“He’ll be casting sheep’s eyes at you and making a great cake of himself as long as you remain in this house.” Bertha was prepared to defend her position with tooth and nail. “I think, miss, that it would be wise of you to leave.”
“But I cannot!” So menacing was Bertha’s attitude that Livvy wondered if she was to be dispatched summarily to meet her Maker. “Believe me, Bertha, I would depart this house on the instant if only I could!”
“Why can’t you?” Bertha was momentarily distracted from her murderous design. “Don’t tell me you’re devoted to that evil gorgon because I won’t believe a word of it!”
Livvy grimaced. “Heavens, no! Madame Arbuthnot is the most unpleasant individual it has ever been my misfortune to know.” She imagined Dickon’s scathing, superior comments were she to turn craven and flee. “Nevertheless, there are reasons why I must stay, at least temporarily.”
Bertha sniffed. “It sounds havey-cavey to me. You could find a position easy enough, especially with your connections.”
“My connections?” Livvy was perplexed.
Bertha wore a sly look. “Why, that Baroness that sent you here. Seems that she could’ve done better by you, doesn’t it? If I were you, I’d tell her so.”
A vague notion, staggering in its impact, was forming in Livvy’s head. “What do you know of Lady Bligh?”
“She’s Lord Dorset’s aunt, ain’t she?” Bertha fiddled with her cap.
“So you know Dickon,” Livvy mused. “I should have thought of that. He was a frequent visitor here, was he not?”
“Yes, miss.” Bertha was most demure. Livvy marvelled at Dickon’s ability to arouse lecherous inclinations in even the most unlikely breast. “Sir William says they’ll take him to the gallows and string him up as he deserves. It’s a pity; he was a fine figure of a man.”
Livvy reached a momentous decision. She grasped the abigail’s arm. “Bertha, I am going to confide in you. Where can we talk privately?”
Bertha’s eyes widened, but she led the way to the kitchens without protest. The large chamber was deserted. Considering the quality of the food served at Arbuthnot House, Livvy was not surprised. She moved across the nagged stone floor and stood before the fireplace. A variety of pots, pans, lids, small mops and jugs were arrayed on wooden shelves set in the recess made by the chimneybreast. Thick dust attested that these articles were not often used.
Bertha drew a rickety chair to the kitchen table and sat down, propped both elbows on the wooden surface in disregard of bits of food and less wholesome things. “Let’s have it, then! I don’t have all day.”
Livvy decided upon a dramatic approach. “I am here under false pretenses. I am not what I seem!”
“Fancy that.” Bertha picked up a chunk of overripe cheese.
“I am prepared to take you into my confidence,” Livvy went on, “but you must promise to repeat no word of what I am about to say.” Did Bertha appear adequately intrigued? “Not even to Sir William.”
“You’re going a bit too fast, miss.” Bertha squashed a maggot with her thumb. “What’s in it for me?”
“My departure, as soon as my task is done.” Livvy averted her gaze from the dead maggot and leaned against a huge brown-painted dresser with shelves, cup hooks, drawers, and cupboards of a putrid yellow-green. “With your help, it may be accomplished speedily.”
Bertha, having devoured the cheese, after dislodging its inhabitants, turned her attention to a hunk of stale bread. “I didn’t reckon you for a clutch-fisted sort. A girl like me has to think of herself, for no one else will.”
Livvy considered this quite likely; Bertha was hardly an appetizing lass. “I daresay I might be able to spare ten pounds.”
“Paltry,” pronounced Bertha, revealing herself as no novice to the arts of bribery.
“Very well, twenty-five.” Livvy hoped her tone was sufficiently firm. With assumed nonchalance, she moved to the stone sink. It was as unsavory as the table, and Livvy quickly turned away. “I thought you wanted me to leave quickly? My task can be accomplished without your help, but it would take much longer.”
Bertha licked her fingers, including the maggot-killing thumb. “I haven’t said no.”
“You haven’t said yes, either,” Livvy pointed out. Her efforts at detection were being frustrated at every turn. Even the housemaid who discovered Arabella’s body had little enough to say, merely bursting into hysterical sobs at the mention of the woman’s name. Judging from the state of Arbuthnot House, she also had little enough to do. “I can tell you no more until I have your word.”
