Anne Perry's Christmas Mysteries: Two Holiday Novels (8 page)

So they had entertained a mere acquaintance in Maude’s place!

“I thought perhaps he was a relative,” Grandmama murmured.

Arthur smiled at her. “Not at all. A business acquaintance.” He sounded tired, a strain in his voice, a kind of bitter humor. “Sent actually to assess whether I should be offered a peerage or not. See if I am suitable.”

“Of course you are suitable!” Bedelia said sharply. “It is a formality. And I daresay he was pleased to get out of the city and visit us for a day or two. Cities are so…grubby when it snows.”

“It isn’t snowing,” he pointed out.

She ignored him. “At least his visit was not marred by tragedy.”

“Or anything else,” Clara added quietly.

“I think it will snow,” Agnes offered, glancing toward the curtained windows. “The wind has changed and the clouds were very heavy before sunset.”

Grandmama was delighted. Snow might mean she could not leave tomorrow, if it were sufficiently deep. “Oh dear,” she said with pretended anxiety. “I did not notice. I do hope I am not imposing on you?”

“Not in the slightest,” Bedelia assured her. “You say you were a friend of Maude’s, even on so short an acquaintance. How could you not be welcome?”

“Of course,” Agnes agreed again, echoing Bedelia. “You said Maude spoke to you a great deal? We saw her so little, perhaps it would not be too distressing if we were to ask you what she told you of her…travels?” She looked hastily at Bedelia. “That is…if it is seemly to discuss! I do not wish to embarrass you in any way at all.”

What on earth was Agnes imagining? Orgies around the campfire?

“Perhaps…another time,” Arthur said shakily, his voice hoarse. “If indeed it does snow, you may be here with us long enough to…” He trailed off.

“Quite,” Bedelia agreed, without looking at him.

Zachary apologized. “We are all overwrought,” he explained. “This is so unexpected. We hardly know how to…believe it.”

“We had no idea at all that she was ill.” Randolph spoke for the first time since Grandmama had come into the room. “She seemed so…so very alive…indestructible.”

“You no more than met her, my dear,” Bedelia said coolly.

Grandmama turned to her in surprise.

“Maude left before my son was born,” Bedelia explained, as if an intrusive question had been asked. “I think you do not really understand what an…an extraordinary woman she was.” Her use of the word
extraordinary
covered a multitude of possibilities, most of them unpleasant.

Grandmama did not reply. She must detect! The room was stiff with emotion. Grief, envy, anger, above all fear. Did she detect the odor of scandal? For heaven’s sake, she was not achieving much! She had no proof that it had been murder, only a certainty in her own suspicious mind.

“No,” she said softly. “Of course I didn’t know how extraordinary she was. I spoke with her and listened to her memories and feelings, so very intense, a woman of remarkable observation and understanding. But as you say, it was only a short time. I have no right to speak as if I knew her as you must have, who grew up with her.” She let the irony of the forty-year gap hang in the air. “I imagine when she was abroad she wrote wonderful letters?”

There was an uncomfortable silence, eloquent in itself. So Maude had not written to them in the passionate and lyrical way she had spoken at St. Mary. Or she had, and for some reason they chose to ignore it.

She plowed on, determined to stir up something that might be of meaning. “She had traveled as very few people, men or women, can have done. A collection of her letters would be of interest to many who do not have such opportunities. Or such remarkable courage. It would be a fitting monument to her, do you not think?”

Agnes drew in her breath with a gasp, and looked at Bedelia. She seemed helpless to answer without her approval. A lifetime habit forged in childhood? Perhaps forged was the right word, it seemed to fetter her like iron. It made Grandmama furious, with Agnes and with herself. It was a coward’s way, and she knew cowardice intimately, as one knows one’s own face in the glass.

Clara turned to her husband, then her mother-in-law, expecting some response.

But it was Arthur who answered.

“Yes, it would,” he agreed.

“Arthur!” Bedelia said crisply. “I am sure Mrs. Ellison means well, but she really has no idea of the extent or the nature of Maude’s…travels, or the unsuitability of making them public.”

“Have you?” Arthur asked, his dark brows raised.

