by Lynn Messina
The cheroots on the other hand…
Yes, she thought, sitting up straighter in her chair. Mr. Mayhew furnished his chef with them regularly, and his wife, who reportedly did not approve of the practice, was spotted giving Mr. Réjane a pair of cheroots on the day of the dinner party.
Clearly, yes, that was how she did it, and once he was insensible, it would have been easy enough to slice his head off—physically, she thought, recalling the distinction Henry had made, not mentally.
Mentally, it had to have been horrifically difficult.
But if she had that within her, the ability to make the cut, whether unflinchingly or with great revulsion, the question was how she could have done it while also being in the presence of her maid.
Whatever her talents, Mrs. Mayhew could not be in two places at once.
Had Annette lied to protect her mistress?
It was possible, of course, for servants told untruths at the direction of their employers all the time. But collaborating Mrs. Mayhew’s story about a nightmare was not a harmless white lie; it was helping a murderess get away with her crime. Surely, Annette did not value her position so highly that she would run the risk of being hanged alongside her mistress?
And to hold to that lie when questioned by the Duke and Duchess of Kesgrave—Bea could not believe the lady’s maid had enough spine to withstand that kind of pressure without revealing anxiety.
No, Bea assumed Annette was telling the truth, which meant Mrs. Mayhew had enacted her deception via another method.
Scrutinize the variation, she told herself, reviewing the suspect’s story. The intensity of the nightmare was unusual, even if she sometimes had bad dreams. Ordinarily, she summoned her maid to her bedside to read her a comforting story for a short time. But on the night of the murder her dreams were so terrifying she could not bear to stay in her bed and insisted they retire to the dressing room for several hours.
The variations: a different room and a longer time period.
What, then, did the dressing room offer that the bedchamber did not?
Considering the unusual length of the interval, Bea immediately thought of the clock—the one that was prominently displayed above the vanity. She had noticed it almost as soon as she had entered the room and consulted it herself whilst teasing Kesgrave about their plan to have an informal dinner in the bedchamber.
At that time, she had rattled off how many hours and minutes until they would be alone together, and Kesgrave, marvelous pedant as he was, corrected her assessment.
What had he said?
The clock on the wall over there is off by several minutes, for in fact you should be trembling beneath me in one hour and fifty-one minutes.
Oh, but the clock should not have been wrong. According to Parsons, setting the clocks was among the duties performed daily by the staff. The only way the time could be off by so many minutes was if someone had moved the hands recently.
Not just recently, Bea realized, but since the morning of the party. The butler himself had said it: None of the chores had been performed properly the day before because the servants were too distressed by the murder. That meant the clock in Mrs. Mayhew’s dressing room had not been reset as per usual, which was why the time was still off when Bea consulted it yesterday a little after four.
Could Mrs. Mayhew really have been so devious as to—quickly, Bea did the calculation—push back the hands by an hour to make it appear as though she had been in the dressing room during the interval of the murder? If she had killed the chef after everyone had retired—likely around two o’clock, for the last person to go to sleep had been Mrs. Blewitt at one-thirty—then she could have returned to her room, cleaned up, changed the clock, climbed into bed and promptly affected a terrifying nightmare. Hours later, when the maid thought she was going to sleep at four, she was really going to sleep later, around five o’clock or so.
It was an elaborate scheme and very difficult to prove. But there must be evidence somewhere in the house: a bloody glove, a poisoned cheroot.
Bea’s stare as she considered Mrs. Mayhew’s guilt must have been quite intense for Mr. Mayhew, who was not known for his observational skills, noticed her interest and jubilantly remarked on it.
“The duchess is going to accuse you next!” he exclaimed, practically bouncing with excitement as he gestured to his wife. “By the time she is done making her way through the entire household, Kesgrave will have committed his whole fortune to Mayhew & Co.”
He spoke with such casual contempt for her deductive skills, Bea could not help but turn lightly pink at his observation. She tilted her eyes briefly down, and when she raised them again, she found the duke studiously examining her.
