The Duke's Agent (2 page)

At last he approached the ancient bridge. Across it, the town sprawled before him in the setting sun. Down stream the river was stained purple, red and ochre with the dye from the woollen works at the water's edge. The houses clotted together around yards in growing density along the alleyways threaded around the mills and tanning pits that scarred the lower town.

The mud rose up the gelding's legs as they passed through the cramped alleys of the working quarter. The stench from the tanning yards and the rotting sewage in the sinks between the tenements made it an unhealthy place. No one lingered there unless they had to. The buildings piling up the hill grew better spaced. The street broadened and began to show elements of graciousness as it approached the brow of the hill. It was here, beyond the market place, that the leading citizens of Woolbridge had their dwellings, fine stone houses built on plots spiralling out about the parish church, whose medieval tower crested the town.

The lamps were being lit outside the houses as the rider turned his tired horse into the stable yard of the Queen's Head. Standing opposite the church at the junction of the main eastern and southern roads into Woolbridge, this was the town's finest hostelry. Here Jasper Bedlington, innkeeper, was honoured to cater to the gentry (Fine Assembly Rooms – Dances held twice a month in the Winter Season). The postboy had just brought the papers from the posting house at Greta Bridge, so the front parlour was unexpectedly busy. Captain Adams had that moment arrived to collect his copy of the
Newcastle Courant
and was making conversation with Mr Gilbert, the surgeon, who, on the same pretext, had come to take a glass of wine in company.

Captain Adams, a well-preserved man of fifty or so, had retired from a line regiment some years previously. He liked to cultivate the air of a bluff, no-nonsense soldier, though his contemporaries in the regiment might have told you that he
was a quiet sort of fellow when in the King's service. Mr Gilbert was a leading citizen of the town. A surgeon by training, he was a man of means and only practised occasionally when particularly desired, or when he felt the need to demonstrate the lesser talents of Dr Phitts, the town's other medical man, who was forced to doctor for a living.

Having prevailed upon Mr Gilbert to keep him company with a glass of port, Captain Adams arranged himself by the parlour fire, settling his stiff leg on a wooden stool.

‘So I hear His Grace the Duke is sending some fellow to investigate that Crotter's affairs, eh?'

Mr Gilbert, a discreet man, contented himself with lifting a knowing eyebrow across the top of his glass.

Captain Adams snorted and rubbed his leg. ‘Never was a death more providential, I'd say!' He took a draught and speculated how far old Gilbert would open up. The man liked to play at piety like a canting Methodist but underneath it all he was as fond of gossip as any. ‘Potter discovered him, they tell me.'

‘It was he who brought the corpse into town,' replied Mr Gilbert carefully. One of his many contributions to the life of the community of Woolbridge was to serve as medical authority on the few occasions when cause of death needed to be ascertained. ‘He'd been dead a day or two – his heart stopped as he sat in front of his fire. May the Lord have mercy on his soul and may the lesson remind us all of the precious gift of life.'

Captain Adams did not quite see the connection. From his point of view Crotter had died. The precious gift of life had proved something of a jilt to him – but he was not going to quarrel.

‘There was no one to miss him, I suppose,' he observed.

Mr Gilbert flinched a little at the Captain's robust lack of proper sentiment in the face of death. The bluff soldier gazed into the fire.

‘Never would have servants about the place. The man lived like a pig.'

‘Captain! Captain!' the surgeon protested. ‘We should not speak so of the dead! It is true that Mr Crotter perhaps lacked the domestic felicity such as you and I gain from the blessed married state, but …'

‘Crotter needed a wife, you say?' cut in Adams. ‘Well, not any more. Ha!' The Captain marked his humour with a self-congratulatory tap on the arm of his chair. ‘Another glass, sir?'

Mr Gilbert was diverted from replying by a commotion as the stableboy came in search of the innkeeper. A gentleman visitor had just arrived in the yard. Woolbridge was not unused to visitors. It did not lie far off the post road, but between fairs and market days travellers of the better sort were uncommon. Adams and his companion craned their necks to look down the passage to see who the stranger might be.

