Pickett cut him short. “Yes, we know. I wonder if we might see your mistress.”
The butler inclined his head. “If you will come inside, I shall inquire.”
He took himself off, and returned a moment later with the information that Lady Buckleigh and her mother would receive them in the drawing room. Pickett had not bargained on the presence of Mrs. Gubbins, but decided it might be a good thing if she were present; after all, Miss Gubbins was about to receive a considerable blow—two of them, in fact. She might want her mother’s support. They followed the butler to the door of the drawing room, where he announced, “Mr. Pickett and Major Pennington, ma’am.”
The two ladies sat side by side on the striped satin sofa, the younger wearing a crisp morning gown of figured muslin, the elder a walking costume and sturdy half-boots whose dew-bespattered kid uppers (to say nothing of the damp patches beneath the wearer’s arms) bore testament to her morning constitutional. Lady Buckleigh—or rather, Miss Gubbins—rose gracefully and bobbed a curtsy. “Mr. Pickett. And Major Pennington,” she added with a chill in her voice that led Pickett to wonder just what Lord Buckleigh had told his bigamously wedded bride about Jamie’s rôle in the loss of his first wife.
“Come in, come in,” bellowed Mrs. Gubbins jovially, once again usurping her daughter’s rôle as hostess. “We’ve just rung for tea. Betty, my dear, you’ll have to send the butler back for extra cups.”
Pickett quickly demurred. “We’ll not impose on your daughter’s hospitality, ma’am. In fact, we have come on a sad errand.” Turning to the young woman who believed herself to be Lady Buckleigh, he said, “I am sorry to inform you that your—that is, that Lord Buckleigh is dead.”
“Dead?” Betty Gubbins’s face turned first white and then red, and her voice rose on a note of hysteria. “But he can’t be! He was in perfect health only this morning!”
“It is true, nevertheless. I discovered him lying on the path between here and the gamekeeper’s cottage on the Greenwillows estate.” He paused, but if he had hoped for some hint of guilt from the young woman, he was doomed to disappointment. “I’m afraid he was already beyond any assistance I might have been able to render.”
“Oh, but dead! Mama, what shall I do?” She burst into noisy sobs.
“There, there, my pet.” Mrs. Gubbins cooed, gathering her daughter to her bosom. “Your papa may not be a lordship, but he’s a very warm man, you know, and he’ll see that you never want for anything.”
“If I may make a suggestion,” Pickett said, “you might want to send a few of the servants to bring the, er, to bring his lordship back home. Also, a message to the coroner would not go amiss.”
“The coroner?” Betty Gubbins lifted her head, revealing tear-drenched eyes that now sparkled with indignation. “Surely you cannot mean to suggest that my husband was murdered?”
“That will be for a coroner’s inquest to decide, ma’am. Although a tragic accident might be just within the realm of possibility—but only just—all the evidence points to willful murder.”
“But why should anyone do such a thing?” she demanded, her gaze shifting accusingly to Jamie. “Perhaps Major Pennington can tell us.”
“Nonsense!” put in Mrs. Gubbins. “Depend upon it, my pet, it is nothing but a tragic accident. I daresay some poacher saw him moving through the trees and shot him, thinking he was a deer.”
Pickett regarded her curiously, his expression unreadable. “Did I say he had been shot, Mrs. Gubbins?”
“Of course you did!” the woman insisted, as her daughter stepped backwards out of her arms to regard her with mounting horror. “You said you’d discovered him lying on the path, and that he’d been shot dead!”
“I said I’d discovered him lying on the path, and that he was already dead, but I did not say how he had met his end. I wonder how you knew that, unless you had seen him yourself—or, perhaps, shot him yourself?”
“Nonsense! Why, I’ve been right here with Betty all morning!” She turned rather wild eyes on her daughter in a silent plea for confirmation.
“Your clothes suggest otherwise,” Pickett observed, looking down at her damp half-boots, “and the fact that you have not yet changed indicates that your return to the house was quite recent.” Never before had he thought the near-constant clothing changes demanded by Society might prove to be useful.
“Why, you—you—” Mrs. Gubbins sputtered, turning quite purple in the face.
