The Arnifour Affair

by Gregory Harris

  “No,” he said with defiance. “She wasn’t lying. I was there that night. And we had a hell of a go of it. I’m just glad I got a chance to tell him what I thought before someone made the laudable choice to snuff him.”

  “Eldon!”

  “Then tell me . . . ,” Colin continued over Lady Arnifour’s outburst. “. . . Tell us all what you said.”

  His face clouded. ”My father was vile and loathsome, and he cheated or used everyone in his life to get whatever he wanted. And I include in his notable list of dupes Abigail Roynton, as remarkable and vivacious a woman as there’s ever been.” He smirked at his mother. “So it was my pleasure to carry on my father’s questionable carnal finesse when it became clear that he’d tired of the extraordinary widow. I will admit, at first I only seduced her to raise the old sod’s ire, but I quickly realized that she was a font of information about him, and a willing one at that. I knew I’d be able to use what she confided in me if only to protect my own best interests. And I was right.

  “Abby told me he’d not only founded half a dozen clubs in town, but that he’d also invested in that many more in China. Most of his employees were smuggled in on cargo ships from Shanghai. They’d arrive as indentured slaves and my dear father would seal their fates by making them addicts.” He finished another shot of whiskey and took the time to pour a refill before continuing. “The only thing I couldn’t figure out, the only thing even Abby didn’t know, was where the hell he’d gotten the capital. I knew it had to be coming from somewhere unsavory, but I never dreamed he was bilking it from his own wife.” He shook his head. “And to think it was over her bastard child. How repulsive we’ve all become—”

  “You have no right!” Kaylin howled.

  “Please!” Colin bellowed. “Will you go on. . . .”

  Eldon tilted back another quick sip. “I decided to have it out with the old swindler. I told him he could either cut me in on his other businesses or I would confess to my mother everything I’d found out.” His eyes seethed with anger. “You can just imagine my astonishment when he only laughed at me. Now I know why. How pathetic I must have looked, threatening to turn him over to the very person who was bankrolling him. Consistent right up to the end, aren’t I!” he growled.

  “And what about you, Kaylin?” Colin turned to her, looking smaller than ever from her perch on the couch next to her mother. “What did you make of your father’s character and livelihood?”

  “There have already been too many ugly revelations here, Mr. Pendragon,” she said quietly. “I haven’t the heart for any more.”

  “Ah, but you mustn’t refuse. We are finally getting somewhere.”

  “You will mind yourself, Mr. Pendragon,” Lady Arnifour warned. “I’ve had about enough of this.”

  “Of course you have. We can summon Scotland Yard if you’d prefer. I’d be perfectly content to continue with the inspector and a stream of bobbies in attendance. But let me assure you, this will be done. You were saying, Kaylin?”

  “What is it you want from me, Mr. Pendragon?”

  “The truth. Were you aware of your father’s dealings?”

  “Absolutely not.” She glanced over at her mother with what looked to be both pity and regret. “He left me alone. I have nothing to say against him.”

  “Did you ever visit him at his club in Whitechapel?”

  “And why would I do that? Those places represent everything I despise.”

  “How so?”

  “They prey on weak-minded people, Mr. Pendragon, and foster addiction in the name of business.” Her voice was tight. “Women are treated like baubles, dangled in front of eager clients with no greater expectation than to entice them to ruin their lives. And haven’t you been listening to my brother? Those same women are enslaved, their loyalty assured by virtue of the dependence on opium they’re forced to cultivate. Isn’t that reason enough?”

  “My apologies.” He nodded his head slightly.

  She nodded back, but her glare was wintry cold.

  “I can see you’ve given this a great deal of thought. It’s commendable that you’re able to be as compassionate of your father’s memory as you are. I assume you’ve made your peace with him.”

  “I have.”

  “And Elsbeth?”

  “Elsbeth?” She shook her head and dropped her gaze. “I had no quarrel with her,” she said.

