The Hellfire Club

Chancel on the grounds late that night. 'Tell me if I'm right. Did you take walks at night?' Agnes glanced fearfully at her, then nodded. 'The night Katherine Mannheim died, you took one of your walks. You went up the path toward Gingerbread.' Agnes lifted her head and gave her another frightened glance. 'Were they carrying her body? Is that what you saw?'

'No! No!' She covered her eyes with her hands. 'Then I would have known right away, don't you see? I saw… you have to tell me.'

'You saw them.'

Agnes shook her head.

'You saw Hugo Driver.'

Agnes looked at her in furious disappointment. 'No!'

'Lincoln Chancel,' Nora said. A great deal of what was as yet unspoken fell into place. 'You saw Lincoln Chancel leaving Gingerbread. My God, Lincoln Chancel killed her.'

Dick Dart took his hands from behind his head and leaned forward, malicious delight alive in his face.

Nora said, 'He was going back to Rapunzel to get Driver. I'm right, aren't I, Agnes? You saw him going through the woods, but you didn't know why.'

Agnes forced herself to take a deep breath. 'He was running. I couldn't tell what the noise was. I thought it was some animal. I was by the big boulder up on the path. We used to have bears in our woods back then, and sometimes we still do. I hid behind the boulder, and the noise got closer and closer. Then I heard a man swearing. I knew it was Mr Chancel. I peeked out. Here he comes out of the path, racing like a crazy man up toward Rapunzel. He went over the bridge, bang! bang! bang! I was so afraid. I wished it was a bear! I should have…' She drew up her knees and buried her face in the covers.

Nora moved onto the bed and embraced her.

'Female bonding,' Dart said.

'You thought you should have gone to the cottage,' Nora said. Agnes sighed in her arms. 'But you were afraid. You were right to be afraid. They might have caught you.'

'I know.' Agnes leaned into Nora's; chest and took another deep breath. 'I started back to Main House, and then I decided I had to look in on Miss Mannheim after all, but I heard Mr Chancel and Mr Driver coming down from Rapunzel, so I stayed behind the boulder. They came over the bridge, clump clump clump, and went up the Gingerbread path.'

She pulled away from Nora and patted her face with the bedcovers. 'You can sit down again.'

'Are you sure?' Agnes shrank from another attempt at an embrace, and as Nora got off the bed, she collapsed onto her pillow. 'I went flying back to Main House. I got upstairs, and the mistress was standing in the hallway. What's going on, Agnes, she says, why are you running around in the middle of the night, I demand an explanation. I told her. She says, Agnes Brotherhood, you leave this to me. She slapped on her big red hat and out she went. The mistress loved that big red hat, but it was the silliest thing you ever saw.' Agnes glowered at the ceiling.

'You waited for her to come back,' Nora said.

'Waited and waited. After a long time she looks around my door and says, Agnes, Miss Mannheim is one of those women who require male companionship when their spirits are low. Mr Chancel chose to protect himself from scandal. Put the entire matter out of your mind, she says.'

'And you tried to do that.'

Agnes gave an unhappy nod. 'I asked if Miss Mannheim was all right, and she said to me. Women like that are always all right.' Dart grunted in approval. Agnes scowled at him. 'I'm not saying there aren't women like that, but Miss Mannheim was a fine person.'

'The next day you must have thought that she'd run away.'

'I thought she left. There's a big difference between running away and leaving. Miss Mannheim wouldn't have run away from anything.'

Agnes tugged her robe around her and looked at Nora with frustrated defiance. She had told her story, but at the center of the story was a vacuum.

A knock at the door cut off whatever she might have said next. Marian Cullinan peeked in. 'We must be having a wonderful time, you've been in here so long.'

'High point of the tour,' Dart said. 'Fantastic tales of the good old days.'

'Wonderful.' She approached the bed.

Nora looked at Agnes to see if she remembered what she had been asked to do, and the old woman dipped her head a fraction of an inch.

Marian stepped between them. 'Agnes, you know the rules. I bet your blood pressure is through the roof.'

'I want to say something to Mrs Desmond, Marian.'

'One little teeny-tiny thing, and then I have to take these nice people away.'

Agnes reached for Nora's hand. 'You have to hear the rest.'

Marian laughed. 'You want to tell these people your life story, Agnes? Mrs Desmond will stop in again, I'm sure.'

'Tonight,' Agnes said, clutching Nora's hand.

Marian displayed a trace of impatience. 'That won't be possible, Agnes. We have to protect your health.'

Agnes dropped Nora's hand. 'You're not my doctor.'

'Well, on that note.' Marian smiled at Nora. 'Shall we?'

She bustled them out with a complicitous glance at Dart and a pained smile for Nora. 'I hope that wasn't too awful.'

'You kidding?' Dart said. 'That was better than Psycho.'

Shaking her head, she took them toward the staircase, 'I don't know how we're going to tell her that she can't lead any more tours. I mean, look at her, would you want to follow Agnes around the estate?'

A door clicked open behind them.

'Now what?' Marian said.

Clutching her bathrobe about her, Agnes hobbled out of her bedroom.

Marian put her hands on her hips. 'I see it, but I don't believe it.'

'Last roundup,' Dart said.

Marian hurried up to the old woman and whispered to her. Agnes tottered forward another step. Roughly, Marian turned her around and marched her back to her room. Agnes shot Nora a look of bleak humiliation. A few seconds later, Marian came out and locked the door.

'Honestly. I've had my difficulties with Agnes, but I never had to lock her in her room before. She said she had to go to the office, can you imagine?'

'It can't really be necessary to lock her up,' Nora said. 'What if she has to go to the bathroom?'

'She can hold it until she gets her dinner. Margaret's already in a fine old state, thanks to Norman and his jackboots. By the time dinner is over, I'm going to need that nightcap.' Marian took them to the staircase. 'I'm not sure what to suggest. Ordinarily you'd want to go back to Pepper Pot or walk around Lenox, but it looks like we're building up to a rainstorm, and when that happens our paths turn into mudslides. Let's go down and see what it's doing outside.'

A gust of wind slammed against the building. Somewhere beneath them, windows rattled in their frames. 'As we speak,' Marian said. Rain struck the front of the house like buckshot, fell away for a second, and then came back in a stronger, continuous wave.

The lights had been turned on in the lounge. The windows showed a dark sky sheeting down rain onto a sodden lawn. 'At least the last tour ended before we had a lot of would-be lawyers demanding their money back.' In the distance, trees bent before the wind. 'It's a wild one.' She turned to Dart. 'What do you want to do? We have umbrellas, but they wouldn't last a second out there. You could make a run for Pepper Pot if it dies down, but you'd be covered with mud by the time you got there.'

'Screw that,' Dart said. 'I hate getting wet. Mud drives me up the wall.'

Beyond the splashing lawn, the trees threw up their arms. 'It looks like you're stuck here until the end of dinner. We might be able to scrounge some boots for you, Norma, but Norman, what do we do about you?' Marian