Lady violet goes for a g.., p.17
Lady Violet Goes for a Gallop, page 17
“The Williamses, Grants, and Donohues have turned out in force.” Ann nodded to a ragged assortment of people standing along the opposite wall.
A contingent of The Gauges staff was also on hand, Biddle not among them.
The din in the room rose around us until Sebastian nudged my arm. “He’s here.”
Freeman emerged from the kitchen entrance behind the bar, St. Sevier behind him. I was relieved to see that Hugh’s hands were not bound, and he was turned out as a fashionable country gentleman ought to be.
I saw the moment when Hugh’s gaze lit on Ann. His smile was slight and pained, but he bowed to her as courteously as if they were acquaintances meeting in the churchyard. He nodded to me and to Sebastian, then took a seat set apart from the table Freeman occupied.
The physician Freeman had recruited from the next shire spoke first. In quick, clipped tones he reported that based on the quantity of blood described at the scene, the young lady’s competence in the saddle, and her continuing absence, foul play was extremely likely. Moreover, “if a man knew where to strike,” a single hard blow to the head could cause death.
At Freeman’s request, the doctor confirmed that Hugh—being a physician—would know exactly where to land such a blow. Freeman’s medical authority went on at ghoulish length about the brain twisting, blood gushing into the skull, and the humors congesting, which no doubt delighted the gallery enormously.
I began to regret attending, then Sebastian, who had at some point taken my hand in his, squeezed my fingers gently.
Right. Noli desperare.
Giles Bellamy averred that he’d come upon Miss Faraday’s dead body, but Freeman was careful to establish that Giles had never checked for a pulse, never listened for a heartbeat, never even touched Miss Faraday to know if her skin was warm or cold. Further, Giles admitted that he had no medical training, was terribly upset at the time, and had never, in fact, seen any dead human bodies prior to the occasion in question.
All Giles could say was that he’d seen Miss Faraday prone and unresponsive to his shouting and that he’d then gone for the magistrate. When he’d returned more than an hour later, the clearing had been empty.
Holly Faraday’s father testified that his daughter had been in the habit of riding the bridle paths at all hours and had done so safely for years. The import of that last statement was that she’d done so safely as long as St. Sevier had not been in residence at Belle Terre, of course.
Anthony Bellamy added that St. Sevier had been extremely wroth with him in the churchyard, threatening to take stern measures if Bellamy did not cease making the very reasonable request to enclose the last of the common acreage.
“I have never seen a man so violently gripped by temper,” Bellamy said, “and over mere words, and reasonable words uttered on holy ground.”
A righteous murmur of agreement went through the gallery, though the Williamses, Grants, and Donohues looked disgusted, and Mrs. Cooper regarded Bellamy with a flat stare.
Bellamy waited for the room to come to order before delivering his final blow: He’d heard St. Sevier and Miss Faraday arguing in the woods, heatedly, just days before the young lady “came to grief.”
The London solicitors did what they could after that performance.
Why had Giles gone to that clearing at that hour of the day? Had he been planning to meet Miss Faraday, perhaps? Had he and Miss Faraday quarreled recently?
Had Anthony Bellamy raised his voice at St. Sevier, and had Bellamy himself been the party to broach the topic of the enclosure? So Bellamy had started an argument on holy ground, hadn’t he?
If Bellamy was so certain Miss Faraday and Monsieur were arguing, what precisely were they arguing about? Perhaps about Miss Faraday, Miss Bellamy, and other young ladies of the shire making free with Monsieur’s woods in an improper manner?
An amused murmur went through the assemblage at that question, while Bellamy was left to sputter and glower and sniff.
St. Sevier was called to testify, though by law he could have declined to incriminate himself—which was, of course, precisely what a culprit would do. He reported that he and Miss Faraday had had words about the risks she and her friends took when they trespassed at all hours in his woods. He had no issue with their use of the bridle paths, but they strayed far from those byways.
His concern was for their safety, and his concerns had apparently been justified.