“It was interesting, too,” Pickett continued, “that when comforting your daughter, you said her father would take care of her. You never said anything about his lordship, about her widow’s jointure.”
“Because he never really married her, the blackguard! Oh, he came a-courting with flowery words and a fancy title, but all the while he was still wed to that Runyon girl! I may not be a ‘ladyship,’ Mr. Pickett, but I wasn’t born yesterday. When you told that tale at dinner, I had no trouble putting two and two together and getting four.”
“Yes, and you told us you would know what to do to any man who served your daughter such a turn, did you not?” he recalled, not entirely without sympathy.
“If you’re thinking I regret what I did now that I’ve been caught, I’m afraid you’re fair and far off! I confronted his high-and-mighty lordship that same night after Betty had gone up to bed, and he laughed in my face. Told me if I didn’t want to see my daughter utterly ruined, I’d keep a still tongue in my head. You may call it murder, Mr. Pickett, but I say he had it coming to him, thinking he could play such a trick on my girl just because her father didn’t have a fancy handle attached to his name. Why, I’ll wager he never would have treated a lady of his own class so shabbily!”
“Don’t bet on it,” muttered Jamie.
“Oh, Mama, how could you be such a fool?” shrieked Betty, her veneer of gentility abruptly stripped away. “Now I’ll never be a ‘ladyship’!” With this pronouncement, she burst into gusty sobs.
Pickett sighed. “This is a bit irregular, what with it being the Justice of the Peace who is dead, but I think you had better come with me, Mrs. Gubbins.”
The faint click was nearly inaudible, drowned as it was by Betty Gubbins’s moans, but Pickett heard enough to make him turn—and find himself staring down the barrel of Jamie’s pistol.
“What the devil—?”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Pickett, but Mrs. Gubbins isn’t going anywhere except to Bristol, where she may board the next ship for America,” Major Pennington informed him.
Setting his hands on his hips, Pickett regarded his mutinous lieutenant with more exasperation than fear. “You’d shoot your own brother-in-law?”
“You’re not my brother-in-law yet,” Jamie reminded him with a grin. “As for shooting you, I couldn’t bring myself to kill you—aside from the fact that Julia would never forgive me, I quite like you for your own sake, you know.”
“I wish I could say the same for you!” retorted Pickett.
“You’re talking a bit rashly for someone with a gun trained on him,” Jamie responded in like manner. “No, Mr. Pickett, I wouldn’t kill you, but a ball in the leg would hinder you sufficiently to give Mrs. Gubbins ample time to escape. I’m afraid it wouldn’t do much to enhance your honeymoon, either,” he added apologetically.
“But you volunteered to assist me! We’re on the same side!”
Jamie shook his head. “Not entirely. You are driven by a sense of duty to justice and the Crown, whereas my motivation is rather more personal. The man had beaten Claudia black and blue on more than one occasion, and I am delighted to see him get his comeuppance at last. The fact that he met it at the hands of a woman lends a pleasing symmetry to the whole business. In avenging her daughter’s ruination—and Claudia’s mistreatment at the same time, although she did not know it—Mrs. Gubbins has made it possible for Claudia and me to marry at last. Is it likely that I would allow her to hang for it?”
“You do realize I could have you charged as an accessory after the fact
?”
Ignoring this threat, Jamie turned to the still-sobbing Betty Gubbins. “Come, girl, hush this caterwauling and help your mother pack her bag! Only one, mind you, ma’am, and carry only the barest essentials for a month-long sea voyage. I can’t hold Mr. Pickett at bay indefinitely, you know, for the man is my brother-in-law, or near enough as makes no odds.”
Responding, perhaps, to the major’s air of command, Mrs. Gubbins hurried from the room with her daughter hard on her heels, the latter vowing to accompany her mother, since she could (she said) never hold her head up in England again.
Their footsteps clattered up the stairs, and as the sound grew fainter, Major Pennington addressed his captive. “It is not as if she is going utterly unpunished,” he pointed out. “She is obliged to leave everything behind, to try and begin again in a country half a world away. It is not so very different from being transported, when you think of it.”
