by Joan Aiken
Then it became known that she had made some discovery which seemed to afford her a kind of angry satisfaction; she was closeted first with Mrs Fitzroy, who forthwith summoned Colonel Campbell. He, unluckily for himself, had just returned from his club.
“Look, sir, what Fleury has discovered in that child’s box!” Mrs Fitzroy announced, waving a pink ostrich plume in his face. “Mine! which had been missing since last Thursday sennight!”
“What child’s box? I do not perfectly comprehend you, ma’am,” replied the Colonel, impatiently, but with an anxious frown.
“Why, that Susan — the maid, my granddaughter’s maid. Hired, sir, by you! This was found in her box! And if she has this, who knows what else she may have purloined? I demand that constables be fetched immediately, and a search of her belongings be made!”
“Seems that it has been, already, ma’am,” rejoined the Colonel, not at all happy at this disruption in his household, though relieved that the plume had been located in the maid’s box and not (as for one hideous moment he had apprehended) among the possessions of his daughter or her friend.
The constables were duly summoned, and poor Sukey was interrogated. Sobbing and trembling, she denied all knowledge of how the pink plume came to be in her box: “She had never seen nor touched it, no, that she hadn’t, nor would never dream of doing such a thing. She loved her young ladies, was very happy with them, had everything her heart could wish, why would she want to make off with something she could never use?”
But her box was diligently searched by the officers, and other vanished articles were found there — scissors, a pair of stockings, a packet of pins.
“I never put them there!” wept Sukey. “Some wicked person done it out of spite, to lay blame on me! I never prigged nothing from no one.”
The evidence, however, was too strong against her, and the officers prepared to take her away, assuring Colonel Campbell that further questioning of the culprit, at the constabulary office, would most likely discover the whereabouts of the bracelet.
Jane and Rachel had not, at the outset, been informed of these happenings, but the presence of constables in the house, their loud footsteps and voices, could not be concealed, and the girls were in the front hall, aghast and pitying, as tiny Sukey was brought down quaking between two burly officials.
“I am sure, I am perfectly sure she did not do it!” whispered Jane in horror, and Rachel stammered, “Oh, S-Sukey, p-poor Sukey! I d-do not, no I c-cannot believe she would do such a thing —”
When Sukey saw the girls in the hallway she pulled herself out of the officers’ grasp, exclaiming in a choked voice, “I must bid goodbye to my young ladies —” ran to them and hurriedly kissed their hands, repeating over and over “I never done it! You’ll believe me, won’t you, Miss Jane, Miss Rachel —?” then without waiting for the constables to regain their grasp of her, she fled like a mouse through the open door, down the steps, and out into the square.
With angry shouts the two men pursued her, but, light and fleet of foot, she eluded them and raced away down Duke Street.
“I hope — oh, I do hope she gets away from them —” gasped Rachel.
“But, poor Sukey, what will become of her? She has lost her place and her good name!” Jane was horribly troubled. “With us, Sukey was always so very honest. On any little commission we gave her, she always rendered such strict account, down to the last farthing. No, I cannot believe she took those things.”
“Wretched child, I fear she has dished herself by this flight,” muttered the Colonel. “It does seem an admission of guilt. If she had been prepared to stand her trial, she might have been proved innocent —”
“Ridiculous!” cried Mrs Fitzroy. “It is perfectly evident the girl was guilty! I could have told you so — I knew it from the very start!”
Rachel and Jane, terribly distressed by this occurrence, could think of nothing else. They sat in the schoolroom, shivering and crying, quite regardless of Miss Winstable, whose view of the matter ran precisely counter to their own.
“Of course the girl had taken the bracelet. And it is to be hoped the constables rapidly apprehend her. No doubt they will then discover the whereabouts of your grandmother’s valuable bracelet, at some thieves’ kitchen.”
This was not to be, however. Later that evening Colonel Campbell came to the room with a grave face to tell the girls that Sukey, being pursued by the constables through the traffic of Oxford Street, had dashed recklessly in front of a coach-and-six, gone under the hoofs of the horses, and had been picked up lifeless.
