A scandalous death, p.11
A SCANDALOUS DEATH, page 11
She pulled it harder, and then, with the same click and shift, the clasp loosened, and the panel opened obediently, just as if it had last been used yesterday.
Beyond was a faint blob of light. It came from a keyhole.
She was in another wardrobe. And now, she had to get out – and safely through whoever’s bedroom this was.
It belonged to a man, that was clear. There were no lacy, satiny garments here. As she climbed through the gap, she kicked over a pair of long leather riding boots. They tumbled onto their side with a clatter, causing Mary to freeze. Would anyone hear that?
Nobody flung open the wardrobe door, so after a short but heart-pounding pause, she continued climbing through.
A riding jacket, a few pairs of breeches, a few dinner jackets, and some starched shirts. She could see the array of clothing dimly through the light the keyhole provided.
Now, she was the whole way through. Could she close this gap again?
She pushed at the wooden panel, and after some wiggling, her efforts were rewarded, and it slid jerkily into place again.
Where was she? And would she be able to get out of the bedroom unseen?
She pushed open the wardrobe door. Now she knew where she was!
This was the grumpy Colin’s room – the oldest brother’s quarters, and not one of the bedrooms that she’d been allocated so far. He and his wife – well, in theory at least – shared this room. When they weren’t cavorting with other people in the billiards room or the hay loft.
Thankfully, the room was empty.
The housemaids hadn’t yet gotten here to clean, and it was a mess. The bed was tangled, a hip flask lay on the floor, a sherry glass was on the side table. Colin’s wife Janet had also been busy in the dressing room – trying on different blouses, it seemed, from the eight or so that were scattered around.
An empty plate with a smear of sauce rested on the Persian carpet by the fireplace. Next to it, Mary saw in surprise, one of the hounds was snoozing. When it saw her emerge from the wardrobe, it lifted its head and thumped its tail briefly, clearly untroubled by this surprising apparition.
She didn't waste any more time – and now was not the moment to search for any secrets. She was already going to be unforgivably late for her tutoring appointment. Having been early, she hadn't thought she'd get stuck in a wardrobe and then have to extricate herself via a secret passage.
She hurried along the corridor, noticing that something gray and filigree was dangling in front of her. Plucking at it as she rushed around the corner, she saw a spider web was stuck to her cap.
Shuddering as she removed it, Mary hoped that the spider had remained behind and wasn’t perched on the back of her head.
She didn’t have time to check. It was already five past eleven, according to the grandfather clock.
This was the corridor where Master Ferdinand had his study room. His bedroom was the second-last door on the left, and the study room was all the way at the end. Preparing an apology for her tardiness, she hurried up to the door, which was slightly ajar, and pushed it open, readying herself for a hasty entrance.
She felt something move and shift at the top of the door.
And then, a soft parcel landed on her head, and the world exploded in a white, blinding cloud.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
It was flour! What felt like a ton of flour had just fallen on Mary’s head, and now she was covered in it! Flour was everywhere. On her cap, on her shoulders, all over her white apron and navy blue uniform, on her shoes. It was in the air and in her eyes, and she sneezed. This caused a large wad of flour to fall off the top of her head and onto the floor, along with a large, irritated-looking spider that scuttled off toward the window, leaving a trail of flour behind him as he went.
As the flour dust cleared from the air, Mary became aware of hysterical laughter, emanating from the young, long legged man who was sitting at the desk with his feet up on it.
“Oh, that was the funniest thing I ever saw! You walked right into that, didn’t you? You look like a ghost! Help, my study is haunted!” He could barely get out the words, he was spluttering so much with laughter. “The way you sneezed! Oh, that was simply classic!”
“Master Ferdinand! You – you set that trap for me?” she asked him incredulously.
They hadn’t even been introduced! She’d planned to do that as soon as she walked in, but the flour bomb had derailed her plans. Now he was laughing so much he was almost falling off his chair.
The chair was an antique one, set at a desk with ornate, carved legs on the far side of the room. The flour hadn't reached here. The rug was clean and the floor was shiny and his books, some on the desk and some on the floor, looked untouched by the destruction.
“Well, I set it for whoever walked in. I knew it would be some hapless maid!”
The scorn in his voice surprised her. This young man did not have respect for anyone he considered an inferior. His tone made that abundantly clear.
And it was filling her with suspicion.
Mary had assumed him to be innocent, a sweet teenaged boy with nothing more to worry about than his studies. But here he was, pranking her in a thoroughly mean way and laughing about it to her face. One thing was obvious: he wasn’t in any fear of punishment. He’d obviously decided he could do what he liked to the staff without consequences.
Now, that raised some very serious questions in her mind.
What had he done to Sarah-Jane after she'd supervised his lessons yesterday? Had they argued? Was the murder his form of retribution because she'd said she'd report his atrocious behavior? Or had his evil pranking escalated, and he’d killed her just because he could?
Maybe Ferdinand saw something in Mary’s eyes, because his laughter stopped abruptly.
