Jane and the Canterbury Tale

by Stephanie Barron

  “All in good time, my dear sir, all in good time.”

  As Sir Davie launched into a further account of his experience of the islands—his passion for the tropics—his sad love affair with a Creole girl of passable birth but little fortune—the unfeeling nature of his father’s overseer—a falling out with the fellow over the course of his apprenticeship—Sir Davie’s determination to take to the sea once more—his flight, by night, to a merchant ship weighing anchor with the tide in Freetown Harbour—the years of travel that succeeded: rounding the Cape; his first sight of Alta California; assays in the Arctic; his first glimpse of Macao—and at last, when he was three-and-twenty years old, and had been absent from England some seven years, the news, received two months after the fact by letter delivered by H.M.S. Laconia, of his father’s death, and his own accession to the baronetcy.

  “I made for home immediately, of course, by constant exchange of ships, arriving some seven weeks after the receipt of the letter and posting as swiftly as I could to Kildane. A few days sufficed to put me in possession of the facts of my existence; I claimed a comfortable fortune, a house of the first stare, and an easy footing among the Great. My father’s steward—now my own—displayed excellent management of Kildane’s affairs, but impressed upon me my duty to marry. I looked about the Marriage Mart once the Season was launched, and was so fortunate as to engage the affections of a reasonably-dowered and not ill-favoured female, the aforementioned Mary, with whom I lived barely a twelvemonth before she died in childbirth, and my son with her.”

  “I thought you said her name was Anne,” I objected, frowning slightly.

  “Anne? Mary? Elizabeth? They are all much of a muchness, are they not? But perhaps you are right. Undoubtedly my late wife’s name was Anne.”

  “You have my deepest sympathy,” Edward said, less drily than Sir Davie’s caprice should have urged; for he, too, had lost a wife in childbirth.

  But Sir Davie waved an airy hand. “I underwent a curious change as Anne’s dust was interred in the Kildane vault. I may almost describe it as a liberation, my dear sir. It was as tho’, having fulfilled all the duties expected of my caste, I might now throw off convention in favour of adventure. A week had not elapsed before I found myself in Southampton, searching out a likely East Indiaman, and had embarked once more on the roving life that exactly suited me. Kildane I left in the steward’s care, and for years the arrangement answered nobly. I might draw upon funds lodged at various locales—Malta, Halifax, Macao—with only infrequent halts in my travel at home. And so decades wore away in swift succession! The American colonies revolted; the French King lost his head; armies moved about the globe; Napoleon rose to conquer the world, and fell to ruin on the Cossacks’ steppes—and all the while I lived a sybarite’s life: collecting stories and memories, enemies and friends, adventure and near-mortal escapes! If I had but leisure and inclination, I might pen a memoir that should set the Fashionable World ablaze, with a rage for seafaring exploration!”

  “No doubt,” Edward said. “And if your present confinement in gaol cannot spur inclination, it shall at least provide opportunity. I will furnish pen and paper should you require it.”

  “You are very good, sir,” Mr. Burbage said, with a quirk of his lips, “and your patience defies belief. Sir Davie, if you might turn at last to your acquaintance with Mr. Curzon Fiske—”

  “Ah! Poor Curzon!” Sir Davie mourned. He gave up strolling and settled down upon his wooden bed. “Was there ever a fellow possessed of more engaging address? Or fewer morals? Have you noted, during the course of your life, Mr. Knight, how often the two coincide?”

  “You met him, I collect, in Ceylon.”

  “There you would be out,” the seaman returned with unruffled calm. “We met in Bangalore, in the midst of a decidedly heated dispute between the local maharajah and the Honourable East India Company. Shots were exchanged. Heads rolled. A particular fort, as I recall, was beseiged. Fiske and I encountered one another when the subsequent looting had reached a fevered pitch, and both of us attempted to secure the same cask of jewels. Fiske sought the pistol thrust into his belt, but I was before him—and contrived to render him insensible with a blow to the head.”

  Edward, at this juncture, rubbed in desperation at his temples.

  “And the jewels?” I enquired.

