Jane and the Stillroom Maid jam-5

by Stephanie Barron

  “Did the other maids observe the girl’s direction Monday night? Could they name, perhaps, the owner of her borrowed feathers?”

  Sir James paused in the act of replying, and eyed me dubiously; and only then did I recollect that a Justice should never share his knowledge before an Inquest, particularly with a person so wholly unconnected to the neighbourhood as myself.

  “Pray forgive me,” I managed. “My interest borders on the unseemly. It is only that having discovered the poor girl, I am naturally anxious—”

  “I do understand. But I must beg you to await the Coroner’s panel.”

  “When is it to meet?” Mr. Cooper enquired.

  “Thursday morning — and it cannot be too soon for my liking,” Sir James said frankly. “Tivey made no effort to conceal the extent of the girl’s wounds; and the mood of the townspeople is grown quite ugly. The savagery of her end has given rise to fear and speculation; both will work a hideous change in the quietest folk. All manner of accusation and rumour fly about.”

  “A good deal of it must concern ourselves,” I observed. “Though I assure you we know little of Freemasonry, we are nonetheless strangers in the neighbourhood, and must consequently draw every eye.”

  “Nonsense!” my cousin cried; but his colour had heightened unhealthily.

  “I fear you view the matter only too clearly, Miss Austen,” the Justice replied. “It is to your benefit that Mr. George Hemming — a local man of some consequence — was of your party, but suspicions will remain. The corpse was found at such a remove from the gentlemen’s position on the riverbank, and a good deal of time elapsed from its initial discovery to its eventual appearance in Water Street—”

  “But this is absurd!” Mr. Cooper protested. “Would you have it that Miss Austen despatched the abominable maid? Miss Austen, who never laid eyes on the girl in her life, and should have no cause to murder, if she had?”

  “Pray contain yourself, sir,” I begged him. “You would not wish to awaken my mother.”

  “I rather think,” Sir James assured my cousin, “that not the slightest suspicion has been visited upon Miss Austen’s head. Recollect that her gloves and gown were entirely free of blood.”

  Unlike Mr. Cooper’s own, which were splashed with the maid’s gore by the time he achieved Water Street. My cousin considered of this; took the point that the respectable George Hemming should not be the object of local calumny — and his countenance drained of colour.

  “But I am a man of God!”

  “And may undoubtedly prove that you were in your hired bedchamber at the exact hour of the maidservant’s end,” Sir James concluded briskly. “You will, however, be required to speak to the disposition of the body. Whatever misunderstandings are presently in circulation, must be silenced by the Inquest. Have you sufficient courage, Miss Austen, to face the Bakewell worthies? You shall not be charged with Freemasonry, at least.”

  “I think I may say that I am equal to Bakewell’s worst, Sir James,” I replied.

  “I fear you have not yet seen it; but, however, a few days of patience, Mr. Cooper” — this, to my apoplectic cousin — “and the matter should be resolved.”

  “Miss Austen certainly shall not appear before a Coroner’s panel,” Mr. Cooper protested. “To stand in front of Mr. Tivey and the very lowest sort of folk, in a public inn, and answer all manner of impertinent questions! It does not bear thinking of.”

  “I have done so before,” I observed.

  “Have you, indeed?” Sir James bestowed upon me a penetrating look.

  “You were not then under my protection,” my cousin replied. “I cannot allow it. What condemnation should I justly merit, from Sir George Mumps, for so exposing a young lady to the public eye!”

  “But the matter, Cousin, is hardly in Sir George’s keeping,” I reminded him. “And if you will insist upon using such words as protection, in the absence of your excellent wife, I do not know what Sir James will think of us!”

  This final declaration — carrying with it all manner of scandalous implication, as though the discomfitted clergyman had offered me carte blanche in return for my favours — so shocked Mr. Cooper, that he was speechless for several minutes.

  “It is unfortunate that Miss Austen should have found the body, Cooper,” Sir James went on, “but there is nothing for it. Her testimony must be invaluable. I could wish Miss Austen greater felicity in the nature of her victim, but there again, we are but sport for circumstance.”

