Peril at Somner House

by Joanna Challis

  I was annoyed that Angela had betrayed my connection with Padthaway and its notoriety, but Sir Marcus kept wisely away from any topic related to fine houses, aristocracy, or scandal.

  Appreciating his acute sense of perception, considering the great case at Padthaway and its sequel, I relished our return to the weighty matter looming ominously over this house.

  “Pity,” Sir Marcus sighed. “I daresay we’ll have to all go home now.”

  “How? There’re no boats,” Angela pointed out. Getting out of her chair to walk across the room, she tapped her lips in deep thought. “And no. Knowing Kate as I do, as I am a particular friend of hers, I know she’d prefer that we stay. It will help her to grieve and address all the horrible things associated with a death in the family.”

  I gaped at her, a trifle embarrassed. Her voice sounded entirely too cold and analytical for my liking. Why? Did she, like Josh, wish Max dead in order to free Kate from her burden?

  “Oh, there’s Bella and Josh!” Gleaning from the window, putting aside his tepid, distasteful cold tea, Sir Marcus bid them entry.

  Had Josh stumbled upon her on his way to the beach? Shivering against him, a white-faced Miss Woodford smiled her thanks. Guided to a seat, Mr. Lissot depriving a chair of its rug to place around Bella’s icy shoulders, he explained his absence, mentioning me and the pergola.

  “Why didn’t you say you’d seen him?” Angela railed at me. Turning to Mr. Lissot, she said, “We were searching for you everywhere.”

  She was hunting for more information.

  Mr. Lissot supplied none.

  Shielded in his attentiveness to the frozen-limbed and silent Miss Woodford, he inquired after Kate.

  “Put to bed,” Sir Marcus said.

  “Perhaps I ought to go to her?” Angela mused aloud.

  “I think it’s best,” Mr. Lissot eventually replied, “that we leave her be for now.”

  Monosyllabic sympathies ensued until Sir Marcus inquired if anybody was hungry.

  “Food!” Arabella shrieked, shooting to her feet. “How could you even think of food when my cousin is dead!”

  Returning, sobbing, to Josh’s compassionate arms, we all stared guiltily at each other.

  “She saw the body.” Mr. Lissot searched his pocket for a handkerchief to give Bella.

  “Forgive me,” Sir Marcus began.

  “Ah, Mr. Trevalyan!” Rushing to the door, Angela relieved him of his great, droplet-strewn overcoat. “We’ve been beside ourselves with worry.”

  Reminiscent of a Spanish inquisitor, Roderick Trevalyan grimly gravitated toward the seat nearest to him, which happened to be the head of the table. Had the fact already occurred to him he was now lord of this house? I searched for an obvious sign of joy in his victory, found none, and consigned myself to my own treacherous imagination.

  “You will all be shocked to learn we have positively identified the body as my brother, Max.”

  It was a glacial, remote voice, not dissimilar to Angela’s. Or Josh Lissot’s, for that matter. Did everyone hate Max so much as to wish him dead? I felt intensely sorry for the departed. Certainly, he wasn’t dearly departed, was he?

  Roderick now lowered his stoic gaze to address each face, all in systematic order. When he came to me, a slight dent crossed the middle of his forehead. “We have no inspector here on the island. The village county police will handle it until the weather changes.”

  Sir Marcus coughed. “You lead to my next question. In the circumstances, should we seek alternative accommodation on the island? We do not wish to impose upon your sister-in-law or yourself in your grief.”

  Good grief, thought I, he delivers a very pretty speech. Appropriate and poignantly tactful.

  “I shall stay.” Bella spoke first, dusting her thick glasses. “I am one of the family. You don’t mind, Rod, do you?”

  I lifted a brow at her pleading, earnest face, how it transformed where Roderick or Max where concerned. She evidently loved her cousins very much and I suspected they’d all grown up together.

