The Devil and Drusilla

by Paula Marshall

  More than that, the sense of growing danger surrounding him was not lessened by his conviction on the ride home that unseen hostile eyes were watching him. He had experienced this odd sensation on more than one occasion before, and it had always proved to be correct.

  In the end, his musings invariably took him back to the strange business over the crypt at Marsham Abbey, but again, what that had to do with anything was a mystery.

  He remembered a toy he had been given not long before his father died. It had consisted of several odd pieces of wood with colours painted on them, and when the pieces were fitted together correctly a picture appeared.

  The bad thing was that, so far as the puzzle he was faced with at Tresham was concerned, he was rapidly becoming aware that he did not possess all of the pieces necessary to complete the picture. The good thing was that today he had acquired one more.

  And even that was not an unmitigated good for he was certain that it had taken Betty James’s death to provide him with it.

  Chapter Nine

  ‘I understand that Lord Devenish visited you today and that you ate nuncheon with him—alone.’

  Cordelia Faulkner invested her last word with a doom-laden quality which suggested that Devenish and the Devil were as synonymous as rumour had it.

  Drusilla’s reply was a quiet, ‘Yes, he did. He was kind enough to visit Giles—a visit which I understand did him a power of good. Afterwards we ate together, and he encouraged me to rest a little—which I did. Nothing occurred which need trouble you in the least.’

  ‘But I am troubled, my dear. I don’t think that Lord Devenish has marriage in mind—far from it—and if you do wish to marry, would it not be wiser to consider someone sound of your own age? Sir Toby Claridge, for instance. He was a great friend of dear Jeremy’s and would make you a most suitable husband.’

  Drusilla’s patience with Jeremy’s meddling aunt snapped at last. She rose, and said in as level a voice as she could manage, ‘Dear Miss Faulkner, may I remind you that you are not my guardian, and furthermore, that you are here as my guest to be a companion for myself and Giles. I welcome your advice, but I have made it plain to you that so far as Lord Devenish is concerned I must allow my own judgement of him to be my guide. That being so, I must ask you not to raise the matter again.’

  Had a mouse bitten her Miss Faulkner could not have been more surprised. In her two years at Lyford House Drusilla had allowed her to air her prejudices without contradiction. Like most female bullies, when crossed she took refuge in tears.

  Out came her handkerchief. She hid her face in it for a few moments, surfacing only to say in a reproachful voice, ‘I am sure that I only speak with the best intentions in mind.’

  ‘No doubt,’ said Drusilla, sorry to have been driven at last to speak her own mind, ‘but I do not wish to hear either your best or worst intentions concerning Lord Devenish. As for Sir Toby Claridge it is I who will have to live with him as his wife, so you must leave me to make up my own mind about him also.’

  She did not tell Miss Faulkner that, beside Devenish, Sir Toby seemed even more callow than he was. She thought that she had said sufficient to silence Miss Faulkner, at least for the time being.

  ‘I shall go up to poor Giles to see how he fares,’ Miss Faulkner declared self-righteously, privately convinced that Devenish’s visit could have done him nothing but harm.

  ‘Oh, I wish that you will not. His nurse says that he is sleeping peacefully after managing to eat a little, and it would not do to wake him.’

  Trembling a little, Miss Faulkner picked up her canvas work and announced that she would retire to her room. All the way upstairs she silently lamented Drusilla’s stiff-necked attitude over her attempts to warn her off Devenish. She also decided that she would privately urge Sir Toby to press his suit with her lest others be there before him.

  Once she had gone Drusilla sighed unhappily. If Miss Faulkner thought that she was attracted to Devenish she was correct, but that did not give her the right to act like a mother-hen with one chick. She remembered that Giles had said after Devenish’s arrival at Tresham that it would set all the biddy hens from ten miles around clucking and gossiping as nothing else had done for the past ten years.

  ‘And every mama with a marriageable daughter will set her cap at him,’ he had added.

