Jane and the Twelve Days of Christmas (23 page)

This was blunt speech indeed.

I turned my gaze to Mr. West.

He regarded me steadily and sombrely. “You are persuaded the crux of the matter is an illegitimate child?”

“It seems possible, does it not? Why else should that charade have been read out for all our consideration? It was intended to embarrass one of the company. Only Miss Gambier, after hastening to solve the riddle, refused to exhibit a sense of shame. She offered contempt instead. For that, I must applaud her.”

“But we cannot know that this putative child was hers,” Chute protested.

“No. And now that she is dead, we will have difficulty learning anything at all,” I agreed.

“Miss Austen and I know very little about the Gambiers,” West observed. “Perhaps you, sir, who are better acquainted with the family—”

Chute sighed. “I am barely acquainted with Edward and Mary. It is true I have known Louisa—Lady Gambier—and her sister, Jane, from the time they were born. Their father, Daniel Mathew, was brother to old General Sir Edward Mathew—he who was Governor of Bermuda, or some such.”

“Grenada,” I supplied. The island had been much spoken of in our household, when brother James was married to the General’s daughter, Anne.

“Exactly so. The General carried off the Duke of Ancaster’s daughter, and did very well for himself. His brother Daniel also set up as a gentleman—living, I presume, on his wife’s fortune. Daniel’s daughters, Louisa and Jane, were both plain as pikestaffs, but paraded as heiresses. Long in the tooth, I will add, when the Gambier brothers decided to offer for them. Louisa went off first, to James Gambier—the Admiral—and Jane second, to Samuel. He was Commissioner of the Navy Board when he died last year—and ought to have left a tidy fortune to his children. But he had the Gambier weakness for gambling.”

“So his son told me,” I said. “Edward Gambier makes out that his prospects—and presumably, those of his late sister—are tied up completely in his uncle and aunt, who as you know are childless.”

“They are not the first couple to look for an heir among cousins,” Chute observed. He had done so himself.

Fortune, inheritance, debt—all may be grounds for murder, I
reflected. “Edward Gambier declared quite frankly over Christmas dinner that he hoped his uncle had not got a by-blow somewhere, to cut him out of his hopes.”

Raphael West gave a whistle. “Did he, by God? I suspect young Gambier may have been living on his expectations this past year—and that he, too, inherited the Gambier weakness for gambling. He is too often seen at Watier’s.”
⁹

“I suppose that is why he chuses to rusticate in the country now, and drink my port instead of his club’s,” Chute said thoughtfully. “Living on tick never answers. Despise the habit. It has been the ruin of better men than young Edward.”

“Lady Gambier must exert an awful power,” West mused. “For it is in her hands, is it not, if her nephew is to be saved from his creditors—or broken?”

“I believe she exerted that power freely over Mary Gambier,” I added. “Her ladyship made it very clear that she suspected an attachment between her niece and Lieutenant Gage—and could not approve the match.”

“Tho’ he is aide to her husband?” Chute enquired in disbelief.

“That would appear rather a detriment in Lady Gambier’s eyes,” I managed. “She does not admire the Navy.”

“Extraordinary.” Chute turned to West. “You believe Louisa hated poor Gage enough to set a trap for him with that wire? I should not have said she had so much spite in her.”

“I do not mean to say her ladyship murdered Lieutenant Gage,” I amended hastily. “But she certainly negatived his suit. Of course, if there was a child in the case—”

“I do not suspect her of being in the pay of Buonaparte’s confederates,” West added quietly. “She can have had no need to kill for the Treaty, when her husband was its chief negotiator.”

“What about young Edward, then?” Chute slapped his thighs and winced as the pain of gout took him. “Needs a bit of the ready—is willing to sell his uncle’s state secrets to meet his obligations—falls into the clutches of the French—?”

“And when his sister refused to help him, killed John Gage,” West concluded. “There would be an added incentive, in that Mary Gambier’s expectations of inheritance should become her brother’s, upon her death.”

I shook my head. “Even if we accept Edward Gambier was capable of murdering his sister, how was it effected? Would Mary Gambier take a mortal dose of laudanum from her brother’s hands, if she suspected him of killing Lieutenant Gage?”

