Jane and the Canterbury Tale (15 page)

I
BROKE OFF ABOVE, BECAUSE A SUDDEN SHOUT FROM THE
direction of Bentigh and the Lime Walk roused me from my study—a male shout, full and rich with the satisfaction of discovery. I threw back the bedclothes, stepped to one of the Yellow Room’s great windows, and peered through the glass. I could discern nothing. The consciousness, however, that the party of constables prescribed by Dr. Bredloe, as being best suited to a thorough searching of the murderous ground, must already be established on the Pilgrim’s Way, urged me to throw off my wrapper, don a serviceable gown, wash my face and pin up my curls under a suitable cap for day wear, and search out my spencer. I could not allow such a fine morning for a walk to pass in indolence.

Ten minutes’ brisk exercise brought me up with the search party—rough local men, by the look of them, urged to greater endeavour by a stout individual with a sash of office tied about his chest.

“Good morning, Constable,” I said brightly, as tho’ it were the most natural thing in the world for a lady to be nosing about a scene of murder on a bright October day. “I am Miss Austen, sister to Mr. Knight the Magistrate, you know, who lives at this place. How are your men getting on?”

“Well enough, ma’am,” he returned cautiously. “Well enough. I had the honour to speak with the Magistrate myself this morning, in Canterbury.”

“I am sure you were an immense source of comfort to him.” I offered this flattery with a confiding air. “My brother is desirous that everything to do with this sad affair should be conducted according to the absolute letter of the Law—and to know that
you
are about the search for the spent ball must greatly relieve his mind.”

“It’s kind in you to say it, ma’am.”

I glanced at the several fellows bent over the brush, sweeping it with their hands, which were gloved in rough workman’s leather. “I daresay with such capable fellows, you might be so fortunate as to discover the duelling pistol itself! What a feat
that
should be! Quite a feather in your cap, Constable …”

“—Blewett, ma’am.”

“Of course.” I beamed at him. He unbent a little.

“You know about the pistol, Ma’am?”

“Oh, yes. I was present, you know, when Mr. Fiske was discovered—and with my brother when the body was first examined. It seems clear that a single ball despatched him, poor gentleman.”

The constable glanced over his shoulder, found no one to be observing him, and said in a hoarse whisper, “Then I don’t mind admitting as we’ve been so lucky as to find the ball—it were dug right into the trunk o’ one of the chestnuts, right off the Pilgrim’s Way, just about chest-high.”

So Fiske had been standing, as we suspected, when he was killed.

“Which tree?” I demanded cheerfully.

Constable Blewett led me to the tree without further hesitation; I had secured my
bona fides
, from a simple complex of confidence and presumption.

“The ground is sadly trampled hereabouts,” he said apologetically,
“the beaters and the gentlemen as was out shooting, having milled about the place something dreadful; but the snick in the tree is clear enough.”

He was correct: The ground near where Fiske had lain was a morass of footprints, none of them clearly distinguishable the one from the other; I could not even make out the imprint of my own half-boots, where I had crouched over the body yesterday. My heart sank. The constable’s men had only confused matters further. But the tree to which I was directed stood some three yards from the body’s position, in the opposite direction along the side-path from where Edward and I had discovered the two sets of hoof-prints. As Blewett observed, the gash in
this
tree’s bark from the lead ball was breast-high. As I gazed at the furrow in the wood, the constable drew from his pocket a flattened slug of metal, and displayed it in his palm.

“There she be,” he said with satisfaction. “Went in and out of the blasted—of the
unfortunate
gentleman, clean as whistling Bob’s yer uncle.”

I confess I stared at it, fascinated. I was once treated to some instruction in the art of duelling, by a master of the same; and the object I now regarded bore not the slightest resemblance to the lead ball thrust down a pistol’s muzzle.
¹
The ball’s path through Curzon Fiske’s body had so distorted its original shape that it appeared to be nothing more than a fragment of metal, flattened and oblong, incapable of doing harm to anybody.

“It is impossible to discern from this what sort of weapon fired it, I suppose.”

“Oh, you could say right enough it were a pistol, ma’am—the weight of lead is too small for a rifle.”

“I see.”

“I’m sure as the crowner won’t have no difficulty placing it as the ball what came from the pistol itself,” he added with complacency.

“The pistol itself?” I repeated.

