Death of a Dishonorable Gentleman

by Tessa Arlen

  He looked up as a large barn owl dropped out of an oak tree, its great round head turned to fix Lord Montfort briefly with an accusing stare before it leveled out on powerful wings to glide silently ahead of him down the lane. In the twilight of the evening its feathers gleamed silver-white against the dark hawthorn. If he had been a Roman he would have taken the owl’s appearance as a very bad omen indeed. But you’re not a Roman, he told himself, all you need is a decent dinner.

  Outside the public house, he let his horse drink at the trough. The dogs hadn’t moved from the group of men enjoying their supper at the wood tables against the timbered frame of the building, but now two of them wandered up and sank their muzzles into the water alongside the horse. For Lord Montfort it was a companionable moment; on any other evening, at any other time, this would have been a peaceful end to the day.

  He walked his horse over to the crowd of men who were gathered around a keg of ale. He handed Bruno’s reins to a young boy standing on the edge of the group and loosened the horse’s girth before he joined the crowd at the pub door. He allowed himself to be welcomed by those who worked for him, reassured by the closeness of men he had known for years.

  “Been a long day, my lord, and a pity we didn’t find the young misses.”

  “Sure to turn up though, your lordship, young people being what they are these days.”

  “Thank you, Dawkins, I’m sure you’re right.”

  “Know I am, my lord. That Violet’s a good girl, she ain’t in no trouble, you can be sure.”

  Lord Montfort was grateful for their cheerful determination to be optimistic; he was conscious of their respect and knew they only wished him well. He spent a little while with them outside, drank a tankard of ale, thanked them for their help, and apologized for taking them away from their work at one of the busiest times of the year. Then he climbed back on his impatient horse and made his way home. As Bruno clattered up the village street, the gossip, which had been fueled by the first tankard of ale and quelled by his arrival, flared up with greater relish and he was glad that he was not around to hear it.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Belowstairs at Iyntwood, there was no respite from a grueling schedule that was beginning to take its toll on Mrs. Jackson’s beleaguered staff. With the additional visiting personal maids and valets swelling their numbers, she felt as if their world had been condensed into an obstacle race without a finish line. With Violet’s disappearance, the housemaids Agnes and Elsie were shorthanded, and very early that morning Mrs. Jackson and Dick had helped them ready the reception rooms before returning belowstairs to help with the breakfast trays.

  As soon as guests and family gathered on the ground floor of the house later that morning, Agnes, Iris, and Dick—once again helped by Mrs. Jackson—worked through the guest wing and the family’s bedrooms. They were exhausted at the end of the morning and Mrs. Jackson was grateful for the particularly delicious dinner Iris had prepared for the downstairs midday meal: shepherd’s pie, followed by a nice jam roly-poly pudding with custard.

  Mrs. Jackson knew that a good meal and an opportunity to relax from the labors of the day often produced a surfeit of idle chatter among the lower servants. So when Mary and Myrtle had cleaned up the kitchen after the family’s luncheon, and Iris joined them for Mable Thwaite’s instructions for tea and dinner, the housekeeper went into her stillroom across the corridor from the kitchen and kept the door open. She quite easily heard the housemaids and the kitchen servants chewing over the events of the morning. Myrtle had been talking to one of the gardeners who had delivered fruit and vegetables for the family’s dinner; in the village they had still not heard from Mr. Simkin’s sister over at Ticksby if Violet had gone to her.

  “How’s that search going on?” Iris White asked for the fifth time that day.

  “Not very well, my girl, because if they’d found them, it would be all over. Anyway, you hope they don’t find them, because they wouldn’t be alive if they did.” Only Mable Thwaite could be this callous, thought Mrs. Jackson as she leaned a little farther toward the open door of the stillroom.

  “How could you say such a thing?” Iris was shocked.

  “Because Violet is a local girl, not from the town.” Mrs. Thwaite snorted in contempt. “And she knows the country round here like the back of her hand. So she’s not lost. And we all know that Miss Lucinda went off in her motorcar.”

  “Well, it’s poor little Vi I’m worried about—”

  “Well don’t be, she’s done a bunk. Mr. Hollyoak had better start counting the silver.”

