Murder in Pug's Parlour (6 page)

Her heart melted. Dear Franz, how could she have doubted him? After all, she was Duchess of Stockbery, whereas dearest Honoria, sweet as she was, was merely the wife of a baron’s second son. There was no comparison. But all the same she was not completely at ease. And this murder . . . Suppose Franz became difficult and insisted on his diplomatic rights? His pride might well be offended if the policeman carried out his threat to question everyone in the house. It was not as though Greeves had been any loss. Very far from it. She had always disliked him, even before he . . .

She shivered, and forced her mind away from these
unpleasant channels. She pulled herself together with great effort, and looked at Franz shyly from under her eyelashes. It rarely failed to charm him.

‘Dearest. There, I’ve called you that. In public too. That’s my second crime this evening. But I shall be good now. You can dance with anyone you please. You’re quite right. We mustn’t be seen too much together.’

No, she couldn’t sacrifice Franz. George knew about it, of course, but never mentioned it. It was a matter of discretion. These things were understood in their circles. Provided no one else knew. That was the code. She thought of the Beresford scandal, still the talk of London. Teddy couldn’t take another divorce in his circle, even if the idea of becoming Princess attracted her in her wilder moments. They’d be dropped from the Prince of Wales’ set if any breath of suspicion tainted herself and George. She watched Franz swirling round the floor in the arms of an unattractive matron – he was a clever man – and took the arm of a particularly shy youth standing forlornly by a potted palm. He was eldest son to one of the richest landowners in Kent, a fortune made, alas, from butchery, which put him out of the running for Jane even in these free and easy days.

‘Do take pity on me and ask me to dance, Mr Taylor.’ Her Grace was famous for her charm.

In his library George, twelth Duke of Stockbery, stood morosely in front of the fire, hands behind his back, an ancestor glaring down at him from the full majesty of his Van Dyck portrait. It had been a rum sort of day altogether. Started with a fellow bursting into the morning room before he’d even read
The Times
announcing one of your guests had butchered your butler or as near as dammit. Then old Hobbs had served the fruit before the dessert.
Hobbs wasn’t going to be up to Greeves’ standard. Things were going to be deuced uncomfortable at the Towers for a while. He’d say that for Greeves, everything ran smoothly. No discrepancies in the accounts, never bothered him with details, just kept things going. The Duke tried to conceive what could have made one of his servants disturb the calm that he assumed existed behind that baize door. In theory he knew that beyond that door lay a whole world of men and women, but as they were devoted, he assumed, to the cause of serving
him
they became an amorphous block of
them.
Now unwillingly he was forced to face the fact that one of them had apparently dropped a dose of something lethal into Greeves’ victuals. The thought of there being such hatred tucked away in his domain was disturbing. He turned his mind to pleasanter topics – Honoria. His brows darkened. No, that wasn’t pleasant at all. Where the devil was she? And what was she doing dancing with that nancified Prince fellow? Real ladies’ man. Why, he’d sometimes thought he had his eye on Laetitia. The door opened.

‘Why, George, how silly. Here you are. I’ve been looking for you all evening.’

He looked at her suspiciously.

‘Dammit, Honoria, you knew I was waiting for you. What the devil have you been doing with the Prince fellow?’

Her pretty eyes lit up with surprise. ‘Really, George, what language. Why, I was just waiting to see you. We must be careful, you know. We mustn’t be seen together too much. After all, you see enough of me when we’re alone.’ She giggled. She put her head on one side in that way that always made him putty in her hands.

‘Trouble is, I never know with you, Honoria,’ he grunted. She came close to him and looked up at him with those large appealing eyes.

‘Now, George—’

‘Tonight, Honoria?’ he asked hoarsely. ‘You’ll give me the usual signal?’

She smiled roguishly. ‘Ah, that would be telling, George, wouldn’t it?’

Lord Arthur guided Lady Jane through the intricate manoeuvres of his fifth dance with her that evening. He was pleased with himself. She was the best catch in the Home Counties, perhaps in England at the moment. Not much spare money, but couldn’t fault the breeding. And he didn’t have anything to fear from Walter Marshall.

