Death and the Chevalier

by Robin Blake

  ‘How did you lose them?’ I said.

  ‘I tied the purse strings through a saddle strap that some boneheaded stable lad never properly latched. After bouncing up and down for several miles of the road from Preston to Liverpool, the strap opened and the accursed purse slipped off. It evidently fell into the ditch.’

  ‘On the Liverpool Road, you say?’

  This detail had not been mentioned at the inquest.

  ‘Yes, I’d covered thirty-five miles or more before I missed the money. I rode back but couldn’t find it. Only yesterday night did I learn it was picked up some time later by another. Near two hundred and thirty guineas, gone like that!’

  He snapped his fingers.

  ‘When was all this?’ asked Fidelis.

  ‘Back in October, at the start of the month.’

  ‘So the bag lay undiscovered in the ditch all that time. It is fortunate you heard of the discovery.’

  ‘I was travelling across Warrington Moss when I stopped at an inn. A Penwortham man was there, talking about how the vicar of Penwortham had spoken from the pulpit about a large purse of money being found, and if anyone claimed it, they should come forward in a timely manner. I discovered the vicar was cautious. He never said how much was in the purse or who the finder was, or even where it was found.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘What do you think I did? I almost broke my horse’s legs riding up here to tell the reverend gent what road I lost the purse on and how much was in it. That was yesterday morning. I then heard that Limmington had piked it just last week, and there was to be an inquest. My money was gone, and I resolved to attend your hearing in the hope of finding out where it had gone to.’

  ‘Did you not go to Mr Fleetwood, the squire at the Priory? You should rightly pursue your claim through him, as he is magistrate here.’

  ‘That girl had been kicking up a lot of shitty straw about me with her tale-telling. We got an earful of that this morning. I knew better than go near the beak. He might arrest me for breach of promise.’

  ‘Well, that is understandable. So, how can I help you now, Mr …? I don’t know your name, sir.’

  ‘My name is Sigginho. Jaime Sigginho. My father was a Portugoose who engaged in the wine trade.’

  ‘Then what service can I do you, Mr Sigginho?’

  ‘You have investigated the death of Limmington; you know the facts behind the facts, if you follow me. So tell me, are you sure the party of rebels really found my money? I have an inkling they did not and that the gold is still hidden in Limmington’s house.’

  ‘You heard the evidence about the wainscot panel. What makes you doubt it?’

  ‘I mistrust that old woman. She’d sell her daughter into kennels for the right price. I sense dishonesty in her.’

  ‘I’m afraid there’s nothing I can tell you more than you heard in the inquest.’

  Sigginho leaned forward across the table and suddenly his face seemed transformed, hideously. His eyes glowed with intensity. His mouth distorted.

  ‘I think you lie, Mr Coroner.’

  He was snarling. He grasped my forearm.

  ‘And if you’re withholding something from me that might help me find my money, I swear I’ll—’

  I snatched his hand from my arm. ‘You won’t threaten me and get away with it, Jaime Sigginho,’ I said. ‘You’ve heard my answer and must be satisfied. Now, off you go.’

  I snatched the bottle from the table and thrust it into Sigginho’s arms. The man rose and stepped back.

  ‘Very well, if that’s your very best answer, then I shall follow your most kind advice.’

  He stalked away and out of the room. Luke, who all this time had been watching Sigginho intently, clapped his hands together in admiration.

  ‘Bravo, Titus! That was well done indeed, and not without hazard to yourself, I may say.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think so, Luke. But I am rather amazed at his threatening me. The man seemed so smooth and almost agreeable at first. He even made me feel for him, losing such a large sum in that way.’

  ‘I never believed his story. It doesn’t cohere. This tale of a loose saddle strap! Does a man tie two hundred guineas to his saddle and not check it is secure? I say he is riding piggy-back on the case. The money was never his, but he saw a way of claiming it by concocting this tale. It is all as false as the name he is using.’

  ‘The name is an unusual one, certainly. Portuguese, he says.’

  ‘That is entirely ridiculous.’

  ‘How can you be so sure?’

