“It was thirty pounds more than I was expectin’, Missy,” Wilhelmina replied, flicking her cloth briskly over the seat of the chair before sitting herself down with a thump and looking her mistress straight in the eyes. Victoria suppressed the sudden urge to flee, knowing that somehow the tables had been turned and Wilhelmina was about to ask some very probing questions of her own.
“What I wants to know now, Miss Victoria, is this—how much did the cheeseparin’ old skinflint set by for you? I’ve been watchin’ you and wonderin’ what it is that’s put you so badly off your feed. You’ve been sittin’ in here day in, day out for over a week now, shufflin’ those papers back and forth from one pile to another. It’s bad news, isn’t it?”
Victoria hesitated a moment, wondering if it was exactly fair to pour out at least a part of her troubles to Willie, who could do nothing more than commiserate with her—other than to throw a few colorful curses the Professor’s way, of course—but she did feel a great need to talk to somebody.
“Well,” she began slowly, a note of bitter self-mockery in her tone, “as you must know, Willie, there existed between the Professor and myself a certain, er, want of openness while he was alive.”
“He treated you like an unpaid servant, lovin’ and trustin’ none but hisself and his useless scribblins’,” Wilhelmina cut in candidly. “Let’s call a spade a spade, Missy. There’s naught but ourselves here to listen, you know.”
Victoria lifted her head, throwing her long, slim neck and clearly defined, fragile, square jaw into prominence. “You’re right, Willie, as usual,” she said with some asperity. Then, losing a bit of her bravado, she began to ramble, hoping to change the subject. “It’s time to call a spade a spade, whatever that silly saying means, for whatever else would one call it—a flowerpot? Willie, did you ever stop to consider just how silly some of our time-honored sayings are? Like ‘right as a trivet.’ Whatever could that mean? Could it just as easily be ‘left as a trivet’? Or ‘wrong as a trivet’? After all—”
“Are we soon goin’ to be servin’ tea in the parlor to the sheriff’s officers?” Willie interrupted brusquely, not about to be sidetracked now that she had nearly gotten her mistress to the sticking point.
“You mean like Lord Barrymore did years ago, Willie?” Victoria asked, obviously still more than eager to digress from the distasteful subject of her current financial embarrassment. “I read somewhere in the Professor’s notes that Lord Barrymore was dunned so much that the sheriff’s officers seemed as much at home in his house as did his own servants.”
Wilhelmina nodded impatiently. “Yes, yes. His lordship had them dress up as servants when he was throwin’ a party. I know all about it, Missy. Us that serve know everythin’. Now stop tryin’ to twist out of it and tell me—are we rolled up?”
It was no use, Victoria decided, opening her mouth to speak. “The Professor held the purse strings entirely, of course,” she began slowly, “and I doubt even you could find anything unusual about that.”
“Not out of the way, Missy, just stupid,” Wilhelmina answered baldly. “As if there was yet a man born who knew the real cost of things—yellin’ for fresh peas in the dead of winter like I was goin’ to take m’self off out into the back garden and find ’em hangin’ on the trees.”
“But although he kept the household on quite a strict budget,” Victoria pressed on, wishing to get over this rough ground as smoothly as she could, “he always seemed to have funds enough to purchase his expensive books and his favorite tobaccos and, of course, his finely aged brandy. Oh dear, that sounded rather condemning, didn’t it?”
“He knew how to live, that he did. I’ll say that much for him,” Wilhelmina put in thoughtfully. “I can’t say I liked his choice of tailors, with the dull as ditchwater browns that he fancied for everything, but the quality was always there, wasn’t it?”
Victoria nodded her head up and down firmly, as if Willie’s confirmation of her assessment of the Professor’s finances had reinforced her own feelings. “Naturally I assumed that the Professor had some private form of income—monies invested in the Exchange, or some income from an inheritance. You know what I mean.”
Wilhelmina sat forward at attention. “But?”
“But his solicitor tells me he has no record of any such matters, and I have searched and searched this room without unearthing a single clue as to where the money came from. Even this house is rented.”
