Murder Most Malicious

by Alyssa Maxwell

  A scream, muffled by the door, sent Phoebe to her feet. A shout followed, and by the time Phoebe reached the corridor, Grams, Fox, Julia, and Amelia were already hurrying to the gallery. Phoebe ran after them, with Eva close behind. The screams persisted, coming from the guest wing.

  “It’s mine! Give it back, you insolent thing!”

  CHAPTER 16

  In a flurry of nightgowns and wrappers, Phoebe and the others scurried into the guest wing. Lady Allerton’s door opened and she, too, came running out to the corridor. The shouts continued, two female voices raised in a furious debate.

  “Give it to me!”

  “No, my lady, I shan’t. Now move away from the door, I beg you!”

  “Not till you do as I say!”

  Phoebe recognized at least one of those voices—Lady Cecily, though she had never heard such a tone from the woman before.

  “Sounds like they’re about to come to blows,” Fox announced gleefully. Theo’s door opened and in shirtsleeves he peered out.

  “What on earth?” Grams muttered and went to Lady Allerton’s side. “Lucille, is that your aunt we’re hearing?”

  Lady Allerton gave a start. “Oh, Maude, I think it must be. And her maid. They woke me from a sound sleep.”

  “Has someone been hurt? Ladies? Fox? What is this all about?”

  Phoebe turned to see Grampapa and Lord Owen striding toward them from the gallery. Owen stopped to speak with Theo. Grampapa placed a hand on Phoebe’s shoulder as he went by. Though Theo remained on his threshold, Lord Owen continued until he reached the others and then hovered, as if unsure whether to remain on hand or go to his own room and mind his business. He glanced back once at Theo, who hadn’t moved. Remaining on hand seemed to win out after another shout erupted, words Phoebe would not have repeated. Fox chuckled under his breath. Lady Allerton winced, clutched her wrapper tight beneath her chin, and ran in slippered feet to her aunt’s door.

  “Lucille, please allow me.” Grampapa went to the door in question and rapped his knuckles loudly. “Cecily, dear?” He raised his baritone to be heard over the clamor within. “Are you quite all right, Cecily? I’m going to open the door now.”

  Inside the room, all fell immediately silent. And then a voice that was not Lady Cecily’s called out, “Someone help, please!”

  Grampapa opened the door, and the dropping of both his and Lady Allerton’s jaws sent Phoebe and the others hurrying to see what the matter was all about. Inside, the same voice that had cried out for help now exclaimed, “Lady Cecily, no!”

  “There now, Cecily, it’s all right.” With a hand extended, Grampapa stepped into the fray. From the doorway Phoebe saw Lady Cecily and her red-haired lady’s maid facing each other only inches apart, their hands raised above their heads. Lady Cecily’s hands were empty, but one could easily see that she was reaching for an object the maid held just beyond her reach.

  Phoebe gasped and pointed. “Grams, your pugio!” What did this mean? Had Lady Cecily stolen the dagger from the case in the billiard room?

  Lady Cecily jumped as she attempted to dislodge the pugio from her maid’s grip. Waving her hands in the air, Lady Allerton rushed in. “Aunt, what are you doing? Stop it at once. At once, I tell you!”

  The maid stood on tiptoe and teetered when Lady Cecily jumped again. Thank goodness the dagger could do no harm buried inside its sheath. His face alight with excitement, Fox squeezed past Phoebe and into the room. He pressed himself against the wall, no doubt to make himself as inconspicuous as possible and avoid being sent away. Amelia, Julia, Eva, and Lord Owen lingered in the corridor, their riveted faces holding expressions of bafflement and shock in varying degrees. Phoebe’s gaze rested a moment on Lord Owen. Of them all, he seemed the least surprised. She wondered why.

  Grampapa motioned for silence. The maid took the opportunity to lower the pugio behind her back and step away from Lady Cecily.

  “There, there now, Cecily,” Grampapa said in a placating tone. “All is well.”

  Was it, Phoebe wondered? They had just found in a confused, elderly woman’s possession the weapon possibly responsible for Henry’s demise. Could Lady Cecily have . . . to her own great nephew?

