Jane and the Stillroom Maid (20 page)

When barely a yard from the doorway I called out in a harsh voice, “Who is it? What do you want at this hour of the night?”

All movement beyond the oak planks immediately ceased.

And then, to my horror, I heard a shrill scream and the crash of a heavy china object upon the floor. I pulled back the bolt, threw open the door—and found my sister, Cassandra, standing in the hall, well wrapped up in a dressing gown. Mr. George Hemming lay inert at her feet.

She had broken her chamber pot upon his head.

W
E SUMMONED MY COUSIN
M
R
. C
OOPER, AND BADE
him carry his friend into the comparative privacy of our communal parlour, where Mr. Hemming was laid across two armchairs. The tumult in our passage had disturbed the innkeeper’s rest; he shuffled up the narrow back stairs from his quarters with a lighted lamp, and begged to know why decent people could not keep to their beds of an evening. At the sight of Mr. Hemming lying still insensible across his comfortable armchairs, Mr. Davies’s mouth dropped open, and the hand holding his lamp began to shake.

“It’s nivver anoother murther?”

“No, sir, it is not,” retorted my cousin. “Mr. Hemming has merely indulged too much in drink, and suffered an unfortunate blow to the head in navigating his way through your narrow corridors! He requires a vial of hartshorn, a damp cloth, and a quantity of hot coffee, which I trust an inn as reputable as The Rutland Arms should be capable of supplying.”

“And a fresh chamber pot, I think, Mr. Davies.” Cassandra cast the innkeeper a winning smile as he
turned to go. “Mine has unaccountably shattered. Pray leave your lamp, as well—”

“How does Mr. Hemming appear, Edward?” I asked my cousin. “Are the bones of the skull at all injured?”

“I think not, Jane. But his brain must be sorely addled by the quantity of Blue Lightning he has consumed. His very clothes reek of gin!”

“I am quite well, damn it—or would be, if you’d leave off hovering!” muttered the solicitor, his eyes opening. “What in God’s name connected with my head, Cooper? It felt as though the house itself fell upon me!”

“I fear you struck your skull against the lintel of my door, sir, in attempting to open it,” I told him primly. The blow had succeeded in sobering the gentleman more swiftly than any coffee could do. “Perhaps you would explain what you meant by such a visit, and at such an hour? We are all agog at the honour of it.”

“Your door?” He had the indelicacy to look horrified. “I was assured it was Cooper’s.”

“Unhappily, he is presently occupying the next room down. But you have secured his attention, Mr. Hemming, as well as my own, by the manner of your approach. Pray tell us in what way we may serve you.”

George Hemming gazed around the circle of faces staring down at him, and the belligerence died out of his countenance. “I came to confess,” he told us. “I thought it best to seek out Cooper, and make a clean breast of it. Clergyman, you know—adept at this sort of thing. Shriving.”

“Confess?” I repeated, puzzled. “To playing truant? Avoiding the Inquest? Or to indulging in spirits beyond what any sound person should tolerate?”

Mr. Hemming began to shake his head, then stopped short as the pain in his skull seized hold of his senses.

“To the murder of the stillroom maid,” he said.

Friday 29 August 1806
∼

“I
MPOSSIBLE
!” I C
RIED
.

Mr. Hemming scowled up at me, then struggled to a sitting position. “It is all too possible, I assure you, Miss Austen—though I admit myself quite gratified to discover you believe me incapable of violence.”

His speech was still somewhat slurred with drink, and he pressed a palm to one eye. As he did so, a small gold trinket slipped from his hand and fell with a clatter to the floor. I bent swiftly to retrieve it: the miniature portrait of a golden-haired lady, arrayed in the style of perhaps thirty years before. Even shown thus, in the poorest likeness of watercolour on ivory, she was a beautiful creature, her glance imperious, her cheekbones high under slanting green eyes. The late Mrs. Hemming, I must suppose.

“Lord, how my head aches!” Hemming muttered. “Where the Devil is that coffee?”

My cousin Mr. Cooper dropped to his knees beside his friend’s chair and grasped his free hand firmly. It was not an attitude of dignity in the best of circumstances, but when adopted in nightshirt and cap, must verge on
the ridiculous. “The Lord is rejoicing, George, though your misery be great; for He loveth nothing so well as repentance. Sing with me, brother! For the time of your sinning is at an end.”

“Bosh,” said Mr. Hemming succinctly. He kicked out at the chair directly opposite and struggled to his feet. “Be so good as to inform me where I might find Sir James and have done.”

“I believe he was called away on urgent business this evening,” I replied with circumspection, and held out the miniature.

Hemming stared as though he had seen a ghost, and accepted it with trembling fingers. His eyes, replete with shame and misery, slid away from mine. Aware, of a sudden, of my immodesty in standing before such a figure in my chemise, I sashed my dressing gown.

“I sought Sir James at Monyash before returning to Bakewell,” he said. “Having screwed up my courage before the prospect of the gallows, I was afforded no opportunity to throw myself upon the Law; and thus took solace in bottled spirits. I drank the health of the Snake and Hind’s last patron, and should be there still if Jacob Patter had not shown me the door. Do you know Sir James’s direction?”

“Even if I did, I should not offer it to you now. You
cannot
intend to inform him of your absurd claim, Mr. Hemming! He will have no choice but to send you to Derby, to await the sitting of the Assizes.”
1

“Having done my duty, I cannot fault him for performing his,” the solicitor retorted carelessly.

