The Earl's Mortal Enemy

by Issy Brooke

  “My lady.” She bobbed and curtseyed. Juliet was in her early twenties and had been in service of one kind or another for almost a decade. She hadn’t risen any higher than chambermaid due to a general lack of ambition and something that Theodore called “no gumption.” She was perfectly able to follow a list of tasks and she had a good attention to detail but she showed a dreadful lack of initiative. She had always been told what to do, so if she was left without orders for a few hours, she seemed to wind down like a clockwork doll and just stand there uselessly until reanimated with a fresh set of commands.

  “Have you seen Mr Pegsworth this morning, Juliet?” Adelia asked.

  “Er – what? Yes. No. Sorry, my lady.”

  Adelia blinked in astonishment at the curious reply from the maid. Juliet hung her head so that all Adelia could see was her white frilly cap above wide shoulders.

  “Juliet, whatever do you mean? It was a straightforward question that can have one of two answers. A yes, and a no. Which is it?”

  “Sorry, my lady, I thought you might have meant ...”

  “Look at me.”

  Juliet reluctantly raised her head. She was frightened. Her eyes were wide and her skin paler than usual below the rash of freckles over her button nose.

  “Juliet, you need to tell me everything.”

  “It wasn’t me, my lady. It wasn’t my idea.” She began to cry and Adelia was astonished.

  They were still in the public corridor. Adelia opened the baize door and nodded. “Right. You and I are going to get to the bottom of this. Down you go. We shall sort this out in the housekeeper’s room. March!”

  Juliet responded almost automatically, almost rushing downstairs to the servants’ areas of the house. She knocked and flung herself into Mrs Cooper’s room before the housekeeper could call out for her to enter. Mrs Cooper looked in alarm at Adelia.

  “Please, Mrs Cooper, if we might beg your indulgence. Juliet has something important to tell us.”

  The housekeeper settled herself in her armchair with a puzzled look, and Adelia sat on an opposite chair while Juliet remained standing, her hands nervously clasped in front of her. When the maid spoke, she addressed the housekeeper.

  “I didn’t realise what he wanted, not really,” she said.

  “He?” Mrs Cooper spoke sharply and immediately leapt to the most obvious conclusion, one of the commonest hazards of having a large staff of men and women working together in a house. “Who has laid a hand upon you, child? I shall have them turfed out!” Adelia did not disagree with that general reaction. This was Mrs Cooper’s domain, after all.

  “Mr Pegsworth,” Juliet whispered.

  Mrs Cooper stared at Adelia in horror. Adelia found that she could not speak.

  Mrs Cooper said, “What did Mr Pegsworth do?” She, too, sounded hoarse.

  “He said you wouldn’t miss them, my lady, and you haven’t, so it’s ... not as bad as it looks, is it?”

  “We have no idea what you are talking about. Let me be more direct. Apologies, my lady, if I have to be indecorous. Juliet, has Mr Pegsworth touched you, romanced you or seduced you in any way?”

  Juliet looked startled. “Oh, no, ma’am! No, my lady! Never!”

  Adelia let out her breath. Well, that was some relief, at least.

  “Then what are you talking about?” Mrs Cooper went on.

  “He took some things from here and he sold them. I helped him to take them. I know it’s wrong, but when he asked me to help him, I didn’t think. He just told me and I did what he told me to do.”

  Adelia sat back in the chair and passed a hand over her face. The idea that her brother might have molested someone was abhorrent beyond measure. The notion that he’d been involved in stealing from her, though, was entirely plausible and probably wasn’t even the first time. After all, he was still full of resentment that her life had turned out much better than his, and he felt that he was “owed” by her. It certainly wasn’t beyond him to take what he thought was rightfully “his” and not even see it as stealing. It would be more like “redressing the balance” in his mind.

  “What has he stolen, and when did he do it?” Adelia asked wearily.

