by Mike Ashley
‘I did not know it was yours,’ said the man meekly. ‘Loose me, boy. I’ll not attempt to run away.’
‘Halloa! here! what’s to do?’ roared a big fellow, swinging himself over the gate. ‘Any tramp been trespassing? Anybody wanting to be took up? I’m the parish constable.’
If he had said he was the parish engine, ready to let loose buckets of water on the offender, he could not have been more welcome. The Squire’s face was rosy with satisfaction.
‘Have you your handcuffs with you, my man?’
‘I’ve not got them, sir, but I fancy I’m big enough and strong enough to take him without ’em. Something to spare, too.’
‘There’s nothing like handcuffs for safety,’ said the Squire rather damped, for he believed in them as one of the country’s institutions. ‘Oh, you villain! Perhaps you can tie him with cords?’
The thief floundered out of the ditch and stood upon his feet. He did not look an ungentlemanly thief now you came to see and hear him, and his face, though scared, might have been thought an honest one. He picked up his hat and glasses and held them in his hand while he spoke in tones of earnest remonstrance.
‘Surely, sir, you would not have me taken up for this slight offence! I did not know I was doing wrong, and I doubt if the law would condemn me. I thought it was public property!’
‘Public property!’ cried the Squire, turning red at the words. ‘Of all the impudent brazen-faced rascals that are cheating the gallows, you must be the worst. My bank notes, public property!’
‘Your what, sir?’
‘My bank notes, you villain. How dare you repeat your insolent questions?’
‘But I don’t know anything about your bank notes, sir,’ said the man meekly. ‘I do not know what you mean.’
They stood facing each other, a sight for a picture: the Squire with his hands under his coat, dancing a little in rage, his face crimson; the other quite still, holding his hat and gold spectacles and looking at him in wonder.
‘You don’t know what I mean! When you confessed with your last breath that you had robbed me of my pocket-book!’
‘I confessed – I have not sought to conceal – that I have robbed the ground of this rare fern,’ said the man, handling carefully the green stuff in the black bag. ‘I have not robbed you or anyone of anything else.’
The tone, simple, quiet, self-contained, threw the Squire in amazement. He stood staring.
‘Are you a fool?’ he asked. ‘What do you suppose I have to do with your rubbishing ferns?’
‘Nay, I supposed you owned them – that is, owned the land. You led me to believe so, in saying I had robbed you.’
‘What I’ve lost is a pocket-book with ten five-pound bank notes in it. I lost it in the train. It must have been taken as we came through the tunnel, and you sat next but one to me,’ reiterated the Squire.
The man put on his hat and glasses. ‘I am a geologist and botanist, sir. I came here after this plant today – having seen it yesterday, but then I had not my tools with me. I don’t know anything about the pocket-book and bank notes.’
So that was another mistake, for the botanist turned out of his pockets a heap of letters directed to him and a big book he had been reading in the train, a treatise on botany, to prove who he was. And, as if to leave no loophole for doubt, one stepped up who knew him and assured the Squire there was not a more learned man in his line, no, nor one more respected in the three kingdoms. The Squire shook him by the hand in apologizing and told him we had some valuable ferns near Dyke Manor if he would come and see them.
Like Patience on a monument, when we got back there sat the lady, waiting to see the prisoner brought in. Her face would have made a picture, too, when she heard the upshot and saw the hot Squire and the gold spectacles walking side by side in friendly talk.
‘I think still he must have got it,’ she said sharply.
‘No, madam,’ answered the Squire. ‘Whoever may have taken it, it was not he.’
‘Then there’s only one man, and that is he whom you have let go on in the train,’ she returned decisively. ‘I thought his fidgety movements were not put on for nothing. He had secured the pocket-book somewhere and then made a show of offering to be searched. Ah, ha!’
And the Squire veered around again at this suggestion and began to suspect he had been doubly cheated. First, out of his money; next, out of his suspicions. One only thing in the whole bother seemed clear, and that was that the notes and case had gone for good. As, in point of fact, they had.
