Death and the Chevalier

by Robin Blake

  ‘She is Mrs Bigelow, a widow. Came here from – I can’t remember where, Yorkshire maybe – to marry Simon Bigelow who had a pie shop. He died within a year and, seeing no future in pies, she went as a servant to Limmington.’

  ‘Please inform her that I shall require her to attend.’

  We shook hands on it.

  I dined with Elizabeth and Madame Lachatte. The latter had spent the morning within doors reading The Fortunate Mistress, which she was sure was a story of real life and not some invention. She relayed the details to us with so much enthusiasm that, throughout much of the meal, it was ‘Roxana this’ and ‘Roxana that’, exactly as if she was telling of the goings-on of a favourite sister. Afterwards I retired to the office, where Furzey and I drew up Griselda Bigelow’s statement based on what she had told me in the morning, and which I would be sending over to Penwortham for her signature once Furzey had produced a second fair copy.

  In setting down my summary of Griselda’s evidence about Horace Limmington’s death, a number of questions had come to me. One was that of the weapon: a great big axe, she had said. Why an axe? Griselda may have believed the Highlanders fight with battleaxes, but I did not.

  None of our guests were present at the supper table that evening. The Marquis had spent all afternoon at the Prince’s war council and, on coming in, had ordered bread, cheese, fruit and wine in his room. Madame Lachatte, escorted by Captain Brown, was visiting the lodgings of one of the other ladies in the company, Mrs MacSheridan. So Elizabeth, Fidelis and I sat down together and were able to talk freely about the case of Limmington, which was to the fore in our minds. I had shown Fidelis Griselda’s statement but had not heard any conclusions he may have drawn from his examination of the body. But first I raised the question of why the Highlanders had used an axe for this attack.

  ‘On consideration,’ I added, ‘I wonder if they were carrying the axe to get into premises, if necessary by breaking down doors.’

  ‘Or perhaps she meant a pike,’ suggested Elizabeth.

  ‘If she did,’ said Fidelis, ‘it does not help matters, for neither an axe nor a pike killed Horace Limmington.’

  ‘How do you know that, Luke?’

  ‘It is not the right kind of wound, Titus. Surely you could see that for yourself!’

  ‘I did not look so very closely.’

  ‘If you had, you would have seen that his skull wasn’t split open, as by an axe blow. It was crushed like the shell of a boiled egg when you tap it with your spoon. It was something flat and wide that killed the man – something like the flat of a spade.’

  ‘A spade? So why would Griselda say they used an axe?’

  ‘She did not see the attack, but only heard it.’

  ‘And yet she was so definite about an axe. And if they’d had a spade with them, she would have seen it.’

  ‘I didn’t say it was a spade, Titus. I referred to something that would have the effect of a spade.’

  Fidelis’s exasperation was showing in his face, but Elizabeth laughed.

  ‘Not many things have the effect of a spade without being a spade,’ she said.

  ‘Shall we put that aside?’ I said, ‘Something else has occurred to me that is hard to square with these details of the rebels. Griselda says that Limmington shouted at the soldiers and defied them. But when I spoke to him the same morning, he was unmistakably sympathetic to the Pretender’s cause. Why would he then have behaved so provokingly to the Pretender’s men, even at the cost of his own life?’

  ‘Obviously, dearest, Griselda may not be telling the truth,’ said Elizabeth.

  ‘And if she isn’t, it’s not the only thing she’s been lying about,’ said Fidelis.

  ‘What else has she lied about?’ I said.

  ‘The time of death. I don’t think Limmington gave up the ghost just before dawn. I think the man died hours before that. Possibly at the moment he was struck, or quite soon after.’

  ‘What makes you think so?’

  ‘Rigor mortis. What time was it we saw him? Eleven o’clock? That would be only four hours after sunrise, and in a house as cold as that I would not expect the stiffening of the body to be so well advanced. I would say he must have died more than ten and less than fourteen hours earlier.’

  ‘But why would Griselda lie about that?’

