by Elsa Hart
Cecily’s thoughts remained on the Mayne estate. “And is it a large family?” she asked.
John examined a leaf and cast it aside. “Artichokes? Oh, I don’t know about the families and names in Latin you scholars use.”
Cecily corrected him gently. “I was referring to the Mayne family.”
“Oh, yes.” John looked slightly embarrassed. “The Mayne family, of course. I can tell you Sir Barnaby had no children. Martha says the estate is to be divided between the widow and a distant cousin.”
“And what will happen to the collection?”
John heaved a sigh. “That I don’t know, but it will be a shame indeed if it’s not looked after when he spent so many years laboring over it.” He paused and looked at Cecily from under wiry gray brows. It was an assessing look. “Try a radish,” he said, and handed a single translucent sliver across the table to her.
She took a bite, enjoyed the crisp texture and heat of it, and thanked him. “I am reminded that Dioscorides and Pliny both celebrated the radish above all roots,” she said. “And that a radish cast in solid gold was one of the decorations in the Delphic Temple.”
John looked pleased. “Don’t know much about the ancients myself, but the first time I ate a radish raw, like this, so thin you can see through it, was a revelation to me, Lady Kay, a revelation. I’d never thought to do anything but boil and fry and bake a vegetable. But now I say eat them raw whenever it’s the season for it. Sir Barnaby took some persuading on the idea, but Mr. Dinley was a great help to me in that.”
Cecily saw his expression fall as he spoke the curator’s name. “You and he were friends?” she asked.
John hesitated, then appeared to conclude that a person willing to sit in a kitchen and speak of radishes could be trusted. “I’d have said we were. He always came to tell me what he read about new vegetables coming to our English gardens. On several occasions he persuaded the master to put a little money toward the greenhouse so that I could attempt my own experiments with new seeds.” John fell silent.
Curiosity nudged Cecily forward. “Did he and Sir Barnaby often quarrel?”
“Quarrel?” John reached for a bowl of tansies and began to clean them. “No, Dinley wasn’t the sort to quarrel. Sir Barnaby shouted at him often enough, to be sure, but Dinley never seemed to take offense. He seemed—” John searched for words. “He seemed a contented fellow, Lady Kay. Quiet, diligent, happy to be part of the master’s work. No matter how hard I think on it, I cannot understand what could have made him do such a terrible thing.”
Martha’s voice reached them from the kitchen door. “We all believed we knew Mr. Dinley’s temperament.” Cecily turned and saw the housekeeper enter, Thomasin behind her carrying the bucket. The water inside it was darker than it had been, and the rags bunched in the maid’s hand were tinged a sickening pink.
“But we were wrong,” Martha continued. “And no pleasant memories of Mr. Dinley reading letters to us from distant shores can survive what he did. They’re dead along with the master. Walter Dinley is a murderer and a thief, and if there is justice in the world he’ll be punished for it.”
Cecily’s thoughts went instantly to the missing sheet of paper. “A thief?”
Martha nodded. “He stole the jeweled pistol from the Artifact Room, and that’s only what’s obviously missing. It was in a glass case at the center of the mantelpiece.”
“He didn’t have a pistol when I saw him,” said Cecily.
“Then he had it hidden in his jacket,” said Martha. “Or left a sack of stolen objects in the alley before he committed the foul deed.”
The explanation did not make sense to Cecily. She recalled Dinley’s words. We argued and I killed him. Everything about the scene suggested that Dinley had killed Sir Barnaby while in the grip of a sudden, violent rage, not in the commission of a premeditated theft. If Dinley had wanted to steal from the collection, surely he had subtler means available to him. And if he had taken the gun for its death-dealing power, why hadn’t he used it? “We were all surprised when Sir Barnaby left the tour so hastily,” she said. “Did you see him when he came downstairs?”
“See him?” Martha’s eyes narrowed. “None of us saw anything. We were all here in the kitchen.”
“What of the message that drew him down?” asked Cecily. “I understand it was delivered by a courier.”
