A Dangerous Collaboration (A Veronica Speedwell Mystery)

by DEANNA RAYBOURN

  “How can you tell?” Tiberius challenged.

  I explained about the paneling as Stoker resumed his explorations. We started at opposite ends of the panel and pressed towards the center without victory, neither of us having discovered the mechanism. I realized there was a commotion behind us and glanced backwards into the bedchamber to see Caspian and Mertensia and Helen gathered, watching anxiously.

  I climbed out of the little chamber while Stoker put out his head to address Mertensia and Caspian. “I do not know which of you to ask, but I require permission to break down the wall.”

  Aunt and nephew exchanged glances and nodded in unison. Before anyone could speak, Stoker returned to the hole and lifted one booted foot, slamming it hard into the panel. It made an ominous creak but did not break. Stoker braced his arms and positioned himself again, kicking the panel until it shattered with a deep moan of protest. He ripped at the broken boards until he made a hole large enough to admit him. I knew, even before I heard the soft intake of breath.

  “He is there,” I murmured, eager for the others not to overhear just yet. It would be too upsetting for them to discover his corpse in situ.

  “He is,” Stoker said, putting one leg over the broken panel to reach into the chamber beyond.

  “Shall I tell them to leave?” I asked softly.

  “No. Tell them to get out of the bloody way,” he ordered. “He is still alive. And he is not alone.”

  * * *

  • • •

  I had to take Stoker’s word for Malcolm’s condition, for when Stoker emerged from the back passage carrying the man, I thought him certainly a corpse. He was bone white and unconscious, his breathing scarcely detectable. Helen burst into loud weeping, but Mertensia had recovered her composure. Stoker deposited Malcolm onto his bed and issued a series of commands with regard to treatments to be applied.

  “Do you think him likely to die?” I asked as he assessed his condition.

  “Possibly,” he said with a grim expression. “I saw neither food nor water in there. He is badly dehydrated and suffering from shock and the temperature. It is cold as the grave in there.”

  I hardly dared to ask. “Is it Rosamund—” I began.

  “No,” he said, clipping the word sharply. “Mrs. Trengrouse.”

  He made another trip into the second priest’s hole to retrieve her. She was unconscious and Stoker handed her off with obvious distaste to Caspian. “Take her to her room. She is responsible for the attempted murder of myself, Tiberius, and Veronica, as well as your uncle. You will guard her and make certain she does not attempt to leave this house if she wakens,” he ordered, looking for all the world as imperious as his brother.

  If the boy resented being ordered about by Stoker, he gave no sign of it. He nodded smartly and did as he was told. Mertensia hovered in the doorway.

  “Trenny,” she said softly. “I can hardly believe it.”

  “Believe it,” Stoker said in a stern voice as he returned to Malcolm’s care. “She’s damned near killed your brother as well, I would wager.”

  Mertensia drew in a deep breath. “I will order whatever you need from the stillroom and Daisy will bring it. I will attend to Trenny myself until you can examine her.”

  Stoker agreed by way of a grunt and Mertensia left. Helen, rising magnificently to the occasion, organized the maids into producing hot bricks and water in record time. A fire was kindled in the hearth, the applewood logs soon crackling and giving off welcome heat. Counterpanes thick with down were heaped atop the unconscious man and tucked tightly about him. Stoker kept a close watch, marking the slow rise in Malcolm’s temperature by the return of color to his cheeks. Through it all, Tiberius sat, still as a graven god, on a chair in the corner, saying nothing.

  After a few hours, Mertensia returned, looking tired and deeply sad. “She has come to,” she told us. “She said very little before she went to sleep again. But she seemed glad to know that my brother has been found before it was too late. How is he?”

  “The same,” Stoker told her. She went and shuttered away the sun lest the bright light hurt Malcolm’s eyes when he woke. She brought a small chair next to his bed and seated herself, watching over him as he slept.

  “Is someone with Mrs. Trengrouse?” I asked her.

