Death, Diamonds, and Deception

by Rosemary Simpson

  “I’m sure I wouldn’t know, Mr. Hunter,” he finally said. “We’ve never been troubled by that type of situation in this household.”

  Not that you know of or will admit, Geoffrey thought.

  * * *

  Prudence and Mrs. Mitchell talked over cups of tea.

  In the housekeeper’s mind her time with Miss MacKenzie was less an interrogation than a conversation. As she explained to Prudence, she chose to rule her maids lightly and allowed Cook to make kitchen decisions without undue interference. For the most part, given that there could always be exceptions, she was a woman who believed that too domineering a personality made for bickering, unpleasantness, and conflict below stairs.

  “As in other walks of life, I imagine,” Prudence agreed.

  “I’ll do my best to answer whatever questions you have,” Mrs. Mitchell promised. “But I can’t guarantee that I’ll always have an answer, and I prefer not to guess at something personal.”

  “We’re trying to get a sense of Mr. Whitley. How he conducted himself here in the house, what his relationship was with his stepfather, his mother, and the footman who hanged himself. Whether there were any improprieties of which you were aware.”

  Mrs. Mitchell swirled the few sips of tea remaining in her cup, but there were no leaves in the bottom to hint at either the past or the future. “When he was sober, Mr. Whitley was a considerate gentleman,” she said slowly. “Unfortunately, for most of the time I knew him, he was in the clutches of demon rum. I didn’t assume the position of housekeeper here until after the previous housekeeper retired. That was only two years ago.”

  “So you never knew him as a child or a very young man?”

  “He had already graduated from Harvard and gone to work for Mr. De Vries.”

  “Had Leonard Abbott been assigned to him as valet yet?” Prudence and Geoffrey had agreed that addressing the suicide would be the first thrust of their investigation.

  “Mr. Harris tried out one or two of the other footmen before settling on Leonard. Not everyone is cut out to be a valet or a lady’s maid. It takes special talents.”

  “Did Mr. Whitley express a preference for him?”

  “That was a bit odd. Mr. Harris and I had several conversations about it. Even though the maids fall under my care and the male staff under Mr. Harris’s supervision, we do consult with one another as frequently as necessary to keep a good balance going.”

  “What was odd about Abbott?”

  “Mr. Harris was never very explicit, but I got the impression that Mr. Whitley put in a word on his behalf when the agency sent him over for an interview. He certainly encouraged his rise from footman to acting valet. Leonard became a great favorite with the young men Mr. Whitley entertained in his rooms. If Mr. Harris sent another footman up to wait on them, he always came back down saying Leonard was wanted. Asked for by name.”

  It was unusual for a visitor to the house to know the name of a footman. Even more strange that he should be singled out.

  “Tell me about Mr. Whitley’s friends. How often did he entertain them?”

  “Usually two or three times a week. Almost always in the late afternoon or when dinner was over. They were going out together, you see, drinking and gambling or attending one of the debutante affairs, so they spent an hour or two getting ready.”

  “Lubricating themselves?”

  “I haven’t heard it described like that before, Miss MacKenzie, but yes, that’s more or less what they were doing. Leonard served them whiskey in Mr. Whitley’s suite of rooms, hardly ever more than two or three guests at a time. Whenever Mr. Canfield stayed over, he saw to him as well.”

  “Meaning he acted as Mr. Canfield’s valet?”

  Mrs. Mitchell nodded, but did not elaborate.

  “I find it a bit peculiar that Mr. Canfield would spend the night here,” Prudence said. “His own home can’t be more than five or six blocks away.”

  “Mr. Canfield didn’t get along very well with either of his parents,” Mrs. Mitchell said, pursing her lips in disapproval. “He’d taken the Gold Cure, but he couldn’t seem to make it work. Whenever he was too far gone to chance going head to head with his father, or his parents had gone to their country house, Mr. Whitley would invite him to stay here. There were always empty guest rooms in that wing of the house, and Mr. De Vries didn’t seem to mind. I’m not even sure he was always aware of Mr. Canfield’s presence. He would be up and gone for the day long before the young gentleman stirred. It wasn’t my place or Mr. Harris’s either to inform him if Mrs. De Vries chose not to let him know.”