“Aye.” His eyes widened, big with news. “We found it a quarter of an hour ago, sitting innocent as ye please on a headstone in St. Lawrence churchyard. ’Twas Vicar as called our notice to it; he were up early, were Vicar, and he’s a keen man for seeing what didn’t ought to be there. I don’t wonder the Magistrate—your good brother, ma’am—failed to discover it yesterday, with all the bother over the corpse. Why a duelling pistol should be set like a present on the headstone in the churchyard—”

“Where is the pistol now, Blewett?”

He gestured with his head towards Godmersham. “Why, up to the Magistrate’s, of course.”

I
SPED MYSELF BACK TO
G
ODMERSHAM WITH MORE HASTE
, and less appearance of casual exercise, than I had left it. I found Edward seated behind his desk in his own book room.

This is a small apartment at the rear of the house, tucked to the right of the staircase. It is an intimate sort of closet, less grand and imposing than the library, where thousands of volumes are stored, and the two fireplaces anchor either end of the vast room, with five tables and various armchairs scattered in between. Edward’s book room is where the business of the estate is conducted, where he meets with his tenants and his steward, and where he retreats in time of exhaustion or sadness or trouble.

I have even known him to sit there in moments of joy, of course, when there is world enough and time to spend a few moments merely gazing out over the back garden, and considering of how fortunate a man’s life may be.

Today, however, I found him smoking tobacco in a pipe—a practice so little usual with him, that the reek of it forced me backwards upon the very doorstep.

In front of him, on the desk, sat a gun: made of chased silver and burnished wood—rosewood, at a guess—with a sinuously curving butt. It was a handsome thing, probably from one of the finest craftsmen of the art. I searched my mind for the name of such an one.
Manton
. That was it! Gunsmith to the nobility. Purveyor, in former days, to one Lord Harold Trowbridge.

“Jane,” Edward acknowledged, and took a draw on his pipe.

“The constables have found the pistol, I see.” I endeavoured to make my voice steady and light.

“So they have. Should you like to see it?”

I approached the desk. Edward did not shift his position, nor touch the thing; he merely reclined in his chair, one leg crossed over his knee, idly smoking. His eyes were narrowed; he was staring not at me, but at some phantom in the middle distance.

It was difficult to conceive that such a beautiful object—so lovingly made, so dearly purchased, and housed, no doubt, in a velvet-lined box with its mate—should exist solely for the purpose of making a fool of its owner. For what else may a duelling pistol accomplish? I do not speak of
honour
. I heard enough of such folly from my friend the Rogue’s lips to know how deep tragedy may cut at men’s souls; how the notion of honour—its defence, its hasty outrage—eats at their complacency, their confidence, their whole position in the World. I have known dear friends destroyed by a chance word, when in their cups, and sent flying in terror from the only life they have known; I have heard of good men who died, all on account of that useless word
—honour
. And its agency? This bandbox trinket, bought at breathless expence, from a man who understood the engineering of death—Manton.

“You will observe the wood is damp,” Edward said, “from lying out in the churchyard all night. A sad thing—such a treasure should be more nobly treated.”

“Have you learnt anything from it?”

“—Who fired it, or left it to be found on the grave, you would mean?” Edward set down his pipe. I do not think I had seen his features set so harshly in many years—not since his beloved Elizabeth’s death. “The pistol cannot tell us what occurred on the night of the wedding ball, to be sure. But it may scream the identity of its owner. Manton is careful to engrave his guns with the name, or initials, of the purchaser.”

I stared at him wordlessly, and felt my heart begin to pound.

“This one,” Edward offered, almost as an afterthought, “appears to belong to James Wildman. Do you think, Jane, that our friend and neighbour has killed a man?”

  
CHAPTER TWELVE
  

22 O
CTOBER
1813,
CONT
.

“O
F COURSE
I
DO NOT BELIEVE
M
R
. W
ILDMAN CAPABLE
of murder!” I retorted. “And I should be very much surprized, Edward, to learn that
you
do.”

He lifted his brows. “As Mr. Knight, whose lands run alongside Chilham’s, divided by the ancient Pilgrim’s Way—as a friend who knows and esteems Wildman’s whole family—as one who has watched young James himself grow from boy to man—I must declare it impossible. As First Magistrate, however, in possession of a gun responsible for the death of Curzon Fiske …”

“You must weigh the possible guilt or innocence of every person within ten miles of the Pilgrim’s Way,” I concluded quietly. “I quite take your point. But James Wildman—! I cannot conceive of so elderly a gentleman toiling along the
Pilgrim’s Way over the Downs in the dead of night. He must be nearly seventy if he is a day, and prostrate with gout!”

Edward’s brow furrowed at this. “It was young James, and not his father, that I had in mind,” he said gently. “Observe the initials.”