by Issy Brooke
“If it was a case of foul play, there are certain uncomfortable questions that then arise,” Lady Agnes went on. “It would mean that a killer is present right here in the castle. Possibly right now.”
He stopped with his hand reaching out for the door. Was it a hint? Was she dropping information to him that he ought to be picking up on? He searched her face for a clue and found nothing.
“It could mean that. But some murders are accidental,” he pointed out.
“Indeed so. Yet what if Hartley Knight was targeted?”
“But why would the house steward be a target?” he asked. “What did he know? Did he have something that someone else wanted to take from him? Is it to do with the lapis lazuli? Because...” He stopped himself. Somehow he didn’t feel comfortable in revealing what he knew about the provenance of the gemstones – not yet.
Lady Agnes was nodding along to each point that he made. “All interesting questions, Lord Calaway.”
The Countess spoke, suddenly, her voice high and slightly creaky. “That Mr Knight did not know as much as he thought he knew.”
Theodore let his hand drop to his side. “My lady, what do you mean?”
She coughed. Lady Agnes looked at Theodore as if it were his fault that the elderly woman was now struggling to breathe, and he winced. Lady Agnes leaned over and put her hand on The Countess’s forearm. “Shall I fetch warm milk?”
“No – no. It ... passes. Do excuse me. You asked me what I meant? No more and no less than I said. Knight had been in this family for years.” The Countess spoke in short bursts, breathing hard in between, but her voice grew stronger as she went on. Theodore’s medical eye could detect nothing particularly wrong with her beyond the normal effects of extreme age. “Knight had been here for so long that he felt he knew everything there is to know about the family and our history. But...”
“But, he did not,” Lady Agnes finished for her. “He was an arrogant man with a lust for control and a lust for – well, you shall not mind me saying it, but a lust for women. We ought to have got rid of him a long time ago.”
“Why didn’t you?” Theodore asked boldly.
She snorted. “I am not in charge here.”
It seemed that no one was. Percy was away and Felicia was having attacks of hysteria and hallucinations in her room. Theodore bit his tongue but Lady Agnes smiled when the silence lengthened and he did not reply.
“I know what you are thinking,” she said. “But it was always thus. Our family has had its ups and downs. It will all come out right, in the end.” She shifted in her seat slightly, a movement designed to mark the end of the conversation as she returned her attention to the book in front of her. She had long since moved her hand and lost her place in the text.
The Countess was nodding. “Yes. Yes. They come and go. What do we care? But it will all be well. Curse, what curse?” She started to laugh as if someone had made the most brilliant of jokes.
Theodore felt profoundly uncomfortable. He had a dozen questions, all unsayable. He was not ashamed to admit later, as he spoke to Adelia, that he fled from the room and hid in the tower until he heard them leave the lower room. The two women with their secrets and their hints confused him, especially as he was more used to Lady Agnes being forthright. Her two natures – one forthright, one secretive – made his head spin.
WITH THE HOUSE STEWARD gone, the household was not running as smoothly as it had done previously. One of the small annoyances that hit them on Wednesday night was the sudden realisation that letters had been delivered earlier in the day, but no one had thought to alert the recipients. After dinner, Theodore was handed a slim envelope addressed to himself, and he excused himself to read it in his room. Adelia stayed behind for a short while. She seemed to be engaged in close conversation with Felicia, although he wasn’t sure what it was about.
Theodore settled in a deep armchair by the open window. He sniffed the air. He wondered if his mind was playing tricks on him because he was sure he could detect a freshness in the very light breeze that was twitching the thin gauze that hung artfully around the window behind the thicker velvet curtains. The room was growing dark and he had a lamp on the table by his elbow. He brought the letter close to his eyes then groaned and held it at arms’ length instead. Damn this cursed aging.
It was from Percy, at last, and it was a curious letter indeed. Theodore read it through once, and the contents made him go back to the beginning and double-check the date at the top. He was scanning it again when Adelia came in. She, too, was carrying a letter.
