Chapter 15

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

For a second, the déjà vu was stunning. It was as if a fist had reached into my chest and wrapped around my lungs, squeezing. I wasn’t even aware that I had been worried. Not until now, when—for the third time today—I stood outside a bedroom door after knocking, and I remembered what had been waiting inside the room the other two times I had done the same thing.

But then there were noises from inside, and a moment later, the door opened and Constance’s face peered out. “Oh!” She smiled. “Hullo, Roslyn. Pippa.”

“Hello, Constance,” I managed, and if my chest felt a bit tighter than it ought to, I think I was the only one who noticed.

Aunt Roz swept past Constance. I took a breath and followed, and Constance shut the door behind us, looking from Aunt Roz to me and back. “Is everything all right?”

“Everything is fine,” Aunt Roz assured her, at the same time as I said, “Other than the two murders.”

My aunt and I glanced at one another, before we both seemingly decided that it was the better part of valor to simply let that statement lie.

“Yes,” I turned back to Constance. “All is well. There’s nothing new.”

“Miss Fletcher was murdered? As well as Mr. Rivers? Constable Collins said he was dead when he came downstairs.”

I nodded, after taking a moment to sort out the pronouns. “Someone cracked him over the head with a vase. There was no attempt at all to try to make it look like anything but a violent attack.”

Unlike Cecily’s death, which had been carefully designed to look like a natural occurrence, or at best an accidental overdose with death as the result.

Unless, of course, it had actually been an accidental overdose and nobody had tried to make it look like anything else.

Although with Rivers dead, it did make it more likely that whatever had happened to Cecily had at least been instigated by somebody, whether the goal had been to kill her or simply to make her body reject the pregnancy. If it hadn’t been done on purpose, why kill the person who was the most likely purveyor of the pennyroyal?

“Pippa, dear,” Aunt Roz’s voice cut through the noise in my head, and I blinked and took another step into the room.

“I’m sorry.” Aunt Roz had taken a seat on the edge of the bed, while Constance was standing halfway between me and her, with her hands twined anxiously together before her. “I was just thinking,” I added, vaguely.

Aunt Roz’s eyebrows rose. “I just arrived. Would one of you care to explain exactly what has been going on here this weekend?”

I exchanged a glance with Constance, who made a face, but waved at me to go ahead.

I drew breath. “From the beginning, then. Last night, when I came up to bed, I ran into St George coming out of Cecily Fletcher’s room…”

After going through the entire sordid story, up to and including walking in on Dominic Rivers’s dead body, I closed my mouth and waited for Aunt Roz to give her verdict.

There was a moment’s silence.

“In my day,” she said, “there were Beecham’s Pills.”

I blinked. “There are still Beecham’s Pills, aren’t there?”

She nodded. “There were also Dr. Vandenburgh’s Female Restorative Pills, and French Periodical Pills, and of course there was turpentine and diachylon and gin...”

“I don’t think she drank turpentine,” I said, while Constance made a face, “although there was probably some gin last night. A lot of the drinks were gin-based, as I recall.”

Constance nodded agreement. “Turpentine has a very pungent smell, as I recall, and I can’t imagine it being in either the drinks or the tea. Someone would have noticed, surely?”

Oh, surely. “What was left in the cup last night smelled like mint,” I said. “I think I would have noticed had it smelled like turpentine.”

“Pennyroyal is quite easy to find, as well” Aunt Roz said. “Easy to distill, too.”

“We found a patch of it growing just a few hundred feet from the front door,” I nodded, “so anyone who wanted to make their own wouldn’t have had a problem.”

“Laetitia, Geoffrey, and I are all familiar with the area,” Constance said, and I turned to her.

“Nobody suspects you , Constance. You had no reason to want Cecily Fletcher dead. Or her baby gone, either. It certainly wasn’t Francis who got her in trouble.”

Aunt Roz shook her head firmly. “Of course not, Constance. That would be silly.”

Constance didn’t look reassured. “Do you think it was one of my cousins, then?”

