Jane and the Stillroom Maid (4 page)

26 August 1806, cont.
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T
HE STENCH OF BLOOD AT THE FOOT OF THE CRAG
was nearly overwhelming—a hot, sweet, animal smell that engulfed the senses and obliterated thought. I pressed one gloved hand to my nostrils and closed my eyes. A feeling of faintness was inevitable, but I
would
not give way. It was imperative that help should be sought from my cousin and Mr. Hemming—but they were fixed at the riverbank, perhaps a half-hour back along the path already traversed. My scream of terror had not alerted them. I opened my eyes and allowed my gaze to travel over the form sprawled in the dust. A round hole in the center of the forehead, black with crusted blood, suggested first how the man had died; there would be a lead ball lodged in the skull. But other wounds he had sustained, more grotesque and inexplicable: blood seeped from his parted lips, spilling gore over the folds of his cravat and his white shirt-front. The shirt itself was rucked-up over the fastening of his black pantaloons, and his bowels spilled out upon the rock—a sight that must urge a desperate
retching. I turned away, and caused myself to bend nearly double in an effort to contain the wave of sickness. At length the black haze subsided; the blood pounding in my temples returned to its wonted course. I stood up, my back to the savaged corpse, and stared dully at a raven triumphant on a rock. The bird had alighted perhaps five feet from my position, sunlight glinting blue on its sooty feathers; one cruel yellow eye surveyed me with indifference. In the raven’s beak was an oblong of flesh—sandy pink, amorphous, and yet not dissimilar from the breakfast fare on every farmyard table. It was
tongue
. A human tongue. From the cleanness of the wound at the severed end, I should judge that a knife had cut it out.

I began to move down the path away from the body, unable to look at it again. I stumbled once, saved myself from a bruising fall, and then broke into a run.

“M
ISS
A
USTEN
! A
RE YOU ILL
?”

George Hemming cast aside his rod and hastened towards my breathless figure. Mr. Cooper, it appeared, was in the midst of landing a determined trout; his countenance was o’erspread with a fierce scowl, and he did not spare me so much as a glance.

“I am perfectly well,” I assured Mr. Hemming in a feverish accent, “but there is a man lying among the rocks above who is not. I have found a corpse, Mr. Hemming—so viciously worked upon, I dare not trust myself to relate the particulars. We must fetch a surgeon at once! And the Law, if such exists in these wretched hills—”

Mr. Hemming could not be insensible to my wild appearance; in an instant, he was all solicitude, and led me to a broad, flat rock some yards from the river. There I sat down in gratitude and relief. Mr. Hemming pressed a handkerchief into my hands. I found that I was trembling uncontrollably, and that a feeling of
nausea would not be denied. “Do not regard my indisposition,” I cried, “but send at once for aid.”

“Pray calm yourself, Miss Austen,” Mr. Hemming urged. “I will go myself in a moment—or seek help from the miller’s hut—but first, I must insist that you partake of my French brandy. It cannot but prove restorative to one in your condition.”

At this, the admirable Mr. Hemming produced a silver flask from among his fishing tackle and administered a modest draught. I spluttered, choked, and raised a hand to my mouth.

“That’s better,” he said approvingly. “The colour has returned to your cheeks.”

I very much doubted that it had ever been absent—a complexion such as mine does not show to advantage under the twin forces of exertion and summer weather—but I forbore to dispute his gallantry.

“The corpse of a man, you say.” His eyes were fixed upon my countenance with an expression of trouble and anxiety. “A shepherd, perhaps? Or a jagger who lost his way?”

“Jagger?” I was momentarily diverted by the strangeness of the word.

“The packhorse pedlars who roam the Peaks,” Hemming replied. “They bring all manner of goods to more remote villages of Derbyshire, and a fair measure of gossip as well. The jaggers are to be found everywhere among these hills in the summer months.”

“This man was not a pedlar,” I told him, “but a gentleman by his appearance. I should judge his clothes and shoes to be of the first quality, and fairly new.”

Mr. Hemming’s expression changed. From one of interest in myself, it turned to disquiet for another. I saw that he should have preferred to dismiss this death as a misadventure among the lower orders—and with it, all burden to himself. But such was not to be. The claims of a gentleman
must
be felt.

“How old a gentleman should you judge him to be, Miss Austen?”

