Dinner Most Deadly

by Sheri Cobb South

  DINNER MOST DEADLY

  ANOTHER JOHN PICKETT MYSTERY

  DINNER MOST DEADLY

  SHERI COBB SOUTH

  FIVE STAR

  A part of Gale, Cengage Learning

  Copyright © 2015 by Sheri Cobb South

  Five Star™ Publishing, a part of Cengage Learning, Inc.

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.

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  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  South, Sheri Cobb.

  Dinner most deadly : another John Pickett mystery / Sheri Cobb South. — First edition.

  pages ; cm

  ISBN 978-1-4328-3096-0 (hardcover) — ISBN 1-4328-3096-1 (hardcover) — ISBN 978-1-4328-3090-8 (ebook) — ISBN 1-4328-3090-2 (ebook)

  eISBN-13: 978-1-4328-3090-8 eISBN-10: 1-4328-3090-2

  I. Title.

  PS3569.O755D56 2015

  813'.54—dc23 2015008990

  First Edition. First Printing: September 2015

  This title is available as an e-book.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4328-3090-8 ISBN-10: 1-4328-3090-2

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  Printed in the United States of America

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 19 18 17 16 15

  DINNER MOST DEADLY

  CHAPTER 1

  In Which an Entertainment Is Proposed

  In an elegantly appointed drawing room in Audley Street, Julia, Lady Fieldhurst, sat watching raindrops race one another down the window pane. Beyond the glass, the few pedestrians hardy enough to venture out into the inclement weather tugged hats down and collars up to protect themselves from the elements. The dreary scene reminded her all too clearly of Scotland on the day of her departure some weeks earlier. She had been prone to melancholy in the days since then, a depression of spirits that had little to do with the November weather and still less to do with the violent death of her husband six months previously.

  “A penny for your thoughts,” said her companion, a rather dashing young matron in her mid-thirties, a decade older than Julia herself.

  Lady Fieldhurst made a feeble attempt at a smile. “You would find them overpriced, I fear.”

  “Julia, I wish you would tell me what is troubling you,” urged Lady Dunnington. “I vow, I’ve never known you to be so distracted.”

  “I beg your pardon, Emily.” Lady Fieldhurst gave her head a little shake, as if to clear it. “I have had much on my mind of late. The sale of Frederick’s house in Queens Gardens, and the hire of one in Curzon Street while I look for something to buy—”

  “Balderdash!” declared the Countess of Dunnington inelegantly. “Oh, I don’t blame you for selling your husband’s little love nest and purchasing something for yourself with fewer unpleasant associations, but that is not the reason for your current preoccupation. You’ve been this way ever since you returned from Scotland, and that was two weeks ago. When are you going to give in and tell me what happened there?”

  Lady Fieldhurst glanced about the room rather wildly, but there was no support to be found in Lady Dunnington’s graceful Hepplewhite furnishings. “I told you,” she insisted. “I disgraced myself with the Fieldhursts—again!—and was exiled to Scotland for my sins, with George’s three sons in tow. At the last minute, we—the boys and I, that is—decided not to rusticate at the Fieldhurst estate as ordered, but stopped instead at a very pleasant inn overlooking the sea. The boys had a lovely time, but neither George nor Mother Fieldhurst was best pleased with our defection.”

  Lady Dunnington set down her empty teacup with perhaps more force than was necessary, and made a noise that in a less aristocratic female would have been called a snort. “Faugh! Frederick has been dead for six months now, Julia. When are you going to stop letting his mother and his heir browbeat you?”

  “I don’t let them browbeat me,” Lady Fieldhurst said without much conviction. “I have gone into half-mourning, knowing quite well that they do not approve,” she pointed out, gesturing toward her grey gown.

  “Yes, and very pleased I am to see it,” Lady Dunnington said, nodding in approval. “I should be happier still to see you in colors, but I know you dare not flout convention to such a degree, at least not yet. Be warned, though, on the anniversary of Frederick’s death I intend to present you with a bright red bonnet!”