“That is true. She was no fool,” Chute muttered. “And she gave no sign of mistrusting Gambier. In the hours after Gage’s death, Edward had been her chief support.”

I recalled them seated together at dinner, Edward leaning attentively towards his sister. “What if the dose was introduced into her food?” I suggested, “and the bottle left by the body in the Chapel, to suggest self-murder?”

“That would be clever, indeed,” said Raphael West. “The fatal drug might have been placed in her coffee, while in the Saloon—and the addition of sugar would mask any difference in taste.”

“By Jove,” Chute exclaimed. “That is the way to go about it, sir. You might almost have killed her yourself!”

West glanced at me—a sober, earnest look—and failed to turn the jest.

He knows, I thought, that I cannot trust him.

“Lady Gambier poured out,” I said colourlessly. “Miss Gambier sat by her aunt and retired early to bed that evening.” I did not remind the gentlemen of the scene between my brother’s wife and the dead lady; scorn and rage were the last that any of us had known of Mary Gambier.

“If the laudanum was in her coffee, she may have begun to feel a drugged weariness,” West observed.

“And yet she was most active,” I countered. “My young niece, Caroline, sat up much of the night of Mary Gambier’s death—alarmed by footsteps in the nursery wing corridor. The child was afraid Lieutenant Gage’s ghost was abroad.”

“That corridor leads to a back stair,” William Chute said. “It descends to the Chapel.”

“And given that Caroline was disturbed by footsteps,” I mused, “and Miss Gambier perhaps already insensible—is it not possible that her killer chose the nursery passage to convey her body to the Chapel floor? In the middle of the night, he should not like to carry her through the Staircase Hall. He might meet any one of us.”

“Villain,” Chute said bitterly. “It does not bear thinking of. That helpless girl, dragged limp from her bed—and none of us able to save her. When I consider what I shelter in my house—that even now a killer breaks bread with my wife and child—”

“If only we could divine the mystery of the charade,” I said in frustration. “I am sure it is the clew to everything, and Lady Gambier will never reveal it. The secret will go with Mary to her grave.”

But our conversation was at an end. The horses were pulling up, and the footman jumping down from the rear of the carriage. We had arrived at the Angel Inn, Basingstoke.

I
WILL NOT TROUBLE
to relate the particulars of the inquest—how the publick room of the inn had been given over to a considerable
crowd of curious onlookers; how the jury was empanelled, or by whom; how the Coroner appeared, in all the dignity of a wig newly-purchased for the Christmas season and ennobled by his judicial dignities, when in the common way he was merely Mr. Stout, the Basingstoke surgeon. We have all been treated to similar scenes before. When the six men of the jury had been sent into a side parlour to view Lieutenant Gage’s body, and had returned affirming that they understood he had been dead some days, and had lost his life to a broken neck, Mr. Chute was called to give an account of St. Stephen’s Day. Lieutenant Gage’s arrival was considered; his farewells the following morn; the return of his riderless horse, and the discovery of his body.

“You did not summon a doctor, sir, when Deceased was found?” the Coroner enquired.

“It was impossible, due to the condition of the roads. They had not then been cleared of snow, and the thaw was only just setting in.”

“You found the corpse at half-past eleven o’clock in the morning, or thereabouts, by your best estimation—and Deceased had quitted The Vyne some forty minutes or so before. Was the body still warm when you discovered it?”

“Barely. It had been lying some minutes in a drift of snow.”

The Coroner allowed Chute to step down, so that the true drama of the proceeding might occur—which, to my mind, was the testimony of Raphael West and myself. It was our evidence which must turn the inquest from a common enquiry into a fall from a horse, to an exploration of murder.

West was required to take his oath first. He did so with his usual self-containment and faint air of boredom. I was well-enough acquainted with the man now to know that his countenance looked most weary when his attention was most acute. He produced his
notebook and explained the sketches he had made. The Coroner summed up his conclusions.

“And so you would insist that the horse fell—and the rider landed—in places other than where the body was found?”

“Yes, sir.”

A faint murmur of speculation fanned through the crowd.

The Coroner knit his brows. “Are you suggesting the injury to Deceased’s neck was so trifling that he was able to raise himself and change his position—tho’ serious enough that he then expired? For if so, Mr. West, I must say that all my long years of bone-setting are against you. Deceased’s neck was broken right through.”

