Stephanie Barron - Jane and the Canterbury Tale

“I suspect I shall be obliged to enter only the Chief Warden’s room,” I returned calmly, “which is likely to offer a good fire and a clean floor—which is all that I regard.”

“But do not you intend to visit Mrs. MacCallister?” Harriot’s looks were puzzled; she could not conceive another purpose for bearing Edward company.

“Jane indulges me, Harriot,” my brother interjected, “and should not be present at all but for my urgent request. I am to meet with a distinctly odd fellow, who comes into this affair in ways I profess to understand not at all—and as I value my sister’s wits above all others’, I could hardly spare her presence at the interview.”

“Indeed,” poor Harriot murmured, no more enlightened than she had been before Edward spoke. But her husband lifted his eyes from his book.

“You refer, I take it, to the delusional seaman?”

“I refer to Sir Davie Myrrh.”

“—As he stiles himself!”

“—As his solicitor assures me he has every claim to be addressed,” Edward returned with remarkable calm. “He will undoubtedly prove to be an eccentric, George, but I greatly hope he will not prove delusional. I believe he may hold the key to this entire affair.”

“Then I wonder you took so rash a step as to arrest Mrs. MacCallister,” Mr. Moore muttered. I detected considerable rage, barely suppressed, in his tone; and was confirmed in my original conjecture regarding the clergyman. He might talk of haircuts, and affect indifference before his wife and child, but his whole mind was concentrated upon that tragic figure immured in a cell. If Edward went to Canterbury, there, too, should be George Moore, as surely as a moth sought the flame.

I gave Harriot a swift glance, but she appeared insensible to the subtleties of her husband’s purpose. Perhaps it was safest, taken all in all, to cultivate ignorance.

“I arrested Mrs. MacCallister, my dear George, because I had no choice,” Edward said gently. “And because I hoped, perhaps, to lull the true killer into a false sense of complacency.”

I stared at my brother in sharp surprize—and should have pressed a further question, but that the coachman was drawing rein, and the carriage pulling to a halt. We had achieved Westgate, Canterbury—where the gaol is housed. [9] Jane describes this trip to Canterbury in a subsequent letter to her sister Cassandra (Letter 94, dated Tuesday, October 26, 1813), but makes no mention of entering the gaol with Edward. She discloses a second visit to Canterbury gaol in Letter 95, dated November 3, 1813. — Editor’s note .

Westgate is the last of the great medieval portals to the walled city. All the others—dating perhaps from Thomas à Becket’s time—have been demolished, as proving too great an impediment to coach travel. If Westgate remains, it is due in no little part to the gatehouse’s employment as the city gaol; for tho’ a large prison has been built on Canterbury’s outskirts, in Longport, it is for the internment of those already convicted and sentenced—whereas Westgate houses those not yet brought up before the Assizes. It is a dour old place suggestive of the Tudors, sitting at the point where St. Dunstan’s Street becomes St. Peter’s.

“If you should find yourself at liberty in an hour, Jane,” Harriot confided as we stepped down from Edward’s coach, “I shall be waiting in Moffett’s Confectionary. We might pay a call upon old Mrs. Milles, you know. She is a zany, to be sure—but there is no one like her for possessing all the latest gossip. She should give us a minute history of Mrs. Scudamore’s reconciliation, I daresay.”

Mrs. Scudamore is the wife of Edward’s apothecary and physician, who lately scandalised the neighbourhood by deserting her husband; her return to the domestic fold has only served to further outrage her neighbours, who preferred to sincerely pity Mr. Scudamore each time he called with a draught for their ailing children. Such episodes are of consuming interest to Harriot, however much her husband may deplore them; I suspected she hoped to profit from Mr. Moore’s interval with his barber, by wheedling the whole out of old Mrs. Milles.

Such a visit might serve, at least, to fill my letter to Cassandra; for of the latest murder I had told her not a syllable. Her conviction that I deliberately cultivated the macabre was growing with each passing year, and I had no wish to confirm her prejudice.

“I shall find you if I am able, Harriot,” I said, and turned to where Edward waited, in the shadows beneath the ancient gate.

A constable stood guard by the heavy oak door; and when its bolts were drawn back, and the portal thrust open, the passage was discovered to be flagged in stone. Oil lamps hung on great hooks set into the wall, and lent a flaring light to the low-ceilinged way, which had no windows; it was narrow enough that we were forced to step in single-file, Edward preceding me. The flickering light of the lanthorns threw his figure in grotesque relief upon the walls; my own bonnet, with its stiff poke, appeared as a sort of silhouetted coal scuttle, bobbing in his wake.

We were led, as I had suspected, to the Chief Warden’s room—and if my hopes for the cleanliness of the floor were dashed, my expectation of a fire in the grate was not. The atmosphere of the place being both damp and mouldy, I positioned myself near the warmth as unobtrusively as I might, while Edward performed the necessary introductions.

“Warden Stoke—this is my sister, Miss Austen, who has been kind enough to lend me her company.”

“Pleasure, ma’am,” the fellow returned, tho’ without evidencing much of that sentiment. He stared at me pugnaciously from under beetling black brows, his dark eyes fairly snapping. “I hope you don’t think to make a Fashionable Tour, such as the Great are in the habit of doing up at Lunnon; we’re no Newgate here, for the entertainment of them as think gaol is a mischief and a lark! We want none of your Penal Reformers, neither, being accustomed to go our own road and no complaint from any as bear hearing. There’s precious little accommodation for gentlefolk in Westgate, saving Your Honour, and none at all for fine ladies; but it is not for me to question the Magistrate, ha! ha!, the questions being all on the other side, seemingly.”

“We wish to speak with Sir Davie Myrrh,” Edward said, as tho’ this peroration had gone unheard and unheeded. “His solicitor—one Burbage, I believe—is lately arrived from Temple Bar?”

“He is that, and awaiting Your Honour’s pleasure,” Stoke returned. “I’ve only to send word to the Little Inn, and he’ll step round in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.”

“Then do so.”

The warden scraped a bow, and striding to his door, bellowed to one unseen, “Hie, there—you lummox Jack! Stir your shanks and fetch the Lunnon man for His Honour!”

I caught a glimpse of a wizened urchin in nankeen breeches scuttling along the stone passage, his pointed face set in a grimace; then Stoke heaved-to the door.

“My sister’s brat,” he said bitterly. “Seven-months’ child, and a trifle touched in his upper works.”

There being no possible reply, Edward and I turned our attention to the fire. It was smoking badly; and I began to wish that we might have conducted our interview with Sir Davie’s solicitor in the comfort of the Little Inn’s private parlour, with a trifling nuncheon laid out upon the board. But that would be to play into the solicitor’s hands—it was not his relation of events that we preferred, but his client’s. As Sir Davie could not go to the Little Inn, the Little Inn must come to Sir Davie.

At length our impatience was rewarded with the clang of the outer door’s bolts being once more thrown back, and a light tread audible upon the passage flags, and Mr. Burbage was revealed—as a tall and respectable figure in a driving cape and beaver hat. As I curtseyed to the fellow at Edward’s introduction, I suffered the tantalising impression that I had seen Mr. Burbage before—but could not summon the particulars of time or place.