  Julia had to laugh. “If you wish me to appear hag-ridden, by all means do so! I haven’t the coloring to wear bright red, as you well know. I fear I must leave the red to you, my dear.”

  “Very well, then,” acknowledged the dark-haired countess, regarding her friend with an appraising eye. “Celestial blue, or perhaps pomona green. Something besides unrelieved black or grey, in any case—not that you don’t look disgustingly lovely even in mourning. If I were ten years younger, I should be quite mad with jealousy.”

  “And I shall be happy to wear either blue or green,” promised Lady Fieldhurst, “when the time comes.”

  “Still, there are other ways you might rebel,” Lady Dunning-ton said, leaning forward confidingly. “Things the Fieldhurst cabal need know nothing about.”

  “Emily—” Julia shook her head, having a very fair idea of what sort of “things” her friend had in mind. She picked up the teapot to fortify herself against the inevitable harangue, but when she tipped it over to pour, she found herself deprived of even this small comfort. The teapot, it seemed, was empty.

  “Begging your pardon, my lady,” put in a pretty little housemaid hovering discreetly in the background in case of just such an emergency. “Shall I bring more tea?”

  Emily nodded. “Thank you, Dulcie.” Once the girl had absented herself from the room, Lady Dunnington returned to the original subject with all the tenacity of a dog with a bone. “What you need, Julia, is a good tumble with a man who knows how to do the thing right.”

  “Emily, the things you say!” cried Lady Fieldhurst, coloring to the roots of her hair.

  “In other words, my dear,” Lady Dunnington continued, unfazed, “what you need is a lover.”

  Julia made a faint noise of protest, having covered this familiar ground more than once.

  “As it happens, I am currently in the process of acquiring a lover of my own,” Lady Dunnington went on, “so it seems a good time to find one for you while I am about it. I shall give a dinner party, a very select affair with half a dozen or so eligible gentlemen. You may look them over and, at the end of the evening, you have only to drop your handkerchief for the favored one to pick up.”

  “Emily,” said Lady Fieldhurst with some asperity, “I wish you would rid yourself of the notion that every man I meet is clamoring to—to—”

&
nbsp; “To bed you?” Lady Dunnington concluded, seeing that words had failed her friend. “But my dear Julia, past experience has taught me that at any given moment, most men are clamoring to bed someone, so why should not you be the one to oblige them?”

  “ ‘Most,’ perhaps, but not all,” murmured Lady Fieldhurst.

  If Lady Dunnington heard this qualifier, she made no sign. “Now, I have been giving it a great deal of thought, and I’ve come up with several promising candidates—”

  Dulcie the maid entered at that moment bearing a steaming teapot. Lady Dunnington’s plans were suspended temporarily while teacups were refilled with the fresh brew.

  “Several candidates, I say, for the position of particular gentleman friend,” she concluded, after the requisite additions of sugar and milk had been made.

  “You make it sound like an advertisement one might place in the Times,” Julia said.

  “No, my dear, too vulgar by half.” Lady Dunnington dismissed this notion out of hand. “Now, back to my dinner party. You will want Lord Rupert Latham there, I have no doubt—”

  Lady Fieldhurst held up a restraining hand. “Spare me Lord Rupert, I beg of you! If you will recall, the one time I attempted a tryst with Lord Rupert, we discovered Frederick dead on the floor of my bedchamber. It rather destroyed the mood, to put it mildly.”

  “Yes, I can see how it might. Truth to tell, Julia, I have had my doubts about you and Lord Rupert. It seems to me that your dithering on the subject—”

  “I don’t ‘dither,’ surely!” Lady Fieldhurst objected.

