“But if I did do it?”
“Well, that would have to be because you’d always wanted to step into Hutchins’s shoes.”
“I never did.”
“But that’s what you would say.” Mrs. Much upended the teapot on the draining rack. “And if we’re making this up, I’m going to suppose you’ve always hated being at Mr. Hutchins’s beck and call, especially when you’ve said your family has worked at Gossinger for hundreds of years. Oh, how,” she warmed to the scenario, “it must have rankled, never having a proper position here after a lifetime of service!”
Mr. Tipp opened his mouth a crack.
Mrs. Much, however, was in full flood. “Yes, I know as how you’re going to say you’re still officially in charge of the stables, but I’d think all that does is rub salt in the wound when there’s nothing out there on four legs, unless you count a couple of broken-down old tables. And then to find out Sir Henry had gone and left this place to Mr. Hutchins!” She rinsed off the milk jug. “Well, it’s not to be wondered at, my friend, if you went a bit barmy and made sure the only thing he’d be inheriting would be a place in the cemetery.”
“You’ve stitched me up tight as a glove. To tell you the truth,” Mr. Tipp twisted his hands together, “Mr. Hutchins was never quite my cup of tea.”
“Much too bossy by half,” agreed Mrs. Much in the sanguine voice of one who knew herself to be free of this fatal flaw.
“What I minded, though I never did let on, was how Mr. Hutchins would never let me help out polishing the silver.” Mr. Tipp continued to ruminate. “It got me to wondering if he was afraid I’d make off with a piece, because of that maidservant way back in my family as was thought by some to have pinched the Queen’s silver tea strainer.”
“I don’t suppose it was that.” Mrs. Much felt called upon to soothe the poor little man’s wounded feelings before he burst into tears and she ended up having to give the table another wipe. “Possessive, that’s the word for the way Mr. Hutchins carried on about that silver. Anyone would think it had been in his family for two hundred years. Although, I’ve always thought that when you’ve had something for five or six years it’s time to get rid of it and have a change. As Mrs. Frome, God rest her soul, often said to me, if I can’t afford new I’d rather do without.”
Mr. Tipp, who by this time could have quoted verbatim the many acute sayings of Mrs. Frome, merely nodded his head.
“And now it’s time,” Mrs. Much gave the sink a final buff with the drying-up cloth and checked to make sure she could see her face in the taps, “for you to fill me in, Mr. Tipp, on why you think I should be added to the list of suspects.”
“That’s a bit of a puzzler right off the top.”
“Now, don’t be afraid to hurt my feelings.” Mrs. Much sat down at the table and turned on a beaming smile. “If I can dish it out I can take my own medicine.”
“It’s not that I really think—"
“Of course not.”
“But if,” Mr. Tipp addressed a spot slightly to the north of her head, “I was a proper detective it could cross my mind that you was more than a little worried on account of Mr. Hutchins acting so cross on account of you washing those tapestries and so on that he might have seen you got a bad reference and that could have dashed your hopes of going to work at Buckingham Palace.”
“Well, I never!” Mrs. Much tried to sound admiring. “Mr. Tipp, you’ve certainly got an imagination.”
“Left to himself, Sir Henry’s a bit of an old softie.”
“Well, her Ladyship isn’t.”
“But it’s Sir Henry as always writes the references. I’ve thought on that sometimes,” Mr. Tipp was back to looking Mrs. Much in the eye, “and I wonder if it could be because she’s a touch nervous about her spelling, same as I am.”
“Well, I doubt anyone could accuse her of going to Oxford or Cambridge. Except on a day trip, that is.” Mrs. Much had begun to recover from having been put—figuratively speaking—in the dock. But there was no denying that Mr. Tipp had set her to thinking along some rather dark lines. “It seems like we’ve covered everyone what could possibly have wanted Mr. Hutchins out of the way. There wasn’t anybody else in the house that day save for young Flora, and you couldn’t possibly think she would ... not her very own grandfather what brought her up from when she was a kiddie. Unless ...” Mrs. Much looked around the antiquated kitchen and realized anew how desperately anxious she was to escape Gossinger Hall. “Unless,” she continued, “young Flora saw herself being chained to this house so long as her grandfather lived and took what she thought was the only way out.”
