Murder Most Welcome

by Slade, Nicola

  Her face took on a glow of almost religious fervour as she continued, her voice rising to a throbbing note that sounded, to Charlotte, dangerously close to hysteria. ‘An heir.’ She gave a gusty sigh. ‘To carry on the sacred Name of Richmond, a grandson, an heir to the property, how dearly have I desired it, yearned for it, prayed for it, my poor boy’s child.’

  ‘Really, Mama-in-law.’ The protest was made in a plaintive little voice which nevertheless carried a steely undertone. ‘I was under the impression that you already had an heir to the property in the shape of my husband. Also your poor boy, in case you had forgotten.’

  The interruption masked Charlotte’s instinctive shudder at Mrs Richmond’s suggestion and she straightened her shoulders as she regained her usual calm reserve. At the same moment Agnes left off her ineffectual poking at the fire smouldering in the vast black marble fireplace. Charlotte eyed this monstrosity with interest. Modelled possibly after Adam and not one of his better designs, at that, she thought, remembering her godmother’s views on, among other things, art, music, architecture and furniture design (‘the more you appear the complete bluestocking the less anyone will suspect you if there’s trouble, Char’). Agnes reluctantly surrendered her place to the superior parlourmaid who now entered, casting a withering look at the almost defunct fire. As the fire sprang magically to life under these expert ministrations, Agnes, looking rather dispirited, seemed suddenly to become aware of the small, plump girl who was now frowning in fury at Mrs Richmond.

  ‘Oh, Lily, dearest Lily.’ She uttered soft cries of delight and rushed forward in an attempt to press unwanted kisses on her victim’s round, pink cheek.

  Mrs Richmond Senior gave Lily a sweetly mournful stare while her daughter-in-law fussed with the flounces on her hooped skirts as she sat down on the nearest chair (an ugly spindle-legged object covered in a shiny brocade in an unattractive shade of maroon, strongly suggesting raw liver). Making great play of looking to see if Agnes had left sooty handprints on her lustrous light-coloured silk folds, Lily ignored the other three women in the room. Only when she had satisfied herself that not a speck of soot adhered did she lift her eyes, to find Agnes eagerly hovering once more at her side.

  ‘Oh, Agnes, sherry, how thoughtful you are to me,’ Lily said by way of forgiveness in her little-girl voice, taking the crystal glass which Agnes was now offering. ‘Oh, it is quite like Papa’s sherry that we used to have at Martindale when dear Mama was alive. Oh, how happy we were then, I could almost fancy myself there. Only, of course, the drawing-room at Martindale is a much grander room than this, though this is well enough, dear Mrs Richmond.’

  She sipped daintily at her sherry wine and bestowed a gracious smile upon the head of the household.

  ‘Now, what were we saying? Oh yes, an heir to Finchbourne. What did you mean, Mama-in-law? I do not understand.’

  Ignoring both the mortified groans from Agnes and any possible embarrassment that Charlotte might feel (though in fact Charlotte had herself in hand now and was watching the scene with some amusement), Mrs Richmond replied in tones quite as plaintive as those of Lily.

  ‘I merely speculated that dear Barnard might not, in fact, have been my heir. That it could have been the case – quite within the realms of possibility – that Charlotte might have been in a delicate situation, even yet.’

  Paying no attention to Charlotte’s stiff but fervent denial, young Mrs Barnard Richmond sat bolt upright, her shoulders stiff, her spine poker-straight. An angry scarlet flush stained her plump young cheeks and her fine dark brows met in a straight line above her little retrousse nose.

  ‘I hardly think so, Mrs Richmond.’ She spoke coldly. ‘I hardly think that could be so.’ She glared at Charlotte and turned again to Mrs Richmond. ‘I don’t believe it. I won’t believe it.’

  ‘Lily? Why are you looking like a thundercloud, my dear?’

  At this juncture, a large, beefy man walked into the drawing-room, rubbing his hands with pleasure at the sight of the now crackling fire.

  ‘Good evening, Mama.’ He bowed to Mrs Richmond. ‘Agnes.’ He kissed his sister with affectionate gusto. ‘And this must be…?’

  ‘Charlotte, my dear,’ interposed Mrs Richmond. ‘Allow me to present your brother Barnard, dear Frampton’s younger brother. That’s right, Barn, give your sister a kiss.’

  Charlotte submitted to a bashful salutation, accompanied by a fervent pressing of her hand.

  ‘Delighted, delighted. Poor old Framp, dear old fellow.’

