Death of a Dancer

by Caro Peacock

  ‘Please sit down,’ Blake said.

  He was standing beside the chair facing us, which meant Hardcastle had no choice but to sit with his back to the screen. They sat and for a count of twenty or so, neither of them said anything. Blake’s face was partly screened from me by the back of Hardcastle’s head, but as far as I could see he was impassive.

  ‘What did you want to see me about?’ Hardcastle said.

  ‘I think you know.’

  A good line. Hardcastle fidgeted in his chair. His left leg came out from under the table, showing the toe of a scuffed boot. The change of position made the right side of his coat hang down beside the chair. The pocket of it was weighted with something that looked a lot heavier than a handkerchief. I saw Surrey’s eyes going to it and knew that Blake could hardly have failed to notice it on their way along the corridor. Hardcastle said nothing.

  ‘I think you may have lost this –’ Blake said.

  He took a paper from his pocket and threw it down on the table in front of Hardcastle. The marriage lines.

  ‘What are you doing with that?’ Hardcastle’s voice was high and alarmed.

  ‘Do I congratulate you, then?’ Blake said. ‘I’ve heard of plenty of women living off gentlemen, but not many gentlemen would stoop to living off a woman, especially a dead one.’

  There was a depth of contempt in Blake’s voice that I hadn’t expected. Beside me, I was aware that Surrey was poised for action, balancing on the balls of his feet. He motioned to me to move aside so that he could spring out quickly if needed. I stayed where I was.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Hardcastle said.

  Like me, he seemed to have been caught off balance by the bitterness in Blake’s voice.

  ‘Are you going to take her name?’ Blake taunted him. ‘The right dishonourable Mr Columbine?’

  Hardcastle made a choking noise. As far as he’d had an education, it had been a conventional one and these were fighting words.

  ‘Dishonourable? How dare you call me dishonourable?’

  Hardcastle got to his feet, pushing against the table, and moved towards Blake. Blake must have expected it. He stood up and stepped smartly sideways so that Hardcastle lurched past him towards the door, then turned, looking ready to charge. Blake faced him.

  ‘There are worse words than dishonourable, aren’t there? How does murderer suit you?’

  From the furious expression on Hardcastle’s face, Blake must have realised that he’d moved too far and too fast. As Hardcastle came back at him, Blake stepped rapidly towards the screen, stumbling in his hurry.

  I assumed it was to have help near at hand if Hardcastle attacked him. My main concern was to stop Surrey jumping out to protect Blake there and then. I mouthed ‘Wait’ at him. He might not have taken any notice, but at that moment our view changed. Blake in his hurry must have blundered against one wing of the screen, knocking it back at right angles so that Surrey and I were effectively boxed in and could see nothing.

  Then Blake screamed: ‘Put that away. No! Put it away.’

  At the same time, the sounds of a scuffle, a chair falling over and Hardcastle’s panic-stricken screech, higher than Blake’s.

  ‘No. No.’

  Then the bang of a pistol. Surrey swore and pushed me aside. The screen rocked and we both came tumbling out of it together. I had, after a fashion, expected the sight that awaited us. Surrey hadn’t, but he had a clear enough view of it to be as good a witness as anyone could wish. One man was bent over, hands to his face. The other was upright, holding a smoking pistol in a hand that was rock-steady. The man bent over was Hardcastle, the one with the pistol Barnaby Blake. For a heartbeat we all stood just as we were, with no sound except Hardcastle’s whimpering.

  ‘So you tried to kill him too?’ I said to Blake.

  He raised the pistol. He was looking at me so he never noticed that the door from the corridor had opened. When a man-shaped meteor came flying at him and struck him a blow on the side of the head so hard that he and the pistol arced to the floor in different directions, he wouldn’t even have known who hit him. I looked over his unconscious form at Daniel who, to the best of my knowledge, had never raised a hand in anger since his schooldays, and had made up for it with this one blow.

  ‘You needn’t have worried about me,’ I said. ‘I told you it wouldn’t be loaded.’

