Chapter 14 The Dead Husbands Book #2
Helena closed her eyes briefly. "There is a servants' turn behind the west passage. It opens near the room prepared for him. Agnes uses it when she wishes to avoid Marianne's maid. I know it because Jasper once forbade me to use it. Naturally, that made me remember it."
"Naturally," Constance said.
Helena looked at her then, and despite everything, a flicker of something like amusement crossed her face. It was gone almost before it lived, but Constance saw it. The sight felt indecently precious in a house built from dread.
"Bring no candle once we are near," Helena said. "There is usually a lamp left burning beside him. And if anyone comes, you are to say you followed me because I was unwell."
"That would put suspicion on you."
"Suspicion is already on me. It may as well earn its keep."
"Helena."
The name came without title. It stopped them both.
Helena's face altered. In the dimness, without the full armor of the drawing room, the change was almost unbearable. She looked not offended, but pierced.
"Do not use my name when I am trying to be sensible," she whispered.
"Then do not ask me to be safe when safety means leaving you alone with lies."
For a moment neither moved.
Then Helena said, "Come."
The servants' turn was narrower than the main passage and smelled faintly of soap, extinguished lamps, and cold stone.
Constance followed Helena through it with her heartbeat loud in her ears.
The house changed when one moved through its hidden routes.
The grandeur thinned. Paint gave way to plain plaster.
Thick carpets ended. Boards creaked with less forgiveness.
Dacre House, seen from behind, looked less like inheritance and more like machinery.
At the end of the passage, Helena paused and listened. Constance listened too. At first she heard only her own breath. Then a low murmur from somewhere distant, perhaps a male servant speaking belowstairs, perhaps the house remembering voices.
Helena opened the door a hand's width.
The room of death lay beyond.
Jasper had been placed in the smaller reception room rather than the grand drawing room, perhaps because the family wished privacy, perhaps because Inspector Carver had not yet permitted full ceremony.
Heavy curtains were drawn. A lamp burned near the mantel.
Another stood on a low table beside the covered shape beneath the sheet.
Constance had never liked the Victorian habit of making death into a room one could visit, but here the custom had become more than morbid. Jasper's body was not only being mourned. It was being staged.
Helena entered first. Constance followed, closing the servants' door without a sound.
For a moment, neither woman moved.
Jasper's covered face made a pale ridge beneath linen.
The sheet had been arranged with care. On the table beside him stood a silver candlestick, a small vase of white flowers, a shallow bowl, and three books.
One was a small prayer book bound in black.
One was a Bible. The third was wrapped in dark cloth and tied with a narrow ribbon.
Constance felt her mouth go dry.
Helena saw it too.
"That was not there when I last came," she whispered.
"When was that?"
"After Inspector Carver first questioned me. Marianne insisted I pay proper respect. There were flowers, the candlestick, and the prayer book. Not that." Helena's voice changed. "Not a wrapped volume."
Constance moved closer. The cloth was dark green, not black. It had been chosen to vanish in the dim light. The ribbon was black mourning ribbon, which made the object appear ceremonial. Clever. Very clever.
She did not touch it at once.
"If this is D.IV.19," she whispered, "then someone put it beside him after death. Not among the books. Near the body. The note was true."
"Or written by the person who placed it there," Helena said.
"Yes."
"Constance, if you touch it and someone enters, they will say you were tampering with evidence. If I touch it, they will say I was retrieving what I had hidden."
"Then we must make a record before touching."
Constance took out her notebook and sketched the table quickly: candlestick, bowl, flowers, prayer book, Bible, wrapped volume, the distance from Jasper's covered hand. She noted the ribbon, the cloth, the lamp, the time as near as she could judge from the mantel clock.
Helena watched the door.
When the sketch was done, Constance removed a clean handkerchief from her satchel and used it to lift the ribbon. The knot was loose. Deliberately loose. Whoever tied it had not meant the parcel to resist opening.
The cloth fell back.
A small folio lay beneath it, bound in brown calf, with brass clasps dulled by age.
On the spine, in small worn letters, was the shelf mark.
D.IV.19.
Constance heard Helena's breath catch.
For several seconds the room held all three of them: the dead husband beneath linen, the widow beside the table, and the cataloguer looking at the book that should not have been there.