  “Is it your impression that Mrs. De Vries kept a good many of these inebriated nights from her husband?”

  “The judgment isn’t mine to make, Miss MacKenzie.”

  “But if you had to guess, Mrs. Mitchell?”

  “I would say that this is a household in which lives are lived separately.” She paused and swirled the teacup again. “Not many questions are asked upstairs.”

  “I’m sure you and Mr. Harris talked about Leonard after the young man’s unfortunate demise,” Prudence said. She’d led Mrs. Mitchell down a meandering path to make the direct questions less obvious. “I wonder if Mr. Whitley’s preferential treatment of Leonard led to the footman’s taking advantage of the situation.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Did he, for example, ask for and expect to be given extra time off? Was he often late back from his half days and was he reprimanded for it?”

  “Mr. Harris disciplines the male staff, as I think I may have mentioned.”

  “Yes, but you also led me to believe that you and Mr. Harris work in tandem, as it were. That you value each other’s opinions.”

  “We do.” The housekeeper paused, as if to think through how to phrase what she would say next. “I don’t see what harm it will bring to tell you that we did talk about Leonard. More than once. And after he did what he did, we tried to puzzle out the why of it. Mr. Harris was especially hit hard. He wondered if there was something about Leonard that he should have noticed, something in the days leading up to when he took his life. I told him not to be concerned, that none of us had the slightest notion he was in such desperate straits.”

  “Was Leonard Abbott treated differently than the other servants?”

  “I can’t deny that he got away with a few things. He was Mr. Whitley’s favorite. And whenever Mr. Canfield stayed over, he always asked for him.”

  “You know we found a Tiffany ring box in his bedroom? And an envelope full of betting slips?”

  “And I heard there was a snuffbox in his trousers pocket, also.”

  Proving once and for all that servants always knew everything that happened in the house where they worked.

  “Can you think of any reason why he’d have those items in his possession?”

  Mrs. Mitchell poured hot water into the teapot, then waited for the leaves to steep. “The snuffbox was a gift,” she said. “Everyone downstairs knew Mr. Canfield had given it to him. Leonard used to sit at the table in the servants’ hall with the snuffbox out beside his hand so we could all see it. Then he’d take a pinch and sneeze into his handkerchief. I’ve always thought snuff was a dirty habit, myself.”

  “The snuffbox contained cocaine when he hanged himself, Mrs. Mitchell,” Prudence said, watching closely for signs of surprise or shock.

  “So Mr. Harris said. But I know snuff when I see and smell it, Miss MacKenzie. And it was snuff he put up his nose in the servants’ hall.”

  “What about the betting slips?”

  “Mr. Whitley bet on the horses all the time. So did the other young gentlemen. You’d see Leonard stuffing bits of paper into his pockets and slipping out the kitchen door when he had no business leaving the house. He’d come home all out of breath, like he’d run to the bookie on the corner and back. I never saw him with any money, but he was placing bets, that’s for sure.” She hesitated. “I’ve thought about that Tiffany ring box, but Mrs.
De Vries never told me she was missing any of her jewelry. And she would have, so I could question the maids and search their rooms. It might be that he found it somewhere and picked it up for no good reason except it was from Tiffany. A girl could be fooled into thinking the gift she was getting was worth a lot more than it actually was if it came in a Tiffany-blue box.”

  “Was Abbott walking out with someone?”

  Mrs. Mitchell suppressed a low-voiced laugh. “He wasn’t much of a one for the ladies,” she said.

  “So he wouldn’t put a cheap ring into a Tiffany box to buy a girl’s affections?”

  “He might have thought to sell it to one of the other footmen,” Mrs. Mitchell ventured.

  “Was he the kind of person to try a little blackmail if he thought he could get away with it?” Prudence asked.

