The Regency Detective (7 page)

Mary hesitated. ‘I’m not sure whether Jack will …,’ she saw her aunt’s reaction and smiled, ‘… yes; I would love to attend, Aunt Harriet.’

‘Very good, my child, I will send my carriage for you at six. And you can tell Jack, if you wish, that you will be home by half past eleven.’

On the journey back to Great Pulteney Street, Swann and Mary quickly became lost in their own thoughts. For Mary, her emotions were in conflict. She felt sad but her mind was effervescent from meeting her aunt. In many ways, her relation had been abrupt and rude but Mary had found the forthrightness in her manner refreshing. There were no hidden meanings within what she said, no nuances one had to decipher. Her aunt said what she felt and you quickly knew exactly where you stood with her. Mary was already looking forward to Thursday and the gathering of ‘like-minded’ women.

From childhood onwards, Mary knew her aunt more by reputation than from actual personal experience. She had apparently moved to her present residence near the market town of Frome around two years earlier, but neither Mary nor her mother had received any invitation and her aunt had never visited them in Bath. The sisters had fallen out several years before, so Mary’s father had told her once, and Harriet’s name was thereafter rarely mentioned in the house.

And now there seemed to be animosity between Jack and Harriet, although she consoled herself with the notion that they were both only being protective of her; each in their own way. Hopefully she could go to her aunt’s house the following evening without the need to justify her actions to her brother.

Meanwhile, Swann’s mind was in turmoil from his encounter with his adoptive relative. He had only encountered Harriet on a handful of occasions but each time, including this most recent one, came away from their interaction feeling judged. In many ways Swann respected Harriet’s outspoken manner and felt a kinship with her somewhat iconoclastic nature. Despite her title and standing she was known to hold extreme views and on more than one occasion, Swann had been told, had been the house guest of the radical William Godwin and his wife.

Harriet had married young but her husband had died not long afterwards and the inheritance she had received allowed her to indulge an independent lifestyle. She had written several pamphlets on a range of subjects and was an outspoken advocate on women’s education. She had travelled extensively throughout the Continent until Napoleon had effectively cut England off from the rest of Europe.

Throughout her life, she had made as many powerful enemies as she had allies, but somehow the latter allowed her this blithe attitude toward her reputation. But whereas he respected her, Swann thought any association with Mary might be detrimental to his sister. He consoled himself, however, with the fact that this would hopefully be the last time they saw Harriet for a long time.

Swann now turned his attention to a more immediate dilemma to be dealt with – that of Edmund Lockhart.

At the age of eighteen, fourteen years previously, Swann had embarked on the quest to bring his father’s killer to justice by whatever means necessary. Even before then, however, he had begun to develop what he termed the ‘System’. The System was a method of deductive reasoning that combined Socratic dialecticism and Hobbesian logic, but circumscribed by common sense. At its heart was the detailed examination of the various answers arising from any given question, in order to bring about a satisfactory conclusion. This exploration would continue to be applied until the truth, or as close an approximation of it as possible, was achieved. It had served Swann well on a number of previous occasions and so he decided to apply it to the matter of Edmund Lockhart and the coach journey they had shared from London the day before.

Swann thought back and recalled the information he always instinctively absorbed, even when it was not relevant to an investigation. On arriving at the Royal Mail coach’s departure point in Lad Lane, Swann had been assured of three pieces of information. The coach would depart at thirty minutes after seven precisely, it would reach Bath thirty minutes after nine the following morning and, aside from the driver and guard employed to protect the mail box, he would be travelling alone. The initial piece of information had proved accurate, as had the next, despite a delay at their first stop – the General Post Office in Lombard Street – where congestion from a multitude of Royal Mail coaches bound for different parts of the country had held up the loading of their own mail box. It was the final piece of information, however, which had proved incorrect.

Five minutes before the coach had been due to start out from The Swan with Two Necks coaching inn, the trio of additional travellers entered the carriage. This had swelled its occupants in a single instance to the full compliment a Royal Mail coach was permitted to carry inside. Although Swann had been unperturbed by this intrusion at the time, a piece of information was a piece of information and the fact it was inaccurate told him one of two things; either the ticket officer who informed Swann of his sole occupancy not thirty minutes before was unaware of these extra passengers when relaying the information, or else the arrangements were made in the time that had elapsed since. If the former, this merely implied a lack of communication within the organisation and therefore this particular avenue of enquiry could be brought to a conclusion, as it could add no further dimension to the main question: what Lockhart was doing on the coach and why he kept silent about it at the funeral? However, if the latter, that the arrangements were made in the time that had elapsed since, then purchasing their tickets so close to departure suggested the decision to travel was almost certainly a recent one, as leaving it that late on an already predetermined journey did not seem likely. It also meant that the passengers were in some haste to arrive at their destination and possessed the money to pay for the privilege – the cost of a ticket on the Royal Mail coach being substantially higher than that of an ordinary stagecoach, one of which left later that evening.

Swann could have easily clarified any or all of these details through initiating a casual and seemingly innocuous conversation with the gentleman of the company – who he now knew to have been Lockhart – during the journey, but he had not done so as these details were not important at the time and he wished to converse as little as possible. In fact, the opportunity had presented itself not long after the trio boarded. After courtesy nods of acknowledgement, Lockhart had enquired as to whether Swann was travelling to Bath for the season. ‘No,’ Swann replied, adding, so as not to appear too rude, that it was ‘for a personal matter.’ Lockhart seemed keen to engage further, but Swann had averted his gaze outside the carriage to indicate the conversation ended.

