Brides of Falconfell

by Bancroft, Blair

  Twenty minutes later, I paused outside the Yellow Room, considerably shaken by my attempt to assure the kitchen staff they could cope with a major reassignment of duties in spite of the pall of two deaths in two weeks, Miss Maud being struck down, and rain pounding so hard on the roof it seemed like trumpets announcing Judgment Day. My paltry efforts had not been helped by Mrs. Maxwell, who had swept into the kitchen in the midst of my efforts, the smell of death still clinging to her clothes. Nor had she taken the advent of Anton Fournier well, her huffs and sour looks quickly raising the tension below stairs to a level worse than it had been before. Fortunately, I had the forethought to send Nettie to the Yellow Room before I told the staff about our new cook. But now the moment of reckoning had come. On the absolute least felicitous day I would have chosen to inform Nettie of such an upheaval, I must now tell her of Anton’s arrival.

  I drew a deep breath and opened the door.

  “She’s come, ain’t she?” Nettie demanded, jumping to her feet, her short, plump body quivering like a blancmange beneath a round face, framed in salt-and-pepper gray and topped by an oversize white mob cap.

  “Please sit down, Nettie,” I said, seating myself on the gold brocaded settee across from the chair she had been sitting in when I entered the room. After skewering me with a glance of grim suspicion, Nettie complied.

  Try as I would, no words adequate to the situation came to me. The simple truth would have to do. “It is not a moment I would have chosen, Nettie, but yes, our new cook has arrived. And added one more surprise to our day. Our new cook is male.” Nettie gasped. “And young. And so shockingly attractive I fear you will spend half your time shooing the kitchen maids to their duties instead of gawping at him.”

  “Merciful heavens,” she murmured, clearly stunned by the news.

  Thank goodness. Perhaps Anton was just the shock we needed to turn Nettie’s thoughts from her demotion.

  I was wrong.

  Her gray eyes suddenly widened in alarm. “He’ll know,” she said. “In but a minute, he’ll know. Ah, mercy, my lady, it’s not my fault, truly it’s not. I tried, the Good Lord knows I tried, but she frightens me, she does. So I went along with it, I did. But he’ll know and he’ll tell, cuz men ain’t afraid to speak up, now are they?” I stared as she burst into tears, burying her face in her hands.

  Chapter Seventeen

  “Nettie.” I spoke her name gently several times, finally touching her arm in an attempt to get her attention. “Nettie, I need you to explain. What will Mr. Fournier find out? What has been happening in the kitchen that I should know about?”

  But all I could distinguish between sobs was, “Not my fault, not my fault.”

  Finally, I spoke sharply. “Nettie, stop that caterwauling at once and explain yourself!”

  That did it. She gulped, rubbed her eyes and cheeks with her apron, and looked at me with considerable trepidation, her teeth sunk into her bottom lip. “I’m a coward, my lady, I know it. All of us, cowards. We should have said something, but for all we knew Fraser was in on it. And where was we to find new jobs within twenty miles of here?”

  I kept a rein on my temper, managing to say with reasonable calm, “In on what, Nettie?”

  She was quivering again, head to toe, her mob cap waving as if the storm outside had penetrated the walls. Her voice was so low I had to strain to hear it. “She buys cheap, my lady. The worst cuts, the gnarliest vegetables, weevily flour. Spices ignored altogether.”

  “She? You mean Mrs. Maxwell? Nettie nodded. “But surely Hammersley gives her a more-than-ample household allowance—”

  “Indeed, my lady.” Nettie sniffed. “She pockets the difference.”

  “She what?” I whispered.

  “I hear it’s done in many great houses, my lady,” Nettie said with more animation than she had shown previously. “It’s just that Mrs. Maxwell . . . well, she carries it further than most. Perhaps because no one’s complained until now.”

  “Nettie, are you certain about this?”

  “Oh yes, my lady. She’s been doing it for years. Says the fourth baron was her grandda and she can do as she pleases.”

  The Hammersley eyes. And Hammersley arrogance. “Does anyone else know?”

  Nettie hesitated. “I’m not sure, my lady. Fraser should, but men can be right strange about not seeing what they don’t want to see.”

