Page 11 of Mischief at Marsden Manor (Pippa Darling Mysteries #6)

CHAPTER ELEVEN

It felt as if I had been away from the dining room for a long time. However, when I came back through the door, everything was as it had been. Francis was whispering to Constance, Laetitia was hissing into Crispin’s ear, and Lady Violet and the Honorable Olivia had their heads together in a low-voiced and tense conversation. Crispin’s expression was one of resigned suffering. The chair between Christopher and Wolfgang was still empty, and I pulled it out. “Your turn.”

“Excuse me?”

They both turned startled blue eyes on me, one pair of cornflower and the other a dark shade of navy.

“Not you,” I told Wolfgang with a smile. To Christopher I added, “Constable Collins wants to see you. He’s outside with the bullet.”

Christopher’s brow wrinkled. “What am I supposed to tell him that you haven’t already?”

“Nothing. He wants you to confirm what I told him.” I took my seat and shook out the napkin I had placed on the table earlier. “I’m sure you have nothing to worry about.”

I picked up my knife and fork as Christopher muttered an apology and walked away. Crispin shot a look at his back and then one at me, question in his eyes. I shook my head and he rolled his eyes and turned back to Laetitia. I directed my attention, and a warm smile, Wolfgang’s way. “Did anything happen while I was away?”

“Most of the guests wondered what you might be sharing with the police,” Wolfgang said. He had finished his luncheon in my absence, and now he was fiddling with his napkin ring, turning it over in his fingers.

I arched my brows. “What secrets did they think I was sharing?”

“They don’t know,” Wolfgang said. “Although someone mentioned that the person who finds the body is always a suspect.”

Yes, of course someone had mentioned that. I shook my head. “Not this time, I’m afraid. None of us even knew Cecily Fletcher before this weekend. We certainly didn’t know that she was expecting. Whoever procured the pennyroyal and did away with her would have had to have known that ahead of time.”

I let my eyes linger of Dominic Rivers for a moment. If he noticed, he gave no sign of it. He was either so deeply into his own thoughts that he didn’t notice—and hardly surprising, if he had brought the pennyroyal here—or he knew, but refused to give me the satisfaction of showing me a reaction.

“No one did away with her, Miss Darling,” Laetitia said coldly. “It was an unfortunate accident, that’s all.”

I smirked. “Of course, Lady Laetitia. If you say so.”

“I do say so.” She was sitting down, and it’s hard to stomp your foot under those circumstances, but she appeared as if she wanted to.

“Darling,” Crispin said.

I turned my attention to him. “Yes, St George?”

“Let’s not speak of it, if you don’t mind. It’s inappropriate conversation for the luncheon table, and frankly, it’s making me feel quite ill.”

“I’ve never known you to care about something like that before,” I said. He certainly doesn’t have a weak stomach, and it wasn’t as if he had been the one to watch Cecily breathe her last.

“I know, Darling. But believe it or not, I rather liked her.”

Laetitia twitched in her seat, and he shot her a look before turning back to me. “She was a nice girl, and she didn’t deserve this.”

Violet shook her head aggressively. “No, she didn’t.”

No, of course not. No one deserves to be foully murdered, or to die from an accidental overdose of pennyroyal, even. I eyed Violet. “You were friends.”

She nodded. “The best.”

“She must have confided in you, then.”

“Oh.” She blinked, and her eyes flickered for a second back to… was it Crispin? Or the Honorable Reggie, or perhaps Dominic Rivers?

“No,” Violet said finally, turning her eyes—and attention—back to me. “She didn’t tell me anything.”

“She was your best friend, but she didn’t tell you who she had been sharing her bed with?”

Violet shook her head.

Well, that was interesting, wasn’t it? “Perhaps you weren’t as close as you thought?”

“What a horrible thing to say,” Olivia Barnsley uttered, scowling at me down the length of the table.

I smiled sweetly back. “I’m so sorry you feel that way. Did she confide in you, perhaps?”

“No,” Olivia said mulishly. “It was none of my affair.”

