by Lucy Worsley
‘That’s right,’ confirmed Mr Sprack. ‘The shopkeeper then says, to the victim, or ideally to the victim’s rich friends, “If you pay me a hundred pounds, or thereabouts, I will retract my testimony to the magistrate. And then you, Mr Customer, you will avoid the risk of being tried and perhaps being transported to the criminal colonies.” It’s devilish, isn’t it? Would you want to run the risk of going to court, of having an overloaded magistrate making a hasty judgement upon you, if you could be sure of getting off? You never know which way things will fall in the courtroom.’
Aunt Jane was nodding, as if in recognition.
‘That’s about the size of it,’ Mr Sprack concluded. ‘For rich folk, one hundred or even two hundred pounds is worth it. The risk of the prison ships and a life in the hellhole of Australia is not worth taking.’
Fanny wrinkled her brows.
‘But why would they send Mr Drummer to the hellhole of Australia?’ she asked. ‘It’s an awfully long way.’
‘Because the lace was very valuable, Fanny,’ Aunt Jane explained. ‘It was worth, oh, thirty or forty shillings. And if you get convicted of a theft like that, then to the colonies you go.’
‘But magistrates are there to make sure that such mistakes don’t happen!’ Fanny cried.
‘And how much time,’ her aunt replied crisply, ‘have you seen my brother Edward putting into his duties as a magistrate? How carefully does he investigate each case?’
Fanny hung her head, reluctant to admit the answer. But she knew it was ‘not very much’. Her father was just so busy, so sociable, so wrapped up in his hounds and his friends, his lands and his debts.
‘Yet there’s something a bit odd here,’ said Mr Sprack. ‘In the other cases I’ve seen, the criminals made contact with the accused, or at least with the accused’s rich friends. They had to make it clear that they could be bought off. And you said that Mr Drummer hasn’t mentioned such an approach? He’s just been left to rot in prison with no word from anyone?’
‘I’ve thought of that,’ said Aunt Jane. ‘I think the wicked shopkeeper didn’t realise how proud Mr Drummer would be, and how reluctant to ask for help, and how busy and perhaps lazy my brother might be, therefore failing to offer it.’
‘But that’s so unfair!’ Fanny cried. ‘It’s awful! Mr Drummer could be sent away on a prison ship, and he hasn’t stolen that lace, has he? How can we prove the shopkeeper is crooked?’
‘Well, I think there might be a way,’ Aunt Jane said. ‘The date of poor Mr Drummer’s trial is fast approaching, and I think the crooked shopkeeper will be getting ready to approach his rich friends at Godmersham, to see if they will take the trouble to buy him out of trouble. I propose that we – you and I, Fanny – draw this to a head. See if we can make it happen.’
Fanny shrank back against the hard boards of the bench. Her aunt was talking in a frightening way. Mr Sprack was looking at her too, and nodding.
‘Um, shouldn’t we just … tell my father?’ she asked quietly.
‘No, Fanny,’ Aunt Jane said firmly. ‘For several reasons. Firstly, he’s got so much on his mind, and he’s so inefficient about his business. And Elizabeth with child again, and quite ill with it too.’
Fanny, to her shame, realised that yes, her mother had been looking very heavy and tired. And she, Fanny, had not really asked, or helped, or done anything about it. She’d been afraid her mother might snap at her.
Fanny nodded.
‘And,’ her aunt continued, ‘it’s a delicate matter. I invited Mr Drummer to live at Godmersham. It’s my fault, in a way. I want to try to get him out of gaol.’
‘If I were you,’ said Mr Sprack, stroking his beard, ‘I would send this one –’ he gestured at Fanny – ‘into the shop, to ask a few questions. See if anyone is eager to meet a well-dressed friend of your Mr Drummer’s. Someone with a shilling or two to spare.’
So she was to bait the trap! She was to see if she could tempt a potential blackmailer into providing evidence of his or her treachery. They were talking almost as if Fanny were a thief-taker herself.
‘I think you will play the part very well, Fanny,’ Aunt Jane added, ‘because you always look so demure.’
Despite the backhanded nature of the compliment, Fanny sat up a little. Mr Sprack had said that her manner was a valuable quality in a thief-taker.
