It appears my Husband has gone off and left me Destitute, else I would have placed a Shilling beneath the Seal of this Letter to cover the Cost of its Delivery. I hope you will Forgive the Omission, and place the Blame squarely on the Shoulders of my Lord and Master, where it Belongs.
Having disposed of Pickett, she refolded the letter, picked up the candle, and tipped it over the letter, allowing the melted wax to drip onto the paper in a small puddle which, when cooled and hardened, would form a seal. She fanned her missive to and fro in order to hasten this process, then blew out the candle and carried her clandestine correspondence downstairs.
She was not surprised to find the public room empty, as most of the village would have gone to the funeral of one of its best-known citizens; she was, however, somewhat taken aback to discover Mrs. Hawkins and Lizzie absent as well, and a lad who smelled faintly of the stables behind the counter in their place.
“Yes, ma’am?” The boy snapped rigidly to attention. “May I help you?”
“I was hoping for a word with Mrs. Hawkins,” Julia said, glancing past him at the door which led to the kitchen.
“She’s gone to the funeral.”
He sounded a bit puzzled by her request, as if anyone ought to have known this. And so she should have, Julia supposed; it was only women of her own class who eschewed the burials of even their nearest and dearest kin.
“She’s left me in charge,” he continued, with a hint of pride in his voice. “Is there anything what I can do for you?”
Julia hesitated only a moment. She had hoped to entrust her correspondence to Mrs. Hawkins. But when the innkeeper’s widow returned, so too would her own husband. If she wanted to dispatch the letter without his knowledge, she was unlikely to have a better opportunity.
“I have a letter which I should like to send to my sister in Somersetshire,” she said. “Can you tell me how to get to the receiving office?”
The stable lad relaxed as if easy to be presented with a problem so easily solved. “Oh, aye. If you’ll leave it with me, ma’am, I’ll see it goes out with the next batch.”
“Thank you,” Julia said, and surrendered her contraband correspondence.
“That’ll be a penny, it will.” The lad slipped the letter into a canvas bag beneath the counter, then held out his hand expectantly.
“A penny?” echoed Julia in some consternation. “Why should I give you a penny now, when my sister will be obliged to pay a shilling to accept delivery?”
“Oh, but she won’t have to,” the stable hand assured her. “And what’s more, it’ll get there quicker, too. That’s the beauty of it, see?”
Julia rather thought she did “see,” and she did not like it one bit. She knew there were peers and Members of Parliament who misused their franking privileges, but paying a penny in order to have one’s letters franked seemed the outside of enough; she doubted even her late husband’s clutch-fisted heir, George, could have concocted so mercenary a scheme. She also failed to see how this might allow a letter to reach its destination any faster, as it would be traveling in the same post as its unfranked fellows.
She was not quite sure who in Banfell or its environs might enjoy franking privileges, as she could not recall having been introduced to any Members of Parliament, much less any aristocrats. She was forced to admit that this might be a good thing, else she might have been sorely tempted to tell the man just what she thought of a venture that was, if not precisely illegal, then certainly unethical. At the moment, however, she had a more urgent problem—and one, moreover, that rendered all the others moot.
“I don’t have a penny,” she confessed. “That is, I do, but my husband has gone to the funeral and taken his coin purse with him.”
The lad gave her fashionable gown an appraising look. “Never mind, I can see you’re good for it. I’ll tell Mrs. Hawkins what’s in the wind, and you can pay her next time you see her. In the meantime, least said, soonest mended, aye?”
As this echoed Julia’s sentiments exactly (at least where her letter to her sister was concerned), she readily agreed. She turned away from the counter and was about to return to her own room when the door to the inn was flung open and Percival Hartsong strode into the room in a state of high dudgeon.
“Why, Mr. Hartsong! I thought you would be at the funeral.”
He gave her a curt nod that was half agreement, half greeting. “Just came from there.”
“Is it over so quickly, then?” she asked, relieved to have concluded her business, and apparently not a moment too soon.
“No,” was his terse reply.
“Then why—?”