Martha nodded. “I saw the man approach.” She gestured to the narrow strip of glass that gave the occupants of the basement kitchen a view of the feet, hooves, and wheels passing on the street outside. “I heard him knock, and I would have sent Thomasin up to admit him had not Dinley arrived at the door first.”
“But didn’t the courier wait for an answer?”
“If he did, he stayed outside the house,” said Martha. “We never spoke to him.”
Cecily could see the expressions of the three servants becoming withdrawn. Her questions were making them nervous. She tried to make her voice sound merely sympathetic. “To think,” she said. “Mr. Dinley was in the kitchen with Miss Fordyce only a little while before it happened.”
The three of them looked at her blankly. “Miss Fordyce,” said Thomasin slowly. “Was she the pretty one in the beige gown?”
Cecily looked at them in surprise. “Yes. He brought her here, didn’t he? To clean and bandage the cut on her hand?”
“Miss Fordyce never came into the kitchen,” said John.
“But Mr. Dinley was adamant,” said Cecily. “He said you kept salves.”
“I do,” said John. He gestured to a shelf lined with neatly sealed bottles of various size. “But I’m telling you the truth when I say no one asked for them yesterday.”
“What became of the young lady?” asked Thomasin.
Cecily stared. “She left. Dinley put her in a carriage. Didn’t you see it through the window?”
“No carriages came to the house after the guests arrived,” said Martha.
“Then Mr. Helm did not depart in a carriage?”
Thomasin answered. “The foreigner? No, I saw him go on foot.” Martha and John nodded affirmation of her words.
“Do you know where he went?”
“No,” said Martha. “And it surprised us to see him go. He was supposed to stay to supper. Sir Barnaby was clear on that.”
“At what time did he leave?”
John spoke thoughtfully. “The eggs had come to a boil, and I thought to myself the timing would be just right to serve them at six. It must have been something like a quarter to the hour.”
“So close to when it happened?” asked Cecily. At a quarter to six, the fatal argument might already have begun.
“It was a quarter to six,” said Martha slowly. “It was the last time I noticed the clock, thinking all was as it should be. The front door closing when he left was the last sound I heard from upstairs before the screaming.”
CHAPTER 9
Lady Mayne’s arrival later that afternoon necessitated a hasty emptying of the carriage house to make room for her coach. From the window of the Plant Room, Cecily watched John wrestle an assortment of enormous bones into a corner of the garden, then drag the painted coffin through the gravel to the house. It was not until Lady Mayne had interviewed the servants and installed herself in a chamber adjacent to the master bedroom that she sent her maid, a severe young woman named Susanna, to bring Cecily to her.
Cecily had spent the afternoon in pursuit of plant names. With her own specimens stacked beside her, she searched the Mayne collection for matching ones. She pulled bound catalogues and journals and indices from shelves. She read letters and traced her index finger over faded maps, following the routes of other travelers. With great care, she slid specimen sheets out from dense piles. She squinted to count dried petals and sepals and to decipher descriptions made imprecise by the cold, illness, fatigue, or haste of the collectors who had scrawled them.
The work cleared her mind and renewed her energy. By the time Lady Mayne summoned her, she had not onl
y confirmed that the sweet-smelling plant with pale pink flowers she had collected and pressed two years ago had been given the name “Salvia orientalis Absinthium redolens” by an earlier collector, but had also arranged her puzzlement over Barnaby Mayne’s death into a list of questions. She would not assign two plants the same name if there were discrepancies between them. It only followed that she would not accept what appeared to have happened as truth until she could make sense of it.
First, there was the matter of the missing gun. She had gone to the Artifact Room and located the empty glass box in the center of the mantelpiece. A label attached to it described a snaphance pistol of Spanish make etched in scrolls and florals and set with semiprecious stones. She did not believe Dinley had taken it, and she wanted to know who had. She also wanted to know why Dinley had lied about putting Alice Fordyce in a carriage, where Otto Helm had gone, what message had been delivered by the courier, and why a document had been removed from the desk. Finally, she wanted to know what Meacan, who to her knowledge had not yet returned, was up to.
