CHAPTER EIGHTEEN #2
In her first youth, she must have been extraordinarily pretty, but now—approaching thirty I guessed—she was handsome, the sort of comeliness that owes everything to elegant bones and serenity.
She moved quietly and calmly, and it was this very tranquility I found so appealing.
I aspired to such sangfroid, but I had found it impossible to reconcile detachment with passionate fervor.
One may be elegant or enthusiastic, but seldom both.
If she was aware of my scrutiny, it did not offend her, and in a very short time we were comfortably ensconced with a tin of shortbread.
She handed me a cup and smiled.
“Napoleon’s wedding china,” she told me.
“Rather different from Stoker’s notion of hospitality,” I remarked.
She looked to him and they exchanged smiles.
Their friendship was a comfortable thing, and no doubt of long duration to make them so easy with one another.
He put down his cup.
“Lady C.,” he began.
“Do not think to scold me,” she remonstrated softly.
“I read the newspapers before I sent them on.
I could not stay away and do nothing to help.
I know how black things are against you at present.”
“All the more reason for you to have stayed in Cornwall,” he argued.
“If this all goes south, you might have at least been able to persuade the authorities that you had no notion we were here.
Now—”
“Now I shall be able to offer you and Miss Speedwell proper assistance,” she finished.
Her smooth brow furrowed slightly.
“It is unfortunate that Sidonie saw you.
She is a terrible gossip, but if I explain the danger properly,” she said to Stoker, “she will hold her tongue.
You know how she feels about you.”
I tipped my head.
“How does she feel about you?”
I asked Stoker pleasantly.
He flushed a dull red, but it was Lady Cordelia who replied.
“My maid has conceived a tendresse for Stoker.
Somehow she got it into her head that he is a proper buccaneer and she has never quite recovered.
The French can be very suggestible,” she added.
I was beginning to like Lady Cordelia.
She turned to Stoker.
“You must know it never entered my mind that you might be guilty,” she said quietly.
“Bless you for that.”
Her smile was tinged with sadness.
“I know how much the baron loved you.
You would never have repaid that affection with violence.”
I interjected.
“You, too, knew the baron, Lady Cordelia?”
She nodded.
“Through my brother.
His lordship collects, well, everything, really, as you can see,” she said with a gesture that encompassed the whole of the Belvedere.
“And the baron enjoyed art.
My brother first made his acquaintance a decade ago.
They attended an auction, both of them bent on acquiring a painting of lovebirds rumored to have belonged to Catherine the Great.
The bidding was furious, and in the end, both of them were outbid.
They consoled each other by way of a rather splendid bottle of port.”
“Friendships have been built upon less solid foundations,” I mused.
Her smile deepened.
“Indeed.
In any event, they became quite good friends.
It was through the baron that we met Stoker.
We were deeply saddened to hear of the baron’s murder,” she added with a pensive look.
“How did you learn of it?”
I asked.
“Veronica,” Stoker said, a warning edge to his voice.
“What are you implying?”
“Nothing.
I merely wanted to know his lordship’s reaction.”
It was a lie of omission.
Naturally, I was curious about the earl’s reaction to his friend’s death, but it also occurred to me that the Beauclerk family was the common ground between Stoker and the baron.
Perhaps they knew more than they ought.
Stoker guessed my thoughts and disabused me of them swiftly.
“His lordship and Lady Cordelia would be as likely to bludgeon Max to death as the queen would to ride naked in Trafalgar Square,” he said brutally.
To her credit, Lady Cordelia was not offended.
She lifted a graceful hand against my quick apology.
“Please, do not trouble yourself.
It is the most natural thing to wonder, and I should have doubted your intelligence if you hadn’t.
The truth, as it so often is, Miss Speedwell, is quite prosaic.
The baron was a friend who came to dinner two or three times a year.
He and my brother occasionally met for lunch or attended art lectures together, but that is the whole of it.
We did not know his friends, save Stoker, and we had no motive to harm him.
I give you my word.”
Her word could have been a lie, but I would have staked my own life upon that smooth, guileless brow.
Lady Cordelia was that rarest of things—a creature without malice.
She reminded me of a statue I had seen once in Sicily of a placid Madonna, above worldly cares and sweetly indulgent of those below her.
She went on.
“As for my brother, the best way to explain Ambrose is to say he is vague and oblivious.
It isn’t his fault, of course, but he spends nearly all his time with his collections.
He takes almost no notice of the world around him.
That is why I have the management of his household.
I keep his account books; I organize his staff.
I even oversee the rearing of his children since the death of his countess.”
I must have looked surprised, for she paused, and when she spoke again her voice was softer.
“I love my brother dearly, Miss Speedwell, but I am not blind to his faults.
He would be less than useless at murder.
He has no stomach for the gritty realities of life.
He couldn’t even bring himself to talk about the baron’s death with me.
One of the advantages of being a lady,” she said with a sudden wry twist of her pretty mouth.
“Gentlemen seldom like to discuss unseemly things with us.”
“But unseemly things are often the most interesting,” I pointed out.
“Indeed.”
She gave a sudden smile, illuminating her face like a rainbow after a storm.
“But we have more pressing matters to speak of than my brother.
Is it possible to prove that you were not at the baron’s house on the night of his murder?”
she asked Stoker.
“Well,” he said, tugging a bit at his collar, “in point of fact, I was with someone.”
“Excellent!”
she said, but almost as soon as the word fell from her lips, she followed Stoker’s glance to me and gave a little sigh.