She got no further. “I know when I’m not wanted!” the poet said indignantly. “I know when—you there!” he barked at the stable hand turned barkeep. “Give me a pint of your best, and be quick about it!”
The boy jumped to obey this command, and once the poet had received his tankard and taken a long pull from it, Julia ventured to ask, “Mr. Hartsong, what has happened?”
“What has happened? What has happened? I’ll tell you what has happened! I started to recite my poem—‘The Hair that Floateth Outward on the Stream,’ you know—and that dam—er, dashed farmer stood up and told me that if I didn’t shut my mouth, he’d shut it for me! Well, I’d like to see him try!”
Julia, having seen the farmer in question, suspected he would make very short work of the willowy poet, but recognized that Mr. Hartsong would not appreciate having this fact pointed out to him.
“If Miss Hawkins asked you to recite the poem at her father’s funeral, then it was very wrong of Mr. Wilson to interrupt you,” she agreed warmly.
Mr. Hartsong had the grace to look ashamed. “She didn’t ask me, precisely,” he confessed. “Still, I thought she must be gratified, to think of her father being immortalized in such a fashion.”
Julia suspected that gratification might not have been the uppermost emotion in Lizzie Hawkins’s mind at the pre-emption of her father’s funeral service by an attention-seeking poet. Still, she doubted Mr. Hartsong would view his own actions in such a light; in fact, Julia was beginning to believe he was the most narcissistic young man of her acquaintance.
“Perhaps such a work as you have composed would be better shared in another setting,” she said with as much diplomacy as she could muster.
To her surprise, the poet was not only receptive to this tactful observation, but enthusiastic about it. “A public reading! What an excellent suggestion!”
In fact, Julia could not recall having suggested any such thing. Still, she remembered that Jedidiah Tyson occasionally hosted poetry readings at the Golden Feather, and wondered if she might be forgiven (by her husband, if not by the Hawkins family) for bringing them up now. It soon became evident, however, that Mr. Hartsong had his own ideas about how his genius should be unleashed upon an unsuspecting world.
“It could be held here in the public room,” he pronounced. “Tonight, so it would still be part of the festivities—er, observances—and I could stand there, before the fireplace, and recite it from memory. Do say you will come! After all, one might say the whole thing was your idea.”
“Oh, I, that is, er—John!” When the door opened to admit Pickett, Julia all but fell on his neck, her own guilty conscience forgotten. “Is the funeral over, then?”
“Only just.” He acknowledged her companion with a nod. “Mr. Hartsong.”
“Mrs. Pickett has just put forth the most excellent suggestion,” declared the poet, whose spirits had undergone so dramatic a transformation since Pickett had last seen him that his eyebrows rose slightly as he glanced at his wife. “Tonight I shall give a public recitation of my poem. Has Mrs. Hawkins returned yet? No? I must speak to her at once.”
He made as if to head for the door, but Pickett took hold of his sleeve. “Don’t.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“When I last saw her, Mrs. Hawkins was deep in discussion with the vicar. I don’t think she would appreciate
the interruption.”
“Interruption?” echoed the poet, bristling. “Let me remind you that we are speaking of Art! Surely a work of this importance—”
“—deserves Mrs. Hawkins’s full attention,” Julia put in soothingly. “She might be more receptive to the idea if you approach her when she is not distracted by the vicar’s conversation.”
Pickett’s skeptical look suggested that she might be doing it a bit too brown. In this he had much mistaken his man, for there was no flattery too blatant for the poet to swallow.
“Very true,” exclaimed Mr. Hartsong, much struck. “Holy orders do tend to make a fellow run on, do they not? As if every word they utter comes straight from the mouth of God! Very well, I shall wait until she returns, and put the idea to her then.”
“Do I really want to know,” Pickett asked Julia some minutes later, having adjourned with his wife to their own room, “how you came to suggest to that fellow that he do a public recitation of that god-awful poem?”
“I didn’t actually suggest any such thing,” Julia insisted. “I merely offered a tactful suggestion—too tactful, it appears—that Mr. Hawkins’s funeral might not have been the best place for his verse.”