“Transportation is for thieves, not murderers,” pointed out Pickett, who had cause to know, having seen his own father thus sentenced.
“Surely some allowance must be made for the fact that Mrs. Gubbins had considerable provocation,” Jamie argued.
“Perhaps, but that was for the courts to decide, not you.”
“And what chance would she, a merchant’s wife, have had against an aristocrat? Can you honestly tell me that hers would have been a fair trial?”
They might have debated this point indefinitely, had not the Gubbinses, mother and daughter, appeared in the door of the drawing room, each of them struggling with a bulging portmanteau.
“I don’t know how to thank you, Major—” Mrs. Gubbins began.
“Never mind my thanks,” interrupted Jamie, waving impatiently toward the door with his gun. “Just get you gone.”
“Yes, sir! At once, sir!” Mrs. Gubbins and her daughter hurried to the large front door, reaching it just as it opened to admit Mr. Gubbins, who had spent the morning fishing in the stream below the house. “Horace! Thank God! Have you any money on you? Give it to me at once!”
“What? Shopping again, Edna?” asked Mr. Gubbins, withdrawing a roll of bank notes from the inside pocket of his coat.
“Betty and I must away to Bristol. Dear, dear Major Pennington will explain everything!” She snatched the money from her befuddled spouse, gave him a quick kiss on the cheek, and made for the stables, shrieking for the coachman as she and Miss Gubbins made their escape.
But if Mr. Gubbins thought his wife’s behavior puzzling, there were still greater surprises in store for him. For as the merchant reached the drawing room, he drew up short on the threshold at the sight of Major Pennington holding Sir Thaddeus Runyon’s son-in-law at gunpoint.
“Look here, what’s toward?” he demanded.
Jamie, judging it time to release his hostage, lowered his pistol. “I’m sorry to tell you, sir, that your wife has shot Lord Buckleigh, and been obliged to flee before Mr. Pickett here could haul her off to the roundhouse.”
“What, my Edna? Nonsense! Why should she do such a thing?”
“She did it in defense of your daughter, who has been shamefully used.” Jamie briefly recounted the story of Lord Buckleigh’s bigamous marriage.
At its conclusion, Mr. Gubbins gave a sigh. “Well, I can’t say I liked his lordship above half. I’m sorry for Betty, mind, for she was that pleased to be a ‘ladyship,’ but I’m plump in the pocket, if I say so myself, and what with her being my only child, she won’t lack for men willing to marry her with no questions asked. Not any lordships, I trow, but that’s no great loss, in my opinion.”
“And what of yourself, Mr. Gubbins?” Pickett asked. “Will you continue here, or join your wife and daughter in America?”
“Oh, once she writes to me with her direction, I’ll send my wife sufficient funds to see her through until I can settle my affairs here and follow her across the water. Although,” he added with a lurking twinkle in his eye, “between you and me and the lamppost, I may not be in any great hurry.”
With these words, Mr. Gubbins took himself off, leaving Pickett and Jamie alone to pick up the threads of their interrupted debate.
“I should go after her, you know,” Pickett said with a marked lack of enthusiasm. He supposed his return to London would be further delayed while he appeared at yet another inquest; he did not envy the coroner and the constable the task that lay before them, what with the Justice of the Peace being dead and his self-professed killer on board a ship bound for America. He was thankful he had no obligation to report such an outcome to Mr. Colquhoun; his magistrate would certainly have choice words for any of his men who bungled a case so badly.
“Perhaps you should, but I suspect you won’t, for you know justice when you see it.” In a bracing tone, Jamie added, “Come, Mr. Pickett, even had he lived, Lord Buckleigh never would have paid the price for killing that groom. Neither he nor Tom were fool enough to leave any correspondence that could have been traced back to the blackmail scheme, but even if you’d had a mountain of evidence against him, it would have made no difference; his lordship’s position as Justice of the Peace put him beyond your reach. If you had continued with your investigation—and I quite see that your own integrity would not have allowed you to do anything else—you would have achieved nothing, only put a large blot on an otherwise distinguished career. Mrs. Gubbins dispensed the justice that you could not. In a way, she did you a favor. And speaking of favors,” he added in a lighter tone of voice, “I have one to ask of you.”
