Laetitia Rodd and the Case of the Wandering Scholar

by Kate Saunders

  ‘Is he – I mean—?’ Mr Jennings hung back fearfully, his gaze fixed upon Joshua’s face, so white and still upon the pillow. ‘Will he recover?’

  ‘I’d say so, sir,’ said Mrs Hurley. ‘If everyone does as I tell them.’

  ‘Thank God!’ He went to Mrs Welland and laid a gentle hand upon her shoulder.

  She straightened herself proudly, her face flushed and wet with tears. ‘I can endure no more of this,’ she said softly, never taking her eyes from Joshua. ‘He made me swear I’d never tell it – when he took the papers to his brother, he kept back that stupid map—’

  ‘Map?’ I remembered how Mr Carlos had spoken of a map, and I had dismissed it as nonsense.

  ‘No, no, no – there’s no buried treasure!’ Mrs Welland cried out passionately, before I could mention the gold. ‘It’s a drawing, like the plan for a house – Joshua said I must never tell, for he was in constant fear of his life, and one man had already died from knowing! I don’t know what there was to know – but it is a drawing of the old limekiln!’

  I fired off an urgent message to Inspector Blackbeard and wrote a short note to my brother. And then I spent the next twenty-four hours in a stupor of fatigue. My feet were so blistered by those agonizing second-best shoes that I hobbled about in my woollen slippers, my bones creaking like the hinges on an old gate.

  ‘You’re not as young as you think you are, ma’am,’ said Mrs Bentley (who had weathered the night a great deal better than I had, and was now, I felt, rather smug in her sprightliness). ‘You can’t expect to go gallivanting about in cabs without paying a price for it later. Not at your age.’

  ‘Don’t remind me,’ I groaned, ‘for I feel every year of it!’

  She insisted upon making a fire in the drawing room, and I sat myself down beneath my dear husband’s painted gaze. I was on the point of dozing off when the postman came, bearing a letter from Minna Yates.

  Minerva Cottage

  West Hill

  Putney

  Dear Mrs Rodd,

  I know that you have spoken to Mr Arden, and I am afraid you must think very badly of me. You have listened to me with such sympathy, however, that I find I have a great desire to tell you everything. I beg you not to think that I am making excuses for myself. I know that I was wrong to deceive my dear brother, who is moved only by his love for me. Since the death of our father, we have been all in all to each other and he worries so dreadfully about my health – in fact, my health is Charley’s sole extravagance.

  I suffer from a small irregularity of the heartbeat, which I regard as little more than a nuisance; I am forced to rest when I would rather be active and that is the worst of it. But poor Charley heard of various wonders performed by a certain fashionable physician in Wimpole Street, and nagged at me until I had agreed to consult him.

  As I told you on our journey together, I am staying with our dear Aunt Emma in Putney. Her house is very pleasantly situated near to the river, surrounded by trees and gardens, and so comfortable that I am in a fair way to being spoilt! Aunt Emma (actually our great-aunt) is a cheerful soul who plies me with delicacies and expects me to ‘sit on a cushion and sew a fine seam’ all day long. When I expressed an interest in doing some work for the poor, she replied, ‘Pish! There aren’t any poor folks in Putney, so you must get used to doing nothing!’

  Aunt Emma escorted me to Wimpole Street, for she was also consulting the great man, though I don’t believe there is anything the matter with her beyond the fact that she is seventy-eight years old. I had told her nothing about Mr Arden and tried to pass off our meeting in the park as a coincidence.

  She was not fooled, however, and saw the truth of the situation at once. I poured the whole story out to her and though she scolded me for lying to Charley, she declared herself to be sympathetic. Being from an earlier and more worldly generation, my aunt could not help fastening upon Mr Arden’s wealth, and congratulated me for my ‘catch’ until I really could not blush harder without bursting into flames!

  Sir Digby Pyle is a shining, smooth, immaculate creature, who listened to my pulse as if chatting to it in a drawing room. His advice was perfectly sound, but did not amount to much more than plain common sense. And he annoyed Aunt Emma, by suggesting that her gout would trouble her less if she gave up all her favourite eatables and drinkables.

