A Death in the Pavilion (4 page)

I turned the handle of my door and lent gently on the door at the same time to help prevent the hinges from groaning. But like everything in this house the hinges were well-looked-after and well-oiled. The door gave easily. A cold gust of air blew out my candle flame. Richenda crept to my side and held her candle aloft.

Stairs.

Chapter Six
The Creature in the Attic

With her usual flair Richenda moved her candle into exactly the place where I had held mine aloft and it too guttered and went out. Richenda uttered a small squeak which would have been much louder if I hadn’t stuck my hand over her mouth. I reckoned a companion got to take far more liberties than a maid, especially when we were outside the bedroom door of a potential wife-murderer.

Richenda’s pale blue eyes widened and rolled and for one dreadful moment I thought she was going to faint. I feared considerable injury if she landed on me. But I did the lady an injustice. She pulled my hand none too gently away from her face, scowled ferociously, and whispered, ‘What do we do now?’

Neither of us having interest in tobacco, we did not carry any means of making fire on our persons. ‘Do you want to go back?’ I asked. Richenda shook her head. ‘The moon’s bright tonight.’

‘That won’t help us in an attic,’ I answered.

‘In this one it will,’ said Richenda deepening her voice, presumably in an effort to sound ominous, ‘there are windows. I checked from the outside. If you walk over in the woods on the left just before the tree-line you can see up far enough to see them.’

‘That’s odd,’ I said.

Richenda nodded.

‘Is there any reason we’re doing this in the middle of the night?’ I asked. ‘We could wait until Muller goes back to town and his mother is having her afternoon nap.’

‘I didn’t think you would be chicken,’ said Richenda.

I sighed. ‘You have to admit I am awfully good at coming across the unpleasant and unexpected,’ I said. ‘I’m sure daylight would make it easier.’

‘Personally, if Muller has shut his mad wife up in the attic, I’d rather discover her when she was asleep,’ said Richenda.

I agreed she had a point. Cautiously I mounted the first stair. Of course, it creaked. Wait until Richenda stands on you, I thought down at it, you’ll positively groan. I moved on quickly, not convinced the treads would take the weight of both of us at once. The staircase was no darker than the rest of the house and my eyes were beginning to adjust when we were plunged into pitch-darkness.

‘I closed the door,’ hissed Richenda in my ear. ‘We don’t want anyone following us up.’

‘I can’t see a thing,’ I protested.

‘Oh, let me,’ said Richenda.

There followed some complicated tussling as we manoeuvred for position. If Richenda wanted to go first I had no objection. I had begun to get a very bad feeling about this plan. We squeezed past each other in the dark. Richenda, though large, proved to be squishy without her numerous usual strappings. I got a bit breathless at one point and seriously considered it might be better to pitch down the stairs than to have my lungs flattened out against the wall, but the moment passed and she was ahead of me.

‘Right,’ breathed Richenda, and she gave a little snort not unreminiscent of a horse anticipating a good gallop. ‘We’re off!’

As if to prove her superior fearlessness and excellent night vision she set off at a fast pace. I lagged cautiously behind her. Now we had tested the width of the passageway against our frames I wanted warning if I needed to press myself against the wall as she tumbled past.

In my defence I will say that Richenda had considerably more padding than my bonier self and was less likely to come to serious injury. Besides, now I was in the rear I found myself unreasonably peeved. Usually when I made night-time discoveries I was in the lead. Mentally I scolded myself for being prideful, but as a servant one has very few distinguishing characteristics. I rather liked being the brave and bold one. Obviously not too bold. I am a vicar’s daughter after all. My internal musings were cut short by Richenda sneezing. If you have ever heard a horse sneeze you know the sound. While not overly loud it is pronounced and liable to be moist. I hung back.

The air tasted dry and stale in my mouth. Dust tickled my nose. Reason asserted itself. No one came up here. Even a mad wife would need to be fed over a period of three years. I opened my mouth to share this insight with Richenda, but I was cut off by a loud thump. Sense fled. My heart beat frantically, but I pressed my lips tight so no sound could escape.

A most unladylike exclamation came from above. ‘There’s a hatch,’ said Richenda. ‘I just found it with my head.’

‘Is it bolted?’ I asked.

‘Wait a mo,’ said Richenda. ‘I’m feeling around the edges. Hmm. There it is.’

I heard a rusty bolt being pulled back and then came a bang that must surely wake anyone below as Richenda threw open the hatch. ‘Quick!’ she cried and scrambled up. ‘Before anyone comes.’ I had a sudden mental image of us both standing over the closed hatch, candlesticks aloft to preserve our virtue. Giggles bubbled inside me.

