“You said ‘suspected,’” I said when it became obvious Gage was not capable of making a reply. Not at the moment. My heart squeezed at his distress. “So you have no proof it was Miss Galloway’s mother?”
“No. But there simply wasn’t anyone else.” Rory shrugged. “Not unless Annie traveled far afield to obtain it.”
Which was possible, but not very likely. And all but impossible to discover now—fifteen years later. Not to mention the fact there was no way of knowing if Miss Galloway’s mother had known what Annie intended to use the poison for.
With Annie having been hanged long ago for her crime, and Miss Galloway’s mother dead, there was really no point in stirring it all up again. But Rory’s warning was duly noted. Just because I’d felt empathy for Miss Galloway didn’t mean I could trust her. I pressed a hand to the fabric concealing the bottle of tincture she’d given me, curious whether its contents would match those inside the bottle we’d found in Alfred’s room.
* * *
• • •
Upon our return to Langstone, Gage set off to visit his grandfather. He invited me to join him, but I demurred, figuring the two of them needed to spend some time alone. Maybe Lord Tavistock would feel more comfortable delving into private matters without me hovering in the background.
Rather than remain in our chamber where Bree was puttering around, I elected to explore the manor. I could have dismissed my maid, but it was already difficult enough for her to complete her tasks in a strange house without my impeding her just so I could be alone. Besides, I’d been eager to poke my nose into some of the other rooms and corridors ever since our arrival. The unsettling sensations I’d experienced outside Alfred’s chamber had dampened my enthusiasm somewhat, but I was still determined to discover what I could.
So armed with a candle and a tinderbox tucked in my pocket, just in case a stray wind—or mischievous ghost—blew it out, I set off down a corridor I’d yet to traverse. My progress was slow, as I took my time to examine some of the treasures—or lack thereof—gracing the walls. I was surprised to find valuable and exquisite paintings by Vermeer and Titian interspersed with other poorly executed works of art. Had the worthless pictures all represented the same style, I would have attributed them to a family member, but it was clear most of them had been created by different people. I couldn’t decide whether that meant Lord Tavistock and his ancestors had been clueless about art, or they hoped to flummox any would-be thieves.
I nearly gasped at the sight of a Rembrandt hanging haphazardly above a mahogany side table with a bust in one corner. This masterpiece should be hung with more care, taking pride of place high on the wall of the dining room or drawing room, not tucked next to a stand filled with spears that could topple over and tear the canvas. The only thing reassuring about the random placement of these artworks was that the corridors were so dark, at least sunlight certainly couldn’t damage them.
I found dusty bedchambers with their contents covered in white sheets, and private sitting rooms with their writing desks still stocked with stationery. I even stumbled into an old garderobe with its hole carefully covered by a plank of wood. Down a flight of stairs at the back of the house, I stumbled into a billiard room with its balls racked, ready to be played. It appeared less abandoned than many of the chambers, making me suspect it had seen more recent use.
Retracing my steps, I turned right down the next corridor, hoping to locate the library, and found myself at the end of a long passage that overlooked some shadowy chamber below. I realized, with a start, that this was the portrait gallery. Peeking over the railing spanning one length of the corridor, I could see down into what I presumed to be some sort of great hall or ballroom.
Turning back toward the portraits, I inched my way down the gallery, examining each one. Before my eyes, the Trevelyan features regressed through the centuries. A large portion of the males seemed to have inherited the same striking silver eyes Lord Tavistock possessed. Though I pondered if maybe the artists had exaggerated the intensity of their sheen in several of the pictures.
One painting in particular drew my attention, for it boasted three people as its subjects. The man held pride of place, glowering down at me with his silver eyes, while a rather dowdy woman hovered behind him. Then almost in the background stood another woman, her face averted as if she were looking over her shoulder. She appeared as if she weren’t supposed to be in the portrait at all, as if she’d accidentally meandered into the background, but, of course, the artist would have had to have added her with intention. But why had he painted her thusly?
I recalled what Miss Galloway had said about Alfred not being the first person to have gone missing from Langstone Manor, and I couldn’t help but wonder if this woman was the other vanishing resident. Lifting my candle higher, I studied all of the portraits with renewed interest, curious which of these people might also have disappeared. Had they ever been found, or was this the last trace of their existence?
I shivered in a stray draft. My sense of foreboding and the flickering light of the candle combined to eerily magnify the emotions captured in the faces of Gage’s ancestors, making them all the more intense. So that the jaded Georgian gentleman in his curled wig seemed to roll his eyes; the laughter of a simpering debutante in a golden gown with large hoops almost tinkled aloud from behind her fan; and the fiercely scowling Roundhead all but leapt out at me. His glaring visage made me startle and nearly drop my candle.
Or perhaps it was the sharp realization that I was not alone.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
I spun around to see the Dowager Lady Langstone step out of the shadows at the other end of the gallery. How long she’d been watching me, I didn’t know, but I felt a pulse of irritation at her for behaving so. She could have announced herself.
