A Dangerous Collaboration

by DEANNA RAYBOURN

  “Trenny’s nursery,” Mertensia put in. “She came here as a nurserymaid. She would have viewed it as the greatest betrayal.”

  Malcolm went on. “So she lured her away quietly after the ceremony and killed her. She did not tell me the how or the where. Just the fact of the deed. And that was when I went for her.”

  “Went for her?” Stoker asked.

  “I did not know what I was doing,” Malcolm said simply. “But I put out my hands and they were around her throat. She was going to let me do it, that is the most terrible part. It was as if she were content to die at my hands. But then the room began to spin and I realized she had dosed the wine with one of Mertensia’s concoctions. I was dizzy and weak and I lost my senses for a while. I came to just as she hauled me into the priest’s hole. I tried to rise, but I could not. And I listened as she closed the panel behind her, imprisoning me in my own house.”

  I tried to imagine the horror of hearing the door to one’s own tomb closing. A goose walked over my grave just then and Mertensia shuddered visibly.

  “So I was there, in the darkness, knowing at last what had become of Rosamund, and much good it did me. I realized that I was going to disappear just as she had. No one would ever know what had become of me.”

  “Forgive me,” I put in. “But you spoke of murder. Whose murder have you committed?”

  He looked at me in surprise. “Did I not say? Trenny’s,” he said, his mouth trembling as he spoke the words. “To my shock, she came back to bring me food. I had been senseless for a long while, many hours, I think. She dosed the food and drink as well so that I would not be able to shout for help. I was too weak to refuse.”

  “Which is why you never heard us when we were on the other side of the panel discovering the traveling bag,” Tiberius put in. Malcolm gave a sickly smile. The idea that rescue had at one point been so near was too horrible a thought to contemplate.

  “Why on earth would she have left the bag there?” Mertensia asked suddenly.

  Malcolm shrugged. “Where else? It had been safely hid there for three years before I found it. If she had made an effort to destroy it, she might have been discovered. Far better to put it back where it had been all along.” Malcolm took a deep breath, steeling himself it seemed, and went on. “She said she only meant to keep me there until everyone had gone and she had decided what to do with me. She wanted forgiveness, she told me. And she came too close,” he said, something feral lighting in his eyes. “I grabbed her by the skirts to drag her close to me and when she fell, I caught her by the throat. We fell together, and in our struggles, the panel closed again, locking us inside together.”

  I looked to Stoker, who stepped forwards. “Rest your conscience,” he said gently. “Mrs. Trengrouse is not dead. She is unconscious and in her room, under guard.”

  Malcolm gave a start, pushing himself up against his pillows. “What is to be done with her?” he demanded.

  Tiberius spoke. “That is for the magistrates in Pencarron to decide. She will be taken there if and when she becomes fit to travel.”

  “The scandal,” Malcolm said, his voice breaking. “It will come upon us anyway. In spite of all we have done to keep it at bay.”

  Mertensia tried to soothe him, but Malcolm clutched at her, his knuckles white as he gripped her arms.

  “It is ironic, is it not?” Malcolm demanded, the gleam in his eyes brightening feverishly. “She thought to murder me and I turned the tables on her. And then we were locked in there, together, for many hours. So many hours,” he added, beginning to laugh. “And now they will hang her. They’re going to hang her,” he repeated, still laughing. His voice rose higher and higher as he was seized by hysteria, and it was a very long time before I forgot the sound of that laughter.

  * * *

  • • •

  Stoker ruthlessly injected Malcolm with a decoction he mixed from Mertensia’s supplies. He ordered one of the kitchen maids to sit with her master, and we trooped disconsolately down the stairs to the drawing room. There was so much to say but we took refuge in silence instead. Stoker poured out stiff drinks for everyone, insisting on our taking them as medicinal remedies for the shocks we had all suffered. I went with Mertensia to look in on Mrs. Trengrouse. Daisy scuttled out when we arrived. “She has just come to again,” she told us, darting avid looks over her shoulder to the woman in the bed. Huddled there, stripped of her jangling chatelaine and her air of authority, she looked like exactly what she was, an aging woman without hope.

