Chapter 17

There were still sounds comingfrom within the carriage house. One of Sammy's constables, I assumed, or perhaps Sammy himself. I supposed I could simply go over and have a peek, but Christopher hadn't made mention of anything particularly exciting going on inside, so it was probably just the equivalent of a constabulary bloodhound sniffing at everything and nothing.

The boot room door turned out to be locked, something that hadn't happened, in my recollection, more than half a dozen times before during the day. I turned my feet towards the croquet lawn and back door instead.

The body was gone, obviously, and so, I assumed, was the croquet mallet. I hadn't looked in the mortuary van before it rolled off down the driveway, but I assumed the mallet had been there, carefully wrapped. It ought to be. Unless Sammy had it stashed somewhere, but I couldn't imagine where, since the constabulary seemed to be getting around on bicycles, and surely he didn't plan to carry it down to the village strapped to his back at the end of the investigation?

The lawn was empty but for a bobby squatting on the grass next to where Abigail's body had lain. He had his hat off and the sun shone on brown hair, instead of the flaming carrot red of Sammy's head. I thought about engaging him in conversation, just to see if he might let some inside information slip, but he looked like he might be praying, or at least doing something else important, and besides, Sammy had surely warned the constables away from telling anyone anything. I would have done, had I been in charge.

So I merely walked past him with a muttered "Pardon me," giving both him and the crime scene a wide berth, and made my way up onto the flagstone of the terrasse and across to the door.

Inside, the house was quiet. Neither the library nor the study are rooms that particularly invite anyone to kick their heels up in them, and someone must have warned off Cook, because the kitchen and scullery were empty. Hughes hadn't arrived, either, or so I assumed, until I heard her voice float out of Uncle Herbert's study as I approached.

"—knows."

"I have no idea what you mean," Uncle Herbert answered, but there was a brittle note in his voice that stated, as plainly as words, that he was lying. He had understood exactly what she meant, and furthermore, he wasn't pleased about it.

I stopped, of course, out of sight of the door, while I waited to see whether they had heard my approach.

And it seemed as if they hadn't, because Hughes made a sound that might have been a giggle in someone younger and less dignified. In either case, there was nothing particularly servile about it, nothing like what a domestic servant should do to the master of the house. I arched my brows and eased a bit closer, holding my breath.

"I can't make it much clearer than that, Lord Herbert."

"But he can't possibly," Uncle Herbert protested. "We said we'd never speak of it. I don't know how you'd know. You weren't even at Sutherland then."

"Lydia Morrison and I compared notes," Hughes said composedly. "I know His late Grace's idea was to get rid of anyone who knew anything?—"

The late Duke Henry, obviously. She must be talking about whatever had happened when Lydia Morrison had been sent to Dorset to work for Constance's mother, and Hughes had come back in her place.

"—but you know, Lord Herbert, how servants gossip."

There was a hint of something like satisfaction in her voice, or maybe more like triumph; something almost threatening, or at least suggestive that a threat might be in the offing, or could be if she so chose.

"That wasn't even the first time it happened," she added maliciously, "was it?"

I could almost feel the question shiver in the air.

There was a moment of silence, and when Uncle Herbert's voice came back, it was tight with what I judged to be a mixture of anger and fear. "What do you mean by that?"

"Surely you remember Maisie Moran?"

I blinked. My thoughts whirled, scrabbling. Was this someone I should know?

Then I realized that no, I didn't remember Maisie Moran. I had no idea who Maisie Moran was, or had been.

Uncle Herbert clearly did. "That was a long time ago," he said roughly. "Before I met Roslyn. Before we got married. It had nothing to do with us."

"Of course not." Hughes's voice oozed poisoned sympathy. "But one child with a woman not your wife is one thing. Two is quite another."

Child?

I gasped out loud, and then slapped a hand over my mouth, my heart beating faster.

But they must be too involved in their own conversation to have heard me, because Uncle Herbert was already speaking again. "Maisie never—" he began, voice hot, and then he choked on the rest of the sentence. There was a moment, one during which I was every bit as shocked as he was, I might add, before he spoke again. "No one ever told me!"

