Jane and the Twelve Days of Christmas (24 page)

Having seen Mrs. Gage settled in her chair and her child supplied with baked apple, however, Chute’s shrewd brain turned to more critical matters.

“I forget my manners,” he said handsomely. “You will allow me to make you acquainted with Miss Austen—she has lately been a guest at The Vyne—with Mr. West, and with Lord Bolton, our Justice of the Peace.”

She inclined her head to all of us, but said only, “You’re the lady as was called to evidence. And the gentleman as made the drawings.” Her speech, like her dress, was not refined; her skin was coarse and her teeth indifferent. A plain face and an ageing one; but I could trace in it the remnants of prettiness, and her figure was buxom. As a young girl, Amy Gage had probably been a coquette. Knowing something of the Navy, I suspected the Lieutenant had wooed his landlady’s daughter, while posted in Sheerness or Deal.

“You will not be offended, I hope,” Chute continued, “when I tell you that we had no notion of your existence, and thus could not inform you of your husband’s death. How did you come to learn of it, Mrs. Gage?”

“The news is all over Portsmouth,” she said. “How the Admiral’s messenger was killed in performing his dooty. I went to the Port Commander and asked him straight. He told me there was to be a ’quest—he’d had it from the Admiralty Signals. He gave me coach fare to Basingstoke.”

“Have you accommodation?” Chute enquired.

Amy Gage shrugged. “I’ll shift somewhere for the night. But what’s to become of me then, I’d like to know, and the boy? I’ve hardly enough blunt to give Jack a decent burial! How we’ll live now he’s gone, there’s no telling.”

“He will have a Naval pension, surely?” I suggested.

“On a lieutenant’s pay? No better than a beggar’s portion,” she retorted contemptuously. “If he’d made Master or Post—but he
couldn’t get a ship, now Boney’s gone to ground. No, it won’t do. I’ll put the child on the parish, I will, and go into Service.”

It was plain from the trend of the woman’s words that John Gage’s death in itself was barely a source of grief. Shocked as I was at the fact of his having possessed a wife—when his attachment to Mary Gambier, and hers to him, had been quite clear—I felt a twinge of sympathy for the dead man. It seemed a reproach to his memory that his loss was measured only in pounds and pence.

“Provided you may prove the truth of your marriage to Lieutenant Gage,” William Chute said smoothly, “you may discover there is a sum in keeping for you—having died as he did in the service of the Crown.”

This was nonsense, as I very well knew. Every Naval officer dies in service to the Crown, whether he be on shore or at the Antipodes, for he holds the King’s commission. But I perceived that Chute was angling for intelligence, and hoped the promise of coin might win it.

“I wear his ring, don’t I?” Mrs. Gage said defiantly. “It’s a fine thing when a respectable widow is made to feel no better than a strumpet. Ask Gambier if I’m John Gage’s wife!”

“My dear lady,” Chute said swiftly, “I offered no insult. It is customary, before bounties such as I mentioned are paid out, to ensure that the recipients are legally entitled to them. The claims, for instance of your husband’s other relatives—an aged mother, perhaps?—must be weighed against your own.”

With a sharp movement, Amy Gage turned to Lord Bolton. “Listen on him! Jack was alone in the world, until he found me. But you fine folk with your words and your laws will cheat me out of my due. It’s the old story, as is seen all over Portsmouth—good men die, and their kin are turned out like slops from the bilge.”

“Mrs. Gage—” Lord Bolton began, in consternation, but Raphael West forestalled him.

“When did you last see your husband, ma’am?” he asked quietly.

“Christmas Eve. He didn’t ought to have come, being meant for London and the Admiralty—ought to have taken the packet out of Ostend, into Kent. But Gambier was wishful Jack should see her la’ship. Give her his letters. So Jack took a Navy cruiser to Portsmouth instead.”

“Had he been absent from you long?”

“He’s never home more than one night together,” she said simply. “Spends all his time in Gambier’s service. The child don’t hardly know him. But that’s all right. Jack made sure we had enough to live on. I don’t know how we’ll make do, now he’s gone.”

West ignored this reversion to a burning subject. “He left you Christmas morning?”

“Still dark, it was. And no word since. I didn’t think nothing of that—until Sally at the Bosun’s Whistle told me about the ’quest, and I went to the Port Commander.”

