“Yes. I watched those at the rail.”
“Your wife did not accompany you this morning?”
“Mrs. Collingforth is indisposed. And with Everett up from Town—”
“I see. And so you insist that there was no one within the chaise when this lady observed Mrs. Grey to enter it?”
“I tell you, Austen, I never returned to the coach until the moment I pulled open this door!” The desperate man glanced with revulsion at Mrs. Grey's rigid countenance. She lay, partly covered with a borrowed shawl, a few feet from my brother, as tho' resting under his protection. “Can not you fetch a surgeon, and close the woman's eyes? How she stares at us all! 'Tis hardly decent!”
“Is there a surgeon present?” Neddie called harshly over the ring of faces.
Muttering, and a jostling to the rear; then a short, round-faced man with a bald pate appeared, bowing to left and right. “Tobias Wood,” he said, “at your service, Mr. Justice, sir.”
“Very well, Mr. Wood. We shall require your assistance by and by, in removing the corpse to Canterbury. Perhaps for the present, it would suffice to close her eyes.”
This Mr. Wood did, with a gentleness of purpose that must relieve the hearts of many.
“Madam,” my brother said to his wife with punctilious courtesy, “you have said that you observed Mrs. Grey to enter Mr. Collingforth's chaise just before the final heat. That would be—” He consulted his watch, and glanced at Henry.
“—sometime before two o'clock,” Henry supplied. “I recollect the hour, because it was the Commodore's last race.”
“I should put Mrs. Grey's approach to the carriage rather closer to half-past one,” Lizzy said clearly. “But you know it makes no odds, Neddie, because Mrs. Grey was certainly alive when the heat was run. We all saw her riding her black at the head of the pack, and afterwards she drove her phaeton out of the grounds. I merely raised the point because Mr. Collingforth seems to have forgot the earlier visit.”
“I know nothing of any visit!” he shouted; and a vein in his neck pulsed dangerously. One of his captors lost his grip on the man, and Lizzy stepped backwards as the right arm swung free.
“I perfectly apprehend your reasons for raising the point,” Neddie said politely to his wife, as tho' he presided over a ruling in a parlour game. “Did Mrs. Grey knock upon the chaise's door?”
“She did. It opened immediately to admit her.”
“So there was someone within?”
“I must assume so. I did not glimpse the face.”
“Miss Austen?” Neddie enquired formally of me.
I shook my head in the negative.
“Mr. Collingforth,” he continued, “what of the boy you engaged to stand watch over the carriage?”
“Ran off to spend his coin, I must suppose. Such things have occurred before.”
“Will the young man engaged by Mr. Collingforth come forward now and tell his story?” Neddie cried.
This time, there was no movement to the rear of the crowd. Neddie repeated his words, to no avail; and Collingforth looked blackly at his friend Everett. The latter's countenance was as contemptuous as before.
Neddie mopped his reddening brow with a square of lawn and turned once more to the unfortunate gentleman. “Can you offer any explanation for Mrs. Grey's visit to your carriage, Collingforth?”
“I cannot. And as your good lady says, Mr. Justice, it makes no odds. The jade lived to win her race, and carry her plate from the field. How she came to end up here, and in such a state, I cannot say. But I suggest you enquire of the parson, Mr. Bridges, and his fine military friend. Ask them why they might have wanted the French trollop dead, and I'm sure you'll hear an earful.”
Beside me, Lizzy's fingers clenched about the pearl handle of her parasol, and her green eyes drifted languidly over the assembled faces. Searching for her brother, perhaps, with the barest hint of anxiety.
“You have a marked proclivity for abuse, Collingforth, that you would do well to suppress,” Neddie said warningly. “The lady is Mrs. Grey, whatever your opinion of her; and I would request that you show some respect of the dead.”
Collingforth shot a look full of hatred at the corpse, and I shuddered to observe it. However Mrs. Grey had charmed the gentlemen of Kent, this one had not been among their number.
“Did you invite her to the chaise, Collingforth, and fail to keep your appointment?”
“I did nothing of the kind. I'm a respectable married man.”
Someone in the crowd guffawed loudly, and Collingforth cast a bloodshot gaze over the assembled faces. “I'll demand satisfaction of the next man who offers disrespect.”
“What about Mrs. Grey?” someone called. “You call what you did to her Respect? Where's her habit, Collingforth? You keep it to give to your wife?”
“Silence!” Neddie shouted, in a tone I had never before heard him employ. “I require a fast horse and rider for Canterbury! There's a gold sovereign for the lad who makes the journey in under an hour!”
“I'm your man,” cried a fellow in a nankeen coat; one of the stable boys, no doubt.
“Ride like the wind to the constabulary,” Neddie instructed him, “and send back a party of men. We will require any number. Where is Mrs. Grey's groom or tyger?”
“Mrs. Grey's tyger!” The cry went up, and was repeated through the swelling ranks; and after an interval, the boy with the bent back was rousted from the stable-yard, with the Greys' jockey in tow.
The tyger stopped short at the sight of his mistress, and gave a strangled cry. Then he looked blindly about the ring of men, his fists clenched; saw Collingforth still pinioned; and rushed at him, flailing and pummelling. “Why'd you want to do it, you coward? Why'd you want to go and kill 'er for? She wanted none o' your kind! You couldn't leave 'er in peace!”
Neddie grasped the boy's shoulders and pulled him away. “What is your name, boy?”
“Tom,” he said. “Tom Jenkins.”
“Why did your mistress leave you behind?”
“She asked me to walk La Fleche back home. Crandall, 'ere, was to walk the filly.”
Very white about the lips, the jockey touched his cap.
“La Fleche?” Neddie enquired.
“The black 'un, what she rode in the heat.”
“I see. And what road did she intend to take?”
“Why, the road to Wingham, o' course. The Larches lies just this side o' Wingham.”
Neddie glanced around him. “Henry! Have you a fresh horse?”
“Of course.” My brothers had gone mounted to the race grounds well before our party in the barouche, being eager to see the Commodore into his stall, and survey the course. We had joined them some hours later.
“Then set out immediately along the Wingham road. Mrs. Grey's phaeton must be found, and secured from injury. Ten to one it has been stolen—” He stopped, perplexed. The unspoken question hovered in the air: How had Mrs. Grey come to lie in Collingforth's chaise, quite devoid of her scarlet habit, when we had all observed her to drive out of the grounds a half-hour before? And if she had met with mishap along the road, and her phaeton been stolen — why was her body not lying beneath a hedgerow?
“I shall send a constable towards Wingham immediately I have one,” Neddie continued, “but until he arrives, Henry, I beg of you, do not stir from The Larches. If you happen upon the phaeton by some lucky chance, remain with it until the constable appears. Now, Tom!”
“Yes, sir?” The tyger dashed away his tears and endeavoured to stand the straighten
“Is the black horse in any state for ajog?”
“As fresh as tho' he never was out, sir.”
“Very well. You and your colleague — Crandall, is it? — shall bear Mr. Austen company along the Wingham road. If the phaeton is discovered, leave Mr. Austen in custody and proceed to The Larches. Inform the household of what has befallen your mistress. Is that clear?”