Jane and the Canterbury Tale Read online

  “Every note of tragedy has been struck by yourself, has it not, Mrs. Thane?”

  “What do you know of tragedy?” she retorted, her words as venomous as her aspect.

  “Enough.” Another small step into the room, nearer to her position. “And I apprehend even more of the ways of murderers. How they may betray themselves by the smallest mistake. You do not possess a maid, I think, as you suggested yesterday when we met in the attic passage? —Or perhaps I should say, No maid living. For you cut Martha Kean’s throat in the coppice, did you not, having first lured her to the place with a note penned in your son’s hand?”

  A groan fell from the lips of Old Wildman, but the woman who held all our gaze did not regard it; she smiled glitteringly at me, instead.

  “Aye, I slit the wench’s throat—and was glad to do it! In that I preserved the reputation of my son, at least. That she should presume to bear his child!”

  “His hand alone should secure the girl’s trust and her eager vigil in the coppice,” I mused. “I imagine it was your discovery of such a note—tossed in a corner of a room or mislaid upon a table, and establishing an assignation between Mr. Julian Thane and Martha Kean—that first apprised you of their clandestine entanglement. Did you keep the slip of paper by you to confront Julian with your knowledge?”

  “I soon found a better use,” she retorted bitingly. “I never thought the idiot girl would keep the note in her pocket—I assumed she would toss it on the fire.”

  “Unfortunate,” I agreed. “Indeed, when I consider of your every choice in the affair, you might almost have intended to hang your son.”

  “Never!” she cried out. “Vicious jade—my son is all in all to me … a more princely being was never born …”

  These last words trailed off in a keening sob, and she crouched low as tho’ in anguish, hugging her arms about her knees, grizzled locks trailing about her face. Her form rocked precariously on the sill. I felt rather than saw Edward start forward, as tho’ to intervene, but I held up one hand. She had not told us enough—and any approach now might send her flying into air.

  “Really?” I said wonderingly. “Why, then, did you wear your son’s drab shooting coat when you murdered Martha, if not to see him hang?”

  “So that the girl should take no alarum as I approached!” She spoke so rapidly, her words might almost have been gibberish. “Can you not have an idea of the beauty of it, clever Jane? I, tall as I am, striding towards the wench, the folds of the coat hiding the knife in my gloved hand—and she flung herself into my arms to die! Martha wanted Death. Oh, yes—she wanted Death as wantonly as a lover. Until, of course, the knife was at her throat—she turned to flee, but I had her in my grasp, I pulled back her hair and did the thing in seconds. Killing, you know, is a paltry business.”

  Old Wildman had sunk down into a straight-backed chair that sat near the door; I risked a glance, and saw that his head was in his hands. He should be of little use; but Edward still stood beside me. I resumed my study of the raving figure in the window.

  “But as Martha struggled,” I observed with as much calm as I could command, “her fingers tore at your coat, securing a loose button. And you never noticed. That was fatal to Julian, was it not? I imagine you felt some horror when you learned of your mistake. Taken in company with the incriminating note you failed to secure—it was in search of that you took the risk of visiting Martha’s bedchamber yesterday—you may congratulate yourself, Mrs. Thane, on having thoroughly botched the business. And secured a noose around your son’s neck.”

  “You are a vile creature,” she whispered.

  “It seems the only just return for your earlier efforts,” I added serenely, “to hang young James Wildman.”

  “What?” Old Wildman sat up, his hands clenched upon his knees. “What do you say of my son, Miss Austen? What has Augusta done to James? I will be told!”

  “—Only borrowed his duelling pistol to despatch Curzon Fiske.” It was my brother who spoke this time, in an aside to his neighbour. “Your James stood between Julian Thane and an inheritance Mrs. Thane was determined her son must have—your fortune, old friend.”

  Spots of mottled colour stood out on Old Wildman’s cheeks. His eyes sparked dangerously. “Do you mean to say that you crept out by night and shot poor Curzon Fiske? Good God, ma’am! To what possible end?”

  “I discovered Martha in her meeting with the seaman in the back garden,” Mrs. Thane said in that same rapid, maddened accent. “Adelaide had sent her. Martha was frightened. She was always afraid of me—and I made her divulge the whole—where Fiske meant to wait, and with what hopes. I saw how he might be used. I took James’s pistol from the gun room, and when the thing was done, I left it in the churchyard. One death, after all, might bring about another.”

  “Or several,” Edward observed. “What unnatural mother, Mrs. Thane, should willingly send her daughter to gaol, for a murder she did not commit, and say not one word to preserve that child’s life and reputation?” He turned away in disgust.

