That could not have been an easy thing to accomplish.
“Who cleaned the floor?” Bea asked.
As innocuous as the question was, it caused Esther to squeal in horror at the grisly allusion and then immediately apologize for displaying inappropriate squeamishness. “I’m sorry, your grace. It’s just that it’s so…”
But she could not say what exactly it was, for it was too dreadful for words, and Parsons explained that the scullery maid had fainted the moment she grasped fully what had happened to the chef. “She was one of many,” he said approvingly, as if swooning was the only proper female response to decapitation. Then he added with a hint of censure, “Gertrude cleaned up the blood with the help of Thomas.”
Bea looked at the sturdy kitchen maid. “You did not faint?”
Although her tone had been neutral, Gertrude stiffened with offense. “It was not as if I wasn’t deeply distressed by Monsieur Alphonse’s death. I worked closely with him for two years and liked him very much. It was a horrible tragedy, what happened. But wringing my hands in distress would not get the floor clean, and Mr. Mayhew was more concerned with disposing of the le peu before anyone else got hurt to assign a footman to the task. I was left with the choice of doing it myself or stare at the large puddle of blood.”
“Describe it,” Bea said.
Uncomprehending, the kitchen maid stared at her. “Pardon me?”
“The puddle,” Bea explained, gesturing to the floor as she tried to imagine what it had looked like when Parsons entered the room in the early hours of the morning. She knew nothing about the properties of blood but assumed that it behaved similarly to water in many ways. How far it had spread and how much it had dried would provide her with some useful information. “Describe it.”
Gertrude blanched at the request but nodded faintly. “The floor tilts ever so slightly to the east side of the room, so the blood ran toward the fireplace and away from the entrance.”
Bea nodded. “And how far did it travel before it started to dry?”
The servant took several steps deeper into the room and stopped about two feet from where Parsons had found the body. “Here. It was hardest to scrub up the blood where it had begun to dry. It made a ring around the edges.”
“That could not have been pleasant,” Bea observed.
Stoically, the kitchen maid said that it had to be done.
Bea accepted the simple truth of the statement and considered the scene in light of the information she had just discovered. If everything in the kitchen had been washed and returned to its place last night and le peu was not substantial enough to accommodate a grown man, then the missing cleaver might in fact be the murder weapon, not Mr. Réjane’s invention.
If so, where was it now?
Most likely with the assailant, she thought, for it would have been impossible for Parsons to make an argument for the cutting apparatus with a bloody cleaver lying next to the body.
In that case, a careful inspection of everyone’s quarters might reveal the guilty party.
It was equally possible, however, that the killer had left it behind, tossing it onto the floor in a moment of frenzy or panic. If that was true, then the cleaver could very well still be in the room.
But where?
Not in plain sight or Parsons would never have succeeded in convincing Mr. Mayhew and the constable.
Pensively, Bea lowered herself to look under the tables, shelves and cabinets.
At once, the three staff members gasped in collective horror at the sight of the Duchess of Kesgrave on her knees.
Recovering first from his astonishment, Parsons said, “Your grace, you really must not…you must let us…the floor isn’t clean…tell us what you are…how can we help…”
Although she was mildly amused by his distress, she conceded that it was probably quite justified and reckoned she was the first peeress to ever drop to her hands and knees in public. Nevertheless, she did not allow their disapproval to sway her from her purpose and, having ruled out the table that supported le peu, she lowered her head another inch to look under the cabinet directly to the left of the entry arch. It was the next closest to where Parsons found the body and, sure enough, she spotted something that very possibly met the description of a largish meat cleaver. At the very least, it appeared to have a wooden handle. It was too far away for her to tell for sure, and she tried stretching her arm under the cabinet.
Devil it! It was just beyond her grasp.
She could reach it if she lay flat on the floor, but even she knew that was an indignity too far. Miss Hyde-Clare could have got away with it without raising an eyebrow, but the Duchess of Kesgrave engendered expectations.
Reluctantly, Bea rose to her feet and addressed Parsons. “Beneath the cabinet, about partway to the wall, you will see a device with a wooden handle. Please retrieve it.”
The butler was horrified by the request, his face losing some of its color at the prospect of pressing his entire body on kitchen floorboards recently soaked with blood, but he was too well trained to deny her and complied immediately if not enthusiastically.
He was a tall man, however, with longer arms than Beatrice, and could grasp the handle without prostrating himself, which, she thought, was a nicely consoling factor. Judging by the grimace on Parsons’s face as he brushed imaginary dust from his knees, he did not agree.
Only when he felt sufficiently self-possessed did the butler hand Bea the item he had retrieved from under the cabinet. As she had suspected, it was the missing cleaver and given the dried blood on the blade, the murder weapon as well.
All three servants comprehended its significance at once, but only Esther, who suffered from an excess of sensibility, promptly dropped to the floor in a faint. Gertrude inspected the scullery maid’s head
