by Issy Brooke
Adelia remembered one name. “Ah, Clara Jenkins – and, er...”
“Mary Jenkins, my lady. Cousins.”
“Ah, I do see the resemblance. I should like to ask you about Mrs Rush.”
Their mouths opened in surprise. “She didn’t do it, my lady!” Clara burst out. “You mean about the murder, don’t you? Begging your pardon – but that’s what you mean – I heard what she said and she’s full of sh... full of ... wrong.”
“Full of wrong,” Adelia repeated with a half-smile. “I like that. And it is better than what you nearly said. So why is she wrong? Why did she say what she said?”
Clara and Mary slid sideways glances at one another. Clara was obviously the talkative one because she spoke again. “Well, my lady, can I speak, um, freely?” She went very red.
“You may. Indeed, people’s lives depend upon it. Although do try not to swear; it is the Lord’s Day, after all.”
“Shouldn’t dream of it, my lady!” Clara said with an exaggerated horror which made Mary giggle. “Well, then. Mrs Rush, see, she’s a woman of ...” Clara had to chew her lip for a good few seconds. “She’s a woman of appetites. She likes ... company. Male company, that is. She’s known for her ... ahh...”
“Lovers?”
Clara and Mary were both beet red by this point. “Yes, yes, my lady. Sorry, my lady. But she is. Problem is, though, the gossip says ... and I know I ought to pay no heed to gossip but there ain’t nothing else to do really ... so the gossip is that not one of her, um, lovers, survives. Dead, they are. All dead. Somehow.”
Saying the word dead made all of them grow serious and stop giggling, Adelia included.
“And her latest lover was Hartley Knight?”
“Yes, my lady. And now he’s dead too.”
“Who ended the relationship?”
“Not sure. They say that she did, when she found out about him and Eliza. And him and Polly. And him and that barmaid in the village.”
Adelia winced. “Well, she does indeed have at least three motives. Perhaps each of those women have a motive, too. Tell me, though; how did her previous lovers die?”
“It’s hard to say, my lady, because of all the gossip. First they said that John the Dairyman had a cough and it were consumption but then they said later she had done it by poison, see. And the others, the stories grow up afterwards. So I don’t pay no heed to them.” Clara tried to look aloof and smug. It was, after all, a Sunday, when one at least pretended to be a better person than one was.
“Thank you. And do either of you know how Mr Knight died?”
They looked at one another again but only Clara spoke. “He slipped? Hit his head? The police were saying that. We don’t know, my lady. Do you?”
She didn’t want to cause panic among the staff but she could hardly lie. She took a middle ground. “He has had an injury to his head, but I cannot see that Mrs Rush was anything to do with it.”
She left them to their work and went to find Felicia.
FELICIA WAS SITTING on her bed, knees together, hands clenched on her lap, staring at the wall and trembling throughout her whole body. The air in the room was close and sticky. Adelia went straight to the window but Felicia cried out as she made to fling it open.
“Mama, please, I beg you – don’t let the evil in!”
“Felicia, now listen. You are letting yourself fall victim to silly imaginings. You are not a girl any longer and you haven’t been for some years.” With a firm shove, Adelia got the upper part of the casement open. Some of the smaller panes were loose in their leaded network of diamonds and Adelia tutted. Percy was going to get a stern talking-to when he finally got home. An Earl had responsibilities to his house and his estate.
And turning to look at her daughter, she thought: he has responsibilities to his wife as well.
“There. Isn’t that better?” she said. “A bit of fresh air never did anyone any harm.”
Felicia was crying silently, shaking and shivering like she had a fever, wobbling her head side to side like she had been shouting “no” for a very long time and was now exhausted. She didn’t speak. She merely whimpered, a low animal sound.
Adelia was scared at the sight of her, and she hid it by becoming overwhelmingly brisk. She sat down on a chair, rather than on the soft bed, and remained stiff-backed as she tried to speak sense into her daughter’s fuzzy mind.
