Chapter 14

Everyone wasin the sitting room by the time I made my way there. Laetitia looked quite comfortable cozied up to Crispin, not quite on his lap, but as close as she could get without being there. Constance was perched next to Francis on one of the Chesterfields, hand between both of his. Christopher was next to them. Aunt Roz stood by the window, swaying back and forth, still holding the baby, while Uncle Herbert watched from one of the armchairs. His expression was half concerned, half indulgent. If little Bess turned out to be their grandchild—or even if she didn't—it looked as if they were quite ready to shower her with attention. Uncle Herbert was probably concerned that Aunt Roz was getting attached, actually.

Uncle Harold kept a keen eye on Laetitia and Crispin, and so did Lady Euphemia. Although when I walked in, she gave me a cold up-and-down look before turning her attention back onto her daughter. It wasn't quite blatant enough for me to justify being rude, so I ignored it and headed for Christopher. "Budge up, please."

He scooted closer to Constance, and I fitted myself on the edge of the sofa next to him. "Quiet crowd."

Quiet enough that I couldn't ask him who might have just arrived in the sitting room from upstairs, not without having everyone present hear me.

He nodded. "Anything going on outside?"

"Not that I could see. The body hasn't been covered, and Sammy was nowhere to be seen. When I checked outside the boot room, both he and Wilkins were gone from the driveway. I think perhaps he headed back to the village for reinforcements."

Or perhaps Sammy had been the one upstairs in my room. Looking for… evidence?

"He left," Christopher reiterated, "and left the body on the lawn?"

I shrugged. "Hard to say what else he could have done with it, to be fair. He can't move it until it's been photographed and examined in situ, and for that, I assume he needs the medical examiner. Would that be Doctor White, do you suppose?"

"I think so, Pippa," Aunt Roz said from over by the window. "Did Wilkins drive Constable Entwistle to the village?"

He might have done, now that she asked. I had assumed Wilkins had merely vanished into the carriage house to await His Grace's pleasure, but it was possible that Sammy had commandeered the Crossley and Wilkins's services instead of setting off on his bicycle. It would make sense, if he planned to bring people back with him.

I wouldn't mind at all if they came back with the doctor, actually. I had a few questions for Gerald White. Including why no one had noticed Abigail walk off in the middle of the night, and also whether she had woken up at any point yesterday, and had perhaps said something to someone about what she was—or had been—doing here at Beckwith Place. Something more specific than what we already knew, or thought we did.

"This is intolerable," Lady Euphemia said, with another look at me, as if it were my fault. "Isn't there something that can be done?"

"Done about what?" was the obvious answer, and I thought about giving it. Aunt Roz got in first.

"I'm afraid not, Euphemia, dear. When poor Grimsby was shot in the Sutherland Hall garden maze in April, all we could do was wait for the police to finish their job and let us go home. I'm afraid it'll be the same now."

"We'll have to figure out what to do with the baby," Francis said, and sounded as if the words were dragged out of him by force. "If the girl… if her mother isn't here to take care of her, what do we do? We can't simply keep her."

He glanced at little Bess, snuggled up on his mother's shoulder with her thumb in her mouth, and quickly away.

"Of course not," Aunt Roz said, rubbing the baby's back. "Not unless someone in the family wants to claim her. I assume none of you has changed his mind since yesterday?"

She waited. No one had, of course, and it was hard to blame them for that. If it had been difficult to claim responsibility for little Bess before the murder, it was doubly hard now.

"We can put Tom on figuring out who she belongs to," I said, "once he gets here. I'm sure there are records somewhere in London. Abigail may have had other relatives. Parents, or a sibling. A flat-mate, even. Someone who can be notified about her death. And there's the baby's father, unless he's the one who killed her. If he did, giving him the baby wouldn't be a very healthy thing to do, I suppose…"

There was a beat of silence. Crispin, of course, was the first one to break it. "Which one of us are you accusing, Darling? Kit, Francis, or me?"

I met his eyes. The gray was darker today, and troubled, like storm clouds. "None of you, St George. You've all told me it wasn't you, and I trust you. All of you."