Mr. Tipp did not appear to be listening hard to what she was saying. “There was other people here the day Mr. Hutchins died,” he said slowly. “There was that tour of schoolboys and their teacher from some swanky London school.”
“So there was.”
“And if you remember, Mrs. Much, one of those schoolboys was Lady Gossinger’s nephew. His name was Horace. Or it could have been Boris.”
“That’s all very interesting, Mr. Tipp, but why in the world would he murder Hutchins?”
“I’m not thinking he did; but I do mind that when I met up with him outside the tower sitting room he said something that didn’t strike me as strange at the time, Mrs. Much, but when I thought on it later, it fair gave me the shivers. That boy said as how someone should lock Lady Gossinger up in the garderobe.”
“Gracious!”
“Suppose,” Mr. Tipp’s face seemed to flesh out in his evident enthusiasm for his theory, “Boris, or whatever his name was, got Mr. Hutchins to show him the garderobe and then locked him in for a joke. It’s the sort of thing schoolboys do; leastways they did in the stories I read in The Schoolboy’s Annual when I was but a lad myself. And like as not he meant to go and let Mr. Hutchins out, but either he forgot or he couldn’t get away from his teacher again.”
“Oh, if that isn’t the nastiest suggestion you’ve put forward yet,” said Mrs. Much, “a kiddie of his tender years responsible for the death of a fellow human being!”
“Yes, but not with—what’s the word?—intent. When he went to let him out, Hutchins was dead from his heart giving out or whatever.” Mr. Tipp shook his head. “Leastways, that’s the way I see it.”
“I suppose it’s nicer to think we’re dealing with someone that pulled a silly stunt instead of a coldblooded killer who worked it all out beforehand.” Somewhat unsteadily, Mrs. Much got to her feet and went over to the pantry, where she kept an extra cardigan hanging on the back of the door. “It’s bad enough when you read about murders in the papers, like that woman what disappeared from the launderette in Grimsby the other week, or that old man as was last seen not too far from here. But you don’t never expect it on your own doorstep, so to speak. Now, like as not you’ve let your imagination run away with you, Mr. Tipp, and brought me along for the ride, but it seems to me we might do right to phone the police. That was ever such a nice young man who came to talk to Flora and Mr. Warren about the bank robber.”
“He did do a thorough job of asking questions, didn’t he?” Mr. Tipp took a look at the clock and he, too, got to his feet. “I suppose they soon get the knack of it—asking probing questions I mean, so as to get people telling them things they never meant to let slip.”
“Yes, very clever when you come to think of it,” Mrs. Much responded in hollow tones. Her mind had settled like a damp rag on her former employer Mrs. Frome, who had been so kind as to remember her devoted housekeeper in her will, made within a few months of succumbing to an overdose. And before Mrs. Frome there had been nice, kind Mrs. Ashford, who had also left Mrs. Much a tidy little remembrance before falling afoul of the mushroom soup.
What, heaven help her, would be the outcome if the police started poking into the deaths of those two ladies? Wasn’t it almost a foregone conclusion that they would leap to the decision that they were dealing with an old hand at murder? Mrs. Much took a couple of slow, steadying breaths.
It wasn’t like Sir Henry would have gone and left her anything in his will? Unless—an icy hand clutched at her heart—Sir Henry was the sort who believed it only right and proper to leave a little something to his housekeeper, even if she hadn’t worked for him more than a few months.
Afraid of betraying the fact that she wasn’t one-hundred-percent calm and collected, she walked over to the window. Where she could just make out the figures of Flora and Mr. Vivian Gossinger standing in apparent conversation in the garden. For the first time Mrs. Much pondered the question of why Sir Henry had decided to bequeath Gossinger Hall to his butler, but as quickly as it came the thought was wiped out of her head. She suddenly felt horribly defenseless with her back to the room. She wasn’t afraid of Mr. Tipp. No, what scared her was feeling that someone ... or something ... was hovering beyond the kitchen door, soaking up her fear, having already taken in every word of her and Mr. Tipp’s conversation.
