The Regency Detective (10 page)

‘Are you all right?’ asked Swann.

Mary nodded her head.

They stayed crouched behind the pianoforte until Swann thought it to be safe. As he stood to investigate, there was a knock on the door of the drawing room.

‘Is everything all right, madam? I heard a smashing sound.’

‘Come in Emily,’ answered Mary.

‘A rock has been thrown through the front window,’ said Swann to Emily, as she entered. ‘Stay here with my sister while I investigate and I do not want either of you going over to the window, is that understood?’

The two women nodded.

‘It is for your own safety,’ added Swann, as he himself then went over to the smashed window and cautiously peered out from the side of its curtain; the air immediately cool to his face. The street below was empty. He then looked down at the drawing room floor and saw that thankfully the force and trajectory of the rock had been stopped by the curtains and it lay below them amongst the glass. He carefully picked it up and carried it with him as he went downstairs and out through the front door of the house. Whoever had thrown the rock was now long gone. All that remained was its aftermath: the barking of neighbourhood dogs, roused by the disturbance; the servants and domestic staff from nearby houses, who had either voluntarily or else been ordered to venture out into the street to find out what had occurred; and their masters and mistresses who watched covertly from adjacent windows, twitching the curtains back and forth as they waited for reports from their servants as to what lay behind this most disagreeable incident at this most unearthly hour.

After informing the assembled crowd as to exactly what had occurred and telling them they could go back inside as there was nothing more to the matter, Swann then looked down at the rock in his hand. He noticed the piece of paper attached. He untied it and read the contents:
Swann – don’t meddle where you don’t belong or else.

Bath, Wednesday
19
th October, 1803

I find it incredible to think that it was only yesterday morning I stepped out of the coach and arrived in Bath and yet the events which have transpired since then would ordinarily be hard pressed to occur within a month or an even longer period. No sooner had I alighted from the coach, than I became involved in a crime which had seemed to have reached its close earlier this evening, with the apprehension of its perpetrator outside the Assembly Rooms. Yet instead this has provoked another incident, namely that of the shattered window, for I must assume it was this felon’s apprehension which is, in some way, connected to this latest occurrence. I will discuss the matter with Fitzpatrick tomorrow, but in my own mind I do not assume any other possibility.

Whatever reason lay behind this attack though, I believe that I must now insist on Mary moving to London with me, once my business here in the city is concluded. Especially with the addition of Lady Harriet’s invitation signalling the potential start of a regular interaction between them and the most disagreeable presence of Lockhart. I must therefore use all my persuasive arguments to get her to agree to my decision.

With this abrasive intrusion, I feel somewhat like Crusoe on discovering the footprint. The knowing that there something is out there to which I am not privy, is not a position I relish. It is not through fear though, as I am used to danger, but Mary has become involved and that is something which I would have wished not to have occurred. I will not let someone else I care about be hurt in any way again. I remember … but no, I do not wish to disclose in these pages that which should never be recorded. It resides in my memory and that should be enough. I will endeavour simply to send a message back to the instigators of this attack before I leave Bath and allow the matter to rest at that.

I have also been shaken from reading Robinson Crusoe and I have therefore decided to read no more of it. I shall return the volume to the library and there it will stay. I believed the book held a possible release to my solace, however slight, but I see now I was wrong. If anything, it has produced feelings I did not know existed and certainly do not want to experience again.

It is hard to believe what mere words can arouse. But through them, I have come to realise that I find myself seemingly at odds with the world around me. I feel at times like Rousseau’s Solitary Walker, walking in a world in which I feel I do not belong, a world which in many ways repulses me, a world which embraces all I loathe and abhor – wealth, greed, and self-aggrandisement – at the cost of the ordinary person.

I ask myself once more, as I have done so on many occasions previously, what drives a person to commit a crime, to murder, to steal, to trick, to leave another human being in a worse state? Morally, I cannot understand it. There must be logic to the world, some natural sense, other than the religious observance which seems to end every such conversation with the words ‘it is God’s will’. Was it God’s will that my father should die, that he should be murdered but the perpetrators walk free, to go about their daily business for all these years, while others, including myself, suffer? For twenty years I have mourned my father and not a day passes when I do not recall a statement he made or a conversation between us or the expression on his face when he regaled to me the memories of the fairs he visited when he was younger. He was the perfect man that I so long to become, yet find I fall short in so many aspects.

At periods such as this, I cannot help but think Hobbes is right – that man’s nature is intrinsically evil and it is only the rules society creates that prevents him from killing his fellow man. Left to their own devices, men would inevitably turn to slaughtering each other, resulting in everyone’s life becoming ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.’ For did not even Rousseau, who so passionately believed in man’s ‘primitive state of innocence’, eventually come to see his fellow man as agents of his own discontentment and that all were out to pursue him to his grave by treacherous means and so leaving him to become, in his own words, a solitary walker through this world.

I do not believe I am as paranoid as Rousseau thought himself to be, yet I can identify with him in the way he saw the world. We are born into this world, to fend for ourselves, at the mercies of forces unseen and at any moment can be swept away into an abyss of grief or despair, swept by the tidal wave of fate, or incredulity. What would have happened that evening if those men had gone to the next house and not the Gardiners, or some divine intervention had called them to tend to other business? Every scenario that might have occurred on that evening has taken place within my mind during these past twenty years.

As for what I have sacrificed because of it, I cannot even begin to describe. I have written about this subject in yesterday’s entry but it requires repeating. I have Mary and of that I am thankful. I have many acquaintances in London, but not friends. As for female companionship of a more romantic nature, of course not, why would I wish to be with any other female after her. It is not to be. I have long since chosen my own fate and whether the forces that govern us will allow this destiny to be carried out I can only wait to see, but mark my words, as I write them in this very journal, I will do everything in my power to make sure that it does work out the way I want it.

