The Sudbury School Murders

Chapter Five

The next morning, I received a letter from James Denis. He briefly thanked me for telling him of Middleton's death. He also asked that I furnish him with the complete details of the inquest and anything I discovered about the murder. He stressed that it was most important. "Middleton sent me several letters about the dangers there. Guard yourself."

I viewed the last sentences with surprise and some mild annoyance. I agreed with Denis that danger lurked here, and that blaming Sebastian for Middleton's death was not the right solution. But I wished Denis had been clearer about what dangers Middleton had hinted and who I was to guard against.

I tossed his letter aside and opened one from Grenville. Grenville professed amazement at the murder and asserted he wanted to come down as soon as he could get away. He was distracted at the moment, he said, by the disappearance of Marianne Simmons.

I stopped, brows rising. Marianne had lived upstairs from me in London for the first year or so I'd lived in rooms above a bake shop. She was an actress by trade, making her living treading the boards at Drury Lane. With her golden curls and childlike face, she also lived by enticing foolish gentlemen to give her more money than they should.

Grenville himself had given her money; in total, thirty gold guineas, though I tried to tell him not to waste his coin. A few months ago, Grenville had taken Marianne from Grimpen Lane and deposited her in a gilded cage on Clarges Street, a fine Mayfair address. He'd given her every luxury, but she'd chafed at her confinement and had amused herself by torturing him.

Now, it seemed, she'd broken out of the cage and flown. Grenville wrote of it in terse sentences. She had disappeared a few days before. He had searched, but had not found her. He had decided to hire a Bow Street Runner.

I blew out my breath, picked up a pen, and prepared to write back that he should not do such a damn fool thing.

I hesitated. It was not my business. I was not terribly worried for Marianne's safety; she had often vanished from her rooms for weeks at a time and returned without any harm done. If Grenville hired a Runner to drag Marianne home, she would simply leave again and find a more clever way of escaping. This was a game he could not win.

Why he was so adamant on keeping her confined, I could not understand. Grenville was usually the most rational of gentlemen, but where Marianne was concerned, he had certainly lost his head.

I turned his letter over and wrote on the back, "Let her go. It can only do you harm if you find her. Your motives are the best, I know, but you cannot bind her if she does not want to be bound."

I knew Grenville would not want to read those words or heed them, but I wrote them for what it was worth.

As I sealed the letter, I remembered something that I'd pushed to the back of my mind. A few days ago, during my morning ride, I had taken the horse as far as Hungerford. At the end of the High Street, I had seen a woman who'd looked remarkably like Marianne duck back inside a house. At the time, I'd thought nothing of it, believing Marianne safely in London with Grenville.

Hungerford would certainly be a place to hide from Grenville. But why should she hide herself here in the country, so close to the Sudbury School, where she knew I'd gone? I had assumed, and apparently Grenville did too, that she'd gone to visit a man. I was in all likelihood mistaken about the woman I saw, though it could not hurt to discover whether I was in error.

My next letter was from Lady Breckenridge. I opened it carefully, as though it might sting me, and well it might. Lady Breckenridge's letters to me so far had been filled with barbed witticisms about various members of the haut ton. The letters amused me-I shared many of her opinions-but they did leave me to wonder what barbed witticisms she made about me in my absence.

This letter urged me to cease praising the beauty of the Berkshire countryside and write of something more interesting. "Really, Lacey, you are a man of intellect, and what's better, common sense, and yet, you address me as though I were an inane debutante who would want to hurry down and do a watercolor of the place. Amuse me with anecdotes of the silly things country people and merchant schoolboys get up to, for heaven's sake."

As usual, with Lady Breckenridge, I did not know whether to laugh or grow irritated. Donata Breckenridge was thirty, black-haired, blue-eyed and sharp-tongued. I had disliked her when I first met her-over a billiards game in Kent-but she had rendered me assistance during the affair of the Glass House not a month ago. I'd come to see that she could be kindhearted beneath her acid observations. I had also kissed her, and the memory of that was not disagreeable.

I laid her letter aside, reflecting that she might find news of the murder a little less inane than my descriptions of country meadows.

I had left the next letter for last. Louisa Brandon had not yet written me since I'd arrived in Sudbury, though I had written her twice, and I'd feared she would not correspond with me at all. But now she had-three thick sheets full of her slanted writing.

I broke the seal, sat back in my chair, and prepared to savor every word.

I was still savoring the letter later, when I rode my usual horse to Sudbury for the inquest that afternoon. Louisa had said nothing out of the ordinary, nothing that one acquaintance might not say to another. She'd described a tedious supper she'd attended with her husband with veterans from the Peninsular War, "during which the colonels congratulated one another on the depth of the dung they had stood in and the viciousness of the flies that had bit them while they waited for the French to shoot at them."

