“When Caroline died, I was struck by the contrasts,” he said. “The house was so full of people on the day of her funeral, I wanted to bellow them off the premises, and then it was empty. Wretchedly, unendingly empty. I wanted company, and I wanted to be alone. Caroline was nowhere to be seen, and she was everywhere I looked.”
“She died in winter, didn’t she?”
“March. We spent the next March with my brother, but then his spouse also died.” Axel’s own grief had finally lessened when he had become the one who knew the path of mourning. He’d tended to the practicalities while Matthew had reeled and stumbled, and stared into an unrecognizable future.
“Aren’t you supposed to tell me time will heal my loss, Mr. Belmont? That a quick death is a mercy?”
Axel suspected spouting platitudes to this woman, even as wan and slender as she was, might land him on his arse in the snow.
“Somebody has already told you what a blessing it is to have your freedom, I take it, along with all the casseroles you can eat, provided the sight of nothing but black for the next year doesn’t destroy your appetite.”
A chance to start over, some fool had said upon Caroline’s death. To find a fresh mount. Axel hadn’t known whether to be violent or sick, or violently sick, at that brand of comfort.
“You might consider going away,” Axel suggested after they’d hiked a quarter mile directly into the wind. “Spain is a pleasant contrast this time of year, or Italy.”
“And who will tend Stoneleigh Manor? Gregory left it to me, or told me he would, and I don’t trust his children to care for the estate in my absence. They are much enamored of their city routines.”
Mrs. Stoneleigh was Axel’s immediate neighbor, and Colonel Stoneleigh had ridden Candlewick’s bounds more than once in Axel’s absence.
“I will keep an eye on the property for you, if necessary. For the next month or two, nothing will need much tending in any case.” Travel would also allow the widow a margin of safety if the murderer was still in the vicinity—assuming she hadn’t had Stoneleigh killed herself.
“That is a generous offer, Mr. Belmont. A kind offer, and I will consider it, but I would like to know who killed my husband before I abandon his house for sunshine and new faces.”
“We would both like that answer.” She, likely so she could put her husband’s memory to rest; Axel, so he could return to the soothing embrace of his flowers, and the herbal on horticultural remedies for female complaints that would be his next publication.
After more trudging arm in arm, they passed through the Stoneleigh Manor gates. Black bunting luffed in a bitter breeze, and the head footman, a black armband pinned to his sleeve, black crepe about his hat, bowed them onto the property.
“You will tell me if I am a suspect?” Mrs. Stoneleigh asked, halfway up the drive.
By night, the house had looked settled and solid. Under gray skies, with windows swagged in black crepe, the façade was as grim as an open grave. All dead grass, dark earth, cold, and sorrow.
Mrs. Stoneleigh’s question required an answer.
“You are not a suspect, as of now. I considered you, of course, because you had opportunity, living in proximity to the deceased. You had motive, being one of Stoneleigh’s heirs. Shreve reports you came down the stairs in response to his cries of alarm. Unless you found a way to shoot your husband, discard the murder weapon, climb up to the second floor, and then emerge from your room and run down the stairs, you are not the perpetrator. Finally, Mrs. Jensen was going up to her room and saw you emerge from your bedroom.”
Axel’s relief upon interviewing the housekeeper had been considerable. For all Abigail Stoneleigh was not likable, he’d wanted her to be innocent of murder. As a result, he’d investigated her activities thoroughly.
“I am truly not under suspicion?” Her voice was low, carefully steady.
“You were concerned?” She was not under suspicion of having pulled the trigger, though she might have hired an accomplice.
Her gaze flicked over his face as they crunched along the frozen road. “Rather than sleep, I have thought and thought about the colonel’s death. Shreve said the French doors were open a crack when Ambers found Gregory—Ambers came through those doors and claims he hadn’t had to unlatch them.”
Thus far, her recitation comported with the sequence of events as Axel had been able to reconstruct them. Shreve had dissolved into dignified tears fifteen minutes into Axel’s attempts to question him. Ambers had been summoned from his interview by news of the colonel’s favorite afternoon hunter cast beneath a pasture fence.
