Mystery Loves Company

by Sheri Cobb South

  “Thank you, Rogers,” she said, giving him a grateful little smile.

  She turned her attention to the breakfast laid out on the sideboard, and lifted the lid of a silver chafing dish. The aroma of freshly cooked bacon, usually so pleasant in the morning, now assailed her, an offense against her nostrils. She dropped the lid back in place with a clatter, and turned away just in time to be violently ill all over the floor. As if things could not possibly get any worse, a knock sounded on the door at the front of the house.

  The butler glanced helplessly at his mistress and then in the direction of the front door, clearly torn as to where his duty lay.

  “See who that is, Rogers,” Julia gasped between retches. “Tell them I am indisposed.”

  “Yes, madam,” he said, and hurried from the room.

  He returned a very short time later, hovering awkwardly in the doorway. “Begging your pardon, madam, but it is the doctor—Mr. Gilroy. Under the circumstances, I thought perhaps you might wish to see him.”

  As if on cue, the physician’s head appeared over Rogers’s shoulder. Julia removed the napkin she had pressed to her mouth. “Forgive me, Doctor. I don’t know what happened, but it appears to be over now—all except for cleaning up the mess,” she added, grimacing at the disgusting puddle at her feet.

  Rogers assured her of his willingness to see to this task, and suggested that she might perhaps be more comfortable in the drawing room. Dr. Gilroy took her arm to assist her to this chamber, adding over his shoulder that the butler might bring his mistress a little—a very little—dry toast.

  “In fact, I came in the hopes of finding your husband at home,” the doctor said as he guided her into the drawing room. “It occurred to me that he might wish to borrow my medical text for its information on prussic acid, at least until he has completed his investigation of that particular case. But while I seem to have missed Mr. Pickett, it appears I’ve come at a good time nonetheless.”

  “I’m quite all right now, truly I am,” Julia said shakily, allowing the physician to settle her on a chair. “It is only that I have not been sleeping well recently, and have not had much appetite of late. As for the other, well, I fear it does not take much to make me ‘cast up my accounts,’ as the saying goes.” It was true. On one occasion not so very long ago, the mere sight of John Pickett in a passionate embrace with another female had provoked just such a reaction. Small wonder, then, that so bitter a quarrel as they’d had the previous day should eventually yield the same result.

  The doctor, however, seemed uninterested in this disclaimer. “Never mind, Mrs. Pickett. You’ll find that such symptoms are not uncommon for a woman in your condition, but they usually pass after the first few months.”

  “My ‘condition’?” echoed Julia, bewildered. She hadn’t been aware that quarreling with one’s husband constituted a “condition,” much less that it manifested certain telltale symptoms. “What condition is that?”

  “I beg your pardon,” the doctor said in some consternation. “It appears I may have spoken too soon. Naturally, I assumed—but—forgive me for asking so personal a question, Mrs. Pickett, but when did you last have your menses?”

  “It was—” She broke off abruptly. When had it been? Not while she had been nursing the injured John Pickett in Drury Lane—she certainly would have remembered that!—nor had it occurred while they were visiting her parents in Somersetshire following the wedding. “February,” she said at last. “I don’t recall the exact date, but I was certainly finished by the twenty-fourth, for that was the night of the fire at Drury Lane Theatre.”

  “Some women occasionally miss a month,” he remarked.

  She shook her head. “Not I. Mine are usually like clockwork.” Her eyes widened in dismay as the doctor’s implication became clear. “Dr. Gilroy, if you mean to suggest—”

  “Just so, Mrs. Pickett,” he replied, bestowing an avuncular smile upon her. “It is perhaps a bit too early to be entirely certain, but I am reasonably sure that you are going to have a child, very likely by Christmas.”

  She gave a bitter little laugh. “I can assure you, Doctor, it is no such thing.”

  “What makes you say so?”

  “To put it bluntly, Dr. Gilroy, I am barren. In six years with my first husband, I never showed the slightest sign of being enceinte.”

