Chapter Thirteen
Let me be certain I understand this,” Lexington said, rubbing his fingers against his temples.
“You took a couple of tourists on a jaunty little excursion to Bramble-in-the-Vale, enlisted them to deceive a member of local government, managed to get yourselves kidnapped by said local government official’s daughter, then blackmailed them into granting Crawley an exclusive interview rather than allowing the wheels of justice to operate? ”
He sounded, Georgie thought, very, very tired.
“I think you’re forgetting the bit where we learned that an esteemed colleague of yours is leaking private information to the local press,” she pointed out.
“I don’t think we should be so loose with the word ‘press,’ ” Arthur muttered.
Lexington stared at both of them for several seconds, then shook his head. “I think I need something stronger than tea,” he said, staring darkly into his teacup.
They were gathered in the Scrumptious Scone, because Sebastian had declared the moment they’d disembarked from the train that being kidnapped had given him a powerful appetite.
The tearoom was bustling as ever, but they’d procured a table tucked away in one corner that gave them some modicum of privacy.
Miss Singh and Miss de Vere had regretfully waved away the invitation to join them, as they needed to collect a book from the library before it closed.
(“We are reading Death of a Ghost for the Book Clue Crew this month—Miss Halifax said we’re welcome to join the book club, even though we don’t live in the village!
” Miss Singh had informed them excitedly.
“Mr. Penbaker himself told us the book was very good!”)
They’d had the good luck to run into Lexington as they were walking down the high street, and he had agreed to join them, though at the moment he appeared to be very much regretting that decision.
Sebastian, meanwhile, had a platter of sandwiches before him, and was eating his way through the stack with even greater speed than usual. “I’ve been traumatized,” he informed Georgie. “The only way to soothe myself is through sandwiches. They’ll help me emotionally escape that cellar.”
“Yes,” she said. “Your harrowing experience has clearly marked you for life.” She sighed, taking an unenthusiastic nibble of her own sandwich. Her mind was racing, turning over the morning’s events and the subsequent revelations, and she was feeling a bit discouraged.
“Did you learn anything at all useful?” Lexington asked, noticing her expression.
She pinched the bridge of her nose, grimacing a bit at the headache that lingered in the wake of that cup of drugged tea. “Just one: Penbaker was having an affair.”
“Allegedly,” Arthur added, sounding a bit unconvinced. “Forgive me if I take everything Lettercross said with a grain of salt.”
“This village has an awful lot of attractive women,” Sebastian said, with the tone of a connoisseur. “Might be difficult to narrow it down.”
Lexington had gone scarlet and busied himself slicing the crusts off his sandwich. Without missing a beat, Arthur reached across the table to steal one of his crusts; Lexington gave him a stern look.
“Waste not,” Arthur said with a shrug.
Georgie, meanwhile, was frowning down at her plate, something niggling at the back of her mind. She glanced out the window in time to see a pack of Murder Tourists walk past on that day’s Murderous Meander, one of them clutching a book. Georgie blinked, then clapped her hands together.
“Miss Halifax!” she said, startling her lunch companions into silence.
“Excuse me?” Arthur asked.
“Don’t you recall what Miss Singh said as she was leaving for the library? Something about Mr. Penbaker recommending a book to her—the one they’re reading for that godforsaken book club this month.”
“And…?” Arthur asked. “We know he liked to read crime novels.”
“Yes,” Georgie agreed, “and we know, according to Mrs. Penbaker, that it was a relatively new interest, as of… approximately a year ago. I wonder what could have possibly sparked it?”
“Perhaps the fact that his own village seemed to be turning into a Murder Village?” Lexington suggested.
“Perhaps,” Georgie conceded. “But perhaps it was his new paramour.”
“Ah,” Sebastian said, nodding. “That’s not a bad thought, Georgie. Librarians are famously licentious, you know.”
“No,” Georgie said. “I don’t know.”
“Well,” Sebastian began, in a tone of fond reminiscence, “there was a librarian at Cambridge who was extremely flexible—”
“That’s enough of that,” Georgie said hastily, watching Lexington blush even harder. Arthur, she noticed, was eyeing the constable with interest.
“So,” Arthur said, dragging his eyes away from Lexington, “you think that Penbaker commenced an affair with the village librarian, which inspired his interest in crime novels, and she poisoned him in some sort of crime of passion?”
“It would hardly be the first time a jealous lover committed a crime,” Georgie pointed out.
