“Thank you, Kate,” Lizzy said, grateful for her sister’s kind words. “But here is one thing I’d like to know.”
The others looked at her and she, in turn, pointed at the dead body, the soles of his shoes facing them.
“Who did I just kill?” Lizzy said. “Who is he?”
Chapter
Sixteen
“I think I might be able to help you out there,” said Raymond Allen.
The duke had surprised himself by being the first on the scene, the first to arrive after hearing Lizzy scream, running toward potential danger rather than in the direction that sheer common sense dictated, which would be to run away from it, preferably as far as possible. He’d never thought himself to be a particularly valorous man; in fact, he knew that he was not. But then, he supposed, damsel in distress and all that. Even a timid man must sometimes do what one must.
What didn’t surprise him was that having spoken up, he was now being ignored.
He watched as the others approached the corpse, joining the doctor with varying degrees of trepidation.
“The color of his blood,” Lady Elizabeth said, sounding confused. “Can that be quite right?”
“How do you mean?” Dr. Webb said. “What do you think is wrong with it?”
“Only,” Lady Elizabeth said, still sounding confused, “when I cut my finger or some such, the blood that comes out is a much more lively vivid red, while his is dull as rust, the color of a brick, almost like what blood looks like after it’s completely dried and it’s no longer so…lively.”
“Ah, I see what you mean,” Dr. Webb said, looking briefly confused himself before hardening his expression into something more decisive. “Still, I’m sure it’s all quite normal.”
“But how can that be?” Lady Elizabeth pressed.
“Head wounds, you know,” Dr. Webb said authoritatively. “They are different from any other kinds of wounds.”
“So you’ve seen this before?”
“Well, no. I’ve never actually had any patients who were shot in the head before, but I suspect that if I had, they would look exactly like this.”
And the duke suspected, or was beginning to, that the medical man might not quite know what he was talking about.
“But that smell,” Lady Elizabeth went on, covering her nose.
“That is the smell of decomposition, my dear,” Dr. Webb said.
“So quickly?” Lady Elizabeth asked skeptically. “Because I’ve seen a few recently dead things before, and—”
“As I said already—head wounds. They are quite different than—”
“Oh, look!” Lady Katherine said. “The man has livery on. Could he be one of ours?”
“I suppose it’s possible,” her father said. “But if so, which one could it be?”
“He’s not one of yours,” the duke said. And then, when no one appeared to hear him, “I said, he’s not one of yours!” he practically shouted.
“He’s not?” Lady Katherine said, looking surprised, and the duke wondered what surprised her more: that someone had contradicted her and her father, or that he was still there. “Who is he, then?”
“I believe that must be Parker,” the duke said, reluctant now to come too near.
“Parker?” Lady Katherine said. “And who is he when he’s at home?”
“My valet,” the duke said. “Or, at least, he was.”
“Oh, that’s right,” she said, “you’d mentioned something at breakfast about his disappearing.” She moved closer still to the headless corpse, seemingly not put off in the ways most of the others were. “But how can you be so sure?”
“Because the livery is all wrong,” the duke said, gesturing vaguely with his fingers. “Or, if not all wrong, there are certainly differences.” He enumerated what those distinctions were: a slightly different-colored this, a slightly different cut of that, and so forth.
“I suppose you’re right,” Lady Katherine said. “His livery is all dusty and dirty—not typically the Porthampton Abbey way. But are you quite sure he is not one of ours?”
A part of him couldn’t believe they were having this discussion. She obviously didn’t pay enough attention to her own footmen to notice the differences between hers and this one.
“Quite sure,” he asserted vehemently.
“Seems such a shame,” she said. “He decides to leave service and then he winds up like this?”
“None of this would have happened,” Will Harvey spoke up, addressing his words to the earl, “if you’d listened to my warning.” As though suddenly realizing to whom he was addressing his remarks, he added a hasty, “Sir.”
“And what exactly was that warning again?” the duke asked.