  “I see. And did it never occur to you that the fault might lie with your first husband, rather than yourself?”

  “Oh, no,” she said decisively. “The physician was quite clear on that point.”

  “Was he? How did he know?”

  She looked at him blankly. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Unless there is some obvious indicator—an absence of menses on the woman’s part, for instance, or a lack of vital fluids on the man’s—it is practically impossible to assign a definite cause to a couple’s childlessness. So again I ask: how did the physician know?”

  “He never said,” she confessed. “He informed Lord Fieldhurst—my first husband—that the deficiency was mine, and that it was doubtful anything could be done to correct it, but he never stated the basis for his conclusion. I assumed it must be some complicated medical reason that we would not have understood, even had he attempted an explanation.”

  The doctor nodded sagely. “I suspected as much.”

  “But why? Why would Dr. Humphrey lie about such a thing?”

  “Humphrey? Do you mean Dr. Edmund Humphrey, by any chance?”

  “Why, yes. Do you know him?”

  “Only by reputation, but that is enough. Dr. Humphrey has made a long and lucrative career out of telling aristocrats what they most want to hear. He would not want to jeopardize a valuable source of income by informing Lord Fieldhurst that he was sterile.”

  Julia was glad to be sitting, for she suddenly felt faint. Now that she thought of it, in spite of her first husband’s serial infidelities, she had never heard the slightest whisper of his having fathered a child on any of his mistresses. And no wonder: Frederick had been sterile. All those years, it had been he, not she, who was responsible for his lack of an heir and his cousin’s eventual assumption of the title.

  “Fieldhurst knew, nonetheless,” she said at last. “He must have known. And yet he let me bear the blame all those years!”

  “It was very wrong of him, of course,” the doctor said, “shamefully so. And yet, if I may offer a word of advice, Mrs. Pickett, Lord Fieldhurst is dead. Let his sins against you die with him, and concentrate instead on celebrating the birth of your child with your new husband.”

  She nodded. “Yes, that is good advice, Doctor. Thank you. But you spoke of ‘symptoms,’ in the plural. What other symptoms may I expect?”

  “It appears you are experiencing some of them already.” He ticked them off on his fingers. “Alterations in sleep patterns, loss of appetite, and nausea, particularly in the morning. Some women also notice changes in temperament —emotional outbursts, for instance, such as sudden bouts of tears or uncharacteristic querulousness . . .”

  “I see,” she said slowly, recalling several incidents over the past weeks that appeared very different in the light of this revelation. Perhaps her husband might forgive her more readily, once he knew the reason for her inexplicable moodiness. She glanced up at the clock, and saw that it was not yet nine. Hurry home, she silently begged across the miles. Please, please hurry.

  * * *

  Pickett, for his part, awoke that same morning in some confusion as to where he was and why he had apparently slept in his clothes, as well as why he should be possessed of a pounding head and a mouth that felt as if it had been stuffed with cotton wool. Gradually, however, the memories returned: the quarrel with Julia which had ended in the realization that he was unable to satisfy her; the stagecoach journey to Croydon; the previous evening’s overindulgence.

  Bracing himself against the pain he knew would follow, he sat up in bed, clutching his hands to his head. He had been drunk exactly twice in his life, and those
experiences had been sufficient to demonstrate why he had no desire to cultivate the habit. The first had occurred a year earlier, while he was investigating Lord Fieldhurst’s murder, and had been purely unintentional: he had been questioning a person of interest in a public house, and had not realized until much too late that the man was attempting to drink him under the table. Last night’s excesses, however, had been quite deliberate, a desperate attempt to forget, if only for a few hours, all that he had lost. The only trouble with drinking to forget, he reflected bitterly, was that one returned to sobriety only to discover that nothing had changed: the thing one had hoped to forget was still there, and in the meantime, one felt considerably less able to face it. Then, too, there was still the investigation that had necessitated the journey in the first place; he could hardly show up at the door of Washbourn Abbey in his present condition. Responding reluctantly to the call of duty, he swung his legs to the floor, stood up—and cracked his pounding head against the rafters.

