Tamasine released her hands, stepping back a pace, her smile vanishing. “I have no duty. Others have a duty to me.”
“Assuredly,” agreed Ottilia, and deftly changed the subject, moving to the sofa and touching the colourful shawl thrown across its back. “I do admire this style, Tamasine. Is this typical of houses in Barbados?”
For a moment it seemed the girl was not going to rise to the bait. She stared frowningly at the shawl, as if she did not understand the significance of Ottilia’s words. Then she went behind the sofa and put out a hand to stroke it.
“Oh, I know them all. Blue, green, purple, red, yellow.”
To Ottilia’s interest and surprise, she pointed out each patch as she gave the colour. Was this how she had been taught? By demonstration only? It was not inconceivable she had grasped the letters of the alphabet in the same way, but whether she might have been induced to recognise the symbolism of letters grouped together remained a question.
Leaving the shawl, she shifted to the mantel, regarding herself in the mirror. Not, Ottilia noted, in the critical gaze other young ladies might use, seeking to discover errant curls or a defective mark. Instead Tamasine stared directly into her own eyes, almost as if they belonged to another to whom she spoke.
“Joslin does not want me to marry anyone for I have all the money.” She turned suddenly, and Ottilia once more found herself the recipient of one of those fixed and chilling looks. “He died, you know. He cannot stop me if he is dead.”
Startled, and not a little perturbed, Ottilia knew not what to reply. Her suspicions of the girl returned tenfold. Hard as it seemed to credit her with a murderous scheme, this freely confessed motive could not but raise spectres. Throwing caution to the winds, she risked all on a single throw.
“Is that why you pushed him, Tamasine?”
The blue gaze faltered and the girl looked abruptly vulnerable. A little gasp left her lips and her smooth skin wrinkled in a frown. “Did I? I don’t remember.”
“You told me you had killed him,” Ottilia pursued doggedly, not without a qualm.
A whimper escaped the girl. “Where is Lavinia? Why does she not come?”
Ottilia’s senses were alive with conjecture, but she could not feel it politic to employ her usual ruthless methods with this female. She adopted a tone carefully casual.
“Would you wish me to call Lavinia?”
Tamasine did not answer. She put her hands to her head and pulled at her hair, little quivers passing across her face meanwhile. Her eyes flicked this way and that.
Ottilia watched without speaking. What did this betoken? Was it real? It looked almost as if she were acting, for she had not before shown conduct comparable to this. She tried a gentle note.
“Tamasine?”
The girl glanced at her, but did not answer. Instead, she crossed the room and opened the door, where she stood for a moment, apparently surveying the hall. Then she threw a gleeful look over her shoulder. “They are all gone. I am free.”
She vanished on the words, and Ottilia, though she hurried to the door, was too late to see where she went. But she could hear rapid footsteps on the wooden stairs and surmised the child had escaped to the floors above.
Ottilia could not reconcile it with her conscience to do nothing, although she was uncertain how to proceed. She crossed the hall and went to knock on the door through which Miss Ingleby had earlier emerged. There was no response. After a moment, Ottilia turned the handle and looked in, finding a book room which mirrored the parlour opposite in size. Casting a glance back into the hall, she seized opportunity and went inside.
A tambour desk stood near the window, its roll-top up. A collection of papers and ledgers spread out across the inner surface bore witness to Miss Ingleby’s present industry. Two ledgers were open, one atop the other, and several documents, their seals already broken, had been piled in an untidy heap, as if a hasty hand had rummaged through them. A freshly sealed letter lay on the blotter and Ottilia read the direction.
It was addressed to Mrs Ruth Delabole at an address in the County of Berkshire. She hoped Miss Ingleby intended despatching the thing by fast courier. The sooner the woman got here the better, and no doubt she would waste no time if she knew how matters were left.
