Death at the Manor (The Asharton Manor Mysteries Book 1) (2 page)

“He’s got an eye for the girls, too,” said Meg, the little kitchen maid, with a giggle.

“That will do, Margaret,” said Mrs. Cotting sharply. “Don’t be forgetting your place, now.”

“Sorry,” Meg said, abashed. We bent to our work again but, after a moment, I caught her eye and winked, and she stifled another giggle.

Miss Cleo was dark as the mistress was fair, with a clever face and a very drawling, sardonic voice, a complete contrast to Madam. She came down with her to the kitchen one day, dressed in her cream satin house-pyjamas, if you please, and wafted about, sticking her face into the larder and lifting up lids on the saucepans on the Rayburn, bold as brass. All the while, she smoked a cigarette in a long, ebony holder. I thought Mrs. Cotting was going to have a fit. It would have been funny, if I hadn’t known I’d be the one to have to deal with the aftermath. Of course, Mrs. Cotting would never have said anything to Cleo Maddox’s face – she had a
title
, after all. Instead, Mrs. Cotting would vent her anger on Meg and me.

I quite often saw Miss Cleo in the garden; swimming in the pool, playing tennis with Mr. Manfield or sometimes Mr. Denford. Annie told me, in a scandalised tone, that she had been seen down at the river one dawn morning, swimming with
nothing on
. She was the talk of the village, apparently, but it didn’t seem to bother her. The rich are like that, though; things that would bury someone of the working class merely slid off them like oil. She seemed a bit of an odd friend for the mistress to have, to be honest. They were so different, both in looks and in manner, but again, perhaps it’s different for those with money. They like to be with people like themselves.

The master himself was very different to both his wife and her brother. He was a stockbroker, whatever that was, and he was a thin, short man with very black hair and a neatly trimmed moustache. According to Violet, the lady’s maid, he was soft-spoken, gentlemanlike in his manners, and quiet.

“He’s always struck me as a bit lonely,” she said one evening, when we were talking in the servants’ hall. “Doesn’t seem to talk to the mistress much, or she doesn’t talk to him. Been even more like that since her brother came back and now Miss Cleo is here.”

“Wasn’t that how they met?” said Annie. She was smoking a cigarette which she’d cadged from Albert, one of the stable boys, and I was trying not to cough.

Violet nodded. “Mister John introduced them, out on his ranch in Africa. The master was a friend of his, Mister John’s.”

“I’d like to go to Africa,” I said, not really thinking.

Violet snorted. “Catch you saving up enough to go to Africa,” she said, laughing. “Honestly, Joan.”

I smiled dutifully at my supposed silliness, but I was aware of a spurt of anger. Why shouldn’t I go to Africa? Wasn’t I allowed to dream? The trouble with Violet, and with all the girls I knew except for Verity, is that their dreams were so small. All they wanted from life was marriage, to a tradesman or the under-footman; marriage and babies and perhaps two rooms to call their own. I wanted more than that. Surely there was more to life than that? And what man would ever marry me anyway, with my plain face and my towering frame? No, I knew that life wouldn’t hold much romance for me. That was why I was trying to learn to cook, so I would always be able to support myself.

Verity was the same. She may have been only a housemaid (although at Lord Carthright’s place, so not exactly a two-a-penny establishment), but she knew what it was like to have to take care of yourself from an early age. We’d met in the orphanage when I was ten and she was eleven. Our beds had been next to one another in the dormitory and we’d whisper after the lights went out, about all the amazing things we were going to do when we were grown up. Dreams were all we had in the orphanage, they were what sustained us.

As luck would have it, the post brought a letter from Verity that day. I read it up in my room after the day’s work, by the light of the flickering candle set in the holder on my bedside table. I was so tired my eyes kept closing, but I forced them open again and again. I chuckled at Verity’s descriptions of how the butler in her household had got so drunk on the dregs of champagne from one of Lord Carthright’s parties that he’d fallen down the last two stairs to the scullery. Verity and Mrs. Antells, the housekeeper, had had to
roll
him along the corridor to his room as he was too heavy for them to lift and had to leave him propped up against his bed, snoring drunkenly. He
was
an old sot, I remembered, having met him once when I’d been there for tea.

