Jane and the Canterbury Tale Read online

  “And I commend you for it. But do consider, you pea-goose, how strident the chorus shall become when the lady—or her husband—or perhaps, even, her brother—is taken up by your excellent father for murder.”

  “What?” Fanny reared up from the sopha in dismay, and whirled upon me like a tigress. “You cannot mean it! None of the Thanes—and neither of the MacCallisters—was of the shooting-party this morning! You might as well accuse my brother Edward, or Jupiter himself!”

  “I might, had Mr. Fiske been shot by a fowling piece in the middle of a crowd of beaters and dogs—but he was not, Fanny. He was murdered in cold blood in the dead of night, probably by a duelling pistol at close range. Or so I suspect the excellent Dr. Bredloe shall soon inform us.”

  I took a sip of tea to allow her time to clamber down from her high horse. “I observed the black marks of powder discharged upon the man’s coat. He was certainly standing within inches of the person who killed him, and his belongings were tidily stowed to one side of the path—which suggests that he both knew his murderer, and was expecting to meet that person exactly where we found his body at about eleven o’clock this morning.”

  “Good Lord,” Fanny said faintly, and sank back down upon the sopha.

  “I am not an intimate of Kentish society, as you know.” Cook’s apple tart, I discovered, was unequal to the one my friend Martha Lloyd was in the habit of making, but was commendable nonetheless. “I have not been among you, indeed, in some four years. Adelaide Fiske, neé Thane, was an utter stranger to me before she proceeded down the aisle of Mr. Tylden’s church—and her first husband I do not recollect ever having met at all. I have heard some of the gossip you mention, of course—your young friends Sophia Deedes and her sisters were at it, hammer and tongs, even during last night’s ball—but I should far prefer a more sober history, delivered by yourself.”

  “But you cannot truly believe it possible that someone we know—someone, perhaps, that I even danced with—could be capable of shedding an innocent man’s blood?”

  Ah. The shadow of Julian Thane’s compelling countenance had slipped between us.

  “I think it unlikely in the extreme that Mr. Fiske was killed by a stranger to himself,” I told my niece. “Beyond that, I may speculate nothing. Only consider, Fanny, how odd it is that he should appear in the neighbourhood of Chilham, on the very night of his wife’s second marriage … an event that he could have thrown into chaos.”

  “—Had he known of it,” she pointed out. “We cannot be certain he was even aware of the festivities at Chilham. Had he been, should he not have exerted himself to halt so bigamous a proceeding? Aunt Jane! Can you believe it possible that any gentleman should behave otherwise? No, no! You throw everything that is right and good into disorder, and by so doing, force all the parties concerned to behave in the most awkward and extraordinary fashion! Surely there is a more rational, and simpler, explanation?”

  Poor Fanny. She had much to learn of the world, if she believed that all about her were right and good, and the reverse extraordinary. But I said only, “Murder has the effect of twisting awry what once appeared to be order. I cannot begin to conjecture what occurred in Mr. Fiske’s case—who might be embroiled, and whom we may place entirely in the clear—until I know more of the man and his history.”

  Fanny drew breath, and studied my countenance for the space of several heartbeats. “You are a formidable lady, are you not, Aunt Jane?” she asked wistfully. “When I was a child, I was used to think you were like a good faerie—always dropping out of the sky with your delightful stories, and the dolls-clothes you embroidered so neatly; playing at cricket regardless of the stains the lawn left on your dress, and teaching the little ones to toss spillikins. It is only now I am grown older—and have been privileged to read your novels, and apprehend the subtlety of your observations—that I know how cold a reason you command.”

  “I shall chuse to take that as a compliment.” I set down my tea, which was growing tepid despite the warmth of the fire. “Cold reason may be a useful tool, Fanny, in your father’s pursuit of justice; for make no mistake, he shall pursue it, whichever one of his neighbours he must force into a noose. As he said only this morning, Curzon Fiske was a Kentishman, and deserves his measure of English law—no matter how depraved his past life may have been, or how justly his murderer regarded the taking of such a life. You may help me, or no; but in helping me, you may save one of your friends from all the calamity of an unjust accusation.”

