Jane and the Stillroom Maid (36 page)

For an instant he said nothing; then he took the book from my hands.

“Leave word for your mother where you are gone, Jane. And do not neglect of your sunbonnet. Having disappointed Mrs. Austen in so much else, I owe her this small gesture of attention.”

31 August 1806, cont.
∼

B
EING A GENTLEMAN OF SOME DESPATCH
, L
ORD
H
AROLD
undertook to pen a note to His Grace at Chatsworth, informing the Duke of his intelligence regarding the Marquess, and instructing a party of men to turn their efforts towards Miller’s Dale. He suffered the Duke to know that we should proceed thence ourselves, in an effort to locate Lord Hartington without delay; and that if the search were unavailing, we should await assistance in the miller’s cottage.

“Now tell me all you know, Jane—or all you suspect,” he commanded, when we were settled in the Devonshire equipage.

For this once, despite the heat of August, I must own I valued the discretion of a closed carriage; no one should overlisten my conversation with Lord Harold.

“Lord Hartington was acquainted with the stillroom maid,” I said, “for nearly a twelvemonth. He first undertook to ride over to Penfolds Hall, in secret; and as Tess Arnold’s notations are entirely concerned with
remedies for deafness, I must imagine him to have been preoccupied with these.”

“Deafness? But surely he is not so very troubled by the impairment to his hearing?” Lord Harold remarked.

“I suspect that few are privileged to know just how far the difficulty extends. A person such as Lord Hartington—the sole heir to a princely realm, with all the burdens of wealth and birth, all the expectations of Society placed upon him—cannot admit to infirmity. He must struggle against it from a boy; and disguise what he cannot help. From the little I observed him, I should say that he is an adept at the reading of speech. Though he cannot hear, he may often comprehend, provided the speaker’s face is turned towards him.”

“I see. And yet he was troubled enough by infirmity that he sought help from the stillroom maid.”

“She makes no reference to the success or failure of her remedies; but certainly his lordship continued to seek them. Whether he eventually met with Tess Arnold from
other motives
, I cannot say; but I presume as much, from the place of the meeting having changed.”

“He no longer rode to Penfolds?”

“Last winter, he began to meet his witch in the rocks above Miller’s Dale. The meetings, from this date, grow less frequent—you will recollect that he was often from Derbyshire during that period, Her Grace the Duchess having been in Town for most of the winter.”

“Georgiana fell ill there in March,” Lord Harold said soberly. “Lord Hartington, I believe, was much by her side. He did not return to Derbyshire until she was interred at Chatsworth, in early April.”

“He met with Tess infrequently during the course of the summer, and always in secret; though once, at least, he appears to have been accompanied by a tutor. Perhaps he could not throw that gentleman off.”

“No tutor worth his pay would neglect the charge of his employer, nor the confidence of his pupil,” Lord
Harold observed. “We may consider the gentleman present, but sworn to silence. He is no longer in the Duke’s employ, in any case, and may not speak against the Marquess. But I interrupt: you have obviously formed an idea of young Hartington’s purpose. Was he dallying with the maid?”

“I do not believe so. It should be a chilly place for such a purpose, in the depths of January; and by the summer he had clearly learned to hate her. No, Lord Harold—I believe the Marquess required information. You will recollect that he must have observed his mother’s decline.”

“Georgiana? What can she have had to do with Tess Arnold?”

“Her Grace was being steadily dosed by the stillroom maid, for a variety of liverish complaints, from the late summer of last year up to her death.”

Lord Harold’s expression hardened. “That book tells you so much?”

“It records the frequent remedies sought by Lady Elizabeth, for a variety of ills she does not appear to have suffered. Lady Elizabeth would carry off the gravel, and her stomach was much indisposed; she required eyewash, and remedies for the liver—and once, it must be said, for a persistent cough. This, at least, we may impute to have been Lady Elizabeth’s own. The rest I believe were purchased on behalf of Georgiana Duchess. The remedies contained an increasing quantity of morphia, such as must relieve the most acute suffering; and the oil of bitter almonds, which I believe is poisonous over time. It is possible her London physicians were unwilling to prescribe what must certainly kill her.”

Lord Harold reflected upon this in silence. “Bess told me that Hart certainly blamed her for Georgiana’s death.”

“Whatever charge his mother laid upon her bosom friend—whatever Lady Elizabeth chose to take upon
herself—should never have been meant for the boy’s ears. But Lord Hartington’s ears are not his only means of acquiring intelligence. I assume he observed an exchange between the two ladies that was not intended for him.”

Lord Harold sighed heavily and passed a thin hand over his brow. “
I’d hoped the witch had died in agony
. Hart hated the girl, Tess Arnold, because he thought her remedies killed his mother. Is that what you would say, Jane?”

“I would go further, my lord. I believe that the Marquess suspects the maid and Lady Elizabeth between them of having colluded to
murder
his mother—so that Lady Elizabeth might be Duchess in Georgiana’s stead.”