  “Adelaide is nothing to Julian!” Augusta Thane cried. “She proved as much when she disdained my counsel, and threw herself away on Curzon Fiske! Aye, might they both die and be damned, for the insult they served me! A thousand such should be ample sacrifice for my son!”

  “And young James Wildman, as well?” I murmured.

  “Good lord,” Old Wildman muttered. “Of course. I see it now. Would that I had cut my tongue out, before I said aught of my intentions! It was too vast a temptation for you, Augusta. I never dreamt, you know, that anything would ever happen to James, and make Julian my heir—simply meant it as a kindness to you, and a mark of my concern for all your family. What a fool I’ve been!”

  “Julian deserves your fortune!” Mrs. Thane flashed. “He was born to it. Anyone who saw my son and yours, standing side-by-side, should immediately know which ought to be the other’s master! Julian, so noble, so elegant in every aspect, his mind informed and his manners the equal of the Great—to be … usurped in his degree, by a cousin with nothing more to recommend him than an amiable air and the fortunate accident of birth!”

  “Augusta,” Old Wildman said warningly. “Don’t say what you’ll regret. Come down from that window like a sensible woman, now.”

  A sensible woman? I glanced at Edward, appalled.

  And at that moment, Augusta Thane began to laugh.

  It was a hideous and chilling peal of merriment, all the more terrible for being utterly free of hysterics. I would swear that Mrs. Thane was not mad, but as sane as I am—and that it was the Devil she saw, advancing across the room in the form of my brother, to lift her down from the window.

  As the thought entered my mind in one blazing instant, she stepped forward into air, her gaze fixed upon the sky—and still laughing, was gone.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Exit Dancing

  “… be pleased

  That neither of you lies dead or about to be seized

  And imprisoned. Thus we’ll reach the end of this road.”

  GEOFFREY CHAUCER, “THE KNIGHT’S TALE”

  THURSDAY, 11 NOVEMBER 1813

  AND SO I AM COME AT LAST TO THE CLOSE OF MY TWO months at Godmersham, and my interesting sojourn among the rich and contented folk of Kent—who have provided unexpected matter for study, and enlivened with their prevarications and poses the essential folly of my fictitious Emma. I have found occasion, during the relative peace of the past fortnight (which encompassed only one concert, one bout of unexpected houseguests, an intimate dinner for fourteen at Chilham Castle, and a third expedition to Canterbury gaol in the Magistrate’s company), to turn once more to that bewitching creature of my own invention—who, tho’ full twenty years of age and the mistress of her father’s establishment, is utterly unlike my own dear Fanny. Emma is happy and vain, secure and carefree, bossy and endearing; while Fanny—Fanny, I fear, has been crossed in love, and in a manner likely to blight her future for some time to come. She is
less cheerful, less active, less given to sudden quirks of humour—and more melancholy in her looks when she believes herself unobserved. In short, she recalls to mind another girl of twenty, whose first attachment proved to be less than she had dreamt—myself, in the aftermath of my beloved Tom Lefroy’s abandonment.

  If I might have spared Fanny this pain—! I, who know too well the black despair of disappointed hopes—! But I should then have spared her Life, in all its desperate striving; and I would not have Fanny miss a particle of real feeling that comes in her way. She will be a better woman, I daresay, for having endured the heartbreak of Julian Thane.

  He left the country with his sister and her husband the morning after our final dinner at Chilham, which—tho’ awkward enough—served as a useful coda to the unhappy events that had bound the two households. No mention was made of the hateful woman whose desperate last act of self-murder, had at least been accompanied by a full letter of confession, signed and dated in her hand. In this, Augusta Thane succeeded in saving both her children—not merely with the sacrifice of her neck, but in the explicit details of each mortal act she had accomplished: the shooting of Curzon Fiske on the side-path near St. Lawrence churchyard, and the brutal slaughter of Martha Kean. Her account was at once so thorough, and so entirely without remorse, as to convince any reader of its veracity, and clear all suspicion of others from the Magistrate’s and coroner’s minds. The happy release of Mrs. MacCallister that very evening, at which I assisted, was the sole episode on which my brother Edward might congratulate himself; and the earnest hand he offered both the lady and her husband, and the manner in which he then expressed all his joy in Adelaide’s deliverance, may be taken as evidence of his previous misery at the progress of the affair.