  “Proved to be nothing more than a lady’s collection of valueless baubles,” Sir Davie concluded sadly. “At which discovery, I tossed them over my shoulder for the next benighted fool to covet, and did my best to drag Fiske out of the melee. It seemed the least I could do for a fellow Englishman. By the time he came to himself, we were beyond the fortress walls and I was able to apologise most civilly for the trouble I had caused. In return, he generously invited me to join him on an expedition to Ceylon—in which legitimate business he had been engaged by the Company, before the regrettable affair at Bangalore had diverted him.”

  “But I thought you said he saved your life,” my brother interjected, bewildered.

  “And so he did! —A good two years since, perhaps less, when malaria swept through the lowlands, he saw me carried, by mule-drawn pallet, into the more salubrious air of the tea plantations. These are found amidst the Ceylonese hills, you know, and at that altitude, the mortal humours are dispersed, and the fever’s hold gradually abates. There is a hill-station there, frequented by Portuguese monks, who are adept at treating the illness; they offer a sort of tonic, steeped from bark, that is most effective. Certainly, my dear Mr. Knight, I should have died in the lowlands but for Fiske’s intervention.”

  “Two years, perhaps less,” Edward mused. “Fiske’s people received word of his death not long after—by an epidemic fever in Ceylon. How came that error to be made?”

  The baronet shrugged. “Having some little knowledge of Fiske’s character—his secretive mind, his deft manipulation of apparent facts—I should imagine he wished to be dead. A very little effort might serve. The dropping of some papers, of a private nature, on a suitable-looking corpse—and the thing is done, my dear sir! Particularly in so harum-scarum a locale as Ceylon.”

  “But why?” Edward demanded, in some perplexity.

  “I gather that the name of Fiske had become a burden to him. Some little difficulty, over the borrowing of Company funds—lamentably impossible to repay …”

  “And yet, he saw fit to return to England?”

  “His plans were not then fixed, his chief object being to depart Ceylon without further detection—or pursuit. As he had so kindly deferred his flight to see me carried into the Highlands, I felt it incumbent upon me to demonstrate an equal measure of civility—and begged to accompany him when he should eventually quit the place. A month later, when I was fully recovered, we made by sea for Goa, a Portuguese canton on the western coast of the Subcontinent. The monks very kindly pressed upon us letters of introduction and safe-passage. Ah! The ladies of Goa! Such sublimity of eye, such softness of skin! And such an art in their fingers! —Begging your pardon, Miss Austen.”

  “Not at all,” I said politely.

  “None of this gets us any nearer Chilham Castle,” Edward observed, with a jaundiced eye for Mr. Burbage.

  “Sir Davie,” the solicitor prodded, “the hour is advancing. If you would be so good—”

  “Yes, yes,” the baronet said with an irritable flutter of his hand. “We spent a delightful interval in Goa, Fiske and I. It is an entrepot of trading, you know, and Fiske contrived to exchange a quantity of rubies he had collected somewhere—Burma, I believe, but the expedition was before my acquaintance with him—for a considerable sum of gold, which he had sewn into his coat. It was thus he carried his fortune back to England, and one presumes—to Canterbury itself.”

  “His coat,” Edward repeated, in a tone of stupefaction. “But—”

  “You did not consider of the lining of his coat?” Sir Davie enquired with an air of melancholy. “It is ever the same, among those who spend a lifetime without venturing bey
ond the shores of England; I daresay you expected his funds to sit in Hoare’s bank, and have buried the poor fellow with his fortune! Once word has got out—through no agency of mine, I need hardly state—you will be forced to post sentries around the grave in St. Mary’s churchyard. That is where poor Fiske was interred, I believe?”

  “It was.”

  “I should think you will have every fortune-seeker in three counties bent upon exhuming his remains,” the baronet said idly.

  “Good God!” Edward rose precipitately from his chair and began to turn about the small confines of the cell. “Impossible! The corpse was disrobed, and washed, before burial. Some one of the goodwives who performed the service must undoubtedly have felt the weight of such a fortune, in taking charge of the clothing!”

  “Perhaps the wench robbed him, then,” the baronet returned. “Who can say?”

  “Sir Davie.” My brother confronted the baronet. “I can no longer waste precious time in canvassing your reminiscence. Pray have the goodness to explain when you landed in England with Fiske, and how you came to have that pouch of tamarind seeds in your possession.”

