Stranger at the Dower House (Strangers Book 1)

by Mary Kingswood

  She sat in the drawing room awaiting the tea and currant buns, making polite conversation with Miss Beasley, who murmured almost inaudible replies, clutching her reticule tightly, and looking as if she had rather be far away.

  When Miss Gage came in, her lips were pursed in disapproval and Louisa guessed that she now knew of the body in the basement. “Come, Phyllida. Your pardon, Mrs Middleton…Middlecroft, but I am afraid that we cannot stay after all.”

  “Not even for tea and currant buns?” Louisa enquired sweetly, giving up all attempts to correct the name.

  “No. Something has occurred… we are having some difficulty with the arrangements we made… the rota for dinners. Most unfortunate. Oh, and Laurence asked me to tell you that he has gone himself to Dr Beasley. About the body,” she added, oozing disapproval. “Come, Phyllida.”

  Miss Beasley muttered, “So sorry,” and scuttled after her friend, who almost bumped into William bringing the long-awaited tea and buns. He stood gazing after them uncertainly.

  “Go and show them out, William,” Louisa said calmly. “Yes, put the tray down there.”

  She was left alone with the tea and currant buns. There was still a half-full glass of wine in one hand and the bottle in the other, she discovered, so she took them through to the study. Then, feeling this to be inadequate to the circumstances, returned for the brandy decanter. The currant buns called to her rather loudly, so she took those, too. Thus fortified, she worked industriously at her lists until Mr Gage returned with Dr Beasley in tow.

  Dr Beasley was a spare man in that uncertain age between fifty and sixty, who reminded her a little of Ned. Greying and slightly stooped, but not yet infirm. He greeted her with great enthusiasm — ‘You have a body for me, I understand, Mrs Middlehope. Excellent! Excellent!’ — practically rubbing his hands with glee. Louisa left them to their work, having no desire to see Dr Beasley’s investigation of the body, which would, she was tolerably certain, be deeply unsettling to watch.

  She still had wine left in Mr Gage’s bottle as well as several currant buns, so she brought cushions from the drawing room and settled herself comfortably on the window seat, nibbling and sipping, and pondering the strange turn her life had taken. She had just finished the last currant bun when the door knocker sounded again. This time William’s slow tread was heard in the hall. Voices, one of them female, then William’s apologetic head peered round the door.

  “Begging your pardon, madam, but there’s a lady outside with a gig.”

  “I see. Is she coming in? Does she need someone to hold the horse while she visits?”

  “No, madam. She wants you to look at it.”

  “At the horse? Oh, a gig. She must be from the Hall.”

  William blinked at this apparent non sequitur, making Louisa laugh. In all the excitement, she had almost forgotten that there was an unwanted gig at the Hall. It was Miss Saxby herself driving a neat little equipage with a sturdy pony in harness.

  “How very kind of you!” Louisa cried. “And what a charming little rig. How can you bear to part with it?”

  She waited, watching carefully, for it seemed to her that there was something about the gig that she had not grasped. It seemed as if Miss Agnes had been dismayed by the offer to sell it.

  Miss Saxby seemed unconcerned. “We have no need for it, and it might as well be used.”

  “Well then, it will suit me admirably.” She rubbed the pony’s nose gently. “I have no feed or hay for this little fellow just at present.”

  “That is no problem at all,” Miss Saxby said. “I can bring all you will need to start with, but… do you have a groom?”

  “Oh yes. William here will do all that is necessary.”

  “Excellent,” Miss Saxby said. “How are you settling in, Mrs Middlehope?”

  “Quite well, I had thought, until I discovered a body in the wine cellar.”

  Miss Saxby gave a squeak of astonishment. “A body? Goodness!”

  “A woman,” Louisa said. “She has clearly been there for a long time. I wonder if anyone from the village disappeared years ago?”

  “I will ask at the Hall,” Miss Saxby said. “Mags, our old nurse, has been here for ever. If anyone vanished, she would know.”

  After agreeing to return the following day with the gig and some supplies for the pony, she drove off again, leaving Louisa amused to consider that the animal would be better provided for than she was. But at least she had wine now!

