Jane and the Canterbury Tale

housed.[9]

Westgate is the last of the great medieval portals to the walled city. All the others—dating perhaps from Thomas a Becket’s time—have been demolished, as proving too great an impediment to coach travel. If Westgate remains, it is due in no little part to the gatehouse’s employment as the city gaol; for tho’ a large prison has been built on Canterbury’s outskirts, in Longport, it is for the internment of those already convicted and sentenced— whereas Westgate houses those not yet brought up before the Assizes. It is a dour old place suggestive of the Tudors, sitting at the point where St. Dunstan’s Street becomes St. Peter’s.

“If you should find yourself at liberty in an hour, Jane,” Harriot confided as we stepped down from Edward’s coach, “I shall be waiting in Moffett’s Confectionary. We might pay a call upon old Mrs. Milles, you know. She is a zany, to be sure—but there is no one like her for possessing all the latest gossip. She should give us a minute history of Mrs. Scudamore’s reconciliation, I daresay.”

Mrs. Scudamore is the wife of Edward’s apothecary and physician, who lately scandalised the neighbourhood by deserting her husband; her return to the domestic fold has only served to further outrage her neighbours, who preferred to sincerely pity Mr. Scudamore each time he called with a draught for their ailing children. Such episodes are of consuming interest to Harriot, however much her husband may deplore them; I suspected she hoped to profit from Mr. Moore’s interval with his barber, by wheedling the whole out of old Mrs. Milles.

Such a visit might serve, at least, to fill my letter to Cassandra; for of the latest murder I had told her not a syllable. Her conviction that I deliberately cultivated the macabre was growing with each passing year, and I had no wish to confirm her prejudice.

“I shall find you if I am able, Harriot,” I said, and turned to where Edward waited, in the shadows beneath the ancient gate.

A constable stood guard by the heavy oak door; and when its bolts were drawn back, and the portal thrust open, the passage was discovered to be flagged in stone. Oil lamps hung on great hooks set into the wall, and lent a flaring light to the low-ceilinged way, which had no windows; it was narrow enough that we were forced to step in single-file, Edward preceding me. The flickering light of the lanthorns threw his figure in grotesque relief upon the walls; my own bonnet, with its stiff poke, appeared as a sort of silhouetted coal scuttle, bobbing in his wake.

We were led, as I had suspected, to the Chief Warden’s room—and if my hopes for the cleanliness of the floor were dashed, my expectation of a fire in the grate was not. The atmosphere of the place being both damp and mouldy, I positioned myself near the warmth as unobtrusively as I might, while Edward performed the necessary introductions.

“Warden Stoke—this is my sister, Miss Austen, who has been kind enough to lend me her company.”

“Pleasure, ma’am,” the fellow returned, tho’ without evidencing much of that sentiment. He stared at me pugnaciously from under beetling black brows, his dark eyes fairly snapping. “I hope you don’t think to make a Fashionable Tour, such as the Great are in the habit of doing up at Lunnon; we’re no Newgate here, for the entertainment of them as think gaol is a mischief and a lark! We want none of your Penal Reformers, neither, being accustomed to go our own road and no complaint from any as bear hearing. There’s precious little accommodation for gentlefolk in Westgate, saving Your Honour, and none at all for fine ladies; but it is not for me to question the Magistrate, ha! ha!, the questions being all on the other side, seemingly.”

“We wish to speak with Sir Davie Myrrh,” Edward said, as tho’ this peroration had gone unheard and unheeded. “His solicitor—one Burbage, I believe—is lately arrived from Temple Bar?”

“He is that, and awaiting Your Honour’s pleasure,” Stoke returned. “I’ve only to send word to the Little Inn, and he’ll step round in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.”

“Then do so.”

The warden scraped a bow, and striding to his door, bellowed to one unseen, “Hie, there—you lummox Jack! Stir your shanks and fetch the Lunnon man for His Honour!”

I caught a glimpse of a wizened urchin in nankeen breeches scuttling along the stone passage, his pointed face set in a grimace; then Stoke heaved-to the door.