The Bosun’s Whistle was a Portsmouth publick house.

“This Sally,” I broke in. “She knew to come to you? Tho’ your husband was so lately returned, and so briefly? She was aware, I collect, that he was bound for the north on Admiralty business?”

Of a sudden, Mrs. Gage looked less sure of herself. Her gaze shifted from mine; her hands worked at her little boy’s jacket. “No harm in raising a pint of bitter on a cold winter’s night. Or passing the time o’day with a friend.”

I glanced at Raphael West. A French cypher of Chute’s correspondence had been found on a man seized in a Portsmouth tavern. Was it the Bosun’s Whistle?

He gave no sign. “Did your husband tell you where he was bound, on the Admiral’s private business?”

“I know now,” she said darkly. “Bound for his death, he was. What
I want to know is, was his purse on him? Or did the fellow who did for him, take his coin too?”

There was an instant of appalled silence. Then William Chute said drily, “I shall instruct the Coroner, Mr. Stout, to deliver over your husband’s effects, ma’am, once the inquest is done. If you wish to bury him, you may even have his body.”

“Not I,” she returned indifferently. “That’s the Navy’s affair. He did ought to be tossed over the rail in his hammock. Jack’d like to meet Davy Jones, and no expence about it.”

I thought of Mary Gambier on her knees before the Lieutenant’s bier, and felt a wretched chill in my heart.

Mrs. Gage rose from her chair and snatched the child back onto her hip. The little boy’s face was liberally smeared with baked apple; he buried it stickily in his mother’s shoulder. She strode up to William Chute.

“You write to the Admiral and tell ’im how we’re left. Tell him I mean to put Jack’s boy on the parish. If he wants me, he’ll find me in Portsmouth—until I can bear the charge of lodgings no longer!”

T
HE REMAINDER OF THE
inquest held no surprizes for me. The Coroner’s panel was summoned from its enjoyment of Mr. Fitch’s barrels, and required to listen to Mr. Stout’s guidance. Lord Bolton was respectfully asked if he had anything further to add—as Justice of the Peace for the Basingstoke locality—and he gave it as his opinion that further facts might yet come to light in the Lieutenant’s death. With such clear direction from the established authorities, the six worthies of the jury retired to ruminate among themselves; and within very few minutes, pronounced a verdict of murder, by person or persons unknown.

The day being already far advanced, Mr. Chute was anxious to
summon his coachman and have the carriage brought round from the Angel’s yard. As Mr. West and I hurried from the publick room where the inquest had been held, I observed Lord Bolton approach Amy Gage. He reached into his coat and produced a notecase. No doubt the sight of that little boy brought to mind his own wife and child—delivered into far different circumstances this Christmas.

“U
NACCOUNTABLE
,” I
SAID AS
we rattled over the icy cobblestones towards Steventon once more. “Lieutenant Gage married—it is in every way unaccountable!”

“Only if you assume that Mary Gambier understood the case,” Raphael West returned. “It is probable that she was as ignorant of his circumstances as we were. Despite her clear attachment, she cannot have known him long or well. Gage was too often absent on his duties, and absent from England.”

“Her brother told me that the Lieutenant was perpetually in service to Lord Gambier—following him about the Continent as a sort of aide-de-camp.” I glanced at William Chute. “That is unusual in the Navy, to be sure, but the Admiral has been turned on shore these several years, and his duties have lain in administration rather than command. I suppose Lieutenant Gage served him as secretary, rather in the way you employ Benedict L’Anglois; and no mention of his personal life ever arose.”

“To be sure,” Chute replied. “I believe Miss Gambier made Gage’s acquaintance only last summer, in Brighton. But to think he chose to marry such a woman! She is not at all like Mary Gambier—and we must hope Mrs. Gage knows nothing of that lady’s existence, or sad end. Thank God Bolton did not wish to hold an inquest on Miss Gambier’s death—only consider of the embarrassment for all concerned!”

We were silent a moment, while the early winter dark slowly took possession of the carriage interior. The flickering lights of the side lanterns became more pronounced against the dusky backdrop; I reached my toes to the hot brick, refreshed at the Angel, and wished I might already be at Steventon, in the privacy of my bedchamber, to consider of all I had learnt. I felt oppressed by the sordidness of The Vyne affair, beyond anything I had yet known; a weariness of deceit and betrayal overcame me.

