by Abigail Agar
‘Just the part relevant to the trial if you please, Mr Fielding,’ the judge said impatiently.
Mr Fielding raised his hand with a magnanimous effect and nodded once more. ‘Of course. Well, as I was saying, Miss Vera described the terrible crime and the carriage of the murderers. I made the connection immediately to a story a priest had told me of that very distinctive carriage and the unusual owner. My mind works like that you see, connecting the dots. Well, then we had a lead as to find the true murder. We all had a jolly good meal and thought we knew what to do next. Only then it became clear that Vera herself was thought to be the guilty one. That’s when we helped her get herself disguised to go into hiding. But I’m not the sort of man to let an injustice lie, so I set about tracking the murdering scoundrel down. I should get some credit for that, don’t you think? Helping you lot with your job?’ Mr Fielding looked expectantly at the judge.
Vera stifled a laugh and tried not to let the twinkle in Mr Fielding’s eye catch her own.
‘That’s not really how it works, Mr Fielding,’ said the judge. ‘Carry on to the relevant part of your story if you wouldn’t mind.’
Mr Fielding nodded. ‘Like I was saying, I’m a man who doesn’t let a scoundrel get away. In my business, it’s just bad for one’s reputation–’ Mr Fielding seemed to pause to consider what he’d just said. ‘But never mind about my business. This is about a murderer of innocent citizens. The family of an innocent young woman.’ His eyes met Vera’s, and she couldn’t help smiling at him.
He continued, ‘That’s the reason why I used every connection, gave bribes, not like criminal graft by any means, just the odd kindly donation to a fella here or there if they were kind enough to dole out the information I was in need of. So it was that I was able to track down the scum-breathing bastard who had done the crime. The facts I had made it easy enough to acquire, and when I finally found his trail, I was ready for him.’ Mr Fielding took a dramatic breath. ‘The pub he was loitering in was the kind fancy folk like down in Portsmouth. Word was he was waiting for his ship to come in. He was off out of the country. Import-export, he’ll tell you. And he’d be right of a sort, but we’ll come to that. So, this pub was a nice sort of place, you know, engravings on the walls, candles right left and centre, pretty barmaids with a smile for whoever comes their way. Not my kind of watering hole, but to each their own.’
‘Are we getting to the point, Mr Fielding?’ asked the judge.
Mr Fielding nodded. ‘There he was sat at the bar scribbling in a little black book. I walked up behind him, knowing full well this was a man with the will to kill another man, and grabbed him by the shoulder. You should have seen the look in his eye. Like he’d been waiting his whole life to finally have justice done to him. I raised my voice and told him he was coming with me for the crimes he’d done. His first move was to try to run like a coward. As he scrambled away, he knocked candles over right left and centre. The poor barmaid was screaming and the other patrons tried to right the candles. One man even threw his coat over one to prevent a fire; I appreciate that type of self-sacrifice in a man. Anyway, I paid no heed to the trail of fire and followed him like a bloodhound and beat him to the door. Now, as you’ll see, this murdering scoundrel is no small man, but I still managed to throw him up against the frame of the door. As I did, I shouted to him that his time was up, and he was about to face justice for his crimes; I told him that his kind would always pay in the end and now at my hands he didn’t stand a chance. It was quick thinking in the moment with all the chaos, but I’m quite pleased with the speech. The bastard did fight back, though. He laid a few punches into me, pulled a sword on me, but I paid him back with more, borrowed his knife to pick my teeth with.’ He pulled a short dirk which could not be described as a sword by any stretch of the imagination and placed it dramatically on the rail of the witness box.
‘Yes, I’ve taken worse – far, far worse in my time,’ he continued, barely breaking his stride. ‘The pub was filled with screaming now and the scent of fur burning from the lining of the brave firefighter’s coat. But still I pummelled the criminal with my hands until he was crying almost as hard as the barmaids were. He made one more break for it out the door, but the heavy rain of that evening had made the steps slippery. As he scrambled, looking like a chicken running from a butcher, he slipped and fell all six stone steps. He landed on his face, a mark of which you can still see now.’
The entire room turned to look at Kuznetsov whose face showed very little sign of the drubbing Mr Fielding was describing.
Vera began to worry that he might be damaging his credibility a little at this point. But still his tale rolled on:
‘His consciousness left him then, just as much from my blows as from the force of the stone. From there, my work was easy enough to complete. I dragged the sorry-excuse-for-a-man off like he was a stag I’d struck. Blood leaking from his face, he looked a terrible mess, but I felt no remorse, for he’d done far worse to others.’ Mr Fielding held his head high and then gave a final punctuating nod to close off his tale.
