Peril by Post Page 8

They reached the foot of the cliff without mishap, having moved at a brisker pace, even in semidarkness, than Pickett had done with Julia. Percival looked first one way and then the other, then voiced the pertinent question. “Which way do we go now?”

  Since it appeared he was destined to find the body whether he wished it or not, Pickett would have preferred to do the thing quickly, while there was sufficient darkness to cover him in case he should betray by some careless gesture or expression that he had seen the body before. Still, he willed himself not to propose they go upriver, where he knew it lay. Great was his relief when Ben put forward the same suggestion.

  “There.” The young farmer pointed in the direction of the waterfall. “Pool at the bottom of the falls offers the best fishing. If it’s fish he was after, he’ll have gone that way.”

  Percival shot him a resentful glance, and for a moment Pickett feared he would counter this recommendation by insisting they go downriver, leaving Pickett himself to cast the deciding vote. But apparently the poet could think of no compelling opposition, for he gave a grunt which Pickett supposed indicated agreement, and stepped into the water, boots and all; whatever his speculations as to Lizzie’s bare feet, he apparently had no intention of exposing his own. Pickett wondered whether the poet actually earned enough from his verse that he could afford to be cavalier with his footwear, or if he had a generous patron. Of Ben Wilson, he had no such doubts: the young farmer scrambled out of his sturdy brogues, just as Pickett had done with his own boots the previous day. As for Pickett himself, he followed the same procedure, leaving his boots beside Ben’s shoes on the narrow strip of riverbank.

  Soon the three young men were sloshing their way against the current. They had not gone far before Percival was bemoaning the fact that the cold water poured in over the tops of his boots, drenching his stockings and freezing (as he claimed) his feet. Pickett, all too conscious of his own cold feet—and the fact that at so early an hour they should by rights have been entwined with Julia’s amongst warm bed linen— had no sympathy to spare for him.

  When at last they came upon the body, Pickett did not have to feign surprise. He distinctly remembered turning the innkeeper onto his back and making sure his head was clear of the water, but Ned Hawkins now lay face down at the river’s edge, his graying hair drifting in the current like some exotic species of aquatic plant. Although his clothing was disarranged, there were no marks on the body that might indicate disturbance by a wild animal. And since Mr. Hawkins had clearly been incapable of moving himself when Pickett had last seen him, his change in position could only mean one thing.

  Someone else had searched the body.

  6

  In Which John Pickett Testifies at an Inquest

  THE TREK BACK UP THE path was much slower than their descent had been. Pickett and Ben carried the innkeeper’s body between them, while Percival held the lantern aloft to light their way. The only sound to be heard over the rushing of the water was the labored breathing of the bearers and occasional snatches of the poet’s newest tragic ode, “The Hair That Floateth Outward on the Stream,” which he saw fit to try out on a captive (if inattentive) audience.

  It was not until they approached the inn that he emerged from the grip of his muse long enough to consider the practical matter at hand. “I say! Who’s going to tell the widow?”

  Ben Wilson set his jaw. “I will. Known her all my life.”

  Pickett was not sorry to be relieved of this task. At some point he would have to talk to Mrs. Hawkins and discover what she knew of her husband’s summons to Bow Street—if she was aware of it at all—but for now he was only a guest at the inn, a visitor enjoying the beauty of the Lake District with his bride.

  His bride, who was no doubt watching from the window as they approached the inn with their burden—and who would certainly expect a full accounting upon his return.

  Nor was Julia the only one watching. As they rounded the corner of the inn and approached the front door, it flew open and Mrs. Hawkins ran toward them, skirts flapping.

  “Ned, Ned!” she shrieked. “Speak to me!”

  “Alas, those lips will never speak again,” pronounced Percival, then counted the syllables of this sentence on his fingers, pleased to discover that he had spoken in perfect iambic pentameter without even trying.

  “If you’ll show us the way, ma’am, we’ll lay him on his bed,” the farmer told the widow gently, then turned to address the poet in quite a different tone. “Make yourself useful, Hartsong, and give her your arm.”

