Murder Most Welcome

by Slade, Nicola

  He quirked an eyebrow as she sat in taut silence.

  ‘No? How fortunate. But I did not think you would have done, not with your upbringing to sustain you.’

  Had it come, the moment Charlotte had been dreading? Was she to be exposed? She strove to school her expression into one of cool indifference, while her heartbeat sounded so loud inside her head she was sure he must hear it.

  ‘What do you mean?

  ‘Mean? Why, my dear, I’ll tell you. I discovered from someone, a person you will be glad to hear is now dead, that your precious stepfather, the sainted Will Glover, was nothing more than a common criminal, a convict who had escaped from Botany Bay and travelled the length and breadth of Australia posing as a clergyman. A nice little arrangement he made for himself, I was told. Settle in some remote area, build up a trusting congregation and then, when they had collected enough to build a church, a summons would arrive from Adelaide, or it might be Melbourne, or even Sydney, and the Reverend William Glover would have to set off to see his dying father, or mother, or his brother, as it might be. What more natural than that his devoted wife and daughter should accompany him? As for the building fund for the church, why that accompanied him as well, leaving his parishioners older and wiser and considerably poorer.’

  Charlotte forced herself to stay in her seat, fighting an impulse to leap to her feet, to make an unladylike fist and punch her tormentor in his sneering mouth. And then what? Flight? No, she told herself, he has some scheme or other, he must have, otherwise he would have announced this as soon as he arrived. She felt as though her face had frozen into that expression of chilly calm and her back ached from being held stiff as a ramrod, but her pride in not letting go sustained her.

  He poked his head down at her.

  ‘What? Not a word to say? Dear me, perhaps I should tell you some more of my story. Now where was I? Ah yes, that was your stepfather. Your mother now … What was that, my dear? Did you wish to say something? How very wise, do not interrupt me now, pray, I am in fine voice. Yes, your mama … Unfortunately my informant could not furnish me with any history for your dear mother, but she was most forthcoming when it came to your exalted godmother.

  ‘Lady Margaret Fenton. What a ring that name has, does it not? Nothing about it to suggest the drab she became. As I heard it the lady’s exasperated brother, the earl, paid good money to ship her to the colonies, and a retainer to stay there, rather than have her embarrass him at every turn. Very fond of young gentlemen, I believe, was Lady Meg, very fond.’

  He gave a snort of laughter and clapped his hands on his knees as Charlotte sat white-faced and shivering in spite of the warmth of the sun.

  ‘I can’t say I find it in my heart to blame her, not I, certainly. However, I digress. The final straw, I believe, came about when Lady Meg announced herself with child by one of her many, many, many amours and when her brother suggested marrying her off she almost sent him off in an apoplexy by informing him that the father of her child was a fine strapping footman from Jamaica whom she had seduced in a ducal household and therefore a trifle difficult to foist even upon the most unsuspecting dotard. What became of that child, I wonder? Did your godmama ever confide in you? I have no information as to how she picked up your mother and yourself but I was told, as an incontrovertible fact, that Lady Meg met her death from a seizure while pleasuring – on the dining-room table, too! – a distinguished foreign guest (a very distinguished foreign guest!) of the governor of New South Wales and that the whole affair almost caused a diplomatic incident.’

  He sat back, waiting for a response.

  ‘Why are you telling me this?’ Charlotte spoke through dry lips.

  ‘Isn’t it obvious? I want you to do as you are told and if you do not I shall, with great regret, be forced to reveal the shocking truth about my bride and how grievously I have been deceived.’ He shifted his position and added, ‘At present, no-one but myself knows about this, not even my dear Lance. He can be, alas, a trifle indiscreet at times. I might be persuaded to hold my tongue, Charlotte, upon terms.’

  ‘What do you want of me?’

  ‘No need to grit your teeth, my dear.’ He laughed and patted her hand, laughing again as she snatched it away. ‘Oh no, you are quite safe from my attentions now; as you are very well aware, my tastes run in quite another direction. However, my beloved Lance is altogether a more complex character.’

  ‘What?’ She was outraged. ‘But I thought you wanted to marry him off to Agnes?’