“Shreve assumed the doors were open for fresh air,” Mrs. Stoneleigh went on, “because Gregory often enjoyed a pipe with his brandy, though doubtless the killer left in haste. I asked Ambers to look for fresh tracks, but he was unwilling to leave me alone under the circumstances, and the winter wind did its work quickly.”
Axel could not fault Ambers’s decision, for the circumstances had included a murderer at large, or possibly dithering about the very scene of the crime.
“We have only Shreve’s word regarding the open French doors,” Axel said. “Ambers told me that they were unlocked, not that they were ajar.”
Shreve ought to be a suspect, along with the dapper, devoted Mr. Ambers, who’d been so conveniently smoking out of doors at the very hour his employer had been murdered. No night porter had been on duty at the front door to confirm Ambers’s contention that he’d come hotfoot up the main drive either.
“You don’t want to accuse Shreve?” Mrs. Stoneleigh asked.
“I do not.” What man wanted to accuse anybody of murder? “He hasn’t as clear an alibi as you. He was closest to the scene, and he had time to commit the crime, open the French doors, secret the murder weapon somewhere, then run into the corridor.”
Though, damn and blast the luck, diligent searching with a strong compass magnet had not revealed a gun beneath the snow anywhere near the house.
“What is Shreve’s motive?” the lady asked, as if repeating a familiar query. “Gregory left Shreve a tidy sum for years of service, but Shreve will probably keep his post with me.”
Clearly, Mrs. Stoneleigh knew the contents of her late husband’s will. “Lack of apparent motive is one reason I have not taken him or Ambers into custody.”
“Character,” Mrs. Stoneleigh rejoined, “is another. Ambers has been with us for years, as has Shreve. He and Gregory struck up an acquaintance on the passage home from India, and they were as close as servant and employer could be.”
Axel and the widow toiled up the drive arm in arm, the silence between them growing chillier with each step.
“I am sorry, madam. Murder is offensive business. I am insensitive to discuss such matters with you now. I do apologize.”
“Don’t,” she said. “I would rather have your blunt questions than Mr. Weekes’ well-meant platitudes. His eulogy was interesting.”
The eulogy had been blessedly short, given how cold the church was. The Stoneleigh Manor drive, by contrast, seemed quite long.
“Did the vicar’s eulogy in any way describe the man you were married to?”
“As long as we’re being shockingly honest, there was a resemblance—Gregory loved his hounds.”
Gregory Stoneleigh had loved to strut about, waving his riding crop in time to his bloviations.
“But?”
“But Gregory had no more clue how to run this estate and care for his lands than I would have about, say, building one of your glass houses. I think he married me largely for my ability to salvage his estate.”
“I wasn’t aware of that.” Because Mrs. Stoneleigh’s attractiveness was the first thing any man would see about her—and her reserve.
She marched up the front drive, from which the snow had been cleared. “Gregory was a cavalry officer to his bones. The horses were exclusively his domain, and he doted on them endlessly. The home farm, the tenant farms, the cottages, the commerce, the crops, the cloven-hoofe
d stock, the dairy—they baffled him, and by the time we married, the functional parts of the estate were much in need of management.”
“Stoneleigh came out eleven years ago?” Axel tried to recall the year, pegging everything in memory against his sons’ ages, his wife’s death, or when he’d built the second glass house.
The wind caught Mrs. Stoneleigh’s black veil and batted it against her mouth. She re-secured the lace with an onyx hat pin, never missing a step.
“The colonel returned to England more than ten years ago. He lasted here some years before the income stopped covering the expenses. He wasn’t about to invest his own money in the land, his Indian wealth being for his children, so he acquired me to improve the situation.”
Her recitation was matter of fact, not quite bitter.
“The colonel explained this to you?” If this was Stoneleigh’s entire view of marriage, the lady’s lack of obvious grief made more sense.
Axel was so intent on the conversation, that when Mrs. Stoneleigh slipped on a patch of muddy ice, he nearly didn’t catch her.