Turning back to face him, she said in what she hoped was a casual way, “Perhaps we shouldn’t go to the police at this stage of the game, Mr. Tipp. It’s not like we’ve anything really to go on, when it comes right down to it.”
“And I don’t think Sir Henry would be best pleased at us interfering, as he’d be bound to see it. So what do you think, Mrs. Much, of the two of us keeping our eyes and ears open?”
“But I won’t be here,” she replied. “I’ll be at Buckingham Palace trying to talk the Queen into fitted carpets.”
“So you will. Meaning it’s all up to me, isn’t it?”
Mr. Tipp sounded heroically excited at the prospect of embroiling himself in another period of treachery and intrigue in the shadowy history of Gossinger Hall. But there was not time for Mrs. Much to try to talk him out of playing Sherlock Holmes, because the door bounced open and Miss Sophie Doffit entered the kitchen to announce that Lady Gossinger had made herself ill following the funeral. The old lady did not add that her Ladyship had achieved this result by drinking the entire contents of a bottle of sherry. She demanded a pot of extremely strong coffee and bore it away with what Mrs. Much, in her nervy state, sized up as a strangely triumphant smile.
Chapter Nine
For Flora, the days after the funeral got all jumbled together like scarves thrown higgledy-piggledy in the drawers of a dressing table. There were only a few distinct moments: Being in the garden with Mr. Vivian Gossinger, and telling him it was difficult to believe that Grandpa was dead and feeling safe for the first time in days when he put an arm around her. Sir Henry asking if she’d like to get away for a while and live in Bethnal Green in a flat that had once belonged to her Ladyship’s parents.
And now Flora sat in the middle of a long carriage on an early morning train to King’s Cross. There were two men seated opposite her, separated from her by the laminated table. She saw that the one next to the aisle wore a clerical collar, but otherwise she hardly noticed them. Her two suitcases were in the overhead rack and her face was pressed to the cool of the window. Flora had only been to London once before when she was a small child; come to think of it, she had never been anywhere much.
Her whole world had been Gossinger from when she was three years old and Grandpa had explained that he wasn’t the King of England, but only Sir Henry’s butler, and that no crowns went with that job. To the chuff-a-chuff-chug noises of the train, the memories returned in soft shining colors behind her closed lids: Watching while Grandpa went about his work. Telling him that she loved him more than gingerbread or playing dressing-up in the trunk room, and even more than rainy days.
Flora remembered the time when she had begged him to promise he would never die and leave her, the way her mother had done, or at least not until she was nine hundred and ninety years old. On that occasion she had hugged him passionately, and promised him that when he was too old to be a butler anymore they would go and live in a little house by the sea at Cleethorpes and then it would be her turn to read him bedtime stories.
Shifting her position slightly, Flora sensed rather than saw that one ... or perhaps both ... of the men opposite were watching her, but she didn’t wonder what was attracting their attention. Unlike the train, which was rushing past another station, her mind had traveled back again to the time when her world was real and safe. She had sometimes missed her mother, but had never felt too bad about not having a father. When she was still very young she had concluded that God had temporarily run out of these items at the time she was about to be born in the same way that the cake shop might be out of Bakewell tarts on a particularly busy day. What Flora got instead was Grandpa.
And she had never stopped feeling lucky. He was sometimes a little stern and not much given to hugs or kisses, and a few times, such as when he sent her to bed early because she had said that Sir Henry had big ears, she had decided Grandpa loved everyone at Gossinger more than her, and the Queen more than anyone in the whole world. But even at that moment she had known in the kernel of her heart that Grandpa would have burnt at the stake, without a wince, if anything or anyone had threatened harm to his little girl.
