A Tall Dark Stranger (3 page)

“But what was he doing here?” Mrs. Murray repeated.

“He said he was on a walking tour,” I told her. “Actually, he was looking for relatives in the graveyard. Fanshawe was the name, Rupert and Marion. He said they’d died in the last century. There are no Fanshawes hereabouts other than yourself. You were a Fanshawe before marriage.”

She paused a moment. “What did he look like?”

“He was young, tall and thin, with fair hair and blue eyes. He seemed gentlemanly. Very well dressed.”

She thought a moment, then shook her head. “No, I don’t know him. There are no Stoddarts in my family. Such a pity when a young man dies,” she said, rubbing her ugly club thumbs against her fingers. “Well, I was going to take my leave, but since I’ve lent my gig to your footman ...”

We did the polite thing and had the horses put to to drive her home.

“I thought she’d never leave,” Aunt Talbot exclaimed when the front door closed. “She seemed mighty interested in that corpse, didn’t you think?”

“Yes, I noticed she asked twice who he was.”

“I believe she was worried about her fate line. I hope I didn’t worry her unduly by mentioning it, but there was a noticeable break in her fate line. I judged it to occur near the end of her third decade. It will be a comeuppance for her after having her bread buttered on both sides since her marriage.”

I shan’t venture into the intricacies of the fate line. Timing its irregularities is a tricky business.

“Let us go down and keep Lollie company,” she continued. “It can’t be pleasant for him, sitting with a corpse. And there’s no saying the murderer won’t return.”

She was keen to get all the details of the murder firsthand and I was becoming fretful at having left my paint box behind, so I went with her back to the scene of the crime.

“That there man’s been murdered” was Monger’s verdict when he beheld the sodden corpse. Monger, a graying man with an undistinguished face and bad teeth, had been a solicitor’s clerk until he was dismissed for incompetence, at which time his cousin, McAdam, had appointed him to the post of constable.

“We are not blind, Monger,” Aunt Talbot said, glancing at his hands. Despite his earth hands, he displayed nothing outstanding in the way of common sense. “What are you going to do about it?”

“He’ll have to be buried” was Monger’s reply. “That’s not my job.”

Auntie has a low tolerance for stupidity. “Send for McAdam, Lollie,” she said.

Monger nodded his approval. “Aye, ‘twould be best, and a sawbones to give the certificate. There’ll be an inquest into this piece of work. I’ll sit with the body till Joseph gets here.” His cousin, Joseph McAdam.

Aunt Talbot couldn’t resist a glance at Stoddart’s hands before leaving. “A fire hand, it looks like,” she said as an aside. “Unreliable. A revolutionary, I shouldn’t wonder.”

I recovered my paint box and sketch pad, and we went back across the flower-strewn meadow toward the house. Monger lit up a pipe and sat down on my sketching rock to await McAdam’s arrival.

When we had gone beyond hearing, Lollie opened his hand to reveal a waterlogged note. “I got this from Stoddart’s pocket,” he said, “You just might be right about his being a revolutionary, Aunt Maude.”

She flushed with pleasure and forgot to chide him for going through the dead man’s pockets. “What does it say, Lollie?”

“Not much, but it looks dashed suspicious. It’s printed, for one thing. That hides the handwriting. ‘Meet me at the water meadow at six. Bring the money. We’ll exchange.’ It isn’t signed. Stoddart obviously had some agreement with the writer. He knew who the note was from.”

“Was there money in his pocket?” Aunt Talbot asked, hastening homeward without breaking stride.

“Not a sou. His watch is gone as well. I noticed he was wearing one yesterday.”

Auntie considered this for a moment, then said, “Since the murderer left the note behind when he went through Stoddart’s pockets, can we assume that he is not the man who wrote it?”

“The note was folded up and in the bottom of his watch pocket. If the murderer pulled the watch out by its chain, he’d never have noticed the note.”

“An unsigned, printed note doesn’t tell us much,” I ventured.

“On the contrary,” my aunt said. “It tells us a great deal: that Stoddart was buying something clandestinely. Their meeting in the meadow at six in the morning suggests the seller wanted the utmost privacy. And that suggests some manner of illegality.”

“The note doesn’t say six in the morning,” I pointed out. “Perhaps the meeting was for six last night, or tonight, or any night. It might have been in his pocket for days.”