  Barnard retired in confusion to wipe the manly dew from his eyes as his mother sighed then, with a sniff and a look of disdain, beckoned to her other daughter-in-law.

  ‘Barnard’s wife, Lily, my dear.’

  Lily Richmond bared her large white teeth and rather more of her large pink gums in a chilly smile as she stood on tiptoe to greet her new sister.

  ‘Gracious, how tall you are, Charlotte! You make me feel such a little thing. My papa always called me his Little Lily, you know.’

  ‘How charming.’ Charlotte bared her own teeth in reply, mindful that while they were equally pearly, she was, thankfully, much less prodigally endowed with gums.

  ‘Now, Lily.’ Barnard stowed his large red spotted handkerchief into his pocket, harrumphing loudly to cover his emotion. ‘What’s all this? You look just like one of the stable kittens that’s about to scratch, my dear! What has ruffled your fur so?’

  He laughed heartily at his own pleasantry, repeated it several times, rolling it around his tongue; still finding it apt, he then took the glass held out to him by the eagerly attendant Agnes and sat down on an oak stool beside his wife’s chair.

  ‘It is just that Lily took exception to my notion – alas now discovered to be unfounded – that Frampton’s widow might yet become the mother of Frampton’s child,’ said his mother in an injured voice as she applied the linen and lace handkerchief to her eyes once more.

  ‘I’m sure I meant no word against you, dear boy, merely that I should have been so happy to have a remembrance of your poor brother to carry on the sacred line.’

  ‘A child?’ Barnard’s bluff, bronzed face beamed rosily round at them. ‘Capital, a capital notion. What a thing it would be, would it not, Mama? Dear old Framp a father, hey?’ The pleasure was slowly replaced by a puzzled frown. ‘Old Framp, eh? I don’t know … Mama, are you sure? I mean, old Framp, y’know, not a ladies’ man, not at all … not by any means.’

  His voice tailed away under his mother’s woebegone gaze and his wife’s narrowed eyes. He swivelled his head still further and took in Charlotte, with her slender figure, quite unmistakably unmaternal.

  ‘No, no, Barnard.’ She took pity on his bewilderment. Really, she thought, compared to his brother, the poor creature seemed rather slow-witted. She shuddered a little as she remembered Frampton’s vicious tongue and thanked God that he was dead. ‘It is no such thing. It was merely conjecture on your mother’s part.’

  ‘Oh, what? Ah, yes, conjecture, quite so, thank you. Still’ – he cast a suddenly shrewd glance of warning at his wife, still glowering around the room – ‘it would have been a delightful thing if it were so, delightful.’

  ‘Well said, Barnard.’ His mother dropped a crumb of approval in the direction of her remaining son. ‘I am pleased to see that one of you, at least, feels the correct sentiments.’

  Quietly assuring Agnes that her feelings were not hurt, Charlotte sipped her sherry thoughtfully and watched with interest as Lily sank back in her chair, apparently absorbed in pleating the heavy black fringe on the half-mourning lavender silk flounces, her small, plump face carefully devoid of expression. Mrs Richmond diligently applied her handkerchief again, a heart-rending picture of bereft maternity, while Barnard drained his glass and held it out for a refill.

  Charlotte considered her new situation. This was what she had always wanted, she reflected. Respectability, wealth, comfort, and a family – it was all within her grasp and for a moment the prospect terr
ified her. What if she put a step wrong? What if she spoke out of turn and it all came tumbling down about her ears? Then her native commonsense and optimism reasserted itself.

  The size of the house had surprised her, as had the number of servants coming and going about their duties. The house, she reflected, would certainly do. Living at Finchbourne Manor, respectability would be hers without question, wealth and comfort too. But could she bear the family?

  As though in response to Charlotte’s thought, Agnes paused to pat the younger girl’s hand as she carried the decanter towards her brother. Charlotte flushed slightly. I should be ashamed by such kindness, she reproved herself; the question should rather be can they stand me?

  Agnes reached her brother’s side in response to his cajoling smile. ‘Here you are, Barney dear, though it will soon be time to expect our guests. Will Grandmama be joining us tonight, does anyone know?’

  ‘She certainly will,’ boomed a female voice from the doorway, and in came an elderly woman whose bulk was not minimised by the profusion of mourning jet which armour-plated her monumental bosom.

  ‘Grandmama.’ Barnard rose hastily and placed a substantial chair, heavily encrusted with carving, near the fireside. ‘Here, old girl, sit down here.’

