Cardington Crescent (12 page)

He could think of nothing to say. George’s murderer had to be one of the eight. He could not believe it was Vespasia herself—and please God it was not Emily!

“I had better go and see them. How is Emily?”

For the first time Vespasia could not look at him; she bent her head and hid her face in her hands. He knew she was weeping and he longed to comfort her. They had shared many emotions in the past: anger, pity, hope, defeat. Now they shared grief. But he was still a policeman whose father had been a gamekeeper, and she was the daughter of an earl. He dared not touch her, and the more he cared for her the more deeply it would hurt him if he trespassed and she were to rebuff him.

He stood helpless and awkward, watching an old lady racked with grief and the beginning of terrible fears.

Anyway, what could he say? That he would somehow alter things, hide the truth if it were too ugly? She would not believe him, or want him to do that. She would not expect him to betray himself, nor would she have done so in his place.

Then instinct overrode reason and he reached forward his hand and touched her shoulder gently. She was extraordinarily thin, for all her height when she stood; her bones felt fragile. There was a faint smell of lavender in the air.

Then he turned and went out of the room.

In the hall there was a girl of perhaps twenty, her hair the brilliant color of marmalade, her face pale under its dapple of freckles. She had hardly a shred of the beauty with which Vespasia had dazzled a generation, but she was just as thin, and there was perhaps an echo of the high cheekbones, the hooded eyelids. She was staring at Pitt with a mixture of horror and curiosity.

“Miss March?” he inquired.

“Yes, I’m Tassie March—Anastasia. You must be Emily’s policeman.” It was a statement, and phrased like that it was surprisingly painful.

“May I speak with you, Miss March?”

She gave a little shiver; her revulsion was not for him—her eyes were too direct—but for the situation. There had been a murder in her home, and a policeman must question her.

“Of course.” She turned and led the way through the dining room to the withdrawing room, cool and silver-green, utterly different from the suffocating boudoir. If that was the old lady’s taste, this must have been Olivia’s, and for some reason Eustace had permitted it to remain.

Tassie offered him a seat and sat down herself on one of the green sofas, unconsciously placing her feet together and holding her hands as she had been taught.

“I suppose I should be honest,” she observed, looking at the pale muslin of her dress. “What do you want to know?”

Now that it came to the moment, there was very little to ask her, but if she was like most well-bred young ladies she was confined to the house a great deal of the time with little to do, and she might be extremely observant. He debated whether to treat her delicately, obliquely, or frankly. Then he looked at the steady, slate-blue eyes and thought she was probably more like her mother’s family than her father’s.

“Do you think George was in love with your sister-in-law?” he said without preamble.

Her eyebrows shot up, but she retained her composure with an aplomb worthy of an older woman.

“No. But he thought he was,” she replied. “He would have got over it. I understand that sort of thing happens from time to time. One just has to put up with it, which Emily did superbly. I don’t think I should have been so composed—not if I loved someone. But Emily is terribly sensible, far more than most women, and infinitely more than most men. And George was—” She swallowed, and her eyes filled with tears. “George was very nice, really. I beg your pardon.” She sniffed.

Pitt fished in his breast pocket and brought out his only clean handkerchief. He passed it to her.

She took it and blew her nose fiercely. “Thank you.”

“I know he was,” he agreed, filling the silence before it became an obstacle between them. “What about Mr. Radley?”

She looked up with a watery smile. “I think he’s quite tolerable. In fact, as long as I don’t have to marry him, I daresay I should like him well enough. He makes me laugh—or he did.” Her face fell.

“But you don’t wish to marry him?”

“Not in the slightest.”

“Does he wish to marry you?”

“I shouldn’t think so. He doesn’t love me, if that is what you mean. But I will have some money, and I don’t think he has any.”

“How very candid you are.” She was almost worse than Charlotte, and he found himself wishing he could protect her from all the anguish that was bound to come.

“One should not lie to the police in matters of importance,” she said quite sincerely. “I was really very fond of George, and I like Emily, too.”

“Someone in this house murdered him.”

“Yes. Martin told me so—he’s the butler. It seems impossible. I’ve known them all for years—except Mr. Radley, and why on earth should he kill George?”

“Might he have imagined Emily would marry him if George were dead?”

