Chapter Twenty-One
Tuesday dawned damp, dreary, and very, very busy.
The day commenced in less-than-relaxing fashion, with Georgie awakening warm and sleepy in her comfortable bed. Warmer than usual. Very warm.
Because there was a bare-chested man pressed against her back.
“Sebastian!” she hissed, scrambling to a sitting position before she was even fully conscious, belatedly grasping for a sheet to pull to her chest. “You have to leave.”
“Hmmm,” he mumbled, and she looked down at him, his golden hair tousled, his face oddly young in slumber.
She’d been alarmed to learn the night before that the only thing more attractive than the sight of him in his expensive jumpers was the sight of him in nothing at all.
She allowed herself one gratuitous look at the lean muscles of his arms and chest, then reached over, seized a pillow, and bashed him across the face with it.
That, at least, had set proceedings in motion.
He’d stumbled into his clothing—discarded in exceptionally haphazard fashion the night before—and then she’d frantically ushered him out the door so that he might return to his bedroom.
With a quick glance down the hall to ensure that neither Papa nor Abigail had decided to choose that precise moment to wander around, she’d more or less shoved him out the door, and had nearly closed it behind him, giddy with the sense of having got away with something, when it was pushed open once again—
So that he could take three rapid steps toward her, seize her face in his hands, and give her a kiss so deep, so lingering, that she thought it should probably be illegal this early in the morning.
“We are going to solve a murder today,” he informed her in a low voice when he drew back. “And then, once we’ve done that, you and I are going to talk.”
He dropped his hands, swept her an absurdly courtly bow, and then was gone, leaving Georgie to slump back against the doorframe and wonder, dimly, if all her limbs were still attached.
“Ahem,” came a voice from the hallway, and Georgie whirled around to find her father emerging from the kitchen stairs in his house slippers.
“Papa,” she said, acutely conscious of the dressing gown she’d hastily flung herself into and of the love bite on her throat she’d caught a glimpse of in the mirror. “Good… morning.” She feigned a coughing fit to buy herself a bit more time.
Papa looked unfazed. “Glad to see Fletcher-Ford is awake,” he said mildly, walking past her down the corridor. “I’d like to ask him about last year’s Oxford-Cambridge rugby union match at breakfast.”
And with that, he was gone. It was only several long moments later that Georgie managed to wrench her jaw shut.
“It is too early for scheming,” Arthur said darkly, a couple of hours later. Georgie had waited as long as she could before phoning him that morning—and had shown up at the door to his tiny flat at the not-entirely-respectable hour of half eight, Sebastian in tow.
Upon first arrival, Arthur appeared to be alone, but not five minutes after she arrived, there was a knock on the door, and Constable Lexington was revealed to be on the other side of it. “Hello,” she said upon opening the door. “I brought you a scone.”
“I happened to be passing,” he began a bit stiffly, “and I thought—”
“Constable Lexington,” Georgie interrupted, “why don’t you refrain from insulting my intelligence and just… not bother?”
A brief, startled silence; Georgie glanced over to see Arthur suppressing a grin, and he raised an eyebrow at Lexington, who was carefully avoiding Georgie’s eyes.
“All right,” he said, after a long moment, and then he added, “But only because I want a scone.”
And Georgie, rather startled, realized that that had been a joke.
Half an hour later, Arthur and Lexington had their marching orders. “I think all the files from resolved cases are in the back of some closet or other,” Lexington said, draining the dregs of the cup of coffee Arthur had given him. “No one will likely even notice me digging around.”
“But you can be back here by one?” Georgie pressed, a bit anxious. There were an awful lot of moving pieces to this plan.
“I don’t see why not, barring some sudden murder investigation that requires my attention—and given what you’ve worked out, that seems unlikely.”
“Has anyone at the constabulary noticed that you’ve been preoccupied this past week?” she asked curiously.
Lexington’s mouth tightened and then eased. “I’ve learned, over the past few years,” he said, his voice even, “that no one at the Gloucestershire constabulary cares overmuch what you get up to, so long as you don’t make anyone else’s job too difficult, and don’t rock the boat in any way.”
“How noble,” Arthur muttered, his eyes on his own coffee cup, and Lexington shot a sharp look at him.
“I told you—”
“Not now,” Arthur interrupted, his tone a bit curt. The two men looked at each other for a long moment, some sort of silent conversation taking place that made Georgie feel like a bit of a third wheel.