  “You know something of the girl’s history?” I asked him curiously. “Pray divulge it, if you will.”

  “There are few in Bakewell who can be ignorant of her character. Tess Arnold was the subject of considerable gossip, you understand. She was not entirely a respectable creature. And there are some who would have it she was a witch.”

  “A witch?” I was startled. “Surely not!”

  “Mr. Cooper might be the soundest judge of such matters,” returned Sir James with a pleasing deference for my cousin. “I cannot pretend to a spiritual court; my powers are purely temporal.”

  “But whence arises such a charge?” I enquired. “Surely the people of Bakewell are not so simple as to believe a serving girl possessed of the Devil.”

  “She was, after all, a stillroom maid.”

  “Which tells me nothing more than that she was an adept at the preservation of peaches,” I retorted peevishly. “There is nothing very wonderful in this.”

  “An adept, too, at the compounding of simple medicines,” Sir James supplied. “Tess Arnold was reputed to know everything about healing the sick. There are some who claim that she had mastered still greater arts — that she sold charms for lovers, and curses for enemies; that she could blight crops and cause sheep to drop their lambs stillborn. The power of her look would sap the strength from a man, so the women of Bakewell say.”

  “And now they would have it that she died at the Devil’s hand,” I concluded. “Is that the sum of the tale? That an incubus destroyed Tess Arnold on the rock?”

  In the flickering light of the lamps, I saw my cousin’s eyes, wide and grave; and then he crossed himself once against the Evil Eye.

  “Incubus or Freemason — such things have been rumoured in country towns before this,” Sir James observed. “It is far more comfortable to throw the guilt upon mysteries one cannot understand, than upon a human being disturbingly like oneself.”

  I threw up my hands in exasperation. “There is another force at work in country towns, Sir James — a force of greater power than witchcraft, and certainly as deadly: jealousy, and the malice that it will breed. You said, I think, that Tess Arnold was not considered respectable. Is that because the people of Bakewell believed her a witch? Or because she was a woman of easy virtue?”

  My cousin Mr. Cooper uttered a scandalised snort. “Remember where you are, Jane, and do not run on in the wild way you are suffered to do at home!” he cried.

  Sir James appeared not to have heard his injunction. “You are anxious to defend her, though totally unknown to you before,” he observed.

  “Recollect that I saw her face,” I told him. “When I believed it to be a man’s, I was struck by the delicacy of feature; now that I know it to have belonged to a woman, I can comprehend the envy it might arouse.”

  “She was reported to be liberal in the granting of her favours,” Sir James conceded, “although in that instance, too, a jealous tongue may do much with little matter.”

  “She was foully and cruelly murdered, and she cannot have been more than five-and-twenty! How is such a creature to possess the depth of art you would describe?”

  He said nothing for a moment; and then, setting down his glass, he shook his head. “I should be the last to deny the evil weight of a jealous tongue, Miss Austen. But it is my experience that few women of any age or social station end as Tess Arnold did. And that must give one pause. Her death was achieved in a kind of fury, as though the gods themselves had spread her bowels upon the rock.” />
  To Find if a Body Be Dead or Not

  Stick a needle an inch or so into the corpus. If it is alive, the needle will become tarnished whilst in the truly dead the needle will retain its polish.

  — From the Stillroom Book

  of Tess Arnold,

  Penfolds Hall, Derbyshire, 1802–1806

  Chapter 5

  A Consultation with the Solicitor

  Wednesday

  27 August 1806

  “I THINK, MR. COOPER,” I SAID WHEN WE HAD ALL ASSEMBLED in the parlour for breakfast this morning, “that our first object should be to pay a call upon your friend Mr. Hemming.”

  My cousin looked up from his buttered toast in astonishment. “Upon George? I am sure that he is hard at work, Cousin, in his solicitor’s offices. However much Mr. Hemming may look the gentleman, he is not entirely at leisure. His time is not his own to command, but must await the pleasure of his clients, upon whom his sustenance depends. We shall certainly not find him at home.”

