“You are absolutely correct,” Charles agreed. “This is the worst time of year to look.”
“We could go to Percy Chalke, and ask him if he can force his mistress to be reasonable in her treatment of Julie.”
Charles lifted his brows. “I don’t know that she has it in her to be reasonable. Now, if everyone understood that Miss Acton was Julie’s mother, it could lance the wound, get all secrets out in the open. It does seem like one secret builds on the next in that family.”
“She is Julie’s mother?” William exclaimed.
“With Jacques Rueff,” Charles confirmed, knowing his fellow reporter would keep the information to himself.
“Bloody hell,” his friend muttered. “I had no idea. No, if Julie is Miss Acton’s daughter, I don’t see anything improving. She’s better off away. If a mother cannot treat her own daughter with a natural tenderness, there is no hope for her. And she doesn’t like the new mistress. Aren’t you concerned for her?”
“I’ll tell you what,” Charles said. “The Hogarths will take a hackney home because of the late hour. We’ll go with them and knock on the tradesmen’s entrance to Carley House. Perhaps someone will still be in the kitchens and can check on Julie for us.”
“Can we manage that?”
“If we had an excuse.” Charles snapped his fingers. “I will speak to Bertram.” He hunted through the room for the young man, William in tow, and found him holding his hands over the fire in the kitchen.
“Gentlemen,” Bertram exclaimed. His hands went to his unbound neckcloth, and he quickly retied it.
Charles’s keen eyes detected a rash on the lad’s throat. “You don’t look well. Would you like us to convey you back to Brompton with us tonight?”
Bertram blinked slowly. “You’re going to Brompton?”
“We want a quick word with your mother’s new maid, actually.”
“Why?” He rubbed at his throat.
“I am responsible for having her hired,” Charles admitted. “And I want to check on her.”
Bertram had dark shadows under his eyes. “It’s after midnight.”
“I think enthusiasm is waning,” Charles said. “The beer is gone again. We’ll be there and back before you know it, no trouble to the household.”
“I’ve seen yawning,” William added.
“I’ll send Fred to fetch a hackney for us all,” Charles said. He went for his brother, before Bertram Carley could think twice about the sense of getting the new family maid out of bed late at night.
Miss Hogarth joined him when he came back into the room after sending Fred to find the hackney. “Do we need to get our wraps?”
“Yes,” Charles said. “I’ll fetch them for you, and we are all going to escort you home.”
“You are?” She tilted her head. “Why? Something to do with our murders?”
Chapter 27
Charles put his mouth to Miss Hogarth’s ear. “William is worried about Julie Saville. We have a scheme to check on her, since she didn’t turn up tonight.” He explained his plan to visit Carley House.
“I can simply check on her tomorrow,” Miss Hogarth offered.
Charles moved to stand behind her, and said in a low voice, “Look at Mr. Aga.”
Indeed, the reporter was shifting from side to side as he spoke to Bertram Carley, clearly nervous.
“Goodness,” Miss Hogarth exclaimed.
“I begin to think he’s in love with Julie Saville,” Charles said. “I don’t see the reason for such anxiety. It was never likely she would come here tonight.”
“Nor even proper,” Mr. Hogarth said, appearing at his side. “A parlormaid at Mr. Dickens’s party?”
“One hopes she will be able to call herself an actress again someday soon.” Charles felt the need to defend the girl.
“I look forward to escorting these gentle ladies home,” Bertram said, coming toward them with a beaming smile at Miss Mary Hogarth, in conversation with Charles’s sister near the window.
Miss Hogarth and her father said nothing, but made sure that Miss Mary Hogarth was at the far end of the coach from the hopeful lover as the six of them seated themselves in the hackney coach a few minutes later. The fact that Miss Hogarth had listened to his concerns and made arrangements, trusting his judgment, despite the fact that Bertram, cad or not, would in many ways be a catch for a Hogarth, warmed Charles’s heart.