“Twenty-five pounds.” Bertha clasped her hands across her stomach. “Very well, you have it. You needn’t worry about Sir William; he’s not interested in what I think.”
Livvy overlooked this crudity. “I am not a servant at all,” she confided, hoping she had not misread Bertha’s character, “but Lord Dorset’s fiancée, come here to clear his name.”
Bertha stared. “I would never have guessed. You don’t seem the sort to take his lordship’s fancy, but there’s no telling about the gentlemen.”
Sourly, Livvy contemplated this backward compliment. “How right you are. Bertha; they are truly an unpredictable lot.”
“That’s a kick in the teeth for Arabella!” Bertha laughed. “Lord Dorset played fast and loose with her ladyship while getting himself shackled to you. But there! I knew she wasn’t worth a groat to him.”
Livvy refrained from asking how Bertha had come to this conclusion, for she suspected she already knew. Lord Dorset had a damnably undiscriminating eye. “Then you’ll help me, Bertha?”
“For twenty-five pounds,” Bertha retorted cheerfully, “I’d send me own mum to jail. What do yon want to know?”
Weak-kneed with success, Livvy sank into a chair. “Tell me about Arabella,” she said, trying to appear more confident than she felt. It occurred to her belatedly that she had no notion what she was supposed to find out.
“She was a queer one.” Bertha drew patterns on the table’s filthy surface. “Flirting with every man that came near and leading poor Sir William a merry chase.”
“When did Sir William first, er, take an interest in you?”
“Don’t you go thinking I had anything to do with it!” Bertha leaned across the table, eyes snapping. “Sir William was besotted with his wife and had no eyes for anyone else when she was around.”
“I see.” Livvy gingerly grasped a filth-encrusted knife and moved it out of the abigail’s reach. “Isn’t it a trifle odd that he should notice you so belatedly? You were Arabella’s dresser; he must have seen you every day.”
Bertha’s indignation was replaced by an equally unsettling smugness. “So he did, but I haven’t been here over three months, miss. It takes some gentlemen a while to get up their nerve.”
“Three months!” Livvy was dismayed. “I thought you were with Lady Arabella during her previous marriage.”
Bertha shook her head. “She had an abigail who’d been with her for years, but when she married Sir William, she turned the poor creature off without so much as a reference. That’s an ungrateful way to act, if you ask me.”
“Odd, indeed,” murmured Livvy. “Have you any idea where the woman went?”
“None at all. But I imagine I could find out.” Bertha’s glance was meaningful.
“Ten more pounds,” Livvy prompted, as lavish with Lady Bligh’s fortune as Lord Dorset was with his own.
“Done!” Thus inspired, Bertha became ever more helpful. “There’s something else, miss: Arabella was terrified of someone or something, sure as I’m sitting here. Many’s the time I thought she was going to jump right out of her skin.”
So intrigued was Livvy that she, too, leaned her elbows on the table. “Who, Bertha, who?”
“That’s what I can’t figure out.” Bertha screwed up her features in thought. “It wasn’t Sir William or Lord Dorset, of that I’m sure.”
“Luisa, perhaps?” If it was true that Lad
y Arabella had lived in utmost dread, her foul-tempered mama-in-law was the most likely source.
Bertha shook her head. “I think not. Her ladyship hated Madame, no doubt of that, but you don’t deliberately provoke someone you’re afraid of, and the two of them were always at it hammer and tongs.”
Livvy jerked her elbows off the table and rose to pace the room. She paused near a cast-iron range, obviously never used, and contemplated an iron mantelpiece that held plates, candlesticks, and a large saltshaker, all liberally festooned with cobwebs. “When did all this begin?”
“A man came to see her ladyship about two months ago.” Bertha was still engaged in tortuous thought. “I doubt he was a gentleman, for all his fancy dress. He didn’t stay long but when he left. Lady Arabella looked like she’d seen a ghost. It was after that she became so queer, flying into the boughs if even a letter came.”
“I wonder who he was.” Livvy suspected she was being treated to a highly exaggerated account; Arabella had been far from the nervous sort of female who heard danger in every footfall.
“I’ve no notion,” Bertha shrugged. “Her ladyship wasn’t one for confidences.”