  “William,” she said, as they returned to the house, “what was that altercation on the doorstep earlier? Another footman, although I did not recognise the livery.”

  He went bright red. “Oh, I forgot! He left you this, madam.” He fished in a pocket and brought out a small folded letter addressed in a lady’s elegant hand.

  She broke the wafer and scanned the contents.

  ‘Galtre House, Tuesday. My dear Mrs Middlecombe Middlecross, I regret to inform you that owing to a prior engagement, we shall not be able to entertain you to dinner this evening. Pray accept my apologies for the inconvenience. Jane Anderson’

  She laughed, but said, “A letter would not put you so out of countenance. What did the Andersons’ footman say to so upset you?”

  “Oh… it was all nonsense, madam. I took no notice, but if he says it again, I’ll draw his cork, I swear it!”

  “No need for that, William. Most undignified, to be brawling on the front step. If any such insult should occur again, lofty disdain is by far the best response, and then shut the door in his face.”

  “Lofty disdain… shut the door… certainly, madam.”

  His expression was so fierce that Louisa burst out laughing as soon as he had gone. She was still laughing when Mr Gage and Dr Beasley emerged from the service stair.

  “Dear lady, are you all right?” Dr Beasley said.

  “Perfectly, I assure you. And what are your thoughts on my unexpected visitor, Dr Beasley?”

  “Unexpected and unwanted, eh?” He beamed at her, thumbs resting in the pockets of his waistcoat. “Too soon to say, except that she appears to be quite a young woman — or was, twenty or thirty years ago. And locked in there all that time! Fascinating, quite fascinating. I shall need to do quite a lot more work to determine how this poor girl died, and perhaps discover enough to identify her. Your butler’s room would be an ideal place to conduct a more thorough examination… a medical examination, if you understand me. There is light and a table, and the air is both cool and dry. May I, therefore, trespass on your good nature a little further, madam? Will you permit me to leave the young lady where she is for tonight? I shall return tomorrow with all my equipment and take my time to do a thorough investigation. But if it would distress you—”

  “No, certainly not. The lady is dead, and cannot hurt anyone. I have only a very small staff, so it will not incommode anyone in the slightest. Have you locked her into her prison again?”

  He affirmed it, arranged for her to send the squire to see him if he should arrive and the two men departed, leaving Louisa to her lists, and the tricky problem of how to arrange dinner without any food in the house. For herself, she would not have minded, for there was plenty of wine now, and she thought there might still be currant buns in the kitchen, but she could not live on currant buns for a week and the inn with the world’s worst cook was not appealing.

  She went downstairs and summoned her French maid, Marie, her Shrewsbury acquisitions, William and Sarah, and twelve-year-old Tilly Timpson, so newly arrived from her father’s shop that she still wore her cloak.

  “We have a difficulty,” Louisa told them. “We shall have to provide our own dinners until Mrs Nokes arrives on Monday. Do we have any meat in the house?”

  “Mr Vale sent over a box of things — some cutlets, sausages, a ham, an ox tongue,” Sarah said. “Nothing for the spit, but I can griddle the cutlets and sausages.”

  “That is a start. Any vegetables?”

  “Carrots and tatoes, mam.”

  �
��Well, we ought to be able to make something with those and the ham… a soup, or some such,” Louisa said optimistically. “The ox tongue… Marie, you are French, you must know how to run up a ragoût.”

  “Moi? Mais non, madame! Je comprends les vêtements mais pas la cuisine. C’est quoi, un ragoût?” I understand clothes but not cooking. What is a ragoût?

  “I can cook a bit, mam,” Tilly said. “If I can run home and ask Ma if I can borrow Leah — she’s my oldest sister — she can give me a hand. I can mebbe pick up a few things from the shop, too, if you like.”

  “Excellent girl! Yes, please.”

  It was, perhaps, the oddest dinner Louisa had ever had. She sat in state in her dining room, at the head of a table long enough to seat twenty people, eating the strange assortment of dishes her servants and Tilly’s sister had managed to concoct. The soup was rather good, the cutlets came in a tasty sauce with dumplings, and there was an apple pie, but naturally there was no fish and little fresh meat or vegetables. She kept paper and pencil beside her as she ate, to jot down notes of all the omissions. At least there was wine, and Tilly had provided both cheese and nuts from the shop. It was a dinner, of sorts, and she was in her own house and would now, it seemed, be able to pursue her objectives discreetly without undue attention from the locals.

