Murder at Archly Manor

by Sara Rosett

  Eyebrows raised, Gwen said, “Oh my. Did you see her eyes? Is she . . . ?”

  “I’m afraid so.” Lady Pamela’s eyes were dilated again, and since a happy disposition was not her normal state, only one explanation came to mind. It also clarified why Lady Pamela had stayed on at Archly Manor. I was certain she wouldn’t be able to indulge her habits so easily at her father’s country home or London townhouse.

  “Well. That does explain certain things,” Gwen said. “Thank goodness Violet hasn’t been drawn into that.” Gwen gave me another look. “You don’t seem surprised.”

  “No. I’ve seen Lady Pamela this way before. I think it’s—er—typical for her.”

  Lady Pamela neared the top of the stairs, and Gwen said, “Should we help her down the stairs? If she tries to skip down them, she might actually hurt herself.”

  “There’s Tug, come to escort her down.”

  We let Lady Pamela and Tug have a few minutes’ lead, then Gwen and I went down. Sebastian met us at the foot of the stairs. “Welcome back to Archly Manor. Thank you for bringing Violet,” he said to Gwen. He was in his genial host mode, and I could see he was going to act as though we had never had the conversation in Alfred’s apartment.

  Gwen said, “Thank you for having us. It’s a lovely idea to have a little memorial for Alfred.”

  “Not so small now,” Sebastian said as we walked to the drawing room for tea. “Tonight’s dinner is limited, but tomorrow may be a crush. The word is out about our little gathering, and I do hate to turn anyone away.”

  “Violet, Olive, and I will return to Parkview Hall tomorrow. We don’t want to impose.”

  “You can’t leave so soon. It’s no imposition at all,” Sebastian said. “Besides, Violet is going to look through Alfred’s belongings tomorrow. She didn’t tell you?”

  “No, she must have forgotten to mention it to me,” Gwen said.

  Sebastian said, “I thought there might be some things Violet might want . . . letters, perhaps. She and I fixed it up on the telephone earlier today. I hope you’ll both stay. Surely an extra day isn’t too long at Archly Manor.”

  Gwen’s smile became fixed. “That would be lovely.”

  “Excellent.” Sebastian stepped back to allow Gwen and me to enter the drawing room first. Violet was chatting with James as they looked through gramophone records, while Tug and Lady Pamela hovered at the table with the jigsaw puzzle. Lady Pamela’s giggles carried across the room, more evidence she was high. I didn’t believe that a jigsaw puzzle could be that entertaining, especially to someone like Lady Pamela.

  Thea spoke in low tones to Muriel, who was seated on the sofa beside her. Muriel’s face was carefully blank, but Thea didn’t bother to hide a frown as she looked at Violet. Hugh stood behind Muriel, a pipe in his mouth. With his receding hairline and paunch, he looked as if a parent had accidentally wandered into a room of Bright Young People.

  A mechanical smile appeared on Thea’s face. “Hello again,” she said as Sebastian escorted us across the room. The words were innocuous enough, but there wasn’t an ounce of warmth in them.

  Sebastian leveled a look at Thea, then said, “Don’t mind my sister. She’s rather out of sorts today.”

  Thea flushed, and her hand fluttered up to adjust her long rope of pearls. “The last few days have been a trying time.”

  “For all of us,” Gwen said. Her tone was even, but I sensed an edge of anger underlying the words. I knew she was being protective of Violet.

  A servant approached and spoke to Sebastian. “If you’ll excuse me,” he said to us with a quick bow of his head as he moved away.

  Gwen took a few steps away from Thea and Muriel. With her back to them, Gwen blew out a breath through her nose. “As if I would go off and leave Violet alone here.” Her gaze moved to Lady Pamela. “Especially now that I know about some of the things that are going on.”

  “I know how you feel, but one more day won’t make a difference,” I said. “Even Violet has enough sense not to get involved in Lady Pamela’s—um—activities. Besides, looking through Alfred’s belongings is an excellent opportunity.”

  Gwen looked at me blankly for a moment.

