The Regency Detective (19 page)

‘Good,’ said Swann. ‘I want you to follow a certain gentleman while he is there. And you’ll be pleased to know that for this undertaking I have something more instructive than a verbal description.’ Swann produced a small sketchbook and opened it at the pre-marked page containing a drawing of a man’s head and shoulders. It was of Edmund Lockhart, his sister’s suitor. ‘You do not need to know the man’s identity, but I believe he will be on this morning’s Royal Mail coach. I want you to board the coach when it stops outside The Three Tuns and then report back to me this man’s movements while he is in Bristol. But I do not want him to realise he is being followed.’

‘We’ll be like shadows, sir, as always,’ said George.

‘Very good,’ replied Swann, as he put the sketchbook back in his jacket pocket and took out a small brown envelope, which he handed to George. ‘The coach tickets are inside and there is enough money to adequately cover your vitals.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ said George.

‘You are welcome, George.’ Swann then put his hand in a different pocket and produced a handful of loose coins. ‘And this is a little extra for a few mugs of ale. Consider it as payment for the trouble you both encountered last evening on my behalf.’

Bridges and George both grinned widely.

‘Thank you again, Mr Swann,’ said George.

As George went to take the coins, however, Swann closed his fingers around them. ‘You can each have one mug of ale with your food,’ said Swann, ‘but the rest is to be consumed
after
you have accomplished what I have asked. Is that understood?’

As the two men nodded, Swann opened his fist to let them collect the coins.

‘I know you will not let me down,’ said Swann, with a discerning expression. ‘The Royal Mail coach returns to Bath, on its way back to London from Bristol, at half past eight this evening, so I suggest we meet at the Fountain Inn around nine o’clock. Enjoy your day, gentlemen.’

George and Bridges bowed respectfully and headed excitedly towards the exit, as if two children had just been let loose in a confectionary shop. As they went outside to the street, a magistrates’ clerk rushed by them and entered the inn. He glanced around anxiously but on seeing Swann headed directly over to him.

‘Mr Swann,’ said the clerk. ‘Mr Fitzpatrick supposed I would likely find you in this establishment at this hour.’

‘Then he knows my routine well. But what is your urgency, sir?

‘There has been an occurrence elsewhere in the city and Mr Fitzpatrick would value your opinion on the matter. His carriage awaits you outside, if you do not mind.’

Swann took the last mouthful of his coffee and stood up. ‘Then let us depart immediately,’ he said.

Mary stood in the middle of her drawing room in Great Pulteney Street perplexed. She had searched everywhere in the room – as well as having looked for it in her bedroom – or at least everywhere that she thought it might be. It was unlike her to misplace anything, but especially the small sketchbook, given she had been drawing the previous evening. She was certain her memory was not faulty in recollecting that she had put it away in the bottom drawer of her dresser, but even if that had been the case, it no longer resided there this morning. She had questioned Emily about its possible whereabouts, but to no avail. She would ask Jack on his return.

After her brother had decided to stay on in Bath, the days had naturally fallen, or so it felt to Mary, into a most agreeable and mutually beneficial routine. They would each rise around seven o’clock and while Jack went for morning coffee in town and to collect any post off the Royal Mail coach, she would busy herself with her ablutions. On Jack’s return around ten o’clock, they would sit down to breakfast together and discuss any relevant matters of the day. Her brother had not returned for breakfast this morning, although this was not an unusual occurrence, so Mary had eaten alone.

She was now getting ready for Mr Luchini’s arrival at eleven o’clock. Since the death of her mother, Mary had spent more time at home and a weekly art lesson being one of the activities she pursued. Mary had made her stand against the current conventions, she believed, by attending the ball whilst in mourning, but then had withdrawn from Bath’s social life on, she felt, her own terms. And so consequently now only attended intimate dinner parties and private gatherings, or else immersed herself in long walks to the city’s outlaying villages, such as Weston and Swainswick, when the weather was conducive and Edmund was free of business commitments; both of which seemed to have become rare of late.

The absence of these walks did not perturb Mary too much, however, as on her aunt’s insistence she had recently begun a concentrated programme of reading. This consisted of several volumes borrowed from Harriet’s own library and all of which had been written by women. Up until this point in her life, the subject of women’s writing, or at least writing by women
for
women, had seemed too contentious for her to become involved in and she had always viewed that type of writing with trepidation. Her parents, although not outwardly condemning writing by such women as Mary Wollstonecraft or Hannah More, the latter having actually been a close neighbour at number seventy-six Great Pulteney Street until the previous year, had nevertheless not encouraged discussion of it either; despite her mother’s appetite for gothic novels written by women. And whether by chance or design, her father’s library contained only one book by a woman writer; Burney’s
Evelina
, which Mary had retrieved the day of her mother’s funeral.

The first major revelation on undertaking this course of reading, along with the lecture she had attended the previous month and also through discussions with her aunt, had been the realisation of the voluminous amount of books that actually existed whose contents could be described as radical and the number of women who had written them; going as far back as a century and a half before the present day.

For Mary, and she believed this to be true for many of her gender, any thinking about their status in society or indeed questioning women’s position in life, had begun with Mary Wollstonecraft. When
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
had first been published a decade or so ago, it immediately became notorious and brought vilification upon its author. Mary had yet to read the book, but what she did know about the contents, which had been received second or even third or fourth hand, was that the authoress’ main idea – equality of women to men – was deemed far too dangerous for polite society. At least this was the belief held by many of the male members of her social world – and perhaps this included her brother as well – and, so she had heard on several occasions, any association with it would only led to misfortune. The malice towards her namesake while alive continued in the present, six years after her death, and one particular venomous piece of prose she remembered reading recently advocated that her life and works should be read with disgust by every female who has any pretensions to delicacy, with detestation by everyone attached to the interests of religion and morality, and with indignation by anyone who might feel any regard for the unhappy woman, whose frailties should have been buried in oblivion. And yet, as Mary had now come to recognise, this tradition of ‘dangerous writing’ and vilification towards its creators stretched back further than she could ever have imagined.