She wore a gown of chartreuse silk—another dress that was elegantly fashionable and all but put my simple forest green gown with bows at the shoulders to shame. Her thick hair was arranged in ringlets on either side of her head and topped with a thin gold diadem. I couldn’t help but admire her cool beauty, though it made me wonder why she’d not remarried. Though I couldn’t say much for her personality, her attractiveness and impeccable breeding should have attracted a second husband. In my experience, most gentlemen never looked past the exterior and the basic niceties. I assumed she’d not wished to enter into matrimony again, but why? Was she all consumed with her sons’ inheritances, or was there another reason?
Her dark eyes gleamed at me in the candlelight like hard gems. “Admiring our artwork?”
I scrutinized her features, trying to tell whether she was slyly implying she’d been observing me for even longer than I suspected. But I already knew if I asked her outright she would deny it. Instead I turned back to the portraits on the wall. “Some more than others,” I replied indifferently.
She stepped up beside me, gazing up at the fine lines etched into the face of a woman attired in an Elizabethan ruff. It was one of the oldest paintings in the collection. Possibly the wife of the first Baron Langstone, long before Viscount Tavistock was added to their titles.
“They say she was mistress to the king. Another lady-in-waiting plucked from the queen’s service. And that’s why her husband was granted the title and these lands.”
She could only have been talking about Henry VIII, for no other king would have been the right age, though she spoke as if she were gossiping about the current monarch.
“How many titles do you think have been won thusly? By a woman on her back.” Her piercing gaze turned to meet mine before returning to the portrait.
I suspected she’d just insulted me, and that I was supposed to respond with righteous indignation. Contrarily, a bubble of amusement rose inside me. After all the dreadful names I’d been called, all the gruesome acts I’d been unjustly accused of, being charged with seducing Sebastian Gage, the golden lothario, into marriage was almost laughabl
e. It certainly wasn’t worth getting ruffled by. Not when it was what Lady Langstone clearly wanted.
I smothered a giggle and strolled on to the next portrait, trusting she would follow. “I understand Lord Tavistock is hopeful of an engagement between Lord Langstone and Lady Juliana Maristow.”
“Yes.” She paused for so long after that single statement that I thought she was going to refuse to elaborate. Whether she’d been weighing her words, or my silence had prodded her into saying more, I wasn’t certain, but it seemed far more likely to be the former. “It is a good match.”
“Was Alfred pleased by it?”
Her chin arched a degree higher as she replied almost in challenge. “Why would he not be?”
I turned to look at her, finding her answer interesting. Lady Langstone seemed to me a very deliberate person, and though she could be startled into giving a reaction or response that hadn’t been first carefully considered, I didn’t think this had been one of those instances. If she had believed her son was pleased by the engagement, would she not have said so? Did that mean she knew better? That Alfred had not liked it. Had she joined Lord Tavistock in pressuring him to accept the match regardless?
As if aware of the topic of my contemplation, she switched to another topic. “I trust your rooms have been satisfactory.”
“Our rooms are lovely. Though . . .” I hesitated, uncertain whether to mention the pranks to Lady Langstone. In the end, I decided I was more curious what her reaction would be than worried she would dismiss my concerns as silly. “I believe some of your staff might be intent on making mischief.”
“The missing trunks?” she surmised without removing her gaze from the portrait of a mother and her five children we were standing before. She sighed. “It is so hard to find good staff in this area. Especially since the manor presses into the heart of Dartmoor. It’s always been this way,” she added as we sauntered down to the next painting. “Maids coming and going. And the ones that do stay often aren’t of the best quality. As Mrs. Gage found out.”
I blinked at the portrait before me, shocked she’d referred to the maid who poisoned Gage’s mother in such a conversational manner. However, I refused to give her the satisfaction of seeing she’d disconcerted me.
But Lady Langstone wasn’t finished.
She sighed again, rather affectedly. “I told her to get rid of that maid. There were plenty of other girls from the villages nearby she could have employed. But she wouldn’t listen. And look where it got her.”
“Buried cold in the ground?” I couldn’t help but retort, made furious by her casually cruel remarks.
She flinched, but then recovered. “Well, yes.”
I silently fumed, trying to keep my temper under control, and almost missed what Lady Langstone said next.
“She brought that maid with her from Plymouth, you know. She wasn’t a local girl.”
I turned to her quizzically. “Annie wasn’t Mrs. Gage’s maid before she married?”
“No,” she scoffed. “She couldn’t afford the woman her father employed for her. Her husband hadn’t yet attained his riches.” She spoke with distaste, as if Lord Gage had been a privateer, pillaging and looting, not the captain of a Royal Navy vessel who’d captured a number of large ships for the Crown as war prizes.
Ignoring the tone of her voice, I tried to focus on the content of her words. “So life in Plymouth was rather less grand than here at Langstone, especially in the early years of her marriage.”
She wrinkled her nose. “I suspect it was downright squalid.”
Coming from her, such a description could imply any number of conditions, so I did not concern myself with the details. A Royal Navy captain might not boast of impressive accommodations, but he also wouldn’t live in ramshackle lodging. However, it was plain Gage’s mother had come down in the world. Greatly.
