country scene full of glancing sunlight and fragile, almost insubstantial trees, as though not only the spring but the garden itself might vanish. Pitt hardly needed his occasional work recovering stolen art to know that it was good.
William did not hear him till he was a yard away. “Good afternoon, Mr. March. Forgive me for interrupting you, but I must ask you certain questions about Lord Ashworth’s death.”
At first William was startled, simply because his concentration had precluded his awareness of anyone else; then he put down the brush and faced Pitt bleakly.
“Of course. What do you want to know?”
Thoughts were teeming in Pitt’s head, but looking at the clever, vulnerable face, the delicate mouth, the quicksilver dreamer’s eyes, he abandoned them as clumsy, even brutal. What was there left to say?
“I am sure you must realize that Lord Ashworth was murdered,” he began tentatively.
“I suppose so,” William agreed with obvious reluctance. “I have tried to think of a way in which it could conceivably be an accident. I failed.”
“You did not consider suicide?” Pitt said curiously, remembering Eustace’s determined attempts.
“George wouldn’t kill himself.” William turned away and looked at the canvas on his easel. “He wasn’t that kind of man….” His voice trailed off, and his face looked even thinner, pinched with a sorrow that seemed to run right through him.
It was precisely what Pitt knew to be true. There was infinitely less hypocrisy, less self-regard in William than in his father. Pitt found himself liking him.
“Yes, that is what I thought,” he agreed.
For a moment William was silent, then recognition lit his face.
“Of course-I forgot. You’re Emily’s brother-in-law, aren’t you?” he said, so quietly his words were almost lost. “I’m sorry. It’s all very …” He searched for an expression of what he felt, but it eluded him. “Very hard.”
“I am afraid it won’t get better,” Pitt said honestly.”I’m forced to believe someone in this house killed him.”
“I suppose so. But I can’t tell you who-or why.” William picked up his brush again and began to work, touching a muted raw sienna into the shadows of a tree.
But Pitt was not ready to be dismissed. “What do you know of Mr. Radley?”
“Very little. Father wants to marry him to Tassie because he thinks Jack’s family might get him a peerage. We have a lot of money, you know-from trade. Father wants to become respectable.”
“Indeed.” Pitt was startled by his frankness. There was no attempt to protect his father’s weakness, no family defense. “And might they?”
“I should think so. Tassie’s a good catch. Jack’s not likely to do better-aristocratic heiresses can afford a tide, and the Americans won’t settle for anything less. Or to be accurate, their mothers won’t.” He went on working in the shadows, looking at the Vandyck brown, discounting it, and squeezing out burnt umber.
“What about Emily?” Pitt asked. “Doesn’t she have more money than Miss March?”
William’s hand stopped in midair. “Yes, she will have, now that George is dead.” He winced as he said it. “But Jack has too much experience of women, if even half his reputation is deserved, to believe from a couple of evenings’ flirtation that Emily would consider marrying him-especially with George behaving like such a fool. Emily was only retaliating. You may not be aware of it, Mr. Pitt, but in Society married women have little else to do but gossip, dress up in the latest fashions, and flirt with other men. It is their only source of entertainment. Not even an idiot takes it seriously. My wife is very beautiful, and has flirted as long as I have known her.”
Pitt stared at him but could see no additional pain, no new anger or awareness of fear as he said it. “I see.”
“No, you don’t,” William said dryly. “I don’t suppose you’ve ever been bored in your life.”
“No,” Pitt admitted. There had never been time; poverty and ambition do not allow it.
“You are fortunate-at least, in that respect.”
Pitt looked at the canvas again. “Neither have you,” he said with conviction.
For the first time William smiled, a sudden flash; then it was gone again as quickly, replaced by the knowledge of tragedy.
“Thank you, Mr. March.” Pitt stepped back. “I shan’t disturb you any longer, for the moment.”
William did not reply. He was working again.
Downstairs, Stripe was also finding things difficult; he was not any more welcome in the servants’ hall than Pitt had been in the withdrawing room. The cook looked at him with acute disfavor. It was the hour after luncheon, when she should have been able to take a little time off before beginning to think of dinner, and she wished to sit with her feet up and gossip with the housekeeper and the visiting lady’s maids. There was always scandal to exchange, and today especially she was overburdened with the need to express her emotions. She was a large, capable woman with pride in her job, but spending all day on her feet was more than anyone should be asked to bear.
“Hurts me veins something terrible!” she confided to the housekeeper, a rotund woman of her own age. “Wouldn’t tell them flipperty parlormaids that, though! Gets above themselves far too easily as it is. Not the discipline there was in
“Everything’s going downhill,” the housekeeper agreed. “And now we’ve got the police in the ’ouse. I ask you, whatever next?”
“Notice, that’s what.” The cook shook her head. “’Alf the girls givin’ notice, you mark my words, Mrs. Tobias.”
“You’re right, Mrs. Mardle, you’re right and no mistake,” the housekeeper agreed sagely.
They were in the housekeeper’s sitting room. Stripe was still in the servants’ hall, where they ate and had such companionship as their duties allowed time for. He was uncomfortable, because it was a world he was unused to and he was an intruder. It was immaculately clean; the floor was scrubbed by the thirteen-year-old scullery maid every morning before six A.M. The dressers and cupboards were massed with china, any one service worth a year of his wages. There were jars of pickles and preserves, bins of flour, sugar, oatmeal and other dry stores, and in the scullery he could see piles of vegetables. There was a vast black-leaded cooking range with its bank of ovens, and beside it scuttles of coke and coal. Of course, the boiling coppers, sinks, washboards, and mangles would all be in the laundry room, and the airing racks drawn up to the ceiling by pulleys, full of clean linen.
Now, in this warm, delicious-smelling kitchen, he was standing in the middle of the floor with an array of maids and footmen in front of him; all stiffly to attention, immaculate, men in livery, girls in black stuff dresses and crisp, snowdrift caps and aprons, the parlormaids’ trimmed with lace many middle-class ladies would have been glad to own. Stripe thought by far the handsomest of them was the lady’s maid of the household, Lettie Taylor, but she seemed to regard him with even more disdain than the others. The visiting ladies had naturally brought their own staff, and they were also present, except Digby, Lady Cumming-Gould’s maid. She had been elected to remain with the new widow, perhaps because she was the oldest, and considered the most sensible.
Somewhat uncomfortable under their hostile gaze, Stripe licked his pencil, asked the questions he was obliged to, and noted down their answers in his book. It all told him nothing except that the trays were set the night before and left in the upstairs pantry, where the kettles were brought and the tea made freshly-or in Lord Ashworth’s case, the coffee-each morning. On this particular occasion there had been an unusual turmoil and the pantry had been filled with steam, and apparently unattended, for some minutes. Anyone could, at least in theory, have slipped in and poisoned the coffee.
He asked for a private room and was shown the butler’s pantry, which actually was a sitting room for the butler’s personal use. There he interviewed each member of the staff alone. He asked-with commendable subtlety, he thought-for any information they might have about relationships within the family, comings and goings; and learned precisely nothing that his own guess could not have told him. He began to wonder if they identified with their masters or mistresses so closely that it was their own honor they defended, their own status in the small community that existed in this house.
Finally, on being handed Pitt’s note regarding the digitalis, he asked Lettie to take him upstairs and show him Mrs. March’s room and her medicine cabinet, and any other medicine cabinet in the house.
She put her hands up to tuck her hair in more tidily, then smoothed her apron over her slim hips. To Stripe, blushing a little at the thought and terrified lest it should show in his face, she was the prettiest, most pleasing woman he had ever seen. He found himself hoping this investigation would take a long time-several weeks at the
