Death Sits Down to Dinner (14 page)

“What are you and Tom doing about this snooper?”

“Well, I talked to Captain Vetiver, and he’s arranging with navy intelligence to check out the factory and those who work for us or with us. If there
is
something going on, I hope we are not too behindhand.” Clementine wondered if perhaps Captain Vetiver was involved in the Secret Service Bureau.

“Will you have an opportunity to look at Wildman-Lushington’s plane when you are at Eastchurch?” She pressed home her opportunity: “Because if you do, would you bear in mind my theory that he might have witnessed something on the night Sir Reginald was killed? And see if you can find anything that might point to someone tampering with the machine?”

Harry smiled and nodded that he would. Perhaps talk about espionage had made him feel that sabotage was not such an outrageous idea either, because he said, “I’m not an experienced engineer, but I would know what to look for.

“Well, I should be going. What are you doing with yourself while you are in London?”

“We have plans for the opera and the ballet, Lady Ripon’s ball for Nellie Melba at Claridge’s, and I have promised myself an hour or two with Gertrude Waterford and Olive Shackleton at Madam Lucile.” Clementine dutifully recorded the events that would fill her next days and realized that every single one of them provided an opportunity for gossip, and that gossip was the source of useful information.

Chapter Twelve

Mrs. Jackson’s second day at Chester Square had ended far more successfully than she ever could have imagined. She had spent time with Mr. Jenkins, who was unusually alert and up to the mark and had assured her that the flowers she wanted could be delivered directly from Covent Garden market on the morning of the event. “We are all standing by, ready to be directed by you in our efforts, Mrs. Jackson,” he had reassured her with his old-world courtesy.

She worked steadily through the day, organizing the last items on the menu, and by five o’clock she decided to take a tea tray up to Miss Gaskell and see how she was doing.

She found Miss Gaskell sitting up in bed, still pale but less restive than she had been earlier that day. Within, a fire was crackling merrily in the grate in a room that had seen the working application of the duster and the carpet brush; without, the sun was burning brightly, warming the air enough to reduce hillocks of shoveled snow to mere mounds of gray slush and providing at the same time enough light to make Miss Gaskell’s room almost cheery. Mrs. Jackson had not had the opportunity to go for her customary walk for three days now, and she felt a claustrophobic need for fresh air. She walked across the room and lifted the sash a little to let some into the room.

“You seem to be a good deal better this afternoon, Miss Gaskell. How do you feel in yourself?”

“My headache has gone and my throat is less sore. But I still feel quite dreadfully tired.” Miss Gaskell had slipped a bookmark into her copy of
Ivanhoe
and laid it aside on the table.

Mrs. Jackson came alongside the bed and automatically started the business of plumping up the pillows. As she did so, she peeked behind the cushion and noticed that the framed photograph was no longer there. Looking around the room, she saw that it had not been returned to any of the little tables and dressers that furnished the room with plenty of surfaces on which to exhibit this kind of memorabilia.

She poured a cup of tea for Miss Gaskell and urged her to try a little hot buttered toast. As the young companion sipped her tea, she ran over the success of her morning’s arrangements, and when asked by Miss Gaskell what she could do to help, she handed over the job of writing place cards for the dress-circle seating.

“Everyone will come,” said Miss Gaskell. “They always do, and as Miss Melba is singing we will probably gather some extra uninvited ones, who will come with invited friends. It’s always the way.”

“Have you head Miss Melba sing before?” Mrs. Jackson did not have an ear for music, not even for the popular music-hall songs that provided affordable entertainment of a far less formal kind. For years she’d been mistakenly under the impression that Nellie Melba was a dancer.

“Yes, I was lucky enough to go to the opera in my first year here with Miss Kingsley when Miss Melba was singing in
La Bohème,
her voice is sublime. It was my first visit to a real opera, such a thrilling experience.”

“You did not go with your parents to the opera, or the concert house?”

