Axel (4 page)

As he demolished the food—why did all funeral casseroles taste the same?—he kept an eye out for possible suspects.

Mrs. Stoneleigh had been holding court in her corner for almost two hours when Axel decided the shadows under her eyes and her pallor demanded she be allowed privacy.

“Would you be offended, Mrs. Stoneleigh, if I suggested the assemblage is waiting for you to withdraw?”

“Is that how it’s done? Well, I am willing to oblige.” When she rose, she leaned on Axel and didn’t merely take his arm for show.

Mrs. Weekes took Mrs. Stoneleigh’s other arm. “She hasn’t taken a thing to eat, poor lamb. Not so much as a tea cake.”

The poor lamb stiffened, perhaps at being referred to in the third person.

“Wait here.” Axel ducked over to the buffet and filled another plate. He crooked his elbow at Mrs. Stoneleigh, and barely waited for her to wrap her fingers around his arm. “You simply leave. You keep walking, you don’t chat, don’t meet anybody’s gaze. Otherwise, your neighbors will shower you with their infernal, interminable kindness until you can barely stand.”

The lady heeded his instructions, and within moments, he had her upstairs in her private sitting room, a plate of food before her.

“Eat,” he admonished. “I’ll fetch you tea, unless you’d like something stronger?”

“Tea would be lovely, with milk and sugar.”

He eyed the plate, from which she had eaten nothing, and realized he was well and truly—if inconveniently—worried about her. The worry housed a goodly dose of resentment too, which probably made him convincing when he treated her to his best “do as the professor says” scowl before taking his leave.

Axel Belmont, an unlikely guardian angel if ever there was one, would stand over Abby until she consumed her portion, so she tucked into the food. He’d chosen simple fare: slices of apple, cheese, and ham, and two pieces of liberally buttered bread.

He paid attention, and not simply to the evidence relevant to a murder investigation.

Mr. Belmont had loved his wife, as had been obvious to anyone with eyes. His Caroline had loved him back, and loved their boys as well. They’d been such a happy little family, Abigail had dreaded the sight of them, the boys up before their parents when they rode out, or all four in the buggy on their way to church.

So of course, Mr. Belmont would comprehend that rich food did not digest easily on a grieving stomach. He would understand that a woman needed solitude after dealing with so many people, most of whom hadn’t bothered to call on her twice in all the years she’d dwelled among them. He would grasp immediately all manner of realities Gregory would never have understood even were they explained in detail.

Mr. Belmont reappeared carrying not a delicate tea cup, but a substantial, steaming mug.

“Your tea, and I purloined a few of these.” From his pocket he withdrew several tea cakes in a serviette, keeping one for himself and putting the rest on Abby’s plate.

“Will you sit, sir?” The tea was ambrosial, soothing and fortifying, prepared to the exact sweetness she preferred.

Mr. Belmont flipped out his tails and lowered himself beside her. “I will remain as long as you keep eating. I am avoiding interrogation by the gentlemen around the punch bowl.”

Interrogation about—? Oh.

Oh dear
. Abby bit into a cold slice of apple. “For you and I to be closeted up here isn’t quite proper, is it?”

He settled back, his frame filling his corner of the sofa with elegant, sober tailoring, and a perpetual scowl.

“You’re a widow now. By virtue of your husband’s demise, you graduate from needing chaperonage to being a source of it.”

Like the tea, the apple was lovely. Belmont’s brusque company was fortifying too, oddly enough.

“We are such a silly society,” Abby said.

“In many ways, though you have cleared the first hurdles of losing a spouse, so some of the silliness is behind you. You’re through the death, the wake, and the burial, and can get on with the grieving.”

Death.
Mr. Belmont eschewed platitudes and euphemisms, while Gregory had hardly ever dealt in blunt truths. All bluster and chit-chat, when he wasn’t scolding some servant or other.

Or his wife.

“I keep waiting for the grieving to start.” Abby considered a slice of apple, which her grandpapa had insisted was the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. “I keep waiting for tears, for sorrow, for something momentous, but all I feel is upset and… sad.”

“I recall saying nearly the same thing to my brother when Caroline died. There’s no wrong way to mourn. You’ve described your relationship with Stoneleigh as cordial, and maybe a marriage free of passion means you are spared passionate grief as well.”