  ‘I do, my dear, I do indeed. I can think of no better brother-in-law and of course I shall always welcome them in my home. In fact, I shall insist that they live with me. No, Charlotte, think for a moment. My mother has already lost no time in harping on at me about an heir for Finchbourne.’ He looked aggrieved as Charlotte shrank away in horror. ‘For pity’s sake, girl, be practical. I need an heir, Lance is willing, you have no choice.’

  ‘I won’t do it!’ She spat the words at him.

  ‘You will, if you wish to continue living within a hundred miles of here.’ He spoke decidedly, the pleasant air gone and in its place an implacable determination. ‘I have heard your praises sung by almost everyone since I arrived, Charlotte. I know how much you have made this place your home. Do you think I do not understand you? I’ve been watching you, my dear, when you were unaware. You love this place and all the people in it and there is very little that you would not do if it allowed you to remain here.’

  Even in the midst of her distress, Charlotte was amazed at the perception Frampton displayed. That he, of all people, should recognize her desperate need for the security and love afforded her by Finchbourne and its inhabitants, tore at her heart.

  ‘There, there.’ Frampton patted her shoulder again in a parody of husbandly affection. ‘You are overcome, and no wonder. I shall not press you, you may rest assured, but I promise you, Charlotte, you will do as I tell you. Between us you and I and Lance will furnish my mama with the heir she so desires!’

  CHAPTER 6

  Dinner was a sombre affair. At one point Charlotte observed Agnes cast a harried glance around the table, open her mouth to utter one of her usual inanities, catch her mother’s glacial eye and perform her celebrated, if involuntary, impersonation of a rabbit, eyes staring, nose twitching and teeth nibbling at her bottom lip as she subsided meekly into her chair.

  Barnard attacked his thick slice of beefsteak with an air of frowning concentration, shrugging off Lily’s interruptions. He and Frampton had come in together from the stable yard but there was nothing friendly or fraternal about their attitude. Now and again Barnard raised his eyes from his dinner and stared thoughtfully at his elder brother from under furrowed brows but Frampton ignored him, chatting all the while, in an inconsequent manner, with his mother and Lancelot Dawkins.

  Charlotte picked at her food, shrunk in on herself so that she was at the farthest possible distance from Dawkins, who sat next to her, so that no part of her body could conceivably be in contact with his. Her mirror had shown her a face pinched and wan with misery but tonight even her most heroic efforts failed, and she made no effort to conceal her state of mind.

  Uncle Henry, who was dining with them, tore into his bloody beef with yellowing tombstone incisors, glaring all the while at his nephew with an expression of disbelief and mounting anger. Frampton’s (or Dawkins’) announcement at the church door had all but robbed his uncle of the power of speech – no mean feat, Charlotte reflected, dragging herself out of her introspection. Frampton had later, after shaking his wife’s foundations, taken off to Winchester accompanied by the obsequious Dawkins, thereby robbing his uncle of a legitimate prey. Tormenting the hapless curate had, for once, failed to satisfy the vicar, so Charlotte had gathered from Agnes’s hurried aside, and only a concerted blast at the rapidly decreasing colony of magpies in the churchyard elms prevented him from an apoplexy.

  Agnes was apparently not the only diner to notice the brooding atmosphere in the room. Charlotte obs
erved that Lily had withdrawn from her self-absorption and was smiling with bright malice at her in-laws. With little difficulty Charlotte read Lily’s thoughts; her sainted papa’s code of conduct at Martindale required women to be spritely and sweet, so Lily had apparently determined that she would be both, in spite of her fury at Frampton’s atrocious treatment of his brother. She leaned forward to address her mother-in-law.

  ‘My goodness, we are all so gloomy today, are we not? Mama Richmond, how is your back today? You are looking very well.’

  She ignored the martyred sigh with which this deliberate provocation was received and turned her fire upon Frampton.

  ‘How was dear Lady Walbury today, Frampton? I saw her talking to you in the village this afternoon as I drove home from my visit to my friends. Poor creature, she seemed much agitated, I thought. Such a waste of a sweet bunch of early pinks she was carrying, the way she was shredding the petals. Still, hers is such a sad, sad story.’