  The housekeeper’s startled expression told her that blackmail had been the furthest thought from Mrs. Mitchell’s assessment of the dead footman turned valet. It was obvious that she immediately began running rapidly through the household roster to determine who, if anyone, could be hiding a misdeed serious enough to warrant extortion. Had one of the maids stolen a piece of seldom worn jewelry and then tried to dispose of the box in which it had been stored? Been caught in the act by Leonard? But if he wasn’t much for the ladies, what could the maid have offered in return for his silence?

  Prudence knew the moment Mrs. Mitchell realized that Abbott’s blackmail victim was possibly Mrs. De Vries herself. And she also intuited that the housekeeper must have suspected that her employer’s wife was too secretive about some of her afternoon excursions for them to be entirely innocent. A lady with nothing to conceal was always open about her whereabouts, never met alone with a gentleman not of her immediate family, and did not return to her home after an outing looking flustered or with her hair slightly disarranged.

  “We’ll never know whether Leonard would take advantage of someone else’s misfortune,” Mrs. Mitchell said stiffly. She genuinely liked Lena De Vries, who was by far the most gracious mistress she’d ever worked for. “Will we?”

  “I think we’ll find out a great deal about him,” Prudence answered. “He’s left footprints.”

  CHAPTER 23

  The unopened envelope inscribed to Leonard Abbott that Mrs. Mitchell handed over to Prudence bore a return address on Long Island, in a town Prudence had never heard of and had difficulty locating on a map.

  “It must be very small,” she told Josiah, who had found the office atlas and studied it with her.

  “Probably not much bigger than a crossroads village,” he said dubiously. “Not on the coast, so the chief means of livelihood is likely to be farming.”

  “The letter is from his sister,” Prudence said, rereading it now with a mental picture of where the writer lived. “She tells him to take care of his throat this winter because he had snow coughs when he was a child. Whatever those are.”

  “I’m going to guess that as soon as the first bad snowfall isolates the farms out there, people start hacking and sneezing and don’t stop until spring. Hence a snow cough.”

  “It’s not a long letter,” Prudence continued, smiling at Josiah’s logical explanation.

  “And not very well written,” he added, pointing out the awkwardly penned sentences and misspellings. “A sister of limited education.”

  “But caring,” Prudence chided. “She writes that everyone is well, but doesn’t mention any names. Presumably he knows whom she means. The dairy herd has grown by three cows and a flock of ducks has been added to the chickens they already raise. The family sounds moderately prosperous.”

  “Why didn’t the housekeeper open it when it arrived?”

  “She said he got a letter every other month or so. This one arrived after William had had his stroke. Mrs. Mitchell didn’t open it right away because she didn’t want to have to make the decision to write the parents about their son’s death. Not so much that he was dead, but the manner of it.”

  “But she would have done so eventually?”

  Prudence nodded. “Either she or Mr. Harris, the butler. Neither of them wanted to bother Lena with it, not when she had William’s condition to deal with and wasn’t well herself. But she would have had to be informed that they now had an address for Leonard’s next of kin. There’s a terrible stigma to suicide. I can’t even imagine how a family in a small community would handle it.”

  “What will happen now?”

  “Geoffrey has sent Amos out on the train. He’ll give them the news in person and hand over Abbott’s few effects. Lena insisted on paying a month’s wages.”

  “I don’t envy him, having to tell a family that one of its members took his own life.”

  “What seems strangest to me is that the police found no photographs of relatives when they searched Leonard’s room. Neither did the maids who cleaned it. He’d apparently thrown away or burned whatever mail he received from them, and as far as the butler and the housekeeper knew, he never visited.”

  “The Brooklyn Bridge has been open for more than six years now.”

  “Exactly,” Prudence said. “The trip to Brooklyn and then further out on the island isn’t that difficult anymore.”

  “So Leonard Abbott was estranged from them?”

  “That’s my best guess right now. Somehow he got from small farm to big city household via one of the most dependable domestic employment agencies I know of.”

  “He had to have had good references,” Josiah said. “Possibly genuine. Probably forged.”

  “Amos will have the whole story when he gets back.” Prudence tumbled the Tiffany ring box in the palm of her hand, opening and closing it as if a woman’s diamond or emerald ring would miraculously appear when she raised the lid.

