A Rich Full Death (7 page)

Sitting, it must be said, looking remarkably subdued; and considerably readier to comment on the scene in the piazza, where the little steam-tram was hissing and clanging off on its way to Prato, than to tell me what had happened. That something
had
happened became ever more painfully apparent, in direct proportion to Browning’s evident unwillingness to broach the subject.

Meanwhile I filled the gaping silence by describing my expedition to Siena, reporting my conversations with Doctor McPherson and the fragile aunt’s gigolo, and concluding with a statement to the effect that Mr Joseph Eakin’s innocence had apparently been established beyond any doubt.

At this, without the slightest warning, Mr Browning threw his head back and broke into deafening peals of laughter, which then abruptly subsided again, leaving for all trace the smallest of ironical smiles—like the gentle swell of the ocean when the storm has blown over.

‘I don’t need you to tell me that, Mr Booth,’ he said quietly. ‘No, no—I found that out the hard way!’

And at length the whole story emerged.

That day—we are speaking of last Monday, following our conversation at Doney’s and my departure to Siena—had initially seemed auspicious for Mr Browning. First of all, a stroke of fortune had enabled him to succeed where the police remained baffled, and identify the woman who had called on Isabel shortly before her death—or rather, she had identified herself, for it was none other than Miss Isa Blagden, the doyenne and mainstay of our little community here, and one of the Brownings’ closest friends.

She lives in a villa on Bellosguardo hill not far from the one the Eakins’ were renting, and had in a very short time become intimate with Isabel, partly perhaps by the accident of sharing the same Christian name (as do Mr Browning and I, it just occurs to me; may that augur well!). She had therefore hastened to share with the Brownings her horror at the tragedy which has shocked us all so deeply, and communicate to them the particularly ghastly thrill with which she had learned that she had been the last person to see poor Isabel alive.

‘She had called at the villa,’ Browning explained, ‘as dearest Isa always does everything—on a sheer wild whim of kindness, and with as little thought of formality as the bird that comes to perch on your window-sill—and found Mrs Eakin all alone in the house. Instead of relishing the prospect of company, however, as one might have expected, her hostess seemed oddly
distraite
and ill at ease—indeed I gathered that her reception had been what a nature less sweet than Isa’s might have simply called rude. After twenty minutes of desultory and inconsequential chat, therefore, Isa left Mrs Eakin to the solitude which she seemed so anxious to resume.

‘Nothing they said appears to shed any light whatever on what happened so soon afterwards—but one very important point did nevertheless emerge. Isa repeated several times that Mrs Eakin appeared to be very nervous, starting and looking out of the window at every sound. One way in which this nervousness apparently betrayed itself was by her continual fingering of a gold locket she was wearing.’

The significance of this point can hardly be overstated, for when Isabel’s body was laid out on the table in the kitchen no such locket had been visible.

‘I had an opportunity to question the maid, Beatrice, about this,’ Browning went on. ‘She at first absolutely denied that her mistress had ever possessed such a piece of jewellery, but when I showed her I knew she was lying she changed her story quite dramatically. There
was
such a locket—and, significantly, it was not kept with the rest of Mrs Eakin’s jewellery, but hidden in a chest containing items of clothing. Beatrice, sensing some intrigue, had examined it one day, and found that it opened, and that the inside was inscribed with the initials O.V.A.’

This seemed indeed to be an important clue, although its utility is unfortunately considerably diminished by the fact that these initials do not seem to correspond with any name that either Browning or I know of here in Florence. At all events, in an attempt to solve the other puzzle—namely, what had become of this locket—Browning decided to go and search the garden of the villa once more.

Once again, he was in luck, for he found—not the locket, but something so infinitely more damning that it put all thought of the locket out of his head: a folding pocket-knife, engraved with the name Joseph Ernest Eakin!

‘While I was examining this object with a degree of excited attention which you may well imagine,’ Browning continued, ‘my attention was attracted by the appearance of Mr Eakin himself, who enquired heatedly who the devil I was and what I was doing in his garden. In other circumstances I might have been flustered or embarrassed at being thus surprised by the object of my suspicions, and on his own land. But not after finding that knife! With no great effort to be conciliatory I identified myself and explained that there were several unusual circumstances surrounding his wife’s death, and I should be grateful if he could help to throw some light on them.

‘Mr Eakin’s eyes narrowed—suspiciously, I thought—as he enquired frigidly what those circumstances might be. I then attempted to explain them, as I did to you yesterday in Doney’s. But—well, some of the points appear to have little enough weight, taken in isolation, while the matter of the table, which ties and binds all together, is really quite tricky to expound clearly and simply to such a totally unsympathetic listener. In short, it no doubt all sounded rather confused and impertinent, and enabled Eakin to make a cutting remark at my expense. This stung me, so to clinch the matter I produced the knife I had just found and challenged the man to deny that it was his.

‘It did not for a moment enter my head that he would be able to brazen it out: his name was on the handle and I had found it lying where his wife had been found hanged from a piece of rope cut with a knife. Imagine my dismay, then, when he took the thing from me, examined it long and coolly, gave it back with an untrembling hand, looked me straight in the eye and declared in a level tone that he had never seen it before in his life!

