“They were invited?”
“So Gwynyth says.” Lamorna might have been sucking on lemons, so pinched with disapproval was her expression. “Now, why would he invite her here—Lord Footrustle? He couldn’t stand the sight of her before. But I guess he couldn’t invite the children to stay without their mother dragging herself along. I don’t hold with divorce and I’m certain you don’t, either, Father. But in this case I saw it was necessary. She was in show business when he met her, you know. Lady Baynard was outraged and for once I could only agree.”
It was as if she collected her grievances in a bowl and would paw through them, turning first one, then another, to the light. He wondered how much of her time was spent in this manner. With Lady Baynard gone, she would have too much time for that sort of thing.
“Gwynyth kept leaving the twins with us when they were little,” she said now. “With me, that is. Whenever the last nanny quit. So she got free babysitting, too. I never got a word of thanks for it.”
“I see,” he said neutrally, trying and failing to imagine a worse caretaker for small children than this bitter woman.
“Then there are the Americans,” said Lamorna. “Lord Footrustle’s daughter Jocasta and her husband, Simon.” She paused dramatically and actually tapped her index finger against the side of her nose. “From California. And you of all people must know what that place is like: Sodom and Gomorrah.”
Max decided to breeze right past that one. “Surely Jocasta is British?”
“Her mother was American. And Simon is American. And Jocasta’s been there so long the taint of sin is upon her now, never to be washed away. But what you should know is this: I’ve seen them wandering about at all hours. Up to no good at three A.M.”
“What were they doing?” asked Max.
“They were looking very suspicious,” said Lamorna. With a significant nod, she parted her lips in a wintry smile.
“Quite likely they’re jet-lagged,” said Max. “I well remember how upsetting long-distance travel is to the eat-and-sleep cycles. At three A.M. here they would be expecting their dinner back home. Or their stomachs would be expecting it.”
While he thought this was likely true, he made a mental note to have Cotton ask about these nocturnal wanderings. They—or one of them—might have seen something the rest of the house had not.
“You don’t find their behavior suspicious?” Lamorna demanded. Clearly he had lost points with her for being such a thick nincompoop. “Given what’s happened? Given that just days after their arrival—three days, in fact—Lord Footrustle was poisoned?”
Cotton had told Max what little he knew of this episode.
“I’m not sure that’s significant,” said Max aloud. “The timing of their arrival.” In fact, he thought it as likely the poisoner—if poisoner there were—waited until the entire family had gathered so as to throw the net of suspicion as wide as possible.
“It is significant,” she pronounced. “There was no love lost between Jocasta and her father. To become an actress! It’s as if she chose the one profession most likely to upset him.”
That Lord Footrustle had himself later married a woman in show business seemed to have escaped her for the moment.
“I gather you were here when he married Gwynyth. How did Jocasta take that?”
He expected a rebuke for asking such a nosy question. In fact, he couldn’t have said why he asked it, but it seemed to release a flood of pent-up emotion.
“Hah!” she said. “How did she take it? I’ll tell you how she took it. She didn’t like it any better than I did, but my dislike was based on moral reasons, as you shall hear: The pair of them weren’t married two minutes before those twins came along. Not two minutes! If you ask me Alec and Amanda escaped the curse of illegitimacy by a hairsbreadth! Never doubt”—and here she raised a finger heavenward—“never doubt Lord Footrustle was shanghaied into that marriage. Gwynyth is nothing but a brazen hussy.” Sniff. “No better than she should be.”
She was reminding him an awful lot of her grandmother by this point. He wondered if there were a gene marker for blatant snobbery. At least Lady Baynard seemed to have missed the religious nutter gene. But here Max pulled himself up short, for he’d been forgetting Lamorna was adopted.
“But as to how they all came to be here,” she said. “I’m afraid they don’t share that kind of thing with me. As I told you, I’m here on suffering.”
The truth of that was becoming undeniable. She was a member of the family, in fact, but also an outsider. This could be useful to the police—she might see an angle the others might miss. That this angle might be skewed and distorted, however, he didn’t doubt for a moment.
“Tell me about your grandmother. How did you get on?”
“Lady Baynard? She came back to the castle when her husband died.” He noticed she’d ignored the second half of his question.
“Lord Baynard.”
“Yes.” She seemed strangely reluctant to pursue this topic. She began worrying a button on her sweater. The thread holding it had begun to shred.
“Wouldn’t,” he said, “wouldn’t it be more usual for a widow of her station in life to have remained living at her husband’s ancestral home?” He reached for the old-fashioned word. “In a dower house, perhaps?”
“Usual,” she mused. “Yes. Except that her husband was a rotter.” The really old-fashioned word surprised him so, he struggled not to laugh. “He gambled,” she went on. “They had to sell his ancestral pile to some American actress and her husband—and he was some sort of singer.”
Well, the disgrace of it all. She said this the way others might mention a drug dealer and her consort.
“It was her own fault, of course, for choosing him,” said Lamorna now.
“What do you plan to do?”
“I plan to do what I’ve always done,” she said, a look of faint surprise on her face. “I’ll stay on, look after things, lead the occasional group through on tour.”
