Chapter Five #3
“I’ll see if Lady Arden is available,” he said, poker-faced.
He had Clio wait in the gracious entrance hall, where decorative plasterwork swirled playfully across walls painted a delicate pale gray.
The balustrade on the elegant staircase curled with rococo twirls, the floor was marble, and between the flourishes of ornamental plaster huge paintings hung, life-size portraits of bewigged aristocratic women posed against bucolic backgrounds, wearing tight bodices and plumped-up skirts like puffs of silken cloud.
He returned quickly, his soles clip-clipping on the marble flooring, and Clio followed him down a corridor wide and long enough
to play cricket in. It was the sort of home where the owners were aristocratic enough that they probably did.
He showed her into a large and gracious drawing room where Lady Arden sat on a wide sofa facing the door. It was upholstered
in primrose yellow, and she occupied the middle seat, an aged charcoal whippet curled up beside her, unbothered by Clio’s
arrival. A fire crackled in the hearth. There were more oil paintings in here, and a collection of drawings. Side tables offered
homes to an ornate chinoiserie vase, bottles of alcohol, and a gathering of silver-framed photographs. It had echoes of the
Brutons’ home but was much grander.
Lady Arden was an older woman, in her late sixties, Clio guessed, beautifully preserved, with exceptional bone structure and
glacial-blue eyes. She was slender bordering on skinny and wore jeans and a black sweater, her collar a white lace crown that
stood up around the base of her neck, like an homage to Tudor royalty, who, to be fair, she could well be related to. A thick
strand of pearls hung over her sweater. The matching earrings were large enough to stretch her earlobes. She smelled of something
expensive and exuded confidence from every pore.
“Do have a seat,” she said. “It’s lovely to meet you.
” The sentiment in her words didn’t carry over to her tone of voice or her expression, where a trace of a smile appeared only fleetingly before her face settled back into looking stony.
There were some women, Clio thought, who had the ability to make you wither in their presence.
Lady Arden was surely one of them, but Lillian had been, too, and, in her mentor’s honor, Clio was determined that she would not wilt.
“No, thank you. I’m trying to trace a piece of embroidery that Eleanor Bruton had in her possession, and I heard it might
have been here?”
“Who?” Lady Arden said.
“Eleanor Bruton. From the Old Vicarage in the village. I was told she was a frequent visitor here when a relative of yours
was ill.”
“Oh, yes. She did visit rather tirelessly. A very boring woman, but my sister-in-law had a high tolerance for life’s strugglers.”
Her snobbery, Clio thought, was so uncompromising, it was borderline magnificent.
“The embroidery belonged to my sister-in-law. She was living with us here while she was ill. Bloody brutal cancer. It ravaged
her. Took her very quickly. After she died, the embroidery disappeared. I don’t know where it went, and I don’t really care.
It had some sentimental value to her, I believe, but it was very tatty and ragged. I didn’t see what the fuss was about.”
With such an embarrassment of extraordinary objects and artworks around her, Clio supposed this made sense.
“Why was Eleanor Bruton suspected?”
“Visitors who aren’t close friends often have sticky fingers.”
“Was Eleanor close to your sister-in-law?”
Lady Arden shrugged. “Not particularly. She was a church busybody. One of those types who gather around the bedsides of the sick and dying to nurture because they haven’t got anything better to do. I shan’t allow it when
it’s my time. It’s pure voyeurism, if you ask me.” She shuddered performatively.
“Who noticed the embroidery was missing?”
“That would be my niece. Mostly absent while her mother was dying, quick to arrive when it was time to collect her things, and apparently adept at pushing through probate at record speed. She made a lot of noise about the embroidery because apparently, my sister-in-law had promised to give it to her. She made a tremendous fuss about having had an emotional attachment to it, though you’d have thought we might have seen her more if that were true. Why do you want to know?”
Clio wondered how honest to be. “They have eyes and ears everywhere,” Lillian had said. They were often embedded in powerful
families.
“I’m not sure,” she lied. “My superiors don’t tell me everything. I’m just here to ask the questions and I’m very grateful
for your time.” She stood. Lady Arden watched her appraisingly, as if skeptical, and Clio felt a ripple of alarm. The man
who’d shown her in appeared in the doorway. Had he been listening? Lady Arden nodded at him.
“I’ll see you out,” he said.
Out front, Clio asked, “What’s your role in the household?”