“Oh, n-no!” whispered Rachel. “Oh, P-Papa!”
Jane, without a word, stood up and left the schoolroom to make her way to her own chamber.
Unthinking, blind with tears and numb with misery, she, without considering, opened the door, not of her own room, but of the one now occupied by Fleury.
Made aware of her mistake immediately by the different arrangement of the furniture, she was retreating when a gleam on the white coverlet of the bed caught her eye, and with a cold shock of horror she recognised Mrs Fitzroy’s opal-and-pearl bracelet.
“So Fleury took it!” breathed Jane. — She was about to dart forward and pick up the trinket when it struck her that if she were to carry it to the Colonel, there would be only her unsupported word to assert that that was where she had found it. Let the Colonel see for himself —!
She flew down the stairs and whispered to him urgently: “Colonel Campbell! Please to come with me for a moment! It is of the greatest importance and urgency or I would not ask you! Do, please, come quickly!”
“What is it, child?” Puzzled, he allowed her to lead him to the door of the maid’s room.
“Now go in, sir, and look before you. Look on the bed!”
He went in, but there was a shriek of wrath from within. Fleury had returned, and was demanding by what right her privacy was violated. “Not so much even as a knock! Most disgraceful!”
“Look on the bed, sir!” said Jane.
But of course there was nothing on the bed.
“I saw it — Mrs Fitzroy’s bracelet. It was here but now!” Jane kept reiterating.
“Lies! The child is telling monstrous, scandalous lies!” screamed Fleury. “Just because her wicked little fille de chambre was found guilty — now she must accuse me — who nevaire took nossing!”
“I am afraid I must ask for this room to be searched, nonetheless,” said the Colonel calmly. “An accusation has been made — we cannot have the whole house in an uproar until this business has been thoroughly investigated.”
The constables were fetched back; but they found nothing. Jane repeated, over and over, her absolute conviction that she had seen the bracelet on the bed.
“You were wholly mistaken! Of course you were mistaken!” angrily declared Mrs Fitzroy.
But the Colonel, to Mrs Fitzroy’s outrage, declared his entire belief in Jane’s story. “She is a careful, observant child. I have never known her anything but utterly truthful; and why should she lie? I am sorry, ma’am, but, in the circumstances, I cannot tolerate the maid’s continued presence in this house. She is under considerable suspicion, which I, for one, believe to be justified. And I also believe that, by planting false evidence, she caused that unfortunate girl’s death. — She must go, and without delay.”
Mrs Fitzroy at first furiously declared that, where her maid was not welcome, she herself could not possibly remain. At this hearts throughout the whole house beat high in hope. But unfortunately Mrs Fitzroy presently recollected that nowhere else would she be able to live board and rent-free, within reach of her friends, and in a tolerably fashionable quarter of London. Her other daughter, Lady Selsea, was married to a man with whom Mrs Fitzroy was not on speaking terms; no hospitality could be hoped for in that quarter. With an exceedingly ill grace she decided to accept the situation. Fleury left the house, in a cloud of wrath and contumely. Another maid was hired, and two lasting results of the affair were a deep an
d continuing sense of grief and injustice in the hearts of Jane and Rachel, and a greatly strengthened dislike of Jane Fairfax in the heart of Mrs Fitzroy, who, from that time on, lost no opportunity of injuring Jane if she could do so inconspicuously.
Shortly after this, thinking it best for all the parties to separate, Colonel Campbell took his wife and children off to Weymouth, leaving Mrs Fitzroy in undisputed possession of the house.
Rachel was in high hopes of finding the Dixon family at Weymouth. “They often do go there, and Matt wrote saying they planned to do so this year. I am longing for you to meet them, Jenny —” But, alas, this was not to be. Matt wrote again, with news that his brother Sam had been laid low by a rheumatic fever. It was not thought advisable to travel.
In the autumn, when the Campbell family returned from Weymouth to London, there was an unexpected postscript to the bracelet affair.
A great-aunt of Colonel Campbell’s had died in August, leaving her nephew a certain amount of property including some old-fashioned jewellery which Mrs Campbell, who never wore personal adornments herself, decided to dispose of.