  He let out a ragged sigh. It was going to be one of those days.

  Half an hour later, feeling somewhat the better for having washed, shaved, and consumed several cups of strong coffee, he inquired of the innkeeper the direction of Washbourn Abbey and set out on foot. A Londoner born and bred, Pickett was no great lover of country living, and did not look forward to a seven-mile trek along rutted country lanes, especially when his head pounded anew with every step. Consequently, when a farm wagon drew alongside him and the driver offered to take him up, he accepted the offer with gratitude; besides accomplishing the journey in much less time, the obligatory small talk which courtesy demanded he make with the farmer served to distract him from endlessly rehashing the angry words he’d exchanged with his wife, and her final accusation.

  At length the wagon rounded a curve, and the vista that came into view inspired Pickett to interrupt the driver’s engrossing account of how Farmer Dawson’s cow had given birth to a calf with two heads.

  “Is that Washbourn Abbey?”

  “Aye.” The driver leaned over the side of the box so that he might spit onto the road below. “That’s it.”

  Away to their right, the ground rose in a long, gentle swell of green meadow. A massive house of weathered grey stone commanded the rise as if looking down on the lesser beings in the valley below, its powerful lines reflected in the ornamental lake spread out beneath it like a robe at a monarch’s feet. Behind it, the dark green of a line of trees stood in stark contrast to the pale stone of the house as well as the blue of the sky beyond. Staring at it, Pickett could not help feeling a pang of sympathy for Lady Washbourn; it must have been quite a shock to go from being Miss Eliza Mucklow, daughter of a wealthy brewer, to the mistress of such a pile. His own rise from Drury Lane to Curzon Street, while disconcerting in its own way, was nothing to this. Perhaps if he had admitted his ignorance, had asked . . . But no, the same pride that balked at living as his wife’s pensioner forbade his asking her for instruction on a matter at which, to his mind, any man worthy of the name would have excelled instinctively. Well, he hoped he and his pride would be very happy together.

  He shook off the unproductive train of thought and dragged his attention back to the matter at hand. Julia had claimed that Lady Washbourn was in love with her husband, having coaxed such a confession from the lady’s own lips; what, then, had the poor little countess endured to drive her to so desperate an action as plotting the murder of her husband? He found himself in the curious position of hoping he did not find the evidence against her that he had come from London to seek.

  “Mind you, five years ago it didn’t look so fine as this,” the driver remarked. “The old place was well nigh falling to rack and ruin before his lordship was wed. But a regular Midas, her ladyship’s father was, and a whole army of workmen descended on the house and its outbuildings before the ink on the marriage lines was dry. Kept half the countryside in work for more than a year, it did.”

  “I see,” Pickett said. “If you’ll set me down here, I can walk the rest of the way.”

  The driver drew up his horses, and Pickett thanked him and offered him a shilling for his pains, which the man rejected with the easy generosity of country people. Pickett thanked him once again and climbed down. He stood watching as the wagon lurched out of sight, then turned and set out for the grey house on the hill.

  He did not approach the massive double doors at the front of the house, but followed the raked gravel drive around the eastern façade to an unassuming door at the rear. Recognizing this as the service entrance, he stepped up to it and rapped sharply. A moment later it was opened by a young maidservant in a mobcap and a voluminous apron.

  “Yes, sir?” she asked, gaping at him.

  “My name is John Pickett. I’ve come from Bow Street, in London.” He gave the girl his card, wondering as he did so if she could read it. “I should like to have a word with the housekeeper, if I may.”

  “Yes, sir,” the girl said again. “If you’ll come this way, I’ll fetch Mrs. Hawkins.”

  She bobbed a curtsy and left him just inside the door. When she returned a short time later, she was accompanied by a gaunt female of indeterminate years. “This is Mr. Pickett, mum,” she said, then bobbed another curtsy and took herself off.

