Jane and the Barque of Frailty (14 page)

“And who, Henry, is that?” I murmured.

“Charles Malverley—third son of the Earl of Tanborough. He is devilish astute in the upper works, I understand—serves his lordship as private secretary. Ambitious, and a great favourite with gentlemen and ladies alike.”

At that moment, a communicating door from the far side of the publick room opened, and a man I judged to be Thomas Whitpeace paced swiftly towards the coroner’s chair. He was diminutive and spry, a balding man of middle years blessed with the bright eyes of a bird; and I observed him survey the august crowd with a slightly satiric look.

He cleared his throat, well aware of the devices of theatre—and there it was again, I thought: the sensation of being played to, in a grotesque drama whose ending was beyond my knowledge. Whitpeace offered no welcome, no recognition that this was an inquest quite out of the ordinary way—but announced the names of the panel without further ado. These appeared to be men of trade for the most part— citizens of the neighbourhood surrounding Covent Garden, and thus purveyors of market goods, or the labour that sustained them: wheelwrights, carters, a butcher, and a poulterer. Several looked decidedly ill-at-ease; but one, a squat, red-haired individual with powerful arms, glared contemptuously at the lot of us. Samuel Hays was a smithy, and foreman of the panel, and hewas not to be put out of countenance by a deal of ton swells, up to every grig.

I was interested to see whether the man’s expression altered after he was conducted, along with his fellows, to view the Princess’s decaying corpse— which must have been placed in the room Thomas Whitpeace had just quitted—but upon his return Hays appeared, if anything, more defiant than ever. He was alone in this; the rest of his panel looked quite green.

“Let it be known that Deceased is one Princess Evgenia Tscholikova, so named and recognised by two persons here present who have sworn before the magistrate as to Deceased’s identity. We are to consider,” Thomas Whitpeace said quietly into the well of expectant faces, “in what manner Deceased came by her death, in the early hours of Tuesday, the twenty-third of April, 1811—whether by mishap, by malice aforethought, or by her own hand. The coroner calls Druschka Molova!”

A stir filled the closely-packed room as the black-clad figure of the maid moved heavily towards Thomas Whitpeace. She kept her eyes trained on the floor, and was followed by one of the men who had accompanied the Russian Prince.

“I am Count Kronsky,” this personage said, with a dramatic bow and clicking of his heels, “and I will speak for the maid, as she does not understand the English.”

His own accent was so impenetrable that the coroner had to request him to say his piece again, before comprehending it, Druschka following the exchange all the while. When it came to the swearing of the oath, the maid refused, as being contrary to her Orthodox faith; and at length, exasperated by the complexities of multilingual persuasion, the coroner proceeded to his questions.

The story that unfolded was a simple one. Druschka had been raised from a child on the estates of the Pirov family, and was employed as the Princess’s personal maid at the time Evgenia turned fifteen, and was presented to the Tsar’s court. At the Princess’s wedding—which occurred when Tscholikova was seventeen—Druschka had accompanied her mistress to the home of her husband; and from thence she had journeyed to Vienna, later to Paris, and lastly, to London. The maid’s fierce loyalty and love for the dead woman was transparent, even through the voice of her interpreter.

“On the night in question,” Mr. Whitpeace said, “you last saw your mistress … when?”

At eight o’clock, Count Kronsky relayed, when the Princess had entered a hackney bound for Covent Garden.

“She did not return home that evening?”

No indeed, tho’ Druschka had waited faithfully in the hall from midnight onwards, intent upon undressing her mistress and seeing her to bed. She had still been sitting in the hall of the house in Hans Place when the Runner had come from Bow Street, and taken her to view her mistress’s corpse.

The coroner had only one further question to put—and this was of so curious a nature, as to give rise to speculation among the audience. He held aloft a fragment of porcelain, perhaps as large as a man’s hand, jaggedly broken, and asked whether the maid recognised it.

The elderly Russian turned the fragment over in her fingers, her lined face crumpling. She gave way to racking sobs, quite horrible to hear—and no further communication was possible. Count Kronsky spoke sharply in his native tongue, and seemed on the point of striking Druschka; but Mr. Whitpeace ordered him to let the maid stand down.

As she did so, she raised a streaming countenance and said in guttural English, “It is milady’s.”

Count Kronsky put a short and brutal question, received his answer, and said, “This porcelain box once held the Princess’s jewels.”