  “Very well, call it vacillating. Or shilly-shallying. Or wavering. By whatever name one chooses, your inability to make a decision regarding Lord Rupert suggests that something important is missing there. Still, he will do as a pattern-card by which you may measure the others, since we know that he, at least, is clamoring to bed you. Now, besides Lord Rupert, there is Sir Reginald Montague—have a care, Dulcie!” she scolded, as the tray of tea cakes the maid offered tilted dangerously in the direction of Lady Dunnington’s lap.

  “But I scarcely know Sir Reginald Montague!” Lady Fieldhurst protested.

  “My dear Julia, who said anything about you? I have had my eye on Sir Reginald for the last fortnight. Then there is Mr. Brantley-Hughes, of course, and Captain Sir Charles Ormond—we should be taking down the names, lest we forget someone promising. Dulcie, will you fetch paper and ink from my writing desk? There’s a good girl. What a pity Town is always so thin of company in November!”

  Dulcie crossed the room to the elegant rosewood writing desk and soon returned bearing paper, quill, and inkstand.

  “Now, where were we? Mr. Brantley-Hughes—”

  “I thought Mr. Brantley-Hughes was your lover,” Julia pointed out.

  “ ‘Was’ being the operative word,” Lady Dunnington noted, writing down the name. “He and I are quite exploded, but if you have an interest there, I’ve no objection to your taking my leavings.”

  “But Mr. Brantley-Hughes is married!”

  “So?”

  Julia’s expression grew mulish. “I will not force another woman to endure what I went through with Frederick.”

  Lady Dunnington’s brow puckered in a thoughtful frown. “That will narrow the field considerably.”

  “Then perhaps you had best abandon the notion altogether.”

  “Never!” Lady Dunnington declared, jabbing the air with her quill for emphasis. “I shall merely have to dig a bit deeper. Captain Sir Charles, as I recall, is a confirmed bachelor, and then there is Lord Dernham, whose wife has been dead these past three years. Who knows? If you’ve a mind to marry again, you might persuade him to dip his toe once more into the waters of matrimony.”

  “And once again face the pressure of providing a titled husband with an heir? I thank you, Emily, but no!”

  “Forgive me, my dear,” said Lady Dunnington with unwonted seriousness. “I wasn’t thinking. But you must know that the same barrenness you so deplored in your marriage must be considered an advantage when seeking an attachment of this sort. No danger of a cuckoo in the nest. Now,” she added on a brighter note, “what think you of Lord Edwin Braunton? He is the younger son of a duke, and as his elder brother already has two sons, he is under no pressure to marry and ensure the succession—”

  “Why, Lord Edwin must be forty-five years old if he is a day!” exclaimed Lady Fieldhurst.

  Lady Dunnington’s eyebrows rose in surprise. “Forty-five is hardly old, my dear. Dunnington is still virile at fifty—not that it does me any good!—and Frederick was past forty when he died, was he not?”

  “Forty-one, but still—” Lady Fieldhurst could hardly explain to her friend that her tastes of late had run toward younger men—one young man of four-and-twenty, to be precise, two years younger than her own twenty-six.

  “I’m putting Lord Edwin on the list, nevertheless,” Emily insisted. “Gentlemen of a certain age know better how to please a lady. But what think you of Mr. Martin Kenney? Not a day over thirty, I’ll wager, and he possesses that roguish charm that Irishmen wear so well.”

  “Long on charm, but short on funds,” retorted Lady Fieldhurst.

  Surprised, Emily looked up from her list. “I had no idea you were hanging out for a rich man. Are things as bad as all that?”

  “No, for Frederick did leave me quite comfortably well off,” Julia acknowledged, giving credit where it was due. “I have no need for a wealthy lover, but neither do I wish to support him—which would almost certainly be the case with Mr. Kenney.”

  “I shall add him to the list anyway,” said Emily, suiting the word to the deed, “so that you may decide if he would be a sound investment.”