A glance at the ledgers showed them to refer to expenditures concerned with housekeeping and Ottilia turned her attention to the open documents. Without picking anything up, she scrutinised the one on top and a few lines told her she was looking at the instruction that gave Tamasine Roy into the guardianship of Sir Joslin Cadel. Was Miss Ingleby looking to discover if Tamasine’s father had made provision in the event of Sir Joslin’s demise? Ottilia recalled her defensive attitude when questioned upon this point.
Her fingers itched to sift through the pile for she could make out nothing of value from the few words visible in the items below the one on top. She had no right whatsoever to be examining anything and might with justice be criticised for doing as much as she had already done. Yet a streak of prescience insisted she look further.
Refraining from disturbing the papers, Ottilia examined the little compartments in the top, which proved to contain the usual assortment of seals, wax, pens and oddments. Turning to the drawers below, she opened the narrow central one and found a collection of clean parchments ready for use, which might argue a tidy mind if it were not for a scattering of odd slips of yellowed notes. The banked drawers either side she found to be stuffed with documents, some in tied bundles, others in disordered clumps.
Ottilia suffered a passing pang of sympathy for the unsuspecting Mrs Delabole, who must inherit this muddle, unless she proved willing to leave the bulk of it to a legal advisor. She was about to close the last drawer when a fragment in an unfolded letter caught her eye.
‘…resembles too closely the conduct of my poor incarcerated Florine…’
Without thought, Ottilia twitched the letter out of the drawer and ran her eyes down the sheet. It was addressed to Sir Joslin, penned in a spidery uneven fashion, which suggested the hand that wrote it had been shaky or infirm. It was signed ‘Matthew’, and the burden of the man’s plea was a request to use his daughter with gentleness.
‘In you, my most beloved cousin and friend, I place my trust as I charge you with the care of my tortured little soul. She may not long burden you, cast as she is in her sad mother’s mould. But while she lives, I conjure your mercy on her behalf. Let her be as free as it may be done without harm to any or to herself.’
There was more in similar vein, but the hints contained herein were enough to set Ottilia’s mind ablaze. She stared at the paper, reading the words again as their inner meanings battered at her brain. Tamasine had taken the taint from the distaff side? Then she could be dangerous. What had the unfortunate Florine done to prove mad enough to be shut away from the world? What of this notion the girl might not live long? Ironic it was instead the guardian who had left this earth. Could the mother have died as the result of some act of insanity? Or might she have taken her own life?
These conjectures were interrupted by the sound of footsteps in the hall outside, apparently approaching the book room door. Ottilia stuffed the letter back in the drawer in haste and slid it shut. She looked about for a way of escape and headed for a second door that led away from the hall. Slipping through, she quickly closed it to behind her without fully shutting it. Then she put her eye to the crack in order to see who might enter the other room.
She heard the sound of the door opening, and footsteps crossed to the desk. By what she was able to make out, the intruder was male. Her eye ran down his legs and up again to his back and she caught the wig tied in a queue at his neck. The butler Lomax!
Ottilia held her breath, gripping the door for fear of it slipping from her grasp. From what she could hear, the fellow was sifting papers. Then he opened a drawer and rummaged within. A faint sound of exhaled breath reached her. Satisfaction? The drawer slammed shut and the man shifted out of her line of sight fo
r an instant. Then he crossed it again and his footsteps told Ottilia he was heading for the door.
She hesitated, trying to decide whether she might safely re-enter the book room and aim by that way for the hall. But if Lomax was still within earshot, or hovering in the hall itself, she would give herself away. Thinking to look for another way out, Ottilia gently closed the book room door fully. Turning, she ran slap into Miss Ingleby.
Chapter 8
The companion, standing a few paces away in the room Ottilia had entered, regarded her with a look compound of satisfaction and disdain.
“Spying again, Lady Francis?”
Ottilia opted for the bald truth. “Yes, I’m afraid I was.” She gestured behind her. “I think Lomax has taken something from one of the drawers in there.”
A swift frown swept away Miss Ingleby’s former expression and she started forward, pushing past and wrenching open the book room door. Ottilia followed her in, watching as she went quickly to the desk and jerked one of the drawers open. She stared at its contents briefly and slammed it shut again. As she began a repetition of this action with the other drawers, Ottilia intervened.
