The Intrigue at Highbury m&mdm-5

by Carrie Bebris

  “Oh, gracious! I could not possibly — the vicar’s wife — whatever would people say? I would be the talk of the village.”

  “There is no harm in it. And not only would you honor me by the privilege, but also do me a great favor, for as the vicar’s wife surely you set the example of fashion in Highbury. Once it was known that you allowed me to read your tea leaves — purely for entertainment, of course — there would be those as would come every morning to have me look into their cups to see what the day might bring.”

  “Well, I — it is true that people look to me as a model of taste and propriety. Is that not true, my caro sposo?” Her husband directly affirmed her status as the arbiter of style in Highbury.

  She glanced at the empty teacup still on the table beside Loretta. Mrs. Elton’s face revealed longing that had nothing to do with thirst.

  “I am thinking, Mr. E., that if I submitted — only this once — strictly for amusement, of course — that no one could find fault with me. It would be merely an innocent diversion. And my patronage would benefit poor Miss Jones and her efforts to return home.”

  “Oh, do allow her, Mr. Elton,” Loretta said.

  Mr. Elton gave his consent, Mrs. Elton sat down, and tea was ordered.

  As it arrived, Mrs. Knightley and Mr. Dixon entered. The room seemed to brighten immediately, though whether from Thomas Dixon’s warm greeting to the Eltons or the high polish of his top hat, leather boots, and silver-handled walking stick, Elizabeth could not decide.

  Mrs. Knightley’s greeting to the Eltons was cooler but gracious. She gestured towards the tea. “Are you having your fortune read?”

  “Why, yes! Mr. E. and Miss Jones simply insisted. It is all in sport, of course. Perhaps when we have done, you would like a turn?”

  “Not today.”

  “I should think you would enjoy the entertainment. It would be a change of pace from the word games that have lately occupied you.” Mrs. Elton forced a smile. “Have you identified the author of that other puzzle you said arrived in the post?”

  “No, not yet.”

  “How very frustrating. Does not the handwriting offer some clue?”

  “It was penned in block letters, which are not very revealing.”

  “Well, I should think that Mr. Knightley could determine their writer, if he turned his mind to it.”

  Mrs. Knightley managed a polite smile. “Mr. Knightley’s mind has been occupied with weightier matters.”

  “Ah, yes — Mr. Churchill’s death. It must indeed weigh upon you both that he died at your house. He was such a good man! Generosity itself towards Frank, and Frank not even Edgar Churchill’s blood son.” She shook her head and sighed. “I grieve for the whole family.”

  “I am sure we all do,” Mrs. Knightley said.

  “With tragedy such as that surrounding you, I understand why you do not wish to have your fortune told, even for amusement. I would dread to hear that more ill luck awaited me.” She turned to Miss Jones. “Or do you tell only happy fortunes?”

  Miss Jones had grown quiet during the exchange between Mrs. Knightley and Mrs. Elton. Elizabeth was hardly surprised. Though their words were perfectly civil, the undercurrent was strong and deep, and no one of sense would have intentionally ventured into those waters unprepared.

  “I speak the truth as I see it,” Loretta said.

  Mrs. Elton appeared flustered for a moment, but then adopted a bright smile. “What about you, Mr. Dixon? You must have your fortune read!”

  Thomas Dixon, who had seemed to be concentrating more intensely on the shabby state of the room’s wallpaper than on the conversation taking place before him, gave a start at Mrs. Elton’s suggestion. His gaze shifted from the Eltons, to Mrs. Knightley, to the Darcys. He barely glanced at Miss Jones. “Thank you, no.”

  Elizabeth had expected a gentleman whose life was so wholly given over to idleness and pleasure to have seized the opportunity for a novel form of entertainment.

  “Why not, sir?” Loretta challenged him with a bold gaze. “Do you fear what I might reveal?”

  Mr. Dixon adjusted the cuffs of his coat and picked an imaginary piece of lint off his left sleeve. “Not at all.”

  “Then what is the harm?” Her tone turned teasing. “Perhaps we might learn the name of your true love.”

  The very notion seemed to appall him. With a stiff bow, he encouraged the others to enjoy their diversion and told Mrs. Knightley that she would find him waiting outside whenever it pleased her to return to Hartfield.