"Who else is there, though?" Constance wanted to know, with a shrill hint of hysteria in her voice. She was clutching Francis's hand with both of hers now, instead of him keeping her hand enfolded in both of his. "I mean… just look at that baby. That can't be a coincidence!"

We all stared at the baby. She blinked back at us with those big blue Astley eyes, under that fuzzy mop of fair Sutherland hair.

"A lot of babies have fair hair and blue eyes," Maurice said. "Why, even Geoffrey when he was little?—"

His wife and son both sent him matching looks of fury, and he snapped his mouth shut.

"All I know is that she isn't mine," Francis said into the silence that followed. "And I certainly didn't kill her mother. We were together all night, Connie. You know that."

Constance nodded. "I know, Francis. But someone did. And I imagine it must have been one of us."

There was a beat of silence. Then?—

"Well, I never!" Laetitia said, at the same time as her mother exclaimed, "Really, Constance!"

"Sorry, Aunt Effie. But what are the chances that someone random came onto the grounds and murdered her? She wasn't a local. Nobody here knew her."

She glanced around the room. No one spoke up.

"If she had been from here," Constance continued, "Pippa would have recognized her when she saw her in London last week, and so would Doctor White, surely. And Lady Roslyn and Lord Herbert, not to mention Francis…"

"She wasn't local," Christopher interrupted. "You can forget that idea. None of us have ever seen her before."

Francis nodded. So did Aunt Roz and Uncle Herbert.

"Well," Constance said, "then what are the chances…?"

"She might have gotten a lift from the village," I suggested, "late in the night or early this morning, and something happened."

"The croquet mallet, though, Darling," Crispin said. "Who outside the family would have known where to find that?"

Not many people, for certain. He did, obviously. He wasn't a resident of Beckwith Place, but he had spent enough time here to know where the croquet sets were kept. Uncle Harold might have known, too. Everyone in the family probably did. Constance would have figured it out by now for certain.

But it also wasn't impossible that one of the others had wandered into the carriage house sometime between their arrival yesterday afternoon, and Abigail's arrival in the middle of the night.

Lady Laetitia had been glued to Crispin's side every time I had seen either of them yesterday, but before Christopher and I arrived, she might have done a recce of the grounds, including the carriage house. I couldn't picture either the Earl of Marsden or his wife clambering around our carriage house—why would they?—but again, they could have, had they chosen to. And the same was true of Geoffrey. I had no idea why any of them, save for Laetitia, would have wanted Abigail dead, but any and all of them might have known where the croquet mallets were kept.

Crispin had even mentioned that Geoffrey had not been with the others in the drawing room last night, hadn't he? Geoffrey might have decided to motor into the village last evening. He'd had access to several of the motorcars, his parents' Daimler or Constance's Crossley, at least. He slept alone, so no one would have noticed him being gone. And Geoffrey was definitely the type to pick up a lone female begging a lift up to Beckwith Place.

Abigail had been out of her element here in the countryside. The walk from the village to Beckwith Place was a distance in the dark, especially for someone not familiar with the shortcut through the fields. The dark and silence of the country can be quite disturbing when you're used to the hustle and bustle of Town, too. So yes, if a nice-looking gentleman in a nice car—and Geoffrey Marsden was decidedly nice-looking, for all that I can't stand him—if he had offered Abigail a lift, she might have taken it.

And if he had done, he was also the type who would have expected something in return. And when Abigail refused—which surely she must have done, considering what the consequences had been the last time she had let some smooth-talking, good-looking bloke wheedle his way into her unmentionables…

"Excuse me." I got to my feet, abruptly. Crispin blinked. He had been watching me, perhaps waiting for me to answer the question he hadn't quite managed to get out earlier, the one that had started me down this path of conjecture. I avoided his eyes and turned to my right instead. "Christopher?"

"Of course." He rose politely.

"Don't do anything stupid," Aunt Roz said.