  Well, that was true enough. What neither of them had bargained for was that Giles would come to regard Devenish as either his lost father or the older brother he had never had, and that Drusilla would fall head over heels in love with him.

  ‘There’s a letter waiting for you, Hal. The Lord Lieutenant sent it by special messenger. He said that it was urgent. I put it on the desk in your study.’

  Devenish tossed his riding gloves on to the boule table in the back hall. ‘That’s prompt of him, if it’s what I think it is.’

  ‘Did you find out anything useful about young Stone’s attack?’ Rob enquired casually.

  ‘Only that it was most probably robbers at work since he was foolish enough to stray too far afield,’ replied Devenish equally casually. He was not about to tell anyone, not even Rob, of his suspicions: better so. He would pass on the news of Betty’s disappearance later as though it had nothing to do with Giles. He had a strong suspicion that Giles, having lost his memory, would be safer if his attack and Betty James’s disappearance were not connected.

  Rob did not say I told you so to the news about the robbers. He did not need to, his face said it for him. Well, that suited Devenish down to the ground, and he grinned a little ruefully at his own ability to deceive even his best friend.

  He opened the Lord Lieutenant’s letter immediately. It was as he had thought. He had asked, earlier that morning, for a list of the dates on which first Jeremy Faulkner had disappeared, and then the girls. The letter told him that the Lord Lieutenant’s secretary had been sufficiently interested to keep a log of everything to do with the matter, and had immediately compiled a list for m’lord’s use which he had enclosed.

  Devenish ran his eye down it quickly. One thing he found there interested him mightily. The first girl’s disappearance had been reported a week before Jeremy Faulkner’s. The others had been reported at several-month intervals—the next, indeed, occurred six months after Faulkner’s death.

  He put the paper down and walked to the window to stare across the Park. Was he running mad to think that there was something significant in the two disappearances being so close together in time?

  Not that it told him anything directly useful. He had battered his brains long enough on the subject, and decided to let it rest for the time being.

  He pulled out his fob watch to check the hour. He was giving a small dinner party for some of the local gentry and their wives and the two Parsons, Williams and Lawson. As Lawson had no wife he had been reluctantly compelled to invite Lady Cheyne to join them.

  To be honest, he would have preferred to ask Drusilla but he did not wish to encourage gossip by publicly seeming to be over-partial to her. He knew that Miss Faulkner was not the only local busybody who disapproved of her friendship with him. If they thought that it was love—or seduction—their tongues would never stop clacking—and he did not want her to be hurt.

  That he was wise in so thinking was confirmed when he met Rob on the way upstairs.

  ‘I never asked you how you found young Stone,’ he said, ‘I was more concerned with informing you about the letter. It’s a pity that it was he who was attacked so brutally, since it means that you will be compelled to visit Lyford House frequently to check on his condition, thus giving ground for further gossip about you and Mrs. Faulkner.’

  Devenish’s fine eyebrows rose. ‘Further gossip? I was not aware that there had been any. No, do not tell me of it. I have no wish to know who cannot be trusted to mind their own business and not mine.’

  Rob coloured. ‘I thought it something which you ought to know,’ he began defensively, and somewhat incoherently. ‘I have only your best intere
sts at heart.’

  ‘Whenever anyone says that to me,’ returned Devenish, ‘my one instinct is to disbelieve them absolutely. What they are really saying, is that they are much better able to use their judgement than I am! Allow me to be the best judge in my own cause, and, as you love me, do not mention Mrs Faulkner to me again, other than impersonally. This evening I have to endure Lady Cheyne and that is quite enough—if not too much.’

  Like Miss Faulkner Rob sighed and shook his head as Hal bounded upstairs as though he were running a race against time. Why was it that wilful people would never believe that you really did have their best interests at heart?

