Jane and the Barque of Frailty Read online

  “My grandfather will be pleased to learn that you have paid us this call,” Sylvester Chizzlewit told me. “I hope I may assure him of your continued health and happiness, Miss Austen?”

  “I am well enough,” I replied, “but I collect that Mr. Chizzlewit is not. He no longer sits in chambers?”

  “He was much beset by an inflammation of the lung this winter, and undertakes a trial of the waters at Bath. We are hopeful they may prove beneficial. Miss Austen, I must beg you to remain where you stand, and avert your eyes, as the measures we have adopted for the concealment of our keys will admit the confidence of no one.”

  The words were uttered with as much courtesy as the intelligence of his grandfather’s indisposition, or his wishes for my continued health; but there was a firmness in tone that brooked no question or delay. I turned my head away, and heard a soft click under Sylvester Chizzlewit’s fingers, as tho’ a panel in the wainscotting had slid back on hidden springs.

  “Very well,” he said, raising a formidable ring of keys; “we must now seek the mates of these from Jonas.”

  Jonas, it was presently revealed, was an elderly clerk whose white hair sprouted in tufts about his head, and whose back was stooped with a deformity of the spine. He smiled vaguely when roused from his ledgers in the room adjoining Sylvester Chizzlewit’s; his myopic pale eyes roamed over my figure.

  “Keys,” he murmured, as if to himself. “But can she be trusted? His lordship thought so, aye—but his lordship’s dead, isn’t he?”

  “That will be quite enough, Jonas,” Chizzlewit said sharply. “Pray bestir yourself.”

  The old man sighed, and eased his arthritic frame from the high stool on which it was perched. “None too young, is she, and not what his lordship might be expected to favour. A lady-bird, they said, as was in his keeping, but I cannot credit it. Too long in the tooth by half … ”

  I was put to the blush, and knew not where to look, but Mr. Chizzlewit preserving a perfect gravity, I attempted insensibility, and followed in Jonas’s muttering train.

  The clerk led us down a corridor lit by flaring lamps set into the woodwork, and into a pleasant room devoid of company. A handsome table held down the centre of the room, and several easy chairs were scattered about, but no fire burned in the imposing hearth.

  Jonas crossed to the chimneypiece, and took up a position on one side. Mr. Chizzlewit stood at the other. Without a word, the two inserted their keys into indiscernible holes in the woodwork, and at the count of three, sprang the locks in a single motion.

  The chimneypiece swung outwards, as tho’ it were a door: revealing a considerable chamber behind, inky with blackness. Sylvester Chizzlewit coolly reached for a taper that lay on the false mantel, and lit it in the flame of an oil lamp. Then he held it aloft.

  “I must beg you, Miss Austen, not to attempt to look within. Jonas, we require the Bengal chest.”

  TO BE LEFT ALONE WITH MY TREASURE WAS TO FIND again the comforting embrace of a familiar friend. When the door of the patrons’ chamber had closed behind the solicitor and his clerk, I ran my fingers over the raised figures carved in teak (most of them grossly improper), the heavy iron hasps and hinges, and the sloping initials cut on the lid. Then I drew an ornate key from my reticule and—glancing over my shoulder with apprehension, for Jonas’s air of mystery was infectious—set it in the lock.

  There were too many riches within. I might have been tempted to peruse the journals that described his lordship’s trek by horseback into the wilds of Central Asia; his visits to the court of St. Petersburg, and his views on the murder of the present Tsar’s father; his abduction of a lady from a harem near Jaipur; or his tête-à-tête with Napoleon Buonaparte, in a Paris prison from which he subsequently escaped, in lowering himself through a series of drains—but I had not come to Chizzlewit’s chambers solely to indulge in memory. Lord Harold was killed in the autumn of 1808, and if memory served, he had been much taken up with government policy at that time, being newly returned from the Peninsula. George Canning had then held the Foreign Ministry, and Robert Stewart, Lord Castlereagh, the Ministry of War. Lord Harold must certainly have been acquainted intimately with both.

  The journal I sought was a slim one bound in bottle-green calf, the chronicle of the Rogue’s final year—begun in January of 1808 and ending abruptly with the first few days of November. I skimmed rapidly through several passages; his lordship had been writing from Oporto. The relevant entries spanned several months.