With these questions turning over in her thoughts, she followed Susanna to Lady Mayne’s door. The room they entered was dim, the windows already draped in the black silk of mourning. If the chamber had ever been intended for use by the lady of the house, it had forgotten itself long ago. The collection had filled it, as it had filled the other bedrooms, like sediment ushered up a beach by a rising tide. Where the walls were not lined with cabinets, they were studded with turtle shells, antlers, and dried crustaceans.
Lady Mayne sat in a chair by an unlit fire, a candle on the table beside her. Her skin was as densely lined as the surface of an icy pond cracked by a fallen stone. The hair visible beneath her widow’s hat was gray. She sat very still at the center of the chair as if she was afraid it would tip over if she moved. Behind her on the bed, a white cat slept.
Cecily’s condolences were accepted with a tremulous nod. Lady Mayne started to speak, but her lips trembled and she pressed them together. Cecily offered to return at a later hour, but the widow shook her head and gestured for Cecily to approach. At last the quivering lips relaxed. Lady Mayne settled more deeply into her chair. “It—it is the odor,” she said in a tight voice. “It has been years since I endured a journey into the city.” She indicated the chair opposite her. “Sit, please, Lady Kay.”
A glance at the chair made Cecily pause. Resting on the red woven seat was an open box subdivided into sections, each of which contained a brittle husk of a beetle. Lady Mayne noticed her guest’s hesitation and craned her neck forward to look. She sucked in her breath. “Susanna,” she snapped. “How am I to receive callers when even the chairs in my own bedchamber are being used as pedestals for—for insects?”
The maid hurried over from the edge of the room, where she had been draping black cloth over shelves. She seized the box, set it on the floor, and slid it roughly under the chair with her toe.
“I apologize,” said Lady Mayne stiffly as Cecily took a seat. “My husband had no consideration for the comfort of his guests. I am mortified.”
“No apology is necessary,” said Cecily, somewhat taken aback. “To assemble and maintain a collection as remarkable as this must have required your husband’s complete dedication, a quality for which I have nothing but admiration.”
“Is that so?” Lady Mayne’s lips curved in a small, bitter smile. Her eyes, pale as raindrops on glass, focused on a distant point in her memory. “When we were married, my husband had his butterflies and his books, as so many educated gentlemen do. I imagined—you know how we women spin fantasies of times to come—I imagined that if God should grant us long lives, my husband would lean on a silver-topped cane as he pottered through our house showing guests his little collections. I would indulge his habit of buying books. A few antiquities, perhaps.” Lady Mayne’s gaze returned to the present. “Instead—” She stopped and indicated the walls around her with a listless hand.
“The Mayne collection became one of the most consulted in England,” said Cecily.
“Consulted?” Lady Mayne cocked her head as if she did not understand the word.
“By scholars,” said Cecily. “I know at least ten books of reference, essential books, that could not have been written without the aid of Sir Barnaby’s cabinets.”
“He used to tell me these displays would lead men to truths of great significance,” said Lady Mayne. Her voice was soft and cold as falling snow. “But that is not what I see. When I look at these walls, I see paths leading into realms of idleness and madness. And have I not been proven correct? Was not my husband’s murderer mad? Might it not have been these very shelves that made him so?”
Cecily had no intention of challenging a grieving woman’s views on the pursuit of knowledge, but Lady Mayne appeared to be waiting for her to speak. “Did you know Mr. Dinley?” she asked.
“I did not need to know him,” said Lady Mayne. “I met enough of them in the past. The collectors and their curators, the travelers and their patrons. Oh, they each had their particular obsessions, but it was what they had in common that made me retreat to my room and utter my prayers. It was the way their eyes burned like coals. They frightened me. Sometimes, even my husband—” Lady Mayne stopped herself, but the words she had been about to utter hovered between them. My husband frightened me.
After a short silence, Lady Mayne sighed. “Mad or not, it makes no difference now. And if the villain escapes the hands of the law, he will not escape God’s justice.”