"Of course not. When do we ever?" He grinned as Aunt Roz rolled her eyes, and put his hand on my back to guide me out of the room. "Come on, Pippa. Let's go."

We ducked out of the sitting room and towards the front door. Behind us, I could hear Lady Euphemia clear her throat. "Roslyn, my dear…"

"What are we doing?" Christopher wanted to know, heading for the front door.

I glanced up at him. "Checking the motorcars. It occurred to me?—"

He changed direction. "We'll need gloves, then. Don't want to leave any evidence of our own."

No, indeed. I let him pull the door open to the back of the house, and then followed him into the boot room, where he rummaged around until he found a pair of driving gloves for himself and a pair of Aunt Roz's gardening gloves for me. They looked ridiculous with my outfit, all ratty and stained with dirt, but at least they would keep me from getting my fingerprints all over everything.

"We'd better hurry," Christopher added, pulling the door to the driveway open. "We don't know how long we have until Sammy comes back with reinforcements. Would you tell me why you decided this was necessary?"

"It was what St George said about the croquet mallet, and from there a detour into how Abigail might have arrived at Beckwith Place last night."

"She walked, don't you think?"

He nodded me towards the row of cars parked along the driveway.

"It occurred to me," I said as we took off in that direction, "that she might not have. That perhaps Geoffrey went to the village—St George said he wasn't in the drawing room last night—and that he might have come upon her walking back here, and offered her a lift. And then one thing led to another."

"Say no more." Christopher headed for the sleek green Daimler and the burgundy Crossley. "He would have taken one of these two, don't you think?"

Rather than the Duke's Crossley—which wasn't here, I noted—or Crispin's Hispano-Suiza? Almost certainly.

"What are we looking for?" Christopher pulled open the Daimler's door and bent over the leather upholstery.

"I have no idea," I said. "Hair? Makeup smears? She left her tote in the garden before she fainted, so I don't suppose it's likely we'll find a reticule or anything of that nature. And I don't think she was wearing jewelry, was she? A dropped earring would come in uncommonly handy…"

Christopher sniggered. "Chance would be a fine thing. But I don't think we'll be that lucky, Pippa. And she was wearing both her shoes, too."

I nodded. "I doubt we'll find anything at all, to be honest. But I couldn't sit there any longer. The desperation was choking me. Constance is scared out of her mind about what might happen to Francis, and the way Laetitia was petting St George…"

"Was she petting him?"

"Playing with his hair," I said. "Stroking the back of his neck. Dipping her fingertips under his collar. It was indecent."

He looked at me. "You know, Pippa…"

"Fine," I said. "It wasn't indecent. We've both seen her do worse. But it was inappropriate for eight o'clock in the morning in your mother's and father's sitting room. Not to mention the other circumstances that make it in poor taste."

The dead body on the lawn, the police investigation, and the now-motherless baby that might be Crispin's.

Christopher shot me a look. "Are you quite certain you aren't just jealous, Pippa?"

I gave him one back, a longer and more narrow one. "Why on earth would I be jealous, Christopher? I can barely stand St George. I have no desire to touch him. And I certainly wouldn't want to run my fingers through his hair. It's full of brilliantine, isn't it?"

Really, it would take real indulgence for any woman to run her fingers through any man's hair these days, sticky as it's likely to be.

Christopher laughed. "You have to admit that for someone who swears up and down that she dislikes the man, you're rather opinionated when it comes to other women liking him."

"I don't mind women liking him," I said. Or sniffed, rather. "But her parents were sitting right there, Christopher. So was his father. So were the rest of us. Why on earth can't she keep her hands to herself when we're all forced to watch?"

"I imagine her staking her claim works better when we're all there to see it," Christopher said and closed the door to the Daimler's driver's side. "I don't see anything inside."

I nodded and followed suit. "I don't, either. It's more likely that Geoffrey would have used Constance's Crossley anyway. He drove it up here, didn't he? And his father might have had something to say about it if he took the Daimler to the village pub."

We headed for the burgundy saloon car.

