Murder Goes Mumming

by Charlotte MacLeod

  “Give me some while you’re slopping the hogs,” said Cyril, joining the breakfast party without ceremony. “Where’s Don? Off plotting the murder of the reigning heir, namely me? One step nearer the throne, eh, Squire?”

  “Here, have a kidney to stop your mouth.”

  May slammed a plate down in front of her brother without, for once, trying to make a joke about it. “Donald’s helping Baptiste set up the Christmas tree in the Great Hall.”

  “Energetic of him.” Cyril eyed the kidney and took a piece of toast instead. “I hope they get it straight for once.”

  “How would you know? You’re half cockeyed already.”

  “That’s a base canard, which is French for a low duck, in case you’re not bilingual, Madoc.”

  “Thank you. I get most of my language training trying to read the libretti when my mother drags me to hear Dafydd sing.”

  In point of fact, Rhys was fluent in both city and country French as well as Welsh, Cree, Aleut, and a few more languages, including the officialese in which he was expected to write his reports. However, he preferred to be taken for a nitwit and often was. He’d remarked to Janet last night that the Condryckes must think she was marrying him for his connections, and she’d replied, “Of course I am. Just make sure you stay connected. I like you with all your parts on.” An ideal attitude for a policeman’s wife. He pushed back his chair and stood up.

  “Avanti, then, as we say at La Scala. Are there a great many trimmings?”

  “Tons. We always have an enormous tree.”

  Babs put down her empty cup and rose to lead the way. “Anyone who wants to lend a hand is cordially invited. Don’t all leap at once.”

  “Damn the fear of it.”

  Cyril decided he’d eat the kidney after all. Herbert went to get himself some finnan haddie. Roy appeared, trying not to look the way he no doubt felt, and Janet was glad of an excuse to leave the breakfast room.

  Chapter 8

  JANET HAD DECIDED TO save her white pullover for best and put on a gray-green cardigan with gray flannel pants and a red scarf for a flash of holiday cheer. It was a good thing she had. The boxes were dusty from their year in the attic and there were, as Babs had said, a great many of them.

  “How on earth did you get all these things down the attic stairs by yourself?” she asked Babs. “It must have taken ages. Why didn’t you wait and let us lug them the whole way down?”

  “Oh, I didn’t mind. That’s my way of working off a few calories so I can pig it later with a clear conscience. You young things don’t have to worry but, as I keep telling Val, wait till you get to be my age.”

  Babs was in fact looking svelte and trim with a bright print smock over her sleek black trousers and a black pullover in the cowl-necked style she favored. It looked like real cashmere and no doubt was. Babs couldn’t be wearing mourning for Granny because one didn’t in the country. Black cashmere was simply the sort of thing she’d wear.

  It was interesting to see how differently the Condryckes wore the same sorts of clothes. Clara was safely tasteful, May was flamboyant, Val a conformist in her own way though she’d have raised the roof if anybody said so. Babs was the one with a real sense of style.

  She had also the instincts of a good general. Roy hadn’t dawdled over breakfast. Perhaps because he was trying to demonstrate what an up-and-coming young man he was, he bustled into the Great Hall to help with the tree. To Janet’s dismay, Babs delegated him to help carry down ornaments while Madoc, as the lightest and most agile man present, was sent up the tall wooden stepladder to hang spun-glass frivolities on the topmost branches. That left Janet and Roy to make the last trip to the foot of the attic stairs together. It worked out pretty much as Janet expected.

  “Look, Janet,” Roy began as soon as they were up on the top floor out of everyone else’s earshot, “I know what you must think of me.”

  “Then there’s no point in discussing it, is there?” she replied. “Can you manage that last boxful? Be careful with it. Babs says some of these ornaments are almost a hundred years old and I daresay they’re worth a young fortune.”

  “Do you have to be that way?”

  “I’m the way I am, Roy. Those who don’t like my manners will just have to lump ’em. You and I happen by coincidence to be guests of the Condryckes. We have a duty to be civil as long as we’re under their roof, so let’s do the best we can and leave it at that, eh?”

