Jane and the Stillroom Maid (8 page)

“Incubus or Freemason—such things have been rumoured in country towns before this,” Sir James observed. “It is far more comfortable to throw the guilt upon mysteries one cannot understand, than upon a human being disturbingly like oneself.”

I threw up my hands in exasperation. “There is another force at work in country towns, Sir James—a force of greater power than witchcraft, and certainly as deadly: jealousy, and the malice that it will breed. You said, I think, that Tess Arnold was not considered respectable. Is that because the people of Bakewell believed her a witch? Or because she was a woman of easy virtue?”

My cousin Mr. Cooper uttered a scandalised snort. “Remember where you are, Jane, and do not run on in the wild way you are suffered to do at home!” he cried.

Sir James appeared not to have heard his injunction. “You are anxious to defend her, though totally unknown to you before,” he observed.

“Recollect that I saw her face,” I told him. “When I believed it to be a man’s, I was struck by the delicacy of feature; now that I know it to have belonged to a woman, I can comprehend the envy it might arouse.”

“She was reported to be liberal in the granting of her favours,” Sir James conceded, “although in that instance, too, a jealous tongue may do much with little matter.”

“She was foully and cruelly murdered, and she cannot have been more than five-and-twenty! How is such a creature to possess the depth of art you would describe?”

He said nothing for a moment; and then, setting down his glass, he shook his head. “I should be the last to deny the evil weight of a jealous tongue, Miss Austen.
But it is my experience that few women of any age or social station end as Tess Arnold did. And that must give one pause. Her death was achieved in a kind of fury, as though the gods themselves had spread her bowels upon the rock.”

Wednesday
27 August 1806
∼

“I
THINK
, M
R
. C
OOPER
,” I
SAID WHEN WE HAD ALL ASSEMBLED
in the parlour for breakfast this morning, “that our first object should be to pay a call upon your friend Mr. Hemming.”

My cousin looked up from his buttered toast in astonishment. “Upon George? I am sure that he is hard at work, Cousin, in his solicitor’s offices. However much Mr. Hemming may look the gentleman, he is not entirely at leisure. His time is not his own to command, but must await the pleasure of his clients, upon whom his sustenance depends. We shall certainly not find him at home.”

“Very well,” I replied, “then let us seek him at his place of business if we must. It is imperative, I think, that we discover what Mr. Hemming truly knows of the maid Tess Arnold. The Inquest cannot hope to be a pleasant affair in any case—”

“I am sure you love nothing better than a Coroner’s panel, Jane,” my mother objected.

“—but if we appear in ignorance of your friend’s
purpose, in concealing from us the truth of the maid’s identity when he must surely have known it, we shall feel ourselves the objects of a very poor joke, indeed.”

Mr. Cooper set down his teacup with a clatter of crockery. “You cannot really intend to make such a display of yourself, Cousin, as to appear before Mr. Tivey at the Snake and Hind tomorrow morning!”

“My dear Mr. Cooper,” I replied, “can
you
really know so little of the English system of justice, as to believe I am offered any choice?”

G
EORGE
H
EMMING KEEPS HIS OFFICES IN
C
ARDING
Street, less than half a mile from The Rutland Arms; and it was (hither we repaired after breakfast. My mother declined the errand, but Cassandra consented to make a third of the party, the day being very fine, and our time in Bakewell all too short.

“Do you really intend to quit this place on Friday?” she enquired of our cousin. “I suppose you must believe your admirable wife sorely in want of you. I must own that were I to consult only myself, I should prolong the visit—I have not seen a tenth of the region’s beauties! Not a standing stone nor a cavern have we explored, Jane! And how I long to open my sketchbook before a chasm or a torrent, and attempt to seize them in crayons!”

“My dear cousin—we cannot throw off the dust of Derbyshire too soon,” Mr. Cooper replied indignantly. “I shudder to think what Sir George Mumps should say, did he know of our entanglement in this dreadful affair; and he shall know of it very soon, for I related the whole to my dearest Caroline, and she will feel herself obliged to publish the intelligence throughout Hamstall Ridware. It must make a very great piece of news, indeed. I daresay she will be asked to dine on the strength of it.”

Being momentarily torn between the most sublime
gratification, at the thought of himself as the object of general admiration and pity within his parish—and the gravest anxiety for his noble patron’s good opinion—my cousin very nearly lost his way. I steered him gently back from the turning into Water Street, and said, “Just here, Mr. Cooper, I believe we shall find Mr. Hemming.”

A painted sign in a prosperous shade of bottle green announced the premises to all of Derbyshire:
George Hemming Esquire, Solicitor at the Bar
. Mr. Cooper begged us to precede him onto the doorstep, then did the honour of the brass doorknocker; it made a hollow, echoing sound, as though the offices burrowed deep.

“There is your cavern, Cassandra,” I murmured, “and mind you make the most of it.”

The door swung open to reveal a tall, thin heron of a fellow arrayed in rusty suiting and a well-worn collar. He clutched a quill in one hand; the fingertips of the other were stained dark blue. His head was bare and balding; his eyes were of a watery brown; what hair he possessed was already grey. Mr. Hemming’s clerk. He had spent all his life apprenticed to the Law, and should carry ink-stained fingers to his coffin because of it.

“No appointments today,” he said firmly, and made as though to shut the door.

I put out my hand and grasped the handle. “But we are not here on business, Mr. …”

“Bartles,” he replied. “Joseph Bartles, Mr. Hemming’s chief clerk. Mr. Hemming is not at leisure at present.”

“George has spoken so very highly of you,” my sister Cassandra put in warmly, to Mr. Cooper’s astonishment.

“‘I should be nowhere at all without Mr. Bartles,’ he said, only Monday evening. ‘Mr. Bartles is the man I depend upon’—isn’t that right, Jane?”