  “Aunt Cecily, whatever are you doing with a keepsake left to our dear Maude by her father?”

  Now that the commotion had died down, Phoebe noticed in Lady Allerton’s question a resignation that suggested such bizarre behavior was nothing new for Aunt Cecily.

  The elderly woman dropped her arms to her sides and angled a sheepish glance at the audience she only now seemed to notice. As tame as a kitten, she batted her eyelashes. “It is mine. I found it,” she said in a girlish whine.

  “Oh, Aunt. You didn’t find it at all.” With a deep sigh Lady Allerton cupped Lady Cecily’s shoulder and said, as though attempting to persuade a child to tell the truth, “You took it, didn’t you?”

  “I’d have given it back. . . .”

  Lady Allerton turned to address the others. “She’s developed this odd fascination with knives and swords. Last year it was screws.”

  At this Fox snickered. Grams silenced him with a look, and said, “Screws? As in furniture and gadgets?”

  “Indeed, Maude. She stole a screwdriver from our man-of-all-work and went about the house unscrewing table legs, door hinges, and even lamps before we caught her at it. I cannot understand these obsessions of hers, but so far they’ve all been temporary and for the most part quite harmless.”

  Grampapa looked astonished, and not a little concerned. “For the most part?”

  “She doesn’t mean to cause difficulties, Archibald. She can’t help herself.” Lady Allerton’s chins jiggled as she aimed a scowl at the maid, still holding the pugio, but out of sight in the folds of her dress. “You should have been watching her more closely, you lazy thing. You know how indisposed I’ve been. First my Henry, and now this. . . .” She raised a forearm to her brow. “A body can only endure so much!”

  “Now, Lucille, don’t faint! Not again.” Grams took hold of Lady Allerton’s wrist with one hand and with the other lightly tapped her cheeks.

  Discreetly the maid slipped the dagger into Grampapa’s waiting hand. “I found it under her pillow, my lord.” Phoebe noted the woman offered no apologies or explanations addressing the charge of laziness Lady Allerton had leveled at her.

  Grampapa seemed in no mind to berate her. “Good job. Thank you.” He dropped the sheathed blade into the pocket of his cutaway coat. It weighed the garment down, causing it to hang crookedly on his frame. “I think it might be a good idea if you went below while we continue to calm your mistress. Please make her some tea, and you might have some yourself as well. I’ll have someone send for you when it’s safe to return.” He scanned the faces hovering in the doorway. “Eva, please go with her.”

  The maid curtsied and turned into the corridor. Eva followed her.

  “But, Aunt . . .” Lady Allerton seemed recovered from her near faint. “Why do you persist in taking things you know quite well don’t belong to you? That is stealing, and stealing is wrong.”

  “No, no, I merely borrowed it, dear. I wished to see it up close.” Lady Cecily smiled now, the last traces of her agitation gone. “I’d have returned it in the morning. Or sometime soon.”

  Grams spoke gently. “But, Cecily, how did you open a locked case?”

  Lady Cecily shrugged and raised a hand to her curly coiffeur. “A hairpin, of course.”

  “But if you had simply asked me, I would have shown it to you myself.”

  “Would you have?” Lady Cecily sounded genuinely surprised. “You’re such a dear, Maude. You always were.”

  While Grams took this in, Grampapa said to the others, “Everything is under control now and no harm done. You may all return to your rooms. Fox, that especially goes for you.”

  “Oh . . .”

  “Get along, young sir.” But then he called Phoebe to him and handed her the pugio. “My dear, take this with you. I’ll c
ome for it in a little while.”

  The dagger was cold and heavy against her palm. “I’ll guard it with my life, Grampapa.”

  He kissed her forehead and she left the room. The others had already dispersed and Theo had apparently retreated into his bedroom. Perhaps he had come to view scenes such as this as a matter of course.

  Phoebe could hear Julia’s and Amelia’s light chatter from the corridor on the far side of the gallery. She sped her steps to catch up to them, but as she entered the gallery a male voice called her name softly.

