Page 57 of Blackmail at Beckwith Place

“The village?” I suggested, in exactly the same baffled tone, as if I couldn’t understand why he didn’t understand something so obvious. Before I dropped the tone—I was being rude, after all, and fully aware of it—and added, “It’s moot at this point, anyway. Sammy caught him, and now he’s stuck.”

Uncle Harold eyed me for a moment in silence before he moved past me towards the kitchen. “Come along, Crispin.”

He didn’t quite snap his fingers, but I got the impression he would have liked to.

“Yes, Father.” Crispin slipped through the doorway and past me with a murmured, “Pardon me, Darling.”

I turned to watch him go. “Head all right, St George?”

He glanced at me over his shoulder. “Yes, Darling. Should I be worried that you keep asking?”

“I don’t see why,” I said and flapped a hand at him. “As you were, St George.”

He nodded and ducked into the kitchen after his father, who had started talking to Aunt Roz. “—cannot conceive of why, Roslyn?—”

I rolled my eyes and went in the other direction, back to the boot room door. After putting my ear to the crack, I could hear the continuation of the conversation outside.

“—nothing!” Wilkins’s voice said belligerently. “I spent the night in the village, didn’t I? Had a pint or two in the pub and went up to my room.”

Sammy’s voice said something, too softly for me to catch, and I eased the door open a centimeter, the better to hear.

“Full house up here,” was Wilkins’s answer. “Between His Grace and his young lordship coming from Sutherland Hall, and all the Marsdens visiting from down in Dorset, and Master Christopher and his bird down from London, Lord and Lady Herbert’s got a houseful, don’t they?”

I rolled my eyes. Not that it wasn’t all true, of course, but did Wilkins really imagine that I was involved with Christopher? His ‘bird’? How deplorably low class.

“—girl?” Sammy asked. “Had you seen her before?”

“I haven’t seen her now,” Wilkins pointed out.

“She was here yesterday, the others said. Swooned on the lawn and was taken to the infirmary in the village.”

“I don’t know nothing about that,” Wilkins said.

“So you hadn’t seen her before?”

“Before…?”

“Before she ended up dead on the lawn,” Sammy said, with rather strained patience.

Wilkins sounded reluctant, and it was hard to blame him. Nobody likes to admit to having seen dead people before they were dead. “I saw her yesterday. Drove her and the doctor back to the village after his lordship ran down in the H6 and fetched the doctor in the first place.”

“Why didn’t his lordship drive them back?”

“Got pulled into orbit by the other bird,” Wilkins said, and I smirked at the description of the very elegant, highly-born Lady Laetitia Marsden.

Until Sammy asked, “The one that was here with him a minute ago?”

“That’s Miss Darling,” Wilkins said dismissively. “His Grace would never allow that.”

“She’s Lady Roslyn’s ward, ain’t she? Her niece or something? What’s wrong with that?”

“German,” Wilkins said grimly.

“Oho.”

Neither of them said anything else for a few moments. Remembering the war, no doubt. They must have both taken part, given their ages.

I grimaced. It’s never pleasant to come face to face—or ear to crack in door—with the prejudice. I know it’s there, but most of the time I’m able to forget about it. Until something like this happens, or until someone like Euphemia Marsden expresses what a pity it is that my mother chose to leave England for Germany and my father, and then it all comes back.