She stared at him. “Not unless he is a lunatic!” Then she turned it over in her mind, realizing the only other possibilities. “But I suppose he could be. You can see very little indeed of some people in their faces, watching them do all the usual things everyone does, eating theirdinner, making silly conversation, laughing a bit, playing games, writing letters. There is a way of doing all these things, and you are taught it as a child, like the steps of a dance. It doesn’t have to mean anything at all. You can be any kind of person underneath it. It’s sort of uniform.”

“How perceptive you are. You are like your grandmother.”

“Grandmother Vespasia?” she asked guardedly.

“Of course.”

“Thank you.” She breathed out in relief. “I am not in the least like the Marches. Have you solved anything?”

“Not so far.”

“Oh. Is that all? I should like to go and see how Emily is.”

“Please do. I shall find your brother, if I can.”

“He’ll be in the conservatory, at the far end. He has a studio there.” She stood up, and courtesy bade him stand also.

“Painting?”

“He’s an artist. He’s very good. He’s had several things in the Royal Academy.” There was pride in her voice.

“Thank you. I shall go and find him.” As soon as she had gone he turned to the row of French doors and the vines and lilies beyond. The conservatory felt humid and full of heavy growth and smelled of lush flowers and hot, perfumed air. The afternoon sun beat on the windows till it was like an equatorial jungle. In the winter a giant furnace maintained the temperature, and a pond the dampness.

William March was precisely where Tassie had said he would be, standing in front of his easel, brush in his hand, the sunlight making a fire of his hair. His thin face was tense, utterly absorbed in the image on his canvas; a country scene full of glancing sunlight and fragile, almost insubstantial trees, as though not only the spring but the garden itself might vanish. Pitt hardly needed his occasional work recovering stolen art to know that it was good.

William did not hear him till he was a yard away. “Good afternoon, Mr. March. Forgive me for interrupting you, but I must ask you certain questions about Lord Ashworth’s death.”

At first William was startled, simply because his concentration had precluded his awareness of anyone else; then he put down the brush and faced Pitt bleakly.

“Of course. What do you want to know?”

Thoughts were teeming in Pitt’s head, but looking at the clever, vulnerable face, the delicate mouth, the quicksilver dreamer’s eyes, he abandoned them as clumsy, even brutal. What was there left to say?

“I am sure you must realize that Lord Ashworth was murdered,” he began tentatively.

“I suppose so,” William agreed with obvious reluctance. “I have tried to think of a way in which it could conceivably be an accident. I failed.”

“You did not consider suicide?” Pitt said curiously, remembering Eustace’s determined attempts.

“George wouldn’t kill himself.” William turned away and looked at the canvas on his easel. “He wasn’t that kind of man... .” His voice trailed off, and his face looked even thinner, pinched with a sorrow that seemed to run right through him.

It was precisely what Pitt knew to be true. There was infinitely less hypocrisy, less self-regard in William than in his father. Pitt found himself liking him.

“Yes, that is what I thought,” he agreed.

For a moment William was silent, then recognition lit his face.

“Of course—I forgot. You’re Emily’s brother-in-law, aren’t you?” he said, so quietly his words were almost lost. “I’m sorry. It’s all very ...” He searched for an expression of what he felt, but it eluded him. “Very hard.”

“I am afraid it won’t get better,” Pitt said honestly.”I’m forced to believe someone in this house killed him.”

“I suppose so. But I can’t tell you who—or why.” William picked up his brush again and began to work, touching a muted raw sienna into the shadows of a tree.

But Pitt was not ready to be dismissed. “What do you know of Mr. Radley?”

“Very little. Father wants to marry him to Tassie because he thinks Jack’s family might get him a peerage. We have a lot of money, you know—from trade. Father wants to become respectable.”

“Indeed.” Pitt was startled by his frankness. There was no attempt to protect his father’s weakness, no family defense. “And might they?”

“I should think so. Tassie’s a good catch. Jack’s not likely to do better—aristocratic heiresses can afford a tide, and the Americans won’t settle for anything less. Or to be accurate, their mothers won’t.” He went on working in the shadows, looking at the Vandyck brown, discounting it, and squeezing out burnt umber.

“What about Emily?” Pitt asked. “Doesn’t she have more money than Miss March?”