“Is that from Percy?” she asked.
“It is. Did you get one too?”
“No. This is the one that he sent to Felicia. It’s rather brief but I suppose that is only to be expected. He says he is coming home sometime during the week beginning the eighteenth – that was Monday just gone, wasn’t it?”
“Indeed. He doesn’t mention any dates to me in this letter. Were they sent at the same time?”
They compared dates. They were. And Theodore tapped the top of his own letter. “What do you notice about that?”
“Oh!” said Adelia. “He wrote and sent it before Hartley Knight was killed.”
“Exactly so.” He sighed.
Adelia sat down. “So what is bothering you about it?”
He hesitated. The contents were unsettling.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“He speaks about our Felicia. He says he has received an anonymous letter that was warning him of her potentially dangerous illness – in her mind – her unpredictability, her possible ... violence.” Theodore felt his mouth go dry. “It is a nasty, malicious sort of letter and Percy himself acknowledges the spite in it. But he also asks me if I might examine her, as a doctor not a father, when I come to visit. Naturally he knew we were visiting around this time. Here ... you can read it.”
He passed it over to her and watched her face as she read it through. She pressed her lips together and handed it back without a word.
“He seems to have had no idea who might have sent it to him,” Theodore mused. “And the accusations against Felicia are false, of course.”
“Of course they are!” Adelia burst out. “She has some problems but – violence? Never!”
“Never.” Theodore remembered how Felicia had frantically lashed out when confronted about the sewer gas she was convinced was everywhere; but that was understandable, he told himself. “Someone has a vendetta against her.” It occurred to him then that there was an obvious explanation for the way she thought there was sewer gas everywhere – perhaps there really was. If someone in the house was conducting a campaign against her, and someone had poisoned Hartley Knight, those two events could very well be linked. He shuddered. It made Felicia a potential victim and certainly not a suspect. How many women had been labelled mad, over the years, when they had merely been speaking an uncomfortable truth?
But was he clutching at straws, blinded by paternal love to the truth of the matter?
“Who could be acting against her?” Adelia asked. “Lady Agnes, The Countess, Lady Katharine, Oscar Brodie, some wayward household servant ... none of this seems likely.” Hadn’t Oscar warned her, though? He had seemed to speak out of care and affection, not spite.
“Lady Agnes seems all too likely to me,” Theodore said grimly, and told Adelia all about the encounter with her and The Countess in the study earlier.
“She is a strange one but ...”
“But you don’t want to think badly of her. I know. It is the same with all of them. And strangeness is no crime. Perhaps the perpetrator of all of this is Lady Katharine, working through her son, conducting her evil plans from out in the gatehouse. What I cannot fathom is what she would gain from it all. She is Percy’s sister. Felicia is not a love rival and Lady Katharine does not lack for money, nor the chance to be part of society should she want to be.”
Adelia nodded. “I, too, struggle with finding a motive for them. Have you had any luck with di
scovering what Knight might have been hiding in the ice house?”
Theodore sighed even more deeply than before. “Ah. There is more to that, too.” He told her of the surprise at finding out that none of the lapis was true lapis. Her eyes widened and she shook her head in disbelief.
“But this is nonsense,” she said. “Why is it kept at all? Why is it a secret? Who knows about this? Why kill over it? You know, I really cannot contain myself. I am longing for Percy to return because there are so many questions that I feel only he has the answer to. Also...”
Theodore noted, with concern, that his wife’s face darkened and her eyes grew moist. “What is it?”
“You must not let Felicia know that I have shared this with you,” she warned.
“I promise.”
She took a deep breath. “I meant to tell you this the other day, when she finally unburdened herself to me. She was with child, and she lost it, very close to the birthing of it. The tragedy has quite undone Percy. Rather than stay to comfort his wife in her sorrow, he has reacted as if all the loss is his own, and fled from her side.” Her hands clenched and Theodore felt his own anger rise to mix with his shock, sadness and sympathy.