  “Oh?” Colin furrowed his brow as he continued to scrutinize her. “Then I am confused. Elsbeth was a woman you thought to be your cousin and yet you’ve already admitted by your silence that she was also someone you understood to be having an affair with your father. I also recall you being most disparaging when discussing your father’s trysts with Mrs. Roynton. So while you demurred to name Elsbeth as the new object of your father’s affection, you made it clear that you neither condoned nor excused him or his mistress. All of which makes me believe that your coyness is decidedly unconvincing.”

  “And yet we are the ones being disparaged, Mr. Pendragon, as you persist in spinning a flimsy web of hunches around us. Surely my mother’s payments to you have earned us more than that?”

  Colin smiled, his dimples framing the edges of his mouth with significant pleasure. “Well spoken. And you are absolutely right. So now it is time for me to admit that I myself am guilty of a bit of coyness. I will ask you to indulge me by returning to the night before the attack. The night Eldon admits to finally purging his soul. What you have not admitted is that you followed Eldon there that night, didn’t you?”

  “That’s enough.” Lady Arnifour bolted to her feet. “I’ll not have you accusing my daughter of dishonesty. You will remove yourself from this house at once or the inspector will most certainly be sent for.”

  Colin stood firm a moment before nodding as though in agreement. “Mrs. O’Keefe!” He pulled open the door and hollered out into the foyer, “Mrs. O’Keefe! Would you please be so kind as to fetch the inspector and a contingent of bobbies.” He slammed the doors shut and turned back to us. “While we wait the hour it will take that rabble to make their way here, I shall finish my postulation.”

  “This is appalling,” Lady Arnifour stammered, shifting her weight as though getting ready to leave the room, and yet she still did not. Perhaps she understood as I did that Colin would not let her. And in the space of that moment, Mrs. O’Keefe quietly slid the door open in response to having been summoned and hovered just inside.

  “Appalling?” Colin rolled right along, having adopted an air of faux indignation. “I would say appalling was your decision to remove your daughter from the house in the aftermath of the murders for fear she might be found out. Appalling is your willingness to allow the son of a man you supposedly love to take the fall for a crime you know he did not commit. Appalling is trading one life for another because you’ve decided one is more valuable. Appalling is bearing a child whom you turn away from because she reminds you of your most profound mistake. . . .”

  Lady Arnifour clutched at her chest and sank back onto the sofa, her face as ashen as spent cinders. Her eyes had lost their focus and she appeared to no longer be aware of anything around her.

  “For the longest time,” Colin spoke again, choosing his words deliberately as he too stared at Lady Arnifour, “I’ve been unable to figure out who you’ve been trying to protect. Have you been covering your own complicity? Or were you doing so for someone else? I see now that it was a bit of both.”

  No one spoke.

  “Let me tell you what I know to be true, and then let me tell you what I believe to be true,” he said after a moment. “Because of the affair Elsbeth and the Earl were having, she came to understand the truth of her parentage. Nathaniel made me realize that. I’d made the blunder of misconstruing his devotion toward Elsbeth as romantic passion, but I was wrong. It wasn’t a lovers’ quarrel overheard between the two of them the night of the attack, but rather a disapproving argument between siblings. Nathaniel was insisting she end the affair even as she warned
him to stay out of her business.

  “And do any of you comprehend what that conversation tells us about Nathaniel and Elsbeth?” He glanced at their faces but did not wait for a response. “It tells us how close they were. Which makes perfect sense when you remember that neither Elsbeth nor Nathaniel was an Arnifour. The two of them lived on the periphery of this willful and self-possessed family. Fortunate for them, I suppose, until Elsbeth learned the truth. Only then could she finally rid herself of her feelings of dissociation, for through her biological mother, she now belonged.

  “It was their shared secret which allowed them to have the sort of confrontation they had on the night she was attacked. But Elsbeth was not to be so easily dissuaded from her perch at the Earl’s side. For in spite of Nathaniel’s words, she rode out to meet the Earl just as she’d been doing for months—whenever Kaylin wasn’t along. And while all of you established that a walk was a customary part of the Earl’s evening, only one of you knew that Elsbeth and the Earl went many nights to that barn. The two of them headed out in separate directions at differing times, but Elsbeth would double back and pick him up, riding down with him for their indiscretions.

