The Regency Detective

by David Lassman

  Swann took the last mouthful of his coffee and stood up. ‘Then let us depart immediately,’ he said.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Mary stood in the middle of her drawing room in Great Pulteney Street perplexed. She had searched everywhere in the room – as well as having looked for it in her bedroom – or at least everywhere that she thought it might be. It was unlike her to misplace anything, but especially the small sketchbook, given she had been drawing the previous evening. She was certain her memory was not faulty in recollecting that she had put it away in the bottom drawer of her dresser, but even if that had been the case, it no longer resided there this morning. She had questioned Emily about its possible whereabouts, but to no avail. She would ask Jack on his return.

  After her brother had decided to stay on in Bath, the days had naturally fallen, or so it felt to Mary, into a most agreeable and mutually beneficial routine. They would each rise around seven o’clock and while Jack went for morning coffee in town and to collect any post off the Royal Mail coach, she would busy herself with her ablutions. On Jack’s return around ten o’clock, they would sit down to breakfast together and discuss any relevant matters of the day. Her brother had not returned for breakfast this morning, although this was not an unusual occurrence, so Mary had eaten alone.

  She was now getting ready for Mr Luchini’s arrival at eleven o’clock. Since the death of her mother, Mary had spent more time at home and a weekly art lesson being one of the activities she pursued. Mary had made her stand against the current conventions, she believed, by attending the ball whilst in mourning, but then had withdrawn from Bath’s social life on, she felt, her own terms. And so consequently now only attended intimate dinner parties and private gatherings, or else immersed herself in long walks to the city’s outlaying villages, such as Weston and Swainswick, when the weather was conducive and Edmund was free of business commitments; both of which seemed to have become rare of late.

  The absence of these walks did not perturb Mary too much, however, as on her aunt’s insistence she had recently begun a concentrated programme of reading. This consisted of several volumes borrowed from Harriet’s own library and all of which had been written by women. Up until this point in her life, the subject of women’s writing, or at least writing by women for women, had seemed too contentious for her to become involved in and she had always viewed that type of writing with trepidation. Her parents, although not outwardly condemning writing by such women as Mary Wollstonecraft or Hannah More, the latter having actually been a close neighbour at number seventy-six Great Pulteney Street until the previous year, had nevertheless not encouraged discussion of it either; despite her mother’s appetite for gothic novels written by women. And whether by chance or design, her father’s library contained only one book by a woman writer; Burney’s Evelina, which Mary had retrieved the day of her mother’s funeral.

  The first major revelation on undertaking this course of reading, along with the lecture she had attended the previous month and also through discussions with her aunt, had been the realisation of the voluminous amount of books that actually existed whose contents could be described as radical and the number of women who had written them; going as far back as a century and a half before the present day.

  For Mary, and she believed this to be true for many of her gender, any thinking about their status in society or indeed questioning women’s position in life, had begun with Mary Wollstonecraft. When A Vindication of the Rights of Woman had first been published a decade or so ago, it immediately became notorious and brought vilification upon its author. Mary had yet to read the book, but what she did know about the contents, which had been received second or even third or fourth hand, was that the authoress’ main idea – equality of women to men – was deemed far too dangerous for polite society. At least this was the belief held by many of the male members of her social world – and perhaps this included her brother as well – and, so she had heard on several occasions, any association with it would only led to misfortune. The malice towards her namesake while alive continued in the present, six years after her death, and one particular venomous piece of prose she remembered reading recently advocated that her life and works should be read with disgust by every female who has any pretensions to delicacy, with detestation by everyone attached to the interests of religion and morality, and with indignation by anyone who might feel any regard for the unhappy woman, whose frailties should have been buried in oblivion. And yet, as Mary had now come to recognise, this tradition of ‘dangerous writing’ and vilification towards its creators stretched back further than she could ever have imagined.