  “Very well,” I replied, “then let us seek him at his place of business if we must. It is imperative, I think, that we discover what Mr. Hemming truly knows of the maid Tess Arnold. The Inquest cannot hope to be a pleasant affair in any case—”

  “I am sure you love nothing better than a Coroner’s panel, Jane,” my mother objected.

  “—but if we appear in ignorance of your friend’s purpose, in concealing from us the truth of the maid’s identity when he must surely have known it, we shall feel ourselves the objects of a very poor joke, indeed.”

  Mr. Cooper set down his teacup with a clatter of crockery. “You cannot really intend to make such a display of yourself, Cousin, as to appear before Mr. Tivey at the Snake and Hind tomorrow morning!”

  “My dear Mr. Cooper,” I replied, “can you really know so little of the English system of justice, as to believe I am offered any choice?”

  GEORGE HEMMING KEEPS HIS OFFICES IN CARDING Street, less than half a mile from The Rutland Arms; and it was (hither we repaired after breakfast. My mother declined the errand, but Cassandra consented to make a third of the party, the day being very fine, and our time in Bakewell all too short.

  “Do you really intend to quit this place on Friday?” she enquired of our cousin. “I suppose you must believe your admirable wife sorely in want of you. I must own that were I to consult only myself, I should prolong the visit — I have not seen a tenth of the region’s beauties! Not a standing stone nor a cavern have we explored, Jane! And how I long to open my sketchbook before a chasm or a torrent, and attempt to seize them in crayons!”

  “My dear cousin — we cannot throw off the dust of Derbyshire too soon,” Mr. Cooper replied indignantly. “I shudder to think what Sir George Mumps should say, did he know of our entanglement in this dreadful affair; and he shall know of it very soon, for I related the whole to my dearest Caroline, and she will feel herself obliged to publish the intelligence throughout Hamstall Ridware. It must make a very great piece of news, indeed. I daresay she will be asked to dine on the strength of it.”

  Being momentarily torn between the most sublime gratification, at the thought of himself as the object of general admiration and pity within his parish — and the gravest anxiety for his noble patron’s good opinion — my cousin very nearly lost his way. I steered him gently back from the turning into Water Street, and said, “Just here, Mr. Cooper, I believe we shall find Mr. Hemming.”

  A painted sign in a prosperous shade of bottle green announced the premises to all of Derbyshire: George Hemming Esquire, Solicitor at the Bar. Mr. Cooper begged us to precede him onto the doorstep, then did the honour of the brass doorknocker; it made a hollow, echoing sound, as though the offices burrowed deep.

  “There is your cavern, Cassandra,” I murmured, “and mind you make the most of it.”

  The door swung open to reveal a tall, thin heron of a fellow arrayed in rusty suiting and a well-worn collar. He clutched a quill in one hand; the fingertips of the other were stained dark blue. His head was bare and balding; his eyes were of a watery brown; what hair he possessed was already grey. Mr. Hemming’s clerk. He had spent all his life apprenticed to the Law, and should carry ink-stained fingers to his coffin because of it.

  “No appointments today,” he said firmly, and made as though to shut the door.

  I put out my hand and grasped the handle. “But we are not here on business, Mr. …”

  “Bartles,” he replied. “Joseph Bartles, Mr. Hemming’s chief clerk. Mr. Hemming is not at leisure at present.”

  “George has spoken so very highly of you,” my sister Cassandra put in warmly, to Mr. Cooper’s astonishment.

  “‘I should be nowhere at all without Mr. Bartles,’ he said, only Monday evening. ‘Mr. Bartles is the man I depend upon’ — isn’t that right, Jane?”

  “Oh — yes, yes, indeed,” I replied, with an eye for the clerk. His ancient chest had visibly swelled with pride. “I do not know where our excellent friend George would be without you. How well I recall Mr. Hemming’s words, as we all drove towards the Dale only yesterday: ‘So dependable in every respect! So entirely worthy of trust! If I have earned some small measure of success, it must all be laid to Bartles’s account!’”

  “I do not recall—” my cousin began, in tones of the greatest disapprobation.

  “—You were asleep, Edward, you always are. We shan’t be a moment, Mr. Bartles. Is Mr. Hemming within?”

  “Certainly, miss,” Bartles replied, and drew wide the door.