An imperious bell pealed. “Madame,” sighed Bertha, “will be wanting her brandy.” She rose to fetch dusty bottles, which Livvy accepted cautiously. “I’ll be seeing what else I can find out, miss, but the people in this house are a close-mouthed lot.”
Of that, Livvy was only too aware. She paused in the doorway and turned. “Thank you for your help, Bertha. I am most grateful.”
“No need for thanks,” Bertha retorted, moving toward the larder in search of further sustenance. “Just pay up, like you said.”
“What if I find out that Sir William was involved in his wife’s death?” Belatedly, Livvy realized that she risked having her investigations ruined. “Have you thought of that?”
“I’ve thought of little else these past several days, and lay with a murderer I will not do.” Bertha’s expression was self-righteous. “A girl has to draw the line somewhere! If Sir William is a murderer he’ll find himself out in the cold, and without a kind word from me.”
Livvy thought that Sir William, in such a case, would lose more than the company of his convenient. “And if not?”
Bertha flashed a saucy smile. “If not, miss, he’ll find himself standing before a preacher, and in record time!”
Livvy mulled over these disclosures as she reluctantly mounted the stair. Bertha’s ambitions were as absurd as they were grandiose, and hardly of a sort to find favor with Madame Arbuthnot, who ruled her son with an iron fist and a guilt-barbed whip. Sir William was never allowed to forget that he was responsible for the accident that left his mother imprisoned in her wheel chair. Cautiously, Livvy opened the drawing-room door. The chamber had all the benevolent atmosphere of a prison cell.
Like a magpie, Madame Arbuthnot squatted in her cluttered nest. Her flabby chin rested on her equally flabby chest, and rattling noises issued from her open mouth. Livvy tiptoed into the room, placed a brandy bottle on the table beside Luisa’s chair, and cautiously settled onto the hard love seat. Madame’s past and character were written on her face, and it surpassed anything a delicately nurtured English lady should have been expected to understand. Livvy wondered if Luisa’s crippling accident had also twisted her mind. Were not the old woman a helpless invalid, she would surely have been capable of any villainy.
Luisa stirred and Livvy held her breath, only to release it when her formidable employer subsided once again into moist, unpleasant snores. Madame, who expected substantial returns from even her most meager investments, would not be pleased to find her paid companion idly taking her ease. It was Livvy’s duty not only to provide a meek foil for Luisa’s hectoring tongue, but also to dress and undress her, a task that filled Livvy with revulsion. Even this was not the worst, for she also had to tend to her employer’s most basic needs, emptying slops and rinsing the vessels with scalding water and turpentine. She folded reddened hands in her lap and pondered the eccentricities of fate. Surely she had committed no transgression of such magnitude to warrant subjection to Sir William’s brutish advances and his mother’s bullying ways.
“Caught you!” barked Luisa, causing Livvy’s heart to stop. “Lazy good-for-nothing chit! I don’t pay you to loll about like a lady of leisure!”
“I beg your pardon, ma’am,” Livvy replied meekly. Surely the possessor of those beautiful golden eyes could not have been born a gruesome crone. “I only meant to be at hand in case you should wish me to perform some service for you.”
“A likely tale!” Luisa reached for her bottle, one in a long succession of which even Livvy had lost count. Not yet prepared to face the day, Luisa was still clad in a gown and petticoat of once fine calico, now torn and stained. A Duke of York’s nightcap hid her sparse gray hair. “A more worthless bag of bones I have yet to see.”
Livvy suffered this slur in silence, for it was true that she’d grown even thinner during her sojourn at Arbuthnot House.
“No man would ever look twice at a female as scrawny as you,” Luisa remarked, in fine fettle, “except my son, who’ll chase anything in or out of skirts! Cat got your tongue, Primrose? I know quite well what goes on in my house.”
Livvy, with difficulty, maintained her servile attitude. “I hope I know my place, ma’am.” It was galling to take such abuse, and for the sake of a man she detested heartily.
“You don’t blush, either,” remarked her tormentor. “Hardened to impropriety, Primrose?” Luisa raised the bottle to her lips and drank, then passed the back of her hand across her brandy-splattered chin. “I’ll wager it’s not the first time you’ve been offered a slip on the shoulder by a handsome gentleman.”
