The Ladies In Love Series

by M. C. Beaton

  There was a long silence after they had left. The earl toyed with his cigar cutter and thought of the pleasures of the night to come. There was nothing more exciting, he reflected, than making love to a girl in that bed beside the open window. It had been a long time, but he could almost experience the erotic thrill of the cold air on his naked back and the warm, struggling, and protesting girl underneath. Pleasure would surely be doubled this time, for he had bought a new interior spring mattress from Peel’s in the Tottenham Court Road in honor of his wedding night.

  Giles toyed with his glass and thought very uncomfortable thoughts. Never, he reflected, had he seen a girl so naive and so innocent. He wished his own rooms were on a different floor. He wished he could escape, but the servants had told him that the roads were blocked.

  “Go easy with her, Uncle,” he said at last. “She’s so very young.”

  The earl looked at his nephew doubtfully. There had been a time when he, the earl, had almost had Farmer Bligh’s youngest, but Giles had stepped in and threatened to horsewhip him if he so much as laid hands on the girl. The earl knew that Giles’s slim figure was deceptive and that his beautifully tailored evening suit covered a formidable mass of muscle and sinew. What if he should interfere with tonight’s pleasures?

  Then Giles himself gave the earl an idea. “Where did you meet her?” Giles asked.

  The earl had a brain wave. He tapped the side of his nose and grinned. “Stage door of The Follies,” he said.

  “What? Are you trying to tell me that that beautiful, innocent creature is a chorus girl?”

  The earl nodded gleefully.

  “Then why marry her?”

  “Blackmail,” said the earl. “I had her when she was a minor, see? I may not have been the only one, but her parents found out and made me sign a paper saying I would marry her when she came of age.”

  The earl lay back, watching with amusement the rare expression of shock on Giles’s face. Of course Giles would find out the whole thing was a tissue of lies, but by that time he should have had a few nights fun and that was all that mattered.

  “She’s a brilliant little actress,” observed the earl eventually, breaking the silence. “More than me has fallen for that butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-my-mouth act. Why, ask Chalmers! He would have married her himself if he could have.”

  “Chalmers is very wealthy. Why didn’t she accept him and release you from your promise?”

  “Chalmers ain’t got a title,” said the earl, “and my Susie had a mind to be a countess.”

  Now, Giles Warden had certainly known his uncle to lie. But he could not believe that his uncle would have the imagination to think up such a whopper as this. And Susie was not in the room. Seeing Susie through the distorting glass of the earl’s imagination, Giles seemed to realize that all her innocent ways were the result of low cunning.

  He felt depressed and sick.

  “I shall not join you in the drawing room,” he said wryly. “Have a good night.”

  “I shall, my boy,” said the earl, grinning. “Oh, indeed I shall!”

  A bare half hour later Susie crept shivering into bed. She had tried again to close the window without success and, although a fire was burning on the hearth, the room was unbearably cold, and the bed was pushed up against the window. As she huddled down under the blankets she realized the room was still lit by two bright oil lamps. She would need to crawl out and extinguish them.

  She was just reaching to turn down the wick of the first lamp when the door from her husband’s quarters opened and the earl bounded in.

  He was stark naked.

  Susie stared at him in terror. The only male nudity she had ever seen was a statue at the Royal Academy, and the muscular marble figure had worn only a fig leaf. But that handsome stone creature left her unprepared for the reality of a naked, hairy, middle-aged man with a peculiar appendage like a pump handle sticking out from his body.

  “Come here!” said the earl thickly, stretching out his arms.

  Susie shrank away from him, and then the pursuit began in earnest. She fled toward her sitting room, but the earl got there first and locked the bedroom door and threw the key out of the window.

  Susie ran hither and thither about the room, pursued by her gleeful husband, who was uttering noises like battle cries.

  He made a dive and nearly got her, and she jumped onto the bed and was bounced off again by the excellent spring of Mr. Peel’s mattress and landed in a sobbing heap on the floor.

