“Very well, John, if that is what you wish.” Her crestfallen expression brightened as a new thought occurred to her. “I know! Mama intends to take a basket to Tom’s widow and children tomorrow afternoon following the inquest. Shall I accompany her, and report back to you anything she says—Tom’s wife, that is, not Mama—that I believe may be significant?”
“An excellent notion,” he said, relieved to grant her this innocuous involvement in the case. She might even discover something useful; it would not be the first time. “By the bye, don’t fret if I haven’t returned in time to take a nuncheon with you. I may stop by the Pig and Whistle after I leave Tom’s house. If so, I’ll get something to eat there.”
Julia heaved an exaggerated sigh. “I see I am going to dwindle into one of those unfortunate females whose husbands spend all their time in taverns,” she said mournfully.
Pickett caught her about the waist and pulled her close. “I think you know better than that,” he said, and bade her a lingering farewell.
As Tom had a wife and family, the groom did not live above the stables like many a bachelor of his profession, but had a modest house at the edge of the village. Although the cottage was small, it was neat and well-kept, with curtains at the tiny windows and fresh thatch on the roof. Pickett knocked on the door, and a moment later it was opened by a boy of about ten who stared at him with mingled fear and suspicion.
“Good morning,” Pickett said. “May I see your mama?”
The boy’s eyes narrowed warily. “Who wants to know?”
“John Pickett.”
“You’re from up at the big house.”
Sir Thaddeus’s house was surely not the only big house in Norwood Green. Nor, for that matter, was it likely to be the largest, for Lord Buckleigh’s ancestral home was almost certainly bigger. However, Pickett correctly assumed that to the boy, the “big house” meant the one where his father had been employed. He nodded.
“I am married to Sir Thaddeus’s daughter, but I am also a Bow Street Runner, from London. If your mother will allow me, I should like to try and discover who m—” Murder was such a harsh word, too harsh, surely, for the ears of a child mourning his father’s violent death. “—who did this terrible thing to your papa.”
To Pickett’s surprise, the boy shut the door in his face. He stood there debating whether or not to knock again when it was opened once more, this time by a female with a baby on her hip and a toddler clinging to her skirts. She must have been very nearly Julia’s age, but Tom’s widow, while not unattractive, looked older, worn down as she was with labor and childbearing and, now, the death of her husband. Pickett wondered what would happen to the family, now that its breadwinner was gone.
“Mrs.—” Too late, Pickett realized he had never heard the groom’s last name. “Tom’s wife?”
“Aye. My Tommy says you’rre goin’ to discoverr who killed his fatherr,” she said with the burred “r’s” so prevalent in West Country speech.
“With your assistance, ma’am, I would like to try.”
“Come inside, then.”
Pickett did so, stooping to pass through the low doorway. He found himself in a square room that served as both sitting and dining room, not unlike the larger of his own two rooms in his Drury Lane bachelor lodgings. Here, however, a woman’s touch was evident, from the pewter plates neatly arranged on a shelf above the table to the bright rag rug before the fireplace, upon which two more children played, both of them younger than Tommy but older than the clinging toddler who hindered his mother’s steps.
She sat down on one of the two mismatched chairs placed before the fire, and gestured for Pickett to take the other. He did so, and immediately one of the two children got up from the rug and waddled over to his chair, leaning against his knees and gazing up at him with unconcealed curiosity.
“What a fine fellow you are,” said Pickett, although in fact he had to guess at the gender of the child, who still wore long skirts. “My name is John. What’s yours?”
“Billy,” said the child, and Pickett breathed a sigh of relief at having not given offense to a little girl. The boy raised his arms and Pickett, correctly interpreting this gesture, picked up the child, settled young Billy on his lap, and tried not to think of the children he would never have with Julia.
“First, Mrs.—” There it was again, his ignorance of the woman’s name. Fortunately, she saw his dilemma and took pity on him.
“Pratt. Martha Pratt.”
