Page 27 of Word of the Wicked (Murder in Moonlight #5)

M iss Mortimer was next on Constance’s list of people to see, not just about the delivery of her letter but about the missing bracelet.

She didn’t know if the two were connected, but they both seemed odd and out of place.

Although few and far between, the missing items were remembered by the village constable, even from childhood. Surely that said something?

She found herself curiously reluctant to go up to the manor house.

After last night, it had become a place of danger in her mind, and she had long ago learned to avoid those.

At the back of her mind lurked the uneasy thought that if Peregrine Mortimer had pushed her down the stairs because she’d caught him cheating at cards, what might he do to his aunt in order to inherit her fortune more quickly?

Did she prefer to think of the culprit as Miss Fernie so she didn’t have to face him again? She had grown too used to being safe , to having her bodyguards in footmen’s livery. And she missed Solomon.

How had he found David? Was his brother even still in the house, or had he bolted again? Part of her wished they could just forget the trivial matter of these foolish letters and concentrate on the more serious crime of this murder and keeping David safe.

But something in Sutton May was not trivial. The letters were surely symptomatic of something much nastier building behind them, something very dangerous. Someone, whether a genteel old schoolteacher or an entitled young rake, had pushed her down the stairs.

Outside the Keatons’ shop, she hesitated. Then, deciding it would be quicker to borrow the inn’s gig to go to the manor, she turned back toward the village square and the vicarage.

Mr. Raeburn might be reluctant to talk about his flock, but she doubted Mrs. Raeburn felt the same restrictions.

Alice the maid admitted her at once, though she asked her politely to wait while she found out if the mistress was at home—the fiction by which ladies could avoid receiving those they did not wish to see.

Most vicars’ wives, apart from a few reforming zealots, would have avoided Constance like the plague. Mrs. Raeburn received her at once with a welcoming smile, so if Miss Fernie had somehow discovered Constance’s identity, she did not appear to have blabbed it. Yet.

“Mrs. Silver.” Gliding toward her, with her hand outstretched, Mrs. Raeburn glanced beyond Constance’s shoulder, and her smile drooped slightly. “Mr. Grey is not with you?”

“Mr. Grey was called back to London on urgent business. But I expect him back this evening, or tomorrow at the latest.” Constance, though more used to identifying physical attraction in men, was not blind to the signs in women.

She knew a spurt of irritation with Mrs. Raeburn, even found herself examining her hostess’s charms with an anxiety she was appalled to recognize as jealousy.

“I do apologize for taking up your time again,” she said hastily. “I know vicar’s wives tend to be kept as busy as their husbands.”

“Oh, I have no appointments until the Christian Women’s Circle meeting this afternoon. We organize the May Day Fair every year. Do sit down. Does your investigation prosper? Or must you wait for Mr. Grey’s return?”

“I would not waste my time—or Dr. Chadwick’s—in waiting.”

“How very independent you are!” The remark did not seem to be entirely admiring. “Is it true you are betrothed to Mr. Grey?”

“Indeed I am.” So keep your eyes on your own husband . Constance tried and failed to laugh at herself and turned swiftly to business. “I have just been talking to Constable Heron, and he mentioned a few items in the village that have been inexplicably lost over the years.”

“Really?” Mrs. Raeburn sounded only vaguely surprised and not terribly interested. It was not, clearly, the sort of gossip she enjoyed.

“One of them, apparently, was a prayer book from the vicarage.”

“Ah!” Memory clearly dawned, followed swiftly by annoyance. “Yes indeed. It was a lovely little book, bound in leather with gold tooling, engraved with my husband’s initials. The pages were edged with gold leaf, too. I gave it to him as a gift, on our first Christmas at Sutton May.”

“It sounds very beautiful. He must have been delighted.”

“He was. He treasured it. We were both really annoyed when we could not find it anywhere.”

“When exactly did it disappear?”

“Oh, it must have been at least three years ago now. Maybe four. Certainly, between one Sunday and the next.”

“Then he only used it during the Sunday service?”

“Oh no, he kept it in his study to consult also. But if he couldn’t lay his hands on it at once, he would use one of the others that were to hand.

A vicarage tends to collect several Bibles, prayer books, psalm books, and hymnaries…

At any rate, he only noticed it was missing when he was looking for it on Easter Sunday.