Auntie again considered for a moment, then jerked her head in acknowledgment. “Point taken,” she said curtly.

“What is more interesting is that the meeting occurred in our water meadow,” I said. “Stoddart must have been meeting someone from this neighborhood who would know about it.”

“That path through the meadow isn’t actually public, but it’s used widely by all the locals,” Auntie mentioned.

The path she referred to joins two parallel roads. By cutting through the meadow pedestrians can cut a mile from their route. But still, it is only locals who would know about it.

We continued discussing this exciting event after we reached home. We went in by the back door, the closest way. I noticed Cook had George out picking vegetables. Inez had stuck by her vow not to venture out into the garden. Already the effects of the murder were being felt. It seemed almost incredible that a murder should have occurred in this peaceful corner of the land.

George looked up to tell us that the groom was taking Mrs. Murray’s gig home and would return in our carriage. One can always count on George to be on top of things. He knew we would want to go to the village ourselves that afternoon.

We sat in the Rose Saloon, each of us keeping one eye turned to the window to watch for McAdam’s arrival. Auntie forgot herself so far as to accept a small glass of wine to recover her breath. She sipped at it as if it were hemlock.

Lollie passed around the note, held in place on a plate to keep it from falling apart. It was sodden, but the pulp that remained suggested that it had been a cheap sort of paper. Luckily, the message had been written in pencil. Ink would have run, making the writing illegible.

“A gentleman would have written in ink,” Aunt Talbot informed us.

“I wonder what he was exchanging the money for,” Lollie said.

“I shouldn’t be surprised if he was a spy for Boney, paying for war secrets,” Aunt Talbot replied. “Did he have a foreign accent at all?”

“No, not a trace,” I said.

“An Englishman, then. A traitor along with all the rest. Never trust a fire hand. I wonder if McAdam would let me take a print of it. Much the best way to read the lines and mounts.”

The print is taken by smearing the hand with ink, placing a clean paper on a sheet of glass, and pressing the hand on the paper. The result is then studied with a magnifying glass to reveal the clues as to the person’s character. Even the whorls and loops on the fingertips are examined.

“Don’t be a ghoul, Aunt Maude,” Lollie scolded.

“His character hardly matters now,” she said. “The man is dead. He’ll no longer afflict society.”

“You’re hard on Mr. Stoddart,” I said. “Are you forgetting he’s the victim? You speak as though he were the murderer.”

Auntie looked quite surprised at this. Lollie seemed to have forgotten it as well. I expect it was the man’s lying about Bath that had prejudiced their view.

“Perhaps he was an English spy trying to buy French secrets from his murderer,” Lollie suggested. He didn’t like to admit that an English spy would sink to murder.

“We don’t know that it had anything to do with spying or even with that note,” I insisted. “It could be that Stoddart was buying stolen goods, or something of that sort.”

“A fence,” Lollie said, nodding importantly at knowing the cant term. “But I haven’t heard of any big robberies hereabouts.”

“I wager both men were from London,” Aunt Talbot decided. “Much wiser to sell stolen goods away from where they were stolen. What a villain the murderer is, and to think he’s running about the countryside, unknown.”

She watched from the front window as McAdam rode up on his bay mare, then went to the door to speak to him. When she returned, she said, “He’s going directly to the water meadow. No word of any robbery in town. He wants that note, Lollie, It is evidence.”

Lollie decided to put it in the oven with the door open to dry it. Unfortunately, Betty closed the door, and it was dark brown by the time the mishap was discovered. When Lollie tried to pick it up, it fell to pieces. McAdam stopped in for a word after viewing the corpus delicti.

McAdam is a short, balding little man with sharp brown eyes. We tease Auntie that he has a
tendre
for her because he once carried her parcels two blocks to the carriage in Chilton Abbas.

We told him all we could remember of our first meeting with Stoddart and of seeing him with Maitland before we spoke to him. He said he’d have a word with Maitland. Lollie told him about finding the body that morning. McAdam chided Lollie for searching the man’s pockets and was, of course, not happy to learn the note was now a pile of ashes. Lollie was able to give him the message word for word and even duplicated the printing, which did much to mitigate McAdam’s wrath.

