“I’ll go to Witch Haven and deliver the message about the archery contest,” I said.
“You will?” Livonia eyed me with a mixture of respect and concern. “What if she’s nasty to you?”
“Someone has to go, and it can’t be Lord Belfrey as he’s banned from the premises. I’ve a strong suspicion that, despite her protestations of eternal enmity, curiosity will bring Miss Celia Belfrey to your proposed event.”
“Won’t miss the chance to scoff from the sound of her.” Mrs. Malloy nodded the hat. “I’ll go with you, Mrs. H. After all,” she added importantly, “it would be more of a proper invitation coming from one of the contestants, which you’re not, when all’s said and done.”
This wasn’t at all what I wanted, seeing my main intent was to have a private talk with Nora Burton. But there was no arguing her point. Fortunately, Livonia spoke up, reminding her of a prior commitment.
“Well, yes, being at the meeting with you and Alice Jones and Molly Duggan to decide what rooms we’ll each focus on for setting to rights is important. And I know it was agreed on right after church, but…” It was clear from the pursing of her glossy purple lips that Mrs. Malloy was seriously torn.
“What about Judy Nunn?” I asked slyly.
“Her? She’ll be out in the gardens, tearing out tree stumps with her bare hands or rerouting the brook.” Thunderous brow.
“She’s incredible!” Livonia enthused. “His lordship seems very impressed.”
“He does?” Tommy nudged at a stray stone with the tip of his shoe. “And may the best contestant win?”
“Absolutely.” Livonia looked up at the sky.
“And who that may be is yet to be decided.” From the fierceness of Mrs. Malloy’s tone, I knew she’d made her decision. She’d be at that meeting not one second late. Breathing a sigh of relief, I suggested that either she or Livonia write a note to Miss Belfrey on behalf of the contestants, which I would take along to Witch Haven. Eager to be of service, however minimal, Dr. Tommy produced a pen and notepad. The missive was dictated by Mrs. Malloy and written down and neatly folded by Livonia.
I lost no time in making off for Witch Haven. It was tempting to linger in the leafy lane, enjoying its green shade and mosaic of shadows on the ground, the warm breeze suggesting a frolicsome mood to the day. Would I be speedily shown the door after saying what I had to say-if given the chance? My hand grasped the door knocker. My heart thudded along with its hammering fall. There was a line between sins of omission as addressed by Reverend Spendlow and sticking one’s nose in other people’s business. The door opened with startling speed, scattering beyond recoverable reach the words I’d been shoving into random order.
“Good morning,” said Nora Burton; she was again lumpily dressed in a wintry-looking skirt and sagging cardigan. The thicklensed glasses loomed large on her face, contracting her expression of polite inquiry to a lift of the mouth.
“Back like the bad penny!” Assuming admittance, I placed a foot on the threshold.
“Without the dog.” She didn’t budge. “Did you find the owner?”
“Yes…”
“Good, I’ll let Miss Belfrey know.”
“I have a message for her from the contestants in the reality show.” I held it out and watched her pocket it in the shapeless cardigan. “But it’s you I must talk to.”
“Must?” She stepped backward into the hall.
“Somewhere private.”
She stood rigidly still, as if finally the moment she had been anticipating since coming to Witch Haven was at hand.
Aware that the hall might have ears, I whispered the question. “You are Eleanor Belfrey?”
11
N o need to explain last night’s dream in which I had been powerless to scream a warning of impending danger, or to mention Reverend Spendlow’s sermon. No steaming indignation, no guilty outrage from Nora Burton. She retained her calm demeanor, skipping the question as to why her true identity was any of my business to go directly to the core. “How did you guess?”
We were now in her bedroom, she seated on the edge of the bed, I in a cobalt blue velvet chair. A small white dog-a Sealyham terrier asleep in a basket before the fireplace-added the perfect cozy touch. I had always thought I would prefer a small dog. The furnishings were charming, the warm amber, cobalt blue, and rose color scheme reflective of the hall and drawing room. Given Celia Belfrey’s demand for perfection, I doubted there was a room at Witch Haven that wasn’t lovely.
