Jane and the Canterbury Tale

leaving you with such a tangle on your hands, Mr. Knight, having been a party to the cause of it. That should be a shirking of responsibility no gentleman worthy of the name would entertain. We shall be grateful for the nuncheon, but our first object must be to ascertain whether Miss Knight is entirely recovered from her shock of this morning —which, in the event, must have been considerable.”

“Oh, Fanny’s all right,” Finch-Hatton drawled. “I’d go bail she’d stand buff against anything—capital little body, Fanny! But if we must stay here, we might have a neatish game of billiards, by the by. You don’t object to ale in the billiard room, sir, surely?”

“Not unless you’re prone to spill it,” Edward returned brusquely. “Mrs. Driver has enough mess on her hands this morning.”

Finch-Hatton had been lounging in the doorway again—it seemed the only possible attitude that young man could adopt. Now he thrust himself away from it with such an air of insouciance that the dead stranger might have been so much trussed game. What was it about Jupiter that drove all the young ladies of the neighbourhood to tears of ecstasy whenever he came in their way? The blond hair, unruly over the chiseled brow? The full lips, given to the most sardonic of twists? The powerful figure of a sportsman? —Or exactly this attitude of immense boredom towards the world and everyone in it? I suppose it might be considered something, for a young lady to excite so weary a fellow’s notice; but for my part, the conquest seemed not worth the prize.

“George.” Edward nodded peremptorily in the direction of the door, and the gentlemen trouped out of the scullery without another word.

“Young Finch-Hatton is growing positively insolent,” Mr. Moore observed. His nostrils were compressed as tho’ insolence bore as strong an odour as the stables. “I wonder his papa does not check him. But, then, as I suppose it is possible he will be called an earl one day—perhaps the cultivation of arrogance is permissible.”

“An earl?” I repeated. Fanny had said nothing of this; Mr. Finch-Hatton’s prospects had thus far entailed nothing more than the inheritance of Eastwell Park, a rather ugly modern house some seven miles distant.

Mr. Moore shrugged. “It is unlikely, of course—but Finch-Hatton stands to inherit the title if the present Earl of Winchilsea fails to produce an heir. His cousin’s estate is so entailed[2]. You may imagine how this increases his appeal among the damsels of the neighbourhood. My excellent wife has condescended to remark upon it.”

“Enough of Jupiter,” Edward said. “You have heard something of our sad mishap, I collect?”

“And of its cause,” Mr. Moore replied heavily. “On how many occasions have I observed the total want of care and reverence so essential to the employment of firearms, among the youth of our acquaintance! I suppose we must give thanks that it was not one of our own young gentlemen who suffered the fatal tragedy; but that any should be compelled to offer up his life, in the cause of another man’s mere sport—”

There it was, the inevitable stricture—but Edward cut off his old friend with one raised hand. “This fellow did not die of a fowling piece,” he said quietly. “Step closer, and observe the wound.”

As I expected, Edward had seen all that I had seen: the stiffness of the limbs, unnatural in one only lately killed; the way the blood had seeped entirely into the ground in the hours before the body was discovered by Bessy the spaniel, so that Mr. Plumptre’s coat was not even stained when we knelt upon it; the deathly cold of the unfortunate man’s skin; the coagulation of fluids around the wound; and the wound itself—which was formed of a single, neat hole in the left breast, undoubtedly through the heart.

“There are even the marks of powder on the man’s coat,” I observed distantly, “as tho’ his assailant stood quite near him when the pistol was fired. A sort of Judas kiss, in fact.”

“Pistol?” Mr. Moore glanced at me in consternation; I must presume that ladies were not permitted to display a broader knowledge of the world than was seemly, when in the presence of the late Archbishop’s son. “Are you suggesting he was already dead when those young fools fired upon him?”

“They did not fire upon him,” Edward declared. “They fired upon a covey of pheasant—and bagged five birds. I shall make a thorough examination of the fowling pieces, and await Dr. Bredloe’s expert opinion, naturally—but I should think this man has been dead for hours. Would not you agree, Jane?”

“Entirely. I should be interested to learn the doctor’s opinion as to the approximate hour of death, however— the night air in autumn is chill, but the ground still retains some warmth; that variance must affect the degree of stiffening we have observed.”

“Good God!” Mr. Moore exclaimed, with all the outrage of a man confounded by a female’s brazen disregard for decorum; “are you actually suggesting that this man was … was …”

“Murdered? I am, sir.”

The clergyman shot me one appalled glance, then strode quickly towards the body.

There was a brief silence, punctuated by Mr. Moore’s shallow breathing; Edward raised one amused eyebrow in my direction, and shrugged slightly. Then the clergyman said, in a voice quite raw with suppressed emotion, “You have summoned Bredloe? He is even now making for Godmersham?”

“I hope so, indeed.”

Mr. Moore swung around and stared at Edward, his pallor ghastly. “Idiot! You had better have thrown the corpse in the Stour, and allowed some other to find it!”

“What wild talking is this?” Edward exclaimed, astonished.

“You do understand that this is no pilgrim lying dead in your house? You apprehend the disaster that is about to break about all our heads?”

I stared at my brother in bewilderment, and read an equal incomprehension in his countenance.

“What can you possibly mean, sir?” I attempted.

Mr. Moore swept his hands wide in a gesture of despair; out of habit, perhaps, they formed a benediction over the dead man’s chest. “You see before you the corpse of a prodigal son returned—and at how ill an hour. I do not know what may be said to Adelaide. Or how the intelligence is to be conveyed to her. When she learns—”

“You would refer to Mrs. MacCallister?” I asked.

“I would.” But Mr. Moore was not attending to me; his gaze was all for Edward—the First Magistrate of Canterbury. “This man is none other than Curzon Fiske, whom his wife believed dead long since.”

“—And on the strength of that belief,” my brother said slowly, “was yesterday married to another.”

We were none of us required to utter the hateful word bigamy aloud; it jangled unspoken in all our minds.

Chapter Five A Pact of Silence

Success—as clerics say, all things have their time—

Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Merchant’s Tale”

21 October 1813, Cont.

“By all that’s holy,” Edward said softly as he studied the corpse’s features, “you have the right of it, Moore. Curzon Fiske! The beard and whiskers deceived me—not to mention the humble mode of dress and the excessive tanning of the skin, which should not be unnatural in one only lately returned from the Indies. I should never have known him, however, but for your better knowledge of the man.”

Mr. Moore visibly recoiled. “We were acquainted well enough when we were boys, to be sure,” he said. “I do not think there is more than a twelvemonth’s difference in our ages, indeed, and our fathers were friends of long standing. But in later years, our ways lay much apart.”