A gentleman of thirty or thereabouts entered the parlour. He wore a neat sort of riding dress, and Captain Adams fancied he had something of a military look. He was casting about for some pretext to engage the newcomer in conversation when Jasper Bedlington bustled in from the tap. He was a barrel-shaped man with receding hair that had left him with a monkish tonsure above a boyish face.

‘Mr Jarrett, sir? Why, we had given you up for tonight. There was but one piece of luggage brought up from the posting road quite a hour ago, and no sign of your manservant. It'll take but a moment to ready your room, sir.'

‘I had business on the way, so I rode over from York. My man is indisposed and is to follow in a day or two,' replied Mr Jarrett. He had a deep, calm voice. ‘Are there any messages left for me?'

The innkeeper cast an appreciative eye over his visitor; he liked a proper gentleman. ‘Now I am glad you mentioned
that, sir, for there was a boy who came over from Sir Thomas up at Oakdene Hall. Let me see.' Mr Bedlington wiped his hands thoughtfully on his apron and turned to roar over his shoulder. ‘Polly! Here, Polly! Where did you put that note the boy brought for Mr Jarrett, my love? My wife, sir, God bless her,' he explained, turning back to the traveller, a surprisingly coy blush staining his rosy cheeks.

Mistress Polly blew into the front parlour, a jolly-looking woman of formidable size.

‘Now Jasper, my pet, you know you put it yourself in a safe place and never gave it to me.' She twinkled engagingly at Mr Jarrett and inserted her bulk behind the bar. ‘I rather think you put it by Mr Raistrick's special reserve. Aye and here it is!' She returned with a piece of cream paper folded under a seal which she presented to the visitor with an energetic bob curtsey.

Mr Jarrett, feeling that such friendly service required that his kindly hosts should be rewarded with the satisfaction of their obvious curiosity, gravely broke the seal and read the contents.

‘But how kind, I am invited to tea tomorrow afternoon,' he informed the company.

The couple before him beamed, as if genuinely happy at their visitor's good fortune.

‘Our boy, Jack, will be pleased to show you the way to the house, sir. It's not far. And what time would that be, sir?' asked Mrs Bedlington, poised to go and arrange matters.

‘Three in the afternoon?' ventured Mr Jarrett.

‘Capital. That's all arranged then,' said his host, striking his hands together as if to seal a bargain. Then, wreathed in smiles, Mr Bedlington proceeded to shepherd his guest up the stairs to his best room.

‘Jarrett, eh?' said Captain Adams, as the innkeeper and his charge disappeared. ‘But he's a youngish man. That's unexpected.' Then, noticing his companion was looking
bemused, he picked up his paper and tapped a section with a broad finger. Mr Gilbert's eyes scanned an advertisement for Barclay's Asthmatic Candy, ‘for many Years been proved a most effectual Preservative from the ill effects of Fogs and DAMP AIR'. He looked up at the Captain perplexed.

‘No, no, man! The announcement, there!' insisted Adams. Then Mr Gilbert saw it:

He had slept well. His thirty years of life had given him experience of all sorts of shelters, from shattered Portuguese chapels to West Indian palm huts, and he was pleased to find his bed free of fleas and the room to himself. Despite his recent months of inaction Jarrett found it difficult to fall out of the habit formed on patrol of rising at half past two in the morning. When not occupied in active service, the custom left a man with many extra hours to fill. This Sunday he disposed of his first waking hours by ordering his thoughts and impressions on to paper. That done, he sharpened his pen afresh and began a letter. Mrs Bedlington's cherished grandmother clock was striking five below as he signed it. Fanning out the few papers he had culled from his search of the old library on the table before him, he checked through what he had written. He folded up two closely written sheets in his letter, addressed and sealed it.