Wilhelmina’s expressive brows came together as she frowned, considering what she had just heard. “Are you tryin’ to tell me that the old bas—, um, that the Professor left you without a penny to scratch with? I can’t believe it! It doesn’t make a whit of sense, Missy.”
“Oh, there’s some money in the house,” Victoria explained hastily. “I found nearly one hundred and fifty pounds locked in a small tin box in the bottom drawer of his desk. There’s more than enough to honor the Professor’s bequests to you and Betty, and the rent for this quarter’s already been paid. If nothing else, at least I didn’t find any unpaid tradesmen’s bills.”
“So there’s naught but a hundred pounds standin’ betwixt you and the street?” Wilhelmina pursued intently, shaking her head in mingled anger and disgust. “You keep my thirty pounds. I’ve got more than enough put away that I don’t need to be takin’ the bread out of a child’s mouth. Lucky thing for old Quennel that he’s dead, let me tell you, for I’d like to strangle him with my own bare hands, and then go off to the hangman singin’!”
Victoria looked around the library at all the books the Professor had purchased over the years. “If only he hadn’t chosen to leave the collection elsewhere,” she said, sighing. “I’m sure I could have realized a considerable sum on its sale.”
“The Earl didn’t seem like he was over the moon to have been landed with the dusty stuff,” Wilhelmina pointed out helpfully. “I’d be willin’ to wager he could be talked into givin’ it all back to you if you was to ask him.”
Victoria fairly leaped from her chair to cross the room and look out the window at the small garden, hiding her flushed cheeks from the housekeeper’s all-seeing eyes. “That man is utterly abominable!” she shot back with some heat. “I wouldn’t ask the Earl of Wickford for a stale crust of bread if I were starving in a gutter!”
“Which you might very well be, Missy, if you don’t rid your foolish head of this notion you’ve taken into it about finding the Professor’s murderer,” Wilhelmina supplied archly. “Better you spend the next few months sniffin’ around for a husband to take care of you, I say.”
“A husband! I have not the least expectation of such a thing!” Victoria, pulling a face, cried indignantly. “Oh, maybe once or twice—long ago—I had the usual dreams about falling in love with some handsome gentleman and living happily every after. But I’m three and twenty, Willie, and well past the usual age for marriage, even if I were so coldhearted a person as to seek matrimony simply as a way to save myself from having to make my own way in the world like any honest woman. Besides,” she added, spreading her arms as if to invite Wilhelmina’s inspection of her unprepossessing appearance, “who do you propose as a suitable match for someone like me—the rat catcher?”
The housekeeper jumped to her feet, a quick flush deepening the color in her naturally rosy cheeks. “Now see here, Missy, there’s nothin’ the matter with you that a bit of good food and some fresh air wouldn’t put to rights! You’re the spittin’ picture of your blessed mother—Lord rest her soul and forgive her for being so weak as to allow herself to be married off to Quennel Quinton like she did—and she was a truly beautiful lady.”
Victoria’s dark amber eyes softened as she shook her head slowly in the negative. “Ah, Willie, you’re a wonderful friend to me, truly you are. But then you didn’t get to hear Lord Wickford’s blighting assessment of my charms—or should I say my lack of them.”
“Knowing you, Miss Victoria, you probably laid him out in lavender with that sharp tongue of yours before his lo
rdship even had the time to look at you.” At Victoria’s involuntary wince, Wilhelmina pressed her point home. “Men are not so knowin’ as they think they are, you understand. First you must present them with a pretty package—only then will they take the time to tug on the ribbons, like, and look a little deeper. Once he got to know you as I do, Lord Wickford would be like warm butter in your hands.”
Victoria walked back over to the desk and sat down wearily. “I don’t know, Willie. That description sounds rather messy to me. Besides, I don’t like Lord Wickford. He’s as shallow and vain…and…and arrogant as the rest of his sort. I have no desire to gain his approbation. I’d as lief retire to the country and raise dogs, really I would. But first I want to—that is, I must keep my promise to the Professor.”