There was also later, when he had studied his fellow passengers surreptitiously while they dozed. Nothing in their basic character profiles, assembled in his mind at the beginning of the journey, required any alteration – experience and disciplined observation had given him the ability to accurately gauge a person’s temperament having just met them – except perhaps their ages. Lockhart’s age, which Swann originally estimated to be close to his own, needed rising slightly, while the two women required their ages to be increased by a decade between them. Swann had placed their ages in the early-twenties and although they still held their looks, the life-lines earlier suffused by the darkness and deftly-applied powder on their faces could no longer be concealed within the elucidating dawn light.

Even then, however, there had been something about Lockhart that did not feel right to Swann. It was as if the man had stepped onto the stage in Drury Lane and assumed a role. One he was well-accustomed to playing, certainly, but a role nonetheless.

The three passengers were travelling together, he had concluded, but did not know each other especially well. There was certainly no romantic attachment between either of the women and Lockhart and he sensed the three of them had only met not long before the coach had departed; so in this way, it felt as if Lockhart was escorting the women to their destination, which he later discovered to be Bristol.

At the core of the System was what Swann termed ‘givens’ and ‘assumptions’ – one would be a predetermined fact, while the other the conclusion which might be drawn from it. Using the information he had recalled, he applied it to this particular situation. Given that Mary believed Lockhart had been due to return from London today, along with the lateness of the ticket purchases, it could therefore be assumed that Lockhart had not expected to travel to Bristol. But given the fact he had not mentioned this change of plan to Mary, it was further to be assumed, perhaps obviously in this case, that he did not want her to know about it. This assumption resulted in two possible outcomes; the undertaking of something underhanded within his personal life, or alternatively the matter was related to his business. Either way, Swann surmised, the women were connected with it, as given they had all entered the coach at the same time, it could be assumed they were travelling together. For it to be pure coincidence, all three of them would have had the same urgent need to travel to Bristol that evening and then arrived at the station to purchase their tickets at exactly the same time. Although this was a possibility, common sense dictated this was more than mere chance. And given there seemed to be no personal involvement, it could be assumed to be business related. If that was such, it could therefore be assumed that Lockhart was simply adhering to the existing convention that men did not concern women with matters of that nature.

By the time the carriage transporting Swann and Mary home had turned into Great Pulteney Street, Swann had reached his ‘satisfactory conclusion’, although he was not satisfied. He decided, therefore, as the driver pulled up outside the house, to investigate it further by contacting Fitzpatrick – who, although not able to offer much information on Malone through their conversation at the funeral, might be able to convey more on Lockhart – discreetly confronting Mary’s suitor personally and, if Swann felt the right opportunity presented itself, to inform Mary herself.

On returning home after the funeral service, Swann and Mary had spent most of the afternoon in the drawing room, either in contemplation or reading books;
Robinson Crusoe
by Daniel Defoe and
Evelina
by Frances Burney.

Enthused at her meeting with her aunt, Mary had decided on the carriage ride back that she wished to begin reading more books about women’s experiences which had been written by women. She had been a little disappointed to find her father had only male writers in his library, except for the Burney volume, and even that was only there, she assumed, because her father probably did not realise that it had been written by a woman. It was a first edition and had been published anonymously, the author’s identity and gender not being revealed until several years after its publication. It was in the epistolary form – a novel based on a series of letters – and although not advocating any serious revolution in women’s thoughts, nevertheless had caused a stir in its day.

The only other book in the house that had been written by a woman was
The Mysteries of Udolpho
by Ann Radcliffe, which her mother had been reading before she died. It had been borrowed from one of the four circulating libraries that she belonged to and would have to be returned. She had a feeling it was Pratt and Marshall in Milsom Street, but she would ask her brother to make enquiries. Her mother had adored gothic novels and in one month, she remembered, had devoured the following:
The Italian, Castle of Wolfenbach, Clermont, Mysterious Warnings, Necromancer of the Black Forest, Midnight Bell
, and
Orphan of the Rhine
. Mary had gone to take the bookmark out of the
Udolpho
book, when she had found it, but for some reason had left it in there and replaced it on her mother’s bedside cabinet.

For whatever reason, and she could not think what that might be, Mary had never purchased any books while in Bath. With the contents of her father’s library, albeit dominated by male writers, and the circulating libraries the family subscribed to, there never seemed to be any need. Nothing she had read from either source had made her want to purchase a copy of her own.

Swann had also chosen his book from the library, although there was no disguising the gender of its author. Daniel Defoe had been widely credited with creating the novel form, although he had already had a distinguished career as a journalist and pamphleteer before writing his first novel,
Robinson Crusoe
, at the age of almost sixty.

The previous evening, on his first night in Bath and before retiring to bed, Swann had made a brief study of the library and its contents. He had discovered the book and had taken it off the shelf. As he held it in his hands he felt the familiar binding, the familiar texture and the familiar lettering that spelt out the author’s name and its title. After he had been adopted by the Gardiners he had returned the book to the library without reading any more. He always thought that one day he would finish reading it, but for one reason or another had not done so. He had searched for it on one occasion in the library at the London residence but could not locate it; the reason for that now clear. He could have bought a copy of the book for himself but there was something about wanting to read that exact copy. On discovering it, he had taken it out and decided that now was the time to finally finish it and so find out what had happened to this man stranded on his ‘island of despair’. He had begun reading the book immediately, from the beginning again, and continued reading it during the afternoon. Crusoe had now established himself on the island and where he had been full of regret at the place where Swann originally stopped reading, he had subsequently come to terms with what fate had dealt him. When Swann had reached the place he had stopped, he paused for a few moments and thought about his father.