A Sinister Establishment

by Lynn Messina

  And still Marlow’s demeanor remained unaltered.

  It was an impressive achievement by any measure, and although Bea heartily resented his attitude toward her, she could not help admiring his self-control. Perceiving it, she regretted just a tiny bit that the scene in the bedchamber had not descended into full-fledged farce, with Marlow getting down on his hands and knees to find the new Duchess of Kesgrave trembling under his bed. Surely, the surprise of that development would have been too much for even the resolute butler. He would have been compelled to reveal some sort of response, even if it was just distress at the unsightly accumulation of dust beneath his mattress.

  But of course, there would not be thick layers of dust under the beds in the servants’ quarters. Kesgrave House was too well run for such slipshod housekeeping.

  Bea wondered how Marlow would react if she were to repeat his own words back to him. That, she felt confident, would unsettle him enough to cause him to draw his lips together in a slight frown.

  But verbatim repetition would also expose her methods, and that was the last thing she wanted. It was far more satisfying to appear slightly omniscient or as if in the short time she had been in the house, she had acquired an efficient network of spies.

  To bolster that image, Bea said in response to Joseph’s question, “I am a skilled investigator and make a practice of knowing things. That is why you sought my expertise, is it not?”

  Dumbfounded, the footman nodded. Then, horrified by the informality of the response, he straightened his shoulders and said, “Yes, your grace.”

  Happily, Bea did not flinch.

  Progress, she thought, before turning to Marlow and inviting him to stay. “I fear the events Joseph is about to relate will be terribly upsetting, and I suspect he will need your support. But you must not feel compelled to remain if you have other, more pressing matters to which to attend. I trust you to determine how best to allocate your time.”

  He dipped his head.

  At last, a response!

  Then he spoke: “If it meets with your grace’s approval, I will remain.”

  As Bea had hoped he would remain for the entire interview, she made no objection. “Very good,” she said. “Let us begin, then. Tell me about Monsieur Alphonse, Joseph.”

  The footman darted his eyes at his superior, as if seeking his consent. Bea detected no movement, but Joseph, satisfied by what he found, explained that the deceased servant was the chef at number forty-four. “It is the house just around the bend of the square. Mr. Mayhew hired him two years ago, during a trip to Calais, where Monsieur Alphonse owned a little patisserie. He made extraordinary cakes that looked like the pyramids of Egypt or Roman temples. He could make a cake that looked like anything, just anything at all. But he made other things as well such as these wonderful crispy, caramel biscuits he called croquantes. Last week he brought a box of almond ones when he came to visit Mrs. Wallace, and they were splendid. He called on Mrs. Wallace often because he was sweet on her,” he said, before hastily adding with a defensive look at Marlow, “Mrs. Wallace herself said that, so it is not gossip.”

  Bea was astonished by this information. If he had said that Napoleon Bonaparte himself lived next door she could not have been more shocked. “Monsieur Alphonse was Auguste Alphonse Réjane?”

  As she had already established herself as slightly all-knowing with the footman, he displayed no surprise at her question, merely tilting his head to the side and asking if she knew him as well. “He was very popular in the square because he was so good-natured and generous. Mrs. Wallace says that French chefs are usually demanding and unpleasant to work with, but Monsieur Alphonse was nothing like that. He was always smiling, even though he didn’t like working for Mr. Mayhew. He thought he was—”

  Whatever opinion the deceased chef held of his employer, Bea would not discover, for Joseph broke off his speech abruptly and immediately apologized for indulging in vulgar gossip. “Marlow has a very strict rule against gossip, which he finds reprehensible and unbefitting a great house such as this one. It is unacceptable behavior, your grace, and I am very sorry to have forgotten myself so fully.”

  Naturally, Bea found it noteworthy that the butler who had dismissed her as a brash and assertive schemer enforced an injunction against the very activity in which he himself indulged, but she was too interested in the information to broach the hypocrisy. That the most celebrated chef in Europe had lived around the bend in Berkeley Square was astounding. That he had been brutally murdered was heartbreaking.