‘And good luck to you,’ said Mr Sprack.
At that moment, there was the ear-splitting sound of the horn being blown, and a stir in the bar.
‘I’ve got to get that coach,’ he said. ‘I’ll have to be leaving you. I’m after my slavers, you know, and I think they’re making for the ships at Deptford. Write to tell me how it goes, Miss Austen.’
With that he rose – he really was quite astonishingly tall – drew his cloak around him and slipped out of the little door into the yard. It was almost as if he’d never been there at all.
And Fanny and Aunt Jane were shockingly and quite inappropriately left alone in the common bar of the Star Inn, with two used glasses and what Fanny feared might be an empty bottle of brandy.
Chapter 26
The draper’s shop, Canterbury
Fanny was more nervous than she’d been in her whole life as she strolled down the last bit of pavement towards the draper’s shop where Mr Drummer had come a cropper.
Or to be more accurate, a ‘stroll’ was what she was aiming at. She felt that she must be walking so self-consciously that everyone in the street would be wondering what was wrong with her.
Aunt Jane was waiting in the carriage so that Fanny could – as her aunt put it – maintain her ‘cloak of anonymity’ as she went on her mission.
‘Or shall I come with you?’ Aunt Jane had asked, at the very last minute. Perhaps she’d noticed the way that Fanny kept nervously picking at the skin of her thumb.
‘No, thank you,’ said Fanny. She could tell that for some reason Aunt Jane really wanted her to face this task alone.
Hey-ho, Fanny thought to herself, perhaps this will train me for a life as an assistant thief-taker. Someone like that really could be the heroine of a story.
And yet even on ordinary days she disliked going into shops, and asking for what she wanted, and being made to feel that she was wasting the shopkeeper’s time if after all she did not buy what was offered. She much preferred going in with her mother, who would sweep in and buy or not buy and think nothing of it.
Fanny hesitated on the step of the shop, desperately longing to go skipping back to James and the carriage and Aunt Jane as fast as her feet could carry her.
She pretended to look through the bow window at the wares displayed behind it. Swathes of silk and cotton spilt down from hooks, enticing her with their glowing sheen.
It was no good. She must go in. She clutched the shopping list in her hand, making the paper crackle, and banged the door open.
Inside it was dark and close, and the shop seemed to have retained something of the summer’s stuffy heat. Fanny loosened the ties of her bonnet and pushed it back on her head. Its sides had prevented her from looking round the room. She wanted to scan the place for suspicious signs, just as Mr Sprack might do himself.
This was a different draper to the one the Godmersham family usually patronised. But it all looked familiar: babies’ caps, and stockings for gentlemen, and dress material, and India muslins all stacked in a profusion of wooden shelves and cubbyholes.
The counter was worn smooth, perhaps from the rolling out of so many bales of cambric over the years, Fanny thought. And there, prominently displayed upon it, was a card saying, Gloves for gentlemen. Five shillings. Excellent price.
Her heart nearly skipped a beat. Yes, surely these were the very same gloves which – to the penniless Mr Drummer – had seemed such a good bargain. Until the transaction had landed him in prison.
She approached the counter and saw, with a start, that in the dark corner behind it stood a stocky, aggressive-looking woman. She was staring at Fanny in a way th
at suggested she’d been watching her ever since she’d entered the shop.
Two other ladies were examining silk thread over by the window, and Fanny’s courage wavered at the thought of doing her business before witnesses.
But she approached the counter, and said good afternoon. The saleswoman’s pugnacious face was rather like those of the fighting dogs her brother George adored.
The woman was dressed in a sprigged muslin gown in a pink that clashed unpleasantly with the red of her face. She was obviously supposed to be wearing a delightful gown that might tempt the customers to buy something similar, but Fanny thought that it was so tight for her, and so unbecomingly frilled, that she looked rather like a dressed-up pig.
She also had an unexpectedly low and gruff voice.
‘Yes, miss?’
The words were deferential, but the tone was not.
But this at least was a prompt for Fanny to begin.