“Are you certain?” he asked softly.
She nodded.
“I suppose I am not fully surprised,” he admitted.
Mr. Mayhew, not appreciating the sotto voce exchange between the spouses, complained that he could not hear a word the duke was saying.
“La, they are probably discussing the best way to extricate themselves from our presence,” Mrs. Mayhew said with an almost aggressive vivacity, “for you are making them extremely uncomfortable with your talk of deposits.”
Reminded again of his manners, Mayhew brazened out the blunder by insisting he was considering only the duke’s convenience, for it was far easier to stay abreast of one’s investments when they were in a single place.
“You mean his steward’s convenience,” his wife corrected sharply, “for it is he who keeps abreast, not Kesgrave himself.”
As Mrs. Mayhew strove to appear delighted with her husband, Bea realized the woman had actually done him a favor by unceremoniously chopping off the head of his prized chef, for if she had not behaved so immoderately now, she would have inevitably behaved immoderately in the future—with him as her victim.
“He is right, Mrs. Mayhew,” she said, taken aback by her own strange reluctance to say the words forthrightly. Only minutes ago, she had laid the same charge at the banker’s feet and experienced not a hint of self-consciousness. Was it because Mrs. Mayhew was a woman or because she had not irritated Bea with the same vigor? She had felt repelled by Mr. Mayhew from the moment he’d started to detail his pedigree. “I am going to accuse you next.”
Having his supposition confirmed delighted Mr. Mayhew, who clapped his hands exuberantly, but his wife stared silently for several long seconds. Then said somberly, “Please don’t. It is not funny anymore.”
Bea rather thought it had never been funny: the greatest chef in the world cut down in his prime. All the wonders that would never exist.
“I have not worked out all the details,” she said, “but to start, I know you changed the clock in your dressing room to make it appear as though you were there between the hours of two and four when you were actually in the kitchen killing Mr. Réjane around two. I also know you administered laudanum to him so he would not struggle while you removed his head with a meat cleaver. You administered the drug via the two cheroots you gave him that afternoon. You used a cleaver because you had heard the kitchen maid threaten his life with it and you wanted suspicion to fall on her. You chopped off his head because you assumed that is how she would have done it. You murdered him because you feared your husband’s elaborate fraud would unravel if Mr. Réjane had been allowed to send a letter complaining about your husband’s mistreatment of him to the Mayhew brothers.”
The lady turned ashen. Her lips remained pulled in a friendly arch, as if she were contemplating a pleasant thought, but their red was the only hint of color on her face. Her eyelids blinked furiously, and Bea felt she could see the cogs in her brain turning as she tried to decide how to respond to such a thorough charge.
Bea thought her best strategy was to deny it categorically, to insist that her guest was confused or bore her some grudge or simply lacked the mental acuity of a man to understand the matter properly. The groundwork for the latter approach had already been neatly laid by Kesgrave, and
all she had to do was build on its very sound foundation. Female inadequacy could always be relied on to invalidate a very good theory, and here it was only her word against Mrs. Mayhew’s. Her case could not be proved so much as robustly argued.
Ah, but she was a duchess now, which meant any argument she made would be more solemnly considered. That was why the servants had so eagerly blamed each other for the vicious crime. They knew a peeress’s interest made them more vulnerable to a miscarriage of justice.
Nevertheless, Bea did not believe Mrs. Mayhew could be condemned on her word alone. She would have to figure out some way to maneuver her into admitting the deed. Or perhaps she could gain access to the private quarters of the house to find incriminating evidence, although it seemed unlikely that a woman who had planned a murder to such coolly brilliant detail had left a bloody night rail laying around.
Bea, however, was spared the necessity of doing anything more by Mr. Mayhew, who inhaled sharply and screeched, “You harridan! You fishwife! How could you behave so recklessly! Slaughtering our golden goose! Are you mad?”