He got up, stretching his stiff back. Outwardly the wound in his side had healed to a long puckered welt, but inwardly it still ached on a morning. He opened the casement and leant out to look over the tumbled roofs. There was a comforting homeliness to the scene before him. Thin trails of smoke drifted up as hearths were rekindled. These roofs sheltered hundreds of human souls whose entire lives were encompassed by this place. His imagination stretched out for a moment to comprehend what that must be like – to belong so wholly to one place; to live your life from cradle to grave known to all your neighbours. His fingers strayed
to the slim plait of golden hair he wore about one strong brown wrist. He tucked it back beneath his shirt cuff. Much as he might appreciate the virtues of a settled life, he knew himself incapable of sustaining them in his own person. He was destined to be a wanderer from birth. He pulled his mind back to his present task.

The inhabitants of the Queen's Head began to stir. Mrs Bedlington, her hair still in papers, was scolding the maid, Molly, out of her warm bed to stoke the kitchen fire. Master Jasper stood before his piece of glass humming an air as he stropped his razor rhythmically against a leather strap. In the stables the horses fidgeted, their ears twitching to catch the sounds of Matt, the stableboy, coming with his pails of feed.

Jarrett sat at his window with a sketch book on his knee. Across the street stood the church. Under his swift fingers a pencil impression appeared. The Norman tower with its worn stones. A side view of the porch over the west door. The wicket gate overgrown with a romantic twist of dogrose. A little man in a dusty black hat too large for his head came bustling down the street and opened the wicket gate. His outline with its preposterous hat took shape on the paper. Two more men arrived from behind the church and entered the tower. The bells began to ring across the roofs of Woolbridge.

There was a knock on the door and Mrs Bedlington entered, looking flustered in her best Sunday silk.

‘Is there anything you might be wanting, Mr Jarrett, sir? Before we go to divine service, that is – it being the Lord's Day.'

‘No. No, I thank you,' Jarrett replied, hurriedly putting his sketch aside. ‘I shall be attending there myself.'

From below the innkeeper called up, ‘I'm gone, Polly!'

‘Indeed, my love; we shall follow directly,' his wife shouted back, before recollecting herself. ‘My husband is music
master, sir,' she explained apologetically. ‘Keeps them all in order in the gallery. Always likes to be there early.'

Through the casement Jarrett saw Mr Bedlington hurry across the street bearing a large crumhorn. He watched him negotiate his way carefully through the wicket gate.

‘Well, if you've no need of anything, sir, I'll be off. The maids, you know, sir. Those girls would be late for their own funeral I shouldn't wonder if they weren't harried.' With this observation Mrs Bedlington closed the door briskly behind her, pausing on the other side of the thin wall to bellow up the attic stairs: ‘Molly Dade! No amount of preening 'll make you better than you are in the eyes of the Lord – you come down here directly, girl!'

Jarrett shrugged himself into his coat, picking up his hat and a Malacca cane. He caught a glimpse of himself in the glass as he passed. ‘Fine enough for the provinces,' he murmured to his reflection. He was leaning down to polish a smudge from one hessian boot when he remembered the letter. He picked it up from the table and slid it into his coat. It was better not left lying about. Settling his hat on his head with a smart tap, Mr Jarrett set off for church swinging his cane.

*

The street below was clogged with gigs and carriages as the worthies of Woolbridge arrived for the service. St John's church stood on a hill. To the north it fronted the road. To the south its graveyard fell away behind the church, its oak-bordered boundary giving on to the Desmenes, the open common land that marked the town's eastern edge. Snaking up the hill came a patchy line of the lesser folk among the Reverend Prattman's congregation. Tenant farmers with their sturdy wives, and the lumbering lads, their farm workers, straggling behind them as they eyed the girls, serving girls from the merchants' and tradesmen's houses who giggled together in knots. Weavers with their thin-faced apprentices,
shopkeepers and small traders, they all walked up through the graveyard, stopping to greet acquaintances on the paths under the oaks.

These two sides of Woolbridge, the carriage kind and the stout ordinary folk, met and mixed at the west door where the Reverend Prattman presided. He towered above his people, tall and hearty in his clerical wig and wide-winged black gown, flinging out his massive hands in welcome. He was the benign epitome of the Established Church, embracing in his range of responses the whole people of his parish. He greeted the rough sallies of the farmers with loud appreciative barks of laughter; he bent over the delicate Mrs Gilbert, the surgeon's wife, with gentle attention; he directed his clerk and bell-ringers while swapping a Cambridge jest with a retired parson colleague from his old college.