"Of course not," Hughes said, her tone dripping with false kindness. "His Grace sent her away, didn't he?"

"Did he?" Uncle Herbert sounded almost confused. "He did? My father?"

"Of course he did, my lord. You were engaged to Miss Roslyn by then, weren't you? It wouldn't do to have Miss Moran show up with a claim."

"But…"

Hughes waited, but Uncle Herbert didn't end up saying anything more. If his thoughts were anything like mine, scurrying like crabs in a bucket, I couldn't blame him for that. Unless I had misunderstood something, he had just been told that an affair he'd had—with one of the maids? Really, Uncle Herbert?—before he married Aunt Roz, had resulted in a child he hadn't known existed.

"Why bring this up now?" Uncle Herbert finally managed, which was a salient point, I thought. It wasn't as if we didn't have plenty of other things to worry about this weekend.

"If not now," Hughes wanted to know, smoothly, "then when?"

After a second she added, "Now is when it matters, isn't it?"

"You mean?—?"

Uncle Herbert must have thought better of what he was going to ask, because he stopped. And thought for a moment before he asked, instead, "What do you want?"

"Money," Hughes said bluntly. When he didn't immediately respond, she added, "You, my lord, have every incentive to help me with that. I'm sure you, like your father, wouldn't want someone with too much knowledge hanging around your wife and children."

There wasn't much Uncle Herbert could say to that, of course. Nor did he try. "How much?" he asked instead, voice rough, and I was vividly reminded of Christopher, sitting on the bed in his room at Sutherland Hall after his audience with the Duke his grandfather, asking Grimsby the same question.

"Enough to go somewhere else for a fresh start," Hughes said. "Somewhere far away from Beckwith Place and Sutherland Hall. I think perhaps it would be better not to tempt fate."

Indeed. I focused on holding my breath and not shifting my feet as Uncle Herbert mentioned a sum. Hughes countered with one quite a bit higher, and they dickered back and forth before settling on the same amount which Grimsby had tried to extort from Christopher two and a half months ago. While Christopher and I hadn't had it, I didn't think coming up with a thousand pounds was going to be a problem for Uncle Herbert. He might have to do some fast talking to Aunt Roz to explain where it had gone, however. It was enough that she'd notice it missing.

Enough for Hughes to buy a small cottage somewhere out of the way, and live quietly on what was left for a good, long time.

"It'll have to wait until after this mess is sorted," Uncle Herbert warned, and Hughes tittered.

"Of course, Lord Herbert. We wouldn't want to draw any extra attention to the current situation."

I rolled my eyes even as I toed my shoes off as quietly as I could. It sounded as if they were winding up the conversation, and the last thing I wanted was to be caught outside the door with my ear to the metaphorical crack. Whatever this had been about, it had clearly been important enough to Uncle Herbert to pay a thousand pounds for Hughes's silence, and it was probably best if he didn't know that any of the rest of us knew about it.

So I slipped my feet out of the shoes and bent and picked them up, and then I scurried, as quietly as I could in my stockings, across the hall and through the door of the boot room. And placed my shoes on the floor there, as if I had just come in from outside. In the event anyone happened to notice me—say, if Hughes made for the side door, the quickest way out of the house—it might look as if I had just arrived from outside.

For good measure, I slipped my feet back into the brogues as my thoughts churned. Uncle Herbert had had an affair with a woman named Maisie Moran before he and Aunt Roz got engaged, and she'd had a child?

Francis was turning thirty next week, and Uncle Herbert and Aunt Roz had been married at least a year or two by the time he came along. He hadn't been one of those ‘early' babies, as far as I knew. Maisie Moran's son or daughter would be thirty-two or -three by now, then.

That was if he or she existed at all, of course, and Hughes wasn't just making the whole thing up. She hadn't given Uncle Herbert any proof of anything she'd said. He had tacitly admitted to the affair with Miss Moran, and hadn't claimed that a child couldn't have come from it, so I supposed I'd have to take that part of it as fact. But just because there could have been a child, didn't mean that there had been one.