“Oh—yes, yes, indeed,” I replied, with an eye for the clerk. His ancient chest had visibly swelled with pride. “I do not know where our excellent friend George would be without you. How
well
I recall Mr. Hemming’s
words, as we all drove towards the Dale only yesterday: ‘So dependable in every respect! So entirely worthy of trust! If I have earned some small measure of success, it must all be laid to Bartles’s account!’”

“I do not recall—” my cousin began, in tones of the greatest disapprobation.

“—You were asleep, Edward, you always are. We shan’t be a moment, Mr. Bartles. Is Mr. Hemming within?”

“Certainly, miss,” Bartles replied, and drew wide the door.

We were ushered to a bare little anteroom, where the scriveners’ desks stood bleakly in a wash of sunlight; a young man was arranged behind one, his face pale and his brow furrowed as he shifted from foot to foot. Unlike Mr. Bartles, this fellow’s collar points were enormous and his neckcloth elaborately tied; they quite prohibited him from lowering his chin over his work, so that he was forced to peer down his nose at the foolscap before him, in a manner that I wondered did not drive him mad.

“If you will please to wait,” Mr. Bartles said formally, and bowed to my cousin. “The name again, sir?”

“Edward Cooper.”

“And the Miss Austens,” Cassandra added with a brilliant smile.

“Good God, Edward, whatever are you doing here?” exclaimed George Hemming from the doorway of an inner chamber. “I’m most deucedly pressed this morning. I cannot possibly spare a moment—”

“I think perhaps you must, sir.” I moved towards him swiftly, and Cassandra followed. “Sir James Villiers paid us a most delightful call last evening, and your company was sorely missed. You should have added so much to the general tone of conversation—to the brilliance of the party! Do you not wish to hear what the Justice had to say, on the subject of angling?”

Mr. Hemming hesitated; he glanced from ourselves to his two clerks, who were attempting to overlisten
the conversation without appearing to do so; and then the cast of his countenance changed.

“How delightful to see you again, Miss Jane Austen,” he said. “I can certainly spare a quarter-hour for any news you might bring.”

We filed through the doorway and found ourselves in a comfortable room, with a broad mahogany desk and a quantity of volumes bound in leather, a decanter of spirits, and a painting in oils of a gentleman from the last century. Two chairs were pushed back against the wall; but Mr. Hemming made no gesture towards them, and I preferred to stand in any case.

The solicitor surveyed us with a tight and uneasy smile. “I had not looked for such a visit,” he observed, “but I must assume that circumstances urge it. You are come, Edward, about this business of the maid?”

“Indeed, I hardly know why we are come, George—unless it be that my cousin Jane insisted upon it,” Mr. Cooper replied. “I am sure that the demands of your work are many, and if the ladies disturbed you in this extraordinary application, I must beg leave to apologise.”

Mr. Hemming leaned against the edge of his desk, his fingers gripping the wood painfully. But his countenance and his voice were all that was easy. “Miss Jane Austen would interrogate Mr. Hemming. From what I know of Miss Jane Austen, I should have looked for the honour. Very well, my dear lady—how would you be satisfied?”

“We are to appear before the Coroner’s Inquest tomorrow, Mr. Hemming, as no doubt you must yourself. My past experience of similar authority has taught me that honesty before a panel invariably saves a good deal of trouble.”

He crossed his arms over his chest and peered at me with amusement. “And have you a
good deal
of such experience, Miss Jane Austen?”

“Enough,” I replied succinctly, “to apprehend that you lied, Mr. Hemming, when you failed to identify
the corpse above Miller’s Dale as being that of Tess Arnold—a young woman with whom, I understand, you have been acquainted for most of her life.”

He went pale, and clutched convulsively at the desk; then thrust himself to his feet. “I could not know what I saw in Miller’s Dale. In such a scene of horror, who should not be confused? The girl’s clothes—the savage wounds to her body—I barely spared a moment to study the face. I was as astonished as yourselves to learn last evening that she was not the gentleman she appeared, and a complete stranger.”

“Then why did you behave so oddly at the time? I distinctly recall every word and action. You appeared distracted and oppressed in your manner; you insisted that Deceased must be a traveller like ourselves, and undoubtedly from Buxton. And when we prevailed upon you to return with us to Bakewell, you washed your hands of the affair—‘Devil take the consequences,’ I believe you said. There was nothing of confusion in all this, Mr. Hemming, but rather a measure of conscious deceit.”

“That is absurd!” he burst out.

“Sir James Villiers does not appear to think so,” I replied. “And we may presume that he has no reason to prevaricate, when he suggests you were acquainted with the maid for years.”

“I have never denied that. I merely failed to recognise the girl in death.”

“But I would put it to you, sir, that you
did
—and that the fear her murder occasioned arose from some other cause, than merely horror at her wounds.”

“Jane!” my cousin cried, aghast. “How
can
you be so shameless! Mr. Hemming has given us his word as a gentleman!”

George Hemming stared at me, his features working; then he turned away, and put his face in his hands.

“Would you care to offer an explanation for your
extraordinary behaviour, sir, before Mr. Tivey requires it of you?” I pressed.

“I cannot see that I owe any young lady so wholly unconnected with me as yourself, the slightest word in regard to the matter,” the solicitor said bleakly. “Whatever I may
then
have felt and done, stands between me and my God.”

“Very well, George,” said Mr. Cooper hurriedly. He turned towards the door. “We shall not disturb you further.”

“I can think of only two explanations,” I persisted, my eyes on Mr. Hemming’s face. “That in recognising the maid, you guessed at the hand of the murderer, and were so wretchedly anxious on
his
account, that you sought to throw the entire affair into Buxton, a district far from the maid’s home.”