  ‘Now that you are truly an independent woman, you must learn to think like one,’ Harriet had told her, as they stood together next to a bookcase containing what her aunt termed ‘the collection’. ‘And the first thing you need to do is begin a systematic and chronological reading of the writers I have assembled here.’ Many of the volumes in the collection were either long out of print copies, or else privately published, but nevertheless they existed. Women it seemed, at least since the time of Shakespeare, had taken the time to reflect on the situations they had found themselves in, as part of the female race, and then had the courage to set those thoughts down on paper for publication.

  The first writer Harriet recommended, as she pulled out several volumes of her work, was a woman with the unusual sounding name of Aphra Behn. Although born to neither position nor fortune, Behn had lived the most extraordinary of lives, during which she had travelled extensively, including to the West Indies, become a spy for Charles II, the reigning monarch, and had been an early advocator of the abolishment of slavery; the latter most forcefully promoted through her writing, Harriet explained, which she turned to in order to make money when she found herself imprisoned for the debts incurred during the King’s service but which the monarch, either indifferently or deliberately, chose not to reimburse. So successful was Behn that she had become the first English woman to earn her living by the pen and her prodigious output, as Mary could see for herself, took up almost an entire shelf and included several plays, at least a dozen works of fiction, and many collections of poetry and translations.

  ‘And yet, if you read any history of English literature,’ exclaimed Harriet, angrily, ‘it is as if she had never existed.’

  Despite the immense success her work achieved during her lifetime, Behn was constantly ridiculed, belittled and verbally abused by male ‘critics’, who not only excluded her from their literary circles of power, but accused her of putting her name to works which had, they claimed, actually been written by her male lover. The final and most enduring insult though came after death, with her burial in Westminster Abbey. This was not in poets corner, however, as her achievements might suggest, but under the floor of a doorway, said Harriet, through which ‘countless generations of feet would slowly erase her name, her reputation, and even her existence from the annals of literary history.’

  If Behn had been one of, if not the, first woman writer to speak on behalf of her gender and question the imbalanced roles women and men occupied, then the writer of the volume Mary most recently finished reading carried this argument even further. A Serious Proposal to the Ladies for the Advancement of their True and General Interest, which had been originally published, Mary had noted, a century before Wollstonecraft’s Vindication, made its central argument in a satirical but thoroughly entertaining manner. If men were seen to be superior and women silly, the authoress wrote, then it was because men had used their power to arrange society so as to reflect and continue this notion, thus allowing them to retain authority. But what was more incredible was that in many ways, women were blamed for these ‘social arrangements’ men devised. ‘Women are from their very infancy debarred from those advantages,’ the writer had argued, ‘with the want of which they are afterwards reproached, and nursed up in those vices which will hereafter be upbraided to them.’ It was a problem of education, it had been concluded. Men
educated themselves, limited it to their female counterparts and then put the blame wholly on them because they were not educated! And what was more, it seemed, was that men preferred it this way. It reminded Mary what the speaker Catherine Jennings had so adamantly said the previous month about the Garden of Eden and the apple of knowledge. ‘So partial are men to expect bricks where they afford no straw,’ Mary also now recalled reading somewhere recently. This was ‘dangerous’ writing indeed, yet at the same time she also experienced a strange sensation of realisation. If the talk at her aunt’s house a few weeks earlier had been a spark to it, then the reading she had undertaken since had given rise to the full expression of viewing things in a totally different way for the first time in her life. And it was also after reading this particular book that she had begun to realise what her aunt had meant at the funeral of Mary’s mother, when she remarked Mary had been educated like a man and it was now time for her to be educated like a woman. With the books she had already read and the ones Harriet had promised to continue sending to her, she now felt well on the way to attaining a ‘proper’ education.