“If you spent that evening together unchaperoned, I am afraid the damage to Miss Speedwell’s reputation will render her a less than desirable witness to your whereabouts.”
“Oh, that is the least of our troubles,” I told her with a wave of the hand.
I outlined—as briefly and delicately as clarity would permit—my previous romantic entanglements.
“So you see,” I finished, “the Queen’s Counsel would label me a harlot and discount entirely any alibi I could provide.
Also, I suspect leaving Little Byfield in the company of a gentleman I had only just met and spending the night with him in the privacy of his carriage would not be received at all well.”
True to the maxim that a lady never betrayed shock, Lady Cordelia merely inclined her head.
“Is there anything else?”
she inquired pleasantly.
Stoker covered his face with his hands.
“For the last several days we have been living as man and wife in a traveling show,” he said, his words muffled.
Lady Cordelia gave a brisk sigh.
“Well, I don’t suppose you could have managed things much worse unless you had actually been found standing over his body with the fossil in hand.”
Stoker winced, dropping his hands.
“Is that what killed him?
A fossil?
The newspaper gave no details.”
Lady Cordelia’s sympathy was very nearly palpable.
“I sent only the edition with the briefest account.
I thought it might be less painful for you to hear the details from a friend rather than read about them in some sensationalist story.”
They exchanged a look of understanding.
“But I will tell you whatever you need to know.
As far as the murder weapon is concerned, the investigators established it was a rather heavy piece of something—a shell, I think it was.”
“An ammonite,” he said flatly.
“It was a fossilized shell.
I know the one.
He always kept it on his desk.
What was it, then?
A crime of opportunity?”
She shrugged.
“The inquest determined it was murder by person or persons unknown.
Signs of a brief struggle, and immediate flight when the housekeeper, Mrs. Latham, came to investigate.”
“Was she harmed?”
“She was pushed down quite roughly and hit her head.
She remembers nothing, only an impression of darkness and pounding feet.
But she will be all right.
She has gone to stay with her sister in Brighton,” she said in the same distracted tone.
She fell silent a moment, then roused herself, her manner suddenly brisk.
“I think it best if we do not apprise his lordship of your presence here just yet.
He returned from Cornwall with me and is locked in his study, wrestling with a rather thorny paper he is writing for the
Journal of Antiquity.
He would not thank me for the interruption.
We will hope that by the time he is finished, the matter will be resolved.
In the interim, you must stay here in the Belvedere.”
“Are you certain we will not disturb his lordship?”
I asked.
“My dear Miss Speedwell, when my brother is engaged in his writing, you could walk into his study unclothed and take a nap upon his desk and he would not notice.
Besides, we cannot hope to hide you from him forever.
Merely until we can choose a propitious time to tell him.
Now, I shall require a scarf or glove.
Some piece of raiment that I may use to introduce your scent to the dog.”
I unwrapped the bit of scarlet silk I had worn at my throat and handed it over.
“That will do nicely.
If you happen to see a creature that looks like an overgrown bear roaming about, that is Betty.
Once she has your scent, she will not harm you.”
“Betty?”
“Short for Betony,” Stoker informed me.
“His lordship’s sheepdog from the Caucasus.
Two hundredweight on a lean day.”
“Heavens,” I murmured.
Stoker turned to Lady Cordelia.
“What about the gardeners?
And the children?”
“The children are away,” she told him.
“The late countess’s family like to have them for a few weeks at the end of spring each year.
The younger ones, that is.
Hugo and Casper are at school.
As for the gardeners, so long as you take the path back through the shrubbery to the little gate, you should not be seen.
They are busy planting an herb knot near the kitchens and the work is exacting.”
She gestured to a narrow door in the paneled wall.
“Various earls through the centuries have used this as a sort of sanctum, a place to escape the family.
They fitted it out with various comforts.
You will find the necessary domestic offices in there, a sink and .
.
.
and, er, other plumbing conveniences.
The Medici cabinet by the stove has a few tins of cake and tea and other things to eat.
Please help yourselves, and I will bring more provisions later.
In the meantime, rest and make yourselves at home among the collections.
I think you will enjoy them, Miss Speedwell, and Stoker has always longed for the chance to have a good rummage.”
“You have thought of everything,” Stoker said quietly.
A touch of rose blossomed on her cheeks at the compliment.
“I try.”
She stood and extended her hand to me.
“Miss Speedwell, a moment?”
I took her hand and walked with her to the door, where we were just out of Stoker’s earshot.
“Miss Speedwell, it is not my place to say this, nor your responsibility to respond, but I hope you will do your best to keep him occupied.”
“I am afraid I don’t take your meaning, my lady,” I began.
She gave me a thoughtful look.
“Then let me speak plainly.
By whatever means necessary, I hope you will keep him from boredom.
It is the demon that torments him and drives him to drink.
It will destroy him if he lets it.
And we who are his friends must not permit that to happen.”
I nodded.
“I will do what I can, Lady Cordelia.”
She squeezed my hand and slipped away, graceful as a fawn as she departed.
I returned to the snug and fixed him with a challenging eye.
“You have heard what Lady Cordelia suggests.
That we hide out here in safety until the police have found the culprit.”
“I did,” he said in a perfectly reasonable tone.
“And you agree that this would be the most logical, sensible course of action?”
“I do.”
“And you understand I mean to do precisely the opposite?”
His mouth curved into a slow smile.
“I do.
Where shall we begin?”
I returned the smile with one of my own.
“At the beginning, of course.”