Darcy stirred impatiently. The peddler had an interesting history, but none of it explained his recent dealings with the Churchills and the events of June twenty-sixth. “When and why did you seek out the Churchills?”
“Though I was content with my gypsy
“Last spring, the caravan camped just outside of Highbury. I was not with them, but there was an incident involving a young woman who became frightened when some of the children begged her for a coin. A gentleman intervened — Mr. Churchill, the woman called him. Though he bears a resemblance to my own appearance fifteen years ago, Rawnie Zsofia needed no physical cues to know him immediately for my kin. She had already seen him in visions. When I was next with her, I sensed that something had changed. I asked why she was so heavyhearted. ‘The time is come,’ she said.
“I traced Frank to the Churchills’ house in Richmond, then over the next month ascertained that the senior Churchills were indeed the couple who had abandoned me. Though I trusted the truth of Rawnie Zsofia’s visions, I needed more objective proof before attempting to meet them. And that is
Mr. Knightley, who had been taking occasional notes as Mr. Deal spoke, stopped his pen midstroke. “After spending years among a race infamous for thievery, you discovered that your parents were quite wealthy, yet you had no ambitions of claiming some of that wealth as your own?”
A wry smile formed on Mr. Deal’s lips. “My life with the gypsies indeed influenced me, but not in the manner you assume. The Roma are, in fact, not an avaricious people; their language does not even include a word for ‘possession.’ They take and use only what they need, and cannot comprehend the compulsion of ‘civilized’ men to acquire more.” His expression grew serious again. “When I say I did not aspire to the Churchills’ riches, I speak the truth, and after seeing the creature my birth mother became under the malignant influence of money, I am even more decided. I want no part of the Churchill fortune; my cousin Frank is welcome to it.”
“And is this what you told Agnes Churchill?”
“Our conversation never progressed that far. Even if it had, her own enslavement to power and wealth so distorted her thinking that I doubt she would have believed me.”
Mr. Deal cleared his throat several times. It was dry in the room, and he had been speaking some time with little interruption. Mr. Knightley rose and went to a small side table that held a decanter and glasses. As he poured a glass of wine and handed it to Mr. Deal, Darcy went to Elizabeth.
“What brings you?” he whispered.
“Mr. Cole was called away,” she whispered back, “but says he will return directly.” She nodded towards Mr. Deal. “This is quite a tale.” She appeared reluctant to leave.
Indeed, he would not mind hearing her assessment of the story when Mr. Deal had done telling it. “Stay if you wish. Though be discreet.”
He returned to his position near the table with the wine. Mr. Knightley had just topped off Mr. Deal’s glass.
“Pray, describe exactly what transpired during your meeting with Mrs. Churchill,” Mr. Knightley said.
Mr. Deal swallowed more wine before continuing. “I thought it would be best to meet only my mother first, so I waited for a time when Frank and Edgar Churchill were out — that is why the servant saw me loitering in the neighborhood. When the opportunity arose, I called at the house as a peddler and was granted an audience with Mrs. Churchill.”
Darcy having declined Mr. Knightley’s silent offer of wine for himself, the magistrate returned to his writing table and once more took up his pen.
“It was not a joyous reunion,” Mr. Deal continued. “Though I took care to hide my maimed arm from view, it caught her notice. She started, and peered into my face, where she found enough Churchill in my features to confirm her suspicion — which I did not deny.
“She paled and stepped back, arms thrust defensively in front of her, as if she beheld a ghost. I suppose in a sense, she did, for she had presumed me dead all these years. But she quickly recovered herself. Before I could offer even a word of explanation for having sought her out, or tell her how long I had imagined that moment, she accused me of coming to blackmail her, to steal her fortune, to threaten her position in society. How dare I appear after all these years to take what she had spent a lifetime protecting? How dare I presume to even breathe?”
He took a fortifying draught. “The full story of my nativity tumbled out. Her travail was long and difficult, surpassed in dreadfulness only by the horror of her first sight of me. The trauma she experienced was somehow my fault — I, an infant but minutes old. She refused to present a crippled son to her husband, or to acknowledge the deformed child as her own for all of society to judge her. What little blame that remained unassigned to me was laid on the head of the expensive London physician who had delivered me. Though the physician asserted that my deformity had manifested long before her lying-in and had nothing to do with the instruments he had employed as she labored, she threatened to destroy his reputation if he did not help her get rid of the child by telling Mr. Churchill that it had been stillborn. The attending nurse was paid to dispose of ‘the monstrosity.’ Mrs. Churchill did not care what happened to me, so long as she was never reminded of
Darcy glanced at Elizabeth. Her countenance was full of pity and sadness. He, too, felt sympathy, yet — he hoped — maintained enough detachment to respond to Mr. Deal’s revelations objectively. As all Highbury had already witnessed, the peddler was a consummate storyteller.
Mr. Deal drained his wineglass. “You can imagine my pain upon hearing myself so described, my very existence thought of only in terms of its affront to her. But more was to come: When Mrs. Churchill had done spewing out the details of my first rejection, she cast me off a second time. After all these years, my father still believed I had been stillborn. She threatened my life if I revealed myself to Edgar Churchill or exposed them to society. Should I speak of this matter to another soul, no one would miss a lying vagabond peddler, she said, or question his disappearance.
“Her cruelty and selfishness stunned me. I told her, quite honestly, that neither she nor her husband need fear further contact from me. I had done with them both.”
Darcy refilled Mr. Deal’s wineglass. “She worked herself into this terrible temper entirely by herself? With no provocation from you?”
Mr. Deal stared at the glass thoughtfully. “Though her words were strong, I could see fear in her eyes at the threat my existence posed to her power and position in society, and within her marriage. I think that in the hidden recesses of her heart, where she dared not ever look, she had been waiting her whole life to be called to account for what she had done — a criminal living in perpetual dread of being caught. I think the knowledge of her sin preyed upon her nerves for nine-and-thirty years, growing sharper as she aged and came ever closer to facing her Creator. And when I appeared, the greed and guilt that had been feasting upon her soul came rushing forth in a torrent.”
He looked up at Darcy. “You said she died following our meeting — I heard that a seizure took her.” He set his wineglass on the candle pedestal beside his chair and turned to Mr. Knightley. “I swear to you, I did nothing to antagonize Mrs. Churchill or provoke her anger. Nor did the seizure begin while I was with her, though she was in such a state of agitation that I can well imagine it coming upon her. When I quit the house, however, she was alive and in full possession of her faculties. My only crime was that I was, too.”
Though Agnes Churchill had provided her son with ample motive for murder, Mr. Deal’s account of events was supported by the reports they had already received from her Richmond physician and household servants indicating that she died of an apoplectic fit. It seemed that if anybody was to blame for her death, it was Mrs. Churchill herself.
Edgar Churchill’s death, however, remained suspicious.
“You claim that you told Agnes Churchill you would attempt no contact with your father,” Darcy said, “yet you were seen with him here in Highbury at least twice — once in conversation at Randalls, and again in Broadway Lane whilst Frank purchased his snuff box.”
Mr. Deal nodded. “When I said that to Mrs. Churchill, I was so wounded by her treatment of me that I assumed I would receive a similar reception from her husband. But after my initial shock subsided and I had time to consider the matter, I realized that I was not the sole victim of her pride and deceit. In discarding me, she had