  Dinner was as tiresome as might have been expected. Much idle discussion of the attack on Giles told Devenish nothing that he did not already know. No one seemed to connect the attack on Giles with that on his brother-in-law. Labouring men, thrown out of work by a local and unpopular landowner, were blamed.

  ‘We have no Luddites to contend with down here,’ was the general verdict offered by Mr Williams, with the added gloss, ‘but we do have troubles of our own. It behoves us all to be careful where we walk and not to do so without a companion.’

  He added ruefully, ‘We have suffered another strange occurrence at the church. Someone stole the two large white candles which stood on either side of the altar and replaced them with black ones.’

  Lady Cheyne shivered, ‘Strange indeed. It reminds me of something I read once. I cannot think what!’

  This unhelpful offering would have amused Devenish at any other time, but after the news about Giles and young Betty the lady’s inconsequence only served to irritate him. Particularly since something had tugged at his memory while Mr Williams had been speaking and the lady’s idle comment had driven it away.

  The evening’s so-called entertainment over, and all the guests safely on their way home, Devenish turned to Rob, who privately thought that Hal was not quite his usual sardonic self and had seemed preoccupied during dinner.

  He said, ‘One moment before you retire. I did not speak to you of it earlier but it will be current gossip soon enough and I did not wish it to be hashed over during dinner.

  ‘When I visited Halsey this afternoon to try to find out if anyone there had seen Giles yesterday, the Jameses told me that Betty had disappeared yesterday. She had left home around noon—and never returned. It seems that the James family were not worried until she had failed to come down to breakfast this morning. They were apparently resigned to the fact that she was given to staying away overnight.’

  Rob nodded, and said wryly, ‘A pity, that. The trail will be cold.’

  ‘True.’ Devenish waited for him to make the inevitable connection with Giles having been struck down on the same day. He did not have long to wait.

  ‘Strange that it should have occurred at the same time that Giles was attacked.’

  ‘Perhaps the same man,’ offered Devenish. ‘Who’s to know? Most likely it’s a coincidence.’

  Rob looked doubtful, but did not pursue the matter—nor did Devenish tell him about Giles’s rendezvous with Betty.

  Later, alone in his room, his head buzzing, Devenish sat down and began to make a list of the odd events of the last two years to see if there were any pattern to them.

  It was while he was writing down a brief account of his accidental finding of Jeremy Faulkner’s ring in the crypt at Marsham Abbey that the memory which had been teasing him during dinner came back.

  He remembered his surprise when, after falling beside the altar in the crypt and catching his hand against it to steady himself, he had found black candle grease under his fingernails.

  So, someone had been burning black candles in the crypt. Had that same someone placed them in the church and, if so, why? There was no doubt in his mind that the sheep had been placed on the altar to desecrate the church—was that also the reason for black candles being substituted for white ones?

  And what had Lady Cheyne not remembered? Or had she been chattering away mindlessly as was her wont?

  There were other connections but they demanded leaps in logic to make them. So be it. He had done such a thing before and had often been proved right later.

  For example, two of the missing girls were wearing similar expensive necklaces which no village lad could have given them. That must mean that they were involved with a man of means, a gentleman most likely.

  And then Giles was attacked when Betty was about to tell him something. Now what could that be? Something, perhaps, which might incriminate others, since it seemed increasingly likely that Giles had been hidden and left to die—like his brother-in-law—in case Betty had had time to tell him anything incriminating.

  The necklaces must have been given to the girls for services rendered—and if so, what were they? It must have been for more than simple sexual favours from various gentlemen, married and unmarried. No one would commit murder to hide such a commonplace activity as that. No, the girls must have known of something discreditable for such extreme measures to have been taken.

  And if Betty and Kate had been killed in order to silence them, then could it be that the other missing girls had been disposed of for the same reason? He was beginning to find it difficult to believe that any of them had gone to London, as was commonly supposed.

  Had Jeremy Faulkner been killed because he was involved in something wrong and was about to inform the authorities of it? Was that the explanation of his changed behaviour during the last six months of his life?