The judge stared incredulously at Mr Fielding. ‘Do you have anything further to add Mr Fielding?’
Mr Fielding nodded his head. ‘Yes, Your Honour. You see we knew he had a room at the pub. From what my suitably bribed – or rather rewarded informants told me. So we took a little look around his rooms. What we found was enough to make any true born Englishman furious. Maps all of the South West coast, dozens of towns marked, lists of names – including old Ladislaw’s – some code books and a sheaf of pamphlets detailing how a loyal Polish fella might cause trouble for old Blighty thereby assisting old Bonaparte in his Peninsular campaign. I don’t go in much for politics, but it appears that this fella wanted use of old man Ladislaw’s printing press. Got turned down for some reason. Lord knows why, Ladislaw’s no fan of the Prussians.’
Vera knew exactly why. Father might have hated the Prussians, but he loved his adopted nation of England. He would have done anything to help the campaign in the East, but the Peninsular was between the English, Spanish, and the French.
A polite refusal and Father would have thought he was done. But Kuznetsov couldn’t let a man go who knew his game.
Her father died because he had to choose between loyalty to one of two coloured rags and chose wrong, the Union Flag over the King’s Flag of Poland.
‘Anyways, we’ve turned the lot over to your fellas to look over. The jury will want to see them, but so will the army at some point. Mighty interesting sort of folks I’ve rounded up. Almost feels it should be worth some sort of reward.’
‘Are you quite done now, Mr Fielding?’
‘I’d say just about so.’
‘And you stand by the truthfulness of your words.’
‘I took an oath didn’t I? You saying I don’t take an oath in a courthouse seriously?’
The judge looked on with raised eyebrows. ‘It seemed worth making sure. It’s quite a tale you’ve told.’
‘Am I free to go now?’ asked Mr Fielding.
‘You are not on trial, Mr Fielding,’ said the judge. ‘You are a witness. The issue of your freedom is not at stake today.’
‘Right, right, old habits,’ said Mr Fielding. ‘Then I’ll step down shall I?’
‘If you’d be so kind,’ said the judge.
***
They took Vera back to gaol before Lord Stanley could seek her out, so it was late in the evening before they could catch up and compare notes. Mr Phillips arrived with Stanley in tow.
‘Sounds like you had quite a day in court, Miss Ladislaw,’ Phillips said.
She could barely speak; she felt so emotional. In thirty-six hours, she had gone from losing all hope to having all her hopes fulfilled. It seemed now that her innocence was only a matter of a few days to sort through the evidence.
Her parents’ killer was in a cell a floor below sharing a single bucket with two dozen other hardened criminals with all the Englishmen’s tolerance for foreigners
in their blood.
But above all, here was Lord Stanley. Returned after he had been lost so completely to her. He said nothing, just stepped forward and embraced her. Her legs felt numb, and she gave way letting him take all her weight. It was only then that she realised how much more than just her own body she had been carrying around.
They stood like that for what felt like an age, and it was still too short for Vera. When they broke apart, he said, ‘Forgive me, my love. That I am a fool and a coward should be clear by now. How I could still deserve your love is beyond me, but if I am to have any chance of happiness, I must beg it with all my power.’
‘I give my forgiveness on one condition.’
‘I will meet it.’
‘That you reciprocate in kind. Every lie I have told you, every crime against you, the fact that I allowed you to wear that hideous suit to the ball. All of it. You must forgive me as I forgive you.’
‘Sold,’ he cried. ‘Sold to the beautiful woman with the hideous gown.’
‘You must blame Mr Phillips for my fashion, my love. But now tell me, what changed your mind.’
‘Would you believe me if I said it was my intuition and analytical mind that solved the case?’
‘Not in a millennium.’
‘I never stopped believing you were innocent. I ran because I was terrified of losing you to the gallows, as I lost my wife to grief, and my son to plague. It took me the time from your cell back to the Manse to be sure I had made a mistake. But what truly turned me around was Helen. She was waiting at the door when I arrived and demanded I go back. She told me what you told her, and I remembered that running had cost me too much already. It was time to fight.’
‘And how did you come to be in the matter with Mr Fielding?’
‘That was rather easier. As I was returning to town, I saw a number of carts near the East Wing under the cover of the trees. On dropping in on the nefarious crew who were liberating me of much of my least used furniture, Mr Fielding was very quick in giving you up as an accomplice. Rather than send him to join you here in gaol, I helped them load up some of the more expensive items from the East Wing in return for allowing me to assist in bringing in this Kuznetsov. After that it was a day’s trip down to Portsmouth, a day to find him and a day back, just in time to interrupt your trial in the most knightly way possible.’
