Jane and the Genius of the Place: Being the Fourth Jane Austen Mystery (23 page)

The manservant, Russell, sped desperately in his wake, protesting, “But, sir! I cannot be assured that Mr. Austen
is at homel
”

“And where else should he be, man?” the stranger cried. “For he is certainly not about his duty!”

He paused by the closed library door, however, and allowed Russell to thrust it open.

“Mr. Grey, sir, to see you.”

I suppose I should have surmised as much; but, in fact, I was quite thoroughly routed in my expectation. How anyone in Kent might describe this man as a
naif
— or even remotely under the thumb of his young wife— was beyond my comprehension. Valentine Grey was not a man to be bent to any woman's pleasure; he would never be dismissed to his lodgings in London, and made a fool of, the length of Kent; nor was he to be whipped into submission, as Francoise Grey had managed with at least one gentleman at the Canterbury Races. Here was a figure of energy and decision, a formidable adversary and partner. Had she quailed in her heart, the wild French miss, when presented with the man who was her husband?

Valentine Grey, in short, was not what I had expected.

The library door snapped shut behind him.

I slipped out of the saloon and made my way through the passage to the kitchens, and from thence to the stillroom, where a stout garden trug and shears sat innocently on a table by the garden door. I took them up, as though intent upon the culling of flowers for this evening's dinner—and stepped outside quite unremarked.

After the dim quiet of the saloon, the force of morning sunlight was like a blow against the cheek. I had come away without my bonnet. It was this sort of behaviour, my mother was forever reminding me, that brought freckles to the neatest complexion. But I cared little for such things at present; my complexion was spoilt beyond repair, and had been these three years at least. I hastened towards the swath of cornflowers and lavender that ran riot on either side of the library's French windows, pausing to clip a stem or two from each nodding plant. Neddie had thrust open a window to admit of the breeze; and the murmur of voices rose and swelled before ever I attained my object.

“You can be at no loss to understand why I have come.”

“Indeed, Mr. Grey, I am unable to account for the honour of seeing you here. Pray sit down.”

“Thank you—but I prefer to stand.”

There was the sound of a man pacing; an impatient expulsion of breath; and I had an idea of Valentine Grey come to rest before the barren hearth, and staring unseeing into the grate.

“Then pray tell me how I might be of service,” Neddie said, “for I perceive that you are greatly distressed.”

“Who would not be, circumstanced as I am?” From the sound of it, Mr. Grey had wheeled to face my brother. His next words had all the viciousness of a challenge. “You have spoken with the Comte de Penfleur, sir!”

“I was so fortunate as to make the Comte's acquaintance last evening—yes,” my brother acknowledged.

“And what sort of lies has he been telling you?”

“Lies?” Neddie could affect astonishment as readily as any of the Austens. “I cannot think why the Comte should lie to me, Mr. Grey—a virtual stranger, and one charged with the resolution of his ward's murder. But perhaps you may enlighten me.”

“Because he is a blackguard of the worst sort—a cunning insinuator, a seducer of other men's wives, a man without scruple or bar to his malice. Because he hates me as surely as he breathes, Mr. Austen, and has made it his object in life to destroy me.”

In another man, such language might have sounded preposterous—the stuff of a Cheltenham tragedy. Grey's quiet vehemence, however, spoke all his conviction; he said nothing more than what he believed to be the truth, and had suffered beyond endurance. —Or so I concluded, as I bent low over a clump of lavender.

“You speak of the Comte de Penfleur who is even now resident in your house, Mr. Grey?” My brother's voice was incredulous.

“I do.”

“You welcome such a man into your home—a man you regard with contempt and abhorrence, a man you acknowledge as your enemy?”

“My wife is dead, Mr. Austen, and will be buried tomorrow.” Grey's words fell with infinite weariness. “I cannot deny the head of her family admittance to the rites. The Comte arrived, I may assure you, with the intention of removing Francoise to the Continent for burial. It is only due to the extreme heat of the weather, and the advanced decay of the corpse, that she is allowed to remain here. Indeed, had the Comte been capable of swaying his father a year since, Francoise should never have left France at all. Hippolyte has charged me most bitterly with neglect, in the event of her death.”

“The Comte, I must conclude, was against your marriage?”

