The Deception at Lyme: Or, the Peril of Persuasion (Mr. And Mrs. Darcy Mysteries) (17 page)

“Mr. Darcy, how can I ever express my gratitude? I had no idea—Ben must have followed me out here when I left the house with Wentworth—” The bewildered child lunged toward his father’s arms. The captain took him from Darcy. “Ben, do you not know better?” Though his words expressed admonishment, they were gently delivered. He glanced back to Darcy. “I saw you running toward him but I—damn this leg! Damn the French, I should say, and their grapeshot. Were it not for you and Wentworth—”

“Think nothing of it,” Darcy assured him.

“I cannot help but think upon it, and offer you my thanks.”

The swimmer—Wentworth, he presumed—having reached the steps, Darcy extended his hand to help him up the slippery stones. Wentworth accepted, and soon stood dripping on the quay. Rivulets of water ran into his eyes from his hair, his soaked, tight-fitting coat looked a straitjacket, and he would be very fortunate if his boots were not ruined.

Darcy was a little embarrassed that he himself had emerged from the incident dry save for the effects of Wentworth’s splash. “If you must thank somebody,” he said to Captain Harville, “thank your friend. It is he who met with greater inconvenience.”

Wentworth laughed and pushed his hair back from his forehead. “This old sailor is quite used to getting wet, I assure you.” He now extended his hand to Darcy. “Captain Frederick Wentworth.”

Darcy would hardly describe Captain Wentworth as old. The man before him could not possess many more years than thirty, and, despite Sir Walter’s oration on the detrimental effects of life at sea, looked the model of health and vigor. Even dripping water from his coat sleeves, he bore himself with dignity Sir Walter could not touch. Darcy could easily imagine this man leading a full ship’s complement to victory.

He heartily shook the captain’s hand. “Fitzwilliam Darcy.”

“Darcy?” Captain Wentworth turned to Captain Harville. “Is this the gentleman of whom you were telling me?”

“The same.”

“Mr. Darcy, my friend Harville is not the only person here in your debt. My family is much obliged to you and Mrs. Darcy for the aid you rendered my wife’s stepmother when she fell on this very pavement. I understand that were it not for you, her child would not have survived.”

“I hope Captain Harville retained some of the credit for himself and his wife.”

“Not nearly enough, I am sure.”

They stepped back against the wall to let a cart pass. The horses plodded slowly, in no hurry to take their cargo from the cutter to the Customs House. The creatures traversed the same road so often that they probably did not at all mind when smugglers managed to bypass this required review process and spare them their labor. Darcy wondered what these barrels held. French brandy? Spanish wine?

Jamaican sugar?

“Lady Elliot was also assisted by another naval officer, Lieutenant Andrew St. Clair.” Darcy hoped Captain Wentworth would be able to tell him more about the dubious lieutenant. “Are you acquainted with him?”

“Regrettably, I am not,” Wentworth replied. “I shall have to find him out and extend my thanks to him, as well.”

Captain Harville shifted a now recovered and impatient Ben to his other arm. “We could stand here for another hour at least, discussing accidents on the Cobb and who among us deserves gratitude. We have not even touched upon last autumn’s incident—eh, Wentworth?” Harville chuckled. “But you must be uncomfortable in those wet clothes, and Mrs. Harville must be frantic, looking for Ben. Come—let us find you some dry things. I cannot send you home to Mrs. Wentworth looking like this.”

Darcy fell into step with them. The two captains bantered easily, as old friends do, but in a manner that invited Darcy’s participation rather than left him feeling an outsider. They had not gone far when Harville spied an object farther down the walk.

“Is that your hat on the pavement ahead, Mr. Darcy? There—near the gin shop.”

“The gin shop?”

“Those wooden doors. There’s an old ammunition storeroom behind them, built into the wall, from the days when there were cannon on the Cobb. It came to be known as the gin shop for the hoist they used to move the cannonballs and gunpowder.” He chuckled. “The name lasted longer than the cannons. At any rate, you had better retrieve your hat before the cart horses trample it. Those animals will not diverge from their path no matter what lies in their way. Wentworth, may we stop a moment to rest my leg? Yes, do take Ben, if you will. No, no—I do not need to sit, only lean against the wall.”

