A Fatal Winter (16 page)

Doris said, “What was odd was this: People thought Lord Footrustle, the ‘sickly’ one, always worried about his health, would go before Leticia—if they thought about it at all, of course. Men do tend to go first. And he’d had a couple of little scares. But that’s why he was so particular about his health, all them potions he had.”

Her hand had begun to shake again and she set down her cup with a clatter. Her cheeks flooded with color. It was like watching a video of a sunrise play out in fast-forward motion.

“It’s been that big a shock! In all my days I never thought to see the like,” she said.

Max reached over to mop at her saucer where the coffee had breached the lip of the cup, then sat back in the creaking rush-seat chair to listen. He was quite certain she wasn’t done yet—might never be done. She might compulsively talk of the goings-on at Chedrow Castle for the rest of her days.

“How kind you are,” she said, lifting the cup with a somewhat steadier hand.

Max looked about and noticed a display of house bells ranged across one wall. Each would ring with a different pitch so the staff would know who was in what room wanting something. As Doris had said, it was all frightfully
Downton Abbey.

Doris turned to follow his gaze.

“They’re not much used except the ones connected to Lord Footrustle’s room and Lady Baynard’s. We’ve only got two hands apiece, Milo and me. Even they recognized the fact.”

“Did his bell ring on the morning that he died?”

“No.”

Max didn’t suppose it had. Cotton had told him the old gentleman had been surprised in his sleep, in all likelihood had never awoken from sleep. A sneaky crime, the calling card left by a coward.

“But I’m not always here in the kitchen, you know,” she continued.

“Ah. You have rooms elsewhere in the castle?”

“That we do. In what we call the West Wing.”

Milo said, “I did not discover body until later in morning because he sleeps in late—he
slept
in late—and I had been instructed not to wake him until ten. He was a night owl who stayed up late but also woke up late, unlike most gentlemen his age,” said Milo.

“He was like a vampire, actually,” said Doris.

“Really, Doris,” said her husband.

“Lord Footrustle never came down early,” Doris said.

“He liked to stay in bed and read, and take his time getting dressed,” confirmed her husband.

“You have outside help?” Max asked them. “Well, you must. The place is enormous.”

Doris said, “We have a girl from the village to help with the prep for dinner, and two more to act as daily help. ‘Act’ being the operative word most days. Those two go home well before the sun sets, no doubt worn out from their efforts, which seem to consist of sipping tea in between jabbing feather dusters at the tops of the picture frames.”

“The police will have to interview them, of course,” said Max.

“They’ll have their work cut out for them to try and get some sense out of Lotty. Dotty Lotty we call her. Interviewing the other two will be like talking to a bowl of goldfish. Good luck to that Inspector Cotton. He’s rather a nervy fellow, isn’t he?”

Max smiled. Cotton was a perpetual motion machine. If they could harness that energy nations could put an end to wars over oil.

Milo added, in the interest of thoroughness, apparently, “Iris sometimes also comes in with her mother to do for the castle. Doris can’t manage it all, of course, and neither can I, although I turn my hand to whatever is needed, including some of the gardening.”

“You act as a chauffeur sometimes, I would imagine?”

“Not very often. There simply is not time, even in off-season.”

“How did Lady Baynard get around? Did she drive?”

Milo seemed to find this a ludicrous suggestion. People like Lady B did not drive themselves anywhere.

“I put her into taxi that came to take her to station. This was December thirteenth. The family have car but they let the chauffeur go long ago as full-time persons were not needed. I fill in as chauffeur on the special occasion but it is not practical for me to drive car and keep in good repair along with everything else I do.”

It was the first hint Max had heard of complaint, and it may not even have been that. He noticed the trellis of permanent worry lines that crisscrossed the man’s forehead.

“How did she seem that morning?” Max asked him.

“The same person she always was. Grumpy. Maybe little worse because she had cold.”

Doris stood to attend to a dish simmering on the stove. From there she stomped her sure-footed way around the kitchen from pot to plate and back again, not a motion wasted. At one point she balanced several plates on one arm, as easily as if they’d been glued on.

Max turned to Milo and asked him how he came to be here.