  “I cannot speak for my sister-in-law,” Roderick murmured, “but I see no need for you all to leave. Accommodation is scarce out here—”

  “And Kate needs her friends.” Braving his brevity, Angela smiled to soften the impact and to make up for her former insensitivity. “Above everything, she dreads being alone. And at such a time…”

  She left off with an unfinished thought. Supremely clever of her, I thought, and, to be truthful, I was grateful. I had no wish to dither around the island, looking for someplace inspirational to stay. Judging from where we’d disembarked, the choices were dismal.

  “No, I am quite determined you shall all continue your stay at Somner House…in the interim. Now, if you will excuse me, I have matters to attend to before Mr. Fernald arrives.”

  “How strange,” echoed Angela, agitated to have been sent away not once, but twice, from Lady Kate’s door. “They’ve posted Hugo at her door. He’s shelling peas.”

  No lunch, but dinner seemed to have been ordered and I made a mental note to transmit this news to the starving Sir Marcus.

  “And Josh Lissot! Who does he think he is! Did you see how he cut me down?”

  Storming to her bed, Angela fluffed her pillows, very like the aggressive strokes Lord Max had done to the fire on the previous eve.

  “Aren’t you being a little overprotective, Ange? Kate’s a grown woman. She and Mr. Lissot may be great friends—”

  “Great friends,” she sneered. “More like…”

  She couldn’t seem to stomach the word.

  “Lovers,” I finished for her. “Can you blame her? Like you said, after what she’s suffered with Max and they do share a love of art. It’s perfectly natural. It’s more than natural. It’s human.”

  “Natural! Yes, but not Josh Lissot. He’s not right for her.”

  “Who is?”

  Silence answered me.

  Brooding upon this, Angela swept up the magazine on her bed. I also did the same, but with a book. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë. It suited my mood, considering the heroine’s suffering and her rakish husband’s likeness to Max himself.

  Max…dead? I had difficulty believing it. So sudden and unexpected, an accident, no doubt, or could it have been a suicide propelled by drugs? No, I had since learned from my experiences at Padthaway. What appeared on the surface, the logical speculations, could mask the truth.

  I had barely reached halfway through my chapter of The Tenant when we were summoned downstairs by Bella. She knocked on the door, the expression in her eyes partially hidden by her thick-rimmed glasses. I noted some color had returned to her face. What distressed her more, her cousin’s death, or her obvious love for Roderick and her fear Angela or I would steal him away?

  A dreary milieu certainly awaited us in the drawing room.

  Sir Marcus paced by the fireplace, where Max and I had shared our private tête-à-tête; Roderick sat austere in the middle of the most upright divan, Arabella swift to take a place beside him; Josh Lissot preferred to pace along the side wall, feigning the odd glance up at Kate’s paintings, and the village police chief hovered behind me.

  He was a man of average height, slight build, and hairy arms. Younger than I anticipated, and quite good-looking with short, dark blond hair, even features, and a ready smile.

  Once Angela and I made use of the last divan left, Kate entered the room.

  Cloaked in a gown of black velvet, a dusky pink crocheted shawl gracing her shoulders, she slipped almost unnoticed into the room. Her hair lank, her face drawn and her eyes downcast, she attempted a tiny greeting to everyone, but it was clear she was still shaken by the news.

  “And Lady Trevalyan,” nodded the police chief, introducing himself as Mr. Fernald. “Ladies and gentleman, I won’t keep ye long today though further questionin’ will be ongoing here at Somner.”

  “Perhaps it would be best if we remove to—”

  “Oh, no, Sir Marcus,”
Kate decreed. “I can’t bear to face all this alone. Please,” she said, glancing around the room, “I don’t want any of you to leave.”

  “Roderick?”

  Covering my mouth to conceal my shock, I couldn’t believe the policeman addressed Roderick Trevalyan so informally.

  “It’s fine with me, Fernald,” Roderick Trevalyan replied, not showing the slightest offense. “You may use the study or the library to conduct your interviews.”

  The new master of the house delivered his first decision. I expected once the grieving process ended, Somner House would embark upon a new era. A dramatic change that would affect Kate above everybody else—a childless, penniless widow now dependent upon the goodwill of her brother-in-law. Poor Josh, Kate’s lover, lacked the financial freedom to relieve this impending burden.