  Amen to that!

  “Nettie,” I said carefully, “you must know that you if you did not trust Fraser, you should have spoken to Baron Hammersley about your suspicions.”

  “Yes, my lady,” she mumbled.

  “Then please look on your new role as Assistant Cook as a just demotion. And enjoy the fact that as soon as new supplies can be brought in, you will no longer have to work with inferior food. Also, I believe you will find Mr. Fournier quite likable. I only hope he can cook as well as he can charm.” I offered a coaxing smile. “Needless to say, you will repeat none of this conversation to anyone else. I will, however, pass along your remarks to Lord Hammersley and advise him to await Mr. Fournier’s report on the state of the kitchen before we proceed any further. Is that understood?”

  “Yes, my lady.” Once again Nettie wiped her eyes, then added, “Thank you, my lady,” bobbing a curtsy so awkward I feared she would topple over.

  I sat for a long time, considering what I had just heard. Unfortunately, it made sense, although I would need to consult Hammersley and Fraser and hear what Mr. Fournier had to say before doing something as drastic as turning off Falconfell’s housekeeper without a character. Or would Hammersley arrest her for theft?

  I nearly moaned out loud. I was worrying about household thievery with Justine lying dead and Maud unconscious but one floor above my head . . .

  Anger, kicking guilt aside, grabbed me by the throat. Why me? How had I gotten myself into such a fix?

  A pair of fine blue eyes, a sympathetic smile—eleven years ago. And that was enough to send me hieing off to the isolated north of England, plunging into murder, madness, major theft. And marriage. Maud was not the mad one. It was I, Serena Emilia Farnborough. Correction, Hammersley. Lady Hammersley, wife of Thayne.

  I stared at my hands, clasped so tightly in my lap. A rueful smile twitched at the corners of my lips. Surely not so mad, after all. Merely a bit . . . daring. And goodness knows Managing Serena needed more scope than ruling the sickroom.

  Was that so horrid? I asked myself. To want my own niche in the world? A husband? Children?

  I grimaced, shoving my justifications aside. The Lady of Falconfell had no time for self-serving speculation. Rapidly, I sifted through my obligations and chose Maud above all others. A visit to her room would allow me to report on her condition when I imparted Nettie’s tale to Hammersley.

  I glanced around the Yellow Room and realized with no little sadness that today its cheerful colors had failed to alleviate the gloom. As I levered myself up from the settee, I felt I carried the weight of a demon on each shoulder. Perhaps I did. Falconfell tended to inspire such fantastical thoughts.

  I glanced at the clock on the mantel. Not yet noon, and I had already experienced enough upsetting events for a week, possibly a month.

  The greatest irony: I had been married but twenty-four hours.

  I needed to speak with Thayne, but somehow, not forty minutes later, I found myself outside, wrapped in my boiled wool cloak against the pervading dampness as the sun attempted to peek through still-roiling clouds, while rivulets of rain water dripped off the roof. My visit to Maud had shown no change in her condition. I took a few moments to apologize to Martha for the defection of her helpers—the creation of Violet’s new wardrobe would be slower than I had hoped. And then the blessed silence penetrated my tumultuous thoughts. The rain had stopped. Instead of searching out Thayne, I threw on my cloak and hurried outside, hoping the cool, rain-washed air might help me make sense of it all.

  I stood on the front steps and gazed down the mist-strewn valley. Not mist really, I
supposed, but clouds scudding down this cleft in mountains on their way to rain on someone else. Not a sight to elevate my spirits. Heedless of the rain-soaked grass, my leather boots, or the hem of my gown, I walked around the house, as I had once done with Violet. The tulips, daffodils, and hyacinths glistened with raindrops, while the poor catkins drooped, looking as soaked as a kitten left out in the rain. When I turned the corner to the gardens, I noticed how carefully cement troughs had been laid to guide the run-off from the cliff through the gardens and into a small tributary stream that ran past the house before joining the river. When I first saw the winding troughs, I had thought them merely artistic. Now I realized they were a necessity to keep the gardens from being washed away with every storm. A harsh county, Northumberland.