  She opened her eyes when we went to the bed. It was a narrow iron affair with a serviceable coverlet of green wool. A rag rug covered only part of the floor and a single small window was the only source of air or light beyond the shaded lamp on the night table. I wondered if it had ever struck the Romillys that this woman—who had given the better part of her life in their service—lived so modestly, so chastely. It was not a comfortable bower, I reflected. It was a nun’s cell, ascetic and plain and devoid of vanity or indulgence. And I was suddenly immensely, terribly sad for the woman who had spent her life within its indifferent walls.

  Suddenly, Mrs. Trengrouse spoke, her voice broken and soft. “I should like to speak with Miss Speedwell alone, if I might, miss,” she said to Mertensia.

  Mertensia gave her a long, level look. “Very well. Mind you take your medicine before too long,” she said with a nod towards a bottle on the night table.

  Mrs. Trengrouse nodded. “I gave my word,” she assured her young mistress. With a long backwards glance, Mertensia took her leave and the room fell to silence.

  “I saw it in your face,” Mrs. Trengrouse told me. “Pity. Don’t pity me, miss. I haven’t had as bad a life as some.”

  “But you might have had a life of your own,” I protested.

  She made a rusty sound that might have been a laugh. “A life of my own! That is an impossible dream for a woman in service. Your life belongs to them. And I never minded, you know. Not once. I came from the cottages over Pencarron way. Eight of us in the house and never enough food. I was skinny as a rake when I came to be a nurserymaid to the Romillys. Mr. Malcolm was still a babe, it were that long ago. I cared for him as if he were my own. And when he was eight, they sent him away to school. So many years passed before he came home proper, and when he came home, he weren’t a boy anymore.”

  Her diction lapsed a little into the more rustic tones of her childhood. “I loved him, loved them all, but Mr. Malcolm was always my favorite. The burden of caring for Mr. Lucian and Miss Mertensia would have taxed another man, but not Mr. Malcolm. He sent them to school because he feared he wouldn’t be able to raise them proper, but as soon as Miss Mertensia ran away to come home, he said he would keep her here always, just as she wished, the kindliest brother you ever did see. I worked my fingers clean to the bone for him. Whatever he needed, I did it. I valeted for him. I cooked for him. I cut his hair and shined his boots. Until at last, I was above it all, housekeeper of this castle.”

  Her eyes shone with pride as they lighted on her chatelaine, lying cold and pointless upon the night table. “The day I pinned that to my skirt was the greatest day of my life,” she said. “And I thought we would always be together, the master and I. Miss Mertensia would marry one day, I expected, and leave us. And then it would be just the two of us, Mr. Malcolm and me, like a pair of bachelors, growing old in our comfortable seclusion. Then she came,” she said bitterly. “And it all fell to ashes.”

  “He loved her,” I reminded Mrs. Trengrouse.

  “Loved!” The word twisted her thin lips to something ugly. “She weren’t worthy of it, weren’t worthy of him.”

  I stared at her, feeling the most abject pity for any creature I had ever known. Her doglike devotion was appalling; any woman with spirit or strength could only feel revulsion at the notion of offering oneself up like a sacrificial lamb to the slaughter of one’s own independent thought and fe
eling. For decades Mrs. Trengrouse had effaced herself until she was nothing other than an automaton, moving through her master’s life with no thought beyond serving him and thereby winning his regard, taking care of a family that was never quite her own.

  “You think you would never do this for love,” she said suddenly. “You think you are above such abasement. But you cannot know what it means to love someone so much that nothing matters, nothing at all. Not your pride, not your dignity, not yourself. Nothing but your little ones and their happiness. That was me with Mr. Malcolm and Miss Mertensia.”

  “That is not love,” I told her.