  Elizabeth watched with disappointment as he quit the inn. She had wanted very much to learn that name.

  As much as Mr. Dixon apparently wanted to keep it secret.

  Twenty-Six

  “She will never lead any one really wrong; she will make no lasting blunder; where Emma errs once, she is in the right a hundred times.”

  — Mrs. Weston to Mr. Knightley, Emma

  Emma was beginning to dread the arrival of the post.

  Each day brought something more vexing. First the charade. Then the riddle. Now a word puzzle of yet another sort.

  GRAL IRNIE DNOMHC

  VEIHTTS HTSASE LYE DEVI

  EWDEH LL MADE GNO

  What vexed her most was not the challenges presented by the puzzles. It was the fact that their continued accumulation rendered it increasingly unlikely that Mrs. Elton had authored all of them.

  When the third note arrived, addressed solely to Mr. Knightley, Emma had at first ascribed it to Mrs. Elton along with the others. The infuriating woman had, after all, brought up the subject of the puzzles only the day before, as Miss Jones prepared to tell her fortune. Like the first two, this latest bore a local postmark. But each puzzle had become successively more difficult to decipher; Mr. Knightley and Mr. Darcy still awaited a response regarding the second one from the friend they thought might be of assistance. They were not even entirely certain as to the nature of the third.

  “I believe it is a cipher puzzle.” Mr. Darcy cast it back onto the writing table in Mr. Knightley’s study. “Though I cannot begin to guess how we are to determine the key.”

  “There may be no method to it at all,” Elizabeth said. “The arrangement could be random — a simple anagram.”

  “Not so simple when one is trying to work out the solution.” Mr. Knightley picked up the note and scanned it once more. “If it is indeed an anagram, one cannot form ‘Churchill’ or ‘murder’—there is no U.”

  “That is why I favor the cipher,” Darcy replied.

  Cipher or anagram, Emma grudgingly conceded to herself that Mrs. Elton could not possibly have created all three word puzzles. The woman was simply not that clever. Which meant that Emma had been wrong.

  Emma despised being wrong. Particularly when in the process, her husband was proved right. Emma loved Mr. Knightley beyond expression, felt blessed indeed to be the recipient of not only his affection, but also his wisdom and experience. But she could not help wishing that events would prove her correct on occasion.

  As the Darcys deliberated solution tactics, Mr. Knightley noticed Emma’s state of glum contemplation.

  “I daresay Mrs. Knightley has more experience with word puzzles than any of us. Last year she and a friend compiled a book of riddles, conundrums, and so forth. Emma, what strategy would you recommend for solving this?”

  The question drew her from her brooding. “The original letters could have been systematically rearranged, such as moving the first letter of each word to its end,” she said. “Or they might have been substituted one for one — A becomes B, B becomes C, and so on. I propose that we each copy out the lines and work independently on different methods. Perhaps the gentlemen could attempt to determine a substitution alphabet, while Mrs. Darcy and I experiment with rearranging the existing letters.”

  It was agreed. Three copies of the message were made and, equipped with pencils and large sheets of foolscap, all four of them settled down to apply themselves.

  Elizabeth, w
anting no distractions, retired to the library to work.

  As she had in Mr. Knightley’s study, she stared at the message again. This time, however, she thought not of the letters on the page, but of the unknown person who had arranged them.

  This was not a conundrum in a book, written to amuse and entertain. It was a communiqué, written to deliver information. The puzzle’s author wanted the message to be deciphered, or he would not have sent it. If his goal was to challenge, not to thwart, the solution might not prove as difficult as they anticipated.

  The most sensible way to begin, she decided, was to simply write out the puzzle backwards. There must, after all, be some method to the placement of the letters and “words” as arranged — mustn’t there? She need not put herself through mental contortions if the author had not.

  Reversing the first line, however, revealed only that the solution would require more effort. “Chmond einri larg” made even less sense than elevated religious houses and gatherings of braggarts. Nevertheless, she reversed the rest of the puzzle to see whether any patterns emerged.

