Chapter 28

Twenty-Eight

THE BRANDY ROOM

Me, and a layout of coffee, almond croissants, late-yield berries, buttered crumpets, and tureens of jam, yogurt and oats were waiting for Ian when he arrived.

And I was prepared, including the fact I’d already downed a whole cup of joe.

“Excellent,” he said when he entered the room. “Bloody coffee. I slept like the dead and I can’t shake it.”

Hmm…perhaps an excuse as to why he woke in such a foul mood.

I tipped my head back, and he pressed a hard but brief kiss on my lips before he threw himself on the sofa beside me and reached for the coffeepot.

“How late did you work?” I asked.

“Too late,” he murmured. “Email is the bane of my existence. It feels like I can delete fifty, and a hundred more will have arrived. I should never have made investments in Asia and Australia. The time difference means I never stop receiving emails.”

This was one of the myriad reasons I liked my job. It didn’t really depend on email. It was about face-to-face interaction.

“How did you sleep?” he asked, resting slanted sideways toward me against the back of the sofa with one finger hooked through a coffee cup that was squat, masculine, and ivory with a wide swath of what looked like tortoiseshell, banded in thin lines of gold, stating plainly what I thought from the beginning.

Each room had a matching service.

In his other hand, he held a croissant.

“I had a dream about Adelaide and Augustus.”

His brows drew down. “Is that why you asked Mum for their letters?”

“Yes. It was a very real-feeling dream.”

His smile was wolfish. “Were you doing naughty things to Augustus while you were lying beside me, darling?”

“They were picnicking with their kids, but yes, Adelaide’s thoughts rang the top bell on the saucy scale.”

He chuckled.

I twisted to reach to the table beside me and flipped the photograph I took from the safe toward him.

His gaze fell to it, and he halted in taking a bite of his croissant.

“Where did you find that?”

“It was in the safe.”

His eyes drifted there.

“Who’s this?” I asked, reaching over the top and pointing to the woman in the back with her head turned toward William. The same woman who came racing down the aisle in the dream where I was marrying David/Thomas.

He leaned forward, taking a bite of his pastry, and narrowed his eyes on the picture.

He sat back again, chewing and swallowing, and blithely stating, “It’s Rose. Rose Alcott. William’s wife.”

I nearly choked.

So I had to force out, “Rose is William’s wife? Record scratch and go back. William had a wife?”

He took a sip of his coffee, studying me, and then said, “Yes. As you know, some Alcott men have a tendency to stray. Why are you reacting like that?”

“I’ve asked about her before.”

“I wasn’t keeping anything from you, Daphne. I just hadn’t got ’round to telling you that part yet.” Another downward dip of his brows. “Are you angry with me?”

I set the photo aside and didn’t answer his question. Not because I was angry at him, because I was weirded out and needed answers myself.

So I asked my own.

“What happened to Rose?”

“Well, she was briefly considered a murderess after Dorothy took her fall,” Ian told me. “But she was quickly discounted.”

“Why?”

“Several reasons, the primary one was she had an alibi.”

“Do you know what that was?”

He seemed stricken for a moment before he said, “It was her husband.”

By damn.

“Tell me now, Ian, who do you think murdered Dorothy?” I demanded.

He stared me in the eyes, reading my tone, and said, “I think she became too messy for David, so he had her killed. I don’t think he did the deed, like he didn’t kill Joan, because he probably wouldn’t be caught dead belowstairs either, absolutely no pun intended. But he needed her out of the way to marry Virginia, so he killed her. And he was sure to be out with Virginia when Dorothy was pushed to her death.”

“Have you read her nephew’s book about her?”

“Certainly.”

That morning’s tenseness came back again, a thousand-fold, especially after last night’s dream, and what that might mean about the other ones besides, and you could hear the strain in my voice when I asked, “Did she die in a shocking-orange dress?”

“Although you will never fucking see them.” My tone had been tense, his voice was a growl. “I have. The police took pictures of her dead body. Possibly it was about the investigation. The fact they made the rounds and are easy to find even to this day, it was more about her fame and the macabre thrill of her death. But although it’s black and white, it’s known she was in a custom-made Schiaparelli sheath. And it was black.”

I let out a huge breath.

“What’s this about?” he demanded.

“I’m having dreams.”

“I know. You’ve said.”

“They’re very vivid. Last night, unbelievably real.”

“You’ve said that too.”

“I dreamed she died in an orange dress.”

“Because you know of Clifton’s book. But have you read it?”

