Ten Lords A-Leaping: A Mystery (Father Christmas) (26 page)

“Croquet is a metaphor for life,” Jane declared, lining up her next shot. “It occupies a middle ground between sophistication and savagery. Like the upper classes,” she whispered to Tom, then raised her voice: “I read that somewhere.”

“Then I am in the slough of despond.” Lucinda took another sip. “But—ha!” She laughed as Jane’s stroke failed to send the ball through the next wicket. “Tables may turn.”

“Tables may,” Jane responded with light humour as Lucinda
handed her glass to Max and glided over the grass to claim her ball.

“Everyone is lying … or maybe
dissembling
is the word.” Jane presented a furrowed brow to Tom as she resumed their earlier conversation. “Even me. Maybe I’ve lived in England too many years. You English are all great dissemblers, you know. Putting on false appearances, concealing facts or intentions or feelings under some pretense or other.”

“One of my mothers is American. That lets me half off the hook, perhaps.” Tom smiled. “Then what
are
you dissembling about?”

“I did see something from my bedroom window, Tom. Or at least I think I did. The thunder woke me from a dream, so wisps of the dream may have been clinging to me, but I thought I saw a figure down on the lawn near the parked cars. There’s a motion-sensor light there.”

“Your bedroom faces north?”

“Yes, towards the moor.”

“Did you recognise the figure?”

Jane lowered her voice to a near whisper. “Not at the time. I looked down and thought, oh, someone is checking the drainpipes—the kind of dopey thing you think when you’re half asleep. I remember seeing my father do it once, when I was girl, and we had a fierce storm in the middle of the night. But our house was tiny, and Eggescombe is huge—I have no idea how water drains, and the staff are on holiday anyway and wouldn’t check drains at night in any case.”

“Then …?”

“Hector. I’d forgotten what I saw, as you do when you awaken in the middle of the night, but then when Jamie and I
came across him in the Labyrinth in that white robe, I suddenly remembered what I thought I’d seen.”

“What will you do?”

“I don’t know. Is it anything meaningful?” Jane swung her mallet absently. “What I thought I saw—if I really saw anything at all—might have been some time before Olly returned to Eggescombe. I didn’t look at a clock—”

“The Met might have times for the storm activity on the moor.”

“—and I’m loath to drop Hector in the soup. He’s part of my husband’s family and they’ve had more than their share of trouble. Georgie’s baby strangled; Georgie, Oliver, and Lucy’s father falling and hitting his head playing tennis; Dominic’s father drowning on that insane solo round-the-world sailing venture; now Olly murdered. They’re not a family for dying in their beds. My husband’s a sweetheart, but my detecting efforts make him a little cross sometimes. He’s a bit old-fashioned when it comes to women’s careers, but my failure to be of any use over his brother’s murder years ago, when I had had successes elsewhere, I think has put him off my sticking my nose in.”

They paused to watch Lucinda’s shot, which ably took her green ball almost the width of the court and—amazingly—through the next wicket at a challenging angle.

“Ha! I told you tables would turn,” she called to Tom and Jane, taking her glass from Max for a quick sip before addressing the ball to take her bonus shot.

“And,” Jane frowned, “I find Lucinda’s story about spending the entire night with Dominic not entirely convincing, don’t you?”

Tom started. “Well …”

“She wasn’t in her room when I went looking for her this morning, but her bed had been slept in at some point. Besides, I know the room Dominic was assigned. It’s in what they used to call the bachelors’ corridor. The bed isn’t large, and there’s no daybed, as far as I can remember. They might have spent some time in his room after the party last night, I suppose, but all of it?” She shrugged. “They’re really thick as thieves, the two of them. Which is fascinating since Charlotte essentially abandoned Dominic’s father—and Dominic—to marry his brother. You’d think resentment would have thrived like weeds. Anyway, they were probably in Dominic’s room hatching a scheme of some nature.” A look of horror flashed across Jane’s face. “I didn’t mean—”

“I know.”

“Your turn, Tom,” Jane said as Lucinda’s ball failed to achieve further glory.

Gingerly, Tom planted his feet into a straddle before his ball, thinking that his ankle really did feel much healed. The shooting pains had almost vanished. But somehow the cast boot made his play awkward.

“Don’t put too much pressure on it yet,” Marguerite cautioned from the sideline.

