolts being once more thrown back, and a light tread audible upon the passage flags, and Mr. Burbage was revealed—as a tall and respectable figure in a driving cape and beaver hat. As I curtseyed to the fellow at Edward’s introduction, I suffered the tantalising impression that I had seen Mr. Burbage before—but could not summon the particulars of time or place.

  “You wish to interview my client, Mr. Knight?” the solicitor enquired pleasantly. “I must warn you that the conversation is sure to be protracted, and to span the globe, Sir Davie being little disposed to concision in his affairs. He is a raconteur of considerable power, and has long defied even his friends’ attempts to curtail his speech.”

  “A wonder, then, that he has remained silent the better part of two days,” Edward returned.

  Mr. Burbage smiled engagingly. “I said that Sir Davie dearly loved a good story; I did not say that he was a fool. Naturally, having been placed in a cell, he preferred to hold his counsel until his Counsel should have arrived.”

  “Then let us waste no more of Sir Davie’s time.”

  A nod for the chief warden, and a massive iron ring of keys appeared; with a grunt, Stoke made for the door and Edward followed. I trotted in his wake, while Mr. Burbage brought up the rear; we were led deeper into the Westgate premises, which, tho’ not vast, so nearly resembled a warren of tunnels that I might have fancied myself in the dungeons of the Tower. Heavy doors with metal gratings set into their centres at chest-height, and then again below, at the threshold—presumably for th
e delivery of meals—lined the passages; and occasionally a visage would loom at one of these, unshaven and clothed in shadow, only the glittering eyes throwing back the lanthorn-light. It was, I reflected, an experience such as heroines of horrid novels should relish; and with quickening heart I absorbed the wretched atmosphere, as another lady might the candlelit glow of Almack’s Assembly. What fodder for prose was this!

  At length Stoke halted before a cell like any other, and fitted one of his numerous keys to the lock. “Prisoner, stand back from the door!” he bellowed, and I suppose the violence of his timbre was enough to cause most intimates of Westgate to quail. But when the portal swung inwards, we observed Sir Davie Myrrh reclining at his leisure upon a hard wooden shelf that served as a bed, his arms behind his head and his gaze fixed upon the ceiling.

  “Appeared at last, have you, Burbage?” he demanded languidly—for all the world as tho’ he received the solicitor in the anteroom of White’s or Watier’s. Try as I might, I could not reconcile the baronet’s appearance—for he still sported the tar-stained breeches, the ragged beard, and the neckerchief of a navvy—with his cultivated speech.

  “Get up, you dog,” Stoke snarled; and for the first time, Mr. Burbage turned his eye upon him.

  “Have a care, Warden,” he said in an icy tone. “There is no call for insolence or ill-treatment of the baronet.”

  Again, I suffered the conviction that I had met Burbage somewhere before; but upon what occasion?

  “That will do, Stoke,” Edward said. “Leave young Jack to wait in the passage; we shall inform him when our conversation is done.”

  “Conversation, is it?” Stoke leered. “Seems to me as how a knave’s only got to ape the Quality to win the indulgence of the Law. But it’s not for me—”

  “No. It is not for you to question the Magistrate,” Edward agreed firmly. “But you might bring several chairs—or even stools—to this cell, Stoke. Do you imagine that my sister wishes to stand for the length of the interview?”

  The warden cast a jaundiced glance in my direction. I smiled upon him beatifically.

  “Hie, you lummox!” he called into the passage.

  Three chairs were brought, one at a time, by the struggling urchin Jack. The warden glared around at all of us, then inclined his head with grudging deference to Edward, and turned on his heel.

  As the door was locked with a metallic groan, I experienced a positive thrill of apprehension. It was as tho’ I had become a character of Mrs. Radcliffe’s, and must expect to find a skeleton behind every veil.

  1 Jane describes this trip to Canterbury in a subsequent letter to her sister Cassandra (Letter 94, dated Tuesday, October 26, 1813), but makes no mention of entering the gaol with Edward. She discloses a second visit to Canterbury gaol in Letter 95, dated November 3, 1813. —Editor’s note.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The Seaman’s Story

  He’d been in every harbor, no matter where,

  From Gottland to the Cape of Finisterre.…

  GEOFFREY CHAUCER, “GENERAL PROLOGUE”

  25 OCTOBER 1813, CONT.

  “WELL, THIS IS A DEGREE OF COMFORT UNLOOKED-FOR,” Sir Davie observed with an air of gratification as we took our seats. “Unfortunate that I haven’t any Port to send round, or ratafia for the lady. You are remiss, Burbage—quite remiss—you have made no introductions—but perhaps you are not in possession of the lady’s name, never having expected to be honoured by her presence this morning.”

  “I am Miss Austen,” I told him, “Mr. Knight’s sister. We shared a bench at the inquest.”

  It seemed to me that Mr. Burbage started a little at my words; but Sir Davie was already assessing my countenance shrewdly.

  “That affair was not very edifying, alas—too much of the curious truth was, as I suspect, deliberately left out, Miss Austen. Forgive me for speaking frankly, Mr. Knight; I do not presume to infringe upon your province, or criticise one whose motives I suspect are pure. I may address you as Mr. Knight, I hope? ‘Your Honour’ seems unduly grave.”

  “Murder is invariably so,” Edward observed. “If you are done with your pleasantries, Sir Davie, I have a few questions I should like to put to you.”

