Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  The judge expressed his concurrence in the opinion of his learned friend; and George Duke’s shadow, of double, or twin-brother was removed from the court to he in Carlisle prison until further inquiries should set him free, or justify his detention until the following assizes.

  The jury then retired, and deliberated on the strange and conflicting evidence that had been put before them. The tide of popular feeling had completely turned as regards Millicent Duke; and the twelve honest citizens of Carlisle were lot slow to agree to a verdict in her favour. This verdict was received with unanimous applause.

  Millicent Duke was carried out of the court in the strong arras of her cousin Darrell. The feeble frame had given way at last, and she had fallen into a swoon while Thomas Masterson was telling his story. —

  Early the next day they took her back to Compton-on-the-Moor; not to the roomy old mansion in which the murder had been committed, but to a pleasant chamber at the Black Bear, where she was faithfully served by Phoebe the pretty chambermaid. Faithful Sarah would have gladly tended her dear Miss Millicent, but she had her hands full of sad work at this time, and could spare no time from her attendance on the sick bed of her sou.

  The race of Henry Masterson, alias Captain Fanny, alias Sir Lovel Mortimer, was well-nigh run. Before the spring flowers should bloom in the woods and hedgerows about Compton-on-the -Moor Sarah’s newly-found son had passed away from this pleasant earth. He lingered for upwards of a fortnight after Millicent’s trial, and died in his mother’s arms, conscious to the last, resigned to his early death, and honestly penitent for the wickedness and folly of his brief career.

  He was thunderstruck upon hearing an account of the proceedings at Carlisle.

  “I fully thought that it was James Duke who was murdered,” he said, “and that the unhappy lady had done the deed in some paroxysm of madness or despair. I can do much to throw a light upon the business, and to clear the lady’s name, and thus do one act of justice before I die; but I had best tell my story on oath before competent witnesses, as it may help to hang this man James, who, for that matter, is better out of the world than in it, having never been of any service to a living creature.”

  That evening, in the presence of his mother, Samuel Pecker, and Attorney Selgood, Captain Fanny made a deposition, which was carefully written down by the lawyer, and afterwards signed by the sick man.

  In this statement the highwayman told how James Duke had been first his comrade and afterwards his servant. How he had been from first to last an ill-conditioned fellow, nicknamed by those who knew him Sulky Jeremiah, and sometimes, by reason of his constant bad fortune, Unlucky Jeremiah. How the hatred between the twin-brothers was well known to all who were acquainted with either of them; and how, on hearing of George Duke’s disappearance, he, Henry Masterson, had thought that James might profit by the circumstance to pass himself off for his brother, and thus get possession of the wife’s fortune. This plan had been discussed and matured in London, when the highwayman chanced to meet the wedding party upon the steps of St. Mary’s church. This chance meeting decided James Duke upon immediate action. He started that night for Compton-on-the-Moor, having been furnished with money for his journey by Captain Fanny; and having appointed to meet the highwayman, a week afterwards, at the Black Bear, and share with his old comrade and master the fortune acquired by the imposition.

  This was all that Henry Masterson could tell; but it formed a powerful link in the evidence against the man lying in Carlisle gaol.

  Captain Fanny was sleeping under a turf-covered mound in Compton churchyard when James Duke was placed in the dock, where Millicent had so lately stood, to take his trial at the Midsummer assizes for the wilful murder of his brother George.

  Link by link the chain of circumstantial evidence was forged. Every step of the accused from London to Compton-on-the-Moor was tracked by one witness and another; but the most damning of all the evidence against him was that given by the ostler of a small inn on a cross-road thirty miles from Compton, where James Duke had hired a horse, and whither he had returned on foot at dusk on the evening after the murder, carrying with him a bundle, and sneaking into the inn-yard like a thief, with his clothes all bespattered by blood and clay; the foul marks being caused, he said, by a fall from his horse, which he had left for that reason at Compton-on-the-Moor.

