Chapter Eighteen #3
“But there’s more than that, isn’t there?” Constance said. “He has a motive to kill Percy, doesn’t he?”
Adelaide’s fingers twisted together in her lap and stilled again. “Some might think so. I believe he…admired me. In a respectful way that was nothing like Percy’s pursuit.”
“Did he know about Percy’s pursuit?” Solomon asked.
“Of course he did,” Adelaide snapped. “Percy was blatant. The whole town and countryside knew. And…” She drew another breath. “And I may have said something.”
“To Sir Felix?” Constance said. “What?”
“I can’t remember exactly, but…I met him at the market one day and stopped to exchange a word.
I think we had only said good morning when I saw Percy coming directly toward me.
In order to avoid him, I walked away from Sir Felix quite abruptly, and so I felt obliged to explain my rudeness when next I saw him. ”
“So he knew Percy was pestering you,” Constance said. “Knew that it upset you, and that Percy was, in fact, a threat to you, not just a neighborhood joke.”
Adelaide nodded. She held herself stiffer than ever, and Solomon guessed there was both shame and anger in this confession.
David had stopped watching her. He was leaning forward, gazing at his hands.
There was something he wanted to ask and would not.
Or, at least, not here. So Solomon did it for him.
“Did you return Everett’s…admiration?”
Adelaide glared at him. “Did I want him as my lover? My husband? No. But I was pathetically grateful for his respect and his friendship. He is a decent man, and I don’t believe it’s in his character to have blown Percy’s brains out and hidden his body so stupidly in the canal.”
She had a point. Everett knew the canal. He owned it. He would have known the body would surface in the lock, even weighed down so haphazardly with those few rocks in Percy’s pockets.
Constance said seriously, “Thank you for telling us this. What do you think Sir Felix was doing here that day? It doesn’t sound as if he was taking a shortcut.”
Adelaide hesitated, then shrugged. “I thought he was making sure all was well. I’ve seen him do it before, more often than he calls in.”
“Like a London policeman on his beat,” Constance said thoughtfully.
“I wanted Percy gone,” Adelaide said abruptly. “But I don’t want to be the reason he was murdered.”
Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?
The words popped into Solomon’s mind—Henry II’s reputed cry of frustration, referring to his archbishop, Thomas Becket, who was subsequently murdered in Canterbury Cathedral by Henry’s obliging knights.
Could Adelaide have inspired Percy’s murder in such a way?
Knowingly or otherwise? He wasn’t even sure he could blame her.
He could only imagine the constant fear of being pestered and stalked and hunted by such a man as Percival Harvey, who had imagined he held all the cards against an isolated woman concerned only for her reputation and her son’s future.
Constance said, “Percy is likelier to be the cause of his own demise. His obsessions, like his actions, are not your fault. Tell me, are you acquainted with Penelope Owens?”
Adelaide’s brow twitched, as though the apparent change of subject took her by surprise. “The doctor introduced us once. At church. She does not call.”
“Does she have a suitor, to your knowledge?”
“I have no idea.”
“It struck me that she likes Sir Felix quite a lot.”
Solomon sat up straighter. “She resents Adelaide.”
Constance wriggled, and produced the torn cloth she’d found in the wood. Leaning forward, she gave it to Adelaide. “I believe this is yours.”
“I tore it on blackberry thorns. I suppose I can mend it now and give it to charity.”
“Where were you when it tore?” Constance asked.
David snapped his head around as though to tell her off. He never got the chance, for Adelaide answered immediately.
“Some wild bushes near the canal, about a mile from the town. Near where David was sketching. I didn’t know it had ripped so badly until I got home and my maid started clucking. Why? Where did you find it?”
“In Larchford Wood,” Constance replied. “Stuck on an unlikely twig close to where the shooter must have stood to fire at Solomon and me.”
Adelaide was nothing if not quick. “You think Penelope found it and tried to implicate me? Just to give her more chance with Sir Felix?”
“Oh, more than that,” Constance said. “I think she actually did the shooting, though I doubt she meant to hit either of us. Just warn us off asking questions about Everett—whom she might even suspect of Percy’s murder—and implicate you at the same time.”
“It’s a leap,” Solomon said slowly. “But it makes a kind of sense. We need to speak to Everett again. And Penelope. And her father, come to that. The squire would be a triumphant match for the doctor’s daughter, would he not? And Percy could easily have been pestering her too.”
He made an instinctive move to get out of bed before he remembered he was in company and sat back again, chagrined.
Constance laughed. “Not until the doctor has seen you.”