For a moment, she hung against him. For those few instants, she struck Axel as too slight, disoriented, and winded, rather than prickly or overly composed.
She straightened and resumed her progress. “Gregory was honest. I was desperately in need of marrying—my parents had recently perished in a house fire—and he was in need of a competent wife for his country estate. He provided well, and I saw to it he was left free to ride about the countryside—occasionally with you—while his children got on with the business of being adults.”
None of the mourners walking ahead had so much as glanced back at Mrs. Stoneleigh’s misstep.
“When are Stoneleigh’s children expected?”
“Gervaise will arrive on Tuesday, Lavinia probably the same day, possibly a day later, but they’ll stay in Oxford. Each made it plain I was not to delay the final obsequies on their behalf.”
Axel had met the son—a handsome, bachelor barrister quite assured of his own consequence—but not the daughter.
Mrs. Stoneleigh stumbled again on a rut, this time pitching right into Axel.
He wrestled with the impulse to carry her to the manor, which lay a hundred yards ahead. She’d hate him for that, and yet… He kept both hands on her shoulders and studied her, not as a magistrate searches for clues, but as botanist assesses a specimen newly arrived to his care.
“You are tired. Exhausted, probably. Can you sleep?” The question was personal, even from one who had been bereaved himself, though she did not appear to take offense.
“I can sleep.” She glanced away, as if she recognized the bleak winter landscape and could not place where she’d seen it before. “Some. Gregory and I were cordial, but my bed is not where I miss him.”
Her husband had been thirty years her senior, and had had a daughter nearly her age. Conjugal relations between the Stoneleighs had likely been infrequent and … subdued. And yet, the male part of Axel regretted that a man was dead and his own wife would not miss his attentions—at all.
“You missed your Caroline that way, though, didn’t you?” Mrs. Stoneleigh asked. “As more than a cordial housemate? I am so sorry, Mr. Belmont. Women can cry, carry on, faint, and go into declines, but men are allowed much less latitude when bereaved.”
How Axel hated funerals, all funerals, and nearly hated Abigail Stoneleigh for her very solicitude.
“I missed Caroline.” He still missed her—sometimes.
“She was wonderfully lively,” Mrs. Stoneleigh replied. “I envied her that boisterousness, and she seemed an ideal mother for two busy little fellows.”
They reached the house, the widow leaning on Axel more than she had earlier. Perhaps she allowed his support because she was tired, or perhaps because Axel had given her a few honest words, and she’d comforted him.
Caroline had died so long ago, he should no longer need comforting, and he didn’t. And yet, Mrs. Stoneleigh’s condolences hurt, albeit not with the same tearing pain they might have years ago. The late Mrs. Belmont had been a healthy, strapping Viking of a woman, lusty, lively, and perfectly capable of matching her retiring young spouse measure for measure, in bed or in an argument.
Some might have considered Caroline unfeminine, but she’d been a good mate for him, and she had thrived on raising the children.
“My wife and I suited, as opposites do,” Axel said, pulling his thoughts back into the present. “You and I have arrived to our destination, Mrs. Stoneleigh. I believe Mrs. Weekes has commandeered your music room and formal parlor for the buffet.”
“Will you escort me there?” Trepidation flickered in her eyes as she beheld the black crepe wrapped about the front door knocker. “If I must stand around and accept condolences, at least I’ll do so indoors. That sky looks like snow, and my feet are frozen. But forgive me. You are being very kind, and I am out of sorts.”
“You are grieving,” Axel said, quietly enough not to be overheard by others coming up the drive. “There is nothing to forgive.”
The look she gave him might have been gratitude, with a bit of adroitly masked surprise.
He took her around to a side entrance—no crepe on the knocker—and let her establish herself in a corner of the music room. Folding doors between the largest parlor and the music room had been opened, and furniture moved aside to create a large open space—large enough for dancing, in other circumstances.
A groaning buffet was set up along the outside wall.