William’s hand stopped in midair. “Yes, she will have, now that George is dead.” He winced as he said it. “But Jack has too much experience of women, if even half his reputation is deserved, to believe from a couple of evenings’ flirtation that Emily would consider marrying him—especially with George behaving like such a fool. Emily was only retaliating. You may not be aware of it, Mr. Pitt, but in Society married women have little else to do but gossip, dress up in the latest fashions, and flirt with other men. It is their only source of entertainment. Not even an idiot takes it seriously. My wife is very beautiful, and has flirted as long as I have known her.”

Pitt stared at him but could see no additional pain, no new anger or awareness of fear as he said it. “I see.”

“No, you don’t,” William said dryly. “I don’t suppose you’ve ever been bored in your life.”

“No,” Pitt admitted. There had never been time; poverty and ambition do not allow it.

“You are fortunate—at least, in that respect.”

Pitt looked at the canvas again. “Neither have you,” he said with conviction.

For the first time William smiled, a sudden flash; then it was gone again as quickly, replaced by the knowledge of tragedy.

“Thank you, Mr. March.” Pitt stepped back. “I shan’t disturb you any longer, for the moment.”

William did not reply. He was working again.

Downstairs, Stripe was also finding things difficult; he was not any more welcome in the servants’ hall than Pitt had been in the withdrawing room. The cook looked at him with acute disfavor. It was the hour after luncheon, when she should have been able to take a little time off before beginning to think of dinner, and she wished to sit with her feet up and gossip with the housekeeper and the visiting lady’s maids. There was always scandal to exchange, and today especially she was overburdened with the need to express her emotions. She was a large, capable woman with pride in her job, but spending all day on her feet was more than anyone should be asked to bear.

“Hurts me veins something terrible!” she confided to the housekeeper, a rotund woman of her own age. “Wouldn’t tell them flipperty parlormaids that, though! Gets above themselves far too easily as it is. Not the discipline there was in
my
young days. I know how a house ought to be run.”

“Everything’s going downhill,” the housekeeper agreed. “And now we’ve got the police in the ’ouse. I ask you, whatever next?”

“Notice, that’s what.” The cook shook her head. “’Alf the girls givin’ notice, you mark my words, Mrs. Tobias.”

“You’re right, Mrs. Mardle, you’re right and no mistake,” the housekeeper agreed sagely.

They were in the housekeeper’s sitting room. Stripe was still in the servants’ hall, where they ate and had such companionship as their duties allowed time for. He was uncomfortable, because it was a world he was unused to and he was an intruder. It was immaculately clean; the floor was scrubbed by the thirteen-year-old scullery maid every morning before six
A.M.
The dressers and cupboards were massed with china, any one service worth a year of his wages. There were jars of pickles and preserves, bins of flour, sugar, oatmeal and other dry stores, and in the scullery he could see piles of vegetables. There was a vast black-leaded cooking range with its bank of ovens, and beside it scuttles of coke and coal. Of course, the boiling coppers, sinks, washboards, and mangles would all be in the laundry room, and the airing racks drawn up to the ceiling by pulleys, full of clean linen.

Now, in this warm, delicious-smelling kitchen, he was standing in the middle of the floor with an array of maids and footmen in front of him; all stiffly to attention, immaculate, men in livery, girls in black stuff dresses and crisp, snowdrift caps and aprons, the parlormaids’ trimmed with lace many middle-class ladies would have been glad to own. Stripe thought by far the handsomest of them was the lady’s maid of the household, Lettie Taylor, but she seemed to regard him with even more disdain than the others. The visiting ladies had naturally brought their own staff, and they were also present, except Digby, Lady Cumming-Gould’s maid. She had been elected to remain with the new widow, perhaps because she was the oldest, and considered the most sensible.

Somewhat uncomfortable under their hostile gaze, Stripe licked his pencil, asked the questions he was obliged to, and noted down their answers in his book. It all told him nothing except that the trays were set the night before and left in the upstairs pantry, where the kettles were brought and the tea made freshly—or in Lord Ashworth’s case, the coffee—each morning. On this particular occasion there had been an unusual turmoil and the pantry had been filled with steam, and apparently unattended, for some minutes. Anyone could, at least in theory, have slipped in and poisoned the coffee.