Page 29 of Word of the Wicked (Murder in Moonlight #5)

S olomon barely noticed the snarled traffic, so eager was he to show Constance the house he had just seen. For the first time, he had felt at home in a strange house, and was sure Constance would feel it too.

When he alighted from the hackney at last at the Silver and Grey office, he realized it was dark. Janey was locking the front door.

“There you are,” she said. “I’d about given up on you. You going back in?”

“Where are you going?”

She stared at him. “Home? You all right, guv? I mean sir?”

Solomon extracted his watch and read it by the light of the streetlamp. He swore under his breath. “I’ve missed the train back to Sutton May.”

“So you have. And I’m missing me dinner. You sleeping in there or back at your own place?”

For a moment, stupidly, he felt lost. He had been looking forward to dashing back to Constance, to telling her the latest about David and what he had set in motion. To telling her about the house…

He shoved aside what he could not change. “Sorry, Janey. Take a cab home.” He shoved some coins in her hand at random and set off for his house. And his brother.

“Abel Drayman,” he said abruptly, striding into the room where David was dining.

David dropped his fork with a clatter. “I remember him!” He stared at Solomon. “I think…it was him, not me, who killed Chase, the merchant?”

“I think he killed him both times. Could it have been Drayman that Chase was drinking with in the Crown and Anchor?”

“I didn’t see his face. His back was to me, and then I was so fixed on Chase that I didn’t look. What made you think of him?”

“I found your Captain Blake.” Solomon cast himself into the chair opposite his brother.

Oddly enough, the place had been set as though Jenks had expected him home for dinner.

“It was he who took you to the hospital in Marseilles. He thought you would die but was too taken up with Chase and his own problems to find out.”

David shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t mind.”

“It does matter. You were ill with brain fever, David. The scene you witnessed had such a nightmare quality not because you were mad and imagining things but because you were sick and fevered. That was the illness that deprived you of your memories for so long.”

“I am not mad,” David stated.

Solomon poured wine into both their glasses. “You are not mad. You were never mad.”

David raised his eyes. “Remembering you, pretending to be you… That was just…loneliness.”

“Missing your family. As we missed you. But worse because you were alone and unsafe.” And suffering… Imagining that suffering was unbearable. To both of them.

David picked up his glass and drank a large mouthful. “How was Captain Blake?”

“Not well, and somewhat ashamed. I promised him I would put it right.”

“How will you do that?”

“By finding Drayman. I have—er…delegated that task to the police. I doubt they will call here to tell me what they discover, but don’t be alarmed if they do. Either Jenks will deny you or you can pretend to be me.”

David gave an unexpected shout of laughter. “Like the old days.”

And suddenly it was like the old days. Just a little.

*

Constance kept walking, although every nerve urged her to run.

She tensed, gripping the banister hard, for his arms and legs were longer than hers and he could get close enough to push or kick and she would have no chance of fighting back with elbows or heels.

Her only chance was to cling to the rail with her hand and get close enough to the bottom for least damage…

Or she could call out.

Which would reveal her fear, and she had learned long ago never to do that.

“Allow me to show you out,” Mortimer said behind her, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “Did my aunt offend you so much that you storm out before she can even ring for a servant? It’s how things are done in a gentleman’s house, you know.”

So it was to be a verbal attack. That she could deal with.

She kept descending the stairs. “I daresay she trusted me not to steal the silver in my rampage through the premises.”

His footsteps sounded behind her. “But then, she doesn’t know your name.”

Meaning Miss Mortimer did not recognize Constance Silver’s name? Which meant that her nephew did. No doubt Miss Fernie, yet again.

“My name is hardly secret,” Constance said. Only three steps to go now. He wasn’t going to hurt her.

“And yet you expect to be received like an honest woman?”

She reached the foot of the stairs with relief and turned to face him. “I am an honest woman. What are you, Mr. Mortimer?”

He brushed past her, not to help her retrieve her coat and hat, but to riffle the little pile of letters on a sturdy table.

“I am her nephew and her heir and she will not receive you again.”

