“I believe it is Thrace. No — Lady Imogen has pulled to the fore!”

“We ought to have placed a man at the gate,” Spence said tensely. “—To observe the outcome.”

“But Thrace is a man of honour,” my brother objected. “He shall certainly own the truth, once he knows it!”

“With such a prize as Stonings in view?” Spence demanded bitterly; and then he stepped forward, as tho’ torn from his position.

“Good God!” he cried. “She is thrown!”

He began to run down the sweep with painful ineptitude on his injured leg, but Henry was the faster. He passed Major Spence while the rest of us were still collecting our faculties and exclaiming over the fate of Lady Imogen — and in a matter of moments, could be seen halfway down the sweep. He came to a halt by the crumpled figure; I discerned him to lift her in his arms.

Mr. Thrace had wheeled his tearing mount and galloped back towards the little mare. Nutmeg had skittered away from the sweep as tho’ shying from the burden she left behind. As Henry staggered towards us, I was dimly aware of Mr. Thrace coursing alongside Lady Imogen’s mount, and leaning forward to grasp the mare’s bridle.

“Spence!” Henry shouted. “You must send for a doctor!”

“Is she gravely hurt?” the steward cried, and lurched forward to meet my brother. I was only seconds behind him, Catherine Prowting at my back.

Charles Spence bent over the face of his beloved, his own white with shock. His fingers fumbled at her pulse, felt for sense in her neck — and then abruptly he stepped backwards.

“The doctor,” he said numbly. “What can a doctor hope to do here? She is already dead.”

I do not think, in those first moments of tragedy, that Charles Spence could trust himself to speak. He merely reached for the limp form of the Earl’s daughter, and my brother placed her gently in the steward’s arms. Ann Prowting took one look at Lady Imogen’s insensible features — the brutal angle of the head where it rested on the Major, so suggestive of a broken neck — and gave way to a fit of strong hysterics. Thin, high-pitched screaming akin to the hiss of steam escaping a teakettle — until Catherine firmly slapped her sister’s cheeks, and led the sobbing figure back towards the house.

“My lady!” cried the groom, Robley, his monkey eyes staring. “My lady Imogen! Enough of your pranks! Don’t be giving an old man what’s served you faithful a heart attack!”

“We must carry her into the house,” Henry said, “and send for a doctor. She must be seen, Spence — tho’ all hope is gone.”

The steward nodded vaguely, as if unsure of his ground; and at that moment Mr. Thrace pulled up on his lathered grey, Nutmeg’s rein in his left hand.

“Charles! What the Devil— Here, Robley, take this horse back to her stable.” He dismounted, a look of wild dismay on his countenance. “She’s not badly hurt, I hope?”

Spence turned on the Beau his same expression of vague uncertainty.

“She’s dead!” Robley groaned. “The sweetest, most madcap minx what ever slipped her foot into a stirrup! Oh, my lady — I allus said as how your temper would plant you a facer one day, and now look! Dead, and how I am to meet the Earl —Look after her, Robley, he said afore we so much as left London—”

“Stable the horse,” Thrace muttered viciously to the groom; and with tears streaming down his crabbed cheeks, Robley complied. Charles Spence began to walk towards the terrace we had only lately quitted in such a spirit of enjoyment, but Lady Imogen was no feather weight in death, and his game leg was decidedly unsteady.

“Let me take her,” Thrace said, “lest you fall.”

“No!” Spence retorted savagely. “But for you—” Whatever reproach he might have uttered was allowed to die in silence. He trained his gaze on the house’s distant portal, and staggered forward; and so fixed was his purpose that it achieved a kind of sacred beauty. We all of us fell back from respect, and followed in the soldier’s train across the unmown lawns. He laid her in the saloon, on a gold and white sopha only lately refurbished; and knelt at its head with her limp hand in his, a courtier at the bier of a sleeping princess. Thrace stood like a stone near one of the long windows, his face turned to the lake’s prospect. The casement had been thrown open, and birdsong drifted on the air, impossibly sweet. Of all those assembled with heavy hearts in the silent room, Thrace must be the most severely tried by guilt and regret.

“Oh, God,” Spence muttered brokenly from his bowed position on the floor—“when I think of her father!”

Henry stepped forward — alone among the gentlemen still cool and collected. “I shall ride into Sherborne St. John and summon the surgeon.”

“His name is Althorp,” Thrace said over his shoulder. “I will accompany you, Austen.”

“Would that I could offer any assistance in such distress,”

John Middleton said heavily, “but I fear you have long been desiring our absence, Spence. We shall wait only for the doctor, and then depart for Chawton.”

The steward raised his head, as tho’ the words recalled him from a far country, and glanced towards the door. It had opened almost soundlessly on new-oiled hinges, and I saw that the groom, Robley, stood there. Beyond him in the main passage were assembled a hesitant group of domestics, their faces o’erspread with the most potent expressions of shock.

“Beggin’ yer pardon, sir.” Robley’s voice rang with a power quite alien to his earlier tone of sorrow. “I reckoned you ought to see this. ”

He held his right hand aloft.

Spence scowled and rose to his full height. “What is it, Robley?”

“A thorn,” the groom said, “near two inches long, and sharp as the dickens. I found it beneath the saddle when I put Nutmeg in her box. Cut the flesh so deep the mare was bleeding, she was.”

“What is that to me, at such a moment?” the steward cried.

“It ought to be everything, sir,” the groom retorted. “This here thorn’s the reason yon mare tossed her rider, and it was put there a-purpose. This thorn killed my lady Imogen.”

Chapter 19

A Bolt into the Blue

8 July 1809, cont.

There could be no talk of returning to Chawton now. Mr. Prowting stepped forward and grasped the great double doors, as tho’ desirous of shutting out the crowd of domestics assembled in the passage. “You must come in, sirrah, and explain yourself.”

The groom walked determinedly towards Charles Spence.

“You’re accustomed to cavalry, Major. You know what it should be like, with a great sharp thorn such as this beneath the saddle, as soon as her ladyship leaned into her race.”

Spence reached out as if in a dream, and grasped the thorn between his fingers.

“Pressing down on it she was, without even knowing, and the thorn stabbing Nutmeg all the while. It’s no wonder as the horse bolted and threw my lady; wanted to get the saddle off her back, she did.”

“But how—”

“That thorn weren’t there when I unsaddled the mare yestiddy,” Robley persisted obstinately: “The mare was clean. A thorn like that don’t just happen to find itself under a saddle. You take my meaning, sir?”

“You are saying that it must have been placed there,” Mr. Prowting declared, as Charles Spence remained silent. The steward was turning the thorn between his thumb and forefinger, fascinated, but at the magistrate’s words a terrible look of understanding burgeoned on his face.

“You saddled the mare, Robley.”

“But I did not fetch the saddle for the race. It was Mr. Thrace as did that,” the groom returned meaningfully. “Mr. Thrace, who allus rides out alone of a morning, and is in and out of the stable yard at all hours, and dislikes my lady with a passion to equal her own. Thought to put a noose around my neck, he did. Me, what has served her ladyship near twenty year!”