“Ah, you and your little papers, Miss Austen,” the housekeeper returned with a comfortable laugh. “Many's the time I've said to Russell, 'How accomplished all the young ladies are today, to be sure! There's that Miss Jane, always scribbling in her little books, what she sews together herself, and laughing to herself all the while.' There's no end of amusement for the young ladies, nowadays — and in your grandmamma's time, I daresay none of the fine misses even knew their letters!”
I merely inclined my head bashfully at this, and begged silent forgiveness of the dear departed Jane Leigh, late the wife of a Fellow of All Souls, Oxford, who had certainly known her letters — and followed Mrs. Salkeld into the stillroom.[46]
“Here is the ash-tub,” she said with a gesture towards a barrel in the corner. “We always keep a goodly supply, for the soap-making, as you'll see. I'm sure I cannot tell you, miss, where the ashes from the Yellow Room grate might be; and a deal of work you'll find it to sift the lot.”
“Perhaps I might employ a gardener's sieve,” I mused, with an eye to the girth and depth of the barrel.
“Then I shall call for the under-gardener,” Mrs. Salkeld said decisively, “that he might shift the barrel out-of-doors while he's about it, and save us all a good deal of mess. Do you wait a moment, miss, and I'll send Russell in search of the lad.”
I waited a moment — I waited several — and indeed, a quarter-hour had passed, during which the rain failed to dissipate, and the gloom of my task impressed itself forcibly on my mind.
“Are you sure you hadn't better wait for the weather to clear, miss?” Mrs. Salkeld enquired doubtfully, when she had returned from despatching Russell out into the wet.
“You are too good, my dear Mrs. Salkeld — but the anxiety I have caused myself in the destruction of these papers, may only be relieved by immediate activity. I shall take care to don a cloak and bonnet, you may be sure.”
“Lord, miss! You may certainly have the loan of mine, which are hanging right within the door.”
And so, promising to guard Mrs. Salkeld's property from a wanton besmirching, I met the under-gardener on the back terrace, and commenced my unwholesome task.
A QUANTITY OF ASH, AS ANY UPPER HOUSEMAID WILL own, is never a friend to order. Its feather-weight quality will incline it to rapid dispersal in a wind, while its powdery dirt invades every crevice and pore. On a fine day, my task should have been tiresome enough; but that same quantity of ash, turned sodden from the effects of rain, is positively loathsome. Shelter under the eaves of the house as I might, I was as grimy as a chimney sweep's monkey by the time a quarter-hour was out. What my elegant sister Lizzy should say, did she stumble upon me unawares, I shuddered to think; and if Miss Sharpe should venture from her bed—
Mrs. Salkeld had thoughtfully provided a second barrel, for the transference of the stuff, and a large garden trowel in addition to the sieve. My work was fairly rapid, as a result, and I had not progressed beyond a quarter of the barrel's depth when I began to detect a difference in the texture of the ash. Much of it had been of a soft, light-grey powder — the remains of the hickory logs Lizzy burned in her grate while she dressed for dinner, regardless of the season. But now I detected a coarser substance amidst the fine — several large flakes of stiff rag, scorched yellowish-black at their edges.
I dropped the trowel and removed my cotton gloves, already quite spoilt from the effects of the ash — bent down to lift the fragile scraps from their bed of powder— and laid them carefully to rest in the mesh sieve. Delicate work, with all the pressure of time; for Miss Sharpe might determine her migraine to be fled at any moment, and descend to the servants' wing in search of tea. I schooled myself to calm, and fingered my way through the ash for perhaps another quarter-hour, the rain beating soft as a kiss on Mrs. Salkeld's bonnet. Then, perceiving the ash to be once again of the sort that derived from logs alone — more of Lizzy's hickory, no doubt — I declared myself satisfied and carried the precious bits back into the stillroom.
“Mrs. Salkeld,” I called, “I have found success! Russell may retrieve the barrel at his convenience, and convey my thanks to the under-gardener.”
“I'll not be a moment, miss,” Mrs. Salkeld called to me comfortably from the kitchen passage, “once I've just sent this teapot up to poor Miss Sharpe. Rang for Daisy, she did, and another fire; the cold's that penetrating today, what with the rain.”
I left her muttering over the ways of governesses too fine to work for their bread, and smuggled my burden into the library. With the gentlemen gone, it should be quite deserted of life; for Lizzy would spend the better part of the day dressing in her boudoir, in respect of her condolence call at The Larches.
I am sorry to say that Miss Sharpe's letters divulged little to my plundering eyes. However incomplete the attempt at burning had been, the fragments were well-nigh indecipherable. The power of my own sight is indifferent at best, from the adverse effect of writing and sewing in every manner of light; and it was only through the adoption of my brother's quizzing glass — discarded near a pile of tradesmen's bills left lying on his desk— that I could discern anything at all. What emerged under the influence of a stronger lens was a smattering of letters, that trailed off disobligingly: affect? affection? or affable? — mise — chemise? promise? — and then, quite starkly, the entire word death.
I sat back on my heels abruptly at that, and considered. My affection for you, I promise, will endure unto death. That should fit Fanny's reading of the situation. Or perhaps it had said: Such an affable reception, in your white chemise — I am sure you caught your death! Or perhaps the fragments were drawn from separate letters, and together would make no sense whatsoever. In either case, the endeavour was hopeless. I had found just enough to tantalise, and too little to enlighten.
I examined the rest of the fragments in a desultory manner, conscious of an allusion that had escaped me. What was it? Affection? Promise? Nothing to do with those; they were words so debased by the traffic of every day, as to have lost any charge of meaning. Death, then — it must strike any reader dumb with its awful truth. And perhaps the word chemise.
Mrs. Grey, indeed, had found death in her chemise.
I shivered from a cold that owed nothing to the rain, and looked sharply once more at the fragments of paper.
The fractured words, it is true, could tell me little. But I had neglected to consider of the hand.
A firm hand, and yet light in its strokes, like the finest sort of engraving. There was the S, scrawled distinct in the —mise, like a sail unfurled on a t'gallant yard. I had seen this hand before, tho' only briefly. It was the distinctive sloping script of the Gentleman Improver, Julian Sothey.
Chapter 16
End of a Sporting Gentleman
24 August 1805, cont'd.
TOWARDS NOON MY BROTHERS RETURNED FROM THE Hoop & Griffin in Deal — travel-weary, drenched to the skin, and quite put out of humour.
Denys Collingforth's body had revealed nothing of the nature of his murderer, and far too much of the grisly manner of his demise. Henry, I understood from several delicate intimations of the Justice's, had been quite sick for a quarter-hour together, and could not be brought to look upon the corpse again; Neddie had only suffered it through the application of a handkerchief to the nose, and a stout brandy to the stomach.
The cords of the neck were severed quite through, my brother told me, and must have spattered the murderer's clothes in the cutting. Neddie had hired a team of local labourers to dredge the millpond whence the body was recovered, and scour the surrounding underbrush, in the faint hope of discovering the murderer's discarded clothing, which might yet bear a tailor's or a launderer's mark; but he held out very little hope of their discovery. A clever man, who had planned Collingforth's death, might as easily have carried a change of clothes, and burned the bloodied ones along the way. Or he might simply have disguised his sins with a voluminous driving cape until achieving the sprawl of London. There any amount of refuse might be discarded undetected.