The Scandalous Sisterhood of Prickwillow Place (26 page)

Kitty watched in dismay. After such a dreadful night, must they make matters worse with pointless bickering?

A small, muf
f
led sound reached her ears. She looked up to see Stout Alice bending over the fire, attempting to kindle a blaze. Her shoulders shook.

Dull Martha noticed her too, and knelt beside her. “Let me start the fire, Alice, dear,” she said. “You’ve had a trying evening. But don’t cry. Your song wasn’t
that
bad.”

“
Oh
.” The sound escaped Alice’s lips as a sob and a sigh, together. “I’m not upset about the song.” She sat on a divan and plied her handkerchief to her eyes.

Kitty rose and sat down next to Alice. “Aren’t you?” she asked.

Alice wiped her nose. “Maybe I am,” she said. “It was mortifying. But that isn’t the point.” They waited while her kerchief did its absorbent work. “Someone tried to kill me tonight. To
kill
me! And here you all are, squabbling like chickens.” She blew her nose. “Mercifully, I managed to survive, but a dear old man died in my place. I threw away my one and only chance to…”

“To what?” inquired Disgraceful Mary Jane.

Alice struggled to suppress another sob. “Never mind.” She shook her head. “None of it matters now.” She began to laugh bitterly through her tears.

Poor Alice,
thought Pocked Louise.
Strain has made her lose her mind.

“Do you want to know something?” Stout Alice asked the room. “I received a proposal of marriage tonight.”

Smooth Kitty spoke without thinking. “From Leland Murphy?”

Stout Alice shot her a withering look. Even in the dark room, Kitty felt its sting. Alice gestured toward her gray-powdered hair and makeup, and Kitty realized her horrible mistake.

“Don’t be daft, Kitty!” cried Disgraceful Mary Jane. “Look how poor Alice has suffered! Don’t torment her with thoughts of Leland Murphy.” She patted Alice on the shoulder.

“The proposal was from Admiral Lockwood.” Dour Elinor spoke up.

“Oh, you heard?” Alice said. “I thought you were too busy talking to Funeral Charlie.”

“Funeral Charlie!” Mary Jane threw her hands up in the air. “Someone, enlighten me quickly, before I pop.”

“His name is Charles Bringhurst.” Dear Roberta said. “He is the particular friend of Mr. Albert Bly. They’re students at the Barton Theological College.”

“Oh, hang the young men from the theological college!” Kitty
f
lung down her gloves. “They could be cardinals for all we care. Young men are the last things we should be thinking about. Don’t you see the predicament we’re all in?”

“You’re a fine one to talk.” Stout Alice glared at Smooth Kitty. “You spent plenty of time over in the picture gallery, chatting with your young stranger.”

Kitty felt sick. Alice was right, and Kitty felt painfully just how much so. She had abandoned Alice to her dreadful masquerade, to that galling musical performance, and to dangers that were only now too apparent, while Kitty
f
litted and
f
lirted—yes,
f
lirted!—with a young man. That he turned out to be Darling Julius now seemed a fitting punishment for her crimes.

Kitty found it hard to swallow, but she managed to do so, and spoke. “Alice,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry you had to sing tonight. I’m sorry you had to go as Mrs. Plackett and not as yourself.” A look passed between them, and Kitty knew that Alice knew she understood why. “Your friend … Lucy … Lucy Morris inquired after your health and sent you … her best regards for a speedy recovery from your headache.”

Alice nodded. Kitty could see she was mollified, partly. “Thank you for letting me know. That was very kind … of her.” She sighed.

Kitty took a deep breath. “More than anything,” she continued, “a thousand times more, I’m sorry you came within range of…” Kitty tasted bitterly her hollow assurance to the girls that they would all keep Alice safe, “within range of the poison.”

Alice shuddered, then bit her lip. “It’s not your fault, Kitty. You were right. We never should have gone. I was a fool to say we would.”

Kitty embraced Alice. “No, no, don’t say that,” she said. “No one could have foreseen this. Whether we’d walked into the trouble or not, trouble was on its way here. And,” she turned, “for shame, Mary Jane. Don’t vex Louise so.” Kitty was starting to feel rather like Mrs. Plackett herself. “You
did
pick a most unfortunate evening to misbehave.”

Disgraceful Mary Jane shrugged. “How was I to know everyone was guzzling poison?”

The other girls stared pointedly at her.

“Oh, all right,” Mary Jane sighed. She put on her dazzling smile for her youngest classmate. “Pax, Louise?”

Pocked Louise stuck out her chin. “Pax,” she said, with a forgivable touch of stiff superiority, “though what you see in that oily constable, I’ll never know.”

“Give it time, turtledove,” said Mary Jane. She seized Louise by the hand and pulled her onto the couch beside her to plaster a kiss on her cheek.

“Ugh!” Pocked Louise cried, and wiped it off.

Dull Martha’s questions could not wait for this tomfoolery to pass. “Does no one else find it peculiar,” she said, “that another Julius Godding should show up tonight at the social, when we’ve all been so interested in the one in India?”

Kitty swallowed a groan. “Martha. Dear heart. It’s not
another
Julius Godding. He is
the
Julius Godding from India. It’s Mrs. Plackett’s nephew, come unexpectedly for a visit.”

Dear Roberta took Martha’s hand. “So he isn’t a child.”

“Only, perhaps,” Alice said, “in comparison with Miss Fringle. She’s the one who led us to picture him as young.”