  She couldn’t see him, but she recognized Lord Owen’s voice immediately. A shiver traveled up her back and tingled in her cheeks, and this time not due to her capricious fascination with him. What could he want, calling to her from the shadows? “Where are you? Show yourself, please.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to frighten you.” He appeared in the billiard room doorway, outlined by the darkness behind him. Why hadn’t he switched on a light?

  “You didn’t frighten me. I simply couldn’t see you.”

  “As I couldn’t see you earlier tonight, yet I knew you were there.”

  Her spine went rigid. She attempted to swallow and couldn’t. She knew better than to stand there engaging in conversation with this man, yet something kept her rooted to the spot. “What do you want?”

  “To speak with you.”

  “It’s late, and we’ve had rather too much excitement for one night. I’d prefer to talk about whatever it is in the morning.” She moved to go, but he stepped out and grasped her wrist. Not a tight hold. In fact, she barely felt his skin against her own, yet when she tried to pull away she found it impossible to either slip free or open the circle of his fingers. Her heart thrashed against her ribs as a frisson of fear rushed through her. “Lord Owen, if you please.”

  Without a word he drew her into the billiard room, again with that strange insistence that needed no force of strength. The only light came from the dimmed sconces in the gallery and the reflections off the snow outside. Yet his presence surrounded her, made it difficult to breathe. She felt trapped even after he released her wrist. “What were you doing in my room earlier?”

  Instinct told her cry out or hurry away. Yet surely he wouldn’t dare overpower her, here in her own home with Grandpapa but several rooms away. She held her ground. “How did you know?”

  He smiled and inhaled deeply. “Your fragrance . . . violets, is it? Julia prefers rosewater and Amelia uses a citrusy scent, as many young girls do. And you didn’t shut the armoire doors properly after you ducked inside.” He crossed his arms before him. “What were you searching for, if I may be so bold as to ask?”

  “What were you looking for in Henry’s room the other night?” The moment the question left her lips she regretted it. She had just admitted to creeping about the house in the middle of the night. What else would Lord Owen surmise but that she, too, had intended to search Henry’s room?

  He smiled again. At least, she saw the glint of his teeth and hoped that signified a smile and not a snarl. Her fingertips trembled at her sides and she fisted her hands to still them. “You suspect me of . . . what, my lady? Killing Henry Leighton? I can’t fathom any other reason for you to go skulking through a man’s private possessions.”

  “Those photographs are not your private possessions,” she blurted, then wanted to bite her tongue.

  “So you found those. I thought so. See here.” He gently grasped her beneath the elbow and drew her farther into the room; once again, she let him, or had no choice, or . . . She didn’t know which, but she waited in silence while he paused, perhaps to listen for any approaching individuals. She realized then that he hadn’t shut the door to the gallery, and in this she took a measure of comfort. Surely if he intended to harm her he would have sealed them inside.

  He leaned down to bring his face closer to hers. “Let’s stop all pretense. You need to believe two things. One, those pictures were brought here by Henry to persuade your sister—”

  “I know all about that. Why did you take them?”

  “On the contrary, Lady Phoebe, you do not know all about that, nor do you need to know why I confiscated them, at least not at present. But you do need to believe my having them will in no way bring harm to Julia.”

  The way he carelessly tossed out Julia’s name stirred a whisper of jealousy—again. Phoebe narrowed her eyes, not that that brought him into any sharper focus. Her vision had adjusted to the dark, but Lord Owen remained a vague series of outlines, like a wall before her. “Why should I believe you?”

  “That brings me to my second point. You need to believe me when I say this is more dangerous than you apparently realize, though why you’d have trouble understanding the malicious nature of the individual with whom we are dealing is beyond me. Leave it alone, and tell your maid to leave it alone as well.”

  “Of course I realize this is dangerous. But I am not about to let an innocent man hang for a crime he didn’t commit.”

  “You can’t know that for certain, can you?” His voice had become a rough, impatient hiss. She heard him swallow; then he said more evenly, “Just as you cannot know for certain whether I or even Lady Cecily, for that matter, is innocent. She had a perfectly good murder weapon at her disposal, didn’t she?”

  “Lady Cecily, indeed. That confused old woman, a killer?”

