Ten Lords A-Leaping: A Mystery (Father Christmas) (17 page)

“I say, Grandmama,” Max began as they passed into a cool dark hall, his voice rich with import. “I have some astonishing news.”

“Oh, do you.”

“Max!” Jane’s voice contained a world of warning, but the boy could not be stopped. He darted around his grandmother as she entered a bright reception room first. He did a little jig around her as she dropped the bag on top of a pile of books on a large ottoman.

“Uncle Olly’s gone and snuffed it.”

Miranda giggled.

“Miranda!” Tom cautioned.

“Sorry, Daddy.” She turned her head to look back up at him, but she didn’t appear remorseful.

Vexed with his daughter, he almost missed Marguerite’s response or, rather, lack of it. She half turned, her handsome profile accentuated by the light from a high window.

“You don’t say.”

“I
do
say.”

Lady Fairhaven gazed gravely at her grandson for a moment, then turned a slightly cocked eyebrow to the other adults in the room.

“It’s true, I’m afraid, Marve,” Jane said.

“He was
murdered
, Grandmama.” Max plucked a sweet from a bowl of dolly mixture on a side table, then offered the
dish to Miranda. “But we’re not to know how. We’re
children
, don’t-you-know. Bonbon, Miranda?”

“Why don’t you two go and visit the chickens?”

“But I want to look at the pictures, Grandmama.” Max pushed his lower lip out.

“Then you make a start. The albums are there.” Marguerite pointed to a pile tucked against the arm of a couch. “I’m going to take Jane and Mr. Christmas into the kitchen for a moment, for some
adult
conversation.”

“Oh, all right. If you must. Don’t be long.”

Whereas the drawing room, despite its considerable clutter of
objets
and chintz, had been showroom-tidy, perhaps little used, the kitchen showed strong evidence of being the stage for the dower house’s day-to-day life. If in earlier times it had been a warren of drab kitchen, spartan scullery and formless pantries, which Tom guessed it had been from the architectural irregularities, all had been knocked together into one commodious common room, bright with a wash of creamy yellow on the walls, brighter still by the sun slanting through low windows overlooking a back garden. A fireplace, unlit, filled with logs, flanked by two Windsor chairs, occupied one wall, while a long oak dresser shelving a hodgepodge of plates and bowls, cups and saucers, occupied the other. In a far corner, next to a rank of book-laden shelves, which might once have been a butler’s cupboard, sat a roll-top desk, top up, its surface laden with papers, pens, books, phone, clock, a teacup, evidence of work interrupted. In another corner, almost a discordant note, a large flat-screen television perched on an oak refectory table faced towards a many-pillowed couch and a newish kitchen island with jutting sink faucet and cooker
knobs, above which blackened beams teemed with gleaming copper pans. The TV screen was black, but strains of a radio switched on sounded under the scrape of their shoes along the stone floor.

“Strangled, Marve,” Jane said as Marguerite moved deeper into the room and reached for a kettle.

“Ah.” Marguerite turned, her composure little affected, but for a slight lift of her brow. “How is Georgina?”

“In shock, but bearing up, I think.” Jane looked to Tom for agreement as Marguerite poured water into the kettle. “But it does have an awful echo of eleven years ago.”

A play of emotions crossed Marguerite’s face—sorrow, pity, exasperation—but none settled. Finally, she sighed, put the kettle on the hob and said simply, “I’ll make coffee, shall I?”

Not waiting for their assent, she moved around the island to a length of cupboards over a long counter against the wall, removing a bean grinder. Tom’s eyes went to the long pine table, which anchored the room, large enough to seat ten. At one end, half hidden by a bowl of summer blooms, was the remains of breakfast: An old wooden cutting board with a loaf of whole-meal bread sat in a dusting of crumbs, several pots of jam and marmalade, opened, with sticky spoons left on their tops, another glued in a sticky puddle on the well-scrubbed surface itself, filmy glassware next to a carton of orange juice, coffee mugs, cream jug, and cafetière, the last drained but for a puddle of coffee grounds. Jane lifted it.

“Do you need this cafetière?”

“No, I have others,” Marguerite called over her shoulder.

“Let me clear.”

“Oh, would you? How kind.” Marguerite’s head turned
sharply as she moved to the refrigerator. She stared at the table, as if momentarily disconcerted. “Roberto must have made himself at home.”