Like his brother Matthew, Axel could put away a prodigious amount of food. Maybe the local populace hadn’t particularly taken to Mrs. Stoneleigh when her husband had lived, but by God, they knew how to cook for a funeral. Axel put himself together a plate and found a quiet vantage point from which to observe mourners offering their platitudes to the new widow.
As he demolished the food—why did all funeral casseroles taste the same?—he kept an eye out for possible suspects.
Mrs. Stoneleigh had been holding court in her corner for almost two hours when Axel decided the shadows under her eyes and her pallor demanded she be allowed privacy.
“Would you be offended, Mrs. Stoneleigh, if I suggested the assemblage is waiting for you to withdraw?”
“Is that how it’s done? Well, I am willing to oblige.” When she rose, she leaned on Axel and didn’t merely take his arm for show.
Mrs. Weekes took Mrs. Stoneleigh’s other arm. “She hasn’t taken a thing to eat, poor lamb. Not so much as a tea cake.”
The poor lamb stiffened, perhaps at being referred to in the third person.
“Wait here.” Axel ducked over to the buffet and filled another plate. He crooked his elbow at Mrs. Stoneleigh, and barely waited for her to wrap her fingers around his arm. “You simply leave. You keep walking, you don’t chat, don’t meet anybody’s gaze. Otherwise, your neighbors will shower you with their infernal, interminable kindness until you can barely stand.”
The lady heeded his instructions, and within moments, he had her upstairs in her private sitting room, a plate of food before her.
“Eat,” he admonished. “I’ll fetch you tea, unless you’d like something stronger?”
“Tea would be lovely, with milk and sugar.”
He eyed the plate, from which she had eaten nothing, and realized he was well and truly—if inconveniently—worried about her. The worry housed a goodly dose of resentment too, which probably made him convincing when he treated her to his best “do as the professor says” scowl before taking his leave.
Axel Belmont, an unlikely guardian angel if ever there was one, would stand over Abby until she consumed her portion, so she tucked into the food. He’d chosen simple fare: slices of apple, cheese, and ham, and two pieces of liberally buttered bread.
He paid attention, and not simply to the evidence relevant to a murder investigation.
Mr. Belmont had loved his wife, as had been obvious to anyone with eyes. His Caroline had loved him back, and loved their boys as
well. They’d been such a happy little family, Abigail had dreaded the sight of them, the boys up before their parents when they rode out, or all four in the buggy on their way to church.
So of course, Mr. Belmont would comprehend that rich food did not digest easily on a grieving stomach. He would understand that a woman needed solitude after dealing with so many people, most of whom hadn’t bothered to call on her twice in all the years she’d dwelled among them. He would grasp immediately all manner of realities Gregory would never have understood even were they explained in detail.
Mr. Belmont reappeared carrying not a delicate tea cup, but a substantial, steaming mug.
“Your tea, and I purloined a few of these.” From his pocket he withdrew several tea cakes in a serviette, keeping one for himself and putting the rest on Abby’s plate.
“Will you sit, sir?” The tea was ambrosial, soothing and fortifying, prepared to the exact sweetness she preferred.
Mr. Belmont flipped out his tails and lowered himself beside her. “I will remain as long as you keep eating. I am avoiding interrogation by the gentlemen around the punch bowl.”
Interrogation about—? Oh.
Oh dear. Abby bit into a cold slice of apple. “For you and I to be closeted up here isn’t quite proper, is it?”
He settled back, his frame filling his corner of the sofa with elegant, sober tailoring, and a perpetual scowl.
“You’re a widow now. By virtue of your husband’s demise, you graduate from needing chaperonage to being a source of it.”
Like the tea, the apple was lovely. Belmont’s brusque company was fortifying too, oddly enough.
“We are such a silly society,” Abby said.
“In many ways, though you have cleared the first hurdles of losing a spouse, so some of the silliness is behind you. You’re through the death, the wake, and the burial, and can get on with the grieving.”
Death. Mr. Belmont eschewed platitudes and euphemisms, while Gregory had hardly ever dealt in blunt truths. All bluster and chit-chat, when he wasn’t scolding some servant or other.
It Happened One Night: Six Scandalous Novels Page 3