  Aunt Emma is confident that Charley can be ‘talked round’, and thinks his religious objections absurd. He is afraid of losing me, whether or not I decide to turn dissenter – which I certainly will not. Mr Arden has assured me that his only concern is to marry me, and for the sake of marrying me ‘I would gladly change my religion to anything you like from Hindoo to Albigensian!’

  He uttered these words in a state of exasperation, during the terrible argument he had with my brother when they met by chance in Swinford, upon the day of Fr Fogle’s murder.

  We had arranged to meet in advance, when we happened to attend the same tea party. Oh, it was so sordid that I felt sick with shame – though I must emphasize that the two of us only met in public places, and did nothing more reprehensible than declaring our feelings for one another.

  Mr Arden kept hold of his temper, even though Charley actually called him a ‘heretic’, a ‘denier of Christ’ and ‘an enemy of the established Church’. (You may imagine how painful this was for me.) But here is the part I did not tell – that none of us told – namely that the altercation was interrupted by Gerard Fogle himself. He was returning from a walk, heard Charley’s voice raised in anger and intervened at once.

  He spoke sternly to Charley, saying, ‘I expected better of you.’

  To Mr Arden he was civil and I left the two of them conversing – perfectly amiably – while my brother insisted upon whisking me home. Much later, Mr Arden told me that they had engaged in a ‘fascinating’ discussion – something that Fr Fogle was currently writing about for a sermon.

  My dear brother apologized to me for losing his temper and begged my pardon very sweetly. As you observed, Mrs Rodd, there was no shadow left between us by the time we parted at the railway station.

  I have written reams, and only intended this to be a short letter, so I will cease now – but I wish very much that you could come to visit me in Putney. My aunt claims she is ‘too old and too indolent’ to keep to a special day for receiving. You are not merely formal ‘company’, however, and if you make the long journey at an early hour, I can promise you a most delightful day.

  Yours in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection,

  Minna Yates

  The letter moved me greatly, and I wrote a quick reply, to the effect that I would come to Putney on the next day but one.

  I wanted to know why Daniel Arden had not told me of his ‘fascinating’ discussion with Mr Fogle upon the day of the murder. I had a good idea of their subject, for I had seen the sermon.

  I acknowledge my transgressions and my sin is ever before me.

  Forty

  I heard his voice at my door, just as the church clock was striking eight o’clock, and hurried downstairs at once, though I was wearing only one shoe. ‘Mr Blackbeard!’

  ‘Good morning, Mrs Rodd.’ He had not shaved; that stiff face had a hoar-frost of white bristles. ‘I’m just come from Oxford, ma’am.’

  ‘From Oxford?’ I stopped thinking of my sore feet, and my every sense sharpened. ‘But of course – the limekiln! You found something!’

  ‘Indeed we did, and very interesting, too.’ He raised his eyebrows at me briefly. ‘I’m still making sense of it.’

  ‘Come inside, Inspector; I don’t expect you to tell me on the doorstep!’ I sensed the importance of what he had to say he was a veritable boulder in his inscrutability. ‘You must have been travelling through the night; have you had breakfast?’

  He had been in my house on several occasions and was quite at his ease beside my kitchen fire. Mrs Bentley, who had the highest respect for him, made a pot of strong tea and a handsome breakfast of bacon and br
ead-and-butter.

  ‘When I passed you the message about the limekiln,’ I said, ‘I did not think you would investigate in person.’

  ‘You’d call it “instinct”,’ said Blackbeard. ‘I call it a smell. I went myself because it didn’t smell right. And also because certain high-up gents are starting to complain that the police are being too slow. They’re putting the screws on my superiors, as you might say.’ There was a pause while he chomped deliberately at a rasher of bacon. ‘Ever since that second murder, you see, there’s been more public noise about Barton and Mrs Somers, and more people are talking about how they should not go to trial.’

  ‘I have observed as much, and I’m most profoundly thankful for it.’

  ‘Did you find that treasure, then?’ asked Mrs Bentley.

  Blackbeard stared at her for a full half-minute, still steadily chewing. ‘No.’

  ‘Well – what, then?’