If a flush suffused my entire body at this, my discomfiture was lost in the general murmur of interest that swept o’er the publick house at the Russian’s words. Henry, being too captivated by the drama, paid no heed to my momentary lapse of composure.

“I now call one Joshua Bends,” Whitpeace said, “watchman of the Berkeley Square district, to be duly sworn.”

Joshua Bends was an elderly person, much afflicted with rheumatism, and so nearly bent double that I wondered how he managed to sit in the narrow wooden box that served the charleys for shelter. He placed a palsied right hand on the coroner’s Bible and spoke his oath from a toothless mouth; and when he turned to face the room, I detected the hallmark of senility in his bleared and ill-focused eyes.

“How did you come to be present in Berkeley Square on the morning in question?”

“Hey?” Joshua Bends muttered, his hand cupped around his ear. “What’s that, Yer Honour?”

Mr. Whitpeace repeated his query with commendable patience; and Bends lisped through his toothless mouth, “Doing me work, Yer Honour, as is expected. Allus walks right round the square I do, and calls out the hour, as regular as church bells. I’ve been charley in the square coming on thirteen year, and there’s some as says I’m like to die in my box, I am—but I hope as the Good Lord preserves me from the sort o’ death that there Princess had. Pale as snow she was, in a crumpled heap on the paving-stones, and me thinking she was in a dead faint, until my boot slipped in the deal o’ blood she’d lost in dying.”

Mr. Whitpeace made a moue of irritation—his witness had got well beyond him—and said abruptly, “Let us begin as is proper, with the first hour of your labour, my good man. When did you relieve your colleague in the watchman’s box near Berkeley Square?”

“At midnight, same as allus. I clapped old Amos Small on the shoulder and woke him from a sound sleep, I did, and sent him off home to his daughter’s. The bells of St. George’s had just called out the hour. I’m a prompt man. I don’t like to keep a fellow waiting, even if he do be asleep.”

“And so you took up your place in the box near Berkeley Square as close to midnight as makes no odds,” the coroner underlined. “Did you make note of the carriage and foot traffick that passed during your watch?”

“Not partickular,” Bends said, once the question had been repeated in order to satisfy his indifferent ears. “I may have seen a deal o’ carriages, in and around the square, but as to most of ’em—they lets their cargo off at the door, and pulls to the stable yard. I don’t pay no mind. There’s allus a gentleman or two on foot, but they comes nearer to dawn, from they hells and clubs in Pall Mall, and the gentlemen is allus jug-bitten—et of Hull cheese—bless ’em.”

When asked to explain this descent into the vernacular, the good Bends explained that he meant drunk as a wheelbarrow.

“Did you not observe one equipage, at least, to pull up before No. 45, Berkeley Square, and discharge its occupants?” Mr. Whitpeace enquired.

“That’d be his lordship’s residence,” Bends said, with an eye cast shiftily at Castlereagh. “Happen I did see his lordship’s coach at a stand afore No. 45.”

“At what time was this?”

“Nigh on one o’clock, by the bells. They rang out but a notion afore the coach came clattering over the stones and pulled-to.”

“And did you observe anyone to quit the coach?”

“I saw her ladyship step down from the carriage, and a gentleman I took to be his lordship,” Bends said carefully.

“Took to be his lordship? Are you suggesting Lady Castlereagh was accompanied into her house in the small hours of morning by a gentleman not her husband?” Mr. Whitpeace enquired smoothly.

The foreman, Samuel Hays, let out a hoot of laughter; and Lord Castlereagh half-rose from his chair, as tho’ to fling a protest—or perhaps a glove— in the offending blacksmith’s face. A hand from Charles Malverley, however, eased his lordship back into his chair; tho’ I observed his entire form to stiffen with outrage.

“I can tell a lady from a hundred paces,” Bends volunteered affably, “from her way o’ dressing the hair and carrying herself—and Lady Castlereagh is allus so outlandish in her modes, I’d never mistake. Known for it, she is—makes a point of drawing notice to herself. It’s her way o’ cutting a dash, I reckon.”

If Castlereagh was not already purple with indignation, I should be greatly surprised; for it is true that Emily, Lady Castlereagh, is known for her outré habits and eccentricities of dress; but as she is perhaps the foremost political hostess of our day, much is forgiven her. The quiet propriety and elegance that characterise her husband’s habit are not for Lady Castlereagh; she prefers to shock.