I looked up and down the table. “So no one here knows whose child she was carrying?”

No one answered. Until— “Do you?” Laetitia asked.

I shook my head. “Of course not.” She’d been in no condition to tell me much of anything last night, although I suppose I might have asked. It hadn’t crossed my mind, honestly. And I refrained from saying any of it out loud. Someone would likely blame me for not realizing how bad things had been, and then I’d be told how I might have saved her if I’d done something other than put her to bed and hope for the best, and I already blamed myself enough that I didn’t want to hear that from anyone else.

“I don’t really know any of her boyfriends,” I added. “With the exception of St George, of course.”

Laetitia glanced at Crispin. He sighed. “Thanks ever so, Darling. And on that note, I think I’ve had enough.” He tossed his napkin on the table and got to his feet. “Please excuse me.”

I think he was probably addressing Laetitia, or perhaps more generally the rest of the table. Certainly not me. But no one said anything as he walked away from the table, so I took it upon myself to issue a final warning. “Be careful out there, St George. You never know who might be gunning for you.”

He shot me a look. “I know exactly who’s gunning for me, Darling. And I wish you’d stop.”

He didn’t wait for me to answer, just stalked out of the room. The corner of my mouth turned up and I had to hold back a snort. As parting shots go, it had been a good one, and one has to admire that.

I had meant the warning more literally, of course—someone had been out there with a rifle this morning, and we didn’t know whether I, Francis, or Christopher had been the one in the crosshairs. If it had been Christopher, then Crispin was in danger, too. It wouldn’t have been the first time someone had mistaken one of them for the other, especially at a distance.

Or more likely, Crispin had been the one in the crosshairs to begin with, and someone had mistaken Christopher for him, which made a lot more sense. Crispin is much more shootable than Christopher is. For instance, I have never been gripped by an overwhelming need to punch Christopher in the nose, and I deal with that feeling quite regularly as relates to Crispin.

“Was that really necessary, Pipsqueak?” Francis wanted to know when Crispin’s footsteps had faded down the hallway.

I turned to him. “Was what necessary? I wasn’t trying to give him a hard time. He already has enough on his mind, poor bloke.”

Francis’s lips twitched, but he didn’t take the bait. “That’s my point exactly, Pippa.”

Laetitia sniffed indignantly, but she didn’t say anything, either.

“He’ll be fine,” I said. “It sounded as if he was headed outside. Constable Collins is there, and he will talk to him. St George will explain that the last time he had relations with Cecily Fletcher was in February, and that’ll be that. They’re both capable of basic maths.”

Nobody said anything to that, although Laetitia made a face. She had only herself to thank, however. When you accept the proposal of a known philanderer, reminders of his philandering are going to crop up whether you like it or not.

I pushed my chair back. “Mr. Rivers?—”

Dominic looked up in startlement.

“—would you walk with me?”

He looked like he wanted to refuse, but after a moment, and a glance at Francis and then at Laetitia, he nodded. “Of course, Miss Darling.”

“Thank you.” I smiled at Wolfgang. “I’ll see you later.”

He nodded, halfway between agreement and a polite bow. “Of course.”

“Mr. Rivers?” The latter presented his arm, and I tucked mine through it. We walked out of the dining room in polite silence. Once outside in the hallway he wasted no time twitching his sleeve out of my grip.

“What’s this all about?”

“A few questions,” I said, dropping my hand but continuing forward down the hallway towards the main foyer, away from the dining room door. Dominic Rivers, perforce, followed.

“I don’t have to tell you anything,” he told my back, petulantly.

I glanced at him over my shoulder. “No, of course you don’t. Although it will look suspicious if you’re deliberately unforthcoming, don’t you think?”

He turned a shade paler, not a marvelous look for someone with his skin tone. He tried to brazen it out, however, and his sneer was almost—almost—as good as Crispin’s, at least on a bad day. “To who?”

“Whom,” I said, and waited for him to come up beside me before I continued to walk. “To me, and to everyone else I tell about it. Like Constable Collins.”

