Stephanie Barron - Jane and the Canterbury Tale

Fanny shook her head.

“Nor you, Miss Austen? You were denied a singular pleasure, then.” She laughed a little to herself, as tho’ revolving a good joke, a smile teazing at the corners of her mouth. Had I not detected the signs of grief and worry in her countenance at her first appearance, I should have thought her free of all care. Something of this knowledge must have strayed across her mind, for she raised her eyes to mine with limpid clarity.

“I know it is very bad in me not to betray more sensibility,” she confessed, “but had you only known Curzon—! He was the most high-spirited man I have ever met, the most charming … and the least scrupulous. I shock you—I know I shock you—but the openness with which he met each deception he practiced, and owned to his thorough vice, almost disarmed reproof! He was so honest in his misdealings, you see. Had I been a little older, and more aware of the cost of his folly, I should have avoided him like the Devil, tho’ it must have broke my heart; as it was, I was just young enough to cast reason to the winds—and I adored him. There was a time when I should have died for him, sold myself for him, stolen for him—and regarded all as a privilege.”

“Adelaide!” her mother cried. “Consider where you are!”

The lady glanced aside, as tho’ in contemplation of a distant scene, lost to memory. “Such frolics as we had, and such disasters! Such extremities of passion, such quarrels, and such reconciling! I shall never feel for any man in that way again; and I declare I am relieved to own it.”

“ Wretched girl!” her mother spluttered. “Only think if the poor Captain should hear you!”

“Andrew?” Mrs. MacCallister laughed again; but this time, the gaiety was rueful. “Andrew understood the bad bargain he bought in me—for I told him all, myself—but I must pity him just the same. It is something, for a man to find himself foresworn on his very wedding night—I should have liked to have spared him that indignity, at least.”

“Nonsense,” her brother said languidly. “Tylden tied the knot right and tight again between you this morning. Andrew’s a good’un; he’ll stand buff, don’t you fear it, Addie. The fellow’s not the sort to stumble over rough ground; there are few men I’d rather see beside you in such a fix as this.”

“Let us hope, then, that he is not dragged off to Canterbury gaol,” Adelaide observed calmly.

“Good Lord!” exclaimed Mrs. Wildman with a startled look. “The very idea! And the Captain such an honourable gentleman, too! I should think he’d seen enough of death under Wellington’s command without having to seek it in Kent. You mark my words, Addie—it’ll be a common footpad as did for poor Mr. Fiske, and long since gone from the neighbourhood if he has a particle of sense. Fearsome times we live in, with the Regent spending all our incomes and a different army to be paid for every week—It is no wonder the footpads have grown so troublesome; they must make a living somehow as well, poor fellows.”

“A footpad will hardly have discarded James’s duelling pistol in St. Lawrence churchyard, Cousin Joanna,” said Julian Thane.

His words, naturally, caused a sensation.

“James’s pistol!” cried Charlotte Wildman incredulously. “The one Papa ordered specially in London a few years since?”

“That’s the ticket—the pistol, or one of the pair, from Manton’s that James is forever showing off. He likes to clip the suits from playing cards at twenty paces, Miss Knight, when he’s a trifle bosky,” he confided to Fanny, “and the billiard-room wall is shot through with holes on the strength of it.”

Almost despite herself, Fanny dimpled; Thane’s manner was irresistible.

“I am sure Julian is mistaken,” Mrs. Wildman said comfortably as she patted Charlotte’s hand.

“Nothing to do with me,” Julian drawled. “I had it from the Magistrate himself—when he sat me down to ask what I did the night of the ball. Told him I drank a brandy with James after the last of the guests had gone—it was that Tylden party, naturally; one can never be rid of the prosy parson. Twitch shut up the house, and we all went off to bed. Unfortunately, as I sleep alone”—this, with a telling gleam at my niece I could not approve—“I’ve nobody to support me in the assertion. No reward for the just, upon my honour! One has only to snore like a lamb until ten o’clock in the morning, to be met with an accusation of murder the next day!”

“But what can James’s pistol have been doing in St. Lawrence churchyard, in Heaven’s name?” Mrs. Wildman reverted, in a bewildered tone.

“Well may you ask, Joanna. Well may you ask.” A strangely triumphant smile broke on Mrs. Thane’s countenance. “I have an idea the Magistrate shall be most pressing on that point.”

“Whatever are you about, Augusta?” Mrs. Wildman demanded. “You look positively in alt!”

“Perhaps it is a natural elevation of feeling, Joanna, at the reflection that sinners may cast no stones!”

“Sinners?” Mrs. Wildman repeated blankly.

“There shall be no more talk of Adelaide creeping from her marriage bed in the dead of night, once James is clapped in irons!”

Mrs. Wildman emitted a sharp scream, and flung her hands to her breast, with a look of such terror on her visage that I quite felt for the silly woman; her daughter Louisa hastened to her aid with a vinaigrette, which I must imagine was often employed for the purpose of regulating her mother’s spirits. And there, too, was Thane.

“Dear Cousin Joanna, I fear you are overset,” he observed with solicitude. “Pray allow me to escort you upstairs.”

“Never mind playing off your airs, Julian,” Louisa said crossly. “ I shall convey Mamma.”

She was supported in this by her sister; and the three Wildman ladies quitted the room in high dudgeon—and probably a measure of relief.

Fanny rose from her chair and curtseyed to the Thanes. “Indeed, you have been very kind—but Miss Austen and I must take our leave.”

“Before your father’s business is concluded?” Adelaide enquired. “My husband is even now in his hands, Miss Knight. I collect it is the coroner’s assumption that poor Andrew somehow discovered the existence of his rival, and killed him in a passion of jealousy.”

“Do sit down, Miss Knight,” Julian urged. “I should never forgive myself if you were to leave us, while the issue of Andrew’s fate still hung in suspense.”

Fanny looked to me in bewilderment. She had not the slightest idea whether to be firm, and beg that the tilbury be brought round, or to linger at the request of the Thanes. She had no notion her father wished me to learn what I could of the interesting grouping now before us. Theirs was the strangest complex of frankness, on the one hand, and determined suppression on the other, that I had ever witnessed in a family; and I wondered whether the casual boldness of both children was the sole weapon available to combat so repressive a parent.

Mindful of Edward, I determined to adopt a similar bluntness and decide Fanny’s quandary. I retained my chair, and smiled warmly at Adelaide MacCallister.

“Whatever the coroner may have suggested, my brother shall weigh against all that he observes and is told. He must pursue the obvious—and forgive me, Mrs. MacCallister, but in such a case as this, your husband must be possessed of the most obvious motive—but Edward is hardly a simple man, and as magistrate he is aware that murder may be a complex business.”

“Indeed?” the bride said. “Then I may begin to hope.”

Julian Thane emitted a short bark of laughter. “Hope! Tell me, Addie—in which direction does hope lie? Must we hope that James shot Curzon? Or his father, our excellent Cousin Wildman? Would you rather I had done it, perhaps? Or even … Mamma?”