A Sinister Establishment

by Lynn Messina

  Joseph muttered yes, but that was not sufficient for the butler, who insisted the other man speak in full sentences.

  “Yes, you have made yourself clear,” Joseph said.

  “I am gratified to hear it,” Marlow said.

  His tone was smug, for he obviously enjoyed browbeating his subordinates into acquiescence, but Bea could not picture the intimidating butler with a smile on his face, even one swathed in self-satisfaction.

  With his request roundly denied, Joseph saw no reason to remain and immediately quit the room to trim the lamps. Bea closed her eyes and prayed that Marlow would soon follow or at the very least stay in the pantry. The scraping of the chair against the floor indicated an intention to sit down, a development that at once relieved and horrified Bea. As long as he remained at the desk, she was safe from discovery but for how long? Sooner or later, her presence would be missed and she feared what would happen then. Kesgrave would question the servants, and ascertaining that she had not left the house, they would mount a search. Finding no satisfying answers upstairs, they would devote their full attention to the basement and there they would find her, flush to the wall behind the door in Marlow’s room.

  You are being needlessly negative, Bea told herself as she strained to hear Marlow’s movements. There was always the remote possibility Kesgrave would assume she had found marriage to him not to her liking and fled the house in secret. Even now, he could be knocking at 19 Portman Square to inquire about his errant bride.

  How easily she could picture the look on Aunt Vera’s face as Kesgrave explained that he seemed to have misplaced his duchess. It would be a comical mix of concern and confusion, for as much as she would desire her niece’s safety, she would never quite understand why he would wish for her return. Bea had to swallow a giggle as she imagined her relative assuring him it was for the best and perhaps he had escaped a—

  The scrape again!

  Bea froze as Marlow pushed back the chair.

  Was he standing?

  Was he leaving?

  Please leave, she pleaded silently. Please, please leave.

  To her relief, she heard footsteps, but the respite was short-lived because they moved in the wrong direction, toward the bedroom, not out into the hallway. The knob turned and fear caught in her throat as the door opened…opened…opened…and stopped a mere fraction of an inch from her nose. Letting out the breath slowly, she closed her eyes and pressed herself against the wall with every fiber of her being.

  And waited.

  She didn’t think he would linger long. It was the middle of the day, and he had too many responsibilities to absent himself for an extended period of time. No doubt he was merely taking a moment to ensure that his appearance was sufficiently intimidating, a supposition that was affirmed when she heard a drawer open. An unsettling silence followed as he made whatever adjustment he’d deemed necessary, and Bea squeezed her eyes tighter, determined not to witness the utter shock on his face should the horrifying moment of discovery occur.

  But it did not.

  Marlow completed his business in the bedroom and exited at once, leaving the door open so that Bea could observe him through the crack beside the frame. He returned to his desk but, fortunately, did not sit down. Instead, he straightened the stacks of paper resting on the surface even though they were already pristine and orderly. He pushed his chair in, carefully aligning the slatted back with the edge of the desk and quickly confirmed that the safe was securely fastened. Satisfied with the arrangement, he left.

  Intensely relieved to be alone once again, Bea nevertheless held her position, fearful that he would return immediately to finish tidying up the space—smoothing the blanket on the bed, perhaps, or straightening the wall clock, which was slightly askew.

  Tarry too long, however, and she would be back amid the brambles, a prospect so awful to contemplate she felt her bones turn to ice. Purposely, she counted to ten, then back down to zero, and screwing her courage to the sticking place, slid out from behind the door. With a calm that was at once deliberate and hard won, she walked through the pantry and felt the unbearable pitch of her anxiety subside the second she stepped into the corridor.

  It was empty. Nobody saw her.

  Whatever happened now, whatever disaster befell her, she could bear it with equanimity because it would be a million times less horrible than being found tucked behind the door in his bedroom. If Marlow himself appeared, rounding the corner, say, on his way to the kitchen, she would suffer no response at all. Her heart would not pound; her pulse would not quicken.

