Jane and the Stillroom Maid

by Stephanie Barron

  “You believe she is protecting the Marquess?—Against whom?”

  “—the influence of Lady Elizabeth, perhaps—the violence of the Law—possibly she even protects him from me.” Lord Harold paced towards the parlour window in an agony of frustration. “I am the truest friend that Hary-O possesses, Jane, but she will not trust me with her brother’s life, if she fears him guilty of some horror. She learned the lesson of reserve from her mother—an open-hearted, laughing beauty of a woman who paid too deeply the price of innocence.”

  “Her Grace had better have taught her daughter to hold the world in contempt, than to purchase it at such a cost.”

  Lord Harold’s head lashed swiftly around, and for the first time in my life, I glimpsed the full force of his power for love and hate. “Before you would judge Georgiana too harshly, Jane, know this: at seventeen she was a Duchess, a toast, and a beauty—and wholly neglected by her husband. Whatever occurred in her life from that point, must be laid entirely at Devonshire’s account.”

  I was silenced.

  Lord Harold drew breath; he reached for his gloves and hat; he drew on the former and settled the latter over his eye. Only then did he look at me.

  “I shall end by driving my last friend away with my bitter tongue. Forgive me, Jane.”

  “That is something I should never presume to do, my lord. It might justly make you hate me.”

  He touched my chin with his gloved hand, and would have stepped out into the passage—but that I clutched at his wrist.

  “Take me with you.”

  “You cannot expect to do anything in Hart’s case.”

  I reached for the stillroom book and held it before his eyes. “But I know why his lordship exulted in the maid’s death. If you would prove he did not kill her, we must ensnare her true murderer. Nothing else will end this folly of guilt and mutual suspicion.”

  For an instant he said nothing; then he took the book from my hands.

  “Leave word for your mother where you are gone, Jane. And do not neglect of your sunbonnet. Having disappointed Mrs. Austen in so much else, I owe her this small gesture of attention.”

  A Wash for the Complexion

  rate a quantity of horseradish into sweet milk, and allow to stand for six or eight hours. Then apply to the skin with a clean linen rag, and rinse with clear spring water.

  —From the Stillroom Book

  of Tess Arnold,

  Penfolds Hall, Derbyshire,

  1802–1806

  Chapter 26

  Death Among the Rocks

  31 August 1806, cont.

  ∼

  BEING A GENTLEMAN OF SOME DESPATCH, LORD HAROLD undertook to pen a note to His Grace at Chatsworth, informing the Duke of his intelligence regarding the Marquess, and instructing a party of men to turn their efforts towards Miller’s Dale. He suffered the Duke to know that we should proceed thence ourselves, in an effort to locate Lord Hartington without delay; and that if the search were unavailing, we should await assistance in the miller’s cottage.

  “Now tell me all you know, Jane—or all you suspect,” he commanded, when we were settled in the Devonshire equipage.

  For this once, despite the heat of August, I must own I valued the discretion of a closed carriage; no one should overlisten my conversation with Lord Harold.

  “Lord Hartington was acquainted with the stillroom maid,” I said, “for nearly a twelvemonth. He first undertook to ride over to Penfolds Hall, in secret; and as Tess Arnold’s notations are entirely concerned with remedies for deafness, I must imagine him to have been preoccupied with these.”

  “Deafness? But surely he is not so very troubled by the impairment to his hearing?” Lord Harold remarked.

  “I suspect that few are privileged to know just how far the difficulty extends. A person such as Lord Hartington—the sole heir to a princely realm, with all the burdens of wealth and birth, all the expectations of Society placed upon him—cannot admit to infirmity. He must struggle against it from a boy; and disguise what he cannot help. From the little I observed him, I should say that he is an adept at the reading of speech. Though he cannot hear, he may often comprehend, provided the speaker’s face is turned towards him.”

  “I see. And yet he was troubled enough by infirmity that he sought help from the stillroom maid.”

  “She makes no reference to the success or failure of her remedies; but certainly his lordship continued to seek them. Whether he eventually met with Tess Arnold from other motives, I cannot say; but I presume as much, from the place of the meeting having changed.”