  “Or tie a rope around his neck,” she said grimly. “This is serious speaking, indeed. Very well—I shall tell you what I know, but let it be understood, Aunt Jane, that I was a child when Adelaide Thane consented to be Fiske’s bride, and but seventeen when that gentleman fled England. He is so much older than the fellows of our set—I daresay he was almost elderly, nearly Papa’s age!—that I was never acquainted with him myself. Much of what I have learnt, therefore, has been taught at second-hand. Partial as the intelligence may be, however, I shall make you a gift of it.”

  1 Members of Parliament and peers were permitted to affix their signatures or seals to letters, allowing them to be delivered free of charge—a practice known as “franking.” Otherwise, Cassandra would have paid the fee for Jane’s letter, according to its weight, upon receiving it from the post. —Editor’s note.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Curious History of Curzon Fiske

  You slender wives, though much too feeble for battle,

  Be fierce, like tigers roaming far-off India—

  GEOFFREY CHAUCER, “THE CLERIC’S TALE”

  21 OCTOBER 1813, CONT.

  CURZON FISKE, FANNY ASSURED ME AS WE SETTLED IN FOR a comfortable coze, was born of highly respectable parents—his father the second son of a viscount, and his mother the daughter of an earl. The family lived in stile in Chartham, Kent, some four miles distant from Godmersham. Fanny was well acquainted with another Chartham family, the Faggs, whose father held the parish living there; and it was in part from the intelligence gleaned by the clergyman’s numerous daughters—all of whom were acknowledged to be lamentably plain, and thus prone to gossip from a persistent desire for Notice—that she was in possession of so many of the whisperings that surrounded Curzon Fiske.

  He had been reared, it was said, with considerable indulgence, being privy to the wilder habits of his noble cousins; and tho’ sent away to Eton at the age of ten, where his schoolboy days were edified by the example of one George Moore, a year his senior, he declined further instruction at the higher centres of learning, spurning both Oxford and Cambridge. The death of his excellent father while Fiske was as yet in his minority, threw his estate into the hands of trustees until he should achieve the age of one-and-twenty. Having done so in due course, he came into a respectable competence, without having inherited a fortune. This, according to Fanny, he contrived to dissipate in the swiftest possible fashion, through a determined exploration of the more notorious gaming hells the Metropolis might offer; an unbridled fondness for coats by Weston and boots by Hoby; and a predilection for the maintenance of a string of racehorses that invariably failed to place.

  If Fiske’s former neighbours in Kent suspected that his funds were equally at the disposal of a string of High-Flying Cyprians, those frivolous members of the Muslin Company, whose petulant favours must be won with excessive outlays of cash on carriages, jewels, and snug little residences in Richmond—such exploits had never come to Fanny’s ears. Or perhaps she thought her elderly Aunt Jane should be shocked to learn such things from her innocent niece’s lips. Regardless, no mention was made of Mr. Fiske’s amorous proclivities—until the advent of Adelaide Thane.

  It was evident to all, Fanny cautioned, that by the age of four-and-thirty Curzon Fiske had achieved so remarkable a degree of dissipation that he was no longer acknowledged by most of his old friends in Kent. There were genial clubmen abiding in Town—rakes, for the most part, or Pinks of the Ton, Slap Up to the Echo, who continued to
regard Mr. Fiske as a Knowing One, and the best of good fellows—but respectable mammas, with daughters to push off on the Marriage Mart, shepherded their charges in the opposite direction when Curzon Fiske hove into view. For the pockets of Mr. Fiske were entirely to let, and he was well-known to be hanging out for a rich wife.

  By six-and-thirty, he had been forced to sell his patrimony in Kent—the comfortable manor at Chartham—and send his aging mother and unmarried sisters into lodgings in a dismal quarter of Bath. By seven-and-thirty, he had been refused by no less than nine young ladies of unimpeachable virtue and moderate wealth. At eight-and-thirty, he espied Adelaide Thane moving through the figures of the quadrille at Almack’s on the arm of his old friend, George Moore, whose first wife had lately died—and was lost.

  She was, at the time, but seventeen years old. She betrayed already, however, the regal bearing and dark beauty that would ripen, in time, to the depth of elegance I had admired so completely last evening. Fiske stared at her as she went down the dance, and determined to wrest her attentions from Moore.