  “Tally-ho!” yelled the earl, leaping high in the air and landing feetfirst on the bed with all his weight. His heavy bulk turned the bed into a veritable trampoline.

  The steel springs uncoiled with a tremendous thrust and, before Susie’s terrified eyes, the naked earl was catapulted straight out through the window.

  “By Jove!…” were the last words he said.

  In no time at all, there was a sickening crrruuummp! from the courtyard below.

  Susie was a very wealthy widow.

  Chapter 4

  The Earl of Blackhall was buried unwept, unhonored, and unsung, not in Westminster Abbey but in the family vault in the small churchyard in the village with the senior Lady Blackhall, Susie, and Giles the only relatives in attendance. The roads were too blocked with snow to allow any of the earl’s other relatives to visit his graveside, even supposing they had wished to, for he had alienated the lot of them long ago.

  The older servants, who might have mourned the passing of their lord, quickly dried their tears on learning that the earl had left all his vast fortune to his upstart wife, who was no better than she should be.

  The servants who had been present when the earl had been telling Giles of Susie’s disgraceful background had believed every word, and the grim murmur of “murder” could be heard whispering along the castle walls.

  Giles was also troubled. He could not get the memory of Susie staring down at the sea and wishing her husband dead out of his mind.

  He was almost relieved to return from the funeral and find the presence of a burly police inspector accompanied by the village constable waiting for him. Giles was now the Earl of Blackhall, and although he had not inherited the late peer’s money, the castle and its grounds and land were now rightfully his.

  The inspector introduced himself as a Mr. Disher. Giles led the policemen into a small library on the first floor of the keep and asked them their business.

  Mr. Bertram Jones, the village constable, sat in a chair in the corner and took out a large pristine notebook and licked the stub of his pencil.

  “Well, it’s like this, my lord,” said Inspector Dasher awkwardly, removing his hard bowler and resting it on one plump knee. “We’ve been receiving anonymous letters about Lord Blackhall’s death. Now, as you know, Dr. Edwards signed the death certificate and said it was an accident. But in view of these here letters…”

  “This is distressing,” said Giles. “I’ll take you into my confidence, Inspector. My uncle married a very young girl and has left her his entire fortune. There were no bequests at all to the servants. He did not even leave his mother a penny. So my great-aunt and the servants feel his wife coerced him into making such a will, but I know my uncle was lazy and careless and would find it easier to leave the lot to one individual rather than splitting it. He was not the type of man to care what happened after his death. On the other hand, it would ease our minds if you went forward with your investigation. If Lady Blackhall is innocent, then she will be free from these hints and rumors.” He did not say what might happen if she were proved guilty.

  “I must insist,” added Giles, “that no word of this gets into the newspapers. We have enough trouble without being besieged by reporters. We sent no announcement of my uncle’s death to the press. The relatives were all informed by letter. Now, would you like to begin with me?”

  “Very good, my lord,” said Inspector Disher, stifling a little sigh of relief. This had been his first case in upper circles, so to speak, an
d he had been frightened of angry and irate aristocrats reporting him to the lord lieutenant of the county.

  “At the time of the…er…accident, where were you, my lord?”

  “I was in bed,” said Giles slowly. “The castle walls are very thick, and I heard nothing until a maid knocked on my door and screamed that the mistress was crying and shouting and pounding on her bedroom door. I put on my dressing gown and found the door to my lady’s bedroom locked. I entered her bedroom through a door leading from my uncle’s suite of rooms. In her distress she must have forgotten that she could escape that way.

  “She was crying and in a terrible state. She said my uncle had jumped on the bed, and the next thing she knew, he had vanished out of the window.

  “My great-aunt, Felicity, then entered and said some unfortunate things, whereupon young Lady Blackhall was sick.”

  “Can you tell me what your aunt said?”

  “I would rather not,” replied Giles grimly. “Aunt Felicity prides herself on having nerves of steel and does not realize that in tragic circumstances she becomes as unhinged as the next woman.”