  “The tamarind exerted a powerful fascination upon Fiske’s mind,” Sir Davie murmured dreamily. “He found the fruit to be only tolerable—there are any number of exotic plants native to the Indies that produce a more pleasing commestible—but the tamarind figured as a potent symbol in Fiske’s philosophy. The seed, you know, may lie dormant for years in the absence of rain; and yet, when once refreshed by the sweet elixir of water, will send out green shoots with a vigour and a will. Fiske saw in this the constant renewal of hope, the resurgence of life … and the enduring nature of love, regardless of neglect or the appearance of ruin.”

  “Adelaide,” I said. Of course.

  “Precisely. She seems to have been no mere Anne or Mary. Having fled Ceylon without detection—having secured a fortune in gold within his coat—having in the person of myself, a friend whose loyalty sprang from the obligations of gratitude, and who should never betray him—Fiske determined to take ship for England’s shores, and try what felicity the renewal of his attentions to his estranged wife might bring.”

  “When was this?” Edward demanded harshly.

  “Some three months ago. The voyage home from India is a tedious trial, even without the occasional alarums of shipboard struggle, our Indiaman being subject to the intermittent French salvo. More than once I was myself obliged to man the twelve-pounders in the bow, your merchant seamen being nothing so adept as the hearties of the Royal Navy. But, however, we were fortunate to arrive unscathed; and in London, parted company for an interval, so that Fiske might discover his wife’s present whereabouts, and send her a line to prepare her for the unexpected joy of his arrival.”

  “He wrote to Adelaide?” I broke in.

  “Should not you have done the same, after an interval of three years?”

  I exchanged a swift glance with my brother. Here was another instance of Adelaide’s prevarication; she had insisted she believed Fiske to be dead. She had prepared for her wedding, however, in the apparent knowledge that it was bigamous. My heart sank.

  “But are you certain such a letter reached her? How did Mr. Fiske divine where she was?” I pressed.

  “I am afraid that is owing to me,” Mr. Burbage supplied. “Mr. Fiske called upon me some five weeks ago, at the advice of Sir Davie, whose solicitor I have been for a period of years, tho’ heretofore our acquaintance has been largely conducted through a protracted correspondence, much interrupted by the vagaries of distance and occasional disaster. Having acquainted me with the particulars of his history, Mr. Fiske retired to a respectable inn not far from the Thames riverfront, while I endeavoured to learn what I could of his wife and her family, the Thanes. Mr. Fiske was able to supply me with the direction of their country seat, whence I repaired; and through circumspect enquiries in the villages surrounding Wold Hall, swiftly learnt that Mrs. Fiske, having been informed of her husband’s death and having undergone a lengthy period of mourning, was upon the point of a highly-advantageous marriage. I returned to London, and imparted these particulars to Mr. Fiske.”

  “And how did he receive the intelligence?” Edward asked.

  “With sorrow and chagrin. His exact words, I believe, were: Hoisted by my own petard, Burbage. He was fully alive to the irony that events which had once urged his apparent decease, had now told against him—in allowing his wife to proceed, in all innocence, with the next chapter of her life.”

  “But he did write to her,” I persisted. It seemed so material a point, I required to be convinced.

  “So I believe. It was in that letter he advised Mrs. Fiske that he could not walk abroad under his true name without fear of prosecution for debt—and that she should look for the delivery of a peculiar token, as notice of his coming.”

  “The tamarind seeds,” I said.

  “Precisely,” the solicitor replied.

  Oddly, it was the face of Julian Thane that rose most forcibly in my mind at that moment—the dark, elegant countenance animated with sudden violence, as he wheeled upon his sister in the drawing-room at Chilham Castle, the day after the discovery of the corpse. Fiske sends you his calling card, he had said, in outrage that she had not told him of the silken pouch’s delivery; and I guessed, sharply, that he, too, had known of Fiske’s survival; that Thane as well as his sister had read that ominous letter, and awaited the return of one thought to be dead. Had all the Thanes propelled Andrew MacCallister down the aisle of St. Mary’s in reckless disregard for the proprieties? And what had they hoped to gain, from such stubborn indifference to the truth?