The number of eyes that looked studiously away as he met them made Jarrett aware that he was the principal object of speculation that morning among the carriage trade. The blatant attention annoyed him. He set off on a circuit of the church to while away the few minutes before the service began.

The southern wall of the chancel revealed plain, elegant Norman lines. He was admiring a thirteenth-century clerestory window to the left of a low hammer-headed door when he heard sounds of female voices advancing up the steep path. From behind a fine coffin tomb he saw a party of girls approaching.

His first impression of her, as she lifted her skirts to climb the hill, was of a slim ankle accentuated in a fresh white stocking. She had delicate feet, neatly shod in black shoes decorated with a bright square buckle. On his first full view of her his immediate association was with a canvas by de Goya he had seen in Spain – inappropriate perhaps for an English setting, for it was of the painter's mistress reclining naked on a sofa. This girl had the same sensuous black curls,
luminous skin and air of seductive mischief. He found the source of his impression hard to pin down, but her movements were redolent with it. A certain confidence. The bold openness with which her dark eyes cast about the world. Here was a subject for an artist's pencil!

‘Now then, Sal, have you had a token from your soldier boy?'

The black-haired girl turned. The question came on an ill-natured note and she paused. ‘What's it to you, Prudence Miller? Have you so few followers of your own that you have to ask after others'?'

The circle of accompanying girls laughed, half-uneasy, half-eager, their eyes wide in anticipation. Prudence Miller, a solid, bonny girl with a ruddy complexion, advanced to confront the black-haired Sal.

‘At least mine ain't married!'

Jarrett could not see Sal's face but he was near certain she stiffened.

‘And of who are we speaking, Miss Prudence?' Sal managed to speak the name so as to convey a wealth of contempt.

‘Your soldier boy's back, Sal. He's married his sergeant's daughter, Sal, and the sergeant he's taken the Swan Inn on the bridge right here in Woolbridge. What say you to that?'

As Sal seemed to lack a ready answer to this, the floodgates of Miss Miller's resentment broke.

‘All these years you've been telling us Will Roberts'd be back to make an honest woman of you, while you've been flittin' round our men acting like no honest girl would. And now he's back and married another. What do you say to that, Sal?'

There was a particular stillness to the pause that followed. Then in a half-singing voice, an echo of a child's taunt, Sal responded:

‘Fa-la-la; there are plenty of fish in the sea, Prudence
Miller.' With a swing of her skirts she turned on one graceful foot and walked off, calling casually over her shoulder, ‘You comin', Maggie?'

A little girl with bad skin and blue pop eyes detached herself from the audience and hurried round-shouldered after her friend.

A party of men came clumping up the hill, diverting the girls. Hands went to waists, drawing attention to curved hips; shawls and hair were twitched and lips bitten red.

‘You mind you keep to your tune this mornin', Harry Nidd,' counselled Prudence saucily to a tow-haired youth with a broken nose.

‘You keep to yours and he'll see you at Lovers' Leap one of these days, Prudence Miller,' called back Harry's companion, a sandy-haired man with sharp features.

‘You keep your sauce to yourself, Joe Walton,' retorted Prudence, blushing at the general laughter as Joe swiftly countered, ‘There's many a girl likes my sauce, Prudence Miller.'

The singers filed into the church through the door in the chancel wall. Jarrett, conscious that the service must be about to begin, made for the path that led to the west door. As he passed, Sal and Prudence were picking up where they had left off. Sal seemed to be getting the better of the engagement. Her head was held high and her manner lofty, while her opponent stood red-faced, her arms akimbo.

‘I've no need of your men, Prudence Miller. I have one much finer than you'll ever have hope of – a gentleman!'

‘A gentleman! What gentleman would ever walk out with the likes of you!'

‘You don't know him, but you'll hear of him before you're much older, you see if you don't.'

Prudence was not convinced. ‘A gentleman!' she scoffed.