  But what could it be? Nothing so far gave him any clue as to what could be happening of so grave a nature that, rather than have it revealed, those responsible for it were prepared to organise an orgy of murder.

  Which brought him back again to the strange conversation which he had overheard at Marsham Abbey. To make sense of that he needed to discover what secret Harrington and his friends were hiding which had them meeting at dead of night.

  This odd incident reinforced his growing belief that more than one person lay behind the deaths, assaults and disappearances. Yet another link with Marsham Abbey was that one of the deaths, or disappearances, was that of Leander Harrington’s valet.

  The trouble was he could scarcely, without any real evidence—other than his intuition—go about questioning apparently respectable gentlemen and suggesting that they were engaged in a programme of murder and deadly assault. Babbling about black candles and necklaces would not serve at all. Or rather it would serve to make him look and sound like a ridiculous masculine version of Lady Cheyne.

  No, he would wait until he had something firm to act on, and then—then what? Why, chance might tell him, or Lady Luck, those twin deities whose hands might not be forced, but who dispensed their favours on mortal man most often when they were least expected.

  Dog-tired, Devenish lay back in his chair, trying to summon the energy to undress and put himself to bed—he had dismissed his protesting valet for the night long ago. What kept him from doing so was another vague tugging at his memory, a tugging which told him that he had seen or heard something of moment and had not understood its importance at the time—and which he had immediately forgotten.

  He leaned forward and propped his chin on his hands. Yes, he was tired, but sometimes the tired mind gives up its secrets when it ceases to concentrate.

  He closed his eyes and tried to think of nothing. He saw nothing and was nothing, floating away on a tide of non-being.

  And then, as from a great distance, he heard Leander Harrington speaking. He was back in the supper room at Marsham Abbey and Lady Cheyne was demanding to know whether the crypt was as horrid as Mrs Radcliffe had suggested.

  ‘No, not horrid at all, ma’am,’ Mr Harrington was saying hastily. ‘Boring, in fact—and dark. No one has set foot in it for years…’

  Devenish was back in his body again. He opened his eyes. How could he have forgotten that ringing statement from Leander Harrington which was easily disproved not only by his discovery of Jeremy Faulkner’s ring t
here, and the presence of candle grease from candles recently used, but everything which he had overheard Harrington and the others saying at dead of night?

  Harrington had lied.

  The crypt had been used, but he did not want anyone to know that it had been.

  Why?

  Which meant—what? The memory was significant but it still left him with nothing firm to act on. Until he had, he must not attract suspicion from those whom he now thought had not hesitated to kill to preserve their secret, which was connected with the crypt.

  And of the three men whom he now thought were involved the one with whom he must be most careful was Harrington. The weak links were the Parson and Sir Toby Claridge.

  He was inclined to think that Claridge might be the weakest. He had left the neighbourhood shortly after Jeremy Faulkner’s death, had only recently returned and Devenish’s opinion of his intellect was not high. The Parson had sounded fearful in the dead of night, but he was an opinionated man and in the daylight might be less inclined to panic.

  No, Claridge it must be. But how to set about suborning him? Not now, he told himself, yawning, I’m only fit for bed. God send me no nightmares.

  But God was not kind and sent him one of his worst, which he realised, even as he suffered from it, had been caused by his musing on the puzzle into the early hours.

  A week later, during which time Devenish was distracted by a letter from Lord Sidmouth asking him if he had made any progress and did he require the assistance of a Bow Street Runner, as well as by an unwanted, if brief, visit from the distant relative who was his heir, Drusilla was seated in her front drawing room, writing a letter to an old schoolfriend, when Leander Harrington was announced.

  She had been hoping that her visitor might be Devenish whom she had not seen since the day after Giles’s attack, but she allowed herself to betray no sign of her disappointment in her welcome to Mr Harrington. He had come, he said, to commiserate with her over the attack on Giles.