A Tall Dark Stranger (2 page)

“He seems a nice fellow,” Lollie said. He is as friendly as a pup. As long as a man doesn’t actually insult him, he is ready to call him a friend.

“He is a liar, Lollie,” I said, and told him my reasons.

“By Jove, I thought Maitland had a sneaky look about him as they went sliding into the shepherd’s hut. I thought he was probably meeting a woman, but when I got there, they were just having a cheroot. I shall go back this afternoon and see if I can find out what they were up to.”

“Talking leaves no trace,” I told him, very much in Aunt Talbot’s know-it-all way. I must watch that sad tendency. Omniscience is well enough at nine and forty, but not at two and twenty. We continued on home.

We went in at the back door as it is impossible to go to the water meadow without picking up a few traces of mud.

“You’d best make it quick. She’s waiting for her lunch,” Cook warned us.

She,
Aunt Talbot, didn’t like waiting for her lunch. We darted upstairs to tidy up, thinking no more about Stoddart. We had no notion of the importance he would assume in our quiet lives. No notion that murder and treachery swirled around this stranger. All I knew was that he wasn’t from Bath, as he claimed.

If
Methodists ordained ladies, Aunt Talbot would make a good clergyman. She has a fine disapproving air of anything that smacks of entertainment. In appearance, she is tall and thin. Her auburn hair, her best feature, is bound in a tight knob and covered with a cap. Yet despite her sour expression and plain dressing, she has a natural air of elegance, which I envy.

I have a similar shade of hair and I wear mine short and loose. Auntie’s elegance is entirely lacking in me. I stand five feet five inches and have a well-rounded figure. Not fat, just rounded! My fingers are usually smeared with paint or ink, my gowns splattered with mud or powdered with dust.

 Lollie tells me my best hope of nabbing a
parti
is my eyes and my dot of fifteen thousand pounds. My eyes are green and adequately lashed. Mama left me her dot, as Lollie was to inherit Oakbay Hall.

Aunt Talbot is our paternal aunt, Papa’s spinster sister. She arrived in our lives three years ago when Mama died. We were already beyond redemption. I, at nineteen, was not about to be bear-led by a poor relation. On the contrary, we are slowly but surely leading Maude Talbot into a life of dissipation.

She now accepts a half glass of wine with dinner; none for lunch. It gives her the megrims if taken when the sun is up. She accompanies us to the local assemblies, strictly in the line of duty. She goes to the card parlor but won’t touch cards. She gossips instead or tells the ladies’ fortunes.

You may well stare to hear such a stickler for propriety reads palms, but so it is. The little touch of Beelzebub that lingers in the best of us must find some outlet. Auntie does not just read palms; she reads the whole hand. Auntie (and Lollie, too) has an earth hand; short palm and short fingers. These characteristics denote a hardworking, no-nonsense personality. I am afflicted with a water hand: long palm and long fingers, denoting one who lives with his or her head in the clouds and is impractical—in short, artistic.

I got my water hands clean more quickly than Lollie despite my unreliability, however, and went below to distract Aunt Talbot from a lecture with a recital about the stranger met in the meadow. She is a glutton for gossip of any sort. When life offers no great doings, the small ones such as a passing stranger assume a large interest.

“The man—I refuse to call a liar a gentleman—is no better than he should be,” she declared. “A man who lies about his past has some evil to conceal. But then who can you expect to meet if you go trolloping about the countryside looking like a commoner? When God gives a lady no children, the devil sends nieces and nephews in their stead.”

That “looking like a commoner” was a dig at my oldest sprigged muslin. I have two or three such gowns that really ought to be dust rags, but they are too useful for my fieldwork.

“Hardly the countryside, Auntie,” I objected. “I was in our own meadow. And Mr. Stoddart didn’t do anything.”

“I don’t call lying nothing. A man who will tell an untruth will do worse. And posing as a clergyman’s son! I’m surprised Mr. Maitland didn’t run him off. But then Maitland is a perfect gentleman. Almost too good. He never suspects a trick.”

Auntie entertains the forlorn hope that I will nab Maitland. Either that or she is so smitten by his beauty that she fails to hear the gossip about him. Age seems no inoculation against Maitland’s charm.