“Let us say that you observed a gentleman we may presume to be Lord Castlereagh enter his lordship’s abode in company with his lady,” Mr. Whitpeace said evenly, “at a little after one o’clock in the morning. And did you observe anyone to quit the Castlereagh residence later during your rounds?”

“I cannot say as I did.”

“Did you observe a second equipage to pull up before No. 45, Berkeley Square, at any later hour?”

“I did not,” Bends said quaveringly, “and how that pore lady came to be a-laying there at the foot of his lordship’s steps, with her throat cut and her great dark eyes beseeching of the heavens—”

“Joshua Bends!” the coroner said with great decision, “If you cannot confine your remarks to the questions put, I shall not allow you to offer testimony! Pray tell us what else you observed during the course of your rounds, in the interval between the Castlereaghs’ arrival home, and your discovery of Deceased.”

In a series of verbal perambulations, the aged charley related how he had discouraged a woman of the streets from plying her trade on the corner of

Charles Street; how he had watched Mr. St. John Westbrook weave his inebriated course from Lord Sutherland’s private card party to his lodgings in the Albany; how he had walked round the square at three o’clock by St. George’s bells, and heard what he took to be a pair of lovers in extremis in a closed carriage, pulled up in the mews behind No. 43; and how, having taken a catnap between the hours of three and four, he set out after the sounding of the church bells with his lantern raised, to call out the weather and the o’clock, among the shuttered houses of Berkeley Square.

“What direction did you then take?” Mr. Whitpeace enquired.

“Towards Covent Garden—me meaning to nip over for a can of ale and a bit of bread and cheese, like, as is my custom, afore the breaking of the day. A man can get a bite and sup in Covent Garden all night long, if he’s so inclined, what with the carts coming in from the country and the folk setting up for market day. I allus have my bread and cheese after St. George’s tolls four o’clock, I do, me being bred up in the country and used to them hours.”

Joshua Bends stared defiantly in the direction of the magistrate, as tho’ he expected a reprimand from Sir Nathaniel; but the fact of a charley’s playing truant in search of sustenance was as nothing to the grosser crimes with which such men are usually charged—everything from the taking of bribes, to the abetting of thieves and the corruption of young women. Sir Nathaniel made no sign he had noted a dereliction of duty.

“You walked to Covent Garden at four of the clock,” Mr. Whitpeace observed, “and cannot have been returned to the square much before five.”

“Heard the tolling of the bells, I did,” Bends retorted triumphantly, “and went about my rounds to call the weather.”

“In what direction?”

“Clockwise, Yer Worship. Walked right round the square, I did, on the pavings that runs alongside they great houses. And there she were lying, like a heap of old clothes.”

A murmur of unease ran through the room, and Lord Castlereagh shifted in his chair.

“Where, exactly, did Deceased lie?” Mr. Whitpeace asked.

“Across the paving, slantwise, in front of No. 45,” Bends replied. “His lordship’s house.”

“Was Deceased lying on her face, or on her back?”

“Her back. I went to her, o’ course, and felt for her life—but as soon as I knelt down beside her I knew it was no use. The blood was that thick on the ground—”

“Was it liquid?” Mr. Whitpeace demanded. “Or congealed?”

Bends stared, uncomprehending.

“Was it thick upon your hands,” the coroner amplified, “or akin to water? Speak, man.”

“Her neck was wet, but not so wet as to be like water.” The charley glanced about the publick room, as tho’ in search of aid.

“She had not, then, died in the last few seconds.”

Bends shrugged.

“Did you observe any sort of weapon near the Princess?”

“No-o,” Bends said falteringly, “but for the piece of china.”

Thomas Whitpeace leaned towards the charley avidly. “What sort of china?”

“It looked like the lid of a dish. Or maybe a lady’s box,” Bends offered, “such as she might keep treasures in. About the size of a loaf of bread, it was. I’ve never seen the like afore, except in the windows of they shops on Jermyn Street. Very fine, with gilt edging and all manner of birds painted on top.”

“Where did you find this … lid?”

“Smashed on the ground beside the lady.”

“Smashed? How, then, did you know it for a lid?”

“It was broken in three great pieces, and when the Runner come, he fitted ’em together and showed me what it was. One of the pieces had blood along the edge.”