If she wanted to implicate someone else in her crime, Mrs. Mayhew could not have found a better sacrificial lamb than Gertrude Vickers. Regularly, as if by clockwork, she provided fresh fodder for any Machiavellian schemer determined to cast suspicion in a different direction. Of course Monsieur Alphonse was viciously beheaded by the kitchen maid—she had been telling you of her intentions for months!
And how had she described her?
Bea briefly closed her eyes to recall: Gertrude is a rough-seeming creature but very capable.
Did that, finally, explain the wrenching brutality of the murder? Because Mrs. Mayhew believed that was the way a rough-seeming kitchen maid would end a life?
’Twas a horrifying thought.
But if that was the way of it, how had the banker’s wife managed it?
Mr. Réjane was no hulking giant, but nor was he an unusually small man. Subduing him would require strength Mrs. Mayhew decidedly did not possess.
She would have had to incapacitate him first.
How?
With the shovel, she wondered, recalling the way Mrs. Blewitt had brandished it threateningly. It had been conveniently left in the courtyard, and someone had put it away.
Could Mrs. Mayhew have knocked Mr. Réjane over the head with it?
It was possible, yes, but given its heft and Mrs. Mayhew’s slight frame, it would have required all her effort. If she had to struggle unduly with the implement, Mr. Réjane would have time to notice the attack and disarm her.
Why take that risk?
Better to employ a method that did not rely on strength.
A drug of some sort?
Bea herself had spotted laudanum on Mrs. Mayhew’s vanity. Could she have used a tincture of laudanum to render him unconscious?
Possibly.
But how would she have convinced him to ingest the drug? She could not simply adulterate a glass of wine and serve it to him. As the lady of the house there would be no precedent for sharing a drink with one of the servants.
The cheroots on the other hand…
Yes, she thought, sitting up straighter in her chair. Mr. Mayhew furnished his chef with them regularly, and his wife, who reportedly did not approve of the practice, was spotted giving Mr. Réjane a pair of cheroots on the day of the dinner party.
Clearly, yes, that was how she did it, and once he was insensible, it would have been easy enough to slice his head off—physically, she thought, recalling the distinction Henry had made, not mentally.
Mentally, it had to have been horrifically difficult.
But if she had that within her, the ability to make the cut, whether unflinchingly or with great revulsion, the question was how she could have done it while also being in the presence of her maid.
Whatever her talents, Mrs. Mayhew could not be in two places at once.
Had Annette lied to protect her mistress?
It was possible, of course, for servants told untruths at the direction of their employers all the time. But collaborating Mrs. Mayhew’s story about a nightmare was not a harmless white lie; it was helping a murderess get away with her crime. Surely, Annette did not value her position so highly that she would run the risk of being hanged alongside her mistress?
And to hold to that lie when questioned by the Duke and Duchess of Kesgrave—Bea could not believe the lady’s maid had enough spine to withstand that kind of pressure without revealing anxiety.
No, Bea assumed Annette was telling the truth, which meant Mrs. Mayhew had enacted her deception via another method.
Scrutinize the variation, she told herself, reviewing the suspect’s story. The intensity of the nightmare was unusual, even if she sometimes had bad dreams. Ordinarily, she summoned her maid to her bedside to read her a comforting story for a short time. But on the night of the murder her dreams were so terrifying she could not bear to stay in her bed and insisted they retire to the dressing room for several hours.
The variations: a different room and a longer time period.
What, then, did the dressing room offer that the bedchamber did not?
Considering the unusual length of the interval, Bea immediately thought of the clock—the one that was prominently displayed above the vanity. She had noticed it almost as soon as she had entered the room and consulted it herself whilst teasing Kesgrave about their plan to have an informal dinner in the bedchamber.
At that time, she had rattled off how many hours and minutes until they would be alone together, and Kesgrave, marvelous pedant as he was, corrected her assessment.
What had he said?
The clock on the wall over there is off by several minutes, for in fact you should be trembling beneath me in one hour and fifty-one minutes.
Oh, but the clock should not have been wrong. According to Parsons, setting the clocks was among the duties performed daily by the staff. The only way the time could be off by so many minutes was if someone had moved the hands recently.
Not just recently, Bea realized, but since the morning of the party. The butler himself had said it: None of the chores had been performed properly the day before because the servants were too distressed by the murder. That meant the clock in Mrs. Mayhew’s dressing room had not been reset as per usual, which was why the time was still off when Bea consulted it yesterday a little after four.
Could Mrs. Mayhew really have been so devious as to—quickly, Bea did the calculation—push back the hands by an hour to make it appear as though she had been in the dressing room during the interval of the murder? If she had killed the chef after everyone had retired—likely around two o’clock, for the last person to go to sleep had been Mrs. Blewitt at one-thirty—then she could have returned to her room, cleaned up, changed the clock, climbed into bed and promptly affected a terrifying nightmare. Hours later, when the maid thought she was going to sleep at four, she was really going to sleep later, around five o’clock or