  “I never had the pleasure of meeting Monsieur Alphonse, as you called him,” Bea said now in response to Joseph’s question. “But he is discussed in several books I have read about a new style of cooking called la grande cuisine, and he wrote a memoir about his experiences cooking for Talleyrand, Napoleon and Czar Alexander of Russia.”

  Clearly taken aback, Joseph stared at her as if she had announced that she was actually sitting on a tiger, not a settee. “He always said he was a shopkeeper. Something would happen that didn’t make sense to him and he would shrug his shoulders and say, ‘What do I know? I am just a shopkeeper.’ He never once said anything about cooking for Napoleon—at least not while I was around. I asked him once why he left France because he did not seem to like the English. He thought we were staid and predictable.”

  Well, yes, that was true, Bea thought, recalling the chef had used a variation of that description in his memoir. In fact, the exact phrase was “staid, predictable, unimaginative and banal.”

  “How did he respond?” she asked.

  “Mr. Mayhew’s generosity was irresistible,” he replied, darting another glace at the butler as if to make sure this statement did not violate the prohibition.

  “Was he satisfied with the bargain?” she asked.

  Demurring, the footman insisted he could not say.

  His tone was firm, but Bea suspected he could actually say quite a lot if allowed to speak freely. Instead, he refused to utter any word even vaguely scurrilous out of respect for the greatness of the house and the rules that governed its occupants. She wanted to applaud his scruples, but the truth was his integrity left her with a troublesome quandary. Given her own proclivities, it was entirely in her best interest to discourage gossip among the staff, and yet she would discover nothing about Mr. Réjane’s demise if none of the servants would provide her with information. Additionally, she did not want to undermine the butler’s authority by overturning his injunction against the practice but nor did she desire to weaken her own by deferring on a matter of some importance.

  Thoughtfully, she settled on a collaborative approach. “Marlow, I am grateful you have remained in the room because I would appreciate your opinion on the matter. I wholeheartedly agree that gossip is something to be discouraged, and I would be terribly aggrieved to learn the servants were speculating about the duke or myself or exchanging stories about us. But as distasteful as gossip is, I wonder if perhaps something about it isn’t essential to the process of detection. If murderers spoke freely about their actions and motives, then there would be no need to investigate them. What are your thoughts on the matter?”

  Marlow claimed to have no thoughts that did not mirror her own.

  It was a decorous answer and the only one a butler in a ducal residence could give to his mistress, and while Bea appreciated his concurrence, she wondered if he thought she had been brash and assertive in attaining it.

  Aware that the situation was not helped by nurturing the wound to her vanity, she returned her attention to Joseph and asked him what Monsieur Alphonse thought of his employer.

  Cautiously, as if suspecting an invisible trap, Joseph replied, “He called him a petit bourgeois.”

  Unfamiliar with the phrase, Bea could not believe it denoted anything positive, for even without the belittling adjective diminishing it further, the word bourgeois carried the negative connotations of mediocrity and excessive interest in material gain.

  “And that is a
bad thing to be?” she asked.

  Joseph nodded solemnly. “It is the very worst.”

  “How did this petit bourgeois aspect manifest itself?” Bea asked.

  “Mr. Mayhew had what Monsieur Alphonse described as a small-minded palate,” Joseph said with another worrying glance at the butler. It was one thing to discuss the neighbor’s horribly butchered servant and quite another to talk about his inadequate sense of taste.

  One did not have to be familiar with Mr. Réjane’s philosophy to recognize the phrase as the pejorative it clearly was. “Mr. Mayhew is averse to new flavors?”

  “He wanted Monsieur Alphonse to make only the same dozen meals for him and Mrs. Mayhew,” Joseph promptly explained, “and when he had a dinner party, he always insisted on the same quail dish over and over again. Anytime Monsieur Alphonse tried to make something new, Mr. Mayhew complained that it was too foreign or too elaborate. He wanted only familiar foods.”