  Juliet quivered but Mrs Cooper barked at her to answer, and she did, in a small voice. “It was the night that they all arrived, all the rest of them. Monday, it was. He spoke to me before dinner. He had been looking around for a few days. I think he had a little list of what he could take and that no one would notice was gone. So he told me to meet him that night when everyone was going to bed, as soon as they left the dining room, because no one would be out and about in the corridors. He knew the butler would have locked everything up, and he asked me to get the keys, which I did. I’m sorry. We only took small things like little china ornaments and little gold figures and stuff, bits and pieces. No one has noticed...”

  “And then what did you do with them?” Mrs Cooper asked.

  “He took them. I suppose that he sold them the next day but I don’t know.”

  Adelia said, “But the murder happened that very night.”

  “He probably still sold them. Wouldn’t he?”

  Theodore and the inspector had searched Alf’s room; they had not found anything, so Alf must have sold the knick-knacks. But that was not the most important thing.

  The most important thing was that Alf had an alibi for the night of the murder. While Halifax was being killed, her own brother was creeping around the house with this maid, stealing small ornaments.

  “Come with me,” Adelia said. Her stomach grumbled with the lack of her breakfast but she ignored it. “We are going to speak to Inspector Prendergast.”

  “I didn’t do anything!”

  Adelia let her wail and cry. She was flushed and hot with anger, and she took the maid firmly by the hand and hauled her through the corridors and installed her in Theodore’s study, under the watchful eye of Theodore himself, who was still cramming a bread roll into his mouth. She arranged for someone to contact Prendergast to attend at once, if at all possible. She remembered that he had spoken of needing to be somewhere else but she hoped that he might be found and persuaded to return in light of the revelation.

  “And someone find my brother immediately,” she also ordered. “Have him brought here. Use violence if you have to.”

  “Adelia...” Theodore protested, and then he saw the look on her face.

  No one else dared to answer back.

  INSPECTOR PRENDERGAST turned up by midday looking cool and unflustered and giving no sign of where he had been so urgently earlier that morning. Adelia wondered what he’d thought about the events of the previous night, and the way Froude had been so keen to talk about money. But Inspector Prendergast didn’t mention it at all. He nodded at Adelia and Theodore as he entered the study. He was carrying a briefcase and said, “Good morning; my lady, might I thank you for the additional information you discovered on the behalf of the investigation? It has been corroborated this morning and might prove instrumental in moving things forward.”

  “Corroborated?” Theodore said. “Was our word not good enough?”

  Adelia stopped him with a warning look. “He has to do his job,” she reminded him.

  The inspector merely quirked on eyebrow in response. He put his leather case down on the table and regarded Alf and the maid for a few moments, just letting the silence extend long enough to make everyone feel uncomfortable.

  “Well,” he said at last. “Let’s hear what all this is about.”

  Adelia could not help but take over at this point. She pointed at her brother and said, “This man has been stealing from us. From the very moment he arrived here, he was making notes of what small items of value would not be missed. On the night that Froude, Halifax and Montgomery arrived, he arranged with this maid to meet and steal those items. The subsequent day, I believe that he sold them.”

  Alf started to say “No, but...” and everyone hushed him.

  “This is a dreadful matter but
not ... oh.” The implications hit Inspector Prendergast. “That very night? While everyone else was in their beds, Mr Pegsworth and this maid were prowling the corridors of Thringley House?”

  “Yes, no, but it doesn’t mean I’ve murdered anyone!” Alf cried out.

  “I have not said that it does,” Prendergast told him. “Indeed, don’t you see how this works in your favour?”

  “Eh?”

  “The maid told me everything and did not understand the significance of what she told me,” Adelia informed Prendergast and Alf. “She was scared about the theft but had no idea how it related to the facts of the case. I believe her.”

  Juliet flicked her gaze from one to the other, worry on her face, hunting for some clue as to what was going to happen to her now. Inspector Prendergast opened a notebook. “Very well. Let us write this down with as many exact times and details as we can.”

