Alyssa Everett

  My uncle Daventry turned his head and caught sight of me. He beckoned me over, pointing to an empty chair he’d kept reserved just behind Teddy.

  Picking my way past jutting knees and over outstretched legs, I reached the vacant chair. Once seated, I leaned forward to speak confidentially with Teddy and my uncle. “Any idea how this is supposed to proceed?”

  Teddy glanced back at me and shook his head. “Not really.”

  Fortunately, the coroner came over to speak to him. “I’ll be calling just a few witnesses, Lord Cliburne. First the surgeon who examined the deceased, to provide the necessary medical evidence that Sam Garvey died of a blow to the head. Second, I mean to call Mr. Dawson of the Bow Street Runners, to reconstruct the scene of Garvey’s death. Third, Lord Woodford, to verify that the dead man was in his employ and residing in Berkeley Square. Fourth will be Lady Helen Jeffords, to testify that she was acquainted with the victim and that he was importuning her when you came upon them. Then you, my lord, to relate how you struggled with the victim and how he hit his head, and finally Lord Leonard, to corroborate the time and sequence of events. All cut and dried, I’m thinking.”

  That certainly sounded promising. The coroner appeared to accept Teddy’s story at face value—the footman had been pestering Lady Helen, he and Teddy had scuffled, Sam had fallen and hit his head. His version of events had accident written all over it. Even Lady Helen’s involvement with Sam Garvey had been reduced to mere acquaintance, with no hint of suspected infidelities or clandestine rendezvous.

  Sure enough, the inquest began exactly as the coroner had predicted. From his seat in the taproom, the surgeon was sworn in and described the fatal injury to Sam Garvey’s head, fortunately glossing over the precise position and angle of the blow. The jurymen listened to his testimony with sober, attentive faces. Scattered about the room, two or three newspaper reporters even jotted down notes.

  Mr. Dawson came next. I recognized his round, cheerful face from the night of the murder. In a rapid and thorough monotone, he described the murder scene—though he stopped short of branding it as such.

  “And were the circumstances of Sam Garvey’s death, in your professional opinion, consistent with an accidental death or with some more sinister occurrence?” the coroner asked him.

  I tried not to betray my edginess as Mr. Dawson’s forehead crinkled in an expression of frowning concentration. “I can’t say with certainty. The wound suggested a blow from a blunt instrument, and the bronze statuette I mentioned would’ve made a suitable murder weapon. Then again, there wasn’t a spot of blood on any of the witnesses I interviewed that evening, and accounts agree they had no opportunity to change or wash up before my arrival.”

  I let out my breath.

  “That would include Lord Cliburne?” the coroner asked.

  “Yes, and Lady Helen Jeffords too.”

  “Thank you.”

  Next, the coroner asked Lord Woodford a few questions about the deceased and how long he’d been in Woodford’s employ. That too went exactly as predicted.

  As Woodford resumed his seat, the coroner glanced about the courtroom. “Lady Helen Jeffords?”

  “Here.” She raised one gloved hand.

  A stir went through the taproom. I have to admit she made an affecting picture, a vision of dainty blonde femininity. She was dressed in a dusky blue gown and a subdued lilac bonnet, a combination that struck just the right note of modesty and respect for the dead. She was even dabbing at her eyes with a lace-edged handkerchief.

  Just then I caught sight of my cousin John. He’d twisted around in his seat to get a better look at Lady Helen, and his face wore a bleak, anxious expression. I didn’t believe Barbara’s theory that John was the real killer, but at the very least he had information Lady Helen was being blackmailed. Was the look he wore simple brotherly concern for Teddy, or was it proof he knew more than he’d let on?

  Lady Helen swore to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, then the coroner began his questioning with a reassuring smile. “Let’s proceed, Lady Helen. You were acquainted with the deceased?”

  She nodded. “Yes, he was our next-door neighbor’s footman, as Lord Woodford has testified. I saw him sometimes, out in the street carrying packages or with Lord Woodford’s carriage.”

  “And had the two of you ever spoken?”

  She blushed. “Yes, on several occasions.”

