The varied experiences of the past several years have opened a new world entire to my understanding; I have endured and survived encounters with a most unscrupulous body of men, without loss of dignity or a very great diminution of reputation; and I could not but be aware now that Neddie's role in the present drama must afford me a greater knowledge of the particulars, than I had heretofore been able to command. It is not that I am prone to a morbid curiosity, or find enchantment and delight in the manifestation of evil, but rather that the power of laying plain a convoluted puzzle — to the greater good of some unfortunate, and the generalised comfort of Society — must have its very great satisfaction. I have not yet learned to despise my curiosity, for all my mother's anxious urging, or the perils of dubious association it brings inevitably in its train. It has been my privilege (tho' some would call it misfortune) to have the unravelling of a few very tiresome knots in the recent past; and in the present instance of Neddie's need, my talents might prove of use.
“What are we to do, Jane?” Lizzy whispered, “for we should not prolong Fanny's exposure to such a dreadful scene. And yet Neddie—”
“—must remain,” I agreed. “A Justice is required to think of others before his family.”
“But, Mamma, how very odd she looks, to be sure!” Fanny stared fascinated at the spectacle near the coach, now virtually obscured by a crowd of the curious. Another instant, and she had mounted to her favourite perch on the box next to Pratt, with the object of gaining a better view.
“Come down at once, Miss Fanny!” Anne Sharpe exclaimed, and took a decided grip on her charge's ankles.
“Perhaps Miss Sharpe and Fanny might pay a visit to the stables,” I murmured to Lizzy. “It is not above five minutes' walk, and they could enquire after the Commodore. That should divert Fanny's interest.”
Lizzy shook her head decisively. “An admirable notion, Jane, but for the murderer we have loose in the grounds!”
“Murderer?” Fanny slid abruptly back into her seat. “But is Mrs. Grey murdered then, Mamma?”
Lizzy gathered her eldest into her arms. “I fear that the lady is dead, my Fanny, but how she came to be so, I cannot say. I should not have spoken until Papa had come to us. Depend upon it, your father shall very soon apprehend the whole.”
Fanny's eyes might widen at this speech, and her breath come short; but to her credit, the child evinced a tolerable composure. She neither shrieked, nor fell insensible, nor shuddered as with a dreadful presentiment (as might betray an enthusiast of horrid novels), but turned her soft blue eyes upon her governess and said, “Poor Sharpie. I know you have not the stomach for such things — you were taken quite ill when Caky killed a rat once in the nursery.[9] But then, it did squeal most horribly under the poker and tongs, and you are a little goose, are you not?” She patted Miss Sharpe's hand. “I cannot think that Mrs. Grey, however dead, was the sort to squeal. And do consider, Sharpie, that my father must presently relieve our fears.”
Miss Sharpe kissed Fanny's flushed cheek, and very sensibly produced her chapbook, a serviceable volume in which she has been collecting riddles throughout the summer. The scheme was devised entirely for Fanny's amusement; and in a very litde while the two were lost in a familiar exchange, and the danger of hysterics was safely past.
A cicada's trill burst wildly from the copse at the meeting-grounds' fringe — a sudden, sharp keening — and the heat, at the moment, was as oppressive as a lap robe.
“Pray look after the child, Miss Sharpe,” Lizzy said abruptly. “Jane and I must speak to Mr. Austen.” And with a word to one of the liveried footmen, who had been staring impassively into the middle distance all this while, she was assisted out of the barouche. Immediately I followed.
A knot of men, high-born and low, had gathered tightly around my brothers and the Collingforth chaise. With a tap of her parasol on a broad shoulder, Lizzy won her way to the centre, where Denys Collingforth was held firmly in the grip of two of his neighbours.
“I tell you, I know nothing!” he spat out. “The jade would no more speak to me this morning than she'd look at a cur in the mud. Too fine for Denys Colling-forth, and not above saying it to the world. I never came near her, nor she near me!”
“Then how do you explain, Mr. Collingforth, that she entered your chaise just prior to the final heat?” Lizzy broke in smoothly. “My sister and I observed it ourselves.”
The gentleman's mouth fell open, and the colour drained from his face. “Impossible!” he cried. “I was absent from the blasted carriage the better part of the day! Everett will vouch for me — and an hundred others!”
“Where is Mr. Everett?” Neddie cried, with a look of interest for his wife.
The stranger dressed in black, who had supported Collingforth in his dispute with Mr. Bridges, shouldered his way through the crowd. “I am Joshua Everett.”
“Are you acquainted with this man?”
“I am. He is Denys Collingforth, of Prior's Farm.”
“And did you bear him company at any time this morning?”
“For the entirety of it, sir. We breakfasted at eight, drove out to the meeting-grounds and secured our place, and left a boy to look after the horses.”
“That would have been at what hour?” Neddie pressed.
Mr. Everett shrugged, and looked to Collingforth for corroboration. “Ten, perhaps?”
“Half-past. You forget the tankard of ale we drank along the road.”
“Half-past,” Neddie said, as tho' he possessed a mental ledger of Collingforth's doings. “And then, Mr. Everett?”
“Then we walked about the grounds, gave a look to the horses, placed some bets with a few gentlemen among our acquaintance — and took up a position near the cocking ring.”
“I saw them there,” a voice called from the crowd.
“And I,” said another.
Neddie nodded swiftly at my brother Henry, who went in search of Collingforth's acquaintance.
“All that would have been prior to the heats themselves, Collingforth.”
“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.”
9
“Caky” was the nickname Edward Austen's children bestowed on their nurse, Susannah Sackree, who was employed at Godmersham for over six decades. She often served as Jane Austen's personal maid when Jane was resident at Godmersham; she is buried at St. Nicolas's, the old Norman church just south of Godmersham Park, where Edward and Elizabeth Austen Knight are also entombed. —