We were on the Chain Pier at Brighton, Tod and I. It was about eight or nine months after. I had put my arms on the rails at the end, looking at a pleasure party sailing by. Tod, next to me, was bewailing his ill-fortune in not possessing a yacht and opportunities of cruising in it.
‘I tell you, no, I don’t want to be made seasick.’
The words came from someone behind us. It seemed almost as though they were spoken in reference to Tod’s wish for a yacht. But it was not that that made me turn around sharply; it was the sound of the voice, for I thought I recognized it.
Yes. There she was. The lady who had been with us in the carriage that day. The dog was not with her now, but her hair was more amazing than ever. She did not see me. As I turned, she turned and began to walk slowly back, arm in arm with a gentleman. And to see him – that is, to see them together – made me open my eyes. For it was the lord who had travelled with us.
‘Look, Tod!’ I said, and told him in a word who they were.
‘What the deuce do they know of each other?’ cried Tod with a frown, for he felt angry every time the thing was referred to. Not for the loss of the money but for what he called the stupidity of us all; saying always had he been there he should have detected the thief at once.
I sauntered after them. Why I wanted to learn which of the lords he was, I can’t tell, for lords are numerous enough, but I had had a curiosity upon the point ever since. They encountered some people and were standing to speak to them, three ladies and a fellow in a black glazed hat with a piece of green ribbon around it.
‘I was trying to induce my wife to take a sail,’ the lord was saying, ‘but she won’t. She is not a very good sailor unless the sea has its best behaviour on.’
‘Will you go tomorrow, Mrs Mowbray?’ asked the man in the glazed hat, who spoke and looked like a gentleman. ‘I will promise you perfect calmness. I am weather-wise and can assure you this little wind will have gone down before night, leaving us without a breath of air.’
‘I will go on condition that your assurance proves correct.’
‘All right. You, of course, will come, Mowbray?’
The lord nodded. ‘Very happy.’
‘When do you leave Brighton, Mr Mowbray?’ asked one of the ladies.
‘I don’t know exactly. Not for some days.’
‘A muff as usual, Johnny,’ whispered Tod. ‘That man is no lord. He is a Mr Mowbray.’
‘But, Tod, he is the lord. It is the one who travelled with us; there’s no mistake about that. Lords can’t put off their titles as parsons can. Do you suppose his servant would have called him “my lord” if he had not been one?’
‘At least there is no mistake that these people are calling him Mr Mowbray now.’
That was true. It was equally true that they were calling her Mrs Mowbray. My ears had been as quick as Tod’s, and I don’t deny I was puzzled. They turned to come up the pier again with the people, and the lady saw me standing there with Tod. Saw me looking at her, too, and I think she did not relish it, for she took a step backwards as one startled and then stared me full in the face as if asking who I might be. I lifted my hat.
There was no response. In another moment she and her husband were walking quickly down the pier together, and the other party went on to the end quietly. A man in a tweed suit and brown hat drawn low over his eyes was standing with his arms folded looking after the two with a queer smile upon his face. Tod marked it and spoke.
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br /> ‘Do you happen to know that gentleman?’
‘Yes, I do,’ was the answer.
‘Is he a peer?’
‘On occasion.’
‘On occasion!’ repeated Tod. ‘I have a reason for asking,’ he added. ‘Do not think me impertinent.’
‘Been swindled out of anything?’ asked the man coolly.
‘My father was some months ago. He lost a pocket-book with fifty pounds in it in a railway carriage. Those people were both in it but not then acquainted with each other.’
‘Oh, weren’t they!’ said the man.
‘No, they were not,’ I put in, ‘for I was there. He was a lord then.’
‘Ah,’ said the man, ‘and had a servant in livery no doubt, who came up my-lording him unnecessarily every other minute. He is a member of the swell-mob, one of the cleverest of the gentleman fraternity, and the one who acts as servant is another of them.’
‘And the lady?’ I asked.
‘She is a third. They have been working in concert for two or three years now and will give us trouble yet before their career is stopped. But for being singularly clever, we should have had them long ago. And so they did not know each other in the train! I dare say not!’