  “But I don’t want to leave it at that,” he protested, trying to take her hand. “Janet, I made a terrible mistake about you.”

  “Then don’t make another. For instance, don’t fool yourself into thinking my folks must have more money than you thought they did just because I’ve happened to get myself involved with a prominent family. I’m no better catch now than I was eight months ago. Madoc knows all about me, he’s visited my folks, he’s marrying me for the simple reason that he wants to, and don’t for one second think he’s not a better man than you are or that I haven’t brains enough to know it. I don’t have what you’re looking for, Roy, and wouldn’t give it to you if I did, so quit trying to tickle your vanity at my expense. And furthermore you’re skating on thin ice with Val Condrycke because you were dumb enough to get drunk last night, so paste that pretty smile back on your face and go flash it where it will do you some good. Now are you going to carry that last box, or shall I?”

  “Oh, permit me, your ladyship.”

  It wasn’t much of an effort, but maybe it made Roy feel a little better. Janet couldn’t have cared less one way or the other. She went on ahead, relieved to have got the inevitable confrontation over with and concerned only not to drop the fragile ornaments.

  Catching a glimpse of Granny’s bedroom door as they twisted around a corner, she noticed somebody had affixed a black bow and a spray of artificial lilacs to it. That was an understandable way to show respect for the dead, she supposed, especially since nothing else could be done until the storm was over and the undertaker arrived. But the bow was too large, the flowers too obviously plastic, and the whole effect too much like one of Herbert’s practical jokes for her taste.

  Not, Janet reminded herself, that it was any of her business. Anyway, down in the Great Hall it was easy enough to forget that overdone tribute to an old woman nobody appeared to be mourning. Madoc’s detective instinct must have alerted him to what had happened up by the attic stairs, for he cocked an eyebrow and brushed his fingertips against the inside of her wrist as she reached to hand him up a bauble in the shape of an angel flying a hot-air balloon. She smiled back and blew a kiss to the top of the ladder.

  The tree was a balsam fir so tall that not even the biggest of the Condryckes could have reached the topmost branches without something to stand on. Back home, Bert and the kids and an assortment of uncles and cousins would be out in the woodlot by now cutting a tree about a quarter the size of this one, which would still have to be trimmed down when they got it home in order to fit inside the modest farmhouse. Annabelle and her sister-in-law and the Lord knew how many more would be in the kitchen, stirring and baking, drinking cup after cup of tea, chattering nineteen to the dozen.

  There’d be more affection than wit in their conversation and nobody would be playing a practical joke on anybody unless one of the kids took a notion to stuff a handful of snow down somebody else’s neck and get his own face washed in retaliation. Janet wasn’t homesick, but she did feel most profoundly blessed to have been born a Wadman instead of a Condrycke. Or instead of a Rhys for that matter, because if she’d been Madoc’s sister she couldn’t very well become his wife without causing talk. She gave her betrothed such a look of adoration that he almost fell off the ladder.

  By then Val had made her appearance and Roy was lavishing his attentions on her to show Janet what she’d been fool enough to pass up. Val had on a different pair of designer jeans today, a pair of boots with unimaginably high heels, and another oversized pullover. It had been handknit in Italy of shocking pink moha
ir by somebody who must have suffered a great many sneezing fits before it was done. Franny and Winny poked their noses into the Great Hall just long enough to sneer at the tree-trimming party and mutter that they were going to play billiards.

  “They’re going through a phase,” Babs said indulgently to Clara.

  Janet thought Bert would have handled the phase by setting the pair to work at a two-handed saw till they’d emerged from their sulks with a few armloads of stove wood to show for it, but apparently that wasn’t how things were done among the upper crust. She’d better clarify that point with Madoc before they started having young ones of their own.

  Squire, Lawrence, and Herbert were having some sort of conference in the library, no doubt as a result of Granny’s death and whatever family business it would entail. Cyril was with them but Donald, for some reason, was not. Janet would have thought the one businessman among them would be the first to sit in at such a meeting.