The face had been clean-shaven, the skin delicate. “He cannot be much above twenty.”

A whoop from the riverbank then attracted our notice. Mr. Cooper raised high his severed line, an enormous trout depending from its length.

“Edward! We have need of you!” Mr. Hemming cried.

My cousin frowned, then set his fish carefully upon the grass at his feet and ambled towards us.

“Was there any sign of a horse?” Mr. Hemming returned to me with urgency. “Hoofprints, perhaps?—Could he have found his death from a fall?”

I shook my head. “He has been brutally and most savagely murdered, sir. There is nothing else to be said.”

“My dear Jane,” my cousin observed as he achieved our position, “you look remarkably unwell.”

“Miss Austen has sustained a shock,” Mr. Hemming informed him. “She has discovered a gentleman in the rocks above, quite dead.”

“A corpse?” Mr. Cooper exclaimed, with a look of consternation. “Not
again
, Jane! However shall we explain this to my aunt?”

B
UT I WAS SAVED THE NECESSITY OF UNPLEASANT
explanation some hours more. Mr. Hemming conveyed me to the relative comfort of the miller’s cottage, where I was seated in a hard wooden chair by an ancient woman of obscure dialect. There I sipped some water from a chipped earthenware mug, and gazed out of the unglazed window, and felt my terror ease with the water slipping noisily over the mill-wheel’s vanes. It should have been the perfect pastoral scene, of a kind beloved of my favoured poets, but for the preparations
undergone a few moments before: the miller’s waggon readied, and his sole draught horse lured from the fields; a pallet laid out between two poles, and secured with a length of rope; the miller’s wife dispensing a spare sheet, worn quite through in places by time and the marriage bed. A few moments only saw the work completed, and then my cousin, the miller, and Mr. Hemming toiled up the craggy path in search of the ravaged body. They should not miss it for the crows.

Perhaps an hour passed before they reappeared, bearing a draped mass on the pallet between them. The countenances of all three, labourer and gentlemen alike, were stamped with grave disquiet. They set the pallet in the bed of the miller’s waggon with grunts of exertion and relief. The miller’s wife stood in her doorway, twisting her hands in her apron and considering, no doubt, of her sheet.

Mr. Cooper drew a tremulous breath. “May God have mercy on his soul,” he murmured, and wiped his streaming brow with a handkerchief.

“Did you recognise the face?” I enquired of Mr. Hemming.

“I did not,” he brusquely replied. “The poor wretch might hail from anywhere—he need not be a gentleman of this county. There are many who pass through Derbyshire in the summer months.”

He failed to meet my gaze with steadiness, and seemed most anxious to encourage the thought of the murdered man’s alienation from his final resting place. A dim note of warning sounded in the recesses of my brain—but suspicion of such a man as George Hemming must be absurd. His desire to regard the murdered fellow as foreign to Derbyshire should not be extraordinary. It is one thing to witness the mutilation of a stranger—death might have occurred as the result of a thousand grievances and enmities unknown. But the brutal end of an acquaintance is quite another matter. Such an end cannot be readily forgot.

“Are you well enough to attempt a journey, Jane?” Mr. Cooper enquired.

“I am. What is to be done with the corpse?”

Mr. Hemming stared at me in surprise; not one in an hundred ladies, perhaps, should have considered it her place to pursue such a matter. But then he recollected that I had discovered the poor soul myself, and must naturally feel an interest.

“I think it best to convey the body into Buxton,” he said. “It is no greater distance than Bakewell, although in the opposite direction; and chances are good that Deceased will be known there. Many strangers to the district put up in Buxton, intending to take the waters.”

“And does the Coroner for this district also reside in that town?”

“He does not,” Mr. Hemming replied, “but that is no very great matter. Tivey may ride over from Bakewell if he chuses; he does so often enough.”

“The choice appears to have been made already for him, sir,” I returned with some surprise. “He cannot help but ride over; he cannot neglect of so painful a duty! Is the local Justice, perhaps, a resident of Buxton rather than Bakewell?”

“Sir James may be said to reside in neither,” Mr. Hemming replied shortly, “his estate being at Monyash.”

“Monyash! But that is a good deal south of here, and only a few miles from Bakewell, is it not?”

