“What? What is it, Oscar? May I call you Oscar? Please. You can talk to me.” He was “Oscar” in her head though she knew Theodore was firmly calling him “Brodie”. She let her maternal instincts override her antipathy to him, and tried to get closer to him. Here he was, a lacklustre young man whose father was long dead of drink and dissolution, living in the shadow of a castle he was never going to inherit. She did have sympathy for him, after all.
Plus, his habit of hiding in hedges and watching people could very well prove useful.
“Did you see something that morning?” she pressed. “You were here, weren’t you?”
“Yes – yes, I was here with my mother. She does not care for church or anywhere that there are lots of people. But no, I am afraid I saw nothing. Nothing but...”
“What? Something is bothering you, isn’t it? You can speak freely to me.”
“I know, but it’s about your daughter and I don’t want to speak out of turn...”
Now she understood his hesitancy. She warmed to him, slightly. “I am aware that Lady Buckshaw has been behaving oddly. The airs around here do not agree with her constitution and she is sometimes prone to fancies.”
“There is more. She can...” He gulped noisily. “She can lash out. She can be violent. She can be uncontrolled. She needs help, my lady. Please...” His eyes were wide and liquid and full of pain.
“Oh, Oscar. And my poor dear Felicia.” Adelia clenched her fists to stop herself copying Oscar’s nervous movements. “Thank you for telling me. Indeed, I have seen some of that myself.”
“But ... my lady, where was she on the morning of the death? Of the ... murder?”
Adelia recoiled as if he had actually struck her in the stomach. “You cannot possibly be suggesting that my own daughter had anything at all to do with that man’s death?”
Oscar’s face was naturally white, one of those that would not tan in the sun, and he seemed to go even paler. He began to babble a stream of apologies but Adelia did not want to hear them. She hated her rudeness but she could not bear to speak to Oscar any longer. She walked past him and ignored his pleas while his words echoed in her ears. She knew why he was saying such things.
In his position, seeing what he had seen, knowing what he knew of Felicia, she would have suggested the very same.
But bile rose in her throat. Perhaps it was the very plausibility of the suggestion that made her revolt against it so thoroughly.
Felicia was unwell. And that sickness seemed to be in her mind as much as in her body.
And someone who was unwell in their mind, alone in a castle, surrounded by foul miasmas – well, who knew what they could do?
Adelia hated the thought. She strode on towards the gatehouse and glanced back when she neared the front door. Oscar was watching her from the same spot, unmoving, his head hanging and his shoulders hunched. He looked thoroughly miserable and she knew he regretted speaking out.
Well, let him regret it, she thought uncharitably, and turned from him to knock on the door of the gatehouse.
ADELIA HAD MET LADY Katharine multiple times over the past few years as their families were now linked. Each time the lady had made absolutely no impression on Adelia. It was rather like speaking to fog. Lady Katharine was thin, pale, insipid, and appeared to have no interests and no topics of conversation. Adelia sought in vain for some common ground.
They sat in a comfortable and rather over-done sitting room, still decked out in the old style from the earlier part of the century when people were inclined to fill their rooms with as much clutter as possible, and preferably in dark, oppressive colours. There was a clock with an unnecessarily loud tick which only served to emphasise the long, drawn-out silences. Lady Katharine had at least one servant; an old lady with shaking hands brought them both a tray of tea, and inched away backwards like an obsequious medieval courtier.
“Are you quite well?” Adelia had asked at the start of her visit.
“Yes, thank you. And yourself?”
“In good health but goodness, we’re all at sixes and sevens with this death!”
“I should imagine so.” Lady Katharine said it blandly and sipped at her tea. She showed as much emotion as if Adelia had mentioned a new hat. Adelia thought the tea would be too hot to drink as it had only just been poured, but when she took up her own cup she found that it was already lukewarm at best.
“Did you know Hartley Knight?” Adelia asked.
“No. He was the house steward.”
“Yes, but I was wondering if you knew anything about him? He’d been in the family’s service for many years, after all.”
Lady Katharine’s pale eyes were watery and bulged slightly. “But he was the house steward,” she repeated, as if Adelia was missing a very important point. “So of course I knew nothing about him.”
Her lack of information made Adelia push back harder. “You didn’t hear any gossip about what he might have been keeping in the ice house?”
“I do not hear any gossip. And the ice house contains lapis lazuli that the family used to sell as expensive pigments but now it moulders away.”
“Yet they could sell it as gems and jewels...”
“I suppose that they could.”
Each sentence that Lady Katharine uttered was like the stone door of a tomb slamming shut, preventing any further ingress into that part of the conversation.
Adelia drank her tea quickly. It was being made very clear to her that Lady Katharine did not want to talk. If her obstructive manner was out of character, Adelia would have assumed she was ill but Lady Katharine had been like this every single time Adelia had met
