Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor (21 page)

“You would
anatomise
¹
my husband?” Isobel's countenance was sick with shock.

“I fear it is our only course, my lady,” Sir William said, not without gentleness. “In the case of poison, even a purgative that induces vomiting, it is the only method for proving the truth or falsity of the murdered maid's claims.”

I drew a deep breath, and found I was wadding the brown wool of my gown between my fingers.

“Sir William, I doubt you do this for your own satisfaction,” Lord Scargrave said, in a low voice. “There is a public aspect to all of this.” His dark eyes revealed nothing of the nature of his thoughts.

“There is, my lord. I should like the summary of Dr. Pettigrew's findings to be presented to a jury summoned by the coroner assigned to Hertfordshire, who shall be charged with finding the cause of the late Earl's demise. We must in any case summon such a panel for the poor maid Marguerite, and it may as well serve for the presentation of evidence in your uncle's death.”

“My dear Countess,” Tom Hearst's voice broke in, “I fear you are unwell.” Isobel's eyes were closed, and her breathing shallow. The Lieutenant rose as if to go to her; but Isobel stopped him with an upraised palm.

“I feel only what I should, dear Tom,” she said, “and for that, there is no remedy. Please—let us hear Sir William out.”

The magistrate had the grace to look uncomfortable for having caused a lady so much pain, and turned his gaze from Isobel with relief.

“The two cases can have nothing to do with one another” Fitzroy Payne avowed. “The maid's assertions are calumnies and lies. My uncle suffered a common complaint, and though he died of a sudden and was cheated of his span, such things have happened before.”

“Have they, my lord?”

“Fitzroy,” Isobel said faintly, and all our eyes turned to meet her own.

“Do as he asks, my love,” she said, now past all care forpropriety. “We shall never be free of doubt if we resist, and there shall be no living in the country.”

“I very much fear, my lady, that you are right.” Sir William inclined his head stiffly. “And my duty as a magistrate forces me to insist—for the maid's sake, if not your own.”

Tom Hearst coughed, as though he choked, and I raised my eyes to his; but he gazed at something in the middle distance. I observed that his fingers gripped the arms of his chair so fiercely, the knuckles had gone white.

“The maid,” Fitzroy Payne said thoughtfully. “That piece of paper, written in my hand, bears the marks of blood.”

“You are observant, my lord.” Sir William paced about the room and came to rest opposite my chair.

The new Earl appeared to hesitate before asking the question that burned in his mind, but apprehension is a cruel master. “You found it on her person?” he said.

“It was found there, assuredly, my lord.” Sir William cast an uneasy glance my way. I felt my face overcome with blushes, but none of the Scargrave party could spare a moment to study Miss Austen.

“But this is madness!” Fitzroy Payne rose forcefully to his feet, his calm deserting him at the last. “Madness, I tell you!”

We were all of us struck dumb. When a quiet man is moved to passion, it seems the very earth will shake; and at the violence of the Earl's words, Scargrave Manor trembled. Tom Hearst moved to stand tall behind his cousin, and the two faced Sir William with all the strength of their ancestors rising in the blood.

“I swear to you on my honour as a gentleman,” the Earl cried, in a fevered accent, “on the reputation of the proud family of which I claim a part, that I have not seen the girl Marguerite since the day after my uncle's death.”

“And the nuts found among your possessions, my lord?” Sir William's voice was as mild as the dusk beyond the windows.

“If they
did
cause the Earl's death—”

“
If
they did, assuredly.” The magistrate turned and strolled towards the door, as though the Scargrave men suggested no belligerence. “For that, we must await the word of the good doctor:”

“—even if it be that those foul seeds struck him a mortal blow, it can have nothing to do with me,” Fitzroy Payne asserted. “I have known nothing of their existence until the moment you showed me them.”

“Very well, my lord,” Sir William said, and bowed to the entire room.

“You must believe me!”

The magistrate's gaze was on the Earl, and I was struck by die grimness of my old friend's countenance. “I greatly fear; Lord Scargrave,” Sir William said, “that you plead with the wrong man. It is the coroner you must convince.”

1. The medical dissection of corpses was a practice reserved for the bodies of executed criminals, which were often turned over to doctors for scientific study. Anatomization, as it was called, was considered the most degrading fate possible for the body of a loved one, so that even the families of condemned criminals sought to hide their corpses after execution, to prevent such disgrace.—
Editor's note.

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I
MUST CONFESS TO A FEELING OF LASSITUDE AND MELAN
-choly in the three days that have followed my discovery of the maid's body, a mood I may perhaps attribute to the sleeplessness that has marked my nights. Images of the murdered girl—her white-rolled eyes and lolling head, the necklace of gore that encircled her throat—fill up my sight when I would close my eyes; and so I lie wakeful in the December dark, intent upon discovering the hint of footsteps in the gallery. It seems, however; that the spectral First Earl is possessed of discernment in his mourning; tonight he does not deign to recognise the passing of a mere servant with the show that preceded her death. In my present state, however, I cannot find it in me to feel apprehension at his possible coming; even fear is swallowed up in my general malaise.

It was a poor sort of Christmas, despite my quiet pleasure in a letter and a holiday box I owed to my dear Cassandra—containing fifteen yards of a lovely pink muslin for the making up of a new gown. After church in Scargrave Close, Isobel kept to her room for much of the day, while Lord Scargrave sought the freedom of the out-of-doors, walking Scargrave's surrounding parkland for hours and returning only with the falling dusk. I was left to the company of Tom Hearst, whose every attention was monopolised by the lively Fanny Delahoussaye, and to his brother George—who though returned from London, appeared little recovered from his bad humour of Christmas Eve. The cleric wasted many hours in silent contemplation before the fire, brows drawn down over brooding eyes.