  ‘Because I happen to know who he really is, Titus. And the name is an anagram, by the way. Sigginho. Think, and you will get it.’

  I did think. Gohising? Hogsingi? Sognighi? Snighoig? It was no good.

  ‘I am defeated,’ I said. ‘What is it, Luke?’

  ‘Come, come, Titus! It’s O’Higgins, of course. His forenames: Shamus Fingal.’

  ‘Oh, my Lord!’ said I. ‘That’s Jim Fingers.’

  SIXTEEN

  Jim Fingers, Prince of Flicks, was the most notorious highwayman that the north-west could boast of. He was also sometimes called the Cheshire Turpin, and for the last five years he’d been liberally plundering the roads anywhere between Carlisle and north Wales.

  The legend of the Prince of Flicks, or (by his true name) Shamus Fingal O’Higgins, was known from end to end of our region. The man had more aliases than the devil, and as many disguises, and the tales of his exploits passed from mouth to mouth as fast as the breeze. Twice he had escaped from captivity at Chester Castle, the second time dressed as a woman and on the very eve of his hanging. Once he had held up the carriage of Lord Derby himself, and relieved her Ladyship of her jewels, some of which he gallantly returned the next day, along with a single red rose. He was a notorious womanizer, rake and sportsman. He had entered his horse Pirate in a stakes for fifty guineas on Lord Egerton’s course in the Wirral, won in a canter and galloped straight on and over the horizon before he could be apprehended. He was handsome, daring, a deadly shot and, when he chose, a charmer. In short, people (not excepting some of those he robbed) loved the fellow.

  O’Higgins had been born in County Kildare. He grew up a horse-coper and, as time went by, became a horse thief and then a thief in general. He crossed the Irish Sea to try his luck in Liverpool and, after a year of successful plundering, removed to London in search of bigger prizes. In London he got his nickname, but also received a check to his career. The water in that pond was too hot, and too full of big fish with sharp teeth, so Jim Fingers returned to the north-west where he could be sure of being the only pike in a pool of carp. He flourished as never before. Magistrates and constables had chased him, tracked him, tried to trap him, but always he slipped from their grasp.

  And we, just a few moments ago, had been in conference with the man himself. I am not in general bedazzled by glamour, but I now felt pleasure, retrospective pleasure, at our meeting. Many people like to think propinquity with glamour lends glamour of itself. They are deluded. You are not a changed person, and certainly not a better person, after having a passing encounter with fame. But it is undoubtedly a leg-up for your self-regard when you have a good story to tell in the coffee house.

  ‘I am surprised he lost his sangfroid just now,’ said Luke. ‘He is said to be cool under all provocation.’

  ‘How on earth do you know him, Luke?’

  ‘I saw him at a prize-fight – Hayrick Harrison against the Nottingham Gnasher at Liverpool. I sat behind him in the pit and heard him letting slip who he was. He’d bet on the Gnasher, and whereas most people thought Harrison would pound his opponent to death in ten rounds, the Gnasher wouldn’t go down and then he put Harrison down after fifty. It was a hellish struggle, but O’Higgins had gained the confidence of both men’s trainers beforehand, and he knew the true state of play. By the end he was cock-a-hoop and reckless in his confidences.’

  ‘I wonder he did not recognize you when he saw you today.’
r />   ‘No wonder. As I say, I was at his back, and all his attention was directed to the ring, not the seats behind. Add to that it was three years ago. There’s no reason why Jim Fingers would remember me now.’

  We left the inn soon after and, the snow having relented, were riding along the south bank of the river towards the ferry.

  ‘Contrary to your opinion,’ I said. ‘I think it quite possible that O’Higgins really did lose those coins. If they were the proceeds of a robbery, he would not be in a position to report their loss – I mean not to a magistrate or an insurance official – but he might try to find and get them back in his own way. And it would explain how he knows the amount of the gold, and also precisely where it was found.’

  ‘He may have been told that by someone Limmington had confided in. It’s said O’Higgins prides himself on acting only on the best information. As he did, for example, at the prize-fight.’

  ‘On which occasion, by the way, you did not denounce him, Luke. Were you not tempted? There is a price on his head, I believe.’

