Jane and the Canterbury Tale

Loved travel. Loved adventure. Thought she’d find more of both following the drum. Romantickal notions about the Captain; saw him as a hero. Poor James couldn’t hold a candle to that.”

“She sounds the very last person to borrow Wildman’s pistol,” I mused.

Jupiter shook his head regretfully. “Can’t agree with you there, ma’am. Never said Addie wouldn’t use the pistol. She’s pluck to the backbone—and if she thought it best to shoot Curzon Fiske, daresay she’d steel herself to do it! Just don’t think she’d be careless enough to leave James’s pistol behind her. No desire to hang her cousin. Dashed sorry to see him in the box at the inquest, from all I can make out. Made her fair blue-devilled. But she’s no coward, Addie. She’d admit to murder rather than see James hang. Forced to conclude, therefore, that it wasn’t she who left the pistol in plain sight for the constables to find. Certain she’d have said so, straight out, if she had.”

I was on the point of posing yet again the obvious question, the one that had inspired all my interest in breakfast-parlour conversation—Who, then, wished James Wildman to hang?—when the sound of a gentleman’s approaching stride arrested all our attention. It should undoubtedly prove to be Mr. George Moore, come to bid his young friend welcome, and to regale himself in stony silence among the ortolans and kidneys. My heart sank. I might never be so fortunate as to fix Jupiter Finch-Hatton’s interest so entirely in coming days.

But it was not Mr. Moore who appeared in the breakfast-parlour doorway.

“Morning, Hatton,” Edward said with a careless nod. “Morning, Fanny—Jane. I hope you both slept well.”

“I should not have managed a wink, Father, had I known what you were about at the Castle last evening!” she returned with asperity. “To arrest Mrs. MacCallister! Every feeling revolts!”

“Do not enact me a Cheltenham tragedy, I beg,” he said brusquely. “If you’ve quite finished, perhaps you would be so good as to take Finch-Hatton for a turn in the shrubbery; it is no day for shooting, being likely to come on to rain.”

“I am to be occupied with Mrs. Driver for most of the morning, taking an inventory of the linen.”

“Do not be tiresome, Fanny! I wish to be private with your aunt!”

“Oh, very well,” she said irritably, and tossed her napkin on the table.

Jupiter regarded me with amusement. “Doesn’t like me above half, our Fanny. Daresay it’s because I’m a dashed Corinthian. Your servant, ma’am.” And with a bow of remarkable elegance, he ushered my graceless niece towards the back garden.

“You managed that very ill, Edward,” I observed as I rose from the table. “Fanny is no Lizzy or Marianne, to submit in silence to your tyranny. I begin to think the power of the magistracy has gone to your head.”

“I have only just heard that one Mr. Burbage, solicitor to Sir Davie Myrrh, is arrived in Canterbury, Jane. I intend to meet with him this morning, in the presence of his client. Would you do me the honour of accompanying me?”

Chapter Twenty-One A Visit to Canterbury

“Brother,” he said, “do you really want me to tell?

I am a devil, and the place I live in is hell.”

Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Friar’s Tale”

25 October 1813, Cont.

To my dismay, we were joined in the carriage drive to Canterbury by the entire Moore family, not excepting Young George, whom his mother adjured anxiously not to be sick from the lurching of the carriage. Edward took one look at the lad’s face as his coachman sprang the horses, and called out to the fellow to halt.

“I am persuaded George should vastly prefer to ride on the box with Sallow,” he suggested, and overrode Harriot’s anxiety for her son’s safety by jumping out to lift the boy up himself.

“It is never any use to tell the Infantry not to be sick,” he advised his sister-in-law, “and in fact, might be regarded as a positive inducement to cast up their accounts! Fresh air is all the lad requires. He shall do splendidly now.”

“I was never rendered ill from carriage-travel as a youth,” Mr. Moore observed austerely, “tho’ I was forever going about with my father, on matters of Ecclesiastical importance. I cannot account for Young George’s lamentable weakness. I fear he lacks resolution. The influence of his mother’s family, no doubt. We must hope he acquires strength of character in time.”

The fond parent then buried his nose in his book—how anyone can read amidst the swaying of a carriage!— and ignored his companions for the length of the eight miles to Canterbury.

I was curious to learn how so ardent a champion of Adelaide MacCallister’s welfare must regard the latest episode in her career; and indeed, had surmised that Mr. Moore accompanied my brother to Canterbury from a desire to plead Mrs. MacCallister’s case. But in this I was evidently mistaken. Mr. Moore knew of the arrest; but he claimed to have inserted himself into Edward’s carriage merely from a desire of visiting a tailor, and having his hair cut—and professed a keenness to have Young George’s locks shorn as well. Harriot intended to do a little shopping while at liberty from her husband—visiting solely those Canterbury establishments that offered credit, no doubt.

“I wonder you may support the prospect of entering a gaol, Jane,” she said with a delicious shudder. “I am sure I should swoon at the scenes then unfolded before my eyes!”

“I suspect I shall be obliged to enter only the Chief Warden’s room,” I returned calmly, “which is likely to offer a good fire and a clean floor—which is all that I regard.”

“But do not you intend to visit Mrs. MacCallister?” Harriot’s looks were puzzled; she could not conceive another purpose for bearing Edward company.

“Jane indulges me, Harriot,” my brother interjected, “and should not be present at all but for my urgent request. I am to meet with a distinctly odd fellow, who comes into this affair in ways I profess to understand not at all—and as I value my sister’s wits above all others’, I could hardly spare her presence at the interview.”

“Indeed,” poor Harriot murmured, no more enlightened than she had been before Edward spoke. But her husband lifted his eyes from his book.

“You refer, I take it, to the delusional seaman?”

“I refer to Sir Davie Myrrh.”

“—As he stiles himself!”

“—As his solicitor assures me he has every claim to be addressed,” Edward returned with remarkable calm. “He will undoubtedly prove to be an eccentric, George, but I greatly hope he will not prove delusional. I believe he may hold the key to this entire affair.”

“Then I wonder you took so rash a step as to arrest Mrs. MacCallister,” Mr. Moore muttered. I detected considerable rage, barely suppressed, in his tone; and was confirmed in my original conjecture regarding the clergyman. He might talk of haircuts, and affect indifference before his wife and child, but his whole mind was concentrated upon that tragic figure immured in a cell. If Edward went to Canterbury, there, too, should be George Moore, as surely as a moth sought the flame.

I gave Harriot a swift glance, but she appeared insensible to the subtleties of her husband’s purpose. Perhaps it was safest, taken all in all, to cultivate ignorance.

“I arrested Mrs. MacCallister, my dear George, because I had no choice,” Edward said gently. “And because I hoped, perhaps, to lull the true killer into a false sense of complacency.”

I stared at my brother in sharp surprize—and should have pressed a further question, but that the coachman was drawing rein, and the carriage pulling to a halt. We had achieved Westgate, Canterbury—where the gaol is