Free Jane and the Canterbury Tale by Stephanie Barron Page B

Jupiter say happened next?”
    Fanny leaned towards me with a conspirator’s air. “The gentlemen—Jupiter and James and Mr. Plumptre, who was then but eighteen—agreed to play at whist with Curzon Fiske. Jupiter insists it was in an effort to bring some peace to Mrs. Fiske—Mrs. MacCallister, I should say—because her aspect was so wild and distraught, and her husband would do little to comfort her.”
    “And?”
    “And … I do not know what happened
next
,” Fanny admitted, with a flattened expression. “Only that Jupiter turned owlish and cagey, and quite
knowing
beyond what anyone might bear, so that I was out of reason cross, and lost all patience with him.”
    I sighed.
    “When a person who has been frank turns to evasions and hints,” Fanny insisted with asperity, “there is nothing to be done but to ignore him. Anything more would be to reward quite tiresome behaviour.”
    “Undoubtedly. And yet you say that Curzon Fiske left Chilham. And without his wife.”
    “There was some sort of row that night, I think,” Fanny offered with a pretty knitting of her brows, “all the gentlemen having dipped quite deep into the claret. Perhaps the quarrel regarded the winnings, or pound points.”
    Or perhaps
, I thought,
it was to do with Adelaide. For certainly Curzon Fiske did not take her with him, when he fled England for the last time
.
    “In any case,” Fanny persisted, “Mr. Fiske was gone from Chilham by morning, leaving a note he was bound for India; and Mrs. Fiske was abandoned to the charity of her cousins.”
    “Poor woman! And she only one-and-twenty!”
    Fanny shrugged. “She thoroughly enjoyed her career as an Adventuress well enough while it lasted, so one cannot entirely pity her—but I believe the Wildmans treated her with considerable kindness. They even repaired the broken relations that had obtained between Adelaide and her mother, so that Mrs. Fiske was received once more into Mrs. Thane’s house. Her fine clothes and jewels and other belongings were seized by her husband’s creditors; but she lived so quietly and respectably, and the Wildmans backed her so nobly, that her reputation was restored, in time.”
    “Three years since,” I mused, “and she had no word of Curzon Fiske?”
    “Not until the report of his death was received,” Fanny concurred. “We learnt the news of James Wildman, when he rode over one pleasant afternoon in April last year—some eighteen months ago, now. A fever, it was said, contracted while Fiske was in the service of the Honourable East India Company—and the body had been buried in Ceylon.”
    “And so Mrs. Fiske was released of her onerous wedding vows, put on her mourning-clothes, and after a decent interval, was permitted to re-enter Society.”
    “Where, at the age of four-and-twenty, she was so happy as to make the acquaintance of one Captain Andrew MacCallister,” Fanny concluded.
    Andrew MacCallister. How much did he know, I wondered, of his wife’s storied past? Or the nature of her first attachment? And what would be his astonishment, upon learning that Curzon Fiske—so far from having released Adelaide to her happy future—had thrown his dark shadow over her vows, and made of her a bigamist?

   CHAPTER EIGHT   
     

The Tamarind Seed
     
    You must have seen, and more than once, one face
    In a crowd, so white, so pale, you knew at the sight
    This man was walking to death, and could not escape.…
    G EOFFREY C HAUCER, “T HE M AN OF L AW’S T ALE ”
     
    21 O CTOBER 1813, CONT .

    “J ANE,” MY BROTHER E DWARD CALLED FROM THE G REAT Hall as Fanny and I prepared to descend the stairs, “Dr. Bredloe has finished his examination of the corpse, and is partaking of refreshment in the drawing-room. I should be grateful if you would join us there.”
    “I am sure Mr. Wildman has finished writing what must be conveyed to Captain and Mrs. MacCallister,” I murmured to Fanny, “however little he may have relished the task; and