  And so the folk of Godmersham had accepted Old Mr. Wildman’s invitation to dine, as a gesture of thanks and expiation; we had gone to Chilham, and canvassed the hopeful future of the MacCallisters—their expected travels in Cornwall; their brother’s decision to join them on their wedding-journey; the Captain’s hopes of his duties on the Marquis of Wellington’s staff; the likelihood of Buonaparte’s defeat, now that the French were crippled from their exploits in Russia. Fanny endeavoured throughout the whole, to appear as tho’ she had not a care in the world, and knew nothing of the true history of poor Martha Kean. Julian Thane, for his part, was sombre and grave. He was much given to staring earnestly at my niece with his smouldering dark eyes; but she was at pains never to be alone with him—from a kind of cowardice, I imagine, at what might have been said. Fanny has learnt caution, at an age when I should have wished her to study romance—and I cannot help but be sorry for it.

  This evening, however, she seems determined to forget her troubles—and is even now under my eye, dancing the waltz with Mr. Finch-Hatton at the final Canterbury ball of the Autumn Season. They make a striking pair as they circle the floor, Fanny glowing in her cream-coloured silk, and Jupiter every inch the Bond Street Beau—his golden locks brushed in fashionable disorder, his silk knee-breeches fine enough for Almack’s. Fanny will never have Jupiter for a husband, I am sure—but he will serve to increase her consequence at such affairs, and silence the chatter of the Impertinent. I do not fear of his heart suffering in the pursuit—or at least, of his betraying it. Jupiter shall lounge to the very end, and no doubt set a Fashion among his intimates.

  “You are looking very well tonight, Miss Austen,” observed Mr. Tylden, as he bowed and offered me a glass of lemonade. “I do admire that wine-coloured silk—as I must have told you on a previous occasion.”

  I smiled my thanks at the clergyman. For a simple man, Mr. Tylden has performed his duty nobly—in having twice married the same couple without reproach, and having buried in rapid succession the lady’s first husband, and her mother. Mrs. Thane’s rites were unattended, I fear, and her coffin placed in unconsecrated ground—but of this, too little cannot be said.

  “You are to leave us, I apprehend?” Mr. Tylden enquired.

  “I go to my brother Henry’s, in London, on the Monday,” I replied.

  “Then we must hope to see you often again in Kent,” he said. “I wonder—may I have the honour of this dance?”

  My gaze was on Edward—who was standing alone, supporting one wall of the Canterbury Assembly Rooms, that perpetual lost look upon his face; and my heart went out to him. So many distinguished ladies circling the floor, with an eye to his handsome countenance and distinguished bearing—so many glittering neighbours who wished him happy—and Edward remained enthralled to his enchanting ghost. Like Fanny, he did not love readily, or give up his heart without a fight. But as I studied my brother, he caught my eye, and his melancholy softened a little.

  I turned to Mr. Tylden.

  “You are very kind. But perhaps we may defer the pleasure until I am next in Kent? I am promised to my brother for this dance.”

  I made my way through the breathless whirl of the ballroom and raised my glass to Edward’s. It was only lemonade, after all—but it would serve.

  “To the future,” I said.

  He studied my countenance. “After all you have seen in recent weeks, of the folly and bitterness of mankind, you still cherish hopes of the future, Jane?”

  “I do.” I searched for Fanny’s face among the waltzing couples; she was more animated in Jupiter’s company this evening than I had observed her in days. “For what else do we live, Edward—but our hopes of joy to come?”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Since 1995, the Jane Austen Mystery series has been shaped and sustained by the genius of one person—Kate Burke Miciak, Editorial Director of Bantam Books. Kate was the first to recognize the possibilities of Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor, and her support for the series over the subsequent sixteen years and eleven novels has been unflagging. Janeites everywhere owe her a debt of gratitude; mine is one I can never repay.

  Editors Caitlin Alexander and Randall Klein have patiently lent their expertise to this author through numerous books, with a control of temper that would have astounded our Jane.

  Susan Corcoran—an enthusiastic Janeite if ever there was one—promoted the series in its early years, then handed the baton to Sharon Propson and Lisa Barnes, crack publicists who constantly found ingenious ways to win readers’ attention.

  Borrowing Jane’s voice and idiom is a tricky business, particularly for an American born two centuries too late, and without Kelly Chian’s deft supervision of copyedits—and her staff’s ability to catch every one of my egregious errors—these books would not have withstood the rigorous test of the critics’ eye. Thank you for saving me from myself.

  Finally, Bantam’s art department spearheaded the commission of some pretty glorious cover art. Knowing Jane’s delight in frivolous dress, I’m sure she approves.

  Stephanie Barron

  Denver, Colorado

  May 2011

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  STEPHANIE BARRON is the author of the standalone historical suspense novels A Flaw in the Blood and The White Garden, as well as the Jane Austen mystery series. As Francine Mathews, she is the author of several novels of espionage, including The Alibi Club. She lives in Denver, Colorado.