  As soon as she judged the kitchen staff was breaking for their afternoon tea, Mrs. Jackson washed her hands and joined them in the kitchen.

  “The strawberry jam is ready, so you can make scones for upstairs tea, Mrs. Thwaite. Mr. Brown brought some clotted cream up from the dairy early this morning.”

  “Good. Lady Montfort enjoys a nice scone at teatime, poor thing. She must be worried sick. Have a cup, Mrs. Jackson?”

  “Yes indeed, thank you. How is everyone coming through for you with all this extra work, Mrs. Thwaite?” Mrs. Jackson put a sugar lump into her cup and stirred lightly.

  “Well trained every one of them, my girls have certainly pulled their weight.” Here of course was a little gibe. Mrs. Jackson almost laughed. Evidently all of the cook’s kitchen maids were present, correct, and doing their bit for King and Country.

  “I think the food for the ball was a success, but it’s all been forgotten because of that dreadful murder.”

  Mrs. Jackson nodded in agreement. Of course, Mrs. Thwaite’s greatest remorse was that her sensational food had been completely eclipsed by Teddy’s murder.

  “Course, we’re all tired and distracted so it will be a few days before everything is back to normal. It’s poor Mr. Hollyoak I feel so sorry for. Nowhere to go because that blinkin’ sergeant is in his pantry, nosing around and asking questions as if anyone in this house had a reason to off Mr. Teddy.” Mable Thwaite lowered her voice. “Of course, the biggest strain is having all these extras here, cluttering up the place when they should have all gone home. That’s what’s tiring everyone out.” She drank her hot tea rapidly, taking little sips as her eyes darted back and forth across the kitchen and the girls working around the large, scrubbed table. “Oh yes, it’s quite clear of course that the one that done him in is that stranger wandering around the place. That’s why the colonel’s dashed off up to London.”

  “Oxford I thought, with Mr. Barclay.”

  Mrs. Thwaite clapped her hand to her mouth and shook her head. “I am so sorry, Mrs. Jackson, I meant to tell you. Mr. Barclay will be back in time for dinner. Colonel Valentine telephoned his sergeant, who just now told Mr. Hollyoak there had been a change in plans. Colonel Valentine has left Oxford and is on his way to London to talk to Scotland Yard.”

  “Oh, I see. Please keep that information to yourself, Mrs. Thwaite. Will Colonel Valentine return tonight?”

  “No, he’s spending the night in town. I expect he’ll return tomorrow when he’s done.” Mrs. Thwaite let out a gusty sigh. She poured them both another cup of tea, and Mrs. Jackson felt almost companionable in her role of confidante.

  “Let’s hope that the colonel has got everything sewn up and they can all go home.” Mrs. Thwaite jerked her head sideways.

  Mrs. Jackson nodded. She heard the racket coming out of the servants’ hall as visiting valets and maids took their tea. “Very hard on our people, Mrs. Thwaite,” she agreed.

  “It certainly is. They are being pushed out of their own servants’ hall by that bunch of stuck-up visiting ladies’ maids and valets. Full of themselves they are, so la-di-da, and,” she added with so much contempt that Mrs. Jackson laughed, “they never stop their tittle-tattle: it’s gossip, gossip, gossip from morning to night.”

  “Quite shocking of them, Mrs. Thwaite. Now a word about tomorrow: there are still some tables that need to be moved from the music room back down to the library and the smo
king room. James and John are run off their feet, and I think Dick can manage with a handcart.” It was important that she observe protocol as Dick was primarily under Mrs. Thwaite’s supervision, and even though Mrs. Thwaite reported directly to Mrs. Jackson, the housekeeper did not presume to instruct the kitchen staff directly. Having finished her tea, she had her notebook out and was working her way down a list of jobs that still remained undone since the ball, as she waited to be informed.

  “Sorry, Mrs. Jackson, Dick can’t do any heavy lifting at the moment, because he’s injured his right hand. Crushed it bringing down a full churn of ice cream from the anteroom at the end of the ball. Why he didn’t ask for help I don’t know. Just struggled down the servants’ stairs and mashed it up against the wall getting round the landing corner. Stupid boy.” Mrs. Thwaite drained her tea in one gulp and set her cup on its saucer.