“Felicia. Felicia! Look at me! Yes, something quite dreadful has happened but it is the work of men and if there is such a thing as evil, then it resides in people – not in swamps, not in ice houses, not in curses. The police have removed the body and if there is anything amiss as to how he died, then they will surely find it out. You need not fear a single thing.”
“How did he die?”
With a prayer of apology for lying on a Sunday – as if it were worse this day than any other – she said, “He seems to have slipped on the step, that’s all.” She had to have a word with Theodore before he spoke with Felicia. She had to get him to agree to maintain this fiction, whatever his private suspicions, for Felicia’s own sake.
Felicia was still shaking her head as if she didn’t believe it. Adelia sighed. “Felicia, this house and this estate is in a sorry situation. Why does my Lord Buckshaw not attend to his responsibilities? How long has he been gone this time?”
“Seven months,” she replied. “But you knew he’d be like this when you married me to him.”
“And I thought that you would enjoy being the mistress of a castle just like in the fairy tales. Yet instead of ruling with a benevolent authority while he is gone, you are hiding up here and babbling about curses while the household goes to rack and ruin. What has gone wrong?”
The tears fell faster now and she bowed her head. She began to sniff and gulp, muttering only that she was sorry, sorry, but she didn’t fit in, and Adelia’s resolve broke. She moved from the chair to sit alongside her daughter on the bed, and she put her arm around her. Felicia fell against her. Now she was able to talk.
And talk she did.
“We were to have a child,” Felicia whispered, her voice muffled against her mother’s shoulder. “But I knew to keep it secret until the very last minute because ... because I thought if I told people it would all go wrong.”
That was an understandable and very common attitude. Adelia remembered the fear that had stalked her throughout all her pregnancies. You knew of so many women who died during or after the process that you would do anything at all, you’d cling to any superstition, just to take even the smallest bit of control – or to feel as if you were taking control, as forces from within your own body seemed to take over regardless. She stroked Felicia’s hair. She now knew, already, where this conversation was going. This was the “event” that had been alluded to, and it was as she had guessed. But it was important to let Felicia say it all in her own words.
She kept it brief, concluding with, “And after all that, it was good that I did not speak of it to everyone because then, suddenly ... there was no more child. Only a month more, it should have waited, but... it came, and it was not ... there was no more child.” She croaked out the last few words and cried for a little longer until her voice was hoarse.
Adelia murmured a few platitudes and then asked, “Did Percy know?”
“He knew I was with child, he knew right from the start and he had made so many plans though I begged him not to, but he did, and maybe that’s why it all went wrong because the night it happened, only a month before it should have happened, he had just decided that we should have a wet nurse and they child would be named Percy or Priscilla and of course he should never have, never have said it out loud because then the curse came down upon us and ... that night was the worst. And the following weeks were the worst, too. And he could not cope at all, and he ... left.”
Adelia’s grip tightened around her poor, hurting daughter. “He left? What is that nonsense about not coping – him not coping with this? Him of all people? What about you? I s
hall kill him with my bare hands.”
“No, mama, please. It was different for him, I can see that. But it broke him, somewhere in his head I think, and that’s why he went off again when he wasn’t going to. And that’s why he hasn’t come back. I don’t think he will ever come back.”
“He bloody well will,” Adelia said, biting back far harsher curses than that. “He will, if I have to charter a ship and sail out to find him and drag him back by his hair. As God is my witness, he will answer for this. No – not what happened that night – Felicia, you must understand, that is not his fault. It is not your fault. But afterwards, his choice, his actions – those are entirely his responsibility.”
Felicia snuffled into Adelia’s shoulder again. It sounded like “Thank you” and Adelia rubbed at Felicia’s upper arm with her thumb as she rocked her gently and began to tell her all about the Floating Ball, and how she was going to be on the committee, and how she’d find a husband for Lady Agnes if she could. The idea made Felicia giggle, and that was the sweetest sound Adelia had heard for a while.