Lollie joined us and we were finally allowed to listen to Auntie say grace and then eat. Afterward, since the day was too fine to spend a minute inside, I took my sketch pad and watercolor box to the orchard and sketched a yellow loosestrife that grew between the trees. When I tired of that, I dipped into my well-thumbed copy of Gilbert White’s
Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne
to read about nature.

Lollie didn’t get to the shepherd’s hut to investigate, after all. A friend invited him to course hares and of course he was off like a shot to kill more harmless animals.

We had company for dinner, which made it impossible for me to finish work on the morning’s sketches. This didn’t bother me. There were the long winter evenings to do the finely detailed work. Spring and summer were spent on the sketching outdoors.

* * *

The next morning I was back at the water meadow by nine. Lollie accompanied me to pacify Auntie, but in fact he intended to scoot off to oversee the sheep shearing.

“You’ll be safe as churches for an hour or two, eh, sis?” he asked before leaving.

“Yes, I’m fine.” I began looking about for a subject to sketch. “What is that blue thing amongst the bulrushes? Not a flower, surely? There are no water lilies here.”

I peered at the flecks of blue through the bulrushes that swayed in the middle of the water meadow. The water swells in the spring and the bulrushes ring the edge of the water for the rest of the year.

Lollie got a branch and began poking at the blue thing. “Looks like Maitland’s people are using the water for dumping trash,” he called. We share the water meadow with Maitland. Half of it is on his property. “It’s an old jacket. I’ll have a word with Maitland.”

He tried to hook the edge of the branch under the material, but the branch bent. Looking at Lollie, I saw his jaw fall open. He came to rigid attention, like a pointer on the scent of game.

“There’s someone in the jacket,” he said in a high, disbelieving voice.

I dropped my precious watercolor box and darted to join him. I saw a head bobbing in the water, facedown. The branch wasn’t strong enough to pull the body to the edge of the water. In his excitement Lollie waded in and dragged the body out by its topboots. Once on dry land he turned the body over. I was overcome by an unusual fit of maidenly reluctance and turned my head aside.

“Good God, it’s Mr. Stoddart!” he exclaimed.

That was enough to make me turn around. It was Stoddart, all right. He hadn’t been in the water long enough to become discolored or bloated, but he was entirely waterlogged. He was certainly dead.

His open eyes stared at the heavens; his mouth was slack. He looked pathetic with his face as pale as a fish’s belly and his sodden hair plastered against his forehead, but he was recognizable. There were no visible marks of violence on him.

I looked at Lollie in consternation and noticed that his face was as pale as the corpse’s.

“He must have drowned,” I said, returning my gaze to the body and musing on the uncertainty of life.

“What should we do?”

“One of us should go for help. The other will stay here with the body.”

“It’s odd that he’d drown in ten inches of water,” Lollie said, and bent over the body to examine it. “He must have fallen and knocked himself unconscious. Odd there’s no bump. Good lord!” he exclaimed. “Take a look at this, Amy!”

“What is it?” I asked. I didn’t want to “take a look” at whatever it was, but I glanced down to see what Lollie was doing. He had opened the jacket.

“He’s been stabbed!” he exclaimed. “I noticed the hole in his jacket. It goes right through the shirt. The water’s washed the blood away, but he was stabbed right enough.”

I didn’t look at the evidence. After a momentary surge of nausea, I said in a hollow voice, “Then you’d best send for the constable.”

“You’ll stay with the body? Wouldn’t you rather I stay?”

“Yes, much rather.”

I turned to leave, then turned back. “Come with me, Lollie. No one can harm a corpse, but whoever killed him might be lurking nearby.”

“Stoddart’s been dead for hours. His killer wouldn’t stay around. I’ll be all right, but hurry.”

He needn’t have suggested it. I flew through the meadow as if pursued by a madman, trampling wild-flowers underfoot in my dart, which is something I would not usually do. The rank grass entwined my ankles, as if to hold me back.

The trip had never seemed so long. Finally, I ran, gasping, into the house and fell onto a chair in Cook’s steamy kitchen. I was grateful for the comfort of the familiar servants, the stove and aromas of cooking.

“Dead,” I gasped.

Cook turned as pale as paper and grabbed the edge of the table. “Not Master Lollie!” Cook hasn’t yet adjusted to calling Lollie Mr. Talbot, though I have become Miss Talbot.

Her helper, Inez, screamed. Betty, the scullery maid, came darting out of her lair carrying a plate and a tea towel. She dropped the plate and it broke with a clattering noise.