We couldn’t find it in any of the likely places, and he had to take another to church that day.

Later, of course, we searched all the un likely places too, but it never turned up. ”

“Did you report it to Constable Heron?”

Her eyes widened. “Why would we do that?”

“In case it had been stolen.”

“Who would steal the vicar’s prayer book?”

His favorite prayer book, Constance thought. Was that the reason behind the theft? “I don’t know, but it is always a possibility. Anything can be stolen, with or without reasons you or I might recognize. In this case, I imagine it was quite a valuable book, in terms of money.”

“It was not cheap,” Mrs. Raeburn agreed, her expression softening. “But I wanted to give him something special to mark his arrival here. Sutton May is an excellent living.” She shook her head. “But I really doubt it was stolen.”

“Then what do you think happened to it?”

She shrugged with an air of helplessness. “I really don’t know. It was not a large book, so I suppose it might have got knocked off the study desk and landed in the wastepaper basket. Alice could have emptied it without noticing.”

“Alice was with you then?”

“Oh yes. She was quite young when we took her on, when we first arrived here. To be honest, we were not sure we could afford the luxury of a parlor maid.”

And young maids, especially those with less-than-perfect backgrounds, could be paid less than their more experienced sisters. More to the point, Alice’s mother, Mavis, had also lost something.

Of course, servants generally got the blame for anything lost or stolen, but in this case, Mrs. Raeburn seemed to bear no suspicion of malice in her servant.

“Or Luke could have dropped it in the street, I suppose,” she continued. “Although I would have expected someone to bring it back to him if that were the case. Unless it was a market day.”

The day that strangers came into the village. “I suppose,” Constance said without much hope, “you cannot recall who visited you or the vicar during that week? Or whom he called upon, perhaps with the prayer book in his pocket?”

“Oh, goodness, no. You really think someone stole it from him? I thought you were interested in Mrs. Chadwick’s nasty letter—surely the two cannot be connected?”

“They are both unusual events,” Constance said, feeling slightly foolish. “But no, I don’t know if they are connected at all.”

She did not stay long after that, since Mrs. Raeburn seemed more interested in Solomon than in gossiping about the village, and Constance did want to be too pointed in her questions about Miss Fernie.

When she rose to take her leave, Mrs. Raeburn rang the bell for Alice to show her out, and they exchanged civil goodbyes.

As the maid helped her back into her coat, Constance said, “Alice, do you recall a box of your mother’s that went missing a while ago?”

Alice’s hands stilled, then dropped as Constance turned to face her. “I do,” she said. “Pretty little carved box with a sliding lid. You had to find the hidden catch to open it. I loved playing with it, but Mam always put it back on the mantelshelf because it was one of her favorite things.”

“She valued it particularly, then?”

“Oh yes, Miss Mortimer gave her it when she left the manor.”

“Did she?” Constance was aware of her heart beating suddenly faster. “Your mother must have felt the loss of it then. What happened to it?”

Alice shrugged. “We never found out. It must have got knocked into the fire, or into something else that was thrown away.”

“Did she have many visitors around that time?”

Alice’s eyes dropped, then lifted with a shade of defiance. “She don’t have many visitors at all, ma’am.”

Because she was a fallen woman. Like Constance. Only Constance had found a way to thrive in the city, flaunting her sin, and had grown rich, while Mavis Cartwright cleaned the village shop and spent all her free time in church, atoning for what had probably not been her fault in the first place.

“She is a good woman,” Constance said abruptly.

Alice smiled suddenly, like the sun coming out. “She is, ma’am.”

*

Solomon found himself, with some reluctance, at Scotland Yard. Although his instinct had been to personally pursue Captain Blake’s information about the sailor Drayman, to go looking for him among the dockside stews and alehouses, he did not have the luxury of time.

For one thing, the letter about an available house was burning a hole in his pocket. For another, he was uneasy leaving Constance alone for long in a village seething with undercurrents of ill will. As it was, he would struggle to catch a train back to Sutton May this evening.

So he had decided to take a chance on the police doing the work—and not arresting him either as the fugitive or for harboring him. In this particular case, he could not afford to be fobbed off on Constable Napier. It had to be Inspector Omand.

Accordingly, glad of his decent suit and overcoat—which would have been disastrously out of place in the dockside dens of vice—he squared his shoulders and walked into the teeming building as though he expected to be served immediately.