Death and the Chevalier

by Robin Blake

  ‘Which might mean?’

  ‘That the man would never live long to enjoy the money. In my medical opinion.’

  ‘It appears he was visited by a party of rebel so-called tax collectors on the day he died, who may have attacked him. How would his body stand up to such an unpleasant surprise?’

  ‘It would not. I am not surprised he died if what you tell me is true. Even the slightest provocation would have likely been the death of him.’

  ‘His servant says he was struck on the head with an axe.’

  ‘Ah! Well, that would account for any death, of course.’

  ‘But she may not be a reliable witness. I am wondering if perhaps he might in reality have fallen and struck his head.’

  ‘An unexpected intrusion or threat leading to faintness, loss of consciousness and a fall. That would have done for him all right, in my medical opinion.’

  He picked up his watch and looked at it, then drew a sheet of paper from a drawer and began to write on it.

  ‘Now, sir,’ he said, continuing to write, ‘you have had a full ten minutes of my time. Is there anything more?’

  ‘Well, no, I don’t think so, unless you can shed any further light on this case.’

  ‘Have I not shed sufficient light on it? The fellow was moribund; that’s all there is to it. Here you are.’

  He handed me the sheet of paper, which proved to be his bill for five shillings.

  ‘I’m sorry?’ I said. ‘You are … You are charging me for this?’

  ‘Certainly I am, sir. My time costs. If I gave it away free, I would be a pauper like Mr Limmington. I am therefore obliged to sell my time, and I do so at a rate of half a crown for every five minutes.’

  ‘But I am not a patient. I merely asked for your valuable help.’

  ‘If my help is valuable, then you must pay for it.’

  I was incredulous. I couldn’t remember this ever happening before. Briefly, I considered refusing to pay, but then I saw Ross’s grim, implacable eyes.

  ‘Oh, very well, I suppose I have it.’

  I found the money in my pocket and handed it over. Ross whipped the bill from my fingers, endorsed it as paid and gave it back to me. He immediately began ushering me towards the door, but I stopped him.

  ‘One moment, Doctor Ross. I in turn have a paper for you. May I use your pen?’

  I brought the paper from my pocket. It was one of our printed draft summons forms, and I laid it on the table so that I could write Ross’s name over the appropriate line. I then filled in the place, time and date, signed my own name and handed it to him.

  ‘It is a summons for you to attend tomorrow’s inquest as a witness. It is legally enforceable, and I am afraid you will not be permitted to charge the court for your time. I look forward to seeing you there. Good day, sir.’

  The affronted look on his face gave me a certain satisfaction as I left the room.

  A little later Fidelis and I met in Preston, as we had arranged, to discuss the testimony he would give the next day.

  ‘How much did Thomas Ross skin you for?’ he asked as we settled at our table at the Turk’s Head.

  I told him and he laughed.

  ‘Two and six per five minutes? The man is a bloodsucker.’

  ‘He has grown rich from it. His house is splendid.’

  ‘And what did he say about Limmington?’

  ‘That he has been mortally sick for weeks, or even months. I had the impression Limmington might have died at any time, from any number of causes.’

  ‘A sudden shock?’

  ‘Yes. I asked particularly if threats from rebels might have alarmed him so much as to cause him a fatal fall, and he confirmed it. What do you think?’

  ‘I have no reason to contradict that diagnosis. The floor of the study – was it of stone?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then I think we may discount Griselda’s axe. A flight of fancy caused by her hearing but not seeing the event happen. The fall, and hitting his head on the floor, might be enough to kill him.’

  ‘There is the other anomaly in her statement, as you pointed out: the time of Limmington’s death. She will be the first witness. I wonder if she will maintain her original account of it.’

  ‘We shall have to see.’

  He drained his cup of coffee and poured us both another.