“Yes,” Benedict Clarke said, “I should like to know, too. If there is some sort of threat here, we should all be informed.”
“I told His Lordship,” Will Harvey said, “that I was concerned after what had happened with my uncle; you know, being dead, then not, and then dead again. My concern was that, having happened once, it could—”
“Yes!” Lizzy cried eagerly, snapping her fingers at the stable boy. “I’m sure that’s why I reacted how I did!”
“How do you mean, Lizzy?” her father asked.
“Well, when the man, when this Parker started stumbling toward me after Kate was safely out of the way, I was practically frozen with fear. And then I saw those eyes—I could barely move, I was so terrified. I suppose a part of me must have remembered then; you know, what we’d heard last night at dinner: that Will’s aunt finally killed his uncle with a shot through the head. I guess that must be why I shot there and not at some other part of his person. When he just kept coming at me, all I could think was ‘Just shoot him in the head! That should do the trick! Just shoot him in the head!’”
“Once again,” Lady Katherine said, “I feel compelled to say good show, Lizzy!”
“Thank you,” Lady Elizabeth said. “But what about the threat?”
“What threat?” the earl asked.
“What Will described,” Lady Elizabeth said. “Don’t you think that this”—she gestured toward the dead man—“is just like what happened with Will’s uncle?”
“But Ezra Harvey had his heart or some such ripped out first, before being shot by his wife later,” the earl objected.
The duke wondered that they could speak so graphically and heartlessly about the fate of Will’s relative with Will standing right there among them. When the duke shifted his gaze in that direction, it surprised him to notice that Lady Katherine was looking with concern at the stable boy as well. But for his part, the stable boy kept his gaze dead forward, his jaw hard.
“I don’t see that at all, the idea of this being at all like that,” the earl went on, turning to the doctor for confirmation. “Doctor?”
The doctor squinted some more at the corpse before concluding, “I quite agree with you, my lord. We all know that what your stable boy described happening with his own family—dead, not dead, dead again—can’t happen medically. And as for this…”
“So there’s no threat?” the earl demanded.
“None that I can detect,” Dr. Webb said with a shrug.
“But I saw him!” Lady Elizabeth said. “I saw him with my own eyes! There was something really wrong with him!”
“I know what you think you saw,” the doctor said, “and I believe that you believe that you saw it. But such things are simply not possible. This poor fellow, well, who will ever really know what happened to him? Perhaps he left the duke’s service because he decided he’d had enough of working for the upper classes. And then, perhaps, he came back here, bitter, determined to take his vengeance upon the upper classes. No doubt, that murderous impulse was what you saw in his eyes. But beyond that speculation?” The doctor shrugged. “We cannot guess what was in his mind because he is no longer here for us to ask. All we can be certain of is that, whatever you’re thinking this is, Lady Elizabeth, it’s not that.”
�
�W-will I hang for this?” Lady Elizabeth asked.
“Pardon?”
“I killed a man, didn’t I?”
“Don’t be absurd,” her father said. “Clarkes don’t hang! Besides, anyone can see it was a case of self-defense. You felt you and your sister were threatened, and you merely acted upon that threat.”
“And as for those eyes,” Dr. Webb said, “I suppose it’s a good thing you’ve pretty much obliterated them with that straight shot of yours, so now they can no longer devil you.”
The duke felt himself experiencing astonishment and outrage on Lady Elizabeth’s behalf. The medical man had been so dismissive of her, and even her own father had been to a certain extent—why, they’d practically patted her on the head!
He was about to voice some of his own thoughts on the matter, in Lady Elizabeth’s defense. He might tell them that in the short time Parker had been in his service, nothing about the man had indicated he harbored any murderous impulses. On the contrary. Parker had been, in his experience, mostly just mild and bland and not a terribly good worker.