I knew nobody whose last name was Moran. But then Maisie might not be a Moran any longer. Uncle Herbert had married. She might have married, too, and taken her husband's name. And so might her child.

And whatever name it bore, Maisie's child would be a decade too old to have been Abigail Dole. But Hughes had said that it happened again. And it sounded as if it had happened around the same time that Hughes had come up from Dorset in exchange for Lydia Morrison, which had been when Crispin (and Christopher, and for that matter myself) had been infants. Around the same time, I would guess, that Abigail had been one, too.

For Uncle Herbert to have had another child the same age as Christopher, he would have had to—I winced—commit adultery while Aunt Roz was expecting. I don't know why that should make it worse, but somehow it did. I didn't think I would ever be able to forgive my (hypothetical, future) husband if he cheated on me, but if he did so while I was carrying his unborn child, not only would I not forgive him, but I'd probably go after him with a mallet of my own.

But perhaps Christopher had come about as a result of the affair. After, not before. If Uncle Herbert and Aunt Roz were trying to repair their marriage after Uncle Herbert's indiscretion, and they thought another child would do it, they might have had Christopher.

I made a face. The idea of my best friend being the result of an attempted reconciliation between his parents was a bit unpleasant, honestly. I wanted him to be a product of a happy mother and father deciding, after a few years, to try for another child, not a last ditch attempt to fix a failing marriage after one party cheated on the other.

Although none of this was my affair—pun totally intended. What mattered, was that it was possible that Abigail Dole was Uncle Herbert's child by someone other than Aunt Roz. And that would explain why little Bess looked like a Sutherland. Abigail didn't, or hadn't, but if the genes were there, she could have given birth to a child with Sutherland hair and eyes.

What it didn't explain, was that list of items we had found in her tote. Fair hair, blue eyes, black motorcar, grandson of the Duke of Sutherland.

Unless that wasn't Abigail's list, of course, but her mother's. Uncle Herbert had been the grandson of the (previous) Duke of Sutherland at the time when Abigail would have been conceived, before the old man died and Henry succeeded to the title.

I had never been able to reconcile the idea that either Christopher, Crispin, or Francis had lied to me about Abigail. They'd all three sounded very sincere in their denial of her and her child, and this explained why.

What it didn't explain, was who had killed her. But that really seemed like something of a side-issue at this point. I could reason that away as having been done by Laetitia, or in a pinch by Constance or Uncle Harold. Someone who wasn't actually family and whom I would feel better about throwing to the wolves than my own flesh and blood.

No, this was all very much to the good, actually. Yes, my uncle was being blackmailed, and he had, apparently, been unfaithful to my aunt at some point before I'd been born. But while that was bad, nobody in the family appeared to be guilty of murder. I could relax.

And so I did, so much so that I actually staggered, and accidentally knocked into a walking stick that was leaning in the corner of the boot room. It fell over, clattering against the door, and that caused my uncle, who was still lingering in the hallway after seeing Hughes on her way, to appear in the doorway, as pale as a ghost and with terror in his eyes.

It was only slightly mollified by the sight of me. "Oh." He sounded out of breath, although he had certainly not exerted himself on his way across the hallway, so it must be nerves. "It's you, Pippa. What are you doing here?"

He glanced around the tiny boot room, probably to ascertain that I was alone.

"Just came in from outside," I said brightly. "The vehicle from the morgue left with the body, and Christopher offered to take Doctor White to the village in the Bentley. I hope you don't mind."

I'm a reasonably good liar, if I do say so myself. I don't think my voice gave anything away. It sounded perfectly normal and cheerful in my ears.

"No, no." Uncle Harold waved it off as if it were nothing. Under normal circumstances, I would have expected at least a wince at the idea of letting his youngest son go off in the beloved automobile, but right now there was no reaction to that bit of news at all.

"Did you…" He eyed me, "Just now, did you say?"

I nodded.

"Through this door?"

"Of course. Where else would I—?" Oh.