  ‘Denounce him? I won twenty guineas by his tip on the Gnasher. It would not have been the act of a sportsman to denounce him. And besides, it would have had no effect. No one ever knows where Fingers stays. He flits like a wraith in and out of town – this town, that town. He is never visible anywhere long enough to be arrested.’

  ‘You make him sound superhuman, but he is just a man, Luke. Mark my word, Jim Fingers will slip up one day and face his reckoning.’

  ‘Would you like to bet on it?’

  In the evening I sat at supper with Elizabeth, and silence lay between us. There was still that sadness in her face. She was not – or did not appear – agitated, or angry over the Marquis, but she remained reflective and very quiet. She did not raise the matter with me, or allow me to raise it with her. The matter was not open for discussion.

  Matty was doing all our shopping as Elizabeth would not leave the house. Nor, within the house, would she go into our bedroom. She asked Matty to fetch her dresses out and bring them to the attic, where she continued to sleep. I was in a quandary. The attic beds were cramped and the mattresses lumpy. I wanted to go back to sleeping under our own canopy, in our own spacious room. On the other hand, I did not want to lie down without Elizabeth next to me. In the end, she decided the matter herself. She told me she would rather sleep alone for a while. Her face looked infinitely tired as she spoke these words, but I was not compassionate: I was angry and hurt. Of course, I told her, she must follow this inclination for as long as necessary and come back to bed with me in her own time. But I said the words coldly, and rather through my teeth. I did not understand this. What, after all, had happened? The Marquis had a crack at her and failed. That should be the end of it, with the woman glad to have escaped – thanks to my timely interruption. She should not be spurning me. She should be overflowing with gratitude.

  But that, as I now know, is a man thinking. It is not how a woman thinks and, more notably, not how she feels.

  In every other way our household returned to the usual round, and so did the town. Commerce resumed. Those that had buried their treasures dug them up again. The Whig burghers and the faint-hearted rest who’d fled Preston now draggled furtively back, with tales of how they had been called away on urgent business or to attend the unforeseen death of a relative.

  But outside the burgh, the element of disorder and lawlessness that had trailed behind the Chevalier on his military adventure took a little longer to dissipate. There were now more criminals on the highways than ever before. We heard tell of footpads and robber gangs roaming the public roads, relieving travellers of their purses, watches, jewellery and even their clothing. In response, gentlemen took to riding out in companies, while the operators of the Lancaster Flyer and the Chester Belle added a second armed guard to the crews of their coaches.

  This epidemic of crime did much to enhance even further the reputation of Jim Fingers. Being a figure of such notoriety, his name was constantly invoked in connection with these incidents, never mind that for all O’Higgins’s supposed occult powers he could not easily have carried out a hold-up in Orsmkirk and another in Garstang, on the same afternoon.

  Perhaps it was this constant repetition of his name that made me, one night as I lay miserably awake and alone, go over O’Higgins’s intervention in the case of the death of Horace Limmington, and in doing so certain ideas, exciting and novel ideas, flowed into my mind. The following day I went directly to Scrafton’s Roost, taking Suez with me, to talk them over with Luke Fidelis.

  I found him scolding his apprentice, Peason. The boy had taken it upon himself to see a patient during one of Fidelis’s frequent visits to country patients and had attempted to treat her with a preparation of boiling mud, which had scalded the woman’s skin. A tall, pimple-faced youth, Peason now drooped before his master’s wrath.

  ‘You are a poltroon, Peason. What are you?’

  ‘A poltroon, Doctor Fidelis.’

  ‘And remind me, do you not also carry your brains in your buttocks?’

  ‘I won’t do it again, Doctor Fidelis, I swear.’

  His pimples glowed redder than ever.

  ‘You had better not. Ah, Cragg! You see before you a very sorry specimen, still a distant stranger to the medical arts, despite all my efforts to introduce him to them. Shall we walk out? Our dogs will enjoy a turn on the Moor, I think. Finish making up those poultices, Peason, and do the job properly, for Christ’s sake.’

