Page 39 of The Villain’s Fatal Plot (Gravesyde Village Mystery #1)
THIRTY-NINE: VERITY
Verity clutched her hands as half the men rushed out to rescue a coachman. Mrs. Huntley called for tea. Lady Elsa arrived with maids carrying trays. Verity wasn’t in the least hungry. Her stomach felt like stone, and her head whirled.
Minerva patted Verity’s arm, then stood to confer with the steward and curate in the corner. They whispered between themselves, then sent the footman on another errand. Clare poured tea, but Verity was afraid to hold the cup. She was shivering again.
Uncle Warren ? She could not work her mind around Rafe’s accusation. If her stout, miserly uncle wanted her dead, he could have pushed her down stairs any number of times these last years. No one would have missed her. Why would he care if she lived or died? He already had everything she’d ever wanted.
Rafe seemed to believe it had to do with the painting. Was he saying the man pushing her father was her uncle ? Had he taken all she had ever loved as well? Her shivering intensified. It made no sense.
The men returned, shoving and dragging two rather bruised and disheveled... prisoners? Their hands were bound anyway. Distracted by this novelty, Verity appraised the new arrivals.
“Luther?” she whispered in dismay, recognizing the insolent young man who had been assigned to escort her to the bank. He hadn’t been a bad sort, just rude and lazy. What was he doing here?
At the sound of his name, Luther quit protesting and went white as any of the manor’s ghosts.
The other prisoner was female—the woman in black? Verity considered what little she could see of the personage wrapped in heavy skirts, full sleeves held back with bedraggled ribbons, and an ugly bonnet hiding her hair. Of middling age, middling size, jowls drooping toward her wrinkled neck, mouth pinched and angry, she did not look like anyone Verity knew.
“She was beating him with his own crop,” Henri said in amusement as Rafe stationed the prisoners in a corner and placed his massive bulk between them.
Hunt lowered himself to his desk chair and snatched up one of the delicacies Lady Elsa had prepared. He gestured at Luther. “You know him, Miss Porter?”
“He is my uncle’s footman. Why on earth is he here?” None of this made sense. Luther could have beat her senseless, stolen the bank bag, and left her in an alley long, long ago. Like her, he was too stupid to do anything more than follow orders.
“He’s our new carriage driver, calls himself Arthur.” Hunt looked disgusted. “We hired him the week before Miss Edgerton’s death.”
“I didn’t have naught to do with nothing!” Luther protested. “I been taking care of that landau as if it were my own.”
“You stupid fool!” the woman cried. “If you’d done what you ought, my man wouldn’t be suffering in a dungeon! Now you straighten all this out so I can take him home, where he belongs.”
“As far as we are aware, Clement set fire to a cottage and destroyed its contents,” Hunt corrected mildly. “He won’t be going anywhere anytime soon, unless he cares to recompense the owners for the destruction or someone proves his innocence.”
Ignoring the woman’s screech of outrage, Luther leaned over to peer at Verity. “Miss Palmer, is that you? You look different. ”
“You want to see my broken foot as proof?” she asked dryly, pointing her cane at the bandage bulging beneath her open boot. Not that he’d bothered to see her to the physician that night. “Why are you here?”
“Your uncle told us we was to find Miss Edgerton and ask her for his painting back.” Not having been offered a seat, he straightened. Ropes prevented him from placing his hands behind his back as he’d been taught to do but seldom had.
“And when she refused?” Hunt asked before Verity could.
Luther shrugged. “I got my post as coachman. I didn’t need to go back to Town to be yelled at. I always wanted to be a coachman.”
The female prisoner struggled as if she wanted to hit him some more. Verity wished she could remember her, but she didn’t.
“You let my man do all the dirty work, you thatch-gallow! All you had to do was sweet talk the old tabby a little, see how much she wanted for the painting, but no, you couldn’t get past the back door. You left it to me!”
Rafe interrupted this argument. “Is Mr. Palmer in town?”
