Ottilia’s ears pricked up again. Family? Was this a reference to Cassie Dale? Had Lady Ferrensby followed her husband’s example of generosity and compassion? If so, what had befallen Cassie to make it necessary to hide her true identity?
Francis was still frowning, and Ottilia cast him a questioning glance. One eyebrow rose, and he turned back to Lady Ferrensby.
“Forgive my bluntness, ma’am, but Uddington’s attitude seems to me highly suspect. So much so I was moved to warn my wife against having made a dangerous enemy.”
“Dangerous?” repeated the other lady, startled.
“How else would you describe a killer? Especially if he feels he may be cornered.”
Watching closely, Ottilia thought she read an instant of panic in Lady Ferrensby’s eyes. Then it was veiled.
“What will you do if the murder is brought home to Uddington?” pursued Francis relentlessly.
“I do not know, Lord Francis,” returned Lady Ferrensby on a tart note. “Nor do I propose to burden myself with the question unless it becomes necessary to do so.”
“Then let us hope the blame will be found to lie elsewhere,” said Ottilia soothingly. “There are, of course, other persons with reason to dislike Duggleby.”
“Half the village, no doubt,” snapped the other, her eyes sparking.
Ottilia said nothing, merely allowing her gaze to remain steady upon Lady Ferrensby’s face. Francis, having cast a frustrated look at his wife, sat back.
In a moment or two, the heightened colour in Lady Ferrensby’s cheeks died down. “I am more dismayed by all this than I had supposed.” She gave a tiny smile. “I don’t know what I expected. Perhaps that you had drawn a useful conclusion and found out some stranger was responsible.”
Ottilia gave her a sympathetic smile. “I fear it rarely is a stranger.”
“Count yourself fortunate,” cut in Francis, an edge to his voice. “I was obliged to suspect my own brother.”
A tiny gasp issued from Lady Ferrensby’s throat. “Yes, I know. I beg your pardon, Lord Francis.”
He shrugged, and Ottilia read his discomfort. She changed the subject. “What is your opinion of Bertha Duggleby, ma’am?”
“A sadly downtrodden creature,” said the other at once. “I can’t imagine she would have the strength, never mind the will, to raise a hand against her husband. You suspect her, then?”
The eager note did not escape Ottilia. It was plain that any other name than Uddington was acceptable to the great lady of the village. In the circumstances, Ottilia could not blame her.
“One must invariably look askance upon those closest to the victim,” she said, with an apologetic glance at her husband as he winced. “In this case, there is a possible reason why Bertha might dispose of her husband.”
“Which is?”
“Duggleby boasted to her of being in possession of a pot of gold, as she phrases it.” She smiled at Lady Ferrensby’s expression. “Yes, I was quite as sceptical. But it occurs to me the blacksmith might have been remembered in Mrs. Uddington’s will.”
“Gracious heavens!” Her ladyship was frowning. “It’s true, as you said, that he is rumoured to have gone to the funeral.”
“Or perhaps he was summoned to a reading of the will. He would not, I surmise, bruit the matter abroad for fear of Uddington coming to hear of it.”
“Indeed, no.” Lady Ferrensby gave a little shiver. “How macabre it all is!”
“And too close for comfort?” put in Francis, his tone rigid with the memories of last year. “I know just how you feel, ma’am.”
“Thank you, Lord Francis. I must admit it comes as a shock to think there are several persons who might have wanted the dratted fellow dead.”
“Just so,” sighed Ottilia. “Suspicion must fall upon anyone with a grudge against the blacksmith. Including, ridiculous as it may seem, the widow Radlett.”
A disbelieving laugh was surprised out of Lady Ferrensby. “Evelina? You are not serious? Why in the world would she want to murder Duggleby?”
“Revenge,” said Ottilia stonily. “She believes Duggleby killed her dog. Or at least that he beat the animal half to death so that it had to be shot.”
Lady Ferrensby stared. “Yes, but — I mean, I know of that, of course, but...” Her voice died, her imagination evidently boggling at the notion.