“I do not suggest it.” Impossible for West to say outright what his evidence shewed; that was for the Coroner to conclude.

“Then I take it, sir, you would imply that Deceased’s neck was broken after he fell from the horse—and not by the fall itself.”

“From the disturbance in the snow, I can think nothing else.”

“We cannot know, other than from this sketch, that you did see such a disturbance,” the Coroner retorted. “The snow has since melted. This may be all artist’s invention.”

“Another guest at The Vyne was witness to my sketching. You will find her signature appended on the obverse of that paper.”

The Coroner looked for my name; found it; and Raphael West was invited to stand down. It was then my turn to speak.

I told the jury of my walk to the scene of Lieutenant Gage’s death, and of finding Raphael West at work there. I affirmed that the snow was unbroken from the place where the horse was brought down, to the Sherborne St. John road.

“Brought down,” the Coroner repeated. “Surely you mean fell?”

“I do not,” I said firmly, and told him of my discovery of the
entrapping wire. “I then observed footprints in the snow, leading from the trees to the door of the ice house.”

“Suggesting that whoever laid the wire, retreated there for shelter?”

“That is possible.”

“Or waited there, with the object of breaking Lieutenant Gage’s neck, when once his horse was brought down?”

“That is also possible.”

“Did you look within the ice house?”

“I did, with Mr. Raphael West. We found it empty.”

Mr. Chute was then recalled, and told how he had been informed of our discoveries, and had subsequently notified Lord Bolton.

“Do you know of any reason why Lieutenant Gage should be killed, Mr. Chute, on your grounds?” the Coroner enquired in his silkiest manner.

“He carried an important Government dispatch,” Chute said, “which is now missing.”

Another ripple of interest from the crowd.

The Coroner brought down his gavel, and adjourned the proceeding for an interval, so that the jury might partake of the Angel’s ale, and Mr. Stout might organise his thoughts.

“I have secured a private parlour upstairs, Miss Austen, so that we might enjoy a nuncheon in peace.”

“You are very good, sir.” My shivering breakfast with Cook had been of so unsatisfying a nature that I was quite ready to admire the rabbit and leek pie, Cheshire cheese, and baked apples the landlord, Mr. Fitch, had sent up for us. Mr. Chute invited Lord Bolton to join us, and that mild young man informed us he was now the father of a son. Lady Bolton was doing admirably.

We listened to him talk of his wife’s superb temperament—her treating a lying-in as tho’ it were no more than having the headache;
her undiminished beauty; and what young Harry had said when told that he had another brother. Nothing—not even the matter of a double-murder in his preserve—could divert his lordship from his stream of relief and self-congratulation. William Chute was just refilling Lord Bolton’s glass with claret, and raising his own to the health of the infant, when there came a knock on the parlour door.

It was Fitch, the Angel’s innkeeper.

“Begging your pardon,” he said with a nod to all of us as he stooped deprecatingly in the doorway, a second figure behind him, “but this lady is wishful of having speech with you, sirs, and when she told me her name, I thought it best to come straight to Lord Bolton.”

“Her name?” his lordship repeated. “What is it, man?”

Fitch glanced almost slyly over his shoulder, big with news; but the woman he guarded pushed abruptly past him, and strode into the room. She had a child of two or three on her hip.

“I am Amy Gage,” she said defiantly. “John Gage’s widow.”

If this interval of confusion and violence during the Christmas season has taught me anything, it is to value the essential goodness of William Chute—a man I had been much disposed to regard as little more than a rough country squire, of scant education and commonplace gifts. I had been wont, in the past, to deplore the throwing away of such a woman as Eliza Chute upon a man who preferred an hour with his pack of hounds in the stables, to one of studied discourse in his ancestral Saloon. But I was moved to admiration and warmth by the alacrity with which he dismissed the interested innkeeper and ushered Mrs. Gage to a chair by the fire, chucked her boy beneath the chin, and offered both a share of our nuncheon. He succeeded in turning an awkward and uncertain moment to one of easiness; and I perceived that this was a habit acquired as much from his long years of service in Parliament as his standing in Sherborne St. John.