  “How would you describe the nature of those conversations?”

  She lowered her eyes. “Well, they began as only a few words, really little more than polite commonplaces.”

  “Remarks on the weather, and that sort of thing?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You say they began that way. Did matters change?”

  She blushed again, more fiercely this time. “I didn’t wish for them to change.” She stared down at her lap, nervously pleating and unpleating her handkerchief as a single tear spilled from her wide blue eyes and rolled affectingly down one cheek. “But he had rather a teasing way about him, and little by little he became more forward, until I began to feel uncomfortable talking with him.”

  “You thought he was becoming impertinent, overfamiliar?”

  She bit her lip before looking up and nodding. “Yes.”

  “You’re engaged to be married, Lady Helen?”

  She looked over at Teddy, who was turned about in his seat, watching her attentively. My cousin John, I noticed, flushed and glanced down at the floor. “Yes, that’s right.” Lady Helen cast Teddy a small, apologetic smile. “To that gentleman in the front row there, Lord Cliburne.”

  The coroner nodded. He was a bald man with a fatherly air, and he asked his next question with deliberate delicacy. “But you didn’t confide in your intended that the deceased had become impertinent in his manner toward you, is that correct?”

  Lady Helen shook her head. “No, I didn’t. I didn’t want to upset Teddy—Lord Cliburne, I mean—and I hoped Sam—the deceased, I mean—would simply grow tired of trying to flirt with me, and would stop on his own.”

  “You weren’t encouraging him, then?”

  Her shock appeared genuine. “Oh, no!”

  “And you didn’t confide in your father either, my lady?”

  “No, for the same reasons I just gave. I didn’t want Sam to lose his place, I simply wanted him to stop pestering me.”

  Telling the tale, she appeared far more honest and sympathetic than I’d given her credit for on the day I’d accompanied Teddy to Leonard House. I wondered for a moment if I’d done her a terrible injustice, accusing her of consorting with the footman. She was an undeniably pretty girl, albeit in a rather empty-headed way, and I could’ve sworn she was telling the truth. Was it possible the footman had been trying to take liberties through no real fault of Lady Helen’s? Might she be innocent after all?

  But then I remembered her clandestine meeting in the butler’s pantry with John, and the blackmail notes, and how she’d hired Sam to deliver the hush money she’d paid her blackmailer. She might be telling the truth, but it certainly wasn’t the whole truth.

  Lady Helen looked in my direction then, and our eyes met. For the brief space of two or three seconds I studied her face mistrustfully, while she gazed back at me with a steady, considering expression.

  “Now we come to the day of Sam Garvey’s death, Lady Helen,” the coroner said. “Tell the jury, please, what transpired.”

  “Yes, of course.” She dabbed at her eyes, gathering her thoughts before she glanced up with a faintly cagey expression. “Do you mean during dinner, or shall I start before that, with Lord Beningbrough’s arrival?”

  The coroner’s face registered surprise. “Lord Beningbrough’s...?” he echoed in evident bewilderment. “Start with dinner, please, Lady Helen, if that was the first—”

  Wearing an artless smile, she interrupted him. “Because I rather think Lord Beningbrough’s arrival was the first really significant and unusual thing that occurred t
hat day.”

  “I mean the first thing relevant to the footman’s death,” the coroner said.

  Lady Helen looked over at me. “Well, Lord Beningbrough certainly seemed interested in Sam. He was asking some very peculiar questions about my association with him.”

  I stiffened. What was she doing? The coroner had given her every opportunity to present the matter as a simple accident, yet for some reason she’d insisted on dragging my name into it. And my questions to her that day had hardly been peculiar.

  John and my uncle Daventry cast troubled glances at each other, while Teddy simply looked confused.

  The coroner looked confused too. “Lord Beningbrough was asking questions about your association with Sam Garvey?”

  “Yes, that’s right. Rather angry questions, I thought.”

  “And Lord Beningbrough would be...?”

  “That gentleman over there,” she said in a carrying voice, pointing at me. “The Duke of Ormesby’s son.”