  With Suez and Bawty running joyfully ahead of us, we walked by way of Moor Lane.

  ‘Peason is not a bad lad at heart,’ I said.

  ‘I didn’t say he was bad. I said he was a poltroon.’

  ‘It comes from eagerness as much as foolishness. He wants to prove himself in your eyes.’

  ‘He will only do that by doing just as he is told, not less and certainly not more.’

  ‘It is the essence of strict British soldiering, is that,’ I observed. ‘Never do anything other than your precise orders. It’s an awfully limiting existence. Allow the boy a little leeway.’

  ‘I can’t. His leeway loses patients.’

  I gestured at the townlands on either side of us. A week previously they’d swarmed with Highland men, their tents and their fires, their bagpipes and their kilts.

  ‘Well, in the case of the rebel soldiers, the looser regime wins battles, it seems. Theirs is the very opposite of the redcoat way of thinking, I find. They are more like irregulars than regimental troops. But they’ve had some rare successes.’

  ‘I know nothing of the military life, regular or otherwise. Nor do I wish to.’

  ‘Then let’s speak about something else. I have been thinking about the Limmington case. Certain details of it still do not fit.’

  ‘Such as the woman Griselda’s incoherent evidence?’

  ‘Yes, that in particular. I have come around to your view that she lied. And I have formed some thoughts as to why.’

  ‘I wonder if your thoughts are the same as mine. I too have reached some conclusions on this.’

  ‘Very well, let us see. Point and counterpoint. I will go first.’

  Point and counterpoint was a kind of reasoning game that Fidelis and I sometimes played in those days. One of us led off with a partial statement which the other was invited to complete. Then the latter would continue with the beginning of a second consequential statement.

  ‘It’s plain for all to see that Griselda was a discontented woman. She was so because …’

  ‘Her master was a failure, and poor, so that she was paid …’

  ‘Small or no wages for years. She saw the chance of redress, however, when …’

  ‘Limmington found, by chance, a large sum of money by the wayside, but she …’

  ‘Watched in frustration as the man’s honesty led him to proclaim his discovery and try to identify the owner. So, fearing that the money would have to be returned, she …’

  ‘Made up her mind to ha
ve it for herself and saw her chance when …’

  ‘That’s it, Luke! That was my very thought at three o’clock last night. When the rebels came calling, and caused the death of her master, she saw her chance. The money was well hidden and the rebels did not find it. Only she knew the place. Cunning old vixen! She made a pact with them to show where to look in return for a percentage of their haul.’

  ‘In which case, I’ll wager it was the rebels that helped her to get the dead body up the stairs – and it was a dead body, Titus. In which case, the question remains. Why is she lying about the time of Limmington’s death?’

  ‘She needed time for herself to … to do what? To dispose of her share of the loot?’

  ‘It does not seem logical. Why the need? Limmington was dead. He wasn’t going to take it back.’

  There we ground to a halt, unable to see the reason for Griselda’s lie. We turned therefore to the sport of throwing sticks for our dogs.

  The next day, Wednesday, Limmington was to be buried in St Mary’s, Penwortham. I asked Elizabeth to come with me as it would do her good to walk out. She absolutely refused, saying she did not know Limmington from the man in the moon, and saw no reason to mourn him. I went across the river without her.

  It was not a well-attended funeral service. Among the scattering of mourners I saw the old squire Henry Fleetwood of the Priory. Gibbins, with his wife, was also there, assuaging his guilt at having directed the Highlanders to Limmington’s house. Of the women, there was Griselda, who came by herself, and two others that I did not recognize.

  ‘Who are those women?’ I asked Gibbins when we had debouched into the graveyard for Limmington’s burial.

  ‘That’s Mrs Limmington and her sister,’ said Mrs Gibbins. ‘From Macclesfield.’

  ‘They have taken rooms at the Swan,’ Gibbins added. ‘Mrs Limmington refuses to enter her former home. She is standing the funeral refreshments in our private parlour.’

  After the burial we therefore trouped down the road to the Swan for a glass of spiced wine and arval cake. I stood at first with old Fleetwood, who was in a truculent humour.