‘I would like,’ she said, consulting her list, ‘a new chemise for a four-year-old.’ Louie’s had worn out. The woman rooted about, as if it were a great imposition, and found an article which Fanny had, regretfully, to pronounce too small. Louie was growing so fast. Eventually another one was settled upon.
‘Have you a ready-made shirt for a boy of nine?’
‘Have you fine folk so much money you buy such things?’ the woman asked scornfully. ‘What about sewing it for yourself?’
Fanny privately thought that the shop would go bust if the woman was so reluctant to make sales.
‘My mother is so busy,’ she explained, although she really felt it was no business of anyone else’s.
But the loud silence behind her from the bow window told her that the two matrons were likewise judging the family which bought rather than made its children’s clothes.
Fanny coughed before she felt able to continue.
‘Five handkerchiefs.’
‘Five!’
‘My father loses them so often,’ Fanny felt compelled to add.
‘Well, this is going to cost a pretty penny,’ the woman said, beginning to pack up Fanny’s purchases.
‘But you can send the bill, can’t you?’ Fanny asked. ‘To Godmersham Park?’
The words had an electrifying effect. The woman’s hands stopped work immediately, and she was looking harder than ever at Fanny.
‘Would you like,’ she said in a tough, low hiss, ‘to buy anything else?’
‘No, thank you,’ said Fanny, leaning back as far as she could without actually moving her feet and therefore looking as if she were in retreat.
‘Not even …’ The woman leaned closer, and Fanny thought she could detect a taint on her breath. Her face looked oily in the warm room. ‘… a piece of lace?’
The shopkeeper began to thrum her fingernails on the wood of the counter. Fanny noticed, on her left thumb, the nasty-looking stain of a wart. And then, as if by magic, among the handkerchiefs, there was indeed a piece of lace.
She looked at it, aghast, then up again at the woman. Not a flicker on the woman’s face. What did she mean? Was this a signal?
It must be!
And yet behind her, the two other customers had carried on talking as normal, just as if nothing were out of the ordinary.
Fanny looked down at the counter again.
‘And the price?’ she asked.
The answer came in a whisper, but immediately and confidently. ‘Two hundred pounds.’
Fanny almost leaped out of her skin. It was happening! Yes, just as Aunt Jane thought, she had set in motion the next stage of the plot in which Mr Drummer had been caught.
‘It’s not a lot of money for the Godmersham family,’ the woman said aggressively, answering Fanny’s gesture of surprise rather than the words she’d been too shocked to speak.
Fanny looked at her hands, unsure how to respond.
Aunt Jane had told her that when the moment came, she’d know what to do.
She thought hard.
‘I haven’t such money with me,’ she said. ‘It’ll take me time to get it. But how may such a piece of lace be purchased?’
‘Why, right here, at the shop,’ the woman replied, holding Fanny’s eyes. Fanny felt like a mouse, trapped in the gaze of a predatory cat. Her knees were almost knocking together under the strain of standing there. This was extortion! It was against the law!
And yet, Fanny realised, the woman had said nothing compromising. Indeed, the two women now turning to the rolls of ribbon in the corner had heard every word.
‘No,’ Fanny said, gathering her courage. ‘I cannot come here with it. My parents would not approve, and it will be hard for me to gather such a sum. But I could perhaps find it, and give it to … a messenger. At night, probably, would be best. Perhaps …’
Fanny thought very hard.
‘Perhaps at the little temple on the hill in Godmersham Park. That way I could slip out and not be missed.’
The woman snorted.
‘Fine notions of behaviour among the young ladies these days!’ she said. ‘Creeping out at night, helping their gentleman friends.’
Fanny felt suddenly hot with rage. What business of this woman’s? Helping Mr Drummer was the right thing to do! Otherwise he might be sent to Australia! And then she remembered the crinkles at the corners of his eyes as he smiled. Yes, helping Dominic Drummer was not only the right thing to do, it was also a pleasant thing to do.
The thought gave her courage. Fanny felt a severe expression settle over her face, and she lifted her chin and simply ignored the woman’s comment. It wasn’t worth dignifying with a response.
The shopkeeper interpreted Fanny’s silence as assent, and now she gave a curt nod. ‘Tonight, if you please,’ she added, picking up a pencil to tot up Fanny’s purchases. Then she began to wrap them in paper. Fanny watched very hard to make sure that the lace did not make its way into the parcels, but it had once again disappeared from the countertop.
