It was an elaborate scheme and very difficult to prove. But there must be evidence somewhere in the house: a bloody glove, a poisoned cheroot.
Bea’s stare as she considered Mrs. Mayhew’s guilt must have been quite intense for Mr. Mayhew, who was not known for his observational skills, noticed her interest and jubilantly remarked on it.
“The duchess is going to accuse you next!” he exclaimed, practically bouncing with excitement as he gestured to his wife. “By the time she is done making her way through the entire household, Kesgrave will have committed his whole fortune to Mayhew & Co.”
He spoke with such casual contempt for her deductive skills, Bea could not help but turn lightly pink at his observation. She tilted her eyes briefly down, and when she raised them again, she found the duke studiously examining her.
“Are you certain?” he asked softly.
She nodded.
“I suppose I am not fully surprised,” he admitted.
Mr. Mayhew, not appreciating the sotto voce exchange between the spouses, complained that he could not hear a word the duke was saying.
“La, they are probably discussing the best way to extricate themselves from our presence,” Mrs. Mayhew said with an almost aggressive vivacity, “for you are making them extremely uncomfortable with your talk of deposits.”
Reminded again of his manners, Mayhew brazened out the blunder by insisting he was considering only the duke’s convenience, for it was far easier to stay abreast of one’s investments when they were in a single place.
“You mean his steward’s convenience,” his wife corrected sharply, “for it is he who keeps abreast, not Kesgrave himself.”
As Mrs. Mayhew strove to appear delighted with her husband, Bea realized the woman had actually done him a favor by unceremoniously chopping off the head of his prized chef, for if she had not behaved so immoderately now, she would have inevitably behaved immoderately in the future—with him as her victim.
“He is right, Mrs. Mayhew,” she said, taken aback by her own strange reluctance to say the words forthrightly. Only minutes ago, she had laid the same charge at the banker’s feet and experienced not a hint of self-consciousness. Was it because Mrs. Mayhew was a woman or because she had not irritated Bea with the same vigor? She had felt repelled by Mr. Mayhew from the moment he’d started to detail his pedigree. “I am going to accuse you next.”
Having his supposition confirmed delighted Mr. Mayhew, who clapped his hands exuberantly, but his wife stared silently for several long seconds. Then said somberly, “Please don’t. It is not funny anymore.”
Bea rather thought it had never been funny: the greatest chef in the world cut down in his prime. All the wonders that would never exist.
“I have not worked out all the details,” she said, “but to start, I know you changed the clock in your dressing room to make it appear as though you were there between the hours of two and four when you were actually in the kitchen killing Mr. Réjane around two. I also know you administered laudanum to him so he would not struggle while you removed his head with a meat cleaver. You administered the drug via the two cheroots you gave him that afternoon. You used a cleaver because you had heard the kitchen maid threaten his life with it and you wanted suspicion to fall on her. You chopped off his head because you assumed that is how she would have done it. You murdered him because you feared your husband’s elaborate fraud would unravel if Mr. Réjane had been allowed to send a letter complaining about your husband’s mistreatment of him to the Mayhew brothers.”
The lady turned ashen. Her lips remained pulled in a friendly arch, as if she were contemplating a pleasant thought, but their red was the only hint of color on her face. Her eyelids blinked furiously, and Bea felt she could see the cogs in her brain turning as she tried to decide how to respond to such a thorough charge.
Bea thought her best strategy was to deny it categorically, to insist that her guest was confused or bore her some grudge or simply lacked the mental acuity of a man to understand the matter properly. The groundwork for the latter approach had already been neatly laid by Kesgrave, and all she had to do was build on its very sound foundation. Female inadequacy could always be relied on to invalidate a very good theory, and here it was only her word against Mrs. Mayhew’s. Her case could not be proved so much as robustly argued.
Ah, but she was a duchess now, which meant any argument she made would be more solemnly considered. That was why the servants had so eagerly blamed each other for the vicious crime. They knew a peeress’s interest made them more vulnerable to a miscarriage of justice.
Nevertheless, Bea did not believe Mrs. Mayhew could be condemned on her word alone. She would have to figure out some way to maneuver her into admitting the deed. Or perhaps she could gain access to the private quarters of the house to find incriminating evidence, although it seemed unlikely that a woman who had planned a murder to such coolly brilliant detail had left a bloody night rail laying around.
Bea, however, was spared the necessity of doing anything more by Mr. Mayhew, who inhaled sharply and screeched, “You harridan! You fishwife! How could you behave so recklessly! Slaughtering our golden goose! Are you mad?”
Displaying none of the cold calculation with which Bea credited her, Mrs. Mayhew narrowed her eyes with fury as color flooded her cheeks. “Me! Me! Me! You are blaming me for this disaster! None of this would have happened if you weren’t such a hen-witted clodpole that you cannot come up with one other name when inventing excuses to meet with your mistress. The second I mentioned you had an appointment with an investor called Bayne I knew what you had done because Monsieur Alphonse stared at me so intently!”
Indignant, Mr.