Mr. Davies, our long-suffering landlord, materialised in the doorway with a steaming pot of coffee. All conversation was necessarily suspended some moments; but having seen Mr. Hemming furnished with a cup, and having supplied Cassandra with a fresh chamber pot, Mr. Davies soon bowed his way back to bed.

“Pray sit down, Mr. Hemming, and explain yourself,” I urged the solicitor, when the door had shut soundly behind the innkeeper; “for nothing will satisfy me that you are guilty of this horror.”

“What is there to explain?” he airily returned. “I waited in the rocks above Miller’s Dale on the Monday night, and shot the maid as she walked up the path.”

“Merciful Heaven!” whispered Mr. Cooper. “Knowing that she was Tess Arnold, arrayed as a man?”

“Naturally,” he replied defiantly. “She had come out from Penfolds Hall at my urging; and the decision to adopt her master’s clothes was taken by way of security. A maid abroad at such an hour, and in such a place, might well give rise to comment, were she seen; but a gentleman, never.”

“That is very true,” Cassandra murmured.

“Did you then proceed to mutilate her person?” I enquired.

Mr. Hemming hesitated, and his gaze fell.

Of firing a shot, I could believe him guilty; but of cutting out Tess Arnold’s tongue or her bowels—this, George Hemming should never do. I sat down on the chair he had quitted. “And why should Tess Arnold come at your urging, Mr. Hemming?”

“Because I paid her a great deal of money, Miss Austen.” He passed a hand wearily over his eyes. “Tess had been sure of me for many years, you understand; our relations were so predictable and easy, she never thought to preserve a necessary caution. That is the
one mistake I have known Tess Arnold to commit—she failed to regard me with fear—and it cost her life.”

“George!” my cousin cried in horror, “would you add to the list of your sins the debauchery of this woman—a woman in every way your inferior, and thus dependent upon your honour as a gentleman?”

“It was not her favours Mr. Hemming would purchase,” I told my cousin, “but her silence. Am I correct, Mr. Hemming, in believing that Tess Arnold held your very honour over your head?”

“She did,” he replied, “and to preserve it—and the delicate reputation of another creature, far too vulnerable in spirit for such as Tess Arnold—I have paid dearly, and in more than coin. How many years of sorrow and denial have I suffered! But I will not attempt to compel your pity—such tender feelings are not mine to claim. When the maid’s demands for money became importunate, I determined to put an end to the business. I considered carefully of the sin; I weighed the gravity of murder against the evil her blackmail ensured; and set myself upon the course of violence.”

Cassandra shuddered, and turned her face away.

“And so you arranged to meet her at Miller’s Dale on Monday last,” I persisted. “Why that night, above all others? Why not the one evening each month when the maid had secured her leave?”

The solicitor hesitated. “I wished the affair to be quickly achieved. Having taken my decision, I could not bear to linger in suspense. I sent the girl a note at Penfolds, and received her reply within hours.”

It would be well, I thought, to determine whether the maid had ever received such a note. Tess must have been summoned from home by someone. “But having killed her with a single shot,” I persisted, “—a remarkable shot, indeed—why did you feel compelled to visit such savagery upon her person?”

The solicitor looked at me directly. “I hoped her death would be imputed to a madman.”

Cassandra placed her hand upon her throat. “I cannot think it Christian, Jane, to recall these hideous memories of the maid, and particularly in the middle of the night, when such ravaged souls may walk the earth in torment. I beg of you, leave Mr. Hemming’s explanations for the Justice! The guilty are properly Sir James’s province.”

“But Mr. Hemming is
not
guilty, Cassandra. He merely hopes to shield another from discovery—and if I am not mistaken, it is his client, Mr. Charles Danforth. What cause have you, sir, to suspect that gentleman of guilt? Do you know aught of the man’s movements on Monday night, that will not bear an honest scrutiny? Pray speak, before your own case is desperate! The loyalty of a solicitor should not extend so far as the gallows!”

My sister’s face was yet averted from Hemming’s; he observed it, and his countenance paled. Cassandra’s distress should be nothing, however, to the public aversion in which he would be held, did he persist in proclaiming his guilt. That such a man, of reputation and standing in Bakewell, should risk everything on a whim—!

“If I
did
visit the hideous wounds upon the maid’s body,” he said, in a voice less steady than it had been, “I may only claim a profound disturbance of spirit.”

“You will not disclose the nature of Tess Arnold’s hold upon you?”

“I cannot.”

“Nor why you effected the mutilation in such a manner, as to throw suspicion upon your brother Masons?”

To this he made no reply whatsoever.

“Will you produce the note you received from the maid, or the fowling piece that killed her?”

George Hemming raised his head, and in his looks I read a seizure of doubt. Whether fuddled by drink or the torments of his own mind, he had not considered of this point when he constructed his confession.

“In the darkness above Miller’s Dale,” he said, “a man may lose his reason. When I stood over Tess Arnold’s body, I was not then myself. I cannot frankly say what I may have done, or why.”

“To use your own term, sir,” I cried, “
bosh!
You cannot expect me to believe, that having undertaken to kill Tess Arnold—having drawn her out in the dead of night by subterfuge—you then left her body in plain view of the walker’s path above the Dale, and returned to the river so soon as the following morning! Recollect that you were seen to have taken tea here at the inn with us on the night of the maid’s death; and it was then you extended the invitation to all our party for a drive to Miller’s Dale! Are we to believe you so cold-blooded a killer, that you may drink tea and propose the angling scheme, mere hours before despatching your blackmailer? Never, sir! I refuse to credit it!”

“Perhaps I hoped that you would discover her body,” he attempted. “Is it not the way of the sinner to wish his disgrace to be known?”