“I could not help remarking that Mrs. Gage lives in Portsmouth,” Raphael West said quietly. He opened his sketchbook and held one page to the side-lantern’s light. I could just make out the image of a woman and child; he had been drawing Amy Gage while Chute questioned her. In the shape of the boy’s head and the almond eyes, I recognised the technique of Benjamin West—who conjured from every such pair a Raphaelite Madonna.

“Half the Navy resides in Hampshire,” Chute returned indifferently, “when they do not live in Kent.”

“But our spy,” West concluded, “was discovered in Portsmouth—at the very Bosun’s Whistle Mrs. Gage is known to frequent.”

THE SEVENTH DAY

New Year’s Eve saw an end to the thaw. We awoke to a sky lowering and ominous, and a temperature sunk into its boots. Clouds built up all morning as Cassandra and I strolled briskly down Steventon’s solitary street, to fetch chickens from one villager, cheese from another, and fresh bread from a third. We had invited Caroline to accompany us on our brief shopping expedition, and she was everywhere greeted with deference and affection as “Rector’s Young Lady.” We encountered a spinster Miss Sutter, a lady of uncertain years in genteel decline, who was happy to renew her acquaintance with “dear Mr. Austen’s daughters,” and appeared anxious to trace the outline of our younger selves in Cassandra’s countenance and mine. But it is nearly fourteen years since we quitted the parsonage for Bath with our parents, leaving it to James’s care—and that is a period. Every pore of one’s thought and existence is changed. Miss Sutter turned next to Caroline, who was shifting from one cold foot to another.

“And you have lately been staying at The Vyne, I hear! What a Christmas treat, to be sure! Such grand gentlemen and ladies!”

No word of murder had penetrated through the snows, it seemed, to Steventon. Yet.

“And how is your Mamma? Lying down upon her sopha—or improved in health, with all the charm and distraction of her guests?”

Caroline justified the faith I have lately been placing in her quickness and understanding, by refusing to answer such leading questions, and merely displayed Jemima to Miss Sutter’s dazzled eyes. The faeries had come up to scratch this morning, delivering a redingote of Prussian-blue wool; just the thing for a freezing walk along muddy lanes. Once Miss Sutter had declared herself amazed at Jemima’s stile and beauty, we pled the cold and hurried back to the house.

Mary, having been torn from all the richness and stimulation of The Vyne, had declared herself most unwell this morning, and descended into what her son, James-Edward, called “a fit of the dismals.”

“Is that a sample of Edward Gambier’s cant?” I enquired interestedly.

“Thomas-Vere’s,” he acknowledged with shy pride. “I had no notion, Aunt, that he was such a great gun—for he is a clergyman, after all, and generally speaks in that high-pitched manner. But from Gambier’s chaffing when we played at billiards, I came to know that Thomas-Vere is quite the man-about-town. Up to every rig, as they say! Although apparently he keeps exotic fowl in his lodgings, which he did not care to bring to The Vyne. I confess I did not quite understand. But perhaps I did not attend fully.”

“Exotic fowl?” I repeated, my brows raised.

“Gambier was joking Thomas-Vere—all in fun, of course!—about his pockets being all to let, and Thomas-Vere unable to meet his losses at billiards, on account of his Bird of Paradise,” James-Edward explained. “I gather Gambier has seen the bird
when he was up in Town. But perhaps it is an exotic flower, and not a bird, after all? It must be very dear, particularly in the cold of winter months.”

And from what I knew of Birds of Paradise—a euphemism for a brilliant Light-skirt, a Comfortable Armful, or a Bit of Muslin, Thomas-Vere’s Bird would be just as expensive in the heat of summer, when she took to parading in Hyde Park in next to nothing at all. He might wish to keep his mistress secret from his intimate family; but then again, he might be required to approach them for a loan. Thomas-Vere was an admirer of opera—and opera dancers were not happy long on a clergyman’s pittance. If the lady was a true High-Flyer, she would soon demand jewels and a pair of match-greys for her cunning phaeton. Had Thomas-Vere found another source of income?