  “He no longer rode to Penfolds?”

  “Last winter, he began to meet his witch in the rocks above Miller’s Dale. The meetings, from this date, grow less frequent—you will recollect that he was often from Derbyshire during that period, Her Grace the Duchess having been in Town for most of the winter.”

  “Georgiana fell ill there in March,” Lord Harold said soberly. “Lord Hartington, I believe, was much by her side. He did not return to Derbyshire until she was interred at Chatsworth, in early April.”

  “He met with Tess infrequently during the course of the summer, and always in secret; though once, at least, he appears to have been accompanied by a tutor. Perhaps he could not throw that gentleman off.”

  “No tutor worth his pay would neglect the charge of his employer, nor the confidence of his pupil,” Lord Harold observed. “We may consider the gentleman present, but sworn to silence. He is no longer in the Duke’s employ, in any case, and may not speak against the Marquess. But I interrupt: you have obviously formed an idea of young Hartington’s purpose. Was he dallying with the maid?”

  “I do not believe so. It should be a chilly place for such a purpose, in the depths of January; and by the summer he had clearly learned to hate her. No, Lord Harold—I believe the Marquess required information. You will recollect that he must have observed his mother’s decline.”

  “Georgiana? What can she have had to do with Tess Arnold?”

  “Her Grace was being steadily dosed by the stillroom maid, for a variety of liverish complaints, from the late summer of last year up to her death.”

  Lord Harold’s expression hardened. “That book tells you so much?”

  “It records the frequent remedies sought by Lady Elizabeth, for a variety of ills she does not appear to have suffered. Lady Elizabeth would carry off the gravel, and her stomach was much indisposed; she required eyewash, and remedies for the liver—and once, it must be said, for a persistent cough. This, at least, we may impute to have been Lady Elizabeth’s own. The rest I believe were purchased on behalf of Georgiana Duchess. The remedies contained an increasing quantity of morphia, such as must relieve the most acute suffering; and the oil of bitter almonds, which I believe is poisonous over time. It is possible her London physicians were unwilling to prescribe what must certainly kill her.”

  Lord Harold reflected upon this in silence. “Bess told me that Hart certainly blamed her for Georgiana’s death.”

  “Whatever charge his mother laid upon her bosom friend—whatever Lady Elizabeth chose to take upon herself—should never have been meant for the boy’s ears. But Lord Hartington’s ears are not his only means of acquiring intelligence. I assume he observed an exchange between the two ladies that was not intended for him.”

  Lord Harold sighed heavily and passed a thin hand over his brow. “I’d hoped the witch had died in agony. Hart hated the girl, Tess Arnold, because he thought her remedies killed his mother. Is that what you would say, Jane?”

  “I would go further, my lord. I believe that the Marquess suspects the maid and Lady Elizabeth between them of having colluded to murder his mother—so that Lady Elizabeth might be Duchess in Georgiana’s stead.”

  “Impossible!” Lord Harold’s eyes blazed darkly in his pallid face. “You may suspect poor Bess of every indelicacy—of a want of tact, and a self-absorption that may border on the criminal—but she was honestly devoted to Georgiana. Whate
ver remedies she purchased on Her Grace’s behalf, were purchased at Georgiana’s insistence. You may be assured of that.”

  “But I am not fifteen. I am not destroyed by the severest grief. I have not the spectre of illegitimacy to haunt me—I need never regard my father’s despised mistress as being quite possibly my parent. I need never know the agony of being twice dispossessed: once, of the mother I adore; and yet again, of the certainty that I may rightly call her mother. When I consider the burdens under which Lord Harrington has laboured, I must find it surpassing odd that he has not done violence before—to himself, or another. Indeed, he has been an example of restraint.”

  Lord Harold stared. “You mean to say, Jane, that it was not Hart who savaged the girl’s body among the rocks?”

  “Not at all. That horror belongs entirely to another; for it was not the Marquess who summoned Tess from Penfolds Hall; he can have had no reason to look for her that night above Miller’s Dale. You have not heard, my lord, of the robbing of graves, or the uses the maid found for a gentleman’s clothing—but as we have time and road enough for a story, I will consent to tell you all.”