“I cannot think you will possibly find out just what was taken, but I am fairly sure it was a specific drawer. He knew what he was looking for.”
Miss Ingleby paused with her fingers on the handle of the middle drawer and glanced over her shoulder. “Just as you did?”
“I was merely browsing. I have no knowledge of the contents of that desk.”
A scorching look was all the companion’s answer and she turned her attention back to the drawers, continuing what she had started.
Ottilia moved to the other side of the desk, the better to watch the woman’s face. She wore a look of pinched dissatisfaction.
“I believe Lomax sifted through those documents you have piled up there,” she offered. “Before he opened the drawer.”
Miss Ingleby cast a cursory look over the papers on the desk before her gaze came up. “Did you look at them?”
“I glanced at the one on top and I looked to note what the ledgers might contain, yes. But I stopped short of searching through the pile.”
“You surprise me,” came from the woman on a contemptuous note.
Ottilia thought a full confession would serve her best. If Miss Ingleby was persuaded of her candour, she might get further with the creature. “I did look in the drawers.”
The companion was still opening and slamming drawers without making any real effort to look within. Ottilia believed she was principally engaged in an exercise to relieve her feelings for there was certainly no method to her actions.
“Did you find anything of interest?”
“Yes.” Miss Ingleby stilled. Her eyes came back to meet Ottilia’s. Was it alarm in them? She did not speak, but it was not difficult to divine her question. “I found a memorandum from, I think, Mr Roy to Sir Joslin. Written, I suspect, when he was debilitated, possibly close to death.”
She allowed this to sink in, and could see from Miss Ingleby’s sharpening expression that she knew the document referenced. Ottilia struck.
“Florine was deranged, was she not? Mr Roy’s wife? She had to be locked up permanently. Why, Miss Ingleby? What had she done?”
The companion’s features were taut, her gaze dark. With anger? Distress? Both perhaps. Her voice was icy, but even. “It was before my time.”
“Yet I feel sure you know the story. How did she die?”
The woman’s lips tightened. Looking down, she pushed the ledgers and the papers further into the inner recess of the desk and rolled the top into place, effectively concealing everything from Ottilia’s view. Extracting a key from a pocket within her petticoats, she locked the desk with something of a flourish, and looked up again, throwing a look of triumph at Ottilia.
“I should have done that earlier, had it occurred to me that an uninvited guest might pry into matters outside her province.”
The rebuke was just, but Ottilia felt no remorse. There was matter here demanding investigation, and she had rather be reviled and beforehand than hold back only to discover all vestige of evidence had been removed. Particularly in view of the butler’s action and especially with regard to the possibility of Tamasine’s having despatched her guardian to another plane of existence.
She was just wondering how best to respond when the pealing of the front door bell put her out of the necessity of doing so.
An impatient exclamation escaped Miss Ingleby and she turned for the door. Opening it, she looked pointedly at Ottilia and one hand invited her to leave the book room. She did so just as the footman Cuffy came through the servants’ door at the back, heading for the front entrance. Was this Patrick, come with the local doctor and Francis to remove the body?
The difference in attitude toward the party headed by Doctor Sutherland was marked. Lomax treated him with the proper deference of a servant and Miss Ingleby assumed her best social manner, which the Fanshawes had seen in the early morning at the Dower House. Ottilia supposed the show of officialdom was responsible, although Sutherland had dispensed with the services of the coroner, who could not be reached.
“He will trust to the post-mortem to make his decision upon an inquest, in any event,” explained the doctor, who proved to be a man of advanced age and well acquainted with the Polbrook family.
Ottilia was amused to learn he had seen her husband into the world and attended his childish ailments. “Dear me, sir, I feel I ought to question you closely to ensure I have not been hoodwinked.”
Sutherland laughed out. “I cannot think Lord Francis would seek to conceal his youthful peccadilloes. Had it been his brother now...”