Verity signed off her letter with “Joanie, you must write to me again soon, I love receiving your letters. Your descriptions of Asharton Manor are so vivid I feel like I’m there with you. Tell me more about living in the country and whether you’re learning any new dishes, and if the mistress is still having the vapours all over the place. And come to London when you can, I miss you.”

I smiled as I folded up the letter and put it in my bedside table. It might be slightly immodest of me to say, but I do have a good way with words. I find it easy to put them together in pleasing sentences. At least, I think they’re pleasing. Verity’s not the only person to have told me I write good letters. It was knowledge I hugged close to myself, when the days in the kitchen seemed so long, and the work so hard, and I didn’t seem to be getting any better at cookery. At least writing was something I could do well.

Verity’s last paragraph recurred to me the next morning. The mistress had come down to go through the menus with Mrs. Cotting and, having not seen her for a week or so, I was somewhat shocked at her appearance. I’d rather mockingly described her ‘illnesses’ to Verity as the bored fancies of an idle woman, but today she looked properly unwell; pale and thin and with her golden hair dulled somehow, as if the shine had worn off it. She talked to Mrs. Cotting in a listless tone, as if food were the last thing she was thinking about.

Perhaps she was in the family way, at long last, for all she’d lost weight. It can take some women like that, at first. She’d had some sickness, as we heard from Violet in great, and in my opinion unnecessary, detail when she came down to sit with us in the servants’ hall, that evening. I was trying to read a book but had to shut the covers in the end, as Violet went on and on about the mistress’s illness and how she moped around her room all day and had a row with the master.

“Fighting like cats and dogs, they were,” said Violet with relish. “She was crying and he stormed off. Wouldn’t surprise me if she’s up the spout and it’s not his, you know.”

“Violet!” I said, genuinely shocked. Mrs. Cotting was in her own sitting room, or you can be sure Violet would never have said such a thing. “How can you say that?”

Violet looked sly. “I see things, you know,” she said. “He’s not been in her bed in weeks. And she’s fainting and crying and sick all the time. Can’t be anything else, can it?”

I could feel myself blushing. “Well, you might be right, but it’s not for us to speculate, is it?” I said and opened my book again. Violet snorted – she had a most unattractive way of doing that – and she and little Meg went outside to smoke a cigarette and gossip some more.

Nothing more was said about the mistress and, in a week or so, she got well again and began to look better. She didn’t appear to get any stouter, so that theory of Violet’s was complete nonsense, in my opinion. I overheard her and Miss Cleo laughing about Mrs. Carter-Knox’s latest monstrous flower arrangement which stood in the hallway, looming like a piece of jungle stuck in a large vase.

“Darling, one expects to see a team of explorers emerging, with pith helmets,” Miss Cleo drawled, and Madam giggled. I felt a bit sorry for Mrs. Carter-Knox. She always struck me as the odd one out, a middle-aged lady in a house full of young people. Her husband had been the master’s uncle and he’d died fairly young, leaving her a childless widow at forty-eight. Apparently, she’d come for a visit last year and just stayed on, which was another source of friction between the Denfords, according to the gossipy Violet.

I’d been hoping to go to London on my next day off, and had been saving up for the ticket. But, as it happened, Verity and I weren’t able to coordinate our days off in order to be able to meet. I was disappointed, but tried to console myself with the thought that we’d manage it soon. There was so much I wanted to tell her that wasn’t always something I could put in a letter. Like the time I went for a walk in the woods around the manor.

