Jane and the Barque of Frailty (12 page)

clergyman, banker, sailor, and gentleman—at least one had embraced the Law. In truth, the few country attorneys thrown in my way have been prosy individuals, devoid of humour, exacting as to terms and precise as to verbiage, with a lamentable relish for disputation. In this hour of desperate peril, however, I yearned devoutly for a hotheaded barrister in the family fold: one who might knock Bill Skroggs on his back with a single blow, before serving notice that his sister was not a toy for the magistrate’s sport. What I detested most in the Runner’s manner was his easy assurance of my venality—no hint of sympathy or doubt lurked in those hard, pale eyes. Innocence was unknown to Bill Skroggs; in his world every soul was guilty of something. His exultation was like a hound’s that has caught the fox between its teeth. In this I understood the depth of my danger.

Some fleeting thought of Sylvester Chizzlewit coursed through my brain—but such an exquisite gentleman would surely be dining in his club at this hour, and beyond the reach of supplication. Eliza was no support in my hour of need: a lady who has had recourse for fifty years to fits of the vapours, hartshorn, and burnt feathers cannot be expected to show steel in extremis. I should have to attempt to offer Skroggs the truth, and turn the snapping dog on a rival scent.

“You labour under a grave misunderstanding, Mr. Skroggs,” I observed, “and one that is likely to cost you your prize money.
¹
I know nothing of Princess Tscholikova or her death—”

“But you know these rubies and emeralds, and you were cool enough to tell a Banbury story to old Rundell. Isn’t that right, Mr. Black?”

“Acourse it is,” Clem Black agreed.

“Miss Austen purported to have inherited the swag from the Duke of Chandos, only Rundell had seen the jewels before, and noted the occasion in his ledger. The jewels belonged to Princess Evgenia Tscholikova, who departed this life on Tuesday last. Rundell had the cleaning and resetting of her gems four months since.”

“Acourse he did,” Clem Black agreed.

“I have already admitted I told Mr. Rundell an untruth,” I interjected unsteadily. “I regret the necessity that argued such discretion. An acquaintance begged my sister, Mrs. Austen, to broker the valuation and sale of these gems—and I agreed to stand as their owner. We assumed them to be solely and entirely the property of our friend.”

“This would be another Banbury story, Mr. Black,” Bill Skroggs intoned wearily.

“Acourse it is,” Clem Black agreed.

“Oh, you stupid man,” Eliza burst out. She sat up as swiftly as a cork bursting from a champagne bottle. “Can you not see that Jane and I are distinctly un-suited to the murdering of the Princess? She was a Long Meg of a woman—built on queenly lines—and neither Jane nor I is much over five feet! We should have had to stand on a footstool to cut the poor creature’s throat, and the idea of either of us possessing the nerve—”

“Ah, but there is a Mr. Austen to be considered,” Skroggs said with avuncular kindness. “It’s a gang of thieves I think of, Mr. Black, with murder on the side.”

“Acourse it is,” Clem Black agreed.

“The Austen party is ideally situated in the neighbourhood of Hans Town, a hop and a skip from the Princess’s door—Henry Austen being known to the lady, perhaps, as a man of business much inclined to lend his blunt to nobles whose purses are to let. Let us suppose he visits the Princess in Hans Place to discuss the matter of a loan, sympathises with the poor lady’s embarrassed circumstances, so far from home—kills her when her back is turned, makes off with the jewels—and puts his respectable spinster of a sister and his jumped-up countess of a wife on to the job of selling the loot.”

Eliza gasped. “Jumped-up countess! I’ll have you know I am everywhere received, Mr. Skroggs, among the highest members of the ton ! The friends who might end your career in the wink of an eye are legion—”

“Yes, yes, yes,” I said crossly, “but none of this is to the point. What you suggest is absurd, Mr. Skroggs, because the jewels were given to us by a Frenchwoman of our acquaintance, the celebrated opera singer Anne de St.-Huberti, and if you wish to understand how she came by them—I suggest you enquire of her husband, rather than Eliza’s. I can well imagine the Comte d’Entraigues slitting any number of throats.”

“D’Entraigues?” Skroggs gave the name a passable pronunciation, as tho’ he had heard it before. “Old Royalist fled from the Revolution? White periwig, brocade waistcoats? Fond of walking in Hyde Park of an afternoon, ogling the females?”

“The very same.”