I shook my head.

“Well, if you had, you’d know he came to a different conclusion than I have. He concluded Rose killed Dorothy, and that night, Rose was wearing an orange dress.”

I sunk back into the couch.

There it was. That was it.

Decisions my subconscious was making about what I was feeding it were filtering into my dreams. I wasn’t seeing what actually happened. My mind was making it up.

Maybe Ian was right. Maybe we needed to stop talking about this.

Even as I thought that, Ian kept talking about it.

“Clifton was fascinated by Rose, Joan, David’s first wife, and Virginia, almost more so than Dorothy. But he betrays a healthy dose of misogyny, because not simply did he pin all the dirty deeds on women, even if he dedicated the book to her, he was derisive of Dorothy’s lifestyle, the power she wielded through her sexuality, and looked down on her bisexuality. He even tried to argue it was vile conjecture when it wasn’t. Several of her female lovers’ letters and diaries made it clear she enjoyed her own sex as much as the opposite one. And he surmised that Virginia did away with Joan, which is ludicrous. Joan was tall and stately, country stock. I believe she was five eight. Virginia was petite and reed thin, as flappers tried very hard to be. She couldn’t hoist Joan up in a noose from a twelve-foot ceiling.”

“He thought she did the deed herself?”

He nodded. “In the dead of night during another, smaller house party. The problem with his theory was, at the time, Virginia was engaged, supposedly to a man she cared for very much. He got scarlet fever, which led to meningitis, and died. Some say she married David in a fugue state, such was her grief she lost her fiancé, this coupled with the fact she couldn’t have William, her first love, and was being married off to David, who she did not love. David certainly capitalized on it one way or another. He had his ring on her finger within months of Virginia’s fiancé’s death, which was within months of Joan dying.”

He took a sip of coffee and then kept speaking.

“Many women then had little say in who they married, especially those who were highborn. The story goes, the love sprung up between her and William, under the jealous eye of David. He was taken, but her parents put a stop to any hope William had of being with her, and Virginia with William. In the meantime, William found Rose. Virginia’s parents found her a fiancé they approved of. He then found himself dead. David, in my opinion, found a way to rid himself of his wife. He approached Virginia’s parents, and she was married off unceremoniously to her first love’s brother, and forced to live in a house with him, and his wife, and at times her husband and lost love’s paramour.”

I thought of the dates on the portraits, painfully did the mental math, and they didn’t add up.

Particularly when David was deposed as earl.

“Was Virginia pregnant when she married David?”

“No. They didn’t have any children. The earldom was inherited by David’s only child. A son he had with Joan.”

Holy crap!

“So you’re a product of Joan, not Virginia?”

“I am.”

“Whoa. This is making Daniel and Portia and Brittany look tame.”

“Agreed, however, what I’d like to talk about now is, do you always dream like this?”

I shook my head.

“Only here?”

I nodded. “I dream, and I’ve had a few nightmares along the way, but I don’t dream every night, or I don’t recall them. And I do here, and I could tell you everything that happened in them.”

“So tell me,” he ordered. “Now.”

I opened my mouth to do that, or I’d get to it, after I asked about his current intensity, but I didn’t get any words out.

Because, regrettably, he said his next.

“But also, although I doubt you can answer this query, I’d like to know why that photograph was in the safe. It’s not kept there. Aunt Louisa had a meticulously organized filing system with all the history of Duncroft she kept in a room on the top floor. That picture was in it. The only reason Adelaide and Augustus’s letters are down here is because I want them to have privacy, and when we allow outsiders access to our papers, I don’t want them read. That room is locked. Temperature controlled. Has an expensive air filtration system, so the pictures, papers, daguerreotypes, slides and photographs in them will be preserved, as will Aunt Louisa’s tireless work on them. And, for the most part, unless a historian contacts us, that room remains untouched. In fact, I think the last person Dad let in there was Steve Clifton, when he was researching his book.”

Cue another chill gliding over my skin.

Before I could react to it…

“So it’s about the money!” was shrieked from down the hall.

Ian and I sat still, listening, and I’d again tensed up.

Because that was Portia.

We heard nothing and then.

“I don’t believe you!”

I stood.

“Don’t,” Ian urged.

I looked down at him. “I don’t know if I can’t. She’s a guest in your home, Ian. At the very least, she shouldn’t be shouting in the hall.”

I went to the door with Ian calling, “Daphne.”

But what I saw at the end of the hall had me running.