Murder at Mansfield Park

by Lynn Shepherd

  It took several more minutes to convince her, and even longer to quiet her into any thing resembling a composed state of mind, but Maddox was patient. He had one more question to ask, and a demand to make, and he required her to be both rational and sensible when he did so.

  ‘Before I allow you to depart,’ he said presently, ‘I must enjoin you to absolute secrecy as to the nature of our discussion this morning; I have already commanded as much from your maid. I am sure Miss Bertram will find herself more than willing to accede to this request, in exchange for a reciprocal silence on my part. After all, I cannot believe she would wish to submit her mother, in particular, to further unseemly revelations about the goings-on in her own family.’

  There was a blush at this, and she bent her head with downcast eyes.

  ‘Good. I was sure we would understand one another. My final request will not, I am sure, surprise you. Would you be so good as to inform me what exactly Miss Price said to you that morning?’

  Maria stared into the distance, as if to force her attention to the reviving of such a distasteful memory.

  ‘It was very much as you surmised. I was astonished to see her—and see her in such high spirits, into the bargain. I asked where she had been, but she told me that was her affair, and none of mine. She said this in that arrogant, imperious way she had when we were alone, and out of the hearing of either of my parents—as if I was little better than a servant, or one of her pitiable underlings. I had been angry before, but her words and her tone aroused a fury such as I had never felt before. I thought of all the distress she had caused—the scandal in the neighbourhood—my mother’s grief—and yet there she was, parading about in her finest clothes, with no thought for the fact that she had put the whole family through days of doubt and misery on her account. Some part of this I think I said—my recollection is somewhat confused—but I do recall her laughing. Laughing out loud, and saying that she did indeed doubt that the like alarm would have been raised if I had been the one to go off with a man, instead of her. They would not have missed me half so much, she said, or wasted half the effort to discover me, always assuming I could have persuaded any man of fortune or distinction to take me in the first place.’

  A single tear rolled down her cheek at this, and Maddox was moved to pity her; he could only imagine what submitting to the incessant spite and ascendancy of her cousin had been to a temper like Maria Bertram’s, an evil which even the comfort and elegance of such an eligible home could not have entirely atoned for. He had never met Miss Price, but every thing he had heard of her declared her to have been a monster of complacency and pride, who, under a cloak of cringing self-abasement, had succeeded in dominating Mansfield Park, and everyone in it. And without presuming to judge whether she had merited such a fate, he suspected, nonetheless, that Maria Bertram was not the only member of the family who might have yearned for a world without Miss Price, however much they might have shrunk from such a savage and brutal way of achieving it.

  ‘Go on, Miss Bertram,’ he said softly.‘We shall soon have done.’

  ‘I know she meant those words as provocation; I know she meant to insult and offend; but that was no excuse. I will think of what followed with shame and regret for the rest of my life. I struck her, Mr Maddox. I struck her full across the face, and she staggered. She had not expected it— how could she? She could not conceive of anyone having the audaciousness to raise a hand to her—to Miss Price, the heiress of Lessingby. I could scarcely believe it myself, and as I watched her sink on her knees before me in the mud every thing seemed to be happening with strange and unnatural slowness. And then the full horror of what I had done rushed in upon me, and I ran away.’

  The two sat in silence for a moment, each lost in their own thoughts. At last Maria rose to her feet, and made as if to return to the house. She was a few feet away when Maddox called her back.

  ‘You are quite sure she said she had left here with a man—that she had eloped?’

  Maria nodded.

  ‘But she did not say with whom? You do not know who it was?’

  ‘No, Mr Maddox. I am sorry, but I cannot assist you. She never told me his name.’

  Some time before this, Mary had returned to the relative peace of the parsonage, and, finding both Dr Grant and her sister departed on business to the village, she sat down in the parlour to write to Henry. She had not heard from him for some days, and had not written herself since Miss Price’s disappearance: as catastrophe had succeeded catastrophe she had not known how to begin, or how best to convey such terrible and unexpected news; preparing him for the disappointment to be occasioned by the cessation of all work on the improvements was only the least of her concerns.

