sad love affair with a Creole girl of passable birth but little fortune—the unfeeling nature of his father’s overseer—a falling out with the fellow over the course of his apprenticeship—Sir Davie’s determination to take to the sea once more—his flight, by night, to a merchant ship weighing anchor with the tide in Freetown Harbour—the years of travel that succeeded: rounding the Cape; his first sight of Alta California; assays in the Arctic; his first glimpse of Macao—and at last, when he was three-and-twenty years old, and had been absent from England some seven years, the news, received two months after the fact by letter delivered by H.M.S.
“I made for home immediately, of course, by constant exchange of ships, arriving some seven weeks after the receipt of the letter and posting as swiftly as I could to Kildane. A few days sufficed to put me in possession of the facts of my existence; I claimed a comfortable fortune, a house of the first stare, and an easy footing among the Great. My father’s steward—now my own—displayed excellent management of Kildane’s affairs, but impressed upon me my duty to marry. I looked about the Marriage Mart once the Season was launched, and was so fortunate as to engage the affections of a reasonably-dowered and not ill-favoured female, the aforementioned Mary, with whom I lived barely a twelvemonth before she died in childbirth, and my son with her.”
“I thought you said her name was Anne,” I objected, frowning slightly.
“Anne? Mary? Elizabeth? They are all much of a muchness, are they not? But perhaps you are right. Undoubtedly my late wife’s name was Anne.”
“You have my deepest sympathy,” Edward said, less drily than Sir Davie’s caprice should have urged; for he, too, had lost a wife in childbirth.
But Sir Davie waved an airy hand. “I underwent a curious change as Anne’s dust was interred in the Kildane vault. I may almost describe it as a
“No doubt,” Edward said. “And if your present confinement in gaol cannot spur inclination, it shall at least provide opportunity. I will furnish pen and paper should you require it.”
“You are very good, sir,” Mr. Burbage said, with a quirk of his lips, “and your patience defies belief. Sir Davie, if you might turn at last to your acquaintance with Mr. Curzon Fiske—”
“Ah! Poor Curzon!” Sir Davie mourned. He gave up strolling and settled down upon his wooden bed. “Was there ever a fellow possessed of more engaging address? Or fewer morals? Have you noted, during the course of your life, Mr. Knight, how often the two coincide?”
“You met him, I collect, in Ceylon.”
“There you would be out,” the seaman returned with unruffled calm. “We met in Bangalore, in the midst of a decidedly heated dispute between the local maharajah and the Honourable East India Company. Shots were exchanged. Heads rolled. A particular fort, as I recall, was beseiged. Fiske and I encountered one another when the subsequent looting had reached a fevered pitch, and both of us attempted to secure the same cask of jewels. Fiske sought the pistol thrust into his belt, but I was before him—and contrived to render him insensible with a blow to the head.”
Edward, at this juncture, rubbed in desperation at his temples.
“And the jewels?” I enquired.
“Proved to be nothing more than a lady’s collection of valueless baubles,” Sir Davie concluded sadly. “At which discovery, I tossed them over my shoulder for the next benighted fool to covet, and did my best to drag Fiske out of the melee. It seemed the least I could do for a fellow Englishman. By the time he came to himself, we were beyond the fortress walls and I was able to apologise most civilly for the trouble I had caused. In return, he generously invited me to join him on an expedition to Ceylon—in which legitimate business he had been engaged by the Company, before the regrettable affair at Bangalore had diverted him.”
“But I thought you said
“And so he did! —A good two years since, perhaps less, when malaria swept through the lowlands, he saw me carried, by mule-drawn pallet, into the more salubrious air of the tea plantations. These are found amidst the Ceylonese hills, you know, and at that altitude, the mortal humours are dispersed, and the fever’s hold gradually abates. There is a hill-station there, frequented by Portuguese monks, who are adept at treating the illness; they offer a sort of tonic, steeped from bark, that is most effective. Certainly, my dear Mr. Knight, I should have died in the lowlands but for Fiske’s intervention.”
“Two years, perhaps less,” Edward mused. “Fiske’s people received word of his death not long after—by an epidemic fever in Ceylon. How came that error to be made?”
The baronet shrugged. “Having some little knowledge of Fiske’s character—his secretive mind, his deft manipulation of apparent facts—I should imagine he
“But why?” Edward demanded, in some perplexity.
“I gather that the name of
“And yet, he saw fit to return to England?”
“His plans were not then fixed, his chief object being to depart Ceylon without further detection—or pursuit. As he had so kindly deferred his flight to see me carried into the Highlands, I felt it incumbent upon me to demonstrate an equal measure of civility—and begged to accompany him when he should eventually quit the place. A month later, when I was fully recovered, we made by sea for Goa, a Portuguese canton on the western coast of the Subcontinent. The monks very kindly pressed upon us letters of introduction and safe-passage. Ah! The ladies of Goa! Such sublimity of eye, such softness of skin! And such an art in their fingers! —Begging your pardon, Miss Austen.”
“Not at all,” I said politely.
“None of this gets us any nearer Chilham Castle,” Edward observed, with a jaundiced eye for Mr. Burbage.
“Sir Davie,” the solicitor prodded, “the hour is advancing. If you would be so good—”
“Yes, yes,” the baronet said with an irritable flutter of his hand. “We spent a delightful interval in Goa, Fiske and I. It is an entrepot of trading, you know, and Fiske contrived to exchange a quantity of rubies he had collected somewhere—Burma, I believe, but the expedition was before my acquaintance with him—for a considerable sum of gold, which he had sewn into his coat. It was thus he carried his fortune back to England, and one presumes—to Canterbury itself.”
“His coat,” Edward repeated, in a tone of stupefaction. “But—”
“You did not consider of the lining of his coat?” Sir Davie enquired with an air of melancholy. “It is ever the same, among those who spend a lifetime without venturing beyond the shores of England; I daresay you expected his funds to sit in Hoare’s bank, and have buried the poor fellow with his fortune! Once word has got out—through no agency of
“It was.”
“I should think you will have every fortune-seeker in three counties bent upon exhuming his remains,” the baronet said idly.
“Good God!” Edward rose precipitately from his chair and began to turn about the small confines of the cell. “Impossible! The corpse was disrobed, and washed, before burial. Some one of the goodwives who performed the service must undoubtedly have felt the weight of such a fortune, in taking charge of the clothing!”
“Perhaps the wench robbed him, then,” the baronet returned. “Who can say?”