  … unfortunate that Gustavus IV should be quite mad, as he is the sole ally on which His Majesty may depend in the region of the Baltic… my man writes from St. Petersburg of the Tsar’s threats to our Swedish King, to suggest that if Gustavus prefers to keep Finland, he had much better join with Russia and drive Britain out of these waters …

  … seems clear that our intelligence of the Tsar’s intentions is wide of the mark. I cannot make out why the reports I obtain are so transparent on the matter, and those that Castlereagh reads directly contradict them … Thornton signs his treaty in Stockholm, and two weeks later Russian troops cross the Finnish border … there is duplicity in all this.

  Castlereagh’s ten thousand men are sailing north to Gothenburg, with no clear orders and no one but Sir John Moore to save them … he is to defer to a mad king, who wishes to use British troops to seize Zealand from the Danes …

  … I am sick at heart that when we most need troops here in Portugal and Spain, they are sent on a fool’s errand instead, to bait the Baltic tiger … I cannot make my voice heard in Canning’s ministry … he is all for helping the Spaniards to help themselves, but ordnance and funds are lacking … here, where we most require troops to face Marshal Junot, our attention is divided. Do we fight Napoleon, or the Tsar?

  … Moira tells me of disputes between Canning and Castlereagh, and fears it will end badly… Canning is everywhere known to be less of a gentleman than Robert, and it is not to be wondered at, his father dead in his infancy and his mother upon the stage, the kept mistress of a dozen men—but one would have thought he would learn loyalty during his days at Oxford …

  … this abortive campaign shall be adjudged a failure of Castlereagh’s, and a discomfiture to Portland’s government …

  I could make little of all this; the web of policy, again, too entangled to comprehend. Certainly the abortive defence of Sweden had been followed by the even more ignominious expedition to Walcheren, an island in the Scheldt, which Lord Harold had not lived to see—forty thousand troops, thirty-five ships of the line, more than two hundred smaller vessels, and very little to show for it, while behind our backs, the French arrogantly installed Buonaparte’s brother on the throne of Spain. Again, the pressing need to crush the Enemy in the Peninsula had given way to a fool’s errand in the northern seas. Lord Harold was clearly disturbed by a discrepancy in intelligence— but he wrote to himself in these pages, as a man does when he ruminates upon anxieties in his mind: elliptical and reflective, without the need for explanation. Not for the first time, I wished acutely for his living presence.

  One name, however, had leapt out at me from the journal’s pages: Moira. Lord Harold had known Henry’s intimate friend, the debt-ridden Earl. I should have expected it; both men had been bred up as Whigs from infancy.

  The plaintive sounding of a clock somewhere in chambers alerted me to the fact that the day was much advanced; Eliza would be wondering if I were lost. I slipped the bottle-green volume into my reticule and locked Lord Harold’s chest.

  ELIZA WAS, INDEED, ANXIOUSLY AWAITING MY return—but it was Madame Bigeon who informed me of the fact. Manon’s aging mother answered my pull of the front doorbell. When I would have stepped into the hall, she urged in a rapid undertone, “Pray, mademoiselle, do not for the love of Heaven delay, but go for Monsieur Henri at once!”

  “Is it Eliza? She is—unwell?” I managed.

  Madame shook her head. “It is the Runners. Bow Street is in the house!”

  1 This wa
s the traditional meeting ground of duelists, outside London.—Editor’s note.

  Chapter 9

  The Gryphon and the Eagle

  Thursday, 25 April 1811, cont.

  ∼

  “FETCH ME INK AND PAPER, AND I SHALL REQUIRE the hackney to carry a note to Henry,” I told madame—but before she could hasten on her errand, a barrel-chested fellow in a dull grey coat and a squat, unlovely hat had barred the passage behind her.

  “What’s all this?” he demanded, surveying me with a pair of eyes both sharp and small in a pudding face. “Are you the mort what’s visiting from the country?” 1

  “I am Miss Austen. This is my brother’s house. And who, my good sir, are you?”

