M. C. Beatonis the author of the hugely successful Agatha Raisin and Hamish Macbeth series, as well as a quartet of Edwardian murder mysteries featuring heroine Lady Rose Summer, the Travelling Matchmaker, Six Sisters, House for the Season, School for Manners and Poor Relation Regency romance series, and a stand-alone murder mystery, The Skeleton in the Closet – all published by Constable & Robinson. She left a full-time career in journalism to turn to writing, and now divides her time between the Cotswolds and Paris. Visit www.agatharaisin.com for more, or follow M. C. Beaton on Twitter: @mc_beaton.
Titles by M. C. Beaton
The Poor Relation
Lady Fortescue Steps Out • Miss Tonks Turns to Crime • Mrs Budley Falls from Grace
Sir Philip‘s Folly • Colonel Sandhurst to the Rescue • Back in Society
A House for the Season
The Miser of Mayfair • Plain Jane • The Wicked Godmother
Rake‘s Progress • The Adventuress • Rainbird‘s Revenge
The Six Sisters
Minerva • The Taming of Annabelle • Deirdre and Desire
Daphne • Diana the Huntress • Frederica in Fashion
Edwardian Murder Mysteries
Snobbery with Violence • Hasty Death • Sick of Shadows
Our Lady of Pain
The Travelling Matchmaker
Emily Goes to Exeter • Belinda Goes to Bath • Penelope Goes to Portsmouth
Beatrice Goes to Brighton • Deborah Goes to Dover • Yvonne Goes to York
Agatha Raisin
Agatha Raisin and the Quiche of Death • Agatha Raisin and the Vicious Vet
Agatha Raisin and the Potted Gardener • Agatha Raisin and the Walkers of Dembley
Agatha Raisin and the Murderous Marriage • Agatha Raisin and the Terrible Tourist
Agatha Raisin and the Wellspring of Death • Agatha Raisin and the Wizard of Evesham
Agatha Raisin and the Witch of Wyckhadden
Agatha Raisin and the Fairies of Fryfam • Agatha Raisin and the Love from Hell
Agatha Raisin and the Day the Floods Came
Agatha Raisin and the Curious Curate • Agatha Raisin and the Haunted House
Agatha Raisin and the Deadly Dance • Agatha Raisin and the Perfect Paragon
Agatha Raisin and Love, Lies and Liquor
Agatha Raisin and Kissing Christmas Goodbye
Agatha Raisin and a Spoonful of Poison • Agatha Raisin: There Goes the Bride
Agatha Raisin and the Busy Body • Agatha Raisin: As the Pig Turns
Agatha Raisin: Hiss and Hers • Agatha Raisin and the Christmas Crumble
Hamish Macbeth
Death of a Gossip • Death of a Cad • Death of an Outsider
Death of a Perfect Wife • Death of a Hussy • Death of a Snob
Death of a Prankster • Death of a Glutton • Death of a Travelling Man
Death of a Charming Man • Death of a Nag • Death of a Macho Man
Death of a Dentist • Death of a Scriptwriter • Death of an Addict
A Highland Christmas • Death of a Dustman • Death of a Celebrity
Death of a Village • Death of a Poison Pen • Death of a Bore
Death of a Dreamer • Death of a Maid • Death of a Gentle Lady
Death of a Witch • Death of a Valentine • Death of a Sweep
Death of a Kingfisher • Death of Yesterday
The Skeleton in the Closet
Also available
The Agatha Raisin Companion
My Lords, Ladies and Marjorie
M. C. Beaton
Constable & Robinson Ltd.
55–56 Russell Square
London WC1B 4HP
www.constablerobinson.com
First electronic edition published 2011
by RosettaBooks LLC, New York
First published in the UK by Canvas,
an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd., 2013
Copyright © M. C. Beaton, 1981
The right of M. C. Beaton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.