  He gave her a twitch of a smile. ‘That was fine bacon, Mrs Bentley. Thank you kindly and I only wish I had a tale of treasure to bring you in return. Upon the day in question, I went to that old kiln, accompanied by two policemen and two hired labourers with pickaxes. Under all that ivy and whatnot was the stone shell of the kiln with part of the roof collapsed. There was a sort of seam in the stones, Mrs Rodd; that’s the only way I can describe it: someone had broken them apart and then tried to cover it up. And not long ago, neither. So I told the men to break it open again. And off they went with the pickaxes. It was not a quick job, ma’am.’

  ‘I should think not!’

  ‘And it was not an easy job. But we went at it with a will, until we had hacked out a good heap of the stones. Whereupon one of my men gets down on all fours and sticks his head through the hole. He calls out that there’s some sort of chamber or cellar – and then back he scrambles, quick as the wind and white as a sheet. “There’s a corpse inside,” he says, “and its grinning skull was inches from my face!”’

  ‘Sir Christopher Warrender!’ I cried out, my heart hammering. ‘I knew it! Has there been a formal identification?’

  ‘Not as such,’ said Blackbeard. ‘I flashed a lantern in there before the body was moved, and a strange sight it was, I can tell you. If you ladies will pardon me, he had bits of flesh still on him, on account of the atmosphere he’d been kept in, and a blue swallowtail coat that looked good as new.’

  ‘The gossips and storytellers were right all along,’ I said (shuddering slightly at the thought of that poor withered thing in its blue coat). ‘This is justice as it operates in the countryside – people do not forget things, and they are not impatient, knowing full well that the truth will work its way out eventually, like a splinter!’

  Blackbeard sighed and shifted his chair closer to the fire. ‘I’d like a word with my wife at this moment. I should’ve listened to her, Mrs Rodd, for she always turned out to be right about things in the end. And she always wanted me to investigate the death of Sir Christopher.’

  ‘Perhaps Mrs Blackbeard’s theories were sounder than you thought,’ I said. ‘Who was her preferred murderer?’

  ‘Well now,’ said Blackbeard. ‘I couldn’t give you any names, ma’am, after such a time. But she reckoned it was one of the local blackguards.’

  He fell into a meaningful silence, watching me closely, whilst my entire world turned a somersault.

  ‘Mrs Goodly gave us a list of local blackguards,’ I said (my voice sounding oddly calm and distant in my own ears). ‘But only one of them is still alive.’

  ‘Dan Smith,’ said Blackbeard.

  ‘Yes—’

  ‘I’d like a word with Mr Daniel Arden,’ said Blackbeard. ‘And that is another reason for my presuming to call so early, ma’am. I’m hoping you can tell me where to find him.’

  I apologize to the reader for my density, and must admit that I did not see it because I did not wish to see it.

  But it all fitted together, as neat as the drawers in my mother’s satinwood bureau.

  Dan Smith arrived in Plymouth quite alone.

  Alone, because he had killed Warrender and hidden his body in the old kiln.

  This was the great crime that Mr Arden confessed to Jacob Welland, upon that bare hillside in Desolacion – the greatest of them all.

  This was the reason he had made his entire life one act of atonement. And this was the reason he had agonized over the morality of his getting married.

  Hannah Laurie was the key to it all, as I have said before. She was in Mr Arden’s sights when he returned to Binstock – for she was the last Warrender, and he wanted to make amends to the rightful descendants of the man he had murdered. When he found that she had died and her twin sons were orphans, he saw it as a clear sign of the Almighty’s innate rationality.

  ‘He ain’t at the hotel,’ Mr Blackbeard said. ‘They haven’t seen a hair of him since yesterday morning. He ain’t at Binstock. I was hoping you might know his whereabouts, ma’am – for it’s my belief that Mr Joshua Welland came across that corpse, and knew who done it – so Arden put a bullet in him, to shut him up.’

  I was on the point of exclaiming that this was nonsense, and Mr Arden would never risk such a wild and desperate act, when the words died on my lips.

  ‘Joshua did all that hiding away in hedges and ditches,’ said Blackbeard, ‘on account of dodging Arden.’

  ‘Oh, dear heaven!’ I cried out. ‘Now I see why he was so eager to assist me in my search! No wonder Joshua did not dare to trust me! Oh, I have been so gullible, so smugly blinded by goodness knows how much prejudice and snobbery!’