“Right,” she said brightly, standing to take her own teacup back into Arthur’s tiny, cramped kitchen. “Well, I’ll leave you to it, I suppose—and we’ll meet at the Shorn Sheep at one?”
“Where are you off to, then?” Arthur asked with a wary glance at her.
“To see Dr. Severin,” she said.
“Why?” Arthur asked suspiciously. “If you’re going to try to warn him off Abigail, then Georgie, I really think you ought to reconsider—”
“I’m not,” Georgie said simply. “But I do have a hunch that I’d like him to confirm.”
She might not have intended to warn Severin away from her sister, but she still was somewhat surprised—and not entirely pleased—to arrive at his cottage to find Abigail, of all people, standing on the front steps.
“Georgie!” Abigail at least had the decency to look a bit guilty. “What—er—”
“What am I doing here?” Georgie finished. “I might ask you the same.”
“Well,” Abigail said, creating more syllables than naturally existed in that word, “if you must know, I’m here to collect a packet of herbs Tom”—Georgie blinked at her sister’s use of Severin’s given name—“wants me to give to Mrs. Chester when I’m at the Scrumptious Scone later.”
“Herbs for what?” Georgie asked.
Abigail shrugged. “Some sort of joint trouble. He has a tea he claims will help. He’s quite knowledgeable about these sorts of things, you know,” she added, a note of defensive pride in her voice.
“He says lots of doctors think that medicinal herbs are simply something that ignorant country wives fret over, but that many of them actually work quite well.”
“Does he,” Georgie said. Her mind landed on that letter from Severin to Penbaker, on whose reverse side Sebastian had typed his test sentence on the typewriter. Severin had advised Penbaker to brew some sort of medicinal tea for joint pain, if she recalled correctly.
“Abigail, did you—oh!” Severin appeared at the door, a paper packet in one hand, and he looked surprised to see Georgie.
“Miss Radcliffe. Hello.” His voice—warm with affection when he’d uttered her sister’s name—went considerably more guarded upon spotting Georgie, and she realized in a flash that she was being rather horrible about this entire thing.
“Hello,” Georgie said, then paused for a moment before adding, “You might call me Georgie, if you want.” She glanced at Abigail and saw her sister’s face brighten. “I wanted to ask you a few questions about the day Mr. Penbaker died, if you don’t mind?”
“Not at all,” Dr. Severin said, handing the paper packet to Abigail. “Did you want to come in?”
“No.” Georgie shook her head. “Or, rather—this won’t take long. It’s just a couple of questions, really. Were you still prescribing Mr. Penbaker some sort of medicinal tea for joint pain at the time of his death?”
Severin nodded. “Nettle and willow bark. It’s an old remedy, but it works well. His wife had just come to pick up a new packet of herbs from me that morning.”
“Had she,” Georgie repeated, growing more certain by the second that her hunch was correct. “And do you recall the time you called on Mrs. Penbaker and her husband? She said it would have been just after two that she would have arrived home—does that sound correct?”
“No,” Severin said slowly, his dark brows pinched in thought. “It’s funny you should ask—I always keep a record in my notes of the times I attend patients, and I was just looking through them again this morning, searching for something else. It was around four that Mrs. Penbaker phoned me.”
“And Abigail, you’re certain that the fete planning committee meeting did not run long that day?” Georgie asked her sister.
Abigail nodded. “I remember it particularly, because I offered to do a dramatic recitation of ‘The Lady of Shalott’—just as a trial run, so they could see how impressive it would be!—but I was told we were out of time, because it was a minute till two, and we couldn’t run over.”
“So you were done at two,” Georgie said, “and Mrs. Penbaker did not phone Dr. Severin until after four. Leaving two hours between when her meeting ended and when she notified the doctor.”
Severin and Abigail frowned. “That doesn’t make any sense,” Severin said. “She told me she’d just arrived home and found him in that state—I remember it particularly, because she couldn’t tell me when he’d started feeling unwell.”
“It does make sense,” Georgie said, “if those hours in between were spent poisoning her husband.” She met Severin’s gaze directly. “And I think I know how she did it—and I’m going to get her to confess to it.”
By one o’clock, their plans were in place.
Mrs. Penbaker was usually at home eating lunch, after a morning spent at the village hall, giving tours of the murder exhibition.
They met, as arranged, outside the Shorn Sheep, though Georgie’s thoughts—of poisonous herbs and murderous plots—were derailed briefly when she caught sight of Sebastian. Or, more accurately, Sebastian’s knees.