A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in
Publication Data is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-1-47210-139-6 (ebook)
Cover copyright © Constable & Robinson
For Harry Scott Gibbons
and Charles David Bravos Gibbons
with love
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter One
“Life is a backwater,” said Miss Marjorie Montmorency-James to the looking glass. She practiced a soulful look and hoped she looked like that famous actress, Ellen Terry.
“Life is a backwater,” she said again, but, since she was alone in the drawing room, no one replied and, when she turned around, there was no one to look back at her except a multitude of paper eyes in the photographs stacked on top of the Bechstein grand piano. Marjorie sank down disconsolately into the red plush upholstery of a carved walnut chair and stared at the toes of her pointed openwork shoes.
The house was very still and silent. But then her grandmother’s well-run house always was, protected from the noisy elements of the world outside by thick carpets and thick curtains. The well-trained servants were about their duties in the kitchen. Although Marjorie often wondered idly what it would be like to be a servant and live one’s days out in a basement under gaslight, she had never gone into the kitchens although she had lived her eighteen years in this house on Haddon Common in London.
Neither had she penetrated to the attics, only being dimly aware that they existed when the servants’ alarm clock sometimes disturbed her sleep.
She had been brought up by her grandmother, Mrs. Wilton. Her parents had died in a carriage accident when she was only a baby. Mrs. Wilton did not believe in sending a young girl to school and so she had been educated at home by a governess, only recently dismissed. Marjorie was lonely but she did not miss her governess who had been a strange, quiet, timid female called Miss Muggles. Marjorie was relieved to find that Miss Muggles had found other employment but, apart from that, thought of her hardly at all.
She lived her young days out in the house on Haddon Common—a square white house, rather like a bathing lido, designed in the late 1880s by a Scottish architect and considered then to be the height of modernity.
Haddon Common was a trim square of green surrounded by large houses and villas. It was strictly aging middle class. No aristocrat took up residence to flutter the breasts of the elderly widows who made up the neighborhood. No vulgar poor ventured on the sedate common or the tree-lined streets to remind them of the less fortunate.
Social outings were confined to church on Sunday—Anglican of course and very High—bridge parties with her grandmother’s elderly friends and knitting socks for the Underprivileged at a weekly sewing bee. Marjorie’s sole hobby w
as that of buying picture postcards of famous beauties—like Ellen Terry—and trying to change her face and expression to that of the dewy-eyed belles.
Marjorie was quite beautiful but there was no one to tell her so. Her grandmother’s highest compliment was that Marjorie looked “very well.”
She had soft hair of the nut-brown variety that was so fashionable. Blondes and redheads were considered “unfortunate.” She had a clear pale skin and very large gray eyes which changed like water on a winter’s day, sometimes looking black and sometimes silver.
On this day that was to change her life, Marjorie was wearing a high-collared blouse with a deep blond lace bertha falling over her well-shaped bosom. In contrast, her long alpaca skirt was severely tailored. Although she had not formally been “out” anywhere, she wore her hair up.
It had been raining heavily all morning, drenching, soaking spring rain. Now toward evening, the rain had ceased and a pale, watery sunlight, low in the horizon, was gilding the laurel bushes in the front garden.
The drawing room suddenly seemed close and stuffy. Marjorie rose to her feet and walked from the drawing room, through the dark hall, harlequined with diamonds of light from the stained glass on the door, and out into the garden.
A light warm breeze had sprung up bringing with it the promise of winter’s end. The still bare branches of the lilac trees near the wrought iron gates made a lacy pattern against the pale, newly washed sky.
“Life is a backwater,” said Marjorie for the third time. But this time she said it bitterly. She was overcome by a longing for excitement, for love, for flirtation, for theaters, for restaurants, for the company of young men. The air was full of promises of youth and excitement—promises carried to every young girl in London except Marjorie. Grannie’s weekly social evening was the only thing on her dull horizon.