He scoffed. That was a creditable effort, too, although Francis does it better. “A small town bobby investigating a crime that may not have happened? I’m shaking in my boots.”

“A small town constable with the power to arrest anyone involved,” I corrected, “whether you have any respect for him or not.”

He didn’t say anything to that, and I added, “Nobody’s suggesting it’s your fault, you know. I don’t think you planned to kill her.”

All the blood drained out of his cheeks and left them pasty, like day-old porridge. “I certainly did not. How dare you?”

“I just told you that I don’t think that,” I said irritably. “Stop behaving like such a damsel, Mr. Rivers. If you provided her with the pennyroyal, you still aren’t responsible for whether or not she took it.”

He muttered something, in which I was pretty certain I heard the words Billy and Chang . I stopped in the middle of the main foyer and put my hands on my hips. “Billy Chang was convicted of pushing cocaine, not medicinal herbs. And he wasn’t even charged in Freda Kempton’s death. It’s not the same situation.”

“It’s close enough,” Rivers grumbled. “There’s a prison sentence on the books, you know. Offences Against the Person Act . Up to three years for the procurement of drugs to cause abortion.”

“But surely that’s less than for selling, say, cocaine or heroin?”

“You would think,” Rivers said mulishly, “but you would be wrong.”

Was that so? “Well, that’s too bad, isn’t it? You really should have known better, Mr. Rivers.”

He made a face.

“All I want to know,” I told him, “is whether or not it was Cecily Fletcher who invited you here and asked you to bring her pennyroyal.”

He looked at me for a moment in silence, seemingly trying to determine whether or not he should, or had to, answer the question. Finally, he said, “No. It wasn’t.”

“But someone else did?”

He didn’t answer, and I added, “Who was it?”

“I can’t tell you that, I’m afraid.” His tone was bland, businesslike. “That’s confidential information. Professional courtesy, you understand.”

His color was back to normal now, and he looked as if he thought he had the upper hand. I decided to see if I could disabuse him of that notion.

“Or perhaps you just can’t tell me because there wasn’t anyone else,” I said as I watched his face. “Perhaps no one asked you to procure pennyroyal for them. Perhaps you did it on your own, because you were the one who wanted the baby gone.”

He didn’t look particularly guilty, but I pushed forward anyway. “We both know that you spent some time in her room last night. If it wasn’t to hand over the supply of dope she had requested you bring, perhaps it was so she could tell you that she was expecting?”

“Yes,” Rivers said, clearly through gritted teeth.

“Was it your baby?”

“No.” He turned a bit pale at that question.

“Can you prove it?”

“Of course not. But I have no reason to lie.”

“You have every reason, if you killed her.”

He shook his head. “Why would I kill her? As Astley said—Lord St George, I mean—she was a nice girl. I would have married her if the baby was mine and if she had wanted me to.”

Well, of course he would have now that I thought about it. Cecily was, or had been, a Fletcher. The daughter of a younger son, and a mere Honorable, but a Fletcher. She would have been several steps up the societal ladder for someone like Dominic Rivers, who, as far as I knew, was a product of Southwark or some other equally depressed—or depressing—section of London.

“Perhaps she didn’t want to marry you,” I said, turning it over in my head and trying to get the pieces to fit in other ways. “Perhaps she didn’t think you were suitable husband-material, and she turned you down.”

I would have expected him to get angry over the slight to his eligibility, but all he did was shake his head again. “If that were the case, I would have let her do whatever she wanted. I have no desire to get married, you know, even if I would have done the right thing had it been required of me. But I certainly wouldn’t have taken the choice out of her hands by killing her.”

That was a reasonable point, actually. “Fine,” I said. “I never really thought you’d done it, anyway.”

He shook his head. “I didn’t. She was a client. I don’t get romantically involved with clients.”

He was smarter than Billy Chang in that, at least. Billy had bedded quite a few of the women who fetched and carried dope for him, or so I had heard. It hadn’t helped him at all in his trial.

“At least you admit that she was a client,” I said. “Would you like to tell me what she bought from you?”

