“Edward! We have need of you!” Mr. Hemming cried.

My cousin frowned, then set his fish carefully upon the grass at his feet and ambled towards us.

“Was there any sign of a horse?” Mr. Hemming returned to me with urgency. “Hoofprints, perhaps? — Could he have found his death from a fall?”

I shook my head. “He has been brutally and most savagely murdered, sir. There is nothing else to be said.”

“My dear Jane,” my cousin observed as he achieved our position, “you look remarkably unwell.”

“Miss Austen has sustained a shock,” Mr. Hemming informed him. “She has discovered a gentleman in the rocks above, quite dead.”

“A corpse?” Mr. Cooper exclaimed, with a look of consternation. “Not again, Jane! However shall we explain this to my aunt?”

BUT I WAS SAVED THE NECESSITY OF UNPLEASANT explanation some hours more. Mr. Hemming conveyed me to the relative comfort of the miller’s cottage, where I was seated in a hard wooden chair by an ancient woman of obscure dialect. There I sipped some water from a chipped earthenware mug, and gazed out of the unglazed window, and felt my terror ease with the water slipping noisily over the mill-wheel’s vanes. It should have been the perfect pastoral scene, of a kind beloved of my favoured poets, but for the preparations undergone a few moments before: the miller’s waggon readied, and his sole draught horse lured from the fields; a pallet laid out between two poles, and secured with a length of rope; the miller’s wife dispensing a spare sheet, worn quite through in places by time and the marriage bed. A few moments only saw the work completed, and then my cousin, the miller, and Mr. Hemming toiled up the craggy path in search of the ravaged body. They should not miss it for the crows.

Perhaps an hour passed before they reappeared, bearing a draped mass on the pallet between them. The countenances of all three, labourer and gentlemen alike, were stamped with grave disquiet. They set the pallet in the bed of the miller’s waggon with grunts of exertion and relief. The miller’s wife stood in her doorway, twisting her hands in her apron and considering, no doubt, of her sheet.

Mr. Cooper drew a tremulous breath. “May God have mercy on his soul,” he murmured, and wiped his streaming brow with a handkerchief.

“Did you recognise the face?” I enquired of Mr. Hemming.

“I did not,” he brusquely replied. “The poor wretch might hail from anywhere — he need not be a gentleman of this county. There are many who pass through Derbyshire in the summer months.”

He failed to meet my gaze with steadiness, and seemed most anxious to encourage the thought of the murdered man’s alienation from his final resting place. A dim note of warning sounded in the recesses of my brain — but suspicion of such a man as George Hemming must be absurd. His desire to regard the murdered fellow as foreign to Derbyshire should not be extraordinary. It is one thing to witness the mutilation of a stranger — death might have occurred as the result of a thousand grievances and enmities unknown. But the brutal end of an acquaintance is quite another matter. Such an end cannot be readily forgot.

“Are you well enough to attempt a journey, Jane?” Mr. Cooper enquired.

“I am. What is to be done with the corpse?”

Mr. Hemming stared at me in surprise; not one in an hundred ladies, perhaps, should have considered it her place to pursue such a matter. But then he recollected that I had discovered the poor soul myself, and must naturally feel an interest.

“I think it best to convey the body into Buxton,” he said. “It is no greater distance than Bakewell, although in the opposite direction; and chances are good that Deceased will be known there. Many strangers to the district put up in Buxton, intending to take the waters.”

“And does the Coroner for this district also reside in that town?”

“He does not,” Mr. Hemming replied, “but that is no very great matter. Tivey may ride over from Bakewell if he chuses; he does so often enough.”

“The choice appears to have been made already for him, sir,” I returned with some surprise. “He cannot help but ride over; he cannot neglect of so painful a duty! Is the local Justice, perhaps, a resident of Buxton rather than Bakewell?”

“Sir James may be said to reside in neither,” Mr. Hemming replied shortly, “his estate being at Monyash.”

“Monyash! But that is a good deal south of here, and only a few miles from Bakewell, is it not?”

Mr. Hemming turned towards the waggon with a suggestion of angry impatience in his countenance, and retorted that he preferred to carry the body into Buxton, and there was an end to the matter. He hoped to divert some greater misfortune, I guessed, in directing the corpse into a neighbourhood not his own. But why? Gone were the happy manners of the morning; he had become taciturn, preoccupied, closed in his confidence. I read some great trouble in Mr. Hemming’s looks — a greater unease than even the ravaged corpse had produced. Was it possible that the solicitor detected something in the gentleman’s aspect — or in the gruesome manner of his death — that gave rise to the gravest anxiety?

Did he suspect, perhaps, the hand that had done these acts?

Or was Mr. Hemming merely desirous of being rid of interfering females?

“Would you wish us to accompany you, Hemming?” enquired my cousin Mr. Cooper. He made the offer most unwillingly; we should lose the better part of the morning in traversing the hills, first west to Buxton, and then east again to Bakewell.

“Pray escort Miss Austen back to your inn, Edward, and leave this unhappy affair to me.” Mr. Hemming did not deign to look at my cousin as he said this, but kept his eyes resolutely turned towards the harness of his pony. “You shall take my trap, and leave it in The Rutland Arms’ stableyard. I shall send for it later.”

“But how shall you return to Bakewell from Buxton, Mr. Hemming?” I said in exasperation, “if we have commanded your horse? Why should we not all proceed companionably together towards Bakewell, and allow the Coroner and the Justice to exert their authority within their own district? Is not this diversion to Buxton a great deal of trouble, for no very good reason?”

“My reasons are my own, Miss Austen—” Mr. Hemming began abruptly, when he was interrupted by my cousin.

“I confess I must agree with Jane,” Mr. Cooper admitted doubtfully. “I cannot see the purpose of such needless activity, when so many of the principals reside in Bakewell. And we cannot know for certain, after all, that this poor unfortunate was staying in Buxton; he might as readily have taken a room at The Rutland Arms, like ourselves! I am sure that the Justice shall wonder at your decision, George. He will like to know — as we do — why you are so desirous of sending him over hill and dale in pursuit of his duty!”

The solicitor opened his mouth as though to speak, looked from the miller to ourselves without uttering a word, and then shrugged in resignation. “Very well,” he muttered, “let it be Bakewell, then, and the Devil take the consequences!”

With which impenetrable remark, he pulled himself up into the seat of his trap, and reached for the reins.

WE MADE OUR PROGRESS TOWARDS BAKEWELL IN THE heat of the day, the miller’s waggon following slowly behind. The air was oppressive with the promise of thunder, and a mass of cloud hovered over Dark Peak. Our passage was utterly silent but for the sound of the horses’ hooves; even my cousin was unmoved to send Heavenward a sacred song. Heavy as our spirits were, I was mistress enough of my faculties by the time we reached Bakewell to urge Mr. Hemming onward in search of the surgeon, when he would first have set me down at The Rutland Arms. And so it was that we came into Water Street.