  “I shall ask her myself if you would prefer,” said the inspector, and Giles nodded.

  “Now, then, did the young bride say or do anything at all, my lord, that would lead you to suspect she had murder in mind?”

  Giles vividly remembered the scene at the embrasure but found he could not bring himself to say anything.

  But Inspector Disher noticed the slight hesitation and tucked it away in the back of his mind, which was already working furiously. Giles said, “No, nothing,” and the inspector thought, He’s a handsome lad, this new lord, and the old one was a brute by all accounts. Maybe the bride and this lad put their heads together.

  Aloud, he said, “That will be all for the present, my lord. Before I see her ladyship I would like to question the butler. I will need to question the servants, you know.”

  “I’ll send him to you,” said Giles. “His name is Thomson.”

  After Giles had departed, Mr. Thomson made a slow and stately entrance. If he weren’t wearing butler’s uniform, thought the inspector, I would take him for one of the lords.

  Mr. Thomson was a portly gentleman with a bland, superior face, silver hair, and a haughty manner.

  His lordship’s death was most unfortunate, he said, but he believed in getting to the bottom of things.

  He had not been present immediately after the mur—er—accident. Two of his footmen and a housemaid called Betsy had been immediately on the scene. He confirmed most of what Giles had said but managed to convey from his manner that he did not approve of her ladyship and suspected the worst.

  Lady Felicity was next. Yes, she had said some harsh things to Susie, but the girl simply had to pull herself together. Girls of that class had such vulgar emotions.

  “What class?” asked the inspector, wondering how he had the courage to ask this formidable lady one question.

  Felicity always listened to servants’ gossip, and so she related the tale of the blackmail and the stage door of The Follies.

  With a sinking heart, Inspector Blackhall asked Felicity to send Lady Blackhall to him and, after the door had closed behind her, he turned to Mr. Jones, the village constable.

  “Things are beginning to look black, Mr. Jones,” he said gloomily. “I thought these letters would turn out to be just a lot of spite. But now all this about blackmail and forcing the earl to wed! I suppose this Lady Blackhall’s one of them hard, painted floozies. You could tell from that butler that the servants don’t think much of her.”

  “She sounds like a Scarlet Woman,” said Mr. Jones with satisfaction. This was the most exciting moment of his life, and he was relishing it to the full. In his years as a village policeman he had hardly arrested anyone, except for an occasional tramp caught stealing or a drunk on Saturday night. He gazed around the library with great calflike eyes, storing up every detail to tell his wife.

  There was a timid little knock on the door and Susie entered. Both men rose to their feet and stared at her in amazement. She had found a woman in the village to make her a black dress in time for the funeral. Its simple lines hugged her slight, immature figure. Her eyes were enormous in her white face, and her brown hair was pulled up into a demure little coronet on top of her head.

  She’s a child! thought the dazed inspector. Only a child.

  “Sit down, my lady,” he said, “and don’t be afraid of me. No one suspects you of anything now. We simply want to get this matter straight. Now, first of all, give me your maiden name and the names of your mother and father.”

  “My name is Susie Burke,” said Susie in an emotionless voice. “My parents are Dr. and Mrs. Burke of Ten Jubilee Crescent, Camberwell, London. My father is a general practitioner.”

  The inspector blinked. “No connection with the stage, my lady?”

  Susie looked at him in surprise, and then the faint ghost of a smile crossed her mouth. “Oh, no, Inspector. My parents do not approve of the theater.”

  “How did you meet your late husband?”

  “He had an accident; his carriage overturned. His servants brought him to our house, and my mother and father looked after him. He only had a sprained ankle, but they were very impressed with his title.” Again that faint smile.

  “And he fell in love with you?”

  “Yes, if that is love.”

  The inspector raised his bushy eyebrows. “You did wish to marry the earl?”

  “Yes—that is, my parents told me I had to.”