But he shook his head. “I believe not, Miss Darling. My apologies.”

He gave me a little bow. It might have been my own frustration that assigned mockery to it.

“All I’m trying to figure out,” I said, “is whether or not she took something herself, not pennyroyal but something else, because she wanted to deal with the predicament she had found herself in, and it accidentally killed her, or whether someone else gave it to her deliberately, either to bring on a miscarriage or to get rid of Cecily altogether. That’s all I want.”

He didn’t answer, and I added, “She’s dead, Mr. Rivers. She can’t be hurt by anything you tell me now. What’s happened is already scandalous enough. Surely you can just tell me this one thing…?”

“I’m afraid not, Miss Darling. She might be beyond care, but other people are not.”

“Yourself included,” I said sourly. When he didn’t answer—because what could he say, other than that I was right?—I sighed. “Can you at least tell me who invited you here?”

He smirked. “Of course, Miss Darling. It was your cousin.”

“My— Do you mean St George?”

“Who else?”

“I have quite a few cousins here this weekend,” I told him. “And St George isn’t one of them, as it happens, although it’s an easy mistake to make. Did he ask you to bring him anything?”

“Of course not. Requiring gifts would be terribly uncouth. I’m sure he’s above that.”

“That wasn’t what I meant,” I said, “and you know it.”

I waited a moment, but when he didn’t seem willing to incriminate himself further—or at all—I added, “I suppose I’ll just have to tell Constable Collins what you said and have him deal with it.”

“I said that I didn’t kill her, or provide her with drugs to cause an abortion, and that I wasn’t the father of her child,” Rivers said.

I nodded. “And I’ll have to tell him that.”

“Be my guest, Miss Darling.” He sketched some sort of salute and glanced down the hallway in the direction of the back door. “They’re outside on the lawn, you said?”

I nodded.

“In that case, I think I’ll head up to my room. Enjoy the peace and quiet while Reggie’s down here.”

There was nothing I could do to stop him, nor did I feel the need, so I merely told him, “Enjoy your solitude,” and watched as he climbed the staircase up to the first floor and turned down the hallway towards the back staircase up to the next level. Once he was out of sight, I turned on my own heel and headed down the hallway towards the boot room and the door to the backyard.

The others were still on the lawn when I got out there, standing in a group in the middle of the grass, in roughly the spot where Francis, Christopher, and I had stood this morning when the bullet had whizzed by. I glanced at the wall on my way past, and saw that the bullet was now gone, and so was the chip of stone it had kicked loose.

The afternoon sun lit up Christopher’s butter yellow hair, and Crispin’s silver blond ditto, and brought out chestnut highlights in Constable Collins’s dark mop. They all three turned towards me when they heard the door shut.

“Darling,” Crispin said after a moment, neutrally, at the same time as Christopher uttered a more welcoming, “Pippa.”

“I just had a talk with Dominic Rivers,” I said. “He said you’re the one who invited him here this weekend.”

Crispin glanced up at the top floor of the manor. I wondered whether he could see Rivers up there—my first instinct would have been to check the window, had I been Rivers and been told about the gathering on the lawn—but if he did, he didn’t react in any way. After a moment, he turned his attention back to me. “Only in the sense that he rang up to congratulate me after the engagement notice ran in the Times , and I said something along the lines of ‘the more, the merrier.’”

“So it wasn’t a formal invitation?”

“Not from me. Laetitia may have followed up with something written.”

“You told her that you had invited him?”

“Of course I did.” He sounded surprised that I’d ask. “It’s more than my life is worth to get on the wrong side of my intended, Darling. You know that.”

I made a face. “Of course.”

Constable Collins had followed this exchange back and forth impassively, but now he asked, “So Mr. Rivers did receive an invitation?”

“If he says he did, I’m sure he did,” Crispin said. “I wouldn’t have invited him if he hadn’t phoned me—we’re not close; more associates than friends—but perhaps Laetitia wanted to round out the numbers. Cecily was a friend. So are Violet, Olivia, and Serena. And of course there’s Constance and Philippa who had to be invited.”