  IT WAS WELL AFTER THREE O’CLOCK WHEN WE REACHED the valley of the River Wye, and the splashing white of the miller’s weir; all was peacefulness, as it had been nearly a week before, and I might almost have looked to find George Hemming’s upright figure etched against the trees. But no one stood with rod and tackle—only the miller’s wife, her hands perpetually twisting in her threadbare apron.

  “He’s not ’ere,” she called from the doorway before we had even thought to step out of the carriage, “he’ve gone out Buxton way.”

  “Thank you, my good woman,” Lord Harold replied. “We require only your consent to leave our coach under your eye. We intend to walk up into the hills. A party of men under the Duke of Devonshire’s direction may presently appear; pray afford them every refreshment in your power, and conduct them towards that path above the weir.”

  He pointed in the direction I had taken now twice before, and the miller’s wife closed her palm over Lord Harold’s coin. As we turned away, however, I observed her to cross herself with averted eyes; here was one who would believe the stories of Satanic sacrifice.

  We hurried along the path that rose towards the crags above the river, neither of us speaking for some time. Lord Harold cupped his hands to his lips, and called out the Marquess’s name; at the sound of his harsh voice, birds rose out of the surrounding brush with a clatter of wings. The sound had the power to raise gooseflesh along my arm, and curl the hairs at the back of my neck; the urgency of disaster sped our footsteps. Though Lord Hartington might not be guilty of murder, he might yet have done himself violence from despair: I dreaded to think what we might find among the rocks above.

  “Hart!”

  Lord Harold paused at the brow of the last hill. The grey tor where I had found the maid’s body rose jaggedly in the distance. He peered at it, eyes narrowed, and discerned the figure sprawled at its foot; and then, without a word, he began to run.

  THE SCENE WAS THE SAME, AND YET NOT THE SAME, as it had been five days before. I stood gasping at the foot of the tor, my gloved hand to my mouth, and stared at the figure dressed all in black, the welter of blood about the rocks. There was the mark of a lead ball in the forehead, and the staring eyes; but the birds had not yet descended. He clutched a fowling piece in one hand, and a scrap of paper in the other. But this time Charles Danforth’s clothes were properly his own.

  His brother knelt in the dust, hands covering his face, and wept with the horrible, tearing sound of a man unaccustomed to tears. A horse whinnied; I turned, and saw the two gentlemen’s mounts tethered side by side under a tree some thirty yards distant. The same tree, I noted with half my mind, beneath which Lord Harold had found the marks of hoofprints on Friday.

  “Good God,” Lord Harold murmured. He bent to Andrew Danforth and gripped his shoulder firmly. “What has happened here?”

  Danforth raised a streaming countenance and failed to utter a word. If he saw us clearly, I should be greatly surprised.

  “Speak to me, man!”

  He shook his head brokenly. “I was … over there. Towards Penfolds. In the copse.” He drew a shuddering breath and mopped at his eyes with a glove. “Charles was before me. We had come out with the intention of looking for Hart. He suggested we traverse the ground separately, in order to cover the better part of the terrain—”

  “Why here?” Lord Harold enquired sharply. “The Duke had no notion of sending you, surely.”

  “Charles said that he believed the Marquess was much in the habit of coming here. It was his idea to search the place. I heard the shot—I feared for Hart’s life—I spurred my horse down the path and emerged to see—this.”

  We stared down at Charles Danforth. His dark eyes gazed sightlessly at the blue August sky; his mouth was slack. All the power for good or ill that had been etched in that countenance, was fled; only the pitiful shell of the man remained. Slowly, Lord Harold reached out and took the scrap of paper from the corpse’s hand.

  He read it aloud.

  31 August 1806

  Chatsworth

  I, Charles Edgar Danforth of Penfolds Hall, do hereby testify that I am guilty of having killed the stillroom maid Tess Arnold on Monday night, the 25th of August 1806. I followed her into the hills above Tideswell with the intention of shooting her, because I was convinced that she had murdered my children and my wife. Her reasons for so doing I will not name, lest they embroil the innocent; but having lost all that held meaning for me in the whole world, I have no longing for anything but the grave. I am sorry for having caused unpleasantness for anyone; and hope, most sincerely, that Mr. George Hemming will find it in his heart to forgive me. A truer gentleman never lived.