With the hatch open the darkness thinned. It thickened momentarily as Richenda’s posterior filled the hatchway and then lightened. I hurried up after her. Richenda shut the hatch after me. ‘So we have warning if anyone comes,’ she said. I set down my useless candlestick.

Moonlight flooded the attic casting a landscape of shapes and shadows around us. I looked out one of the big round windows. The ground below lay wide and silver in the moonlight. Grass. Not even prickly bushes. Not an escape exit then; unless I pushed Richenda first and landed on her.

I heard Richenda behind me moving across the room, muttering to herself. I turned and tried to make sense of the shapes around us. She really did have much better night-sight than me. The attic was huge. We seemed to be at the end of this wing, and, I realised with a shudder, directly above Muller’s bedroom. Three round windows allowed the moonlight to flood in from the end wall, but the attic stretched on and on. It appeared to contain the whole of this wing without division. Or so I suspected. Bright though the moonlight was, it could not penetrate the most remote corners. Across the floor were not simply boxes, but I could make out the outline of a desk and some bookcases against the walls. It looked as if the attic was indeed intended for habitation. I feared the worst.

‘Richenda,’ I hissed at her disappeared shadow. ‘Come back. Someone’s up here.’

Nothing.

‘Richenda!’

I placed my hand against the wall and began to inch along, skirting the objects I could see. Nevertheless my feet frequently came into contact with hard immovable objects. When they did, I put my hands on them and edged my way round. It would be all too easy to lose my balance. To my surprise most of the things I touched felt soft. Dust, I thought, until I felt a prickling sensation across my hand. Spider webs. Spider webs and spiders. If I never saw another attic again it would be fine by me.

Richenda still continued on, despite my hissed implorings for her to stop. Twice I edged my way around a chimney. At least there were no open fireplaces. I moved as quietly as I could and strained my ears for any sound. I particularly listened for the creaking of the hatch, but Richenda’s footfalls echoed loudly in the darkness. If there was anyone or anything here it must surely have heard us. I begun to feel about me for a weapon. Then I heard it. The sound of a falling body.

‘Ooofff!’ said Richenda. ‘I think I’ve found a fireplace.’

I made my way across as quickly as I could. Richenda lay in a pool of darkness, a combination of soot and shadow. The fireplace was modest, but I didn’t miss that a poker set stood to one side. ‘Are you hurt?’ I asked.

‘No. This was a ridiculous idea, wasn’t it?’

‘Um – yes.’

‘Then why in the world did you let me go ahead?’

I said nothing, but helped pick some of the larger pieces of soot out of her hair. I was about to suggest we took advantage of our luck so far and made our escape, when the rumbling sound we had heard in Richenda’s room filled the attic. In the stillness of the night it sounded loud as thunder.

‘What the hell!’ said Richenda.

‘The chimney. It’s coming from the chimney.’

‘It can’t be,’ said Richenda and, before I could stop her, she grabbed the poker and stuck it and her head up the chimney. ‘Hi you!’ she cried. ‘Come down here this instant!’

There was a rumbling, a clattering and the rushing sound of falling soot. Richenda staggered out and backwards as a creature burst out from the chimney. It squawked and shot across the room in a cloud of soot and feathers.

‘Pigeon,’ said Richenda, sitting down in a barely controlled fall.

The bird, completely panicked, flapped and swooped and dived around us. I hauled Richenda to her feet (no mean feat) and pulled her back with me to the end of the attic where we had begun our adventure. I felt her shaking. ‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘It can’t harm us.’

‘Pigeon,’ said Richenda again and I realised she was shaking with laughter. I opened one of the round windows and the pigeon left the building. We both sat down and gave way to mirth.

We were laughing so loudly we didn’t hear anyone approaching until the hatch was thrown back. Muller appeared, a broken gun on one arm and a lantern in his other hand. He set the lantern down and snapped the gun shut. The look on his face was dark and thunderous.

He pointed the gun straight at Richenda and me.

Chapter Seven
Revelations

‘H-h-Hans?’ stuttered Richenda.

Muller broke the gun at once and set it down. Now I was no longer mesmerised by the weapon I was sure a moment ago was about to send me to my doom, I took in Muller’s full and rather glorious appearance. He wore a green garment, something between a smoking jacket and a dressing gown. Embroidered golden dragons swooped and dived across it. It shimmered by the light of his lantern. On this feet were matching slippers and his legs were clad in green pyjamas of a similar hue. His short brown hair, greying at the sides, without its usual hair oil, curled around his face. In this dishevelled state he looked quite the best I had ever seen him. It occurred to me that in everyday life he did his best to appear as normal and as nondescript as possible. This immediately made me thing of Fitzroy and spies. (Fitzroy had also once levelled a shotgun in my direction, but in fairness this had been to kill someone behind me. Though I had not known that at the time. See my journal
A Death in the Highlands
for the full story.)