“It seems to me that you are hardly in a position to be asking me anything!” retorted Pickett, not entirely placated even though he could not deny the truth of Jamie’s words.
“Perhaps not, but I shall ask, nevertheless. I wonder,” Jamie said, grinning as he offered his hand, “if you will do me the honor of standing up with me at my wedding.”
Pickett struggled with himself, then smiled and took the major’s proffered hand. “The honor is all mine—my brother.”
Epilogue
Which Ends, as It Began, with a Wedding
The guest list was of necessity small, consisting only of the bridal couple’s immediate families, but it was one of the happiest weddings ever to take place in the ancient stone church in the village of Norwood Green. Mr. Pennington presided over the nuptials of his only son as Major James Pennington, resplendent in scarlet regimentals, at long last married his childhood sweetheart, Claudia Runyon Buckleigh. The bride did not wear white—it would hardly have been suitable, given the fact that she had buried her first husband less than a fortnight earlier—but looked radiant nonetheless in apricot silk, with a mantilla of ivory-colored lace draped over her golden hair.
The bridegroom’s mother (whose maternal feelings might have been said by the more rigid of her husband’s parishioners to be stronger than her moral scruples) beamed upon the couple, while Lady Runyon held her little granddaughter on her lap and more than once sought furtive recourse to her handkerchief. Sir Thaddeus blew his nose loudly as the vicar pronounced the two man and wife, and Pickett and Julia, standing at the altar in attendance upon the bridal pair, exchanged fond glances over the heads of the kneeling couple as they recalled their own recent exchange of vows, and the rôle they had unexpectedly played in this one.
At the conclusion of the brief ceremony, Major and Mrs. James Pennington signed the church register and made what was intended to be a discreet exit through a side door. In this, however, they were thwarted, for news traveled fast in Norwood Green, and by this time everyone in the village was aware not only of young Lady Buckleigh’s long-ago elopement with the vicar’s son, but of the perfidy of his lordship that had driven her to so desperate a flight. And so it was that, when the church door was flung open to permit them egress, Jamie and Claudia were met with loud cheers from the villagers and a shower of flower petals from the children, most prominent among whom were the Pratt youngsters. Fortunately, Jamie had anticipated that the people who had known both him Claudia all their live
s would be forgiving once the truth was known to them, and was prepared for this reception. He dug his hand into his pocket, withdrew a handful of coins, and tossed them into the air, then made a hasty exit with his bride while the villagers scrambled to retrieve these riches.
For the Pratt family, there was greater wealth still to come: Jamie had determined to settle at Greenwillows with his wife and daughter, and in appreciation for Tom Pratt’s long years of silence (a silence which, he suspected, had finally been broken only by the groom’s concerns over providing for his growing young family), he and Claudia had decided to invest the money from the sale of his commission, using a portion of the interest to provide for the young Pratt children and, when the time came, to establish them in whatever trades they might choose.
The formalities having been completed, the two families repaired to the squire’s house for the wedding breakfast, where they feasted on bride-cake, spiced negus, and every other delicacy that Lady Runyon could contrive on short notice. However irregular the circumstances of her elder daughter’s second nuptials, she was resolved to throw over the union the cloak of her own respectability in the hope that, as her husband had predicted, the villagers would follow her own example and accept the newlyweds as a proper married couple.
At last the final toasts were drunk, and Major and Mrs. Pennington prepared to depart for their own home. Jamie picked up little Caroline Pennington (who, exhausted by the festivities and liberally smeared with cake crumbs, had fallen asleep on the sofa) and settled her in his arms, with her coppery head resting on his shoulder. As impatient as they were to keep their daughter with them, Jamie and Claudia were resolved to return her to the Turner farm every evening for a time, in order to make the transition as easy as possible for her.
Lady Runyon kissed the child’s smooth round cheek and, after a moment’s awkward hesitation, presented her own cheek to her newly minted son-in-law.
“Thank you for taking care of our Claudia,” she told him. “I know you did the best you could.”
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