The sight of his picking through the letters made her remember that she had not even asked Miss Mortimer what she meant to about the delivery of her anonymous letter. She was not thinking straight enough or clearly enough.

“Were you here when she received the anonymous letter?” Constance asked abruptly.

His gaze flew to hers, not in guilt or irritation, but in sheer surprise. He had expected a retort to his taunt, not a change of subject. “Yes. It was just before the end of my last visit.”

“How did you know about it?”

He curled his lip. “Are you accusing me of sending it?”

“No,” Constance replied impatiently. “I want to know when and how you saw it. Were you looking for post directed to you, as you are now?”

“Yes, as it happens.” A frown tugged at his handsome brow. “I noticed it because the direction was written in such an odd way, in capital letters all of the same size. She never receives letters like that.”

“What time was this?”

“Time?”

“Of the day,” Constance said urgently. “Was it first thing in the morning?”

“No, it was about this time, round about tea, when the latest post is usually fetched from the village by one of the grooms.”

That was different. The other letters had been slipped under front doors during the night, or very early in the morning. “Did you take it directly to her?”

“No, for she had guests to tea. She read it later. And so did I by the simple means of walking into her sitting room and looking. I make a point of knowing everything that goes on in my aunt’s life. I protect her.”

“Do you?” Constance said. “What do you think the letter referred to?”

“Taking responsibility for Hannah Jenson,” he said contemptuously. “It would have been the simplest matter for her to leave an extra letter among the post as though it were nothing to do with her.”

“The same could be said of you. Who had tea with your aunt that day?”

“Lord, how should I remember? The same old faces. It was a Wednesday, when they all come bleating for free food.”

“You won’t make a very bountiful lord of the manor, will you, Mr. Mortimer?” She walked to the hall stand and donned her own coat while he gazed at her with dislike. She placed her bonnet on her head without tying the ribbons. “Good afternoon.”

She drove back to the inn, her head still buzzing with thoughts and excitement, mostly because Solomon might have come back.

He hadn’t, as she quickly discovered. Hoping he would be on the last train, she went up to her room, lit the candles, and spread out her notes again, adding what she had learned.

The first anonymous letter had been delivered to Miss Mortimer before or during her tea party on a Wednesday afternoon.

There had then been a gap of a week before the Keaton letter, and the Nolan letter, both of which had been delivered either during the night or first thing in the morning.

And then nothing—that Constance knew of—until Mrs. Chadwick’s letter last week. A gap of more than two weeks.

Had the writer meant to give up the practice and then been unable to help themselves? Only the death of a child had set them off again. And that letter too had been delivered during the hours of darkness, when the sender was less likely to be seen.

Who had the legitimate business to be out and about at night? Not children, whatever her original suspicions. Those walking home at night, from the Goose or from church meetings. People who lived alone without spouses or servants to notice their going out at such odd hours.

And the matter of the missing items… Was she right that they were thefts? Was she really understanding the reasoning behind them? It was not truly her or Solomon’s business. They had been hired to find the sender of the anonymous letters.

Solomon…

Her watch told her it was time for the last train from London. She rose and went to the window, opening it a crack until she was sure she heard the familiar rumble of wheels on the railway track, the engine’s distinctive whistle…

Her window looked out onto the courtyard and the street beyond. Several men of varying degrees in life, both singly and in groups, did pass through the arch into the courtyard, but none of them were Solomon.

No one came upstairs or knocked on the door.

Until someone did and she actually jumped. “Come in.”

It was the maid, asking if she wanted to have supper downstairs or in her room.

“Here in my room, I think,” Constance replied.

She told herself it was good he had stayed in London, that he needed time with David as well as time devoted to his brother’s problem. Unthinkable that they allow him to hang…

She began to pore over David’s case in her mind until it became confused with Sutton May and letters, and she knew she was too tired to think anymore.

Solomon …

*

She woke to daylight, and the peace of the countryside, apart from the soft knocking at her bedchamber door.

Blinking blearily, she threw back the bedclothes, feeling without success for her dressing robe. Giving up, she decided to simply hide behind the door and staggered across the room.

She unlocked the door and opened it a crack, peering around it.