The room got quiet at that delicate scold, and I took heart. Happy to seek entertainment at another’s expense these people might be, but they were not convinced St. Sevier was the guilty party. Moreover, most of those in attendance were adults with children of their own.
The young ladies had been overly indulged, and every person in the room knew it. St. Sevier had been expressing a reasonable fear for their wellbeing, something nobody else had done.
When asked if he had anything more to say on the matter, St. Sevier looked thoughtful. “Any absentee property owner must accept that, despite a vigilant gamekeeper, poaching is a possibility. Mr. Bellamy’s discovery of blood by the stream suggests my concerns in this regard are well-founded too. Poaching is a violent undertaking and carries serious consequences if discovered. I pray Holly Faraday did not find herself in the wrong place at the wrong time observing the wrong sorts of activity.”
That Banbury tale was worth airing.
Poachers were like fairies—ever handy for explaining the inconvenient. If the population of game was declining, poachers—not a loss of habitat from enclosures—was responsible. If game had grown more wary, poaching—not excessive shooting—was to blame. If somebody’s livestock had been turned loose beneath a quarter moon, clearly poachers setting up a distraction—not drunken youths—were at fault.
Why not blame poachers for Miss Faraday’s situation?
And yet, the crowd in the common appeared to take St. Sevier’s suggestion seriously. Poachers were a fact of rural English life, much as press-gangs had been a fact of life in the port towns for generations.
Though poaching struck me as precisely the sort of crime Freeman and the local landowners would delight in prosecuting vigorously.
I was beginning to hope the jury might return a verdict of death by misadventure when the Belle Terre housekeeper was called to testify. Mrs. Dorrance was a woman of perhaps thirty-five years, with refined features. She wore her blond hair under a lacy cap and held herself as if her post at Belle Terre were tantamount to the same appointment at the Court of St. James’s.
Everything about her, from the confection passing for her cap, to her gliding walk, to her imperial disregard for her neighbors, proclaimed her to be a superior exponent of the domestic class.
She took the appointed chair with all the pomp of a queen holding court, even to arranging her skirts and shawl at tedious length. I was prepared to hear that her employer and his wife had occasional spats—more proof of an ungovernable temper?—or that St. Sevier had threatened to sack some footman for slacking.
The reality was far worse: Mrs. Dorrance had seen Holly Faraday meet with a gentleman in the Belle Terre cheese cave. She could not say for certain who the gentleman was, but he was dressed as a gentleman in top hat, riding boots, and riding jacket. He arrived on foot from the direction of the bridle path, staying for a good half hour and waiting until the lady had departed first before leaving himself.
The only other detail Mrs. Dorrance could add was that when she’d made her way, shocked and aghast, back to Belle Terre, St. Sevier, attired for riding, had been coming up the path from the stable, and his air was most distracted indeed.
In that moment, if somebody had handed me a riding crop, I would have cheerfully striped Mrs. Dorrance with it until my arm fell off. St. Sevier, by contrast, sat as calmly as if he were attending some lecture on the medical uses of roses.
The jury returned a verdict of murder by person or persons unknown. They might as well have ordered Freeman to lead St. Sevier away in chains.
Chapter Twelve
“Something bothers me,” Sebastian said as we trod the same path Ann and I had taken earlier in the day.
“I am a temple to botheration,” I retorted. “Freeman was surprisingly evenhanded, the solicitors did yeoman work on cross-examination, and the jury—without a body—is determined to see St. Sevier hanged nonetheless.”
“But they can’t,” Sebastian said. “The problem all along has been the Campden Wonder. Freeman can hold six inquests, but conviction for murder without a body isn’t possible under English law.”
I was so busy mentally thrashing Mrs. Dorrance that Sebastian’s words took a moment to make sense. “Then why detain anyone? If no conviction is possible, why create all this uproar, and what is the Campden Wonder?”