  It was Hardcastle’s own fault that his face was so scored with powder burns that he looked as if he’d been dragged face down along a gravel drive. I’d told Lady Silverdale that he should carry his pistol conspicuously, but unloaded. No doubt she’d passed the instructions on accurately and he’d bungled that part of it, removing the ball but leaving the wadding and powder charge in the pistol. Still, he could be forgiven for that as he’d done everything else exactly as he’d been told and had just suffered the worst shock of his life. When Blake grabbed the pistol from his pocket and fired it at point-blank range into his face, he must have thought he was dying. Now, rocking backwards and forwards with his hands to his eyes, he started wailing that he was going blind. Robert Surrey looked badly shaken himself but went out of the room and came back with a bowl of water and a clean rag. Barnaby Blake was still laid out on the floor with Daniel standing close beside him as if scared even now that he might escape.

  ‘You shouldn’t be here,’ I said to Daniel.

  The sound of running feet came along the corridor and Kennedy appeared.

  ‘There was a shot. Are you …?’

  ‘we’re all right. Please go and find that policeman,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ Daniel said. ‘it’s all right. I’ll look after her.’

  It wasn’t the time to resent it. Blake started to move his head, groaning.

  ‘What happened?’ Surrey asked. ‘Did he panic and try to shoot Hardcastle?’

  ‘He tried to shoot Hardcastle,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t panic, though. His mind moves quickly. As soon as he saw Hardcastle had a pistol in his pocket, he decided to turn it against him. It wasn’t an accident that he closed the screen so that we couldn’t see.’

  We got Hardcastle to sit in the chair where Blake had been. Surrey gently pulled his hands away from his eyes while I dabbed them with water. They were terribly bloodshot and Hardcastle sobbed with the pain of it, but it didn’t look as if they were permanently damaged. He managed a few words.

  ‘He shot me. He grabbed it out of my pocket before I could stop him and fired it straight in my face.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And he screamed at you to put it away, as if it were you holding the pistol. That’s what we were meant to think. If he’d managed to kill you as he’d intended, his story would have been that you attacked him and got shot while he was trying to defend himself.’

  ‘But why should Blake try to kill him?’ Surrey said.

  ‘Columbine had collected a bundle of IOUs,’ I said. ‘Some of them were enormous sums, others comparatively small. One of them was Barnaby Blake’s for five hundred pounds at five per cent interest. It should have been settled months ago. And she owned a third share of the theatre we’re standing in and seemed discontented with the way he was running it.’

  All Blake’s plans for the theatre had depended on Columbine’s goodwill. The conversation I’d overheard, with him trying to convince her of its bright future, had been a desperate plea for more time.

  ‘That’s why he killed her,’ I said. ‘And this is how.’

  I took the pot of ointment out of my pocket.

  ‘It wasn’t anything she ate or drank that poisoned her. She had an embarrassing complaint and was being treated with ointment. It was supposed to be a secret between her and her maid, but Blake made it his business to know everything that was going on in his theatre. He replaced her usual ointment with a pot that had a fatal dose of thornapple instead of a healing one. I’m sure he took what he needed from Jenny’s basket. He pushed the screen over on Susanna, too. She’d almost caught him going through Columbine’s things, looking for the IOU.�
��

  Surrey didn’t need to know that by then it was under the seat of Hardcastle’s phaeton. Hardcastle had behaved well in the end, according to his lights, so I’d decided to keep some of his secrets. I took the cloth away from his eyes.

  ‘Can you see at all now?’

  He blinked and focused on the horizontal body of Blake.

  ‘Is he dead?’

  ‘No, but he should be,’ Daniel said.

  Steps along the corridor, and Kennedy’s voice.

  ‘… hurry up, for God’s sake.’

  He burst in with two police constables behind him. They’d been dragged from their beat, not expecting this. It took a while to convince them that nobody was dead. By then, Blake was groggily trying to sit up.

  ‘Arrest him for the murder of Columbine,’ Daniel told them.

  ‘He tried to murder me too,’ Hardcastle said. ‘Fired a pistol straight in my face.’

  They stared from one to the other, pondering what to do. Eventually Hardcastle’s high-pitched but Patrician tone had its effect.

