Plain Jane

by Beaton, M. C.

  As soon as the captain returned, Rainbird planned to ask for a few days’ leave. He was sure if he were to travel to Brighton and see Felice, he might be able to persuade her to marry him. He would need to find work outside of service where Palmer could not touch him, but somehow they would manage. Rainbird was too obsessed with Felice to worry overmuch about the fate of the other servants at Number 67. Love gave him mad hope. He was convinced that he would not only be married to Felice but also that somehow Mr Hart might help him find posts for the others.

  Mr Gillespie was at home. As soon as Rainbird told him about Jane, he said they must make all speed. He was so white and tense that Rainbird had the impression he had been waiting for hours for such a summons.

  Mr Gillespie mounted the stairs two at a time to Jane’s bedchamber. But when he was outside the door, he hesitated, and then turned to Rainbird, who was right behind him. ‘Mrs Hart, and Miss Euphemia, are they at home?’

  ‘No, sir. They are at Mrs Baillie’s.’

  ‘I shall examine Miss Jane in privacy,’ said Mr Gillespie. ‘Leave me alone with her. Do not come near, no matter what you hear. Young ladies can become very nervous during examinations and I feel a crise des nerfs has distorted Miss Jane’s wits. She is best left alone with her doctor.’

  ‘Perhaps Mrs Middleton should be in attendance?’ suggested Rainbird.

  ‘No, no,’ said Mr Gillespie heartily, clapping Rainbird on the shoulder. ‘Do not look so worried, man. There is a great deal of fever about. That may be the cause of her disorder. None of you should risk catching it.’

  He waited until Rainbird had gone down the stairs and then he went into Jane’s bedchamber and shut the door.

  The curtains were drawn and the light was dim. She lay propped up on her pillows, her eyes wide and dark in the gloom.

  ‘Now let me have a look at you,’ he said.

  He walked towards the bed, stripping off his dogskin gloves as he did so. His hands were white, strong, and well-shaped.

  On the right hand, there was a large mole.

  Jane stared at it, and drew a long breath.

  ‘You,’ she said.

  ‘It was you.’

  TWELVE

  See how love and murder will out.

  WILLIAM CONGREVE, AMORET

  Mr Gillespie stood very still, looking down at her.

  Although her face was pale, she did not look ill in the slightest.

  ‘You did not take the pills I left for you,’ he said in a flat voice.

  ‘I had them examined at the apothecary’s in Curzon Street,’ said Jane. ‘They contained a very strong measure of quinine – enough to make me appear as if I had the fever. Mama would have sent for you.’

  ‘So you sent for me instead, you meddling jade.’ He drew a pistol from his pocket and levelled it at her. ‘Don’t scream,’ he said.

  ‘Why did you do it?’ asked Jane, marvelling at the steadiness of her own voice.

  ‘Why did I try to kill you at that Baillie woman’s ridiculous party?’

  ‘No,’ said Jane. ‘I know now that was you and you tried to kill me to stop me finding out how Clara died. I meant, why did you kill her?’

  He sighed, sat down on the bed, and laid the pistol on his knee.

  ‘She played me false,’ he said. ‘She played me false,’ he repeated, and then fell silent.

  A wheezy barrel organ was playing in the street below, a child called, a horse clopped past – all the sounds of everyday living came to Jane’s ears while she pressed back against the pillows and faced the murderer of Clara Vere-Baxton.

  ‘Why?’ asked Jane again.

  ‘She had a fever,’ he said. ‘I attended her. She told me she did not want to marry Bullfinch but that her parents were forcing her to accept him. I believed her. She was so very beautiful, the fragile beauty of a Dresden figurine. I fell deeply in love with her. I attended her several times.

  ‘My love appeared to be returned. How could I think otherwise when, after her illness was over, she called at my rooms and became my mistress? I begged her to allow me to speak to her father, elope with me, anything so that she might become my bride.

  ‘But she would cry. She could cry beautifully,’ he said in a sort of wonder. Jane shifted in the bed and he slightly raised the pistol. ‘She had very blue eyes and the tears would spill over and run down her cheeks without ever making her eyes red. She begged me to wait. That Lucas creature was party to our affair. Or rather, she knew Clara was seeing someone. I called on Miss Lucas this morning to be sure she still did not know it was me.’ He laughed. ‘She did not . . . and as well for her that she is ignorant of my part in things. When I saw and heard her talking to you last night, I was afraid she did know. Hence the attempt on your life. But to return to Clara,’ he went on in a dreadfully normal conversational tone. ‘She begged me to wait, as I said. When Clara was with me, she was always supposed to be with Miss Lucas.