  Apart from the small matter of a body in her wine cellar, of course.

  ~~~~~

  ‘The Dower House, Great Maeswood, nr Market Clunbury, Salop. 28th Feb. My very dear Esther, My quiet little backwater has not performed to my expectations in the least. To start with, the local ladies at first saw in me a suitable case for charity, taking pity on my lack of a cook, and therefore invited me to dine with one or other of them every day until my cook appears. I enjoyed two rather good dinners on this basis before this largesse was abruptly withdrawn, although I am at a loss to know what my transgression might have been. I did not, that I can recall, spit or drool or fail to thank my hostess, so I am quite mystified. However, hearing me praise his excellent claret and bemoan the emptiness of my wine cellar, my host of last night arrived on my doorstep bright and early this morning to rectify the latter with supplies of the former. I expressed my gratitude at some length, as you may suppose, and he was so willing to hear his praises sung that we found ourselves depleting the stock perhaps rather more than the early hour warranted. In our excuse, it was an extremely good claret, and it would be an insult to such a fine wine to merely sip it, do you not agree? The agreeable Mr Gage agreed, in any event. While we were thus pleasantly engaged in the butler’s room, having not managed to stray very far from the wine cellar, by chance we discovered that the supposed pile of sacking in one corner was in fact the body of a woman, who had been concealed down there for some years, to judge from the state of the corpse and her clothes. And she had been locked in, my dear Esther! You may imagine how my mind whirls with speculation about that! I am sure I need not ask Dr Deerham to employ some of his prayers on behalf of a stranger whose life came to such a tragic end, quite unnoticed by the world. So you see, my dear friend, all my hopes of a retired life are set at naught, and, which is perhaps far worse, my cook does not arrive until Monday and if she is as untrained as my footman and maid, I shall be in dire straits indeed. My respects to Dr Deerham, and I hope Milly’s tooth is better. Your affectionate friend, Louisa.’

  5: A Geography Lesson

  Laurence spent the evening fending off a deluge of recriminations from Viola. He could not quite decide whether she was most incensed by him spending half the morning drinking wine with the widow, or his lamentable want of good taste in discovering a dead body. It soon became clear that it was Mrs Middlehope preoccupying her.

  “She is nobody!” she said in outraged tones, as they gathered in the drawing room before dinner. “We thought that she was related to Lord Middleton… but she is not a Middleton at all and there is no Lord Middle… Lord Whatever-she-is. Jane Anderson thinks— Really, Laurence, you should not laugh at me in that vulgar way.”

  At dinner, as soon as the soup had been removed, she went on, “When I talked to her yesterday, I could not find out that she is connected to anyone of importance at all.”

  Laurence did not care for this line of thought. “Does that matter, sister?” he said, in his mild way. “You agreed that she is a respectable person, and she is a gentleman’s widow, after all.”

  “Seemingly so,” she conceded, although her tone was reluctant. “Her father had an estate in Herefordshire—”

  “Hertfordshire,” Laurence said. “An estate called Codlington.”

  “Oh… well, that is near enough, and her husband’s people are from Derby or somewhere like that.”

  “Durham. Roseacre, County Durham.”

  “Ah. Where precisely is Durham?” Viola said.

  Henrietta wriggled with pleasure at this opening. “The county of Durham lies between the North Riding of Yorkshire and Northumberland,” she said. “It has Cumberland and Westmoreland to the west and the German Ocean to the east. Its capital is the city of Durham. The principal rivers are the Wear, the Tees, the Tyne and… and one beginning with D. The principal industries are wool, sail-cloth, steel, glass and iron, as well as agriculture. There is an abundance of coal, iron, millstone grit and limestone.”

  “What is millstone grit?” Edward said.

  Henrietta frowned. “I have no idea. Something used to make millstones, I imagine. Oh, Derwent! The fourth river.”

  Viola blinked at this outpouring of knowledge. “How well informed you are, Henrietta dear, but be sure not to talk so when you are in company because—”

  “Gentlemen dislike ladies who are blue-stockings,” Henrietta chimed in. “Yes, I know. When I am with a gentleman, I shall do all I can to pretend to know nothing.”