Bill Skroggs whistled faintly, and jerked his head at Clem Black. The junior Runner thrust himself away from the drawing-room door. Skroggs gestured with a blunt hand towards Eliza’s delicate Louis XV chairs and said, with surprising restraint, “May we?”

“But of course,” Eliza returned disdainfully. She had left off hiding her face in her handkerchief, and was meeting the Runner’s gaze with furious dark eyes. “But if you dare to suggest that my husband is capable of slitting any woman’s throat—”

“I don’t say as I believe you, mind,” Skroggs offered judiciously, “but I’m willing to listen to the whole story, even if it is a Banbury tale. How did the Countess come to give you these jewels?”

Eliza told him the sordid history: how the aging singer had seen her power wane over the Comte d’Entraigues; how she had feared for her future, and confronted the demand for divorce; how she had turned to a friend from her salad days, Eliza Hancock Austen, Comtesse de Feuillide, because of the memories the two ladies shared of glittering nights at Versailles. Eliza threatened to veer off at this point into a side-lane of reminiscence, regarding a prince of the blood royal and a musical evening in the Hall of Mirrors; but a delicate kick from my foot returned her to the thread of her tale. She explained how she had considered of her husband’s reputation— the probity of his banking concern—the ubiquity of rumour—and urged her sister Jane to pretend to ownership of the Frenchwoman’s jewels.

“We know no more than you, sir,” I added when Eliza had paused for breath. “It would seem incredible that Anne de St.-Huberti is in ignorance of the gems’ origin, for she certainly cannot pretend to have held them for years. But perhaps she thought to profit by the sale, did the pieces go unrecognised— and avoid all connexion, if their owner should be divined.”

“But, Jane,” Eliza protested, “that cannot explain how Anne came by the Princess’s jewels. You cannot believe her cognizant of … of … ”

“ … Murder?” I supplied. “Any woman who has survived the Terror with her neck intact, must have grown inured to bloodshed. But it is possible, my dear, that she knew nothing of the jewels’ origin— but was given them to sell by her husband, and enacted a Cheltenham tragedy for your benefit, replete with Barques of Frailty and threats of divorce. It is all a farrago of lies, naturally.”

“I shall never receive her,” Eliza declared mutinously. “I shall offer her the cut direct, when next we meet!”

“Begging your pardon, Comtesse,” Bill Skroggs broke in, “but I’m afraid it will not do.”

I stared at him. “Will it not? Whatever can you mean? It must be evident that we speak nothing but the truth! Indeed, sir, we are as much victims of this rapacious scoundrel as the Princess Tscholikova!”

“But you have no proof.” He looked from Eliza to me. “One mort’s story is very much like another’s: part Devil’s own malice, part fear of the nubbing cheat. If I was to take any of it as gospel, I’d be the laughingstock of Bow Street.”

“Nubbing cheat?”

Skroggs lifted his hand close to his ear, head lolling in a horrible caricature of a broken neck. “Hangman’s rope. You’d say anything to escape it, I reckon.”

He rose regretfully. “I’ll have to lay charges. This tale’s all very well, but there’s an old saying about the bird in hand being worth two in a bush—and I’ve got you both to hand, so to speak. Come along, now.”

“Mr. Skroggs,” I said firmly—Eliza had gone white, her handkerchief pressed once more against her mouth—“what if you were to grant us a measure of liberty, so that we might obtain certain … proofs?”

He laughed brusquely. “As a sort of side-show to your flight to the Continent, ma’am? I do not believe there is any proof you could discover that would interest William Skroggs.”

“—Not even if we were to learn how the Princess ended on Lord Castlereagh’s doorstep? And who, exactly, put her there?”

The Bow Street Runner went still, and shot me a rapier look through narrowed eyes.

“Come, come, Mr. Skroggs,” I said smoothly. “You cannot be interested merely in the recovery of the stones—for those you have. If it were only prize money you held in view, your end should be satisfied, thanks to Mr. Rundell. Something else draws your interest. You were hired, I collect, not by the Princess’s connexions—but by Lord Castlereagh himself, were you not?”

Eliza hiccupped with suppressed excitement.

Skroggs cast a venomous glance at his colleague, Clem Black, as tho’ accusing that unfortunate man of betraying him.

“It seems quite obvious,” I continued, “from the few words you have let slip, that Princess Tscholikova did not die by her own hand.”

