Ten Lords A-Leaping: A Mystery (Father Christmas) (28 page)

“
I
didn’t mean to wake you,” Tom said to Lord Fairhaven, feeling the pew’s silky wood beneath his fingers. It was a lie, but not an extravagant one. He was a little surprised to find Hector in slumber, and in Eggescombe’s chapel, of all places. It wasn’t yet midmorning. But on second reckoning he suspected His Lordship had suffered a disturbed sleep.

As had he.

The evening before, an uneasiness seemed to settle over the great mansion as the August sun sank below the low hills and evening shadows stole across the lawns to stain Eggescombe’s red brick black and swallow the great pile into the night. The library, where Tom had retreated with a few of the other guests, took on a fortress glow, a sanctuary, in which they affected to keep up an appearance of Sunday-evening languor, though the air simmered with tension and unspoken thoughts. Tom partnered with Jane against her husband and Dominic in a
near-wordless hand of bridge while Max and Miranda grappled on the library table, out of earshot, with a Ouija board. Lord and Lady Fairhaven had each found an excuse—paperwork in the estate office, a migraine, respectively—to absent themselves. Lucinda, after flipping through a magazine, retreated through doors to the adjacent music room, bringing Tom a modicum of relief, for he found her presence unsettling. Moments later the melancholy throb of the piano sounded through the half-opened door—Rachmaninoff’s “Vocalise,” Tom realised as his mind drifted towards the languid tempo, drawn to its tinge of regret. Her rendering of the familiar piece seemed skilled and heartfelt, and he found himself mellowing in his harsher assessment of her—and himself—until the Rachmaninoff tipped into Chopin’s Funeral March interpreted as a frenzied boogie-woogie.

“She’s remarkably good, isn’t she,” Dominic had murmured over his hand of cards.

“She’s in remarkably poor taste,” Jamie snapped, slapping his cards to the baize and pushing his chair back. But he was stopped in his movements at the sound of a piano lid crashing and the clacking retreat of shoes along the floor. The outburst did nothing so much as acknowledge their cheerlessness. The children were shooed to bed. Shortly after, the card game ended, none keen for another rubber—or any other diversion.

Tom had told Miranda to take her night things to his room. He didn’t think himself an unduly cautious parent—he wasn’t fond of the fashion for a helicoptering involvement in a child’s life—but the unease the day had wrought had been inflamed for him by his troubling conversation with Miranda about ghosts. Most adults would dismiss a child’s witterings
about a paranormal sighting, but some certain adult, one among those at Eggescombe this weekend, who possessed a terrible secret, who listened attentively to her description of the ghost—wearing
pas beaucoup
or
tout blanc
—might have reason to be fearful. Who wore
pas beaucoup
? Who wore
tout blanc
? Who might shine with ghostly sheen in a burst of lightning or passing through a motion-sensor light? Roberto stripped and wreathed in marble dust? Pallid Dominic in cream trousers and shirt? Perhaps Hector in his terry-cloth robe, witnessed too (perhaps) by Jane Allan. Or that maligned intruder who had made a false confession? What might he wear at night? Too late Tom realised he had sent Miranda back onto the croquet court armed with a counterargument to Maximilian’s assertion that the manifestation on the lawn was of Sir Edward Strickland. Would it spread? Would someone seek to do her harm?

When he got to his room, Miranda had been already tucked up on one side of the four-poster, eyes drooping with sleep, head nodding over her copy of
Alice au manoir hanté
. The door he could only leave as he had found it, unsecured—there was a lock, but he had been given no key. He craved a cool breeze in the room, but he lowered and locked the window instead. Miranda perked up as he readied himself for bed. Striving for light conversation he solicited the wisdom of the Ouija board.

“We asked who strangled Max’s uncle.” Miranda yawned and readjusted the book on her lap.

“Really, darling, I don’t want to harp on this but there is something very serious and sobering about a man’s death—any human being’s death.”

“I know, Daddy. But it was Max who wanted to ask Ouija the question.” She rubbed her eyes and yawned again.

Tom undressed behind a Chinese screen in silence, but he could feel the question rising in his mind like a bubble. Finally, despite his best intentions, he couldn’t help himself: “Well, what did it say, then? The Ouija.”