“Several reasons. Lord Belfrey asked me if my name, Ellie, was short for Eleanor; but there are always any number of ways to abbreviate. I also learned that your last name, before your marriage, was Lambert-Onger. Shorten Eleanor into Nora, take the bert from Lambert and the on from Onger to concoct Burton, and there you are. But that didn’t come to me first. The trigger was your asking if I were talking about Lord Belfrey when I mentioned Georges LeBois the other morning. Afterwards, it struck me as unlikely that Miss Belfrey had never in your hearing mentioned her cousin Aubrey by name. Not because she is fond of him. Quite the reverse. If she would vent her venom to me-a total stranger-then how could you escape being her frequent listening post?”
“What else are paid companions to spoiled, spiteful women for?” Nora’s lips curved bitterly.
“Exactly. And Celia Belfrey is worse than either of those two adjectives, isn’t she? Look.” I leaned forward. “You haven’t said it, but I will. I’m sticking my nose into your private affairs. But I’m not doing so for the fun of it. I’ve heard your story from the three people working at Mucklesfeld and from Lord Belfrey, and I think you’re taking a huge risk in returning…”
“To the scene of my crime?”
“Lord Belfrey doesn’t believe you took the jewels with you when you fled Mucklesfeld.”
“Doesn’t he?” pushing back her hair in a weary gesture. The thin white line of the scar tracing down from the corner of her eye to her cheek showed up sharply in the light coming in through the window framed in floor-length pale blue silk.
“No. You made a… very positive lasting impression on him the day he came to Mucklesfeld and saw you standing halfway up the stairs. When my husband and a friend and I arrived out of the fog the other night, he got the idea that I look something like you did then and still do in your portrait.”
“Yes,” she said, “I can see that.”
“If there is any resemblance, it has to be very faint. You were beautiful. And I have a strong feeling that without those bottle glasses, the scraped-back hair, and frumpy clothes you still are.”
“I don’t spend much time in front of a mirror. Not because of this”-she touched a finger to the scar-“I just prefer not to narrow my focus down to me. I’ve spent my life since Mucklesfeld staying constantly busy in unexciting ways. A nursing career, a small flat, and for the last three years Sophie.” The Sealyham twitched an ear, then reshuffled back to sleep in the basket. “I counted on being sufficiently uninteresting to have a good chance of getting away with this charade. At the start, fooling Celia was all that mattered. Once over that hurdle, I felt reasonably secure. Although sometimes I do wonder about Charlie Forester. He was always so kind, so eager to be of help to me. But,” she shrugged her shoulders, bunching up the cardigan, “it was a very long time ago. I’m not sure I would have recognized him; he’s over eighty now.”
“If Miss Belfrey hadn’t banned Lord Belfrey from this house, he would have presented a problem for you. No disguise or change in appearance would fool him. He seems to me a man of uncanny recall.” That wasn’t giving away more than was justified, was it?
“He… Aubrey made an indelible impression on me, too. For that one breathless moment, I thought I’d summoned up the man who would rescue me. It had been a quite dreadful day.” She removed the spectacles and rubbed her forehead above the bridge of her nose. Without them, her face seemed stripped naked and I caught my first glimpse… just a suggestion, really, of the loveliness that had haunted Lord
Belfrey and the loss of which had played its part in driving his cousin Giles to madness. Nora finally asked the question I would have raised earlier were the situation reversed, but she did so without rancor. “What are you really? Some sort of private detective?”
“Occasional amateur. I’m at Mucklesfeld quite by chance, as I told you. But there was something in the atmosphere right from the beginning, something apart from the accidental death of one of the contestants that drew me in, and that was your story.”
“The absconding bride.” Something in her misty gray eyes told me talking would be a release now the cat was out of the bag and in my lap.
“Was your husband cruel from the start of your marriage?”