Must he be so philosophical? Abby set the rest of the apple slice on the plate.

“Perhaps I will sit bolt upright in bed at midnight, realize I have no spouse, and be overcome by strong hysterics.”
Again.
For what Abby
did
have was a
late
spouse, who’d been murdered at his very desk.

Mr. Belmont ranged an arm along the back of the sofa, the gesture of a man not put off by an ungracious comment.

“Does the possibility of hysterics concern you, Mrs. Stoneleigh?”

Abby had many, many concerns. “One doesn’t know whether to be more concerned by a temptation toward drama, or a lack thereof. I’ve never been a widow before. Ah, what an awful word that is: widow.”

His scowl became less fierce, more irascible. What sort of man had a vocabulary of scowls?

“Widower is equally as unappealing,” he said. “Then it takes on a gilded edge in the eyes of some, as a man becomes desirable for his bereaved status.” This gilding had not appealed to Mr. Belmont.

“Women whose spouses have died are seldom viewed as having the same cachet as men in similar circumstances.”

Perhaps because the men could and did quickly remarry. Nonetheless, this startlingly unsentimental conversation was safer ground than the floundering bewilderment that had struck Abby the instant she’d seen her husband’s body.

Or the fear.

Mr. Belmont passed her a slice of cheese. “If you inherit this property, then you are a wealthy widow. Stoneleigh Manor is lovely, well run, and large, as acreages go in this area. I’d wager that among those assembled below, you will find several of the single gentlemen prompt with their condolence calls, and a few won’t even wait three months.”

A spark of anger flared, at Gregory, for subjecting Abby to those gentlemen and their
prompt
calls after years of neighborly indifference.

She took a bite of the cheese, an excellent cheddar. “You speak from unhappy experience.”

“I do. A man cannot possibly raise his own sons without the assistance of some female who knows the children not and loves them not.”

Many men wouldn’t even try. “I regret that we never had children.”

Mr. Belmont moved Abby’s tea closer to her side of the tray. “Would you really want to be comforting a seven-year-old today, trying to explain why her papa can’t ever take her riding again, or why death isn’t like oversleeping?”

Abby accepted the second slice of bread from Mr. Belmont’s hand, along with the knowledge that his wretched honesty was more comforting than all the platitudes of condolence put together.

“No wonder you are such an ill-tempered fellow.”

He shot his cuffs, which sported a surprising dash of lace. “My sister-in-law calls me reserved, my sons describe me as professorially stern. My brother says I’m backward but dear, and my late wife called me an ass more often than you might think.”

Heavenly days, Mr. Belmont’s recitation provoked him to something approaching a smile.

“Your brother has remarried?” Abby posed the question with the relief of a befogged mariner whose conversational oars have bumped against dry land by chance.

“Recently.” Mr. Belmont held her mug of tea out to her.

She sipped and set it down, but shook her head when he presented a slice of ham.

“You are pale as a winter sky, madam. You need sustenance.”

“I need a pause in my gluttony.” Abby cradled the mug close, wrapping both hands around its warmth. “I haven’t eaten much lately, and my digestion is tentative.”

Blond brows lowered to piratical depths. “Could you be carrying a posthumous child?”

How… presuming and sad the question was. “I could
not.
” Before Mr. Belmont could stumble through an apology for that bluntness too, Abby charged on. “Oh, don’t poker up. I wasn’t that sort of wife.”

He busied himself building up the fire, while Abby wondered what he’d make of her expostulation. He was apparently condoling the widow today, not investigating the murder, so he kept his questions behind his perfect, white teeth.

“I will take my leave of you,” he said, when the fire was throwing out decent heat. “I would like to call upon you within the week, to discuss what I learned when speaking with the staff yesterday, and I want to hear the reading of Gregory’s will.”

So did Abby. Gregory had made promises concerning that will, but Gregory’s promises were more often earnest in appearance than reliable in fact.

“The will should be read next week, after Gervaise and Lavinia have recovered from traveling out from London,” Abby said, rising and putting her mug of tea down. “You have been most kind, Mr. Belmont, exceedingly kind. You have my thanks.”

She did not want him to leave, and she couldn’t wait to get rid of him.

“I have been merely polite,” he replied. “Some would say not even that. Get some sleep, and call upon me should the need arise. I am not saying that for form’s sake.”