But he never got the chance, because Lady Katherine was saying, “Well, that’s settled, then.” And now, to his astonishment, she was raising the hem of the split-back jacket of her hunting costume a bit as she stepped right over the headless corpse before throwing over her shoulder, “Isn’t anyone else ready for lunch?”
Chapter
Seventeen
Daniel couldn’t believe what his ears were hearing.
The second footman normally kept his eyes straight forward on such occasions, but on this one, he couldn’t help but shift his gaze just enough to look around at the others lining the walls—his fellow footman, Jonathan; the maids, Agnes and Becky, drafted into service to help the footmen at this supposedly informal barn “luncheon”—and he could see from the slightest shifts in their typical eyes-straight-ahead-seeing-nothing stances that none of them could believe it, either.
Apparently, someone—that valet of the duke’s, Parker, whom Daniel had met only briefly—had tried to attack Lady Katherine and then Lady Elizabeth, and the latter had shot him dead.
Daniel couldn’t believe that young Lady Elizabeth, whom he had taught how to use a shotgun only just a short time ago, had already employed it in such a deadly fashion, nor could he believe how gleeful they all seemed about it; he couldn’t imagine, if Lady Grace were here, that she would react this way. Although at least, to Lady Elizabeth’s credit, as they talked on and on, her expression had turned from one of eagerness to something resembling dismay at the role she’d played.
But then, after Parker was dead, apparently they’d all stepped over his body and come here for their luncheon!
“Well,” Lady Katherine said now, “it’s not like the body wasn’t going to keep for a bit. What shall we do with it, anyway? Should we send it somewhere?” She turned to Raymond Allen. “Duke, do you know who his people were?”
Daniel had noticed that in addition to Lady Elizabeth’s occasional expressions of dismay, the duke looked appropriately disturbed by what had happened. Daniel supposed it could be that it was his valet who’d been involved, but Daniel didn’t think it was as simple as that. Perhaps there was more depth to the duke than Daniel had glimpsed upon first meeting him the night before? Or perhaps, even, there was greater depth to the duke than the duke saw in himself?
“To my knowledge,” the duke answered with some sadness, “he hadn’t any, so—”
“That’s that, then,” Lady Katherine said brightly. “And then,” she said, eyes flashing as she returned to her recounting of what had gone on before, “Father banished the stable boy, told him not to show his face on the place again before tomorrow.”
“The nerve of that boy!” the earl said heatedly. “He was trying to follow us here. He said he was sure we weren’t safe. As if we needed him for protection!”
“Only you, Father,” Lady Katherine said, “would tell a stable boy he couldn’t come to a barn!”
“He did save Kate’s life,” Lady Elizabeth pointed out.
“Yes,” Lady Katherine said, sobering, “I suppose he did.” But that sobering lasted for only the briefest of instants before she was off again, laughing in her way about some other “madcap” aspect of the day.
Daniel really couldn’t believe these people. But then, when he thought about it for a moment, he could. He, like the others he toiled with Downstairs, had seen and therefore knew all too much about the people he served overhead, while they knew precious little about those down below.
A man had died, and here they were all laughing over their luncheon. Well, most of them, at any rate. And were Lady Grace here, he was sure, she wouldn’t be laughing, either. Still…
What a farce it all was! They’d gone on their little hunt, as they would do when guests came for the weekend, shooting at animals for sport—although he couldn’t say that was completely wrong, since they did always eventually eat whatever they shot. Of course he supposed that wouldn’t be the case today, since all that had been shot was a man. But then, after their shooting, they would come here to this “barn” for their luncheon, as though it somehow meant they were roughing it by not going back to the house for their midday meal.
Daniel himself had roughed it in the war, every day he’d fought in it, and this in no way resembled that. The Upstairs version of “roughing it” still included a long table covered with a fine cloth and set with linen, crystal, and silver. Not to mention the servants—Jonathan, Agnes and Becky, him—called into service to wait upon them.