“Giles never treated me badly.”
“But Lord Belfrey thought… is still convinced you were terrified of your husband after being forced into a marriage contrived by your family.”
“That’s true. My father was in desperate financial straits as a result of some highly speculative investing. He was on the verge of losing everything and there was Giles offering to save the day in return for one small favor. Me. He’d been infatuated with me for several years after meeting me at Ascot on my twentieth birthday. I had no idea. He was older than both my parents by ten years. I suppose when I thought of him at all, it was as a courtesy uncle.” Nora again brushed her hair back from her forehead. A weary gesture. “I was aghast when my father told me, quite unemotionally, what was expected of a dutiful daughter. I railed, of course, but unlike my brother-there were just the two of us-I had always toed the line. Saving the family home for Jeremy to inherit along with an income to support it was of far more importance than any squeamishness on my part. After all, what did I have to complain about? I would be married to a lord.”
“So Giles dipped into the Belfrey coffers to replenish your family’s.”
“And I am supposed to have robbed them further by making off with the jewels.”
“You didn’t?”
“I’m not a thief.”
“No, but I suppose it would have been an understandable revenge against a brutal, merciless husband. But you say he wasn’t that.”
Nora resettled the glasses on her perfect nose. “I hated him at first, thought him unnatural for wanting me, knowing I had no feelings for him. Our wedding night is something I try never to think back on. Not because he forced me to submit, he was I suppose pathetically gentle, and there was nothing… out of the way, that could be considered deviant. But every part of me recoiled from his body… his touch. When I couldn’t block those times out of my mind, I told myself they would get better. But it didn’t happen, and after a few weeks he moved out of our bedroom. At least I had my nights to myself. He said, very kindly really, that it didn’t matter. That having me there, just being able to look at me, like a flower in a vase, was enough.”
“That sounds distinctly creepy to me.”
She stared straight ahead. “I might have grown kinder in my feelings toward him, if the days had not been so unendurable.”
I sat silent in the cobalt blue velvet chair. Sophie the Sealyham slept on. From the continued stare into nothingness, I gauged Nora to be no longer with us but back at Mucklesfeld, avoiding whenever possible the husband who filled her with revulsion, leaving her with only one other source of companionship.
“I understood,” Nora continued tonelessly, “that Celia would resent me. Having a stepmother a couple of years her junior and knowing exactly why I had agreed to marry him would have been enraging for anyone in her position. I expected to be either ignored or the recipient of snide remarks, but she went further than that. This,” pressing a finger to the scar on her face, “happened when she threw a cut-glass dish at me. It literally came at me out of the blue. Nothing apparent led up to the incident. Celia was sitting in the drawing room leafing through a magazine when she picked it up and aimed it at me. When she saw the blood dripping through my fingers, she said, ‘Don’t get that on the floor,’ and swept out of the room. She and I both knew that I would have made a bad decision in telling Giles. I believed then-and I still do-that she would have found a way to get rid of me once and for all given half an opportunity. I began seriously to fear my days were numbered when Giles bought this house for me.”
“Witch Haven? Yours?”
“In their arrangement with him-all very tidy and legal-my parents did seek to secure some protection for me in the event of his death; at which time of course I would’ve had to leave Mucklesfeld. I was to have a place of my own in waiting. Having paid substantially for the privilege of having a wife who couldn’t bear him to touch her,” Nora continued speaking without inflection, “Giles himself felt a financial pinch, so it had to be a reasonably priced house. Six months after our marriage, this one went up for sale and he bought it. To my surprise, having come to feel myself incapable of any positive emotion, I fell in love with the place despite its being in a shockingly run-down state. The only contented moments I spent after that at Mucklesfeld were occupied in planning how I would make Witch Haven my own-collecting ideas from magazines, positioning furniture choices on paper renditions of the rooms, deciding what colors I would use. Before leaving, I had an extensive scrapbook.”