“I met Doris and we married,” he said simply, adding, “I wanted to live in the outer skirts of the city.”

“You have been happy here?” Max asked. “I gather from what your wife has said Lord Footrustle and Lady Baynard were not always easy employers.”

“Too right!” Doris exclaimed, in the midst of one of her room crossings.

Milo visibly expanded at being the center of attention—the repository of insider knowledge regarding the doings of what he thought of as the Upper Crusts. What didn’t he know about what these nobs got up to? His career working on a cruise line had removed any trace of innocence he may have had on that score. The problem was
how
he came by that knowledge, which was a matter of, well, not spying exactly. One could say, of simply being in the right place with ears unstoppered.

“Their cheques always cleared the bank,” he said now. “It is all one can ask of an employer in these economic times. I have no complaints.”

“Huh!” This from Doris. A glance from her husband silenced her.

“I do not think retirement suited Lord Footrustle. He was dynamic person always. I think he grew—how you say?—downtrodden in retirement.”

“Depressed,” corrected Max automatically. “Or despondent.”

Max was a bit skeptical about anything the butler might tell him. He had the sense the man knew things—what was the saying? No man is a hero to his valet?—but how accurate would be his interpretation of what he saw and “knew”? The trouble with eyewitnesses generally was a tendency to embellish. He thought the butler might have that tendency in spades, but the embellishment would be so subtly done it would be hard to see the truth behind it.

“As for Lady B, she was, as I tell you, the same as always. But I think she worried that new arrivals might upset pushcart.”

“Apple cart,” said Max and Doris simultaneously.

“You are talking of Lord Footrustle’s estate?”

“Yes,” said Milo. He seemed happily willing to offer what information he had to buy a few more minutes in the public eye, as it were. Perhaps life with Doris was like that. “He had changed his will not a year before. But who knows if that change was to Lady Baynard’s benefit—or to the benefit of any or all of them?”

“I suppose we’ll soon know,” said Max.

Doris had stopped dead in her tracks and stood worrying the tea towel. Lowering her voice, she said, “I’ve had a bad feeling since they all came here.”

The phrase “déjà vu all over again” flashed through Max’s mind. Leticia—Lady Baynard—on the train, and now this.

“A
feel
ing,” she went on. “O’ course, an old place like this is full of atmospherics. Old murders and betrayals unavenged, and such.”

“And such. Quite,” said Max, smiling, hoping this was not the prelude to some long tale of headless maidens and drowned sailors or even of speckled bands and silent dogs.

“Atmospherics,” she repeated with relish. “There’s been that all right.”

“Do you think you could be more specific, Mrs. Vladimirov?” Max asked. And the floodgates again opened.

“Well,” she began.
“Well.”
She smoothed her apron several times over her lap, tugging and pulling at imaginary wrinkles in the floral-patterned fabric. It was a pretty compendium of butterflies and flowers that Max was nearly certain did not all bloom at the same time except in the apron manufacturer’s imagination. “You want to talk about people creeping about?” This phrase was aimed at her husband. Max averred that he did want to talk about precisely that. “The whole family is greedy but you ask me Lester and Fester have the most to worry about in that department, he being the younger son. The pair of them have been on a scavenger hunt since they got here. Weighing up the value of this ’n’ that. It’s not right. The folk at the National Trust would be bothered if they knew, and I’ve half a mind to tell them to look inside the suitcases before the pair of them leave here. This castle has been home for generations to lords and ladies, and my family has been in service to them since the year aught. To treat the place as a jumble sale—well.”

She seemed to include herself in this pride in the family tree. Of course, Max supposed it was even possible she was descended from those who had served here at the castle in its early days. From someone exercising his droit du seigneur.

“As to Jocasta and Simon: Let me give you a for-example. Let’s say character A is good-looking, but B has more of a personality. Put them together you’d have a whole person. Don’t you find that true of so many married couples? I don’t think she’d last a minute without him. Weak, Jocasta. Always has been since I’ve known her. Borderline.”