"I locked it earlier," Uncle Herbert said gently. "After I let Hughes in. I didn't want people coming and going through all areas of the house, so I locked this door."

Oops. I glanced at the key in the lock, and then back at Uncle Herbert. I'm sure guilt was writ all over my face in large letters.

"How much did you hear?" he wanted to know.

I winced. "Not all of it. Enough to know that you had an affair with one of the servants before you married Aunt Roz, and another with someone else before Christopher was born. And that there may have been children."

"May have been?"

"I didn't hear any proof," I said.

Uncle Herbert nodded. "What do you plan to do with this knowledge, Pippa?"

I blinked. I hadn't thought that far ahead, actually. "Is there something I should do with it?"

His lips curved hopefully. "I suppose it would be too much to ask you to keep it to yourself?"

"I'm not in the habit of keeping things from Christopher," I said.

It wasn't a threat. I wasn't trying to be clever or calculated or whatever it might have sounded like. The words simply fell out of my mouth because they were true. I don't keep things from Christopher. That's not to say that I tell him everything. I don't. But I've never held something like this back. Something that affects him as much as, if not more than, me.

"And we love you for it," Uncle Herbert said sincerely. "You've been the best friend we could have asked for, for Christopher. All these years you've been like a sister to him, and to Francis."

I nodded. We'd shared everything for twelve years, Christopher and I. The idea of keeping this secret from him made my stomach hurt.

However, so did telling him what his father had done.

"He doesn't need to hear this, Pippa," Uncle Herbert said, with something that hit in the neighborhood between anguish and persuasion in his voice. "It would only upset him, when there's nothing he can do about it. It would upset them all."

‘Them all' being Francis and Aunt Roz, I assumed. Perhaps Uncle Harold, who might hold his brother in higher regard than to suspect him of having indulged in multiple affairs—not that there was any part of me that wanted to run to Uncle Harold to tell tales. This was none of Uncle Harold's concern, and aside from that, he might know already.

But there was one person who really ought to know.

"Aunt Roz…" I began, and Uncle Herbert flapped a hand.

"Roz knows."

My jaw dropped. "Aunt Roz… knows?"

He nodded. "Of course. Did you think I would keep secrets from my wife? I told her about Maisie before we were married."

Before I could say anything, a shadow crossed his face. "I didn't know that there was a child, of course. If I had known, I might have been forced to act differently. My father was right about that…"

Duke Henry had been right in sending Maisie Moran away, I assumed, or Uncle Herbert might have felt compelled to marry her, once he knew about the child, instead of Aunt Roslyn.

"But the other?—"

He shook his head. "There were extenuating circumstances, Pippa. And I'm not discussing them with you. But you will not—will not, do I make myself clear?—you will not ask your aunt to explain them. Roz knows, but that doesn't mean I want it dredged up again. Bad enough that I'll have to tell her about Maisie's child."

"You'll tell her about that?"

"I don't keep secrets from my wife, Pippa," Uncle Herbert said sternly. "And when you marry?—"

He stopped, rather abruptly, and breathed in and out through his nose a couple of times. When he continued speaking, he sounded less peremptory, so maybe he had realized that he wasn't really in a good position to be giving marital advice. "When you marry, I hope you won't keep secrets from your husband, either. A happy marriage is built on trust."

Easy for him to say. It couldn't be simple to trust a man who had cheated on you before, so more power to Aunt Roz. But I did love her, she was my blood, and Uncle Herbert was right: I didn't want to cause her any more pain than he must have already caused with this behavior.

"I won't say anything," I said grudgingly. "Not to Aunt Roz nor to anyone else. Not Christopher or Francis or even Constance."

"Or Crispin," Uncle Herbert said.

"No, of course not. It's none of his concern, is it?" Uncle Herbert didn't respond, and I added, "It's not like we're close, you know. Everyone's acting as if something's going on with us, but the truth is that I can barely stand to be in the same room with him, and he doesn't like me any better. I'm certainly not going to confide family secrets in him."