  Emily now entered the drawing room and announced Mr Luchini’s arrival.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Fitzpatrick’s carriage turned into the narrow lane, at the top of Lansdown Hill, and its driver pulled on the reins to bring the solitary horse to a halt alongside the morgue wagon. Swann stepped out and with the precise instructions of the magistrate’s clerk echoing in his ear, followed a single track into the woods to where Fitzpatrick would be waiting for him. Behind him, the carriage now turned and began its journey back down to the city, returning the clerk to the desk in the Guildhall from where he had been summoned, not an hour beforehand, to find Swann and bring him to this location.

  Swann deliberately walked on the track’s edge as he made his way along, so as not to contribute to the number of footprints already visible in the snow-covered footway. There had been a heavy snow storm the previous evening and while the snow had all but melted in the centre by the morning, it remained here on the higher ground. At one particular spot, where the track opened out slightly, the various pairs of prints could be more clearly distinguished between one another and so Swann stopped. He brought out a different pocketbook to the one which contained Lockhart’s portrait and made swift, but nevertheless accurate, sketches of each pair of boot prints, before continuing on his way through the woods. He reached a fork in the footpath but up ahead, on the right-hand side, now saw Fitzpatrick knelt down on the white ground beside a tree. As Swann approached, the magistrate stood up straight and dabbed his mouth with a handkerchief. A pale-faced Fitzpatrick then turned and saw Swann.

  ‘Ah, Swann. Thank you for responding so promptly to my request. As you can guess, this is a most unpleasant business. The poor creature is through here.’

  The men walked together in single file for a few yards, with Fitzpatrick in front, before coming out into a small clearing where two of Fitzpatrick’s men stood guard. Behind them, Swann now saw, was a girl of about seventeen. She hung naked from the trees, suspended there by a number of ropes.

  ‘I thought you would wish to view the body before we brought it down.’

  ‘Yes, thank you Fitzpatrick,’ replied Swann. ‘What time was the girl found?’

  ‘About six o’clock this morning. A gamekeeper on his rounds discovered her.’

  Swann stepped forward and lifted up the girl’s matted brown hair to reveal a bruised neck.

  ‘From those markings around the neck,’ remarked Fitzpatrick, as he watched Swann examine the girl, ‘I would say she was strangled. Would you not agree?’

  Swann did not reply.

  ‘But what is your opinion as to these?’ added Fitzpatrick, as he pointed to a couple of marks in close proximity on the right side of the girl’s neck. ‘You don’t think these may suggest the murderer was a vampi …’

  ‘Fitzpatrick, you surprise me,’ said Swann. ‘Do you really believe this girl will fly off like a bat when night falls?’

  ‘Sorry Swann. But what do you think made them?’

  Swann leant forward and inspected the twin marks more closely. ‘These were inflicted by a type of sharp instrument, not human teeth.’

  ‘But why, if she was strangled?’ asked Fitzpatrick

  ‘I do not know yet,’ Swann now took a step back and stood beside Fitzpatrick, ‘but I have seen enough for my requirements. I appreciate the fact you waited for me, but we need to give this unfortunate child some dignity now.’

  Fitzpatrick nodded and gestured for his men to begin untying the body.

  ‘Do we know her identity?’ asked Swann.

  ‘No,’ replied Fitzpatrick. ‘Her clothes were discovered nearby though and on them was what might be ink from a printer’s press. On my return to my office, I will dispatch an officer to visit all the printing establishments in the city.’

  Swann nodded his approval.

  ‘I have to return to the magistrates’ court now, as a sordid case of blackmail requires my presence,’ said Fitzpatrick.

  Swann was already elsewhere in his mind, however, scanning the scene and trying to reconstruct the sequence of events in his head.

  ‘Swann?’

  ‘What? Oh, yes. I will call on you later at your office, Fitzpatrick. I wish to stay here for the present time.’

  ‘Very good. I will instruct my carriage to return for you?’

  ‘That will not be necessary.’

  ‘But how will you return to town without transport?’

  ‘A constitutional walk,’ replied Swann. ‘It will allow time for contemplation, especially as the weather now seems to be set fair.’

