“You noticed nothing untoward, sir, in your way back to Sherborne St. John?” Mr. Prowting asked keenly. “No mill in the roadway, as I believe these affairs are called among the sporting set?”
“My road did not lie in the direction of the pond, if indeed the poor man met his death in that place,” Thrace explained. “I set off at a canter in the direction of Alton, and thence towards Basingstoke, and achieved Stonings by three o’clock in the morning — my hunter, Rob Roy, being a devil to go, begging the ladies’ pardon.”
Ann Prowting here exclaimed at the beauty of Mr. Thrace’s horse, and the conversation turned more generally to the hunting field, and Mr. Chute’s mastery of the Vyne, and the particularities of certain hounds the gentlemen had known; and my attention might have wandered, but for Mr. Thrace’s enjoyment of general conversation, and his tendency to bring the attention of the whole table back to himself. Had I not observed the easiness of his manners, and the general air of modesty that attended his speech, I might have adjudged him a coxcomb, and despised him at my leisure. As it was, I merely wondered at his reverting so often to the unfortunate end of Shafto French. It is quite rare in my experience for a gentleman to concern himself with the murder of a labourer — unless, of course, he harbours some sort of guilty knowledge, or hopes to expose the same in another. I determined to make a study of Mr. Thrace, and refused a third glass of claret that my mind might be clear. Over the second course, a pleasurable affair of some twelve dishes, the Bond Street Beau related a roguish tale, full of incident and melodrama, concerning a necklace of rubies stolen by a British officer at the Battle of Chandernagar; a necklace of such fabled import, that it was said to have once graced the neck of Madame de Pompadour, and to be worth all of two hundred thousand pounds.[16]
“I am certain the stolen jewels are to blame for that unfortunate man’s death in your cottage, Miss Austen,” affirmed he with a gleam in his eye. “I might have offered the story to the coroner yesterday morning, but from a fear of putting myself forward in such a delicate proceeding.”
These words could not fail to alert Mr. Prowting’s attention; the magistrate was suddenly all interest. “Say your piece, man,” he instructed from his position opposite Henry. “If you know something that bears on the murder, you must disclose it to the Law!”
“Well—” Aware that the notice of the entire table was united in his person, Mr. Thrace inclined his head towards Lady Imogen. “I had the tale from your father, the Earl — who spent some years out in India as a young man, and heard the story at its source. It seems that a fabulous necklace was stolen at sabre point from one of the gallant French defenders so routed by Clive in that illustrious battle, which occurred in the last century, I believe.”
“Clive took Chandernagar from the French in 1757,” Major Spence supplied. “The battle secured Bengal for the English.”
“Exactly so,” Thrace returned. “The story, as the Earl told it to me, is that an English Lieutenant seized the fabled gems from a French defender at the fort’s capitulation, and brought them to England after much intrigue and bloodshed. They were later lost on the road — somewhere near Chawton, if you will credit it.”
Mrs. Prowting emitted a faint scream, one plump hand over her mouth, the other clutching her handkerchief.
“It is said,” Thrace further observed, “that, hounded across land and sea unceasingly by Indian pursuers of a most deadly and subtle kind, the Lieutenant landed in Southampton and made his way by feverish degrees towards London. Coming to St. Nicholas’s Church” — this, with a bow for Mr. Papillon, Chawton’s clergyman, who was seated at the bottom of the table — “he sought refuge in the sanctuary, where the Hindu fakirs, being unmoved by Christian belief, wounded him severely. In Chawton the trail of the purloined rubies comes to an abrupt end.”
“Are you thuggethting, thir, that thith thimple village ith in the unwitting pothethion of the Thpoilth of War?” enquired Miss Hinton. It was the first remark I had heard her to address to the upper end of the table; and I applauded its natural sense. She was not to be taken in by a spurious fribble, a Pink of the Ton; hers was a sober countenance, suggestive of a lady much given to reading sermons, and making Utheful Extracth. Mr. Thrace, his eyes on Catherine Prowting’s glowing countenance, slowly crumbled a piece of bread between his fingers.
“The necklace was believed to be cursed — not simply from the manner of its possession, but from a flaw inherent in the stones themselves. Rubies, so like to blood, must draw blood to them; and so it proved in this case. The Rubies of Chandernagar destroyed each of their successive masters.”
“For what doth it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and loothe hith Immortal Thoul?” observed Miss Hinton with complacency.
“I had not heard this story of my father,” Lady Imogen imposed, “tho’ I know him to have moved in a very rakehell set while in India. Chandernagar, however, was some thirty years before his time on the Subcontinent.”
“I believe the story has achieved a permanent place in the Indian firmament,” Thrace said, “due to its bloodthirstiness. No doubt your respected father learned it of an eyewitness.”
“But surely the marauding Lieutenant was a man of parts?”
Lady Imogen objected. “What are a whole company of Hindu against one hardened English soldier? Major Spence, for example, should never be parted from his treasure so easily!”
Her liquid eyes were dark with excitement, her voice throbbing and low. I observed that while her gaze was fixed on Julian Thrace, Major Spence was observing her; as he did so, an expression of pain crossed his countenance.
“The Lieutenant who seized them, to the ruin of their French owner, had his throat cut while he lay in that very inn which you, ma’am”—this, with a gracious acknowledgement of my mother—“have now the happy fortune to inhabit,” Thrace continued. “The wounded man dragged himself to the publick house, wounded and bleeding, seeking refuge from his pursuers. His body was discovered on the morning following — but of the rubies no trace was ever found.”
“Perhaps this is the root of the cottage’s ill-fortune,” Mr. Hinton observed languidly. “If your story is true, Thrace, the digger of the cesspit was not the first corpse to lie there. I daresay it was the necklace that good-for-nothing ruffian French was searching for, in the depths of Mrs. Austen’s cellar.”
“But it will not do, man!” Mr. Prowting exclaimed, and threw down his napkin. “Shafto French was drowned, as the coroner has said. He cannot both have been treasure-hunting in the cottage cellar, and breathing his last in Chawton Pond!”
A slightly shocked silence followed this outburst; one which the clergyman Mr. Papillon had the grace to end.
“But in the case of the Earl’s Indian story,” he observed with a correct smile, as though improving an archbishop’s views on Ordination, “nothing is clearer. Naturally the rubies were not to be discovered. The thieving Lieutenant gave up his booty with his life, and his murderer lived ever after on the proceeds.”
“One should suppose no such thing,” Mr. Thrace retorted, “it being attested by those who study these matters, that the stones never afterwards came onto the market. What sort of thief makes away with a considerable prize, and does not attempt to profit by it? No, no, my dear sir — the Rubies of Chandernagar are in one of two places: either hidden beneath the stones of your own St. Nicholas’s crypt, where the errant Lieutenant — already fearing for his life — placed them before receiving his deadly wound; or concealed still about the grounds of the late inn.”
16
The Battle of Chandernagar refers to the English East India Company’s assault, under the direction of Robert Clive, of the French Compagnie des Indes Fort d’Orléans in Chandernagar, India, in 1757. At the cost of significant casualties among Royal Navy troops brought in to fight against the French, the British decisively established control of Bengal for commercial trading.