“He is a weaker man than I had thought,” he said. “Though perhaps it is not weakness, exactly, but if not, I am not sure what it is.”
“I would call it cowardice,” Adelia said thickly. “And I shall string him up for it when I see him.”
“No – you must see his point of view. He must be grieving too, and perhaps feeling helpless that he cannot help his wife.”
But Theodore could see that Adelia was in no mood to be mollified. She spat out, “No, I will not hear of it! He is not helpless. The greatest help he could give his wife would have been to remain at her side and face that dreadful time with her, as husband, as helpmeet, not run away to lose himself in adventures while she is stuck here with nothing but memories staining the stones of this castle.”
Theodore could still understand Percy’s reaction even if he disagreed with it. It was unusual for him to be the more perceptive person in the marriage but at this moment, he felt that he was. He decided not to try to persuade Adelia of that fact. He took her hands and comforted her. He didn’t need to win all the battles, after all. They shared a long silence.
Adelia broke it. She straightened up and set her jaw.
“There is one other person we have not considered as a potential murderer. Someone who is very much embedded into the fabric of this household. Someone who might have had motive, and someone who has the perfect alibi,” she suggested, speaking firmly. “Someone who had the means – perhaps – through agents or through the most cunning of subterfuge.”
“Who?”
“Percy, Lord Buckshaw himself.”
Twelve
Adelia could see from the moment she suggested it that Theodore did not countenance Percy as a possible suspect and she was unable to convince him, although he listened closely to her argument. And she herself thought it was deeply unlikely. She knew that there was part of her that wanted him to be guilty because she was so angry with him for his treatment of Felicia.
She could also see that Theodore seemed to have sympathy for Percy and an understanding of his behaviour towards Felicia. Adelia wasn’t having that for a moment. This was her daughter’s wellbeing and that love was utterly paramount in Adelia’s heart. She blamed Percy for abandoning Felicia in her time of need, and that was that. Logic didn’t even come into it. Percy might have had his own point of view but she just did not want to hear it. Those men, she decided, would never truly understand. Then she felt a little bad for dismissing Theodore’s feelings.
But not too bad. He was still wrong in his defence of Percy.
They talked it over anyway – how Percy could have paid for someone to kill Knight, or how Percy, even more implausibly, could even now be hiding in the local area and simply pretending to be travelling. He had a vague motive, if they thought about it creatively. He could be resenting the obvious control and power in Tavy Castle that Knight had wielded, and he could be targeting Felicia to give himself an excuse to have her put away.
Even as she spoke, she could hear how unlikely it all was. But was it any more ridiculous than imagining Lady Agnes as a murderer, or the lad Oscar Brodie, or Lady Katharine?
“What were you and Felicia discussing so earnestly as I left after dinner?” Theodore asked as they blew out the candles that night.
“She is to be At Home tomorrow. Officially At Home. I persuaded her to arrange it when I first arrived. Do you know, she’s not sent out cards for her to be known At Home for years? Not since she moved here, as far as I can tell. And she doesn’t reply to anyone else’s invitations. She burns them and mutters about malign influences. She’s made herself into a recluse just as much as Lady Katharine has.”
“There must be something in the air.”
“Don’t joke,” Adelia said into the darkness. “There really is. Anyway, she was wanting to cancel but as the At Home is to be tomorrow, it is far too late for that. I am sure we shall be perfectly inundated with curious and brazen visitors who will not have cards, but who will be expressing their deepest concern. She is merely having last minute nerves, the silly girl.” And night terrors, and moments of staring blankly into space, her lips moving wordlessly. Adelia felt her mouth go dry.
“She was always more content with books and close friends. She’s not a social butterfly like Lottie.” Theodore’s voice was growing muffled as he sank into sleep.
