Chapter 13
Chapter Thirteen
“You can’t be serious,” I said, as he dipped the pen in.
He flicked a glance my way. “Whyever not? Tell me what to write, Pippa.”
“Doctor Meadows is dead,” I quoted, “Philippa Darling did it.”
Christopher ran the nib of the pen across the paper.
I watched the chicken scratch he produced with his left hand for a moment before I added, “That looks close enough to what I remember to pass for it. But it certainly wasn’t you who wrote the note, Christopher.
We were together when it was delivered. There’s no need for you to prove that you didn’t. ”
“In the interest of fairness,” Christopher said, with the tip of his tongue sticking out of his mouth as he did his best to get his non-dominant hand to cooperate, “we should all have to prove ourselves.”
After a moment, when he had finished the scrawl and laid the pen down, he added, “If we want everyone else to submit a sample, it won’t do for me to refuse, will it?”
Of course it did, when it couldn’t have been him. But I didn’t quibble, just watched as Tom picked up the pen and marked the sheet of paper with Christopher’s name and the date, before handing the pen and a blank sheet across the table to Francis. “Go ahead, Astley.”
Francis took the pen with a grimace and went to work. “For the record,” he said, eyes on his effort, “it wasn’t me, either. I haven’t left the Hall today. Or hadn’t, until Kit and I hared off into the village after Pippa and the constable. Connie can confirm.”
Constance nodded. “We were together from breakfast until luncheon. Neither of us left the grounds.”
“Do you happen to know if anyone else did?” Tom wanted to know, and Constance bit her lip as she thought about it.
“Christopher and Pippa, of course. Laetitia dragged Lord St George into the hedge maze after breakfast…”
I snorted. Tom arched a brow at me, and I said, “It’s the middle of November. Surely they could find a better place to canoodle.”
“I’ll have you know, Darling—” a familiar voice drawled behind me, and I raised a hand.
“Spare me, St George.” Whether he was about to tell me that any place is a good place for canoodling, or it was the fact that Laetitia could make any place a good place for canoodling, I didn’t want to hear it.
Part of me expected him to make his point anyway, but he didn’t. “As you wish.” Instead, he leaned over my shoulder and let his eyes rove over the table. “What’s all this, then?”
“An experiment,” Tom said, gathering up Francis’s scribbled note while watching as Constance took the pen in her left hand and began writing. Her letters were more precise and less spiky than Francis’s.
And as such, also less like the note I had been shown at the constabulary.
Not that I had believed, for even a moment, that Constance had written it.
“I’ll go next,” Crispin said, as Constance started on her second sentence. “You’re planning to test everyone, I assume?”
“Unless you have a better idea.”
But Crispin didn’t. “Good luck explaining this to my father,” he merely said instead.
He left his post behind me—I breathed out, surreptitiously—and made his way to the empty chair on the other side of Constance. There, he pulled a sheet of writing paper towards himself and waited for Constance to pass him the pen before he started his own exercise.
“Is that your dominant hand?” Tom asked after a moment, as the letters took shape across the paper, beautifully controlled and in straight lines, not spiky at all.
Crispin flicked a look at him. “I’m naturally left-handed. I had it beaten into me to use my right hand—”
I winced, and he added, “Not literally, Darling. Don’t worry.”
“I wouldn’t put it past your father,” I said. “Christopher said he tied your left hand behind your back so you wouldn’t use it.”
“Among other things.” He switched the pen to his other hand and kept going. “I won’t say it was fun. But I learned to write like a proper gentleman, and there was no permanent damage done.”
No, indeed. The letters he produced with his left hand weren’t any different from the ones he produced with his right. Neither line looked anything like the chicken scratches Francis and Christopher had come up with.
“Definitely not you,” I commented, and he put the pen down with a look at me.
“No. But then you knew that, didn’t you?”
Of course I had done. Six months ago I might have suspected him of trying to get me in trouble with the police for the fun of it. Now I knew that he’d never make that choice.
“Yes,” I said. “I did do.”
Tom grabbed the pen and used it to write Crispin’s name on the sheet of paper, and then handed the pen to me, along with a blank sheet. “Might as well do this properly.”
I arched my brows, although I accepted the pen. “You think I would accuse myself of a murder I didn’t commit?” Not to mention a murder I hadn’t had the opportunity to commit, since I had been with Christopher and had an alibi.