  ‘Then her visits stopped. I went wild with despair. One day she came to see me again. She had become hard. She told me Bullfinch had taken her to his bank. “It was lovely to be surrounded by so much money,” she said, and she laughed.

  ‘When I reminded her of our great love, Clara shrugged and said she had decided to marry Bullfinch after all. She meant to have a little more freedom and fun before then. She said it was fun to torment Bullfinch, and then I knew she had been his mistress also, and that she thought it was fun to make me suffer as well. Although I saw her at last for what she was – a scheming, heartless, vain jade – I could not stop loving her. But no one else was going to have her if I could not.

  ‘As I watched her, I hit upon a plan. I pretended to take her rejection of me easily and lightly. I began to talk about my work. I said I had discovered a formula for prolonging youth. She was very naive and stupid. She begged me to give her some. Although she was very young, she had a terror of losing her looks. I gave her a heavy sleeping draught, and, when she was asleep, I smothered her with a cushion.’

  ‘But she was found in the Green Park. She had gone out for a walk – that was what they said,’ exclaimed Jane.

  ‘Clara was supposed to have gone for a walk that afternoon when she was, in fact, with me. I wrapped her body in a blanket, went out by the back door of my house and into the mews. I suppose I could have been seen, but I was so mad with grief, I half wanted to be found out, and was at the same time just as determined to get away with it. Odd.

  ‘I put her body on the floor of my carriage, harnessed up the horses myself. The minute Clara had arrived, I had sent all my servants off for the afternoon. My groom had fortunately understood that to mean himself and was nowhere around.

  ‘I drove straight into the Green Park and stopped by the top reservoir. I opened the carriage door and jerked the blanket so that Clara’s body rolled out onto the grass. She lay looking up at the sky. She looked very peaceful. A warden came rushing up and demanded to know what I was doing driving my carriage over the grass. I showed him Clara’s body and said it had been reported to me and I had been summoned direct.’

  ‘I did not know you were supposed to have found the body,’ said Jane.

  ‘In all the shouting and commotion that followed, it was understood that the watch had called at my home and that the body had been discovered by an old woman. When the fuss died down, no one knew I had been there first, so to speak. I performed the autopsy myself, a distasteful business. No one questioned my findings, or lack of them.’

  He fell silent again.

  ‘You are a monster,’ whispered Jane.

  ‘Not I,’ he said. ‘Oh, not I. Blame this so-called London society, if you must blame anyone. I came from a poor family and worked my way up. I was a surgeon’s mate, working in filthy ships from Portsmouth to the Americas. I was lucky enough to find myself a rich patron and to set up a practise in the West End.

  ‘I rose rapidly. I knew how to flatter and cajole these useless hulks of society with their imagined humours. A solid day’s work
would cure most of them. But always behind their eyes, I saw their carefully veiled contempt. I would never be in society, only acceptable so long as I held the Duchess of Vanity’s pulse and told her of her delicate constitution. Clara pointed this out to me. Mr Bullfinch has a great deal of money. Bankers, like brewers, are good ton. Doctors are not.

  ‘Now, you, had you more to occupy your silly mind, then you would not meddle in other people’s affairs.’

  ‘Are you going to kill me?’ asked Jane.

  ‘But of course,’ said Mr Gillespie.

  ‘Of course.’

  * * *

  Lord Tregarthan tossed off his muddied travelling clothes and splashed his head and shoulders with hot water while his friend, Mr Nevill, watched him in a bemused way. ‘I thought you were going to wait until morning to call on Miss Jane,’ he said.

  ‘Not after what you told me,’ said Lord Tregarthan, scrubbing himself dry with a towel.

  ‘What? About that Clara business? Oh, you know gels do have a lot of imagination. Take it from me, it’s all a hum.’

  ‘I never thought it a hum,’ said Lord Tregarthan, pulling on a frilled cambric shirt. ‘I told her to drop the whole thing because I feared any further investigations might put her at risk. She may even now be in danger.’