I smiled. I could imagine Louisa politely containing her boredom, while the retired officers relived the hardships of the Peninsula as though it had been the finest of holidays. The more venomously they'd complained at the time, the louder the laughter and the longer the reminiscences would be. Poor Louisa.

She'd said little more than that. Only that she'd shopped and gossiped with Lady Aline and visited a girl called Black Nancy, who was doing fine as a maid in an inn near Islington.

She apologized for going on about trivial matters that would bore a gentleman, but I imbibed every word as though they were the finest brandy. This is what I wanted with Louisa, the small things, the friendly discussion, the sharing of lives. What she termed trivial, I called pleasure beyond price.

The inquest for Middleton was held at the magistrate's house in Sudbury, a fairly large brick dwelling half a mile on the other side of the village. Behind it a slope of damp green ran down to brush that lined the canal.

We sat in a large hall in the middle of the house, almost a square room with benches all around. The coroner sat on a landing a few steps up from the rest of us, the magistrate next to him. The magistrate reminded me of Squire Allworthy in Henry Fielding's humorous novel Tom Jones; he was rotund, with a pink and benevolent face.

I learned quickly that the magistrate's flesh did not house a warmhearted being but a man slightly harassed that he had a murder on his hands.

The coroner, who was thin and cadaverous, the opposite of the magistrate, called the proceedings to order. Rutledge, looking annoyed that he'd been pulled from the important business of running the school, identified the body as Oliver Middleton, who had come to work in his stables six months before.

The coroner had examined the corpse, he said, as had the local doctor. The coroner announced that Middleton had met his death from a knife across his windpipe, and then he had been pushed into the lock, where he had lain underwater for some time, four hours at the very least. The coroner could not be certain how long Middleton had actually been dead, but certainly no more than eight hours before he'd been found.

Since Sebastian had told me he'd been speaking to him at ten o'clock, and Middleton had been found at six o'clock in the morning, this information did not seem particularly helpful.

According to the stable hands, Middleton had left the stable yard about ten o'clock Sunday evening and said that he was off to Sudbury and the tavern. The landlord of the tavern stood up and told the coroner what he'd told me, that Middleton had never arrived.

"Very well." The coroner looked vacantly about the room. "Where is the man who found the body?"

The lockkeeper shuffled forward and said in his taciturn way that he had gone out to open the lock for an early barge about six o'clock. He'd seen the dead body, recognized Middleton, sent word up to the school and sent for the constable. They'd tried to fish the body out, then decided to send the barge through and drag Middleton out with it, as I had witnessed.

The coroner called Sebastian next.

Every person in the room craned to watch Sebastian walk forward. He looked pale, but otherwise well. In fact, he seemed relieved to be here in this open hall, out of his prison, no matter what happened to him.

Belinda Rutledge had not attended the inquest. I assumed her father had forbidden her to come, something I would have done in his place. A coroner's inquest was no place for a young girl, and she might have betrayed herself in agitation over Sebastian.

"Your name is Sebastian?" the coroner began. The magistrate next to him leaned forward, like a bull lowering its head, and watched.

"Sebastian D'Arby," Sebastian answered, his voice subdued.

The coroner gave him a sharp glance, as though not believing he had a surname at all. "You were employed by the Sudbury School to assist in the stables?"

"Yes."

The coroner looked annoyed that he'd not appended a sir to the yes. "No doubt the residents of the Sudbury School were pleased to know that a Romany was looking after their horses," he said.

A titter ran through the room. Many people considered the Roma criminals simply for existing, and most believed they were horse thieves. Sebastian did not smile. "I am good with the horses."

"Yes, yes, of course you are. Tell me, did you get along with Mr. Middleton and the other stable hands?"

"Well enough."

The coroner moved a sheet of paper. "And yet, one of the stable lads reported to the constable that he had heard you and Middleton arguing, quite loudly, just before Middleton left the stables that night."

Sebastian stared. I stared as well. Sebastian had mentioned no quarrel with Middleton, and I had not heard that any of the stable hands had witnessed such a quarrel. I wondered where the coroner had obtained this information.

I waited, suddenly uncomfortable. If Sebastian had lied to me, I could not help him.

"He makes a mistake," Sebastian said weakly.

The coroner looked displeased. "Mr. Middleton left the stables at about ten o'clock," the coroner went on. "Said he was heading for the public house in Sudbury. At a little past ten, you yourself left the stables, according to the other lads. Where did you go?"

Sebastian wet his lips. His black hair glistened in the chunk of sunlight that slanted through a tall window. "I went for a walk. Along the canal."

"Along the canal. In which direction?"

"South. Toward Great Bedwyn."

"And you returned, according to your statement, at two o'clock?"

"Yes."

"A long walk, Mr… er… D'Arby, wouldn't you say?"

"I visited my family."

"Yes, so you said. Interesting that the constable has not been able to find a trace of your family, on the canal or off it."