Six
Police were swarming over the house and grounds the next day. Adelia dressed for a trip into Plymouth but Theodore begged his leave to be excused from accompanying her as he wanted to stay behind at Tavy Castle and keep an eye on the inspector and his men.
“Have you written to Percy?” she asked as they walked together through the great hall. He was going to escort her and one of Felicia’s more sensible maids to the railway station. Smith, Adelia’s usual lady’s maid, had earned herself a holiday although how much rest she’d get while visiting her sister in Cleethorpes – with her sister’s eleven children – was anyone’s guess. She’d be begging to come back to work before very long.
“I have written about a dozen letters,” he said. “I have sent them to various locations. One must surely reach him.”
“Good,” she said. She had not yet told him all about Felicia’s troubles and the tragedy of the “event”. She didn’t wish to keep any more secrets from her husband than she had to, and was merely biding her time. Ideally, she wanted Felicia to talk to him, or at least be present.
They passed the silver tray by the door and she almost laughed. “There is quite a bundle to go in the post.”
“They are not all mine,” he replied. “Brodie is likewise shocked by the proceedings and has written to Percy himself; his are the envelopes in grey, his attempt at mourning, I suppose.”
“How strange.”
“He is a strange lad but I almost like him. Almost. He is like a half-formed sculpture, in my mind, lacking something I cannot quite define. As you have a mission to organise and sort out other people’s lives, I rather think that if the police will not allow me to investigate here, I should perhaps turn my attention to sorting out Brodie’s life. He cannot fester here for the rest of his days.”
“Good luck with that! What do you plan...?”
They chattered on as they walked to the railway station where Theodore left her and the maid, who had been silently trudging behind, brought her a hot drink from the kiosk.
“You should have got one for yourself.”
“I didn’t like to, my lady.”
“I am not a dragon. Lily, isn’t it?”
The maid was about thirty years old and had a face of freckles that made her look much younger when she smiled. Which she did now, at the use of her first name.
“You’re usually Henderson, aren’t you?”
“Yes, my lady, we go by the formal way here.”
“Lily suits you better. If I may?”
Lily was grinning now and fought it down. It pleased Adelia to make someone happy. She reflected that Smith would have a fit if she was called by her first name – it was a point of pride for Smith to be rigidly correct. But fashions were changing. Some houses still called all their maids Mary, regardless of their real names. Adelia had always hated that custom. At least one’s surname was one’s own – well, one’s father’s own, till one married and had to belong to another man’s name.
Adelia sipped at the drink as they waited on the open platform, preferring the open air because the lounges reserved for women were too stuffy and crowded. She coughed, suddenly, so hard that she had to pass her drink to Lily while she got herself under control.
“Are you all right, my lady? Should we go back to the castle?”
“No, no. I think I have picked up a summer cold perhaps.”
“It’s the air.”
“You are right, there. Do many people get ill at Tavy Castle?”
“No, not once they are used to it.”
There was the unspoken allusion lingering in between them that Felicia had not got used to it and would never quite fit in. It was strange. She was not a cruel mistress nor an overly exacting one. “Lily, tell me plainly. How involved is Lady Buckshaw in the running of the castle?”
“Not at all, my lady. We don’t like to bother her. Mr Knight did it all.”
“Did he, indeed?”
“He did.” Lily bit her lip and Adelia knew she wanted to say more, but didn’t dare.
Adelia prodded her onwards. “Please, you may certainly speak ill of the dead if it is truth.”
“Well,” Lily said, hesitantly. “In truth, then, my lady, he took on rather too much above himself. He took on Mrs Rush’s role, when he should not have, and while my lord is away he took on more that ought to have fallen to my Lady Buckshaw. What will happen now, no one knows. No one is in charge. Mrs Rush is trying but she’s ... well, she’s mourning, sort of. I think she doesn’t want to miss Mr Knight but she does anyway.”
“How curious is the human heart.”