  ‘That is not a medical question. Talking of which, I have another suggestion. Go and see Limmington’s doctor. Ask him about his patient’s overall state of health, which I have reason to believe was not good. I saw certain signs of morbidity.’

  ‘He was sick?’

  ‘The doctor who saw him alive is best placed to answer that. It is probably old Tom Ross at Penwortham. A slave to the Almanack and astrology, like most older medical men, but not a complete fool.’

  Madame Lachatte had not come home by the time we rose, and Elizabeth went up to the Marquis to bring down his tray. After five minutes, when she had not reappeared, I went up to the bedchamber door and found it closed. The Marquis could be heard speaking low, crossed by Elizabeth’s voice rising in strength and pitch. Most of what they were saying I could not understand, until I heard her cry out.

  ‘Mais non, Monsieur le Marquis! Laissez-moi, s’il vous plait!’

  I hesitated for another few moments. Were the cries made laughing? Was this banter? Then I heard her again.

  ‘Non, je vous en pris, non!’

  I burst through the door and saw the Marquis using his weight to pin Elizabeth down on the bed, with his hand beneath her skirt as she struggled to get out from under him, twisting her head to avoid his attempts to kiss her. Then he knew he was discovered. He sprang up to face me, red-faced and alarmed, his penis visibly protruding from his breeches. I took three strides towards him and, swinging my arm, punched him on the nose with all my strength.

  At exactly that moment Madame Lachatte walked in.

  ‘Mais q’est-ce que s’y passe?’ she asked in a shrill voice.

  TWELVE

  I sat alone in my library, making entries in my journal and seething with rage and loathing. Above me the house was glacial. Fidelis had taken a brisk look at the whimpering Marquis’s injured nose and pronounced it broken, for which there was no remedy except time. He then went to bed. Madame Lachatte, herself furious at the Marquis, slammed the door of her room behind her. Captain Brown, on the other hand, took the path of cool discretion – that is, he said nothing and kept out of the way until morning.

  Elizabeth took straight to her bed, having removed the sleeping Hector from his cot and brought him under the covers with her. She needed the kind of comfort that only his warmth afforded.

  As for the Marquis d’Éguilles, we heard nothing more from him. He skulked as only an unmasked would-be rapist can skulk.

  I was going over in my mind all that I had seen in that room and I thought about what might have happened if I had not been there to discover it. If I had gone out of doors – to the coffee house perhaps. Or what if Fidelis had not been there to keep me alert? I might have dozed off in front of the fire and slept for an hour, which I often did do after supper. What then?

  The thought of Elizabeth being touched by that man’s hands, his lips, simply seared me. It seared me and yet I thought it, I pictured it, unable to stop. Over and over, on the edge of tears, my heart beating, over and over.

  I thought of what I would like to do to that man in vengeance. My first impulse – simply to kill him – had passed. The second was to arrest him and haul him before the magistrate, as one would do in normal times. What a feeble idea that seemed now, with our constables impotent, our magistrates fled, and all our law suspended. As matters stood, with a Prince and a whole army at his back, the Marquis was legally untouchable, and I was without recourse. It grievously wounded me that, as Elizabeth’s husband, I could not punish him or see him punished in the courts. Any hope I might have of going to the Prince himself and denouncing the man directly was equally forlorn. After all, d’Éguilles was a member of his hi
gh council, and what did the Prince know of me?

  I went up and squeezed in beside my wife and child. Both were sleeping and so, at length, was I.

  In the morning the Marquis did not dare show his face, while Luke Fidelis had a full day ahead visiting country patients and set off at dawn. So it was only Madame Lachatte and Captain Brown taking breakfast with us – an almost silent meal. Elizabeth would not discuss with me the events of the previous evening and evaded all my attempts to talk to her alone. She saw to Hector’s needs, gave household instructions to Matty and went about the house with even more than her usual bustle, all the time tight-lipped and narrow-eyed.