  She had arranged her paper, pen, and inkstand, and even gone so far as to write ‘My very dear Henry’, when she was suddenly aware of an unusual noise in the hall. A moment later the door of the room was thrown open, and Henry himself rushed into the room, his clothes bespattered with the dirt of the road, and his hat still in his hands.

  ‘Is she here?’ he cried, in a state of agitation. ‘Have you seen her?’

  ‘What can you mean?’ said Mary, rising to her feet in dismay. ‘Whom do you mean?’

  ‘My wife, of course—who else? I’ve come back to find her—I’ve come back to find Fanny.’

  CHAPTER XV

  Mary would remember the hour that followed to the end of her days. She could only be grateful that they were accorded the luxury of spending that hour alone, without even her sister or Dr Grant to overhear or intercede. It was hardly possible to take in all her brother had to say, and it was many, many minutes before she could form a distinct idea of what had occurred. It seemed that while Henry had, indeed, travelled to Sir Robert Ferrars’s estate, he had staid there no more than two days; hearing of Mr Rushworth’s engagement, he had decided, in a moment of rash impetuosity, to return to Mansfield in secret, and contrive to see Fanny. She, as Mary well knew, had taken to walking in the garden alone in the morning, and it was there that he had met her—met her, made love to her, and persuaded her, at last, to run away with him. It was clear that, on her side at least, it was a decision owing nothing to passion, and every thing to hatred of home, restraint, and tranquillity, to the misery of disappointed affection, and contempt of the man she was to have married. Having a man like Henry Crawford wholly in her power had likewise offered its own allurements, as had the idea of a romantic elopement, and all the bustle and excitement of the intrigue—not merely travelling by night, and bribing innkeepers, but imagining the uproar that must have ensued at Mansfield, as soon as she was missed. More than once did Mary shake her head as she listened to this narration; more than once did she picture, with horror, the awful consequences of this rash marriage, had Fanny lived. But she had not lived, and Mary had not yet had the courage to say so. She watched as her brother paced up and down the room, his face haggard and anxious, despite the unaccustomed richness of his attire.

  ‘We were married in London four days later,’ he said, at length. ‘The day after she came of age. She was happy— ordering new clothes and viewing houses in Wimpole-street. She has a quite extraordinary talent for spending money—nothing is too good, nothing too expensive—but little more than a week later I awoke in our lodgings to find she was gone. I have spent every waking hour since looking for her.’

  He threw himself into a chair, and cast his hat onto the table.

  ‘I come here at last in desperation, Mary. Knowing her as I now do, I cannot believe she would have returned here willingly. Not alone, at any rate. In triumph perhaps, to make a point. But the carriage is not yet ordered, the house not yet taken, the announcement in The Times not yet made. No, no, I do not believe it, it is not possible.’

  He fell silent, and they heard the distant sound of the great clock at Mansfield, striking the half hour. Mary stirred in her chair. She hardly dared trust herself to speak, yet it was now absolutely necessary to do so. But even as she was collecting her though
ts and wondering how to begin, the door opened for a second time.

  ‘You see, my dear,’ Dr Grant was saying to his wife as they came into the room, ‘I was quite right. I knew the presence of such a horse in the yard could betoken only one thing. I will see to it that more claret is brought up from the cellar. I am glad to see you again, Crawford, even if you do return to a neighbourhood in mourning. We will all be very thankful when Sir Thomas resumes his customary place at Mansfield, and the funeral can at last take place; so protracted a delay is disrespectful, and serves only to amplify what is already the most lamentable circumstance. Indeed, I cannot conceive a situation more deplorable.’

  ‘In mourning?’ said Henry, rising again from his chair. ‘I do not understand—that is, Mary did not say—’

  Mrs Grant looked first to Henry, and then to her sister. ‘Mary? Surely you have been most remiss—there has not been such an event as this in these parts for twenty years past. You will scarce believe it, Henry, but we have had a murder amongst us. Miss Price is dead.’