  At the emphasis she placed on the last sentence, another stir went through the taproom. Now Teddy looked faintly alarmed, and it took all my self-control not to jump up and tell the girl to keep her silly mouth shut. The reporters were scribbling furiously in their little books. I knew what they were going to think as soon as they heard my father’s name. They were going to imagine I was just like—

  “Lord Beningbrough made some very angry, very jealous accusations,” Lady Helen continued. “As if he believed I’d been encouraging Sam Garvey. The notion seemed to upset him a great deal.”

  The coroner’s forehead creased. “Do you mean to say Lord Beningbrough had formed an attachment to you too?”

  “To me? Lord Beningbrough?” She gave a trill of laughter. “Heavens, no! Why, that was the first time I’d ever met him.”

  “Then why would—?” began the coroner, as I listened with the growing sense I’d been plunged into my worst nightmare.

  Teddy had apparently put two and two together and worked out what the minx was trying to imply. He jumped to his feet. “Lord Beningbrough is my cousin, and he—”

  My uncle Daventry and I each shot out a hand to stop Teddy before he said anything too impolitic, but the coroner had already wheeled to frown in our direction. “Thank you, Lord Cliburne,” he told Teddy officiously, “but you’ll have your chance to give your testimony in a moment.” He turned back to Lady Helen. “You say Lord Beningbrough was angry with you?”

  She nodded, her blond curls bobbing. “With me and with Sam, I thought. Lord Beningbrough appeared to think I returned Sam’s interest, so he came charging to Leonard House to have Teddy—Lord Cliburne, that is—demand whether it was true. I tried to explain I wasn’t interested in Sam, but all the while Lord Beningbrough kept giving me the coldest, most resentful stare—”

  “Lord Beningbrough appeared resentful?” The coroner deliberated for a moment on the direction the inquest was taking, no doubt wondering how it might bear on the likelihood Sam Garvey had died by accident. “And what of Lord Cliburne? Did he likewise seem angry when Lord Beningbrough made these accusations?”

  “Angry at me and Sam? No, of course not. He seemed more embarrassed and unhappy than anything else. I think it pained him to have to ask me such horrid questions, but he had no choice because Lord Beningbrough was so insistent.”

  Damn the girl. I resisted two competing urges—the first to shrink lower in my chair, and the second to get my hands around her throat. She was making it sound as if I’d had a jealous interest in Sam Garvey. Before an entire room full of spectators and assorted newspaper reporters, she was casting the very sort of aspersions I’d been struggling most of my life to escape.

  And that was how her testimony went, with little innuendoes and artful glances even when she moved to the subject of how Sam had met his end. She told the coroner she didn’t know how Sam had got into the house, and that she’d been so frightened both before and after Teddy’s arrival on the scene, she wasn’t sure exactly when or how Sam had met his end. She wept all through her testimony. The only bright spot came when she added that she was certain Teddy hadn’t meant to hurt Sam, because he was incapable of hurting anyone.

  Then, thank God, it was Teddy’s turn to undo some of the damage she’d just done. “First, let me say that Lord Beningbrough is my cousin and he only came to Leonard House with me that day as my friend and kinsman,” he began the moment he was sworn, before the coroner could even ask his first question. “Lady Helen is quite right to say they’d never met before. Beningbrough is the soul of honor, and the...the most stouthearted fellow I know.”

  How had the inquest suddenly become about me? My uncle nodded his agreement with Teddy, but I wanted to crawl out through the back of the taproom. Though I appreciated Teddy’s vote of confidence, he was overstating my case, and there was such a thing as protesting too much.

  Fortunately, the coroner moved on to the actual matter of Sam Garvey’s death. Teddy gave the version of events he’d fashioned to protect Lady Helen, describing how he’d found the footman trying to force his attentions on the girl and they’d grappled until Sam fell and hit his head. Teddy would never have a future on the stage, but at least he gave a creditable enough performance to set the proceedings back on course, and he made his usual impression of blushing amiability. If I hadn’t been so angry about Lady Helen’s insinuations, I might even have breathed a sigh of relief.