  The boy who had been sent to fetch the horse also gave evidence, and told how the prisoner had promised him a guinea on condition that he refused to answer any questions that might be asked him at Compton.

  So James Duke was hung at Carlisle; and a fail headstone was set up by Millicent’s command over the disfigured remains that had been found in the pond, bearing a brief inscription to the memory of George Duke, who was cruelly murdered by his twin-brother on the night of the 30th of January 17 — .

  EPILOGUE.

  Nearly a twelvemonth, elapsed before Millicent had any mind to return to Compton Hall. She lived during that time in the little cottage which she had inhabited during the seven years of her husband’s absence. The garden chamber was razed to the ground, and a new wing in red brick built in its stead, called at first King George’s, and subsequently the Nursery wing. The pool behind the stables was filled and planted over with laurels and holly-bushes. It is to be recorded that the simple villagers declared that no shrub ever flourished upon that accursed spot; but it is also a fact that the place was an exposed corner lying open to the east wind.

  There were grooms and stable-boys of nervous temperament who declared that strange noises were to be heard after dark in the neighbourhood of this mound of earth, and that Captaiu Duke still “walked” amidst the scene of his assassination. But Millicent was never troubled further by the shadow of her husband, and blushed for her own superstitious folly when she remembered how she had mistaken a form of flesh and blood for a spectral apparition.

  Before George Duke’s widow returned to the house in which her ancestors had lived and died, she took her part for the third time in the marriage ceremony, and was united by the curate of Compton to her cousin Darrell Markham.

  Thomas Masterson, convicted of a petty theft, died of gaol-fever in Carlisle prison a few months after the death of his son. So it fell out that Samuel Pecker never to his dying clay learned the true history of the foreign-looking pedlar who stole the spoons and Sarah’s Tompion watch. is there any need for me to tell of the peaceful happiness that reigned at Compton Hall? There is a picture still to be seen in the dining-room of the old mansion — a family group, common enough in such houses, but surely never displeasing to look upon, whether the painter is the mighty Sir Joshua himself, or only some poor imitator of the great artist. It is the picture of a young mother, dressed in an open gown of light blue satin and a petticoat of embroidered muslin, with her pale golden hair turned back from her innocent forehead under a matronly cap of lace and cambric. A sweet and gentle creature, who bend3 over the cradle of a sleeping child, while a stalwart gentleman in a hunting costume stands in the background, with a sturdy urchin of some three years old seated upon his shoulder, and a leash of hounds at his feet.

  THE END

  LADY AUDLEY’S SECRET

  This classic Victorian mystery novel is Braddon’s masterpiece and brought her great fame and success. As well as being an effective and thrilling mystery story, it also has implications for Victorian social politics, especially the nineteenth-century divorce laws, which were steeped in male bias, making it virtually impossible for women to secure a divorce. Reactions to this law paved the way for novels on the theme of ‘accidental bigamy’. Although wildly sensational, these tales flagged up the potentially disastrous consequences of the unfair divorce laws. Lady Audley’s Secret is a classic example of such fiction. As a murder mystery, it was also influenced by elements of the murder at Road Hill House, Wiltshire, in 1860.

  The plot involves the idle solicitor Robert Audley’s investigations into the fate of his friend George Talboys, a sailor just returned to Britain after
years away at sea. George disappears after visiting Audley Court, the country seat of Robert’s wealthy uncle, Sir Michael. Could Sir Michael’s new wife, Lucy, really be responsible? And if so, what secret motive could lead a woman to commit murder?

  The novel had a fraught publishing history. Partly serialised in Robin Goodfellow from July-September 1861, Braddon abandoned the serial half-way through in order to write Aurora Floyd. The novel was fully serialised in the Sixpenny Magazine in 1862, and again in the London Journal the following year. However, it was to become a bestselling phenomenon when issued as a three-volume novel in 1862, making its author and its publisher, William Tinsley, rich.