  FIFTEEN

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we are here to look into the sudden death of Horace Limmington of this parish,’ I said at nine o’clock the next morning at the Swan Inn, addressing those few good people of Penwortham who were there to give testimony, and the many more who had been drawn by the magnetism of curiosity. ‘We shall hear tell of his last hours and some medical evidence also. Shall we begin with the formalities?’

  Half an hour later these were complete. The jury had been sworn and taken to view Limmington’s body. We solemnly measured the head wound and Furzey made a note of it. We examined the body in its nakedness for any other signs, of which there were none of any salience. I said little, but I felt compassion for these shrunken remains. In spite of Dr Ross’s prognosis, Limmington had developed unexpected hopes just before he died, which had just as suddenly been extinguished. Well, I thought, at least he would no longer be bothered by the itch in his testes.

  We returned to the courtroom, which was the inn’s large parlour. The tables had been cleared away to the walls, except for the one Furzey and I sat behind, and the chairs and forms had been ranged in rows before us, most of them being now occupied by the said good people of Penwortham. The jury sat on a single form to my left while facing them to my right stood an empty chair for the use of the witnesses. I consulted the timetable of names Furzey had drawn up, rang my handbell and called to the chair the first of these.

  Griselda, a hunched and shrunken figure in shawl and drugget skirt, shuffled forward and took the oath.

  ‘What is your full name?’

  ‘Griselda Susan Bigelow.’

  ‘And you are a widow who worked lately as servant to the deceased gentleman?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Please tell us what happened at Mr Limmington’s house on the day he died.’

  In front of this audience it proved difficult to prod and nudge her into telling the story of that night, but in the end she got it out more or less as she’d originally told it to me.

  ‘And are you quite sure,’ I said, ‘that the bag of money that was found by Mr Limmington was discovered by these soldiers after he was struck down?’

  ‘Yes. They turned the house over and found where it was hidden.’

  ‘Where was that?’

  ‘He’d made a secret hole in the wall behind the wainscot that even I didn’t know about. I found the panel pulled away, which was how they found it.’

  She also maintained the tale of the axe and did not change her story when I taxed her about the time of death.

  ‘Just before dawn it was, when he gave up the ghost,’ she insisted.

  ‘Where did he die?’

  ‘In his bed. He never rose again after I’d got him upstairs, put his nightgown and nightcap on him, and pulled the covers up over him. I sat up beside that bed hour after hour, I did, listening to his groaning breath, hoping for the better and a-fearing the worse, until the groaning stopped.’

  ‘And did you then call in the usual women to lay out the body?’

  ‘No. What do I need to call in the women for? I know what to do. I don’t need their or anyone’s help.’

  ‘But you had already sent word to Doctor Fidelis of your master’s accident.’

  ‘Aye, well, it’s what you do, isn’t it? Calling the doctor. And like I told you, I knew Doctor Fidelis wouldn’t charge.’

  ‘And then in the morning you sent further word that Mr Limmington had died.’

  ‘I thought to spare the doctor his journey. He’d be no use, would he?’

  ‘However, as we shall learn in a few moments, he was of use to me when we came along together.’


  I told Griselda she could leave the chair. As she tottered back into the audience, there was a disturbance at the far end of the room. A young female voice was raised to a high, and highly indignant, pitch.

  ‘Give me back-word, would you? Yes, you! You dodger! You son-of-a-bitch of a swike! Crack on all evening and then have your cock’s way and sneak off, you rat, leaving me like this? You bastard. You thorough cheating bastard. How dare you show your dirty feak’s face here?’

  I stood up, ringing my handbell. ‘Now then! What is this disturbance?’

  A young woman, fair-haired, red-faced and big-bellied, was standing at the end of a row of chairs almost at the back. By how she was pointing and jabbing the air, her torrent of words was meant for someone in the middle of that row. Those in front turned to see how the abuse was received, and in so doing identified her target as a dandified black-haired fellow, who was staring straight ahead, affecting to take no notice. A complacent smile was smeared across his handsome face.

  The woman paused, as if to give him time to respond; when he didn’t, she flounced from the room and slammed the door.