  ‘Then I shall await your visit later,’ said Fitzpatrick. He gestured to his men to pick up the makeshift stretcher with the girl’s covered corpse upon it and then strode off back through the woods towards his carriage.

  The two men picked up the stretcher and began to follow the magistrate.

  ‘Wait!’ ordered Swann.

  The men did as they were told.

  ‘Show me the bottom of your boots.’

  The stretcher-bearers exchanged a puzzled expression but nevertheless both lifted their boots as ordered.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Swann. ‘You may go.’

  By the time the men were out of sight, Swann had brought his pocketbook out and opened it at the page containing the footprint sketches. Beside two of them he wrote the word F-men, short for Fitzpatrick’s men. Against another sketch he marked F; this was Fitzpatrick’s boots, the pattern of which he observed as the magistrate knelt by the tree, having just been sick. This left two pairs, of which at least one, he assumed, to be that of the murderer.

  Swann turned back towards the large tree from which the girl had been hanging and brought his mind to a place where he could begin to piece together what had occurred here and, in this way, begin the process of finding the perpetrator of this most heinous crime.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  After leaving Swann at the White Hart, George and Bridges had twenty-five minutes to wait before the Royal Mail coach was due at The Three Tuns. After a brief exchange of gestures between the two men, it became apparent that their opinion as to how to spend this time was divided. George was all for going to the Gallon Pot in Kingsmead Square for a few glasses of ale and to reacquaint himself with a couple of women he knew would be there at this time. Bridges, on the other hand, wanted to stay close to their departure point and suggested The Three Tuns, or at least the steps nearby, so as to be there when the coach arrived and make sure the man they had to follow was on it. Following another, slightly longer exchange of gesturing, which at one point became heated, they reached a compromise.

  The building which housed The Bear was, in its early years, one of the biggest in Bath and this had gone a long way to securing the establishment’s status as the foremost inn in the city. Its heyday had long since passed though, and for as far back as anyone could now remember, the site had been und
er constant threat of demolition. This being due not only to the questionable character of the present-day hostelry, but also because it had of late become a serious impediment to those visitors wishing to travel from the developments in the north of the city to the amenities in the centre.

  For George, visiting The Bear meant a chance to meet the renowned, if slightly disreputable, barmaid who worked there, while at the same time Bridges would be afforded the opportunity to see the Royal Mail coach as it came along Cheap Street, so allowing them enough time to be able to board it. They entered the gloomy, subdued atmosphere which prevailed throughout The Bear and ordered a jug of ale between the two of them. George quickly engaged the barmaid in lewd conversation and, in his own mind at least, had immediately established a most promising rapport. Bridges took his glass of beer to one of the front windows to keep watch, but no sooner had he sat down than his thoughts swiftly turned to their journey ahead and the anticipation of leaving the city of his birth for the very first time.

  As is often the way in such establishments, the marking of time can become disassociated with that of the outside world and whereas one might swear that only five minutes had passed, the reality is sometimes four-fold, and so the sudden appearance outside the window of a coach with its distinctive black and maroon panelling, red wheels and the Royal insignia emblazoned upon its door caught the daydreaming Bridges totally by surprise. Downing the remainders of their drinks the two men then dashed outside. Ordinarily George would have been more reluctant to leave, especially as he had struck up such a promising conversation with the barmaid, but even he knew that if they did not board the coach they might not get any more work from Mr Swann.

  By the time George and Bridges reached The Three Tuns, the post had been exchanged and the guard was announcing the last call for boarding: ‘Gentlemen, take your places.’ As the two companions climbed up on to the roof of the coach, Bridges handed over the tickets. There was a moment of suspicion on the guard’s part, as the incongruity between the tickets and their owners’ attire registered in his vigilant mind, but with the driver about to set the horses off and everything seemingly in order with the paperwork, he could do nothing other than console himself with the fact that the pair were not travelling inside the coach, with the more affluent passengers.