  To his credit, Percival rose to the occasion, offering the innkeeper’s widow his escort with all the solemnity the occasion demanded. The odd little processional entered the inn and passed through the public room to the family’s rooms in the rear, where Pickett and Ben were at last able to lay their burden down. By unspoken agreement, they did what they could to straighten the crooked limbs while blocking Mrs. Hawkins’s view of the body, preventing her from seeing the full extent of her husband’s injuries.

  “Thank you for bringing him home,” Mrs. Hawkins said, dignified in her grief. “I know it wasn’t easy, fetching him up from the river.”

  Pickett didn’t have to ask how she had known they’d come from the river; her husband’s drenched hair and clothes, to say nothing of his own and Ben’s sodden sleeves and breeches, told their own tale.

  “I’m sorry,” Ben said simply. “Sorry we couldn’t have brought him back to you alive.”

  She nodded. “Thank you, Ben. You were always a good lad.”

  Percival glanced around the room. “Where’s Lizzie?”

  “She’s still abed. I’ll have to wake her now and tell her that her da is—gone—but I’d rather do it in private, if you lot don’t mind.”

  The poet appeared inclined to linger—hoping for the opportunity to console Lizzie, no doubt—but he could hardly remain when Pickett and Ben were already moving toward the door, especially when they had been specifically asked to go, so he shuffled off in their wake. Pickett, for his part, was more than ready to return to his wife.

  “At last!” she exclaimed when he opened the door and entered their room. “I’ve been waiting forever!”

  “Don’t touch me,” he cautioned, holding out a hand to forestall the embrace she appeared to have every intention of bestowing upon him. “I’m soaking wet, and I’ve been lugging a dead body.”

  “Yes, I know. I watched from the window.” She watched as he picked up the poker and stirred the banked fire to life. “I thought you were going to avoid searching along the river.”

  “I was. But Mr. Hetherington took charge of the search—I suppose he considered it his duty as squire—and he had other ideas.” Having finished tending the fire, he shifted his gaze to the bowl and pitcher on the washstand. “Is that still warm?”

  “Tepid, perhaps.” She poured some of the water into the bowl and stuck a finger in to confirm this theory. “I got out of bed not long after you left, so it’s been sitting for some time. Shall I ring for hot water?”

  He shook his head. “They have more important things to do downstairs. I can make shift with a tepid bath.”

  Suiting the word to the deed, he shrugged off his coat and waistcoat, then pulled his shirt over his head. While Julia observed this operation appreciatively, she nevertheless directed the subject back to the matter at hand. “Why did he send you down the cliff path? Did he say?”

  “He said something about assigning the younger men to the rougher terrain. As it turned out, it was a good thing he did.”

  “Oh?”

  He paused in his ablutions and looked at her. “The body had been moved, Julia. Someone else had been there. If I hadn’t been there at the discovery to see the body in situ, so to speak, I never would have known.”

  “Are you certain? It might have been a—an animal, you know.” Her voice trembled slightly over the words, and Pickett knew she was thinking of her sister, who had gone missing a dozen years earlier and was assumed to have
fallen prey to a wild animal, until she was discovered quite recently, alive and well and living with the man who had rescued her from a cruel and violent husband.

  “The thought occurred to me, too, but it didn’t look that way.” He gave her a highly expurgated description of the innkeeper as he’d first discovered him, and as he had seen the body that morning.

  “Was someone searching for the letter, do you suppose?” she asked at the end of this recitation.

  “I think it very likely. Unfortunately, I couldn’t look as closely as I would have liked, since Lizzie’s rival suitors were there. Although,” he added, “now that I think of it, they might not have paid any attention to me at all. I only wonder that neither of them seized the opportunity to shove the other off the cliff.”