  Val evidently thought so, too, for she asked him, “Daddy, how come you’re not in there with Squire and the rest?”

  Donald laughed indulgently. “Because I’m here keeping a fatherly eye on my beautiful daughter. Val, you should know by now that my responsibility is to represent the family interests down in Saint John. I couldn’t manage both that and Graylings. Why should I? Squire has Herbert, Lawrence, and Cyril to help him. That’s not a spider on your back, by any chance?”

  “Ugh! One of Uncle Herb’s little nasties, I suppose.”

  Val squirmed and Roy leaped to be gallant. Madoc Rhys sat up on his ladder wondering why Donald Condrycke had chosen that particular moment to tangle a fake spider in his daughter’s expensive mohair.

  The tree took a long time to finish, even with so many working at the decorating. There were no lights, since there’d have been nowhere to plug in electric ones and candles were out of the question.

  “Too dangerous,” Donald explained. “We’re miles from a fire station here, as you must realize. Anyway, the tree’s so big that by the time we’d got the last one lit the first would be burned down. We do cheat a bit and hide a battery lantern behind the trunk so we can enjoy it at night. At least I presume we do. Is that in the drill this year, Clara?”

  “It is if we can find some extra batteries. May was fussing that we seem to be running short, for some reason. Of course we do use an awful lot of them, one way and another, around here.”

  “It would be so nice if Squire would get on with the general electrification,” Babs sighed.

  “I couldn’t agree more,” said Clara, “but Lawrence claims the cost would be prohibitive and Cyril objects on general principles. You know Cy and his sense of history.”

  Janet looked rather surprised, though she was too well bred to say anything. She must be thinking Squire was a remarkably benevolent tyrant if he put up with so much inconvenience in deference to his son’s sense of history. Rhys thought it might be as well for her to go on thinking so.

  This question of how much to tell your wife was going to be a sticker. Some of his colleagues had trouble with it, he knew. Rhys had never understood why, but then he’d never before loved a woman enough to want to share everything with her and at the same time protect her from any possible mischance. He didn’t know what he was trying to shield Janet from, he only knew that an old woman who’d probably have died soon anyway was now murdered for no apparent reason, and that things were not what they seemed at Graylings. That, in his experience, was enough to make the boldest wary. He hung the last trimming, agreed that the tree was indeed a thing of beauty, and asked where he should put the ladder.

  “Better let me. It looks heavy.”

  That was Janet’s ex-boyfriend, flexing his muscles at the expense of this puny Welshman she’d been silly enough to settle for. Let him. The poor chap was having a bad morning. Val wasn’t giving him much time and clearly he’d had some sort of set-to with Janet upstairs, in which he’d come off a poor second. Rhys wasn’t about to shed any tears over that.

  One could see why a girl fresh off the farm would have fallen for a good-looker like Roy. He must be a practiced charmer since he’d also been able to attract so experienced a campaigner as Val evidently was. Val had been one of Dafydd’s dates, and Dafydd had his own code of ethics, such as it was. Deflowering virgins was not on the list, assuming he’d ever met one.

  Lady Rhys must have told Dafydd and the rest of the family about Janet by now, and they must be thinking Mother was making her up. Women like Janet Wadman didn’t exist. If they did, why should they want to marry clods like Madoc who couldn’t even read music? Madoc was damned if he’d hold up his wedding for Dafydd. It galled him to think that if Lady Rhys hadn’t been so officious about getting them invited to Graylings, he and his Jenny could be hunting up a justice of the peace right now instead of standing around with pitch on their fingers and apprehension in their hearts wondering which of their genial hosts and/or hostesses had bumped off dear old Granny.

  This might even turn out to be a classic case of the butler done it. Ludovic was a capable man, and a man who could well be working his own mysterious courses at Graylings. Criminal record or not, he needn’t bury himself in so desolate a post unless he was (a) getting paid a great deal more for his services than he’d get elsewhere; (b) in love with the cook; or (c) running a little something on the side.