“Tom found Oliver,” Jane remarked as she loaded the lengths of both arms with plates, then said to Tom, who had openly admired her skill, “I’ve done this before. I waited tables at a lobster restaurant in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, when I was a teenager.”

“I was going to ask where.” Marguerite popped the lip from a canister and spooned coffee beans into the grinder.

“Where I grew up?”

“No, where Oliver was found.”

“I found him in the Labyrinth, Lady Fairhaven.” Tom hobbled into the room out of Jane’s way, feeling inept before these competent women. The door into an adjacent mudroom was open; so, too, was the top half of a Dutch door that led onto the garden. Pegged along a rack against one wall between the doors he glimpsed the usual array of outerwear—waxed jackets, quilted jackets, a riding coat, assorted tweed caps and felt hats—all in country drab, but for one red hoodie crested with an
ARSENAL FC
logo. He had a notion who that might belong to and gave a passing thought to the nature of Marguerite and Roberto’s living arrangements.

“When?”

Tom turned from his glance at the footwear under the mudroom bench, walking sticks and other paraphernalia to respond: “Very early this morning. The sun was barely nudging the horizon.”

“Then no one else was about?”

Tom hesitated. The metallic shriek of beans being pulverised gave him leave to consider his reply. Had it been a trick of the light or, rather, a trick of the shadow? Had he truly seen the back of someone’s head? And why did he think it was a woman’s? Something about the shape, the sense of hair longer than most men wore these days? Lucinda remained worryingly in his mind. But now, unhappily, not wishing to acknowledge the terrible possibility, he studied the back of the dowager countess’s head as she bent to her task, at the cut of her silvery blond hair, conscious that Her Ladyship was an early riser (she had said so moments earlier in the forecourt), conscious, too, that though she was a woman in her sixties, she exhibited the agility and vigor of a woman a decade or more younger. But to be capable of strangling a man? Then beetling off into the shrubbery? And for what possible reason? It was all too ridiculous.

And yet there was something watchful in her eyes when she turned and met his, clearly expecting an answer to her seemingly nonchalant question. Her eyes dipped as she removed the top of the grinder and the moment was lost.

“There wouldn’t have been enough light for me to know for sure if there was.” He chose his words with care as he watched Marguerite spoon the ground coffee into the cafetière. “… anyone about,” he added, noting Jane transfer a curious doubting frown from the used coffee mugs she was carrying to him.

“And you heard nothing?” she asked, depositing the china on the island near Marguerite.

“I can say for certain I heard a cat. And saw one. And I’m pretty sure I heard some noises in the shrubbery.”

The kettle’s hiss turned to a shriek at that moment, severing conversation. Marguerite lifted it from the hob and they waited in silence for the water to cool slightly, the murmur of the muted radio and the ticking of the wall-mounted clock now the ascendant sounds. Tom glanced at the two women, each of whose face reposed in private thought.

“Someone must have been
very
angry with Oliver.” Jane broke the silence as Marguerite poured a little hot water over the grounds and swirled the cafetière around. After a few seconds, she tipped the kettle to pour in the rest.

“Perhaps.” A plume of steam obscured Marguerite’s face momentarily. “Well, yes,” she said, as if conceding the point. She flicked a glance at Tom. “What with? Do you know?”

“If you mean the … instrument of death, I don’t know,” Tom replied, taking the liberty of sitting down. “Nothing was in evidence that I could see. I expect when the scene of crime experts are through something will come to light.”

“We’re going to have the whole spectacle of the police and the law upon us, aren’t we?” Marguerite pressed the plunger into the cafetière. “I can’t think this will go very well for Hector. Jane, fresh mugs are on the dresser.”

“Because the police will learn that Hector and Olly had been fighting?” Jane lifted three mugs off their hooks.

“In part. If Hector’s determined to stand for Parliament, any breath of scandal will do him no good. The prime minister’s very hot on propriety of all sorts these days.”

“Marve, do you have
any
idea why they were at each other yesterday?”

“Not at all. I asked Hector yesterday and he stubbornly refused to tell me. There wasn’t much point in asking Oliver,
as he never gives … gave, rather, you a straight answer about anything.” Marguerite carried the cafetière to the table. “I suppose all one can say to the police is that Hector and Olly never got on, so that yesterday’s incident is simply another in a long line.” She flicked a glance down at Tom. “I can read the ‘why’ in your face, Vicar.”