‘What are you smiling at, Arthur?’ Lady Jane whispered, closing her eyes in the bliss of being so close again to this fascinating man, who admired everything about her.

‘Who wouldn’t smile, dancing with you, dear little thing?’ he replied, rather pleased with this turn of phrase.

In fact he was smiling with satisfaction at the future prospects of Lord Arthur Petersfield. He had little doubt about why the Duke and Duchess had invited him to join the select number of guests invited to Stockbery Towers for the whole of the three-week shooting party. After all, at forty-two years old, right regiment, right address, not bad-looking, member of the Prince of Wales’ set – and that still counted for something despite the Prince of Wales’ present unpopularity – he could hardly fail. And that baccarat scandal at Tranby Croft would soon die down, together with the rumours of his own involvement in it. Lucky that Continental trip had cropped up when it did. The smile left his face for a brief moment. Trouble was that once rumours started they spread to other areas. There were pressures, questions asked when you were forty-two and unmarried. It was time he married, and he could manage someone as docile as this little thing. A year or two’s attention . . .

‘Isn’t this murder exciting, Arthur?’ Lady Jane was
very young, and she hadn’t liked Greeves at all.

He looked at her patronisingly. ‘That’s servants’ business, Jane. Nothing to do with us at all. Don’t bother your pretty little head about it.’

He didn’t bother his about it much either. For, as yet, murder was contained behind the fastness of that green baize door.

Mrs Honoria Hartham laughed quietly. She was famous for her laugh. It had a chuckling, throaty quality that conjured up fantasies in men’s minds and had done so for over twenty years. Her Grace and Mrs Hartham entered a conspiracy of silence about their ages and, if their figures, like trees, bore any clue to their years, these were known only to their intimate ladies’-maids. Drawn to Laetitia in their common defiance of time, a bond hitherto reciprocated by Her Grace in gratitude at being released from wifely duties to His Grace, they were each other’s greatest friends.

‘Oh, Your Highness, now we mustn’t dance together again. It is just the teensiest bit naughty of you to insist on it.’ She tapped his wrist playfully with her fan.

Prince Franz was a little put out. He did not like being slapped playfully on the wrist and, moreover, he had not asked Mrs Hartham to dance but had been skilfully manoeuvred into a position where it would have been pointed to refuse. It was not his policy to offend ladies, and he capitulated. Yet he was equally upset at the thought of annoying Laetitia – no light matter, sure though he was of his hold over her. He dreaded warring women around him, a situation he never courted. It was time he married. He was in his late thirties. His Imperial Majesty the Kaiser Wilhelm II liked his envoys to be married, particularly his London envoys whom he was eager to mould into the model domestic pattern established by Albert the Good. This could not
fail to find favour with dear Grandmamma, Her Gracious Majesty Victoria. Appointed to the London embassy in 1888, the Prince had fought against marriage for marriage’s sake for some time, but the Kaiser had made his views quite plain in Franz’s last visit to Berlin. There was enough choice. His figure was stocky but his height made this less noticeable, and his romantic looks, so reminiscent of the Good Albert himself, ensured that there would be no lack of candidates for his hand. But he had this distaste for women squabbling. It was boring. Sex was sex, for children and home; that he accepted. Here in England he found more was expected – social coquetry, in which he found himself unfortunately accomplished – and successful. After all, one must conform.

‘Madame, I am the happiest man alive. Who would not steal your time when he knows himself unworthy of being granted it by favour.’

Honoria’s heart danced. This was romance indeed. A prince. Just what she needed to take Cecil’s most unwarranted suspicions away from her relationship with George. The Honourable Mr Hartham was a strict man of impeccable upbringing, a member of a highly religious and moral family. A family that had strongly disapproved of his marrying Miss Honoria Mossop with her kittenish ways and lack of family or money. They had been somewhat mollified when she obediently produced three impeccable and highly religious boys but scandalised when, duty done, she proceeded to join the fast Prince of Wales’ set. Her husband, spending a few weeks at their Scottish estate, inculcating a sense of feudal pride into his sons, had been convinced that no harm could come to his wife under the roof of one of the noblest of English peers, until a strange necklace turned up among Honoria’s jewels. She had explained it away and believed herself safe – until Greeves . . .
If only that man hadn’t seen George coming from her room that night.

