Page 30 of A Matter of Murder
It sounded ridiculous, except Miss Jeffries was very serious. Darcy felt his legal instincts take over. “And what proof do you have of this?”
Miss Jeffries sighed. “None that you’ll believe, I’m sure. But it all goes back to the late Mr. Geoffrey Bingley, when he was a young man some sixty years ago. He was known to be an adventurer. He and his younger brother, Francis, left home at a young age and commissioned a ship to take them abroad. They were gone for years, leaving their elderly parents behind with nary a word except for the stray letter here and there. Until one day when Geoffrey and Francis’s father died. It took months, but eventually they returned from across the ocean and Geoffrey brought with him a young wife.”
“Honoria?” Lizzie asked.
“Yes. And she brought with her a fortune, too—which was helpful, because the estate and farms had fallen on hard times. Their father hadn’t been a particularly attentive landlord. Or so the story goes.”
This was not an unsurprising tale. Darcy knew plenty of young gentlemen even now who shirked their duties to their estates, spending money like it was water, only to find that money did not in fact grow in fields—it required a bit more work and cultivation than that. He even knew of a few such gentlemen who’d married their way out of such money troubles. “So Honoria’s money restored Netherfield Park.”
“Yes, and soon after, Geoffrey and Francis’s mother died,” Miss Jeffries said. “And the brothers grew restless again.”
“And then what?” Darcy asked, now more intrigued. As Bingley’s oldest friend, he had a sense of the family’s history, but he’d not heard the story from this angle.
“Honoria held the purse strings, and she didn’t want her husband to leave. But she had no qualms about Francis setting sail. She gave him the money he needed, and he left—but she refused to give Geoffrey the same. He became enraged, and so she hid her fortune somewhere in Netherfield Park.”
“Clever,” Lizzie said admiringly.
“How does one just hide an entire fortune?” Darcy asked. “How much was it?”
“It’s said she brought trunks of silver with her when she married, and she hid whatever remained after restoring the estate.”
How perfectly vague, Darcy thought. It sounded like a rumor, but...
He looked at Lizzie and Charlotte, and knew they were thinking the same thing.Silver.
Was that a coincidence?
“What happened after she hid her fortune?” Lizzie asked. “I take it Geoffrey wasn’t pleased?”
“No, miss, he was not. He had no choice but to stay. He was quite angry with his wife, and rumor was they slept in separate wings of the house. But one day, they had a spectacular shouting match, and Geoffrey threatened to burn down the house around them unless Honoria revealed where the money was hidden.”
“The east wing,” Lizzie said.
Miss Jeffries nodded. “He lit it on fire. But luckily for everyone, it was contained before it could spread to the rest of the house—a miracle, really. The staff saved the house.”
“And Geoffrey?” Darcy asked.
“He survived, too. But he was angry—he’d thought that would work. He left in the night. But they found him the next morning when his horse came back to the stables. He was lying on the ground a stone’s throw from the gates. The consensus was he’d been thrown.”
This was starting to sound like something from a gothic suspense novel—and not a good one. “So it was a terrible tragedy,” Darcy said, sounding doubtful even to himself. But... what if Geoffrey Bingley was their dead man?
Lizzie shook her head, as if reading his mind. “There musthave been a burial—for someone of his status, half the village would have been in attendance. Besides, why entomb her husband in the drawing room flue?”
“So he’d never leave?” Charlotte suggested.
It was quite a macabre thought, but Miss Jeffries said, “Miss Bennet is right—Mr. Bingley is buried in the family plot. But the story doesn’t end there. The next day, Geoffrey’s former valet left to find work elsewhere. He drowned crossing a river in the next county. And one of the maids gave her notice so that she could marry a farmer, but shortly after, she fell sick and died.”
“That’s awful,” Lizzie said. “But—”
“I’m not finished,” Miss Jeffries said. “A footman enlisted and was killed when his musket backfired during training. Not long after that, the butler dropped dead in the lane while walking to the village. And a groom was stung by a bee and swelled up until he could no longer breathe!”
“Oh, well... that is... a lot of tragedy,” Lizzie said, sounding uncertain.
Darcy was not so convinced. “That doesn’t mean Netherfield is cursed. My own estate has experienced its fair share of misfortune—it’s very sad, but that is life, I’m afraid.”
“Just wait,” Miss Jeffries said. “About a year after Geoffrey died, smallpox struck. It killed every single person in the house—everyone except the housekeeper.”
“Oh,” Lizzie said.