Carrie Bebris - The Intrigue at Highbury

Mrs. Todd went to collect her daughter and Miss Jones, who was talking with the peddler while Alice played with a trinket. The conversation appeared to take a heated turn. Mr. Deal regarded the young woman sternly; Miss Jones shook her head and took a step toward him. The peddler glanced at Darcy and the others, then turned back to Loretta and said something that made her take the trinket from Alice, thrust it at his chest, and stride away with the child.

“I wonder what that was about?” Mr. Knightley said.

“It was Mr. Deal who stopped Miss Jones from fleeing when she saw Mrs. Darcy today,” Mrs. Knightley replied. “I expect she was expressing her opinion of his interference.”

The reappearance of gypsies in the neighborhood, and Loretta Jones’s escape from them, was discussed at every table in Highbury by day’s end. At tea in the Bates ladies’ sitting room, over supper at Abbey Mill Farm, during whist club at the Crown, the story was told and embellished until the village had reached such a general state of alarm that Mr. Knightley was obliged to offer assurance that the wanderers had indeed wandered out of the vicinity, and that the village was safe. This he did with caution, wanting to subdue panic yet urge residents to vigilance. If the gypsies did return, hundreds of eyes stood a better chance of spotting them than did the few pairs belonging to parish officials.

While Mr. Knightley held a special parish meeting that night to calm the masses, the Darcys remained at Hartfield to help calm Mr. Woodhouse.

Darcy believed that Mr. Knightley got the better part of that bargain.

Though until today Mrs. Knightley had managed to keep news of the gypsies’ return from her father, this afternoon he had overheard the boy sent to inform the magistrate, and from that moment forward could think of little else. Mrs. Knightley did her best to soothe his apprehension for the safety of his family — and the poultry — but the event of Mr. Knightley’s leaving the house that evening created in the old gentleman such uneasiness that only Darcy’s offer to stay behind mitigated his agitation. Mr. Woodhouse was then in fear for Mr. Knightley’s safety, and that of James the coachman, and all his neighbors venturing out after dark to the meeting, and it was all the three of them — Mrs. Knightley, Darcy, and Elizabeth — could do to divert him.

Elizabeth even joined him in another basin of gruel.

This last finally assuaged his anxiety enough that Mrs. Knightley persuaded him to retire for the evening. With solemn promises to inform him of any developments, including her husband’s safe return to Hartfield, Mrs. Knightley accompanied her father to see him comfortably settled in his chamber.

Left in the drawing room — and to themselves for the first time all day — Darcy and Elizabeth could at last freely discuss the day’s events.

“Do you believe our chances of recovering our belongings have improved or diminished now that we have located Miss Jones?” Elizabeth asked.

He hesitated to share his honest opinion, for it was not optimistic. “I should be very surprised if we ever see the christening set again. The ring, I have entirely given up as lost.”

She nodded in resignation. “I, too.”

“Do you believe that she was held by the gypsies against her will?”

Elizabeth pondered his query for a longer time than he had required for hers. “That is a difficult question,” she finally said. “As a victim of her ruse, I am disposed to doubt every word she utters. Yet as a woman, I do not want to disserve her if her story is indeed true.”

“You said that Miss Jones was less cooperative before Mr. Knightley and I arrived. Did she reveal anything to you that I do not already know?”

“Only that I should avoid serpents.” She offered no further explanation, only an enigmatic smile.

He toyed with the idea of affecting disinterest; with anyone else he would resist on principle alone such deliberate baiting. But Elizabeth was not anybody else. Nor was he wont to resist her. “Does Highbury suffer some sort of snake problem?”

“Miss Jones read my tea leaves and claimed that a cluster of them formed a snake, apparently a potent sign of ill luck.”

“We are now resorting to prognostication to guide our enquiry?”

“It was not my idea, but hers.”

“Then it is most fortuitous that you happened upon Miss Jones just in time for her to warn us of impending doom. And what did you make of the serpent?”

“I saw a clump of wet tea leaves and a fortune-teller who is herself our bad luck.”

Darcy went to a decanter on the side table and poured two glasses of wine. He handed one to Elizabeth. “Was your call at the vicarage any more successful?”

“Potentially. It seems the housekeeper hired two local girls to help in the kitchen on the night of the Eltons’ dinner party. Mrs. Knightley and I were on our way to speak to them when we encountered Miss Jones, and I must confess that I forgot our errand entirely once I saw her.”

“We can seek them out tomorrow. My visit with Mr. Knightley to the post office proved as futile as predicted. We had to rouse Mr. Fletcher from a sound sleep when we entered, and he has no memory of either letter’s being left there. Is Mrs. Knightley yet convinced that Mrs. Elton authored the riddles?”

“More than ever. Mrs. Elton admitted to sending the first, though I believe Mr. Elton wrote most of it. As to the second, however, she claimed ignorance. I must confess that after today, I understand Mrs. Knightley’s inclination to attribute any unpleasantness to the vicar’s wife. Mrs. Elton is more boastful and vulturous than the bunch of crows we observed fighting over carrion as we departed.”

Her choice of words amused him. “Bunch of crows?”

“You would criticize me for linguistic imprecision after I just endured gruel?” She paused. “Very well — flock of crows. Though three seems rather small to constitute a flock. And doubtless there is some more colorful word than ‘flock’ to describe crows. Something akin to a ‘gaggle’ of geese, or a ‘parliament’ of fowls.”

“I believe that there is, but I cannot recall the term.”

“The way they were cawing and vaunting their triumph, I might use our mysterious riddler’s ‘gathering of braggarts.’ The village children found them quite a spectacle.”

Darcy sipped his wine, his thoughts idly skipping upon other names for groups of birds, terms he used when shooting. A nide of pheasants, a bevy of quail, a covey of partridges. He had never hunted crows, though anyone who had ever heard the wretched cries of the troublesome creatures might be tempted to cut them short. A group of crows in great agitation sounded like they were screaming bloody—

Murder.

“A murder of crows.”

Elizabeth, who had been about to sip her wine, lowered her glass. “I beg your pardon?”

“A gathering of crows is called a ‘murder,’ ” Darcy said.

“Indeed? Well, now — that is a rather ominous term.” She took a drink from her glass after all.

“It is an old word. I cannot now recall where I read it.”

“I think I prefer ‘gathering of braggarts.’ ”

He was silent a moment, brows drawn together. “If a braggart is one who crows—”

She set aside her wineglass. “ ‘Perhaps an unkind individual witnessed the murder of an elevated religious house’? Oh! But should that not read ‘at’—the murder at Donwell Abbey? The abbey was not murdered; Edgar Churchill was.”