  ‘Lily!’ Agnes hurtled into the breach in horror as a frozen silence filled the room. ‘Won’t you have another glass of wine, dear? And perhaps you, Charlotte dear? In fact, let us all have some more wine in – in celebration.’ Her voice tailed off in the ensuing silence.

  ‘Oh do hush, Agnes, do!’ There was an edge to Mrs Richmond’s voice and Agnes subsided, bright patches of colour on her cheeks, eyes downcast in mortification. She brightened a little when Charlotte gave her a small, tight smile, immediately extinguished when Lancelot Dawkins edged nearer, smiling also.

  ‘Frampton?’ Mrs Richmond’s tone was surprisingly chilly as she addressed her Lazarus. ‘I did not know that Lady Walbury had returned from London. What did she want with you? The woman is mad and I wish you to have nothing to do with her.’

  ‘The woman was an exceeding nuisance,’ put in Lancelot Dawkins in his irritatingly languid voice. ‘Poor Frampton was so much agitated by the encounter that he had to lie down upon his bed for quite half an hour, his pulse racing. He is not well enough for such scenes, indeed he is not. Why is the woman not locked away in some suitable asylum?’

  For once the Richmonds were a united herd as they glared with disdain at the upstart Dawkins.

  ‘That is not your concern, Mr Dawkins.’ Barnard spoke with a decision that elicited a rare nod of approval from his mother and admiration from his other female relatives, despite their own preoccupations, old Lady Frampton going so far as to say, ‘Well spoken, lad, ’ear, ’ear!’

  ‘Lady Walbury is an elderly woman and a much respected resident of these parts,’ Barnard continued. ‘And everyone is more than willing to make allowances for her eccentricities of speech and manner. We all, unhappily, know the cause from which they sprang. Pray let us hear no more about it.’

  He returned his attention to his plate, ignoring his brother who seemed about to speak, then thought better of it, throwing down his spoon and slouching back in his chair.

  ‘My dear Frampton,’ was Lancelot Dawkins’s next foray into the conversation. ‘You really do not look well, my dear fellow. You should retire early tonight.’

  ‘Yes, you do look ill, Frampton,’ agreed Mrs Richmond, peering at her heir in concern before turning to the butler, who had brought her the evening post. ‘Perhaps you should take more rest, dear, you are very flushed. Here, let me see if there are any letters for you. No, no, one for Barnard; one for you, Lily, from your papa; one for me.’

  Making no apology to the assembled company, she proceeded to open her own letter.

  ‘Why, good gracious me! Frampton, my dear boy, you will be interested to hear this, most interested indeed. Your very own commanding officer, Colonel Fitzgibbon, writes that he will be in Winchester on business for a day or so – no, let me see, for the better part of a week, he says – and intends to call upon us tomorrow having heard of your return. What a very pretty attention to be sure. I wonder …’ She paused and brightened. ‘I wonder if I could interest him in my charity works? The military must furnish him with so many dreadful … What…? Why, Frampton, dear boy, whatever is the matter?’

  ‘No, Mama!’ Frampton was on his feet, his chair overturned behind him. ‘He must not come here. I will not … I cannot see him. You must send at once to tell him to keep away. I – I cannot …’

  To their consternation he took a step back, clasped a hand to his head with a groan and collapsed in a dead faint, his face suddenly drained of the blood which had suffused it.

  Barnard was beside him in an instant.

  ‘Out of my way,’ he bellowed as he thrust Lancelot Dawkins aside as Frampton’s supposed nurse dabbed ineffectually at Frampton’s brow with his own elegant silk handkerchief. ‘Here, Hoxton.’ He gestured to the butler. ‘Send someone to prepare Major Richmond’s room then come back and help me with him.’

  He ripped open his brother’s coat. ‘Let him have some air. By heavens, he is burning up with fever and shaking like a leaf besides. He must be got to bed without delay.’

  Charlotte rose quietly and left the room. At Frampton’s door she met the head housemaid, who was trying not to have hysterics because she had missed all the excitement and felt it to be her due.

  ‘That’s enough,’ Charlotte said decidedly. ‘Stop that noise at once or I’ll throw a bucket of cold water over you. Let me check Mr Frampton’s room. Here, get rid of all these cushions and kickshaws and open the windows at once. A sick man needs fresh air, not this stifling atmosphere. And what’s this? Incense burners? Good God, I thought Frampton preached austerity!’