  She nodded. “Helen has offered to sit with her, and Caspian is pacing outside with Malcolm’s shooting pieces. You would think she were dangerous as Napoléon,” she finished with a ghost of a smile.

  “She rather was,” I reminded her.

  “I cannot think what happened,” she said in a halting voice. “Her mind must have turned for her to harm Malcolm. It is impossible. He was her favorite, we all knew. She always loved him best,” she added. And I thought then how terrible love can be when it is not properly returned, thwarting and twisting itself into something unrecognizable—and dangerous.

  After another hour, Malcolm roused, blinking hard against the light of the single lamp burning on the mantel. In the dimness, he struggled to make out shapes.

  “Mertensia?” he called feebly. His sister went to him, putting his hand to her cheek.

  “I am here, Malcolm.”

  “Was it a nightmare, then? Nothing but a dream?”

  Mertensia glanced to Stoker, who gave her a sharp shake of the head. She smiled at her brother. “Nothing but a dream,” she told him. “Sleep now. You are safe.”

  But he did not sleep. Instead, tears began to seep from beneath his closed lids.

  “Malcolm?” Mertensia called softly.

  He turned his head on the pillow, his face averted. “I have done a wretched thing,” he told her, his voice a hoarse whisper. “A wretched thing indeed.”

  She leant near. “I am sure you have not,” she told him.

  He protested, shaking his head violently. Stoker moved to Mertensia’s elbow. “Keep him calm,” he instructed.

  Mertensia patted her brother’s hand. “Whatever you have done, you must have thought it right at the time,” she told him.

  “I wish absolution,” he told her. “I must be absolved.”

  “Absolution for what?” she asked.

  “For murder,” he burst out, the tears flowing freely down his cheeks. “For murder.”

  CHAPTER

  20

  After his storm of weeping had passed, Malcolm composed himself and began his confession. Not to a priest, for there was none present on the island, but to those of us who had gathered at his invitation. His sister sat beside him, holding his hand as if to give him strength during his ordeal.

  “I hardly know where to begin,” Malcolm told us.

  “Begin with Rosamund’s travel bag,” I said gently. “That is what started this whole sorry business, is it not?”

  He nodded. “Yes. I haven’t been able to settle to anything for so long. Eventually, I decided upon writing a sort of history of St. Maddern’s. I pored over the old books in the library, deciding what to include. Trenny was a great help to me as I put together the legends—all those moth-eaten old stories of mermaids and giants. And then I thought I ought to include the building of the castle itself. I dug through the archives and found the plans. There was nothing from the first construction, but there were extensive renovations done in the reign of Elizabeth.”

  “The priest’s holes,” I murmured.

  “Exactly. A few were constructed where old private staircases had been. One or two were dug out of the living rock. I thought it would be great fun to explore them properly. They hadn’t been mapped in years and half of them had been forgot,” he went on. “When I opened this one, I discovered a second built behind it, a sort of double blind to trick the priest catchers into believing they had found all there was to see when they discovered the first hole. I pressed on and found the second and that is when I came upon the traveling bag.”

  Malcol
m paused and Mertensia handed him a glass of water, holding his head so that he could drink. When he had finished, he resumed his story. “I realized then that Rosamund had not left the island. You see, I always believed she had got cold feet after the wedding and run away from me. To the man she really loved.” He looked steadily at Tiberius.

  “You knew.”

  “No. I only suspected. I always thought it too good to be true when she chose me rather than you,” he said simply. “I had seen her looking at you when she thought she was unobserved. Do you remember that summer? How we pushed one another, spurring our horses to impress her? Swimming further, jumping higher? We were ridiculous. And when she said she wanted me, me, I was exalted. It was only later that the doubts set in.”

  “Doubts?” I asked.

  “How could she choose me when she might have had him?” he asked.

  I said nothing and waited for Tiberius to answer. It was the opportunity he had anticipated through the long, cold nights of the past three years. It was the chance to tell Malcolm the truth, once and for all, to exult in his victory at last.