Rousseau comes to mind again. In one of the discourses he wrote towards the end of his career, he meditated on his life and the state of mind which had arisen from the varied circumstances of it. Where he had experienced periods of prosperity, he recounted he had no lasting impression or ‘agreeable memories’, yet by contrast, the times of his life when he experienced hardship, there was an overriding wealth of emotions which seemed to burst forth, which resulted in his existence seemingly more complete and his life more fully lived at these times. Is that why I am perhaps afraid to find Malone, because I believe that there will be nothing left to provoke me, or to stir my soul? Do I somehow find solace in the great wrong which has been done to me? Whatever I may think, I perhaps cannot deny that I only really feel alive when I think of the revenge I wish to take and this sets anger in my heart which warms me.

Now that the funeral is over, I can turn my full attention back to Malone and the criminal aspect of Bath and, if my instincts are correct, I will be crossing paths with them in the very near future.

It was spitting with rain when Swann left the house in Great Pulteney Street the following morning. The makeshift covering over the smashed window had held and it would soon be replaced by a pane of glass that workmen were bringing later that day.

What was on Swann’s mind now, however, was who the perpetrator of this broken window had been. Who had sent the warning and disrupted the house the previous evening? He made his way into the centre of town and towards the magistrates’ court, where Mary believed Fitzpatrick might be. On arriving at the building, however, he was informed that the magistrate had no session during the morning and would therefore, no doubt, be working from his office in Queen Square. Swann made his way up the High Street and into Milsom Street, reputed to be the most prestigious shopping street in the whole of the South West.

The cross-sweepers were already out in force, clearing pathways through the mounds of droppings from the multitude of livestock driven through the city earlier that morning, on their way to slaughterhouses located near the river. The smell of the manure hung palpably in the air as Swann made his way through the crowd of early morning shoppers, who consisted almost exclusively of young ladies. He turned left into Quiet Street and then Wood Street and into Queen Square, emerging into it by the south-east corner.

Queen Square had been the architect John Wood’s first great achievement in Bath and was to have been his inaugural pronouncement of the grand design he envisaged for the city. He had sited it to the north-west of the city’s old medieval boundaries, midway between what would later become the upper and lower towns, on land leased to him by its owner, Robert Gay. Excavation work had begun in December 1728 and the first stone was laid the following month at the corner of Wood Street, where Swann now stood. It took seven years to complete the Square and much of his original plan had been changed. Wood had initially envisaged three sides of the Square – the north, east and west – to collectively form a palace forecourt, this splendid view to be appreciated each morning by the architect himself, from the windows of his house within the south range of buildings. While the east side remained basically as he had primarily imagined, the buildings on the west became that of a large mansion.

The magnificently designed north expanse of houses, seven in all, had also remained for the most part intact. Dominating the Square, as it was intended to do, the differing sized buildings nevertheless formed a symmetrical composition which resembled a Palladian palace façade.

In the middle of the Square was a garden and at its centre was an obelisk. The Square stood on sloping land that was going to be levelled but to save money, which at the time had been estimated to be about four thousand pounds, Wood had instead built the houses to the natural contours of the land. The prestige of an address in the Square had been lowered in the preceding years, but even from the brief encounters Swann had already shared with Fitzpatrick, he would not have imagined the magistrate considering even for a moment moving his offices elsewhere. Swann now entered the Square proper, made his way up the east side and then went inside the address he had been given at the Guildhall.

Meanwhile, inside the four-storey building, Fitzpatrick was in discussion with Evans, the local shopkeepers’ representative and the man who had attempted to have Tyler prosecuted earlier that week.

‘I understand exactly what you are saying, Mr Evans,’ said Fitzpatrick, as he sat behind his office desk, ‘but I do not know how I can help at the present.’

‘That is where you are wrong, Mr Fitzpatrick,’ said Evans. ‘To start with, you could agree to address our shopkeepers’ meeting tonight. As their representative, if you were to attend at my request, it would show credibility on my side and for your own standing would show that the local magistracies are concerned about the problem of rising crime and its affect on trade in the city.’

‘I am only too aware of the problems that exist in relation to crime and trade,’ replied Fitzpatrick, sounding as sympathetic as he could.

‘We are already into the season, Mr Fitzpatrick, and the city should be thriving. Yet visitor numbers are down and those that have come here are under constant threat of violence or being robbed by thieves. And we shopkeepers have not fared much better either; Richardson, the watchmaker, had his entire stock of timepieces stolen from outside his shop only two days ago.’

Fitzpatrick could not restrain himself as he heard this age-old problem again.

‘But to be fair, some of this is brought on by yourselves,’ he replied. ‘You do, for example, leave your wares exposed on the street.’

‘But we have to display them there, to encourage trade,’ Evans retorted. ‘Yet boys so young as not long off their mother’s suckling make our life a misery.’

At this moment Swann appeared at Fitzpatrick’s office door. An expression of relief could be seen in the magistrate’s face.

‘Ah, Swann. Come in, please.’

‘I hope I am not interrupting,’ said Swann.

‘Not at all,’ replied Fitzpatrick.

Swann entered the office and Fitzpatrick made the introductions. The two men greeted each other cordially.

‘Mr Evans is the shopkeepers’ representative, Swann.’

‘I assume you are kept very busy in your role, Mr Evans.’

‘That is correct,’ said Evans, appreciative of the insight the other man had shown. ‘And if I may enquire, what is your occupation, Mr Swann?’

‘Mr Swann is a consulting detective with the Bow Street Runners,’ Fitzpatrick interjected.