‘Richenda,’ he said in astonished accents. ‘Euphemia too? What in God’s name are you doing up here?’

‘We heard an intruder,’ said Richenda in a throbbing accent.

‘It was a pigeon,’ I explained. Richenda shot me a deathly look for ruining the mood.

‘Why the devil didn’t you wake me?’ demanded Muller.

‘I didn’t feel it would be appropriate for me to come to your room,’ said Richenda in a strangely breathy voice. I assumed she was trying to sound alluring, but honestly it sounded more like she had a bad chest cold. ‘Besides, Euphemia has much experience of going about in the dark.’

Muller raised an eyebrow at me and I had to suppress a chuckle. ‘You could have summoned a servant to fetch me,’ he said not unreasonably.

‘I didn’t want to disturb you,’ said Richenda, still trying to be weak and feminine. As this was rather like a shire horse trying to skip like a lamb she wasn’t awfully successful. But it was a better response than admitting we were checking to see if he had locked his last wife up in the attic.

‘Could we possibly continue this discussion downstairs?’ I asked.

‘Of course,’ said Muller at once. ‘I don’t know what I was thinking. Please, ladies, descend.’ And he gestured to the stairs.

Once we were all back on the landing, Muller turned on the gas light. ‘It is not my usual practice to chat to ladies in the middle of the night, but I think we should take a cup of tea together in the morning room. Please meet me there. I need to lock away the gun.’

Richenda and I exchanged looks. Then Richenda nodded. We both smelled a mystery. Muller waited until we left then we heard him open his door. ‘Am I sooty?’ hissed Richenda.

‘No, not really. Am I?’

‘Why would that matter?’ said Richenda rudely.

‘So you are eager to win his affections,’ I said.

Richenda bit her lip. ‘If we can rule out the wife-murderer thing.’

I nodded, unaccountable mirth bubbling inside me. ‘That does seem sensible.’

We had reached the ground floor by now. Both of us too caught up in our discussion to be even remotely disturbed by shadows.

‘Oh damn it, Euphemia,’ said Richenda, ‘I’m not getting any younger. My brother is – well whatever he is, he is not a saint.’

‘No,’ I agreed wholeheartedly. ‘I …’

‘Listen. I’m not like you. I come from a different class. Women my age need to be established. I’ve only a couple more years and people will be talking about me as a confirmed spinster. I want a family, dammit. I want a place in society. I cared for Tippy, but he’s gone and there’s nothing I can do about that. Muller’s alive and he’s clearly looking for a wife.’

‘Have you fallen in love with him?’ I asked quietly as I opened the door to the morning room. I turned on the gas lamps.

Richenda snorted. ‘No, I have not. I barely know the man. I do find him charming,’ she admitted.

‘Everyone does,’ I said.

Richenda brushed my comment away like I was a fly. ‘He behaves like a gentleman and I have no doubt he would treat his wife with consideration and the proper respect. But his mother, even when she isn’t pretending to have that dreadful accent …’

‘Why does she do that?’ I interrupted.

‘No idea. Batty as a fruitcake if you ask me. But the point is, I can make Muller richer. I can offer him the shares in the bank. I can give him children. And I know how to behave.’

I looked at her blankly.

‘Do I need to spell it out? If he marries me I know how to look the other way should he ever require extra – er – activities.’

It took me a moment to catch on. ‘Mistresses, you mean?’ I gasped.

‘I’m not a beauty,’ said Richenda staunchly, ‘but I could make him a good wife and I think we would make good companions. With all the chaos that has happened to my family and been caused by my family I think he’s my last shot.’

She lifted her chin in defiance, but I thought I saw she was blinking back tears. I looked away. ‘Where is that maid with the tea?’ I said.

Richenda blinked hard. ‘Indeed.’

‘Richenda, would you object if I repinned some of your hair? It has come down a little. A lady should always look her best.’

‘Thank you, Euphemia.’ It was the first time I felt Richenda was being sincere. Who would have thought that an incident with a pigeon in an attic could lead to me feeling sorry for a woman I had, if not hated, largely despised.