  Dr Grant was the only one among them capable of any rational thought or deliberation in the course of the extraordinary disclosures that must naturally follow, though Mary could have wished his remonstrances less rigorous, or at the very least, rather fewer in number. Dr Grant had, indeed, a great deal to say on the subject, and harangued Henry loudly and at length for having so requited Sir Thomas’s hospitality, so injured family peace, and so forfeited all entitlement to be considered a gentleman. Mrs Grant needed her salts more than once, during this interminable philippic; while Henry, by contrast, seemed hardly to hear a word of it. He was not accustomed to allow such slights on his honour to pass with impunity, even from his brother-in-law, but his manner was distracted, and his whole mind seemed to be taken up with the attempt to comprehend such an unspeakable turn of events; he had started that day a husband, even a bridegroom, but he would end it a widower.

  Dr Grant had not yet concluded his diatribe. ‘And now we have this wretched man Maddox in our midst, poking and prying and intermeddling with affairs that in no way concern him, in what has so far proved to be a fruitless quest for the truth. He will want to see you, sir, without delay; that much is abundantly clear. There will be questions—and you will be required to answer. And what will you have to say for yourself, I wonder?’

  There was a silence. Henry did not appear to be aware that he was being addressed. He was staring into the bottom of the glass of wine Mary had poured for him, his thoughts elsewhere.

  Dr Grant cleared his throat loudly. ‘Well, sir? I am waiting.’

  Henry looked up, and Mary saw with apprehension that his eyes had taken on a wild look that she had seen in them once before, many years ago. It did not bode a happy issue.

  ‘What did you say?’ he cried, springing up and striding across the room towards Dr Grant. ‘Who is this—Maddox— you speak of? By what right does he presume to summon me—question me?’

  The two men were, by now, scarcely a yard apart, and Henry’s face was flushed with anger, his fists clenched. Mary stepped forward quickly, and put a hand on his arm. ‘He is the person the family have charged with finding the man responsible for Fanny’s murder,’ she said. ‘It is only natural that he should wish to talk to you—once he knows what has occurred.’

  Henry shook her hand free; he was still staring at Dr Grant, who had started back with a look of alarm.

  ‘Henry, Henry,’ said Mary, in a pleading tone, ‘you must see that it is only reasonable that Mr Maddox should wish to talk to you.You may be in possession of information that could be vital to his enquiries. You must remember that you saw her—spoke to her—more recently than any of us. It may be that there is some thing of which you alone are aware, which may be of vital significance—more than you can, at present, possibly perceive.’

  She stopped, breathless with agitation, and watched as Henry stared first at her, and then at her sister and Dr Grant.

  ‘So that is what you are all thinking,’ he said, nodding slowly, his face grim. ‘You think I had some thing to do with this. You think I was responsible in some way for her death. I—her husband—the man she risked every thing to run away with—you actually believe that I could have—’

  He turned away. His voice was unsteady, and he looked very ill; he was evidently suffering under a confusion of violent and perplexing emotions, and Mary could only pity him.

  ‘Come, Henry,’ she said softly. ‘Your spirits are exhausted, and I doubt you have either eaten or slept properly for days. Let me call for a basin of soup, and we will talk about this again tomorrow.’

  ‘No,’ said Henry, with unexpected decision. ‘If this Maddox wishes to see me, I will not stay to be sent for. I have nothing to hide.’

  Dr Grant eyed him, shaking his head in steady scepticism. ‘I hope so, for your sake, Crawford.’

  The two ladies turned to look at him, as he continued. ‘We here at Mansfield have spent the last week conjecturing and speculating about the death of Miss Price, but it seems that we were all mistaken. It was not Miss Price at all, but Mrs Crawford.That puts quite a different complexion on the affair, does it not?’

