“Yes, gracias. His Grace has been most kind. And her ladyship,” she said, smiling as she looked from one to the other. “I am grateful for Miss Beckett’s services.”
Ah. Miss Beckett was Lady Atwood’s personal maid. Now Kendra knew who’d helped Carlotta get ready for the evening.
“Until other arrangements are made, I shall be delighted to share my lady’s maid with you, Mrs. Garcia Desoto,” the countess said, a small smile playing about her lips as she raised the sherry glass and took a sip.
Delighted, my ass, Kendra thought. A lady’s maid had many duties to perform, but one of the major ones was to tell their mistress what was happening belowstairs, or any other gossip that they had picked up. By sharing her lady’s maid, the countess was guaranteeing that whatever Carlotta happened to say would be funneled back to her.
The Duke looked at his sister as he set down the decanter. “I would like you to make an appointment with your modiste, Caro,” he said as he brought a small glass of sherry to Kendra. “Carlotta ought to have a new wardrobe.”
Kendra’s fingers convulsed around the delicate stem of the wineglass. Carlotta. Fast work. She’d been here more than nine months, and the Duke rarely called her by her first name. At least he wasn’t calling her Charlotte.
“I do not need a new wardrobe, Your Grace,” Carlotta demurred, running a slender hand down the bodice in a gesture that brought attention to the gown that even Kendra could see was at least five years out-of-date, the skirt narrower than was the current fashion. “I did not come here for gowns.”
“Nonsense, my dear—” The Duke broke off when the door opened.
“Lord Sutcliffe, Lady Rebecca,” Harding announced, and then withdrew quietly as Alec and Rebecca swept into the drawing room, bringing with them the faint scent of cold and smoke from outdoors.
Kendra took a step back to watch the Duke introduce Alec and Rebecca. If Carlotta was nervous at all about meeting two people that Charlotte had known in her childhood, she didn’t show it. Her lovely face remained carefully composed, even when there was an awkward beat of silence after the Duke identified her as Mrs. Carlotta Garcia Desoto.
“Mrs. Garcia Desoto… I confess, if you are really who you say you are, I find such formality odd,” Alec said, his mouth curving to take the sting out of his words, although his green eyes remained sharp. Kendra suspected the smile was more for his uncle’s benefit than Carlotta’s.
The Duke said, “I admit that I was in the same predicament. Carlotta gave me permission to not stand on ceremony and allowed me to call her by the Christian name with which she is most familiar.”
“I would be pleased if you would call me Carlotta,” she said to Alec and Rebecca, and smiled.
“Sherry?” the Duke asked Alec and Rebecca.
“Thank you,” Rebecca said, and glanced briefly at her godfather before returning her gaze to Carlotta. “Do you remember me at all?”
Carlotta’s dark eyes were unreadable as she scanned Rebecca’s scarred face. “I’m not certain,” she said slowly.
Rebecca waited, but when the other woman didn’t expand upon that, she shrugged. “I was only three when Charlotte was lost to us.” Rebecca accepted the sherry the Duke had poured for her. She lifted the glass, eyeing Carlotta over the delicate rim. “Are you certain you don’t remember anything? We were playmates.”
Amused by Rebecca’s fishing, Kendra sipped her sherry and watched Carlotta study Rebecca’s face for another long moment.
“I think I do remember you,” Carlotta said slowly. “It’s only fragments, mind you. A little girl with red hair. I let you play with Annie—my doll. I believe you were crying at the time.”
“I sound very ill-mannered,” Rebecca said with a faint smile.
Carlotta glanced at Alec. “I have some memories of you, as well, my lord. I remember you staying with us at the castle during the holidays.” A frown puckered her smooth brow. “I have a feeling of sadness with the memory. Your father had died… You had a mother and brother, but you never saw them.”
“Stepmother,” Alec corrected coolly.
Carlotta’s eyes darkened. “I never understood why you were so alone.” She hesitated, then gave a quick laugh. “I always looked forward to your visits, though. I am certain I made a pest out of myself, following you about.”
Alec lifted a silky eyebrow. “I would never be so ungentlemanly as to say so.”