Once more, Daniel briefly shifted his straight-ahead gaze to glance at his fellow servants: Jonathan, who was never too happy to lose to Daniel at cards, which he usually did, and yet who was always willing to play another hand; Agnes, whose job it was to tend to Lady Katherine and who did so more staunchly than any general protecting his country; and Becky, who waited attendance on both the younger daughters of the house and whom Daniel sometimes thought, when he thought about a future in which he would have marriage and family, might be the person he would have those things with. After all, who might he ever marry but another servant? He couldn’t help but think that if war ever came to Porthampton Abbey, he’d rather have these three by his side to fight—come to that, throw in Fanny and Mrs. Owen—than all of Upstairs and their fancy guests put together. Well, maybe he’d want Lady Grace by his side, too, not that he imagined she’d be much use in a fight, but he couldn’t see abandoning someone decent like her to the devices of the useless lot she’d grown up with.
Here they sat at their long table—Lady Katherine at one end, her father at the other, with Dr. Webb, Benedict Clarke, the duke, and Lady Elizabeth between them—consuming their “roughing it” meal, which consisted of what exactly? Cucumber sandwiches, cold turkey, asparagus tart, poached salmon, scones, blancmange, lemonade, ginger beer, lemon barley water, Turkish coffee. Oh, and a chocolate soufflé. A chocolate soufflé! Could anything be more ridiculous than that?
Even in a barn—a barn!—these people expected everything to be perfect.
Well—Daniel sighed internally—it wasn’t for him to judge. All he needed to do was make sure his eyes were facing forward, that his expression showed none of what he was feeling, and to simply act his part.
Which was what he was doing when Mr. Wright entered the barn, the old man huffing slightly after his trek down from the house. Propped on his hand was a silver salver with some piece of paper on it. Daniel wondered it hadn’t blown away in the day’s strong wind. But then he thought ruefully, Not even a folded sheet of paper would think to defy old Wright.
Mr. Wright stopped just inside the entry, waiting to be noticed.
“Yes, Wright,” the earl said. “What is it?”
“A call came for Dr. Webb,” the butler announced, “and I have taken the message down for him.”
“Well,” His Lordship said, “bring it over, then.”
The butler obeyed, and Dr. Webb removed the piece of paper fr
om the silver plate, unfolded it.
He started to read, his brow furrowing as he did so. At last, he looked up.
“Apparently, I’m needed in the village,” Dr. Webb said. “I’m sure it’s nothing, really. There’s been some small disturbance there caused by a sick woman. She refuses to come in to my surgery and they’ve called for me.”
Chapter
Eighteen
Grace couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
And based on the expression on her new friend Merry’s face, he couldn’t, either. All this talk of a man being killed that very day and Lizzy’s being the one to shoot him.
Grace sat there in the dining room with the others, dressed in her midnight-blue satin Vionnet dress with matching gloves, a diamond clip in her hair, and thought how extraordinary it was. Just twenty-four hours ago, they had all sat here together for their first dinner of the weekend—so much had changed in such a short time—and now here they all were again. Well, except for one person.
“Where is Dr. Webb?” she asked.
Her father explained about the doctor being called away to attend to one of the villagers.
“I told him,” her father finished, “that he should take our car and driver and that the chauffeur might stay with him to ferry any messages back and forth if there was anything I needed to be notified about. There’s a phone in the surgery, of course, but apparently the woman refused to come in, so he is attending to her at home. You know hardly any of the villagers have phones. Anyway, I’m sure there is nothing to be concerned about.”
“Whatever the cause of his absence,” Grandmama said, “I’m so glad the doctor is no longer with us. The people one finds oneself compelled to dine with these days!”
“Yes, Hortense,” Grandfather, for once awake, said drily, drawing out the word, “I quite agree. In fact, I’ve been feeling that way at this table for many years now.”
“I wish you’d consulted me before lending Dr. Webb our car and Ralph,” Kate addressed her father, referring to the chauffeur. “What if I wanted to go somewhere?”
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