  “Oh really? Then I’ll just have to manage with a gardener’s boy and Dick’s direction then.” Mrs. Jackson made a little note in pencil as she mentally filed away this information.

  “Right you are then, Mrs. Jackson. Now I’ve got to get back to it … they’ll be wanting their tea up there before you know it.” She heaved herself to her feet, straightened up her cap, and took a deep breath before issuing the first of her instructions.

  Mrs. Jackson went off to check that the footmen had lit the fires in the long drawing room and the red room and that the housemaids had tidied the guests’ bedrooms before the changing bell rang. Then she shut herself in her parlor to work on her household accounts for her meeting with Mr. Hollyoak tomorrow morning. In the quiet of her room, she went methodically about her task with half a mind, as she ran over her own movements late on the night of the ball.

  On Sunday morning, overtired but far from ready to turn in, Mrs. Jackson had been in the laundry room, washing two linen napkins that had been stained with red wine. When she was finished, she switched off the laundry-room light and walked the length of the servants’ hall corridor to the back stairs. Out of habit, she checked rooms as she passed. There was a quiet orderliness in the spare and silent workrooms that Mrs. Jackson particularly enjoyed. She pottered about, tidying-up things left out and generally imposing order on small evidences of chaos, inevitable when everyone worked at full stretch.

  Quite suddenly she had felt tired; it must have been getting on for four o’clock, and she reminded herself that she had to be up at seven. She decided to call it a day and trudged up the stairs to her own quarters by the second-floor back stairs. As she pushed open the door to the second-floor landing, she had been aware that the heavy green baize door at the entrance to the servants’ stairs off the ground floor of the house had closed; it had a way of swinging to with an exaggerated creak no matter how often the hinges were oiled.

  As Mrs. Jackson hesitated in the doorway, she held the door slightly ajar for a moment, and heard footsteps, light and quick, coming up the stairwell. Then complete fatigue overcame her and she stepped back, letting the door swing to, catching out of the corner of her eye a flash of black and white starting up the next flight to the maids’ quarters on the third floor.

  Mrs. Jackson could have checked whether it was Agnes or Elsie coming back from working in the anteroom, but she was done with her day and eager to get her shoes off and relax in her bed with a book until she nodded off to sleep.

  She had made the assumption at the time that it was either Agnes or Elsie, but now that she came to think of it, who was it running up the stairs so lightly? The first housemaid, Agnes, and the second housemaid, Elsie, attired in their best black uniforms, had been stationed in the south anteroom attached to the ballroom, where they had kept the footmen supplied with ice cream and champagne throughout the night.

  But now she knew that it could not have been either of these two girls returning from their work to their attic bedrooms. Elsie was heavy on her feet and Agnes, a deliberate and methodical worker, proceeded everywhere at a frustratingly slow pace. The footsteps Mrs. Jackson had heard were those of a slightly built figure and neither Agnes nor Elsie could be described as petite. And if it had been either Agnes or Elsie returning at the end of the night’s work, she would have walked across the terrace to the kitchen yard, come through the scullery door, and had a cup of cocoa belowstairs before going up to her room on the attic floor for the night. It was doubtful that either of them would have presumed to walk through the ground floor of the house to the use the back stairs by the dining room.

  Mrs. Jackson’s subconscious had done its job, and now she stopped what she was doing and concentrated hard. Whoever had started up the stairs immediately after her had joined the back stairs from the ground floor of the house and not the servants’ hall. So who could that be? Mrs. Jackson worked a process of elimination. All the kitchen maids wore gray dresses, so it could not have been any of them, and they had all been in bed anyway. There were only three housemaids who wore black dresses after four o’clock in the afternoon: Agnes, Elsie, and Violet. Violet had been asleep in bed at ten so that she could be up early to help put the house in order. Agnes and Elsie would not use the main floor of the house to get to the back stairs. Lady Montfort’s personal maid, Miss Pettigrew, wore black, and was slight in form and about the same height as Violet, but her room was on the far side of the house on the servants’ floor above Lady Montfort’s room. All the visiting ladies’ maids would have been in the guests’ rooms on the second floor of the house and with no need to use the servants’ hall stairs, as they had their own set of stairs from their attic bedrooms to the guest bedrooms and then on down to the servants’ hall at its far end.

