Chapter 46
The report of the little gun sounded very loud in the quiet room.
The Baron stood swaying for a moment, and Miss Macintyre, still clutching her weapon, leapt forward with astonishing agility and pulled the precious painting from his hands; there was a grotesque moment in which he seemed to resist her and they struggled, but then she managed to prise it from his grip, and jumped back as he subsided to the floor like a marionette with the strings cut.
This was no wonder. She’d shot him in the head.
Beatrice’s inner chamber door swung open and she burst out, then froze on the threshold, regarding the bizarre scene with wild eyes, apparently unable to speak.
The Major recovered himself first and strode over to check on the fallen man.
He was somewhat accustomed to seeing people mown down in front of him, as he hoped the others were not.
‘He’s quite dead,’ he said levelly after a moment.
‘That was an extraordinary shot, Miss Macintyre, straight through the eye. I always knew from a boy that governesses were greatly to be feared. Is it the sort of thing you make a habit of?’
‘Not recently,’ she replied, still cradling the painting in her arms as though it were a newborn baby she had just rescued from some deadly peril.
‘Though a certain skill with weapons has occasionally been useful on my travels. I did warn him; you both heard me. But even while I was saying it, I knew he wasn’t listening.
I was perfectly prepared, you see, to have to shoot him. ’
‘What in the name of heaven was he doing here in my room, whoever he is?’ Bea asked faintly, clutching the doorframe and looking frantically from one of them to another.
Nobody felt like pulling back the scarf to reveal the face, or what was left of it; this would in any case have been a difficult and unpleasant feat, in the circumstances.
‘It’s Lord Pallant,’ Miss Macintyre said, ‘and he came to steal this Rembrandt that’s been hanging here more or less unnoticed, I imagine, for fifty years or so.
I told you Mrs Albery had hidden depths, did I not?
These rooms were hers, I’m almost sure Mrs Pritty will confirm, and she received visitors here.
I’ve been waiting for him to appear since the night of the party.
And I was right, which is most gratifying.
But do you think we could all go downstairs and have some brandy, assuming there is any in the house? ’
Cecilia said swiftly, ‘I’ll go and get some, and wake Mrs Pritty to see if she can send Mr Fisk for the village constable.
She’ll know what to do. You both keep watch, and I’ll bring the brandy back upstairs.
We can sit in my room, Bea, not here. But we can’t leave Bianca – who I must assume is still sound asleep – alone up here with a dead body and an open passage that anyone else could use to creep into the house.
We’ve had quite enough excitement for one night. ’
Miss Macintyre and the Major admitted the sense of this, and Cecilia sped off down the stairs, still carrying her candlestick even though it gave no light.
No doubt she would be some while on her errand.
Alistair shook himself mentally. An absurd desire to tidy up made him wish to close the panel that led to the secret stair, which was gaping open onto the darkness in a manner he found most unpleasant, but he knew that this would be unwise; the authorities should see everything just as it had been.
This infernal affair was going to be difficult enough to explain without making matters worse by meddling with the evidence.
‘No doubt you were walking on the beach, sir, as you so often do, and saw Lord Pallant coming in the direction of this house?’ Miss Macintyre said in an entirely expressionless tone that still managed to convey both utter disbelief and the fact that she thought this much the best tale to tell.
‘That’s exactly right, ma’am,’ he said quickly.
‘Though I had no notion it was him. I really didn’t, I promise you.
There was something about the person’s manner as he approached the house that was extremely furtive, and yet I had no earthly right to challenge whoever it was.
I suppose it could have been any one of you, going about your private business, or an invited guest. Yet I thought somehow that I was not witnessing anything so harmless, I was deeply uneasy in my mind, and so I decided to follow. And here we are.’
‘Where does the secret passage originate?’ the governess asked with tolerable composure.
They’d passed into Cecilia’s chamber now, a place he’d far rather have been visiting in much happier circumstances, and Miss Macintyre had very carefully set down the painting in a corner, while Miss Constantine set about lighting a few candles.
He thought that they were all, including Cecilia, astonishingly calm for a household who had a dead baron lying in one of their bedrooms and a secret entrance gaping open behind him.
‘In the stables, inside one of the stalls. Once I had seen that, you must understand, I had no choice but to follow into the house and hope I would be in time to prevent some dreadful tragedy. Of course, if it had been some illicit visitor expected by an inhabitant of the house…’
‘It would have been excessively embarrassing for everyone,’ Miss Macintyre replied drily.
Miss Beatrice Constantine appeared to be blushing, but no doubt this was a mere manifestation of shock.
He’d seen new young officers do the same after their first battle; at least she showed no immediate disposition to cast up her accounts in the fireplace, or burst into floods of tears and call for her mama.
Women were made of sterner stuff than men, he’d often suspected, whatever society chose to believe.
But nonetheless, they’d all be better for some medicinal brandy, him included.
He had a great desire to ask the Scottish lady how she had known that His Lordship was going to come housebreaking, as apparently she had, but he thought it would be inconsiderate to make her go through the story more than once – the authorities would be doing that soon enough, no doubt – and Cecilia of all people deserved to hear the first recounting of the tale.
This whole affair, he was slowly realising, could easily have ended very differently for the inhabitants of this house.
Pallant dead was by no means the worst possible outcome. It might even be the best.
In some nightmare parody of a normal social call, the ladies insisted that he seated himself in the tattered old armchair by the fireplace, and he was glad to rest his aching leg.
They sat together on the small chaise opposite, and looked at him in the candlelight.
Nobody seemed to want to be the first to speak.
The house was very quiet again; he could hear an owl hooting outside in the wood.
Miss Constantine shuddered. ‘Un gufo,’ she said softly. ‘My mother would remind us that it’s said to be a harbinger of death, in Italy. But of course it isn’t; it’s just a harmless owl. People are the real monsters, not animals.’
Cecilia was back a few moments later, bearing a heavy tray.
‘Mrs Pritty is indomitable,’ she told them, setting it down on a side table.
‘She will wake her brother and send him in the dog cart to fetch Jem Kersey from his cottage, and together, they will go into the village to rouse the constable. She thinks that he will come back here with them to guard the house, but send someone for the magistrate from Debenbridge. All this will take several hours, of course, and we must be patient. I did not tell her, by the way, that the body is Lord Pallant. I thought it best that we should not claim to know – that it was just an intruder we surprised. After all, we have not seen his face. Though I saw the gold signet ring on his hand and recognised it, so I for one have no doubts.’
Beatrice moved over to her and began to pour tea and brandy, and pass out cups and glasses.
‘Miss Macintyre, I wish you would explain how all this came to pass. How could you possibly know that such a crazy thing as this was going to happen? I feel as though I am about to run mad and cannot properly understand what people are saying to me, as in a nightmare. Why is there a dead man in my room?’
Euphemia took a health swig of brandy before she answered.
‘You do not have quite all the pieces of the puzzle, my dear Beatrice. I know you had all largely put what happened on our first night here from your minds, but I could not. I was awake when I heard the creak – which we must assume now to have been the secret panel either opening or closing – and the more I thought on it, the more I felt that I had seen something, too, when I came out onto the landing. A dark crack in the wall, a deeper shadow: at any rate, something that I could not easily explain away. But I could find no trace of any secret entrance there, nor could I conjecture why such a thing should have happened. Not until I saw the Vermeer on the wall in your mother’s sitting room, Major. ’
He choked on his brandy. ‘The Vermeer…? Oh, the little blue and yellow painting of the young woman?’