  ‘Old girl, indeed, you saucy boy!’

  The scolding was accompanied by an indulgent tap on the shoulder from her fan as the old woman lowered herself carefully on to the ruby velvet cushion, causing the stout blackened oak of the legs to buckle slightly while the carved lions on the arms appeared to groan and writhe in protest.

  ‘Well, well, this is cosy, is it not?’ She nodded round the room, apparently not noticing a stranger and speaking in an accent that Charlotte, to her surprise, immediately recognized as Cockney. ‘Fanny, ’ow are you tonight? You’re looking well.’

  Mrs Richmond sniffed at this provocation. ‘Thank you, ma’am, I am feeling a little fatigued, so foolish of me. My poor back, you know, is a constant trouble to me, though naturally I never distress my dear ones by complaining, and of course I am still subject to fits of overwhelming grief.’

  ‘Grief? What in the world … what, for Frampton?’ The old lady pursed her lips and struggled, making an effort at the last, to bite off the remark that obviously hovered on the tip of her tongue. ‘Well, poor lad, per’aps it was for the best.’

  ‘How can you say so, ma’am?’ Mrs Richmond retorted angrily. ‘My son’s death may have been glorious but that is as nothing to the shining light of his life and the loss to his honoured and ancient lineage. Nay, the loss not only to his family, his regiment, but to his country …’

  Charlotte blinked in astonishment at this pronouncement but her surprise turned to guilty shock as the old lady changed the subject with some haste.

  ‘Well, what about this so-called wife of his, eh? A man of the cloth and a governess, I believe you said her parents was. All well and good, I dare say, if that’s the truth. But did I not ’ear that they had come from h’Australia? Mark my words, you’ll find that they were transported, like as not.’

  ‘How dare you!’ Her sudden spurt of anger (quite unjustified, as she admitted inwardly) surprised her, and in the moment following her outburst Charlotte was overcome by a feeling of shame at her own hypocrisy. But she had a part to play, she reminded herself hastily, and that part surely required indignation at this point.

  ‘Eh? What? What’s that?’

  The old lady started up in her chair, noted the angry glitter in the strange young woman’s hazel eyes and sat back, unusually abashed.

  At that point the butler, Hoxton, coughed discreetly.

  ‘Mr and Mrs Knightley, madam.’

  Agnes and Barnard, who had stood frozen in the appalled silence that greeted their grandmother’s unfortunate gaffe, leapt forward, Barnard looking genial, Agnes babbling with incoherent embarrassment as she attempted to apologize for her grandmother.

  ‘It was naughty, I know, dreadfully naughty,’ she gasped. ‘But truly, Charlotte dear, she did not know you were there, and, well, she is eighty, after all.’

  Charlotte had herself in hand once more and made haste to reassure her. ‘I should not have reacted so strongly,’ she whispered. ‘I was too quick to take offence. I believe that we Australians may be too sensitive on the topic as I know that many people in England fail to recognize the difference between free-born settlers and the convicts.’

  A flurry of welcome met the newcomers, a tall, brown-haired, broad-shouldered man who was tenderly supporting a delicately lovely woman whom he then deposited gently into a chair beside the fire. A few moments’ talk ensued then Mrs Richmond beckoned Charlotte to her side.

  ‘Ah, yes, pray allow me to introduce my daughter-in-law, Charlotte, arrived only this evening, from India. Mrs Knightley, Mr Knightley.’

  ‘Mr Knightley?’ Charlotte’s demurely dropped lashes flew up and she gazed with interested amusement at the guest. ‘Really Mr Knightley? Of Donwell Abbey?’

  ‘Alas, I fear not.’ He smiled, revealing a twinkle in his blue eyes and the suspicion of a dimple in his cheek as he shook her hand and led her to his wife’s chair. ‘Christopher Knightley, or rather Kit, merely of Knightley Hall just two miles away from Finchbourne. Let me present you to my wife. Here, my dear, another admirer of Miss Austen for you.’

  ‘How delightful.’ Mrs Knightley’s large grey eyes glowed with pleasure in her too-thin, too-pale face, the forget-me-not silk of her dress accentuating her ethereal fairness. ‘Kit measures people by their reaction to his name, you must know.’ She held Charlotte’s hand in a friendly grasp. ‘If they make no comment he dismisses them as of no importance. But if they react as you did they are friends for life! Though Kit’s father would have been more correctly of an age to be Emma’s Mr Knightley.’