  Black and white, Mrs. Jackson thought, black and white, and for one terrible moment she wondered if she might have seen a valet or a footman. No, they had sounded like a young woman’s footsteps, light and quick, not those of a man. Though of course there were men who were light on their feet.

  Surely it had to be Violet. What on earth was she doing coming in from the main house at that hour of the night? What was she doing out of bed at all? Mrs. Jackson was suddenly aware, with a little startle of surprise, that Mr. Hollyoak and she had assumed they knew where everyone had been on the night of the murder. They believed the lower servants were obeying orders. Violet should have been upstairs in her bedroom with Mary, in bed and asleep by ten, not running about the house. Of course it was Violet, she thought, Violet going up to her room to change before she ran away. She had not been asleep in bed. The housekeeper wondered who else had been out of line on Saturday night.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Clementine had spent a wretched afternoon waiting for her husband’s return from the search for the missing girls. When he finally came into her sitting room, he bent to kiss her on his arrival but said nothing, and Clementine took one look at his tired face and knew the two girls had not been found.

  She dismissed Pettigrew and sat down next to her husband. The quiet minutes ticked by and she took comfort in the simple pleasure of their being alone together. Unlike many of their friends’, theirs had been a happy marriage. Yes, she thought, they were well suited for the long haul of bringing up a family of children, often encumbered by an irritable mother-in-law, peevish spinster sisters, and shoddy nephews; an estate that required ever more attention; and the villages and the county that would always depend on what the Talbots would unstintingly give. All these loves, loyalties, and responsibilities levied their natural toll. Clementine knew they had been lucky in their marriage; she was reminded of it whenever they spent time with their friends. But she also recognized that it was a success because they had always found the willingness and desire to extend the largest kindness to each other first. Their duty was to their family and their position, but their friendship was important to them both, and they placed each other first in their busy, overburdened lives. She laid her head on her husband’s shoulder and waited for him to tell her about his day.

  “I had to drop in and see how Mother was doing.” He sounded all in, as anyone w
ould be, Clementine thought, having spent an hour with the dowager countess at the end of a long day. How heavenly it would be to have a quiet dinner and then settle down with a book, just the two of them.

  He went on to tell her that Lady Booth was keeping the dowager company in her bereavement. Grateful that a strong corrosive such as Agatha was so readily willing to provide a distraction to his mother’s often unappeasable demands, Clementine listened for reproach in her husband’s voice. Finding none, she suffered only a momentary pang of self-inflicted guilt at having fallen in her duty. She promised him she would go to the dower house tomorrow to pay her respects.

  “Darling, I think you have enough on your plate. She understands your duty is to our guests. Strangely enough, she was remarkably sympathetic, even offered to put up Valentine until this was all over.” Clementine was thankful that her husband understood his mother so thoroughly. She couldn’t imagine how difficult it would be if Ralph were one of those men who suffered from an excess of mother worship.

  “She has heard from Verity, though.” Here Clementine brightened up and lifted her head from his shoulder.

  “Christina will be arriving in Paris from the South of France tomorrow, and when she has had some time to recover from that journey, will continue on here. Verity is coming with her. Of course, Mother will have Christina stay with her at Haversham Hall…” There was no need for him to reassure her that her sister-in-law, Christina, would not be staying with them. Clementine knew exactly how Christina’s visit with her mother would play out. They would be overjoyed to see each other; inseparable for the first three days of their time together, before the inevitable falling out. Then it would be petulant accusations and tearful misunderstandings, imagined slights and misery to anyone unlucky enough to be with them at the time. It was a scenario that replayed itself whenever the two of them got together. She didn’t share these wicked thoughts but allowed herself a moment as she remembered her last meeting with her sister-in-law.