  The awe she had felt upon first enduring the disdain of his thick black brows was gone, swept away by the bracing clarity of truth. Discovering his actual opinion of her liberated Bea from having to worry about it. She was relieved to know with unequivocal certainty exactly where she stood.

  Obviously, she could not remain in that place. Marlow was welcome to despise her and all women—she was not so brash and assertive that she would deny any man his right to cling to small-minded prejudices—but he was not allowed to scorn her aptitude for identifying murderers. Six years of social obscurity and failure had left her with few vanities, and she would permit no one to deride the one thing at which she excelled.

  Thinking she overestimated her abilities!

  She would show him who had an excessive valuation of their own skills.

  How precisely she would do that, she could not say, but as soon as she was safely out of the basement, she would figure it out and then he would be in awe of her.

  Chapter Three

  Saying that Bea decided in a fit of pique to identify the villain who had chopped off the poor neighbor’s head was vastly understating the case.

  Oh, no. It was nothing so tidy or tiny as a fit.

  ’Twas more like an orgy of pique or a massive bout of pique or even a gargantuan mountain of pique so commodious a village of trolls could live in its crevasses along with the four princesses they kidnapped from the nearby castle to mend their stockings.

  It was an ever-expanding thing—the magnitude of her pique—and by the time Beatrice, Duchess of Kesgrave, sat down on the silk settee and pulled the bell cord in the drawing room, she felt consumed by it.

  Curiously, she had not started off that way.

  Climbing the stairs to return to the first floor, she had calmly and coolly reviewed the conversation between Marlow and the man he called Joseph. Well aware of the truism about eavesdroppers and kind words, she was determined not to take offense at slights offered in an exchange she had no business hearing.

  It had been easy enough at first.

  Marlow’s casual remark rejecting her investigative skill, for example, was in every way unexceptional. All men, even the most enlightened ones, assumed women to be inferior in some significant way—too weak, too emotional, too silly, too vain, too bookish, too selfish, too ugly, too capable—and she could hardly resent a Berkeley Square butler for holding the same opinion as every Bond Street beau who perused the wares on offer at the Western Exchange.

  Likewise, his attribution of her deductive accomplishments to Kesgrave. As a longstanding member of the household, Marlow could not be expected to retain the youthful cynicism of a newly hired footman. A dozen years or so into his service, he subscribed wholly to the doctrine of the duke’s perfection, which, to be fair, was the only appropriate response to a coronet and a five-hundred-year-old name. After all, what was the purpose of the lavish munificence of the Matlock family tree if not to overwhelm the servants?

  In the same vein, his observation about the Earl of Wem had only made her laugh. To describe eliciting a confession of murder as a stroke of luck—as if his lordship had been an apple that happened to fall while Bea was standing underneath the branch—required mental contortions so great she was surprised Marlow did not suffer spasms of pain from the effort.

  Yes, Bea had remained calm and cool as she replayed the conversation in her head, but then she arrived at his description of th
e events on the terrace at Lord Larkwell’s ball and her composure deserted her. Hearing those words again almost stopped her heart. Her cheeks turned first to fire and then to ice. And her breath—it seemed to expel itself from her lungs all at once, making it impossible to breathe.

  At the top of the staircase, her hand clutching the railing, Bea had feared she was about to faint.

  What an extravagant reaction!

  So much fuss over a minor thing, she had thought in disgust. All of London believed she had trapped the duke into marriage, her family included. Aunt Vera had been more delicate in her judgment, refraining from using harsh terms such as vulgar display and inevitable debacle, but the implication was exactly the same: A woman of Bea’s indifferent attributes could nab a man of Kesgrave’s only through trickery and deceit.

  A widely held notion and yet somehow it had brought her to the brink of a swoon. That was troubling.