  “To see if we can find anything else that might implicate someone else in Alfred’s murder. Perhaps something that the police overlooked.”

  “Yes, of course.” Gwen gave her head a little shake. “I’m sorry. I’m just so worried about Violet. I want to get her away from here.”

  “One more day, and we’ll be gone.”

  “I’d better make sure of that. Who knows? Perhaps Violet has made more plans for the day after tomorrow and has forgotten to inform me of them. I’ll speak to her.” Gwen went to join Violet and James.

  Monty appeared at my elbow. He handed me a cup of tea. “The party reassembles. Just as if we were in a novel,” he said as we moved to another grouping of chairs. “I expect Longly to arrive at any moment, call us all into the library, then point an accusing finger at someone.”

  “Who do you think that would be?” I lifted my teacup to my lips.

  “No idea. Unlike you, I’m not clever about that sort of thing. I never guess the murderer in novels. My job here is simply to round out the guest list. Of course, now that the word is out about Alfred’s dodgy pastime of blackmailing people, it widens the field considerably. Not surprising, really.”

  “It’s common knowledge now?” I asked.

  “Yes. Everyone is too well bred to speak of it here, but the news has traveled. I heard about it from my man, who heard it mentioned below stairs. No use trying to keep it under wraps. The servants always know everything.”

  “Oh, I don’t mind if the word is out. I think everyone should know what a cad Alfred was. Perhaps that’s wrong of me to say as we’re about to have a memorial for him, but he’s caused Violet and Gwen quite a bit of pain.” I sipped my tea, then asked, “Why did you say you weren’t surprised Alfred was a blackmailer?”

  “He was a sneak. I went to school with enough of his kind to know one immediately. He tried to blackmail me, you know.” He picked up a sandwich.

  “You?” I asked, then noticed he was munching noisily through his cucumber sandwich.

  He swallowed, then said, “Horses. It’s always the horses. I love them dearly. Can’t stay away. I overextended myself at the races. Alfred hinted he’d tell my father.”

  “You don’t seem upset about it.”

  He finished off the sandwich, then picked up another. “Wasn’t. I made sure Alfred didn’t have a hold on me.”

  “How?”

  “I went to the pater and confessed all.” He smiled. “Marvelous to have it all out in the open.”

  “Smart.” I watched him eat his way through the sandwich, surprised that I’d never noticed his rabbit-like chomping. “Did Alfred ever call you by a nickname?”

  “He tried. I put a stop to it pretty quickly.”

  “Was it Muncher, by any chance?”

  “See, you are the clever one. How did you know?”

  “Lucky guess. Did you ever hear him call anyone Songbird?”

  Monty stared at his tea a moment, then shook his head. “No, can’t say I did.”

  I didn’t want to linger on the subject of nicknames. I didn’t want to tell Monty that Alfred had listed the word Muncher as a description in his notebook. I surveyed the room. “Well, even if you weren’t worried about Alfred’s tendency to threaten and demand money, someone here was. No guess as to who it could be?”

  “No. You’ve covered that quite well.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ve heard you’ve been industrious in your effort to keep Violet from being arrested.”

  “There’s no threat of arrest,” I said. “She didn’t do it.”

  “Yes, I think you’re right. But then, I think everyone is innocent.”

  “I suppose that’s the difference between you and me. I think everyone could be guilty.”

  “Except for your cous
ins.”

  “Of course,” I said, but guilt pricked at my conscience as I thought about my suspicions of Gwen. I made a mental note to speak to the kitchen staff and see if anyone could confirm Gwen had cut her hand on a broken glass. Despite Gwen’s denial that she had approached Alfred again, I couldn’t stop those thoughts from whirling around in my mind.

  Thea’s voice carried across the room. “Completely unacceptable.” She picked at a loose thread dangling between two of the pearls on her necklace. “Shoddy workmanship. Not up to standards at all. So disappointing, but then what can you expect of foreign workmanship?” She made a noise as she removed the necklace. “It could break at any moment. It’s literally being held together by a thread.”