"Anyway," I continued, picking up the thread of the conversation where we had dropped it, "I just don't see why her mother and father put up with it. Aunt Roz wouldn't put up with me brazenly petting a young man in polite company. I don't think she would let Constance behave that way towards Francis, either, and they're engaged. It's simply not proper."

"There's a reason for that," Christopher answered as he pulled open the door to the Crossley. "The Countess has her eye on the Sutherland title. I'm sure she'll put up with her daughter's behavior for as long as she has to, in the hopes that it will turn into an engagement."

I ran my eyes over the leather seat of the Crossley, burgundy to match the exterior paint. "Do you think it will?"

"I think," Christopher said precisely, "that the longer he lets it go on without saying anything about it, and the longer the rest of us do the same, the more likely it is that he'll have to come up to snuff at some point."

"Should we say something, then?"

"He's capable of saying no himself if he wants it to stop, Pippa. If he doesn't, he mustn't mind."

"Hard to believe," I said. "It would be different if he cared for her. Then he'd presumably enjoy the public petting. But he isn't in love with her. So what does he get out of it?"

"I imagine it must feel pleasant," Christopher said without looking at me, "and of course there's the fact that he can flaunt it in everyone's face."

"So he simply enjoys making us all squirm? I don't know why we should have to put up with that."

"Feel free to say something to him about it," Christopher said. He was running his fingers between the seat cushion and the back of the driver's chair, not looking at me. "I imagine he'd get rather a kick out of it if you did, actually."

I scowled at him. "You know very well that I can't do that. He'd certainly take it the wrong way, and then he'd never let me live it down."

"Best leave it alone, then," Christopher said, "and simply stop looking." He straightened up. "There's nothing here that I can see."

I shook my head. "It was a bit of a long shot, anyway. Mostly I just wanted to get out of the sitting room. It was uncomfortably close in there."

Christopher nodded and leaned his posterior against the front of the motorcar. "This situation is going to get ugly, you know, Pippa. Sammy Entwistle is almost certainly going to try to pin this on Francis. He's the one with the new fiancée, and I imagine Sammy will think twice before he tries to accuse the future Duke of Sutherland of murder."

"There's you," I said.

He nodded. "But between the two of us living together, and the fact that I've never been one to run after the local girls, I'm sure people have drawn their own conclusions."

He shot a glance my way. "Sammy is welcome to try to pin it on me—in fact, I wish he would; much better me than Francis—but I don't think he's going to."

Likely not. "So it's Francis we have to worry about."

He nodded, and glanced down the driveway towards the road. "I wish Tom would get here."

"It's a bit of a trek from London," I said. "And he might have got caught up with Pendennis before he was allowed to leave. If he was allowed to leave at all."

"He'll come," Christopher said. "He may not be able to take over the case. Sammy might think he can handle it without help, and if they don't ask, Scotland Yard can't cut in. But Tom will want to be here. He won't let us deal with this on our own."

"I hope you're right," I told him, as I turned to look at the doors to the carriage house. "Before we go back inside, let's look in there, too." It was where the croquet mallet had come from, after all. "Maybe there's a clue in there."

"Better put the gloves back on, then." He pushed off from the Crossley and headed for the doors to the carriage house. "And hope we don't leave any clues of our own to what we've been doing. Sammy won't like us interfering with his investigation."

No, he wouldn't. Given how he felt about the Astleys in general and Francis in particular, he'd undoubtedly take it very amiss, and would also do his best to make something of it. Something like, we were trying to do away with evidence that would implicate someone in the family.

That didn't stop me from moving forward behind Christopher. Sammy might be determined enough to blame Francis for the murder, or certain enough that Francis was guilty, that he would overlook something pertinent. We owed it to ourselves, and to Francis, to discover everything we could.

And yes, I quite realize that I was basing that opinion on nothing but worry and old history. Sammy had done nothing so far to indicate that he was interested in railroading Francis, or for that matter anyone else, into a murder charge. But better safe than sorry, and all that. When Christopher ducked inside the dusk of the carriage house, I followed. For a couple of steps, before I stopped.

