Page 1 of Deadly Ghost (Angus Brodie and Mikaela Forsythe Murder Mystery #12)

She closed the door to the library, and prying eyes.

“It is time for your morning tea, Mamà.”

The woman in the chair smiled faintly.

“So many years, and now you are here,” she said. Her hand shook slightly as she accepted the cup of tea.

“We are together now and I will be stronger soon, with your care.”

So many years, the younger woman thought. So many secrets, so many lies—more than twenty years of them as something hardened inside her.

The letters had revealed the truth of the life she should have had. She forced the smile to her lips.

“Be sure to drink all of your tea, Mamà.”

She wore a black gown, appropriate to the occasion, her hair tucked beneath a black hat, features hidden behind a veil that would have revealed something other than grief.

The servants had all been dismissed, except for the housekeeper. The home she had always known was to be sold.

There would be little left after her mother’s illness, the solicitor told her, as the vicar recited the litany for the dead over the open grave.

So very sad, yet enough to keep her for a short while. Yet she had prospects, the solicitor had suggested then. After all, she was educated. She might find a position as a lady’s companion, or tutor. She might marry, all quite acceptable.

Proper and acceptable, for a young woman of her circumstances, from a well-placed family, and all utterly loathsome.

Family.

If it hadn’t been so ridiculous, she would have laughed at the word.

Hadn’t she questioned it from time to time? That feeling that she didn’t quite belong, perhaps in the way that children thought of things that eventually went away.

It had not.

It was during that time only a handful of years earlier, while her mother was preoccupied—perhaps that was more appropriate than grief-stricken over Sir William’s declining health, then mourning his death—that she had discovered those letters from over twenty years before.

Sir William—oddly she had always thought of him by his given name. Not Father, a man who was distant, indifferent to her, as if she didn’t exist. As if he knew ...

Oh, he had provided for her—the tutors, the exclusive finishing school in Paris, an extended trip abroad, and then the past years living in France.

Everything, except a father’s love.

There had been no confrontation with her mother over the letters that explained so much, hidden away like precious mementos. To be taken out from time to time and read over again and again for a lost love?

She had tucked them away where she had found them, something cold growing inside her.

Secrets and lies.

The vicar’s words for the soul of a ‘ good and honorable woman’ whispered among the trees that seemed to weep over the headstones of nearby graves in the drizzling rain. And the man who was there in his common clothes, the stovepipe hat, scribbling in his little notebook.

Burke was the name. He wrote for the crime sheets in the daily newspapers— now it seemed reduced to writing about the dead.

More lies—about a prominent family, service to the Crown, and a life well lived. Yet, lies could be useful.

“Miss?”

She stiffened at the manner in which the vicar addressed her now, as the service ended.

Not Lady Grantham, as it should have been, for now. Still, the omission strengthened her and gave her purpose.

“If you should wish to remain?” he suggested, appropriately somber with his pious dignity.

A question, no doubt for the usual mourners he served, immersed in grief, who couldn’t bear the loss of a loved one.

There was nothing for her here, certainly not sadness. She shook her head, sending the vicar on his way, then turned to the man beside her.

“ Il est temps ,” she told him in French. It was time.