Darcy strode ahead to rescue his hat, which indeed lay about ten yards from the gin shop doors. He reached it just before the horses did, picked it up, and moved flush against the Cobb wall to get out of their way. When the cart had passed, he turned to rejoin the captains, but the sound of voices gave him pause.

“… does not want to be held in soaking-wet arms, and I cannot blame him.”

“Ben, if Captain Wentworth sets you down, you must stay at my side. Do you promise?”

The voices were clear as if the speakers stood right beside Darcy. But Captain Harville yet leaned against the stone wall, his friend and son close beside him, at least threescore feet back along the curve from where Darcy stood.

“All right, then. If you misbehave, I will not take you to the shipyard with your brothers.” Harville looked from his son back to Wentworth. “They are preparing to launch a new Indiaman any day now—a thirty-two-gun, the
Black Cormorant.
Have you seen her? I thought I would take the boys over there later today to have a look.…”

Darcy was astonished. Somehow, the curved wall carried Harville’s voice directly to him despite the considerable distance. He had heard of such acoustical phenomena in domed buildings such as St. Paul’s in London, but he had never personally experienced an instance of it.

He moved away from the wall gradually, determining the proximity required for the effect to work. When he lost the sound, he quickly walked back to the captains. The act of eavesdropping, however accidental, on any conversation, however innocuous, violated Darcy’s sense of propriety. Not wanting to embarrass them, he said nothing to his companions about the discovery.

Seventeen

Upon looking over his letters and things, she found it was so.

—Persuasion

“If only we could purchase sugar for Pemberley direct from the West Indies,” Elizabeth declared as she reached the final leaves of Gerard’s diary. “I had no idea that casks of it came with prizes inside. It is little wonder that sugar barons are so wealthy.”

“I doubt all sugar casks are thus equipped,” Darcy replied.

“Even so, the mere chance of finding such a treasure would sweeten my tea all the more.”

She returned her attention to the journal, while Darcy rose from his chair and crossed their small sitting room to gaze out one of the windows. Though impatient for her to finish, he did not want to distract her reading of the critical last entry by staring at her. As he looked upon the street, however, he barely saw the tourists entering the fossil shop on the corner, the gull poking at some morsel on the ground, the gig trying to maneuver round an opposing coach in a side lane too narrow to accommodate both vehicles. His person might stand in a Lyme cottage in the present, but his mind was in the past, on the quarterdeck of a ship in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

He turned sideways, as if gazing farther up the street, but in truth surreptitiously watching Elizabeth’s expressions as she read. She frowned, eyes narrowed. At last, she finished and looked up at him.

“The approaching vessel, I take it, was the
Dangereuse
?”

“Yes, as evidenced by the date.”

She squinted at the lines. “I can barely make out the date. The handwriting on these last pages is inferior to the rest. Though still clearly your cousin’s hand, the strokes are not as controlled, and the ink is smeared.”

Darcy, too, had been forced to slow his reading when he reached the final entry. Impressions from facing pages, where the ink had not entirely dried when Gerard closed the volume, had resulted in ghostly characters that further hindered legibility. “Indeed, one can see that he wrote the entry in great haste.”

“I do not expect, however, that it is Lieutenant Fitzwilliam’s penmanship on which you are soliciting my appraisal?”

“No—Lieutenant St. Clair’s character.”

“Well.” She glanced at the page once more before closing the diary. “One must read between the lines for that, and you have had more opportunity than I today. You have been unusually pensive since your appointment. What transpired?”

Darcy came away from the window and sat down across from her. He related the full conversation, from the meeting with Captain Tourner to St. Clair’s repeated references to the contents of Gerard’s sea chest. Though he censored some of St. Clair’s descriptions of the horrors of combat, he included more particulars of the battle and Gerard’s injuries than he would have imparted to any other lady in England. As he had hinted to St. Clair, he and Elizabeth had encountered such unpleasantness before, and he was blessed with a wife who could discuss such matters with sense and penetration. He needed both at present.

