Chapter 27

Beau’s interjection brought banter between his Aunt and the Everwell ladies to a halt, but the only reaction he cared for was Madeline’s. While he owed both his Aunt and the Everwell Society a huge debt, it was her wellbeing—and her opinion—that mattered most to him.

“What are you suggesting?” Miss Everwell asked between bites of strawberry tart. “You have something concrete to dissuade him from making his accusations public?”

“Not yet,” Beau said. “But there must be something out there and I will find it.”

“There is something that might help,” Madeline offered, drawing the attention of everyone in the room. “I didn’t give it much thought at the time. It was something Nelson said, while we were on the train.”

“You spoke with him?” Mrs. Hartley asked, her expression turning from surprise to sympathy. “I’m so sorry, Maddy.”

“It was somewhat cathartic,” she said, pressing her lips together, her gaze turning to Beau. “He said that he’d heard Malcolm speaking—babbling was the word he used. He said it was after I left.”

“I thought you were supposed to be the last person who saw Malcolm alive,” Mrs. Hartley said.

“That was in the papers,” Madeline answered. “But clearly that’s a lie. Nelson kept insisting I should have picked him.”

Beau sat forward in his seat.

“I’m meeting with Dominic Ashe as soon as I return to Saint John,” he said. “While the Ferguson crime is old, it was no doubt sensationalized and people would remember it. There had to be something—or someone—who might know something.”

He would be damned if that bastard Taylor would continue to haunt Madeline Murray. The doorbells chimed and soon another visitor was presented to the parlour.

“Mr. Benjamin Miller, of the Halifax Chronicle.”

Miller entered, wearing a well-worn brown suit. If the journalist was shocked at seeing the Everwell ladies sitting in Veronica Turnbull’s parlour, he gave no indication.

“Please sit, Mr. Miller,” Aunt Veronica said, gesturing to a chair next to Mrs. Hartley. “I was just taking some late morning refreshments with members of The Everwell Society. Have you had the pleasure?”

Beau wanted to smile but tried to keep his emotions in check. Aunt Veronica was an effortless hostess, and at moments like this, Beau wondered if his ease with people had come from her.

“I have,” he said, nodding politely to the Everwell ladies. “I believe I did a piece on a Christmas pageant at the Manor several years ago.”

“And you have not returned,” Miss Everwell said, not small amount of judgment in her voice. “You must come back this year. Mrs. Ashe has quite outdone herself of late.”

He nodded, giving the matriarch a polite smile. “I will do my best to make amends.”

Beau wondered what a man like Ben Miller, who had helped provide Dominic with some contacts in Saint John and who, no doubt, regularly reported on murders, corruption, and other sordid details would find so intriguing about a Christmas pageant at a girl’s school, no matter how noble the cause.

“Congratulations on your innocence,” he said, shaking Beau’s hand. “And thank you and Mr. Ashe for the scoop.”

Mr. Miller’s piece on his innocence screaming across the front page of the Halifax Chronicle had been as close to a relief as Beau could muster. No doubt the reporter was the second person Dominic had reached out to.

“I’m catching the train in a couple of hours,” Beau said, feeling Madeline’s moody stare as surely as if she were touching him. “All those messy details you reported on this morning are my life.”

The reporter nodded, apparently unbothered by that. “I want an exclusive as soon as you have time to breathe.”

“As for me, I am afraid I invited you here with a misunderstanding.” Aunt Veronica did her best to appear nonplussed by her misstep in inviting one of the city’s most dogged journalists to her door to discuss an old murder case.

“I’m not certain it is an understanding,” he said, politely declining a cup of coffee as he pulled out his notebook. “I received a telegram this morning from an informant with quite a shocking revelation about one of the staff at Everwell.”

The journalist took a sideways glance at Madeline, and if Beau had no opinions of the man before he walked in, he sure as hell had some now.

“Mrs. Turnbull received a very troublesome letter yesterday, as you know,” Mrs. Hartley said. “Almost immediately, she reached out to inform us of this rather slanderous note, which had no other purpose than to blackmail The Everwell Society.”

Beau wasn’t sure if he managed to keep his eyebrows in place as he took in Phillipa Hartley’s smooth—and utterly false—tale of events that had brought the current occupants of Aunt Vee’s parlour together. If his aunt was thrown off by it, however, she recovered quickly enough.

Miller was already scratching down something in his notebook. If he sensed there was anything amiss, he gave no sign.

“May I see the letter?” he asked.