“I think it could have been any number of people,” I said. “I’ve been to the Dower House before, so I could theoretically have known that there was pennyroyal growing in the ditch. Crispin has been here before, so he might have known. If Laetitia has had her friends here to stay, they may have known. Violet, Olivia, Cecily herself, maybe even Lady Serena.”

“Your aunt and uncle,” Aunt Roz added, “I assume. And all of the servants.”

There was another moment of silence.

“I don’t think Aunt Effie would have done something like that,” Constance said. “And I don’t believe that Uncle Maury would have known what to look for.”

“Of course not, my dear.” Aunt Roz smiled reassuringly. “We’re just talking, you know. No need to worry.”

There was a moment’s pause.

“If Laetitia thought it was Crispin’s baby…” I ventured, and Constance made a face.

“I don’t think she would have tried to kill Miss Fletcher, Pippa. She didn’t appreciate being a suspect in Johanna’s murder at all. Although she might have decided to add some pennyroyal to Miss Fletcher’s drink just to see what would happen. She’s not the most empathetic person in the world.”

No, she certainly wasn’t. On the other hand, Crispin had made it clear that the baby hadn’t been his, and all she’d have had to do was ask him. Surely she would have checked with him first, before she started poisoning people? And if she had done, then she wouldn’t have had any reason to go after Cecily.

“What about Geoffrey?” I asked, and watched Constance grimace again.

“He’s not the most empathetic, either. And he’s not at all interested in being tied down.”

No, I imagined he wasn’t. “Would he have done something about it?”

“Again,” Constance said, “I don’t think he would have killed her. He’s self-absorbed, but not deliberately cruel.”

“Stupid, though.”

“Not the brightest bulb in the chandelier,” Constance admitted, “but he knows that, believe it or not. And he had to deal with the murder investigation at the Dower House, too. I don’t think he would have wanted to risk it.”

“So what you’re saying is that he might also have given her something to get rid of the baby, to get himself out of a sticky situation in which he might be expected to step up and do the right thing, but he wouldn’t have committed murder.”

Constance shook her head. “Not in my opinion.”

I nodded. I shared her opinion, as it happened. Geoffrey was stupid, and sneaking pennyroyal into someone’s tea to try to induce an accidental-looking miscarriage seemed like it was more cunning than he would be capable of. “This is all moot. Living down the road from where pennyroyal grows is one thing. It doesn’t mean that he has ever had anything to do with Cecily Fletcher.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if he has done,” Constance said. “He’s made his way through a lot of the young ladies of the Bright Young set. Although you’re right, I know nothing about Miss Fletcher specifically.”

“One of the other girls, perhaps?” Aunt Roz suggested. “Miss Fletcher’s friend, trying to fix a problem Miss Fletcher couldn’t bring herself to fix on her own? Or another girl after the man whose child Miss Fletcher was carrying, so she wanted Miss Fletcher out of the way, or at least wanted to eliminate the reason why the man she liked had to marry Miss Fletcher and not her?”

“Lady Violet spent last evening with Geoffrey,” Constance murmured.

I nodded. “And Olivia Barnsley spent it with the Honorable Reggie.” Who wasn’t very honorable if he got Cecily with child and didn’t offer to marry her.

“Perhaps I should have a chat with one or both of them,” Aunt Roz said thoughtfully. “I’m sure they’re both very upset about their friend’s death. An older, maternal presence might do one or both of them good.”

It had done me good, so I could hardly quibble with that.

“I can’t imagine that Lady Euphemia will step up,” I commented, and Constance shook her head.

“Aunt Effie isn’t the maternal type. She’ll worry about Laetitia and Geoffrey, but none of the others.”

“I think perhaps I’ll go and see if I can’t be of service to the young ladies,” Aunt Roz said and pushed to her feet. “Perhaps they would appreciate someone to talk to. Not just about their friend, but I can reassure them as to the investigation, as well. We did go through one of our own just a month or two ago.”

“Let us know if they say anything interesting,” I said, as I took Aunt Roz’s place on the bed as she crossed the room to the door. “I’ll let you tackle this on your own. My presence would only complicate things, I think.”

The two young women were much more likely to be forthcoming with my aunt than with me.

She nodded. “Of course, dear. I’ll see you both downstairs later.”