Displaying none of the cold calculation with which Bea credited her, Mrs. Mayhew narrowed her eyes with fury as color flooded her cheeks. “Me! Me! Me! You are blaming me for this disaster! None of this would have happened if you weren’t such a hen-witted clodpole that you cannot come up with one other name when inventing excuses to meet with your mistress. The second I mentioned you had an appointment with an investor called Bayne I knew what you had done because Monsieur Alphonse stared at me so intently!”
Indignant, Mr. Mayhew jumped to his feet, his cheeks turning an unnatural shade of red. “Good God, you dimwitted harpy, she is not my mistress. She is my spiritual adviser and I cannot palm her off when she has vital information about our future to impart!”
Mrs. Mayhew leaped up as well and marched toward him until her nose was but a few inches from his. “You fool! The only thing she has to impart is a bill for her services, which you pay month after month without any consideration of our finances. And she is your mistress, you insufferable buffoon. Just because she reads the tarot while you are having relations does not mean it isn’t intercourse!”
“She has a harelip, for god’s sake,” he shrieked, as if that put an end to the notion of anything inappropriate about their conduct. “And I only compensate her generously because her advice helps the business.”
Mrs. Mayhew found this statement so maddening, she actually screamed. “I help the business by providing you with a gracious home and a serene hostess at your table!”
The banker cackled in contempt, a harsh and unsettling sound. “You gracious and serene? You are a shrew, a vile virago I have had to put up with all these years. And now you’ve ruined everything. Everything! And for what? For why? A wild misconception based on female intuition.”
His wife leaned forward until her nose was actually pressing against his and yelled at the top of her lungs, “He was going to send a letter.”
“Good God, yes, let’s hack up the cook because he was going to put pen to paper. What a very great horror!” he shouted with sarcastic fervor. “Get it through your head, you abhorrent termagant: My brothers would not have cared. They wouldn’t even have noticed a letter from a disgruntled chef. And if they did—so what? Not a single one of them would begrudge me a stipend for all my hard work.”
“A stipend?” she squealed with disdain. “A stipend! It’s not a stipend, you bacon-brained rattleplate! It’s thievery plain and simple.”
“You were the one who called it a stipend,” he spat.
“I was trying to help you appease your conscience because you are a sniveling twit,” she sneered.
Around and around they went, a swirling whirlwind of hatred, contempt and anger, and Bea, suddenly weary of it all, turned to the duke. But she was flummoxed by the display of untethered viciousness and realized she had no clear thought to impart. She desired the scene to be over but wanted no part in the ending of it, and could not imagine either possibility. Consequently, when she looked at Kesgrave she was at a loss for words and when she did finally speak, it was more of a plea than a rational request for help: “Your grace.”
Kesgrave, as if he had been waiting for just such a cue, nodded abruptly and asked her to wait there for a moment. Then he crossed swiftly to the doorway and disappeared into the hall. Mrs. Mayhew howled savagely at the mention of a scarlet gown and shrieked that if anything had led them into penury it was his Arabian stallion.
“I ride Caesar daily,” he bellowed in outrage. “You wore that dress once!”
“To dine with Brummell,” she sputtered.
Only a minute later the duke returned with—inconceivably—Marlow at his heels. In the hallway, just outside the room, Parsons hovered with an appalled expression on his face, which contrasted sharply with the other butler’s bland impassivity.
“A Runner has been sent for,” Kesgrave explained mildly, “and Marlow is going to monitor the situation until he arrives. We may go.”
Although the butler’s presence in the house was wholly inexplicable, Bea was not entirely surprised by it. She did not believe, no, that the duke had anticipated the horrible scene unfolding in the drawing room, but he’d had enough concern about the confrontation that he had stationed Marlow nearby: outside the door, on the pavement in front, in the square across the road.
Heartfully, gratefully, she said, “Thank you, Marlow.”
As stoic as ever, the butler acknowledged the deeply felt sentiment with a barely perceptible nod, then winced uncontrollably when Mrs. Mayhew hurled a string of invectives at her husband over a certain gilded high-perch phaeton he lacked the skill to drive. “Thank you, your grace,” he said with unprecedented emphasis. “It appears Monsieur Alphonse did not suffer an accident after all.”