  The pearls pooled in her hand, dripping over her fingers in long loops as she held them out to Muriel. “Take these upstairs, then telephone Dixon’s and tell them I want them repaired immediately. You can take them in first thing Monday morning. I have an engagement Monday night and want to wear them.”

  Hugh removed his pipe. “No need for Muriel to go. Ring for a—”

  But Muriel had already stood and was cradling the pearls in both hands. “I won’t be but a moment,” she said to Hugh with a warning look. He clamped his lips around the pipe. Muriel left the room, and Monty said in an undertone, “I’m sure we’ll hear about the one hundred—”

  “One hundred fifty pearls,” Thea said. “That many perfectly matched pearls are difficult to come by, and I can’t have the thread fraying. Completely unacceptable. You know my dear husband brought them home from a trip to Singapore. Each one individually hand selected.”

  “Here it comes,” Monty said, his voice low.

  Thea said, “It never pays to be cheap,” as Monty whispered the words at exactly the same moment. I didn’t dare glance at him because I knew I’d laugh, which would be frightfully inappropriate.

  I kept my gaze fixed on the rose pattern on the carpet and muttered, “You’re terrible.”

  “One must find amusement where one can at these affairs.”

  Sebastian left us to our own devices for the rest of the afternoon. Violet retired for a nap, and Gwen curled up in the library with The Lady, saying she never had time to read it at home. I didn’t want to read or stroll in the gardens, and I knew Lady Pamela wouldn’t want my help with the jigsaw puzzle she was pretending to work on, so I went off to look for Sebastian.

  I found him in the billiard room, where a game had just broken up. Monty and Tug had left to take Monty’s new two-seater for a drive, and Sebastian agreed that it would be a good time to show me his studio. “You’ll find it dreadfully dull and tedious,” he said as we went upstairs. He didn’t stop on the floor with the bedrooms but continued up the next flight of stairs to the top of the house.

  “I doubt anything you have an interest in is dull.”

  He flashed a wide grin, which seemed to stretch the skin of his lean face tight over his skull. “Thank you.”

  The nursery was at the far end of the hall, and I could hear the piercing voices of Paul and Rose. Sebastian took a key and unlocked the studio door. “I can’t have anyone messing about in here. Chemicals, you know.”

  “I imagine so.” The room was large and open with a bare wooden floor. Sunlight flooded through three tall windows, lighting up the space. Tables and chairs of various styles were pushed up against the walls beside rolled carpets and a rack of clothes with a shelf above it stacked with hats, wigs, and shoes. What I supposed must be props were scattered around the tables—mirrors, clocks, vases, and bits of masonry. A wooden swing lay in a corner, the ropes coiled on the floor, while the papier-mâché figures that had guided the way to the Silver and Gold party loomed in a corner like something out of a nightmare about a circus.

  Photographs lined the walls and drew my attention. I’d never seen Sebastian’s photographs. I’d only heard they were interesting, which had a wide range of possible interpretations. I thought Sebastian dabbled in photography, but after seeing several of the photographs, it was clear he had a unique talent. The photographs were surprisingly compelling. The images lining the walls were obviously set pieces, elaborately designed and staged, but they didn’t have the stiffness I’d often seen in studio portraits.

  In each one, Sebastian seemed to have captured the personality of his subject. I inched around the room, surprised to find familiar faces mixed in with the photographs of society hostesses. James, seated at a desk covered with papers, pen poised, stared seriously over his glasses, which had slipped down his nose. Jane, the former housemaid, looked over her shoulder, a cheeky grin on her face. I slowed to study a landscape—the only landscape I’d seen so far—but then I spotted Muriel standing behind a garden statue, nearly hidden by the shadow. “I’m fascinated with these,” I said.

  Sebastian was moving around the other side of the room, unlocking another door. “Hmm . . . what?”

  “You’ve managed to capture everyone’s personality.”

  He grinned. “I know.”

  I rolled my eyes. “The correct response is thank you.”

  “I’m never correct. So boring.”

  His attitude should have been off-putting, but a part of me admired his complete disregard for convention. I turned back to the photos. Hugh stood importantly on a portico of a grand house, his attention fixed on his open pocket watch, a pose that brought his hand to his chest in a position reminiscent of the paintings of Napoleon with his hand tucked into his coat. “Is this Hugh’s home?”