“I beg your pardon?” Bedelia said coolly.

“Have you any idea of Maude’s travels?” he repeated. “I asked you if she wrote, and you said that she didn’t.” He did not accuse her of lying, but the inevitability of the conclusion was heavy in the air. She sat pale-faced, tight-lipped.

It was Clara who broke the silence. “Do you think it will still be acceptable for us to have the Matlocks and the Willowbrooks to dine with us on Christmas Eve, Mama-in-law? Or to go to the Watch Night services at Snargate? Or would people think us callous?”

“I don’t suppose we can,” Agnes said sadly. “I was looking forward to it too, my dear.” She looked at Clara, not at Zachary who had drawn in his breath to say something.

“Death does not alter Christmas,” Bedelia responded after a moment’s thought. “In fact Christmas is the very time when it means least. It is the season in which we celebrate the knowledge of eternity, and the mercy of God. Of course we shall go to the Watch Night services in Snargate, and show a bond of courage and faith, and solidarity as a family. Don’t you think so, my dear?” She looked at Arthur again, as if the previous conversation had never taken place.

“It would seem very appropriate,” he answered to the room in general, no discernible emotion in his voice.

“Oh I’m so glad,” Agnes responded, smiling. “And we have so much to be grateful for, it seems only right.”

Grandmama thought it an odd remark. For what were they so grateful, just now? The fact that Lord Woollard had considered Arthur suitable for a peerage? Could that matter in the slightest, compared with the death of a sister? Of course it could! Maude had not been home for forty years, and they had considered her absent permanently. She had chosen to return at a highly inconvenient time, otherwise they would not have dispatched her to stay with Joshua and Caroline. Was there really some family scandal she might speak of, and ruin such a high ambition?

Any further speculation on that subject was interrupted by the announcement of dinner. The meal was excellent, and richer than anything Caroline had offered.

Conversation at the table centered on other arrangements for Christmas, and how they might be affected either by Maude’s death, or the weather. They skirted around the issue of a funeral, and when or where it should be conducted, but it hung in the air unsaid, like a coldness, as if someone had left a door open.

Grandmama stopped listening to the words and concentrated instead upon the intonation of voices, the ease or tension in hands, and above all the expression in a face when the person imagined they were unnoticed.

Clara appeared relieved, as if an anxiety had passed. Perhaps the visit of Lord Woollard had made her nervous. She might be less confident than she appeared. Had she been socially clumsy or otherwise unacceptable? Since her husband was the only heir, that would have been a serious problem. Perhaps she came from a more ordinary background than the rest of the family and had previously made errors, or her mother was one of those women ruthlessly ambitious for their daughters, and no achievement was great enough?

Zachary did not say a great deal, and she saw him look at Bedelia more often than she would have expected. There was an admiration in him, a sense of awe. For her beauty? She was certainly far better looking than poor Agnes. She had a glamour, an air of femininity, mystery, almost power, that confidence gave her. Grandmama watched her as well, and in spite of herself.

What was it like to be beautiful? There were not many women so blessed, certainly she had never been so herself, and neither were Agnes nor Maude. Clara was no more than handsome. Luminous, heart-stopping beauty was very rare. Even Bedelia did not have that.

Grandmama had seen it once or twice, and one did not forget it. Emily’s great-aunt by her first marriage, Lady Vespasia Cumming-Gould, had possessed it. Even in advanced years it was still there, unmistakable as a familiar song—one note, and the heart brings it all back.

Why did Zachary still watch Bedelia? Ordinary masculine fascination with beauty? Or good manners, because this was her house?

Arthur did not watch her the same way.

Agnes looked at both of them, and seemed to see it also. There was a sadness in her eyes. Was it an awareness that she could never compete? Perhaps that was the sense of failure Grandmama detected, and understood. She knew it well: a plain face, no magic in the eyes or the voice, above all the knowledge of not being loved.

Envy? Even hate, over the years? Why? Simply beauty? Could it matter so much? Very few women were more than pleasing in their youth, and perhaps gaining a little sense of style, or even better, wit, in their maturity. And she had not been left on the shelf. But sisters did compete. It was inevitable. Was money also involved, and now a peerage, too?