“You are thinking she could not have cut the beam, brought down the roof, and started the fire,” said Ottilia in a matter-of-fact tone. “That is true. But someone might have done it for her.”
“Once she had struck the man with a hammer,” said Francis.
“Just so.”
Lady Ferrensby was shaking her head. “No, this is fantastic. Who would she ask? Netherburn? At his age, the fellow is incapable of climbing a ladder. Nor is he discreet.”
“Not Netherburn,” Ottilia agreed. “But what of Uddington? Or, come to that, Miss Beeleigh?”
“Alethea Beeleigh? Now you are being absurd.”
“Well, she told me she could replace a wheel on a coach,” pursued Ottilia imperturbably. “It is not beyond the bounds of probability that she could climb a ladder and hack at a beam.”
“Unlikely, I submit,” put in Francis. “A difficult task, not to be undertaken without considerable risk.”
“But if Mrs. Radlett came to her friend for help, having hit Duggleby over the head,” said Ottilia blandly, recalling the curious intimacy she had noticed at their first meeting in the coffee room, “I cannot think Miss Beeleigh would refuse to aid her.”
Francis nodded. “Granted, but she need not do the job herself. There are men enough in the village, and I daresay a fat purse would serve to keep some fellow’s mouth firmly shut.”
Lady Ferrensby’s glance had gone from one to the other of them, Ottilia noted, although she had said nothing. But this proved too much for her.
“Fiddle! No, no, stop. This must be nonsense.”
Ottilia was obliged to laugh. “Yes, I think it probably is. But we cannot afford to disregard the flimsiest of possibilities.”
A shudder of relief went through Lady Ferrensby. “Then you are not serious. Thank heavens! I was beginning to think either I was mad, or you were.”
A sharply ironic glance came at Ottilia from her husband’s eyes, and she had to bite back an unseemly giggle. Just so was he apt to stigmatise her when she indulged in unorthodox actions, if only in jest. There was an opportunity here that was not to be ignored, however.
“Speaking of Evelina Radlett, has it ever seemed to you, Lady Ferrensby, that she may be a secret drinker?”
A blank stare was directed upon her. “What in the world makes you ask such a thing?”
“There was a complaint about watered wine. Molly Tisbury defended her husband’s integrity on the matter and instead suggested Mrs. Radlett had added water herself for the purpose of concealing her own depredations upon the bottle.”
Lady Ferrensby frowned. “It has never come to my attention, if that is so. And I am quite sure Tisbury does not water the wine. Who complained? Miss Beeleigh?”
Ottilia nodded. “Yes, it was spoken of the first day I met the ladies.”
“Then I’ll wager it was indeed Evelina, but not on her own account.”
“Whose, then?”
“Netherburn’s. If she entertained him when Alethea was absent, she would be at pains to conceal it. Miss Beeleigh tolerates the fellow, but Evelina knows she highly disapproves of the possibility of a nuptial between herself and Horace.”
“Yes, I had noticed.” Then the grogginess to which Molly had alluded could safely be attributed to laudanum. But this thought she kept to herself.
Lady Ferrensby was drumming her fingers on the tabletop again, her brows lowering.
“What is the matter, ma’am?”
“I simply can’t imagine what put it into your head that Evelina Radlett could possibly have done the murder. Even with the aid of another. The whole notion is fantastic.”
Ott
ilia had no answer to this. It was clearly not given to Lady Ferrensby to look beneath the apparency for a deeper significance. Evelina had today shown a remarkable ability to point up what she felt might stand against her. She did not consider herself beyond suspicion, that much was clear.
“But that notion opens up another possibility,” said Francis suddenly, interrupting her train of thought. “Remember you said if Molly had done it, then it had been in a fit of temper?”
“Yes?”
“The same may be said of Tisbury, if his wife came to him upon the occasion.”
Ottilia started. “How right you are, Fan!” She saw Lady Ferrensby was looking puzzled. “Francis is suggesting Tisbury might have hacked at the beam and started the fire in a bid to protect his wife.”