“I am no lawyer,” Sebastian said, “and English law and Scottish law are different, but I put my question to the solicitors just now, and they were quite clear on the matter. Some old case from the 1660s, now referred to as the Campden Wonder, resulted in three people being hanged for murder. The head of the household went off one evening to see a tenant and didn’t return, though a few of his effects were found along the roadway the next day.”
“Was he murdered?”
“The jury said yes. The family employed a mother and her two grown sons as house servants, and one of the sons implicated his mother and brother. He testified that the three of them had schemed to rob their employer, had been stealing from the household for some time, and had decided to do him in.”
Sebastian’s gaze lit upon Ann and St. Sevier, who tarried beneath an oak beside the blacksmith’s establishment. Freeman stood some paces off, pretending to study St. Ivo’s tower.
“As magistrate, would Freeman know of this case?” I asked.
“Apparently not, but then, magistrates are not lawyers. They are simply landowners handed a few manuals and charged with resolving petty squabbles. Freeman has never investigated a murder before.”
I could not fathom what Freeman had been about at the inquest. He’d been more thorough and fair than I’d expected. But had his efforts been simply for show, a sop to his conscience when he’d known all along what the jury would do?
“So how does hanging three culprits bear on St. Sevier’s position?”
“Sometime after the executions, the supposed victim came jaunting along, spouting a tale of having been abducted and sold into slavery to some Barbary potentate. He was hale and whole and most assuredly alive.”
“Have the London solicitors discussed that case with Freeman?”
“I asked them to do exactly that before they return to Town tomorrow.”
St. Sevier and Ann embraced, and such was the difference in their heights that Hugh could rest his cheek against her hair. They held each other, and never had I seen a more eloquent portrait of tenderness and despair.
“Why is St. Sevier not free?” I asked. “If he cannot be convicted, why charge him?”
“That is what bothers me. Is this all just a tactic to harass him into selling Belle Terre? A warning that even he dare not ignore. This time, the charges can’t result in a conviction, but they can certainly see him jailed, tried, and humiliated. They can see his wife and daughter covered in scandal. As a warning shot across the bow, a murder trial serves nicely.”
St. Sevier’s posture as he embraced Ann was protective, and I thought of all the times he had interceded on my behalf. He’d risked his life for me, pulled me from a raging river, and pulled me from equally dangerous depths of melancholia. He’d reluctantly escorted me through the solutions of several potentially dangerous puzzles, ever unwilling to see me in harm’s way.
“He’s protecting somebody, Sebastian. I know it.”
“His first obligation is to his wife and child.”
His wife and children, did he but know it. “He might well be thinking Ann and Fiona managed handily without him for years. She left him rather than fall in love with him, but I do believe her strategy failed.”
“Are you jealous?”
I inventoried my feelings as Freeman glanced over his shoulder at a husband and wife who might well never hold each other again.
“She has been through hell, Sebastian, and some of that hell was of St. Sevier’s making. He rescued her, but he also subjected her, a new widow, to unpardonable neglect and anxiety. I hope he is a different man now, but I suspect he’s not different enough.”
I decided in that moment that I, too, would have a private word with Hugh St. Sevier, and I might bring my riding crop along to the interview. For whom would St. Sevier offer his life? I thought of the Grants, Donohues, and Williamses, standing silent and grim along the wall of the inn’s common room. Their children were ill. The wives could not afford medical care in childbirth.
St. Sevier was refusing to petition for an enclosure act because of them and the other families like them.
“If St. Sevier is hanged,” I said, “what happens to Belle Terre?”
“The property either passes to his heirs, if the jury finds he’s a pauper, which juries have been routinely doing for convicted felons for years. They do this both out of compassion and out of disgust for the crown’s excesses. In the alternative, the estate reverts to the crown. After a suitable interval of looting for royal purposes, Fat George will probably award Belle Terre to some lackey in exchange for an unrepaid loan.”
And the royal looting would take years, during which nobody would bother petitioning Parliament for the right to enclose the land because both the petition and the fencing cost dearly. Years, during which the poor families of the shire could run their chickens and pigs over those acres, or graze enough sheep to spin the wool needed for decent clothing.