Cecily hesitated. She had heard the finality in Lady Mayne’s tone. The widow accepted the explanation she had been given. Perhaps it would be wrong to introduce uncertainty to the mind of a woman seeking calm in the wake of bereavement. But wouldn’t it be worse to allow a lie to be perpetuated if there was a way to correct it? “Lady Mayne,” she said, deciding on honesty. “I am troubled by the circumstances of your husband’s death.”
Lady Mayne looked surprised. “Troubled, Lady Kay? In what way are you troubled?”
With the clarity and concision that was natural to her, Cecily explained. She told Lady Mayne about the courier, the print on the desk, the unexplained departure of Alice Fordyce, and the missing pistol. She spoke of Dinley’s temperament, and the surprise expressed by those who knew him that he was capable of such violence. The only item on her list of which she made no mention was the possibility of Meacan’s involvement. “I do not wish to cause you further distress,” she concluded. “But it seems to me very possible that Mr. Dinley either had a more complicated motive for the murder of your husband than he led us to believe, or that he did not commit the crime at all.”
Lady Mayne had listened politely, but without any evidence of strong emotion. “Did Walter Dinley say that he killed my husband?” she asked when Cecily had finished.
“He did, but—”
Lady Mayne interrupted. “I have known women of your disposition,” she said, not unkindly. “I believe you mean well. But Lady Kay, not only have I never met the man who killed my husband, but I have seen little of my husband since the day we wed. I did not know him. I did not follow his affairs. As to the exact circumstances of his death, I have no desire to learn more of them. I intend to remain in this house long enough to fulfill those obligations required of me by law and custom. When I have done so, I will return to a life that I do not expect to change significantly from what it was. If you will be so kind as to spare me, I do not wish to speak of this again.”
A rustling and crunching broke the silence. Cecily located the source of the sound near the hem of her skirts. The white cat had dragged the box of beetles out from under the chair. They were scattered, red and turquoise and black, over the carpet. It was using its claws and teeth to tear one to pieces. Susanna shooed the cat away and began gingerly to drop the beetles back into the box.
Lady Mayne turned her attention back to Cecily. When she spoke, it was as if their previous exchange had never occurred. “I understand that your husband’s estate is in
Lincolnshire, and that he is serving as consul in Smyrna?”
“That is so,” said Cecily.
“The coffee comes from that part of the world, doesn’t it?” Lady Mayne waved a weary hand. “I believe the coffee is much to blame for these obsessions that overcome gentlemen of intelligence. The drink exerts its will not only over the mind, but over the passage of time. They go into those coffeehouses together and become so lost in idle speculation that they forget their families, their devotions, and their duties. Your husband did not return to England with you?”
“His work at the consular office required him to stay.”
“But you must be eager to return to Lincolnshire. What prompted you to break your journey in such an unusual way?”
As Cecily explained that she wished to identify the plants she had collected over the course of her travels, Lady Mayne’s expression became coldly critical. “We must take care, Lady Kay,” she said. “Curiosity was Eve’s weakness.” She lifted a hand and fluttered it at Susanna. “Can you cover that shelf, also? Yes, yes, if the cloth will reach.”
She turned back to Cecily. “You must allow me to assist you as best I can in finding accommodation elsewhere. Doubtless you will wish to depart before evening?”
Cecily drew in a breath. “I had hoped, Lady Mayne, if it would not be an excessive burden, that I might stay a few days more. To complete my work.”
Lady Mayne’s brows lifted in surprise. “Surely that is not what you wish, Lady Kay. The bedrooms here offer no comfort, and the servants are so woefully trained that I am ashamed to call myself their mistress. This will be a place of mourning. You cannot really want to stay here?”
“It is a visit I have long anticipated, Lady Mayne. I can assure you my presence will not be an intrusive one.”
A thought occurred to the widow and her eyes narrowed. “You do not intend, I hope, to make further inquiries into my husband’s death? To do so would not only be against my express wishes, but would violate the sanctity of a house in mourning.”