“I thought Marve was having a pre-dinner nap,” Jane muttered, as Tom scored the wicket, but achieved nothing on the next. His orange ball piddled to a rest in the middle of nowhere.

“I used to be half decent at sport,” he said, as Max called from up the court, “Poor show, Mr. Christmas.”

“I’m not sure this is a sport,” Jane commented. “More a game.”

They watched Maximilian ably smack the ball through the wicket and claim a bonus shot.

“That’s better,” Jane observed of the boy’s play.

Miranda was next. Her ball missed the wicket.

“Oh!” Tom exclaimed, disappointed. “That’s not my girl.”

“She’s usually much better?”

“Much.”

“Where
do
we learn to do this?” Jane sighed.

“Learn to do what?”

“I think your daughter’s letting Max win.”

“Perhaps she’s simply being a gracious guest.”

“Perhaps. But have you considered that she may be developing an interest in boys?”

“May I keep my head firmly rooted in the sand?”

Dominic now returned to the court after retrieving his black ball from the hedge where it had earlier landed. His shot sent Miranda’s ball out of bounds.

“I remember letting a boy beat me at badminton when I was thirteen,” Jane mused. “My mother told me to never give less than my best. So I did, and boys were still interested anyway, so it was good advice.”

“Moments like this when I miss her mother.”

“Shall I say something to her? I could even say it
en français
. Few of them understand a word of French, even though some of them summer in France.”

“You’re too kind. But I’ll have a word.”

“I’m up.” Jane moved a few feet up the lawn and took a stroke. Her ball hit the upright, trapping itself in the jaws of the wicket. “Oh, damn.

“As well,” she continued, glancing back to Marguerite, her
mind seemingly tethered to their earlier conversation. “Something’s not square at the dower house. I think we both caught Marve’s …”

“Dissembling?”

“Yes, I think so—her dissembling about Roberto being with her last night, though he said at his studio this morning that he had worked all night on his sculpture.”

“Not
all
night.”

“No, Marve was insistent it wasn’t
all
night.” Her eyebrows shot up. “I don’t know what that means. But there’s something else, Tom. You recall I cleared the table in Marve’s kitchen?”

“Yes.”

“I cleared three place settings, not two. I don’t know if you noticed.”

“I noticed you noticing something.”

“There were plates and cups and cutlery for
three
. Marve suggested Roberto had breakfasted alone, after she’d gone into the village, which may be true. If so, who was the person Marve breakfasted with? Who else might have been at the dower house this morning? Who else was in Eggescombe Park so early in the morning?”

“One could ask.”

Jane flicked a worried glance at the dowager countess. “Marve is the last person I want to believe has any connection to this terrible death. It would be like finding out my mother-in-law is a cat burglar. I adore my mother-in-law. She’s the only one in Jamie’s family possessed of pure common sense. But,” she added after a pause, “she is highly protective of those she—”

“Come on, you two,” Lucy broke in, “pay attention. It’s your shot, Vicar.”

Tom glanced down the court to see Lucinda’s ball inches from the fourth wicket. He regarded his hedgehog, but his flamingo wasn’t up to the task. His orange ball veered pointlessly to one side.

“Oh, Daddy!” Miranda called.

“Sorry, darling, I’m not in top form today. Perhaps,” he murmured to Jane, “I should ask Lady Fairhaven to take my place.”

“She may have the same idea,” Jane remarked, gesturing with her head towards the boundary line where Marguerite was pushing herself out of her chair. But the dowager countess instead walked over to Gaunt and the drinks trolley to return an empty glass.

“And what of the Gaunts? Dissembling?” Tom asked as Max bungled his shot, stamped his feet, and shouted, “Oh, applesauce!”

“I don’t know them well enough and they seem good at blending into the woodwork. Your housekeeper is more readable, but of course she can’t have anything to do with this. And then there’s you, of course.” Jane cast him an enigmatic glance. “Women can read body language better than men, I think.”

“I’m not sure I—”

“Marve, are you joining us?” Jane interrupted.

“Tom,” Marguerite said, “you looked so uncomfortable, I thought I’d give you the chance to be spectator.”

Phrased that way, Tom felt he had no choice but to retreat from the field of battle and settle into one of the wicker chairs
on the sideline. The advantage was that non-players—with the evident exception of Lucinda—were invited to a drink by Gaunt. Tom’s eyes lingered over Lucinda as she moved across the dappled greensward and pondered Jane’s words. He felt vaguely caught out.