Now Doris was removing a baking pan fragrant with cinnamon rolls from the oven and placing it on a trivet to cool. Then she went to fetch milk and butter from the refrigerator. She moved in short, sturdy steps, a little tugboat plowing through choppy waves.

“Problem is, y’see,” she went on, closing the refrigerator door with her hip, “he’d been generous with them always and they’d come to rely on it. Lord Footrustle, that is. Then he met Gwynyth and the twins came along. Some of the family had their noses out of joint for a while, you can bet. And it did change things. He never went back to supporting them all the way he once had. Gwynyth spoiled it for them, you might say. Opened his eyes, like.

“Mind, I’m no fan of their being here, either. Millie—that’s one of the girls besides Lotty what comes from Monkslip-super-Mare to help do for us—Millie says they leave the bathroom in the Tower looking like somebody washed a pig in there.”

“She is not used to children,” said Milo.

“Who said it was the twins?” demanded Doris.

“Was Jocasta particularly affected by Lord Footrustle’s remarriage?” Max asked.

This was so important a point she stopped midstride and turned to face him. “I should say so. Thing is, he wanted a son, Lord Footrustle, and his first wife could have no more children after Jocasta. When he took up with Gwynyth and produced Alec, and Amanda, in short order—well. It was all like something out of Henry VIII. Jocasta hides it—she’s an actress—but there’s no denying she felt pushed aside.”

“Lord Footrustle was very old-fashioned, you see,” put in Milo. “There was the title to think about.”

But for Doris that ship had sailed, and she was on to another topic. “I will tell you something else for free. There have been ghosts here since I was a girl, and my mother before me, and going back who knows how far. Because there have been horrible murders in the past. Don’t doubt for a moment the ghosts here, Father Max. There was that business of the wife of the third earl up to something or other in the garden. She was seen by her husband through one of the squints in the solar being flirtatious and worse with one of her husband’s knights. Or perhaps it was one of the gardeners. The whole thing, it was like a story out of a Harlequin romance.”

“Or out of
Lady Chatterley
,” said Max.

“But he killed her. The husband, you see. He had her killed. It was easy to organize such goings-on back then. And now she seeks her revenge. I wonder what they make of this mess,” concluded Doris gloomily. “The ghosts.”

Milo seemed to feel a change of subject was in order. “You may want to walk this morning, in the garden. The forecoast later is for snow.” Max started to correct him and then decided forecoast was much the better word, considering how near they were to the sea.

“However, what Doris says is true,” Milo added. “I don’t believe in ghosts but I believe in atmosphere. And there has been a—a
crackle
in the air since they all came here.” Again he spoke in his measured, precise way, each thought carefully examined before release. “You will be wanting to meet the others, and now would be good time. They will just be coming down wanting their breakfast. We serve buffet in Great Hall every morning.”

“We do since they started arriving by the hundreds,” put in Doris. “I can’t serve sit-down meals three times a day, not with the lot of them here.”

“Well,” said Max, standing, “I thank you for your time. That is an excellent suggestion: I’ll go and see who’s there.”

But Doris was not yet finished. “The trouble’s just starting,” she called to Max’s retreating figure. “You mark my words, Father.”

CHAPTER 9

A Small Repast

In the Great Hall, dust motes drifted in the weak sunlight streaming though the high stained-glass window. The light didn’t seem to penetrate much below the arches of the ceiling, leaving the room below in murky shadow.

The room’s corners were marked by four white marble statues on pedestals, all Greco-Roman in theme, and depicting the four seasons. A heavy medieval-era table ran down the center of the room that could easily seat thirty. It was dotted at intervals with massive candelabra, unlighted now but dripping picturesquely with wax. The table overall looked suitable for a twelfth-century monastery, but ranged before it were comfortably padded dining chairs rather than wooden benches. Max was for some reason surprised to notice an elaborately decorated Christmas tree tucked near the cozy seating group arranged before the massive stone fireplace. A few presents wrapped in glitter and gold were scattered underneath the tree, which itself bore gaudy bows of deep purple on its branches. The presents had the impractical, matchy-matchy look of something there only for show, like a tree in the window of Harrods. He was tempted to pick up a box and rattle it to see if his guess was right—that it would be empty.