‘Well, it was a superb opportunity to put me in my place, and Mr Eakin did not allow it to go to waste. With a highly effective combination of wounded dignity and scrupulously controlled rage, he proceeded to remind me that the subject under discussion was the death of his wife, whom he had loved dearly, and of whose loss he had been informed only that morning. “Your feelings for your wife, Mr Browning, are famous,” he went on, while I stood there biting my lip. “Please try to remember that even ordinary mortals, their hands soiled by commerce, may be capable of feelings which are none the less real and painful because they lack your skill in expressing them. I neither know nor care where you obtained that knife, or what your object was in trying to discountenance me with it, or in telling me these absurd tales of tables and holes in the ground. I will say only this—my wife’s death is my personal tragedy, and if you wish to play the amateur police detective I suggest you avoid doing so at others’ expense. I bid you good morning, Mr Browning, and goodbye.” With which he turned on his heel and strode back to the house, while I slunk off the premises like a poacher.’

The idea of that horrible Philistine upstart Eakin thus scoring an easy victory over a man such as Robert Browning was so distressing that I doubly regretted the impossibility of bringing his wife’s murder home to him. Certainly in a just world he
ought
to have done it—or to have hanged for it at any rate!

But meanwhile Mr Browning, with that restless mental energy which characterises him, had already moved on to confront a new complication.

‘We agree, then, that Joseph Eakin did not murder his wife,’ he said, rising from the divan to stand in front of me.

I nodded.

‘Then who, pray, tried to make it seem that he had?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Why man, the knife! If it is not Eakin’s, it must have been placed where I found it with the intention of incriminating him.’

‘But why should anyone do that when it has been given out that Isabel died by her own hand?’

‘It may have been so given out,’ Browning retorted, ‘but remember that at least one person knows better. The murderer is not fooled by his own strategems, and must at least be worried that the police may also see through them, in time. This knife, I take it, represented his insurance policy against that eventuality. If the suicide verdict held, no harm had been done; if it fell through, suspicion would be diverted in the most natural direction, towards the victim’s husband.’

‘But how did he get the knife, then? Where does it come from, if it is not Eakin’s?’

For all answer Browning handed me the article in question.

‘Open it,’ he said.

I tried to do so—without success.

‘I cannot.’

‘No more could I. See, here is the thumb-nail I splintered in the attempt. Plainly the thing is brand-new, bought from a cutler’s shop the same day I found it. It has never been used, never been opened. It was taken straight to an engraver, and Eakin’s name placed on the handle—if you examine the lettering closely you will observe several flakes of metal scalloped up by the burin and not yet dislodged.’

I was extremely impressed with this further demonstration of Mr Browning’s intellect; the operations of his mind, combining as they do an unparalleled grasp of reality in all its raw and unrefined quiddity, with a soaring reach and synthetic power to meld all into ideas of the very largest and grandest carry, are a delight and an inspiration. But there was still one further question in my mind.

‘All this is wonderful, and I have no doubt that you are quite correct in your assessment of the murderer’s motives. But I fail to understand how this knife could constitute evidence against Mr Eakin, given that it is not his.’

‘It couldn’t, of course, from the moment that it emerged that he had an unshakeable alibi. But suppose he had not had one. Who would then have believed his protestations that the knife was not his? You know how the police proceed here—they find some scrap of evidence against some likely suspect, and then obtain a confession by recourse to methods into which no one enquires too closely.’

I remembered that Cecil DeVere had told me while we drove together through the streets of Florence that afternoon that he had seen someone skulking about the garden of the villa on the Monday morning, at the very spot where, a few hours later, Browning had found the knife. When I mentioned this, Browning’s response was immediate and enthusiastic.

‘Splendid! Let us go and see this man DeVere immediately — I have an appointment, but it can wait.’

But I was forced to disappoint him.

‘Unfortunately DeVere will not be at home. I recall him telling me he was going out.’

‘Very well, then—tomorrow morning, without fail! There is no time to lose.’

As though these words had prompted a thought in his mind, Browning consulted his watch and announced that he had to be going. I was genuinely disappointed that he was not staying longer—but he explained that his wife’s chronic consumptive condition had become aggravated again, and that he had to return to look after her.

‘You are not a friend of Cecil DeVere, then?’ I remarked casually as we walked to the door.

Browning replied with an air of slight puzzlement, ‘DeVere? No—I have met the man, I believe. That’s all. Why do you ask?’

‘I was curious as to why you used his name to explain the message which arrived for you on Sunday night—the summons from Isabel’s maid?’

I was very aware that I was treading on delicate ground here — as was confirmed when Browning flushed at this allusion to his mendacity.

‘Did I?’ he queried.

‘Use DeVere’s name? Certainly.’

Browning looked utterly blank.

‘Mr Booth, you may believe this or not, as you choose—and I should hardly blame you if you do not—but the fact of the matter is that I have not the slightest recollection of having mentioned Mr DeVere—whom, as I say, I hardly know—nor the remotest notion why I should have done so!’

This response was so hopelessly inadequate that I did not doubt its veracity for a second; a man as gifted as Robert Browning, had he wished to lie, could certainly have invented a more satisfactory explanation than this ingenuous shrug of the shoulders. The mystery, however, remained.

We arranged to meet the following morning at nine o’clock, at the south end of the Ponte Vecchio—DeVere’s house lies hard by this venerable structure. Then, with a second glance at his watch, Mr Browning left.

It may have been that excessive interest in the time that did it, or perhaps I remembered how he had strangely contradicted himself in the reasons he had given for having to leave a few minutes before. As soon as he had gone, at all events, I rushed to the window and looked out. What I saw so intrigued me that I ran back to the hall, grabbed my cloak and hat, and hurried downstairs after him.

When I got out into the darkening streets Browning was already lost to sight, but I hurried off in the direction I had seen him go, towards the Cathedral. It had been this that had caught my attention, for Casa Guidi is in the district the Florentines call the Oltrarno, south of the river; wherever Browning was so urgently bound, it was not there.