“Not only that,” pursued her husband eagerly. “Which of the villagers are the most assiduous in castigating Cassie Dale for a witch and blaming her for Duggleby’s death?”
Struck, Ottilia stared at him. “Molly, of course.”
“And Tisbury follows her lead.”
Lady Ferrensby was frowning again. “But you said positively, Lord Francis, that you did not believe Tisbury had done it.”
“Not the murder, no. But his loyalty to his wife is strong. I can believe him capable of a cover-up. Indeed, I would lay money on it.” He turned eagerly back to Ottilia. “Tillie, I’ll wager we have our murderer.”
Sleep had eluded Ottilia until the small hours. Or she felt it so, striving not to toss and turn for fear of disturbing Francis. No matter which way she looked at it, she could not refute the arguments in favour of labelling the Tisbury couple: Molly as murderer, her husband accessory after the fact.
Not that she was opposed to the theory Francis had put forward. Indeed, she would be glad to think the mystery solved. But a nagging doubt could not be suppressed.
The only motive Ottilia had found for Molly to be enraged with the blacksmith was the matter of his getting the kitchen maid with child. Was it enough to make her take a hammer to his head? According to Molly’s own account, she had taken her measures by informing Bertha Duggleby. But Bertha had dismissed the matter without interest. Could that have sent Molly into one of her fits of temper? Did she seek out the blacksmith and confront him? Then, when his back was turned, seize a hammer and strike him?
Ottilia had insisted on holding back from taking any action that night. To accuse with as little to go on as Francis’s supposition was just the error she might expect from Lord Henbury. Too much remained unexplained.
Molly, if it had been her act, had not gone to the smithy with the intention of harming Duggleby. But if she had, it would be in character to throw the hammer used into the forge in hopes of being rid of it. But had there been opportunity to do the deed? Meldreth thought Duggleby had died around eight or nine, at which time Molly and her husband would presumably be serving customers in the Cock. Time of death was difficult to establish, and it could well have been earlier. Imperative to discover then whether the Tisburys had been absent, alone or together, at any time that evening.
Yet another snag rankled. Was it coincidence that Molly Tisbury’s fit of ungovernable rage overtook her at such a convenient moment? If the act was not premeditated, it had to be sheer chance that it came to pass a couple of days after Cassie Dale’s vision.
Ottilia was loath to believe in lucky chances. And it was this little thread, inexplicable by natural means, that was responsible for the discomfort of the night.
It seemed as if she had hardly closed her eyes when she was awoken by an unprecedented noise. Starting up in the curtained bed, she listened, replaying the sound in her head: the crash of something heavy, followed by a splintering of lesser sounds.
It had come from below stairs, she thought, as she pushed aside the curtain and thrust down the bedclothes.
“What’s to do?” came sleepily from Francis’s side of the bed.
“Did you not hear it? Something fell downstairs, I think.”
He sat up as she got out of bed. “What time is it?”
“I have no notion, but it is light already.”
Ottilia found her dressing robe and shrugged it on.
“What are you doing?”
Turning, she found Francis had flung out of the bed and was sitting on the edge, regarding her.
“Going to see what has happened, of course,” she replied, stuffing her feet into slippers.
He got up quickly. “No, you don’t. Not on your own.”
“Make haste, then.”
She waited while he found his own dressing gown but went to the door as he was putting it on, an abrupt feeling of foreboding entering her bosom and lending her impatience.
It did not take her long to negotiate the passage and run downstairs to the hall, Francis close behind her. She paused at the bottom of the last flight, looking around.
The place was eerily silent, just as it had been on the day they first came. It felt an eon ago, and Ottilia remembered how this same sense of disappearing time had overtaken her last year when she had become involved in the disaster that had precipitated the Polbrook family into a week of unmitigated hell.
“Must have come from the kitchens,” Francis suggested, passing her and making for the door to the back premises.
But the ominous sensation that had invaded Ottilia’s bosom now struck a chill that led her eyes to the door to the coffee room. Without speaking, almost without willing her feet to walk, she moved towards it.
“Tillie?”