  “Only Kaylin had spied them from her promontory on the boulders across the field on nights she would go there on her own. She would watch the two of them ride up like young lovers, her father and her cousin, disappearing into that barn. . . .” Colin let his voice trail off as he held his gaze on Kaylin, finally perching on the ottoman by her feet. “Am I correct?” he asked. “Did they tarnish your perfect view?”

  She exhaled deeply as her eyes flicked about. “I loved that place. It was so peaceful.” She shook her head. “Then they started showing up.”

  “Did it make you angry? The scandal that was sure to denigrate your family’s name if they were found out?”

  “The Arnifour name has withstood graver injustices over the centuries than my father’s infidelities against my mother,” she said flatly. Lady Arnifour leaned over and seized her daughter’s hand, squeezing it firmly.

  Colin flashed a quick smile before standing and turning his gaze back to Eldon. “And what do you say? Do you agree with your sister?”

  Eldon stared at her, his expression confounded. “I don’t know,” he mumbled.

  “Are you quite finished, Mr. Pendragon?” Lady Arnifour turned on him, sounding for a moment like her normal self.

  “You told your sister about your father’s multiple business dealings after Mrs. Roynton divulged them to you, didn’t you, Eldon?”

  “She had a right to know,” he answered with a bit of a stammer. “He was cheating us.”

  “And you suspected your sister would do something about it—”

  “No!”

  “How dare you!” Lady Arnifour pushed herself to her feet.

  “Sit down!” Colin barked. “We will finish this now.” He wheeled on Eldon. “You set your sister up. You told her everything you knew and then led her down to the club the night before your father was killed. The only thing you earned for your efforts was your father’s scorn, but your sister caused quite a stir.” He turned back to Kaylin. “You made a veritable spectacle of yourself, swinging an oil lamp around and threatening to burn the club to the ground until your father and his security blokes finally managed to hustle you out. You were memorable, Kaylin. In spite of their altered states, you left everyone shaken, which is exactly what Eldon had intended.

  “About the only one you failed to ruffle was your father. He had no idea how much you already knew, or the ways in which your brother was manipulating you: telling you stories of the family’s impending doom, the squandering of your mother’s fortune, the repugnant trade he was in.

  “Which brings us to the night of the attack. I’ll bet tensions at the dinner table were exceedingly high that night, Eldon and Kaylin infuriated by what they viewed as their father’s treachery, and Elsbeth feeling mistakenly emboldened by her secret knowledge. And then there was the Earl. He would have still been convinced that only he had all the pieces in this game. But that’s where he was wrong.

  “Kaylin excused herself from the table partway through the meal with complaints of a headache. Everyone else finished and went their usual disparate ways, the Earl setting off on his nightly jaunt, Elsbeth to the stable to get her horse for her rendezvous, Nathaniel to finish up in the stable, Victor to his garden, Mrs. O’Keefe to clean up her kitchen, and Eldon to the nearest bottle.

  “Unfortunately for Nathaniel, this was the night he decided to confront his beloved half sister about what she was doing. He wanted better for her. But Elsbeth disagreed. They argued intensely, unwittingly providing a motive for the imminent attack. A happenstance all of you, with the sole exception of Victor, have been too happy to hide behind.

  “The Earl and Elsbeth met at their usual spot,” he moved to the fireplace, “a well-trampled patch of grass not more than a third of the way to the barn, and rode the rest of the way together as was their custom. I suppose they thought they were being clever, though they were hardly discreet, yet neither of them knew that someone had already arrived there ahead of them. Someone who had taken a horse while Elsbeth and Nathaniel were fighting and was now waiting just inside the edge of the trees by that barn.

  “When they arrived that night there would have been no sign that this evening was any different from any other. I suspect they were probably so caught up with their passions that they didn’t realize something was amiss until the barn was set ablaze. And from there, everything unfolded with lightning speed.

