Rustication
Page 29
The name of the solicitor who had drawn up the deed led me back to the County Records Office where, as I had hoped, the archives of his firm had been deposited. And there, carefully preserved in an envelope inside a leather portfolio, lay the taunting letter sent to Davenant Burgoyne a few hours before he was killed.
Just above the passage which Wilson had copied and read out to Richard, there was a crease. The most interesting part of the letter had been folded over—presumably by the earl when he showed it to Wilson—so that the detective could not see it. The words that his lordship had kept hidden were these in which the writer, goaded by hearing from Euphemia that Davenant Burgoyne had sneered at bastardy in his confrontation with Richard at the ball, forgot, in his anger at the slur on himself, that Richard himself was not being accused of being illegitimate:
You throw the word bastard in my face but just because your mother was married and mine wasn’t, doesn’t make you any better than me. My mother entered a love-match not a contract of sale negotiated by lawyers. It was your mother that was the bought and paid for whore and not mine.
Writing in the early hours of the morning after the ball, Lyddiard, possibly drunk and certainly excited at the imminence of the murder of his hated half-brother, had made a stupid mistake. This was the sole letter that he had written alone and, without Euphemia to rein in his anger, he had blundered into pointing the finger at himself instead of Richard. The earl must have understood that. He therefore showed Wilson enough of the letter to incriminate Richard but not the part that inculpated his nephew. He then used that piece of evidence to force Lyddiard into dropping his claim on the trust. Far from being the “decent and honourable person” Richard had taken him for, his lordship conspired to let him hang for a murder he knew he did not commit since that both averted the scandal of a nephew being tried for murder and brought him a fortune.
Other mysteries remain. Was Betsy pregnant? Did Richard send her money and even pay her passage out to join him in Canada? It seems unlikely that the answers to those questions will ever be known.
CP.
London, 14th October, 2012.
Acknowledgments
A number of people read and commented on this book at various stages of its composition and I am enormously grateful to the following: Helen Ash, Karin Badt, Linda Buckley-Archer, Emma Dixon, Chris Ellis, Lorna Gibb, John Glusman, Bill Hamilton, Jane Harris, Liz Jensen, Jacqui Lofthouse, Shira Nayman and Joanna Pocock.
About the Author
Charles Palliser has published four works of fiction, including the historical novels The Quincunx (1989) and The Unburied (1999), and has written plays for BBC Radio and the stage. Before becoming a full-time writer in 1990, he taught literature and creative writing in universities in the UK and the US. His fiction has been translated into a dozen languages. The Quincunx was awarded the Sue Kaufman Prize by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. With Irish and US citizenship, Palliser has lived mostly in the UK.
Copyright © 2014 by Charles Palliser
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