  Mary’s eyes widened in sudden fear. ‘You mean—’

  ‘Indeed I do. Whoever might have perpetrated this foul crime, it has made your brother an extremely rich man. As Mr Maddox will no doubt be fully aware.’

  At that very moment, Charles Maddox was sitting by the fire in Sir Thomas’s room. It was a noble fire over which to sit and think, and he had decided to afford himself the indulgence of an hour’s mature deliberation, before going in to dinner. He had not yet been invited to dine with the family, but such little indignities were not uncommon in his profession, and he had, besides, gathered more from a few days in the servants’ hall than he could have done in the dining-parlour in the course of an entire month. They ate well, the Mansfield servants, he could not deny that; and Maddox was a man who appreciated good food as much as he appreciated Sir Thomas’s fine port and excellent claret, a glass of which sat even now at his elbow. He got up to poke the fire, then settled himself back in his chair.

  Fraser had completed his questioning of the estate workmen, and although he had assured his master that there was nothing of significance to report, Maddox was a thorough man, and wished to read the notes for himself. There were also some pages of annotations from Fraser’s interviews with the Mansfield servants. Maddox did not anticipate much of use there, either; he had always regarded both maids and men principally as so many sources of useful intelligence, rather than probable suspects in good earnest. Moreover, only the female servants had suffered that degree of intimacy with Miss Price that might have led to a credible motive for her murder, and he could not see this deed as the work of a woman’s hand. Stornaway, by contrast, had spent the day away from the Park, interrogating innkeepers and landlords, in an effort to determine if any strangers of note had been seen in the neighbourhood at the time of Miss Price’s return. Now that Maddox knew she had indeed eloped, it was of the utmost necessity to discover the identity of her abductor. If Stornaway met with no success, Maddox was ready to send him to London; it would be no easy task to trace the fugitives, and Maddox was mindful that the family had already tried all in its power to do so, but unlike the Bertrams, he had connections that extended from the highest to the lowest of London society; he knew where such marriages usually took place, and the clergymen who could be persuaded to perform them, and if a special licence had been required, there was more than one proctor at Doctors-Commons who stood in Maddox’s debt, and might be induced to supply the information he required.

  It was little more than ten minutes later when the silence of the great house was broken by the sound of a commotion in the entrance hall. It was not difficult to distinguish Mrs Norris’s vociferous tones in the general fracas, and knowing that lady was not in the habit of receiving visitors any where other than in the full pomp and magnificence of the Mansfield Park drawing-room, he suspected so
me thing untoward, and ventured out to investigate the matter for himself. The gentleman at the door was a stranger to him, but first impressions were Maddox’s stock-in-trade. He prided himself on his ability to have a man’s measure in a minute, and he was rarely wrong.This man was, he saw, both weary and travel-soiled, but richly and elegantly attired. Maddox was some thing of a connoisseur in dress; it was a partiality of his, but it had also proved, on occasion, to be of signal use in the more obscure by-roads of his profession. He could, for example, hazard a reasonable estimation as to where these clothes had been made, by which London tailor, and at what cost. This was, indeed, a man of considerable air and address; moreover, the set of his chin, and the boldness of his eye, argued for no small measure of pride and defiance. Yet, in spite of all this, it piqued Maddox’s curiosity not a little to see that Mrs Norris accorded the newcomer neither courtesy nor common civility, and her chief object in leaving the sanctuary of the drawing-room for the draughtiness of the hall seemed to be to compel the footmen to expel the intruder without delay.

  ‘May I be of some assistance, Mrs Norris?’ said Maddox, with a bow. ‘And perhaps you might do me the honour of introducing me to this gentleman.’

  ‘There will be no call for that,’ said Mrs Norris quickly. ‘And I can assure you, he is not a gentleman. Indeed I cannot think what Mr Crawford is doing here, unless it be to enquire what we intend to do about the improvements. The time is not convenient, sir. We cannot stay dinner to satisfy the importunate demands of a hired hand. I suggest you call on the steward in the morning.’