  We were ushered to a bare little anteroom, where the scriveners’ desks stood bleakly in a wash of sunlight; a young man was arranged behind one, his face pale and his brow furrowed as he shifted from foot to foot. Unlike Mr. Bartles, this fellow’s collar points were enormous and his neckcloth elaborately tied; they quite prohibited him from lowering his chin over his work, so that he was forced to peer down his nose at the foolscap before him, in a manner that I wondered did not drive him mad.

  “If you will please to wait,” Mr. Bartles said formally, and bowed to my cousin. “The name again, sir?”

  “Edward Cooper.”

  “And the Miss Austens,” Cassandra added with a brilliant smile.

  “Good God, Edward, whatever are you doing here?” exclaimed George Hemming from the doorway of an inner chamber. “I’m most deucedly pressed this morning. I cannot possibly spare a moment—”

  “I think perhaps you must, sir.” I moved towards him swiftly, and Cassandra followed. “Sir James Villiers paid us a most delightful call last evening, and your company was sorely missed. You should have added so much to the general tone of conversation — to the brilliance of the party! Do you not wish to hear what the Justice had to say, on the subject of angling?”

  Mr. Hemming hesitated; he glanced from ourselves to his two clerks, who were attempting to overlisten the conversation without appearing to do so; and then the cast of his countenance changed.

  “How delightful to see you again, Miss Jane Austen,” he said. “I can certainly spare a quarter-hour for any news you might bring.”

  We filed through the doorway and found ourselves in a comfortable room, with a broad mahogany desk and a quantity of volumes bound in leather, a decanter of spirits, and a painting in oils of a gentleman from the last century. Two chairs were pushed back against the wall; but Mr. Hemming made no gesture towards them, and I preferred to stand in any case.

  The solicitor surveyed us with a tight and uneasy smile. “I had not looked for such a visit,” he observed, “but I must assume that circumstances urge it. You are come, Edward, about this business of the maid?”

  “Indeed, I hardly know why we are come, George — unless it be that my cousin Jane insisted upon it,” Mr. Cooper replied. “I am sure that the demands of your work are many, and if the ladies disturbed you in this extraordinary application, I must beg leave to apologise.”

  Mr. Hemming leaned against the edge of his desk, his fingers gripping the wood painfully. But his
countenance and his voice were all that was easy. “Miss Jane Austen would interrogate Mr. Hemming. From what I know of Miss Jane Austen, I should have looked for the honour. Very well, my dear lady — how would you be satisfied?”

  “We are to appear before the Coroner’s Inquest tomorrow, Mr. Hemming, as no doubt you must yourself. My past experience of similar authority has taught me that honesty before a panel invariably saves a good deal of trouble.”

  He crossed his arms over his chest and peered at me with amusement. “And have you a good deal of such experience, Miss Jane Austen?”

  “Enough,” I replied succinctly, “to apprehend that you lied, Mr. Hemming, when you failed to identify the corpse above Miller’s Dale as being that of Tess Arnold — a young woman with whom, I understand, you have been acquainted for most of her life.”

  He went pale, and clutched convulsively at the desk; then thrust himself to his feet. “I could not know what I saw in Miller’s Dale. In such a scene of horror, who should not be confused? The girl’s clothes — the savage wounds to her body — I barely spared a moment to study the face. I was as astonished as yourselves to learn last evening that she was not the gentleman she appeared, and a complete stranger.”

  “Then why did you behave so oddly at the time? I distinctly recall every word and action. You appeared distracted and oppressed in your manner; you insisted that Deceased must be a traveller like ourselves, and undoubtedly from Buxton. And when we prevailed upon you to return with us to Bakewell, you washed your hands of the affair — ‘Devil take the consequences,’ I believe you said. There was nothing of confusion in all this, Mr. Hemming, but rather a measure of conscious deceit.”

  “That is absurd!” he burst out.

  “Sir James Villiers does not appear to think so,” I replied. “And we may presume that he has no reason to prevaricate, when he suggests you were acquainted with the maid for years.”

  “I have never denied that. I merely failed to recognise the girl in death.”