  It was a staggering notion to Bea—hiring the most inventive chef in the world and leashing him to a narrow rotation of dishes—and she stared at Joseph for several long moments as she tried to digest the absurdity. If all Mr. Mayhew required was technical proficiency, he could have engaged any number of well-respected French chefs and quite a few English cooks.

  But of course he had not employed the chef for his skills but rather his name, which carried with it the luster of emperors and czars.

  “Was Monsieur Alphonse bored in his position?” Bea asked, unable to conceive how he could be anything else.

  Joseph pursed his lips for a thoughtful moment and said, “If he abided by the limitations set by Mr. Mayhew, then I think he would have been bored to flinders. But he ignored them entirely and made whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted. He stopped serving new dishes to the Mayhews, but he certainly did not stop creating them. The servants in the house ate better than some lords, your grace. He’d bring us samples too, to get our opinions on new dishes. He always sought as many opinions as possible. And the things he made were wonderful. Mrs. Blewitt, the housekeeper at forty-four, was told explicitly by Mr. Mayhew to supply Monsieur Alphonse with whatever ingredients he required so he had access to everything. He seemed very comfortable there, so I was surprised he had decided to leave.”

  “He was leaving?” Bea asked, leaning forward in her chair, as any change in the victim’s status was noteworthy. “When did he give his notice?”

  “Yesterday,” Joseph replied. “And no amount of money Mr. Mayhew offered him could induce him to change his mind, so perhaps he was bored to flinders.”

  It was quite startling, Bea thought, that the footman of a neighboring property would be privy to so much private information. “You are very well informed.”

  A light flush colored his cheeks at the observation, but he kept his eyes steady as he explained that he had overheard Monsieur Alphonse telling Mrs. Wallace his plans. “But I wasn’t eavesdropping,” he said, rushing to deny the accusation before it might be lodged. “I would never stoop to such shameful behavior. I just happened to be in the stillroom cleaning the bottles when he came to talk to her and he was excited and spoke so loudly I could not help but overhear. He said he was going to Paris to open a patisserie, and that it didn’t matter how much money Mr. Mayhew offered him to remain, he would not stay. He was leaving in a few days and wanted Mrs. Wallace to come with him.”

  Suddenly and strangely, Marlow squeaked.

  Chapter Four

  In the amount of time it took for Bea to look from Joseph to Marlow, she constructed and dismantled an overwrought three-act tragedy around the brief, jarring sound: Secret love! Thwarted passion! Seething jealousy!

  Afraid of rejection and desperate to maintain domestic tranquility, the butler had managed to successfully repress his feelings—until the day Mrs. Wallace received a proposal of marriage from an upstart Frenchmen who would dare install her in a patisserie. For her to go from keeping house in the finest establishment in all of London to serving cakes to petit bourgeois in Paris was an intolerable relegation, and he could not allow it.

  No, honor demanded a response, and determined to save the love of his life from the wanton self-destruction of foreign commerce, he raced across the square, wielding a…wielding a…

  But here Bea’s imagination failed her because she had no idea what weapon Marlow would wield to vanquish a romantic rival, and even if she could figure out the implement (something silver, she concluded, and polished to a high shine, the better to see the spark of righteous indignation in his eyes), she simply could not picture him swinging it with furious abandon until the illustrious chef’s head was removed from his body.

  The difficulty was not that he lacked the strength to sunder a neck completely, nor that he was deficient in the strong emotions necessary for a violent response, as he had clearly spent years stifling his passions. No, the issue was she simply could not reconcile the indignity of the carnage with the butler’s exalted demeanor. The sheer untidiness of decapitation would offend him—all that blood spurting in all those directions! Surely, he could not be expected to mop up the mess?

  More likely, the sound he’d expelled was the result of the mundane considerations of staffing. The prospect of having to accustom himself to a new housekeeper, perhaps one not as capable or receptive to his guidance as Mrs. Wallace, was no doubt an unpleasant one. Or maybe the explanation was even simpler still: He was alarmed to discover his management was so lax he failed to notice a romance flourishing directly under his nose.

