Chapter Fourteen
Chadbon’s comfortable, successful life seemed to have turned into an ongoing nightmare that he could never quite wake up from.
The maid’s murder had changed the nature of his cozy little gathering intended to further the popularity of his wing of the party, and his own power within it, into a massive problem.
And just when he had congratulated himself on solving it with the curate’s quiet arrest and the discreet handling of the crime within the law, a much more dangerous scandal threatened to erupt.
Kate Ambrose was the wife of a prominent member of Parliament, the daughter of a well-connected baron. If anything happened to her on Chadbon’s property, quite aside from the fact that she was a distinct asset… Well, the consequences were too dire to contemplate.
He should never have allowed her to poke into the matter. And yet if she had not, the wrong man would have been turned over to the assizes. If that had got into the newspapers…
“How long has Kemp worked for you?” Lady Ambrose asked him as the carriage rounded the square and took the road to Chadbon Court.
“Kemp? Oh, decades. Since my father’s day. Why?”
“He arrived very quickly after the shooting last night. And at the scene of Dinah’s murder.”
Chadbon’s jaw dropped. “You suspect Kemp? My dear lady…”
“We have to look dispassionately at everyone. What do you actually know about him, my lord? Has there ever been any trouble between him and the other servants?”
“What sort of trouble?” asked Chadbon, mystified.
“Any sort. Over his discipline, for example. Have any of your staff ever left suddenly with no good reason given?”
Chadbon did not want to talk about that.
And yet the nightmare wouldn’t end until something was done.
He didn’t want his household turned upside down, but a servant of any kind would be an easier sacrifice than a well-born ally.
There would still be hope of covering up Kemp’s arrest by a retirement story, perhaps, and the pulling of a few strings…
But what the devil had Kemp to do with any such matters?
“Well, there was a maid a few years ago who had to leave,” Chadbon admitted reluctantly. “With child, you know. Can’t have such immorality in my house. Kemp fully agreed with me.”
“Dinah was with child too,” Lady Ambrose pointed out.
“Yes, but not—” He broke off, his face heating, and cleared his throat.
“Not by the same man?”
God, did she have to be so blunt? Washing his dirty linen in public, as the saying went, was against everything he stood for and everything he believed in.
But it was true that Society turned a blind eye to the peccadillos of young men.
No one who mattered would think any worse of Chadbon or Gerald for this one.
“Gerald, my son, was once an undisciplined cub. Marriage has sorted him out.”
“Was that an option for the maid concerned?”
“What? How the deuce should I know? My wife and Mrs. Thornfield dealt with the practicalities.”
“She was dismissed without a character,” Lady Ambrose said, as if it mattered.
For some reason, Chadbon tugged at his cravat. “Probably. It’s how such things are managed. I acknowledge it may not be just.”
“Could Mr. Chadbon be the father of Dinah’s child too?”
“No! He has not visited us in almost a year.”
“And Kemp himself does not bother the maids?”
Chadbon’s jaw dropped. “Good grief, no! He is more than sixty years old and as respectable as they come!”
“I may need to speak to him again, and for your sake, he must be honest.”
Chadbon felt he should object to everything about that statement, but somehow he couldn’t find the words. And the girl was already talking again.
“What about Mr. Otteridge?”
He saw the pattern, of course. Both men had been first on the scene after the shot last night. And she did not regard them as rescuers.
“A respectable, married gentleman,” Chadbon said with what dignity he could muster, “who has been my trusted friend and aide for a decade, and more, my closest ally in the Commons.”
“But a man of ambition. Do you think he covets your unique position in the party?”
Chadbon closed his mouth and sighed. “Of course he does. Any man of ambition would—including your husband.”
His reminder was quite deliberate, but it didn’t appear to surprise or offend her. “I rather suspect that is part of Gilbert’s use to you. But Gilbert is not here. Do you know anything, anything at all, that might help us prove that Otteridge did not kill Dinah, or shoot at me?”
“Only that a man of Otteridge’s position does not risk everything by murdering a maid, let alone a lady!”
“Not even if the maid blackmailed him?”
“Dear God, did she?”
“I don’t know, but we must admit the possibility. Who else was up last night when I came to you? Do you know?”
“I didn’t see anyone else. The servants were all abed, apart from Kemp. There was not even a light showing under my wife’s door by the time I retired. I truly think our culprit must be an outsider, you know. Like that drunken fellow who claims he was at Waterloo.”
“Tell me about the squire and his son,” Lady Ambrose suggested.