“Mrs. Pratt, let me say how sorry I am for your loss.”
Martha Pratt gave a cursory nod, and Pickett could hardly blame her. She was left alone with five children and no visible means of support; words, however well meant, had no power to assist her.
“Have you any idea why anyone might do such a thing to your husband? Had he any enemies, or was there perhaps someone who might fancy himself with a grudge against him?”
Mrs. Pratt shook her head. “No, sir, not that I know of. In fact, things was goin’ right well for us. See that bonnet?”
Pickett, not quite sure what Mrs. Pratt’s millinery had to do with anything, nevertheless followed her gaze to a flower-bedecked bonnet of plaited straw hanging from a peg near the door.
“Tom come home with that for me just three days ago—paid five shillin’s for it, and it still almost a full month till quarter day! I scolded him for a spendthrift, but he said all our money worries was about to be over. I thought maybe Sir Thaddeus had given him a rise in his wages, but Tom just laughed and shook his head.” Her face clouded. “I wonder if it would be wrong of me to wear it to his funeral, it bein’ so cheerful and all.”
“I think he would be pleased to know you liked his gift well enough to honor him by wearing it,” Pickett said, and was rewarded by a weak smile.
“To honor him. Aye, that’s what I’ll do.”
“But about this money your husband expected to come into,” Pickett said, steering the conversation back into more productive channels. “He gave no indication as to its source? An inheritance, perhaps, or a new business venture?”
She shook her head. “No, nothin’ like that. Whatever it was, it was a secret, and one he were right proud of.” She sighed and ran work-worn fingers through the toddler’s curls. “I guess we’ll never know now.”
Privately, Pickett was not ready to concede defeat on that point just yet. “I realize this is painful for you, but can you tell me about your husband’s last days? Places he went, people he might have seen?”
“That’s easy, leastways the place is. After dinner he liked to look in at the Pig and Whistle. He weren’t a drunkard, mind,” she added quickly. “It’s just, well, a man who works all day wants to relax, and that’s not easy with a houseful of chillurn underfoot.”
Pickett wondered if the departed Tom would have been as understanding, had his wife expressed a similar desire for time away from her children, and decided probably not. Still, he suspected that, like Lady Runyon where Claudia was concerned, Martha Pratt would not be receptive to any implied criticism of her own departed loved one.
“And had he gone to the Pig and Whistle on the night before last, Mrs. Pratt?”
“Aye, it was always his habit of a Saturday.”
“What time did he return?” Even as he asked the question, Pickett realized it was probably useless, as there was no clock in evidence on which Mrs. Pratt might have read the time.
She hesitated for so long that for a moment Pickett wondered if she intended to answer at all. “I guess you might as well know, for you’re sure to find out,” she said at last. “Truth is, Tom never come home at all that night. Here I was mad as fire, thinkin’ he was with that Sadie, and he was probably dead all along!” Her voice broke and she dabbed her eyes on one corner of her apron.
“Sadie?”
“She what works at the Pig and Whistle. She’s always had an eye for a good-lookin’ man, mind. Calls herself a barmaid, but I could give you another name for her!”
Pi
ckett did not doubt it, but had a feeling that the name she had in mind would not be suitable for the children’s ears. She had given him a couple of promising leads, however, so after encouraging her to send word should she recall anything that might shed light on her husband’s mysterious windfall, he took his leave and turned his steps in the direction of the Pig and Whistle.
The tavern was an ancient brick building whose broad bow window gave an excellent view of the main thoroughfare through the village. This, and the fact that it also housed the posting inn, led Pickett to believe that its regular patrons would be aware of almost anything that went on in Norwood Green or its environs. He opened the door and went inside. At a table near the fire, a gaggle of older men looked up at his entrance, their conversation suspended in mid-sentence. In one corner, apparently waiting while his horses were changed, a bored dandy sat nursing a tankard and rebuffing the advances of a dark-haired damsel whose low-cut bodice threatened to spill her charms all over the gentleman’s table—a circumstance, Pickett reflected with some amusement, which would no doubt disconcert the gentleman a great deal more than it would the female. If he were a betting man, he would take any odds that this was Mrs. Pratt’s despised rival, Sadie.