  CHMOND EINRI LARG

  IVED EYL ESASTH STTHIEV

  ONG EDAM LL HEDWE

  When finished, she allowed her gaze to drift over the letters, giving the words an opportunity to reveal themselves. “CHMOND” drew her attention, for it composed most of the word “Richmond,” the city where the Churchills had been living when Mrs. Churchill died. In fact, the “RI” needed to complete the name was on the same line — preceded by “IN.”

  Something in Richmond. The remaining letters on that line spelled LARGE.

  Large in Richmond. Whatever could be the sense of that? But the phrase was formed by rearranging the reversed letter groupings — not the individual letters — and then merely adjusting the word spaces: LARG EINRI CHMOND… LARGE IN RICHMOND.

  Excited, she tore slips of paper and wrote a grouping on each so she could rearrange them more easily. She had been right: the solution was not as difficult as she had first imagined.

  HEDWE LL EDAM ONG STTHIEV ESASTH EYL IVED LARG EINRI CHMOND

  But now… what did it mean?

  Emma set down her pencil and rubbed her temples. She, too, had left Mr. Knightley’s study to better concentrate, and had chosen the drawing room. Now sheets of paper covered in cross-outs and false starts lay strewn on the card table, and pencil lead darkened her fingertips.

  She had nearly given up, had even risen to rejoin the others in the study and admit defeat. But then her gaze had landed upon her nephews’ box of alphabets, still not returned to the nursery.

  She had removed the letters she needed, supplementing the tiles with small pieces of torn paper to create necessary duplicates. Three D’s. Eight E’s. Then she had spread them out upon the table, arranging and rearranging letters in seemingly endless combinations until something of sense began to form.

  Now the solution stared back at her.

  She counted the letters once more, again checking them against the original message to ensure she had used each one the proper number of times.

  Then she reached for a fresh sheet of paper, dipped her quill in the inkpot, and wrote out the message to share with the others.

  “ ‘He dwelled amongst thieves as they lived large in Richmond.’ ” Darcy handed the paper to Mr. Knightley and regarded Elizabeth with admiration. “Well done.”

  “Indeed, very well done,” Mr. Knightley echoed. “Mr. Darcy and I were having a miserable time attempting to work out a substitution scheme. I must go find Mrs. Knightley. She will be pleased that you discovered the solution.”

  Elizabeth appreciated their praise, but felt it only half earned. “Discovering the solution is one thing,” she said. “Interpreting it is quite another.”

  “Given that the previous riddle holds a clue to the murder of Churchill, ‘they’ almost certainly refers to the Churchills here,” Mr. Knightley said as he moved towards the door.

  “But who is the ‘he’?” Darcy asked. “Frank, who had been our primary suspect, lived in Richmond with his aunt and uncle.”

  “And our other suspect, Thomas Dixon, has spent his life dwelling with wealthy relations,” Elizabeth added.

  “Yes, hardly criminals — Oh! Here you are, Emma. I was just coming for you. Mrs. Darcy has solved the cipher.”

  “Indeed?” Mrs. Knightley turned to Elizabeth in amazement. She held up a slip of paper. “So have I.”

  “That is hardly surprising, given your talent for word puzzles,” Elizabeth said. “After all, the message was simply written backwards, with the word spaces altered randomly and the groupings rearranged.”

  Mrs. Knightley looked at Elizabeth oddly as she accepted the piece of paper Mr. Knightley offered her. “The spellings were not backwards. Nor were the word spaces at all random. They were the key to sorting out the letters — which were entirely rearranged.” She glanced down at the paper she had just received. “He dwelled amongst thieves’?”

  Now Elizabeth was all confusion. “Well — yes. Did you not work out that part?”

  Mrs. Knightley glanced at her husband, then crossed to Elizabeth. Her face was troubled as she handed over the writing she had brought with her to the study. “I worked out an altogether different solution.”

  CLEVER LYING GIRL. DEAL HAD HIDDEN MOTIVES. NOT WHAT HE SEEMS.

  Twenty-Seven

  To guess what all this meant, was impossible even for Emma.

  — Emma

  Minutes elapsed before all overcame their astonishment. That a single group of letters could yield two complete messages, both with disturbing implications, was extraordinary. Though Elizabeth had worked out one of them herself, she now regarded both in wonder.

