Stephanie Barron - Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor

And he was about to do so, when Mr. George Hearst appeared, looking as black as the memory of bad weather and with hardly a nod to me or a word of kindness for the groom.

“Fetch Balthasar as quick as you can, boy,” he said, and when James hesitated, gestured emphatically towards the stable door. “Be off with you.”

The groom cast me an apologetic look.

“And mind you bring him round to the main entrance,” George Hearst added, turning abruptly and walking in the direction of the great house.

What had inspired such haste and truculence, I could not think, and had half a mind to catch him up and enquire of his trouble. But there was something in Mr. Hearst's aspect that warned me off — a suggestion of an increase in his usual taciturnity, perhaps — and I remained where I stood. Few words enough had passed between us since our conversation in the lane the previous week; I half-surmised that the gentleman regretted of his frankness, and had resolved to avoid my company. So I deemed it best to seek the fields while he retained the Manor. After an instant, I followed James to the interior of the lofty-ceilinged stable, searching out his form in the dim light. The groom stood framed against a stall far down the row, where a great black head reared over the door of its box like a military statue of old. The very Balthasar.

“Do you wait another minute, Miss Austen, and I shall have Bess stamping to bear you,” the boy assured me.

“There is no need, James,” I said. “If you but give me her bridle and lead, I shall fetch her myself.”

“I don't know as it's a job for a lady” — he looked all his doubt — ”nor as you'll meet with much success, begging your pardon, miss.”

“As I must wait by the paddock, or wait by the stables, I would fain be of use; and it cannot hurt me to try. Do you take Balthasar to Mr. Hearst, James, and follow me to the fields. Then if the horse outwits me, your conscience may be salved by effecting my salvation.”

BESS WAS AMONG A SMALL GROUP OF HER FELLOW CREATURES clustered by the paddock's far rail. That the horses were intent upon remaining in their corner I readily observed; and wondered at so close a converse in so wide a space. Perhaps they missed the comfortable warmth of their boxes, and sought instead to make walls of one another. Whatever their purpose, it caused me to walk the length of the field in my boots, the snow coming up nearly to their tops. Gathering my courage, I clucked to Bess as Tom Hearst had taught me to do. To my delight, she came towards me obediently enough, and thrust her nose into the bridle, a perfect lady; I had but to snap on the halter and lead her to the paddock gate.

It was here that I encountered difficulty, and of so decided a turn that I was completely routed. For Bess would not approach the inoffensive gate, and, indeed, rolled her eyes and whinnied in such a violent fashion, backing onto her hind legs, that I lost my grip on the halter and was forced to watch in despair as she hurried herself back to the field's far corner. It was, by all accounts, inexplicable. That the mare had entered by the gate but a few hours earlier was evident, there being none other in the enclosure; but to approach it now was to her of all things the most distasteful.

There are those who will assert that Providence robbed animals of sense, and thus consigned them to serve at man's pleasure. But it was my lot to have a country childhood, and though I was denied a mount of my own, was often to observe my dear Madam Lefroy [27] Anne Lefroy, “Madam” among her acquaintance, was Jane's dearest friend during her childhood days in Steventon, Hampshire, despite the disparity in their ages. Anne Lefroy was to die in 1804 as the result of a fall from her horse. — Editor's note. in command of hers. That she worked with the animal's intelligence, rather than doubting the existence of such, was apparent. And so I determined to discover what had so terrified Lady Bess about the gate.

Upon approaching it, I found nothing amiss — it seemed a gate much like any other. A scrap of fabric, grey against the whiteness of the snow, caught my eye, and I bent to retrieve it; a fine handkerchief of lawn, with Isobel's looping monogram. She left them behind her wherever she went; I had myself observed her drop them countless times, and surmised she must keep a running account with a purveyor in Town. But how had one come to be here? I secured it in my pocket, and turned to study the paddock.

As if for the first time, I saw what had filled my sight unnoticed before: several sets of footprints, crossed and trampled one upon the other; led to the small hay shed at one side of the paddock, and the door was slightly ajar. Fanny Delahoussaye again?

There was no sound from within at my approach, unless it was drowned to silence by the excited nickers that rang out from the horses’ end of the field. I touched the wooden door with gloved fingertips, and it slowly swung back on creaking hinges. There could be nothing inside, I determined once my eyes had adjusted to the light, but hay — great mounds of it piled from floor to ceiling, with a slight dusting of snow where cracks in the roof had given way to the weather. The grooms, perhaps, had visited the place upon turning out the horses, and left a sprinkling of fodder fresh upon the snow. I made as if to turn away, when my sharper senses stopped me. The scent of dried summer grass — sweet and musty enough to send one sneezing — had been overlaid with something animal. My heartbeat quickened as I put a name to the odour: it was blood, still warm and wet, and soaked into the hay at my feet.

I bent down and studied the floor, discerning in the dimness a blacker stain. The wetness led to the dark corner of the shed, and though my heart misgave me, I felt that I must know what lay there in the fodder. Lifting my skirts and treading carefully, I crept towards the farthest bale.

The fingers of a hand, reaching in endless supplication from a covering shroud of hay, stopped me still; and for an instant, my courage failed me. That it was a woman's hand I readily discerned, and something very like terror held me in its grip for the space of several heartbeats. But I recoiled at the knowledge of my faint head, and determined to go on rather than back. I reached a gloved hand to the hay and pulled it aside.

It was the maid Marguerite, and in no fit state to be seen.

Her throat had been cut from ear to ear; and her head hung at a lugubrious angle from her neck, which was bedaubed with the welter of blood that had poured from her obscene wound. Her sightless eyes were rolled back into her head so that only the whites were apparent, and her mouth was agape in a silent scream. But it was the limpness of her body, thrown like a rag doll's in the mound of hay, that affected me most strongly; the helter-skelter of limbs, nerveless beyond all mastery, were mute testament to departed life. Had she made the sign of the cross, eyes wide with terror as she died?

I should like to record that I viewed the mangled girl with the equanimity befitting a heroine of Mrs. Radcliffe, or that a black curtain fell before my eyes, and all sensibility failed me, as Charlotte Smith would have it [28] As noted elsewhere, Ann Radcliffe, who wrote The Mysteries of Udolpho , and Charlotte Smith, author of Ethelinde , were two authors Jane Austen read, although they were also practitioners of the Gothic formulas she sometimes lampooned for their unnatural characters. — Editor's note. ; but, in truth, I lost my head and screamed at the fullest pitch of my lungs, turning and running from the gruesome shed without a backward glance.

Once outside in the air, trembling and frantic, I forced myself to halt and consider the facts. The maid was dead, and hardly by her own hand; that she had been murdered, and brutally so, must be made known to Sir William Reynolds at once. But what of her presence, here in the field? Had she been hiding by day in the shed, the better to post her poisonous letters by night? Or had she been lured here from hiding by the summons of her murderer? If the former, a hasty interview of the grooms should satisfy all doubts; either they would admit to consciousness of her sheltering in the field, or profess it to be impossible.