“No, that would be the fire,” was Pickett’s bluntly stated opinion.
“I only meant that he should whisper it in Lizzie’s ear, or some such thing. As for my reasoning, I wonder you should have to ask! Tell me, did Ben Wilson really inform Mr. Hartsong that if he didn’t sit down and shut his mouth, he—Mr. Wilson, I mean—would shut it for him?”
“Oh, yes, he did.” Pickett grinned mischievously at her, and Julia was conscious of her heart doing strange and wonderful things in response. “I’ll admit, I almost hoped Hartsong would continue, just to see Wilson make good on his threat.”
“You would see poor Ned Hawkins’s funeral turn into a donnybrook, just for your own amusement? For shame!”
“Not ‘just’ for my own amusement,” Pickett protested. “Who knows what interesting accusations might have been made during a brawl?”
“What an interesting life you must have led!” Julia marveled. “What, pray, were you hoping to find out?”
“If I knew that, I wouldn’t have to hope for a brawl,” he pointed out. “But it’s interesting, our poet saying at the inquest that he’d arrived a fortnight ago—about the same time Ned Hawkins would have written to Bow Street.”
“Writing bad poetry isn’t a crime. Nor, for that matter, is seducing one’s host’s daughter, so long as she has no objection to being seduced.”
“No, but as you said at dinner last night, poetry doesn’t sound like the steadiest way to make a living. What if he decided he needed more money than his poetry could provide, and found a less than legal means to acquire it? Or what if his poetry is just a pretext for some more nefarious purpose?”
“And when Ned Hawkins found out and confronted him, he—Mr. Hartsong, I mean—pushed him off the cliff? But if Mr. Hawkins had reason to distrust Mr. Hartsong, why would he choose the edge of a cliff to stage a confrontation?”
“Maybe he wanted to spare Lizzie the discovery that her swain wasn’t what he seemed. Or maybe he didn’t ‘choose’ the cliff at all. Maybe Hawkins and Hartsong were in it—whatever ‘it’ might be—together, and he was obliged to keep up the pretense until someone from Bow Street arrived. But Hartsong discovered he’d been betrayed—remember, he was in the public room when we arrived, and would have heard me give our direction as Bow Street. It wouldn’t take a genius to put two and two together and arrive at four. He could have got the wind up and decided he had to get rid of Hawkins before the fellow could tell what he knew. Hawkins might have agreed to meet him somewhere away from the inn, not realizing his secret was out and his life was in danger.”
“Smuggling,” pronounced Julia, recalling her host’s parting words the night before. “Depend upon it, Ned Hawkins was embroiled in a smuggling scheme.”
“It’s possible,” Pickett conceded. “But where, then, does Hartsong come in?”
Julia shrugged. “You’re the Bow Street Runner; you tell me.” As Pickett acknowledged this hit with a grin, she continued. “But no, I suppose it’s up to me to see what I can discover, since Mr. Hartsong seems to regard me as the only one—apart from Lizzie, anyway—who appreciates his literary efforts.”
“Do you think he would tell you anything?”
“It’s worth a try.” Her smile was deceptively demure. “After all, most men don’t find me repulsive.”
“That,” Pickett muttered under his breath, “is what I’m afraid of.”
THE PUBLIC ROOM WAS unusually full that night at dinner. The poet was conspicuous by his absence—still sulking over his dismissal from the funeral, Pickett assumed—but the rest of their fellow guests were there, including the middle-aged sisters who usually didn’t return from their treks until dark, and the artist who, as far as Pickett could tell, preferred to have his evening meal sent up to his room on a tray. As for the other diners, Pickett supposed everyone wanted to discuss the funeral with those most nearly concerned. His own efforts in that direction had not been entirely successful. When he and Julia had first come down to dinner, he had taken the opportunity of offering his condolences once again to the widow.
“It seems strange that your husband should have taken such a fall, familiar with the landscape as he was,” he’d remarked innocently enough, or so he had imagined. “Has anything been troubling him lately?”