Marjorie had once been in love—at the age of fourteen. She had fallen madly for the red-haired butcher’s boy and used to wait with shaking coltish legs at the tradesmen’s entrance for his arrival with the weekly joint. She had weaved fantasies about him, fought for him, nursed him through various deadly and fictitious diseases.
And then one day she had overheard him laughing about her with Rose, the pretty parlormaid. “Fair smitten, she is,” he had jeered. Marjorie’s heart had died of humiliation. For weeks she had planned exotic revenges. She would ride her milk-white steed across the common and spurn his grubby peasant soul beneath her silver hoofs. But Marjorie could not even ride. The butcher’s boy left for another part of London. The hurt disappeared.
But now as she breathed in the smell of damp grass and dripping evergreens, the memory of those first tremulous, passionate emotions came back to her vividly. She stretched her arms up high to the darkening sky and then dropped them helplessly to her sides.
A shaft of white light struck across the lawn. Rose had turned up the gaslight to prepare the drawing room for grandmother’s evening social. Already in her mind’s eye, Marjorie could smell the camphor and cologne of the old ladies and hear their frail, tired voices. She sighed. The breeze had turned chilly and damp, fluttering the lace of her blouse and raising the soft strands of hair from her forehead.
“I want him,” said Marjorie fiercely. But she did not yet know who he was or who he might be, that shadowy lover. The lights of her grandmother’s rented carriage bobbed to a halt outside the gates.
Suddenly cold, Marjorie did not wait to greet her grandmother but turned on her little high heels and pattered over the gravel of the drive, back into the warmth and silence of the house.
There were three old ladies in the drawing room that evening when Marjorie reluctantly entered—and a newcomer.
At first she did not see the newcomer, her bored eyes ranging from the familiar sight of old Mrs. Jenkins mumbling meringues, old Mrs. Bassett slurping tea with little finger sticking rigidly out, and old Mrs. Fyfe-Bartholomew dozing in front of the fire. Then she noticed the strange lady. She was very tall and dramatic looking. Although she must have been in her forties, she carried herself with the youthful assurance of a young girl. She wore a large velour hat impaled with a long pheasant’s tail feather. Her eyes were dark and liquid and slightly bulging and her rouged mouth was drawn into a permanent pout. She was dressed from head to foot in black velvet and long ropes of black jet beads swung from her long neck.
“My granddaughter,” Mrs. Wilton was saying as Marjorie moved forward. “Marjorie, may I present a newcomer to our little community, Lady Bethons.”
Marjorie curtsied low. She had been about to dismiss the newcomer in her mind as someone of no great moment, but … a lady! A real, live aristocrat. Lady Bethons held out a beringed glove in a swanlike motion and Marjorie, who did not know it was very vulgar indeed to wear your rings over your gloves, was entranced.
“My lady,” she breathed, while her mind raced. Perhaps Lady Bethons had a son? Of course, she had. A dashing young man with fine aristocratic features who would fall in love with Marjorie and would sweep her off to his palace in the country. She could almost see herself pouring tea for King Edward. You must not blame Marjorie for being a snob. Everyone was. It was the nature of our times.
“Ah, my dear child,” said Lady Bethons, drawing back and raising her gloved hands as if to frame a picture. “Beautiful, quite beautiful. Absolutely Burne-Jones, my dear. Have you got a fellah?”
Marjorie assumed a world-weary air. “There are no young gentlemen around here, my lady.” How thrilling to say “my lady” to a guest in one’s own drawing room!
“Poor child!” exclaimed Lady Bethons. She opened her reticule and drew out a slim gold case and a long cigarette holder. Under Marjorie’s fascinated eyes, she extracted a cigarette from the case, fitted it into the holder, lit the cigarette with a Swan Vesta and puffed a delicate cloud of blue smoke across the room.
“I adore young men,” she went on. “I love to have them sit at my feet.”
“Don’t we all,” fluted Mrs. Jenkins from under the shadow of an enormous hat laden with wax fruit. “But we’re all too old. No young men want to sit at the feet of a lot of old hens like us.”