  The question appeared to surprise him. Perhaps the better part of his interlocutors were too stunned at the awful sight of a Runner—the terrible gravity of the Law, and Newgate’s dire bulk rising before their eyes—to enquire of the man’s name.

  “Clem Black,” he said. “Of Bow Street.”

  “So I understand.” I took off my bonnet and set it carefully on the table in Eliza’s hall. “What is your business here?”

  I spoke calmly, but in truth was prey to the most lively apprehension on the Henry Austens’ behalf. There could be only one explanation for the presence of a Clem Black in the house: my poor brother was even more embarrassed in his circumstances than his partner James Tilson could apprehend. Perhaps there had been a run on the bank. Perhaps Austen, Maunde & Tilson had discovered a discrepancy in the accounts. Perhaps Henry—so recently installed in this stylish new home, with its furniture made to order and its fittings very fine—had felt his purse to be pinched, and had dipped into the bank’s funds without the knowledge of his partners.

  But at this thought my mind rebelled. Not even Henry—lighthearted and given over to pleasure as he so often was—would violate the most fundamental precept of his chosen profession. When it came to the management of another man’s money, Henry was wont to observe, a banker must be worthy of his trust.

  “You’re a cool one, ain’t ye?” Clem Black said with grudging admiration. “The other gentry mort is indulging in spasms and such. If you’d be so good, ma’am, as to come with me—”

  I bowed my head and preceded him into Eliza’s front drawing-room, where so recently the crowd of gentlemen and ladies had stood, in heat and self-importance, to listen to Miss Davis and her brood in the singing of their glees. Eliza was reclined upon a sopha, Manon engaged in waving a vinaigrette beneath her nose; but at my appearance my sister reared up, her countenance quite pink, and said, “Ah—not Henry. I had hoped— Still, it is probably for the best. We may delay the unhappy intelligence as long as possible. Jane, I have wronged you—and I cannot rest until I have assured you that the injury was unknowingly done.”

  “Hush, Eliza,” I murmured, and joined her on the sopha. “What has occurred?”

  “That man”—she inclined her head in the direction of a second Runner I now perceived to be nearly hidden by the drawing-room draperies, his gaze roaming Sloane Street as it darkened beyond the window—“that man has quite cut up my peace. Indeed, indeed, Jane, I should never have undertaken the errand had I suspected the slightest irregularity!”

  “Eliza, pray calm yourself. Manon—leave off the vinaigrette and fetch some claret for la comtesse. You, sir—can you account for the extreme distress and misery you have occasioned in a most beloved sister?”

  The man at the window turned. At the sight of his face I drew a sudden breath, for its aspect was decidedly sinister. Two pale agates of eyes stared full into my own; a pair of bitter lips twisted beneath a lumpen mass of nose; and the left cheek bore the welt of an old wound—the path of a pistol ball, that had barely missed killing him. He was not above the middle height, but gave an impression of strength in the quiet command of limbs that might have served a prize-fighter.

  “You are Miss Jane Austen,” he said.

  “I am. But you have the advantage of me, Mr.—”

  “Skroggs. William Skroggs. I am a chief constable of Bow Street. Do you know what that means?”

  “I am not unacquainted with the office—”

  “It means,” he said softly, advancing upon me without blinking an eye, “that I have the power to drag you before a magistrate, lay a charge, provide evidence, and see you hang, Miss Austen—all for the prize of a bit of blood-money, like. I’ve done the same for thirteen year, now, give or take a day or two, and I find my taste for the work only increases.”

  He was trying to frighten me. I stared back at him, therefore, without a waver, my hands clasped in my lap. “Do not attempt to bully me in my brother’s house, Mr. Skroggs. His friends are more powerful than yours. Be so good as to explain your errand and have done.”

  The corners of the cruel mouth lifted. “With pleasure,” he said, and lifted a wooden box onto Eliza’s Pembroke table.

  I recognised it immediately. I had carried it myself into Rundell & Bridge, playing country cousin to Eliza’s grande dame.

  “How did you come by those jewels?” I demanded sharply.

  Bill Skroggs—I could not conceive of him as

  William—halted in the act of opening the lid. “Amusing,” he observed, with a leer for his colleague Clem Black—“I was just about to pose the same question to Miss Austen myself.”