*
Having been welcomed back almost like the prodigal son—by Mr. Bancroft, at least—Rupert sat down in his own comfortable bedchamber to write his sermon for Sunday.
There were many things he wanted to say, but the right wording would not come to him.
His mind was too distracted by his own experiences, by Kate’s, by the whole mystery of Dinah’s murder.
He was idly tickling his chin with his quill feather, contemplating the abandonment of his sermon in favor of Chadbon Court, when Mrs. Dale the housekeeper knocked on his door.
“There’s a fellow at the kitchen door who claims you want to see him.”
The way she pronounced fellow gave him all the clue he needed. “Scruffy old soldier with one arm?”
Mrs. Dale sniffed. “Don’t know about the soldier part, but he’s certainly scruffy. Don’t smell too good, neither.”
Rupert, who had already enjoyed his first thorough wash in three days, wasn’t surprised. He stood up. “I’ll come down in two minutes, Mrs. Dale. He won’t steal the silver, so don’t worry.”
With regret, Rupert changed out of his second-best suit of clothes—the first, which had adorned him during his imprisonment, was already in Mrs. Dale’s capable hands—and rummaged in his cupboard.
He pulled out the frivolous, no-longer-new yellow pantaloons which had once pleased him enormously, and couldn’t help grinning as he donned them and fastened the buttons.
Hardly suitable to his current position, but damn it all, they were cheerful.
He left with a bundle of clothes over his arm and made his way down to the kitchen, where he found Salter sitting by the fire, grubby hat in hand, drinking tea and being harangued by Mrs. Dale.
“Thank you, Mrs. Dale,” Rupert said. “Drink up, Salter. We’re going to the stable.”
The stable contained only one small but game old horse called Matthew, who pulled the vicar’s even more ancient gig.
Bancroft had looked after the animal himself until his illness, since when Mrs. Dale had remembered to feed it, but she had otherwise no knowledge and no time to care for it.
Rupert had taken over the duty unasked when he first arrived, and the beast issued a pathetically grateful whinny to see him now.
“First things first,” he said to Salter. “There’s a tap behind the stable. Use it and put these things on. I’ll ask Mrs. Dale what can be done with your own clothes.”
“I got my own kit,” Salter said, sounding aggrieved. “It’s in a safe place.”
Presumably the last barn or disused shepherd’s hut he’d slept in before his arrest. “Not up to standard, though, it is?”
“Not like your rig,” Salter said, eyeing the yellow pantaloons.
“Be grateful I’m the one wearing it,” Rupert retorted.
“Oh, I am.” Salter took the towel, the soap, and the bundle of clothes, and went in search of the tap while Rupert made a fuss of the old horse, whom he led outside for a mild grooming. “So what am I doing here?” Salter asked from behind the stable, to the sound of splashing water.
“Well, I’ll need to get the vicar’s permission, but you could bed down in here in return for mucking out the straw and looking after Matthew here. Mrs. Dale will see you’re fed. Beyond that, I can’t promise much.”
“I wouldn’t be doing much.”
“As to that, I need you for scouting duties. Um, do you still have a rifle amongst that precious kit of yours?”
“Course I do,” said the rifleman. “Here, this coat’s better than the one you’re wearing! You want me to be mistaken for a nob? Swap you coats and it’s a deal.”
*
Just after midday, the sun came out, and in the flurry of everyone fetching coats and hats to spill outside into the gardens at the front and rear, Kate managed to slip out of the side door to revisit the scene of the shooting. But someone was ahead of her.
She stopped abruptly, a strange flutter of fear and confusion in her stomach.
A man crouched on the gravel path, gazing up at the house. He wore a clean shirt and coat and rather natty yellow pantaloons, his hat pushed rakishly to the back of his head—presumably so that it did not impede his view.
“Rupert!” She hurried toward him. “What on earth are you doing?”
“Trying to work out exactly where you were standing when the lantern shattered. I found some tiny pieces of glass around this part of the path, but they could have shifted a few feet in the clearing-up process. Can you remember precisely?”
“Yes. Nearer the door.” She walked back the way she had come.
“I tried to go in and found it locked, so I took a couple of steps back onto the gravel, here, still facing the house, and bent down like this.” Holding up the imaginary lantern in her left hand, she bent and swiped up a handful of small stones and crushed shells with her right.
Hearing the crunch of Rupert’s feet approaching, she let the gravel trickle through her fingers.
“It was dark and I wasn’t paying attention,” she added in a smaller voice.