  The whole of Preston was also in a bustle because, as we learned very early, the rebel army was everywhere striking its camps and quitting its billets prior to moving on. Market stallholders were pushed aside to form a wide diagonal passage across Market Place from the mouth of Friar Gate to the Old Shambles. Captain Brown explained what would happen. At the central cross, where he had proclaimed his father King, the Prince and his immediate retinue would greet the leading regiment as it came up. He would then take his place at its head and lead it on foot, just as he had led it into Preston, and so they would march away. Behind him the Highlanders, Lowlanders, French and Irish, who made up the motley army, would file through Preston in a continuous snake from the top of Friar Gate to the bottom of Church Gate until the last of the stragglers, the baggage train, the women and the hangers-on had entered the hollow way that led down to Walton-le-Dale and the road south.

  Furzey came to the office telling how a couple of Highlanders had slept on his cottage’s parlour floor. Their bare knees and incomprehensible language had terrified his old mother, but Furzey, to my surprise, had nothing bad to say about his unbidden guests. They had been courteous, sung songs and even performed a dance for the entertainment of Mrs Furzey.

  Our own guests departed in a manner rather different from their arrival. The Marquis crept away silently and was hardly noticed, with Captain Brown taking charge of his box and baggage. Madame Lachatte, on the other hand, said a very full farewell to Elizabeth in the kitchen, and then to me in the office.

  ‘I feel you and I have become friends,’ she told me, ‘and I’m grieved we shall probably never meet again. I am also terribly sorry about the Marquis’s behaviour last night. It was bad enough him looking goats and monkeys at your wife all through dinner yesterday, but now trying to … Well, there’s no excuse. I have no control over him. He is a beast. C’est tout!’

  She patted her bosom.

  ‘I’ve told him he won’t lay a finger on this body for a week, so I have. He can go whistle else.’

  I found it hard to devise a response to this last remark, so I changed the subject.

  ‘How are you travelling? Do you ride?’

  ‘I have a seat in the coach of Lady Ogilvy. Mrs Murray of Broughton, the wife of another of the Prince’s great generals, is with us also. She is a most beautiful woman.’

  ‘You need fear no comparison, Madame,’ I said.

  ‘Thank you, sir, you are gallant. Now I must say goodbye, I think, or I shall have to run to catch up with them.’

  As she leaned to touch cheeks with mine, her perfume filled my nose and I became hot and a little stammering. In spite of my concern for my wife’s treatment by the lecherous Marquis, I had not become proof against his mistress’s charm and face. And I thought now, as we said goodbye, that the fact she was the Marquis’s mistress only showed the extent to which last night he had insulted not one but two beautiful women that I cared for.

  I pulled myself together and gave her a bow.

  ‘It has been an honour and a pleasure to know you, Madame.’

  She extended her hand, and I kissed it.

  By nine o’clock, while there were still many running around tidying up after the army, the main body of men had begun to move into Friar Gate and advance towards Market Place. As the first rank reached there, a cheer went up: the Prince had arrived to take up his station. Pipes played, drums drummed, banners streamed, and the townspeople hurried in their thousands to line the route. Many cheered and wished the soldiers victory, others tried to make one last-minute sale or get one last-minute kiss.

  With all this tumult it was impossible to see the Prince himself, and I realized that I had still never had a proper look at him, apart from that distant view during the proclamation. So, with this in mind, I threw on my greatcoat and was about to go out when I was forestalled by a furious hammering at the office door. I opened it myself, as I was nearest, and found myself face to face with the Highlander that I had spoken to two nights before on Playhouse Green – the one with the huge dog.

  ‘Good morning – Sergeant, isn’t it?’ I said politely. ‘How can I help you?’

  ‘You’re Titus Cragg?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I have orders to bring you with me.’

  ‘Bring me where?’

  ‘You’ll find out.’

  ‘But you can’t just—’

  ‘Aye, we can. I see you’re in your coat already.’

  He took a firm grip on my upper arm and pulled me down the steps. Once I was in the street, a second soldier seized my other arm and I was marched away. Twisting around, I saw Furzey standing in amazement at the door and Elizabeth at one of the upper windows. From the movement of her mouth I could tell she was calling my name. I attempted a smile of reassurance.