  “I see. Now, my lady, perhaps you could take us to your room and show us exactly what happened. I am sorry to distress you, but I am afraid it is necessary.”

  “Very well,” said Susie in a flat voice.

  She’s a cool one, thought Constable Jones.

  She’s on the edge of a breakdown, thought his inspector.

  Susie led the way up the stone staircase, which became narrower after the first landing, and they were walking in single file by the time they reached the top.

  The inspector mopped his forehead. He had often wondered what it would be like to live in a castle, and now he thought he knew and, as he confided to his wife afterward, it “fair gave me the creeps.”

  The all-pervading chill of the old keep seemed to penetrate to his very marrow. Dimly he could hear the pounding of the sea on the cliffs, and the chill air blowing along the passage smelled of salt. A particularly nasty-looking ancestor glared at him with contempt from a painting hung on the wall at the top of the stairs.

  “I haven’t slept in this bedroom since my husband’s accident,” said Susie in that deadly flat voice. “I sleep in my husband’s bedroom.” She pushed open a low, heavy oak door and led them through a cheerful sitting room and then pushed open the door of her bedroom.

  A frigid blast of air from the open window struck the party. “I tried to get the servants to close it,” explained Susie, “but for some reason, they would not.”

  Probably bloody-mindedness, thought the inspector. He said, “Why was it you were locked in, my lady?”

  Susie’s pale face flushed. “Must I tell you?”

  “Yes, my lady, everything is important.”

  Susie heaved a little sigh. “I was frightened, you see, and I was trying to get away from him, and he locked the bedroom door and threw the key out of the window. I forgot that I could have escaped through his rooms. I just ran round and round the bedroom, trying to escape.”

  “Why were you frightened of your husband?”

  There was a long silence.

  A sea gull screamed outside, raucous and mocking in the deadly stillness of the castle.

  “He was naked,” said Susie with the wild, timid look of a trapped animal.

  “I quite understand, my lady,” said the inspector gently, and indeed he felt he did. The late earl had not been a particularly lovely specimen, and this young girl struck him more and more as being painfully young and innocent. But that in its
elf might have unhinged her and driven her to murder.

  “And then what happened?” he asked softly, motioning behind his back for Constable Jones to put away his notebook.

  “Well, I jumped on the bed,” said Susie, “and fell off—here at the end, on the floor. My husband then jumped hard on the bed—it was a game to him, you see—and the next thing I knew, he had flown out of the window.”

  “Would you say he was about my build?”

  Susie looked at the portly figure of the inspector and closed her eyes. She was trying not to imagine the inspector naked. “Yes,” she said faintly.

  “Very well, then, my lady. Now, if you will just lie down on the floor where you say you fell, and I will be the earl. Did he say anything?”

  “He shouted, ‘Tally-ho!’ just before he jumped on the bed,” said Susie.

  The inspector fought down an insane desire to giggle.

  “Please,” begged Susie, “before we go on with this, please shut the window.”

  “Right you are, my lady,” said the inspector cheerfully. He crawled across the bed, which was still up against the open window, and stretched up. It took all his strength, for the window had not been shut for some time, but at last the rotted sash cords gave way, and it came crashing down.

  “Whew!” said Inspector Disher. “Afraid you’ll need to get that repaired, my lady. Now, just stay where you are. Where did your husband run from before he jumped on the bed?”

  “Over there,” said Susie, waving toward the far corner of the room.

  “Right. With your permission, I’ll just take off my jacket.” The inspector suited the action to the word and revealed a dandyish side of his character in a pair of scarlet braces embroidered with Scottie dogs.

  Susie closed her eyes.

  “Here we go,” said Inspector Disher. “Now, you watch closely, Mr. Jones. Tally-ho!”

  He ran across the room and leaped full on the center of the bed, which dealt with him as it had dealt with the earl—but with one exception. He rebounded and crashed full into the closed window, which gave a protesting crack but otherwise held firm.