Carlotta laughed. “Which tells me everything.”
Kendra regarded Carlotta. “¿Qué más recuerdas de las visitas de Sutcliffe?” she asked in Spanish, to see how the other woman would react. “¿Algo más específico? Quizás sea algo que solo lo sabe Charlotte y Sutcliffe?”
There was a moment of silence. As far as Kendra knew, only Alec was fluent in the language and understood that she’d asked the other woman if she could remember something specific about his visits to Aldridge Castle.
“Lo siento,” Carlotta finally said, smiling slightly. “Como le dije, mi memoria… me falla. No sabia que hablabas español, Sra. Donovan. Su acento es excelente pero es de mala educación hablar un idioma que los demás no entienden y yo he pasado muchos años sin hablar mi lengua materna.”
She glanced at their audience. “I have told Miss Donovan that her Spanish is commendable, but I would prefer to speak in English. I have spent too long not speaking my native tongue.”
“Yes,” the Duke immediately agreed. “My French is much better than my Spanish, I’m afraid.”
“Dinner is ready,” Lady Atwood said abruptly, rising. She held out her hand for her brother, who dutifully offered his arm. Alec politely escorted Carlotta out of the room, leaving Kendra and Lady Rebecca to follow behind. Rebecca deliberately slowed her step.
“Why did you speak to her in Spanish? You know that she was raised with the language,” Rebecca said.
“Do I? I only know what she has told us. She has a slight accent, and she sprinkled a few Spanish words around…” Kendra shrugged. “I wanted to confirm that she really speaks the language.”
“I never considered that she may be pretending in that as well.”
“Well, she’s not. She speaks fluent Spanish. Her accent is Castilian Spanish, consistent with someone who was raised in Madrid.”
Rebecca was silent for a long moment. “She’s very good, isn’t she?” she finally murmured, looking troubled. “Ingenious of her to remember my hair, but not my face.”
Kendra smiled. “You contracted smallpox three years after Charlotte went missing.”
“Yes, and we could have dispensed with this entire charade if she would have remembered my disfigurement.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. Memory is a funny thing.” Kendra hesitated. “She used the past tense.”
“Pardon?”
“When she mentioned Alec’s mother and brother, she used the past tense. She didn’t say, ‘You have a mother and brother.’ She said, ‘You had.’ ”
“Charlotte shouldn’t know that.” Rebecca’s eyes gleamed with triumph. But the light vanished as quickly as it had come, and she let out a heavy sigh. “Of course, she could have picked up the gossip since arriving in London.”
“And she was talking about the past. Maybe that’s all it was. Not so much a slip of the tongue but that she misspoke.”
Rebecca gave her a long look. “This isn’t going to be easy, is it?”
“Proving her to be an imposter? No, but your artistic skills may help. You’ll be able to give me what I need tonight?”
“Yes. Harding put my box of pastels in the study. Whether it will help you…”
Rebecca’s troubled gaze drifted down the hall toward the dining room. Another liveried footman stood waiting for them outside the double doors.
Kendra drew in a breath, let it out. She needed to be objective. “There’s also the other possibility we need to think about.”
“What is that?”
“That she really is Charlotte.”
Once all were seated and bene
ath Harding’s stern regard, the footmen served the first course of artichokes slathered with hollandaise sauce. Kendra kept her attention on Carlotta, watching every expression that flickered across her beautiful face as she fielded questions about her childhood from Rebecca, Alec, and Lady Atwood. Maybe because the Duke had already heard the story, he sat quietly, staring at Carlotta with a fixed fascination.
The story was exactly the same. Kendra thought Carlotta even smiled at the same moments that she’d smiled before, her eyes taking on the same sad glow as she recited events from her past. But that could be Kendra’s imagination. As she had just told Rebecca, memory was a funny thing. She could be reconstructing it to suit her own predisposition. She believed Carlotta to be a con artist, so was she unconsciously building memories to support that belief?
The china plates from the first course were cleared for the main course: pheasant under glass, accompanied by various jellies, and silver serving platters filled with boiled, buttered potatoes sprinkled with bits of parsley, and tender asparagus shoots. The delicate white wine was replaced with a more robust red, poured by Mr. Harding.
