Not so. “I’ll have Kirby select some strapping young men for it, not to worry, Mrs. Harper,” he said, clearly warming to his own idea. “Decorate the top with the flag. I’ll find some army mementos to lay on it, as well.”
Violet tried once more. “Your Grace, a glass coffin will require special casing around it inside the grave, a large effort for the grave diggers.”
Portland waved her off, in the manner of the wealthy who never understand the work required of their whims. “Not to worry, Mrs. Harper. I have plenty of diggers who can assist with a simple grave.”
Violet repressed a sigh once more and made notes. Adult brass-and-glass coffin. Additional lifting straps. Union Jack.
“Will you have all of the staff come out for the colonel’s funeral?” she asked.
“No,” he replied quickly. “This will be a very private affair.”
“Then . . . just you and perhaps a few of your chief employees, plus the pallbearers?”
“No, no, the employees have been under enough anxiety and worry. We won’t trouble them with this. We will just bury George as quickly as possible so that we can, hopefully, dispel the aura of gloom that has hovered over Welbeck these past days.” Portland nodded, as if declaring it would make it so. Violet had her doubts that a quick funeral would make fifteen hundred estate workers forget about the death surrounding them all. In fact, remembering Mrs. Garside’s hysterical reaction to just Aristotle’s demise, Violet was quite certain that it wouldn’t.
“Very well, Your Grace. Shall I hire any professional mourners?”
“No, no, that’s just more fuss, especially in town.”
“I see,” Violet said, wondering whether there was to actually even be a funeral. “So, other than the pallbearers, you will be the only mourner, sir?”
“Hmm,” Portland said, resting his chin in his hand, his elbow on the polished surface of the intricately inlaid mahogany table. “No, I believe I shan’t go outside that day. Besides, I’ve already attended one funeral in recent days. You may start the procession at the front door, and I will view it from an upstairs window.”
Violet was flabbergasted. The duke planned to pay for an elaborate funeral, to be attended by . . . no one. Well, it was her responsibility to put the deceased into the ground in a dignified manner, and she could certainly accomplish that. It just seemed a shame that he wouldn’t have anyone attending his interment except the pallbearers, Reverend Appleton, and Violet.
A discreet clearing of the throat alerted them that they had company. Kirby, the butler, had entered the room with the noiseless stealth of a cat. “Yes, Kirby?” Portland said.
“Your Grace, pardon my interruption of your discussion. Mrs. Neale and I were just consoling each other over your terrible loss.” He said this with the blandness of someone mentioning that tea was served. “It reminded us of the celebrations for All Hallows’ Eve that the staff have been preparing for. Do you wish that we should stop? We do not wish to intrude on your grief, and Mrs. Neale and I thought perhaps it would be an unseemly amount of frivolity.”
“Ah, you always have my best interests at heart, Kirby,” Portland replied warmly. “However, I do not wish to steal away the joy the servants have each year with the festivities. You may proceed as planned. Hold the events down in the ballroom.”
Kirby bowed and departed, and Violet thought she saw a hint of a smile upon the butler’s lips.
After talking through a few more details with Portland, Violet stood. She still had to make final preparations to Colonel Mortimer’s body, then head over to Worksop to telegram Harry and visit with Reverend Appleton. Portland, however, waved her back down.
“One more thing, Mrs. Harper. I plan to release Mr. Chandler for the funeral. In fact, he shall be a pallbearer.”
More disappointment for Violet. “Are you certain, Your Grace? After all, we haven’t cleared his name in connection with the recent deaths.”
“Is Mr. Chandler your suspect in all three deaths?” Portland asked.
“At the moment, sir, he is my best guess,” Violet replied truthfully. “Except that I cannot be sure of his motives.”
“He is not the culprit.”
“Your Grace? How do you know?”
Portland put a finger to the side of his nose. “I know it isn’t possible for my falconer to have committed such acts. Anyone who cares for feathered creatures the way he does could not possibly wish to commit violence against a living being.”
Violet considered that a weak conclusion. Many a brutal murderer had a pet kitten at home on whom he doted. “Your Grace, perhaps it is time we called the police—”
“It won’t be necessary, Mrs. Harper. I am confident you will quietly find the culprit. I prefer not to have the commotion that involving the police would bring. When the police come, the press are typically right upon their heels, and soon there would be engravings and photographs of everyone from the lowest laundry maid to my own self splashed through every paper in England. This was always my concern, but now that I know the government is looking for ways to avoid repaying my bonds in a timely fashion, I am doubly concerned about the estate’s reputation. I don’t want them to figure out a way to use distress here as a mechanism for refusal to pay—or, worse, as a reason for sending in more busybodies.”
Violet realized that Portland’s care for his workers was considerable, but would not extend beyond his own . . . what was the word? Oh yes, his dignitas, she thought, remembering the ancient Roman word used to describe a nobleman’s sum of his clout, personal reputation, moral standing, and entitlement to respect.
With that understanding, she knew that she would have to continue bearing the responsibility of justice for three men on her own. Very well, then, that was what she would do.