“Impossible!” Lord Harold’s eyes blazed darkly in his pallid face. “You may suspect poor Bess of every indelicacy—of a want of tact, and a self-absorption that may border on the criminal—but she was honestly devoted to Georgiana. Whatever remedies she purchased on Her Grace’s behalf, were purchased at Georgiana’s insistence. You may be assured of that.”

“But I am not fifteen. I am not destroyed by the severest grief. I have not the spectre of illegitimacy to haunt me—I need never regard my father’s despised mistress as being quite possibly my parent. I need never know the agony of being twice dispossessed: once, of the mother I adore; and yet again, of the certainty that I may rightly call her mother. When I consider the burdens under which Lord Harrington has laboured, I must find it surpassing odd that he has not done violence before—to himself, or another. Indeed, he has been an example of restraint.”

Lord Harold stared. “You mean to say, Jane, that it was
not
Hart who savaged the girl’s body among the rocks?”

“Not at all. That horror belongs entirely to another; for it was not the Marquess who summoned Tess from
Penfolds Hall; he can have had no reason to look for her that night above Miller’s Dale. You have not heard, my lord, of the robbing of graves, or the uses the maid found for a gentleman’s clothing—but as we have time and road enough for a story, I will consent to tell you all.”

I
T WAS WELL AFTER THREE O’CLOCK WHEN WE REACHED
the valley of the River Wye, and the splashing white of the miller’s weir; all was peacefulness, as it had been nearly a week before, and I might almost have looked to find George Hemming’s upright figure etched against the trees. But no one stood with rod and tackle—only the miller’s wife, her hands perpetually twisting in her threadbare apron.

“He’s not ’ere,” she called from the doorway before we had even thought to step out of the carriage, “he’ve gone out Buxton way.”

“Thank you, my good woman,” Lord Harold replied. “We require only your consent to leave our coach under your eye. We intend to walk up into the hills. A party of men under the Duke of Devonshire’s direction may presently appear; pray afford them every refreshment in your power, and conduct them towards that path above the weir.”

He pointed in the direction I had taken now twice before, and the miller’s wife closed her palm over Lord Harold’s coin. As we turned away, however, I observed her to cross herself with averted eyes; here was one who would believe the stories of Satanic sacrifice.

We hurried along the path that rose towards the crags above the river, neither of us speaking for some time. Lord Harold cupped his hands to his lips, and called out the Marquess’s name; at the sound of his harsh voice, birds rose out of the surrounding brush with a clatter of wings. The sound had the power to raise gooseflesh along my arm, and curl the hairs at the back of my neck; the urgency of disaster sped our
footsteps. Though Lord Hartington might not be guilty of murder, he might yet have done himself violence from despair: I dreaded to think what we might find among the rocks above.

“Hart!”

Lord Harold paused at the brow of the last hill. The grey tor where I had found the maid’s body rose jaggedly in the distance. He peered at it, eyes narrowed, and discerned the figure sprawled at its foot; and then, without a word, he began to run.

T
HE SCENE WAS THE SAME, AND YET NOT THE SAME
, as it had been five days before. I stood gasping at the foot of the tor, my gloved hand to my mouth, and stared at the figure dressed all in black, the welter of blood about the rocks. There was the mark of a lead ball in the forehead, and the staring eyes; but the birds had not yet descended. He clutched a fowling piece in one hand, and a scrap of paper in the other. But this time Charles Danforth’s clothes were properly his own.

His brother knelt in the dust, hands covering his face, and wept with the horrible, tearing sound of a man unaccustomed to tears. A horse whinnied; I turned, and saw the two gentlemen’s mounts tethered side by side under a tree some thirty yards distant. The same tree, I noted with half my mind, beneath which Lord Harold had found the marks of hoofprints on Friday.

“Good God,” Lord Harold murmured. He bent to Andrew Danforth and gripped his shoulder firmly. “What has happened here?”

Danforth raised a streaming countenance and failed to utter a word. If he saw us clearly, I should be greatly surprised.

“Speak to me, man!”

He shook his head brokenly. “I was … over there. Towards Penfolds. In the copse.” He drew a shuddering
breath and mopped at his eyes with a glove. “Charles was before me. We had come out with the intention of looking for Hart. He suggested we traverse the ground separately, in order to cover the better part of the terrain—”

“Why here?” Lord Harold enquired sharply. “The Duke had no notion of sending you, surely.”

“Charles said that he believed the Marquess was much in the habit of coming here. It was his idea to search the place. I heard the shot—I feared for Hart’s life—I spurred my horse down the path and emerged to see—
this
.”

We stared down at Charles Danforth. His dark eyes gazed sightlessly at the blue August sky; his mouth was slack. All the power for good or ill that had been etched in that countenance, was fled; only the pitiful shell of the man remained. Slowly, Lord Harold reached out and took the scrap of paper from the corpse’s hand.

He read it aloud.