“Oh no, my parents died when I was ten. They died in a train accident when they were quite young. I was brought up by my mother’s much older sister; she was the only family I had. She was so very kind and we became the entire world to each other. But her health was not good and when she died I had to work for a living and so I am here. I have been most fortunate.” She added this last hastily in case, Mrs. Jackson thought, she might appear ungrateful. Young women companions learned to demonstrate eternal gratitude for their meager lot in life, it seemed.

Mrs. Jackson wondered what it would be like to have enjoyed a full and happy family life and then been denied it. She preferred to think that she had been orphaned when in all probability she had been abandoned by parents who were either too destitute to keep her or simply uninterested in being parents. She had been taken in by a kindly neighbor who had brought her up in her large family and then when times became hard the woman had given her up at age seven into the care of the parish orphanage. She never dwelled on the orphanage years, they had been too painful. When she was thirteen she had been found a position as a scullery maid in the large house of a well-to-do middle-class family in Bolton. Determined to do what she could for herself, she had worked long hours, provided the cook with meticulous, hard work, and had been promoted to the job of housemaid. She felt great kinship with this nice young woman and her unpretentious and equable manner. But she couldn’t help wondering about that photograph. It was certainly not of Mr. Gaskell, father of Miss Gaskell, killed when he was a young man. There had been no mention of the aunt’s husband. So who, then?

This question came into her mind off and on for the rest of the afternoon and evening. At the end of the day she decided to walk home to Montfort House. Chester Square was only a mile or two away from Lowndes Square, and the route would take her through Belgravia’s residential streets, crescents, and squares, their central gardens planted with sycamores and plane trees, providing a pleasant sanctuary of greenery in summer and privacy for its surrounding terraced streets. It would be a pleasant walk. The area was well lit and the streets were busy with the servants who worked in the houses of the families who lived in one of London’s most affluent neighborhoods.

As she paced along the pavement she did not notice the familiar, grand white stucco houses united behind a continuous palace front, making each terrace look like a large country house. Wide marble steps led up to black front doors sheltered from the elements by pillared porticoes. Heavy black iron railings protected the front from passersby on the pavement and protected them from falling down in to the little yard below street level—referred to as the area—that led to the servant’s entrance to belowstairs.

She was not alone in the quiet neighborhood. As motorcars pulled up to front doors, down the steps came gentlemen in top hats and heavy overcoats, with ladies swathed in furs to protect them from the cold; lamplight sparkled on the diamonds in their tiaras and in their ears. Other motorcars arrived to deposit similarly dressed individuals at neighboring houses arriving for a dinner party.

Along the wide pavements, servants returned from errands, swept slushy snow from front steps and pavements, or hurried home from a day off with friends or a visit to the Vaudeville Theatre. It was easy walking, the pavements were clear and dry, the air sweet and washed clean by days of wind and snow. Mrs. Jackson’s step was light. She did not look up, immersed as she was in her thoughts.

The only blight on the day had occurred at the end of the afternoon. Martha had arrived in Miss Gaskell’s room to inform her that now that she was a little better, Detective Inspector Hillary of Scotland Yard would be calling at the house tomorrow morning to ask a few questions of her. So would she please be ready to meet him downstairs in the little sitting room at ten o’clock?

The effect this had on Miss Gaskell was quite bewildering, Mrs. Jackson recalled as she crossed Minton Walk and turned left. On hearing this news, she had gasped and fallen back into her pillows, and a fit of coughing had overtaken her with such violence that it had been quite some minutes before she was able to speak. And when she was able to speak she seemed incapable of doing so without breaking down completely. When Martha left the room her back had expressed the scorn and disgust she evidently felt, and Mrs. Jackson glimpsed her face drawn into a tight grimace of disapproval. Feeling protective, she hastened to calm the frightened young woman.

“He only wants to find out what you saw that night that was unusual, to help him understand the events surrounding Sir Reginald’s murder.” Having determined not to speak of the incident in the house unless someone else did first, and no one had uttered a word since her arrival, Mrs. Jackson was aware that she was breaking an unspoken law when she coupled the words
Sir Reginald
and
murder.

“But I know nothing, absolutely nothing!” Miss Gaskell wailed, revealing how overprotected her life had been and also, thought Mrs. Jackson, how unreasonably scared she was.
When someone is this emphatic they know nothing, they usually know a good deal,
thought the housekeeper.

