Chapter 27

A Bride-Ship to India

Monday,

2 March 1807.

“WELL, CAPTAIN AUSTEN,” SAID MR. PERCIVAL Petherihg as he prepared to quit our lodgings this morning, “I am deeply obliged. It is something to have a murder resolved to satisfaction — and before the Assizes, too.”

“Captain Seagrave, I trust, shall be released?” Frank's face was stern; he offered no quarter to the magistrate. Pethering, in his opinion, had made a mess of things; and Pethering should feel the Captain's displeasure as forcibly as any midshipman too clumsy with a quadrant.

“Captain Seagrave is at liberty even now,” the magistrate replied, “and keeping vigil over his wife. Poor lady— there was little enough to be done, I suppose, in such a case.”

“But what could be attempted, was attempted,” Frank reminded him abruptly.

Mr. Hill had followed hard upon Frank's heels at the Dolphin last night, and while Frank held the struggling Lady Templeton, and called out for cordage and watchmen, the surgeon examined Louisa Seagrave. She was lost in a swoon — impossible to rouse — and he judged, from the appearance of her pupils, quite close to death. The pulse was fluttering and weak, her skin clammy to the touch.

“We have not much time,” said Hill grimly. “You must support her, Miss Austen, and walk her about the room, to stimulate the bodily humours.” And with that he went immediately to his rooms in St. Michael's Square, in search of ipecac and tartar emetic.

The maidservant, Nancy, was roused from sleep, and pressed into service in supporting her mistress; we attempted to force some coffee through Louisa's blue lips; we walked, and chafed her wrists, and waved burnt feathers under her nose — but to no avail. Rather than emerge from her swoon, she seemed determined to slide further into unconsciousness.

By the time Mr. Hill returned with his remedies a quarter-hour later, Louisa Seagrave was no more. And Lady Templeton stood accused of a second murder.

It was plain, once the letter her ladyship had written was read and understood, that she meant to implicate Tom Seagrave in the Chessyre plot. The confession ascribed to Louisa's pen — the confession Lady Templeton had sought to wrench from my hand, and cast into the fire once she knew herself discovered — named the Captain as the man responsible for garroting the Lieutenant. Lady Templeton had allowed for no possible reprieve, in her brutal scheme: she intended to see Tom Seagrave hang, and with him, all possibility of her discovery.

“It should be nothing, I suppose, for such a woman to learn Chessyre's name and direction,” my brother had said, as we perused die false confession by candlelight last evening. “Lady Templeton already possessed a good deal of influence; she should soon be the mistress of a considerable fortune; and she had only to promise Chessyre the world, to gain the sacrifice of his honour.”

“And everything else merely followed. Louisa, we may assume, would have told her of your express, and the events the Frenchman witnessed; Lady Templeton might have learned of them as early as Wednesday, when she appeared in Portsmouth. And so she determined to be rid of both men.”

“It is a puzzle,” my brother said pensively, “for you know Tom was told in Portsmouth that Louisa went out in Lady Templeton's carriage that Wednesday night. Do you think, Jane, that Lady Templeton carried her into Southampton, and made her speak to Chessyre?”

“—That she served as lure, you mean, for her aunt's murderous purpose?”

I had glanced down at Louisa Seagrave's body as I said this, and the sight must quell my tongue. Whatever Lady Templeton and Louisa had done between them was finished now. “I do not think, Frank, that we should ask that question.”

MR. PETHERING BOWED; MY BROTHER NODDED SLIGHTLY in return; and the magistrate was shown the door. I collapsed into a chair and stared at my brother.

“I believe, my dear, that we should fortify ourselves with a glass of wine.”

“But it is barely ten o'clock in the morning, Jane!”

“And the sun is not yet over the yardarm.” I smiled up at him. “Consider, Frank, that if you were in the Indies now — or rounding the Horn …”

“I should be already deep into a bottle. Ring for Jenny, my dear — we shall send round to the Dolphin for a bottle of Madeira, and drink to Seagrave's innocence. It is all the man has left to him, poor fellow.”

WEEKS PASSED, AND THE MOVE TO CASTLE SQUARE WAS accomplished. We are established in this comfortable house exactly a fortnight, and know the pleasure of watching spring roll in off the Solent from the broad expanse of our very own garden. Martha and I — for Mary is grown too large for gambolling, particularly on a stone parapet that may permit of only three or four walking abreast — will stroll for hours together along the high old walls of the fortified city, staring out at the faint green of the New Forest. My mother no longer keeps to her bed, but digs at the raspberry canes that are setting out in the fresh earth; she is constantly on the watch for the Marchioness, our neighbour, so that she might have the pleasure of the lady's faerie horses, and find consolation in a fallen woman installed so conveniently to hand. Now that Mr. Hill is gone off to Greenwich, as resident surgeon for the naval hospital there, consolation must be necessary.

Cassandra is expected at home next week, and I have purchased figured muslin for a new gown.

I have been so busy throughout March, indeed, that I have almost forgot the events that opened it — or I had succeeded, perhaps, in diverting my mind from so much that was troubling, and must remain forever unresolved. But the matter was brought forcibly to my attention today, with the arrival of the morning post.

One shilling, eight pence, was demanded of me, for the receipt of a packet in an altogether unfamiliar hand. I duly paid the charge — slit open the seal — and commenced to read with a smile at my lips.

“The man's become a spy,” said Frank shortly, after perusing this missive. “He's been despatched to inform upon the Americans. I shouldn't wonder that he will prove as wretched at the business as he did at avoiding the Emperor.”

I must forgive my brother the slight bitterness of that speech; Frank is only just made aware, by the very same post, of his latest appointment. He is not to have a fast frigate — those are very dear in the Navy at present— but is to command the St. Albans, on convoy duty to the East Indies. In this, I suspect, we see the malice of Sir Francis Farnham, who cannot excuse my brother for Seagrave's acquittal.