“Oh, no! Not Lollie,” I assured them. “There’s a body in the water meadow. The man’s been stabbed. We must send for Monger.”

Inez and Betty screamed in unison and hugged each other for comfort. “Stabbed! We’ll all be kilt.” That was Betty.

“A murderer! I ain’t going out into the garden for vegetables,” Inez averred.

“Hush up, you silly girls,” Cook said. “Who’d bother to murder the likes of you?” On this piece of cold comfort she turned back to me. “Who was it, a stranger?”

“Mr. Stoddart.”

“Oh, the man you and Master Lollie met yesterday.” There are no secrets in a small household such as ours.

“Yes. I’ll send George to Chilton Abbas to fetch Monger.” George is our footman, the only male house servant other than Lentle, our aging butler. We have grooms and gardeners outdoors, but in the house George is our factotum. I don’t know how we would get along without him. “I’d best tell Auntie first,” I said.

“She’s doing a reading. Mrs. Murray stopped by.”

Mrs. Murray is our local M.P.’s lady,
nėe
Marie Fanshawe. Whenever her husband brings her home from London, she entertains herself by swanning through the village in overly elaborate gowns, flirting with all the local fellows and having her fortune read by Auntie. In the earlier days she had held card parties, but once the local ladies discovered the high stakes she played for, they were always busy when she called.

As soon as I had caught my breath, I ran upstairs and into the Rose Saloon. Our less worthy neighbors have their palms read in the morning parlor, but as the carpet and curtains there are well past their prime, such notables as Mrs. Murray are entertained in the Rose Saloon. It is a beautiful, lofty chamber, full of sunlight on that morning in May. Mama had redone it just before her death. Mama always liked to be in fashion.

I stopped a moment in the doorway to compose myself. Auntie was examining Mrs. Murray’s hand. I knew from my own observation that Mrs. Murray was afflicted with club thumbs. It is the only flaw in an otherwise perfect physical specimen. She is a blond, blue-eyed, porcelain-skinned lady who is, incidentally, twenty years younger than her husband but still more than a decade older than myself.

According to Auntie, those clubbed thumbs indicated an unmanageable temper and a coarse, violent nature. I had seen no evidence of these character flaws. Her nature was flighty and vain; I would hardly call her either violent or coarse.

“Oh, Miss Talbot,” she said, glancing up. “Have you had a spill? I see your gown is all muddied.”

“There’s a dead man in the water meadow,” I said. “Mr. Stoddart. He’s been stabbed.”

“Oh, my!” She lifted both hands to her lips. The clubbed thumbs marred the beauty of ivory fingers and flashing diamond rings. “You’re sure he’s dead?”

“He’s been dead for hours, I should think.”

“The devil you say!” Aunt Talbot gasped. “Stabbed? You mean ... murdered?”

“Yes. We found him floating amidst the bulrushes. Lollie stayed with him.”

“Stoddart, you say? That’s not a local name,” Mrs. Murray said, “How did you know him?”

“I met him yesterday. We must send for the constable.”

“Monger?” Auntie said. “The man’s an idiot. Send for the justice of the peace. This is a job for McAdam.”

“Oh, I think in a case like this you should call the constable,” Mrs. Murray said. As the M.P.’s wife, she was allowed to have the final say in the matter.

George—who else?—was sent off for Monger. Mrs. Murray graciously offered the use of her gig for the trip, as Monger has only a donkey cart and the donkey is approaching retirement age.

“I believe we’ll continue this reading another time, Mrs. Murray,” Aunt Talbot said.

“But my fate line! You were just about to read it.”

“I’m too upset to continue this morning. A murder right on our doorstep while we were enjoying ourselves, merry as mice in malt! Gracious me, and Amy and Lollie were talking to him just yesterday.”

“Who is he and where did you meet him, Miss Talbot?” Mrs. Murray inquired.

I told her about meeting him while I was sketching.

“Did he say why he was here?” she asked. I was a little surprised that she asked. It seemed she was beginning to assume the proper provincial curiosity. She didn’t spend much time in the country. Her being here in May was particularly unusual, with the London Season in full swing.

“He said he was from Bath,” Aunt Talbot told her. “Amy caught him out in a black lie. He didn’t know a thing about Bath. It’s pretty clear the fellow was up to no good.”