3-Book Victorian Crime Collection: Death at Dawn, Death of a Dancer, A Corpse in Shining Armour. Caro Peacock
talking about, girl? That was Sir Herbert.’
My hot anger turned to something colder and harder. Until then, I’d had misgivings about entering any man’s house as a spy. Now I knew that if there was any way I could find to repay Sir Herbert for treating my life (and the horse’s and coachman’s lives) so lightly, I would find it. I looked for my bag and found it in the wreckage.
‘Where are you going, then?’ the driver said.
‘To the house. I’m allowed to walk on their sacred drive, I suppose.’
‘In that case, you can go through to the stableyard and tell them to send a man down.’
The bag was heavy and my knee hurt, though I hoped it was nothing worse than bruising. I walked slowly up the drive, my eyes taking in the place like any sight-seer while my mind was otherwise occupied. A broad terrace stretched from the row of windows on the ground floor dotted with marble statues – Apollo, Aphrodite, Hercules, Minerva – looking out at the grazing cattle in the park. Gleaming white steps ran down from it to a formal garden with yew bushes clipped into pyramids and box hedges in geometric shapes. It did not match the Gothic architecture of the house, but it must have cost a lot of money, so perhaps that was the point. A ha-ha divided the formal garden from the pasture, and a bridge large enough to span a good-sized river carried the drive across it, decorated with more marble mythology: Leda and her swan at one end, Europa and the bull at the other.
I felt very conspicuous, as if the hundreds of window panes were eyes watching me. ‘They’re not the spies though,’ I said to myself. ‘I am.’ I gloried in the word now because I thought that I’d found my enemy at the very start. A man who could deliberately run down his own groom driving one of his own vehicles was surely capable of anything, murder included. Blackstone had only told me part of the truth when he said the Mandeville household had something to do with my father’s death. He surely meant Sir Herbert himself. I’d seen for myself that he’d been in Calais three days after my father died and might well have been there for some time. What my father had done to earn the hatred of this money-swollen bully I didn’t know, but I’d find it out and tell the world. He could do what he liked to me after that, I didn’t greatly care.
*
On the far side of the bridge the drive divided itself into two unequal parts. The broader, left-hand one passed through a triumphal stone arch to the inner courtyard of the house. I glanced inside and there was the carriage Sir Herbert had driven. Evidently this was the entrance for the Mandevilles and guests, not limping governesses. I stopped at the point where the drive divided and put my bag down to change arms. Before I could pick it up again, the carriage wheeled round and came towards me, this time at a slow walk, with only the coachman on the box. When I moved out of the way to let it pass, he didn’t even glance down at me, but the footman standing at the back of it gave me a look. The poor man was so plastered with dust from the road that he could have taken his place among the statues on the terrace without attracting notice, apart from a few glimpses of his gold-and-black livery jacket. His wig must have come off somewhere on the journey because he was clutching it in his hand and his muscular stockinged calves were trembling.
I let them go past, then picked up my bag and followed. The side of the house was on my left, with fewer and smaller windows than the front. To the right, a high brick wall probably enclosed the vegetable garden. There was a brick wall on the other side as well and a warm smell of baking bread. We had come out of grandeur, into the domestic regions. I followed as the carriage turned left and left again, through a high brick archway with a clock over the top of it, into the stableyard. A dozen or so horses looked out over loosebox doors as their tired colleagues were unharnessed from the carriage, flanks and necks gleaming wet as herrings with sweat. A team of boys with mops and buckets had already started cleaning the carriage. The footman was walking stiffly away through an inner arch and the coachman was having a dejected conversation with a sharp-faced man in gaiters, black jacket and high-crowned hat who looked like the head stableman. I put my bag down by the mounting block, picked my way towards them over the slippery cobbles and waited for a chance to speak to the man in gaiters.
‘The driver of the phaeton asks will somebody please come down and help him.’
‘And who may you be?’
‘I’m the new governess, but that doesn’t matter. The phaeton is quite smashed and the cob …’
He clicked his fingers. Two grooms immediately appeared beside him.
‘Bring in the cob and phaeton,’ he told them. Then, to me: ‘Beggs – can he walk?’
I was pleased by this evidence of humanity.
‘The driver? Yes, he’s not badly hurt, he –’
Cutting me short, he turned back to the men.
‘So you needn’t waste time bringing Beggs back. Tell him from me he’s dismissed and to take himself off. If there’s any wages owing, they’ll go towards repairing the phaeton.’
‘But it wasn’t his fault,’ I said. ‘Sir Herbert …’
He walked away. I went and sat on the mounting block with my bag at my feet. After a while an older groom with a kindly face came over to me.
‘Anything wrong, miss?’
‘I’m … I’m the new governess and I don’t know where to go.’
He pointed to the archway where the footman had gone.
‘Through there, miss, and get somebody to take you to Mrs Quivering.’
He even carried my bag as far as the archway, though he didn’t set foot into the inner courtyard on the far side of it.
‘The driver,’ I said, ‘it isn’t at all just …’
‘There’s a lot that’s not just, miss.’
The courtyard I walked into was sandwiched between the stableyard and the back of the house. A low building on the left was the dairy. Through a half-open door I could see a woman shaping pats of butter on a marble slab. The smell of bread was coming from a matching building on the right, its chimney sending up a long column of sweet-smelling woodsmoke. The back of the house itself towered over it all, with a line of doors opening on to the courtyard, one with baskets of fruit and vegetables stacked outside. The dust-covered footman was standing by another door, talking to a woman in a blue dress and white mob-cap. When he went inside, I followed him into a high dark corridor.
‘Excuse me,’ I said to his back. ‘Can you please tell me who Mrs Quivering is and where I can find her?’
He turned wearily.
‘Housekeeper. Straight on and last on the left.’
He disappeared through a doorway. The passage was a long one and the door at the far end was green baize, marking the boundary between servants’ quarters and the house proper. At right angles to it, another door marked Housekeeper. I knocked, and a voice sounding harassed, but pleasant enough, told me to come in.
Mrs Quivering reminded me of the nuns. She looked to be in her thirties, young for somebody holding such a responsible position, and handsome, in a plain black dress with a bundle of keys at her belt and smooth dark hair tucked under her white linen cap. But her eyes were shrewd, twenty years older than the rest of her. She looked carefully at me as I explained my business.
‘Yes, you are expected, Miss Lock. I understand there was an accident on the drive.’
‘I’d hardly call it an accident. What happened –’
‘You are unhurt?’
‘Yes, but –’
‘I’m sorry that I can’t allocate you the room used by your predecessor. We are expecting a large number of house guests shortly and I am having