Livvy reflected upon the blindness of maternal love, which made a romantic figure of a man fit only to haunt one’s dreams, like a hobgoblin. “Sir William has made no improper suggestions.”
“He will,” retorted Sir William’s fond parent. “What will you say then, Primrose? Will you agree to a tumble in the hay?”
“Certainly not!” Livvy would tolerate only so much, even for Lady Bligh. She reconsidered, and looked at the floor. “It sounds exceedingly uncomfortable.”
Luisa threw back her head and cackled. “So you do have spirit! I couldn’t imagine Dulcie championing such a mawkish ninny as you appear to be.” Her amusement abruptly fled. “Don’t rely on your luck! If you cross me, girl, it’ll be the worse for you.”
Livvy didn’t doubt the truth of this. Luisa would probably carry out a vicious vendetta with the greatest style. “I beg pardon, ma’am, if I have presumed.”
“Bear in mind, pea-goose, that you’re dependent on me.” Yellow teeth bared in a smile. “It don’t bother me a bit if William had his bit of fun with you, so you needn’t worry about that. Although a scrawny thing like you could barely warm a man’s bones.”
“You misunderstand.” Livvy quailed at the thought of being crushed in Sir William’s fleshy and malodorous arms. “I am not of a promiscuous nature.”
“Holding out for marriage? More fool, you!” Luisa’s bowed shoulders shook. “One thing’s certain: my, son will never marry a fubsy-faced old maid. Take care. Primrose, or you’ll end up leading apes in hell.”
Livvy reflected that, no matter how unpleasant her marriage had been, her widowed state absolved her from the fate reserved for unhappy spinsters. Luisa sank into deep thought, raising and lowering her bottle with hypnotic regularity.
“How,” demanded Luisa, so abruptly that Livvy started, “do you know Dulcie Bligh?” It was a question that might have arisen sooner, had Luisa’s mind not been pickled in brandy.
Livvy was prepared. “Lady Bligh has been very good to me.” She had learned to lie like a trouper in but a few days’ time. “She is my god-mama, you see.”
Suspicion was written large on Luisa’s unpleasant features. “Dulcie stand godmother to a puking squalling brat? Not likely, Primrose!”
“Is it
not?” Livvy countered, interested. “The fact is, she did. I believe there were circumstances which indebted Lady Bligh to my mother.”
To Livvy’s mingled relief and surprise, Luisa accepted this Banbury tale. “Pulled Dulcie’s coals out of the fire, I don’t doubt! You wouldn’t be knowing it now, but Dulcie Bligh was quite a dasher in her day.” The hooded eyes glittered. “Don’t go getting notions into your head, Primrose. You won’t be mollycoddled here.”
Livvy, fascinated by these disclosures concerning the Baroness, was doomed to hear no more. “Fetch me another bottle!” Luisa demanded, and Livvy moved to the bread cupboard, an item that, like all others in Arbuthnot House, showed signs of long neglect. With newly acquired expertise, she removed the filthy cork.
“I hear my son had a visitor yesterday.” Luisa fell upon the bottle as if with a virgin thirst. “Don’t hover, peagoose! Sit down.”
Livvy spoke around the nervous frog that had leaped into her throat. “I believe so, ma’am.”
“Did you see him?” Luisa demanded. The golden gaze was intent. “You’ve got eyes and ears. Primrose! Who was this unexpected visitor?”
“I had but the merest glimpse of him, ma’am,” Livvy temporized. Heaven only knew how Madame would react to the crime of eavesdropping.
“So there was someone! Was he young or old, short or tall? Did he present a rakish appearance, or seem an unsavory specimen?” Madame’s hands trembled, spilling brandy on the soiled gown.
Livvy had an odd notion that Luisa had a definite visitor in mind, perhaps the same mysterious caller who had so upset Arabella. “He was short, and rather stout.” An image of Crump sprang into her mind. “Beyond that, I could not say.”
Luisa relaxed and lost her corpselike hue. “His purpose, Primrose, his purpose! Don’t. shilly-shally, girl, make a conjecture!”
“I’d guess he was from Bow Street, ma’am. He had the look of a thief-taker.” Perhaps now Livvy would learn something of sufficient importance to justify the speedy removal of her mistreated person from Arbuthnot House.
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