Death Sits Down to Dinner

by Tessa Arlen

  If White was surprised that Iyntwood’s housekeeper was to be lodged on the third floor of the house, rather than in the attic bedrooms on the fourth floor with the other female servants, he did not betray any curiosity. He merely bowed his handsome head and murmured that all would be taken care of. Then he asked where Mrs. Jackson would take her meals.

  “Her meals?” Clementine was momentarily mystified. “She will take her breakfast with you belowstairs or in her room if she chooses to, her luncheon and dinner wherever she happens to be. I am sure Mrs. Jackson will tell you what she wants, White.”

  “Then she will not take her meals with the family?” He obviously wanted to be clear on this point, she thought.

  “Certainly not, White. Whatever gave you that idea?”

  * * *

  An unsuspecting Mrs. Jackson had awakened at the Talbots’ country house, Iyntwood, to a snow-filled morning and had decided to go for a nice long walk that afternoon with the dogs. From the moment she had pulled back her curtains and discovered that it had snowed in the night, she had decided to make the best of this glorious winter day. Perhaps she would stop off for a cup of tea with her friend Mr. Stafford, who would be busily at work drafting plans for an extension to Iyntwood’s rose garden to be started in the spring.

  She always enjoyed a long walk in the first snowfall of the year, and at half past two she pulled on her stoutest boots and changed into a thick wool skirt. She buttoned her coat to her throat and wrapped a bright, cherry-red scarf, knitted for her birthday by the first housemaid Agnes, up around her neck and pulled a felt hat low over her ears, completely covering her glossy, dark auburn hair. She had just picked up her gloves when there was a knock on the door of her parlor.

  “Come in,” she called, and the hall boy came into the room and stood respectfully in front of her.

  “Mr. Hollyoak says good afternoon, Mrs. Jackson, and asks you to join him belowstairs.” The boy took in her bulky walking garb. “Soon as you can, he says.”

  And that was it for her walk and her pleasant cup of tea with Mr. Stafford in his cottage on the edge of the park. She changed back into her pinstripe skirt and white blouse and went downstairs to the butler’s pantry. At five o’clock, after yet another change of clothes and dressed in her best dove-gray Sunday suit and hat, and carrying a small suitcase, she boarded the express train at Cryer’s Breech station for Marylebone.

  There was a sense of adventure in the air as the train began to pick up speed, and Mrs. Jackson in her second-class compartment, prettily flushed from her run along the platform to catch the train, was quite pleased at her summons to London. It would be pleasant to do some shopping with Miss Pettigrew in the larger department stores and perhaps have tea at the new Lyons Corner House at Marble Arch.

  An hour and a half later, she was sitting downstairs at Montfort House, enjoying a well-cooked supper with the London staff gathered around her at the servants’ hall dining table.

  Mrs. Jackson was a conservative individual and, as she was fond of saying, she observed the old ways when it came to the conduct of servants in a great house. This was her first visit to Montfort House in many years, and the upper servants were known to her only by name. Within ten minutes of taking her place at the table she had formed the opinion that the present staff in the house got away with murder. It was evident that Lord and Lady Montfort were dining out this evening, but it was quite unorthodox, in her opinion, for the butler and his footmen to be sitting around downstairs at this hour, instead of in waiting upstairs. If Lord or Lady Montfort needed anything before they left for the evening, they would have to ring and wait for a footman to come up from the servants’ hall. Iyntwood’s butler, Mr. Hollyoak, would have been appalled at such laxity and quite rightly, too.

  She lifted her eyes from her plate of food and noticed that there were several pairs of curious eyes fixed on her. Their communal scrutiny did nothing to alter her composure. She knew that they had all been guessing why Iyntwood’s housekeeper had been called up to London from the moment they had heard she was on her way.