  CHARLES EDGAR DANFORTH

  A General Caution

  n the use of these family cordials, we thought it proper to begin with a general account of their use, and the needful caution. Without such care, a book of Medicines may become a book of Poison. …

  —Martha Bradley,

  The British Housewife, or

  Cook, Housekeeper’s and

  Gardiner’s Companion,

  1756

  Chapter 27

  Dr. Bascomb of Buxton

  31 August 1806, cont.

  ∼

  THE MARQUESS OF HARTINGTON, WHETHER HE WERE above Miller’s Dale or no, was no longer our object. Lord Harold sent Andrew Danforth at a run to the miller’s cottage, where he found a party of men despatched by the Duke of Devonshire. Danforth tarried only long enough to send a message to His Grace, before urging the better part of the search party back up into the hills. It was a sober company that soon appeared, with a makeshift litter among them, to bear Charles Danforth home.

  He was placed on the litter, and his eyes closed; and then, with a heave, six men lifted the body high upon their shoulders. Andrew Danforth loosed his brother’s horse, and led it in tandem with his own behind the grim procession. They would walk thus, down the path Tess Arnold had so often trod, towards Tideswell and Penfolds Hall.

  I had remained in Lord Harold’s company while the men were summoned; but I did not wish to make another of the melancholy group struggling through the fields. My heart was at present too full. I turned to his lordship, who lingered only long enough to watch the men out of sight, before hastening to the tree where the Danforth mounts had been tethered. He studied the ground, nodded once, and then made his way back to me.

  “Do you wish to return to Bakewell this evening, Jane?”

  “Not at all. Where do you intend to proceed, my lord?”

  “To Penfolds! However indolent His Grace may appear in the general way—however consumed with worry for his son and heir—he remains Lord Lieutenant of the County. He will know exactly how to act. If I am not greatly mistaken, Sir James Villiers will presently make his way to the Hall; and I should wish to be on hand when he appears.”

  “Then
I shall accompany you.”

  His lordship nodded distractedly. In his hand he still held the last words of Charles Danforth; he folded the piece of paper and tucked it inside his coat. “At the very least, I must be sure to give Sir James this. For it is certainly in Danforth’s handwriting.”

  “Of course. He was a man to do a thing properly, if he would undertake it at all,” I observed.

  Lord Harold’s gaze raked over me keenly; but he said nothing—and so we descended the hills above Miller’s Dale for the last time in silence.

  HALFWAY TO PENFOLDS, THE RAIN THAT HAD THREATENED all day burst in a great roar over our heads, so that the patient Devonshire horses, so long pressed into Lord Harold’s service, were steaming with wet at our arrival. We found the great door thrown open, and a miscellany of carriages standing before it; more than one bore the crest of serpent and stag. Naturally, Lady Harriot would come at the first word of tragedy. Before the wheels of our own conveyance had ceased to turn, Lord Harold had thrust back the carriage door and alighted.

  Mrs. Haskell stood grim-faced and silent in the front entry. Under the livid glare of the summer storm, the old stone of Penfolds closed in like a tomb. I shuddered, my eyes on the housekeeper’s rigid form. She took his lordship’s hat and stick without a word, and waited for me to untie my bonnet strings. “His Grace the Duke is in the parlour, my lord.”

  We followed a footman through one of the doors leading from the hall. A fire had just been lit in a massive hearth, against the chill of the sudden rain; the Duke stood with bent head, staring into the flames. In a chair drawn close to the fire sat Lady Harriot; the Countess of Swithin clasped her hand. I could detect no tears on Hary-O’s face; her countenance was terrible in its self-possession. Andrew Danforth stood by the window, framed in the red folds of a velvet drapery; Sir James Villiers, resplendent in a lavender waistcoat and buff pantaloons, had adopted a place on the sofa. The Justice appeared the most easy of the party. All five looked around as the footman threw open the door, and revealed us to their sight; and I discerned immediately that we were not the persons expected.