  “I give you that she isn’t in her right mind, but that doesn’t rule out the possibility that she snapped, or that someone else didn’t put her up to stealing the dagger. The point is you cannot know what someone is capable of. When the dagger went missing, we all assumed it could have been the weapon used on Henry, if it wasn’t the cleaver.”

  “All right, then, tell me this.” She raised her chin to him and hoped he could make out the defiant gesture. “What is your involvement with Henry and Julia? Is she aware you have those photographs, and do you intend to give them to her?”

  Suddenly his hands came down on her shoulders, and this time she felt the full brunt of the warning communicated by his steely fingertips. She started to shrink away, but he held her firm and gave her a little shake for good measure. “Too many questions. I said leave it alone. Say nothing to Julia for now and believe that if your footman is innocent, he shall go free. If not . . .”

  He left the sentence hanging and strode away from her. Phoebe stood alone in the billiard room, more confused than ever, and believing only one thing Lord Owen had attempted to press upon her.

  Except for her grandparents, Amelia, and Eva, she could trust no one.

  “I tell you, Evie, his lordship was in the strangest mood this morning. If I didn’t have the evidence of my own eyes, I’d have thought I was serving Lord Theodore, not Lord Owen.” Nick dipped the scrub brush he was holding into the cleaning solution of water, baking soda, and bleach, and gently but thoroughly scoured it back and forth across the first of several dress shirt collars, a pre-scrub before the collars were sent to the laundress. “It’s not at all like him to be sullen tempered. I hope it’s nothing to do with my services. I keep hoping this position will become permanent.”

  “I’m sure it was nothing to do with you,” Eva tried to assure him. She felt a moment’s desperation on his behalf. Were he to lose his employment in the dead of winter, it might be months before he worked again, unless he were to accept the most menial position at the lowest wages. How would he survive?

  She stood at the ironing board, waiting for the new electric iron to heat. Miss Shea had insisted on replacing the old flatirons, which Eva had been quite used to heating on the potbellied stove in the corner of the valet service room. Miss Shea had claimed the electric iron would cut ironing time in half, but sometimes Eva felt she spent more effort untangling herself from the electrical cord than she did alternating between two stove-heated flatirons.

  “I wonder if Lord Owen’s mood this morning has anything to do with what happened last night.”

  The brush went still and Nick glanced up from his tas
k. “I heard Dora and Douglas whispering earlier. Something about Lady Cecily?”

  “Such a scene.” She stopped to listen for a moment and, hearing no one in the corridor, continued quietly, “Lady Cecily had taken an antique dagger from a locked case in Lord Wroxly’s billiard room.” Using her fingertips, she sprinkled starch over Amelia’s new silk shirtwaist. “But then, having lived in the Leighton household, I wonder if this comes as such a surprise to you.”

  “Yes and no. Her ladyship has a penchant for mischief, I’m afraid. But as for daggers . . . that’s something new. And to be discouraged as adamantly as possible.”

  Eva nodded absently. “To be sure. So, then . . . you don’t think her ladyship had anything to do with . . .”

  “With what happened to Lord Allerton?” He looked personally affronted, as Eva would have been if someone accused a member of the Renshaw family of a horrendous crime.

  She shook her head. “Silly question. My apologies.”

  They worked in silence for several moments. Nick stood brushing away at Lord Owen’s collars, scrubbing stains that didn’t exist. He sucked his cheeks between his teeth. Eva set down her iron.

  “Something is clearly on your mind, Nick. Why don’t you have out with it?”

  He smiled guiltily. “There is something. Lord Owen confided in me last night as I helped ready him for dinner. It’s about . . . well . . . Lady Julia.”

  “What about Lady Julia?” In a sudden bout of defensiveness, she snapped the question at him.

  “Just that Lord Owen is well aware of the family’s motive in inviting him.”

  “And that motive would be?”

  “A second choice for Lady Julia should an engagement with Lord Allerton not be forthcoming.” He shrugged. “And it certainly doesn’t appear forthcoming now, does it?”

  Eva spoke through pinched lips. “And do you think Lady Julia is a commodity to be pawned off on the next available bachelor?”