Stephanie Barron - Jane and the Canterbury Tale

Edward gave a slight sigh of satisfaction. “I suspected you were acquainted with Fiske. It was he who gave you the tamarind seeds, of course?”

“Not so swiftly, I beg! You leap to the story’s close without a care for the intriguing coincidence of events! Burbage,” Sir Davie exclaimed as he jumped from his hard wooden bed and began to stroll like another Kemble about the theatre of his cell, “you must make the Magistrate understand that he can never hope to penetrate this affair without a thorough knowledge of the peril in which Fiske and I moved, some years ago! If he persists in seeing merely a dead wastrel on the Pilgrim’s Way, when he might rather know the final, agonising loss of a daring man’s hope, as his blood trickles into the unforgiving earth, Mr. Knight cannot pretend to grasp the subtleties of man’s existence—or, at the very least, this shocking affair!”

“Sir Davie,” Mr. Burbage said, “as your solicitor it is my duty to urge you, most earnestly, to answer the questions Mr. Knight may put to you, as succinctly and swiftly as possible. To do aught else is to try the patience of a gentleman whose time is taken up with numerous affairs.”

“Burbage,” Sir Davie uttered mournfully. “I had thought better of you. I had thought you a man of romance, and spirit.”

Edward glanced enquiringly at me; I nodded ever so slightly.

“Very well,” my brother said. “You may tell us, briefly, how you came to know Curzon Fiske.”

“Ah,” Sir Davie breathed as tho’ released into a happy dream, “now there is a tale worth telling! But first perhaps I should just mention how I came to be in Ceylon at all—having spent the better part of my life on the other side of the world, rather as Columbus did, in attempting to reach the Subcontinent. I speak, of course, of Jamaica. My father, the ninth baronet, being a practical rather than a snobbish fellow, had sunk our fortunes into sugar—and did so handsomely from the trade, that I was sent out to the West Indies as a lad of but sixteen, to sit at the feet of the plantation overseer and learn the substance of the business. But it was not to be—for once upon the high seas I discovered a passion for ships that has never left me to this day! Tho’ embarking as a supercargo—a passenger, you should call it—on a merchant vessel bound for the tropics, I soon begged to learn the duties of a true sailor; and being a likely lad enough, for all I was the heir to a baronetcy, I was allowed to have my way. I donned the garb of a common seaman, and earned my bread before the mast, so that my Creole friends did not know me when at last I disembarked in Freetown, and were obliged to take a brown and hale young man to their bosom, who appeared more like a plantation slave in their eyes than the English gentleman they had been led to expect!”

“All very interesting, I am sure,” Edward broke in, “but your youth cannot have any bearing on your present incarceration. Pray honour us with the facts of your acquaintance with Fiske, and your reasons for appearing at the Castle on the night of your friend’s murder.”

If Edward expected the word murder to arrest Sir Davie’s reminiscent flight, he was to be disappointed.

“All in good time, my dear sir, all in good time.”

As Sir Davie launched into a further account of his experience of the islands—his passion for the tropics—his sad love affair with a Creole girl of passable birth but little fortune—the unfeeling nature of his father’s overseer—a falling out with the fellow over the course of his apprenticeship—Sir Davie’s determination to take to the sea once more—his flight, by night, to a merchant ship weighing anchor with the tide in Freetown Harbour—the years of travel that succeeded: rounding the Cape; his first sight of Alta California; assays in the Arctic; his first glimpse of Macao—and at last, when he was three-and-twenty years old, and had been absent from England some seven years, the news, received two months after the fact by letter delivered by H.M.S. Laconia , of his father’s death, and his own accession to the baronetcy.

“I made for home immediately, of course, by constant exchange of ships, arriving some seven weeks after the receipt of the letter and posting as swiftly as I could to Kildane. A few days sufficed to put me in possession of the facts of my existence; I claimed a comfortable fortune, a house of the first stare, and an easy footing among the Great. My father’s steward—now my own—displayed excellent management of Kildane’s affairs, but impressed upon me my duty to marry. I looked about the Marriage Mart once the Season was launched, and was so fortunate as to engage the affections of a reasonably-dowered and not ill-favoured female, the aforementioned Mary, with whom I lived barely a twelvemonth before she died in childbirth, and my son with her.”

“I thought you said her name was Anne,” I objected, frowning slightly.

“Anne? Mary? Elizabeth? They are all much of a muchness, are they not? But perhaps you are right. Undoubtedly my late wife’s name was Anne.”

“You have my deepest sympathy,” Edward said, less drily than Sir Davie’s caprice should have urged; for he, too, had lost a wife in childbirth.

But Sir Davie waved an airy hand. “I underwent a curious change as Anne’s dust was interred in the Kildane vault. I may almost describe it as a liberation , my dear sir. It was as tho’, having fulfilled all the duties expected of my caste, I might now throw off convention in favour of adventure. A week had not elapsed before I found myself in Southampton, searching out a likely East Indiaman, and had embarked once more on the roving life that exactly suited me. Kildane I left in the steward’s care, and for years the arrangement answered nobly. I might draw upon funds lodged at various locales—Malta, Halifax, Macao—with only infrequent halts in my travel at home. And so decades wore away in swift succession! The American colonies revolted; the French King lost his head; armies moved about the globe; Napoleon rose to conquer the world, and fell to ruin on the Cossacks’ steppes—and all the while I lived a sybarite’s life: collecting stories and memories, enemies and friends, adventure and near-mortal escapes! If I had but leisure and inclination, I might pen a memoir that should set the Fashionable World ablaze , with a rage for seafaring exploration!”

“No doubt,” Edward said. “And if your present confinement in gaol cannot spur inclination, it shall at least provide opportunity. I will furnish pen and paper should you require it.”

“You are very good, sir,” Mr. Burbage said, with a quirk of his lips, “and your patience defies belief. Sir Davie, if you might turn at last to your acquaintance with Mr. Curzon Fiske—”

“Ah! Poor Curzon!” Sir Davie mourned. He gave up strolling and settled down upon his wooden bed. “Was there ever a fellow possessed of more engaging address? Or fewer morals? Have you noted, during the course of your life, Mr. Knight, how often the two coincide?”

“You met him, I collect, in Ceylon.”

“There you would be out,” the seaman returned with unruffled calm. “We met in Bangalore, in the midst of a decidedly heated dispute between the local maharajah and the Honourable East India Company. Shots were exchanged. Heads rolled. A particular fort, as I recall, was beseiged. Fiske and I encountered one another when the subsequent looting had reached a fevered pitch, and both of us attempted to secure the same cask of jewels. Fiske sought the pistol thrust into his belt, but I was before him—and contrived to render him insensible with a blow to the head.”

Edward, at this juncture, rubbed in desperation at his temples.