“The money may as well add to Rachel’s dowry; in any case, the things are hideous. You would not want them, would you, Rachel?”
“Not in the very least, Mamma,” said Rachel, to whom the whole topic of jewellery just then was distasteful. In any case she would far rather have had drawing lessons.
“In any case,” continued Mrs Campbell absently, “I understand that Mamma plans to leave you her jewels.”
Rachel did not trouble to say how much she disliked this prospect, but dutifully accompanied her mother to Gray’s, in Sackville Street, on an errand which both regarded as somewhat trivial and time-wasting.
While Mrs Campbell was displaying the jewels and discussing their value with one of the shopmen, Rachel wandered in boredom to the other end of the counter, and came back in a moment, very excited, to say breathlessly, “M-Mamma, d-do l-look here! D-do but look! There — I am sure — is G-Grandmamma’s bracelet!”
There, indeed, it was: neither of them could mistake the bracelet, which they had seen a hundred times before. — Asked who had brought it in for sale, the shopman could not in the least recall. There were so many assistants in the place, it might have been received by any of them. — But, in fact, when all were questioned, one elderly man did chance to recall that the article had been brought in and sold to him by a female who looked and spoke very quick and sharp-like, as if she had been a furriner; a Frenchy, mayhap.
“Would she have looked like this?” inquired Rachel, and drew a rapid sketch on the little ivory tablets that she carried always with her in her reticule.
“Ay, that’s her — that’s the very moral of her, missie!” nodded the man. “It be wonderful the way you caught her likeness!”
A police warrant was issued for the arrest of Fleury, but she was never apprehended. Colonel Campbell, with much dislike for the transaction, bought back the bracelet and restored it to Mrs Fitzroy, who received it with no very effusive expressions of thanks. “I shall always think of it as having been the occasion of my losing the best, most faithful maid I ever had,” she declared.
Colonel Campbell, whose dislike of his mother-in-law had grown apace since she had become a member of his household, kept in his own breast the suspicion that Mrs Fitzroy herself had employed the maid to sell her trinket and then cast the blame on the unfortunate Sukey.
The repercussions of this affair were a very long time in dying away.
Chapter 6
Jane’s visits to Highbury necessarily became shorter and less frequent after the arrival of Mrs Fitzroy in Manchester Square. Buttressed by the company of her friend, Rachel was less vulnerable to her grandmother’s interference, and she continually begged Jane not to desert her. It had always been the Colonel’s plan that the major part of Jane’s time should be spent in his household, “for,” as he declared, “though they meant as well as might be, the poor dear Bates ladies had nothing at all to contribute towards the child’s welfare or education; moreover the situation at Highbury was far from beneficial, mewed up without air in those confined quarters.”
He had begun to observe, furthermore, that Jane’s returns from Highbury to London were accompanied, very often, by an unsettled mental state, a mixture of homesickness with the sad realization that Highbury was no longer her true home. — The Colonel’s insight here, as he grew steadily fonder of Jane with the passing of time, came far closer to the truth than any of his perceptions of his own daughter. Having Jane’s welfare truly at heart, he contrived that her visits to her birthplace should be reduced to a minimum. A few days passed with them at Christmas and at Easter gave Jane the only chance to see her aunt and grandmother; often during these brief interludes she got no glimpse at all of other Highbury acquaintance; though she always made the strongest endeavour to see and talk with Mr Knightley, and felt bitterly deprived on the occasions when this was not achieved.
The wedding of Isabella Woodhouse to Mr John Knightley afforded one such meeting and also a rare encounter with Emma, the sole bridesmaid, now a self-possessed young lady of fifteen in snowy book-muslin over a white silk underdress, and her dead mother’s pearls twined in her light-brown hair. Emma greeted Jane very graciously: “Jane Fairfax, of course she remembered her; very well indeed!” And Emma turned, smiling, to Mr Knightley, who chanced to be nearby: “Such playmates as we used to be! What a long time it seems now since those games of hopscotch and I-spy, when we told each other all our secrets, and you were obliged to wear my old outworn dresses. How you must have disliked it!” — inspecting the other girl at the same time with unaffected, unembarrassed curiosity. Not true, thought Jane. We never played hopscotch — while replying, meanwhile, in similarly courteous and friendly terms.