Nonetheless, Bertram attempted conversation on the jolting ride back to Brompton, despite frequent sips from a flask he’d attempted to pass around unsuccessfully before drinking the contents himself. Charles, unable to see much of Miss Hogarth in the limited lantern light, gave up and closed his eyes, drifting sleepily, wondering how irritated Julie would be by three slightly sozzled men coming to her place of employment in the middle of the night to make sure she was well.
The coach stopped in front of the Hogarths’ house first. Charles came to full attention when Miss Hogarth pressed his hand good-bye, her breath gentle on his cheek. Mary, a saucier creature, patted his shoulder and gave him a wink he could just see in the dim light.
“I look forward to a closer acquaintance with our families,” Bertram said, his words slurring.
“A pleasure to meet ye,” Mr. Hogarth said, without making any commitment to the young man. He joined his daughters on the path to their door.
“You know,” Charles mumbled as the horses began to move again. “You aren’t the only one with a rash. Your new maid, Julie, has complained of such an ailment.”
“That’s not the same at all,” Bertram said.
“No?” William asked. “Why not? Maybe there’s a problem with your water supply.”
Bertram belched. “I don’t know what’s causing mine, but the maid is probably reacting to the cleaning solution Mother likes.”
“Something unusual?” Charles asked, waking up fully.
“Mother likes her tea service to be dazzlingly white.” Bertram fell back against the seat since he hadn’t held on to the strap.
“Doesn’t every proud keeper of her home?” William asked.
“Not like her. I remember she slapped the maid we had around the holidays this year because there was a brown stain on a cup.”
“Did a guest complain?”
“No, it was right after she gave tea to Lady Lugoson and her daughter. They wouldn’t complain. Miss Lugoson and my sister were bosom beaus.” Bertram snorted drunkenly.
“What happened?” Charles asked, trying to blink his way back into full sobriety.
“The maid gave notice. She was a local girl.”
“I meant, what did your mother say?” William said intently. “About the stain? One dousing in tea on an otherwise clean cup should not leave brown stains.”
“If it was badly cleaned?” Bertram said uncertainly.
“Was the maid a lazy girl?” Charles asked.
“Not that I heard.”
“What do you think happened?”
“Some kind of grit stained the cup really b-b-badly?” Bertram ventured.
“Bad tea leaves?” William suggested. He jerked his head toward the window and drummed his fingers on it.
“Maybe.” Bertram yawned.
“Did your mother teach you about poisonous mushrooms?” Charles asked, putting one idea together with another, hoping to get information out of the young man before he passed out. “When you were a child?”
“Of course. Some of them can be quite deceptive.”
“How?”
“Some have red tinges or other obvious signs. You have to be careful.” He warmed to the topic. “In Somerset we have death caps and other poisonous mushrooms.”
“Did you ever see your mother pick any?”
“Once I thought she did, but she laughed and said she knew what she was doing.”
“When was that?”
“I was maybe twelve. I assumed I had just mistaken the yellowish cast of the fungus.”
“What about your sister?”
&
nbsp; Bertram’s head tilted drunkenly. “Never saw her picking the poisonous ones.”
“Did anyone around you die shortly after your mother picked them?” William said, an edge in his voice.
“I remember the mushroom because I was afraid to eat the mushrooms at breakfast the next morning, but no one who ate them became ill,” Bertram said, then giggled.
“What time of year?” Charles asked.
“Autumn, of course.” Bertram stared up at the smoke-stained roof of the coach.
Charles made an encouraging noise. “Oh?”
“That might have been about the time my father’s mother finally died.”
“Was it sudden?” Charles asked.
Bertram closed his eyes. “She had been slowly decaying for years. A blessing that she went.”
William lifted his brows in Charles’s direction, but how could they know if one fact could be joined to another?
The hackney went past Lugoson House, all the lights extinguished at this time of night. The late hour and the country road meant all they could hear were the horses clopping along, the jangle of the reins, the coachman’s winter wheeze.