“Will Viscount Nathersby … erm … will he need help, do you think?”
“Randolph? He won’t want to live here, and he never has. Why wouldn’t he want me to stay on and help? Besides, it’s Alec who inherits the title from Lord Footrustle. It’s not really Randolph’s business.”
Max thought he was beginning to see the situation from her side. There would be free room and board as there always was, but without the fetch-and-carry that her grandmother had subjected her to, and the contempt her granduncle had subjected her to. It was a motive for murder, certainly, and a powerful one. People had killed before to ensure their own safety and security, keeping a roof over their heads.
“He may have other plans,” said Max carefully. “You should ask him, ask them both, once things are a bit … quieter.”
At the thought of leaving, or being cast out, fear stretched across Lamorna’s face, pulling the skin tight around her eyes.
She suddenly burst out, “Lady B was a manipulative liar. She told people stories about how much they would inherit from her, thinking it would make them be nice to her. But I—I didn’t care. I have no use for money.” Then she diluted the impact of this righteous statement by adding, “Besides, her husband ran through so much of it before he died.”
“I see,” said Max. “Randolph has a brother, as I understand it. Lester. And Lester has a wife.”
This immediately brought down her scorn.
“The Australians,” she said. “I hadn’t seen either of them in years. You can be sure they’re interested only in money. Lester ‘does something in finance,’ or so I was told. Again, why would Lord Footrustle do this? Bring all these people here? Strangers, really. Upsetting everything.”
“It may have been simple loneliness,” said Max. “The castle is isolated, and I don’t know how many social outlets he had left. Don’t you think it may have been a desire for companionship?”
“No, I don’t. He had me and Lady Baynard for company. He never could stand any of the rest of
them, so far as I could tell. That’s not surprising, is it?” She began to speak with a nervous and erratic intensity. “Heathen!” she cried. “That’s what they are. It’s what they all are.”
“He was getting older, Lord Footrustle,” said Max. “It makes a difference, and they are his family.”
Too late, he saw the trap he’d sauntered into.
“And I’m not?” she snapped.
“Of course you are,” he said quickly, placatingly. “Yes, of course. Every bit as much as they are.”
She didn’t look convinced because he wasn’t convinced himself. Everything he knew of her situation—and he trusted Awena’s version in particular—painted her as an unwanted outcast. Family by law but not by love.
“It couldn’t have been easy for you,” he said. “After your parents died.”
“A motherless orphan. That was me,” she said. “Like Jane Eyre—that show on the telly last year. Handouts, hand-me-downs.” She adjusted her glasses, pinching the frames on both sides to push them to the bridge of her nose, where they promptly slid down again. Sisyphus glasses.
No mention of being fatherless as well. Max reflected that Lamorna’s view of herself—labels like “orphan” and “hand-me-downs,” however accurate, said much of what he needed to know of her personality. Self-pity was easier than trying to change her fate, and was a trap Bronte would never have allowed her heroine to fall into.
“I used to hear them talking, Lord Footrustle and Lady Baynard,” Lamorna said now.
Max wondered, not for the first time, at this insistence on using their formal names.
“I wasn’t eavesdropping,” she said, with an emphasis that suggested that was precisely what she had been doing. “But I heard them. ‘If there’s money involved you’ll find them perfectly polite, even sober.’ Lord Footrustle said that.”
Max nodded encouragingly. The recent deaths seemed to have loosened her tongue—he doubted very much she’d have felt as free to share with him her views even a week before. Anything that could add to his store of knowledge of what had happened in the days and weeks leading up to the murder would be helpful.
“He said that, you see, because Lady Baynard was worried about spiteful goings-on with all of them here. Fights and quarrels, you see.”
Max did see.
“Was she worried about any one of them in particular?”
Did he imagine it, or was she was tempted to mention a particular name? After a pause she just shrugged and said, “She was worried about all of them.”
“That’s very helpful,” said Max, smiling. No, it wasn’t. “Anything like that you can think of to tell me, please do so. Right away.”
“It’s all just frightfully inconvenient,” pouted Lamorna, sounding more than ever like her grandmother. “We had all these strangers in the house—that was bad enough—and now we have dozens more, snooping and prying and asking questions.”
“Yes, that is the worst of an unpleasant incident such as this.”
“What happens now?” she asked worriedly.
“The DCI from Monkslip-super-Mare will want to talk with everyone, sometimes more than once. You must be patient. You do want to find out what happened to your grandmother, and to your granduncle, don’t you?”
“Not really.” Clearly realizing how cold that sounded, she adopted a look of simpering piety, in imitation of one of the angels adorning her walls, and added the platitude, “It won’t bring them back, will it?”
She was hapless, thought Max, listening to Lamorna. Without hap, whatever that meant. Without happiness, presumably.
Now she pressed the edge of one fist against her mouth in a sudden paroxysm of worry.
“They’re all jealous of each other, you know. It reminds me of Jacob and Esau, the envy. That’s a venial sin, isn’t it? But it seems so much worse.” Then she added, “Please stay until this is sorted. I don’t feel safe around the others.”