“There, there. It will be nothing, you will see.” Mrs. Jackson patted the young woman’s shoulder; she was tired after her long day and in no mood to deal with hysterics, for this was where they were headed it seemed. “Just a few questions, he will put them to you quite clearly. Answer him directly and then it will all be over.”

“Yes, but it won’t, you see?” Another wail echoed up from the tousled head on the pillows. “Because I was not in the salon at the time he was murdered, I was downstairs searching for pure spirit. I had been sent by Miss Kingsley to find it. Miss Meriwether had spilled coffee on her dress … I couldn’t find the bottle, I searched everywhere. I can’t remember. I can’t remember anything.” She was getting herself quite horribly worked up, thought Mrs. Jackson. More coughing, more wailing.

“You simply must get a hold of yourself, Miss Gaskell.” Mrs. Jackson bent and fixed her gaze directly into the young woman’s face, hoping to pull her out of her imagined fears. “Simply tell the inspector what you know.”

Miss Gaskell opened her eyes and stared back with such speechless horror that Mrs. Jackson almost recoiled.

“I can never do that,’ she cried, wrenching away. No one would believe…” She threw herself facedown on the pillows, crying so bitterly that Mrs. Jackson was alarmed for her health and recognized with a bolt of intuition that Miss Gaskell’s near bout with pneumonia had been nothing of the kind. Her reaction to everything in the house from the night when Sir Reginald had been murdered was one akin to fear.
Of course,
she thought,
how stupid I have been. This young woman probably knew Sir Reginald well, since he was so involved in the charity. She has been suffering from shock and grief. Why on earth didn’t I see this before?

As Mrs. Jackson walked head-down in thought along the pavement, reliving the exceedingly tense and dramatic moments in Miss Gaskell’s room, she was unaware that she had taken the wrong turn, and looking up she realized that she was on Sloane Street. She crossed over, turned right into Harriet Street, and then back down Harriet Walk, which ran directly behind the houses on Lowndes Square. As she turned out of the main thoroughfare she caught sight of a familiar London scene at the corner of Harriet Street: a street hawker selling hot chestnuts. She smelled the sweet scent of roasting chestnuts even at this distance. The man, wrapped in an old wool topcoat secured about his waist with twine, a heavy muffler around his neck, and a battered bowler pulled down over his eyes, was standing over a brazier, arranging chestnuts in a large flat pan balanced on top of the hot coals. A fat woman in a cheerful-looking hat adorned with a mass of dyed feathers and a small, thinner woman were counting pennies into his palm, and having concluded their transaction and clutching newspaper cones of roasted nuts walked off around the corner in Harriet Walk. No doubt to return to the servants’ hall of one of the houses on Lowndes Square. Their laughter echoed back across the empty street toward Mrs. Jackson.

She crossed the street and, giving the man tuppence, held out her gloved hands for a cone of newspaper. The scent of roasting chestnuts and hot charcoal rekindled a time when she had first worked for the Talbot family at Montfort House as a housemaid.
How young and scared I was then,
she remembered.
How they teased me about going upstairs to do the fires when it was still dark in the early morning. How would I have felt in those years if someone had been murdered in the house? Terrified,
came back the response.
I would have been scared witless, petrified of being along upstairs in the dark of the house.
She saw herself huddled down in bed with Maisie the scullery maid in their shared room, too frightened to sleep, their eyes glued on the unlocked bedroom door. They would most certainly have been terrified of speaking to a policeman from Scotland Yard about anything they might have seen. But she was quite sure of one thing: every servant belowstairs would have been clamoring for information and gossip in that surreptitious, forbidden way that servants had. A torrent of talk and speculation would have helped to put the situation to rights and the scariness would have become thrilling, like a good ghost story on a stormy night.
That’s exactly what is wrong with Chester Square,
she thought, as she sat down on a bench at the top of Harriet Walk and peeled back the charred skin of a chestnut.
Everyone has clammed up and the enforced silence feeds fear and suspicion.