  The new cook, a pretty and dashing young woman who could be no more than twenty-six if she was a day, was particularly attentive and full of questions. There was no housekeeper at Montfort House; the cook was second-in-command and fulfilled both roles in the house. It was natural for her to be curious as to why Mrs. Jackson was on her turf, but it was not Mrs. Jackson’s habit to explain herself. The butler—and one glance told you he was far too young to be a butler, she thought—having accurately guessed his age at close to her own, would take several more years to acquire the gravitas of demeanor so necessary in a good butler to a large London establishment. Oh well, she sighed to herself, London ways; everything happens at such a fast pace in the city, no wonder Edna Pettigrew always returns with tales of chaos in the servants’ hall at Montfort House.

  Listening to the bright chatter around her, she noticed that, except for the cook, they were all Londoners, another mark against them. Mrs. Jackson, like many provincials, was a little narrow in her view about Londoners. Country-bred people remembered their place and looked up to the old and august families they worked for. City-bred servants were far too independent and unreliable, always ready to turn things to their own advantage. This opinion had been formed years ago, when Mrs. Jackson had started her career in London as a lowly housemaid at Montfort House, and had been reinforced by reports relayed by Miss Pettigrew when she returned from trips to London with her ladyship. “If that Mr. White was offered a job by some rich American he would be off like a shot,” was a pronouncement often made by Miss Pettigrew when she came back from London brimming with information on new fashions, society scandals, and the inevitable report on Montfort House servants’ hall, which was kept confidentially between the two of them.

  Mrs. Jackson politely answered the Montfort House servants’ questions and gave no further information as she ate her supper. She had to admit the food was delicious: a stew of pork, bacon, and white beans, a cassoulet, the cook had been proud to tell her, that must have cost a fortune in ingredients. No shepherd’s pie made up from yesterday’s leftover roast mutton from upstairs dinner in this servants’ hall, she thought as she finished her meal in silence.

  “Her ladyship asks that you go up to see her soon as you can, Mrs. Jackson. You’ve plenty of time to finish your supper as they are leaving at eight o’clock. She’s in the large drawing room.” Mr. White certainly was a good-looking man, standing tall at six foot two, nicely proportioned, and perfectly attired with a pleasant, well-modulated voice.

  “Very well, Mr. White. Thank you, Cook, that was an interesting dish, perhaps you will share the recipe with me before I leave.” And without a backward glance she was on her way upstairs to the drawing room, hearing as she went an elevation in the hum around the servants’ hall table.

  * * *

  Mrs. Jackson climbed the back stairs to the fourth floor of the house, to the old nursery and schoolrooms. When she opened the door, the rooms brought back a flood of memories of her first days as a housemaid in Montfort House, fifteen years ago, when the children were young and Nanny was still able to run after them, in the days before she got too stout to be really effective. The schoolroom was now used for storage, and the furniture that crowded the nursery was covered in dust sheets. But a fire had been lit in the grate and Nanny’s old room was warm and comfortable, with familiar sagging easy chairs, tables and bookshelves filled with classics from bygone days. On the wall was a print of the late King Edward VII and, farther along, another of Queen Victoria when she was a young woman.

  The prospect of the old nursery did a good deal to soften Mrs. Jackson’s stern countenance. Her handsome, classic profile had acquired rather a frigid cast since she had left Lady Montfort a few minutes ago, and her shoulders were still expressing some of the exasperation she had felt toward the end of their conversation. She had dropped all her Christmas and New Year preparations for the season, left her plans for the Iynt
wood hunt ball dangling, to come up to London to help Miss Kingsley rescue her charity evening from disaster. Now she had discovered that this was not the only reason why she had been summoned.

  She swung her suitcase up onto the bed, flipped open the lid, and removed two gray-and-black pinstripe skirts and a smart, well-made black bombazine silk dress, which she snapped briskly to expel any dust from the journey and then carefully brushed and hung in the wardrobe. She pulled open two drawers in the dresser and laid a sheet of lining paper inside each one. She next unpacked a stack of starched white cotton blouses, her underclothes and stockings, and a black full-length apron that she wore if she had to do something extremely messy, like arrange flowers. She laid her clothes carefully in the drawers and slid them closed. She placed her felt slippers underneath the bed and slipped a flannel nightgown under the pillow. Finally, she took out her rose-pink, woolen dressing gown from the bottom of the suitcase, a Christmas present from Lady Montfort last year, and hung it from the hook on the back of the nursery door.