Uncle Herbert nodded. He stuck out a hand. "Shake on it?"

"I suppose," I said grudgingly.

"Good girl." He gave my hand a squeeze. "I promise you there are extenuating circumstances, Pippa. I can't tell you what they are, and I beg you not to interrogate your Aunt Roz or Hughes, but I swear I'm not such a cad as I seem. There were reasons, good reasons, for doing what I did."

"I believe you," I said, even if I wasn't sure I did. I loved my uncle, though. He had taken me in and had become my surrogate father when my parents sent me to England before the war. I didn't want this to come between us.

"Thank you, my dear." He put a hand on my shoulder for a moment. "Now… will you come into the sitting room with the others?"

"I think I need a few minutes to myself," I said. "I think perhaps I'll go back outside and wait for Christopher to come back."

If I tried to go upstairs, there was a chance that someone would see me, and I didn't think I could face Aunt Roz, or Francis or Constance, right now. "Not to talk to," I added. "Not about this. I promised, and I won't. But I think I could use some fresh air. Is it all right if I go out this way?"

"Of course, Pippa." Uncle Herbert turned the key in the lock and pulled the door open. "I'll just lock this behind you again. Better not to have people wandering in and out everywhere."

Definitely. Especially considering the things they might overhear.

"Has Sammy… has Constable Entwistle got around to doing individual interviews yet?"

"He spoke to the Earl and Countess Marsden," Uncle Herbert said, "and to Lord Geoffrey. I can only assume he thinks they are the least likely to be involved, since they have no connection to the Astleys except through their niece."

"No interview with Laetitia?"

Uncle Herbert shook his head. "I hope you have a plan, Pippa, or she'll have Crispin hogtied and bound for the altar before the weekend is over."

"I didn't realize it was up to me to prevent that," I said.

"Someone has to," Uncle Herbert answered, which wasn't an answer, although it was at least nice to know that someone else shared my reservations.

"I've tried to speak to him about it. Two months ago, he was adamant that he didn't want to marry her. I don't know why he isn't putting up more of a fight now."

"Try again?" Uncle Herbert suggested.

"I suppose I'll have to, if nothing changes. Although he might be more inclined to listen to you. Crispin's never liked me much, you know."

"I doubt that," Uncle Herbert said, surely in response to my first statement and not my second. He shook his head. "I can't go behind my brother's back, Pippa. Crispin's his heir, and Harold seems to want him settled down. And I can't say that I blame him. The boy's running wild."

No question about that. "But surely sticking him in an arranged marriage he doesn't want isn't going to make him any less likely to play the field? He'll just be more unhappy and more likely to act out, won't he?"

"I imagine so," Uncle Herbert admitted, "but it's up to my brother what he arranges, and up to Crispin what he'll accept. Perhaps just encourage him not to do anything rash?"

I had no idea why he thought it was my responsibility to affect this, and furthermore, I had no expectation that Crispin would listen any better than he had the last few times I'd brought it up, but I didn't want Laetitia as part of the family either. "It can't hurt to try again, I suppose. I'll try to get him alone at some point today."

"Perhaps we can just hope that Lady Laetitia was responsible for what happened to the poor young lady," Uncle Herbert said, "and Constable Entwistle will take her off to prison for us."

That would be nice. However— "That's what I hoped would happen when Johanna de Vos died. But alas."

Uncle Herbert chuckled. "You'll figure it out, Pippa."

I had absolutely no expectation that I would, but I told him, "Thank you, Uncle Herbert. I'll see you later, then. I'm going to get some air before Christopher gets back."

"He took Doctor White into the village in the Bentley, you said?" Uncle Herbert looked pained. He must have finally realized what I had told him earlier.

I nodded. "I'm sure he'll be fine, Uncle. Wilkins let him drive Uncle Harold's Crossley back from the village yesterday, and that was no problem."

"Let's hope so," Uncle Herbert said. "I'll go join the others. Don't go far, Pippa."

I told him I wouldn't, and then I let him shut and lock the boot room door behind me as I set off down the driveway in the direction of the lane.