3-Book Victorian Crime Collection: Death at Dawn, Death of a Dancer, A Corpse in Shining Armour. Caro Peacock
‘It would be treason, wouldn’t it?’
She asked the question very softly, looking down at the sketchpad. The paper was damp from her tears.
‘I think so, yes.’
‘And my stepfather’s trying to drag me into it, for his own ambition. So I’ve no choice, you see, no choice at all.’
‘Yes, I see.’
She dried her eyes with her handkerchief and took a deep breath.
‘So now there are just two days and seven hours to live through and I’ll be away with Philip and it will be all over. Only there’s that terrible dinner to get through first. I know they’ll make me sit next to him. I’m glad you’ll be there, at least. I shall be able to look down the table at you and know somebody understands what I’m suffering.’
‘I? At the dinner?’
‘Didn’t Mrs Quivering tell you? You’re to fill a gap in the table. Lady Arlen is enceinte again so has cried off the dinner, and that put out the whole table plan because they were a woman short. So my grandmother said you were perfectly ladylike and they could move somebody else up and put you down at the far end. Why are you looking so scared?’
‘He’ll recognise me. He can’t fail to if we’re sitting at the same dinner table.’
My panic was about Lord Kilkeel, but she naturally thought it applied to Mr Brighton.
‘How can he? There are forty people, remember, and you’ll be at the very far end of the table, and by candlelight. The people at the other end won’t even see you.’
I hoped she was right. Mrs Beedle had been clever, seizing the chance to provide her spy with a seat at the dinner. I might have tried again to persuade Celia to confide in her, but two of the house guests, a gentleman and a lady with a little dog, were approaching from the far side of the terrace.
‘Botheration,’ Celia said. ‘I suppose they’re coming to talk to me.’
She crumpled her damp apology for a sketch and rose from the bench to face them while I slipped away, down the side steps of the terrace and into the back entrance.
Mrs Quivering’s assistant was in the housekeeper’s room, drinking sage tea for her sore throat.
‘There’s a letter come for you, Miss Lock.’
She handed over a coarse grey envelope.
‘When did it arrive?’
‘I don’t know. Somebody delivered it to the stables and a boy brought it over.’
The writing was Amos Legge’s. I went into the corridor and opened the envelope.
Miss Lane,
Ther is a thing I heard about the two gentlemen in the travling coach. I will come when I can and ask for you at the back door.
Yours ruspectfully,
A. Legge
If I could, I’d have gone straight to the livery stables to find him, but I was needed back in the schoolroom to superintend the children’s dinner and afternoon walk in the grounds. With so many visitors in residence, ladies and gentlemen kept stopping us, talking to the children and petting them. It made them over-excited and above themselves, but at least we were spared the ceremony of taking them down before dinner.
‘Lady Mandeville has one of her headaches,’ Betty said.
That saved me from having to invent a headache of my own as an excuse. We took off their best clothes, supervised their washing and tooth brushing and got them into their beds by half past eight. When we’d set the schoolroom straight, I said I needed a walk to clear my head. It was time to keep the appointment with Daniel. The light was fading, the brick walls of the vegetable garden radiating back the heat of the day. The gardeners had gone by then, but they must have watered the plants last thing because warm, damp earth scented the dusk, along with lingering whiffs of carrot, spring onions, bruised tarragon. Pale moths wafted around the bean flowers like flakes of ash blown up from a bonfire and a hedgehog rooted and grunted under the rhubarb leaves. I sat on the edge of the water trough and waited.
‘Liberty.’
Daniel Suter’s voice, from the door in the wall.
‘I’m here.’
He came over to me, practically running, tripping on the gravel path.
‘Well?’ I said.
‘You were right, child. Ye gods, what a situation.’
He sat down beside me, breathing hard. I’d known him all my life, but had never seen him discomposed before.
‘You recognised somebody here who was in Paris?’
‘As you thought, the man they call Mr Brighton.’
My heart jolted, like a salmon trying to leap out of water and flopping back.
‘And you saw the portrait?’ I said.
‘Yes. You’re right. There is a very strong resemblance. But you’d expect that, of course.’
‘My father saw it. The dregs of their dull race – I should have guessed.’
‘It wasn’t only your father who saw. They were flaunting it. They were a laughing-stock among the Parisians. The very waiters would bow to him in jest, only he took it in deadly earnest.’
‘Tell me, please, everything that happened in Paris.’
‘There’s not so very much to tell. It all happened over just two days and nights.’
‘Everything you can remember.’
He took a deep breath.
‘It was pure good luck meeting your father in Paris. He inquired at a few hotels where he knew I’d stayed in the past and found me. And, as chance would have it, half a dozen of our mutual friends were there, musicians mostly and …’
‘And?’
‘Lodge brothers. We spent the afternoon in each other’s company, talking about all the things you talk about when you haven’t seen your friends for months. Your father was in excellent spirits, money in his pocket, looking forward to reaching home and being with you.’
‘He said so?’
‘He certainly did. We talked a lot about you. We all had dinner together and your father asked if there was anywhere we might have a hand or two of cards, simply for amusement.’
‘I know. Money never stayed in his pockets for very long.’
‘This time he was determined it should. We went to a place I knew, off the Champs Élysées. He did not intend to play for high stakes, but …’
‘He won a horse.’
‘Indeed he did, from some old marquis who’d won her off somebody else and didn’t know what to do with her. But how did you know that?’
‘From the same person who told me you were together in Paris. So how does Mr Brighton come into the story?’
‘The table next to ours were playing high. There were about half a dozen of them, all English. They were already there when our party arrived and they’d been drinking heavily. Mr Brighton was totally drunk and kept yelling out remarks in that terrible high bray of his. It was a small place and the tables were too close together. At one point, Mr Brighton pushed his chair back suddenly and sent your father’s tokens scattering all over the floor.’
‘Did my father resent it?’
‘No. He had too much good sense to quarrel with a man in drink. We all picked the tokens up and went on playing. It happened a second time and we did the same thing.