“I’m Lady Arden’s butler.”
“People still have those?”
“Very much so.”
When she reached the bottom of the steps he said, “Someone else came asking about the embroidery.”
He had her attention. “Who?” she asked.
“An academic from St. Andrews University. A woman. She said she was working on historical bookbindings.”
“Did she speak to Lady Arden?”
“Just to me. Lady Arden wasn’t here at the time.”
“When was this?”
“It was last autumn, almost a year ago. She was quite persistent, to the point where I thought she might become a nuisance,
but we never saw her again.”
“What was her name?”
“I can’t remember off the top of my head, but I took a note of it somewhere. It was a foreign name.”
Clio handed him a card. “Could you get in touch if you find it? Let me know?”
“Of course. Is there something special about the embroidery?”
She didn’t have to lie. “I really don’t know.”
But she was beginning to believe there might be.
Olivia
Olivia Macdonald, wife of Judge Henry Macdonald, glanced out the window as she put on her necklace, a gold chain with a pendant
in the shape of a spiked wheel.
Outside, she could see the gardener working on the rambling rose at the entrance to the walled garden, pruning its thorny,
lashing branches into submission. Henry would want to tour the walled garden when he came home this weekend. It was his pride
and joy, and now it would be looking lovely for him, which was good, but Olivia struggled to feel as happy about that as she
might usually.
She was having what she called one of her bittersweet days.
Her husband had been with his mistress, Diana Cornish. Bitter thought.
But Diana was unaware that Henry’s wife was a member of the Order of St. Katherine who knew all about the affair. Sweet thought.
Outwitting Diana Cornish was satisfying. As for the affair being a source of pain? As every member of the Order of St. Katherine
must, Olivia understood, accepted, and made the best of the realities of her marriage. She well knew that the garden was only
Henry’s second-favorite place to be. The first was in Diana’s arms. Men will be men. You did not try to change them; you worked
with what you had.
Downstairs, she made tea and toast, which she spread thickly with her homemade marmalade, then sat down at the kitchen table
and opened her laptop.
The screen saver was a photograph of their twin boys from a few years ago, when they were still sweet.
Now, on the cusp of turning fifteen, they reminded her more of giant slugs, dull, oily creatures who were apparently semi-blind when it came to finding any of their possessions and permanently in great need of food, sleep, and charging cables.
There was work to do, with them, but Olivia wasn’t fazed. This was just a phase. She had a plan to turn them into fine young
men, and she had the time to do it, since no member of the Order had a job outside the family once her marriage was established.
It wasn’t allowed. That didn’t bother her, either. Ultimately, it was wives and mothers who held all the power in a family,
even if the men thought they did.
Multiple folders floated on the home screen of her MacBook, with labels like “Family,” “Volunteering,” “Housekeeping,” and
“Holidays.” The app bar glowed with bland software icons, nothing that might attract the attention of her sons (who anyway
tended to regard her and her interests as if both were transparent), or even Henry, who was a great deal sharper and more
attentive than his offspring but nevertheless content to imagine that Olivia wished to spend most if not all her days in service to him and their family.
She clicked through a few menus to reach the app she kept hidden: encrypted audio software. She opened it, slotted earbuds
in, and made a call.
“Hi!” Conchita answered immediately.
“Hi, sweetie,” Olivia said. “Well done.”
“Thank you.”
There were nanny cams hidden throughout Henry and Olivia’s London flat, including the bedroom. Henry had no idea. Olivia visited
the property so rarely that he considered it his private space, for all intents and purposes.
Olivia hadn’t watched any of the recordings of her husband making love to Diana Cornish since the first time.
Once had been enough. His tenderness had been the most difficult thing to witness.
The rest was just biology. Urges. But she’d watched the feed from the hallway camera this morning, and seen Conchita let herself into the flat while Henry and Diana were in the bedroom.
“It was pretty easy,” Conchita said.
Olivia knew this already. The footage had shown Conchita, wearing a cleaning tabard over a hoodie, cheap black leggings, and
sneakers, slip inside and make it the work of seconds to pick up Diana’s coat from the chair in the hallway, to remove Diana’s
phone from its pocket, and to install an app that would allow them to monitor all Diana’s phone activity. Conchita knew Diana’s
passcode because it had been recorded by the cameras before. They had to do this often, because Diana changed her phone frequently,