  She’d seen Lena give Jasper Owens one valuable piece of jewelry at Morgan’s viewing; she didn’t doubt that what was missing from this box had also found its way into Owens’s pocket. And then to a fence or a jeweler who didn’t ask questions. But even Tiffany’s investigators wouldn’t be able to tell her what the box had once contained. She’d examined it carefully; there was nothing like a serial number or anything else distinctive to differentiate it from hundreds of other robin-egg blue boxes exactly like it.

  The only other clue they had to whatever secret Leonard Abbott had been concealing that was worth his life was the apparent link to Aubrey Canfield. A footman with aspirations to become a valet and the son of a wealthy and socially prominent New York family that could trace its proud lineage to the original Dutch settlers. One of them ascending the ladder of accomplishment, the other plunging downward. The Knickerbocker asking for the Long Island farm boy by name. Morgan Whitley making it easy for his friend Aubrey to cross a social divide he should never have attempted to leap.

  Geoffrey had already confided his suspicions, but until Amos returned with supporting evidence, they could be no more than that. Intuitions of a proclivity and possible crime so abhorrent to society that a man tarred with the brush of innuendo might never emerge unscathed.

  Aubrey had been an only son, the eldest of the two Canfield children to survive into adulthood. His sister had made her debut at the first Assembly Ball in mid-December, at the same event where Lady Rotherton breathed on Lena’s diamond necklace and discovered that many of the stones were fakes.

  For a moment, Prudence wondered what case she and Geoffrey would be investigating now had her aunt not produced that damning exhalation. Would the dead jeweler and his assistant still be alive? Leonard Abbott and Aubrey Canfield, whatever connection there was between them? Geoffrey often said it was a useless exercise to speculate on the what ifs of life, but sometimes it was impossible not to.

  “I’m going out, Josiah,” Prudence said, making up her mind before it got too late in the afternoon to pay a social call.

  He waited, eyebrows raised, but she didn’t choose to elucidate.

  He’d have to question Danny Dennis when the hansom cab driver got back from taking her
to wherever it was she was going.

  * * *

  “Mrs. Canfield and Miss Letisha are not receiving,” the butler said, shocked that someone of Miss Prudence MacKenzie’s social standing would think that ladies in a house of mourning would be welcoming callers in the ordinary way.

  “Please inform Miss Letisha that I’m here,” Prudence told him, stepping through the doorway as if he weren’t standing there trying to bar her way. “You may make it clear to her that this is not a social call.”

  Ten minutes later he ushered her upstairs to the small parlor where Letisha Canfield wrote letters and read the inspirational books approved by her mother. As well as the novels she and other daring young women passed among themselves. Her debutante season had come to an abrupt end when her brother died, as had Prudence’s when her father succumbed to a heart attack. They had that in common, as well as a basic stubbornness of character that translated into a yearning for independence.

  “The butler said you insisted he tell me this was not a social call,” Letisha said when they had settled themselves before the fire and she’d rung for tea. “I confess I’m intrigued.”

  “I’m sorry to intrude,” Prudence began, “but it’s important, Letisha.”

  “I knew Aubrey would die tragically. You can’t be the sister of someone with all of his weaknesses and not fear what the future will bring.”

  Prudence had expressed her condolences at the funeral. Now she simply reached out one hand to briefly clasp Letisha’s fingers. “I know you were close,” she said, not adding that she couldn’t remember the exact number of years separating the brother and sister.

  “I was just putting my hair up when he graduated from Harvard.” Letisha touched the perfect bun nestled at the nape of her neck, as though recalling the moment when she had changed her appearance from child to woman. “We grew apart while he was away. Perfectly natural, of course. Things changed when he moved back home. My brother was a very troubled soul, Prudence. He seemed determined not to burden me with his problems, but I knew he was suffering. Sometimes I’d wake up in the middle of the night and tiptoe into his bedroom just to reassure myself that he’d made it home alive. He’d be lying across his bed exactly the way he must have fallen into it, arms trailing to the floor, shoes still on, red-faced and snoring like an old man. I’ve known for a long time that the drink would kill him. I started mourning his death well before it happened.”