  ‘You’re not to blame yourself, ma’am,’ said Mrs Bentley staunchly. ‘He had me fooled!’

  ‘I’m not crowing, neither,’ said Blackbeard. ‘I wasted too much time betting on love for my motive, and it would have done no harm for me to listen to you, when you reckoned it was fear of being found out.’

  ‘That’s handsome of you, Inspector.’ I could not help being touched by this rough admission (which I knew I would never hear again). ‘I know of one more place Mr Arden might be, and if you allow me a few minutes to struggle into my least penitential shoes, we will go there at once.’

  Forty-one

  All I will say of my surprise and my mortification is that it is extremely hard to revise one’s opinion of a person; to be compelled to see them exposed as someone else entirely. I had liked and respected Daniel Arden, I had felt the burning sincerity of his desire to do good. But if the inspector was right, this same humane, compassionate Daniel Arden was a ruthless killer.

  Tough old bird that I am, it all made me feel quite ill, and I was only distantly aware of the carriage stopping. Blackbeard jumped out into the street and returned a short time later with a thick earthenware cup of hot coffee, which he handed to me with a bow.

  ‘It’s off the stall, Mrs Rodd, which ain’t exactly genteel. But I thought you could do with bucking up.’

  ‘Oh, how very kind of you, Inspector!’ The sweet, scalding brew was precisely what I needed. ‘Where are we?’

  ‘Charing Cross, ma’am; we’ll do the rest of the journey by boat, if you have no objection.’

  ‘I should like nothing better,’ I assured him. ‘And the river breezes might help to clear my poor head!’

  ‘It’ll take a hurricane to clear mine,’ said Blackbeard. ‘I’m making all sorts of new connections now, and Arden’s in every one of them.’

  The coffee was hot and heartening and made me strong enough to face up to the new intelligence. ‘I believe he did probably murder Sir Christopher, but I’m not sure about Joshua Welland—’

  ‘There’s plenty of murders,’ he cut in, ‘but only the one murderer, ma’am.’

  ‘Oh—’ For once, I was lost for words and could only gape at Blackbeard foolishly.

  ‘Do you know if the old lady keeps any men about the house?’

  ‘I saw a rather elderly manservant at the station – but you can’t possibly – Mr Arden would never—’

 
‘Come along now, Mrs Rodd!’ The inspector was rather amused, I thought, by my feeble expressions of horror. ‘The trouble with you and me, ma’am, is that we both hate being wrong. I wanted to hang the curate – you wanted to hang pretty much anybody else. But that is all over now and we are both confounded. If we find Arden at the house, he will leave it in fetters; I’ve more than enough evidence to arrest him. And I’ll take a couple of men, in case he turns vicious.’

  ‘That won’t be necessary,’ I said. ‘He would never do anything to upset Miss Yates.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Blackbeard. ‘The question is, how much does the young lady know?’

  ‘In my opinion, very little; I don’t think he could bear her to know the whole truth.’ I handed him my empty cup. ‘I beg you, Mr Blackbeard – please try not to frighten her!’ My faculties were now sharp enough to think of poor Minna Yates, and the fact that we were about to break her heart.

  We travelled the few miles to Putney in a small police steamer, which cut the journey time considerably. I sat on a locker on the deck, out of the worst of the wind, and if I had not been so sick at heart, I would have enjoyed the chilly autumn sunlight that glanced off the water, and the noise and bustle of all the other boats around us on the river. It is always more pleasant to travel along the Thames in the westerly direction, for the warehouses and coal-barges quickly fall away and turn into pretty suburbs; when we stopped at a wooden jetty near to Putney, the water was cleaner than in the city and there were ducks in the reeds.

  Two policemen accompanied us to Minerva Cottage.

  ‘I’ll post ’em at the end of the road,’ said Blackbeard, ‘in case anyone sees us coming and tries to skedaddle, ma’am.’

  I remember our short journey as having a dreamlike quality; we passed prosperous-looking villas, sitting serenely in their fine gardens, as if we were fifty miles from the centre of London instead of five. Miss Emma Critchley’s house was the only building in a short turning off the principal thoroughfare – and when we took the turning, I saw at once that something was wrong.