To his surprise, Mrs. Hawkins had all but gone for his throat. “My Ned was as good a man as ever drew breath!” she declared hotly. “So if you’re thinking he done away with himself, like that coroner said—”
“No, no!” Pickett protested hastily. “I never thought any such thing. I only wondered if perhaps he was distracted by some problem, and was not as careful as he would normally have been.”
“I see,” said the widow, the wind quite taken from her sails. “Truth to tell, I’ve wondered about that myself. But I suppose I’ll never know,” she concluded, dabbing at her eyes with her handkerchief.
Alas, no delicate probing on Pickett’s part as to exactly what might have disturbed her husband had yielded the slightest results, and at last, realizing she was beginning to regard him with some suspicion, he was obliged to drop the subject. He only hoped Julia’s attempts with the poet might yield better results.
He had not long to wait to find out. He and Julia had scarcely finished their dinner when a faint stirring of interest amongst his fellow diners announced the arrival of Percival Hartsong, clad in such funereal garments that any casual observer might have been forgiven for thinking it was his own father, rather than his inamorata’s, who had died. Any suggestion that the poet had abandoned his bohemian manner of dress for a more staid appearance, however, was dispelled by the unstarched cravat that fell in floppy loops from a bow knot, and the artfully disarranged black locks that flowed from his brow. As he entered the inn’s public room, Lizzie—who had obviously been posted as a lookout—began clanking a spoon against the side of a pewter tankard until she had the attention of everyone present.
“Stepmama and I would like to thank you all for coming,” she announced solemnly. “And now, Mr. Percival Hartsong will recite a poem he wrote about poor Papa.”
While it might be true that Ned Hawkins had inspired Mr. Hartsong’s ode, it would have been a stretch to say that he was its subject. It was not about the innkeeper so much as it was about the poet himself: his shock and horror at discovering the body, his sudden realization of the brevity of life, and his melancholy speculations regarding when he himself might meet “that fate to which all mortals must succumb”—an event which, if the glowering expression on Ben Wilson’s face was anything to judge by, might occur sooner rather than later.
After the recitation was over, Pickett held Lizzie at bay while Julia seized the opportunity to congratulate its proud author.
“I found it very—very moving,” she told him. This muc
h, at least, was true: it had moved more than one listener right out the door. “I can see you are possessed of a keen sensibility, Mr. Hartsong.”
“I believe you are right,” acknowledged the poet, unencumbered by false modesty. “I do seem to feel things more deeply than most men.”
“Has any of your poetry been published?”
He sighed. “Alas, no. But I fear it is only to be expected. Men who think of nothing but numbers entered into a ledger are incapable of understanding, much less appreciating, Art. I speak of publishers in particular, of course,” he added hastily, “not of such ordinary men as your husband, who I am sure must possess other excellent qualities in spite of a lack of finer feeling or emotional expression.”
Julia might have informed Mr. Hartsong that her husband had no difficulty expressing his very fine feelings to the complete satisfaction of them both. But as such an outburst would serve no purpose beyond mortifying one and offending the other, she resisted the urge.
“I believe it is often the case,” she said, choosing her words with care, “that true genius is not recognized except in retrospect. Still, to become famous after one is dead is not much good when one craves recognition and, yes, payment for one’s efforts during one’s lifetime.”
“If I could but achieve the recognition my talent deserves, I would gladly forgo worldly wealth!” Mr. Hartsong declared fervently. “I have no shortage of funds, for my father gives me a handsome allowance. Not that he approves of my poetry, but my mother, I do not hesitate to say, takes great pride in my talent, and it is she who champions me. Then, too, I am Papa’s only son and heir, and it would look very bad in the eyes of the world if he were to let me go begging.”
“Clearly, notoriety is what is needed,” Julia declared, thinking of Pickett’s theory that Mr. Hartsong might be involved in some unsavory scheme. “What a pity you cannot engage in some outrageous action which might shock Society, yet not result in your being imprisoned or hanged!”
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