“You’re not, are you? You have unplumbed depths, Mr. Belmont.”

“And a murder investigation to complete.”

The Stoneleigh Manor servants had congregated in their parlor, black armbands in evidence on the livery, tankards of ale or cups of tea for any who weren’t stepping and fetching for the gathering upstairs. Madeline Hennessey wondered if her employer, the estimable Professor Axel Belmont, might have been more comfortable below stairs on such a day.

He’d asked her to keep an ear out for the odd snippet of talk, and Lord knew, the talk was flying. To facilitate loitering among her peers, Hennessey kept her plate full—the Stoneleigh cook had a lovely hand with the roasted beef—and her eyes down.

She could do nothing about her red hair, which got her noticed at any gathering.

“Mrs. Stoneleigh claims the colonel left me his pipes,” Robert Ambers said, not for the first time. He never referred to himself as the head stable lad, he was the
stable master.
He affected a neck cloth even on weekdays, and had his clothing made in London, and according to Mrs. Turnbull, the Candlewick housekeeper, Ambers had once mentioned titled family among his antecedents.

He might be a baron’s by-blow. Had the public school diction and the London tailoring of the Quality, and apparently gave orders like they did too.

“Nigh ten years of service,” Ambers went on, “and he left me a perishing lot of stinking pipes.”

He shot a look at Shreve, who was too old to be on his feet for hours at a time, though too conscientious to desert his post above stairs for long. That look was resentful, and commiserating too.

“Some of the colonel’s pipes are quite ornate,” the housekeeper observed from her seat by the hearth. Mrs. Jensen was reported to be a strict but fair supervisor, a fussy way to say she made a relentless pest of herself to the maids, just as a housekeeper ought.

Hennessey took another sip of her winter ale, a bitter brew for a bitter day.

“Did Missus say anything else?” Heath asked. He was an underfootman and had asked Hennessey to walk to services with him more than once.

She’d declined, of course. Raising a man’s hopes when she was abundantly happy with her post at Candlewick would have been unkind—also a nuisance.

“We do not gossip,” Jeffries, the head footman said, helping himself to more of the sliced beef on the sideboard. Jeffries was a strapping blond specimen who’d made it through the foolish years of young manhood without losing his hair or his common sense.

Hennessey had collected a few kisses from him at a harvest gathering or two. A nibbler, not the worst approach a man could take to kissing.

“Meaning no disrespect, but we can worry for our positions,” Heath retorted around a mouthful of beef. “We can long to know if we’ll have bread in our bellies and a place to sleep at night. Times are hard, and Missus might decide to take a repairing lease at some spa town.”

To go husband hunting? Hennessey didn’t know the lady well, but doubted Mrs. Stoneleigh was anxious to replace the colonel any time soon. He’d been a cold fish, full of his own consequence, and stinking of dogs and pipe smoke even when Hennessey had run into him in the Weasel.

Jeffries paused in his consumption of sliced beef long enough to shoot Heath a reproving look.

“Today is not the day to air those worries.” Jeffries and Heath bore a slight resemblance—cousins, or possibly half brothers. These things happened.

“Death turns a household upside down,” Mrs. Jensen observed. “And such a death as this…”

“Quite so,” Ambers said, rubbing his thumb over a signet ring on his smallest finger. “A tragedy for all concerned.”

The staff clearly knew the colonel had been murdered. Mr. Belmont had said nothing to the Candlewick servants, of course. Suicide was a bad, awful business, wreaking havoc with the inheritances and denying the deceased an honorable burial. A ruling of suicide would not require the magistrate—whose first love was the solitude of his glass houses—to spend hours interviewing servants, peering into desk drawers, and otherwise poking about.

Himself had grumbled about the burdens of his official duties the last time he’d invaded the Candlewick kitchen in search of sustenance, a transgression of which he was regularly guilty, much to Cook’s feigned horror.

“I’m sure madam would write characters for any seeking other prospects,” Shreve said, pulling on his gloves.

Nobody looked relieved.

“Mrs. Stoneleigh needs to know she can rely on us now,” Mrs. Jensen said, rising from her wingchair. “We’re worried about ourselves, when we all know the lady of house hasn’t been faring well lately, and now this.” She surveyed the various footmen and maids taking advantage of the generous fare.