“Thank you,” he responded vaguely as a silver tray entered his field of vision. He lifted the glass fizzing with fresh tonic and glanced at Gaunt as the tray disappeared to the man’s side. He found himself curious about the man. It was true that he, Tom, had in Mrs. Prowse, his housekeeper, staff of sorts, but it was more in name than in reality. Madrun had her own income, derived from a considerable inheritance from a previous incumbent in the vicarage, occupied the entire top floor of the vicarage, and managed the household down to menu choices, with little reference to him. She did everything without a hint of deference—not that he expected any. “Mrs. Danvers with a Hoover,” his sister-in-law Julia, who had once lived in Thornford, had quipped. That was in a moment of pique—Madrun was nothing so formidable—but some small grain of truth held. There were times when Tom felt a little like the second Mrs. de Winter, never quite getting the hang of life at Manderley, convinced he’d violated some local custom or expression. Certainly Madrun never hovered with an expression of proper, impersonal charm, the way Gaunt was doing now, as if balancing his own dignity with the readiness to oblige was a skill learned long ago. You most often knew what Madrun was thinking, particularly when something engaged her lively curiosity.

“Where did you train, if I might ask,” he said conversationally. “A school in London?”

“My father was butler to the Earl of Rossell,” Gaunt replied.

“Then you more or less learned at your father’s knee,” Tom commented when the man failed to elaborate. “I didn’t think those opportunities existed much anymore.”

“They are few,” Gaunt allowed. “Most of my colleagues train in schools in London, as you say, or near; a few abroad.”

“I associate the Earls of Rossell with Shropshire, I think. Or is it Staffordshire? One of them was a botanist, an early champion of Darwin in the nineteenth century, if I remember my school lessons correctly.”

“Shropshire.”

“You grew up on Lord Rossell’s estate, I presume.”

“Longwood, yes.”

Tom sipped his gin. The conversation was getting a bit teeth-pull-y. He searched his mind for some sparkling badinage, but came up empty. He smiled weakly at Gaunt, who took this as a signal to withdraw.

“May I be of any other service?” he asked.

“Thank you, no.”

Gaunt slipped down to the drinks trolley. Tom returned his eye to the croquet court, to the figures moving about on the sun-streaked lawn like errant chess pieces, to the pleasant clicking sound of wooden balls kissing, and considered as the first of the gin entered his veins how elysian this would be in any circumstances but those of the last twelve hours. His mind flickered with images of those he knew who had died unkind deaths, but, sharpening as they were, he couldn’t stop his eyelids sinking—
I am tired!
—and sensing himself sailing through calm waters towards the sweet shores of the land of Nod.

But for a sudden shout of dismay.

The shoreline vanished. Something red and streaking met his startled eyes. It was a ball speeding over the lawn towards him. Reflexively, Tom leaned over his chair and caught the ball neatly in his hand. The others continued to play as Miranda trudged over, hair flopping against her shoulders, to retrieve her ball.

“Rough go, darling?” he said, running his hands over the smooth surface.

“I’m okay,” she replied, though her voice belied a little uncertainty.

“You’re sure? It would be nice if we were on our way to London. I’m sure this will all be resolved soon enough.”

He realised he was repeating the assurances of midmorning when he’d had a few moments alone with Miranda, before Maximilian and Jane assembled and they’d walked to the dower house. He had been disturbed in the breakfast room by Miranda’s blunt response to Lord Morborne’s death—“Was he murdered?”—worried that his little girl, whom he had removed to bucolic Devon from big bad Bristol after her mother’s slaying, was becoming inured to sudden and inexplicable death in close circumstances, as if such things were a fact of her new life. But she had evinced more curiosity than qualm over Lord Morborne’s death then, and now she seemed to be silently ruminating over something. But what? Miranda leaned toward him and whispered:

“Max says one of us strangled his uncle.”

He had his answer. The words jolted nonetheless. “Not you or me,” Tom protested. “Nor Mrs. Prowse, of course. And of
course not Maximilian. Or Lady Kirkbride. Or Lord Kirkbride, I’m certain.” But his failure to tick others off the list with equal alacrity seemed only to cement the boy’s hypothesis. Miranda regarded him with solemn eyes.