“The Comte is in the pocket of the Buonapartes, Mr. Austen, and despises everything to do with monarchy and England. He is too short-sighted to perceive the advantage of financial ties with this Kingdom.” Mr. Grey, it seemed, had commenced to pace again—a rapid, purposeful sound that conveyed all his anxiety. “His father, however, understood that progress was impossible, absent the judicious flow of capital throughout Europe—and promoted the marriage between myself and his ward with that end in view. The first Comte de Penfleur, Mr. Austen, was an excellent man. He died but six months ago. His son shall never do him credit.”

“I quite liked the Comte,” Neddie offered mildly.

If I expected an oath or a blow—some form of brutal denial—I was disappointed. Valentine Grey laughed.

“Everyone does,” he said. “They cannot fail to find Hippolyte everything that is charming. Even those who have cause to know him well—to understand the extent of his depravity—choose not to see the truth. Francoise—”

Grey broke off, and there was a heavy silence.

“Yes, Mr. Grey?” Neddie enquired politely. “You were speaking of your wife?”

“The Comte de Penfleur has what we English sometimes call
address
—the air of authority, of refinement, of self-restraint and confidence. It never deserts him, even in the most hideous of places. And I have seen him in any number of hells, Mr. Austen, to which a respectable man like yourself should never descend.”

There was the briefest of pauses, as my brother assessed his visitor across an expanse of mahogany desk. “Why do you tell me all this, Mr. Grey?”

“Because I hope it will persuade you to divulge your conversation with the Comte last evening.”

“To what end?”

“The elucidation of his motives.”

'You have said yourself that he came to pay his last respects.”

“And perhaps to put paid to the delicate balance now existing between our two banking houses. I believe, in short, that he means to ruin me.”

Neddie drew breath. “For the crime of allowing your wife to be murdered?”

“—Or for making her my wife in the first place.”

“I was never very good at the taking of hints,” Neddie observed. “I much prefer a plain-spoken man to a riddling one.”

That for Neddie, I thought. It was not for nothing that his patron, Mr. Knight, had seen him schooled in the art of fencing.

“I believe the Comte to have a purpose in discovering how much you know.” Grey's voice was as taut as a violin too-strenuously tuned. “He is adept at the drawing-out of the unwitting, through subtle ploys of which they are unaware. He may have learned much from the most trifling of your remarks—and will move in the greatest unease, or the greatest security, depending upon what he believes.”

“Indeed? Then he moves in a sharper light than I!” Neddie's exasperation was obvious. “If the Comte is aware of
how much I know
, then he is in possession of the dearest intelligence in all of Kent, not excepting the intended landfall of the French! To what, exactly, would you refer, Mr. Grey? The facts of your wife's murder? Her liaison with Denys Collingforth? The state of your own marriage? Or her affection for her adoptive brother, the disreputable Comte de Penfleur?”

“Remember to whom you are speaking, Austen,” Mr. Grey retorted ominously. “I am not a man to be insulted, in your home or my own.”

“Then perhaps you might tell me what it is you seek.” From the sound of his movements, Neddie had thrown himself into his favourite chair—a wing-backed fortress drawn up near the cold hearth. Grey, however, paced restlessly to the very edge of the room, and peered unseeing through the French windows. The sight of his compact and powerful form looming near my own had the power to strike terror into an eavesdropping heart— and so I threw my back into snipping flowers as tho' my very life depended upon it. I might have been a sheep cropping grass, or an under-gardener tilling earth, for all the attention Grey paid me.

“Appearance to the contrary, Mr. Austen, I loved my wife. My feeling for her was against the force of all reason—I had long known what she was. A spendthrift, a libertine, an unprincipled creature who lived only for pleasure. But I had waited perhaps too long to marry— and when I fell in love, I did so with utter heedlessness. I threw caution to the winds. I sacrificed everything— pride, principle, even common sense—to win Francoise from her family, and at length I prevailed.”

“And your wife, sir?” Neddie enquired drily. “She met your passion with an equal ardour?”

“She accepted it as a familiar token; men had been driving themselves mad about her since she was sixteen. But Francoise cared for no one but herself. Herself— and her guardian's son.”

“The present Comte.”