  The truth need never have been known, a voice whispered within, if they had managed to kill Fiske sooner.

  I sank back against my hard wooden chair, a sensation of dread curling in my stomach. Despite every mark against them, I had learnt to like the Thanes too much.

  “Sir Davie,” my brother said in a weary voice—having revolved, no doubt, every dark thought that had spun in my own mind—“pray tell me, at last, how you came to be at Chilham Wednesday night?”

  “Nothing simpler,” the old seaman replied. “Burbage learnt of the wedding, and where and when it was to be. Fiske saw that his wife meant to brave it out—she never so much as acknowledged his letter, nor attempted to meet with him, tho’ he sent her his direction in London. He determined to give her a shock, therefore, on her wedding night. But he preferred not to test the memories of all those at Chilham, by descending in the flesh upon the wedding-party. He still owed too much to his creditors in England to be entirely comfortable with full exposure. And there was some other matter—an old scandal he refused to disclose—an affair of honour that prevented him from entering Kent with precisely that measure of easiness he should have desired. And so he went as a common labourer, and I as the seaman I have always been, and we agreed that I should deliver the tamarind seeds, being unknown to the lady. I was to wait for Mrs. Fiske’s reply; Fiske had enclosed a small slip of paper in the pouch, informing her she was to seek me in the back garden, on the lower terrace, once all the household was abed.”

  “I did not glimpse that paper,” I said regretfully. “When the pouch was opened, I saw only a spill of seeds.”

  “And if she had not appeared?” Edward demanded.

  Sir Davie shrugged. “Fiske should probably have given it up as a bad business—and commenced to blackmail the lady. She had certainly left herself open to such an action, however deplorable; and Fiske regarded her in no very amiable light. The desire to punish her for indifference was hard upon him. Yes, I believe I may say that Mrs. Fiske—Mrs. MacCallister, if you will—should not have enjoyed a moment’s peace from that night forward. Poor mite.”

  “And she met you in the back garden?” Edward’s tone was very hard; I guessed that considerable emotion roiled in his breast. Pity for Adelaide—or disgust for Fiske—I could not say.

  “She sent her maid. The unfortunate child was fright
ened out of her wits at the commission, and the sight of me did nothing to support her courage. She thrust at me a knot of paper, and ran as fast as her legs might carry her back to the safety of the Wildman keep.” The baronet smiled reminiscently, displaying very bad teeth indeed.

  “And what did you then?”

  Sir Davie’s gaze lifted to my brother’s. “I walked directly into the village of Chilham, where Fiske awaited me at the publick house; gave him the missive from his lady-love, and put myself to sleep on a straw pallet in the stables. One of the stable boys will no doubt remember me, for I disturbed him upon my entrance.”

  “Which was at what hour?”

  “Perhaps midnight. I cannot precisely say. The wedding revels were still in full force at the Castle when I left.”

  And so Adelaide had communicated with Sir Davie well before the interview between Captain MacCallister and his batman, and the subsequent departure of the two men with their roll of banknotes intended to buy Fiske’s silence. It was a wonder all three did not collide upon the path over the Downs in the dead of night, coming or going.

  “And when you awoke?” Edward prompted Sir Davie.

  “I proceeded to walk towards Canterbury, by easy stages, and was so fortunate as to be taken up by a grocer’s dray a few miles out of Chilham. Fiske and I had agreed to meet at the Little Inn, when once his business should be concluded—but he never came there. Only his corpse appeared, on the Friday, with the coroner behind it.”

  “So it did,” my brother said. He paused a moment, his eyes bent on the stone floor of the cell, his expression abstracted. “You have been exceedingly helpful, Sir Davie. I am in your debt.”

  “In that case, Your Honour,” Mr. Burbage said, “might my client be set at liberty?”

  Edward hesitated, and glanced at me. “I should like him to sign the statement you have recorded, and agree to give evidence, once Mrs. MacCallister is brought up before the Assizes.”

  “When are the Quarter Sessions to be held?” Sir Davie demanded, as tho’ much put out. “I am bound on an expedition to the Galápagos in January!”