Fifteen #3
“He shouldn’t,” Hugh replied, following Michael through the door. “We sure as hell don’t trust him.”
Lachlan had known that too. He’d explained to Michael, through tears and a boy’s ineffective attempts to sweep up shattered porcelain, that Angus appropriated the good carrots for the saddle room whenever he pleased, and—Lachlan had added, chin jutting—“nobody crosses Angus Brodie. Not even when he needs crossin’. ”
Even Brenna didn’t cross Angus, and what did that say?
“Shall we stand about here, breathing old pipe smoke, or have a look about?” Hugh asked.
The place reeked of pipe smoke, and not in the pleasant lingering fragrance Michael associated with the winter evenings of his boyhood.
“Somebody needs to air this damned place out. No dower property should reek of pipe smoke.”
Based on the front hallway, the house was tidy enough. The floors were clean, the rugs freshly beaten, the corners and windowsills free of cobwebs, and yet, an unlived-in quality persisted.
“Unless you’re planning on dying in the near future,” Hugh said, fingering a dark wool cloak hung on a peg, “this house won’t have to serve as a dower property anytime soon. Even the clothing stinks of that damned pipe.”
“Then we’d best not linger here, or we’ll bear the stench ourselves.”
Though Michael wanted to head right back out the front door rather than snoop through his uncle’s belongings.
“What are we looking for?” Hugh asked, heading for the back of the house.
They were looking for a truth nobody had wanted to find.
“Angus probably keeps ledgers and diaries, that sort of thing. My uncle is not stupid. He won’t leave a confession in plain sight, but he might leave enough evidence that I can piece together what happened.”
The first parlor, the most spacious and traditionally the most formal, was largely as Lady Catherine had left it.
Furniture upholstered in the Brodie plaids, a thick Axminster carpet, and a large fieldstone hearth would make the room cozy in winter.
Cutwork and embroidery were framed on the walls, some of it done by Lady Catherine, but much of it less sophisticated.
When Michael moved closer to study one framed, lacy little circle, Hugh remained in the doorway.
“Anne hadn’t the patience for cutwork. Said it would ruin the eyes.”
“Brenna did this one.” The patterns cut into the paper weren’t as delicate or as intricate as Lady Catherine’s pieces, but Michael recognized the paisley motif. “She did this one too.”
“A parlor isn’t supposed to have bare walls. Angus himself did that painting, unless I’m mistaken.”
The painting hung over the fireplace, four children and a marmalade kitten, an unraveling ball of yarn causing much merriment for all involved.
“Preacher’s grandsire, perhaps,” Michael said, studying the kitten. “I can’t recall sitting for this, but Angus was always quick with a sketch. He caught Bridget to the teeth.”
And Erin. Small, pale Erin, who’d been near Brenna’s age but never her match for energy.
“Don’t suppose there’s much to find in here,” Hugh said, still not setting foot in the room. “If I committed a grand crime, I’d hardly leave the evidence in the most public room of the house.”
“Angus isn’t in here much.” Michael turned his back on the portrait, surveying the rest of the room. “The pipe smoke is barely noticeable.”
“How about we look in his office?” Hugh suggested. “I’d love to get a peek at what he pays himself.”
“I know exactly how much he pays himself.” Michael closed the door to the parlor, but had the sense he was leaving behind something noteworthy. Not evidence, perhaps, but something that might point to evidence.
They spent an hour in the office, and found every ledger book and tally sheet neatly organized and filed. Rental agreements, some of them going back to the time of Michael’s grandfather, were arranged alphabetically, and expired agreements kept in the drawer below those.
“Then what are these?” Hugh asked, peering into the bottom drawer while Michael investigated Angus’s desk. “We have the agreements in force now—and they don’t fill an entire drawer—then the leases for all those holdings either vacant or back in your control, and then—”
He scraped the bottom drawer open farther.
“Uncle has a mistress,” Michael said, running his finger down a column of figures in a green ledger book. “Down in Aberdeen. A Mrs. Fournier.”
Hugh lifted the half-dozen leases from the bottom drawer and brought them to the desk Michael occupied near the window.
“You sound pleased for the old bugger.”
Relieved, in fact. “You’re a widower. Don’t you crave the company of a friendly woman from time to time?”
Hugh peered at the figures marching down the page.
“I can’t imagine getting that lonely. Even if she’s French, comely, and creative, that’s a bloody lot of companionship he’s paying her for, and I doubt Angus gets down to Aberdeen more than four times a year.”
The sense of matters out of place grew stronger as Michael considered the figures. Mrs. Fournier was growing wealthy on the strength of Angus’s infrequent visits. On a steward’s salary, she was an extravagance, affordable only if Angus had investments somewhere yielding interest.
But then, how did a man make investments on a steward’s salary, particularly when he was using much of his income on a woman? How did he maintain his household accounts, put some by for his dotage, pay the help who served him day-to-day?
“What have you found there?” Michael asked.
“A few more leases,” Hugh said, pushing the stack across the blotter. “My own among them.”
With Neil’s name scrawled across the top in pencil. Each lease had a name similarly annotated, in faint pencil, and not the leaseholder’s name.
“You’re the only family still here. The rest of this stack have left.”
“Neil nearly went into a decline when old Deardorff and his boys cleared out,” Hugh said, peering at the top lease. “Jack Deardorff was the closest thing Neil had to a friend, though they seldom socialized.”
“I recall Olin Deardorff.” Michael traced Jack’s name—Johnson Andrew Deardorff—in a corner of the Deardorff lease. “He hated the winters and played a mean fiddle.” He’d also never liked Angus, not even when Michael had been a boy.
“That he did. Angus would be happy if I were to clear out,” Hugh said, “but nothing we’ve found suggests he robbed Brenna at gunpoint and made off with a year’s profits.” Hugh scooped up the leases and put them back out of sight in the bottom drawer. “Do we keep looking?”
“I don’t want to.”
“I do,” Hugh said, studying a bookcase full of tomes on art, drawing, architecture, and sculpture.
“I want to find something that will let you hound the bastard from the shire the way he’s tossed so many off their holdings, meaning no disrespect to my laird’s uncle, of course.
I never knew Angus took his art so seriously. ”
“He has talent,” Michael said, rising from the desk.
“My father admitted that much, but studying on the Continent thirty years ago was out of the question. Money was tight, the auld laird not convinced of the value of book learning beyond what it took to read the Bible, and France was falling into bloody disarray.” The office held no paintings, no drawings, and no feminine cutwork or framed embroidery.
And that was also a relief.
“If I were harboring evidence of a crime committed years ago, I’d not keep it in the rooms where tenants, company, or family might visit me,” Hugh offered with studied casualness.
“Neither would I.” Michael closed the ledger book with a snap and reshelved it in the same position from which he’d removed it. “You take the family parlor. I’ll have a look around upstairs.”
Hugh’s expression went blank, pityingly blank, for it was a sorry day when a man had to search through his uncle’s personal effects for evidence of a crime against family.