Chapter 25 #2
“I had already been accused of murder and knew I was on the verge of being sacked. I wasn’t certain you would believe me.
” His response was not as deferential as perhaps it should have been, but it was nevertheless truthful.
We probably wouldn’t have believed him, for it strained credibility even now.
However, there was one question we could address.
“The handwriting,” I pressed my father-in-law. “Do you recognize it? Is it Mr. Thorndike’s?”
The secretary protested, but we ignored him.
Lord Gage scrutinized the page, answering almost immediately. “No.” He glanced at his desk, picking up another piece of paper and holding them both out for me to examine. “See?”
Gage and I stepped closer, comparing the two pages—one being the note to Birnam and the other presumably a sample of Thorndike’s script. They weren’t in the least similar.
Thorndike crossed his arms before him and harrumphed in affront as if this evidence entirely vindicated him.
“Return to your office,” my father-in-law directed. “We’ll discuss this later.”
Thorndike sniffed but complied. I couldn’t help but think his hours were numbered.
“Do you recognize the handwriting?” I turned to ask Gage and Trevor.
Both took their time perusing it but shook their heads.
“I don’t believe I’ve ever seen Miss Whitlock’s handwriting before,” Trevor professed, indicating that he’d not yet grasped our suspicions that she might not have been the person to write it. None of us disabused him of the notion.
“What is the meaning o’ this?” Birnam wanted to know after he and Paget arrived.
“Is this the missive that was slipped under your door?” Lord Gage thrust the paper out for him to see.
Rather than take it, a difficult task with his hands bandaged, he leaned closer, squinting his eyes to read. Almost immediately they widened in recognition. “Aye! I told ye there was a note, but ye didna believe me.”
Gage turned to Paget, who still hovered by the door. “You told us that you saw Birnam pick up the note and set it on the desk, but you couldn’t read it. Does this appear to be the same missive?”
“Noo, see here…” Birnam challenged, but Gage held up a hand, silencing him.
“It’s a simple question merely meant to further validate your statement. Surely, you can have no problem with this.”
Especially since Paget was bound to agree with his employer whether he actually recognized the note or not.
Paget inched closer, barely glancing at the paper before responding. “Aye.”
Gage nodded. “Then will you please fetch us a sample of Miss Whitlock’s handwriting?”
Paget looked to Birnam for guidance, who was eyeing my husband with dawning comprehension. “Do as they ask,” Birnam confirmed. He waited until Paget was gone before speaking again. “Ye think someone else wrote it?”
“You tell us,” Gage countered. “Does the script look like your daughter’s?”
Birnam didn’t flinch at his referring to Miss Whitlock as such in the present company, but his mouth did tighten in displeasure before he leaned close to examine the letter Lord Gage held out to him again. “I canna say for sure. But maybe? ’Tis certainly close enough tae fool me at a glance.”
I wanted to ask him about what Jemmy had claimed about the archery attack, but I decided it would be best if we remained focused on the missive first. While the men discussed the matter—Trevor included, now that he was in accord with the rest of us—I took the paper back from my father-in-law to analyze its contents.
It was short and, just as Birnam had portrayed it to be, a letter asking him to meet Miss Whitlock, but there were two discrepancies that leapt out at me.
“This missive asks you to meet her at 11:45,” I pointed out to Birnam.
“Aye, but I didna return tae my room ’til almost midnight, so I went as soon as I could.”
“But Miss Whitlock and I had arranged to meet at midnight.”
“Maybe she wished to speak to Birnam first,” Lord Gage suggested. “To explain why she’d asked him there.”
This was plausible, but it still struck me as strange given my earlier interaction with Miss Whitlock in the great hall.
“And she asks you to meet her in the blue room.” I gestured to the line in the note. “We were meeting in the office behind the morning room.”
“You do have to pass through the blue room to reach the morning room and beyond, so maybe she thought Birnam wouldn’t know where to go,” Trevor offered.
Again, this was plausible, and the fact that no one else seemed to find these incongruities significant made me doubt my own intuition. But I still couldn’t shake the feeling that these inconsistencies mattered.