Vera laughed.
‘I love to see you laugh,’ he said.
She didn’t reply with words; she embraced him. Their bodies pressed together, his lips on hers, and for a moment, she was not in her prison cell.
Her joy rose from deep in her gut and warmed her whole body with the fire of passion.
Lord Stanley’s muscular chest pressed against hers, and his arms enclosed her in a ring that felt as safe as a fortress.
When they finally broke away from the embrace, Lord Stanley was smiling a smile of boyish pleasure, his eyes still closed in rapture.
Without opening his eyes, he whispered, ’I have one question for you, Vera Ladislaw.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Can you say “yes” to me yet? He opened one eye a little way to try and read the answer in her face.
Vera did her best to hide the happiness she felt and adopted a straight face; the flash of pain on his face told her she was managing it admirably.
‘Well …’ she paused, letting her face drop a bit, teasing the man she loved and still having to fight to prevent the word ‘yes’ from blurting out.
She held on just a little longer, enjoying watching him squirm.
He opened his mouth to say something, stopped, let his face fall.
She let him off the hook, ‘Yes.’ She whispered the word barely loud enough for him to hear.
His whole body straightened up, and he looked into her face.
‘Was that a …?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you mean “yes” or yes you can say “yes”.’
‘Both. There’s nothing left I need to hide. However all this pans out, I don’t want to spend any longer wondering if you will be a part of it. I want you forever, My Lord.’
There seemed nothing more to say, and so they kissed again, and they were once more in a void where nothing existed but their bodies pressed together.
‘There is one more thing I must ask of you, my love,’ she said after an eternity of happiness had passed in the quiet minute in that cell.
‘Anything, anything for you, Vera.’
‘There are two prisoners here, two women, here as much for being women as for any crime. I need your help to help them.’
Chapter 22
Two more days ticked by on the calendar before Vera was released. Judge Kenway came by to speak with her about the new case being levelled against Kuznetsov, and a number of Whitehall types dropped by to ask about her father’s print shop and the link with the plots and machinations of Kuznetsov.
Lord Stanley took a room upstairs from the butchers which stood opposite the gaol. Vera suggested he might be more comfortable in the Regent’s Hotel just a couple of roads over, but he insisted on staying as close as he could.
Phillips allowed Lord Stanley in each morning; his quarters had imparted to his wardrobe a faint smell of wood smoke and salted pork, but Vera forgave him this. Both mornings he arrived with a bouquet of wild flowers for her. She had never seen him so happy.
He helped her with various legal issues that had been accruing after her parents’ death and her disappearance. Her father’s will had been read in her absence, and some distant cousins begrudgingly visited to return the deeds to the property which they had claimed from her inheritance on grounds of her being rendered ineligible by insanity.
With her likely innocent verdict widely publicised and her being the sole heir in the will, they were forced to rescind their claims and resentfully accept invitations to their cousin’s matrimonial celebrations in an effort to butter up a newly enriched relative who might one day be called on for a favour.
Vera didn’t return to her old home. Lord Stanley picked her up with his hunting horse and the ornery old horse she had broken. They rode back side by side talking all the way about their future, their horses frequently linked by the embraces of their riders.
***
‘I can’t thank you enough, Fielding,’ said Lord Stanley over brandy and cigars the next day.
Vera had asked that he be invited out to the Manse to stay a few days as she had some matters to attend to with him. She wore one of her older dresses, a favourite often pulled out for balls and parties; cook had sent her son to the Ladislaw farmhouse to pick up some of Vera’s clothes until the tailor Lord Stanley insisted on could arrive to fit her for a new wardrobe for her new life.
Fielding and Caruthers were both sat with Vera and Lord Stanley, representing a near complete portrait of society, to Vera’s view.
The aristocracy in Lord Stanley, the gentrified middle-classes in herself, Caruthers standing in for the servants, and Fielding for what might – by a generous mind – be termed tradesmen. They all sat around the fire talking as if they were equals. All that was missing was a priest and a soldier and the circle would be complete.
Funny how breaking one barrier seems to make the others seem rather foolish and petty, she thought.
She had broken the lines drawn up between men and women, and now they all seemed to take as read the current state.
Or at least most of them did. Caruthers still seemed deeply uncomfortable to be sat with his employer in this social setting and kept getting up to light people’s cigars and top up their brandy for them.