  As she was arranging her hairbrush and toilet articles next to the washstand she caught sight of herself in the looking glass and noticed that her expression was rather severe.

  Now, Edith, she told herself, you had better lose that look before you go over to Miss Kingsley’s house tomorrow. Lord knows what you will find there.

  After considerable thought on the matter, she decided against acting on Lady Montfort’s suggestion that she discover as much as she could about what was going on in Miss Kingsley’s house—in other words, snoop. She would do nothing of the sort. She would be pleased to organize the charity evening, and do all she could to make it a success, of course she would, and she would enjoy it, too. And when she wasn’t doing that, she would pop over to Selfridges in Oxford Street. Do a bit of shopping, and perhaps talk Miss Pettigrew into accompanying her to the Victoria and Albert Museum, or the National Portrait Gallery. Other than that, she had no intention whatsoever of getting herself involved in another one of her ladyship’s inquiries. Their combined investigation into the murder of Mr. Teddy Mallory last year has been for a very good reason indeed. Lady Montfort’s son, Lord Haversham, had been in danger of being arrested for murder. So it had been right and proper for her to help her mistress in any way she could. But the murder of Sir Reginald was not their business, and if Miss Kingsley was not discussing the sordid death of her friend, then Mrs. Jackson certainly did not believe it was her place to bring it up. As soon as her ladyship had recovered from the shock of finding a dead man at the dining table, she would be quite happy to leave things to the police. With this in mind, she left Nanny’s room and walked across the night nursery to the day nursery and the bathroom next to the nurserymaid’s old room.

  She would take a nice long bath and then pop into bed with her hot water bottle, her cup of cocoa, and a good book. She was halfway through Middlemarch and everything she had read so far confirmed her opinion that marriage wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. As she leaned comfortably back among her pillows and flipped the book open to her marker, she idly wondered if Ernest Stafford ever had time to come up to London.

  Chapter Seven

  Clementine left early the next morning to take Mrs. Jackson over to Miss Kingsley’s house. It was a perfect late-autumn day with clear blue skies and the sort of snap in the air that encourages bracing walks along the embankment, but a wind coming down from the north told a different tale for the afternoon. They made the drive in silence, which did not bode well for Mrs. Jackson’s compliance as an amateur detective’s trusted assistant, thought Clementine, as she settled her gloved hands into her muff and gazed out of the window with a placid expression on her face. Mrs. Jackson had hardly rallied around the flag yesterday evening when Lady Montfort had briefed her on Sir Reginald’s murder. Her manner had been quite correct, but a shade too detached and distant, and her responses had been negligible to say the least. Clementine fully comprehended how deeply conventional her housekeeper was, and though most loyal in her duty to the Talbot family, she probably did not consider the murder at Miss Kingsley’s house to be something she must involve herself in—on anyone’s behalf. She glanced across at her housekeeper’s face. Mrs. Jackson appeared to be quite composed and relaxed, but Clementine suspected that she was probably fuming. Her enthusiastic suggestions to do a little careful investigation of their own at Chester Square had been received with respectful but chilly silence.

  If she had offended her housekeeper’s sense of dignity Clementine was truly sorry. But at the same time she was quite sure that once Mrs. Jackson was settled in Miss Kingsley’s house and had met Miss Gaskell, her instinctive curiosity would be piqued and then they would see what she made of things.

  When they arrived at Chester Square, Clementine noticed that the door was opened for them by the Clumsy Footman instead of the butler.

  “Mr. Jenkins is with Detective Inspector Hillary, in the library, m’lady. But Miss Kingsley is waiting for you in the drawing room.” The man said and on cue, the drawing-room door opened and Hermione walked into the hall. The presence of Scotland Yard’s Detective Inspector Hillary and his sergeant in her house clearly didn’t suit her; she was at her most austere and quite stiff with indignation. Starch aside, she was nonetheless courteous in her welcome to Mrs. Jackson.