  As Charlotte’s place at Mrs Knightley’s side was taken by Lily Richmond, a large, trembling hand was laid on Charlotte’s sleeve and she turned to see the old lady who had risen with some difficulty from her lion-carved throne and was gazing at her with pleading eyes.

  ‘And I’m Frampton’s old granny, me dear.’ The old woman heaved her bulk gratefully on to another chair, of flimsy gilt and cane this time. ‘And you must grant me pardon for my thoughtless words for I had no thought of ’urting your feelings. I would not do so for anything in the world, that I would not. Come now, do you forgive me, hey?’

  ‘Why, of course I do, ma’am,’ Charlotte said warmly, and was clasped heartily to the vastness of whalebone and jet. ‘I’m afraid I did not catch your name. You are…?’

  ‘My mother-in-law, Lady Frampton,’ Mrs Richmond said with a languid wave of her plump white hand, with its weight of mourning bracelets and rings in jet and pearl and plaited hair.

  ‘Lady Frampton?’ Charlotte was momentarily at a loss.

  ‘Ah yes.’ Mrs Richmond heaved a mournful sigh. ‘The Richmond name, my own I am proud to say – glorious, unsullied and unstained! – has always been of paramount importance – paramount, I say – and I, alas, was my father’s only child. My husband took my surname upon our marriage so I felt it only right to give his patronymic to our eldest son.’

  She broke off at the blank look on her new daughter’s face.

  ‘His patronymic, my dear. His surname, in other words.’ She gave a tiny sigh of disappointment at the philistinism of the colonial-born. ‘Otherwise it has long been the custom for the first-born son in my family to take as his given name his mother’s maiden surname. My own father was christened Arlington.’

  Mrs Richmond smiled her sad, sweet smile, this time tinged with satisfaction as she manifestly cast a possessive eye back down the serried ranks of the generations, heroes one and all, but she looked up with faint hauteur as Charlotte answered her with a smile quite as sweet though without a trace of sadness.

  ‘Really? Then perhaps it is a fortunate circumstance that I am not, after all, in an interesting situation.’

  ‘Why, pray?’ Astonished, Mrs Richmond forgot to exclaim
at this lack of modesty before guests. ‘I was under the impression that your maiden name was Glover? A worthy enough name, surely?’

  ‘No doubt, ma’am,’ came the demure answer. ‘Glover was my stepfather’s name, however, though I have often used it.’

  ‘And your father’s surname?’

  ‘It was Lucy, ma’am.’

  Charlotte bit her unruly tongue as Mrs Richmond stared at her in surprise and the elegant Mrs Knightley hastily fanned herself with great vigour. Although Charlotte could not quite see her face, she gained the impression that the lady was smiling while her husband had hastily retired to the chimney breast, apparently to admire the leaping flames in the grate while he tried to pretend that his shout of laughter had been a cough. His tanned, pleasantly rugged face creased into laughter lines and as his eyes met Charlotte’s with an even more pronounced twinkle, he raised a quizzical eyebrow and smiled warmly at her.

  Agnes fussed about him, offering a glass of water, or Old Nurse’s particular horehound and honey mixture to ease his cough, as well as a seat well away from the draught, but he shook his head and was smiling kindly down at her when Mrs Richmond placed herself firmly once more into the centre of attention.

  ‘Do stop fussing around poor Mr Knightley, Agnes,’ she scolded, and when her daughter slunk submissively to Charlotte’s side, her mother struck again. ‘And do leave poor, dear Charlotte alone, Agnes, for heaven’s sake. Let her come here and talk to Mrs Knightley.’ When Charlotte obeyed she found she had nothing to say, however, merely to listen as Mrs Richmond rehearsed once again the tragic tale of her eldest son’s demise.

  ‘How charming,’ put in Mrs Knightley, obviously in a kindly attempt to deflect the monologue and to spare Charlotte’s supposed feelings, ‘to find a new daughter in the midst of your tragedy.’

  ‘Indeed, indeed.’ Gratified by this evidence of sympathy, Mrs Richmond settled to her tale. ‘Alas, dear Frampton, how surprised we all were to hear that he had married poor, dear Charlotte so suddenly, when we had all but given up hope of his ever finding a woman worthy of him. And so opportunely too, with his promotion to major coming hard upon the heels of the wedding. I am sure he never showed any interest in young ladies before. Indeed I was used to despair, but there, the dear boy always insisted that he had never met a woman to measure up to his own mama!’