  “I’ll need to speak to everyone privately in the next few days,” Mr. Fernald said. “I needn’t tell ye that none of ye are to leave the island, for it’s clear murder.”

  Arabella’s face turned a maggoty white. “I think…I think I’m going to be ill…”

  As she ran out of the room holding her stomach, we all exchanged horrified glances.

  “Murder!” Sir Marcus boomed. “How so, dear fellow?”

  “I’m afraid there’s no delicate way to put it…. Lord Max suffer’d blows to the head and face, such as would look after the work of a pickax.”

  Chapter Five

  The horrible fact cloaked the house.

  I now understood Bella’s intense pallor and Kate’s sunken, haunted eyes. Both had seen the body.

  As had Roderick Trevalyan. However, his inherent detachment gave no indication of his true feelings. I wanted to unravel and stir the dormant layers living inside the citadel that was Roderick Trevalyan.

  Angela professed shock several times during the afternoon.

  “I went to see Kate. We spoke for a little while but she wasn’t in the mood for talking.”

  “Can you blame her?”

  She considered. “You’re right. We just have to be ready and there for her when she needs us.” Her eyes darkened. “I saw her strolling outside with Josh Lissot before…”

  “‘Jealousy, a curse,’” I quoted aside from my reading of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Astounded once again by the similarity between the late Max Trevalyan and poor Helen’s dissolute, wayward, alcoholic husband Arthur Huntingdon, I said as much to Angela. Her response provided further insight into the world of the troubled couple.

  “I’ve been there when he’s been bad and it’s not pretty. What do you think drives a person to drink? Excitement? Pleasure? A buzz?”

  “No. Escape.”

  Angela went on to relate what she knew of Max’s involvement in the war. “A fighter pilot. He must have looked dashing in his uniform, and I think that’s what drew Kate to him. They were all fighting over her, you know. The whole club, even the married men. On their return, Kate used to sing for them at the club and they’d all fight for first place.”

  Yes, I began to see shades of the portrait emerge with each passing stroke. “Here, listen to this…Helen received several warnings before marrying Huntingdon and here Huntingdon speaks of his rakish friend Lowborough:

  He kept a private bottle of laudanum, which he was continually soaking at—or rather, holding off and on with, abstaining one day and exceeding the next, just like the spirits.

  And this:

  One night, during one of our orgies—he glided in, like the ghost in Macbeth, and I saw by his face that he was suffering the effects of an Overdose of his insidious comforter. Then he drew up and exclaimed “Well! It puzzles me what you can find to be so merry about. What YOU see in life I don’t know—I see only the blackness of darkness.”

  “I think Max suffered like this,” I murmured. “The eternal darkness, using his empty ‘comforter’ between periods of extreme merriness and then irrational gloom and bottomless despair. Do you know if Kate was warned before she married him like Helen?”

  “Probably,” Angela replied. “Not that it would have mattered to her. She married him for the title.”

  “Besides money and a handsome, if somewhat uncontrollable husband,” I added. “His charms were like a drug to her, too—something she could not refuse.”

  “Well, she certainly had her choices…at least five proposals that I know of.”

  I seized the opportunity to bring up Captain Burke.

  “Oh him.” Angela’s dismissive tone consigned poor Captain Burke to the grave. I knew then she’d not marry him and he’d not renew his addresses to her. She’d given him an icy or vague answer and men loathed both qualities in a woman.

  There was little else to do but to ponder upon the catastrophe of Max’s violent end.

  A violent end. I noted the phrase in my journal. It was a “clear murder” as Mr. Fernald pronounced in his native accent, for one couldn’t disfigure one’s own face. “Angela, are there any boats at the house?”

  “Boats?”

  “Yes, rowing boats.”

  She rolled her eyes. “I expect so. Why don’t you go and find out? I could use some time alone without your endless chattering.”

  My endless chattering. Strange, for I hadn’t seen myself in a chatterer’s role. Usually, I preferred silence, like Roderick.

  I saw him on my way out, on the terrace taking tea with Bella. Upon my blundering intrusion through the whiny terrace door, they started out of their chairs. I sensed their combined discomfort, perhaps halfway through an intensely private conversation.