  “Well, Mr. Pickett? Betty says you’ve come from Bow Street.” Mrs. Hawkins eyed him with disfavor, as if she suspected this tale was nothing more than an excuse to conceal his nefarious intention of seducing the female staff. If only she knew, Pickett thought with a sigh.

  In fact, the prospect of explaining the reason for his visit to the Abbey had caused him considerable unease. As there was no possible way he could justify this as part of an inquiry into Lady Washbourn’s missing rubies, he had no choice but to reveal his continuing investigation into a death which a coroner’s jury had determined was no murder. He only hoped Lord Washbourn would forgive him, given the possibility that his findings might save his lordship’s life.

  “I’m looking into the death of one of Lady Washbourn’s housemaids, Ann Barton by name.” The identity of the dead girl inspired no spark of recognition in the housekeeper’s eyes, and Pickett realized that, with the probable exceptions of his lordship’s valet and her ladyship’s abigail, Lord Washbourn maintained two completely separate household staffs, one for his Town residence and the other for his country estate.

  “Yes, what of it?” challenged Mrs. Hawkins, still on her guard.

  Fortunately, Pickett had expected this response, and now withdrew Lady Washbourn’s letter from the inside pocket of his coat. “I have here a letter from her ladyship stating that I am to be given the full cooperation of the staff during the course of my investigation.” Recognizing that this news would hardly endear him to the very people upon whose cooperation the investigation depended, he added, “I will not require much, Mrs. Hawkins. In fact, I hope to be out of your way very shortly.”

  “Very well, Mr. Pickett,” she conceded with a cautious nod. “What do you want of us?”

  “Very little. I only want to have a look about her ladyship’s still-room.”

  “Her still-room?” echoed the housekeeper, with a skeptical lift of one eyebrow. “Whatever for?”

  “I’m sure you can understand that I am unable to discuss the case in detail,” Pickett said. “Suffice it to say that the girl was known to have drunk a glass of her ladyship’s own peach ratafia just before she died.”

  Mrs. Hawkins gave a disdainful sniff. “Her ladyship has made that particular beverage for years, from her own mother’s receipt, and gives the vicar a bottle every Christmas! If there were anything wrong with it, he and his wife would have been dead these ten years and more.”

  As Lord and Lady Washbourn had married only two years earlier, Pickett knew this for an exaggeration. “Nevertheless, I should like to see it,” he reiterated, standing his ground.

  “Very well.”

  With the air of one bestowing an undeserved favor, she led Pickett through the kitchens to
a small room whose windows looked out onto the herb garden. A work table of plain deal was positioned beneath the window to catch the light, while overhead, bunches of herbs and flowers hung from the rafters, giving off a faint but pleasant odor as they dried. All in all, it seemed a rather cheerful place to plot a murder.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Hawkins,” Pickett said firmly, seeing the housekeeper showed no inclination to leave. “If I require anything else, I will be sure to ask.”

  Mrs. Hawkins gave him one final glare, but left the room without argument. Alone in the small chamber, Pickett closed the door and looked about him, unsure exactly what he was looking for, let alone how he should go about finding it. He selected a glass jar at random and unstoppered the cork, wrinkling his nose at the sharp aroma that rose from the fine reddish-brown powder inside. Conceding that Ann Barton was unlikely to have been poisoned by cinnamon, he replaced the cork stopper and returned the jar to the shelf. In truth, he was more than a bit daunted by the task that he had traveled all the way from London to complete; he had not expected to be confronted with floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with unlabeled jars, bottles, and boxes, each containing some unfamiliar and faintly sinister-looking powder or liquid. It would have been helpful to discover one marked “prussic acid,” “poison,” or even a more general “keep out,” but Pickett put the chances of such a felicitous discovery somewhere between slim and none. He thought wistfully how much more quickly the search might have been accomplished—to say nothing of how much more pleasurable the task would have been—if Julia had been there to examine the shelves on the right-hand side of the room, while he took those on the left.