“No,” Tom said. “But if we’re going to do this, we’ll do it right. This way, no one can say I didn’t turn over every stone.”
Indeed not. I took the pen and began to scratch letters across the paper. The result looked quite a lot like what Constable Daniels had shown me, albeit no more so than what Francis and Christopher had produced.
“I can’t wait to see how my father responds to this,” Crispin said, watching my letters take shape with his chin on his hand.
“Do you think he’ll refuse?”
His eyes flicked up to my face for a second before dropping down to my hand again. “I don’t see how he could. Not without looking exceedingly suspicious.”
“You don’t think he’s guilty, do you?”
I pushed the pen across the table to Tom, who used it to write my name on the sheet of paper bearing my artistic contribution.
“My father?” Crispin said. “It’s you, so on the one hand, I wouldn’t put it past him.”
No, I wouldn’t either.
“On the other, why would he want Doctor Meadows dead? And why now? We haven’t seen Doctor since my mother died.”
“He was here when Lady Peckham passed,” I pointed out. “Sorry, Constance.”
Constance waved her mother’s death away as if it didn’t matter. “Never mind, Pippa.”
“We weren’t here when that happened,” Francis pointed out, and Crispin nodded.
“The last time I saw Doctor, was the morning Mum died.”
“Perhaps so,” I agreed, “but he must have attended Lady Peckham. Even if we were elsewhere when it happened.”
“He did do,” Tom agreed. After a moment he added, with a comprehensive glance around the table at us all, “What? You may have been at the Dower House, but I was here. At least until I motored down to Dorset after you. Doctor Meadows was here. I spoke to him.”
“Did anything happen on that occasion that might have caused—” I lowered my voice, “His Grace to want to get rid of the doctor?”
Crispin shifted on his chair, and Tom eyed me as if he suspected me of having lost the plot. “If I thought so,” he asked me, “don’t you think I would have said something about it?”
I didn’t answer, since the answer was self-evident, and he added, “No, Pippa, nothing at all happened. Everyone was upset, but other than that, they behaved perfectly well.”
“Why would you suspect my father, anyway, Darling?” Crispin wanted to know. He kept his voice low enough that the Duke wouldn’t hear. I chanced a glance in the direction of Uncle Harold, and saw that he was talking to Lady Euphemia.
“I don’t,” I said, “necessarily. You were the one who brought him up, if you’ll recall.”
He looked chagrined at the reminder, and I added, “Although surely he makes for a better suspect than almost everyone else here. He and Doctor Meadows have lived less than a kilometer from one another for decades. The rest of us barely knew the man.”
“Kit and Francis knew him,” Crispin protested. “You did. Aunt Roz and Uncle Herbert certainly did—”
“You did, too.”
He rolled his eyes. “If I had wanted Doctor Meadows dead, I wouldn’t have done it today, nor would I have tried to pin it on you.”
No, I knew that.
“If my father wanted Doctor dead,” Crispin continued, “he wouldn’t have done it when Laetitia and her family were visiting, either.
As you said, they’ve known each other for decades.
Practically any other day would have been better than today.
It’s much easier to come and go unobserved when you don’t have a house full of guests. ”
Yes, of course it was. “Nonetheless,” I said, “if your father killed Constance’s mother, and Doctor Meadows knew about it—”
They both stared at me, open-mouthed.
“What?” I wanted to know. “Lady Peckham came here with the clear purpose of snagging the title of Duchess, either for herself or her ward. And if he didn’t want to get remarried, because it was only a week since Aunt Charlotte died, after all—”
I stopped talking when Constance pushed her chair back.
“Connie?” Francis asked.
Constance looked at him, and then at me, and then she turned on her heel and headed for the door, but not before I—before all of us—had seen the tears gathering in her eyes.
“We’re going to talk about this, Pipsqueak,” Francis told me, before he bolted after her.
Guilt curled through my stomach, but I stayed in my seat and watched as they disappeared through the door into the hallway, one after the other.
At the speed Francis was going, he was likely to catch up just a meter or so down the hall, and even at this moment—perhaps especially at this moment—I knew that it would be better to let him deal with the situation.
I would have to grovel later—and I would do—but not until Constance had calmed down.
“Bloody hell, Darling,” Crispin said. “Not your finest moment, was it?”
“Clearly not.” I shook my head. “I get going, and then I don’t think about what I’m saying. The same thing happens when I get angry.”
“You don’t say?”