Jane and the Canterbury Tale (29 page)

25 O
CTOBER
1813,
CONT
.

“W
ELL, THIS IS A DEGREE OF COMFORT UNLOOKED-FOR,
” Sir Davie observed with an air of gratification as we took our seats. “Unfortunate that I haven’t any Port to send round, or ratafia for the lady. You are remiss, Burbage—quite remiss—you have made no introductions—but perhaps you are not in possession of the lady’s name, never having expected to be honoured by her presence this morning.”

“I am Miss Austen,” I told him, “Mr. Knight’s sister. We shared a bench at the inquest.”

It seemed to me that Mr. Burbage started a little at my words; but Sir Davie was already assessing my countenance shrewdly.

“That affair was not very edifying, alas—too much of the curious truth was, as I suspect, deliberately left out, Miss
Austen. Forgive me for speaking frankly, Mr. Knight; I do not presume to infringe upon your province, or criticise one whose motives I suspect are pure. I may address you as Mr. Knight, I hope? ‘Your Honour’ seems unduly grave.”

“Murder is invariably so,” Edward observed. “If you are done with your pleasantries, Sir Davie, I have a few questions I should like to put to you.”

The seaman opened his eyes a little. “Ought one
ever
to be done with pleasantries, my dear sir? How else, pray, is the savage world to be civilised?”

“You are, I presume, Sir Davie Myrrh?”

The seaman’s eyes rolled towards his solicitor. “
Surely
you have vouched for my identity, Burbage?”

“Mr. Knight asks purely as a matter of form, sir. I would suggest you answer the Magistrate’s question fully and frankly.”

“And, Mr. Burbage,” my brother added, “if you would be so good as to note down Sir Davie’s statement? I may supply you with pencil and paper for the purpose.”

These items being handed from one man to the other, with every appearance of mutual respect and understanding, Sir Davie Myrrh sighed. “Very well. I shall give it to you direct as the Baronetage would have it: Myrrh of Kildane Hall. Davie Ambrose Myrrh, born December 8, 1760, married May 15, 1784, Anne, daughter of Sylvester, Fifth Viscount Havisham of Pembroke, in the county of Warwickshire; by which lady (deceased 1785) he had issue, a stillborn son.”

He turned his satiric gaze upon myself. “I could entertain you, madam, with a further recitation of my family’s glorious history; its resistance under Cromwell, and exertions of loyalty towards Charles the Second; its elevation from mere knighthood to the baronetage; the demonstration, with each succeeding generation, of increasing attention to Duty and the Crown, ending—rather ignobly—with myself, the tenth
baronet, who, tho’ achieving the venerable age of three-and-fifty with health and humour unimpaired, has nonetheless lost wife, child, fortune, and even Kildane Hall. Should you like to learn how I managed it?”

“Not at present,” Edward interposed firmly, before I could answer
Yes, very much
. “What we principally wish to know is how you came to be standing at the front entrance of Chilham Castle on the evening of the twentieth of October inst., presenting a silken pouch to one Adelaide Fiske MacCallister.”

“Ah,” Sir Davie murmured, “but to apprehend how I came to be there, Mr. Knight, you ought to know a little of my history. For no man springs newly-formed into a given day or moment—be it night or morning, October or April, Chilham or Timbuktu. If I am to explain how I came to have a gift for Mrs. Fiske—or did you call her something else?—you must first know how I fell under obligation to her husband. I do not refer, of course, to this person MacCallister.
He
has no place in the tale at all. I refer to Curzon Fiske, an excellent fellow now sadly laid into an early grave, who was so obliging as to save my life in Ceylon some eighteen months since.”

Edward gave a slight sigh of satisfaction. “I suspected you were acquainted with Fiske. It was
he
who gave you the tamarind seeds, of course?”

“Not so swiftly, I beg! You leap to the story’s close without a care for the intriguing coincidence of events! Burbage,” Sir Davie exclaimed as he jumped from his hard wooden bed and began to stroll like another Kemble about the theatre of his cell, “you
must
make the Magistrate understand that he can never hope to penetrate this affair without a thorough knowledge of the peril in which Fiske and I moved, some years ago! If he persists in seeing merely a dead wastrel on the Pilgrim’s Way, when he might rather know the final, agonising loss of
a daring man’s hope, as his blood trickles into the unforgiving earth, Mr. Knight cannot pretend to grasp the subtleties of man’s existence—or, at the very least, this shocking affair!”

“Sir Davie,” Mr. Burbage said, “as your solicitor it is my duty to urge you, most earnestly, to answer the questions Mr. Knight may put to you, as succinctly and swiftly as possible. To do aught else is to try the patience of a gentleman whose time is taken up with numerous affairs.”

“Burbage,”
Sir Davie uttered mournfully. “I had thought better of you. I had thought you a man of romance, and spirit.”

Edward glanced enquiringly at me; I nodded ever so slightly.

“Very well,” my brother said. “You may tell us, briefly, how you came to know Curzon Fiske.”

“Ah,” Sir Davie breathed as tho’ released into a happy dream, “now
there
is a tale worth telling! But first perhaps I should just mention how I came to be in Ceylon at all—having spent the better part of my life on the
other
side of the world, rather as Columbus did, in attempting to reach the Subcontinent. I speak, of course, of Jamaica. My father, the ninth baronet, being a practical rather than a snobbish fellow, had sunk our fortunes into sugar—and did so handsomely from the trade, that I was sent out to the West Indies as a lad of but sixteen, to sit at the feet of the plantation overseer and learn the substance of the business. But it was not to be—for once upon the high seas I discovered a passion for ships that has never left me to this day! Tho’ embarking as a supercargo—a passenger, you should call it—on a merchant vessel bound for the tropics, I soon begged to learn the duties of a true sailor; and being a likely lad enough, for all I was the heir to a baronetcy, I was allowed to have my way. I donned the garb of a common seaman, and earned my bread before
the mast, so that my Creole friends did not know me when at last I disembarked in Freetown, and were obliged to take a brown and hale young man to their bosom, who appeared more like a plantation slave in their eyes than the English gentleman they had been led to expect!”