“It spelled
LUCY
.”

Occult twaddle!
“Max was pushing the whatsit, the planchette, wasn’t he,” Tom said as he removed his cast boot. “The way Grannie Kate does when you play in Gravesend.”

“No.”

“Well, it’s nonsense anyway.”

“Why couldn’t it be her?”

“Lady Lucinda fforde-Beckett? Well, because …” Tom could feel a blush rising from his neck, which he fought to suppress.
Because she had been disporting with your shameful father on this very bed
. “Because … she’s a woman.”

“That’s not a reason.”

“What I mean is, I don’t think she would be strong enough to … you know.”

“I’m going to be strong when I grow up.” Miranda affected a biceps pose. “I’ll beat any boy. You said not to hide my light under a bushel, Daddy. And I didn’t. I won at croquet. Max didn’t really mind, though.”

“Well done, you.”

“All us girls in Year Four think women should be able to do anything men do.”

Tom decided for the pajamas Gaunt had left out the night before. “But is it really an advance for women if they behave as badly as men—who can behave very badly indeed.”

“Shouldn’t women have the right to have the chance to?”

Clever child
. “Yes, you’re right, of course,” he sighed, tying the string of the pajama bottoms. “But Ouija boards aren’t … right, I mean. They’re silly.”

Very silly
, he’d thought as Miranda fell quickly into sleep and his mind instead roiled over the day’s events. The moon followed much the same path as the night before, silvering the bedspread, reminding him of his weakness, though his thoughts were not unalloyed with memory of the pleasure. A near hour of sleeplessness later, he had stooped to the strategy of sliding a chair under the doorknob, to stop intruders or at least wake him if an attempt were made. Was he being paranoid, he thought, and what sort of intruder was he barring? A strangler or a scarlet woman? The jabber of anxious dreams, transmuted vicarishly, punctuated his restless sleep when he finally tumbled into it: He had prepared no sermon, he was late to church, he was in the pulpit with no underpants. When he awoke, the sun was in his room. He wiped the sleep from his eyes, looked around. His heart lurched.

No Miranda.

The chair was returned to its place, the door open a crack. His mind raced over labyrinthine Eggescombe Hall, its myriad rooms, staircases, corridors, and crannies, almost all of them unexplored by him, alarmed as to where she might be. He flung back the bedspread and snatched up his dressing gown from the bedside chair. One arm into one sleeve later and Miranda’s head was poking through the door.

“Daddy, go back to bed.”

“Why?” he replied, suppressing a gasp of relief, wrapping the gown around himself.

“Because I said.”

“Are you coming in?” He perched on the edge of the bed, puzzled, vaguely conscious that standing earlier had not brought a burst of pain from his ankle.

“Close your eyes.”

A scraping sound in the hall signaled her intent. He closed his eyes, smiled in expectation (and a little relief), the acrid odour of sulphur penetrating his nostrils as she drew near and the words to “Bonne Fête” came to his ears.

“Happy Birthday, Daddy! You can open your eyes now.”

“Wherever did you get that?” Tom feigned surprise at the plate containing four petit fours, each with one tiny twisty candle flickering with yellow flame.

“From Mrs. Gaunt, down in the kitchen. It’s left over from Saturday.” She frowned at it. “And my present’s in the car. I forgot it there, sorry.”

“Doesn’t matter. This is lovely. Thank you. You’ve made my birthday memorable—in a very nice way,” he added.

“Make a wish, Daddy. What did you wish for?” she asked after he’d blown out the candles.

“That you’ll be with me for every birthday of my life, darling. Come here.” She sat on the bed and he hugged her, smelling her hair. “I hope you’ll have some of this?”

Miranda reached into her dressing gown pocket and pulled out two forks. She grinned.

After a moment’s quiet dining, she asked, “Will we be able to leave soon?”

“I shouldn’t think much longer. There’s little that we can contribute, you and I, I don’t think.”

“Then we can go to Gravesend?”

“Of course. Grannies are waiting! We won’t be able to stop and stay with Aunt Julia, though.” He paused in thought, then heaved himself off the edge of the bed. “I wonder …,” he muttered, gingerly moving behind the screen to pull his mobile from his trouser pocket.