Emma’s air, Jane was bound to admit, Emma’s manner to every guest at the wedding was beyond praise, just as cordial and graceful as it could be; she had the same smiling, friendly, unstudied address, whether to the Bates ladies, in their mended shawls, to Mrs Perry the apothecary’s wife, or to old John Abdy, bobbing, cap in hand, at the churchyard gate. Emma’s public manner was irreproachable, could not be faulted; but just the same, thought Jane, it is like a clever piece of acting; why should that be so? It is a lesson that she has learned just as well as she can, like playing a sonata by Piccini on the piano; somehow I am aware that her heart is not behind it; under those smiling polite phrases I am certain she criticizes us all the time, and feels superior. Oh, how I wish — and here Jane astonished herself with the vehemence of her own feelings — how I wish that once, just once in my life, I could see Emma Woodhouse receive a real set-down!
The two girls conversed again at the wedding breakfast. Emma inquired with easy interest about life in London, and Jane, this time sensitively mindful that Emma still had never set foot outside Highbury, confined her replies to a few guarded descriptions of Mudie’s library, public breakfasts, scientific lectures, and boating parties to Kew. — Emma did not seem impressed. She has, Jane thought, the gift of making the things she herself does appear interesting and somehow superior, even if they be faults: “Oh, I never do that — I never read that sort of book — I have a strong dislike for such adornments —” at once reducing the objects in question to the kind of tawdry pleasures only favoured by persons of vulgar taste and low mental attainment. In a situation where any other person would have apologised or felt the need to defend her lack of knowledge or deficiency, Emma, by complete confidence, made hers into a virtue. Reluctantly, unwillingly, Jane found herself impressed; and, though she did not like Emma any the better, came away from this encounter marvelling at such an impervious self-satisfaction. “Where can it come from? Isabella has it not, nor Mr Woodhouse.” Idly, Jane wondered how Emma and Mrs Fitzroy would deal together, and concluded that they would probably like one another very well, much better than Mrs Fitzroy liked her grandchild, or her grandchild’s friend.
The property bequeathed to th
e Colonel by his great-aunt had included, besides a sum of money and the pieces of old-fashioned jewellery, a modest estate in the West Indies which was, unfortunately, the subject of legal dispute; other parties, possible legatees, contested the bequest, and the plantation was, furthermore, encumbered with debt. After several years, and copious correspondence on the matter, the Colonel’s lawyers advised that by far the best way for him to submit his claim and reach a practical decision would, without question, be for him to visit the spot himself and settle matters in person. Following much careful deliberation he decided, not only to go, but to take his family with him.
“You and the girls may as well come along, Cecelia. You know that you will be glad to acquire more evidence relative to the slave trade, and your London committees can, I daresay, manage without you for a year or so. Rachel, doubtless, will be pleased to revisit old haunts, and the trip may help to dispel some of the poor girl’s continuing awkwardnesses; travel will open Jane’s eyes to the world —” thus the Colonel glossed over the fact that he was really fond of Jane and looked forward to showing her foreign scenes — “the warm climate, moreover, will be advantageous for her bronchial troubles.”
And, best of all, the Colonel thought but did not say, we shall leave your mother in England. For relations between Mrs Fitzroy and the family were still far from happy; and Mrs Fitzroy had not the slightest intention of quitting London on a visit to uncivilized foreign shores — Paris being one thing, but the Windward Isles, infested with snakes, scorpions, and Yellow Jack, quite another. She had announced her intention of remaining in Manchester Square. Her continued residence in the house would preclude a profitable rental of the property, which must be a disadvantage; even so, the Colonel considered the loss of income greatly outweighed by the happiness of losing his mother-in-law’s company. Indeed, he nourished an unspoken hope that by the time of their return the old lady might have been gathered to her fathers.