At this, Lucy Armstrong could not stifle a sob; and drawing forth her handkerchief, buried her reddened cheeks in the sodden scrap of linen.

“Whatever can be the matter?” I cried. “Surely Mr. Crawford remains in excellent health?”

“Oh, Cholmondeley is as hearty as ever,” Miss Crawford replied, with sharp impatience. “It is not he “who was overturned on the road last night.”

“Overturned!” my mother cried, her hand going to her heart; that she thought of Cassandra, and feared Miss Crawford's intelligence, I instantly discerned, and moved to offer her the assistance of my arm. But she struggled free of me and crossed with unsteady gait to Miss Crawford's chair. “Pray do not keep us in suspense!”

“Overturned, indeed,” Miss Crawford said, with gruesome satisfaction; “and shot into the bargain.”

“I think, Aunt, that the proper term is ‘unhorsed.’”

Miss Armstrong interjected; but her faltering voice was heard only by myself.

“Shot!” my father ejaculated, removing his reading glasses.

“Through the heart.” Miss Crawford looked to the shaken Lucy, her aspect all disapprobation.

“Of whom can you be speaking, Miss Crawford?” I enquired, with something less than my usual graciousness— for the picture of misery that was Lucy Armstrong suggested that it could be but one person. Surely only some injury to Mr. Sidmouth could have occasioned so much distress.

“Oh, Miss Austen!” Lucy cried, her reddened eyes emerging from her kerchief. “It is so very horrible! Captain Fielding is dead — and I have nothing now to live for!”

Chapter 10

Mr. Cavendish Pays a Call

17 September 1804, cont.

WHEN LUCY ARMSTRONG HAD BEEN MADE CALM, AND SENT UPSTAIRS to rest upon my bed with a cool compress on her eyes, we were able to satisfy our outraged curiosity in plying Miss Crawford with questions. It required but a few to determine the nature of the evil so recently befallen Captain Fielding; and not above four sentences sufficed for her relation of what little was known of his untimely end.

The Darby household was only just preparing to depart for town and some shopping this morning, when the sudden arrival of a boy on a lathered horse claimed their attention. A man had been found upon the Charmouth road not far from the house, it seemed, quite dead; the marks of hoofprints round about showed him to have been thrown from his horse, and the animal fled. It but remained for Mr. Crawford to send the ladies on to Lyme in the coach, and for himself to accompany the boy to the scene of the disaster, and discover there the person of Captain Fielding, to the routing of the unfortunate Mr. Crawford's senses. The surgeon Mr. Carpenter, who served as Lyme's coroner, his assistant Dagliesh, and a local justice by the name of Mr. Dobbin, were immediately summoned; the mortal wound to Captain Fielding's heart duly noted; and the conclusion reached that highwaymen had precipitated the gentleman's misadventure, since his purse was observed to be missing.

“And so we returned from Lyme to such a tumult!” Miss Crawford exclaimed. “My poor niece received the news with a pathetic sensibility; her mother fainted dead away; and my brother is even now shut up in his library with a bottle of claret for company. And since we knew you to be likely to discover the Captain's death before very long,” she added, “we deemed it best to inform you as soon as possible, so that you might not hear it first upon the street, and receive a decided shock.”

A shock it should have been; and I would be cold-hearted, indeed, not to feel towards Miss Crawford some depth of gratitude for her present consideration, did I not believe her to find a despicable enjoyment in the spreading of her intelligence. I thrust such uncharitable thoughts from my mind, however, and saw in memory once more the weathered face of Captain Percival Fielding; his bright blue eyes, that could hold such warmth, or shine with steely command; his grace and forbearance in the face of a debilitating injury; his determination to prevail over Lyme's Gentlemen of the Night. Too young for such a miserable end, and taken too soon from the world; better, perhaps, that he had died while gallantly fighting the French off Malta, a few years past, than to have offered his life in defence of his purse. I felt all the tender emotion proper in the face of such a tragedy; but discovered, to my quiet relief, that I felt nothing more. My heart had been warmed by his gallantry, but my deeper emotions had remained relatively untouched.

“A highwayman!” my mother exclaimed, her colour draining away. “I had not an idea of it. That Lyme should be so beset with lawlessness is in every way incredible. I thank God that my dear Cassandra is safe in London. Do not you think, Mr. Austen, that we should quit this place as soon as ever may be?” She turned in some anxiety to my father, who for once appeared to give her fears some consideration.

Miss Crawford glanced around our cottage's small sitting-room with a calculating eye. “You are rather exposed to the street, my dear Mrs. Austen, in the placement of your windows. I should not feel safe, indeed, of an evening by the fire, without some stout barring of that door leading to the entry — perhaps you might have your young man thrust that heavy piece across the way?” She was intent upon a handsome, if somewhat scarred, secretary, that stood in a corner of the sitting-room, and which my father was in the habit of employing for his correspondence. “The windows might be effectively blocked, with the application of wood slatting.”

“Come, come, Miss Crawford,” my father interposed jovially. “If a highwayman were to prospect for riches in Lyme, he should hardly look to Wings cottage. We lack the sort of style to invite a concerted assault. I should imagine myself safer here,” he continued, with a wicked gleam in his eye, “than were I an intimate of Darby — so lonely as you find yourselves, out on the Charmouth road, which we must assume the highwaymen frequent.”

A highwayman indeed, I thought. I should rather believe it a smuggler's man, dispatched to foil the Captain's officiousness, and stealing his purse out of simple efficiency — for Fielding should assuredly have no use for it where his spirit had gone.

Or perhaps the monies were seized in an endeavour to effect the appearance of misadventure, the better to preserve the murderer's security.

At this last thought, which so smacked of calculation, I could not prevent Mr. Sidmouth's face from rising in my mind. With an involuntary sinking of the heart, I forced the image aside, the better to attend to Miss Crawford's intelligence.

“I fear, Mrs. Austen,” the good lady said, with admirable self-command in the face of my father's teasing, “that the dear Captain was too good for us. He was just such a noble character — such a feeling and excellent fellow — as is taken too soon from this earth. It is ever the way. Once a man is prized, he is lost.”

She leaned towards me with a rustle of black bombazine, the better to confide. “I feel for Lucy very much, you know, from detecting in her case something of my own poor history — though Mr. Filch had already proposed, and Captain Fielding had not. And my carriage was ordered some months at Mr. Filch's sudden death, and was to have been very fine indeed, with the intertwined devices of the houses of Filch and Crawford upon the doors.[61] But no matter.” Feeling, perhaps, that I showed too much indifference to the vanished chaise, she returned her attention to my mother, whose aspect was all sympathy. “I comfort myself with the certainty that the Captain's loss shall blight dear Lucy's life, and that she shall die of a broken heart; and then they will be sorry.”