  In recent years, the novel has divided critics in its treatment of a female criminal, with some seeing Lady Audley as the epitome of intrinsic female evil and insanity, while others view the novel as an indictment of the authority’s willingness to brand any female criminal as automatically insane (thereby backing up simplistic gender stereotypes). This very ambiguity perhaps provides a clue to the abiding popularity of the novel, as generations of readers find themselves captivated by the mysterious, dangerous and alluring persona of Lady Audley.

  Title page of an early edition of the novel by its original publisher, Tinsley

  Cover of the mass-market ‘yellowback’ edition from later in the nineteenth century

  Illustration of the confession scene from an early serial version of the novel

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER I.

  CHAPTER II.

  CHAPTER III.

  CHAPTER IV.

  CHAPTER V.

  CHAPTER VI.

  CHAPTER VII.

  CHAPTER VIII.

  CHAPTER IX.

  CHAPTER X.

  CHAPTER XI.

  CHAPTER XII.

  CHAPTER XIII.

  CHAPTER XIV.

  CHAPTER XV.

  CHAPTER XVI.

  CHAPTER XVII.

  CHAPTER XVIII.

  CHAPTER XIX.

  CHAPTER XX.

  CHAPTER XXI.

  CHAPTER XXII.

  CHAPTER XXIII.

  CHAPTER XXIV.

  CHAPTER XXV.

  CHAPTER XXVI.

  CHAPTER XXVII.

  CHAPTER XXVIII.

  CHAPTER XXIX.

  CHAPTER XXX.

  CHAPTER XXXI.

  CHAPTER XXXII.

  CHAPTER XXXIII.

  CHAPTER XXXIV.

  CHAPTER XXXV.

  CHAPTER XXXVI.

  CHAPTER XXXVII.

  CHAPTER XXXVIII.

  CHAPTER XXXIX.

  CHAPTER XL.

  Ingatestone Hall in Essex – the house on which Braddon based Audley Court

  Theda Bara as Lady Audley in a 1915 silent film adaptation

  Neve Macintosh as Lady Audley and Steven Macintosh as Robert Audley in a 2000 BBC TV adaptation

  CHAPTER I.

  LUCY.

  It lay down in a hollow, rich with fine old timber and luxuriant pastures; and you came upon it through an avenue of limes, bordered on either side by meadows, over the high hedges of which the cattle looked inquisitively at you as you passed, wondering, perhaps, what you wanted; for there was no thorough-fare, and unless you were going to the Court you had no business there at all.

  At the end of this avenue there was an old arch and a clock tower, with a stupid, bewildering clock, which had only one hand — and which jumped straight from one hour to the next — and was therefore always in extremes. Through this arch you walked straight into the gardens of Audley Court.

  A smooth lawn lay before you, dotted with groups of rhododendrons, which grew in more perfection here than anywhere else in the county. To the right there were the kitchen gardens, the fish-pond, and an orchard bordered by a dry moat, and a broken ruin of a wall, in some places thicker than it was high, and everywhere overgrown with trailing ivy, yellow stonecrop, and dark moss. To the left there was a broad graveled walk, down which, years ago, when the place had been a convent, the quiet nuns had walked hand in hand; a wall bordered with espaliers, and shadowed on one side by goodly oaks, which shut out the flat landscape, and circled in the house and gardens with a darkening shelter.

  The house faced the arch, and occupied three sides of a quadrangle. It was very old, and very irregular and rambling. The windows were uneven; some small, some large, some with heavy stone mullions and rich stained glass; others with frail lattices that rattled in every breeze; others so modern that they might have been added only yesterday. Great piles of chimneys rose up here and there behind the pointed gables, and seemed as if they were so broken down by age and long service that they must have fallen but for the straggling ivy which, crawling up the walls and trailing even over the roof, wound itself about them and supported them. The principal door was squeezed into a corner of a turret at one angle of the building, as if it were in hiding from dangerous visitors, and wished to keep itself a secret — a noble door for all that — old oak, and studded with great square-headed iron nails, and so thick that the sharp iron knocker struck upon it with a muffled sound, and the visitor rung a clanging bell that dangled in a corner among the ivy, lest the noise of the knocking should never penetrate the stronghold.