“Look, it was just a joke,” he said. “I’ll get back to my books now.”
Retribution or not, Mary decided that part of studying was to learn about the consequences your actions had. Even if he’d murdered Sarah-Jane because she’d been mad at him – well, Mary wasn’t going to shy away from doing what needed to be done.
“You won’t get back to your books,” she said.
“But I need to study!” His voice was defensive.
“That was before you caused rather an unfortunate mess in this room,” Mary said firmly.
“You caused it!”
“There’s flour all over the study floor. And that flour needs to be cleaned up. So we have a choice.” Folding her arms, she tried to assume the selfsame tone that she remembered her mother using, on the odd occasions when she’d been mad at Mary. Her mother had managed to get a very threatening edge into her voice that had made Mary backtrack, and do what she was told, without any further resistance.
She hoped that she was channeling her mum now as she spoke. At any rate, Ferdinand was looking nervous. He took his feet off the desk and placed them on the floor.
“What choice?” he asked.
“Either we clean up the flour now, or else, we go straight to Lady Middlefield and we explain the situation to her together,” Mary said, sweetly. She had a feeling that escalating the situation straight to the grand dame herself might produce the desired response.
And she was right. Ferdinand paled. She guessed that he might have had a defense prepared if she’d threatened to tell his parents – but this was a step too far up the ladder.
“Not Granny!” he said, confirming her hunch.
“Yes, Granny,” she said. “We’re taking this straight to the top. I happen to know she’s still down at breakfast, and that’s just a short walk away.”
“You wouldn’t do that!” he tried.
“How do you know what I would and wouldn’t do?” Mary countered. “You don’t know me at all. I doubt you even know my name.”
There was a silence. He was fidgeting now.
“Well, what is your name?”
“My name’s Mary Adams. That’s not the only question you should have. The other question you should be asking is – where’s the broom cupboard? I’m guessing you’re not familiar with its location.”
“I don’t usually clean up after myself,” he admitted.
“That’s as important as studying,” Mary said firmly. “You go down the corridor. Turn left and then right. It’s the first door on the right. Bring back a bucket, a broom, and a dustpan. In the meantime, I’ll take the rug outside and shake it.”
There was a French door at the far end of the study, which led straight onto the gardens. She'd be able to get the rug flour-free out there and also brush the rest of the flour off her uniform.
And while she did that, she was going to think about her strategy for questioning Ferdinand.
He seemed too shocked at being told what to do by a housemaid to come up with any further argument. He walked to the door, unable to avoid stepping in the flour as he headed out. Seeing that he was leaving white footprints behind him, he started doing a frantic dance in the corridor, tapping his feet together to try to get the flour off his soles, looking so comical that now it was Mary’s turn to suppress a snort of laughter.
When he’d left, she rolled up the edges of the rug, then hefted it to the French door, and outside, lifting it up and shaking it off. The rug was heavy and difficult to handle and she couldn’t help thinking that this was not what she’d expected herself to be doing right now.
At any rate, the flour and the rug were both very dry, and luckily, so was the weather, so the flour didn’t turn into a sticky mess. After some vigorous shaking and brushing, it was as good as new, and so was Mary’s uniform.
She returned to the room to find Ferdinand already busy with the broom.
Having clearly inherited the family trait of inexpertise she’d already noticed, he was sweeping enthusiastically, but not well. Helping him as best she could, tidying up the edges of the flour spill with her dustpan and brush, the mess was soon swept up and they deposited it outside, where Mary thought it looked a little like a fresh snowfall on the green grass.
Then they both returned inside.
“Now, your studies?” she asked.
“My studies?” He looked alarmed, as if he’d expended enough effort already for the morning.
“What are you supposed to be learning this morning?” Mary decided it was now time to guide the conversation around to where she needed it to be. After all, she hadn’t thought this innocent young man could be a suspect, but he’d quickly changed her mind about that.
She needed to sneakily find out what the relationship had been between him and Sarah-Jane, and what had played out in this study.
“Tell me where you finished up yesterday,” she said. “Who was supervising you then?”
To her surprise, his face fell. “Sarah-Jane,” he told her. “And she died last night, they said there was some kind of an accident, she slipped and fell and knocked her head.”
“Is that what you heard?” Mary asked.
“Yes. And I must say, I’m rather sad about it.” Giving his books an unenthusiastic glance, he lowered himself down into the chair with a sigh.
“Don’t you think she’s ‘some hapless maid’?” Mary asked, feeding his earlier words back to him.
His fidgeting looked deeply uncomfortable now.
“Maybe I shouldn’t have said that,” he admitted. “It was – well, I guess after hearing that news, I was a bit out of sorts.”
“Do you really think some people are inferior to others because of the job they do?” she pressured him.
“My father does!” There was audible contempt in his voice now.
“Did you set out to behave the same way he does?”
“I never want to behave like him!” He stared at her angrily. “Look, this was a practical joke. Everyone knows I’m a prankster. That’s just who I am. I can’t change my behavior. And I never want to be like my father!”