“That again!” Wihelmina exploded. “You owe that man nothin’—less than nothin’ now that you know he left you without a feather to fly with. You have two months, or about that, before you must give up this house. Better to spend the time in thinkin’ of yourself—not that selfish old man. Dyin’ he was, and all he could think of was havin’ you go harin’ off to find out who did him in. You’d think that a body who knew he was about to meet his Maker would have a few thoughts about the poor innocent child he was about to leave behind. It’s a bleedin’ pity, that’s what it is.”
Victoria pressed the knuckles of her closed fist to her mouth, fighting against the pain Wilhelmina’s passionate words caused to clutch at her chest. The Professor had never once acted in an affectionate way toward his only offspring, so it would have been totally out of character for him to have had a kind word or two for her as he lay dying, but Victoria was human enough to have wished for more from her father.
In time Victoria, using the vivacious Wilhelmina as a yardstick against which to judge herself, had decided that she was the homely, helplessly ugly specimen the Professor said she was, and had therefore made no demur when he chose to have her dressed in nothing more colorful than mud brown and kept her closeted inside summer and winter, much to the detriment of her pale complexion.
If anything, Patrick Sherbourne’s scathing description of her appearance—added to that of Pierre Standish—had put the final seal on her opinion of herself as being a truly undesirable female. She had a good brain—not even the Professor could quibble with that—but that brain told her that Wilhelmina’s suggestion that she hang out her hopes for a husband was nothing more than an impossible dream.
No, Victoria told herself, reaching out blindly to pick up the first page of one of the stacks of paper lying in front of her, there existed unrealistic goals and attainable goals. Marriage was an unrealistic dream. Victoria was resigned to spending her life as one of the invisible people, destined to observe the world from the sidelines, in the role of governess, or perhaps as a spinster school-teacher.
But before she resigned herself to the deadly dull existence that she felt to be her destiny, Victoria would take one slight detour into the world of excitement and intrigue, just as Patrick Sherbourne had so accurately surmised. She would play Bow Street Runner and ferret out the man who had murdered the Professor. She owed it to him, she comforted herself, having given him her solemn promise she would do it. But that wasn’t really why she was looking forward to her investigation.
Opening the middle drawer of the desk, she slipped a hand inside to draw out the small enameled snuffbox Wilhelmina had found on the floor of the library the morning the Professor was discovered lying there injured. Holding the thing up to the light, she turned it slowly this way and that, admiring the detailed workmanship that had gone into the finely etched initials carved into its lid.
“P.S.,” she read aloud, her eyes narrowing into slits as she contemplated just what those initials could mean. “Patrick Sherbourne. Pierre Standish. Somehow I hope it was one of them rather than any of the others I have discovered so far, for I do believe I would thoroughly enjoy handing over evidence condemning either of those gentlemen.”
Wilhelmina shook her head in mingled dismay and disgust. “It’s a sorry day, it was, that I showed you that snuffbox. I would have turned it over to that bumblin’ constable if I had but known you’d take it into your head to think the thing belonged to the murderer.”
“It has to, Willie,” Victoria reminded the housekeeper. “Just think about it a moment. You clean this house almost hourly, bless you, so that snuffbox never could have escaped your broom unless it was dropped that same night by the murderer. I’m sure the Professor knew his killer; he just died before he could tell me who it was. After all, whoever it was had all night to ransack the library and find the box with the Professor’s money in it. No burglar would have left empty-handed—only a man who had no need of funds would have done so.
“There’s absolutely no doubt in my mind,” Victoria said confidently, placing the snuffbox back into the drawer. “This is a very important clue, and it will lead me to the murderer, of that I am convinced. My only problems presently are money and time. I fear I may not have enough of either to do what must be done.”
Wilhelmina had been still long enough. Reaching down to retrieve her cleaning rag, she began dusting the bookshelves even as she continued her arguments as to the impossibility of Victoria ever succeeding in her plan. “You’d have to go about in Society to rub up against folks like Lord Wickford and Mr. Standish, Missy. That takes money—money you don’t have. It also takes knowin’ the right people. You don’t know anybody but me, and—lordy—I haven’t been invited to sit down to tea with the Queen in ages.”