I had just finished redoing her hair and discreetly wiping away a smut or two when the door opened again to reveal the extraordinary sight of Muller carrying a tea tray. I hurried to take it from him. I have no very great opinion of gentlemen carrying china. By and large they are far too clumsy, not being trained, because of their station, to do the simple things in life. Their hands also tend to be overly large for delicate work.

‘Thank you, Euphemia,’ said Muller. ‘Would you mind pouring for us? I know enough of your history to believe, of the two of you, that you are the least disturbed by this incident.’

I smiled. ‘Shall I take that as compliment?’

Muller had the sense not to answer, but only smile. I could feel Richenda beginning to bristle at my side. I poured tea for us all and added milk and sugar as necessary. I noted that Muller didn’t know Richenda that well as he had not thought to bring cake or biscuits. Richenda always improves with cake. I was taking my first cup of tea when Muller said, ‘I must confess when I realised it was you two ladies in the attic my first thought was that you were looking for my first wife.’

Richenda snorted tea down her nose. Muller pretended not to notice. ‘I thought it likely that, in an attempt to get you to return to Stapleford Hall, Barker would spread malicious gossip about me.’

I felt myself blushing.

‘I also thought that as Euphemia is very loyal to you, despite what she may personally think she would feel duty bound to pass on your brother’s message.’

You see, he really was a charming man. He had skilfully exonerated me from being a gossip.

‘Why would we think your wife was in the attic?’ asked Richenda, who was far less capable of playing the diplomat.

Muller sat back in his seat. He looked into the empty fireplace for a moment before refocusing on us. ‘There were many rumours around the time of my wife’s death. The fact that my father was German and that there is growing ill-will between our two countries has not helped.’

‘There is?’ asked Richenda. I said nothing. Fitzroy had told me a number of disturbing rumours in order to enforce my complicity in his schemes. I was only surprised that Muller was so aware. As far as I knew he spent all his time in England.

‘I am also new money,’ said Muller. ‘I am a bank director rather than an owner of a bank and while I have invested wisely I am not one of the old school.’

‘But you went to the same school as my brother,’ said Richenda.

‘He means he is not descended from one of the known English families,’ I explained.

‘Neither am I,’ said Richenda. ‘Well, Mama was a Lady, but her links are mainly with France.’

Muller nodded. ‘Socially you are far above me, Richenda.’

‘I daresay my brother will continue in his ways and bring our family name down,’ said Richenda bitterly.

Muller was silent.

‘What were these rumours?’ I asked.

‘Everything from my poisoning my wife to locking her in the attic and faking her funeral.’

‘But to what end?’ I asked.

‘I have no idea what is in the heads of my detractors,’ said Muller flatly. ‘I loved my wife very much. It was not in my mother’s eyes a great match as she came from a respectable, but middle-class, family, and Mother had high hopes for me to do better. But truthfully I always felt it was not a good match for my wife as, for all my upbringing, I am accounted a foreigner. We met when I was building the estate and I had never seen a more pretty and fragile creature. I was some years her senior, but for no obvious reason she fell in love with me and I asked her to marry me. For the few years we were together we were, I believe, both very happy. The only sadness was that we had no children. My wife was pregnant several times …’ he swallowed hard, ‘but God granted us no live children.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

‘I fear she was too frail. That those failed pregnancies took too great a toll. I have often felt as if I did indeed murder her. I should have … but she, too, so wanted children.’

‘I thought it was a heart attack that took her from you,’ I asked as gently as I could.

‘That is what our family doctor put on her death certificate, but I have blamed myself these three years for her death.’

Richenda reached awkwardly across the table and touched Muller lightly on the hand. ‘For the little it is worth I think you have nothing to reproach yourself for. I think that your wife was lucky you loved her so much. Few women have the luxury of such a marriage as you describe.’

Muller looked up and into her eyes. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘You are very kind.’

‘And my brother is a pig,’ said Richenda totally breaking the tragic-romantic mood with hard reality. ‘I knew he was a rotter in the nursery, but being twins we always supported each other. But no more. I am only sorry he has been the cause of this distress. I quite understand if you would like us to leave. Euphemia and I.’

‘No,’ said Muller, shaking his head. ‘I won’t hear of it. I will not be the one responsible for sending you back to that man. I know it would be difficult for you to stay here indefinitely …’

‘You mean people will begin to talk,’ said Richenda blushing a fiery red. Fortunately the gas light toned the awfulness of her blush down. Red hair and red skin is not a good look.

‘But until you have some plan for your future I offer whatever protection you require.’

‘Thank you,’ said Richenda.

Goodness. That was the second time she had been sincere in the same evening. Could it be that Richenda was genuinely beginning to break away from her brother’s influence?