She shivered. The Prince mistook it for excitement and a sense of doom overtook him.

She saw the shadow. ‘Come, Your Highness. You need not despair of my favour. You rate yourself too modestly.’ She chuckled.

The Marquise de Lavallée’s eyes twinkled. She hadn’t had such a good evening for a long time. At sixty-two she was forced to be an onlooker at most things – not, thank Heaven, those that mattered. But this evening there was a rare sport of a murder in a ducal house. The Duke and Duchess, whom she liked, had been ruffled and perplexed at this disturbance to the ordered precision of life. She doubted if they really appreciated what had taken place and wondered if, when they did, the tradition of centuries would guide them through this crisis as it had through so many others. Ah, these English. Instead of revelling in it, they would pretend it had not happened, sweep it below stairs, back behind the baize door. In addition to these interesting speculations, she had watched the pretty child Jane’s flirtation with the handsome, enigmatic Lord Arthur; and caught the look in that fascinating young man’s eye. Now if she were Lady Jane . . .

But no, she was merely an onlooker. Save in one respect. She looked possessively and with affection at Francois. Her private secretary who accompanied her everywhere, her
very
private secretary. These things were understood in France. But here in England, how shocked Her Grace would be at the thought of a thirty-three-year-old man creeping into the bed of an old woman of sixty-two, long since widowed. She would not think for a moment of her own sin in leaving the bed of her very much alive husband to
run to the arms of a lover, only to change him like the season’s fashions when the amusement palled. They did not understand in this cold England that the body of a woman was ageless, that it demanded love at seventy as it had at seventeen, that a woman of experience might have something to offer a shy, retiring young man in his thirties.

From his chair next to hers at one end of the ballroom he smiled at her now. That special smile that he used in their secret moments together.

‘Madame . . .?’

She sighed. Even in France it was not permitted to make public display. She tapped his hand gently with her ivory fan. ‘Monsieur Pradel,
je réfléchis.
This murder, will they suspect us, do you think?’

He turned liquid brown eyes on her in amazement. ‘Us, Madame?’

You know, Francois, to what I refer.’

His eyes were filled with anger. ‘To protect you, Madame –
ma vie
. . .’

That serious young man Walter Marshall sat patiently waiting for his waltz. He had spent a dutiful half-hour with his fellow guests (male), partaking of brandy and cigars while the ladies withdrew, and endured the usual ill-informed political discussion – not, as the ladies unfairly assumed, a discussion of the rival merits of Lillie Langtry and Lady Warwick as mistresses, past and present, to the Prince of Wales. It had been somewhat stilted in this house party owing to the presence of the Kaiser’s envoy Prince Franz and views about whether or not Germany had aggressive intentions towards England could not be fully aired.

Since then he had circled the floor with a bishop’s wife, sat out under the potted palms with young Mrs Herbert, danced in stately manner with the Marquise, and paid
exactly the right number of compliments to Her Grace. Her Grace was very charming to him, but he knew steel when he met it. He was not on the Duchess’ list of possible sons-in-law. Now he was sitting waiting for Jane. He had thought of her thus for a long time. Ever since he first met her four years ago, when she was still in the schoolroom, still somewhat pudgy, hair all over the place. She had been in a tree at the time, and, finding descent more perilous then ascent, had been compelled to seek help from the first person that passed. It had been he. He had obliged and, taking her for a servant as she was simply dressed in a print gown, had reprimanded her on the dangers of fair young ladies of tender years putting themselves in positions where they were obliged to expose far more of their (undoubtedly shapely) limbs than was modest. On its being pointed out that he was addressing the only daughter of the Duke himself, he replied, not a whit abashed, that in that event the lecture was even more deserved. Since that meeting he had not been in the least doubt that he was going to marry her.

He was twenty-seven, private secretary to Lord Medhurst, destined as Minister of Commerce in a future Liberal government. He was deemed to have a political future. To be an up-and-coming young man, despite the fact he had once been observed talking to that dreadful fellow Keir Hardie. Yet, since he showed no signs of realising the enormity of his actions, it was in time considered rather daring and public-spirited of him to speak with the head of that funny little Scottish Labour party.