Victoria allowed herself to be amused by Wilhelmina’s small joke, but the housekeeper’s bald truths could not be laughed away. “You’re right, Willie. It’s a difficult task I have set myself. Isn’t it a shame I have no fairy godmother to come wave her wand over me and turn me into a rich, beautiful princess? It certainly would make things considerably easier, wouldn’t it?”
FIVE HOURS LATER, Victoria closed the old journal with a snap and pushed it away from her before propping her elbows on the desk and lowering her chin into her hands. After her first, early successes in compiling a list of likely suspects she had somehow thought it would be only a matter of time before all the remaining pieces of the puzzle fell into place and she could identify the murderer.
But as the list of suspects grew, so too did the questions concerning exactly what the Professor had been up to, locked away in this library year after year. After all, aside from a few widely spaced magazine articles, his work had never been published—so what exactly was the source of his income? If he had no investments, no allowance from some inheritance she had never heard of, then she was at a loss to explain how they had lived in the relative comfort they had enjoyed all these years.
Victoria had also learned that the Professor had no arrangement with any publisher in the city concerning the publication of his “definitive history,” which, as his transcriptionist, she knew to be years away from completion, so there was no point in pursuing that avenue in the hopes he had been receiving funds in anticipation of future profits.
“Still didn’t find anything to the point, did you, Miss Victoria?” Wilhelmina observed as she reentered the library after finishing her own luncheon in the kitchen, shaking her head as if to say, I knew you wouldn’t. “You should be out lookin’ for a husband, and not sittin’ in here diggin’ into these dusty old books.”
“Oh Willie, this is impossible!” Victoria complained, tucking a stray lock of hair behind her ear. “If I thought the Professor’s manuscript was dull, let me tell you, his personal journals make them sound like racy novels in comparison.”
“Like that Mrs. Radcliffe’s An Italian Romance, what I found tucked in a hatbox, sittin’ alongside your best bonnet?” Wilhelmina asked as she flicked her feather duster over a row of books sitting on the corner of the Professor’s desk. “Mayhap I shoulda snuck in here of an evenin’ and read some of his stuff m’self.”
Retrieving the journal and placing it on the top of a sm
all stack of similar books before slipping them all into a large side drawer, Victoria replied regretfully, “Alas, it was only a figure of speech, Willie. The Professor’s writings, both public and private, were all as dry as dust. His journals ramble on for page after page about the most everyday things—as if the price of tallow candles in 1799 should be preserved for posterity.”
“At least you won’t have to go worryin’ yourself that his lordship, the Earl of Wickford, will be readin’ all about the Professor’s wild and wicked past,” the housekeeper offered, abandoning her dusting in order to run a finger along one of the windowsills, just to check up on the housemaid’s efficiency.
“Wicked past? Willie, you know as well as I that the Professor’s life was as ordinary as plain pudding. Why else do you think I have been reduced to reading Mrs Radcliffe?” Then, remembering just what Wilhelmina had said about discovering her latest hiding place for her lending library books, she went on: “About that hatbox, Willie—”
“I was just tidyin’ things up a bit, Missy,” the housekeeper put in hastily. “You know how lazy that Betty is. Why, if I’m not on her all the time, I swear she’d do nothin’ more than wave kisses at the dirt as she breezed by. Did I tell you how I found her last week? There she was, plain as day, washin’ down the front steps with—”
“That hatbox was at the very back of my wardrobe, secreted behind a dozen other boxes,” Victoria persisted, knowing that Willie’s love of cleanliness and order, and not nosiness, lay at the heart of the matter, but not adverse to seeing the housekeeper squirm a bit in her attempt to explain her motives. “There are times, Willie, that your dogged pursuit of demon dirt fairly boggles the mind.”
Wilhelmina lifted her chin and assumed an injured air. “Well, you don’t have to hit me over the head to make me know that you’re pokin’ fun at me, Miss Victoria. And me that’s raised you since before you could so much as walk upright. Your darlin’ mother gave me this position, and I have to say myself that I’ve served very well, but if you are wishful of makin’ changes in the staff now that the old man got his notice to quit, why, I guess I can go to m’sister in Surrey.”
The questioning Miss Quinton Page 5