The man spoke with quiet authority. He was a detective come down from London to Brighton that morning, whether for a private trip or on business he did not say. I related to him what had passed in the train.
‘Ay,’ said he after listening. ‘They contrived to put the lamp out before starting. The lady took the pocket-book during the commotion she caused the dog to make, and the lord received it from her hand when he gave her back the dog. Cleverly done! He had it about him, young sir, when he got out at the next station. She waited to be searched and to throw the scent off. Very ingenious, but they’ll be a little too much so some fine day.’
‘Can’t you take them up?’ demanded Tod.
‘No.’
‘I will accuse them of it,’ he haughtily said. ‘If I meet them again on this pier –’
‘Which you won’t do today,’ interrupted the man.
‘I heard them say they were not going for some days.’
‘Ah, but they have seen you now. And I think – I’m not quite sure – that he saw me. They’ll be off by the next train.’
‘Who are they?’ asked Tod, pointing to the end of the pier.
‘Unsuspecting people whose acquaintance they have casually made here. Yes, an hour or two will see Brighton quit of the pair.’
And it was so. A train was starting within an hour, and Tod and I galloped to the station. There they were, in a first-class carriage, not apparently knowing each other, I verily believe, for he sat at one door and she at the other, passengers dividing them.
‘Lambs between two wolves,’ remarked Tod. ‘I have a great mind to warn the people of the sort of company they are in. Would it be actionable, Johnny?’
The train moved off as he was speaking. And may I never write another word if I did not catch sight of the manservant and his cockade in the next carriage behind them!
Harriet E. Prescott
MR FURBUSH
This is the earliest story in the book, first published in the April 1865 edition of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, yet, apart from a few quaint old spellings, such as ‘clew’ rather than ‘clue’, the story, and certainly the way the crime is solved, seems remarkably modern. Harriet Elizabeth Prescott (1835–1921), usually known as Hallie to her friends – and who added Spofford to her name after her marriage in 1865 – had a writing career lasting over sixty years. She was one of those many talented New England writers, like Mary E. Wilkins, who is also in this volume, though early in her career, until supported by her husband, she found herself having to write anything and everything in order to be able to support her ailing parents. That makes the ingenuity of this story, one of the last she wrote before her marriage, all the more remarkable.
Prescott returned to the character of Detective Furbush in one other story, ‘In the Maguerriwock’ (Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, August 1868) but did not otherwise continue the character. That story, together with an earlier detective story, ‘In a Cellar’, were resurrected by Alfred Bendixen in The Amber Gods and Other Stories (1989) but the original ‘Mr Furbush’ was not included in any of her collections and has been all but forgotten.
Mr Furbush
IT IS NOT very long since the community was startled by the report of an extraordinary murder that occurred at one of our fashionable hotels, under peculiar circumstances and in broad daylight, and without affording, as it appeared, the slightest clew to motive or murderer. Public curiosity, finding that nothing was likely to satisfy it, gradually dropped the matter, and as gradually it died out of the newspapers.
The person who was thus abruptly ushered from this world into the unknown region of the next was a young girl, some twenty summers old and possessed of great personal charms. She was the heiress to a small fortune, a mere annuity, but had resided since her childhood with her guardian, the wealthy and generous Mr Denbigh, who had always surrounded her with every luxury and elegance. When Mr Denbigh married he and his wife took their ward with them on the foreign tour they made, and the three had but just returned to America, residing temporarily at a hotel until their uptown mansion should be suitably prepared, when the sudden and terrible death of Miss Agatha More threw such a gloom over all their plans that the preparations were for a time abandoned, and Mr Denbigh’s energies were called upon to assist his wife in rallying from the low nervous fever into which she had been thrown and prostrated by this tragedy, when, after returning with her husband from a drive, they had discovered it in all its horror.