Bertram coughed and burped up a vent of beery breath that scented the coach. Charles felt queasy and turned his head to the window in the hope of picking up the draft through the improperly fitted glass. Then he saw the row of houses, Georgian structures, probably built from white stone, but badly yellowed and chipped around the edges. Unlike the baroness’s home, the Carley house was well lit, not as if for a party, but as if it were some four hours earlier, the family and domestics still about their evening routines.
“Are so many candles always lit at this hour?” Charles asked.
“Is your mother doing witchy rituals at midnight?” William joked.
“No. I don’t know what is going on.” Bertram thumped the roof and the coachman pulled to the side of the road.
Charles jumped out, followed by the other two men. “Should we go in through the front?”
“Of course, you are my guests. I’ll have our butler find the maid for you and then—”
Before he could finish, a scream radiated from the house, the sound chilling Charles to the marrow. A different sort of cry than Epiphany night, more terrifying.
“Julie!” William yelled, and rushed up the steps. He pulled the bell and banged on the door.
Bertram stared, at a loss with the confusion. They heard a cry, a different female voice this time. “That’s Beatrice.”
Charles joined William at the door, Bertram a few steps behind. While it was secured, it began to open after he rattled it. William pushed through, ignoring whoever was behind the door, and ran across the front hallway, his shoes leaving damp marks on the oriental red fabric.
At the back of the hall was a dark wood staircase with a red runner, leading up to a balcony landing, then the next floor. But the stairs didn’t draw Charles’s attention, nor the figures at the landing.
A girl lay crumpled at the base. At a dead run, he reached her just as William flung himself to his knees on the ancient carpet.
Dangerously still at the foot of the staircase, Julie Saville wore a black uniform dress and white apron, her red hair still contained in a tight bun. Her eyes were closed, and as Charles took a close look, he saw her bodice rise and fall. Still breathing. He muttered a prayer of thanks and leaned forward, looking for obvious wounds.
Above them, he heard a cry, recognizing Beatrice Carley’s irritatingly nasal voice, but the shriek confused him. As he touched Julie’s wrist and William spoke into her ear, he saw a blur pass.
Bertram leapt over Julie’s feet and climbed the steps two at a time, the first occasion Charles had seen him move with purpose.
His attention pulled back to Julie when her head shifted. William glanced at Charles, wild-eyed, then bent back to the girl. “Help me pick her up,” he said, and slowly, so slowly, slid his arm under her neck so he could cradle her head.
Charles sat back on his heels and took the lower half of her body. Together, they carried the just-stirring girl into a room with a low-burning fire in the grate, and deposited her on a sofa that, while not exactly long enough for the purpose, was an improvement over a lightly carpeted marble floor in February.
Outside the room he heard shouts and cries, then footsteps on the stair again. Ignoring the commotion, he found two candelabras on the mantelpiece and lit them to increase the room’s illumination, then returned to the sofa with one of them. Julie’s eyes opened, her gaze snapping to William, then to Charles.
“She pushed me,” Julie whispered.
“Who? Miss Carley?” asked William.
“No. Mrs. Carley,” she corrected.
“Did you complain about the chloride of lime again?” Charles asked, confused as he set the candles on the table in front of the sofa.
“I asked her why she was crying over a miniature painting of a young man.” Julie’s voice sounded a little stronger now.
“Enough,” William said. “Julie, can you move your hands for me?”
Nothing happened for a moment, then the fingers of her right hand, which had been clenched into a loose fist, spread and then tightened again.
“What about your legs?”
Her knees were bent to allow her to fit on the sofa, but Charles saw one leg bend slightly, then the other.
“I don’t see any blood,” William said, letting out a breath. “I think you’ll be fine.” He patted her shoulder.
“Where was she looking at this miniature?” Charles asked. “How did you get to the stairs?”
“Balcony. Chairs there. That’s where she likes to sit. She chased me down. I fell.”
“Must have just been from the landing,” William said. “Or you would have died.”