We assured her that of course she would, and told her where to find Violet and Olivia—“Most likely upstairs in one of their bedchambers. I didn’t see either of them downstairs earlier. Olivia is in Snowdrop and Violet in Lilac, I believe,” and then Aunt Roz was gone and it was just Constance and me looking at one another.

“I can’t believe this has happened again,” she told me as she came over to sit next to me on the bed.

I nodded. “At least none of us are suspects this time.”

Constance shuddered. “Thank the Lord. I barely even knew Cecily Fletcher. And Francis didn’t know her at all.”

“Nor did I. Enough to recognize her face downstairs last night, but nothing more.”

After a moment’s pause, I added, “I feel horrible, though. If I had realized last night how ill she was…”

“How could you have done?” Constance wanted to know. “You knew that she was expecting. It wasn’t unreasonable that she would be sick. And it’s not as if we go around expecting people to have been poisoned, even after the last few months.”

No, I supposed not. “I’m not saying I could have known, or should have. I just feel bad that I didn’t do more. But it simply didn’t cross my mind that anything extraordinary was wrong. I knew she was expecting, so the vomiting made sense. She told me that she had had peppermint tea, and it smelled more like spearmint, but even that wasn’t enough to make me wonder.”

“No, of course not,” Constance said. “Why would it? I would have thought it was a simple misnomer, as I’m sure you did.”

I nodded. “Spearmint or peppermint seemed like a minor distinction then.”

“It’s a minor distinction now,” Constance said. After a second’s pause, she added, “I understand how you feel, Pippa. I felt the same way when Johanna was murdered. Not that you disliked Miss Fletcher the way I did Johanna. But I felt as if I should have prevented it somehow. As if there was something I could have done to make a difference.”

“There wasn’t,” I said. “I was there, and there wasn’t anything you could have done differently.”

“Well, I don’t think there was anything you could have done differently, either. By the time you saw Cecily, she was already ill. The poison had already affected her, and I don’t think there was anything anyone could have done after that. She was already trying to dispel it on her own, after all—or her body was—so even pumping her stomach at that point wouldn’t have helped. Even if she had told you that something out of the ordinary was going on, I think it was too late by then.”

We sat in silence a moment while I chewed on her words.

She was right, of course, but it had taken me until now to realize it.

The truth was, I hadn’t liked Cecily much. Hadn’t known her well, of course, but what little I did know, I didn’t like. She had bothered Christopher in the past, and had gone to bed with Crispin; what was there to like?

But because I hadn’t liked her, I had felt guilty over her death. As if there was something I should have done that I hadn’t, out of dislike. But the truth was that after she had stumbled into the lavatory and dropped to her knees in front of the commode, she had simply been a sick young woman who needed help. I hadn’t held anything in her past against her.

If I had had any inkling of what was going on, or had thought of anything I could have done differently, I would have done it. I felt bad that I hadn’t caught on sooner, but Constance was right: the clues really hadn’t been there. Saving her hadn’t been in my power, and I hadn’t failed.

“Thank you,” I said.

She squeezed my hand once before letting go. “I should go and see if I can find Francis.”

“Aunt Roz said Uncle Herbert took him off somewhere,” I said.

Constance nodded. “He and your German friend almost came to blows. Your aunt and uncle arrived, and broke it up. Herbert took Francis away, and Roslyn latched onto your friend. I came up here to wait for things to settle down, since everyone was staring at me.”

“Christopher went to look for his father and brother when we arrived downstairs,” I said, “so I think I’ll just go up to my room for a few minutes and freshen up.”

Constance got to her feet and smoothed her skirt down. “I’ll see you downstairs later?”

“I’ll get out of these clothes and into something else,” I said, “and then I’ll be down. Won’t take me but a few minutes.”

“Do you want me to come with you?”

I shook my head. “You go ahead and find Francis. If you see Christopher, tell him I’m on my way.”

Constance said she would do, and then we parted ways: Constance down the main staircase to the ground floor and me up the smaller stairs to the second floor.