Sebastian's eyes flickered. "They move all the time. They could be in Bath by now."

"Be assured, we are still looking. Now, did anyone see you on this walk? Did you speak to anyone who would remember you walking about between the hours of ten and two?"

Sebastian glanced once at me. I kept my expression neutral. "I saw no one."

The coroner looked pleased. "And so you walked back to the stables and went to bed."

"Yes. And rose in the morning as usual."

"Whereupon you learned of the death-yes, you told the constable." He shuffled papers again. "When you walked along the canal, did you go anywhere near Lower Sudbury Lock?"

Sebastian looked startled. "Of course. I had to walk past it to reach the stables."

"And you saw nothing amiss?"

"No."

"Very well, Mr. D'Arby, you may sit down."

The room rustled as listeners stirred and whispered to their neighbors. The coroner took his time about calling the next witness, giving everyone, including the jury, plenty of time to speculate.

The next witness proved to be the stable hands called Thomas Adams, who claimed he'd heard an argument between Sebastian and Middleton. "Tell us, in your own time, Mr. Adams, what you heard when the gypsy and Mr. Middleton argued," the coroner said smoothly.

The stable hand was about fifty years old with iron-gray hair. He looked uncomfortable standing up in front of the coroner and magistrate as well as the rest of the men crowded into the hall. "I was just going up the stairs to me bed, in the loft," he said, carefully pronouncing each word. "I heard Middleton down in the stable yard, shouting. He said, 'I don't care what you do, I'm quit of you.' Then the other fellow said, 'Where are you going?' Middleton, he says, 'Down pub. Where I can drink with real men.'" Thomas cleared his throat, looked nervously at the magistrate. "Then the Romany man, he says, 'No, you're going to hell.'"

The coroner perked up. "And what did Mr. Middleton say to that?"

Thomas looked apologetic. "Mr. Middleton said, in so many words, that Sebastian should fornicate himself. A might more vulgar than that, you understand, sir."

The coroner nodded. "And then?"

"Middleton stormed across the yard and out of the gate to the lane. A few minutes later, I see Sebastian also let himself out the gate. I figured they would shout at each other all the way to Sudbury, and I went to bed."

The coroner nodded and dismissed him. As the man shuffled back to his bench, Sebastian sprang to his feet. "He is lying. I never said these things to Mr. Middleton. I never shouted at him."

"Mr. D'Arby, you have had time to tell your story. Sit down."

Sebastian remained standing, quivering. Several of the jury looked alarmed. I caught his eye, made a sit down, for God's sake motion with my hand. Sebastian saw me, lowered himself reluctantly to the bench once again.

The coroner turned to the jury. "Now, gentleman," he began.

He was finished. No more witnesses. The coroner, I could see, had made up his mind. I rose to my feet. "May I speak?"

The coroner looked at me, surprised and slightly irritated. "Yes, Mr… " he peered at me shortsightedly, then realized he did not know me.

"Captain," I said. "Captain Lacey."

"Yes, Captain Lacey?"

"I would like to point out that I knew this man, Middleton, in London. He used to work for a gentleman called James Denis."

I do not know what I expected. Gasps, perhaps. The magistrate and the coroner simply looked at me.

Rutledge, on the other hand, reacted. He flushed until his face grew mottled, his brows thunderous.

"And how long ago was this?" the magistrate asked.

"Before he came here. Last summer, at the least."

"Last summer? Eight months ago? I beg your pardon, Captain, but I hardly understand how can it be connected with what happened here."

"This Mr. Denis is a dangerous man," I said. "I am suggesting that a connection in London, possibly one through Denis, caused Middleton's death. Perhaps some person followed him down here from London and killed him."

The coroner considered this. He took his time. "And why do you suppose that this person, whoever he is, waited eight months?"

"I have no idea," I said. "It is merely a suggestion."

"A suggestion." The coroner wrote something on the ivory colored paper before him. "And I have noted it. Thank you, Captain."

He turned his back and prepared to address the jury. I remained standing a few seconds longer, then realized there was no point. I sat down as the coroner began his summing up and instructing the gentlemen on their duty.

I waited in the chill room with everyone else while the jury conferred in low voices in a corner. I felt Rutledge's glare on me, but I did not acknowledge him. I simply coughed into my handkerchief, the dampness getting the better of me.

The jury at last returned, and their verdict was no surprise. They found that Oliver Middleton, head groom to the stables of the Sudbury School, had been deliberately murdered, and they named Sebastian D'Arby, a Romany, as the one who should be examined by the magistrate for the crime.

The constable came for him. Sebastian, on his feet, clenched his fists and shouted, "I did not kill him. I did not!"

The constable and another large man subdued him and led him away. The magistrate would try him, and very probably hold him until the assizes, where he would face a criminal trial. The inquest was at an end.