“I can’t promise you it will be sorted,” he said. “I can promise to learn what I can, to try to set things right. And you couldn’t be safer with a house full of policemen.”
That earned him a baleful glance. “They’ll only make things worse, you know. They couldn’t possibly begin to understand.”
One glance at her, at the stubborn set of her mouth, convinced him that mere logic would likely confuse her. Much better to approach any subject obliquely.
“It’s a judgment on this castle, I tell you!” she said now. Which Max found more than slightly absurd. This castle had been the scene of so much mayhem, betrayal—surely, yes, even murder—over the years, that if God had not reduced it to rubble long before now, then God never was going to take an active interest in the goings-on at Chedrow Castle.
As she droned on in this vein, literally quoting chapter and verse, Max, smiling amiably, wondered if he could make his escape unnoticed by plunging out the window into the bare flower beds below. He thought Lamorna would have been a fitting companion for Savonarola with his apocalyptic messages and his “Bonfire of the Vanities” burnings. Dealing with the intense yet boring fanatic was another hazard of his profession, like the fawning attentions of elderly ladies.
He felt a barrier had come up between them now, so he said, in his most soothing voice, “I absolutely promise you no harm will come to you.” And because he felt she was keeping something from him, hiding it in all these cries to heaven, he added, “So long as you tell me whatever it is you know that is worrying you so.”
“As I have said,” she intoned with heavy emphasis, “there is a curse on this house. It will fall like the Tower of Babel.”
“There’s actually some debate about that. Whether it actually fell,” Max began, and caught himself up. The last thing he wanted was to enter into that sort of conversation with someone like Lamorna. She was such a poster child for the twisted result of clinging to a joyless, punitive religion, a religion that sapped all the joy from life and led, in its final stages, to the extremism that poisoned the well of sane discourse.
“After all, what goes around comes around,” she said now. A smile of deep, anticipatory satisfaction settled on her lips. Max felt he had heard as much of the collected philosophical wisdom of Lamorna Whitehall as he could take in one sitting. With the repeated assurance that she need not worry and should feel free to come to him with any information or concerns, Max took his leave of her.
He thought perhaps the castle staff could give him a more detached account.
CHAPTER 8
In the Kitchen
He could smell coffee and hear laughter coming from the kitchen as he walked down the dark-paneled passage leading from the Great Hall. It was an incongruous sound for a house in mourning. He recognized one voice: Milo’s deep boom was unmistakable. The other voice was a woman’s.
The door was ajar, and the woman, seeing Max, stood up from the wooden kitchen table and introduced herself as Mrs. Vladimirov (“Call me Doris.”). Max could understand why her husband stuck to the simpler Milo. She was a sturdy British woman with a wide smile and open expression. At the moment, her hands were covered to the elbows in flour.
“Isn’t this a fine mess,” she said. Max assumed she didn’t mean the flour. “A murder investigation at Chedrow Castle. My parents can talk of nothing else. No one will be talking of anything else for years to come.”
Despite the scowl caused by her stated exasperation with the situation, Max thought she had a kind face. Certainly, she viewed Max with ill-concealed friendliness and warmth, but then, most women did.
As she resumed her seat to continue her floury task she sized him up. He was a prepossessing figure but the words that came into her mind were simpler ones from her magazine reading at the hairdresser’s, words like “hottie” and “dreamy,” with dark gray eyes of a peculiar intensity that made Doris feel she was the one person in the world this man had been hoping to meet.
“Good morning to you, sir,” Milo, sitting across from his wife, thundered in his deep bass voice,
aware of and unaffected by his wife’s evident interest in Max. He had had Doris at hello, as the saying went, and she him, and their trust in one another had never faltered.
“Would you care for some coffee, Father Tudor?” Milo asked him.
“I would like that very much.”
“Get him some breakfast cake to go with that,” directed Doris. She was punching at some dough on a cutting board like a boxer keeping an opponent against the rails. She planned to serve the castle guests a lunch that she explained was “on croot.” It looked to Milo like plain old Cornish pasties and he made the mistake of saying so.
“On croot, on croot,” she said. She stood to refill her own cup and to check on something in the oven, thumping about the kitchen as she did so. “I would know what a Cornish pasty is, now, wouldn’t I?”
Soon Max was holding a warming cup of coffee in both hands. Milo sat down next to him, having served him a pastry made with blueberries, nuts, and oatmeal. Max had been fed similar confections by Mrs. Hooser that he would not have offered to a horse. This was sublimely crunchy but moist—made with buttermilk, Doris told him, when he complimented her on it. The kitchen was the epitome of a cozy place that invited one to settle in for long sessions of talk and the exchange of confidences. It had a small fireplace, size being relative—smaller than the fireplace in the Great Hall, yet large enough to roast a good-sized specimen of livestock. The murmur of the sea against the rocks could be heard from a window opened to release some of the cooking heat of the room. The soothing hum served as a counterpoint to the crackle of the hearth.
“I have just been talking with Lamorna Whitehead,” Max told them.
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