  That is, until the coroner posed his final question to Teddy.

  “I’m afraid I must ask, Lord Cliburne—in relating the facts as you’ve given them today, has it been your aim to protect anyone?”

  Teddy hesitated for only a second. “No, of course not.”

  But everyone had seen the hesitation, from the newspaper reporters on up to the coroner’s jurymen. I groaned inwardly. Who could say what the jury would make of that? For all I knew, they might think Teddy was protecting me. Certainly several of the reporters glanced in my direction.

  Next was Lord Leonard’s turn. I hadn’t worried overmuch about his testimony, since he’d never claimed to have witnessed the fatal moment, and the coroner only wished him to confirm the time and sequence of events. He seemed unlikely to say anything particularly damaging to Teddy.

  Unfortunately, I’d never thought to wonder if he might say or do anything damaging to me. Lord Leonard spent the bulk of his testimony taking his revenge for my having dared to meet secretly with Barbara by throwing me hostile, accusing looks.

  At least he seconded Lady Helen’s assessment of Teddy. “I am utterly convinced,” he concluded his testimony, “that Lord Cliburne would not and could not intentionally play a role in any man’s death.”

  At that point, I expected the coroner to sum up the evidence presented and ask the jury to come to a verdict. Instead he cleared his throat and looked in my direction. “I wish to call the Marquess of Beningbrough.”

  It was a good thing I was sitting down. I was so surprised I simply sat mute for a moment, running his words through my brain a second time to verify that, yes, he’d just called me to give evidence.

  I stood. “There must be some mistake. I was never subpoenaed.”

  “There’s no requirement that a witness be subpoenaed in order to provide testimony,” the coroner said. “In conducting this inquest, I’m empowered to call anyone with information that could prove material to the proceedings.”

  I was about to make some further objection when I realized the jurymen were watching me intently, as were the reporters in the room. Any further protest would only make it look as if I had something to hide. Reluctantly, I nodded.

  I was sworn in, and the coroner directed me to give my name and title. “James Augustus Mainsforth Lassiter, Marquess of Beningbrough.”

  “You knew Sam Garvey, my lord?”

  “No, I did not. I’d never laid eyes on him until I saw his dead body two days ago.”

  The coroner looked from me to the jury. “Yet Lady Helen has testified that some hours before his death, yo
u seemed angered that she might return his regard.”

  I leaned forward, trying not to let my fury show. “That was only because Lady Helen is engaged to my cousin. It would hardly be in his best interests to wed a girl involved with another man.” Suddenly Barbara’s porcelain features flashed into my head. For all her cool manners and sharp remarks, she loved her sister. Was it really gentlemanly of me to question Lady Helen’s virtue before a room full of strangers? Besides, any resentment I might show could be construed as sufficient motive for murder. “Of course, I see now I was doing an injustice to a young lady of spotless reputation.”

  A little distance away, Lady Helen broke into a disarming smile.

  “Were you present at Leonard House at the time of Sam Garvey’s death?” the coroner asked.

  I folded my arms. “Certainly not. I was at home, at Ormesby House.”

  “May I remind you, Lord Beningbrough, that I saw you at Leonard House myself when I arrived to view the body?”

  “And I saw you too, but I’d arrived only minutes before you did. I’d returned at the request of my cousin, who was understandably shaken by the events of that evening. You may ask Lord and Lady Leonard, and I’m confident they’ll tell you the same.”

  The coroner and his jurymen alike glanced to Lord Leonard, who gave a grudging nod.

  The coroner turned back to frown in my direction. “Is there anyone else, my lord, who can vouch for your whereabouts at the time Sam Garvey met his death?”

  “For God’s sake—” What did he imagine I’d been doing, waiting in the bushes to kill my male lover in a fit of jealous pique? But once again, I realized anger wasn’t going to help my case, and caught myself just in time to answer with some measure of self-control. “My mother was at Ormesby House when I arrived home.” After a moment’s reflection, I added, “Also, our butler brought me my dinner on a tray in the library, and delivered Lord Cliburne’s note to me there.”