  Juliet was to remain standing, of course. Adelia went to sit next to Theodore and Alf settled himself in an armchair which he dragged up to the table. Inch by inch, they eased the events of the night out of Juliet and Alf, and by the end of it all, the inspector seemed to be as convinced as he could be that Alf was unlikely to have had anything to do with the murder.

  “It is conceivable,” he said, “that Mr Pegsworth found time to rob this house with the maid at his side and kill Bablock Halifax. The timings, however, do not match. We know when Halifax was killed and we know when everyone left the dinner to go to their rooms. It is conceivable, also, that the maid has been paid to come forward now with this story and is a remarkably good actress, falsifying Mr Pegsworth’s alibi. Again, this falls down when one examines this witness, this maid, more closely. I rather think she could not have faked a single thing even if her life depended on it.”

  Alf spoke up at last. “So I’m ... I’m in the clear?”

  Prendergast looked sternly at him. “Only as far as the murder goes, possibly, though I will retain an open mind.”

  Alf sagged in relief but Adelia could no longer curtail her rising anger. After all that she had done for her brother, after all the money she had given him and the sanctuary she had offered him, and the lies, the lies that she had told on his behalf – after all of that, and still he betrayed her? She had been stabbed in the back, over and over, and she wanted to hurl objects at his head, claw at his face, shriek into his ears, and cast him out of the house and family completely.

  But she could not. She stood up but she was aware that both Theodore and Inspector Prendergast were looking at her now. If she said everything she wanted to say, Theodore would want to know more.

  She said, in a restrained way, “I cannot believe you have stolen from me. Oh, Alf, how could you?”

  Alf looked her up and down. Then he twisted his mouth and turned his head away, sighing. “If you must know, I haven’t managed to sell a thing. How could I? The day after, this place got covered in policemen. I couldn’t get away with it. You have to be careful with selling goods anyway. I’ve put it all in a bag and hidden it in the smallest greenhouse out in the gardens. It’s underneath some burlap bags that are piled up in a corner. So there you go, no harm done, right?”

  The inspector was making a note in his book but he stopped abruptly. He put his pencil down. “But if you have not sold anything, how did you come by the money that you have? You clearly obtained finances from somewhere.”

  Adelia’s mouth went dry.

  Alf looked at her and did not speak.

  Theodore was confused but Inspector Prendergast picked it all up. He followed Alf’s look. “Ah,” he said. “Your sister advanced you a loan.”

  It didn’t sound like such a big thing, put like that. She started to relax. “Yes. I let him have a little cash so that he might buy better clothes.”

  Theodore was nearly smiling. “Oh, you should have said. But I do understand.”

  She smiled back, tightly. Perhaps it was going to be all right.

  Inspector Prendergast resumed his notes. Alf knotted his fingers together and didn’t say another word.

  Juliet began to cry.

  Eighteen

  Theodore was thrown into confusion by the revelations. In one sense, of course, he was highly relieved that his own brother-in-law was now mostly ruled out as a suspect. He was pleased for Adelia’s sake, though rather disappointed to learn that Pegsworth was a thief. He was also a little put out to think that Adelia had not confided in him about the money. He couldn’t understand why she hadn’t mentioned it to him. If she had asked him, he would have agreed to the loan immediately. Why, he might have even made it a gift. He would have been happy to have given Alf a little cash to tide him over, as a one-off, at any rate.

  Yet something nagged at him. What else might she not be telling him?

  Froude had been uncouth the previous night. What was that about Adelia’s enthusiasm?

  It wasn’t the first time Froude had been mentioned with regards to his own wife. No – wait – that comment had been from Froude, warning him that Bablock Halifax had spoken in a less than chivalrous fashion with Adelia. But what business was that of Froude’s? He knew that Froude and Adelia had met before, years ago, in London...

  Then he told himself that he was getting paranoid. Perhaps Inspector Prendergast’s secrecy was weighing more heavily on his mind than he cared to admit to himself.

  When Prendergast got up to leave, Theodore fell into step alongside him but the inspector seemed unwilling to give anything away. They walked briskly downstairs, with Prendergast setting the pace.