“You could have told me to stay home,” I said, stung.

He flicked me a glance. “I didn’t mean it that way, Darling.”

“How did you mean it, then?” Because he certainly made it sound as if my presence here, and Constance’s as well, was a necessarily evil.

And in Constance’s case, maybe that was true. She was Laetitia’s cousin as well as Francis’s fiancée; it would have been impossible to leave her out. Not that anyone would have wanted to. Constance is supremely unobjectionable. But for myself, I would have been happy to stay home had he indicated that I wasn’t welcome.

“Don’t be a prat, Crispin,” Christopher said, and put an arm around my shoulders. “You know it wouldn’t be the same without her.”

Crispin looked at me down the length of his nose. It wasn’t a fond look, and he managed to make it quite condescending in spite of being just a few inches taller than me. “I know my life would be a lot simpler if she didn’t always stick her nose into it.”

“For the last time,” I said, “I am not taking responsibility for your bad decisions. Just because I told you that you deserved her, didn’t mean that you had to propose. You could have sulked in silence for a day and gotten over it without doing something that has the potential to ruin the rest of your life.”

He sniffed airily. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Darling.”

“Of course you don’t.” I turned back to Constable Collins. “Rivers said he was invited. He didn’t say by whom, nor whether it was a written invitation. But he’s here as a guest and not merely to do business. At least according to himself.”

Collins nodded. “Did he say anything else I ought to know?”

“He said that he had not given Cecily Fletcher pennyroyal tea. Nor pennyroyal on its own.”

“So if she took pennyroyal,” Collins said, “she got it from somewhere else.”

“Or someone else. For all I know, it grows wild around here.” I gazed around the admittedly pristine lawn. There wasn’t a weed in sight.

“I wouldn’t know what to look for,” Crispin muttered, and I shook my head.

“Nor would I. Nor would Cecily, I expect. She’s a city girl, isn’t she?”

“Clan Fletcher is from the Scottish Highlands,” Christopher said, and Crispin nodded.

“I think Ceci’s family is from somewhere up north. Yorkshire or somewhere like that.”

“Pennyroyal does grow around here,” Constable Collins said. “Miss Constance and Miss Laetitia would both recognize it. So would Master Geoffrey, I assume.”

And the Marsden parents and all of the Marsden servants, no doubt. Although anyone but that small group would have had a hard time distilling it into anything drinkable. It wasn’t as if the guests could wander into and out of the kitchen at will.

Nor that the family would have a habit of doing so—this wasn’t Beckwith Place, where Aunt Roz likes to spend time in the kitchen.

“What does it look like?” A walk in the pleasant afternoon sun sounded good. And if I were walking, I might as well look around at the same time.

“A bit like thistle,” Collins said, “but less prickly. Spiky with pale purplish flowers.”

“We could take a stroll down the lane,” Christopher suggested, “and see what we see.”

I nodded. That was exactly what I wanted. The atmosphere inside wasn’t conducive to my peace of mind. Not between Francis being angry at me over Wolfgang, and Laetitia giving me attitude over Crispin, and Crispin himself being upset with me over Laetitia… although he was out here with us, and might choose to come on the walk, too, so I might not necessarily get away from him by strolling down the lane.

“I’d come with you,” he said, and I steeled myself, “but I suppose my fiancée is likely to be looking for me. I should go inside and do my duty vis-à-vis our guests.”

I had, perversely, my mouth open to tell him that he didn’t owe either the guests or Laetitia anything, but I shut it again when Christopher pinched me warningly. “That sounds like a good idea, old chap.”

“We’ll let you know if we come across anything that looks like it could be pennyroyal,” I told Collins, who nodded.

“I’d better get started on my search of the guest rooms. If you wouldn’t mind, Lord St George?”

He nodded towards the back door. Crispin glanced at Christopher, who gave him a reassuring nod—I have no idea what the reassurance was for, but they knew each other well enough to communicate wordlessly a lot of the time—and then they went off in one direction, into the back of the house, and we went off in the other, across the lawn and around the corner towards the lane.