“So, your cousin and the cook—Mr. Hart—were two casualties of how many?”

“I did not think to enquire.” His mind had been so occupied by coalescing suspicion that he had not asked all he might have during his conversation with St. Clair, and the battle itself, though of tantamount significance to Gerard’s family, had been of such minor consequence in the overall war that it had received little attention in the
Naval Chronicle
at the time. “St. Clair made it sound a large number, though obviously this was no Trafalgar.”

“Perhaps the number of other wounded does not signify,” Elizabeth said. “The salient point is that both Lieutenant Fitzwilliam and the cook died shortly after becoming aware of the figurines—objects that somebody else wanted hidden. The question is whether the timing of their deaths resulted from coincidence or malice. As Lady Elliot’s demise has already put me in a murderous frame of mind, it is tempting to read homicide into this history. However, ship-to-ship cannon blasts followed by boarding and melee seems a rather inefficient method of murder.”

“But a very convenient cover for one—or two.”

“You suspect your cousin and Mr. Hart were killed by a member of their own ship’s crew?”

“The melee provided a perfect opportunity to silence any questions about the idols.”

“Surely you do not think Lieutenant St. Clair himself—”

“It is possible. Or someone acting with his knowledge and perhaps on his instructions.”

“But why should he want them dead? He had their trust—he is the person who hired Mr. Hart, and he acted as a mentor to your cousin. He also had the idol in his possession by the time the battle occurred.”

“Idols.”
Darcy emphasized the
s
as he pronounced the word. “Recall that there were two—hence, twice the value and twice the motive for keeping their existence secret.”

She perused the final entries again. “Your cousin writes that Hart came to him with two figurines, but the later account of his conversation with Lieutenant St. Clair says he gave up only one: ‘I surrendered the idol I had shewn him, but they remain fixed in my thoughts.’ Lieutenant Fitzwilliam must have held back the other idol.”

“Or in the haste of writing, he accidentally left off the
s
in that single instance—a reasonable possibility, given the general state of those lines’ urgency and execution.”

“The word is plural everywhere else it appears,” she conceded. “Yet if he
did
relinquish only one idol, did he retain the other with or without Lieutenant St. Clair’s knowledge? Was St. Clair aware of the second? Perhaps your cousin told St. Clair about only the first. Alternatively, Lieutenant Fitzwilliam might have informed him of both but brought only one with him when he sought out St. Clair.”

“St. Clair could have known about both before Gerard even said a word.”

“Because he himself put them in the sugar cask?”

“Or ordered someone else to.”

“Why would he hide anything of value in a cask to be opened and shared by others, instead of keeping the figurines among his private possessions?”

“Perhaps he did not intend for that cask to be shared, but for it to quietly travel to England with his other personal property.” Darcy gestured toward the diary still in Elizabeth’s hands. “Gerard writes that many of the officers had purchased small quantities of rum, sugar, spices, and other West Indian goods for themselves or gifts for friends at home. When those goods were loaded onto the ship, a cask intended for St. Clair’s stores could have become confused with those designated for his mess.”

“Might that not be true of all the officers’ goods? The cask in question could have belonged to any one of them.”

“Yes, but recall that St. Clair acted as caterer for his mess—he contracted for the group’s sugar and other provisions. If a cask from anyone’s private reserve was likely to be misidentified as communal, it would be his.”

“Again, why would he—or anybody—hide such objects in a cask at all? Why not simply lock them in his sea chest?”

“Perhaps he feared they would be stolen. Perhaps he did not want to be connected with them if they were found.”

“He bought two gold figurines as souvenirs of his time in the West Indies. What is the harm in that? Why go to such lengths and risk to disassociate himself from them?”

“Perhaps the idols were something he was not supposed to possess. Given to him by acquaintances he was not supposed to have.” Darcy rose from his chair. It was difficult to sit still with his mind so restless. He went back to the window, but saw no more of the view than he had before. “I wish Gerard had described the figurines in more detail.”

“Had he known he was leaving behind a mystery for you to solve, no doubt he would have. Unfortunately, he did not expect to die.”