  “Perhaps,” she replied with something of her old authority. “But it was as near as I have ever known. And when I thought it was going to be taken from me when she came . . . I could not bear it.”

  “Rosamund,” I said, drawing out the name like an invocation.

  “She was so lovely, it was a pleasure to hate her,” she told me. “I am responsible for her death and I know I must pay for that. I do not regret it. I will hang happily for what I did to her. They will jeer and taunt and say I am a murderess, but she did her evil first, she did. She was willing to let Mr. Malcolm play father to another man’s child, and that was wrong.”

  “It was,” I agreed. “But not so wrong that she should have paid with her life. Nor should she have answered to you for her misdeeds. It was Malcolm Romilly’s business.”

  “And I was his avenger, righting the wrongs that had been done to him.”

  “Still, it was not your place to make that choice.”

  “My place?” Her laugh was harsh. “I would have had no place if she had lived. She threatened to turn me out. I went to her the night before she were married. I knew she had quarreled with Miss Mertensia about the garden, playing lady of the manor. I went and asked her to be a little kind. She could afford to be generous, I told her. She had everything, the master, the castle, the name and position. She laughed at me and told me to mind my business, and I saw red then. I told her Miss Mertensia’s happiness were my business and always would be and that’s when she said it wouldn’t be for much longer if I kept my uppity ways. She said I had got above myself and needed to learn my place and behave better. And that’s when I lost my temper. I said I knew she was going to have a child and that the church might put it right but that she had no call to speak to me of proper behavior.”

  “She cannot have liked that,” I mused.

  “She did not. She turned on me then and said if I didn’t keep her secret, she would see me put off the island on the first boat, and that’s when I realized it couldn’t be Mr. Malcolm’s child. Until then, I thought they had just anticipated their vows, you see. Many’s the couple that does, especially around here with the priest coming only once a month to see to marryings and buryings. But she would not have turned so white and begun to shake if the child were his. I remembered then that I had caught her once with Lord Templeton-Vane, nothing shocking, mind. But I had come upon them once and she was looking up at him with such an expression on her face as no woman has ever used except to a man she loves. I knew then what she meant to do to Mr. Malcolm. She meant to put a cuckoo in the nest, to give this place to her love child, to disgrace this family,” she finished bitterly. “And I knew I had to take care of my little ones once more and put an end to it.”

  “You played the ghost after the séance, didn’t you?”

  A tiny smile played about her lips. “Mr. Lucian taught me a little of music when he was a lad, first learning his chords. I knew it wouldn’t take much to bring everyone rushing in. I needed only a moment to nip into the passage and through the library. I thought to take Mr. Malcolm by surprise, to make him wonder if her ghost had really been summoned. He might give it all up then, I hoped.”

  She faltered then, her eyes opaque with fear.

  “Did you see her?” I asked.

  She shook her head, one single sharp shake. “No, miss. But I know she were there. Later that night, I went into the music room and I felt a presence. I knew she had come.”

  I might have told her then. It would have been a kindness to tell her the truth, that I had been the presence in the music room. But kindness is not the foremost of my virtues. And so I kept my silence and let her believe that the spirit of Rosamund Romilly had been conjured that night.

  I leant forwards, my voice coaxing. “Mrs. Trengrouse, what did you do with Rosamund after she was dead? If you tell us and she is given a proper burial, perhaps his lordship will speak on your behalf,” I suggested. I had little confidence that Tiberius would do anything of the sort. In fact, I rather suspected he would cheerfully knot the rope himself if it meant revenging himself on the woman who murdered the love of his life. But that bridge was yet to be crossed.

  I gave her an expectant look, but she waved me off. “I am tired now, Miss Speedwell. I am glad the master is safe, and it is time for me to sleep.” She nodded towards the bottle Mertensia had left and I poured out a spoonful of the mixture as she directed. I waited until the housekeeper had drifted off before I left, smoothing the coverlet over her in a gesture of charity.

  Mertensia was waiting outside the door when I emerged.