That is how we passed the morning. Immediately after lunch Auntie remembered she needed a few yards of muslin and put on her bonnet to go to Chilton Abbas. The muslin, of course, was a pretext for going to the drapery shop to retail our adventure to her friends and to learn of any new developments. You have no notion of the importance of gossip in the parish if you imagine for a moment the carriage got away without Lollie and myself in it.

Chilton Abbas is a typical Hampshire village, built around a crystal-clear chalk stream, with a common green complete with duck pond, a High Street, a church, an inn, a tavern, a cluster of shops and houses, and a manor house (occupied by the Murrays) at the end of High Street.

We stabled the carriage at the inn. Lollie went to the tavern and Auntie and I headed to Mulliner’s Drapery Shop. We hadn’t gone six feet before we were stopped by Mrs. Davis, the vicar’s wife and most arrant gossip in the parish.

“I hear you’ve had a busy morning, Maude!” she exclaimed, her cabbage green eyes aglow.

She invited us in for tea, but Aunt Maude wanted a larger audience and opted for the drapery shop. There, in a dark aisle between the ells of muslin on one side and ribbons and buttons on the other, the ladies of the parish clustered like birds in a treetop, chattering.

Miss Addie Lemon, my particular friend, drew me toward the window. Being unattached ladies, we wanted to keep an eye out for gentlemen passing on the street while we gossiped. I, having firsthand information, opened my budget first. Addie listened eagerly, blue eyes wide open as she gasped and exclaimed at all the proper places.

“Oh, my! What a turn it must have given you. Was it horrid?” And later, “Betty baked the note! Well, I never. What had McAdam to say about that?”

She was not without information of her own to impart. “You heard about the money, of course?”

“Only a mention of it in the note,” I replied.

“Five hundred pounds! They say Stoddart had it put in the safe at the inn when he first arrived, then late yesterday afternoon he took it out. He didn’t leave the money in his room, for McAdam searched it from top to bottom and there wasn’t a sou in it.”

“Were there guests staying at the inn?”

“No one suspicious. They say there was a cockfight in an abandoned barn last night and Stoddart was there, along with half the men from the neighborhood. He might have lost the money on a bet. But it’s only a rumor, mind. Oh, and there’s been a stranger spotted about town. A tall, dark gentleman. Someone says he was seen talking to Stoddart.” Such vague
on-dits
were only to be expected. I paid little heed to them.

We were so engrossed in our conversation, we nearly missed Maitland. It was Addie who spotted him first, heading toward the drapery shop. We knew he would not enter that female den and began primping our hair. We managed to be leaving the shop just as he passed by.

“Ladies,” he said, lifting his curled beaver and bowing.

Morris Maitland is so marvelous a creature, I can never quite make up my mind what part of him to admire first. The sun glinted off a golden wave of hair that fell forward when he removed his hat. His blue eyes shone like sapphires; his teeth sparkled. Maitland in the flesh always outdid memory. His blue superfine jacket hugged his broad shoulders. His buckskins were spotless, and little gold tassels bobbed on his gleaming topboots.

Addie overcame her breathlessness first. “Miss Talbot was just telling me you know Mr. Stoddart, the man who was murdered,” she said.

Maitland gave me a mock frown. “So it is you I have to thank for McAdam’s call,” he said. “I would hardly say I know him. I caught him trespassing on my property yesterday morning. He explained that he was out walking and lost his way. We shared a cheroot and he told me about a boxing match he’d seen in Winchester.” This jibed with what Stoddart had told us.

“He didn’t mention that he was looking for his relatives’ graves?” I asked.

After a frowning pause, Maitland said, “I believe he did ask the way to the graveyard. He mentioned he was from Bath. I have relatives there myself, but he didn’t happen to know any of them.”

“That would be because he wasn’t from Bath,” I informed him.

Maitland’s eyebrows rose. “Is he not? I’m sure he said Bath....”

“Oh, yes, he
said
Bath, but I doubt he’d ever been there. He knew nothing of the place.”

“Where was he from?” Maitland asked.

“I have no idea.”

“Did you hear about the money?” Addie asked him.

He hadn’t, and she had the pleasure of telling him. Not to be outdone, I told him about the note. He displayed a suitable degree of interest in both stories. Addie mentioned her theory regarding the cockfight. Maitland admitted he had been there and said he had not seen Stoddart.