Grey must have nodded assent, for no sound fell upon my ears.

“It was in part to separate them that her guardian— the late Comte—betrothed Franchise to me. He must have known that once united in marriage, Hippolyte and his ward would destroy the Penfleur heritage. They are—or were—both selfish, headstrong, dissipated characters; neither restraint nor prudence would survive in their household. They could not be allowed to ruin what he jealously nurtured through revolution and the Empire's rise. And so Francoise was despatched to England.”

“He sold her to the highest bidder,” Neddie said harshly.

“And I was pleased to buy,” Mr. Grey returned, without a flicker of emotion. “I counted the purchase cheap, so mad was I to claim Francoise.”

But what, I thought, had been the currency of exchange? How much of his own financial house had Valentine Grey consigned to his enemy's bankers?

“The letter that was discovered in your wife's novel, Mr. Grey,” my brother broke in. “It was written by the Comte, I presume.”

“Of course.” Grey dismissed this abruptly. “I knew his hand the moment you showed it me. I merely denied the fact, from a desire to keep everything that was painful at bay. That letter can have nothing to do with my wife's death.”

“It may have everything to do with it.”

Grey turned. “What can you mean? Even did the Comte intend to meet my wife by night on the shingle at Pegwell, he cannot have been at the Canterbury Races the very same morning. Every sort of caution would inform against it. And why should he kill her, if he loved her enough to plead for flight? It is beyond all understanding.”

“Perhaps she refused him.”

“Refused him?” Grey's voice was incredulous. “She could refuse Hippolyte nothing, Mr. Austen, from the time she was a girl.”

“Perhaps she had learned to love her husband. Perhaps she thought to remain in Kent, and wrote to the Comte informing him of as much. In a jealous rage, he waited upon the Wingham road, and waylaid her coach…”

“… only to lay the blame upon a complete unknown, the absent Mr. Collingforth? It will not do, Mr. Austen; it decidedly will not do. A man of the Comte's cunning would certainly engage for his rival to hang; he should place the blame squarely upon my shoulders, and laugh the length of my road to Hell. Unless—”

There was a troubling stillness, an interval filled with thought. Then Grey said, “Is that what he told you last evening? That I had strangled Francoise, because she had determined to elope?”

“The Comte de Penfleur said very litde to your detriment, sir.” Neddie's attitude was easy. “He may have intimated a good deal—that you had neglected your wife, that you bore her litde affection, and, indeed, had perhaps allowed her to expose herself to the ridicule of the neighbourhood, from a desire to be rid of her through some deplorable scandal—”

“You call this
very UttleT
Mr. Grey burst out. “Upon my word, Austen, I should tremble to learn what you consider a great deal!”

“—but he fell short of charging you with the lady's murder. A man of the Comte's subtlety, you may be sure, would never so completely show his hand. We may expect him to work upon me by degrees, until my mind is shaped to his liking.”

“You begin to understand him.”

“I think I begin to understand you both. Or at the very least—what each of you wishes me to understand.”

Here was the steel beneath the velvet glove. My brother would have the gendeman comprehend that he was hardly a fool, to be played with as a shutdecock between two batdedores. He would reserve his judgement until all the facts were fully in his possession, and only then would he act. Neither Mr. Grey, nor the Comte de Penfleur, would be privy to his counsel.

“I do not quite take your meaning, sir. I have been completely open.”

“You have presented a very painful picture, sir, of your private affairs—and one that must have cost you something to divulge. I respect and pity you—for the fortitude which allows such a sacrifice of your natural reserve, and for the calculation that has urged it. But as to openness—there, Mr. Grey, our opinions must part company. I regret to say that you have
not
been entirely open.”

“Very well.” Grey's accent held an intolerable strain. “Endeavour to show, Mr. Justice of Canterbury, how I have deceived you.”

“The very morning after your wife's death, you were at pains to discover Mr. Collingforth die culprit; and quite ingeniously, the gendeman's flight and various circumstances conspired to prove you right. The inquest delivered him,
in absentia
, to the Assizes' mercy; and all of Canterbury condemned him as the very worst of men. Leave aside for the moment that his guilt is hardly proved; what is accepted opinion has all the weight of fact in a country neighbourhood, and the Law will always bow to the weight of fact.”