Death Sits Down to Dinner (34 page)

Vetiver had been seated next to Marigold from the moment he arrived in the salon until the end of Lady Ryderwood’s song. How did she know this? Because Mrs. Churchill had said so: “I’m glad to see that Marigold is being told to rein it in by her fiancé, silly little thing. She should have left the room with Hermione’s companion to see to her dress and not sit there like a dowager having us all run in different directions.” Clementine had obediently glanced over at the couple and then resumed her hunting conversation with her husband and Sir Henry, immediately after which Hermione had announced that Lady Ryderwood would sing. Vetiver had been there with them all the time! He had not left the salon; he could not possibly be the murderer.

She heard the person who had come into the room moving around. Was it Hermione counting chairs or rearranging flowers, or was it Adelaide coming to check on her sheet music?
Oh dear God,
Clementine realized in a horrible moment,
if this is the murderer then it’s the Chinese jar they are after, and it’s been moved.
She felt that moment of cold dread when you understand that you have made a terrible mistake. She shivered, the hairs on her arms bristled, and in a flash she knew, as surely as she knew that Lord Montfort had not yet arrived in the house, that she had known all along who the murderer was. “
Che gelida manina!
” Everything came together into a crescendo of understanding, superbly orchestrated. She was alone in the room with the person who had killed Sir Reginald.

Sir Reginald? Here was where inspiration wavered and didn’t slide into place quite as smoothly and as neatly as it should. Sir Reginald did not fit as the victim for this murderer at all; there was no perceivable motive, surely? But undoubtedly his murderer was in the room looking for the Chinese jar, the jar that Clementine could see quite clearly in the far corner of the room. And if Clementine could see the jar, then she would also be seen when it was discovered.

There was an exclamation of annoyance and she caught a movement at the edge of the screen, a flash of the shell pink beloved by Hermione. Clementine felt her stomach heave and she thought for one awful moment that she was going to be sick. A wave of heedless panic engulfed her and she wanted to cry out,
Here I am!
to get the awful moment of discovery over with, as if she were a child playing hide-and-seek and now, after a long and exciting wait, could no longer contain the suspense of being discovered.

She swallowed and watched as the owner of the portable ladder walked over to the precious Jiajing jar and lifted the lid.

Clementine felt elation and panic race through her body, practically paralyzing her. For there, bent over in the corner, was an immensely different creature altogether from the one she knew. This woman moved with decisive, brisk movements, there was power in the set of her shoulders and tremendous confidence in her movements; it seemed, somehow, that she was taller. This was not the lovely creature who habituated drawing rooms and theaters; this woman emanated determined purpose. She moved with the elastic confidence of an athlete, the sort of woman who could easily control and train the spirited horse that she said only her husband could ride.
Lady Ryderwood was the true owner of Lochinvar!
Clementine’s mind flashed back to the night she and Lord Montfort had left to go to dinner at Hermione’s house. Ralph’s voice sounded in her head:

“Yes, I remember her husband well … he was confined to a wheelchair, poor chap, completely crippled by his war wounds. Awfully bad luck for a man who loved his horses…”

The scales, as it says somewhere in the Bible, fell from Clementine’s eyes. Everything she had been led to believe about her new friend crumbled to dust. It was Veda Ryderwood who had climbed down the ladder, murdered Sir Reginald, and climbed back in through the window on that bitterly cold night. Her hands had been like ice! She had touched Clementine, seen her shiver, and laughed it off as stage nerves. Stage nerves! This woman had never been frightened in her life.

Veda Ryderwood lifted out the silk ladder and gathered it up into a bundle, and with the weight still swinging she turned and looked straight at Clementine.

Her stare, direct and penetrating, took Clementine in as if she knew she would find her cowering in her chair behind the screen.

Lady Ryderwood said nothing in the second it took her to assess the situation. She dropped her ladder and closed the short distance between them in an agile bound and, reaching out an arm, fastened a grip of iron on Clementine’s wrist. She jerked her up out of the chair and turned her around all in one smooth and hideously capable movement. Clementine found herself with her arm twisted up tightly behind her back and pinned between her shoulder blades, with Veda Ryderwood’s chin digging into her shoulder.