  “It is not pretence,” Laurence said gently. “At fifteen, you have seen nothing of the world. All you know of it is what you have read in books — rivers and industries and capital cities. Knowing so much of the county of Durham, could you have held a conversation with Mrs Middlehope about it? Could you have talked to her about anything beyond millstone grit? What about the architecture of the city, the cathedral, the principal buildings? Who are the great families nearby? What are the natural attractions of the area, the mountains and woodlands? That is what your education is for, to enable you to move through society and be able to hold a conversation with anyone.”

  He thought he had successfully diverted Viola’s attention from the question of Mrs Middlehope, and for a while the discussion was all on the subject of education. When the children had gone to bed, however, and Laurence had optimistically poured himself a large Cognac and picked up his book, she began again.

  “I hope you will exercise extreme caution around Mrs Middlecombe… Middlehope, dear. You know what young widows are like.”

  Stifling a sigh, he laid his book down. “What are young widows like?”

  “One never knows for sure until they pounce,” she said at once, providing Laurence with an image of Mrs Middlehope as a cat, tail twitching, waiting at a mouse hole for some hapless gentleman to emerge. “Most likely she is on the search for another husband. As a wife, she was well off and now she is poor.”

  “We cannot guess her circumstances,” Laurence said mildly, recalling the expensive evening gown.

  “If she had an independence of any sort she would go to London or one of the spa towns and make a splash, but as she has not, we must assume her to be poor and desperate for a husband to support her expensive ways. Since you are quite the most eligible single gentlemen in the vicinity, naturally she will set her cap at you.”

  “I am not much of a catch, my dear. An estate that needs more work than I can well afford, an income considerably less than it was and Edward’s education still to be paid for… and I am far too dull for a lady like her. No, she could do much better, if a husband is indeed her aim.”

  “Nonsense! You are not as well situated as you were when Catherine was alive, it is tru
e, but our needs are modest and there is no one else with a better income this side of Market Clunbury.”

  “Beasley is comfortably off, I believe.”

  “He is too old and staid to consider marrying now,” she said.

  “The parson, then. He has an excellent income for a man of the cloth, and he is a fine figure of a man, too.”

  “Ah.” Viola looked smug. “A little bird told me, quite in confidence, you know, that he is dangling after one of the Saxby girls. Flora, probably. He will not settle for an impoverished widow. And as for Mr Exton, he is reputed to have a very good income too, but he secludes himself in his villa, going nowhere. The widow will have no opportunity to meet him. I have only met him twice myself, and that by chance in Mr Edser’s. You did not mention the apothecary, either, but he dreams of Agnes Saxby, poor man. That will never fly. The Rycrofts are penniless, and Henry Winslade not much better. No, it is you that the widow is after, you may be quite certain, so be sure to be on your guard. It will be a dark day indeed if ever you replace dearest Catherine with a woman of no family and no breeding.”

  “There is no danger of that,” he said equably. “I shall never marry again.”

  After that, she subsided and, to his relief, let the subject drop. He had no intention of making Mrs Middlehope his wife, but he very much hoped to retain her as an acquaintance. Nor could he quite agree that she was in any way under-bred. Her manners and ease in company bespoke a woman who had moved in a high level of society, and while her day gowns might be somewhat dowdy, her evening dress gave off clear signals of a fashionable and expensive modiste.

  When Viola had gone to bed, he retrieved Paterson’s Roads from the library and looked up Mrs Middlehope’s two previous homes — her father’s, Codlington, and her husband’s, Roseacre.

  ‘Codlington, Hertfordshire, Thomas Westman Esq. A well proportioned brick structure comprising a central block and two wings of pleasing design. Within are many elegantly decorated apartments, and a good gallery that runs through the house with some fine paintings. The park has a circumference of four miles, and contains much fine woodland, a large deer park and a splendid body of water of a serpentine construction, crossed at its centre with an elegant stone bridge with two arches.’