  The seaman opened his eyes a little. “Ought one ever to be done with pleasantries, my dear sir? How else, pray, is the savage world to be civilised?”

  “You are, I presume, Sir Davie Myrrh?”

  The seaman’s eyes rolled towards his solicitor. “Surely you have vouched for my identity, Burbage?”

  “Mr. Knight asks purely as a matter of form, sir. I would suggest you answer the Magistrate’s question fully and frankly.”

  “And, Mr. Burbage,” my brother added, “if you would be so good as to note down Sir Davie’s statement? I may supply you with pencil and paper for the purpose.”

  These items being handed from one man to the other, with every appearance of mutual respect and understanding, Sir Davie Myrrh sighed. “Very well. I shall give it to you direct as the Baronetage would have it: Myrrh of Kildane Hall. Davie Ambrose Myrrh, born December 8, 1760, married May 15, 1784, Anne, daughter of Sylvester, Fifth Viscount Havisham of Pembroke, in the county of Warwickshire; by which lady (deceased 1785) he had issue, a stillborn son.”

  He turned his satiric gaze upon myself. “I could entertain you, madam, with a further recitation of my family’s glorious history; its resistance under Cromwell, and exertions of loyalty towards Charles the Second; its elevation from mere knighthood to the baronetage; the demonstration, with each succeeding generation, of increasing attention to Duty and the Crown, ending—rather ignobly—with myself, the tenth baronet, who, tho’ achieving the venerable age of three-and-fifty with health and humour unimpaired, has nonetheless lost wife, child, fortune, and even Kildane Hall. Should you like to learn how I managed it?”

  “Not at present,” Edward interposed firmly, before I could answer Yes, very much. “What we principally wish to know is how you came to be standing at the front entrance of Chilham Castle on the evening of the twentieth of October inst., presenting a silken pouch to one Adelaide Fiske MacCallister.”

  “Ah,” Sir Davie murmured, “but to apprehend how I came to be there, Mr. Knight, you ought to know a little of my history. For no man springs newly-formed into a given day or moment—be it night or morning, October or April, Chilham or Timbuktu. If I am to explain how I came to have a gift for Mrs. Fiske—or did you call her something else?—you must first know how I fell under obligation to her husband. I do not refer, of course, to this person MacCallister. He has no place in the tale at all. I refer to Curzon Fiske, an excellent fellow now sadly laid into an early grave, who was so obliging as to save my life in Ceylon some eighteen months since.”

  Edward gave a slight sigh of satisfaction. “I suspected you were acquainted with Fiske. It was he who gave you the tamarind seeds, of course?”

  “Not so swiftly, I beg! You leap to the story’s close without a care for the intriguing coincidence of events! Burbage,” Sir Davie exclaimed as he jumped from his hard wooden bed and began to stroll like another Kemble about the theatre of his cell, “you must make the Magistrate understand that he can never hope to penetrate this affair without a thorough knowledge of the peril in which Fiske and I moved, some years ago! If he persists in seeing merely a dead wastrel on the Pilgrim’s Way, when he might rather know the final, agonising loss of a daring man’s hope, as his blood trickles into the unforgiving earth, Mr. Knight cannot pretend to grasp the subtleties of man’s existence—or, at the very least, this shocking affair!”

  “Sir Davie,” Mr. Burbage said, “as your solicitor it is my duty to urge you, most earnestly, to answer the questions Mr. Knight may put to you, as succinctly and swiftly as possible. To do aught else is to try the patience of a gentleman whose time is taken up with numerous affairs.”

  “Burbage,” Sir Davie uttered mournfully. “I had thought better of you. I had thought you a man of romance, and spirit.”

  Edwar
d glanced enquiringly at me; I nodded ever so slightly.

  “Very well,” my brother said. “You may tell us, briefly, how you came to know Curzon Fiske.”

  “Ah,” Sir Davie breathed as tho’ released into a happy dream, “now there is a tale worth telling! But first perhaps I should just mention how I came to be in Ceylon at all—having spent the better part of my life on the other side of the world, rather as Columbus did, in attempting to reach the Subcontinent. I speak, of course, of Jamaica. My father, the ninth baronet, being a practical rather than a snobbish fellow, had sunk our fortunes into sugar—and did so handsomely from the trade, that I was sent out to the West Indies as a lad of but sixteen, to sit at the feet of the plantation overseer and learn the substance of the business. But it was not to be—for once upon the high seas I discovered a passion for ships that has never left me to this day! Tho’ embarking as a supercargo—a passenger, you should call it—on a merchant vessel bound for the tropics, I soon begged to learn the duties of a true sailor; and being a likely lad enough, for all I was the heir to a baronetcy, I was allowed to have my way. I donned the garb of a common seaman, and earned my bread before the mast, so that my Creole friends did not know me when at last I disembarked in Freetown, and were obliged to take a brown and hale young man to their bosom, who appeared more like a plantation slave in their eyes than the English gentleman they had been led to expect!”

  “All very interesting, I am sure,” Edward broke in, “but your youth cannot have any bearing on your present incarceration. Pray honour us with the facts of your acquaintance with Fiske, and your reasons for appearing at the Castle on the night of your friend’s murder.”

  If Edward expected the word murder to arrest Sir Davie’s reminiscent flight, he was to be disappointed.