Mr Denbigh was himself greatly afflicted by the death of his ward and the fearful manner of it – she had been strangled in her own handkerchief – for besides the debt of affection he owed her as a child of a dear dead friend, long years of familiarity, her extreme loveliness and the winning gentleness of her sweet and timid ways had given her a deep and warm place in his heart. Of late she had been a little out of health, not recovering rapidly from the great exhaustion and weakness of severe seasickness, and he had been unremitting in his endeavours to promote her comfort and happiness. While in making ready their new abode both he and his wife had paid such heed to the tastes and needs of Agatha, meaning, as Mr Denbigh said, that it should be felt by her to be as much her own home as theirs, without any sense of obligation, that now the place without her seemed too much a desert ever to enter upon it again.
Mrs Denbigh, moreover, must have felt sorely, it would seem, the loss of the gentle daily companion of three years; but even more than on her own account she appeared to resent the deed for the sake of her husband, to whom she was so passionately devoted, and no sooner was she able to lift her head from its pillow once more than she interested herself with revengeful vigour in the proceedings that had been undertaken. Mr Denbigh, personally, cared little to discover the perpetrator of the atrocious crime – he felt that no human justice of cord or gibbet could restore Agatha – but his wife, burdened with their bereavement and with her own weight of indignation, would not rest with the mystery unravelled. In the deepest mourning, discarding almost every ornament, impressing so upon them more deeply the emergencies of the case and commanding their sympathies, she was closeted every morning with the detectives of the police, sparing her husband as much of the painful duty as possible, as she would have walked over burning plough shares at a word from him.
It was at first supposed that the deed had been done for plunder, as various valuable jewels, gifts of the Denbighs and heirlooms from Miss More’s own mother, were discovered to be missing, but they afforded in themselves insufficient reason and were subsequently discovered in a package picked up by one of the police themselves at a crossing of a crowded thoroughfare where they had apparently been purposely dropped. Neither did Miss More’s lovers afford any clew to the miscreant. She had had several suitors and attendants, none of whom had
Mr Denbigh favoured; and though Mrs Denbigh had urged Agatha to regard young Elliot with kindness, Mr Denbigh frowned, Agatha remained indifferent, and young Elliot – having taunted Mr Denbigh with the assurance that since he countenanced none of Miss More’s lovers it could be but from sinister intentions on his part – had withdrawn, vowing vengeance and declaring that, since he could not have her, nobody else should. Still, that was hardly murder. And the poor fellow was found, besides, to be in such a heartbroken state as to disarm suspicion. The only other accusation that could take shape and breath might have been directed toward Agatha’s maid, but as she was able to prove that she was down in the laundry and had remained there uninterruptedly from nine until one, while the occurrence had taken place between the hours of eleven and twelve in the morning, and as she had evidently nothing to gain and much to lose by it, that idea was also dismissed, though both young Elliot and the servant-maid remained under surveillance. Finally, in despair, the Denbighs abandoned the investigation and departed to spend the winter in Madeira, returning in the spring to their city abode, whose adornment had been left to the tender mercies of the upholsterers, since they had themselves so completely lost interest in it.
Here the general course of the matter rested. One officer alone, Detective Furbush – a man of genteel proclivities, fond of fancy parties and the haut ton, curious in fine women and aristocratic defaulters and peculators – who had not at first been detailed upon the case but had been interested in the reports of it, having become at last much in earnest about it pursued it still, incidentally, on his own account and in a kind of amateur way. It seemed to him a fatal fascination, a predestination of events that kept his steps nearly always about the purlieus of the Margrand House.
One day that Detective Furbush had happened, in a spare hour, to take his little daughter into a photograph gallery, he lounged about a window while the child was undergoing the awful operation. Along the opposite side of the street from this window ran one end of the Margrand House with its countless windows and projections. The Margrand House fronted on a square, one end of it running down this street and always receiving, on its stone facings and adornments, the whole sheet of the noon sun. A thought suddenly occurred to Mr Furbush. So as soon as the operator was at leisure he attacked him with the enquiry if there were any picture of that fine building, the Margrand House, to which the operator replied affirmatively, and showed him one taken from the square. ‘However,’ said the operator, ‘though it doesn’t take in so much and was only what this one window could do for itself, I call this a prettier picture,’ and he produced something which, having been taken at such a short focal distance, resembled the photographs of the rich architecture of some Venetian façade. ‘It was the morning of the Great Walden Celebration,’ continued the operator.