  ‘It must be love,’ said Mr Nevill with wonder. ‘You’ll meet and kiss and you will both have a good laugh at your wild imaginings.’

  ‘I hope so,’ he said grimly.

  ‘Ain’t you going to ring for your valet?’

  ‘No, he’ll take too long.’

  Mr Nevill watched in admiration as his friend scrambled into his evening clothes at top speed. ‘Want me to come with you?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ said the earl with a grin. ‘I want her all to myself.’

  But as Lord Tregarthan walked to Clarges Street, he put away his fears for Jane’s safety, and concentrated instead on the joy of seeing her again.

  The door to Number 67 stood ajar. He walked into the hall and found Alice, Jenny, Lizzie, and Mrs Middleton huddled at the foot of the stairs. They turned and looked at him, their eyes showing a mixture of excitement and fear. ‘Where is Miss Jane?’ he asked.

  ‘She is upstairs being attended by Mr Gillespie . . .’ began Mrs Middleton, but Lord Tregarthan did not wait to hear any more. He bounded up the stairs and almost fell over Rainbird, who was sitting on the landing outside Jane’s bedchamber, holding a cudgel. He put his finger to his lips when he saw the beau. ‘I’m waiting for the signal,’ he whispered.

  Lord Tregarthan was about to demand, ‘What signal?’ when there came an unearthly bloodcurdling shriek from Jane’s bedroom.

  Rainbird leapt to his feet.

  ‘That’s it!’ he cried.

  Holding the pistol steady, Mr Gillespie edged closer to Jane. Behind him, the door of a large wardrobe slowly swung open revealing Angus MacGregor, Dave, and Joseph. Unaware of their presence and that they were waiting to spring, Mr Gillespie inched even closer while Jane crouched back against the pillows.

  ‘You cannot shoot me,’ said Jane. ‘If you shoot me, then everyone will know it was you.’

  ‘True,’ he said. ‘But there are better ways . . .’ He suddenly jerked the pillow out from behind Jane’s head and brought it down with murderous force over her face.

  MacGregor’s Gaelic warcry sounded behind him as if all the demons had risen from hell to claim his soul.

  At the same moment, the door of the bedroom burst open and Lord Tregarthan dashed in with Rainbird.

  Mr Gillespie disappeared in a tangle of arms and legs and MacGregor, Dave, and Joseph threw themselves on top of him on the bed.

  He wriggled out from under them like an eel, fell onto the floor, and scrabbled for his pistol. Lord Tregarthan stamped on his groping hand and Miss Jane Hart, with a triumphant cry, brought a full jug of water down on the doctor’s head.

  He stretched his length on the floor and lay still.

  ‘Get the watch! Get the constable!’ cried Lord Tregarthan.

  He picked Jane up bodily from the bed and cradled her against his chest, smoothing back the tumbled hair from her eyes.

  ‘You are brave and crazy,’ he said. ‘Why on earth did you allow that fellow near you, you with all your suspicions?’

  Jane smiled at him mistily. ‘I wanted to be brave as well. I wanted to be worthy of you, and I thought I would be wonderful to catch the murderer of Clara myself. The servants agreed to help. They were told to hide in the wardrobe until he had betrayed himself and then rush to the rescue.’

  ‘But we couldnae rush when we wanted,’ said MacGregor, ‘because he had the gun and we were feart it might go off.’

  Mrs Middleton, Alice, Jenny, and Lizzie all crowded into the room. Jane only had eyes for Lord Tregarthan. ‘I thought you did not love me,’ she said shyly.

  He bent his head and kissed her, kissed her the way he had dreamed of kissing her all those weary days in France. He felt her passion rise to meet his own and all his fears that she might be too young, innocent, and frightened to match his feelings melted away. He was too much lost in the feel of her, in the scent of her, and the sharp awareness that she was wearing nothing other than a thin muslin nightgown to notice the staff of Clarges Street gathered around, gazing at the pair of them with silly smiles on their faces, except for Dave, who went very red about the ears and started making wretching noises until Mrs Middleton cuffed him.

  Mr Gillespie, who had recovered consciousness some moments before, startled them by leaping to his feet and making a dash for the door.