  I was taken – or dragged – to the House of Correction in March Lane, which the rebels had been using to detain a few Prestonians who had offended them. I was immediately brought to the business room of Arnold Limb, who in more normal times was custodian of the place. Sitting behind Limb’s writing table, an officer with a clerk alongside him was dealing with the release of the detainees, who stood in a file outside the door, guarded by a pair of armed soldiers. One of the prisoners hoping to be liberated was Arnold Limb himself; another was Sergeant Oswald Mallender, with three days of stubble on his chin and an aggrieved look about his eyes. Seeing me pushed forward ahead of him, this at once changed to suspicion. I had many times crossed swords with this law officer, who was ignorant enough to believe a sergeant took precedence over a coroner.

  I was presented to the man in charge, a grizzled Scotchman with a weathered face and thick beard. He exchanged a few words in Gaelic with my escort while looking me gravely up and down. Switching to English, he asked my name and I told him. He spoke to the clerk, then snapped his fingers and held out his hand, into which the clerk smartly delivered a paper, which he looked over before turning his attention back to me.

  ‘You are Lawyer Cragg?’

  ‘Yes. And I would be obliged if you would tell me why I have been seized. You have no legal authority here. As a lawyer I know this.’

  He pointed to the prisoners waiting outside the door.

  ‘We had authority enough to lock them up. We call it the authority of the Regent of Scotland and England, Prince Charles Edward. Do you deny that authority?’

  ‘Most certainly I deny it, if it deprives me unjustly of my liberty.’

  ‘We’ll see about “unjustly”. We hear you have been party to, or are privy to information on, the deaths of our comrades William Sinclair and John MacNab. These men disappeared after coming to this area with letters from the Prince greeting his supporters. Our information is that they were killed. D’you ken what I’m talking about?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, of course I do. You see I’m coroner and I—’

  ‘Good. Then you may stop your blathering, because you’re coming on the road along with us.’

  I was shocked into silent gaping. The Highlanders that had brought me here received a couple of curt instructions, upon which they turned me smartly around and we marched out to the House of Correction’s courtyard. A large cart stood near the gate, in which two rows of men sat facing each other. The soldier guarding the cart dropped the tailgate as we approached, and I was pushed up to join them. Arnold Limb’s stock of leg ir
ons had been looted from his storeroom and each of the prisoners wore a shackle around his right ankle, which was attached by a chain to one of the links of another much heavier chain – I would call it a nautical chain – lying on the cart bed. I was duly shackled to it by the guards in the same way. It was a simple arrangement that made the prisoners’ individual escape impossible and their collective escape unlikely.

  Most of my fellow prisoners sat with their heads bowed, deaf to everything but their own thoughts. There were two among them that I recognized. One was a very loud-mouthed fellow called Bellasis who was often heard in the Mitre bringing verbal brimstone down on the heads of all Jacobites. The other was Archibald MacLintock, and it was he that I was sitting next to.

  ‘For what have they taken you up, MacLintock?’ I said.

  ‘Some daft idea they’ve got.’

  ‘How is that?’

  ‘They found letters in my house. A very nasty neighbour of mine suggested that they make a search. Well, I do correspond with Glasgow, you know, but only on matters commercial – purely commercial. I also write to Manchester, Liverpool and London. And now the rebels threaten me with their military punishment as a spy. My wife’s afraid it means they want to shoot me. What do you think, Cragg? Surely they won’t go so far.’

  ‘I’m sure they will only interrogate you and let you go.’

  ‘Which they could’ve done in Preston. For what reason did they arrest you, Cragg?’

  ‘They think I know something about the murder of the two Scotchmen who were found dead near Ribchester with their heads off. They are quite right. I do know something about it, but, like you, I’m not sure why they haven’t simply questioned me in Preston. Perhaps there is another reason for this.’

  I did not enlarge on the thought – not out loud. I preferred not to pour all the details of why I had broken d’Éguilles’s nose in public. And, in any case, the thought depended on the extent of d’Éguilles’s power and influence in the army. No doubt he bitterly resented my assault on him. I had been in the right, but that would not stop him from hating me for it.