Murder at Mullings--A 1930s country house murder mystery

Table of Contents

Cover

Previous titles from Dorothy Cannell

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Epilogue

THE THIN WOMAN

DOWN THE GARDEN PATH

THE WIDOW'S CLUB

MUM'S THE WORD

FEMMES FATAL

HOW TO MURDER YOUR MOTHER-IN-LAW

HOW TO MURDER THE MAN OF YOUR DREAMS

THE SPRING CLEANING MURDERS

THE TROUBLE WITH HARRIET

BRIDESMAIDS REVISITED

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING ERNESTINE

WITHERING HEIGHTS

GOODBYE, MS CHIPS

SHE SHOOTS TO CONQUER

The Florence Norris Mysteries

MURDER AT MULLINGS *

Other Titles

SEA GLASS SUMMER *

* available from Severn House

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First published in Great Britain and the USA 2014 by

SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

19 Cedar Road, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM2 5DA

eBook edition first published in 2014 by Severn House Digital
an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

Copyright © 2014 by Cannell & Company.

The right of Dorothy Cannell to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Cannell, Dorothy

Murder at Mullings.–(A Florence Norris mystery ; 1)

1. Murder–Investigation–Fiction. 2. Hermits–Fiction.

3. Detective and mystery stories.

I. Title II. Series

813.5'4-dc23

ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8338-4 (cased)
ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-501-8 (trade paper)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-501-7 (ePub)

Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

This ebook produced by

Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.

For my granddaughter, Hope Thomas, who brings sunshine to the cloudiest day.

To Joe Maron, who inspired this book by telling me about ornamental hermits.

W
hen Florie Wilks arrived at Mullings to work as a kitchen maid, she saw herself stepping not only into a world of grandeur, but one poised thrillingly on the ledge between reality and the sort of transporting fiction she loved. She couldn't count the number of such books she'd devoured at the risk of being told by her furious father that the next time she wasted a tallow candle staying up half the night reading he'd send her to live with nasty Aunt Aggie.

Carrying her small bundle of possessions on arrival day, she passed through the iron gates and was waved on by the lodge keeper towards the servants' entrance. Alas for her wide-eyed dreams, she was soon to discover that bricks and mortar, coupled with extensive acreage, do not always make for a world abounding in heroes and heroines.

With its velvet lawns, formal gardens, expansive woodlands, serenading waterfalls and productive home farm, Mullings was the acknowledged great house of Dovecote Hatch. Nonetheless, it had long been the conviction of the neighbouring gentry that the Stodmarsh family, which had inhabited the estate from one generation to the next since its beginnings, must be counted hereditarily a sadly dull lot. In the broad scheme of things, this view had validity. England had long flourished or floundered without members of the Stodmarsh family being accorded honors for valor or hanged for villainy. Within an hour of her arrival, Florie was to discover that throughout the generations not one riotous scandal or harrowing melodrama had occurred within the boundaries of Mullings to wend its way into local, let alone national, lore. She was promptly informed by the housekeeper that there were no tales to be told of unfaithful wives tossed off the roof, no insane persons locked in turrets, no duels fought with either swords or pistols in the murky first light of dawn, no daughters gambled away into wedlock with debauched old men by their profligate fathers' reverses at the gaming table. A pity the same could not be said of other leading families who she wouldn't name!

In the view of those who gladly boasted of their rollicking forebears' escapades, the Stodmarshes' failure to live life to the hilt would have been their affair, had their mopish propriety not cast a pall over any social event in which they participated. The men did not foxhunt, revere their tailors or know a damn thing about poker. They handled the running of their properties themselves without the aid of an estate manager, and even when young their conversation was jeeringly found to be middle-aged, running the gamut from farming to the need to repair the church roof. As for the Stodmarsh females, it was a source of much drawing room tittering and chortling that they were either petulant pansies or dismal dahlias not worth being plucked.

Had Florie heard these comments, she would have thought them very unkind (even though she would have been disappointed that the Stodmarsh women were not considered as beauties scattering male conquests like silk scarves in their wake). Just the sort of thing nasty Aunt Aggie would say in different words: ‘All of a bunch, squint-eyed or saggy-bottomed, take your pick.'

There was one meagre mercy. The critics – chief of whom were the Blakes of The Manor in Large Middlington, the Stafford-Reids of Hidden Meadows in Small Middlington, and the Palfretts of Chimneys in Kingsbury Knox – could not accuse the Stodmarshes of viewing themselves as scholarly. An announced familiarity with Virgil, an impassioned interest in the history of the Belgian Congo, or even – God forbid – the ability to haltingly list all the kings and queens of England from Ethelred the Unready to present times would only have served to shove them higher up the ladder of the most crushing bores the glory of Britain had ever produced. Leave the pontificating to politicians and parsons! The Blakes in particular believed the increasing association of brains with success in trade made displaying more than a modicum of intelligence smack of a coarseness verging on blatant vulgarity.