  Tiberius held Malcolm’s gaze. “There is no mystery, my friend. She loved you.”

  It was a lie told for the noblest of reasons, and in that moment of duplicity, I had never counted Tiberius higher in my esteem.

  “She did not come to me,” Tiberius went on. “My God, man. I would have had the decency to tell you if she had. I would never have let you suffer these years never knowing if she were alive or dead.”

  “I realize that now,” Malcolm said. “I knew that summer I was her second choice. She was luminous when she looked at you,” he added with a nod towards Tiberius. “But I understood her. I knew she wanted, above all else, security and contentment. You were exciting but dangerous. You would never have let yourself be ruled by a woman, no matter how much you loved her. Rosamund knew she could have her way with me. I would have done anything for her, and I was content with that,” he insisted. “She did love me. We would have made a good life together and I would have cared for her. I knew something had happened to make her decide so suddenly about marrying me, but I did not question my good fortune. Not at first.”

  He paused and Mertensia, with Stoker’s blessing, offered him something else to drink, a sip of hot whisky this time. He swallowed it down and resumed his tale. “As the wedding drew nearer, I saw how changed she was. There was a hectic sort of gaiety to her, a forced happiness, feverish. And when the harpsichord arrived . . .” He paused again. “It did not take a genius to piece together what had happened.”

  “I ought not to have sent it,” Tiberius said. “It was an ungentlemanly thing to give that to another man’s bride.”

  “She loved it,” Malcolm said dully. “As she loved you. I thought I could make her forget you. I thought we would have children and be happy together. So I married her. And that day she simply vanished and all I could think was that she had run away to be with you. There was no note and her things were gone. No one could make a case for harm to have come to her, so there was this limbo, this terrible, awful limbo where I had a bride but no wife. There were no boats missing, so how could she have left St. Maddern’s? But the island was searched and she was not here either. I even hired a private inquiry agent to follow you when you returned to London,” he told Tiberius. “But there was never any proof that you had seen her again, and no matter how hard they searched, there was no trace of her to be found. It was as if she simply vanished.” His lips twisted wryly. “We Cornish believe in piskies and faeries and mermaids. I half wondered sometimes if there might have been truth to some of those ludicrous old legends. It did not seem possible that she might have disappeared. But she had. And so I got on with things as best I could. I did everything I was supposed to do as master of the Isle, but it was a half-life at most. I was sleepwalking, you understand. Until I found the bag.”

  His eyes were bleak as he took another draft of the hot whisky. “When I discovered it, I knew then that I had been a fool. Rosamund might have abandoned me, but she would not have left in her wedding gown without so much as a change of linen. Something had happened to her—some accident or worse.”

  He lifted his head, looking at each of us in turn. “And I began to wonder who might have wanted to harm her. I lay awake at night and I could imagine a motive for everyone who had ever known her,” he went on. “I drove myself halfway to madness and back imagining every possible scenario, every unthinkable crime that might have been done to her. And I realized I had to discover the truth before the not knowing destroyed me. So I invited you all here to help me. I thought that if we were gathered under one roof, here where it all happened, someone might say something or see something. I thought the truth must be here, just out of reach if only we could find it.”

  “Did you know Helen was a fraud?” I asked. “She does not speak to ghosts.”

  He made a gesture of dismissal. “I suspected as much, but I wanted to believe in her. I wanted to believe it was possible that Rosamund could communicate, that she could somehow make herself known to us. If there was the slightest chance she could do so, then I meant to take it.”

  Tiberius sat in his chair with the solemnity of a judge while Mertensia continued to pat her brother’s hand.