The train pulled in then, and any further conversation was lost in the flurry of boarding and seating and watching out for Plymouth, just a short distance away.
MRS CARSTAIRS WAS PRESIDING over her At Home with grace and wit and an absolute ocean of hot tea and delicate finger food, all designed to be eaten in a way so that visiting ladies need not remove their gloves. Hats remained on heads, too, as no one would be crass enough to stay for too long. Visiting times were a constant shuttle of bored ladies ferrying themselves from one house to another, nibbling politely on an endless stream of narrow sandwiches and delicate cakes held together with just the right amount of cream. Keeping such things fresh in the oppressive weather was an ongoing battle for the army of staff behind the scenes. But in the drawing rooms of Plymouth, there were no hints at what had gone on to bring such perfect food to the tables.
Adelia was drawn into the bosom of Mrs Carstairs’ home, and urged to sit by the window where there was just the tiniest hint of a breeze coming in off the sea. A tall lithe man with silvered hair, wearing a naval uniform, bowed low to them all and left, remarking on the quality of Mrs Carstairs’ pastries. A few ladies were also just leaving, a matriarch and her three daughters, and the older lady had heard of Adelia. She cooed and simpered and expressed admiration at Adelia’s success in marrying off all seven of her own daughters, and as they left Adelia caught the departing lady hiss to one of the girls, “If she can get all seven wed, why are you being so difficult? Captain Everard looked at you! It must mean something.”
Mrs Carstairs smiled until they had gone, then her face changed and Adelia realised the first smile was a polite one – this one now shining on Mrs Carstairs’ face was a genuine one. “How delightful to see you, Lady Calaway. Oh, Mrs Winstanley, do come and join us by the window, do! Now, Lady Calaway, come with me and join us both. I must say, what an honour it is that you have come. My dear husband told me all about your dear husband and I was privileged to meet him briefly last week. I don’t support he happened to mention a little party we are planning?”
Mrs Winstanley, a woman with three chins and bushy eyebrows and a decidedly wicked, throaty laugh, sat with them and they all leaned in to begin discussing the Floating Ball.
It was to be a late one, like the exclusive events in London. There would be a military band to
provide music for the dancing, and a midnight supper, and champagne flowing as freely as a river. A marquee would be set up on the dockside so that people could alight and ladies would have a private section within it to attend to their dress. Concerns had been expressed about the arrival of coaches and where people would be dropped off, and Mrs Carstairs had begun planning one-way systems and even envisaging the closure of a road – “Oh, we shall see to that, don’t worry. I know people.” There would be strings of lights in many colours and she was hoping to use cannons to shower the waters with vibrant fireworks. “I am not entirely sure if that will work,” she ended, “but Captain Everard assures me he will look into it.”
“It sounds marvellous,” Adelia said with enthusiasm. “And it’s just what we need at Tavy Castle to take our mind away from recent events.”
Mrs Winstanley seized on the invitation to speak of the death. “We have heard of the most strange things! Is it really true that one of the servants was found dead in the garden?”
Adelia glanced at Mrs Carstairs for permission to speak of the unpleasant matter in her parlour. Mrs Carstairs was looking as eager as Mrs Winstanley for information, and she nodded enthusiastically, so Adelia went on. “Yes, the house steward, Hartley Knight, was dead though he was not found in the garden as such. He was actually in the ice house. The police seem to believe that he slipped.”
“You say that as if you don’t believe it. Is your husband investigating?” Mrs Carstairs asked.
Adelia’s role in the previous investigations were forever overlooked. But she didn’t mind; she had no desire to bring shame upon her family. She shook her head. “Lord Calaway is not involved as the police feel they have matters quite in hand without his help. However, there are doubts around the death.” She dropped her voice. “There was no reason for the victim to be in the ice house and my husband does not believe that he merely slipped accidentally. He does not think the blow to his head was enough to kill him.” She sat up again. “So, now we are wondering, who might have wanted to murder the house steward?”