“Perhaps Mr. Penbaker ended the affair—or Miss Halifax realized that he was never going to leave his wife and grew enraged.” She paused, contemplating.
“And didn’t Mrs. Penbaker mention that Miss Halifax had helped plant the poison garden?
It wouldn’t be difficult to slip a clipping of something into a bag—or perhaps she has her own poison garden at home! ”
“I suppose it’s possible,” Arthur said, rubbing his chin. He stole another of Lexington’s crusts and glanced at his wristwatch. “I’d better be off—I want to head to the Register and get working on this exclusive exposé of The Deathly Dispatch and its sources.”
“I’d write quickly,” Lexington advised, “before the Lettercrosses tip off Harriday and he tries to threaten you into silence.”
“I expect the local police are going to look on Buncombe-upon-Woolly even more fondly after this,” Georgie said. “Which means it’s all the more imperative that we make progress on this investigation before they get wind of it. We need to speak to Miss Halifax.”
“How do you propose to do that?” Lexington asked, polishing off a sandwich. “I hardly think this is an appropriate conversation for the library.”
“No,” Georgie agreed, leaning back in her seat.
“I’ll think about it tonight—I’m sure I can come up with a plausible excuse.
One that does not,” she added, seeing Sebastian opening his mouth to speak, “involve you lying around the library reading a book in a state of undress, waiting for our allegedly licentious librarian to stumble upon you and demonstrate her”—Georgie grimaced—“flexibility.”
“Darling Georgie,” Sebastian said, glancing up from his loving contemplation of baked goods, “I’m flattered. You didn’t even insinuate that I don’t know how to read!”
Dinner at Radcliffe Hall that evening was somewhat subdued.
Georgie, still processing the day’s revelations, felt little desire to chat over the meal—Mrs. Fawcett’s excellent pork chops and roasted vegetables—but, somewhat more surprisingly, Abigail didn’t seem to be feeling very chatty, either.
Papa and Sebastian talked amiably of Cambridge professors whose names were meaningless to Georgie, and did not seem to mind—or possibly even to notice—the relative lack of contributions from the female half of the table.
It was June, and so even after dinner, there were a couple of hours of daylight left.
“I’m going to take Egg for a walk,” she said, as Mrs. Fawcett cleared the plates.
Papa merely nodded, and Abigail murmured something about reading a book in her room, but Sebastian glanced at her. “Fancy some company?” he asked.
In truth, Georgie wasn’t at all sure that she did; it had been a long, odd, confusing day, and she couldn’t shake the feeling that something about her perception of Sebastian Fletcher-Ford had shifted since that morning.
It seemed incredibly churlish to say no, however, so she merely nodded and went to fetch Egg from the kitchen, where she was hovering around Mrs. Fawcett’s ankles, hoping to be slipped a leftover slice of meat.
Georgie shivered slightly as she and Sebastian walked out the front door, glad she’d grabbed her favorite gray cable-knit jumper to slip over her dress.
Sebastian had ditched his suit jacket when they’d returned home that afternoon and was now wearing a navy-blue jumper that looked so soft Georgie nearly reached out a hand to stroke it.
The air had cooled as the sun sank lower in the sky, and around them the world was alive with the sounds of the countryside: birds warbling their evening songs, sheep bleating, the distant shout of parents in the village calling children in for bed.
Egg, after a long day spent at home engaged in her profession (napping), walked with a spring in her step, but the fact that she stopped to sniff approximately every five feet meant their progress was slow.
“You did well today,” Georgie said, after a few minutes’ meandering in silence. Sebastian was walking beside her with his hands thrust in his pockets, head down as though deep in thought. At the sound of her voice, he looked sideways at her.
“And you did well to manage to keep from sounding surprised as you said that,” he replied, with the air of a schoolteacher offering a pupil praise.
Georgie didn’t smile, but she wanted to. She wondered if he could tell.
“I meant it,” she said instead. “It was—well, being kidnapped and trapped in a dusty cellar would have been considerably worse if you hadn’t been there.”
“You’d have been just fine,” he said quietly, and she glanced at him, surprised. “You’re the most self-sufficient person I’ve ever met.”
“Surely not more so than the great Delacey Fitzgibbons,” she said, trying to inject a note of levity into a conversation that had somehow almost immediately come to feel a bit heavy, before remembering—too late—his revelations of the morning.
She grimaced by way of apology. “Or not so great, I suppose.”