  He made it as far as the landing when Rainbird’s cudgel struck him full across the shoulders.

  He toppled straight over the bannisters and fell down the stairwell like a stone. He struck his head on the tiles of the hall and lay still.

  After seemingly hours of questions and hysterics while Number 67 Clarges Street resounded to the tread of alien feet from the Bow Street Runners to every reporter in town, including a woman of stultifying gentility who wrote the Home News column in The Lady’s Magazine, Lord Tregarthan managed to see Jane settled for the night and requested an audience with Mrs Hart.

  Mrs Hart eyed the handsome beau with disfavour. On her arrival back, his comments on her neglect of her younger daughter had been caustic to say the least. ‘It is now two in the morning, my lord,’ she said frostily. ‘I would remind you of that fact. I am not made of iron, you know. My poor Euphemia is quite overset.’

  ‘Poor Euphemia has not as much to be upset about as Jane,’ he said coldly. ‘She was not half killed.’

  ‘But she has the greater sensibility,’ said Mrs Hart tartly. ‘And when may I expect my husband’s return?’

  ‘He has decided not to return, madam. He has rejoined the navy and is awaiting his ship in Dover. He is anxious to be of service to his country. By Gad, madam, Captain Hart is a Trojan, and this nation is lucky to have him.’

  Mrs Hart raised a wisp of handkerchief to her lips. ‘Not returning. But he must! I have already sent out invitations to a rout in his honour.’

  Lord Tregarthan looked at her in exasperation. Her daughter had been nearly murdered, a murderer had been found with his neck broken in her hall, and yet all she could think about was her blasted party.

  ‘Before I left Captain Hart,’ he said, ‘I told him I wished to marry your daughter and received his permission.’

  ‘Not Jane?’

  ‘Of course, Jane.’

  Mrs Hart studied him. All at once she hated this handsome lord who had been instrumental in luring her husband away from her, who had spoiled the social triumph of her planned rout, who had dared to rail at her over her treatment of Jane. A slight tinge of malice crept into her pale eyes. ‘Jane is too young to know her own mind,’ said Mrs Hart.

  Lord Tregarthan looked at her, outraged. ‘Does that mean you withhold your permission?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mrs Hart. ‘Yes, I do. And since Captain Hart chooses to behave like an unnatura
l husband and father by holding himself absent, he no longer has any say in the matter.’

  ‘You are the unnatural parent, not he,’ raged Lord Tregarthan.

  Mrs Hart experienced a slight qualm of unease. Lord Tregarthan was a Catch. It would be folly to refuse his offer. But let him sweat a little. He must be punished for having said all those hard things.

  ‘As I told you,’ she said in a deceptively mild tone, ‘Jane is very young. Perhaps if you are prepared to wait a few years . . . ?’

  ‘Good evening, madam,’ said Lord Tregarthan in tones of deepest disgust.

  ‘But . . .’ Mrs Hart realized she had gone too far and half rose from her seat, but Lord Tregarthan was already striding from the room.

  He made his way angrily down Clarges Street, determined to see Jane in the morning and try to discover what they could do. Mr Hart had given his permission, but not in writing. Perhaps it might be necessary to go back to Dover and ask Mr Hart to delay sailing and to travel to London to see his daughter wed. But he was back in the Royal Navy and it was highly unlikely he would be allowed to do so.

  Lord Tregarthan heard the light patter of feet behind him, and swung around, stick at the ready in case it should prove to be a footpad. But the dim light of the parish lamp shone down on the features of Rainbird.

  ‘My lord,’ said Rainbird, ‘when does Captain Hart return?’

  ‘He does not,’ said Lord Tregarthan. ‘I have just been explaining to Mrs Hart that Mr Hart has rejoined the navy.’

  Rainbird’s face fell. ‘I had hoped, my lord, to ask Mr Hart’s permission to take some days’ leave of absence. You see,’ he burst out, ‘I must see Felice. We had an understanding . . .’

  ‘I am sorry,’ said Lord Tregarthan gently. ‘I did not know.’

  ‘She said nothing of me?’

  ‘Felice was sea sick and then too worried about the perils of our mission to talk about anything else. She never said anything about herself, other than that her parents had been servants in a noble French household and had fled to England when their masters were killed. They died a short time ago and Felice went into service.’