  She turned at the sound of footsteps on the stairs.

  ‘Is that you, Barnard? Lay him down on his bed for a moment and I will help you. Unless you would care to do so, Mr Dawkins? You are, after all, allegedly employed as nurse-companion to my husband?’

  Lancelot Dawkins was too preoccupied in making dashes about the room bewailing her depredations on the Ottoman elegance of his arrangements, to heed her tone.

  ‘Oh, how could you!’ He sounded, for the first time in their acquaintance, like the very young stripling he was, his voice raised in complaint, shorn of its drawling veneer. ‘Look at this velvet cushion, this silk coverlet; they’re worth a fortune and thrown aside as if they were common calico. I told Frampton the moment I met you that you were beneath him.’

  ‘I take that as meaning that you do not intend to be of any practical assistance, Mr Dawkins,’ was Charlotte’s only response, delivered in her driest tone, as she and Barnard rapidly stripped the invalid of his evening dress.

  ‘What’s this? Oh, thank you, Hoxton, just what we need, tepid water. Could you ask cook to send up some barley water, please? Lots of fluids, I think, don’t you, Barnard?’

  Barnard nodded as they sponged Frampton’s burning, sweating body, wringing out cloths and laying them on his flushed forehead as he shook and muttered incoherently.

  Lancelot Dawkins then tried to recoup his position as he retreated to the bedroom door.

  ‘This is not the same fever that I have nursed Frampton through,’ he told them, shaking his head. ‘It is something new, and to me, it looks very much more serious.’

  ‘Then you must leave us, Mr Dawkins,’ Charlotte told him, feigning concern. ‘I have no doubt that you have already caught the infection from Frampton so I will ask Hoxton to have a room prepared for you in the attics, that the rest of the household need not suffer. I think you should lie down at once, you may be in grave danger. I wonder if it could be cholera?’

  Barnard waited until they were alone, the reluctant Dawkins, stripped of his sophistication and now plainly a frightened adolescent, firmly under Hoxton’s magisterial hand.

  ‘What do you actually think it is, Charlotte? Not cholera really, I think?’

  ‘I think it must be malaria or some similar sort of fever.’ She shook her head slightly and answered in her usual matter-of-fact manner. She took an invalid feeder from the butler who had passed Dawkins to the footman, and tried to induce Frampton to take some liquid. ‘I’ve seen these chill
s and tremors before, in Australia, and in India. The only thing we can do is what we are, in fact, doing; plenty of fluids and keep him sponged down, taking care not to let him become chilled.’

  For some time they were fully occupied with their work, addressing only brief commands to each other. After what seemed an age Charlotte straightened up for a moment, her hand in the small of her back.

  ‘Oof! How I ache. You know, Barnard, if it is malaria, he should have quinine, so perhaps we should send again for Dr Perry.’

  ‘Whatever you require, dear Charlotte.’ Barnard’s tone was warm with approval as he wiped the sweat from his eyes and watched his sister-in-law as she deftly tucked her husband’s sheets about him. ‘Mrs Perry promised to send the doctor here the moment he returns from his business meeting in Southampton, but I think you may have done the trick without him. Frampton seems a little quieter now, don’t you agree?’

  She nodded and went to look out of the window into the summer darkness, taking in great lungfuls of the scented air wafting up from the lilacs in the bed below.

  ‘Oh, that’s so much better. How lovely this dear place is, you can have no idea.’

  Barnard wiped his hands on a towel and set it down before he joined her, gazing up at the hills behind the house.

  ‘You are a remarkable woman, Charlotte,’ he said quietly and put a comforting arm about her shoulders. ‘Instead of fighting for his life you might rather have been hoping for a different outcome.’

  She turned her head and stared at him, their eyes meeting for a long moment in the shadowy silence before she shrugged and turned aside.

  ‘I know, I’m a fool to myself, am I not? But I think you are exaggerating, you know, Barnard. I don’t think he was – or is – in any danger of dying.’ Her lashes drooped and she rallied for a moment. ‘But perhaps we should not tell that to the unspeakable Dawkins; with luck he might take fright and leave!’