  A glorious old place. A place that visitors fell in raptures with; feeling a yearning wish to have done with life, and to stay there forever, staring into the cool fish-ponds and counting the bubbles as the roach and carp rose to the surface of the water. A spot in which peace seemed to have taken up her abode, setting her soothing hand on every tree and flower, on the still ponds and quiet alleys, the shady corners of the old-fashioned rooms, the deep window-seats behind the painted glass, the low meadows and the stately avenues — ay, even upon the stagnant well, which, cool and sheltered as all else in the old place, hid itself away in a shrubbery behind the gardens, with an idle handle that was never turned and a lazy rope so rotten that the pail had broken away from it, and had fallen into the water.

  A noble place; inside as well as out, a noble place — a house in which you incontinently lost yourself if ever you were so rash as to attempt to penetrate its mysteries alone; a house in which no one room had any sympathy with another, every chamber running off at a tangent into an inner chamber, and through that down some narrow staircase leading to a door which, in its turn, led back into that very part of the house from which you thought yourself the furthest; a house that could never have been planned by any mortal architect, but must have been the handiwork of that good old builder, Time, who, adding a room one year, and knocking down a room another year, toppling down a chimney coeval with the Plantagenets, and setting up one in the style of the Tudors; shaking down a bit of Saxon wall, allowing a Norman arch to stand here; throwing in a row of high narrow windows in the reign of Queen Anne, and joining on a dining-room after the fashion of the time of Hanoverian George I, to a refectory that had been standing since the Conquest, had contrived, in some eleven centuries, to run up such a mansion as was not elsewhere to be met with throughout the county of Essex. Of course, in such a house there were secret chambers; the little daughter of the present owner, Sir Michael Audley, had fallen by accident upon the discovery of one. A board had rattled under her feet in the great nursery where she played, and on attention being drawn to it, it was found to be loose, and so removed, revealed a ladder, leading to a hiding-place between the floor of the nursery and the ceiling of the room below — a hiding-place so small that he who had hid there must have crouched on his hands and knees or lain at full length, and yet large enough to contain a quaint old carved oak chest, half filled with priests’ vestments, which had been hidden away, no doubt, in those cruel days when the life of a man was in danger if he was discovered to have harbored a Roman Catholic priest, or to have mass said in his house.

  The broad outer moat was dry and grass-grown, and the laden trees of the orchard hung over it with gnarled, straggling branches that drew fantastical shadows upon the green slope. Within this moat there was, as I have said,
the fish-pond — a sheet of water that extended the whole length of the garden and bordering which there was an avenue called the lime-tree walk; an avenue so shaded from the sun and sky, so screened from observation by the thick shelter of the over-arching trees that it seemed a chosen place for secret meetings or for stolen interviews; a place in which a conspiracy might have been planned, or a lover’s vow registered with equal safety; and yet it was scarcely twenty paces from the house.

  At the end of this dark arcade there was the shrubbery, where, half buried among the tangled branches and the neglected weeds, stood the rusty wheel of that old well of which I have spoken. It had been of good service in its time, no doubt; and busy nuns have perhaps drawn the cool water with their own fair hands; but it had fallen into disuse now, and scarcely any one at Audley Court knew whether the spring had dried up or not. But sheltered as was the solitude of this lime-tree walk, I doubt very much if it was ever put to any romantic uses. Often in the cool of the evening Sir Michael Audley would stroll up and down smoking his cigar, with his dogs at his heels, and his pretty young wife dawdling by his side; but in about ten minutes the baronet and his companion would grow tired of the rustling limes and the still water, hidden under the spreading leaves of the water-lilies, and the long green vista with the broken well at the end, and would stroll back to the drawing-room, where my lady played dreamy melodies by Beethoven and Mendelssohn till her husband fell asleep in his easy-chair.