I bent myself to the pianoforte, music being the one solace for my nerves, but was eventually forced to break off by Miss Delahoussaye, who called me to attention long enough to pronounce us all a sad sort of company for Christmastide. She proposed some simple amusement—play-acting in the parlour, perhaps, or the arrangement of
tableaux vivants
, neither of which activity was suited to our mood or situation.

“There is Fanny!” Madame Delahoussaye exclaimed indulgently; “so gay, no trifle can burden her light spirits; so full of good humour, that one forgets all one's cares!”

“I should hardly call murder a trifle,” George Hearst remarked in his mordant voice, “though if one is so disposed, all that is serious in life may be ignored by a steady pursuit of frivolity.”

“La, George, you
are
a stick,” Miss Fanny observed. “I wonder the murderer has not seen fit to send
you
off, out of sheer
ennui.
But never mind. We shall amuse ourselves the better without you.”

“As is generally the case,” Mr. Hearst replied, “though I count it no dishonour. Since you find amusement in everything, Miss Delahoussaye—even what is serious or tragic—stimulating your ability to laugh must be considered a talent very much in the common way. I confess I pride myself on rarer qualities.”

“There must be a store of old clothes about, in such an ancient seat as this,” Fanny said, paying him no heed; “I am sure Lieutenant Hearst would delight to see me arrayed as Marie Antoinette, and parade himself as the Sun King.”

Madame appeared startled, and surveyed her daughter narrowly. “I should sooner wish you to have the ordering of your history, my dear,” she said, “for some several generations separate the two.”

Fanny shrugged with elegant disregard. “Pooh, Mamma! When one is play-acting, it makes no odds. I shall call for Mrs. Hodges, and turn the attics topsyturvy.”

“Pray do not, Fanny,” Madame said sharply. “We should sooner hear your lovely voice raised in song—and to deprive us of your presence would be a cruel piece of work. I am sure,” she said, “that Lieutenant Hearst agrees.”

I was surprised to hear her appeal in such a case to a man she despised, and concluded that fancy dress was indeed abhorrent to her. But Miss Fanny was all smiles in an instant, and I must give up my place at the instrument. In truth, I cared little, and soon sought the privacy of my room; for she
would
persist in singing boisterous carols of the season, in an ill-considered display of liveliness.

Yesterday, Sir William presided over the removal of the late Earl's coffin from the great stone sarcophagus in Scargrave Close churchyard, and saw it entrusted to Dr. Pettigrew, the London physician. In this he was attended by Eliahu Bott, the Hertfordshire coroner a trim little fellow with a perennially dyspeptic look. The inquest is called for this afternoon, and all are to attend. I myself must offer testimony of the finding of Marguerite, and feel no little trepidation at the prospect. And so my life is as suspended as indrawn breath, awaiting that relief of tension that I pray the inquest will bring.

Sir William himself has grown remote in speech and aspect; he has ceased to impart what ever he knows of the case to me, treating me rather with a gentle and solicitous concern that inspires only fear. That he knows some ill of Isobel and Fitzroy Payne—that he believes them, in fact, to be guilty of both murders—I have surmised. Lacking that affection for the Countess born of close acquaintance, or that respect for the character of the new Earl I persist in harbouring, Sir William is unfettered in his judgment; and so I anticipate his harshness with regard to the inquest and fear for its outcome. His duty as magistrate for the district compels him to prove my friends’ guilt;
¹
and in gathering what may tell against them, he is assiduous as ever in his days at the King's Bench. That he was absent some few days in London, in search of witnesses for the coming panel, I learned from his dear lady upon calling at the house in the Scargrave carriage; and her own gravity of manner, and pitying look, did little to cheer my hopes of a happy outcome.

Though the weather has held fair since Christmas Eve, I have scorned Lady Bess and the pleasures of riding horseback; scorned my journal, my volume of Boswell, even my letter-writing—for how to tell my dear Cassandra of the evil men may do? And, in truth, I hardly know what I should write; for I cannot find the logic in events for myself, much less for the understanding of another. The world is revealed as an uncertain place, where the face of a friend may hide the intent of a murderer; where the stoutest protestations may serve to beguile the trusting into a false complacency. Isobel's handkerchief, found by the paddock gate, and Fitzroy Payne's handwriting on the note found in the maid's bodice—to say nothing of the Barbadoes nuts in his possession—are facts which cannot be denied. Even did no word of Isobel's attachment to her nephew emerge at the inquest, the sagacious among the jury might surmise it, from the linkage of evidence and the respective ages and association of the parties. A stranger to either's character might readily assume that the heir poisoned his uncle for the dual purpose of acquiring his fortune and his wife; and that Isobel, needy of money and younger by a generation than her spouse of three months, should happily accede to the plan of her amorous swain. The maid's death is handily disposed of; she had accused the lovers to the magistrate, and won a brutal silence as her reward. And so the prospects for both are most black, indeed.

I say nothing of my own credence in the plot outlined above. To be frank, I know not what to think. An unhappy choice is before me: to find the Countess's and her lover's earnest avowals of innocence to spring from the grossest duplicity, and my own faith in Isobel to be founded upon sand; or to accuse others, equally intimate to the household, of adding to the sin of murder that of entangling the innocent in a deadly web of suspicion. Neither is to be preferred, for both are based upon die worst in human nature; and though I have learned to laugh at such—to look for it among my acquaintance and mock it in my writing—when met with evil in its truest form, I find that even
I
cannot dismiss it with worldly detachment. The maid was too dead, and too anguished in her dying, to permit of it; any more than the ravaged face and painful final hours of the late Earl should counsel mercy to his assassin.

Later that afternoon

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