“And Mr. Hinton? Did he also think well of your husband?”

“Mr. Hinton be blowed!” She buried her face in her hands and sobbed pitifully. “Oh, God, Shafto, me lad — I should’ve known when you did not come back! I should have looked for you myself!”

“You could have done no good, had you roused the entire country,” I told her gently, and placed my hand on her shoulders. “A thousand men in search of your husband could not have saved him. If he was killed by the man he went to meet at midnight on Saturday, he found his end before you even understood he was missing. And no one but a tenant of this house could have discovered the body.”

She lifted her visage, blue eyes all but drowned. “A proper wife would’ve known he was gone.”

“Indeed, you take too much upon yourself.” I grasped the lanthorn in one hand and put the other carefully on the young woman’s shoulder, drawing her towards the stairs. “Your duty now is to preserve your children from exposure to the malice of your neighbours, and to fix in their memories a picture of their father in life, such as shall comfort and support them the rest of their days. Have you both boys and girls?”

And in speaking of her children, Jemima French discovered some fleeting comfort; enough to carry her into my kitchen, and sustain her for the length of time required to drink my tea.

Excerpt from the diaries of Lord Harold Trowbridge, dated 26 February 1785, on board the Indiaman Punjab, bound for Portsmouth out of Bombay.

... I walked about the quarterdeck this morning at Captain Dundage’s invitation, glad for the freedom it afforded from the seamen holystoning the decks and the constant activity of the Indiaman. It is as nothing, of course, to the relentless toil of His Majesty’s Navy — two such ships of the line hovering in escort just off our port and starboard bows; but such a knot of bodies is constantly passing to and fro amidships that I should be hard pressed to achieve any sort of exercise without the Captain’s kind intervention. There is very little society, either. Freddy Vansittart has made a friend of the First Lieutenant, Mr. Harlow, and spends his hours in firing a gun off the stern rail at any creature that moves; tho’ well enough to look at without his powdered wig, and possessed of high courage that makes him a fine fellow in a fight, Freddy was never one for discussing philosophy, and is certain to prove tedious company in a voyage so long as this. My esteemed employer, Governor-General Hastings, being a prey to seasickness and in no mood for conversation — the politics of my friend Fox having succeeded in cutting up his peace and requiring his resignation from a post the Governor prized above all others in life — I am left to my own devices more often than not. I find I can bear the solitude quite cheerfully. It affords me the opportunity to consider of my future.

In four months’ time I shall be five-and-twenty. Which is to say that, despite my father the Duke’s concerted effort to thwart every impulse of my existence, I must come into my late uncle’s fortune under the stipulations of his Will. With sudden wealth, any number of avenues are opened to me: I might establish a high- flyer in Mayfair and offer her carte-blanche; I might squander my yearly income in a fortnight at picquet, as Fox himself has done; or I might spurn the obligations of a Man of Fashion and Birth, and throw the lot into the India trade. The Governor himself has told me the recent India Act is designed to clip the wings of the Honourable Company, as its profits are too great and its threat of dominion over the Subcontinent, with Mr. Hastings as its king, all too feared. Hence his departure in high dudgeon for the English coast. I see in my employer’s present fall an opportunity: I shall take my money and become part-owner in a ship — an opium trader bound for China. Like any gaming hell, the China trade has all the appeal of high risk and rich return, with the added attraction of being deeply offensive to His Grace the Duke of Wilborough. But as his lordship the Viscount St. Eustace once observed, I was born a commoner and a commoner I shall always be.[11]

I have profited from my turns about the quarterdeck in conversing on certain points with Captain Dundage, who is a veteran of these seas for the past decade. What he does not know of Indiamen and tea and the fortune to be made in poppies is not worth asking. And there is an added incentive in this: the Captain has in his safekeeping a young lady of retiring habits and infinite charm — a virtuous and well-born French girl of eighteen, reared in Madras and bound for a betrothal in England with my very enemy the Viscount St. Eustace — a man she has never met.

How has it come about, this bizarre and distant proposal from a stranger nearly twice her age? She cannot have an idea of his lordship’s depravities — of the Beauty he has already crushed beneath his fist. She cannot know his dangerous proclivities, his desire for mastery, his miserly clutch on the riches he claims, his delight in other people’s misery; she cannot understand the Hell her life is to become. I must know more of this girl and her history.

I confess on this page that the temptation to ruin St. Eustace’s hopes is fierce upon me like a fever. But the Captain is scrupulous in shielding his charge from all eyes, and when Mam’selle takes the quarterdeck air, I am not permitted to ascend.

There are months yet to surge through the southern seas, in fair weather and foul, and months may work a wondrous change. In the meanwhile I strive to impress old Dundage with my air of industry, my keen questions regarding triangular trade, my well- bred manners and unimpeachable connexions. We shall see how long is required for the French citadel to fall.

Chapter 10

The Joiner’s Tale

6 July 1809, cont.

“It is decidedly a gentleman’s boot,” Mr. Prowting agreed as he peered at the footprints in the cellar’s dirt, “and most decidedly not mine. I wonder, sir, if we might compare your apparel to these?”

Henry obediently held out his shoe for the magistrate’s observation. Mr. Prowting placed a pair of tongs from heel to toe, and then applied the span to the mark in the dirt. Henry’s foot was a full inch longer and perhaps a quarter-inch wider.

“It will not do,” our neighbour decreed sadly. “Clearly there has been a third set of well-made boots in this place that cannot be accounted for. I do not regard the marks of the labourers who removed French’s body — they are all about, but clearly distinguishable in their heavy soles and hobnails from this. It is as Mr. Munro observed — tho’ I did not like to credit it at the time. Shafto French was brought here already dead, and hidden of a purpose. And by a gentleman! It does not bear thinking of, Miss Austen. I had made certain the drowning was an accident — a terrible mishap born in the heat of fisticuffs between French and one of his fellows.”

“—Bertie Philmore, perhaps?”

“—Tho’ his wife was prepared to lie about the business. I made certain we should have the truth from Philmore in time. But it will not do.”

I almost pitied Mr. Prowting as he crouched with his tongs in his hands, ample stomach uncomfortably swelling over the band of his breeches; he had certainly comprehended the trouble that the marks presaged. Only a handful of persons in the neighbourhood of Chawton and Alton could be described as gentlemen — and most of these should have known of the cottage’s desertion. The magistrate was faced with the unhappy duty of suspecting some one of his neighbours — or subjecting all of them to an examination of their footwear.