That was a very queer thing. The more I’ve thought about it, the stranger it seems. It was my afternoon off and it was such a lovely day I thought I’d spend it exploring a bit more of the grounds. There were apparently some lovely walks in the woods that surrounded the estate and, although I was slightly nervous about getting lost, I decided to go for a bit of a tramp about. I packed up some sandwiches and a flask of tea and set off. I passed Mrs. Carter-Knox in the garden, cutting flowers for another of her arrangements, while Miss Cleo and the mistress drank cocktails in the conservatory. I sighed for a moment at the unfairness of life. What I wouldn’t give to be able to swan around, poking flowers into vases and then retiring back to my rooms, exhausted, for a nap, just as Mrs. Carter-Knox did every day. What I wouldn’t give to sit in a luxurious conservatory and swig cocktails, lifting the glass with my fingers covered in diamond rings, knowing I could sit there all day if I wanted to, because I didn’t have to cook, or wash up, or scrub down the kitchen table. Why hadn’t I been born into a highborn family? Why did I have to be poor and work for my living?

I stomped out of the gardens and followed the footpath to the woods, feeling cross at the unfairness of life. After a few moments, though, I began to cheer up. It was a sunny day, with the blue sky covered in scudding white clouds – warm for May. I had to be back by six and I wasn’t planning on being out longer than a couple of hours. I really didn’t want to have to find my way back through the woods in the dark.

I walked, at first keeping the manor in sight but, as I grew more confident, I struck out on the smaller paths that wound through the beech trees. They were majestic trees and walking down a line of them felt almost as though I were walking through somewhere like a cathedral. The old brown leaves rustled beneath my feet as I walked and the woods were alive with bird song. I was enjoying myself so much I barely noticed that I was straying farther and farther into the woods. The trees gradually began to change, from the smooth-skinned beeches, to the gnarled oaks and the darker evergreens. They grew ever more thickly about the path and my steps began to be more and more hesitant.

Eventually, I stopped. I was in some sort of vague clearing, in the midst of a thick forest of pines. The sun had gone behind a cloud and the noises of the forest somehow became muted and then stilled altogether. I stood uncertainly, looking about me. The clearing was about forty foot wide and in the middle stood a jumble of stone. I walked a little closer. As I got closer, I could see that the stone was actually broken masonry. Had a house once stood here? I looked about me, at the forest pressing in on all sides. Suddenly, I felt swamped by a wave of uneasiness. No, it was stronger than that. It was fear.

I turned, my hand up to my throat, heart thudding. The silence pressed down on me like a thick blanket and my ears buzzed. Then, above the noise of my heartbeat, I heard a distinct sound – a loud crack as a twig snapped underfoot. My fear leapt up another notch. Was there someone following me? Chasing me? I am ashamed to say I was almost panting, my heart racing. I saw a figure through the dark branches of the trees, moving towards me, and nearly screamed. Then, as he stepped out into the clearing, a surge of relief made my knees weaken. It was John Manfield, the mistress’s brother.

He walked up to me, his gun crooked over his arm, smiling and whistling. All of a sudden, my panic seemed incomprehensible. The smile I gave him in return was possibly far too eager, but I was just so relieved to see a familiar face.

“Good afternoon,” he said. “Out for a walk?”

Now that I had myself under control again, I was beginning to feel uncomfortable in a different way. I simply could not stand and chat to this man in a manner in which I could have chatted to a man of my own class. The knowledge of the gulf between us closed up my throat and I could only nod, dumbly.

“Certainly a lovely day for it,” said Mr. Manfield. He looked at me a little more closely. “Are you quite well, Joan?”

The terror of the past few minutes must still have shown in my face. Impulsively, I said, “I was afraid I was lost. I found this clearing and – well, it was strange…”

I trailed off. I didn’t even really know what I was trying to say. But Mr. Manfield was looking at me as if he understood. 

“Gave you a bit of a turn, did it?” he asked, and I found myself nodding. “Yes, it’s a strange place. Used to be an old place of worship here, you know. A long time ago.”

“Really?” I was interested, despite myself.

Mr. Manfield nodded, staring about him at the encircling trees. “The vicar was telling me about it, last Sunday. They used to worship one of the heathen goddesses here. Astarte, she was called. Pretty strange stuff used to go on here, by all accounts.”

I could feel myself blushing. Heathen goddesses sounded like the sort of topic where some men would take the opportunity to make some rather broad jokes. As that occurred to me, it also occurred to me that I was alone in the middle of a wood with a man, a man who apparently had ‘an eye for the girls’. What if he—? I wondered what would be worse, to run or to stay…