All was done at last, and the woman nodded at her once more, not in a friendly way, but in complicity.
‘All right,’ Fanny said over her shoulder, as she began to leave the shop. ‘Tonight!’
Chapter 27
The attics, Godmersham Park
Aunt Jane greeted Fanny with a big smile.
‘You did it, didn’t you?’ she said at once. ‘You negotiated the fee to buy the shopkeeper off, and set up the handover rendezvous as well.’
‘How did you know?’ cried Fanny, a little disappointed that she hadn’t been able to keep her aunt in pleasurable anticipation, as she’d hoped. She’d imagined them driving along in the carriage, and Aunt Jane begging her to tell her what had happened. Fanny would have sighed, and told the story only after being soothed and indulged. But her aunt had guessed straight away.
‘By your walk,’ Aunt Jane confessed. ‘You came bouncing down the street as if it were your birthday. Unlike when you went to the shop, as if walking to the gallows. So Mr Drummer is a step nearer to freedom!’
Mr Drummer. Mr Drummer. There was no time, however, for thinking about him now, because her aunt was busy asking her about every detail of what had happened inside the shop. When Fanny reported how the piece of white lace had mysteriously ‘appeared’ on the counter, Aunt Jane clapped her hands in delight.
‘A prestidigitarian!’ she said.
‘What’s that?’ asked Fanny.
‘Someone with very quick fingers, someone who could work as a professional pickpocket, for example,’ her aunt explained. ‘I’ll warrant that that draper’s shop doesn’t make its money as a draper’s, but is just a front for a den of thieves. It’s the exact same trick I read about in the newspaper from Bath. And now we have them on the back foot! Well done, Fanny!’
Fanny glowed. To her surprise, the journey had passed so quickly that they were already in the park.
Fanny Austen, thief-taker, sang a voice in her head. She could have hugged herself. Until she remembered that the next stage of the challenge would unfold to
night, out at the temple in the dark. It wasn’t so much fun to consider that.
Fanny prepared herself to behave in front of her family as if exactly nothing had happened. As if she and Aunt Jane had never even thought of going on a mission, undertaken with a thief-taker’s advice, for the entrapment of an extortionist.
But just as the carriage entered the last bend of the drive, it gave a violent swerve.
‘What can James be thinking of?’ Aunt Jane exclaimed.
Fanny snatched off her bonnet and poked her head out of the window. She saw that a farm wagon, travelling at great speed, had almost forced their carriage off the road. James drew the horses to a halt.
‘He almost put us in the ditch!’ he called out. ‘Are you ladies hurt?’
Clouds of dust still lingered in the air.
Fanny and Aunt Jane, sobered by the shock, decided to get down and walk across the grass to the door.
Fanny hoped that the house would be quiet. She wanted to be by herself, to think about how Mr Drummer might thank her for what she’d done, dipping down his chin to disguise a bashful smile …
But as soon as she opened the door of the hall, she discovered all her siblings gathered there, and a great deal of confusion.
‘Fanny!’ cried her mother. ‘You’re back. Where have you been?’
Fanny tried to think of an appropriate answer.
‘Meeting with a notorious thief-taker’ wouldn’t do it.
But her mother, as usual, wasn’t really listening.
‘Now, Fan,’ her mother was saying, urgently. ‘You must go at once and find Anna. She’s very upset.’
‘But what has happened?’ Fanny asked. ‘Is someone hurt? What is it?’
She’d already lost her mother’s attention. Elizabeth was picking up a weeping Louie and patting her on the back.
Lizzie was at Fanny’s elbow.
‘Did you see the farm cart?’
‘See it?’ cried Fanny. ‘It nearly killed Aunt Jane and me!’
‘That was Mr Terry,’ said Lizzie. ‘Anna gave him his marching orders. She was terribly upset. He insisted on leaving at once, and the cart was the only thing to hand, seeing as how the carriage had mysteriously disappeared. Why did you and Aunt Jane take so long at the shops?’ she asked with interest. ‘Did something happen?’