Taking her leave of the duke, Violet rushed back to Worksop and met with Reverend Appleton, working patiently to overcome his consternation that a funeral would be held so quickly with no time for visitation of the deceased. It was a delicate dance she performed, explaining the urgency of the funeral without revealing that the man had been murdered, nor that there were simply to be no mourners. Reluctantly, he agreed, but would not permit her to leave before he pressed a bound collection of his sermons into her hand.
She then rushed off to telegram Harry for a glass coffin, hoping he could ship it on a train this evening. At the last second, she also added in a request for him to send along the finest elm burl coffin in the shop. Just in case the glass one failed to contain its occupant.
Violet had never held her breath so much during a funeral before, a great irony given that it was just her, a coachman, and eight pallbearers making the trip from Welbeck to Worksop Priory. It was just short of a miracle that the glass coffin had survived the handling and train trip from London, and she supposed that as long as it survived the distant viewing by the duke, she could let out a small sigh of relief.
She had worked diligently upon returning from town the previous afternoon to put the colonel into a condition ready for display within a glass coffin. Along with copious amounts of cosmetic massage, his red-jacketed Grenadier Guards uniform, with its enormously tall, furred hat, hid the damage that had been done to poor Colonel Mortimer.
Portland offered a wave from an upper-story window as the pathetic little procession departed. Violet didn’t know any of the men that Kirby had selected as pallbearers except for Martin Chandler, who avoided even glancing in her direction. Normally, Violet would have walked at the back of a procession, but this time she climbed onto the box with the driver, and once they had exited the long estate driveway, the pallbearers loaded the coffin onto the carriage, and all found places to hang from on the side of the conveyance, to speed their trip to town.
Violet attempted to muse about her investigative matter as the horses clopped along, but they found every rut in the road to drag the hearse’s wheels through, rattling her bones and driving her to distraction with worry that the coffin would shatter into pieces. Dear God, how s
he hoped she wouldn’t have to return to the storage locker at the train station to retrieve the elm coffin.
However, they made it to the churchyard without any damage, and the good reverend did his part well. Violet probably stopped breathing for a full minute as the pallbearers slipped the lifting straps around the coffin to pick it up and lower it into the hastily constructed enclosure in the ground. Each sway of the flag-draped coffin caused her to restrain a gasp. With a sickening clank it finally made it to its destination.
Violet hoped to never deal with a glass coffin again.
As the party made its way back to the hearse, Chandler finally acknowledged Violet’s presence. “Mrs. Harper, if I might have a word. . . .” he said, a spark of his old self-assuredness back. “May I ask that you visit me at the rookery upon our return? I would offer to visit you directly, but of course my present circumstances make that impossible.”
Would he remain confined until Violet solved this case? If so, she needed either to conclude definitely that Chandler was the killer or to quickly find another culprit. “Yes, but what is it you wish to see me about?” she asked.
His lazy smile had returned. “Believe it or not, I wish to tell you a story that you will find most interesting.”
Violet sat across from Chandler inside his cottage, which was just a single room. They sat at a worn oak table, with an oil lamp between them providing an incongruously merry light for their discussion.
“I suppose I owe you an apology, Mrs. Harper,” Chandler began. “I haven’t been entirely honest with either you or His Grace.”
Violet was silent. This much she knew.
“You see,” he continued, “I thought that if I pretended not to know the colonel all that well, I could continue my own . . . investigations, shall we say . . . in the background while you continued with yours. I figured my confinement would only last a few hours until His Grace realized how unfair it was and I would be free to act as before. But now I’m not so sure that will happen. And I have information you need in order to do some intelligent questioning about the colonel’s death, because I can tell you, Mrs. Harper, that you are as far off the path as an eagle hunting for a fox in a bog.”
Violet ignored the jibe, waiting to see if Chandler had anything valuable to say.
“I confess I feel right bad about His Grace, thinking the colonel was such a dear friend of his. The colonel had his plans the minute he moved onto Welbeck estate.”
“What plans were those?” Violet asked.
Chandler interlocked his fingers on the table. “I guess I should start from the beginning. Do you know about the Cavendish sisters?”
Where had she heard about them before? “Oh, you mean the seventeenth-century Royalists, Jane, Elizabeth, and Frances? Yes, His Grace told me that they protected Welbeck from Cromwell’s men during the war.”
Chandler nodded. “Was that all he told you? There’s far more to the story than that. The Cavendish sisters were very clever. When word came that the Roundheads were on their way, their father fled like a coward, but the girls set to work protecting the house. One of the first things they did was to gather the servants together to help them bury all of the silver. Well, all of it except for enough forks, knives, and serving bowls to convince the Roundheads that they had done no such thing.”
Violet was intrigued. “Where did they bury it?”
“No one knows. It might have been in one place, or it may have been scattered around. Legend has it that the girls made a pact to leave it buried until their father came home. Of course, he never did, and as the sisters began making good marriages with wealthy men, they simply forgot about the enormous treasure they had buried.”
Events and conversations began clicking together rapidly in Violet’s mind. “So you and the colonel were working together to try to find this supposed treasure.”
