Chapter Six #2
Cathy laughed as she read one of the bundles of notes. “Poor Sir Walter! His secret is that his wife could not give him children, and faked all of her pregnancies. His daughters were all borne of his mistresses. ‘Tis fortunate for Mr. Willoughby, his heir, that he still could not produce a son!”
“No wonder he flirts with all the ladies,” Emma drawled. “He must still hope to amend that, for he dresses like a dandy twenty years younger – and twenty years out of fashion!”
“That is not the only sordid affair. Mrs. Rushworth and Mr. Crawford,” Lady Allen said with a gasp.
“Do slow down! I cannot transcribe it all so quickly!” Harriet sat at the desk, and removed each person’s sheet of paper one by one to update the facts and clues they discovered.
Sir Edward offered to assist her, employing a little tray in his lap to write upon.
They went faster with two scribes, and uncovered increasingly incriminating information.
Mr. Willoughby, who was kin to Lady Allen as well as Sir Walter, had fathered a child out of wedlock with the ward of a gentleman officer who resided near Lady Allen’s property, Allenham, in Devonshire.
“My father seems to think Mr. Willoughby has some reason to fear reprisals from this Colonel Brandon, for meddling with young Eliza Williams,” Mr. Tilney observed as he passed Cathy the dossier.
“My goodness, it seems natural children are quite common in my family,” Lady Allen tutted, blushing.
“I suppose he need not fear either I or Sir Walter would disinherit him; it would be most hypocritical. But I grew up in Devonshire, you know; I met the colonel when I was younger. I rather fancied him, at one time, before I met Edward. He is quite a fearsome man, and poor John has every reason to fear Colonel Brandon will call him out. John is a terrible shot.”
“Oh! That is worth writing down,” Cathy told Harriet.
“Terrible shot,” Harriet repeated as she retrieved his page.
“Hmm, I had not thought Rushworth had any other secret beyond his wife’s infidelity, which is really far too obvious,” Mr. Darcy remarked. He closed that dossier thoughtfully.
Sir Edward looked at him expectantly. “I cannot argue that, but what shall I write down for him?”
“No, he said there was something,” Elizabeth reminded him. “Something about his mother?”
Mr. Darcy nodded and resumed reading over the papers.
“His mother had the management of his estate, Sotherton Court in Northamptonshire for a dozen years, from the time her husband died until her son came of age and left university – Oxford, of course,” he shared a sneer with the other two gentlemen.
“Mrs. Rushworth profited a great deal off of illicit smuggling, most intrepid for a widow. And you might as well document that Henry Crawford has for the last year been a frequent guest at Sotherton Court, as the lover of the new Mrs. Rushworth. It seems his access to the house afforded him some chance to snoop for secrets, since the captain was extorting him for secrets.”
“Do you think him too stupid to be the murderer?” Cathy scrunched her face pensively. “His mother was being blackmailed, and also his wife, so the pair of them have double the motive.”
“I think him too stupid to even have a wife,” Emma drawled. “If that man can read, I will eat my own bonnet.”
“It could all be an act,” Elizabeth suggested.
She thought of how Mr. Wickham had slithered into their midst last year, hiding his own villainy by shifting the blame to Mr. Darcy with silver-tongued lies.
Could Mr. Rushworth’s inanity be a mask to conceal a more sinister character?
Everybody still seemed a suspicious possibility to her; not even all those present were exempted from her doubts.
“Anyway, I do not like the idea that having a relative with a secret makes one doubly suspicious,” Emma admitted, her fingers trembling as she opened Lady Susan’s dossier. “Good Lord,” she cried, and handed it to Lady Allen.
“Oh my! It says here she is implicated in the death of her husband. There is no concrete proof, but the accusation must frighten her if she has been buying the general's silence.”
“Oh no,” Emma groaned. She wrung her hands.
“She was quite merry after my late uncle died. He was not very kind to her. But she was put out that she should lose her home and be obliged to stay with various relations when London became too expensive for her – surely she would not have inconvenienced herself in such a way!”
Mr. Tilney looked over Lady Allen’s shoulder, perusing the documents she held. “It does seem he has some rather compelling evidence, courtesy of Mrs. Younge.”
He handed Emma another dossier, labeled Esther Denham. “Read this and perhaps it will cheer you.”
Cathy looked up with interest. “It must be one you have read, for I noticed you did not advise us to seek her society yesterday.”
“With good reason,” Emma gasped. “She attempted to murder her aunt, Lady Denham, a wealthy widow who resides in Sanditon. A poisoning was attempted, though the poor old lady survived, and Miss Denham’s own brother was implicated, causing Lady Denham to cut him from her will.
Miss Denham might have gotten half, but when Lady Denham did die a few months later; Miss Denham got everything.