  “You may sit with us if you wish, Miss du Maurier.” Roderick felt it his duty as host to include me.

  I smiled, noting Bella’s downcast, brooding eyes upon me, hoping I’d refuse. Clearly, she did not wish me present. Thanking them for the kind offer, I pressed on to the refuge of the gardens.

  Gardens in winter traditionally suffered during the unfavorable season, but the ones here at Somner seemed to thrive. Giant trees planted by early settlers graced the perimeter amongst the swaying native palms, hedges of crimson bottle-brush and dog-rose berries at their feet. Wild rosemary grew between gardens imbedded with yellow freesias, camellias, creamy hydrangeas, and dusty pink orchids. The red lion amaryllis, a particular favorite of mine, towered above clusters of jasmine, blue cornflowers, and winter chrysanthemums. Everywhere I turned, flowers still thrived in the cold, but the rose garden mourned the loss of its colorful companions, the black baccara rose looking lonely beside the odd wintered red rose.

  “‘A strange, nervy kind of creature is Arabella Woodford,’” I whispered to the black baccara rose in my best Arthur Huntingdon voice.

  “You know talking to oneself implies insanity?”

  Sir Marcus grinned, basking on a shady seat hidden amongst the hedges. Staggering to the side, I upbraided him for his sly behavior in not alerting me to his presence and he laughed.

  “I am gloriously incognito,” he confided. “And positively delicious for gossip. What else can we do? Clam the mouth and resume a formal detachment?”

  We discussed this at length as it was an intriguing subject. How should one fill the days while we remained at this house of death, I began to wonder. Ignore the brutal murder and continue our creative respite?

  Sir Marcus proposed we do the opposite.

  “I say we head to that window there where I believe our trusty police chief is interviewing Kate…what say you, Sherlock? Or do you intend to lose yourself in sad gardens?”

  I swallowed. Eavesdropping upon Kate Trevalyan again? It bothered my conscience. Certainly not twice in one week could I commit such folly.

  “Oh, come.” Sir Marcus nudged me. “I know you caught her out with Lissot.”

  I stared at him.

  “Your face betrays you. You’re a keen observer, Daphne. May I call you Daphne? And keen observers sometimes forget to mask their own keen observations. You, for instance, at the breakfast table this morning.”

  “What of it?”

&n
bsp; “You looked like an innocent girl, shocked by the loose morals of your peers. It was there…all over your face when you said ‘I think I know where she is…’”

  Brought to my senses by an unfriendly gust of chilly air, I dissected the ramifications of Sir Marcus’s elucidation. Was my face so easily readable? Strange, since nobody in my family thought so. “Close shuttered” was the term, I believe. “Happily close shuttered in my own world,” I’d often retort. But never ever had I imagined others could see so easily into my fiercely guarded world.

  I put it down to disbelief. And acute astonishment. A death…and an exposed affair. These events did not occur every day, and if they did, they did not occur together, did they?

  “Come.” Grabbing my hand, Sir Marcus propelled the two of us toward the house.

  I shivered as we drew near. The panes of the window, splattered with salt spray, encompassed the hazy vision of a sobbing Kate and a military pacing police chief. His heavy frown and blazing eyes suggested direct accusation and obviously no delicacy had been employed.

  I did not expect Mr. Fernald to possess the nerve to address a lady in such a manner. It was entirely opposite to the assiduous ministrations of Sir Edward at Padthaway, I recalled.

  Concealed from their view, Sir Marcus and I leaned closer to the pane.

  “…you and Mr. Lissot! Why did you not mention this before?”

  “I tried,” Kate sobbed, “but I couldn’t find the words.”

  “Couldn’t find the words, eh? How convenient for ye both. I’ll be havin’ a word with ye brother-in-law. He won’t take kindly—”

  “He knows.”

  Kate’s voice, suddenly calm.

  Eyes slit, Mr. Fernald jutted our way. Ducking our heads just before he reached the window, Sir Marcus and I exchanged a halting breath. What if we were detected? How embarrassing, and how discourteous to poor Kate.