high, she made for the door.
“Oh, please!” I begged-caught however foolishly in superstitious dread. “Don’t go off miffed. Stay and have half my prawn sandwich.”
“Luncheon awaits,” hand on the knob, she did not turn her head. “We’d have sat down half an hour ago if your friend Judy wasn’t still outside with Lord Belfrey filling his head with promises of velvet lawns and herbaceous borders. And now it’ll be me that’s late.” The snap of the door behind her indicated that this was entirely my fault. To blunt my chagrin, I ate my lunch without tasting it and lay back down. No chance of Ben appearing for a while at least. He must be fully occupied in the dining room or kitchen. As for Thumper, I recognized the hopeless folly of yearning for him to leap through the window. Courage! I told myself. At least I wasn’t Wisteria Whitworth dreading the arrival of the malevolent wardress mouthing the names of the patients she had smothered in their beds after they refused their morning gruel that she’d put her whole heart into the stirring. That miserable old Mr. Codger… I smiled faintly at coming up with such a redundant name. Perhaps I was drifting off to sleep.
But that wasn’t to be. Mrs. Malloy’s disastrously silly suspicions kept pulling me back from the verge. Disastrous because she wasn’t much good at concealing her feelings when her nose was out of joint. And silly because if someone had seized upon the fog to bring about Suzanne Varney’s death, there was no reason to assume it was Judy Nunn. Someone living at Mucklesfeld could have easily heard the car coming, made sure the exterior lights were off, and nipped outside at the propitious moment with a torch. One now missing from its accustomed place. If killer there be, it would have to be someone who had more to fear from poor Suzanne’s arrival than the mere possibility that Lord Belfrey would choose her as his bride.
I lay longing for another cup of tea, a hot one this time, accompanied by another lemon tartlet. I still had more than an hour to go before joining the contestants in the library. Thinking of what might be offered to eat at that time would only make my current pangs worse, so I went back to concocting nonsensical theories about a murder I hoped to convince Mrs. Malloy hadn’t happened. Let the suspects seat themselves in a circle.
My mental gaze fell first on the trio of Mr. Plunket, Mrs. Foot, and Boris. Before finding refuge at Mucklesfeld, originally as squatters and then as employees on Lord Belfrey’s return from America (when they must have expected to be given their marching papers), they had been homeless. The prospect of his lordship’s marriage had to have rattled their rib cages. What if the new wife insisted they leave? What chance did any of them have to reestablish themselves? Would they be separated? That, I felt sure, was an anguish not to be borne; together they were the insiders, not the brutal reverse. But if the first contestant to show up conveniently died, his lordship might decide against continuing with
My watch showed scant progress toward teatime. If I were to pretend seriously that Mrs. Malloy was right that murder had occurred, then I would have to add employer to employees in our group of suspects. Why might Lord Belfrey have decided to eliminate one contestant off the bat? Perhaps when he belatedly saw Suzanne Varney’s photo laid out with the others by Georges in the study, he realized that she could ruin his chances for a marriage that would save Mucklesfeld. What could Suzanne have known to his detriment that had sealed her fate? I considered the possibility that he had behaved improperly toward her on the cruise they had shared, wincing away from more graphic wording. Illogically, my heart rebelled against the possibility that he had been anything other than a gentleman; after all, if a man would commit murder, he was likely capable of other hideous violations. But I desperately didn’t want to believe anything of the kind about Lord Belfrey.
What other damning evidence might Suzanne have had against him? A dire, but less ugly possibility sprang to mind. Perhaps she had reason to know, having met the genuine article, that he was not the real Lord Belfrey! Not that I condoned the behavior of imposters (or of highwaymen, for that matter), but there is a certain romantic allure to the face masked by black cloth or pretense. What if two Englishmen living in America, uncannily similar in appearance, chanced to meet-one telling the other he had just been informed by letter that his cousin Lord Giles Belfrey had died, making him heir to the title and ancestral estate? What if during an evening at his home in a remote rural community, this man had waxed nostalgic over the course of rather too many whiskeys and sodas on the family history, mentioning names, situations, before dramatically and conveniently collapsing? What if after failing to revive him, the other sized up the potential for starting over after two failed marriages (doomed from the start because of his fixation with Eleanor) and an abruptly ended career? What if the deceased was so newly arrived in the area that his passport and air ticket were in view on a table and his other identification in his wallet, waiting to be plucked from his jacket pocket and replaced by another set?