“Oh, dear. And I thought I was doing well looking blank.”

Marguerite laughed and continued: “They’ve never really rubbed along, Hector and Olly. There’s no point in not saying these things. If I read detective novels correctly, we’re all in for a bout of living in each other’s pockets.” She settled the cafetière next to the cream jug Jane had left on the table. “I think it’s simply … well, sometimes you meet someone and you simply can’t bear them from the moment you shake their paw. Biscuit, anyone? Mrs. Gaunt sent over some lovely baking the other day. She’s a superb cook, she really is, but I do find her a little severe.” Marguerite glanced about. “There it is!” She walked over and lifted a tin from the counter under the window. “Now what was I saying?”

“Hector and Olly not getting on,” Jane prompted.

“Right, yes, well, I think there was some incident when they were in the Parachute Regiment. I don’t really know. I’m not sure if it’s important now.” Marguerite opened the lid and placed the tin on the table. “Plates, Jane, if you please. Anyway, the Stricklands and the fforde-Becketts are rather chalk and cheese. Unlike the fforde-Becketts, the Stricklands have managed to weather the chop and change of the last century. Perhaps it’s having remained resolutely Catholic through the Reformation and the Civil War. It’s made the Stricklands
wilier. I’ve just thought of that. I’m not sure it’s true. But it is true that the fforde-Becketts threw most of it away on the horses, women, bad investments—that foolish scheme in the West Indies of Olly’s father. By the way, Tom, you should get Maxie to show you and your daughter the priest holes at the Hall and such. He adores the intrigue.” Marguerite glanced at her watch as she sat down and bid Jane do the same. “I wonder …”

“Wonder what?”

“I don’t usually go, even on Sunday. Sorry, I’m thinking out loud. Father Downes, Jane. You must have met him while you’ve been here. He comes up to Eggescombe from Ivybridge every morning when Hector’s in residence to say Mass in the chapel. A retired priest.” Marve turned to Tom. “Quite the amateur architectural historian. Loves Eggescombe.” She laughed. “And last Sunday, he stayed on for lunch, Mrs. Gaunt’s cooking being the attraction. I can’t say I blame him. She is a little treasure.”

“Shall I be mother?” Jane’s hand brushed the cafetière’s handle. “Black or white?”

Both Tom and Marguerite opted for black coffee.

“But you are coming for Sunday lunch, Marve.”

“Oh, of course. I’m simply wondering if I should go to Mass. I’m a convert, you understand,” she said to Tom, adding obliquely, “it was the price of admission. Dare I bring Roberto?” She smiled knowingly at Jane.

“To lunch? Hector didn’t say.” Jane flicked a glance at Tom as she poured the coffee.

Marguerite snorted. “Roberto’s too busy working anyway.”
She pinched her lips in thought, then said in a somewhat reluctant tone, “I suppose I could take you over to the stables when we’re done here so you could see what he’s doing.”

“I’d like that,” Tom said, considering the excursion another way to keep the children preoccupied.

“He won’t be terribly communicative, though.” Marguerite looked as though she regretted the invitation. She glanced at Tom then lifted a biscuit from the tin. “I’ve had a thought—Dominic!” She bit into it. “Was he terribly pleased?”

“Marve!” Jane looked up from the cream she was pouring into her mug.

“Was he, Tom?”

“I couldn’t say.” In truth he couldn’t, though he had a qualm. When Lucinda had dipped into her deep curtsy and addressed her half brother with the honorific, Tom, later than the others, had realised the implication. With Oliver possessed of no legitimate male heir of his body, the marquessate passed automatically to his late father’s late brother’s son—his cousin, Dominic fforde-Beckett.

Dominic had received Lucinda’s gesture with an expression of bemusement. He was wearing cream-coloured khakis and a fresh white shirt, the sleeves of which he was rolling to his elbows as he responded:

“I feel like I’ve stumbled into Act Two of some Regency farce—or is it Jacobean melodrama?—and haven’t the foggiest what the play is about. What
is
the play about? Is that kedgeree I smell? Good morning, all.” He pushed his long, slightly damp hair behind his ears.

“The gods have smiled upon you this morning, brother dear.”

“Lucy, that’s
quite
enough out of you,” Hector barked. “Oliver has died, Dominic.”

“What do you mean, died?”

“Died. Ceased to be.” Hector sounded the exasperation of a man fed up. “Died!” he said again.