  “They would’ve fled outside where they were immediately set upon, their hunter waiting for them. The Earl was run down first. He received several blows to the back of his head from a large knot of wood the killer had found among the trees. Once the Earl had been felled, the killer turned back to go after Elsbeth. She had not gotten very far, mistakenly choosing to turn and hold her ground, thinking, perhaps, that she might be able to convince her attacker not to hurt her. But she was wrong. This attack was as much about her as it was the Earl. Though the blows she suffered lacked the ferocity of those that had been wielded against the Earl, it was only because the killer was already fatigued. Isn’t that right, Kaylin?” He turned to her. “So tell me, what did Elsbeth say when she came to your room that night to, as you said, check on you? It certainly wasn’t to ask you to go riding, was it?”

  No one spoke for a moment as everyone turned to Kaylin.

  “Don’t say a word,” Lady Arnifour suddenly blurted in a voice that sounded as detached as it was hollow. “He’s got nothing but a cluster of speculation.”

  “That’s all you’ve got to say?!” Eldon sputtered.

  “Not one more word from you. You don’t know a thing.”

  “At least I’m not being accused of murdering anyone—”

  “Stop!” Kaylin bellowed, stabbing at her temples. “Isn’t it enough already? Isn’t it?!” She turned on her brother. “You did this. You took me to the club that night after telling me how Father owned a dozen of them, addicting patrons and enslaving women. You let me go in there and threaten him, threaten the whole bloody place, and when we went home that night you told me it was the last vestiges of our inheritance. All we would be left with were those vile clubs and this crumbling house—”

  “Don’t—,” Lady Arnifour pleaded.

  “It’s too late!” Kaylin snapped, casting her gaze to Colin. “It was an outrage, Mr. Pendragon, the mockery my father made of all of us. I wasn’t about to become a spinster with an ownership in opium clubs! Oh . . . I despised him for what he was doing to me, but unlike my pathetic brother, I decided I would do something about it.”

  “You mustn’t. . . .” Lady Arnifour started to sob as she seized her daughter’s arm, but Kaylin only shook her off and stood up.

  “I decided I would go out that night when he went for his walk and have it out with him, one way or another. I wasn’t going to sit idly by and watch him annihilate everything around us.” She s
hook her head and moved over by the windows, wrapping her arms around herself as though she were suddenly cold. “You were right; dinner was awful that night. The room was intolerable and when I couldn’t take it anymore, I complained of a migraine and left.

  “I went upstairs and changed into my riding things and that’s when Elsbeth came up to see me.” Her face clouded and her lips pursed. “She came up to ridicule me. My father had told her that Eldon and I had come to the club the night before, and she laughed at me for thinking I could have any effect on what he was doing. It made me mad . . . it made me outraged . . . to think she presumed that whoring around with my father gave her the right to say such things to me! I hated her. . . .”

  “Oh, Kaylin.” Lady Arnifour shrank back on the couch, weeping piteously.

  “I knew they would meet up that night. The two of them so proud of themselves. So while Elsbeth was arguing with Nathaniel, I took one of the horses without a saddle or bridle or reins and rode down to the barn and waited for them. And I didn’t have to wait long. They came trotting across the field on one of the bays, one of my favorites, and they’d barely dismounted before he was pawing all over her, her laughing and letting him do whatever he pleased. It was sickening. And never once did they bother to look around and see if anyone might be there, might catch them, never in all the times I’d seen them. They didn’t care. The two of them, they were deplorable.

  “So as soon as they disappeared into the barn I crept forward and set it ablaze. Let them have their fire with their passion. . . .” She gave a hollow chuckle that died in her throat. “My father came out first; he spotted me and started hollering at me, said I was bloody starkers. Can you imagine? I rode him down, Mr. Pendragon, just as you said, and I struck him with a knot of burl I’d found in the woods. It felt good; watching him blubber like the pathetic creature he was, it only made me angrier. And she . . . she was no better than him. I should’ve known she was born of my flesh. We are a contemptible lot, but at least I kept them from destroying everything. . . .” Her voice trailed off and I wondered if she yet had any real understanding of what she had done.