He took a seat at a table near the window, and a moment later the young woman abandoned with a huff of annoyance her fruitless pursuit of the dandy, and flounced across the room to Pickett’s table.
“What’ll you have, ducky?” she asked in accents far from refined.
Pickett ordered a pint of the local ale, and a moment later she returned with the foam-capped beverage and set it before him on the table with a thunk.
“You’re not from around here, are you?” she asked, leaning one hip on the table and looking him over with an appreciative gleam in her eye.
“No, I’m just visiting.” Then, since he hoped to get information from her without being obliged to fend off unwanted advances, he added, “As it happens, I’m on my wedding trip.”
“Weddin’ trip?” she guffawed, drawing the attention of everyone else in the place. “I wouldn’t have thought Norwood Green was a likely place for a honeymoon.”
Pickett grinned somewhat sheepishly in acknowledgment. “No, but my wife’s family lives hereabout.”
Her eyes widened in recognition. “I know who you are! You’re that Bow Street man who’s married Sir Thaddeus Runyon’s daughter!”
“His younger daughter, Julia,” Pickett said with a nod, thinking he had been correct in supposing that not much escaped the notice of those at the Pig and Whistle.
“Brave man, aren’t you?” she asked, chuckling.
“Am I?” He stiffened. “Why should marriage to Mrs. Pickett require any degree of bravery?”
Although he had hoped to stay in her good graces in order to acquire information, he was not about to let her or anyone else slander his wife with impunity. He was conscious of a certain satisfaction at seeing the barmaid squirm uncomfortably.
“No special reason, I’m sure,” she demurred hastily. “Only, well, one hears things about her and her first husband—”
“One hears nasty rumors, in London just as in Norwood Green. This murder of Sir Thaddeus’s groom, for instance. I’ll wager there is no shortage of theories about that.”
“No, for there hasn’t been anythin’ like that to happen here since that business with Sir Thaddeus’s other daughter—the older one, Miss Claudia—back in ’96.”
Pickett was more interested in what had happened to Tom, but since the subject of Claudia Runyon had come up, he decided he might as well learn what he could about the Runyons’ “ghost.”
“Yes, what happened to Claudia Runyon?” Pickett asked, then added quickly, “I knew there was some scandal, but my in-laws don’t talk about it, and of course I don’t like to upset them by asking.”
“I should say not!” Quite uninvited, she plopped down on the seat opposite and leaned forward to disclose in a conspiratorial whisper, “Whatever they may say about wild animals, everyone here knows that poor Miss Claudia—although she was milady Buckleigh by then—why, she was killed by the vicar’s son!”
“Who, Major Pennington?” Pickett exclaimed, feigning shocked revulsion. He suspected her of exaggerating—certainly there had been nothing in Jamie’s reception at church to suggest that “everyone” believed him guilty of murder—but he had no desire to still the barmaid’s tongue by challenging the accuracy of her assertions, so long as those assertions did not concern his wife.
“Aye, though he hadn’t yet joined the army, mind you, so he was still young ‘Mr. Pennington’ back then. He’d been in love with her ever since she left the schoolroom, and when she married Lord Buckleigh, he took her off and killed her in a jealous rage!”
“I was under the impression that her body had never been found,” observed Pickett.
“No doubt he threw her into a gorge—no shortage of those up in the hills, you know. What’s certain is that they quarreled over tea, for there was broken china flung all over the place, and then when her horse come back to the big house without her, a search party went out, but all they found was her weddin’ ring lyin’ on the ground, and her shawl caught on a bush. All bloody it was, too,” she added with a decisive nod, as if this damning evidence quite clenched the matter.
“Does it not seem a bit, well, odd, that having had such a row in the drawing room, she should decide to leave the mess behind and go out riding?”