  The heavy black brows were part of it. Aunt Vera’s countenance could express disapproval in myriad ways, but her eyebrows were thin and brown and rarely pulsated. Nor could she sneer convincingly. Her condemnation took the form of petty slights endlessly applied, like pinpricks to one’s soul.

  But Marlow’s disgust was more like an arrow, sharp and true, and it struck her deeply. Like the lion with the thorn in his paw, she could not simply tug it out and nor could she ask Kesgrave to remove it. Appealing to her husband to soothe her hurt feelings was not only intolerable but impractical as well. He was already weighed down by responsibilities—his name, his coronet—and she would not add chastising the servants to appease his wife’s ego to the list.

  Ah, but it wasn’t just vanity, Bea had thought. It was household management and domestic tranquility and her entire future. Securing the esteem of the staff was vital to her career as a duchess, for no woman who failed at home could have any hope of succeeding in society. Marlow, she knew from painful firsthand experience, was determined to undermine her. One by one, yes, she had been able to dismiss the harm of his statements, but taken together they represented a stunning lack of respect for her authority.

  It would be one thing if he had kept his views to himself. Bea had no interest in regulating the thoughts and feelings of the people in her employ. But he had not held his own counsel. No, he had openly expressed his contempt, caring nothing for her dignity (“brash and assertive”) and for the position she was struggling to occupy with grace (“straining above her station”). And then he shared it with an underling, which made the offense all the more flagrant. Joseph was under his management, which meant he was subject to his influence and would no doubt be inclined to adopt his opinions.

  The situation could not stand.

  Clearly, it could not, for Marlow must not be allowed to infect the entire staff with his deleterious judgments.

  As it was, she could not hear the perfectly anodyne your grace without flinching. How much worse would her twitching problem be when those words were tinged with scorn? Would her entire body convulse?

  Even if she was not addressed with derision on a single occasion, the result would be the same because it was what she believed was happening that shaped her reality, not the events themselves.

  This fact she also knew from painful firsthand experience because she had suffered a horrendous slight soon after her come-out and had allowed it to ruin the rest of the season. Then she had allowed it to ruin the next season and the next until her aspirations were a hollow echo too faint for even her to hear.

  Could it happen again?

  Oh, yes, she thought, so very easily. Kesgrave House had an excellent library in which she could happily bury herself for decades.

  But she did not want to let the mistakes of the past repeat themselves. Last time, she had fallen silent, sanctioning her own exile and withering on the edges of society. By not defending herself, she had created her own terrible consequences.

  Here, however, Bea had to pause and, recalling the duke’s ministrations yesterday, last night and that morning as well as the lovely conservatory with the pink, purple and yellow flowers, conceded that perhaps terrible was not the most accurate description of the consequences she had been forced to endure.

  Even so, she had learned her lesson well from Miss Brougham: Allow an imposing creature to define the terms of your existence and six or seven years later she will lead you to your destruction like a lamb to the slaughter.

  Patently, Marlow would never stoop to conspiring with Lord Tavistock, as Bea’s archnemesis had, but it was impossible to say what other form his spite might take. And if he was turning the servants against her one by one…

  No, she thought furiously, the matter had to be dealt with swiftly and firmly, and resenting the obligation, she had tugged the bell cord.

  A footman entered almost immediately, a courtesy that disconcerted her slightly, for at Portman Square one usually had to wait a minute or two for a servant to appear and Kesgrave House was so much larger. Plainly, she stated her request and was further disconcerted when she was informed that Joseph was already present.

  “I am Joseph, your grace,” he explained.

  “Ah, yes, of course you are,” she said, regretting Mrs. Wallace’s thwarted assemblage of the staff more than ever. Formal introductions would not have necessarily solved the problem, for footmen were inevitably a matched set and therefore hard to distinguish even after being made individually known, but at the very least she would have been aware of the function Joseph served within the household. “Then just Marlow, please. Thank you.”