  Miss Thane was no heiress. Her father had been a gamester, well-known to Fiske from numerous encounters across the punting tables. She was exactly the sort of woman he ought not to pursue, much less marry—and so of course Fiske was compelled to achieve both. In wooing Adelaide Thane, he pitted himself against one of his oldest friends; George Moore was frank in admitting his object was to gain the lady’s hand, and the rivalry added spice to Fiske’s conquest. He set himself to be all that was charming; devoted himself to Miss Thane and her mother—who was wise enough to recognise a wastrel when she met one, having lived her life in a gamester’s pocket—and succeeded in encouraging that wary female to ride tyrant over her daughter, threatening the young lady with incarceration in her bedchamber and bread-and-water for a week, if Adelaide chose to encourage such an ineligible parti.

  Naturally, when Fiske was forced to flee London for relief from his creditors, the impressionable Miss Thane was ready to throw her future into his hands, and elope to Paris. The triumph was achieved one windy midnight, with a headlong flight to Dover and a perilous crossing prolonged by foul weather for some twenty hours, the prospective bride prostrate with seasickness for the duration.

  “How long ago was this?” I interjected.

  “The year Six, I believe,” Fanny replied, “for it was then that Mr. Moore took Aunt Harriot as his wife.”

  “—Seeking consolation in the arms of propriety and baronet’s blood, having been worsted in the fight for Beauty.”

  “I should not describe Aunt Harriot as ill-favoured, exactly,” Fanny said doubtfully, “tho’ it is certain she cannot shine when compared to Adelaide Fiske, and she possesses only a moderate understanding. Dear Mamma was still with us in the year Six—and tho’ I was not in request as a bridesmaid, I recollect taking some enjoyment in Aunt Harriot’s wedding. The only peculiar aspect of the ceremony was that the parish clerk at Wrotham, where Aunt was married, held Mr. Moore in such profound dislike that he ensured the funeral hymn was sung instead of the usual Nuptial Psalm.”

  “Dear, dear. But to return to Curzon Fiske, and his harum-scarum bride—”

  “Miss Thane would, as I have said, been seventeen at the time of her elopement to the Continent. I do not know how the couple contrived to live, tho’ it is rumoured that Mr. Fiske set up a gaming establishment in one of the lesser towns—Lyons, perhaps, or Liège—I am forever confusing the two—and that his beautiful young wife condescended to deal faro at one of the tables.”

  Fanny’s intelligence from this point forward was a patch-work of conjecture and fable. Nevertheless a vivid portrait emerged, of the two reckless citizens of the world making their glittering way across the Continent, regardless of Napoleon’s armies or the sudden falls of governments. They were spotted in Warsaw, as guests of a count; they took lodgings in St. Petersburg, and entertained the Tsar; they counted prelates in Rome and renegades in Sicily among their favoured intimates. Whenever they fled a locale the pair were sure to leave debts behind them; but curiously, Curzon Fiske seemed increasingly well-to-do. His wife went in jewels and the latest modes, which set off Adelaide’s figure and looks to perfection; his way of living was invariably of the first stare; and the baggage train that followed from province to province was a marvel of conspicuous display. By the time he returned to England—

  “Returned?” I queried. “He faced down his creditors in this country, at last?”

  “He must have done. Else Adelaide Fiske could not have been welcomed into the bosom of Chilham Castle by Old Mr. Wildman, as she undoubtedly was, three years after her headlong elopement.”

  And so, in the year 1809, Curzon Fiske returned triumphant to the land of his rearing, with the object of devoting his accumulated wealth to the purchase of an estate in Kent. He had matured in his travels on the Continent, it was said, and thrown off his rackety ways in an effort to please his wife; his intention now was to re-establish his good name—and Adelaide’s—in Society. He descended upon Canterbury’s August race-meeting, and renewed acquaintance among the Plumptres and Finch-Hattons and Wildmans and Austens (they were not yet Knights); was much seen at Chilham Castle—and looked gravely into a number of houses said to be available for hire. One was leased at last at considerable expence, and staffed with servants from London; Mrs. Fiske left her cards on visiting days, and formed one of the party at the local Assemblies; and the Fiskes were pronounced by all in Kent as a delightful couple, handsome in the extreme.