Paget returned with a paper written in a neat, concise hand.
Compared side by side, the letters matched the note in size, but not in the style they were formed.
In fact, they differed enough that I wondered how Birnam hadn’t recognized it.
But it was at least possible that if he’d read swiftly without any expectation that it might have been forged, he might have missed it.
“Then who wrote this note?” Birnam demanded to know.
“Someone who wanted to lure you to the blue room,” Trevor supplied.
The implication being, to kill him.
Birnam’s features were thunderous, and while I might have been mistaken, I thought I detected at least a glimmer of genuine alarm in his eyes. “Ye said your secretary found it?”
“Yes, and he will be thoroughly interrogated,” Lord Gage assured him. “But in the meantime, I think you should continue with the precautions you started taking after your attack on the archery field.”
An attack his son had told me not an hour ago that he had feigned.
Birnam brandished a bandaged hand in Lord Gage’s face. “Figure oot who killed Miss Whitlock, and do it quickly, or I may have tae take matters intae my own hands.”
What exactly this meant, I didn’t know, but he turned on his heel and stalked from the room with Paget trailing close behind.
“Are we sure Birnam didn’t write that note to replace the one he allegedly lost?” Trevor queried once Birnam had gone.
“Let’s just see.” Lord Gage opened a drawer and removed a paper he’d clearly been saving for just such an occasion. I wondered where he’d gotten it.
But it took less than a second to apprehend that Birnam’s handwriting looked nothing like the script on the missive. Birnam’s scrawl—on a letter directed to Lord Melbourne—was chunky and uneven, while the missive was neat and precise.
“This doesn’t preclude Birnam from having forged and planted the note, just that it wasn’t written in his hand.” Lord Gage looked to Trevor. “What does Miss Birnam’s handwriting look like?”
Trevor’s brow furrowed in displeasure, but he answered anyway. “Not like this.”
There was a rap on the door, and Lord Gage called out for whoever it was to enter.
“Dr. Clarke is here to see to Mr. Birnam,” Bowcott informed us.
I couldn’t decide whether I was relieved not to have to perform the task of changing the unpleasant man’s dressings or disappointed not to have a ready opportunity to question him again.
“Very good. Show him up,” Lord Gage instructed.
I noted Trevor glide out the door before the butler closed it. I suspected he didn’t wish to have his loyalty further tested by my father-in-law.
“Were you and Anderley able to question Paget?” I asked Gage before I lost the chance.
“Yes, and he was as closemouthed as ever,” he said in disgruntlement.
“Not even your intimidation tactics worked?” I attempted to tease, but Gage’s grave response sobered me.
“No. But he did let one interesting thing slip.” His eyebrows raised. “He suggested that Birnam was in negotiations with Milngavie for Matilda’s hand in marriage.”
“Milngavie?” I repeated in astonishment, for I couldn’t imagine a less likely match. “But he hates Birnam.”
“That doesn’t mean he hates his daughter.”
We both turned to look at Lord Gage.
“Matilda Birnam is a pretty girl. And word is that Milngavie needs money.”
“But at the expense of his integrity?”
He shrugged one shoulder. “Men have sacrificed more for less.”
He wasn’t wrong, but if Paget’s claim was true…My stomach cramped. Poor Trevor. We’d thought there was time, but what if there wasn’t?
Gage’s eyes warmed with empathy. “There is one other thing you should both know. A pair of leather gloves was found tucked up on an overhead beam in the stables, and they’d clearly suffered some sort of damage from acid.”
“Then there goes our supposition about Birnam,” I replied. “For if he wore gloves, he wouldn’t have burned his hands and wouldn’t have had any reason to pick up the bottle after the fact to mask that.”
“Not necessarily,” Lord Gage cautioned, locking the missive as well as the sample of Birnam’s handwriting away in his desk.
“The gloves might also have been planted to divert suspicion. Or they might have nothing to do with Miss Whitlock’s attack, perhaps being left there by a neglectful stable boy. ”
I groaned, earning myself sympathetic looks from both my husband and his father. “Then, let me tell you what Jemmy Birnam told me.”