  ‘Can I ask your name, sir?’

  ‘Rodney Hardcastle.’ Recognition dawned in their faces. Any policeman on a beat in the theatre area would know about Rodney Hardcastle. He didn’t leave it at that, though. ‘I am the son of Lord Silverdale and you’d better arrest that man for trying to kill me. Oh, and call me a cab to take me back to Mayfair, there’s a good fellow.’

  ‘For the first time in my life, I’ll admit that the English aristocracy has its uses,’ Daniel said.

  It was late that night, almost midnight. He, Kennedy and I were sitting by the fire and sharing a bottle of claret. The desperation had gone from his face and voice, but reaction had set in and he could scarcely move for exhaustion. I was bone-tired too, so that even going upstairs to bed seemed a near impossibility. Mrs Martley had retired hours ago, angry with all of us.

  ‘Yes, I’m not sure that they’d have arrested him on our word,’ I said. ‘I’m not looking forward to having to face Hardcastle’s mother, though. I hardly returned him in good order.’

  ‘Just a few scratches.’ Daniel dismissed him with a wave of his empty glass. ‘He deserved worse. Anyway, do you have to face her?’

  ‘Probably not.’

  ‘Do you know what the best part of today was, Libby?’

  ‘Punching Blake?’

  ‘Not even that. The best thing was seeing the expression on Phillips’ face when you put the jar of ointment on the table in front of him. I’ve never seen a barrister at a loss before.’

  ‘He was still cautious, though. He’s not sure it will amount to proof.’

  ‘No, but he admitted that if the jury at the trial had known about the poison not being in the syllabub and about the IOUs, Jenny would probably not have been convicted. And he said it, actually said it.’

  In the light of all this, they can’t hang her now. Charles Phillips, one of the most experienced barristers at the Old Bailey, had said the words. Daniel wanted to set them as an anthem with organ and trumpets. Phillips had been in such a hurry to go and consult people about it that he’d practically run out of the room. Daniel was to meet him again tomorrow, then they’d go together to see Jenny.

  ‘He did warn you that they won’t let her out at once,’ I reminded him.

  ‘That doesn’t matter. Or rather, it does, but it’s nothing in the face of thinking … Oh God, when we left the Old Bailey after talking to him, we actually walked over the place outside Newgate where they put up the gallows. It struck me that the next time they put them up it might have been for …’

  His voice died away.

  ‘it’s all right,’ I said. ‘it’s not going to happen. Not now.’

  ‘No, thanks to you. Tell me, when were you sure it was Blake?’ Kennedy said.

  ‘When I saw the IOU, I thought it might be. Then the attack on Daniel convinced me. But I couldn’t understand how he’d done it – until I saw Marie. I was following some wrong tracks too. For a while I thought it might be Surrey, in the pay of Lady Silverdale.’

  ‘From what you say, sHe’s quite capable of it.’

  ‘Probably. Only it couldn’t have been Surrey who pushed over the screen on Susanna. Quite apart from not being the sort to do a thing like that to his own daughter, he’d been in his dressing room at the time, talking to me.’

  ‘Why did the attack on me convince you?’ Daniel said.

  ‘It happened when we started seriously looking for Marie. Whoever planned it didn’t want us to find her and learn about the ointment. But he was clever enough to use the old search for Rainer as bait and hire an actor to impersonate him. That meant the killer had to be somebody you’d taken into your confidence.’

  ‘I was a fool,’ Daniel said. ‘I’d really convinced myself Blake wanted to help.’

  ‘Not a fool, no. Blake was clever and took his opportunities. Perhaps the idea of murdering Columbine to solve his financial troubles only came to him after that fight on stage. He knew it would make Jenny the main suspect. He put thornapple in the syllabub in all the confusion when Columbine was dying and made sure the policeman took the bowl away with him. He played a clever game at her trial. I dare say he bribed or bullied Jane Wood into giving evidence against Jenny, while he pretended to be sympathetic to her.’

  ‘And Hardcastle would have been his last line of defence?’ Kennedy said.

  ‘Exactly. If that pistol had been loaded and Hardcastle had died, Blake would have made sure that word about his secret marriage got out, muddying the waters all over again.’