"We found it," Helena said.
Constance did not answer immediately. Something was wrong.
The brass clasps were closed, but not evenly. The upper clasp sat slightly strained, as if the pages within had swollen or been disturbed. The leather around the fore edge bore a mark that did not match age. A pressure mark. Recent.
She opened the first clasp with the handkerchief. Then the second.
The book gave a faint sigh.
Inside were devotional texts in a formal hand, prayers, household meditations, notes on births and deaths, scraps of copied psalms, and later pages inserted in different paper. Constance turned carefully. Helena stood close enough now that Constance could feel her warmth, but not touching.
Several leaves had been cut near the back.
Not torn. Cut.
A narrow compartment had been made by pasting pages together and slicing an inner space from them. It was a hiding place inside a book, crude but effective unless one knew to look.
The compartment was empty.
Constance closed her eyes.
"Someone removed what was inside," Helena said.
"Yes."
"And left the book here to be found."
"Perhaps. Or intended it to be found by the right person, at the right time, in the right room."
Helena looked toward Jasper's covered body. "Beside him. Like an offering. Or an accusation."
Constance examined the compartment without touching the cut edges. A few fibers clung to the paste. There was a faint stain inside, brown at the edge, not blood, she thought, but old adhesive or perhaps wax. In one corner something tiny had caught.
She bent closer.
A fragment of paper. No larger than a fingernail.
Constance used the tips of her clean handkerchief to lift it. The fragment bore only part of a word, written in brown ink.
...band's...
Her heart began to pound.
"What does it say?" Helena whispered.
"Only part of a word. Perhaps husband's."
Helena stared at it. "The dead husband's book."
The phrase moved through the room like a draft from an opened grave.
Constance laid the fragment on a blank page of her notebook and folded the page around it. "The reference was real. Jasper's missing volume contained something. A note, a confession, a legal paper, a letter, something with that phrase. Someone removed it before we found the book."
"Or before they placed the book here."
"Yes."
A noise came from the hall.
Both women went still.
Footsteps. Slow, deliberate, approaching from the main corridor, not the servants' door.
Helena looked at Constance. There was no time to rewrap the volume perfectly. No time to leave. No time to hide without making guilt visible.
Constance closed the book, but left the cloth open. She placed both hands on the table, not touching the volume.
The door opened.
Lady Marianne stood there.
She wore a dark dressing gown over a high-necked night wrapper, her hair braided severely for sleep. She did not look surprised enough.
Her eyes moved from Helena to Constance, from Constance to the opened cloth, from the opened cloth to the book.
"How moving," Marianne said. "The widow and her cataloguer keeping vigil."
Helena stepped away from the table, deliberately placing herself between Marianne and Constance. "I could not sleep."
"No," Marianne said. "I imagine not. A guilty conscience is an energetic companion."
Constance felt Helena stiffen.
"Lady Marianne," Constance said, before Helena could answer, "this volume was found wrapped beside Lord Dacre's body.
It is the missing shelf mark D.IV.19. It contains a concealed compartment from which material has been removed.
I have made notes of the room's arrangement and will give them to Inspector Carver. "
Marianne's gaze settled on her. "You have been busy."
"Accuracy requires it."
"And how did you know to come here?"
Constance hesitated for a fraction too long.
Marianne saw it. Of course she did.
"An anonymous kindness?" Marianne asked softly. "How convenient for you. This house has become generous with scraps of paper."
Helena said, "If you knew the volume was here, you should have informed Inspector Carver."
"If I had known," Marianne replied. "But I did not enter this room to inspect furniture. I entered because I heard movement where there should have been reverence."
"You sleep dressed for interruption," Constance said.
Marianne looked at her. "A woman in this family learns readiness. Some learn it as duty. Others learn it as deceit."
"Which did Jasper learn?"
The question escaped before Constance could soften it.
Marianne's face changed very slightly. "My brother learned that indulgence ruins women and softness ruins families."
Helena's voice was low. "Your brother learned cruelty and called it principle."
Marianne looked at her then. Something hard and old passed between the two Dacre women. It did not feel like grief. It felt like inheritance.
"You will not speak of him so beside his body," Marianne said.
"He never hesitated to speak of me beside mine," Helena replied.
The room seemed to contract.