“Probably going to be terribly bruised,” Charles agreed. “We’ll have to carry her to the carriage.”
“Where to from there?” William asked.
“We’ll take her to the Hogarths,” Charles decided. “That’s close. Wait a moment, let’s check your left arm, Julie. You haven’t moved it yet.”
Julie moaned as she shifted, her arm trapped between the sofa back and her body. Her elbow bent and her hand came into view.
“What’s that?” William plucked something round from her hand.
Charles fetched a candelabrum and stood over William’s shoulder. He saw the handsome face on the miniature. His eyebrows rose and his suspicions sparked to life. “That’s Horatio Durant.”
“Give it to me,” said an angry female voice.
The air shifted. Skirts rustled, then William’s arm was jerked back.
“Mother!” Beatrice Carley shrieked as more Carleys ran into the room.
Bertram reached his mother, grabbing her around the waist.
Charles lifted the candelabra from the table so it wouldn’t be pushed over if one of them were attacked again, and put it on a table by the wall. He grabbed the miniature from William’s hand, holding it out of reach.
“Why do you have this?” he demanded of the wild-eyed woman.
Beatrice started to cry. “She killed him. She killed my beloved.”
“What?” Charles demanded.
“He wasn’t a suicide?” William asked.
“She loved him,” Julie said drowsily behind him. “Big tears running down her nose. Slobber and snot. A right mess.”
“The laudanum,” Charles said, realizing the truth had been before him all along. He stared coldly into Mrs. Carley’s eyes. “You drugged him, then slit his wrists.”
“He was naked in a bathtub,” William said.
“They must have been bathing together,” Charles said, blushing.
“He had a headache,” Mrs. Carley said, matter-of-factly, fussing with the cuff of her black dress. A mourning dress. It looked too tight, as if the fabric had shrunk or she had gained weight. “He drank it himself.”
“Why?” Charles asked, not entirely believing her. “Why kill him?”
&nbs
p; “I watched him do it,” Mrs. Carley said.
“Then what?” Charles demanded.
“I helped him with the knife,” she said in the same calm voice.
That dress continued to bother him. Mourning, yet an evening dress as well, that left her fleshy arms and weathered décolletage on view, in early February chill. He could see no sign of gooseflesh on her arms, however.
“Why?” Charles asked. “Because of his finances?”
She glanced at him, as if noticing for the first time that a real person was speaking to her. “He hurt my daughter. My husband found out about us. Horatio was ruining everything.”
“Who else hurt your daughter?” Charles asked. “Christiana Lugoson?”
“She won Horatio’s affection away from Beatrice. Christiana was a whore like her mother. She didn’t deserve him.” Mrs. Carley spat on the tattered-around-the-edges carpet under her feet.
What a thing for an upper-class gentlewoman to do. That, and the lack of jewelry that might also indicate her place in the order. She was half one thing and half quite another. How had he not seen it before, this light of madness in her eye? Had it only appeared when her husband sent her out to Brompton?
“And Marie Rueff hurt Bertram?” Charles asked, not quite believing how reasonable he sounded as he pieced together the chain of events. But he didn’t want her to fly into a rage again. He wanted answers.
“Terribly,” Mrs. Carley growled, a crazed, dark look in her eyes.
“I bet she put something in the tea,” Julie said from the sofa.
“You had the tea service bleached every day, so you’d only poison the people you wanted,” Charles said. “You, the mushroom expert, the wise woman, would know how to kill with a cup of tea.”
“My grandmother taught me that,” Mrs. Carley said.
The room stayed transfixed, horrified, as the woman began a monotone recital of her family tree, going back three generations before that famous last witch tried in Somerset.
“Surely these are old wives’ tales,” Charles cried.
“No,” Mrs. Carley said, in a slightly more triumphant voice. “My great-grandmother killed three to get her daughter the man she wanted. I even know their names, John Mill, James Smith, Alan Barber.”
A Tale of Two Murders Page 29