And indeed, reader, he made it in style. He arrived in no mean hackney, but rather in a coach-and-four painted black with a great orange-colored device of some sort painted upon the door. Thus I could not be certain that Mr. Donnelly was within until the footman came round the coach and opened the door. And even then there was naught but a leg visible to the eye. Since I had never given particular attention to the shape of Mr. Donnelly’s leg, I was no better off than before. Nevertheless, the voice that came to me through the open door was recognizably his own. What the words were I could not be quite certain, yet the laugh that followed them I knew quite well. But whose was the other voice, the one that boomed forth from deep inside the coach? I had never heard a laugh to equal it in volume or grand hilarity. Such a laugh as that would bring a smile to the face of a mourner, or brighten the sour countenance of a Scottish judge.
I rose to make my presence known and advanced toward the coach that I might catch a glimpse of Mr. Donnelly’s companion. As it happened, a glimpse was all I could manage, for just as I came near enough to see within, Mr. Donnelly finished with his leave-taking and climbed down; the footman slammed shut the door behind him.
“Jeremy!” he exclaimed. “Is it you? What news do you bring? Nothing dire, I hope.”
“Ah well, a body for you to examine, I fear. We must go to the Trezavant residence in Little Jermyn Street.”
“The Trezavant residence? Is it my employer who has been killed?”
“No sir — one of the servants, rather.”
“Well, just give me a moment. I’ll go upstairs and get my bag.”
With that, he disappeared into the building. I heard him rushing up the stairs, and not much more than a minute later, I heard him rushing down again.
As I had described earlier, Drury Lane was so lively at that hour that there proved to be no difficulty whatever in finding a hackney coach available. We were thus on our way to the livery stable where I might hire a wagon and a driver, then on to Little Jermyn Street.
Once we were settled in the hackney and bouncing about, Mr. Donnelly remarked to me that it was only by good fortune that he had returned at such an early hour.
“Whose good fortune?” I asked in a bantering mode.
“Why, yours, if you were determined to wait, and mine because I was given the chance to escape from a most dreary dinner party.”
“Oh? Whose dreary dinner party was that?”
“Lord Mansfield’s.”
“Truly? I’d always felt that the Lord Chief Justice was anything but a dreary conversationalist — rude perhaps, even upon occasion dictatorial, but never dreary.”
“Oh I know,” said Mr. Donnelly, “but he had made his invitations to the party a month ago, and since then he has taken on that blasted Somerset case, which has all London talking. All London, that is, except for Lord Mansfield.”
“I don’t quite follow,” said I.
“Well, since he is the presiding judge, and since the case is still in trial, he absolutely refused to discuss it, nor would he allow it to be discussed at his table.”
“But Mr. Donnelly, that is quite customary.”
“Well, I know, but the Somerset case is all his guests wished to discuss. Couldn’t he have loosened his restrictions for just this one night?”
“I don’t think so. It wouldn’t have been proper.”
“Well, perhaps so,” said he, the exasperation he had felt lending a certain tone to his voice, “but really, there must have been twenty of us there, and you’ve no idea what pathetic attempts were made at table talk. The evening would have been a total loss had it not been for that Dutchman.”
“Dutchman?”
“Indeed,” said he, “Zondervan is his name. He began telling some of the joiliest and funniest tales that ever I have heard. We were to imagine ourselves in this place — probably of his own invention — there in the lowlands. Oh, what was the name of it? Dingendam, something like that. But he told the stories, and he acted out all the parts, even the women. Oh, he did the women very well indeed, all in falsetto. Dear God, the man was do entertaining!”
(This was high praise indeed, considering that it came from Mr. Donnelly, for he himself was one of the most entertaining men at table I have ever known. Many is the evening that he had us all rocking with laughter with his own tales of Dublin, Vienna, and the Royal Navy.)
We were drawing near to the livery stable, but I was determined to pursue the matter that I might have my answer as swiftly as possible.
“Mr. Donnelly,” said I, “this name, Zondervan, is it a very common one among the Dutch?”
He took a moment to think before answering. “Why yes, it must be. I’ve known of a few in my time — one in Vienna, another in New York — used to be New Amsterdam, did you know that? The Dutch had it first. Did you know that, Jeremy? “
“Uh, yes sir, I did, but — ”
“Why do you ask? “
“Well, I’d come across the name myself in the course of my investigations in St. James Street. Would it be the same Mr. Zondervan?”
“Oh, I daresay it would. In fact, it was he who took me home.”
“The man with the laugh?”
“Indeed he does have a great, booming laugh, does he not? When he rose from Lord Mansfield’s table and said that he must be off to the wharves to check the manifest of a ship arrived today, I gave my apologies, as well, saying I must look at a patient of mine in St. Bart’s. We were both excused and left together. He offered me a ride to Drury Lane, saying that it was on his way, then he kept me laughing the entire distance with another tale of those fools of Dingendam.”
“He’s a merchant then?”
“Oh yes, and quite a successful one, too, I’m sure. And indeed, he must be the same man, for I now recall that he did mention that he lived in St. James Street.”
The hackney in which we had been riding pulled to a halt. A glance out the window told me that we had reached the stable. I threw open the door and promised Mr. Donnelly that I should only be a moment or two. And as it proved, engaging the wagon, the team, and the driver took less than five minutes in all.
The events of the rest of that long evening hardly warrant description. Even then, it seemed to me that I had spent many times like it before during my years with Sir John Fielding. Nothing conclusive was learned during the magistrate’s interrogation of Mrs. Trezavant’s maid, Hulda. All that was gained from Mr. Donnelly’s preliminary examination of Crocker’s body was that she had not been murdered where she lay beneath the tree, but dragged there from a place much nearer to the house. Mr. Patley’s lantern revealed blood on the path at a spot much nearer to the back door of the house. When the wagon arrived from the livery stable, Mr. Patley and I carried Crocker’s body out to the front and placed it in the conveyance. It seemed to me that every step of the way the constable uttered some new curse or a threat under his breath at those who had done this awful deed. The driver threw a canvas cover over the girl’s form and made ready to go. Mr. Donnelly climbed up beside the driver and they set off for his surgery in Drury Lane, where he would conduct a postmortem examination. Only then did our party, which included the two constables and Mr. Johnson, take our leave from the Trezavant residence and venture forth to engage a hackney. The evening was done at last. I was so greatly tired by the long day and the many nights I had recently gone wanting for sleep that, when I climbed up to my little bedroom atop the house, I managed only to kick off my shoes before I collapsed upon the bed and sunk instantly into a sound sleep.
And that, reader, is how Annie found me next morning. She shook me awake. Yet I came to myself only reluctantly, emerging from a dreamless sleep as from some deep, dark forest pool. I sat up, panting and gasping, doing my best to come to terms with the state of wakefulness into which I had been rudely hauled.