“Can you feel this, Lady Montfort?” Something hard pressed into Clementine’s back and she gasped with pain. “Yes, I see you do; it’s a gun. One peep and I’ll put a bullet in your liver. Agonizing, and you will die awfully slowly.”

Fear froze Clementine from head to foot. She thought her heart was going to burst out of her chest. Lady Ryderwood let go of her arm and she carefully slid it down to her side, hardly aware that the sharp pain in her shoulder had now turned into a dull, aching throb.

“I had you earmarked from the start as one of those women who can never quite mind their own business. How right I was.” Veda Ryderwood stepped back, pointing her gun.

“Che gelida manina—your tiny hand is frozen.”
Clementine said aloud the words that had meant little to her on that night; her Italian was particularly poor, and Lady Ryderwood smiled.

“Yes, that’s right. Now you remember. But you remember far too late. I was cold, from climbing up the ladder in my underclothes.” She laughed as she saw Clementine’s look of disapproval. “My skirt detaches from my dress quite cleverly, it was the work of a moment to unbutton and drop it to the floor so I could climb the ladder. But when I came in through the salon window I brushed against you and you shivered. I thought you more alert than you actually are, and so I passed my cold hands off as stage fright.”

“You killed Sir Reginald … but why?”

“Yes, I killed him, and now I’m going to have to include you in the last part of my plans and then kill you too. A pity really, as you are the only really decent person I’ve met since I came back to this godforsaken country with its unbearable, complacent arrogance; so convinced that every one of you is born to rule.”

“It’s your country too…”

“Oh really? I don’t think it is. My mother was Dutch, my father German. I married an Englishman certainly, but that most doesn’t make me English. He was another stupid fool who thought that the English were God’s appointed. Take away your colonies and dominions and what are you after all? A bunch of uneducated, isolated barbarians with nothing to recommend you, and now you will lose your empire to a country that knows how to govern.”

“Germany? That’s quite ridiculous!” Clementine laughed.
Keep her talking,
she said to herself.
Ralph will surely come through that door in a moment.

“Yes, that’s right, Lady Montfort, Germany. The German culture is more educated, refined, and elevated than that of England any day. I’ve spent an amusing eight months watching you all. There is nothing this country has of any value, except its industry, its steel mills, and its lucrative colonies. Britain has become a culture wholly obsessed by money, with no real interest or comprehension of music, literature, or philosophy; a culture completely empty of intellect and certainly with no obedience from its social inferiors. Your monarchy is borrowed from Germany, even the cuisine you enjoy is French. It’s astonishing that your greatest writer of
this
century is a dolt like Rudyard Kipling and your most notable composer is Elgar!”

“Good heavens, I’m not interested in Kipling and Elgar!” Clementine was calculatedly brusque; she must push Lady Ryderwood into a revelation. “I simply don’t understand why you killed Sir Reginald
.
”

“It’s quite simple; I was merely doing my job.”

Clementine laughed, it was a shaky laugh, but the best she could do. “Your job? Oh, for heaven’s sake!”

“I will explain since your imagination only takes you so far. Unlike you, I never had the advantages of birthright. I came from a humble family. My father died when I was fifteen, leaving my mother and me with nothing. I had a natural talent and I worked hard to make it pay; you have no idea how grueling it is to train the voice. Hours of practice require physical stamina and dedicated patience; there is never a day off. I was employed at the Munich Opera House…”

“You are Velma Moser,” Clementine couldn’t help herself as she remembered her conversation with Lady Ripon at the theatre. “You are the Queen of the Night!” The pitiless cruelty of the role was far better suited to this new Lady Ryderwood than the timid and gentle Butterfly. It was an inspired guess, and Clementine was rewarded for it. She had touched on conceit and now Lady Ryderwood or Velma Moser, or whoever this woman really was, was eager to tell her story.

“Yes, I am
Velma Moser
.” And being the diva she was, the woman preened. “My most successful role was the Queen of the Night; no one can sing that aria as well—I was barely twenty years old when I first sang it in Munich. Twenty!”