  “Perhaps the letter doesn’t have anything to do with it,” said Julia, much struck. “Perhaps one of Lizzie’s suitors killed her father. If Ned Hawkins made it plain that he favored one of them over the other for his daughter’s hand—”

  “If marriage to Lizzie was the motive, then I’m thinking Percival would be our man. I can’t imagine many men would be pleased with the idea of their daughter rejecting a yeoman farmer with his own land in favor of a poet, even one of good family. Of course, that’s assuming it’s marriage Percival has in mind, which I don’t for one moment believe. A pastoral mistress might be all very well, but when it comes time to take a wife, Percival will want a lady of his own class, and one with a dowry that will enable him to write that high-minded drivel of his without his being obliged to trouble himself with such mundane matters as earning his bread.”

  “And yet he cannot be entirely without resources,” Julia pointed out. “After all, he can afford a prolonged sojourn in the Lake District.”

  “Funded by his father, no doubt. But I suspect Hartsong Senior would clip the purse-strings quickly enough if Percival were to return home with an innkeeper’s daughter on his arm.” He grimaced. “I haven’t forgotten to what lengths your first husband’s family was prepared to go, in order to prevent you from making just such a misalliance.”

  “There you have it, then! If it was seduction, rather than marriage, that Percival had in mind, then he would have all the more reason to want Ned Hawkins out of the way. It would certainly be to his advantage not to have his paramour’s irate papa at hand to protect his daughter’s virtue,” Julia deduced, then frowned thoughtfully. “No, that can’t be right. Mr. Hawkins must have outweighed him by six stone or more—far too much for Percival to have thrown him off balance.”

  “Oh, it can be done,” Pickett assured her. “You just have to catch your man unawares and hit him low. Take his legs out from under him, you know.”

  She stared at him. “Do I even want to ask how you know this?”

  He gave a sheepish little laugh. “Let’s just say I’ve had to make my share of hasty exits.”

  “Well, don’t think you can escape from me so easily,” she said, wrapping her arms about his bare torso.

  This time he made no effort to avoid her embrace. “Not even if I take your legs out from under you?”

  “Especially not if you take my legs out from under me,” she replied, and the bleak activities of the dawn were temporarily forgotten.

  THE CORONER’S INQUEST, a requirement in the case of any death not resulting from illness or old age, was held the following afternoon in the inn’s public room. It seemed to Pickett as if the entire village had turned out, and Julia agreed that this was very likely the case.

  “They all must have known him, and besides, rural villages offer so little in the way of social occasions that no one will want to pass up such an opportunity. I know it sounds rather cold-blooded,” she added apologetically, no doubt thinking of the rural village where she had grown up, and where they had both been obliged to testify at just such a proceeding, “but there it is.”

  “I suppose there will be even less entertainment now,” Pickett remarked.

  “Oh? How so?”

  “The assemblies at the Golden Feather,” he reminded her. “I shouldn’t think Mr. Tyson would have the cheek to host a dance while his rival lies dead right across the street.”

  “Very likely not,” she agreed. “And there lies the solution to the mystery,” she added, lowering her voice to a conspiratorial whisper.

  “Where?” Pickett asked, baffled.

  “You killed Ned Hawkins yourself, so you wouldn’t be obliged to escort me to an assembly.”

  “My guilty secret is discovered at last,” he murmured into her ear, sending her into a fit of giggles which she quickly turned, not very convincingly, into a cough. “Although I hope you will tell me how I managed to do the deed while lying sound asleep on a blanket in full view of my accuser. It seems a useful talent to cultivate.”

  “Then, too, I wonder at your killing our host and obliging Mr. Tyson to cancel one assembly, or perhaps two, when you might have killed Mr. Tyson and put an end to them altogether.”

  “Speaking of Mr. Tyson,” Pickett said thoughtfully, “there’s another one who probably won’t shed any tears to have Hawkins gone. I might have to send you across to the Golden Feather to do a bit of investigating.”

  “Do you mean it?” Julia asked, surprised and gratified to be entrusted with such a task. “Are you certain you wouldn’t prefer to do it yourself?”

  He shook his head. “I’m afraid appearing crestfallen at the cancellation of the assembly is beyond my acting ability.”