  “I told no one what I meant to do. I knew Caspian and Helen would come because they are Romillys when all is said and done. They would come for the memory of Lucian and perhaps to further Caspian’s chances to become my heir,” he added with a thin, slightly cynical smile. “And I knew you would come, Tiberius, because you were too bound up in Rosamund’s story. When you asked if you could bring your fiancée, I thought perhaps I had been wrong after all about your feelings for Rosamund. I told myself that you were coming solely as a friend to me, and when I saw you, I realized how much the past few years had taken from me. Not just Rosamund, but you and the friendship I had cherished for half my life.”

  Tiberius’ gaze was brighter than usual, and Malcolm cleared his throat roughly. “In any event, I surprised everyone with my announcement about the traveling bag. I suppose it was childish of me, but I was so afraid none of you would come if I told the truth about why I wanted you. And I was so desperate to put an end to all of this. Trenny was most upset. She kept wringing her hands and saying that the dead must be left in peace. ‘But, Trenny,’ I told her, ‘we do not know she is dead.’ It was only the next day that I remembered something, a thing I ought to have remembered as soon as I found the bag.”

  “What was that?” I asked.

  “Trenny was the one who volunteered to search all the nooks and crannies in the castle when Rosamund disappeared. She is the only one who could have put the bag there,” he said simply. “Everyone had a part of the island to search and that was hers.”

  “There’s something else you forgot,” Mertensia put in. “Lucian taught her a few songs on the harpsichord. She must be the one who played the ghost during the séance.”

  Malcolm’s pale face whitened further. “My God,” he murmured.

  “There is a passage behind the paneling of the music room,” I told him. “Did you not know of it?”

  “It never occurred to me,” he said simply. “I don’t think anyone has used it since I was a boy. If I thought of it at all, it would have been to assume it was blocked.”

  I shook my head. “She had only to slip into it as we approached. It would seem as if the room were empty because no one passed us as we came in. If she were quick and quiet, no one would guess a thing.”

  “And that was what terrified Helen into believing Rosamund was really a ghost,” Mertensia finished. “But why? Why go to all that palaver just to upset Helen’s séance?”

  “To discourage any further investigation into Rosamund’s disappearance. Malcolm was willing to give credence to Helen’s abilities,” I went on. “But Trenny knew how superstitious Helen is. She realized that if she could fright
en Helen, then she and Caspian would leave and perhaps the entire investigation would founder. It was a desperate gambit, but she had little time to plan since Malcolm sprang the thing on us all and took her by surprise.”

  Mertensia’s response was bitter. “I should not have thought Trenny would have it in her.”

  “She would do anything for the family,” I said, working it out slowly. “Including protect him from the bride who was not worthy of marrying a Romilly. She murdered Rosamund.”

  I saw Tiberius’ grip tighten on the arms of his chair. Mertensia made a sound of harsh protest, but Malcolm buried his face in his hands.

  “I cannot believe it,” Mertensia said finally. “And yet . . .”

  I turned to Malcolm. “When did you discover that she was the one who had murdered Rosamund?”

  His expression was one of perfect wretchedness. “When she locked me in that bloody priest’s hole. She came to me with a glass of wine, as she always did when she had a favor to ask. She protested about the séance, about everyone searching and asking questions. She said it was only going to stir everything up again, churning up the misery we had only just begun to put behind us. I told her that I could never get on with my life properly until I knew what had happened to Rosamund, that the uncertainty tortured me. I told her that we had to carry on until I had discovered the truth about Rosamund’s murder, that I would not rest until I had unmasked the villain. And I saw it again, that sudden terror flicker over her face. And I knew. I knew.”

  He paused to take another sip of whisky, shuddering hard as it went down. “We were here in this room. I confronted her and she admitted it. She said that Rosamund was pregnant with someone else’s child. It was not difficult for me to guess whose,” he added with a glance at Tiberius. “She said that she had tried to accept the idea that Rosamund would be the mistress here, that she would have to take orders from my wife. But as she sat in the chapel, listening to us make our vows, she realized she could not. She said that letting Rosamund come into this castle as the lady of the house, bringing her bastard child into the nursery, that it was more than she could bear.”