Her uncle? Why on earth would her uncle even know Gravesyde existed... Miss Edgerton . He’d sent Luther to retrieve a painting. He knew where her former governess lived. Why? She’d never in a lifetime cipher all this. People weren’t numbers.
Luther shrugged. “Not so’s I’m aware. I ain’t seen him since I left Town.”
The servant was not only too tall to be the man who’d pushed her, he’d been driving the carriage at the time. She couldn’t accuse him of anything except laziness.
The woman—Mrs. Clement?—shut up and looked wary instead of answering the question. Could she have worn men’s clothes this morning?
“We can lock her in the wine cellar until she talks,” Hunt suggested. “I think we’ve plugged all the rat holes.”
Very, very scared, Verity wanted this over now. Uncle Warren? Here? She could scarcely think about what Rafe was insinuating. If these people somehow killed Miss Edgerton...
But they seemed to be saying they were only sent for the painting. Unable to stay silent any longer, she dug her fingers into her palms and demanded, “Are you saying Mr. Palmer, my uncle, asked you to retrieve a painting from Miss Edgerton?”
Luther bobbed his head eagerly. “Sent me and Clem to fetch it. Her ladyship here come along to borrow her family’s caravan, said she wasn’t letting her man sleep in no woods.”
Apparently gathering the seriousness of the situation, Mrs. Clement remained mute.
“Why would my uncle want a painting when he just lost his business premises? He never cared about the paintings on his office walls, and I’m certain his wife would not want anything so evil.” Verity still couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
Luther shrugged again. Mrs. Clement pinched her lips tighter. At a nod from Hunt, his artist cousin ambled off.
The man she thought was Lady Elsa’s husband arrived, shoving a filthy and cowed Clement. Verity studied the prisoner closer but still couldn’t place him. He was only a little taller than his wife, rounded, balding, and bandy-legged. He could have been the man who pushed her, except he’d been locked up.
“Thanks, Jack.” Hunt reached for a decanter and glasses on a shelf behind his desk. “Is it too early?”
“Stop it, Hunt,” Clare said in annoyance. “You’re taunting the prisoner, and you don’t know for certain how guilty he is.”
“I ain’t guilty of doin’ nothing more than I was told!” Clement protested. “I told you everything I know.” He only cast one anxious glance at his wife, then glanced longingly at the brandy decanter.
Arnaud returned bearing an easel and a portfolio. He took out Miss Edgerton’s painting and set it up. “Is this the painting you were sent for?”
The prisoners stared at the dark portrait of evil. Their mouths dropped open. Clement, in particular, grew deathly pale. Admittedly, the watercolor presented a shocking image. Tears rolled down Verity’s cheeks as she finally accepted what Rafe had been telling her.
“That’s my uncle’s carriage, isn’t it?” she whispered. “It just isn’t painted like that anymore.”
Cursing and weeping, Clement crumpled to the floor.
“Why?” Verity whispered, taking the handkerchief Minerva handed her.
“Clem didn’t mean to do that!” Mrs. Clement cried. “It were an accident! Clem didn’t know the old bastard pushed him. It was all of a sudden like. He been holding that over my poor man’s head all these years, and it was him that did it! He needs to hang.”
Verity concurred, but she didn’t know how it would be done and she still didn’t fully understand why. Her father’s business had failed. The house in its undesirable part of town couldn’t possibly be worth killing for. What had her uncle gained?
“Stand up and tell us what happened,” Hunt ordered, nodding at Rafe to yank the prisoner back to his feet.
Visibly shaken, Clement shook his head in denial. “It were an accident! They was fighting all the way home. They got out. I was told to go around the block, keep the horses moving. It wasn’t a street for fancy carriages. Mebbe I returned a little too fast?—”
“You were drunk as usual, you old fool! The gin will be the death of you.” Mrs. Clement wept the words.
“I couldn’t of stopped!” he cried. “Nobody coulda stopped. He just stumbled right in front of the horses. It all happened so sudden.”
“And then you left him there,” Verity whispered in horror. “You drove off and left him there. He might have been saved!”
Standing with the aid of her cane, she slapped the weeping coachman as hard as she possibly could. It felt good.