Stephanie Barron - Jane and the Stillroom Maid

“There is your cavern, Cassandra,” I murmured, “and mind you make the most of it.”

The door swung open to reveal a tall, thin heron of a fellow arrayed in rusty suiting and a well-worn collar. He clutched a quill in one hand; the fingertips of the other were stained dark blue. His head was bare and balding; his eyes were of a watery brown; what hair he possessed was already grey. Mr. Hemming’s clerk. He had spent all his life apprenticed to the Law, and should carry ink-stained fingers to his coffin because of it.

“No appointments today,” he said firmly, and made as though to shut the door.

I put out my hand and grasped the handle. “But we are not here on business, Mr. …”

“Bartles,” he replied. “Joseph Bartles, Mr. Hemming’s chief clerk. Mr. Hemming is not at leisure at present.”

“George has spoken so very highly of you,” my sister Cassandra put in warmly, to Mr. Cooper’s astonishment.

“‘I should be nowhere at all without Mr. Bartles,’ he said, only Monday evening. ‘Mr. Bartles is the man I depend upon’ — isn’t that right, Jane?”

“Oh — yes, yes, indeed,” I replied, with an eye for the clerk. His ancient chest had visibly swelled with pride. “I do not know where our excellent friend George would be without you. How well I recall Mr. Hemming’s words, as we all drove towards the Dale only yesterday: ‘So dependable in every respect! So entirely worthy of trust! If I have earned some small measure of success, it must all be laid to Bartles’s account!’”

“I do not recall—” my cousin began, in tones of the greatest disapprobation.

“—You were asleep, Edward, you always are. We shan’t be a moment, Mr. Bartles. Is Mr. Hemming within?”

“Certainly, miss,” Bartles replied, and drew wide the door.

We were ushered to a bare little anteroom, where the scriveners’ desks stood bleakly in a wash of sunlight; a young man was arranged behind one, his face pale and his brow furrowed as he shifted from foot to foot. Unlike Mr. Bartles, this fellow’s collar points were enormous and his neckcloth elaborately tied; they quite prohibited him from lowering his chin over his work, so that he was forced to peer down his nose at the foolscap before him, in a manner that I wondered did not drive him mad.

“If you will please to wait,” Mr. Bartles said formally, and bowed to my cousin. “The name again, sir?”

“Edward Cooper.”

“And the Miss Austens,” Cassandra added with a brilliant smile.

“Good God, Edward, whatever are you doing here?” exclaimed George Hemming from the doorway of an inner chamber. “I’m most deucedly pressed this morning. I cannot possibly spare a moment—”

“I think perhaps you must, sir.” I moved towards him swiftly, and Cassandra followed. “Sir James Villiers paid us a most delightful call last evening, and your company was sorely missed. You should have added so much to the general tone of conversation — to the brilliance of the party! Do you not wish to hear what the Justice had to say, on the subject of angling?”

Mr. Hemming hesitated; he glanced from ourselves to his two clerks, who were attempting to overlisten the conversation without appearing to do so; and then the cast of his countenance changed.

“How delightful to see you again, Miss Jane Austen,” he said. “I can certainly spare a quarter-hour for any news you might bring.”

We filed through the doorway and found ourselves in a comfortable room, with a broad mahogany desk and a quantity of volumes bound in leather, a decanter of spirits, and a painting in oils of a gentleman from the last century. Two chairs were pushed back against the wall; but Mr. Hemming made no gesture towards them, and I preferred to stand in any case.

The solicitor surveyed us with a tight and uneasy smile. “I had not looked for such a visit,” he observed, “but I must assume that circumstances urge it. You are come, Edward, about this business of the maid?”

“Indeed, I hardly know why we are come, George — unless it be that my cousin Jane insisted upon it,” Mr. Cooper replied. “I am sure that the demands of your work are many, and if the ladies disturbed you in this extraordinary application, I must beg leave to apologise.”

Mr. Hemming leaned against the edge of his desk, his fingers gripping the wood painfully. But his countenance and his voice were all that was easy. “Miss Jane Austen would interrogate Mr. Hemming. From what I know of Miss Jane Austen, I should have looked for the honour. Very well, my dear lady — how would you be satisfied?”

“We are to appear before the Coroner’s Inquest tomorrow, Mr. Hemming, as no doubt you must yourself. My past experience of similar authority has taught me that honesty before a panel invariably saves a good deal of trouble.”

He crossed his arms over his chest and peered at me with amusement. “And have you a good deal of such experience, Miss Jane Austen?”

“Enough,” I replied succinctly, “to apprehend that you lied, Mr. Hemming, when you failed to identify the corpse above Miller’s Dale as being that of Tess Arnold — a young woman with whom, I understand, you have been acquainted for most of her life.”

He went pale, and clutched convulsively at the desk; then thrust himself to his feet. “I could not know what I saw in Miller’s Dale. In such a scene of horror, who should not be confused? The girl’s clothes — the savage wounds to her body — I barely spared a moment to study the face. I was as astonished as yourselves to learn last evening that she was not the gentleman she appeared, and a complete stranger.”

“Then why did you behave so oddly at the time? I distinctly recall every word and action. You appeared distracted and oppressed in your manner; you insisted that Deceased must be a traveller like ourselves, and undoubtedly from Buxton. And when we prevailed upon you to return with us to Bakewell, you washed your hands of the affair — ‘Devil take the consequences,’ I believe you said. There was nothing of confusion in all this, Mr. Hemming, but rather a measure of conscious deceit.”

“That is absurd!” he burst out.

“Sir James Villiers does not appear to think so,” I replied. “And we may presume that he has no reason to prevaricate, when he suggests you were acquainted with the maid for years.”

“I have never denied that. I merely failed to recognise the girl in death.”

“But I would put it to you, sir, that you did — and that the fear her murder occasioned arose from some other cause, than merely horror at her wounds.”

“Jane!” my cousin cried, aghast. “How can you be so shameless! Mr. Hemming has given us his word as a gentleman!”

George Hemming stared at me, his features working; then he turned away, and put his face in his hands.

“Would you care to offer an explanation for your extraordinary behaviour, sir, before Mr. Tivey requires it of you?” I pressed.

“I cannot see that I owe any young lady so wholly unconnected with me as yourself, the slightest word in regard to the matter,” the solicitor said bleakly. “Whatever I may then have felt and done, stands between me and my God.”

“Very well, George,” said Mr. Cooper hurriedly. He turned towards the door. “We shall not disturb you further.”

“I can think of only two explanations,” I persisted, my eyes on Mr. Hemming’s face. “That in recognising the maid, you guessed at the hand of the murderer, and were so wretchedly anxious on his account, that you sought to throw the entire affair into Buxton, a district far from the maid’s home.”

“Not at all!”

“Or, that you played a role yourself in Tess Arnold’s death, and carried us into Miller’s Dale yesterday with the design of establishing yourself creditably in the minds of the chief witnesses to her discovery!”