The conversation continued around her, concern for those who would be alone over the Christmas period and possibly in need, those whose health was poor, anyone to whom they could or should give a small gift. Would the weather deteriorate?

“Do you often get shut in by the snow?” Grandmama inquired with interest. “It must be a rather frightening experience.”

“Not at all,” Zachary assured her. “We will be quite safe. We have food and fuel, and it will not be for more than a day or two. But please don’t concern yourself. If it happens at all, it will be in January and February. You know the old saying ‘As the days get longer, the weather gets stronger.’” He smiled, transforming his face from its earlier gravity to a surprising warmth.

She smiled back, enjoying the sudden and inexplicable sense of freedom it gave her. “I have found it very often true,” she agreed. “And I am sure you are quite wise enough to guard against any possible need. It was rather more such things as someone falling ill that I was thinking of. But I daresay that is a difficulty for all people who live in the wilder and more beautiful country areas.”

She continued being charming. It was like having a new toy. She turned to Bedelia. “You know, Mrs. Harcourt, I would never have seen Romney Marsh as anything more than a very flat coast, rather vulnerable, with a permanent smell of the sea, until I met Miss Barrington. But on our walks I saw how she was aware of so much more! She spoke of the wildflowers in the spring, and the birds. She knew the names of a great many of them, you know, and their habits. The water birds especially.” She was inventing at least part of this as she was going along. It was exhilarating. The surprised and anxious faces around her increased her sense of adventure.

She drew in her breath and went on. “I had never realized before how perfectly everything fits into its own place in the scheme of things.”

“Really?” Bedelia said, her voice almost expressionless. “It is an interest she had developed recently. In fact, since she left England altogether. She must have gained it from reading. Except perhaps in her early childhood, she never saw them in life.”

“She did not go walking a great deal?” Grandmama asked innocently.

“She was only here for a matter of hours,” Bedelia informed her. “She did not have time to go out at all. Surely she told you that she arrived without giving us any prior warning, and we were thus unable to accommodate her. Do you imagine we would have asked Joshua Fielding to offer his hospitality were it possible for us to do so ourselves?”

So she was correct! Maude had been given the single dose of peppermint water by someone in the house. She must think very rapidly. Better to retreat than to cause an argument, much as the words stuck in her mouth. Was it better to be considered a fool and of no danger at all, or as a highly knowledgeable woman who needed to be watched? She must decide immediately. She could not be both, and time was short.

Bedelia was waiting. They were all looking at her. A brilliant idea flashed into her mind. She could be both apparently stupid, and extremely clever—if she affected to be a little deaf!

She drew in a breath to say so, and apologize for it. Then just before she did, she had another thought of infinitely greater clarity. If she were to claim to be deaf then any evidence she gained could later be denied!

She smothered her pride, a thing she had never done before, except on that unmentionable occasion when her own past had loomed up like a corpse out of the river. But if she had survived that, then nothing this family could do to her would ever make a dent in her inner steel.

“You are quite right,” she said meekly. “I had forgotten she had been away so very long. If she had no interest before, then it must have been acquired entirely by reading. Perhaps she was homesick for the wide skies, the salt wind, and the sound of the sea?”

There was a flash of victory in Bedelia’s eyes, a knowledge of her own power. Grandmama felt it as keenly as if it had been a charge of electricity between them such as one is pricked by at times if one touches certain metals when the air is very dry. She had read that predatory animals scented blood in the same way, and it gave her a shiver of fear and intense knowledge of vulnerability, which made life suddenly both sweet and fragile.

Was that what Agnes had known all her life? Or was she being fanciful? What about Maude? Was she crushed, too? Was that really why she had left England, and everything familiar that she unquestionably loved, and gone to all kinds of ancient, barbaric, and splendid other lands, where she neither knew anyone nor was known? A desperate escape?

Perhaps there was very much more here, beneath the surface, than she had dreamed, even when she had stood in the bedroom beside Maude’s dead body this morning?

Bedelia was smiling. “Perhaps she was,” she agreed aloud. “But she could have chosen to live by the sea if she had wished to. Poor Maude had very little sense of how to make decisions, even the right ones. It is most unfortunate.”