Mr. Hemming turned towards the waggon with a suggestion of angry impatience in his countenance, and retorted that he preferred to carry the body into Buxton, and there was an
end
to the matter. He hoped to divert some greater misfortune, I guessed, in directing the corpse into a neighbourhood not his own. But why? Gone were the happy manners of the morning; he had become taciturn, preoccupied, closed in his confidence. I read some great trouble in Mr. Hemming’s looks—a greater unease than even the ravaged corpse had produced. Was it possible that the solicitor detected
something in the gentleman’s aspect—or in the gruesome manner of his death—that gave rise to the gravest anxiety?

Did he suspect, perhaps, the hand that had done these acts?

Or was Mr. Hemming merely desirous of being rid of interfering females?

“Would you wish us to accompany you, Hemming?” enquired my cousin Mr. Cooper. He made the offer most unwillingly; we should lose the better part of the morning in traversing the hills, first west to Buxton, and then east again to Bakewell.

“Pray escort Miss Austen back to your inn, Edward, and leave this unhappy affair to me.” Mr. Hemming did not deign to look at my cousin as he said this, but kept his eyes resolutely turned towards the harness of his pony. “You shall take my trap, and leave it in The Rutland Arms’ stableyard. I shall send for it later.”

“But how shall you return to Bakewell from Buxton, Mr. Hemming?” I said in exasperation, “if we have commanded your horse? Why should we not all proceed companionably together towards Bakewell, and allow the Coroner and the Justice to exert their authority within their own district? Is not this diversion to Buxton a great deal of trouble, for no very good reason?”

“My reasons are my own, Miss Austen—” Mr. Hemming began abruptly, when he was interrupted by my cousin.

“I confess I must agree with Jane,” Mr. Cooper admitted doubtfully. “I cannot see the purpose of such needless activity, when so many of the principals reside in Bakewell. And we cannot know for certain, after all, that this poor unfortunate was staying in Buxton; he might as readily have taken a room at The Rutland Arms, like ourselves! I am sure that the Justice shall wonder at your decision, George. He will like to know—as we do—why you are so desirous of sending him over hill and dale in pursuit of his duty!”

The solicitor opened his mouth as though to speak, looked from the miller to ourselves without uttering a word, and then shrugged in resignation. “Very well,” he muttered, “let it be Bakewell, then, and the Devil take the consequences!”

With which impenetrable remark, he pulled himself up into the seat of his trap, and reached for the reins.

W
E MADE OUR PROGRESS TOWARDS
B
AKEWELL IN THE
heat of the day, the miller’s waggon following slowly behind. The air was oppressive with the promise of thunder, and a mass of cloud hovered over Dark Peak. Our passage was utterly silent but for the sound of the horses’ hooves; even my cousin was unmoved to send Heavenward a sacred song. Heavy as our spirits were, I was mistress enough of my faculties by the time we reached Bakewell to urge Mr. Hemming onward in search of the surgeon, when he would first have set me down at The Rutland Arms. And so it was that we came into Water Street.

Hemming pulled up in the midst of a dozen equipages; the miller’s waggon ground to a halt behind. Tuesday is market day in Bakewell, and Water Street was at a standstill. The solicitor craned his head over the sheep farmers and lead miners, the quarry workers and tradesmen lounging in the doorways, and cried out, “Mr. Tivey! I want the surgeon, Mr. Tivey!”

All conversation ceased. The tradesmen straightened; the farmers stared. I felt suddenly as though I were condemned to death by exposure. My cousin gave a little sigh of exasperation. And then, with a clang of iron and sparks from the blacksmith’s forge opposite, a broad-shouldered devil of a man set down his hammer.

He was not much above thirty, with powerful forearms and heavy dark brows, a living embodiment of the fabled Vulcan. He wiped blackened palms on his
leather apron and studied our faces. “What’s so great a matter, George Hemming, that it warrants a summons on market day? Tha’ knows I’m not my own man of a Tuesday.”

Mr. Hemming jumped down from his gig, and the crowd parted to permit his passage. He spoke in a lowered tone to Michael Tivey, while the men standing nearest did not attempt to conceal their interest. However bent upon discretion Mr. Hemming might be, however, it appeared that Mr. Tivey did not share his inclination. He turned away from the solicitor’s urgent intelligence, and whistled appreciatively, his eyes on the shrouded burden in the miller’s waggon. “If no one claims ’im, ah’ll be wanting the body for study, mind.”