Flora stared out the window at fields and trees and scatterings of houses speeding past as if fleeing an invading army. She felt terribly small and lost, in much the same way that a nun might have done at the time of the Reformation after being booted out of the convent by Henry VIII’s henchmen without so much as a spare set of undies and being told not to loiter. I expect I look just as odd and out of touch with the world, thought Flora, as if I was wearing a rough woolen habit and one of those meek faces that comes from praying all day and half the night in a cell the size of a pantry.
Her glance passed over the heads of the two men sitting opposite her and focused on the women in the carriage, particularly the ones of about her own age. They all looked so ... Flora floundered for the word, so ... alive. Some were smartly dressed. Others looked as though they hadn’t had a bath or washed their hair in recent memory. But none of them looked as though they were going up to London for the first time in their lives. Studying a red-haired girl dressed like an Edwardian tramp with a silver stud in her nose and her eyelashes weighed down with mascara, Flora fingered the knot at the nape of her neck and felt a twinge of envy. She remembered the time when she bought a lipstick—Persuasion Pink was the color—and how Grandpa could not have looked any more disappointed if she’d told him she’d earned the money to buy it standing on street corners talking to strange men in fast cars. Grandpa hadn’t forbidden Flora to paint her face like a circus clown. He’d merely reminded her, without raising his voice, that what she wore and how she comported herself must always reflect for better or worse on Gossinger Hall. Flora had come close to saying something defiant on that occasion, but she had noticed that when her grandfather turned away his shoulders were a little stooped and his hair was closer to white than gray. It was the housekeeper at the time, a Mrs. Jolliffe, who’d spoken up in Flora’s defense.
“No harm in a bit of lipstick, Mr. Hutchins. Even the prettiest girls” (her tone made it plain Flora could not count herself in this fortunate category) “don’t like to go around with their faces bare as a baby’s bum. And Flora’s at that age. Wanting to make the most of herself. Don’t tell me you haven’t seen the way she colors up when Mr. Vivian Gossinger comes for a stay and so much as tells her good morning?”
“I never!” Flora had cried, being mightily tempted to hurl the hateful lipstick at Mrs. Jolliffe’s smiling face.
“Indeed not!” This time, Mr. Hutchins broke with precedent and raised his voice in addressing the housekeeper. “I take extreme offense at the suggestion that I have not brought up my granddaughter never to behave with any degree of familiarity toward members of the Family.”
“You can’t stop a girl from thinking, not when it comes to young men,” Mrs. Jolliffe had responded, completely unabashed. “Especially one the likes of Flora here, that’s been kept cooped up at Gossinger, never getting to mix and have fun with people her own age.”
At that point Flora had
run out of the room wishing she were dead and Mr. Vivian Gossinger had never been born. She had never, ever thought anyone would guess her secret. Flinging herself down on her bed, she made up her mind that the next time he said good morning to her she would look as daft as she could; that way he couldn’t possibly think Flora Hutchins had the brains to lie awake at night wondering what it would be like to step out into the soft green waking of very early morning and find him waiting for her by the weeping willow tree.
And I was standing under that tree, thought Flora, once again staring out the train window, after the police left on the day of the funeral and Vivian came out into the garden to tell me I wasn’t to worry about the future because he knew Sir Henry and her Ladyship would see I was all right. But I’m sure—she pressed her nose against the pane of glass and closed her eyes—that there was something else he wanted to say and didn’t, because he kept circling the weeping willow as if it were a maypole hung with ribbons just to tangle him up into knots. Perhaps he was having trouble finding the right words to tell her how sorry he felt about Grandpa’s death, but Flora didn’t think it was that.
Then, Sir Henry came out to join them. And it was at that moment Flora spotted the woman in front of the Dower House Nursery Garden across the road.
There had been no mistaking her. She was the gypsy-looking person in the mustard-and-black plaid cloak who had been at Grandpa’s funeral. Who was she? And why the will-o’-the-wisp act? Those questions kept creeping back into Flora’s mind, along with the realization of how little Grandpa had ever told her about his life and attendant relationships outside of Gossinger Hall. I wish I’d asked him more—about my mother especially, Flora thought, but I always knew it made him unhappy to talk about her. As though there was ... more wrong than the sadness that she died young.
God Save the Queen! Page 9