‘Now that you are truly an independent woman, you must learn to think like one,’ Harriet had told her, as they stood together next to a bookcase containing what her aunt termed ‘the collection’. ‘And the first thing you need to do is begin a systematic and chronological reading of the writers I have assembled here.’ Many of the volumes in the collection were either long out of print copies, or else privately published, but nevertheless they
existed
. Women it seemed, at least since the time of Shakespeare, had taken the time to reflect on the situations they had found themselves in, as part of the female race, and then had the courage to set those thoughts down on paper for publication.

The first writer Harriet recommended, as she pulled out several volumes of her work, was a woman with the unusual sounding name of Aphra Behn. Although born to neither position nor fortune, Behn had lived the most extraordinary of lives, during which she had travelled extensively, including to the West Indies, become a spy for Charles II, the reigning monarch, and had been an early advocator of the abolishment of slavery; the latter most forcefully promoted through her writing, Harriet explained, which she turned to in order to make money when she found herself imprisoned for the debts incurred during the King’s service but which the monarch, either indifferently or deliberately, chose not to reimburse. So successful was Behn that she had become the first English woman to earn her living by the pen and her prodigious output, as Mary could see for herself, took up almost an entire shelf and included several plays, at least a dozen works of fiction, and many collections of poetry and translations.

‘And yet, if you read any history of English literature,’ exclaimed Harriet, angrily, ‘it is as if she had never existed.’

Despite the immense success her work achieved during her lifetime, Behn was constantly ridiculed, belittled and verbally abused by male ‘critics’, who not only excluded her from their literary circles of power, but accused her of putting her name to works which had, they claimed, actually been written by her male lover. The final and most enduring insult though came after death, with her burial in Westminster Abbey. This was not in poets corner, however, as her achievements might suggest, but under the floor of a doorway, said Harriet, through which ‘countless generations of feet would slowly erase her name, her reputation, and even her existence from the annals of literary history.’

If Behn had been one of, if not
the
, first woman writer to speak on behalf of her gender and question the imbalanced roles women and men occupied, then the writer of the volume Mary most recently finished reading carried this argument even further.
A Serious Proposal to the Ladies for the Advancement of their True and General Interest
, which had been originally published, Mary had noted, a century before Wollstonecraft’s
Vindication
, made its central argument in a satirical but thoroughly entertaining manner. If men were seen to be superior and women silly, the authoress wrote, then it was because men had used their power to arrange society so as to reflect and continue this notion, thus allowing them to retain authority. But what was more incredible was that in many ways, women were blamed for these ‘social arrangements’ men devised. ‘Women are from their very infancy debarred from those advantages,’ the writer had argued, ‘with the want of which they are afterwards reproached, and nursed up in those vices which will hereafter be upbraided to them.’ It was a problem of education, it had been concluded. Men educated themselves, limited it to their female counterparts and then put the blame wholly on them because they were not educated! And what was more, it seemed, was that men preferred it this way. It reminded Mary what the speaker Catherine Jennings had so adamantly said the previous month about the Garden of Eden and the apple of knowledge.
‘So partial are men to expect bricks where they afford no straw,’
Mary also now recalled reading somewhere recently. This
was
‘dangerous’ writing indeed, yet at the same time she also experienced a strange sensation of realisation. If the talk at her aunt’s house a few weeks earlier had been a spark to it, then the reading she had undertaken since had given rise to the full expression of viewing things in a totally different way for the first time in her life. And it was also after reading this particular book that she had begun to realise what her aunt had meant at the funeral of Mary’s mother, when she remarked Mary had been educated like a man and it was now time for her to be educated like a woman. With the books she had already read and the ones Harriet had promised to continue sending to her, she now felt well on the way to attaining a ‘proper’ education.

Emily now entered the drawing room and announced Mr Luchini’s arrival.

Fitzpatrick’s carriage turned into the narrow lane, at the top of Lansdown Hill, and its driver pulled on the reins to bring the solitary horse to a halt alongside the morgue wagon. Swann stepped out and with the precise instructions of the magistrate’s clerk echoing in his ear, followed a single track into the woods to where Fitzpatrick would be waiting for him. Behind him, the carriage now turned and began its journey back down to the city, returning the clerk to the desk in the Guildhall from where he had been summoned, not an hour beforehand, to find Swann and bring him to this location.

Swann deliberately walked on the track’s edge as he made his way along, so as not to contribute to the number of footprints already visible in the snow-covered footway. There had been a heavy snow storm the previous evening and while the snow had all but melted in the centre by the morning, it remained here on the higher ground. At one particular spot, where the track opened out slightly, the various pairs of prints could be more clearly distinguished between one another and so Swann stopped. He brought out a different pocketbook to the one which contained Lockhart’s portrait and made swift, but nevertheless accurate, sketches of each pair of boot prints, before continuing on his way through the woods. He reached a fork in the footpath but up ahead, on the right-hand side, now saw Fitzpatrick knelt down on the white ground beside a tree. As Swann approached, the magistrate stood up straight and dabbed his mouth with a handkerchief. A pale-faced Fitzpatrick then turned and saw Swann.

‘Ah, Swann. Thank you for responding so promptly to my request. As you can guess, this is a most unpleasant business. The poor creature is through here.’

The men walked together in single file for a few yards, with Fitzpatrick in front, before coming out into a small clearing where two of Fitzpatrick’s men stood guard. Behind them, Swann now saw, was a girl of about seventeen. She hung naked from the trees, suspended there by a number of ropes.