She threw out a hand, but she did not turn. With a calm born of that numbness preceding certain horror, she noticed the tremble of her fingers. Then she reached out and grasped the handle of the door.
Inside the room, the cause of the noise was immediately obvious. Hannah Pakefield was half standing, her bulk thrust against the long table at the back, her hands over her mouth as if to stop a scream. Her eyes, in a countenance white with shock despite the reddened wounds from yesterday’s battle, were round and huge, stark with terror.
At her feet lay a heavy wooden tray, its contents scattered around it. Crockery lay broken and crushed, and pooling liquid formed a little lake from which protruded a variety of silver cutlery.
The picture married up with the sounds that had woken Ottilia, but she took this in somewhere in the periphery of her mind, the rest concentrated on what sight it might be that was riveting Hannah’s attention.
She let go the door handle and moved into the room, turning in the direction of the landlady’s fixed gaze. Her gorge rose, and for a moment she stood transfixed, her brain flying to the horrible vision described by Cassie Dale, which was here brought into being.
Seated on a chair with her head resting on the round table was Molly Tisbury, her face turned towards the room. Her arm hung loose at her side, and her legs had buckled. Protruding from the whiteness of her neck and stained red at that point was the handle of a kitchen skewer. Her eyes were open, her mouth slack, and she was stone-dead.
Chapter 11
For several heart-stopping moments Francis stared at the spectacle, inevitably thrown back to the hideous day he had discovered his sister-in-law’s mangled corpse in her own bed.
Gradually the new picture, with its very different manifestations, impinged itself upon his consciousness, and he forced himself back to the present. The first coherent thought came out of his mouth without benefit of decision.
“Well, that blows my theory out of the water.”
Tillie’s instant frowning glance brought him to a realisation of the inappropriate nature of this remark, and he hastily pulled himself together.
“Never mind that now. I had best send for Tisbury on the instant.”
Tillie caught his wrist as he turned, and he felt the tremble in her fingers.
“Meldreth,” she said, an unaccustomed quaver in her voice. “Not Tisbury. Not yet. We must have the doctor before anyone.”
He covered her fingers and held them tightly. “Courage, my dar
ling. You are made of sterner stuff than this.”
Her clear gaze met his, and she hazarded a tiny smile despite the glistening he saw there. She drew a shaky breath and clutched his supporting hand.
“I will cope, Fan. And you are perfectly right. This throws us back to point non plus.”
Her voice was strengthening as she spoke, and Francis was struck anew with the fervent admiration that had been his early reaction to the extraordinary woman of whom he now had possession. He drew her briefly close.
“Do you know that I love you more than anything in the world?”
The murmur in her ear was productive of a hiccoughing sob, and Tillie pulled away, her eyes shining and a tremulous smile upon her very kissable lips.
“What a moment to choose to tell me so!”
Francis grinned. “The perfect moment.”
Then he let her go, and his soldiering instincts took over.
“To action, my love. You deal with Mrs. Pakefield while I find a messenger. Thank heavens Ryde returned last night,” he added, turning for the door.
“Not Ryde,” said Tillie quickly, recovering fast. “He won’t know where Meldreth lives. Send Pakefield. Or no, better yet, send the girl Patty.”
Pausing in the doorway, Francis glanced to where the landlady had sunk noiselessly into the nearest chair, her gaze, now blank, still fastened upon the dead body of her rival.
“Nothing would induce me to send Pakefield,” he said in an undervoice. “The fellow is useless. He would likely wander aimlessly all over the green while we waited like idiots.”
“Send him to me here instead. He may at least support Hannah.”
“Very well. But I will find Ryde, too, for I think we are going to need him.”
“Francis, wait!”
He was already in the hall, but he halted and turned back to find Tillie in the doorway, a frown gathering on her forehead.
“One or other of us must be in this room at all times, Fan.”
He nodded, instantly appreciating the sense of this. “At least until the authorities — such as they are — have done their part.”
The Lady Fan Series: Books 1-3 (Sapere Books Boxset Editions) Page 53