  Little more than a twelvemonth passed away, however, before Curzon Fiske was off again—bound for India this time, and without the beautiful Adelaide.

  “She had borne enough, I suppose, and wished to remain in her settled life,” I mused. “Mr. Fiske was obliged to flee his creditors, I presume?”

  Fanny wrinkled her nose. “If it were only that … I have heard that tho’ he arrived in Kent with a considerable fortune—as much as thirty thousand pounds, it has been said—he squandered it in the old way, gambling being a sort of fever with him. But there was some other reason why he could not stay—why Mrs. Fiske, as she then was, remained behind—and the breath of scandal is never far from the story. I simply do not have an inkling as to what occurred on that dreadful night, Aunt, when he disappeared—”

  “You make it sound like a horrid novel, my dear,” I retorted, amused.

  “But it was! A sudden removal from the Fiskes’ home, and an abrupt arrival at Chilham, on the bitterest of January nights, when the wind and snow howled. The duns were at the Fiskes’ very door, they said, and the lease on their house in receivers’ hands. Of course Old Mr. Wildman took them in, tho’ James has said his father could not like it; and what should Curzon Fiske do, but set to drinking claret at a furious rate, and challenging all the gentlemen present to whist for pound points—when everyone knew he had barely a shilling to his name!”

  “You were not of the party at Chilham on that occasion, I collect? What year would it have been—1810?”

  “I was not present,” Fanny admitted in a grudging tone, “and neither were my brothers, being as yet schoolboys at Winchester—but Jupiter Finch-Hatton knows what occurred, and it was from him I had some part of the story.”

  “Very well. What does Jupiter say happened next?”

  Fanny leaned towards me with a conspirator’s air. “The gentlemen—Jupiter and James and Mr. Plumptre, who was then but eighteen—agreed to play at whist with Curzon Fiske. Jupiter insists it was in an effort to bring some peace to Mrs. Fiske—Mrs. MacCallister, I should say—because her aspect was so wild and distraught, and her husband would do little to comfort her.”

  “And?”

  “And … I do not know what happened next,” Fanny admitted, with a flattened expression. “Only that Jupiter turned owlish and cagey, and quite knowing beyond what anyone might bear, so that I was out of reason cross, and lost all patience with him.”

  I sighed.

  “When a person who has bee
n frank turns to evasions and hints,” Fanny insisted with asperity, “there is nothing to be done but to ignore him. Anything more would be to reward quite tiresome behaviour.”

  “Undoubtedly. And yet you say that Curzon Fiske left Chilham. And without his wife.”

  “There was some sort of row that night, I think,” Fanny offered with a pretty knitting of her brows, “all the gentlemen having dipped quite deep into the claret. Perhaps the quarrel regarded the winnings, or pound points.”

  Or perhaps, I thought, it was to do with Adelaide. For certainly Curzon Fiske did not take her with him, when he fled England for the last time.

  “In any case,” Fanny persisted, “Mr. Fiske was gone from Chilham by morning, leaving a note he was bound for India; and Mrs. Fiske was abandoned to the charity of her cousins.”

  “Poor woman! And she only one-and-twenty!”

  Fanny shrugged. “She thoroughly enjoyed her career as an Adventuress well enough while it lasted, so one cannot entirely pity her—but I believe the Wildmans treated her with considerable kindness. They even repaired the broken relations that had obtained between Adelaide and her mother, so that Mrs. Fiske was received once more into Mrs. Thane’s house. Her fine clothes and jewels and other belongings were seized by her husband’s creditors; but she lived so quietly and respectably, and the Wildmans backed her so nobly, that her reputation was restored, in time.”

  “Three years since,” I mused, “and she had no word of Curzon Fiske?”

  “Not until the report of his death was received,” Fanny concurred. “We learnt the news of James Wildman, when he rode over one pleasant afternoon in April last year—some eighteen months ago, now. A fever, it was said, contracted while Fiske was in the service of the Honourable East India Company—and the body had been buried in Ceylon.”