“Sutcliffe told me that you found Mr. Pascoe murdered,” Rebecca said, turning her attention to Kendra when there was a natural lull in the conversation with Carlotta. She picked up her knife and fork, smoothly slicing into the pheasant breast. “Poor Mrs. Gavenston. I imagine she was devastated. What happened?”
“He was killed in the cottage that he was using as a writer’s retreat,” Kendra said. “Crime of opportunity, since the murder weapon was the knife that Pascoe had brought with him. There was bread and cheese on the table.”
For the first time that evening, the Duke seemed to really focus on Kendra, his gaze sharpening with interest. “Do you know why someone would murder this young man?”
“No. But I intend to find out.”
Carlotta looked confused. “I do not understand. Why would you take it upon yourself to find who killed this man, Miss Donovan? Was he known to you? You… you are a woman.”
“I believe the truth is important,” Kendra said, making a point of staring across the table into the other woman’s dark eyes. “And I don’t see why I would be less interested in the truth because I’m a woman.”
“In Spain, women are not so… bold as to be involved in such things.”
“Nor are they in England,” Lady Atwood said stiffly. “Miss Donovan is somewhat unorthodox. But she is an American. And I will confess, she has a remarkable ability to ferret out the truth.”
Carlotta smiled faintly, picking up her glass to sip her wine. “How will you go about seeking the truth, Miss Donovan?”
“Simple. Human error. People tend to get overconfident. They don’t realize that they’ve left a trail. It’s only a matter of finding that trail and following it to the truth.”
She leaned forward to spear a potato, smiling across the table at Carlotta. Not exactly subtle. But she wanted to send a message.
Carlotta said nothing, but judging by the glint that appeared in her dark eyes Kendra thought that the message had been received.
* * *
Two hours later, Kendra scanned the two pastel sketches that Rebecca had made of Carlotta. She’d captured not only the physical beauty of the woman, but her artistic eye had managed to capture her spirit as well. Kendra frowned, because what she saw wasn’t a hardened grifter. Instead, Carlotta seemed softer, not necessarily innocent—there was a shrewdness there—but younger, her lips curved in humor.
Kendra glanced up at Rebecca and Alec. They’d escaped to the study shortly after dinner, leaving the Duke and his sister with Carlotta in the drawing room.
“Thank you. This will help,” she said, rolling up the foolscap and tying it with a ribbon. “I’ll give it to Mr. Kelly when he comes tomorrow morning.”
“Tomorrow morning?” Rebecca shot her a speculative look. “Breakfast?”
Kendra grinned. “I think that can be arranged.”
“She was not what I expected,” Alec admitted softly from where he was standing, staring broodingly into the fire simmering in the hearth. Earlier, he’d poured himself a short whiskey, and he now took a drink.
Kendra glanced at him. “What did you expect?”
He shrugged his broad shoulders. “I’m not certain. Less personable, I suppose.”
“Less attractive, you mean,” Kendra said drily.
Alec’s white teeth flashed in a rakish smile as he turned toward her. “Was she attractive?”
Kendra laughed.
“When will you be returning to Cookham?” Rebecca asked Kendra as she gathered her pastels back into her art box.
“I’m not sure. Constable Leech thinks the inquest will be tomorrow. I’ve only begun interviewing people.” She glanced at the slate board that had very little writing on it. “I need to make notes, get a timeline going.” She needed to get organized, follow procedure.
Alec set down his empty glass and picked up Rebecca’s box of pastels. “We shall leave you to that then. Becca, I’ll escort you home.”
Rebecca glanced between them. “I shall bid the Duke good evening, and meet you downstairs, Sutcliffe,” she said breezily, leaving the room.
Alec smiled as he tucked the art box under one arm and walked over to Kendra. “Try not to stay up all evening,” he murmured, and lifted his hand, trailing a finger along Kendra’s jaw before leaning down to brush his lips against hers, lightly at first, then deep enough to make her toes curl. “You need your rest,” he whispered, straightening.
Kendra said nothing as she watched him leave the room. It took a full minute after he was gone for her toes to uncurl.