  As Bea waited for Joseph to return with the butler, she was pleasantly surprised to find herself utterly calm at the prospect of the confrontation. She took a breath and discovered that it was not at all constrained by the wild beating of her heart. Her heartbeat, moreover, was barely discernable.

  She ascribed her strange composure to her eagerness to perform the task at hand—no, not deflating the pretensions of a portentous butler, for that aspect of the encounter properly terrified her. Rather, she was excited to probe the mystery of Monsieur Alphonse’s grisly death. She might have no idea how to be a duchess, but she certainly knew a thing or two about being an investigator and the sense of familiarity and competence she felt was all she needed to breathe easily. Here, finally, was solid ground.

  Terra firma, she thought in homage to her cousin Russell’s inadequate Latin.

  Kesgrave would be appalled, of course, but even the prospect of his strenuous objection felt wonderfully familiar. He would argue that she was breaking her word, and she would counter that any promise made under duress was not binding. Then she would add that this particular situation did not meet the terms of their agreement because the neighbor’s body had not fallen in her path. In fact, she had no clue where his body had fallen. Then he would remind her of the spirit of her vow, and she would point out that she made no vow at all, thanks to Mr. Bertram’s offended sensibilities. (“I will not condone the denigration and mockery of the sacred institution of marriage with the introduction of gruesome and violent imagery. If that is what you require, you must seek it elsewhere.”)

  Oh, yes, Bea was eager to begin and could feel no sense of guilt or impropriety at the thought of investigating a murder from the high perch of a duchy. She had done everything correctly, even agreeing to adjust her vows, and still the decapitated corpse of Monsieur Alphonse had been delivered to her feet. She would never presume to know the strange workings of Providence or fate, but it did seem pretty clear to her that some higher power desired her assistance.

  It would be discourteous to withhold it.

  The door to the drawing room opened, and Marlow’s intimidating form entered, followed by Joseph. The two men were of the same height, but whereas the footman was lithe and narrow, the butler was thick and wide, with shoulders that seemed to stretch from one bank of the Thames to the other. It was the stoutness of his form, the way he stood as resolute as an oak tree, that made him so menacing.

  His disdainful blac
k brows were merely a bonus—gilding, for example, on a lily.

  Examining his blank expression, Bea detected no emotion at all, and although she had not expected to see a hint of shame at the deplorable things he had said about his new mistress, she had thought curiosity or interest would not be out of line. As far as he knew, she had just emerged from her bedchamber and requesting his presence was among her first formal actions as a duchess. Surely, he found that intriguing.

  Joseph’s visage, however, was equally bereft of emotion, which was, she supposed, a testament to the quality of servant a ducal home retained.

  Patiently, Bea waited until the two men were standing in front of her before explaining why she had summoned them. “It has come to my attention that an associate of Joseph’s has suffered an untimely death and he—Joseph, not his associate,” she said in an unnecessary clarification that indicated she felt more anxiety than she had realized, “would like to consult with me on the matter. I am prepared to offer my assistance now, provided Marlow approves. I am new to this household and have nothing but respect for the orderly workings of its management. I trust you will let me know if you have any objections?”

  As Bea had no intention of deferring to Marlow on the matter, she was being deliberately provoking in hopes of eliciting a reaction. The butler did not oblige, keeping his expression entirely empty. Not by a single twitch of a muscle did he reveal that the information he had just heard was shocking to him in any way. His eyes remained focused, his forehead smooth, his shoulders still. To any observer witnessing the exchange, he would appear to be hearing something commonplace that everyone already knew, such as the sun set in the west or grass was green.

  Ah, but Joseph…

  Baffled by the information, he gawked in astonishment, jaw dropping open and his eyes seeming to pop out of his head. Staring at her in confusion, he tried to comprehend what had just happened. How did she know?

  He glanced quickly at Marlow, and finding no edification there, returned his attention to Bea. “But how…?” he asked, trailing off as he struggled to formulate the question. “I don’t…I…I mean, how…?”