“But this doesn’t explain…”

“Then do not interrupt, Lady Montfort.” Lady Ryderwood was warming to her story now. “It was in Munich that I met Sir Francis Ryderwood. He fell in love with me, and took me away from the exhausting life of an underpaid performing artist. For the first time I knew what it was like not to worry about money, to eat well and wear beautiful clothes, and with the allowance he gave me I was able to keep my mother in some comfort until she died. Unfortunately, Sir Francis patriotically decided that he would return to his old commission to fight in the second Boer War. No, Lady Montfort, I was not concerned for his safety, but I did manage to persuade him to marry me before he left.

“My concern was for my mother’s two younger sisters, my aunts Katryn and Andrea, the kindest, gentlest women I ever knew when I was a little girl. They had gone to live in southern Africa in the late 1890s. Many young Dutch girls emigrated to the Transvaal to marry Boer cattle farmers. The men were happy to have young wives from the old country: strong, willing, working-class farmers’ daughters, who wanted the opportunity of a new life with hardworking husbands who would give them big families. When the Witwatersrand Gold Rush fomented even more discord between the Dutch Afrikaners of the Transvaal and the British settlers in the Cape, your government decided it was time to intervene, on behalf of the British immigrants of course. It was a long and bloody struggle and the Boers fought bravely for their freedom to the bitterest of endings.

“When my war-hero husband returned severely crippled from his war wounds, I did not feel that this was sufficient reparation for the lives of my aunts and my little cousins who had died such terrible deaths in British camps. They just disappeared like that!” Veda Ryderwood snapped her fingers in the air and her face was as cold as stone as she continued. “I was alone and in despair when I heard how my aunts were taken from their farms and corralled, along with thousands of other Dutch Afrikaner women and children. With the Boer women and children incarcerated, the British set about the destruction of their farms: burning homesteads and poisoning wells to deprive the Boer rebels of food and shelter, while their families starved to death in those camps. Yes, I can see that you have perhaps heard of Lord Kitchener’s shameful scorched-earth policy. It was successful; it certainly brought the last of the Boer rebels to heel.”

“The British army didn’t intend for them to die.” Clementine felt the story was a little one-sided; at least she hoped it was. “They put them in camps because they were alone on their farms with no one to protect them.”

Lady Ryderwood’s laugh was bitter as she shook her head, “They starved to death in those camps.

“Even though Francis was in a wheelchair, I knew I could not continue with him. I had to make a plan. Bad investments had reduced his fortune and we had to live inexpensively in Ibiza, so there was nothing to be had from him. I wrote to my old voice teacher, Franz Schmidt, as I knew I would have to earn my living again. He immediately came to visit me in Ibiza and he did something far better than return me to the stage of the Munich Opera House. He persuaded me to work for the German government, to gather useful information and cause chaos within the British government in the event we went to war. Francis was dying anyway, but his title and position in society would be of greater use to me if he were dead.”

“You killed your husband? You killed Sir Francis?” It finally came to Clementine just how ruthless this woman was, and she instantly regretted her outburst.
When my time comes,
she thought
, she will show no mercy.

“I agreed to his death. I have never felt such freedom as I did that day.”

Clementine shuddered; the woman was a monster, and she had been stupid enough to fall for her gentle charm and her lies.
But this did not explain why she had killed Sir Reginald
. And then it came to her. Veda Ryderwood had come through a window into a room lit by candlelight, and from behind her victim, seated at the top of the table, she had seen the heavy, balding head sunk down between broad, slouching shoulders. Sir Reginald even smoked the same cigars as Winston Churchill. This woman had intended to assassinate the First Lord of the Admiralty. That was why, when Winston breezed in on her aria, she had beheld his arrival with such an intensity of surprise. It had not been annoyance that he had blundered in on her nearly finished song. Veda Ryderwood had understood in that moment that she had made a tremendous mistake.

“You killed the wrong man, didn’t you? You meant to kill Mr. Churchill!”

“Yes, it was unfortunate, I killed the man who was invited to stay on in the dining room after dinner. It was the footman who gave my note to the wrong man. I don’t make mistakes.”