It says she nursed her aunt for weeks after the incident, and might have covered her tracks well indeed but for the general’s informant, Mrs. Clay, whose brother is the doctor in that village. I wonder if she made a second attempt.”
Elizabeth offered up the dossier she had been perusing.
“It seems the general, via Henry Crawford, attempted to prove that Mr. Parker, also of Sanditon, was involved, both with the poisoning, and with Miss Denham herself. But there is no solid proof, writes Mr. Crawford to the captain in a letter from last August. There are some financial documents that show that Mr. Parker had been diverting some of the funds raised by his brother and their business partner, Lady Denham. They have quite an enterprise in expanding the village, to create seaside attractions that will draw in visitors and their ready funds. Mr. Parker is an embezzler, and possibly has more to do with Miss Denham than meets the eye.”
“It is noteworthy that they were both together at the time of the, er, gunshots.” Harriet looked up from her hasty scrawling, and was met with approval for her observation.
“So,” Sir Edward said, pushing his spectacles up his nose; he had pulled them out of his pocket when he began taking notes, and Elizabeth was glad that they were restored to equanimity, enough so that she could tease him a little.
“We have a handful of natural children, family reputation, forbidden love, abolitionist destruction of property, financial crimes, and possible or attempted murder. Cathy, my dear, when you pin these papers back on the wall, perhaps try rearranging them, not using the four columns you had before. We might rank the secrets from most to least incriminating and deduce who had the greatest motive.”
“But motive alone would implicate Mr. Tilney above everyone,” Cathy cried. “We must also consider a suspect’s character and behavior. And where they were at the time, of course, and then, Mr. Crawford, Mrs. Younge, and Mrs. Clay have no secrets, but they have motives enough.”
The group took this notion to heart, and discussed it at length. “Aside from myself, Henry Crawford has the best reason to harm Fred,” Mr. Tilney said. “The man who forced him to trade in secrets.”
“Secrets belonging to Mr. Bertram, the Rushworths, and Mr. Parker,” Mr. Darcy added.
“Lady Susan and Miss Denham have motive to kill, and have been capable of it in the past,” Cathy said. “Will you turn them over to the magistrate?”
“I will give him those dossiers and let him decide what to do with the ladies,” Mr. Tilney said, giving Emma an apologetic look. Emma held her head high, but she appeared unsettled.
“I think Sir Walter and Mr. Willoughby were standing near the window when it blew open,” Emma said. “What if one of them unlatched it?”
“I should mark that down,” Harriet told her. “And also, Mr. Crawford and I think Mrs. Rushworth were standing near the captain just before….”
When Harriet had finished her scribbling, she handed the papers to Cathy, who smeared ink on her hand as she collected them.
She and Sir Edward began to pin them up on the wall.
Emma went to help. She placed the Innocent placard on one side of the wall and pinned the one that said Suspicious on the other side.
There was some debate amongst them, but they eventually agreed upon the placement of all the suspects, which had not varied too much from what it had been before.
As Cathy began to replace the green, blue, and pink strings to connect them, Elizabeth examined the wall. “This one is smeared with ink.”
Cathy glanced at it; the bottom of the page was illegible from where she had brushed her hand over it. “Oh, he is near the innocent side, anyhow. Now tell me, shall I connect a pink string from you to Mr. Darcy? You had a great deal to say to one another during our exploration this morning.”
Elizabeth jerked her head toward Mr. Darcy, suddenly struck by something he had said – or rather, had not said.
When he so easily agreed to her adding a thread of connection to the wall, had he thought she meant a pink string between them?
Could that have been why he did not explain himself in her confusion?
“He told me what he told us just now of the secret the general held over him, and he advised me on how to approach my uncle about… everything.” Elizabeth kept her face neutral, though this was not the whole truth.
There had been something tender between them, though it was not one of the more important matters for her mind to dwell upon.
Cathy grinned. “What an intimate conversation! Perhaps a very light pink thread, but it is a fair beginning. I wish Mr. Tilney would think to cry on my shoulder!”
Elizabeth swatted at her sister. “He rather looked as if he had been crying, when the gentlemen returned from… their task.”
“I thought so, too,” Cathy agreed, slumping her shoulders. “I fancy him madly, Lizzy. If Mr. Tilney really is guilty, I shall never recover from it.”
Elizabeth cocked her head to one side in a sardonic pose. “You have known the man three days.”
“Well, I have not met very many, you know,” Cathy pouted. “None so handsome, nor so charming.”
“Nor so… in possession of an ancient castle, which is now sure to be haunted?” Elizabeth grinned, and Cathy did likewise.
“It is something every handsome man should endeavor to possess, if he possibly can.”