I looked around the bedroom-the word stolen coming to mind. Mrs. Foot had accused Ben of stealing her kitchen. “And you came here a short time ago to find Celia Belfrey occupying your creation?”
“Extremely close. Of course there are some things I would change, perhaps because I have changed, but surprisingly my anger against her didn’t spill over to infect my feelings for the house. Perhaps it has the sort of aura that can’t be tainted, however unpleasant the personality of the occupant?”
“Maybe.” The empathy I had felt for this woman upon first hearing about her, in good part because of my attributed likeness to her, was increasing. I also saw houses as personalities; it was what I brought to my work as a designer. “How did Witch Haven get its name?”
For the first time I saw Nora… Eleanor… really smile. “It may be a legend, but the story goes that back in the sixteen hundreds a young woman from this area was accused of witchcraft on the grounds that a young dairy farmer was savagely gored by his bull after she supposedly hexed him. Her version was that she’d had to fight him off on several occasions when he’d cornered her in the lane as she was passing. It was his wife who raised the village against her. On the day she was to be hanged, the squire’s son came galloping up to the prison yard waving a writ for her release and plucking her from the gallows as the noose was lowered.”
“Romantic! Or was he all about justice?”
“There must have been love, or at least passion, involved in his mission of mercy because he afterwards installed her in this house, with sufficient armed menservants to ensure her protection. And here she lived out her days to the grand old age of ninety-two.”
“Was Celia Belfrey also captivated by the house and its history?”
“I’m not sure if she wanted it because it was mine or because it also spoke to her. She had an eye for beauty along with an almost manic acquisitive streak.”
“Almost?”
The smile against rested for a moment on Eleanor’s lips before she turned her face away. “That day when I saw Aubrey looking up at me from the foot of the stairs, I had the mad idea that he was that squire’s son, having ridden hell for leather to the rescue. As I said, it had been a dreadful day. Celia was in a glinty-eyed fury, as she always was on the days when I sat for my portrait, and Charlie Forester had come to tell me that Hamish the Scottie had been inexplicably injured-what appeared to be a torn muscle in one of his front legs. I knew Celia had taken out her rage on the poor little fellow. I think Giles did, too, but he was always afraid to stand up to her. He told me to go to my room and stay there. It was an order-quietly given, but I didn’t attempt to argue. A bolted door… that was sanctuary. I think he knew that she was to be feared.”
“His lordship’s assessment of the situation was
that you were his cousin’s prisoner. This Charlie Forester, why would he leave Mucklesfeld to work for her here?”
“I think he feels it his duty to keep an eye on her, to be the watchguard against her doing something dreadful, especially against Aubrey now he’s back. I don’t think she considers Dr. Rowley someone to be dealt with right now. He hasn’t taken Mucklesfeld from her… yet.”
I shivered. The Sealyham lifted her tufted white head and clambered out of the basket onto the bed, to perform a circle before settling down on Eleanor’s lap. But she didn’t again close her eyes. Had she picked up on my unease? Or did she experience a more pervasive sense of danger? My time with Thumper had led me to believe fervently in the omniscient powers of man’s-and woman’s-best friend.
“It was during the hours spent in my room that day that I made up my mind to leave and take Hamish with me. I knew I couldn’t go back to my parents or let them know any more than that I was safe. It was easier in those days to make an untraceable phone call. I had to disappear, and fortunately I had some friends-beatniks, was my mother’s description-who were ready to help me set up a new identity. But I couldn’t completely give up the old one. It would have been as if Celia had succeeded in murdering me-and melodramatic as that sounds, I know that was her plan. So I became Nora Burton.” She sat stroking the Sealyham with a fine-boned hand.
“When did you learn you supposedly had taken the family jewels with you?”
“Within a few days of my escape. My friends had chosen to break with the circle in which they and I moved, but they still had sufficient access to the latest scuttlebutt. When they told me what was being said, I knew that Celia had taken the only revenge left to her. She would know that Giles would not go after the insurance money and thereby set up a criminal investigation. In his own way, I believe he did love me.”
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