  “I am so grateful Lady Montfort can spare you from your duties at Iyntwood, Mrs. Jackson. Your reputation has preceded you and we are indeed fortunate to have your help. I am sure our charity evening will only benefit from your guidance. I will not introduce you to Miss Gaskell today, as it is important she has her rest. The butler will take you to her little office where you will be able to work undisturbed with the help of Miss Gaskell’s records of previous events for the charity. And if you need to use the telephone, you will find it in the library. That is of course if we are lucky enough to be able to use that room today.” She glanced toward the closed door of the library, her mouth tucked down in the corners in distaste.

  She’s as sour as lemon barley water, thought Clementine, confident that her housekeeper was more than a match for the old lady’s iron rule over her household and her determination that not one word of what had occurred in her dining room would be uttered at Chester Square.

  At that moment Inspector Hillary came out of the library, followed by a remarkably flustered Jenkins. The old man looked as shamefaced as if he had confessed to at least a dozen heinous acts, and was careful not to catch his mistress’s eye. Evidently in both their minds he was guilty of disloyalty simply by being in the same room as the policeman.

  “Finally, Jenkins. I was wondering where you might be.” Hermione did not acknowledge Detective Inspector Hillary, her gaze was fixed somewhere over the policeman’s head as she addressed her butler. “Now, this is Mrs. Jackson.” Without turning her head, she gave an imperious wave toward the area in the hall occupied by Iyntwood’s housekeeper. “She is here to organize the charity evening. I have told her to use the library telephone rather than the one in the butler’s pantry, so she won’t get in your way. She will be returning to Montfort House at seven o’clock this evening, so please make arrangements with Cook for her midday dinner and her tea. Perhaps you would show her down to the between-stairs office, if you have quite finished here.” And turning to Clementine: “I will send Mrs. Jackson back in my motorcar, and Macleod will collect her tomorrow morning at nine o’clock sharp.”

  Hermione, having made all the arrangements she deemed necessary, was about to make her farewells when Hillary spoke.

  “How fortunate you should arrive at this moment, Lady Montfort. I was wondering if—” But what he was wondering was interrupted by Hermione, as if he simply weren’t there.

  “My dear Clementine, I must say goodbye. Now my library has been made available to me, I can get on with my morning, what is left of it.” Ignoring the policeman, she walked past him into the room he had vacated.

  Clementine turned to Inspector Hillary and smiled to make up for Hermio
ne’s snub, but he appeared not in the least perturbed by the elderly woman’s dismissive behavior. “I was hoping that I might call in on you, Lady Montfort, it would be helpful to resume our conversation about last night. Would it be convenient to follow you home, and might Lord Montfort also be available?”

  The library door closed quite audibly as Clementine replied, “Yes indeed, Inspector. If we leave now, we might perhaps catch Lord Montfort before he leaves for his club.”

  * * *

  Clementine would never have admitted to anything of the kind, but she was a natural for detective work. She possessed considerable intuition and had an inborn gift for timing, and once she had corralled her natural enthusiasm and vital energy, she knew when to inquire, and when to hold her counsel and let others do the talking, but most of all she knew when to prod. An endless fascination with people and what drove them to do the things they did had given her great insight into the oddities of human nature. She was naturally sociable, a practiced conversationalist, and had such easy manners that her company was much sought after in polite society. As a consequence she was invited everywhere, and there was no one in the Metropolitan Police, not even its commissioner, Sir Edward Henry, who had an address book to equal hers.

  “Inspector Hillary, please sit here by the fire. White will bring you a cup of coffee and Lord Montfort won’t be a moment. I am so glad I caught him before he left the house.” And then, as if their visit were entirely social: “I do hope you will stay for luncheon,” and by way of letting him know that luncheon was imminent and Lord Montfort would not expect to be kept waiting: “Our son Harry will be joining us—should be here at any moment.”