“Wonder what, Daddy? Oh! Your foot seems much better.”

“If Dosh or Kate has called back.” He kept the ringer on vibrate most of the time. He scrolled through the received calls in the last twelve hours: His sister-in-law Julia had called in the evening as had a number of folk from Thornford, prompted, he expected, by the news of the death at Eggescombe. “I left a message yesterday explaining what’s happened to us, though of course they’ll have heard it on the radio or seen it on TV. Ah, they have called. Shall we call them back or is it too early?”

“Not too early,” Miranda said slyly.

Breakfast had been a cheerless affair, though mercifully absent the drama of the morning before. Hector passed Tom and Miranda on his way out, turning to announce to those remaining—Georgina, Jane, Jamie—that he would be in the chapel, his tone a warning: Woe to him who dared disturb. But after a decent interval of toast and coffee and conversation tempered by respect for Georgina’s evident suffering, Tom made his way to Eggescombe’s private chapel, his heart laden but his mind bent nevertheless on disturbing a man at prayer. But Hector was not at prayer.

Gripping the ring of the door handle, Tom had sent the
inside latch shooting up with a noisy clank. Entering, he’d pushed the oak door creaking on iron hinges. He’d shambled down the shadowed nave along the blue-and-white-checkered marble, soon realising from the set of Hector’s head and shoulders along the front pew that his was the posture of sleep, not devotion. Bonzo, on the pew next to his master, raised his head a little, blinked, and settled back to his own rest. He’d taken a few moments to glance around at the exuberant use of marble, an indication that the chapel was clearly post-Reformation, a later renovation to Eggescombe Hall, before noisily clearing his throat and setting Lord Fairhaven’s eyelids to flutter open.

“I was resting my eyes.” He focused blearily on Tom, though his sleep-thickened voice betrayed him.

“I thought I might pay the chapel a visit, while I had the chance,” Tom lied, adding another: “I thought you might have left by the time I arrived.”

“Have you a ticket?” Hector’s smile stopped short of his eyes.

“I must have left it in my other trousers.”

Hector grunted at the riposte and straightened his posture. “The chapel sees mostly day-trippers now. Part of the package for some, with the Labyrinth.” He flicked an uncertain glance at Tom, as if remembering their encounter there, before looking away, to the sanctuary lamp burning before the altar.

“Built in 1836 by my several-times-great-grandfather,” he continued. “Of course, in earlier times the Mass had to be celebrated in the attic because, well …” He trailed off, patting the dog’s head.

“Lord Fairhaven—”

“Yes.”

“There’s something I want to speak to you about.”

Hector regarded him sulkily. “I thought there might be.”

Tom settled into the pew across the nave from Hector. Stained glass fetching a bit of light from the sky cast dancing shadows over pews. “I’m sorry if this sounds like an accusation, but I don’t believe I’m wrong in thinking that in the Labyrinth yesterday morning you removed something from Lord Morborne’s pockets.” When Hector didn’t respond, he continued. “By all accounts, Lord Morborne was wedded to his mobile—I noted it myself at the Plymouth airfield—but the device seems to be missing. I’m deducing, I don’t think unfairly, that you took it.”

Hector’s lower lip slipped from its mooring. He regarded Tom with barely concealed displeasure. “Have you mentioned this to anyone?”

“If you mean the police, no. I have, however, discussed it with Lady Kirkbride. Perhaps I shouldn’t have, but I think she’s of very good character and has your best interests at heart.”

“And what would my best interests be, Vicar?”

“In being forthright.”

“I’m not sure that would be in my best interests.” Hector glanced away.

“Much depends on whether your interests lie with God or mammon.”

Hector didn’t respond. He shifted in his seat to face forwards. Finally, he said, as if addressing the altar, “I’ve been sitting here since breakfast wrestling with my conscience, Vicar. I do have one, you know. I realise people think that if
you have any association with party politics, then your morals and ethics and what-have-you are suspect. But, you see, it’s so often a question of efficacy. How might one get things done—good, worthwhile things—if one must constantly worry about the minutiae of some moral equation or consider every single possible consequence. Sometimes one must push on.”