“When she returned here with young Sebastian and that maid in tow, she claimed it was her illness that convinced her to make the move, but I didn’t believe it.” She sniffed. “It was evident to me she was simply tired of her life in that tiny house by the sea, doing much of the work she was accustomed to the servants managing. That’s the real reason she showed up here without warning. She wanted to come home, but she couldn’t. Not really. So she claimed she was only here for a visit, just until her health improved, until her husband came back from the sea.”
I didn’t want to give her story any credence, especially not when it was delivered in such a self-righteous tone. But there were elements of it that struck me as being perhaps more accurate than what I’d always assumed given the little information Gage had relayed to me.
“Wasn’t she ill?” I asked, turning to face her directly.
She brushed this aside with a flick of her wrist. “No more than a convenient cough when it suited her. She didn’t truly become ill until a year or two later. And then . . . I suppose you know the rest.”
About the poisoning. About how her maid, Annie, had feared she would be replaced and so began dosing her mistress with poison from time to time to prolong her illness.
It was heartless the way Lady Langstone spoke of it as if it were merely a trifling matter. It made me angry, and determined that she wouldn’t escape this conversation unscathed.
“We visited Lord Glanville yesterday.”
Had I not been watching for it, I might not have detected the way her eyes flinched.
“Did you,” she replied with an admirable amount of nonchalance. “Then I assume he confirmed the information I already relayed to you.” Her eyebrows arched in accusation.
“Yes . . . and no.” I furrowed my brow as if she had confused me. “Why did you tell us Lord Glanville visited you when it was you who went to him?” I elected not to mention the flurried state Glanville had described her being in.
“Did he tell you that?” she asked with cool reserve. She shook her head as if in bemusement. “The man is a drunk, and likely can’t recall one day from the next.”
“Are you saying you didn’t visit him?”
Her smile tightened to something akin to pity. “I’m saying the man can’t be trusted.”
Once again, she hadn’t really answered my question, and her implication that I was to be pitied for my naïveté was grating. “Does that mean you think he’s involved in Alfred’s disappearance?”
“No,” she huffed. “It means you shouldn’t believe everything you hear.” She started to turn away, but paused to offer me one last bit of advice. “Lady Darby, if I were you, I would spend less time worrying about the veracity of Lord Glanville’s memory and more time concerned with the violent man you married.”
I blinked in astonishment.
“Ask him about the dagger,” she said, and then swept from the room before I could recover from my state of shock to demand she explain.
I didn’t believe for even one second that Gage was a violent man. I’d known violent men. I’d seen the way they operated. I’d survived a marriage with one. Yes, it had only been three months since Gage and I wed, but never during that time or the eight months before had he displayed any sign of those characteristics. Not to mention the fact that two of his closest friends were also my brother-in-law and an old family friend. I had no doubt Philip and Michael would have warned me if Gage exhibited any forceful tendencies.
That being said, Lady Langstone evidently wanted me to find out about something. She’d mentioned a dagger, and I could only assume it was the Bray ceremonial dagger referred to at dinner two evenings prior. I’d perceived then how the mention of it affected Gage, but I hadn’t yet asked him about it. I supposed now was as good a time as any.
Unfortunately, when I returned to our chambers, Gage was nowhere to be seen. And by the time I heard him return to the connecting room, I was already dressing for dinner. I was curious where he’d been all afternoon, and told him so when he joined me to
escort me down to the dining room.
“Hammett arranged for me to speak with several members of the staff, including the gardener who last saw Alfred.” He glanced at me in puzzlement. “Did a servant not relay my message asking you to join me if you were available?”
I shook my head.
He frowned. “An oversight, I suppose.”
But I could tell neither of us really believed that.
“In any case, the gardener no longer had the newspaper clipping Alfred dropped.” Frustration tightened his voice. “Said no one told him it could be important, so he burned it as kindling. He seemed genuinely distressed when I asked for it, so I don’t think there was any malice intended.”
“Did he read it?”
“He couldn’t. He’s only literate enough to recognize his own name and a few place names and such. But he said he noticed the words Langstone, Tavistock, and Gunnislake, which is a small village southwest of Tavistock. Beyond that, he couldn’t make anything else out.”
“That’s not much to go on.”
“No, it’s not. But perhaps my grandfather will have some idea what the article was about.” He exhaled wearily. “Barring that, I suppose I could search for an intact copy of the edition of Woolmer’s Gazette we found in Alfred’s chamber.”
I lifted the skirts of my claret red evening gown with black braid as we descended the stairs, lowering my voice so as not to be heard by anyone hovering in the entry hall below. “That might require an awful lot of effort to discover something we’re not even certain has anything to do with your cousin’s disappearance.”
He grimaced. “That’s why I’m hoping Grandfather can enlighten me instead.”
I wanted to ask him about his visit with his grandfather earlier that day, but we were nearly to the bottom of the staircase and would soon be joining Lady Langstone and Rory. In that little time, I knew I wouldn’t receive a satisfactory answer. Not to mention the fact that I wished a few moments to prepare myself before seeing Gage’s aunt again. I’d wanted to plead a headache, except I’d known it simply wouldn’t do for either of us to miss two dinners in a row. My suspicion that Lady Langstone would view my absence as some sort of triumph also steeled my resolve.
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