In complete honesty, I should perhaps confess that I did have an ulterior motive for wanting to go upstairs. Yes, I had worn the same clothes since I got up this morning. I had crawled across the lawn in them after being shot at, and I had found two different dead bodies wearing this skirt and blouse, as well as walked down a dusty road and picked weeds in them. I did want to get out of them and into my afternoon dress.

That was not the only reason I wanted to go upstairs, however. I wanted to see what, if anything, Constable Collins might have discovered since the last time I had seen him, but more than that, I wanted a chance to listen in on the conversation Aunt Roz might be having with Lady Violet and the Honorable Olivia.

And since I did, and didn’t see the sense in giving anyone advanced notice that I was coming, I stopped at the foot of the stairs and kicked my shoes off. With them in my hand, I proceeded up the stairs silently, in my stocking feet.

The upstairs hallway looked the same as it had the last time I’d been here. I peered into the alcove on my way past, and saw that the peacock feathers were gone from the plinth. The door to Dom Rivers’s room was closed, and that was fine by me. The gentlemen from the mortuary hadn’t arrived yet to pick up the body, and I assumed Collins was trying to keep it from being gawked at by anyone else until then.

There were faint noises from within the room, the sounds of Collins investigating, I assumed. I didn’t think any of the reinforcements from the village had arrived yet, either, so it was still only him working the case here at Marsden Manor. Perhaps he had thought it possible to get fingerprints off the peacock feathers, and he had taken them in there with him. It wasn’t an outrageous idea: whoever had picked up the vase must have lifted the feathers out first, and laid them on the plinth, although if he—or she—had been wearing gloves, there’d be no fingerprints on any of it.

I didn’t knock on the door. Instead, I edged down the other side of the hallway towards the rooms on the opposite side.

Cecily’s room was the one in the middle. The door was still standing open. First on my right was Snowdrop, which I thought was Olivia’s room. I sidled up to the door, crossing my fingers that the floor wouldn’t creak, and held my breath.

There were no sounds from within. I could hear the rustling from across the hall, as well as the faint murmur of voices, but from further down.

Lady Violet’s room it was, then.

I abandoned Olivia’s door and skirted Cecily’s—the room inside was empty, and the bed had been stripped; the sheets, I assumed, had been gathered as evidence—to wind up in front of Lilac, directly across from my own Wisteria.

“—cannot believe it,” a voice said from within. I recognized the slightly adenoidal undertones as belonging to Violet. I don’t think I had heard enough of Olivia’s voice to recognize it, and it definitely didn't belong to Aunt Roz, who may or may not even be here. It could simply be that Violet and Olivia were having a conversation.

But no— “That she would take such a step?” Aunt Roz inquired. “Or that someone would do it to her?”

There was a pause. I imagined Violet and Olivia looking at one another. Then?—

“Either,” Olivia said. It had to be Olivia, since it wasn’t Violet, nor was it anyone else whose voice I recognized. “Ceci wasn’t the maudlin sort. She wouldn’t have offed herself over something like a baby, even if the bloke wouldn’t marry her. “

Violet seemed to agree, because she added, “If she wanted the baby, she would have kept it. If she didn’t, she would have taken steps. There are ways for a girl to get out of a predicament like that these days.”

She sounded very cool about it. Perhaps she had already had to deal with a similar problem of her own. I wouldn’t be surprised, since—judging by the way St George got around—these girls weren’t shy about sharing their favors, and when you do, sometimes there are consequences.

However, something else about Olivia’s assertion had caught my attention, and I hoped that it had caught Aunt Roz’s, too.

And right on schedule, she asked, “Did the father of the baby not want to take responsibility?”

There was a beat. I imagined Olivia and Violet exchanging a glance.

“We don’t know,” Olivia said eventually.

“She didn’t confide in you?”

“She told us when she first suspected,” Violet said. “But she didn’t say anything about who she might be involved with.”

Aunt Roz hesitated. I could feel as well as hear the pause. “My nephew…”

“Oh, no,” Violet denied immediately, while Olivia added, firmly, “That’s ancient history.”

“At least six months old,” Violet added.

“Dead and buried,” Olivia said.

Ancient history, indeed. Although it was the same thing that Crispin had told me—February—so I suppose it was nice to have it confirmed.