  Darcy was the first to recover. “If the puzzle’s two solutions are to be taken as a single message, our peddler does not merely trade with the gypsies — he is a member of their band.”

  “Or was,” Elizabeth countered. “The message says ‘dwelled,’ and he remains here in Highbury despite the rest of the caravan’s having moved on.”

  “Even so, it implies more than a business relationship between Mr. Deal and the gypsies — and between Mr. Deal and Miss Jones, whom I presume is the girl referenced. If his contact with the gypsies was sporadic and minimal, as he would have us believe, they could have kept her hidden from him during her period of alleged captivity. In fact, they likely would have gone to considerable trouble to keep an Englishwoman out of his sight. But if he lived amongst them, he surely knows her; moreover, he did nothing to help her escape the caravan. Which means that either Miss Jones is lying about having been held against her will, or Mr. Deal’s allegiance to the gypsies surpasses his loyalty to his own people.”

  Elizabeth preferred believing Miss Jones a liar to discovering the amiable peddler capable of dishonor towards a distressed young woman of any race. If they in fact had been living together amongst the gypsies, she found it curious that Mr. Deal had been the person who prevented Miss Jones from fleeing when Elizabeth had first sighted her in Highbury. Had he wanted to help Elizabeth, win her trust and favor? See Miss Jones brought to justice for theft? Return Miss Jones to the gypsies for some reward, only to have been thwarted by the intercession of Mr. Elton and Mrs. Todd? Hidden motives, indeed.

  “Whatever Mr. Deal’s actions — or lack thereof — by Miss Jones, the author has drawn our attention to him in some connection to Richmond,” Mr. Knightley said. “We know that Mr. Deal does business there, for Richmond is where he obtains his sling bullets. We need to determine whether he was there at the same time as the Churchills, and what, if any, contact he had with them.”

  “Mrs. Weston’s housekeeper has a sister in Richmond,” Mrs. Knightley said. “She wrote of doing business with Hiram Deal this past summer.”

  “Did not Mrs. Churchill die during the summer?” Darcy asked.

  “Yes,” Mr. Knightley said. “On the twenty-sixth of June.”

  “Perhaps Mr. Deal is the unkind individual who witnessed the mu
rder of Churchill—Agnes Churchill.” Darcy paused. “Or perhaps he committed it.”

  “I thought her physician determined that she died of an apoplectic seizure,” Mrs. Knightley said.

  “It is in his professional interest for that to be the case. It might not be in the interest of justice for us to accept the diagnosis without question,” Mr. Knightley replied.

  “Let us begin by ascertaining whether Mr. Deal’s time in Richmond coincides with that of the Churchills,” Darcy said. “We should speak to the Churchills’ servants and learn whether he ever called at their house. If we are fortunate, the attendants who accompanied Frank and Edgar Churchill to Randalls will be able to help us.”

  Mr. Knightley nodded. “If not, we shall have to track down the staff who served them while they leased the house.”

  “Should a journey to Richmond prove necessary, I can depart as soon as a horse is readied,” Darcy offered.

  “I hope it is not needed,” Mr. Knightley said. “The afternoon is already half gone, and I want to confront Mr. Deal himself by day’s end.”

  Thanks to the recollective powers of a footman who had served the Churchill family for twoscore years, Darcy was spared a hasty ride to Richmond. He instead spent the evening with Mr. Knightley and Hiram Deal. It had been Mr. Knightley’s idea to host the intimate little gathering in his small study at Hartfield, which afforded more privacy than the Crown, his usual venue for magisterial business.

  It had not been Mr. Deal’s idea to attend it.

  The peddler arrived in the escort of Mr. Cole. Though Mr. Deal labored to maintain his customary affability, there was wariness in his manner as he greeted Mr. Knightley and Darcy.

  At Mr. Knightley’s nod, Mr. Cole left the study. The constable would wait in the drawing room with the ladies and Mr. Woodhouse, near at hand should he be wanted. As far as Mr. Woodhouse knew, Mr. Cole — and his waiting carriage — were at Hartfield to visit Mr. Woodhouse. Mrs. Knightley’s father need not know that a suspected murderer was presently under his roof.