  It took some time, since Lady Fieldhurst raised some objection to almost every candidate presented for her approval, but at last Lady Dunnington announced herself satisfied. In addition to Sir Reginald, the roll contained the names of five other gentlemen whom Lady Fieldhurst found to be the least offensive of the lot.

  “What of the ladies?” asked Lady Fieldhurst when the countess pronounced her list complete.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Who amongst the ladies of our acquaintance do you plan to invite?”

  “Why, none of them!” declared Lady Dunnington in some surprise.

  “You will not want your numbers to be so uneven,” Lady Fieldhurst pointed out.

  “My dear Julia, the entire purpose of this dinner is to find you a lover. Why on earth should we want to invite competition? If we were to invite other ladies, I should be obliged to choose the most tedious and haggish females of my acquaintance, the better to appear to advantage by comparison. My reputation as a hostess would be utterly ruined, and that I refuse to do, my dear, even for you!”

  “It will look very odd, just you and me and half a dozen gentlemen sitting down to dinner,” observed the viscountess.

  “On the contrary, the gentlemen will be delighted, and the ladies will never know, since they will not be in attendance. Now, when shall we have this dinner? What about Wednesday? Almack’s does not host assemblies this late in the year, so there will be no danger of conflicting schedules, and—oh, fiddle!”

  “What is the matter?” asked Lady Fieldhurst, indulging the forlorn hope that the countess would be forced to abandon her scheme.

  “My butler has gone to Shropshire to visit his sister, and Jack the footman is down with the ague. Did you not wonder why it was Dulcie who opened the door to you? Dunnington did not object to my setting up my own establishment, but he refuses to give me an allowance sufficient to staff it properly! I suppose there is nothing for it but to wait until the butler returns, but as his sister is said to be deathly ill, there is no telling when that might be.” She gave a little huff, although whether her annoyance was directed at her estranged husband or the butler’s disobliging sister was not immediately apparent.

  The maid Dulcie cleared her throat. “Begging your pardon, my lady,” she said softly, “b
ut I should have no objection to admitting your guests, if you should have need of me. It might even be more fitting for the sort of party you propose, to have a female at the door.”

  Mistress scowled at maid. “Impertinent girl! When I need your advice on hosting a dinner, I shall be sure to ask for it. Oh, but wait,” Lady Dunnington said in quite another tone, her eyes growing round. “It might work. Yes, I see it now! We shall give it a classical theme, and our guests shall be greeted at the door by a female in Grecian draperies. Or do I mean Roman? Never mind, I’m sure I have something suitable left over from the Herrington costume ball last spring. It shall be altered to fit you, Dulcie.”

  “Yes, my lady.” Dulcie’s doe-eyed gaze dropped to the floor, and she smoothed the skirts of the starched white apron covering her black cotton frock, no doubt wondering what she had let herself in for.

  Lady Fieldhurst knew exactly how she felt.

  CHAPTER 2

  In Which a Dinner Party Devolves into Disaster

  Lady Fieldhurst could only hope Lady Dunnington’s enthusiasm for the project would fade before the invitations were sent, even though she knew enough of that determined Society matron not to feel optimistic. It was not that Julia had sworn off men, precisely, although in the days following her unexpected release from a miserable marriage she had found the prospect of forming some new intimate connection with a male of the species unwelcome in the extreme. More recently, however, she found herself thinking about the pleasanter aspects of such a connection, at least where one particular man was concerned. Unfortunately, her two attempts at acquiring a lover had ended in disaster, albeit in very different ways. The first time, as she reminded Emily, she and Lord Rupert Latham had got as far as the door of her bedchamber, only to find it blocked by the dead body of Lord Fieldhurst. The second, more recent attempt had taken place in Scotland, where she had offered her favors to the one man in England (if Emily were to be believed) who did not want them. Now, faced with a dinner party in which almost half a dozen specimens would be presented for her approval, she found herself torn between dread of opening herself up once more to rejection and a rather desperate need for confirmation of her own desirability.