  “You have dismissed the guard?” I asked, looking to the empty chair where Caspian had sat, shotgun broken awkwardly upon his knee.

  “We have no need of that now,” she said simply.

  I handed over the bottle I had taken from the night table. A tiny skull was etched at the corner of the label. “Nor ever again, I should think.”

  She gave me a steady look. “Will you tell them?”

  I shook my head slowly. “It is not my place.”

  “I had to,” she said fiercely. “You heard what Malcolm said about the scandal. He is nearly unbalanced as it is. I do not know if he will properly recover, but I can promise you that being dragged through the mud of every cheap newspaper in England will destroy him. It was the only way.”

  I said nothing and she squared her shoulders. “I gave her a choice,” she said. “She needn’t have taken it if she didn’t like. I would not have forced her. But she wanted to atone and this was the only way.”

  “It is an easier death than she deserves,” I pointed out.

  “But it will give Malcolm a chance at a better life,” she countered, and I could not fault her logic.

  I turned to leave her then and she put a hand to my sleeve. “Thank you.”

  I nodded to the closed door. “Go and sit with her. Even a murderess should not die alone.”

  * * *

  • • •

  On my way to the drawing room, I stopped at the castle’s chapel, a tiny chamber consecrated for prayer from the first days when Romillys had lived upon St. Maddern’s. It was ten paces across and a perfect square, with a tiny altar set before a stained glass window depicting the patron saint of the island. I knew he had other names—Madern, Madron—and that he was a hermit devoted to his gifts of healing. I did not believe in religion, old or new, but on the slimmest chance that the old saint watched over his island, I offered up a fervent wish that he would employ his talents for healing once more and visit his kindness upon the Romillys. Heaven knew they were sorely in need of them. It was restful with a single pew cushioned in scarlet velvet and tiles of black and white marble underfoot while the ancient fragrance of incense hung in the stillness of the air. The ceiling was vaulted and laced with carvings of the fruits and fish of the island, a reminder to those who worshiped here that they enjoyed a rare and wonderful abundance. And as I turned to leave, I saw another figure, tucked behind a bit of carving upon the lintel of the door, so discreet that it would have been easy to miss her—a mermaid, the pagan ancestress of the Romillys, remembered here in this most Christian of places. I wondered if she, too, watched over those who lived upon her island, and I hoped so. I bowed my head to her as I left.

  CHAPTER
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br />   21

  I found the others in the drawing room. Stoker had retrieved the tantalus from the dining room and picked the lock, liberally distributing brandy to remedy the day’s shocks. I had not paused long in the little chapel, but it was time enough for the end to come to Mrs. Trengrouse. Mertensia joined me as I entered the drawing room, saying little to the others except that Trenny had passed away quietly and suddenly. Stoker gave me an oblique look and I nodded once, careful that only he should see. I knew what silent question he had posed, and I knew, too, that he would interpret my reply correctly. To the others, I did not explain about the little bottle with the skull upon the label or the choice that Mertensia had given Trenny. The old woman had got an easier death than she deserved but it would spare the family much in the way of scandal.

  The atmosphere was unhappy and the cause of this was soon apparent.

  “What has been decided? What will you do?” I asked Tiberius.

  The gathering turned as one to him, watching with avid eyes. His expression was inscrutable. “I hardly know. Malcolm is half out of his senses. Mrs. Trengrouse has been revealed to be a murderess, and Rosamund is still missing. It is the devil’s own breakfast. God only knows what the courts will make of it.”

  “Is it necessary to tell them?” Mertensia ventured hesitantly.

  “I beg your pardon?” he asked with perfect hauteur.

  “Well,” she began in a slow voice. “We do not know precisely what happened to Rosamund, that is true. But Trenny confessed to killing her, so we know more than we did before. Those who loved her can finally mourn her. As far as justice is concerned, her murderess has met with it. It wasn’t a rope at Newgate prison, but it is death nonetheless. Trenny has paid for her crimes. Surely we can agree upon that.”