Stephanie Barron - Jane and the Genius of the Place

Miss Sharpe kissed Fanny's flushed cheek, and very sensibly produced her chapbook, a serviceable volume in which she has been collecting riddles throughout the summer. The scheme was devised entirely for Fanny's amusement; and in a very litde while the two were lost in a familiar exchange, and the danger of hysterics was safely past.

A cicada's trill burst wildly from the copse at the meeting-grounds' fringe — a sudden, sharp keening — and the heat, at the moment, was as oppressive as a lap robe.

“Pray look after the child, Miss Sharpe,” Lizzy said abruptly. “Jane and I must speak to Mr. Austen.” And with a word to one of the liveried footmen, who had been staring impassively into the middle distance all this while, she was assisted out of the barouche. Immediately I followed.

A knot of men, high-born and low, had gathered tightly around my brothers and the Collingforth chaise. With a tap of her parasol on a broad shoulder, Lizzy won her way to the centre, where Denys Collingforth was held firmly in the grip of two of his neighbours.

“I tell you, I know nothing!” he spat out. “The jade would no more speak to me this morning than she'd look at a cur in the mud. Too fine for Denys Colling-forth, and not above saying it to the world. I never came near her, nor she near me!”

“Then how do you explain, Mr. Collingforth, that she entered your chaise just prior to the final heat?” Lizzy broke in smoothly. “My sister and I observed it ourselves.”

The gentleman's mouth fell open, and the colour drained from his face. “Impossible!” he cried. “I was absent from the blasted carriage the better part of the day! Everett will vouch for me — and an hundred others!”

“Where is Mr. Everett?” Neddie cried, with a look of interest for his wife.

The stranger dressed in black, who had supported Collingforth in his dispute with Mr. Bridges, shouldered his way through the crowd. “I am Joshua Everett.”

“Are you acquainted with this man?”

“I am. He is Denys Collingforth, of Prior's Farm.”

“And did you bear him company at any time this morning?”

“For the entirety of it, sir. We breakfasted at eight, drove out to the meeting-grounds and secured our place, and left a boy to look after the horses.”

“That would have been at what hour?” Neddie pressed.

Mr. Everett shrugged, and looked to Collingforth for corroboration. “Ten, perhaps?”

“Half-past. You forget the tankard of ale we drank along the road.”

“Half-past,” Neddie said, as tho' he possessed a mental ledger of Collingforth's doings. “And then, Mr. Everett?”

“Then we walked about the grounds, gave a look to the horses, placed some bets with a few gentlemen among our acquaintance — and took up a position near the cocking ring.”

“I saw them there,” a voice called from the crowd.

“And I,” said another.

Neddie nodded swiftly at my brother Henry, who went in search of Collingforth's acquaintance.

“All that would have been prior to the heats themselves, Collingforth.”

“Yes. I watched those at the rail.”

“Your wife did not accompany you this morning?”

“Mrs. Collingforth is indisposed. And with Everett up from Town—”

“I see. And so you insist that there was no one within the chaise when this lady observed Mrs. Grey to enter it?”

“I tell you, Austen, I never returned to the coach until the moment I pulled open this door!” The desperate man glanced with revulsion at Mrs. Grey's rigid countenance. She lay, partly covered with a borrowed shawl, a few feet from my brother, as tho' resting under his protection. “Can not you fetch a surgeon, and close the woman's eyes? How she stares at us all! 'Tis hardly decent!”

“Is there a surgeon present?” Neddie called harshly over the ring of faces.

Muttering, and a jostling to the rear; then a short, round-faced man with a bald pate appeared, bowing to left and right. “Tobias Wood,” he said, “at your service, Mr. Justice, sir.”

“Very well, Mr. Wood. We shall require your assistance by and by, in removing the corpse to Canterbury. Perhaps for the present, it would suffice to close her eyes.”

This Mr. Wood did, with a gentleness of purpose that must relieve the hearts of many.

“Madam,” my brother said to his wife with punctilious courtesy, “you have said that you observed Mrs. Grey to enter Mr. Collingforth's chaise just before the final heat. That would be—” He consulted his watch, and glanced at Henry.

“—sometime before two o'clock,” Henry supplied. “I recollect the hour, because it was the Commodore's last race.”

“I should put Mrs. Grey's approach to the carriage rather closer to half-past one,” Lizzy said clearly. “But you know it makes no odds, Neddie, because Mrs. Grey was certainly alive when the heat was run. We all saw her riding her black at the head of the pack, and afterwards she drove her phaeton out of the grounds. I merely raised the point because Mr. Collingforth seems to have forgot the earlier visit.”

“I know nothing of any visit!” he shouted; and a vein in his neck pulsed dangerously. One of his captors lost his grip on the man, and Lizzy stepped backwards as the right arm swung free.

“I perfectly apprehend your reasons for raising the point,” Neddie said politely to his wife, as tho' he presided over a ruling in a parlour game. “Did Mrs. Grey knock upon the chaise's door?”

“She did. It opened immediately to admit her.”

“So there was someone within?”

“I must assume so. I did not glimpse the face.”

“Miss Austen?” Neddie enquired formally of me.

I shook my head in the negative.

“Mr. Collingforth,” he continued, “what of the boy you engaged to stand watch over the carriage?”

“Ran off to spend his coin, I must suppose. Such things have occurred before.”

“Will the young man engaged by Mr. Collingforth come forward now and tell his story?” Neddie cried.

This time, there was no movement to the rear of the crowd. Neddie repeated his words, to no avail; and Collingforth looked blackly at his friend Everett. The latter's countenance was as contemptuous as before.

Neddie mopped his reddening brow with a square of lawn and turned once more to the unfortunate gentleman. “Can you offer any explanation for Mrs. Grey's visit to your carriage, Collingforth?”

“I cannot. And as your good lady says, Mr. Justice, it makes no odds. The jade lived to win her race, and carry her plate from the field. How she came to end up here, and in such a state, I cannot say. But I suggest you enquire of the parson, Mr. Bridges, and his fine military friend. Ask them why they might have wanted the French trollop dead, and I'm sure you'll hear an earful.”

Beside me, Lizzy's fingers clenched about the pearl handle of her parasol, and her green eyes drifted languidly over the assembled faces. Searching for her brother, perhaps, with the barest hint of anxiety.

“You have a marked proclivity for abuse, Collingforth, that you would do well to suppress,” Neddie said warningly. “The lady is Mrs. Grey , whatever your opinion of her; and I would request that you show some respect of the dead.”

Collingforth shot a look full of hatred at the corpse, and I shuddered to observe it. However Mrs. Grey had charmed the gentlemen of Kent, this one had not been among their number.

“Did you invite her to the chaise, Collingforth, and fail to keep your appointment?”

“I did nothing of the kind. I'm a respectable married man.”

Someone in the crowd guffawed loudly, and Collingforth cast a bloodshot gaze over the assembled faces. “I'll demand satisfaction of the next man who offers disrespect.”