  The coroner entered the room at that moment, rendering further conversation impossible. In Pickett’s experience, coroners were a mixed lot: sometimes physicians experienced in medical matters but ignorant of the law; sometimes solicitors who relished the opportunity to ape their superiors in the judicial hierarchy, the white-wigged barristers who presided over cases before the Old Bailey or the rural assizes. The coroner who presided over the inquiry into the death of Ned Hawkins was a solicitor, and seemed to be one of the more capable members of the species, for which Pickett was thankful; as one of the three purported discoverers of the body, he would be obliged to testify. This in itself was not unusual, for he had testified at numerous inquests in the past, and would no doubt testify at many more in the future. But never before had he been obliged to deliberately withhold information, and so fearful was he that he might inadvertently describe some detail from his first, private viewing of the innkeeper’s remains that he had rehearsed his testimony the night before, with Julia serving as coroner—a procedure he had not performed since his earliest days at Bow Street. Not, of course, that Julia had participated in these sessions (he had not yet known of her existence, much less that she would one day be his wife), but he still had memories of himself as a terrified nineteen-year-old member of the Foot Patrol, pacing the floor of his small Drury Lane flat while he recited the pertinent facts of the case and framed answers to any question which his magistrate had told him the coroner might be likely to ask. As he recalled, this exercise had lasted so late into the night that his landlady, who lived in the back of the chandler’s shop below, had finally pounded on the ceiling of her own bedchamber with a broom handle and demanded that he be quiet and go to bed so that a body could get some rest.

  The coroner pronounced the inquest in session, and after hearing Mrs. Hawkins’s account of how her husband had not been seen since about noon two days previously, and how a search party had been sent out only the day before, sent the widow back to her seat and summoned the first witness.

  “Will Mr. Edward Gape please take the stand?”

  The name was not unfamiliar; Pickett recognized it from his midnight search of the inn’s register. Great was his surprise, however, when Percival Hartsong rose and made his mincing way to the front of the room, where he took the chair his hostess had just vacated.

  “Your name is Edward Gape?” the coroner asked somewhat skeptically, giving voice to Pickett’s question as well as his own.

  “It is,” the poet admitted tersely.


  “And yet you have been calling yourself Percival Hartsong.”

  “I write poetry,” the young man said, bristling. “Whoever heard of a poet named Gape?”

  The coroner apparently found nothing to dispute in this rhetorical question. “You are visiting from Norfolk?” Receiving a nod in the affirmative, he continued, “And what do you do there?”

  “As I said, I write poetry.”

  “This is how you make your living?” the coroner asked in some surprise.

  “No—at least, not yet.” Apparently resigned to the fact that the coroner would require the information, he confessed rather grudgingly, “I receive an allowance from my father, Sir Richard Gape.”

  “How long have you been in Banfell?”

  “I arrived a fortnight ago.”

  “And your business here?”

  Edward Gape might have been called to testify, but it was Percival Hartsong who waved an expansive hand and answered rhapsodically. “Inspiration, my good man! Inspiration for my Art: the lakes, the becks, the fells”—he cast a leering glance at Lizzie Hawkins, seated white-faced and numb beside her stepmother—“the other natural beauties—”

  “Yes, we know all about you poet fellows,” the coroner said, unimpressed. “Tell me, were you acquainted with Ned Hawkins?”

  “I wouldn’t call it an ‘acquaintance,’ but I could hardly fail to know the man, as he was my host. I’m putting up at the Hart and Hound,” he added unnecessarily, as everyone in the village must have seen him in its public room, tossing back tankards of ale and flirting with the innkeeper’s daughter.

  “And yet you interrupted your holiday to join in the search for a man who was essentially a stranger,” the coroner observed. “A kind and thoughtful gesture, Mr. Gape.”

  “Not at all,” the poet demurred. “Experience is as meat and drink to the poet, for how is one to write about Life unless he first experiences it? And what better way to understand Life than to come face to face with Death?”