“As to that, well, I’m sure I couldn’t say,” she admitted grudgingly. “I don’t pretend to understand the ways of the Quality.”
“And now Sir Thaddeus’s groom has been found dead,” Pickett said, seeing there was nothing new to be learned about the mysterious disappearance of Claudia, Lady Buckleigh. “It would appear the Runyons have had more than their share of trouble.”
“Aye, some are sayin’ the family is cursed, what with their older daughter dyin’ like that, and then their younger—well, but you know all about that, don’t you? Still, it seems to me that any curse would strike the family itself, not their servants.”
Pickett could find nothing to argue with in this assumption and, having no great faith in curses in any case, decided to try a different approach.
“About this groom, Tom Pratt: were you acquainted with him?”
The barmaid sat up and eyed him belligerently. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Pickett gave her a look of wide-eyed innocence. “I only assumed that, given the popularity of the Pig and Whistle, there must not be many people in the village unknown to you.”
“Well, that’s true,” she admitted, unbending slightly. “Tom did come in here three or four times a week, and almost always on Saturday night. And no wonder, him havin’ a nagging wife and a houseful of brats.”
The groom’s children had not seemed particularly bratty to Pickett, nor had Martha Pratt seemed like a nag; in fact, if the flowered bonnet was anything to judge by, Tom Pratt had been quite devoted to her. He knew better than to make this observation aloud, however. “And this past Saturday? Did he seem, I don’t know, different in any way? Fearful of his life, perhaps?”
“No, indeed! In fact, he was happier than I’d seen him in many a long day. Come into money, he had, or was about to—buyin’ drinks for everyone in the place and spendin’ like a drunken lord.”
“And he didn’t say where his sudden good fortune had come from?”
She shook her head. “Several folks asked him, but he just shut his mummer and wouldn’t say a word.” Her expression grew pensive as a new thought occurred to her. “There was one thing that was curious, though. As the drink flowed more free, the toasts got more and more rowdy. At one point Tom raised his mug and said, ‘To milady Buckleigh, the founder of our feast!’ It was that odd, since her ladyship had only just returned from her honeymoon and hadn’t done nothin’ yet, nor planned to, so far as I’d heard.”
“Could he have been toasting the memory of the first Lady Buckleigh, perhaps?”<
br />
“Maybe,” she said doubtfully, “but it sure didn’t sound like it.”
“Still, if he was drunk—”
“Oh, he weren’t fallin’-down drunk, only about half seas over,” she said.
“Perhaps he—”
“Sadie!” From behind the bar, the taverner bellowed at his errant serving maid. “Sadie, quit hobnobbin’ with the customers and get to work, girl!”
Sadie rolled her eyes and got up from the table.
“I beg your pardon,” Pickett said. “I’ve taken too much of your time.”
“Any time, ducky,” she said, waving away his protests. She leaned down (giving Pickett an unobstructed view of her rather formidable cleavage) and whispered, “And listen here: any time you get tired of a ‘lady’ and want a ‘woman,’ you just come and ask for Sadie!”
Having reduced Pickett to blushing incoherence, she strutted across the room with much swaying of hips.
Chapter Nine
Which Features an Inquiry
into the Death of Tom Pratt
He had withdrawn from her, Julia reflected, and she was not quite sure why. It was not that her husband was brusque, or even neglectful; in fact, when he had returned from the village he had kissed her with all the tenderness she might have wished. And yet there was something troubling him, something he refused to share with her. She felt a wholly irrational annoyance with Tom Pratt for getting himself murdered and thus intruding upon what was supposed to have been their wedding trip. At least, she assumed it was Tom’s murder on his mind; better that, she supposed, than the discovery of her four hundred pounds per annum or, worse, their visit to the nursery and the brutal realization that he would never have children of his own. After a morning spent with Tom’s widow and her brood, however, it would have been hardly surprising if his thoughts had taken such a turn.
For Deader or Worse Page 10