  “His father’s. Hugh will inherit it someday.”

  “Lucky Muriel,” I said but wondered how she would get on as the mistress of a grand estate. I had a hard time picturing her managing the servants.

  I moved to the next photo. “Who is—oh, it’s Thea.” She wore her long strand of pearls, and her hair was the same, but she was so slender I hadn’t recognized her immediately.

  Sebastian squinted across the room and saw which photograph I was looking at. “Yes, she was my first subject and got tired of posing for me. I learned to photograph people with her as my model. I only convinced her to let me take her picture that day because she’d just received the pearls—her famous one-hundred-fifty-perfectly-matched-pearls,” he said. “Thank goodness she wanted to show them off. Otherwise, I don’t think I could have convinced her to step in front of the camera.”

  I strolled, scanning the room and saw several more photographs of Thea, all of them in unique and different poses. I halted in front of an arresting image of Lady Pamela with her arms crossed and leaning on a mirrored surface. Her head was tilted, and her cheek rested on the back of one hand. The mirror created a double image, showing Lady Pamela right side up as well as upside down in the reflection.

  The composition of the photograph was unusual, but it wasn’t what caught my attention. It was her jewelry. Lady Pamela wore a double-strand pearl bracelet with two square-cut jewels surrounded with small diamonds.

  “These stones in this photograph, what were they?”

  Sebastian looked up briefly from fiddling with a camera. “Emeralds.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes,” he said unequivocally.

  I stared at the portrait for a long moment, then said, “Do you have a telephone on this floor?”

  “No. They’re all on the ground floor—under the stairs, in my study, and the butler’s pantry. Why?”

  “I need to call Inspector Longly.”

  “How very tedious. Must you?”

  “I’m afraid I have to. He must see this picture.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  I used the telephone in Sebastian’s study. After waiting an extremely long time on the line, I was finally connected with Inspector Longly. We exchanged greetings, then I said, “I think you should see a photograph here at Archly Manor. It’s a picture of Lady Pamela wearing a pearl bracelet. They could be the strings of pearls that were in Alfred’s pocket.”

  “You can tell that from a photograph?”r />
  “I know it sounds unbelievable, but bear with me for a moment. The bracelet has two square-cut jewels that link the strands of pearls. I can’t tell exactly what color the stones are in the photograph, of course, but they’re obviously darker stones, not diamonds. Mr. Blakely took the photograph, and he says the stones were emeralds. On the night of the Silver and Gold party, Lady Pamela forgot her handbag. It was on a table near me, and when she came back for it, several things spilled out, including two square-cut emeralds surrounded by smaller diamonds. At the time, I thought they were dress clips, but they look exactly like the stones in the photograph.”

  “So you think the pearls were detached from these jewels that linked the two strands of the bracelet together?

  “Four strands,” I said. “They’re double strands of pearls. Two strands connect the jewels. Yes, I think the pearls and the jewels were separated.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, the mostly likely possibility is that Lady Pamela cut off the strands of pearls and gave them to Alfred.”

  “Instead of cash for a blackmail payment?” Inspector Longly asked. I’d expected that he’d sneer at the idea, but his voice was thoughtful. The line was silent for a few moments, then he said, “Is Lady Pamela at Archly Manor?”

  “Yes. Sebastian is giving a small dinner party, and she’s attending.”

  “And you returned?”

  “The dinner party is in honor of Alfred. Violet was determined to be here, so Gwen and I came with her.”

  “I’ll see you shortly.”

  The dressing bell had already rung by the time I hung up the telephone. I dressed quickly with Milly’s help, changing into a gown of turquoise chiffon with glass beads in a geometric design on the dropped-waist bodice. Gwen had given it to me when she cleared out her wardrobe last season, and I’d hemmed up the skirt so it didn’t brush the floor. I rushed downstairs and managed to enter the drawing room shortly before Babcock announced dinner.

  Monty, who was near the door when I walked in, cocked an eyebrow. “And what have you been up to?”