“Of course,” he said, gesturing to the bell pull near the edge of the bed.
She was appalled. “At this hour?”
“What hour is it?” he asked.
Bea had no idea, which indicated, she felt, that it was too late to bother the servants.
Kesgrave held out the candle and noted it was a little past eleven, which meant several servants were still in the kitchen. “Regardless of the time, you cannot expect me to go traipsing around my own larder. I am happy to treat Mayhew’s pantry with such disrespect but value the esteem of my own staff much too highly. You shall ring the bell and wait with deferential patience for one of the footmen to present himself at the door.”
Thoughtfully, she contemplated him in the candlelight, whose golden glow somehow made his handsome features angelic. “You are scared of them.”
He blinked in surprise at the accusation. “Terrified. Have I not been candid about that from the very beginning? It is the servants’ house; I merely live in it.”
“And this is the strength and confidence you wish me to emulate?” she asked with amusement.
“There is no confidence abroad without comfort at home,” he said earnestly, as if quoting scripture.
“Humbug,” she dismissed.
And yet Kesgrave remained resolutely ensconced on the other side of the bed, his back against the pillows, his angel face alight with humor.
“Very well,” she muttered, pulling the cord, “but when James or Joseph or whoever appears at the door, I am saying that it is you who desires a snack. Knowing your cowardice, they will easily believe you fobbed off an unpleasant task to your new wife. They probably think it’s the only reason you married someone as brash and assertive as I. No doubt they regard me with great pity in the servants’ quarters.”
The duke nodded approvingly. “You see, there are ways of establishing yourself with the staff other than identifying the murderer in the house next door.”
Bea expected him then to ask the natural corollary—how was identifying the murderer in the house next door establishing herself with the staff—but to her relief he showed no such curiosity. No matter how joyful he made her, she was never going to relay the tale of hiding behind the door in the butler’s bedroom.
It was indeed Joseph who answered the summons and after a lavish description of her husband’s inopportune hunger and desire for ham and Wiltshire, she assured him she had made progress in her investigation of Monsieur Alphonse’s death.
“Parsons has admitted that he said it was an accident to drive attention away from himself, so you were right to be suspicious,” she said, then added that the duke would also enjoy a little more of the foie gras. “With a loaf of bread to go with it as well.”
When she closed the door and returned to the bed, Kesgrave said, “It appears I am craving a midnight feast.”
“You have had an active evening,” she informed him, settling herself against the headboard with the ledger pressed against her raised knees. “Now let us make a list of our suspects. Ordinarily, I would begin by noting everyone’s movements in order to exclude those people who could not have been in the room to commit the crime. However, the circumstance makes that impossible, as everyone professes to being in the same place: tucked up warmly in their beds. Likewise, in the usual course of my investigation, I would identify who among the assailants nurtured a particular enmity toward the victim. Here, too, we are in a quandary, for it appears everyone had a quarrel with him. Nevertheless, we must start somewhere so I suggest at the beginning.”
“Parsons,” he said, easily following her line of thought.
“Parsons,” she agreed. “As he himself pointed out, there is plenty of evidence against him. But that is why I don’t think he is guilty. From the moment he discovered the dead body, he has done everything wrong. I think if he were actually guilty, he would have made more of an effort to appear innocent.”
Kesgrave allowed that her reasoning was sound, but it failed to account for the massive unpredictable factor that had upended the butler’s well-conceived scheme. “At no point in the planning of his murder could he have imagined the Duchess of Kesgrave knocking on the door demanding the right to investigate. If you remove that from the equation, he in fact did do everything right. He knew his employer would not want to deal with the wretched inconvenience of having a chef whose head was chopped off. That is why he decapitated him—because he knew the more gruesome the deed, the more eagerly his employer would accept any explanation that made the slightest modicum of sense.”
Bea conceded it was a valid point. “He did say everything had worked out nicely until I showed up.”
“And he had the strongest motive,” he added. “As soon as Mayhew finds out about the pilfered wine, he will be sacked. And I am confident that is only a matter of time.”
“It is a strong motive, to be sure,” she said thoughtfully. “But he did not point a finger at anyone else. I cannot say that is significant, but he is the only servant we interviewed who did not blame someone else. Stebbings blamed Henry, Henry blamed Laurent, Laurent blamed Esther, Esther blamed Mrs. Blewitt, Mrs. Blewitt blamed Gertrude, Gertrude blamed Parsons. Even Annette, who isn’t a suspect, blamed Stebbings. I feel like that should weigh in his favor.”
“But only one person among the litany may be guilty,” Kesgrave said. “The rest are innocent, which means that innocent people point fingers just as often as the guilty. Or, perhaps in this case, more than.”
“All right,” Bea said with a sigh as she added Parsons to the sheet of paper.