  “The suspicion now must fall squarely on Montgomery,” Theodore said in a low voice. “I assume we keep the knowledge of what Pegsworth’s done as a secret?”

  “Montgomery?” said Prendergast as if that idea were a sudden surprise to him. “You believe Mr Montgomery to be the main suspect?”

  “Yes – don’t you think so?”

  “There is also Mr Froude.”

  “He does not have the dark past that Montgomery has, nor the prior connection to Halifax.”

  “Perhaps you are right,” Prendergast said in a tone of voice that reminded Theodore of when Adelia was humouring him. He didn’t like it.

  “We must act now, surely,” Theodore said urgently. They were now leaving the house. Prendergast headed for the stables, where his horse was waiting in a loose box, still bridled and with the saddle resting up against a wall, pommel-down. “For though we will try to keep this a secret, I fear that maid will soon reveal all. Then what will Montgomery do? He will panic. He might even run, if his nerve breaks.”

  “He does not strike me as the sort of man whose nerve is inclined to break,” Prendergast said pleasantly. He waved the approaching groom away and picked up the saddle, hefting it into the crook of his arm as he opened the loose box’s door with his other hand.

  “Perhaps not. But are you not itching to make an arrest? It’s been seven days.”

  Prendergast did not reply at first. He slid the saddle onto his horse’s back and ran through the usual methodical tightening of the girth and checking of the straps. When he was satisfied, he rested his hand on his mount’s neck and faced Theodore. “The relationship between Lady Calaway and Mr Pegsworth is an interesting one, don’t you think?”

  Theodore frowned. “They are brother and sister.”

  “But there is strife there, and secrets too. What can you tell me about them?”

  Theodore was shaking his head in confusion. “Strife, yes, because their childhood was an unhappy one and I am aware that Pegsworth has never really found his way in life. He does harbour some resentment against Adelia, and I suppose that I can understand why. But secrets? No. I have no idea what you are talking about. But then,” he added, “no doubt that’s the whole point of secrets. If I knew about them, they would not be secrets.”

  Prendergast smiled briefly. “Quite so.” He took hold of his horse’s reins and began to lead him out into the yard, heading for a mounting block. Theodore remained where he w
as, thinking about Prendergast’s words. Prendergast mounted and walked his horse in a circle around the yard, settling himself comfortably into the saddle. He pulled up alongside Theodore.

  “Mr Pegsworth is not entirely clear of suspicion,” he said to Theodore in a low voice. “I am telling you this out of respect for you and our long friendship and I am mindful also of your unfailing support to me over the years. However, I would like to ask you to keep this to yourself. I did not want Mr Pegsworth to know that I still consider him of interest to the investigation. Please, if you will, observe him closely but as unobtrusively as you can, and I should be particularly grateful if you do not bring your wife into your confidence on this matter.”

  Theodore’s mouth nearly dropped open. Prendergast’s formal and commanding manner was deeply unsettling every time Theodore encountered it. Before he could respond coherently, Prendergast had put his heels to his horse and urged it out of the yard at a steady trot. He did not look back.

  Theodore sat down on the mounting block and tried to piece it all together in his mind. Was Pegsworth still to be considered a potential murderer? Why, and how?

  Then he launched himself back onto his feet. If this was so, then he was going to do everything in his power to bring about justice.

  At whatever cost.

  “PAPA, CAN I TALK WITH you?” Edith said at luncheon. The meal was almost over. Theodore had just stood up to leave, and he looked down at her in surprise.

  They had all sat down semi-formally, which was not usually how the family ran the midday meal, but with the ongoing presence of guests it was easier for the kitchen staff to have more definite arrangements. Froude and Montgomery, however, had begged leave to miss this meal, and the dining room felt empty without them. Pegsworth did not take up much space. Theodore was surprised to see him show his face at all, especially since the revelations about his thievery. His stomach must have been bigger than his shame, Theodore thought.