I might have warmed to such a scenario if it weren’t connected to Suzanne Varney’s murder. As it was, I nixed it firmly. Whatever might be false at Mucklesfeld, I was in no doubt that his lordship had lost his heart, completely and forever, when looking upward at Eleanor Belfrey in her portrait gown on the stairs.
Another glance at my watch convinced me I had spent long enough concocting motives for a murder that was all in Mrs. Malloy’s head. I was about to get off the bed to do something about my face, hair, and clothes before heading down to the library for tea, when the door opened and in crowded Mrs. Foot.
“I’ve come for the tray.” She beamed a gap-toothed smile, the heavy dusty gray locks matching matted clouds outside the window. Gone was the sunshine of a half hour before. Did the weather at Mucklesfeld tend to be this fickle, and were Mrs. Foot’s moods equally changeable? Certainly, she was making more of an effort to be jolly than she had that morning. Had Whitey been returned safe and sound to her fond embrace? Before I could inquire, she asked winningly if I’d had a nice little nap.
“I tried, but my mind’s been rather awhirl.” I smiled up… way up at her. She would have to do a long bend to pick up the tray, which was perhaps why she made no attempt to do so. Quickly, I set it on the bed.
“Now don’t you overdo,” she admonished. Then I saw the hesitancy lurking in the greenish-yellow eyes. The smile, an overture at buttering me up perhaps, was gone. She’s bracing to tell me something, I thought. And sat still, waiting. “You must have had a bad night, dear,” a flicker of the spider leg lashes, “and for that I’m ever so sorry.”
“It wasn’t your fault that I fainted.” That wasn’t entirely true, and maybe she realized that peering through the banisters had spooked me.
“That’s not what I’m getting at, dearie.” She lowered her head, the ungainly hands smoothing down the sides of her faded print frock, plucking a thread here and poking at a tear there. A nervous gesture, no more. Why did it conjure an image of those hands closing about my throat… squeezing it dry of breath? Because I was again seeing her as the asylum wardress who had aroused palpitations in Wisteria Whitworth’s unequaled bosom. “Before coming up, I confessed to Mr. Plunket and Boris what I’d done.
“What tricks?”
Her head stayed down, but I continued to feel those eyes. “Putting the hot-water bottle I knew leaked in your bed.” She moved a foot, drawing a circling motion on the floor in a parody of a child enduring the indignity of confessing to a disappointed mummy or daddy. “The other I did when you were deep asleep, as I knew you would be after taking those tablets Dr. Rowley prescribed. He’d let me have some a few weeks ago when I had a bout of lying awake nights fretting because Mr. Plunket was feeling down. I was scared he’d go back to the drinking that had finished him with his job and family years back, and him so lovely, like you’ll have seen, when he’s sober.”
“What else did you do?”
“Came in and opened the window. Most couldn’t reach up to that, but like I said to Mr. Plunket, I’m tall as a willow tree.” She now cranked up her head, and seeing the fierce glint of pride spread over her features, I waited for her to add that height was something she had worked on her entire life, and that with continued sacrificial exercise she would gain another foot and a half by morning. Instead, she explained her object had been for me to awake damply chilled to the marrow.
“Why?” I felt entitled in sounding put out.
“Nothing personal, if that’s a comfort.” The gray locks could have been the fog framing a tombstone.
“Then…”
“Had to think what was best for his lordship, didn’t I, dearie? Has to be him first and foremost with Mr. Plunket, Boris, and me. I’d seen the way he was taken by how close you looked like the portrait. The one of Eleanor Belfrey. Relieved, we’d been, when Miss Celia Belfrey marched in and took it away. It was like it had bewitched him, and that’s not a happy way for a man to live.