“I must speak with St. Sevier.”
“Now is not the time, Violet.”
“We are out of time. Freeman could bind him over tomorrow morning, and then St. Sevier is off to be killed by jail fever or in some contretemps among his fellow prisoners.”
Sebastian took me by the wrist, for I’d marched off in the direction of the couple under the oak.
“Not now. For all you know, Ann has also conceived St. Sevier’s child. They will never hold each other again, never touch each other again.”
“And I cannot permit that tragedy to befall them. Wash your hands of me if you must, go back to London or Perthshire and try to forget this situation if you can, but I will not rest until I’ve reached the bottom of it.”
Sebastian gazed down upon me, his expression unreadable. Just when I thought I might have to make a scene, he smiled.
“Stay here.” He stalked past me and approached Freeman, while I waited some yards off, wishing I had my riding crop.
Puzzle pieces taunted me from every direction. Where was Holly Faraday, or where was her body? If she was seriously injured and had no physician to tend her, she was as good as dead. Then too, if getting away with murder in England was as simple as hiding the body, why was Freeman so intent on seeing St. Sevier charged with the crime?
Who was St. Sevier protecting?
Who had met with Holly Faraday in that cheese cave—if not Hugh?
What if the objective was, as Sebastian said, to prompt Hugh into selling? Who in the area could afford to purchase the property at even a bargain price?
The answer hit me like a wave of vertigo: Freeman could. He was clearly one of the best set-up in the neighborhood, and he’d know exactly how to wrest every drop of revenue from so much acreage. If he intended to buy the place—from Ann, should St. Sevier be hanged, or from St. Sevier, should the murder charges come to naught—then an appearance of evenhandedness in his investigation was mandatory.
Sebastian stood in conversation with the object of my suspicions. Freeman glanced at me, then at St. Sevier and his wife, who had stepped apart, but continued to hold hands. Freeman nodded, though he did not look happy.
And neither did Sebastian.
“I will escort Ann to Belle Terre,” Sebastian said when he returned to me. “You will be permitted to ride with St. Sevier in Freeman’s coach back to Freeman’s manor. He will ride on the box, and I will collect you when I’ve seen Ann safely home.”
“Thank you.” I did not want to know how Sebastian had effected this minor miracle, but I hoped the process had involved putting the fear of a powerful Scottish marquess into Freeman. More likely, Sebastian had appealed to romantic gallantry, which—oddly—had no place in my motivations at present.
“There’s something else, Violet.”
“Bad news.” What could be worse than seeing St. Sevier charged with murder?
“Earlier today, the solicitors explained to Freeman the general holding resulting from the Campden Wonder: No body means no murder conviction. Freeman inquired of them if kidnapping charges also required the production of the kidnapping victim, and the solicitors allowed as how it did not.”
“Then St. Sevier will be charged with kidnapping Holly Faraday?”
“Freeman’s considering it.”
Which meant Hugh would be hanged, though no proof had been produced of either murder or kidnapping.
“Take Ann home,” I said, “and have a look at the boot prints of as many of her domestics as possible, starting with the lovely and catastrophically disloyal Mrs. Dorrance.”
“How many days have we spent sharing coaches, St. Sevier?” I fired my question at him as he moved to the rear-facing seat in Freeman’s commodious conveyance. “You need not stand on ceremony with me at this late date.”
“I am not standing on ceremony, my lady. I am sitting such that the lovely aspect of your countenance is fully before me and not obscured by your millinery. How are you?”
Oh, to hear that slight, tart, confiding note in St. Sevier’s voice. To know his spirit was not yet vanquished and his gallantry in fine repair.
“Do not attempt to cozen me, sir. I am trying to save your life, while you are making your final arrangements. What in God’s name are you about?”
“You need not save my life, Violet, though I thank you for the sentiment. I am in no danger of being convicted. Some old English case which demands a body be produced to prove murder protects me.”