  After the buzz of comment over this incident had fallen away, I asked Dr Ross to come forward. He swore his oath in a cold, resentful voice, and answered my questions in much the same style.

  ‘Yes, I was for some time Limmington’s medical adviser … No, I had not seen him for several months … That is correct. He had multiple disorders … No, I did not think he would recover. I considered him a hopeless case … A few more months at the most … He would quite likely have been killed by an unforeseen unpleasant surprise, or reprehension of the senses – what we doctors would call an incursus improvisus – or even a blow to the corpus, or the head. Such a knock would lead in all probability to a cordial insult.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Doctor?’

  ‘Insultus cordialis, sir. What many call an attack to the heart.’

  ‘Leading to immediate death?’

  ‘Oh, yes – in the state of Limmington’s health, I would say so.’

  I let him go. He’d spent ten minutes in the chair – time, by his reckoning, worth five shillings, a sum (I was happy to reflect) he would never get.

  Next to the chair came Luke Fidelis. He gave a succinct summary, entirely in English, of his physical examination of the body.

  ‘So what do you consider to have been the cause of this unfortunate death?’ I asked.

  ‘A blow to the head which may have led to bleeding in the brain. If so, he would have fallen unconscious and died within a few minutes.’

  ‘What about Doctor Ross’s suggestion of – what was it? – an insult to Mr Limmington’s heart?’

  ‘That is possible also, if his health was as Doctor Ross described. Supposing the injury to the skull did not kill him instantly, it might very well have caused the heart to fail.’

  ‘Let’s turn to the question of when Mr Limmington died. You mention the stiffness of his flesh when you examined it. Do you draw any inference from this as to the time at which the death occurred?’

  ‘Stiffening begins in the eyelids no less than five hours after death. It takes a matter of a few hours to become general across the entire body. If the body is kept cold, that would be longer – ten to fourteen hours.’

  ‘And stiffness was indeed general by the time you saw it?’

  ‘It covered the whole of the body.’

  ‘And the temperature of the house was …?’

  ‘Very cold. There had been no fire in the room.’

  ‘And what time was it when you made your examination?’

  ‘Half past ten in the morning.’

  ‘Our first witness stated that Mr Limmington had died just before dawn. Are you saying that is incorrect?’

  ‘It must be. I would be very surprised if Limmington was still breathing when that night began.’

  ‘Twelve hours earlier than we have been told?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The jury were nudging each other and whispering.

  I then called Constable Gibbins, who confirmed that the four Highlanders had come to his inn and sat by the fire to warm themselves while poring over a handlist of names. This time he remembered a little bit more about them than he had told me beforehand.

  ‘They were very jovial. Laughing and joking. I was concerned that they might drink too much and start a fight, but no, because just as the noise they were making came to a head, one of them said something very sharp to the rest and all at once they became quiet. I am guessing he was the officer, the leader. Mark you, until this moment he had been joshing and jesting as much as anyone but, as I say, he suddenly put a stop to it.’

  ‘And all this was in Gaelic?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so. Not English, any road.’

  ‘And was this leader the one that spoke to you about the whereabouts of the three men on his list, that he hoped to take taxes off?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Was Mr Limmington’s name on that list?’

  ‘It was.’

  ‘And did you tell the rebels where Mr Limmington lived?’

  ‘I did. Like I said, they told me they’d set fire to this inn else.’

  ‘And what time did they leave you to go, presumably, to Mr Limmington’s house?’

  ‘Three o’clock, I suppose.’

  ‘And at this point did you, as the constable of Penwortham, do anything to prevent them?’

  ‘No. What could I do? Get the Watch out? In daytime? They’d never turn out before nightfall, even if they thought it was to catch a boy that picked a pocket. And if I told them it was to go up against a gang of Highlanders … well! You may forget that!’

  This caused an outbreak of laughter and rib-nudging.