The Runner smiled thinly. “Forgive me, ma’am— but you cannot possibly know that.”

I shrugged. “No murder weapon has been mentioned in the newspapers. I collect that none was found by the lady. Do you think it was a knife, Mr. Skroggs, or a gentleman’s razor that slit the wretched Princess’s throat?”

“Either would serve,” Skroggs replied with ruthless precision, “but I will not be led into an admission

I am enjoined not to make prior to the convening of the coroner’s panel. I cannot allow you to spread rumours in this way, Miss Austen. —Being but a suspect criminal, prattling for her life.”

“If indeed the poor creature was deliberately and coldly taken,” I continued, oblivious to his scruples, “then her killer chose to place her directly on Lord Castlereagh’s doorstep. The scandal that has followed is everything an enemy of his lordship could desire. I do not for a moment entertain the notion that Castlereagh was himself responsible for striking the Princess down, and leaving her where she fell; such careless disregard for convention is not in his character. Therefore, he was the object of a plot. I have an idea that Castlereagh would wish to know who was the party that set out to destroy his reputation and career.”

“Naturally!” Eliza cried, “So that he might challenge the fellow to a duel, and put a ball through his heart!”

“Mr. Skroggs refuses to say yea or nay,” I mused. “And in his very silence we may read a fatal admission. He is in Lord Castlereagh’s hire, and the Princess’s jewels are merely a foothold on the greater slope he must climb. But how, indeed, shall such a man as a Bow Street Runner penetrate the holy of holies—the inner sanctum of the British ton—where, without doubt, Lord Castlereagh’s enemy hides?”

I paused for effect. The countenance of William Skroggs was slowly flushing scarlet.

“I hold myself as good as any of them,” he said hoarsely.

“No doubt you do.” I ran my eyes the length of his figure. “But I fear, my good sir, you will never come within an inch of your killer. You do not possess the air or address—or forgive me, the birth—that distinguish a Bond Street lounger. His native ground will be barred to you. Whereas my sister—that jumped-up countess … is everywhere received.”

Clem Black snorted derisively. I observed Bill Skroggs’s hands to clench.

“You require our help as much as we require your mercy,” I declared. “Come, Mr. Skroggs—shall we strike a bargain?”

¹
Bow Street Runners were not public servants but professional thief-takers more akin to our present-day bounty hunters. They typically worked for a percentage of the value of any stolen goods recovered; this was their “prize money.” As the jewelry belonged to Princess Tscholikova, presumably her family would pay the reward once the gems were recovered. This pursuit of gain made Bow Street Runners typically less interested in justice or the guilt or innocence of those they pursued, and more intent upon the simple recovery of goods. Although they were empowered to arrest suspects and bring them before the magistrate, justice was for the court to determine.—
Editor’s note
.

Chapter 11
Lord Castlereagh Condescends

Friday, 26 April 1811

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T
HE MORNING OF THE
P
RINCESS’S INQUEST DAWNED
fair and bright, more May than April, with a frivolous breeze that set the horse chestnut leaves to fluttering. I had no share in the innocence of the day, however; I was wrapped around in deceit, the chief object of it my brother.

Upon Henry’s return from his bank, Eliza and I had said nothing of the Bow Street Runners’ calamitous call. We had enjoined poor Madame Bigeon and Manon to secrecy, and their love for Eliza was so great, that at length they acquiesced—tho’ Madame was all for recruiting Henry’s wit and stoutness in foiling the brutal intent of the Law. The Frenchwomen’s experiences in their native country, and the troubles that occasioned their flight to England, had taught them to trust neither in plots nor constabulary—but to avoid all such authority as might sever their heads from their necks. In this I detected good sense and hard courage, and resolved to employ the two ladies’ talents whenever my own should fail me.

I had managed, in the end, to bring Bill Skroggs neatly round my thumb. The Runner had been taught to see the sense of my argument—that Eliza and I should penetrate where he should be barred— and had agreed to accord us our liberty for the space of one week: a mere seven days to defeat the object of a most cunning and subtle killer. I found the constraint of the brief period immaterial; I had always intended to quit London by the end of the month in any case. The imperative to clear my name in the interim merely added a fillip of interest to the waning days of my Season. I had much to do, if I were not to hang.

While Manon ushered the two men to the door, and Skroggs issued his final cold-blooded warnings, I was busy enumerating in my mind the chief points that must be addressed, in an undertaking such as this: