Page 22 of The Villain’s Fatal Plot (Gravesyde Village Mystery #1)
TWENTY-TWO: VERITY
Verity’s hands shook as she lifted the small, very detailed watercolor of a rainy night, a racing carriage... and a cloaked figure, hands upraised, as if shoving the gentleman under the wheels. The illustrator had brilliantly depicted the action—and the result—of what must have been an instant’s work. And the victim’s horrified expression as he hit the pavement.
She’d recognize her father’s mustache and red pocket handkerchief anywhere. As a former sea captain, he’d sported facial hair most of his life. Her mother had made him trim it. Tears rolled down her cheeks at the memories.
Her thoughts spun wildly, leaving her unaware of her audience until pragmatic Minerva examined the rest of the documents.
“Bring the lantern closer, please. This looks like a piece of a letter saved from a fire.”
Verity had been told her father had been cudgeled and robbed. Or had she just overheard whispers? She’d been very young and the adults hadn’t tried to explain. It was possible no one had explained the horror to her mother either.
Verity only half listened as the others talked around her. She tried to identify the coachman or the cloaked gentleman, but their faces weren’t more than a blur in the rain. Had Miss Edgerton seen this scene? It was so very detailed... The carriage had a gold stripe around the base and gold-painted spokes. The tails of the horses were bobbed and beribboned. The cloak had a fur lining, and the gentleman’s hat stood taller than most. He was clean shaven...
“Verity,” Rafe said gently, trying to remove the sketch from her hands. “You said this is your father?”
She widened her eyes and stared at him in horror. She should never ever have said that. What had she done?
She’d trusted these people with Miss Edgerton’s last words and now...
They had been about her ? No, no, Faith was dead. Verity had a future...
She shook her head, unable to grasp the implications, the awfulness...
“This isn’t just a letter,” Minerva said. “I think there are pieces of a will in here. The language is formal. It’s as if someone threw a wad of documents on the fire and Miss Edgerton retrieved them.”
As if sensing her distress, Marmie padded out of her hiding place to bump Faith’s... Verity’s... elbow. She lifted the kitten to her face and buried her anguish. She wished she’d never said anything. She’d been right to be cautious. How could she possibly explain? She couldn’t. She simply couldn’t. She just wanted to be Verity, the schoolteacher.
She wasn’t even that.
“Verity, Mrs. Porter,” Rafe said gently, “Miss Edgerton may have been killed for these papers. We need to understand what they mean.”
“I don’t know!” she replied hysterically. “I don’t know. I was only fifteen... Why would she do this? Why would she paint anything so dreadful?”
“Blackmail?” Mr. Upton suggested tentatively.
Verity set the kitten down and tried to stop her whirling thoughts. Blackmail—didn’t that mean extortion ? She couldn’t make sense of it. Miss Edgerton extorting...? “Who? We saw no evidence that she had any extra income. The men are unidentifiable. Who would believe a painting? Why would she want me to see this?”
Minerva had produced a pair of spectacles and was reading the burned scraps more carefully. “The letter contains words like fraud and what appears to be embezzlement . The legal paper contains the phrase amendment to my last ... If this is your father in the portrait, can we assume she saved these papers for you? If so, she may be saying that someone in your life was written out of a will due to illegal activities. Although why she would have hidden them instead of providing them to you or a solicitor or...” She shook her head in dismay.
“So her dying words may have just been to Verity, telling her where to look for information she wished to pass on?” Mr. Upton asked. “They didn’t indicate who killed her?”
Verity clung to that lifeline. But tea ... Her friend had known she’d been poisoned.
“Are you certain this is your father in the painting?” Rafe asked. “Which man?”
Verity blinked at this suggestion and replied in ire. “My father would never commit fraud! My father was attacked by a thief, robbed, and killed over ten years ago!”
“How do you know this?” he asked carefully. “You said you were only fifteen. Might they have hidden the truth from you?”
The large soldier who tramped through the house like an earthquake, had flung a grown man from the tavern, and thundered through the kitchen, spoke with such gentleness, that she wanted to weep.
She shouldn’t deceive him, but there was nothing he could do now. Nothing could bring back her father or her home. They were all gone, along with dead Faith.
They had no way of tracing an ancient story. She could give them that much.
“I overheard people talking,” she whispered, reluctantly recalling that awful night. “I was in my room when a messenger arrived. I heard my mother weeping and ran downstairs. They didn’t know I was there. She and our butler and some stranger were discussing arrangements for a body . The next day, she told me my father died at the hands of a thief. I attended the service but I never saw him again.”
She didn’t have to recall the horrible days that followed. They were etched in her memory with such pain that the words might as well have been carved into her skin.
“And Miss Edgerton was there?” Mr. Upton asked.
Verity nodded and found her handkerchief to wipe her tears. “My mother wasn’t well. The physician confined her to bed. Miss Edgerton held my hand and explained what I must do and when. She helped dye my clothes. I don’t know what I would have done without her.”
“And then she left?” Minerva asked.
Verity didn’t want to talk about this anymore. She wanted to fall into bed and bury her head under a pillow. And even she knew that was a childish thing to do. She was Verity now, a young woman with a sensible head on her shoulders, no longer that helpless child.
Even if her world had exploded once more— She’d survived the last two. She would do so again. The first time, with her father’s death, she’d had to fight hysteria, present a calm demeanor, be the young lady her mother needed... The second time, with the fire, she’d been left hollow. But even with hollowed insides, she knew how to do this. She simply had to edit the story.
“Some days after my father’s funeral, my uncle arrived with solicitors, and told Mother that without Father to operate his company, it would have to be closed. Without income, we had to reduce expenses. I came home from church one Sunday, and Miss Edgerton and almost the entire staff were gone. Mother said she had no choice.”
“There should have been funds from selling the company,” Rafe argued, sounding puzzled.
“Not if he owed the bank for anything,” Minerva suggested .
“I don’t know more. My uncle inherited everything and moved in. My mother took to her bed. I looked after her. He started using the ground floor for his business. Life went on, just not as it was before.” Verity stared at the painting. “If my father was murdered, why would she not have told me? Perhaps the painting is metaphorical, representing the killing of life as we knew it?”
“Where was Miss Edgerton on the night your father died?” Rafe demanded harshly.
Verity shook her head in denial of the direction of his thoughts. “She couldn’t possibly have concealed such an event from us!”
But the memories were there, as clear as the explosion that had rocked her world mere weeks ago. She took them out to look at them again. “It was her day off. She usually went to the shops and bought painting supplies and books.” Verity considered what she remembered. “I believe she came in late, probably after the messenger. My mother had taken to her bed. I was sitting on the stairs, crying, when she returned. What does it matter?”
And then she realized... Miss Edgerton had been out on those empty, rainy streets when her father had died. She shuddered and shoved the painting away.
“No,” she whispered. “She could not have. Why would she not say?”
“Who would she tell? It doesn’t look as if she recognized any face but your father’s.” Rafe studied the painting. “Who would we tell? Would it have made you feel better to know your father died by carriage and not by thief? That’s just a different kind of murder, and no one did anything about it, did they? Was your mother in any state to hire a thief taker? Would there have been any point?”
Verity shook her head. Her hearty, healthy father had thought he’d live forever. She’d come to terms with the monetary loss long ago. He’d wanted his family to have everything they desired. He’d pampered them, given them luxuries, expected them to go out into society the way her mother deserved. He had not prepared them for a future without him.
“Do you happen to know your father’s solicitors?” Minerva asked.
If she did, she couldn’t say without giving her father’s name. Verity shook her head, even as an ugly suspicion crawled under her skin.
“You said your father left everything to your uncle?” Mr. Upton asked after a whispered consultation with Minerva.
And there it was. For ten years, she’d been grateful to her father’s younger brother for moving into her father’s house so they could keep it, allowing her and her mother to stay in their home, however diminished. He’d even paid her mother’s funeral expenses.
“Father had no other family,” she whispered. “Not that I know of. Estates pass to the next male, not to women.”
“Does your uncle know where you are?” Rafe asked angrily.
Overwhelmed, she shook her head again. She couldn’t do this anymore. Rashly, she declared, “He thinks I’m dead.”