  I glanced at Eliza in consternation. She was propped on her cushions, eyes closed, a handkerchief pressed to her lips. It was possible she had fainted; but certain that she had no intention of crossing swords with the Runners. It was left to the novelist to weave a suitable tale.

  Manon appeared with her wine and began to coax a little of the liquid through her mistress’s lips.

  “The jewels were given to me,” I told Skroggs with passable indifference, “and being little inclined to wear them, I resolved to consult Mr. Rundell, of the Ludgate Hill concern. Was it he who required you to call in Sloane Street?”

  “You might say so.” Skroggs chuckled. “He’s no flat, Ebenezer Rundell—and well aware as how a receiver of swag is liable to hang. You won’t find him going bail for no havey-cavey mort with a load of gammon to pitch. He come to Bill Skroggs quick enough.”

  I studied the man’s pitiless countenance, and for the first time a chill of real apprehension curled in my entrails. I understood little enough of the man’s cant to grasp the full meaning he intended, but had an idea of Mr. Rundell consulting his voluminous ledgers, so close to hand, and finding no record of the Lady Mary Leigh or the Duke of Chandos’s ancestral jewels.

  “If you would ask how I came by such a fortune in gems,” I answered calmly, “I am ready to admit that the tale I told Mr. Rundell was false. There is a lady in the case, who does not wish it known that she desires to sell these pieces. I cannot offer you her name, as I should be betraying a confidence.”

  The Bow Street Runner threw back his head and howled with laughter. Clem Black joined him in expressions of unholy mirth. I stared at the two men, bewildered. What had I said to send them into whoops?

  “Betraying a confidence!” Skroggs repeated, almost on the point of tears. “A lady in the case!”

  I rose from the sopha. “Pray explain yourself, Mr. Skroggs. This deliberate obscurity grows tedious.”

  He left off laughing as swiftly as tho’ a door had slammed closed. “You had these gems off a dead woman, Miss Austen, and we mean to know how.”

  “A dead woman?” I repeated, startled.

  He reached into the box and drew out an emerald brooch, in the figure of two mythic beasts locked in combat: the gryphon and the eagle. I had glimpsed the device only a few hours before—on a stately black travelling coach bound for Hans Place.

  “Good God,” I said, and sat back down abruptly, my legs giving way at the knees.

  “Now,” Bill Skroggs said softly, “why don’t you tell us all about it, eh? What’s this confidence you don’t care to violate?—That you slit the Princess Tscholikova’s throat, and left her for my
lord Castlereagh to find?”

  1 Mort was a cant term for woman.—Editor’s note.

  Chapter 10

  Banbury Tales

  Thursday, 25 April 1811, cont.

  ∼

  ELIZA GASPED AT THE RUNNER’S WORDS, AND BURST into tears; Manon broke into a torrent of French, gesticulating with wine glass and vinaigrette; and as she advanced on Bill Skroggs, his partner moved to the drawing-room door and closed it firmly, his broad back against the oak.

  “It was you gave the jewels to old Rundell,” Skroggs said, pushing Manon aside as he approached me, “and you who have a story to tell. I’ll give you a quarter-hour, Miss Austen, by my old pocket watch; and when the time’s sped, it’s off to Bow Street.”

  I have rarely found occasion to wish that among the myriad professions pursued by my brothers—

  clergyman, banker, sailor, and gentleman—at least one had embraced the Law. In truth, the few country attorneys thrown in my way have been prosy individuals, devoid of humour, exacting as to terms and precise as to verbiage, with a lamentable relish for disputation. In this hour of desperate peril, however, I yearned devoutly for a hotheaded barrister in the family fold: one who might knock Bill Skroggs on his back with a single blow, before serving notice that his sister was not a toy for the magistrate’s sport. What I detested most in the Runner’s manner was his easy assurance of my venality—no hint of sympathy or doubt lurked in those hard, pale eyes. Innocence was unknown to Bill Skroggs; in his world every soul was guilty of something. His exultation was like a hound’s that has caught the fox between its teeth. In this I understood the depth of my danger.