Jane and the Canterbury Tale

wished to see—But, Aunt Jane, you must attend! There has been a man found in our meadow.”

“A man?”

She grasped my elbow as tho’ I might require support.

“He is lying on the old Pilgrim’s Way. Quite dead.”

The Pilgrim’s Way ran, as it had since Chaucer’s time, along the Downs to the north of Godmersham, and divided Edward’s land from that of his neighbour, the same Mr. Wildman of Chilham Castle; indeed, it ran straight towards St. Mary’s Church in the little village of Chilham, where Mr. Tylden had united the MacCallisters only last evening. In other words—it ran behind Edward’s house, whereas Fanny had come from the direction of the lane in front, which ran just beyond the river—quite the opposite end of Edward’s acres.

“I do not understand you,” I protested. “The Pilgrim’s Way is on high ground to the north!”

“Yes, yes,” she said hurriedly, “but you must know there is a side-path, often used by those who know of our church, that runs from the Downs, skirts the house, and comes out into the lane. I do not think it is above a mile from the true Pilgrim’s Way; and Papa does not mind those who employ the bridge for the purpose of visiting St. Lawrence’s, for Mamma’s grave is there, and he likes to think of more than just ourselves visiting the church. When I was little, Mamma used to say that grass never grew on the Pilgrim’s side-path, because so many pious feet had trod it.”

I suspected grass never grew there from a dearth of sunlight, but forebore to utter so acid a remark. “I see. And now there is a man lying there?”

“Indeed,” my niece hurried on, “and I suppose he might be a pilgrim in earnest, from the look of him.”

“Not one of our neighbours, then, thank Heaven?”

She shook her head. “A tradesman, I should judge, in a stout travelling cloak, with a leather satchel lying a little off the path, beside a walking stick. He must have dropped them as he fell.”

I turned resolutely towards the river and the ancient Pilgrim’s Way. “How did he die, Fanny?”

“Shot through the heart, John Plumptre says.”

I stopped short and stared at her in dismay. I will confess that I had been perfectly content to think nothing of corpses and death during my visit to Kent; it was not the sort of country for melancholy. Weddings suited the general animation of the neighbourhood far better.

“Bessy, Mr. Plumptre’s spaniel, set up a baying over the body—”

Fanny’s voice wavered as she offered this inconsequential information; in all her haste to report the news she had forgot, for a little, to be tender-hearted. “Oh Aunt—I think Mr. Plumptre is afraid that one of us killed him! Quite by mistake, of course—having aimed for a pheasant.”

Fanny, I could see, feared this, too: That one of her brothers or friends had taken an innocent pilgrim’s life as carelessly as he might a bird’s.

“I must go in search of my father,” she said more steadily. “You will forgive me, Aunt—he must be informed.”

“Of course.”

Among his various duties and honours as a man of consequence in Canterbury, Edward counted the office of First Magistrate. A surgeon being now useless, my brother was the next person who ought to be summoned.

Fanny was off again at a run for the house, her hand pressed against her stays, which must be cruelly impeding her lungs. Edward would still be closeted with his valet, unaware of the signal burden about to befall him. There would be the coroner to rouse, the jury to empanel. An inquest held in some publick house in Canterbury. An attempt to ascertain the unfortunate man’s identity, and convey the dreadful news to his relicts—

And one of our own young men to console, for having murdered a man all unwittingly. I sent up a hurried prayer that which fowling piece had fired the fatal shot, should never be ascertained—and kicked savagely at a pebble as I mounted the old stone bridge.

The River Stour chuckled below, but the happy dream that had been my sojourn in Kent was suddenly all to pieces.

Chapter Three The Unexpected Hessians

… Fortune had once

Been his friend, for a time, and then his foe.

No man can ever expect her favor to last.…

Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Monk’s Tale”

21 October 1813, Cont.

The gentlemen lounged in an uneasy group, restraining their dogs, near the publick footpath. The beaters— two fellows employed by Edward’s gamekeeper—sat cross-legged in the dirt near a pair of canvas bags whose humped shapes suggested the hunting had already been well advanced when the fatal accident occurred. The spaniels’ tongues were lolling cheerfully from their mouths, as tho’ a human corpse were not so very different, after all, from one with feathers; they leaned happily against the legs of their masters, who were unwontedly silent when they ought to have been chaffing each other.

The corpse itself was sprawled across the Pilgrim’s Way, an inert figure clad in browns and greens that must have been indistinguishable from the autumnal verdure; small wonder neither beater nor hunter had noticed the fellow. The man’s utter stillness, coupled with the blood-stained earth all around him, had thrown a pall over the shooting-party.

The scene might have been an engraving by Cruikshank: Mishap of a Sporting Nature, Or, the Wrong Bird Bagged.

There was John Plumptre, his serious dark eyes holding an expression of trouble and a faint line of apprehension on his brow; glorious Jupiter Finch-Hatton, whose posture as he leaned against an oak suggested a fashionable malaise I suspected he was far from feeling; James Wildman, who started forward upon perceiving me, as tho’ determined to offer a lady every civility regardless of chaotic circumstance; and my own nephews George and Edward. Their frank looks of dread recalled countless episodes of schoolboy mischief gone terribly awry: arms broken whilst tree-climbing, window panes smashed with cricket balls poorly batted, and dolls’ heads severed by makeshift guillotines. They were blenching at the prospect of their father’s inevitable lecture, on the thoughtlessness of young men wild for sport.

“Aunt Jane,” Edward said nervously—he is but nineteen, tho’ he affects an attitude of someone far more up to snuff, as must be expected of The Heir—“You have met with Fanny, I conclude.”

“Yes, Edward, I have. She is gone for your father. May I see the poor fellow?”

“Do you truly wish—that is to say, I should have thought—a spectacle not for the frailer sex—” This, from Mr. Wildman, who being the eldest at five-and-twenty, appeared to regard himself as the minder of his fellows.

I smiled at him rather as one of his old governesses might. “Pray do not make yourself anxious, Mr. Wildman. I am quite accustomed to death. My father was a clergyman, you know.”

“Ah,” he said, and looked slightly mortified.

I walked resolutely towards the corpse, the gentlemen heeling their dogs a discreet distance from my skirts, and made as if to kneel down beside the Deceased. I was forestalled by John Plumptre, who flung his shooting coat—a high-collared affair of drab that just brushed his ankles as he strode through the fields—down upon the ground. “The blood,” he said briefly. “It has soaked into the earth.”

I nodded my thanks, and knelt carefully on the coat.