’Twas an admission—a quiet one, to be sure, dignified, understated, butler-ish, but an admission nonetheless—and Bea felt the respect it conveyed. “It appears not.”
“You insufferable gorgon!” Mr. Mayhew cried. “You dare mock my imbalance condition when you are utterly useless with an embroidery needle?”
“You know I suffered a terrible injury to my thumb as a small child!”
Kesgrave murmured further instructions to Marlow, then escorted his wife from the room just as a porcelain vase slammed against the wall. Parsons shuddered in alarm, and the duke placed a firm, comforting hand on the man’s shoulder and assured him Marlow had the matter under control. Although the butler’s expression plainly indicated he did not think it was true, he expressed profound gratitude for their assistance.
Outside, the air was crisp and Bea sighed with deep relief to be away from the stultifying atmosphere of the drawing room. Although the decay of the Mayhews’ relationship was particularly their own, something about it felt oddly similar to the deterioration of the Skeffingtons’. Both enterprises, presumably optimistic at the onset, had ended in murder and enmity, which Bea, scarcely two days into her own union, found almost too dispiriting to contemplate.
And yet she seemed unable to think of anything else, the two awful scenes appearing to play concurrently in her head, Lady Skeffington’s cool indifference, Mrs. Mayhew’s blistering rage. So much contempt and hatred.
Thoughtfully, as if genuinely considering a problem, Kesgrave said, “Obviously, I cannot deposit my money with Mayhew & Co. now.”
Bea smiled faintly at this comment, for she had a deep appreciation for the value of well-conceived understatement, and agreed that his current situation was largely superior. “Unless Coutts’s management has its own secret corruption scheme. I will look into it at once.”
But the attempt at humor fell flat, for it only made her feel somehow complicit in the Mayhews’ tragedy, as if it were her investigation that had created its conditions. It was absurd, she knew, for the wounds had already been festering, and if Parsons’s version of events had been allowed to stand, something else would have brought the putrefaction to light.
Malevolence oozed.
It was an exceptionally dismal thought—ah, yes, the dreary Miss Hyde-Clare—and she smothered a sigh.
Or rather, she thought she had smothered it, but a moment later Kesgrave took her hand in his own. It was a mundane gesture, yes, and yet wildly shocking because dukes did not show their affection publicly, certainly not to their wives, and there were quite a few passersby to witness the outrageous deed. Indeed, Bea thought for certain she had noticed Mrs. Ralston’s intrusive nose among the observers, and the prospect of London’s most zealous gossip haunting Berkeley Square in hopes of catching sight of just such an exhibition almost made her grin.
Clutching Kesgrave’s hand gratefully, Bea marveled at how he continually revealed himself to be more than she expected—more, of course, than the pedantic bore whom she longed to pelt with fillets of salmon in the dining room at Lakeview Hall, but also more than the thoughtful, open-minded, deprecating soul she had discovered him to be.
It was the opposite, she supposed, that caused gnawing resentment, the bitter revelation that the person you married was somehow and substantially less than you had believed.
“If you deem it necessary to inspect Coutts’s books,” the duke said as they turned up the path to Kesgrave House, “then I must insist on a full week to examine the situation before we make the attempt. As it is accustomed to a higher quality of client than Mayhew & Co., we cannot expect them to genuflect quite so deeply before my title.”
Naturally, Bea scoffed at the display of modesty, for having seen him don his full consequence she felt confident he could cower anyone, especially the proprietors of an esteemed institution devoted to the acquisition and consolidation of wealth. In fact, she believed so fully in his ability to puff himself up to a monstrous size, she insisted they visit Coutts on the morrow so that her thesis could be proved correct.
Firmly rejecting the proposal, Kesgrave announced that while he was happy to be bear-led to his ruin by his wife, he required a more compelling reason than to satisfy her curiosity.