  They’d only Ludovic’s word for it that Granny had been alive before they went in to dinner. Squire had sent the butler up alone to see why the old lady hadn’t appeared in the Great Hall and the man had come back with that ludicrous report of the missing teeth, the sort of absurdity the Condryckes would be delighted to accept without bothering to check its veracity. The teeth had shown up in the silliest place possible as soon as dinner was over and there could be no question of Granny’s coming down, but who was to say how long the bear had been wearing them?

  After dinner when May had decided on coffee in the library, it had been Ludovic who’d gone ahead to mend the fire and fetch the tray. He wouldn’t have required more than a second to take the teeth out of his pocket and stick them in the bear’s mouth. He’d know the family’s only reactions would be to accuse each other and regret that they themselves hadn’t thought of pinching the teeth first.

  Ludovic had made a second trip with that pitcher of wassail, and what of that? He could have drunk the stuff himself, or poured it down the bathroom sink, or given it to Granny for purposes of anesthesia and then done his dirty work. An autopsy would show whether in fact Mrs. Condrycke had drunk the wassail, but would it be possible to have an autopsy performed?

  There must be a doctor somewhere nearby who’d been looking after her. The odds were he’d sign a certificate without demur and why shouldn’t he when it was a case of an old woman who, according to Squire, had been more or less written off some time ago? Doctors didn’t create scandals among patients like the Condryckes if they could help it.

  Come to think of it, Squire hadn’t even mentioned calling in the doctor to view the remains although he had sent for the undertaker. Was that because he didn’t know the proper steps to take or because he took it for granted there’d be no hitch in the formalities?

  Janet was twisting a long strand of tinsel rope around the base of the tree. She stopped and looked up at Babs. “I just thought of a costume. May I use some of this?”

  “Certainly, take all you like. Will you need anything else?”

  “No, except—excuse me a moment.” She went over and whispered to Madoc.

  He nodded in mild surprise. “As a matter of fact, yes. How did you know?”

  “Because you never got a chance to.”

  He laughed and gave her a hug. “Ah, Jenny love, you’re the girl for me.”

  “She is.” Aunt Adelaide had materialized again without seeming to have entered the room. “I told her that last night. I told her not to let anybody talk her out of it. Somebody already has but it didn’t work. She didn’t know who you were, did she? Not till your mother
told her. Your mother was right to give her the ring, so you needn’t worry about Janet’s having it. You have been worrying, haven’t you?”

  “Well, a little,” Rhys admitted. “As I told Squire, I did more or less walk in on Janet and say, ‘My name is Rhys, would you care to share it?’ It was in fact my mother who filled her in on the family situation, and that wasn’t till yesterday. Remember, Jenny love?”

  “How could I forget? I called her Mrs. Rhys and almost died of mortification when she raised her eyebrows and said, ‘Madoc, you idiot, didn’t you explain?’”

  Janet giggled at the recollection. “I thought Madoc was just another lost sheep on the mountain like me. The last time we were up home, he was lecturing my brother Bert about the best way to build a pigpen. I told Lady Rhys that and she laughed so hard I thought we’d have to give her first aid.”

  Those Condryckes present obliged by laughing also, but less heartily than was their wont. “And then she went ahead and gave you her diamond?” Val said, as if she didn’t believe a word of it.

  “It was the least she could do,” Madoc confirmed. “Mother was the one who proposed to Janet. Not that I hadn’t meant to, you understand, but she got hers in first. Mother’s rather like that. She had to catch a plane to London and she didn’t want to miss the engagement party, so she hauled off one of her own rings and there we were. That’s the one Janet has on now. It belonged to my great-grandmother, I think. Wasn’t that what Mother said, darling?”

  “Yes, and she’d always intended to give it to whichever of her children got engaged first or said she did.”

  “Oh, Mother wouldn’t say a thing like that unless she meant it. I wanted to buy Janet a new one yesterday but she dug in her little heels and wouldn’t let me, so we’re going to take the money and build a better pigpen instead. Anyway, I’m glad to have your certificate of approval, Miss Adelaide, and particularly grateful you’ve warned Jenny not to get talked out of marrying me. Mother would have fits if she backed off now. How do you know these things?”