It was clearly obvious that he was heading the exact same way, but since he couldn’t see it for himself, she saw no point in trying to keep telling him. But now, she wanted to know what his relationship with Sarah-Jane had been.
“You knew Sarah-Jane? Had she supervised you before?”
He nodded, swinging back in his chair, his legs crossed and his arms laced behind his head. “Yes. She was the regular stand-in for my tutor when he couldn’t get here. She’d done some student teaching in the past, she told me. Not that she talked about her past much,” he said thoughtfully.
“And what did you think of Sarah-Jane?” This was a key question, and she paid close attention to the answer.
“She was a good person. I liked her. She was fun. She laughed about things. We both laughed together. And she was like you, she had – well, a forceful personality. I kind of enjoyed that. Too many people in this place just tiptoe around me,” he said, irritably.
She had a forceful personality. That was the first person who'd ever told her such a thing. She felt very relieved she'd been able to summon up her mother’s strict demeanor at the exact moment when it was needed.
“Did you argue with her at all yesterday?”
“No, I didn’t. I did notice that she was looking a bit – well, a bit distracted. I asked her if anything was wrong, but she said no. She said she'd met someone who'd made her wonder if she should have done things differently."
“Is that so?” Mary’s curiosity was thoroughly aroused now. Yesterday, Sarah-Jane had tutored Ferdinand at exactly the same time of day, before luncheon. And by that time, something had already happened to make her thoughtful and distracted, and not like her usual sunny self?
Was this something different from the crisis she’d told Mary about?
Or had this situation escalated later in the day, and had this been the reason for her panicked buzzing to Mary, so late at night?
How she wished she knew more. But Ferdinand clearly didn’t have any more information, and she’d been very lucky to get what she had.
“So, what lesson are you busy with?” she asked.
“English and mathematics,” he replied. “I hate them both, but we did mathematics yesterday and I think I hate it more.”
“Let’s focus on English today, then,” she said, relieved that this was probably more within her area of expertise than mathematics was.
But, as she took the study book and turned to the questions page, ready to test him on his knowledge, a troubling thought occurred to her.
There was somebody who knew about Sarah-Jane's past. Someone who was staying at Middlefield Manor and who had been in the manor at the time of the murder.
Gilbert might know more about this – a lot more. But how could she question him about Sarah-Jane? She had the feeling that if she did, it would ruin the friendship - or whatever it was turning into – between them.
With a sinking of her heart, as she listened to Ferdinand’s rather clumsy analysis of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Mary knew that there was no choice. Like it or not, Gilbert MacLeod was a suspect, and she’d need to treat him that way.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The luncheon gong had sounded long before Mary allowed Ferdinand to leave his study. If he was going to delay things by setting flour traps, she reasoned, then she was going to make up the time at the end of the session, even if it cut into lunch. That was the price you paid for pranking people.
Thanking her – which she was surprised about – Ferdinand rushed off to lunch, and Mary headed down to the staff pantry for her break. She needed to bounce some ideas off Hannah.
The staff pantry was a hive of activity. Servants, all hungry after a long morning’s work, were thronging into the small, cramped space and squashing up along the benches once they’d loaded their plates with food.
There was Hannah, to her relief. And even better, there was just enough space at the end of the bench for her to squeeze in.
Conversation was still muted, but as she quickly filled her plate, Mary could hear that it was no longer focused on the murder. People were talking about other things. The possibility of an upcoming warm spell that had been announced on the BBC radio station earlier in the morning. The likelihood of the local spring fair being held in their village this year instead of the village over the hill, the possibility that a few single young horse grooms would be joining the staff if the family expanded their stables.
She listened to the conversation with one ear while piling her plate with breakfast leftovers. That was what the servants got for lunch. It made sense, in a non wasteful way, and she personally loved breakfast for lunch. At least she’d get the chance to taste one of those fishcakes. Even though, after what had happened this morning, she couldn’t bring herself to eat any of the beans.
With two sausages, a fishcake, and a big cheese scone on her plate, she squashed in next to Hannah.
First things first. She cut a big slice of the fishcake and devoured it. After all, as her mum had always used to say, nobody could think their best on an empty stomach.
Hannah was piling beans on top of a piece of ham, so when they’d both finished their mouthfuls, Mary decided it was time for the important conversation to start.
“Any more gossip?” she whispered.
“Yes. There is actually something,” Hannah whispered back.
“What is it?” Anything would be good now. Anything other than confronting Gilbert.
“When I was talking to Dickens earlier, there was something that I forgot to mention to you,” she said.
“And what’s that?”
“Dickens said he wasn’t sure how the family had been able to afford a whole extra barn of horses, including one of the champion hunters in the county. He said that until a few years ago, the estate was struggling.”
“And then? What happened?”
"He doesn't know. He guesses that maybe somebody died and left them some money. Or, at any rate, something happened."
“That sounds – well, interesting,” Mary said.
“Dickens said that Colin was spending a lot of time in the old store room down the hill, during the later part of the war. But he doesn’t know why.”