“All very interesting, I am sure,” Edward broke in, “but your youth cannot have any bearing on your present incarceration. Pray honour us with the facts of your acquaintance with Fiske, and your reasons for appearing at the Castle on the night of your friend’s murder.”

If Edward expected the word
murder
to arrest Sir Davie’s reminiscent flight, he was to be disappointed.

“All in good time, my dear sir, all in good time.”

As Sir Davie launched into a further account of his experience of the islands—his passion for the tropics—his sad love affair with a Creole girl of passable birth but little fortune—the unfeeling nature of his father’s overseer—a falling out with the fellow over the course of his apprenticeship—Sir Davie’s determination to take to the sea once more—his flight, by night, to a merchant ship weighing anchor with the tide in Freetown Harbour—the years of travel that succeeded: rounding the Cape; his first sight of Alta California; assays in the Arctic; his first glimpse of Macao—and at last, when he was three-and-twenty years old, and had been absent from England some seven years, the news, received two months after the fact by letter delivered by H.M.S.
Laconia
, of his father’s death, and his own accession to the baronetcy.

“I made for home immediately, of course, by constant exchange of ships, arriving some seven weeks after the receipt of the letter and posting as swiftly as I could to Kildane. A few days sufficed to put me in possession of the facts of my existence; I claimed a comfortable fortune, a house of the first stare, and an easy footing among the Great. My father’s steward—now my own—displayed excellent management of
Kildane’s affairs, but impressed upon me my duty to marry. I looked about the Marriage Mart once the Season was launched, and was so fortunate as to engage the affections of a reasonably-dowered and not ill-favoured female, the aforementioned Mary, with whom I lived barely a twelvemonth before she died in childbirth, and my son with her.”

“I thought you said her name was Anne,” I objected, frowning slightly.

“Anne? Mary? Elizabeth? They are all much of a muchness, are they not? But perhaps you are right. Undoubtedly my late wife’s name was Anne.”

“You have my deepest sympathy,” Edward said, less drily than Sir Davie’s caprice should have urged; for he, too, had lost a wife in childbirth.

But Sir Davie waved an airy hand. “I underwent a curious change as Anne’s dust was interred in the Kildane vault. I may almost describe it as a
liberation
, my dear sir. It was as tho’, having fulfilled all the duties expected of my caste, I might now throw off convention in favour of adventure. A week had not elapsed before I found myself in Southampton, searching out a likely East Indiaman, and had embarked once more on the roving life that exactly suited me. Kildane I left in the steward’s care, and for years the arrangement answered nobly. I might draw upon funds lodged at various locales—Malta, Halifax, Macao—with only infrequent halts in my travel at home. And so decades wore away in swift succession! The American colonies revolted; the French King lost his head; armies moved about the globe; Napoleon rose to conquer the world, and fell to ruin on the Cossacks’ steppes—and all the while I lived a sybarite’s life: collecting stories and memories, enemies and friends, adventure and near-mortal escapes! If I had but leisure and inclination, I might pen a memoir that should set the Fashionable World
ablaze
, with a rage for seafaring exploration!”

“No doubt,” Edward said. “And if your present confinement in gaol cannot spur inclination, it shall at least provide opportunity. I will furnish pen and paper should you require it.”

“You are very good, sir,” Mr. Burbage said, with a quirk of his lips, “and your patience defies belief. Sir Davie, if you might turn at last to your acquaintance with Mr. Curzon Fiske—”

“Ah! Poor Curzon!” Sir Davie mourned. He gave up strolling and settled down upon his wooden bed. “Was there ever a fellow possessed of more engaging address? Or fewer morals? Have you noted, during the course of your life, Mr. Knight, how often the two coincide?”

“You met him, I collect, in Ceylon.”

“There you would be out,” the seaman returned with unruffled calm. “We met in Bangalore, in the midst of a decidedly heated dispute between the local maharajah and the Honourable East India Company. Shots were exchanged. Heads rolled. A particular fort, as I recall, was beseiged. Fiske and I encountered one another when the subsequent looting had reached a fevered pitch, and both of us attempted to secure the same cask of jewels. Fiske sought the pistol thrust into his belt, but I was before him—and contrived to render him insensible with a blow to the head.”

Edward, at this juncture, rubbed in desperation at his temples.

“And the jewels?” I enquired.

“Proved to be nothing more than a lady’s collection of valueless baubles,” Sir Davie concluded sadly. “At which discovery, I tossed them over my shoulder for the next benighted fool to covet, and did my best to drag Fiske out of the melee. It seemed the least I could do for a fellow Englishman. By the time he came to himself, we were beyond the fortress walls and I was able to apologise most civilly for the trouble I had
caused. In return, he generously invited me to join him on an expedition to Ceylon—in which legitimate business he had been engaged by the Company, before the regrettable affair at Bangalore had diverted him.”

“But I thought you said
he
saved
your
life,” my brother interjected, bewildered.

“And so he did! —A good two years since, perhaps less, when malaria swept through the lowlands, he saw me carried, by mule-drawn pallet, into the more salubrious air of the tea plantations. These are found amidst the Ceylonese hills, you know, and at that altitude, the mortal humours are dispersed, and the fever’s hold gradually abates. There is a hill-station there, frequented by Portuguese monks, who are adept at treating the illness; they offer a sort of tonic, steeped from bark, that is most effective. Certainly, my dear Mr. Knight, I should have died in the lowlands but for Fiske’s intervention.”