Aunt Roz didn’t say anything, but I could sense her relief. “Who else, then?”

“We thought it might have been Reggie,” Olivia said, “but now I’m not so sure.”

“The Honorable Mr. Fish?” Aunt Roz clarified. “I’m afraid I’m not familiar with the gentleman.”

“The Fishes came here from Normandy almost a thousand years ago,” Olivia said. “Reggie’s family is from Lincolnshire.”

“And he knew Miss Fletcher?”

Olivia’s voice turned snappish. “Of course they knew one another. But I spent all of last evening with him, and he didn’t have a chance to do anything to her. He was never near her drink to put anything in it, and after he went to his room, he didn’t come back out.”

“You kept watch?”

“For a bit,” Olivia said, “until I fell asleep.”

She must have fallen asleep before Cecily stumbled out of bed and into the lavatory, then, I assumed, or she would have come out of her room to see what was going on, as any caring friend would.

“What do you think, Lady Violet?” Aunt Roz wanted to know.

“I spent last evening with Lord Geoffrey,” Violet said. “If Ceci’s problem was his fault, he didn’t act like it.”

Which probably meant that he hadn’t been too distracted to put moves on Violet when the opportunity came along.

“Are you…” Aunt Roz hesitated, “involved with Lord Geoffrey, Lady Violet?”

Violet laughed. Harshly. “Good Lord, no. We all know better than that. It was just some fun last night.”

The silence that followed rang with something more than just the absence of sound, but I was outside the door and couldn’t tell what it was. It’s hard to make determinations based solely on the sound of someone’s voice and no cues beyond that.

“You both knew Miss Fletcher well,” Aunt Roz said. They both made confirmatory noises. “Why do you suppose she didn’t tell you who was responsible for her predicament?”

There was a beat.

“She didn’t know?” Violet suggested blandly.

“Is that likely?” Aunt Roz wanted to know. She was still soft-spoken and courteous. Had it been me in the family way without knowing who was responsible, her reaction certainly would have been a lot more shrill, but then she had no emotional attachment to Cecily Fletcher.

“No,” Olivia said, with—I guessed—a scowl at Violet. “She knew.”

“How do you know that?”

“She told us,” Olivia said.

“She told you who?—?”

“No,” Olivia said. “She didn’t tell us his name. But she said he was someone she couldn’t marry.”

“Someone she couldn’t marry? Or someone who couldn’t—or wouldn’t—marry her?”

“It’s the same thing,” Olivia said.

It most certainly wasn’t. Bilge couldn’t marry Cecily because he was already married to Serena, and Cecily couldn’t marry Bilge for the same reason. But that’s very different from not being able to marry Geoffrey because he was a cad or Dominic Rivers because he was—or had been—a dope dealer.

Crispin could have proposed to the girl he claims to be in love with at any point these last few months, as there was nothing actually stopping him from doing so, at least until he got engaged to Laetitia. The reason he hasn’t done, is because his father would disown him, and then he and his lady-love would have to crawl off to the Continent to live in squalor, and he doesn’t want to do that. He calls it that he can’t marry her, but in truth, he could if he wanted to. It’s the consequences that have kept him from proposing.

And now, of course, there was Laetitia.

But at any rate, there are lots of degrees between can and can’t, and Aunt Roz was absolutely correct in inquiring into which one this was.

Not that Olivia seemed inclined to acquiesce. “I told you both,” she said. “I don’t know who it is. She wouldn’t tell me. Just that they couldn’t be together.”

And there was yet another permutation of the same excuse. Couldn’t be together because he was married to someone else, or engaged to someone else, or in love with someone else, or because she was in love with someone else, or attached to someone else, or because her family would disown her, or his family would disown him, or because she couldn’t face the consequences of shacking up—in the literal sense—with Dominic Rivers somewhere in the squalor of—never mind the Continent—South London?

“Thank you for your time, girls,” Aunt Roz’s voice said from inside the room. Her footsteps were approaching the door, and I quick-stepped backwards, until I was standing outside my own door instead of outside Violet’s. By the time Aunt Roz stepped out into the hallway, I had my hand on the knob and the door halfway open, and was on my way in, innocently as you please.