“S’right,” came the strangely underwater voice of old Mrs. Bassett, although, in fact, it was, so to speak, under tea since she hardly ever lifted her face from her teacup. Mrs. Fyfe-Bartholomew snored.
For one moment, Lady Bethons’s eyes flashed and her restless hands with their weight of glittering rings moved briefly toward the large steel hatpin in her hat as if she would pluck it out and stab it right through the whalebone barrier of Mrs. Jenkins’s corsets to the old wrinkled bosom underneath and thence to her vulgar middle-class heart. Marjorie suffered with her. Suffered intensely as she blushed for her grandmother’s common guests. How this fine aristocratic soul must feel soiled by their very presence.
Mrs. Wilton, Marjorie’s grandmother, moved forward to take her place at the tea tray. Mrs. Jenkins immediately engaged her in conversation. The new vicar had said a very puzzling thing in his sermon …
“Oh, I have no secrets,” said Marjorie, in answer to a question put to her by the dazzling visitor.
“All gels have,” insisted Lady Bethons. “Tell me, do. There must be some young man.” Marjorie thought of the butcher’s boy and blushed.
“Aha!” cried Lady Bethons, tossing her head back in a gay laugh. “I thought as much. But I will not tease. When do you come out?”
“I don’t,” confessed Marjorie. “Not in London, I mean. But in the summer, we go to Sandypoint and they have a few balls there and grandmama says I may attend.”
“Sandypoint!” exclaimed Lady Bethons in accents of loathing.
“Darling child! You must have a London Season. The balls, the parties, the young gallants. Why, I remember when Bertie, the Prince of Wales he was then … but you must not tell a soul …”
“Oh, no,” gasped Marjorie, feeling quite dizzy at the mention of this royal name.
“Well, Bertie,” said Lady Bethons, lowering her v
oice to a deep contralto, “said to me at the Duchess of Codlingham’s ball, ‘Felicity,’ he said, pressing my hand, ‘were it not for my royal destiny, I would marry you.’”
“Ooooh!” cried Marjorie, clasping her hands. “But you did marry someone else … someone you loved.”
“Ah, yes. I married poor Jimmy. So dashing, so gallant. He died … bravely.”
“May I ask how … I mean if it does not distress you,” ventured Marjorie, her expressive eyes turning almost black with interest.
“It was a long time ago. He died under the hot Indian sun. Some foul native stabbed him. He rolled to the sand. The sun burned down on his face. ‘Felicity,’ he cried. ‘I love you … madly’. But there was no one there to hear. And so he perished.”
“If there was no one there to hear,” pointed out Marjorie timidly, “then how did you come to learn of his last words?”
Lady Bethons’s eyes took on a strange, fixed expression for a moment, and then she said hurriedly, “I meant no one of consequence. His native bearer told his colonel of Jimmy’s last moments before the poor brute died himself. But I should not be distressing a young girl like you with such sad stories. Ah, I see the card table is being set up. You play?”
“Sometimes.” Marjorie was disappointed at this break in the conversation. “But I am not very good.”
But Lady Bethons had left her, in spirit anyway, as her eyes fastened on the green baize table that the parlormaid was erecting in front of the fire.
Marjorie waited impatiently for the games of cards to finish so that she could engage the fascinating Lady Bethons in conversation again.
But no sooner were the hands of bridge finished than Lady Bethons took her leave. Mrs. Jenkins had won, and won heavily, and Lady Bethons did not look at all pleased.
Marjorie waited until she was alone with her grandmother. “Grandmama …,” she began.
Mrs. Wilton looked at her curiously. “You always call me ‘grannie,’” she said.
“Never mind,” said Marjorie in a rush. “I have had such an exciting evening. A real, live lady! And she knows King Edward … or rather she knew him when he was the Prince of Wales and … and … she calls him ‘Bertie’ and he wanted to marry her.” Marjorie did not feel disloyal to Lady Bethons by telling her grandmother.
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