  ‘Then I shall,’ I said. ‘Thank you, Mr Gibbins.’

  I now summed up all we had learned, in such a way as to invite the jury to choose a verdict between murder at one extreme and natural causes at the other. The jury then put their heads together and reached its verdict after only twenty minutes of debate. Supporters of the government evidently outnumbered Jacobites on the panel and were able to browbeat them into acceding to the view that, since all Scotch rebels were savages and killers, this party of them must have been the killers of Limmington. In spite of Fidelis’s testimony about the victim’s head wound, they were so taken with the idea of his skull being cloven by an axe blow that they wrote it into the verdict: Death by undoubted murder by four unknown Highland rebels, and no others, by cleaving the skull of the deceased using a military axe. Luke Fidelis would be highly displeased, but I decided not to interfere. It scarcely mattered, I thought, feeling unusually detached from the problem, and quite happy to allow the verdict to stand. Not very much was at stake in this inquest, I thought. There was no one who mourned Limmington, none who suffered by his death, and no likelihood that the killers the jury had identified would ever be arrested and held to account. The rebel army had marched away. That was all there was to it.

  Or so I thought at the time.

  Outside, it was snowing heavily, and Fidelis and I decided to dine at the Swan before attempting the journey back to Preston. He was, as I had predicted, simmering with anger.

  ‘Those country clodpolls!’ he said as he dissected a cutlet. ‘They shape their ideas of events only according to how dramatic they can be made. You showed them Limmington’s skull, did you not, Titus? It was obviously not cloven. But how much more purple, how much more interesting, when it has been carved apart by a rebel axe!’

  ‘Let it go, Luke. It is not worth bothering about.’

  Fidelis shook his finger at me.

  ‘There is much more to this than you think, Titus. Look at the woman Griselda’s evidence. There are so many gross anomalies and even lies in it.’

  ‘Are you certain she lied about the time of death? She may have been simply mistaken – or, more probably, deluded. The aged mind plays tricks, and more than ever in time of crisis. No. I see this as the fantasy and confusion of
an old woman.’

  ‘She lied, Titus, and for a reason. Take this nonsense about getting the dead man to bed. She could never have got that corpse up the stairs by herself. Therefore, she had help. So you should ask yourself, why does she not say so? And who helped her?’

  ‘But if Limmington was already dead, why did she send for you?’

  ‘I don’t know. But if she thought he was alive, she’s a half-wit.’

  A shadow fell across the table and we both looked up. It was the same handsome, complacent fellow that had been denounced by the pregnant girl at the back of the audience. He was carrying a bottle of wine.

  ‘May I join you?’ he said. ‘There’s a matter I would like to talk over.’

  He placed the bottle on the table and made a help-yourself gesture. He sat down.

  ‘It seems you have made a young lady angry,’ Fidelis said, ‘having first made her something else.’

  ‘I hate to see a slut putting on airs. She was willing enough in the bedchamber, I do recall.’

  ‘She said you gave back-word. I suppose you told her you’d marry her.’

  ‘Marry her! That’s improbable. And I’m not here to comb through that doxy’s entanglements, though I’ll say in my own defence that where I’ve been is a well-trodden path. I doubt there’s a month goes by when that little Pertylott’s not been feathered by one Chantycleer or another.’

  ‘That’s as may be,’ I said. ‘What have you come to us for, sir? To tell something or to hear something?’

  ‘A little of both.’

  ‘Telling before hearing, I think. Pray go ahead with your side of the bargain.’

  ‘Very well, gents. Mention was made in the proceedings this morning of a certain sum of money that the rebel soldiers went away from Limmington’s house with. Am I right?’

  ‘Yes. The purse of golden guineas found by Limmington in a ditch. After the rebels attacked him, they found it in his house and claimed it, quite spuriously, as tax due to them.’

  ‘Quite so. Would it surprise you to learn that those were my guineas?’

  Fidelis, who had been lying languidly in his chair, sat forward and began to listen more intently.