  I headed toward the benches inside an arbor in the center of the garden. Just as I realized the white marble was much too wet to sit on, I discovered I was not alone. One of the three curved benches inside the arbor was occupied. “I beg your pardon,” I murmured. “I did not mean to intrude.”

  Ross Hammersley jumped to his feet. “Not at all, my lady. My thoughts welcome the distraction.” He whisked a linen towel out of a satchel at his feet and, with all the aplomb of a butler in a grand house, wiped the raindrops from the bench next to him.

  I sat. “You too wished to clear your head,” I offered.

  “A bad business.” Ross ran his hand through his damp hair in gesture so similar to Thayne’s my breath caught in my throat. “Suicide?”

  “Thayne maintains she had a weak heart, like Helen.”

  “Nonsense!”

  “I don’t think he actually believes it,” I admitted, “but he wants no trouble from the vicar about the burial.”

  “Nor any hint of murder being wafted about,” Ross added with considerable weight.

  “Murder so evil I find it difficult to believe. She was leaving, after all, and would bother us no more.”

  “And murder is ugly . . . threatening,” he drawled. “Mustn’t frighten the household.”

  A sudden, surprising need to defend Thayne’s edicts swept over me. “I am certain Hammersley, as magistrate, will determine if it is murder and, if so, what to do about it.” Inwardly I winced at the primness in my tone.

  “So very proper, so lady of the manor,” Ross mocked.

  I sat tall on the marble bench, though I felt more like an insect crawling on the wet ground. “I fear none of us is at his best this morning, Mr. Hammersley.”

  “And Maud?”

  “No change.”

  “Maud endured years of Justine’s mockery,” Ross mused, looking off into the distance. “Has it occurred to anyone that she killed Justine then attempted to kill herself?”

  “It has been discussed,” I returned obliquely. ‘For her to be unconscious this long with so little damage to her person would indicate laudanum.”

  “Ah . . . so my cousin is not completely lost in the bliss of his new marriage.”

  “Mr. Hammersley!”

  “My apologies.” Ross held up his hands, palms out. “May we not be friends again? Ross and Serena, as we once were?”

  I wanted to believe the shiver that shook me was due to the damp chill left from the rainstorm, but I feared it might have something to do with my confused emotions. Ross looked so much like Thayne. He had been my first friend at Falconfell. Just this morning he had seemed devastated by Justine’s death. Enough to make me wonder what they had been to each other. If Thayne was telling the truth and Justine had never been in his bed, had she perhaps settled for Thayne’s lookalike?

  Gutter talk! My thoughts had suddenly dived below the level of the worst of the London gossip-mongers. Appalled, I jumped to my feet. “Yes, of course we may be friends . . . Ross. But I have played truant long enough. Duty calls.” I sloshed my way to the kitchen entrance, where the staff played statues as I crossed to the servants’ stairs, only our new cook managing a cheery, “Good morning, my lady.”

  I couldn’t put it off any longer. When I didn’t find Thayne in his bookroom, I tracked him to his bedchamber, where his valet informed me his lordship was changing into riding clothes.

  Ha! I wasn’t the only one longing for escape from the house. I settled onto a sofa in our shared sitting room and waited.

  “Serena, my dear, are you here to chide me for leaving you to cope on your own?”

  I have to admit his greeting, delivered with a smile, warmed me. It was almost as if we were a true married couple. I actually regretted adding to his burdens, but I wasn’t that unselfish. I was not going to carry the load of Mrs. Maxwell’s transgressions by myself.

  But when Thayne settled onto the sofa beside me, I nearly lost my train of thought. We had not been this close since a long-ago waltz in London. I blinked, attempted to ignore the delicious scent of him. I growled at my frail feminine maunderings and plunged into the tale Nettie had told me.

  “Good God!” Thayne exclaimed when I was done. “How could I have been so blind?”

  “It does seem to make sense,” I said, “though I am anxious to hear what Mr. Fournier thinks of the supplies in the pantry. And I fear we must question Fraser.”

  “The accounts always looked correct . . . and she’s been with us forever, since before I was born. And Fraser . . .” Thayne frowned, his hurt showing through.