‘Aye, a fine gentleman!' Catching sight of Jarrett, Sal jerked her head towards him. ‘As fine as that one there.'
She turned and smiled directly at him. Jarrett looked straight into those bold, dark eyes. She had remarkably large pupils that made her eyes seem almost black. He found himself smiling at her. He touched his hat and, with a brief nod of acknowledgement, continued on his way.

As he rounded the corner a compact, military-looking man with a high colour and receding hair accosted him. ‘Captain Adams, sir,' he said, thrusting a chubby hand towards him. ‘And you are Mr Jarrett, the Duke's new agent?'

‘In a manner of speaking,' replied Jarrett, shaking his hand.

‘Thought so. Saw you at the inn as you arrived.' Captain Adams smiled and rocked his cane as it rested on the ground as if his stock of conversation was drying up. ‘Glad to meet you. Capital. Church?' He said, gesturing towards the doorway into which most of the congregation had now disappeared. ‘Come sit with the lady wife and me.'

‘That is most kind,' replied Jarrett. ‘I will be glad to.'

They entered the building and he caught a whiff of the charnel house.

‘Recent burial,' explained Captain Adams, sensing his companion's reaction. He indicated disturbed earth at the back of the north transept. ‘But you'll know about that. Going to be a plaque or some such. Subscription and all that.'

Jarrett surveyed Mr Crotter's final resting place. ‘Who buried him?' he enquired. ‘I understood Mr Crotter had no family in Woolbridge.'

‘I believe Sir Thomas saw to it,' replied Captain Adams, after pondering the question a moment. ‘Wouldn't do to have the fellow lying about in this heat!' he added jovially. ‘My wife, sir.'

Jarrett found himself bowing to Mrs Adams, a broadbeamed capable-looking woman, and her pale daughters. As the ladies were taking their time to arrange themselves
he stood to one side in the aisle looking about the building. Towards the front of the church various degrees of box pews were arranged, each assigned to a particular prosperous household. Benches filled the spaces where the servants and ordinary folk sat. Above, to the left of the chancel, Mr Bedlington and his motley collection of musicians were tuning up in the gallery. The singers sprawled about, waiting. The young man who had bandied words with Prudence was hanging over the rail conversing with Sal, who sat below on a bench looking demure and mischievous at the same time. Jarrett glimpsed Prudence Miller's impotent fury and felt pity for her. She was no match for Sal. His fingers itched to capture the scene – ‘The Country Service: a rural vignette'.

The little man in the over-large hat trotted up the gallery steps. ‘Music master,' he commanded, ‘the parson would remind the singers that they are not to sing the responses!' Then, looking to neither left nor right through an accompaniment of jeers from the singers, the clerk scurried back down the stairs.

*

Henrietta Lonsdale entered the church half a step in front of her aunt. It had been a trying morning. She had known it would be from the moment her aunt's voice had wavered out to arrest her progress as she passed the bedroom door on her way downstairs to breakfast. The words were not material; it was their tone – that pathetic, cajoling, invalidish note her aunt assumed when she wanted to be petted. Henrietta was a dutiful niece to her widowed aunt. She prayed regularly and quite sincerely for God's assistance in granting her patience and a better temper, but the carriage ride that morning had been frosty. Aunt Lonsdale's mood had lightened a little on arrival at church. They had been greeted at the carriage door by Mrs Bedford who had hardly allowed them time to set foot to ground, so eager was she to share the excitement over the Duke of Penrith's new agent.
Henrietta lifted her eyebrows a little at all the fuss. She knew perfectly well that Aunt Lonsdale considered Amelia Bedford a vulgar sort of woman, but the Duke's agent was too choice a morsel for her to be particular about the provenance of the gossip. Henrietta surveyed the man blocking the aisle. So this was the new agent. His clothes were remarkably well cut but they hung slightly loose as if he had lost weight in sickness he had yet to regain. She noted, nonetheless, that he had a good leg. She followed the line of his gaze. Gawping at Sally Grundy, was he? A pity his manners did not match his tailoring.