But here, Sutherland evidently felt he was overstepping the mark, for he harrumphed loudly and turned to the butler, asking to be conducted to Sir Joslin’s remains.
Ottilia did not accompany the cavalcade, which numbered in addition to Patrick and Francis, two men from the undertakers armed with a stretcher, but contented herself with exchanging an eloquent look with her husband in hopes of warning him she had matter for discussion in plenty. Instead, when she saw Cuffy inclined to follow, she seized opportunity and hailed him in as low a tone as would serve to attract his attention without drawing Miss Ingleby’s. The companion had followed up as far as the first flight and was standing looking after the men.
“Cuffy, a word, if you please?”
The footman paused on the first stair and looked back.
Ottilia smiled. “There is too much of a crowd up there already, do you not think?”
With evident reluctance, he abandoned his purpose, stepped off the staircase and came towards her, his features showing anew the grey drawn look that signalled his loss.
“Madame?”
Ottilia dropped her tone almost to a whisper. “Would you object to coming into the parlour, Cuffy?” A short line appeared between his brows and Ottilia surmised he was too wrapped in grief to divine her purpose. “I don’t wish to be overheard.”
At that, his eyes came a little alive and he glanced up at the still figure of Miss Ingleby.
“Just so,” said Ottilia, and moved towards the parlour.
The footman slipped past to open the door for her and followed her in. The door shut with a soft click and Ottilia turned to find the man moving a little into the open space of the parlour.
“I hope my nephews have not been a trouble to you,” she ventured, by way of an opener.
He echoed his colleague. “No trouble, madame. You want to talk of Master Jos’s death?”
“Straight to the point, Cuffy,” she said appreciatively. “Yes, I do want to talk of it. You were close to Sir Joslin, and I am hopeful you may be able to help me uncover the truth.”
Cuffy’s dark eyes burned. “Someone killed Master Jos?”
“I don’t yet know,” said Ottilia with truth, “but the suspicion cannot be avoided. Do you know anyone who might want to be rid of him?”
Slowly he shoo
k his head. “He is a good man. Sick, but good.”
Ottilia seized on this. “Sick how, Cuffy? What was amiss with him?”
One large hand came up to hit at the footman’s chest. “Master has a bad lung. Fever catched him bad. His lung is no good after.”
“How long ago did he suffer this bout of illness with his lungs?”
“Too many years. Ten, maybe fifteen. Master Jos is not working his plantation. He selled the place. He works only for Master Matt.”
Ottilia hastened to unravel this. “You are saying Sir Joslin had his own lands but could not work them after his illness? But he had some capital of his own then? From the sale, I mean.”
“He is not a rich man. He is trying to work the plantation, but it is no good. Overseer there cheated him. Master Jos lost money. He selled his plantation too cheap.”
“Which is why he had to work for Mr Roy.”
“He is not working too much. Master Jos keeps the books; also he looks to teach Mister Simeon how to make sugar, how to do distilling.”
Ottilia’s ears pricked up. Simeon again? “Was Simeon a good pupil?”
A scornful noise escaped Cuffy’s lips. “He does not like to learn. He does not like to work. He is a lazy boy.”
Filing this interesting tidbit away in her mind, Ottilia returned to the matter of Sir Joslin. “I gather your master suffered recurrences of his illness?” She saw puzzlement in the man’s face and simplified her question. “He became ill again and again?”
A dark shadow seemed to cross the footman’s face and he fetched a deep sigh. “He is bad too many times. He has too much pain.” Again the fellow touched his own chest.
“Even here? In these last months?”
Cuffy’s eyes gleamed his sorrow. “Here it is too cold, madame. It is not good for Master Jos’s chest. He gets mighty sick.”
Ottilia eyed the fellow. Should she dare so far without benefit of the post-mortem? Yet if she failed to strike now, who knew when another opportunity would present itself?
“He took laudanum for the pain, did he not, Cuffy?”
The Lady Fan Series: Books 1-3 (Sapere Books Boxset Editions) Page 83