Florie would have been surprised to discover this attitude. She had been brought up to believe that her betters, whilst knowing how to frolic with style, were far cleverer than any ordinary person could ever hope to be. Else, why would God have put them in charge of things?

The Blakes, Stafford-Reids and Palfretts acknowledged this superiority as a fact, not a view, but that didn't mean one had to go around pondering the universe all day. What thought must necessarily be expended by a gentleman beyond crushing the bloody impudence of the lower classes, and instilling in their sons the virtue of doggedly sowing their wild oats before ardently beseeching the hand in marriage of a woman of beauty, breeding and fortune? The desire for one's girls to make spectacular, or at the very least creditable marriages, perhaps burned more fiercely in the maternal than the paternal bosom.

The Stodmarshes had husbanded their wealth well and, lacking charm or wit had, as already observed, done nothing to bring dishonour on their name. Yet no Blake or Stafford-Reid parent had ever encouraged, let alone endeavoured to coerce, an offspring into marriage with a Stodmarsh. The very idea was unthinkable … intolerable. Every celebration, every funeral henceforth ruined! One could laugh if the prospect were not so wretched.

Tales of forbidden love would have been right up Florie's alley. Growing up, she had thrilled to her mother's stories about her own days in service, before she had been married, with a titled family named Tamersham in Northumbria. Their illustrious ancestral home had possessed a moat, turrets and battlements, a portcullis and, casting an even more alluring spell, an old man with long, matted hair and beard dressed in a rough-spun robe dwelling in a cave in a wooded embankment. He was not there by happenstance – Sir Peregrine Tamersham had adhered to a tradition of employing ornamental hermits – although Florie's mother mistakenly believed this to be a fascinating eccentricity peculiar only to that family.

This whimsical folly dated back to the eighteenth century, when some of the upper-crust believed no self-indulgence could be too ridiculous, in keeping up with the Jones-Joneses. Advertisements appeared for male persons willing to serve in such a capacity. Essential requirements for an ornamental hermit included never cutting his hair, beard or nails, and upon leaving his shelter he meandered with his head bowed above an open Bible. The very air around him was steeped in saintly melancholy. It was a delightful fillip for house guests to espy him amidst the groves or by a woodland stream, as it was incumbent on him to ensure they did. He was not hard done by. Nature provided water, and food was brought to him from the house, but he was strictly forbidden from exchanging a single word with the servants.

As a child, Florie had loved listening to her mother's stories, and had particularly thrilled to the image of the pious ancient drawn so vividly by her mother. Oh, to work in such a place! She could not expect Mullings to possess this rare entrancement, but she had hoped for others. Perhaps a private cemetery where wisps of something more than mist drifted up from the graves at dusk, gathering shape and purpose as they slipped across the grounds to seep through walls and windows, back to where they rightfully belonged. Who would not wish to cling, however vaporously, to a world forever glittering with merriment or plunging into thrilling turmoil, where the days swirled from one to the next in a dazzle of privilege? Of course, Florie didn't put it that way to herself as a little girl. But many years later, as housekeeper of Mullings, she would spread it out as such in a letter to her cousin Hattie Fly in London.

The fourteen-year-old Florie who had arrived at the servants' entrance to Mullings, tremulous with anticipation, had looked as much a ghost as any she had hoped to glimpse in a richly appointed corridor or on a dark turn of the stairs. The mature Florie was wont to smile, albeit ruefully, at such starry-eyed simplicity.

Mrs Longbrow, the housekeeper in 1900 when Florie arrived, having reduced Florie to a squeak and nod of the head, continued making it clearer than glass for the next five minutes that the Stodmarshes were the worthiest of county families. They did not indulge in escapades or tantrums.

‘So there'll be no point in attempting to listen at keyholes.'

‘No, Mrs Longbrow.' A dipped curtsy.

‘Not that you'll have reason to leave the kitchen, except to go outside to the privy, until bedtime.'

‘Yes, Mrs Longbrow.' Another dip. Within another half hour Florie had learned that the lord's Christian name was Edward and Lady Stodmarsh's was Lillian. They had two sons – Lionel, aged fifteen, and William, only eleven months younger.

‘Both bode well to follow solidly in their father's footsteps. Never a scrap of trouble from either of them since the cradle.'