  “Is Mrs. Maxwell truly a family connection?”

  “I fear my great-grandfather, the fourth baron, was notorious. Died at eighty-nine with a wench in his bed.”

  “Rab Guthrie has the Hammersley eyes,” I offered, unashamedly fishing for information.

  “A rueful smile lit Thayne’s rugged features. “I’m told we’re brothers, though we have nothing in common but the eyes. Certainly he’s far more handsome than I, all that wavy blond hair, and he must outweigh me by two or three stone.”

  Brothers. And Alice Maxwell some kind of cousin. Not exactly a recommendation for the faithfulness of the Hammersley men, but I kept my wince to myself.

  “Fresh air will help,” I said briskly. “I have just come in from a walk in the gardens and I guarantee it. Go. Our problems will keep.”

  Thayne looked at me, really looked, his frown fading. “I knew marrying you was the right thing to do.” He bent and kissed me on the forehead before picking up his tophat and exiting the room.

  I sat there like a perfect ninny, lips quivering, eyes misting over. Thayne Hammersley had kissed me.

  On a day of tragedy, with Falconfell in almost total disarray, Thayne Hammersley had kissed me.

  The doctor arrived a short time later, full of apologies for having been delayed by a difficult birth. I suspected him of being a opinionated old curmudgeon on sight and was soon proved correct. Mr. Appleby was a man of some fifty or sixty years, with a flowing mane of gray hair. He was as tall and broad as Thayne and Ross, and—oh, heavens!—he had the Hammersley stormy blue eyes. Another offshoot of the family tree.

  After examining Maud, he announced what I already knew—she did not appear to have a concussion. “Struck down by one of her blasted potions, more like,” he growled, adding an apoplexy was possible. Only time would tell.

  As for Justine, Mr. Appleby shook his head and grumbled, “A bit careless of your women, aren’t you, Hammersley?”

  I covered a gasp with my hand, but Thayne took the remark in stride, clearly accustomed to the doctor’s abrupt ways. “Miss Raibourne was to have left us today. None of us expected it to be in this manner.”

  “Suppose you want to pull the wool over the vicar’s eyes?”

  “You do not find the death natural?”

  “Natural? At her age and no prior history of illness?”

  “We wondered,” I ventured, “if she might have been poisoned—not by her own hand.”

  Mr. Appleby drew the covers back up over Justine’s body with care before turning to look at me. “You are asking me if she has been murdered?”

  “We will settle for a verdict of death by unexpected heart defec
t,” Thayne inserted.

  “How fortunate you are magistrate here,” Mr. Appleby stated blandly. “And that I am far too busy to report this suspicious death elsewhere.”

  “Heart defect?” Thayne persisted.

  The doctor shook his head. “I have no sympathy with the church’s view that tortured souls must be buried in unhallowed ground. Heart defect it is. But look to your people, Hammersley.” He paused and turned to me. “Particularly this one. I do not like the feel of what is happening here.”

  Somehow I managed to thank Mr. Appleby for coming all this way and had the sense to invite him to join us for supper, which he rejected with a gracious, “As much as I would like to stay, Lady Hammersley, I must be off. The road is treacherous after dark.”

  Wise man. He had undoubtedly endured a meal or two at Falconfell in the past.

  Thayne, I noticed, thanked Mr. Appleby with more than words. The purse he passed over as soon as the good doctor signed the death certificate must have contained enough to feed the residents of Falconfell for a month. So easy, so very easy, for a magistrate to arrange matters to his own satisfaction.

  Which did not make Justine any less dead. Or the supposition that she had been murdered any less likely.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Maud woke shortly before dinner time, demanding to know why her maid, foolish creature, was soaking her apron with tears. When Thayne and I rushed to question Maud, her dark eyes narrowed as she informed us she could not possibly have been found on the stillroom floor because she had not gone near the place last night. She never left her room.

  Thayne and I exchanged glances, assured her we were delighted to see her so much recovered, and urged her to let us know if so much as a crumb of memory surfaced about last night. Maud harrumphed and waved us out.