16
Kendra needed to jot down notes, maybe scan Pascoe’s papers from the cottage, but she was having a difficult time concentrating. Twice she caught herself standing in front of the slate board, staring at nothing, her mind straying to what might be happening in the drawing room with the Duke, Lady Atwood, and Carlotta.
She wondered if Carlotta knew how to play the pianoforte. Maybe at this very moment, she was entertaining the Duke and his sister with a rendition of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. Or maybe they were playing cards, or dice games. Both were popular activities when a family chose to stay home for the evening instead of venturing out to the steady swirl of balls, fetes, and salons offered by London’s elites.
Family. Kendra’s stomach curdled like she’d eaten a bad piece of meat. If Carlotta really was Charlotte, then they really were family. And she was the outsider.
Damn it. She couldn’t think about it. And she certainly wouldn’t think about how, at any other time, the Duke would have been in the study with her, holding his pipe or sipping a brandy as she talked to him about the investigation. She hadn’t realized until now how much that mattered, how she enjoyed discussing possibilities and theories with him. How much she relied on his perspective.
Annoyed with herself, she paced the room. Of course, he would be spending the evening with Carlotta. It didn’t mean he was buying into her claim that she was his daughter.
Stop thinking about it.
Jiggling the piece of slate in her hand, she wandered over to one of the windows. The day’s thin layer of clouds had broken apart, leaving patches of night sky exposed. Stars pulsed. The moon wasn’t full, but it was bright enough to limn the trees in the park across the street and the piles of brick and wood from the construction zone next door. She remembered her errant thought from earlier that morning, that London was changing before her eyes.
In three months, she would be here a year. She tilted her head back to gaze at the moon. It had been a full moon on the night she’d ended up in the 19th century. She’d thought that maybe it had something to do with the vortex opening, similar to its gravitational pull on the tide. The theory was asinine, of course, but at the time, she’d been desperate. She’d tested it out a month later, climbing the stone steps to the hidden stairwell and waiting for the wormhole to open and whisk her back to her own timel
ine.
Even then she’d realized the chance she was taking. She could have been transported to anywhere in time. There were no guarantees. She knew that now, more than ever.
Suddenly impatient—she’d never been so damned maudlin in the 21st century—Kendra spun away from the window. Focus. Whatever was happening in the drawing room between the Duke and Carlotta, it was Jeremy Pascoe who was dead. He was the one who deserved her attention. He deserved justice.
She stalked to the slate board. Timeline. That was the first order of business. It would be impossible to know with one hundred percent certainty, but Kendra believed that Pascoe had been murdered on Saturday afternoon, not Sunday. He’d left the brewery at two or two-thirty that day. She would have to walk the distance between the brewery and his house, but she doubted that would have taken more than fifteen minutes. At home, he’d filled his satchel with bread, cheese, and a knife. The neighbor had seen him leave around three.
How long would it take to walk from his house to the cottage on Squire Prebble’s land? They’d driven the distance and it had taken them about twenty minutes, plus the time for them to walk, but they hadn’t known where they were going. And you could take shortcuts when walking that weren’t possible when driving a gig. He could have been in the cottage by four, easily.
Then what? Mrs. Gavenston had admitted that he’d been distressed when he’d left the brewery, and his neighbor had remarked that he’d seemed in a foul mood.
Kendra closed her eyes and visualized the crime scene. Pascoe had made himself tea, put out the bread and cheese. She thought about how Mrs. Pascoe had fallen back on the mundane, offering them tea after she’d been informed of her son’s murder. That’s what people did when they were upset. Common, everyday rituals.
So, Pascoe had lit a fire in the stove for the tea, probably also in the fireplace because of the chilly temperatures, even during the day. Then he sat down to lose himself in his poetry.
She glanced over at the traveling writer’s chest that Alec had placed on the side table. She opened it and retrieved several pages, which she spread across the Duke’s desk. She examined not the words, but the angry, savage slashes that marked the foolscap. Was Pascoe already in a temper and took his anger out on these pages? Or was this the result of the natural frustration of a poet unable to express himself in the way that he wanted?
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