  We were silent, looking into the fire. After a while, I asked the question that was in my mind, without looking at Daniel.

  ‘When Jenny comes out, shall you marry her?’

  ‘Yes. Shall you mind, Liberty?’

  ‘I wish both of you joy with all my heart. You deserve it.’

  He got up from his chair, kneeled down beside me and enclosed me in a rib-crushing, passionate hug, quite unlike the friendly or comforting hugs he’d given me in the past. I could feel him trembling and his heart thumping. The first one of its kind – and the last. He was murmuring something, his face against my hair.

  ‘it’s all over, Libby. Thank the gods, it’s all over.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  It wasn’t quite. Ten days later I was riding in the park with Amos when a familiar figure on a showy Arab came towards us at a canter. I’d expected it, but still wasn’t best pleased. For one thing, I thought it was likely to be my last ride on Rancie. The wedding of her new owner was drawing near and any day now the groom would be expecting to have her sent to his country estate. I wanted to experience every second of this bitter-sweet ride without distraction, even from Mr Disraeli. For another thing, I guessed he would have spoken to Lady Silverdale and be bearing some harsh words about putting her son in danger.

  He drew alongside us, raising his hat with one hand as he pulled up the mare with the other.

  ‘Good morning, Miss Lane. I’ve been hearing about your exploits.’

  ‘I’m sure you have.’

  ‘A satisfactory outcome, it seems. Jenny Jarvis is to receive a royal pardon.’

  The news hadn’t been officially announced yet, but as usual he had his sources of information.

  ‘Yes, and isn’t that foolish?’ I said. ‘Why pardon the poor girl for something she didn’t do in the first place?’

  He smiled, not put out by my bad temper.

  ‘It works faster than an appeal or re-trial. You should be pleased.’

  ‘And she’s still in Newgate while they go through all the legal formalities. Can you do anything to get her released more quickly?’

  Since he insisted on being there, I thought he might as well make himself useful.

  ‘I’m afraid you over-estimate my powers, Miss Lane. Today, I’m a simple messenger for Lady Silverdale.’

  ‘Is she very angry with me?’

  He raised his eyebrows.

  ‘Quite the contr
ary. She described you as an unusually resourceful and quick-witted young woman.’

  ‘Doesn’t she blame me for causing her son to be hurt?’

  ‘Why should she? For the first and almost certainly the last time in his life he’s quite the hero. That’s surely worth some superficial scarring and a pair of bloodshot eyes, particularly considering he was no Adonis in the first place.’

  ‘Hero? He behaved better than I expected, but that’s pitching it high.’

  ‘It seems you haven’t heard the full story, Miss Lane.’

  ‘Oh, haven’t I?’

  ‘How he tracked down the murderer of his wife and, at great personal risk, called him to account.’

  He looked at me. I tried to keep my face straight, but couldn’t help laughing.

  ‘Is that really what people are saying?’

  ‘The whole town, I assure you. His father’s so pleased he’s even come back from the country.’

  ‘They’ve admitted that he married Columbine?’

  ‘Once they heard about the property portfolio, they decided that she was an acceptable wife: rich and dead. I’m sure they’ll marry him to somebody else pretty smartly, before the gloss goes off him.’

  ‘So it all ends happily.’

  I couldn’t keep the sadness out of my voice, thinking of Rancie. Perhaps he thought it was for some other reason, because he dropped his teasing tone.

  ‘And what about you, Miss Lane? What are you going to do?’

  ‘Go on teaching music, I suppose.’

  ‘A woman can always marry. I’m sure I could find you somebody quite suitable by the end of the season.’

  I wondered why people would keep trying to marry me off.

  ‘Thank you kindly, sir. But I’ve no plans in that direction.’

  ‘Marriage does let a woman out into the world.’

  ‘As you see, I’m out in the world already.’

  I waved a hand at the trees coming into leaf, the blue sky.

  ‘And teaching girls their scales,’ he said.

  ‘What else do you suggest?’

  I said it sarcastically, not expecting an answer. To my surprise, his reply was serious.