"Where are you going? The croquet set is over here, by the door."

"I know, Pippa." Christopher glanced at me over his shoulder. "I lived here too, remember?"

Of course he did. I looked around at the piles of things—rakes and spades, croquet mallets, old wooden sleds and bicycle tires, and the dust motes dancing in the streaks of sunlight coming through the cracks in the walls—and fought back a wave of revulsion. "Now I remember why I never go in here. It's creepy."

"It's just an old carriage house," Christopher said, "full of old things we no longer use. It's only creepy because of the spiders."

"Precisely. Crispin used to drop them down the back of my dress. Spiders and caterpillars and anything else small and wiggly that he could catch."

Christopher smirked. "I remember. And handfuls of snow and fallen leaves and whatever else was available. He kept doing it for far longer than he should have, too."

"Lord, yes." I shuddered. "I think I must have been fifteen before he stopped."

"He was probably hoping you'd tear off your frock and he'd get a look at your unmentionables," Christopher said with a snigger. "That would have been before he started getting access to women's unmentionables of his own."

"He wouldn't have been interested in mine, Christopher. I'm sure he just enjoyed hearing me squeal." I took another look around the room now that my eyes had adjusted to the gloom. "Do you see anything interesting?"

"Can't say I do," Christopher said. "You?"

"Not really. It seems as if whoever used the croquet mallet must have known where to find it, though. They're not terribly visible over there, are they? Not something you'd stumble over accidentally, it seems."

Christopher nodded. "Takes out the itinerant wanderer, then."

"Was there an itinerant wanderer in the village last night?"

"Not aside from Abigail," Christopher said. "But they make for such handy scapegoats, don't they?"

They did. "I'm fairly certain it has to be someone in the family, you know. Or in the household, I should say. Not only is it too much of a coincidence that she'd come here all the way from London only to get herself murdered by a stranger, but nobody else would know where the croquet mallets are."

Christopher nodded.

"Before we go in, let me ask you something."

"Of course." He put his back against a rickety shelf cobbled together from rough pieces of wood and proceeded to listen attentively.

"When you and Francis went into the front of the house and I went onto the terrasse earlier, who was in the sitting room when you arrived? Was everyone there, or was someone missing?"

Christopher threw his mind back. I could see his eyes grow unfocused. "The Marsdens were there. Except Lord Geoffrey. He came down a few minutes later. But Laetitia was there, as you say, already petting Crispin. Her mother was talking to Uncle Harold and her father was talking to Mum. Constance came down before Geoffrey but after Francis and myself."

"And your father?"

"There from the beginning," Christopher said, "riding herd on the Marsdens. Why do you ask?

"There was someone in my room, looking down at me. Or at the body. I couldn't see who, they stepped back out of sight as soon as they noticed I had seen them."

"Must have been Constance or Geoffrey," Christopher said. "Everyone else was downstairs."

"Why would Constance or Geoffrey be in my room?"

"For a look at the body?" Christopher suggested. "Constance's room has its own window on the croquet lawn, I guess. But Geoffrey's room faces the front of the house."

"Why my room, though? Why not his sister's room?" It would be much more convenient, on the same floor as his own as it was.

"No idea," Christopher said and stripped off his gloves. "Maybe he has some sort of illicit passion for you and wanted to sniff your bedding and imagine himself sharing it with you."

My face twisted, and he added, "Just joking. I'm sure he wouldn't do that. He probably just wanted a look at the body from somewhere he wasn't likely to be seen."

Perhaps. Although I did wish he hadn't chosen to do it from my window.

"Are you ready to go back inside," Christopher added, "or is there something else you want to look at?"

"I can't think of anything." I peeled off my own gloves, or Aunt Roz's, while we turned towards the entrance. "This is all very upsetting. I can't imagine how we're going to figure out what's going on. The only people with a reason for wanting Abigail dead are people I don't think are guilty. Where am I supposed to go from here?"

Christopher opened his mouth, but before he could speak, another voice said, rather gloatingly, "I suggest you go inside and stay there until I call for you."