Rustication (41 page)

They’ve committed a murder and now I am going to kill them. The two people whom I most love. Whom I have loved, I should say. They killed a man—Euphemia by proxy and my mother by her silence. And they have tried to kill me. I’m going to cut them out of my love and my life and that is a kind of murder. They will cease to exist as far as I am concerned.

· · ·

1 o’clock.

Was stuffing some bread into my knapsack—Mother’s gift to me only a year ago—in the kitchen just now when Betsy loomed up out of the shadows. (I had just a candle with me.)

She saw what I was doing and said:
You’re going to cross the marsh?

I nodded:
It should bear my weight now that it’s frozen
.

Her face lit up and she said:
Let me come with you
.

I said:
Out of the question. It’s too dangerous
. I could see what she was going to say so I quickly added:
I can do it alone but not if I have to help another person
.

She looked so unhappy that I said:
When I am settled where I am going, I will write to you
. I saw in her face that she feared I was teasing her again. I said:
Visit Miss Bittlestone. She would like that. And I will send the letter to her to read to you. In fact, I’m sure she will teach you to read
.

Even as I spoke those words, I wondered how long it would be before this household was broken up. I’m haunted by the fear that I might have brought on Betsy the trouble that has come to Euphemia. If so, what would become of her? My mother and sister would not help her. Miss Bittlestone does not have the resources.

I said:
Betsy, the things we did. The nice things
.

She nodded with a secretive smile.

Tell Miss Bittlestone if it turns out that there are any consequences and if I do manage to get away to somewhere safe, she can write to me and I’ll send money
.

She indicated her assent. Then she said:
Look up at my window as you go and I’ll leave the light burning to give you your bearings
.

She stood on tiptoe and raised her face to me and we kissed for the first time. Then she scurried into the dark.

½ past 1 o’clock.

By the morning I will be far from here or I will be dead. The false trail I have laid should lure my pursuers in the opposite direction and give me time to reach my destination. The two or three sovereigns my mother begrudged me but that I will take from her hiding-place, will get me to Southampton. Once there, Uncle T’s letter will convey me across the Atlantic.

There is no moon tonight which means I will not be seen—though I’m sure that nobody but Betsy will be watching—but which will make it hard to pick out the safest footings. I dare not take a lantern since it might alert the policeman if he happens to look in that direction.

The tide is at half-flood now and will be at its lowest at about two hours after midnight. The crucial questions are these: Is it cold enough for the marsh to have frozen and bear my weight? And can I find my way? Apart from Betsy’s dim glow, there will be no light by which to direct my course. As I found when I attempted the crossing ten days ago, there are no houses on the shore and if there are more distant ones, they will not have lights in the middle of the night. I will be like a mariner at sea with no features on the horizon or in the heavens to steer by, knowing that hidden reefs are all around me and that a false move will not be retrievable. If the marsh swallows me, so be it. Better to drown than to swing.

If all goes well I should reach Mr Boddington’s house at three or four o’clock and there I will place this Journal in the hands of the sole person whose judgement and honesty I can trust and I will impress on him that it should be made public only if I am captured or an innocent person is charged. If I die this book will be lost with me and the truth will never be known. Whether I live or perish, I will be remembered as a vicious and cowardly murderer—but I do not care what others believe about me.

Whatever happens to me, I believe the guilty will escape punishment. I should say, judicial punishment, for the impulse that has driven them to this piece of wickedness will not cease to inflict pain on them.

If I make it that far, will I stand at the stern of
The Hibernian Maid
and watch England disappear? I think not. I will look into the darkness ahead of me rather than the darkness behind.

Richard Shenstone,
Wednesday 13
^th
of January, 2 o’clock in the morning
.

Afterword

R
ichard must have crossed the frozen marsh and left the Journal at Boddington’s house or it would not have survived. After that he vanishes from the historical record. Whether he made it to Canada is unknown. If he did, he must have changed his name for I have not been able to find any trace of a “Richard Shenstone” there during the relevant period. What I have established is that nobody was ever arrested or charged with the murder of Willoughby Davenant Burgoyne. Mrs Shenstone died less than a year after these events. There is no record that Euphemia ever married and she certainly did not wed Lyddiard, who died destitute and still a bachelor only eight years later.

The last sighting I have traced of Euphemia finds her living in London at an address in Clerkenwell—then a poor district—in 1873. After that, she disappears—possibly because she married and changed her name—though I have discovered no record of that.

At some point Boddington must have collected the letters from Wilson and pasted them—except for the final one that was in the earl’s possession—into the Journal. When, many years later, his firm was taken over by another, the Journal was deposited in the County Records Office where it lay—apparently undisturbed—until I opened it two years ago.

One of the mysteries that remain is why Lyddiard did not claim the money he was entitled to under the terms of the trust set up by his father’s will. If the whole point of the conspiracy was to gain the inheritance, then he must have had a strong motive.

I had been struck by something that Richard recorded the detective, Wilson, as having said. When he read out the final anonymous letter, he mentioned that he had been permitted by the earl to make a copy of only part of it and that he was not allowed to read the whole. The earl himself was the only person to have seen the full text. I wondered what there was in the letter that the earl wanted to conceal. It occurred to me that if I could find the deed of trust executed by the father of Davenant Burgoyne and Lyddiard, it might lead me to the missing letter.

After an extensive search I found the deed in the national archives at Kew, London, called the Public Records Office. As Richard had been told, under the terms of the trust, Lyddiard inherited the fortune if his half-brother died before the age of twenty-five and without an heir. But I also learned that Lyddiard had to make his claim within twelve months or the entire sum went to the earl.

The name of the solicitor who had drawn up the deed led me back to the County Records Office where, as I had hoped, the archives of his firm had been deposited. And there, carefully preserved in an envelope inside a leather portfolio, lay the taunting letter sent to Davenant Burgoyne a few hours before he was killed.

Just above the passage which Wilson had copied and read out to Richard, there was a crease. The most interesting part of the letter had been folded over—presumably by the earl when he showed it to Wilson—so that the detective could not see it. The words that his lordship had kept hidden were these in which the writer, goaded by hearing from Euphemia that Davenant Burgoyne had sneered at bastardy in his confrontation with Richard at the ball, forgot, in his anger at the slur on himself, that Richard himself was not being accused of being illegitimate:

You throw the word bastard in my face but just because your mother was married and mine wasn’t, doesn’t make you any better than me. My mother entered a love-match not a contract of sale negotiated by lawyers. It was your mother that was the bought and paid for whore and not mine
.

Writing in the early hours of the morning after the ball, Lyddiard, possibly drunk and certainly excited at the imminence of the murder of his hated half-brother, had made a stupid mistake. This was the sole letter that he had written alone and, without Euphemia to rein in his anger, he had blundered into pointing the finger at himself instead of Richard. The earl must have understood that. He therefore showed Wilson enough of the letter to incriminate Richard but not the part that inculpated his nephew. He then used that piece of evidence to force Lyddiard into dropping his claim on the trust. Far from being the “decent and honourable person” Richard had taken him for, his lordship conspired to let him hang for a murder he knew he did not commit since that both averted the scandal of a nephew being tried for murder and brought him a fortune.

Other mysteries remain. Was Betsy pregnant? Did Richard send her money and even pay her passage out to join him in Canada? It seems unlikely that the answers to those questions will ever be known.

CP.

London, 14
^th
October, 2012
.

Acknowledgments