“No—” came a chorus of voices that included Beau, Mrs. Hartley and Aunt Vee.

“Yes.”

All eyes fell to Madeline, who had been the sole—and most important—contrary voice. Not even Aunt Veronica could contain her surprise.

“Are you certain, Miss Murray?” she said. “After everything you have done for my nephew, I do not wish to have you injured any more than you have already been.”

Admiration swelled in Beau’s chest at his aunt’s gesture.

“Quite,” Madeline said, straightening her shoulders, looking Mr. Miller straight in the eye. “I have given Nelson Taylor far too much power over me. My silence does nothing but give his story strength.”

Aunt Veronica handed the letter to Miller, who read it carefully. The collective room held its breath. He read it through once, and then went back and forth over several passages a second time.

“I heard rumours about this murder, years ago,” he said. “I never thought I would meet the accused in person. It was rumoured the woman in question had disappeared.”

“I went to Boston,” Madeline said, and then relayed the story to him, save the most private of details about the nature of the cruel game Ferguson, Taylor, and the others had played to win her hand. “When I left Malcolm, he was most certainly alive. I know, because he was calling me every cruel word in the book as I stormed out. The fabricated story has been told with such assurance that I have been made to doubt my memory, but that is the truth.”

Beau wanted to reach across the room and hold Madeline. To tell her how proud he was of her. Her bearing was as it had been when he’d first seen her. Commanding. Proud.

“The blackmailer is obviously close by,” Miller said, unmoved by Madeline’s confession. “If you’ve become a threat to him somehow, he is feeling both emboldened to show himself and confident in his threat.”

“We encountered him in Windsor,” Beau said, relaying the story of his connection with George’s College, and the substantial commission he was going to lose. “This was clearly done to threaten me to rethink the sale of a property I had promised to sell him. And now I think he’s just out for revenge, which given Miss Murray’s story, indicates a certain pattern of behaviour.”

Miller’s eyes narrowed, and Beau realized he’d revealed something he hadn’t intended. The reporter missed nothing.

“It’s interesting to me that he is using her circumstance to threaten you,” he said. “Clearly The Everwell Society is well intentioned, but hardly in a financial position to pay Mr. Taylor what he demands.”

Now Beau was fidgeting in his seat, unwilling to reveal more than he already had. He had his own feelings for Madeline, but she’d made it clear she wasn’t able to return them. And no one here knew the depth of what had happened between them. But Miller, damn him, may have guessed.

“So why did you bring me here?” Miller asked. “Keeping a letter like this away from the public eye seems like the thing to do.”

“We wanted insurance,” Aunt Veronica said, looking carefully at Mrs. Hartley, the two spinning a web between them. “It seemed likely that this Taylor fellow might decide, owing to the rather public nature of both The Everwell Society and my own family, to send a note to the press, or threaten to push the matter. I thought this preemptive measure would give us the opportunity to ask you to help us keep this quiet, at least until we could address it. However, it seems he has taken it upon himself to press the issue.”

Miller closed up the note and handed it back to Aunt Veronica. “An old murder case, a connection to a local charity with a history of rumours?—”

“—no thanks to you,” Miss Jones said, her dark eyes narrowed and filled with accusation.

“I don’t work the society pages, Miss Jones,” he said, waving away her ire with a casual tone. “But as I was about to say, a story like this would sell a lot of papers. What is in it for me to keep it quiet?”

“How about your job?” Aunt Vee said. “I know Simon Nickerson well enough to ask him to help us.”

“Mr. Nickerson seems to like the way I do my job, Mrs. Turnbull,” he said, not budging from her threat. “And we both know he likes it when I sell a lot of papers.”

It was maddening, but at the same time, Beau had to admire the man for not being threatened. It was probably the same guts that allowed him to report on the goings on of the society kings in a way that got other reporters working in papers back home fired.

“What if you get a larger story out it?” Beau said.

“What do you mean?”

“This old murder case is old news, like you said,” he said. “And do you really want to harm an institution like The Everwell Society, given the good work they do? I don’t think that would reflect well on the paper, or on you.”

That seemed to get the man’s attention. “I’m listening.”

“What if I give you something new to report on,” Beau said, talking faster now, excited by the possibility. “You debunk the story, the Turnbull family is grateful, George’s College is spared another scandal, and Everwell’s reputation is intact—saved from a horrible story. You and your paper are heroes.”

Miller closed up his book. “I’ll give you a week.”