Chandler nodded. “The colonel heard of the legend, and used his old friendship with His Grace to his advantage, pretending to be down on his luck. Knowing His Grace’s good nature in certain circumstances, he was right to assume His Grace would invite him to stay on the estate.”
Now it was Violet’s turn to nod. This confirmed her suspicions about the colonel. “I found some strange holes on the property, particularly in the area where his body was found. They must have been his attempts at testing the earth for locations containing storage trunks.”
“Yes. Sometimes he used his cane, which made less-noticeable holes, and sometimes he used a special, narrow shovel he had purchased.”
Colonel Mortimer must have been affecting to be much more of a drunkard and an insomniac than he really was, in order to stumble about the estate without anyone being suspicious, Violet thought.
“The last time I saw the colonel alive, he was standing outside his cottage with a couple of shovels, and when he saw me, he feigned being in his cups. I presume now that that was to throw me off track. He was hunting around a dilapidated shed behind his cottage.”
“Yes, I know the one,” Chandler said. “It’s smothered in a rose vine. I hear that Miss Kemble, the lady His Grace fancied many years ago, visited here a couple of times and commented on how much she adored the roses on the building. They are some unusual shade of yellow, I think. He has never allowed the building to be removed, nor does he maintain it, and that’s why it just rots on its own. Like his heart, I expect.”
“Was there something about the cottage that made the colonel think there was treasure there?”
Chandler shrugged. “He never told me how he decided on locations. I always figured he chose them randomly. It was only when you showed me the map that I realized he was doing something more methodical.”
That reminded Violet of a large question to be answered. “How did you become involved with the colonel? I’m surprised he would share the treasure with anyone.”
“I think he realized it wasn’t possible to search the entire estate alone. I told the truth when I said he liked to spend time with the birds. We talked, as men do, and I told him that I wanted to be married one day but didn’t want to take on a wife on a falconer’s paltry wage. It gave him the idea that he could help me realize my plans while getting himself a helper who wouldn’t be likely to blab. He offered to split the haul evenly with me when we found it, so there would be no arguing over percentages.
“I suggested to the colonel that I could train the ravens to do some overhead scouting for us, and he agreed. Told me it was a brilliant idea.” Chandler said this with pride in his own ingenuity. “So I did. Aristotle was the best seeker of them, but that really only meant he was the best at finding unusual objects. It was difficult to figure out how to train them to look for odd rises or depressions in the land. When your husband grabbed me so roughly—and unjustly, might I add—I had followed the ravens to that copse of trees because they were behaving excitedly and I thought perhaps they’d found something. What they had seen was Colonel Mortimer. I was just as surprised as you were to find him there, all done in.”
Chandler seemed to have no grief over the loss of his friend, but perhaps friendships developed in the bonds of thievery didn’t tend to be firm and enduring. Remembering back to her first encounter with the falconer, then subsequent events at Worksop Inn, Violet asked, “Have you a lady in mind to take as your wife?”
“Yes, I promised Polly Saunders that once the treasure was found and sold, my half would make me well-off enough to support her and she wouldn’t have to work in her father’s inn anymore.”
“Your interest is in Polly, not Olive, the housemaid?”
“Olive? That little mouse? Why would I be interested in her?”
Why indeed. Poor Olive would be most disappointed to learn that the object of her adoration had no eyes for her, although Violet suspected Chandler would no longer have his position here at Welbeck, and Olive could find someone else less . . . unsavory . . . to pursue.
“How did you know the treasure would be extensive enough to make you wealthy?”
&nbs
p; Chandler waved a hand in the direction of the house. “A place like this? Full of people that have always been rich and powerful? I knew.” He offered another sardonic smile.
“But why would Colonel Mortimer, a man who had an army pension, secure investments, and a comfortable home in London, need to dig up his friend’s estate to find a few pieces of silver? Unless . . .”
Chandler nodded. “The colonel wished to remarry, too. His wife died a long time ago, Mrs. Harper. He thought that a larger fortune would make him more appealing. What with that eye of his and his age, I expect society debutantes weren’t falling all over themselves for him.”
Violet thought that his fondness for liquor might have more to do with women’s reticence toward the colonel, but kept that to herself. Chandler must have taken her silence as belief in his confession, for he finished with, “So you see, I was in partnership with the colonel, but I had nothing to do with his death. I was just as surprised to find him there as you were. There’s an actual murderer still on the loose while I’m shut away like a petty thief.”
Violet shook her head at his audacity. It was time to deflate his rubber balloon. “Well, for one thing, you are a petty thief, or a potential one, at a minimum. And you’ve proved nothing to me, as it makes perfect sense that you would wish to kill the colonel so that you wouldn’t have to split the treasure with him when it was found.”
Chandler gasped. “That’s not true. Mrs. Harper, I’ve told you everything.”
“Once you knew of the legend, what use was the old man to you?” Violet continued. “He was just an inconvenience. Perhaps you had returned to the copse to move his body, and were surprised by my husband. Isn’t it ironic that Mr. Bayes was found in the same location, as well? Almost as if it is your own personal graveyard.”
“What do you mean? Mr. Bayes was found at the skating rink site, killed by your husband’s dynamite.”
Death at the Abbey Page 24