“My sister’s brat,” he said bitterly. “Seven-months’ child, and a trifle touched in his upper works.”

There being no possible reply, Edward and I turned our attention to the fire. It was smoking badly; and I began to wish that we might have conducted our interview with Sir Davie’s solicitor in the comfort of the Little Inn’s private parlour, with a trifling nuncheon laid out upon the board. But that would be to play into the solicitor’s hands—it was not his relation of events that we preferred, but his client’s. As Sir Davie could not go to the Little Inn, the Little Inn must come to Sir Davie.

At length our impatience was rewarded with the clang of the outer door’s bolts being once more thrown back, and a light tread audible upon the passage flags, and Mr. Burbage was revealed—as a tall and respectable figure in a driving cape and beaver hat. As I curtseyed to the fellow at Edward’s introduction, I suffered the tantalising impression that I had seen Mr. Burbage before—but could not summon the particulars of time or place.

“You wish to interview my client, Mr. Knight?” the solicitor enquired pleasantly. “I must warn you that the conversation is sure to be protracted, and to span the globe, Sir Davie being little disposed to concision in his affairs. He is a raconteur of considerable power, and has long defied even his friends’ attempts to curtail his speech.”

“A wonder, then, that he has remained silent the better part of two days,” Edward returned.

Mr. Burbage smiled engagingly. “I said that Sir Davie dearly loved a good story; I did not say that he was a fool. Naturally, having been placed in a cell, he preferred to hold his counsel until his Counsel should have arrived.”

“Then let us waste no more of Sir Davie’s time.”

A nod for the chief warden, and a massive iron ring of keys appeared; with a grunt, Stoke made for the door and Edward followed. I trotted in his wake, while Mr. Burbage brought up the rear; we were led deeper into the Westgate premises, which, tho’ not vast, so nearly resembled a warren of tunnels that I might have fancied myself in the dungeons of the Tower. Heavy doors with metal gratings set into their centres at chest-height, and then again below, at the threshold—presumably for the delivery of meals—lined the passages; and occasionally a visage would loom at one of these, unshaven and clothed in shadow, only the glittering eyes throwing back the lanthorn- light. It was, I reflected, an experience such as heroines of horrid novels should relish; and with quickening heart I absorbed the wretched atmosphere, as another lady might the candlelit glow of Almack’s Assembly. What fodder for prose was this!

At length Stoke halted before a cell like any other, and fitted one of his numerous keys to the lock. “Prisoner, stand back from the door!” he bellowed, and I suppose the violence of his timbre was enough to cause most intimates of Westgate to quail. But when the portal swung inwards, we observed Sir Davie Myrrh reclining at his leisure upon a hard wooden shelf that served as a bed, his arms behind his head and his gaze fixed upon the ceiling.

“Appeared at last, have you, Burbage?” he demanded languidly—for all the world as tho’ he received the solicitor in the anteroom of White’s or Watier’s. Try as I might, I could not reconcile the baronet’s appearance—for he still sported the tar-stained breeches, the ragged beard, and the neckerchief of a navvy—with his cultivated speech.

“Get up, you dog,” Stoke snarled; and for the first time, Mr. Burbage turned his eye upon him.

“Have a care, Warden,” he said in an icy tone. “There is no call for insolence or ill-treatment of the baronet.”

Again, I suffered the conviction that I had met Burbage somewhere before; but upon what occasion?

“That will do, Stoke,” Edward said. “Leave young Jack to wait in the passage; we shall inform him when our conversation is done.”

“Conversation, is it?” Stoke leered. “Seems to me as how a knave’s only got to ape the Quality to win the indulgence of the Law. But it’s not for me—”

“No. It is not for you to question the Magistrate,” Edward agreed firmly. “But you might bring several chairs—or even stools—to this cell, Stoke. Do you imagine that my sister wishes to stand for the length of the interview?”

The warden cast a jaundiced glance in my direction. I smiled upon him beatifically.