Thoughtfully, she considered the shelves along the wall.
Could they be reached from the chair?
Gauging the distance, she imagined her fingers would just touch the edge of the wood. If Mr. Réjane was several inches taller than she, he might have been able to make firm contact….
But that would require quite a lot of conspicuous stretching and Mrs. Wallace claimed to have noticed nothing amiss.
That meant he must have hidden the item while the housekeeper was absent from the room. “Did you leave him alone at any point?”
“No,” she said firmly, and then immediately drew her brows together. “Well, yes, I did, but only very briefly and just to go into the other room. He suggested we toast to our futures—his in Paris, mine in London—and I went to get a bottle of cordial my mother sent me. I keep it in a chest at the foot of my bed. It could not have taken me more than half a minute to fetch it. Actually, we needed glasses as well, and those took me a little longer to locate. Perhaps I was gone for one and a half minutes. Is that enough time for him to have hidden something? He certainly did not seem harried or disturbed when I returned, and I took particular note because I wanted to reassure myself that he was not hurt by my refusal. Additionally, nothing was out of place after he left, which I know because I always straighten up every night before I go to bed. If something had been moved, I would have noticed.”
“I do not doubt that, Mrs. Wallace, for you are remarkably efficient,” Bea said sincerely. Although flattery may be as good as solving a murder for earning a servant’s respect, her admiration for the housekeeper was genuine. If only every person she interrogated were as straightforward and informative as she. “With those constraints in mind, where do you think he might have hidden the object?”
Mrs. Wallace pursed her lips and looked around her room consideringly. “It would depend on the object, I suppose. What are you looking for?”
It was a reasonable question, and Bea admitted with some reluctance that she did not actually know. “But bearing in mind what you said earlier about his not appearing to have something to hide, we may assume the item was very small or very slim.”
“Like a letter?” Mrs. Wallace said. “Or a piece of jewelry?”
Bea agreed they were both likely prospects.
The housekeeper sighed and admitted with consternation that it could be anywhere then—hidden behind the console, pressed between the pages of a book, tucked discreetly in a drawer. Then she looked at her mistress and asked how she would like her to conduct the search. “I can do it myself or summon one of the footmen to look.”
Ah, yes, of course, Bea thought, struck by the trickiness of the situation. She had been so worried about embarrassing Mrs. Wallace with her suitor’s true motives, she had failed to consider the specifics of the search itself. Obviously, it would be untenable for the Duke of Kesgrave to rifle through his housekeeper’s things—not because she was his housekeeper but because he was the duke. Peers of the realm did not do their own rifling. They employed servants for that.
She had done it again, she realized with satirical humor, brought Kesgrave to yet another new low. Would there be no end to the depths to which she would consign him? And this time it would somehow be worse because she would be diminishing him in the eyes of his own servant.
Would assuring Mrs. Wallace that she intended to perform the task herself help to improve his standing among the servants?
Probably not, she decided, as marriage to her had already dealt it a decisive blow.
The question was, then, could it do further harm?
She rather thought the answer was no, as Marlow steadfastly believed she was a brazen hussy, an opinion no doubt shared by the rest of the staff. In that case, shamelessly hunting through the housekeeper’s possessions was in perfect keeping with their expectation of her and nothing would be lost. If anything, Kesgrave might gain their compassion for having allowed himself to be gulled into a match that was even less advantageous than they had first perceived.
But that was not ideal either, earning the pity of one’s retainers.
Then again, really, how much sympathy could a servant truly feel for a duke? She herself loved him quite dreadfully, and she had so little care for his dignity that she’d brought him to his housekeeper’s office to comb through her things.
Before Beatrice could reply to Mrs. Wallace, Kesgrave intervened “Did you have those flowers?”
Focused on the pragmatic concerns of the search, Mrs. Wallace was startled by the question and appeared initially incapable of grasping it. “Did I have.…” She repeated, trailing off before lapsing into a moment of silence. “Yes, your grace, I did. Mr. Marlow gave them to me from the delivery we received from the florist on Wednesday,” she explained as the color rose in her cheeks. Hastily, she added that they were only castoffs. “With sparse blossoms or bruised petals. He did not think they were fit for the drawing room or your bedchamber, so he gave them to me.”
At first Bea attributed her blush to the revelation of Marlow’s kindness—and recalled suddenly the odd high squeak the butler had made when he learned of Mr. Réjane’s proposal—but she quickly realized Kesgrave was the source of her embarrassment. She was horrified by the prospect that he might think that she had appropriated his flowers for her own enjoyment.
Mildly, Kesgrave applauded the practicality of the arrangement and commended the butler for coming