  That would be a gross oversight for a butler as profoundly formidable as Marlow.

  Examining him now for some indication that she had not imagined the noise, she found his expression as impassive as ever. Joseph’s visage was equally bland, but she refused to let that sway her.

  Marlow had undeniably made a peep.

  Ruminating on it further, however, felt like a distraction from the more pressing issue, and she returned her attention to Joseph to ask how the housekeeper responded to the proposal.

  “She refused,” he said, pausing slightly as if allowing the butler a moment to digest the information. Then he added, “But she assured him it wasn’t because she did not enjoy his company. She was very clear that her refusal to go had nothing to do with her feelings for him. It was simply that Paris was so full of French people and very far away from her mother, and besides, she had never really wanted to travel anywhere but to Dorset because she loved being near the sea.”

  Although Mrs. Wallace could not be faulted for her logic, as Paris did indeed contain quite a great many people of Gallic extraction, Bea rather thought her decision had a little something to do with her feelings for the chef. If they had been warm enough, then she would have been inclined to put up with a host of inconveniences, including fewer visits with her mother.

  “How did Monsieur Alphonse react to her rejection?” she asked. She titled her eyes slightly to the left to observe Marlow’s response but had little hope of noting anything of interest. Having allowed one revealing squeak to escape, he was unlikely to permit another.

  “He claimed to feel great despair,” Joseph replied with pointed emphasis.

  The implication was impossible to miss, and Bea asked why the footman doubted the sincerity of the statement.

  “Well, he did not seem particularly despairing, did he?” Joseph said. “In his voice, I mean. I was in the next room so I couldn’t see his face—maybe he looked despairing—but his tone was not anguished at all. He said that he wished there was something he could do to change her mind and that he was beyond himself with disappointment, but then he asked Mrs. Wallace where in Dorset she would like to go and she said Poole and he said he had once visited Bournemouth with Mr. Mayhew. Then they discussed the unreliable pleasures of the beach for a few minutes before Monsieur Alphonse announced that he had to go. Mr. Mayhew was hosting a small dinner party and he had left the quails roasting. Then he promised to call again before he departed London and returned to forty-fou
r.”

  Bea agreed that the chef’s behavior did not appear to match his sentiment, but she allowed for the possibility that he had sought to hide the depth of his disappointment by engaging in polite conversation. She herself had done it on more than one occasion when she’d believed Kesgrave indifferent to her appeal.

  “And how did Mrs. Wallace seem?” Bea asked, wondering if the housekeeper’s behavior could have been spurred by something more sinister than a general disgust of foreign travel. Had she known of a threat to Monsieur Alphonse and sought to keep him safe by turning down his proposal, effectively renouncing him for his own good?

  If that was the case, then she had failed spectacularly in her purpose.

  Or perhaps the explanation was far more innocuous, and she simply could not bear the thought of leaving Kesgrave’s service.

  Regardless of the cause itself, if Mrs. Wallace had rejected him for any reason other than a lack of affection, then she would have been sad or forlorn.

  “It is impossible to say,” Joseph replied.

  Bea nodded, not at all surprised by this response. “Because she maintained the inscrutable air of good humor one expects from an experienced housekeeper?”

  “No,” he said sharply, “because James came running into the room with the news that the duke had just brought his bride home and that threw her into a state of extreme agitation. For a few minutes she paced back and forth in the scullery, folding all the drying cloths and scrubbing rags as if the first place the new duchess would visit was the kitchens. Then she ordered Cook to make fresh tea cakes and told me to clean the mirrors, which was odd soup because I had already cleaned them earlier in the day. I tried to point this out, but she was too agitated to listen. So I came upstairs and cleaned them again.”

  Ending his answer on a disgruntled note, Joseph realized with belated insight that his description reflected poorly on the housekeeper and he immediately sought to amend the account. “That is to say, Mrs. Wallace had been anticipating the arrival of the new duchess for more than a week and had everything so well prepared there was nothing left for her to do but straighten the towels in the scullery,” he said, then looked at the butler again, as if seeking his approval.