Adelia frowned into the darkness. Charlotte – Lottie – was the sixth of their seven daughters. She was always the life of the party, and a constant worry to Adelia. She lived in London and ran with the wild set, the young rich aristocrats who seemed to exist on champagne and gossip. Adelia had not seen Lottie for a long time; there was always some reason why they could not meet up or visit. Always a gathering that she “simply had to attend – rude not to – cannot upset the hosts, you know”. Always an arrangement that could not be rearranged.
Theodore began to snore. Adelia sighed and stared into the velvety blackness, and decided instead to worry about Felicia.
And she also worried about Lady Agnes. With Mrs Carstairs’ help, Lady Agnes was to meet Captain Everard the next day at the At Home here at the castle. Half a dozen carefully-worded notes had flown between Tavy Castle and Plymouth, and it was all arranged, whether Lady Agnes was a suspect in the murder, or not.
FELICIA FRETTED DREADFULLY about the state of the great hall and the ground floor public rooms the next morning. Adelia had to restrain herself otherwise she would have screamed with frustration as Felicia dithered, had weeping fits, hid in closets, strode around the kitchen complaining about the bread rolls, and generally made everything ten times harder than it should have been.
“This is why I do not bother with such things!” Felicia said more than once, wringing her hands as if she had been asked to organise a polar expedition with two days’ notice and no money.
“You hardly need bother with anything. The servants know what they are doing, and Mrs Rush is rising to the challenge marvellously. They have known about this for days and they have everything prepared. You will make it worse if you worry and get in the way.”
By the time that three o’clock had rolled around, Felicia was white with anxiety. They had decorated the large drawing room on the ground floor, putting huge bouquets of flowers on tables that were covered with looping swags of silk and satin fabric. The double doors that led onto a terrace outside were thrown open, and a screen that was painted in a Chinese style was angled across part of it to deflect any injurious draughts. And, as predicted, there were plenty of callers eager to see inside Tavy Castle. Not all of them were superficial busybodies. Adelia felt sure that many people were simply keen to see Felicia and check on her wellbeing. She was a likeable woman, when she wasn’t fretting, and people were genuinely concerned about her since she had seemed to withdraw from local society. Adelia h
ad sent out a selective number of cards, but of course, plenty of people turned up on the chance that social politeness meant they would not be turned away.
Mrs Carstairs arrived early, enveloped Felicia in a warm embrace, gave her gifts of fine chocolates wrapped in tissue paper, and departed quickly. She brought a smile to everyone’s face. Others came and went and Adelia was pleased that people were obviously willing to stick to the convention of not outstaying one’s welcome. Fifteen minutes was quite sufficient. Only one person dared to make a sniffy comment, muttering some underhand remark about the “overdone decoration, like the way my grandmother has her parlour.”
Lady Agnes came to join Adelia around a quarter to four as she sat in the shade of a tree on the lawn. “What time is this gentleman expected?” she asked. “And I warn you, I am not of a mind to pay him any attention at all.”
“I rather fancy he feels the same way about the whole thing,” Adelia said, and her words got exactly the reaction that she had intended them to.
Lady Agnes huffed and said, “Oh, indeed? I shall make him pay attention to me if that is what I choose to do. Now, wait. I fancy that you are playing me off against him. Lady Calaway, you are a manipulative woman.”
“Yes, I am. And I take pride in it. No, now if I may speak more seriously, please just converse with him and see if your manners and attitudes align. If they do – all is well. If not – there is no harm done. There are no expectations on either side. Neither of you are in desperate need of a husband or a wife, so neither of you are propelled by the same urgency that might fuel a younger person who has all the pressure of society, family and time upon them. You can take it or leave it, as you will.”
“It does rather take the pressure off, yes,” Lady Agnes said, adding in a lower voice, “Though if he does not like me, I shall be put out, no matter how much I tell myself I am above such things at my age. How ridiculous we all are!”