“He told me he hasn’t been in Ely in ages,” Kitty said.

Pocked Louise rose and paced the
f
loor. “He isn’t a child,” she repeated. “He stands to inherit all that Mrs. Plackett owns. And,” she said triumphantly, “he’s been here a few days.”

Kitty watched her curiously. “What makes you say that, Louise?”

Too late did Pocked Louise realize her mistake. She had no desire to confess to lying to the young man out by the road. “Well,” she said, “didn’t we see him yesterday in the chemist’s shop?”

Kitty tapped her chin thoughtfully. Mr. Godding had said he’d ventured by Prickwillow Road a day earlier and spoken to another girl, one who told him it wasn’t a school. Could that have been Louise? “My sister…” she mused aloud.

“That’s
right
, he
was
the fellow in the shop!” Disgraceful Mary Jane said. “I thought his face looked familiar.” She whacked Kitty with a sofa cushion. “You shameless thing. Always carrying on about me, while you’re setting up covert rendezvous with strange men you meet in shops!”

“I did no such thing!” Kitty exclaimed. “Meeting him was pure chance.”

Mary Jane winked at the others. “If you say so.”

“Never mind that,” Louise cried. “Don’t you see? We don’t know exactly when he arrived in town, but almost certainly,” she swallowed, “it wasn’t yesterday.”

“So?” inquired Alice. “What of it?”

Louise waved her notebook triumphantly. “Until we can prove he wasn’t near Ely on Sunday, we must place Julius Godding at the top of our list of suspects.”

“Oh!” Dear Roberta cried. “He’s so very young. With
such
nice tailoring, too.”

Kitty felt as though she might be physically ill. Louise was right, and she knew it. But in that moment she hated her for saying it.

“What do you think, Kitty?” Mary Jane inquired. “You spoke with him. Does he seem the murderous type?”

“And what, exactly, is the murderous type?” Kitty attacked the ebony buttons lacing up her collar. “I didn’t see an ax in his back pocket, if that’s what you mean. But don’t you see? Murderer or no, he’s here now in Ely with his mother. Even if he’s the soul of charity, he’s here. He exposes our lie, and this will ruin all. It’s the worst thing that could possibly have happened tonight.”

Dour Elinor shook her head. “Not the worst thing. We’ve been spared the worst thing.”

Dear Roberta leaned her head against Stout Alice’s shoulder. “Admiral Lockwood wasn’t so fortunate.”

Alice began to feel that looking as old and tired as Mrs. Plackett required no effort at all. She turned to Pocked Louise. “It was poison, wasn’t it, Louise? And only in my glass of punch?”

Dull Martha’s lower lip quivered. Kitty gave her a stern look, lest she commence her poison hysterics again.

Louise opened her handbag and pulled out a folded-up cloth napkin. She unfolded it to reveal a large red punch stain. “I’m not sure if this will be a large enough specimen to test, but I’ll try.”

Kitty put her arm around Louise’s shoulder. “Good girl, Louise,” she said. “Quicker thinking than doctors or policemen any day.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Louise said. “I’m fairly certain it is poison, and I think Doctor Snelling knows it, too. He can probably recognize symptoms. Admiral Lockwood had the same blotchy pinkness to his skin that Mrs. Plackett and Mr. Godding did. The spilled glass of punch had an almond smell, which would indicate cyanide.”

Smooth Kitty suppressed an inner quivering that had come over her limbs. “I nearly drank that glass of punch,” she said, “when I sat in your empty chair, Alice.”

Stout Alice dabbed gingerly at the makeup on her face. “Admiral Lockwood urged me to drink that punch,” she said, “right after I accepted his marriage proposal.”

“What a mercy you didn’t drink it,” said Disgraceful Mary Jane. “Wait.
You accepted him?
”

Alice looked up in surprise. “How could I not? He’s a wealthy man. I’d have to be a fool to refuse him.”

Pocked Louise looked visibly wounded. “Are you that ready to leave us?”

Smooth Kitty found she was no less stunned. “What about, er, Lucy Morris?”

Dull Martha sat up. “What, is she engaged to Admiral Lockwood, too?”

Stout Alice began to laugh. “You gooses.
I
didn’t accept his proposal. Mrs. Plackett did. She did because she would. Don’t you see? Of course she would. She’d take his money and send us packing back to our parents before you could say ‘Italian villa.’ So I had to say yes.”

“At least he died happy,” said Dear Roberta.

Stout Alice smiled a bit. “More than happy. I won’t tell you
what
he said to me after I said yes. It’s not decent to repeat. The wicked old salt.”

Disgraceful Mary Jane snickered. “Tell me later on, won’t you, love?”

They sat together in the dark, each occupied by their own private worries. Red
f
lickers from the fire danced with dark shadows across their faces. Despite the growing blaze, the room felt dank and chill.

Dear Roberta shivered. “Brr! Stir the coals, please, Elinor? I just can’t seem to get warm.”

Pocked Louise suddenly sat up straight. “Where’s Aldous?”

The girls looked at each other in alarm. How could they have failed to notice? Usually the scamp would greet them barking at the door when they returned home. Louise began calling his name, while they all fanned out across the dark house to search for him.

Each creak of the
f
loorboards sounded ghostly in Roberta’s ears. She held onto the chair rail in the hallway for reassurance and made her way to the schoolroom. They’d stowed Mr. Godding’s crates of belongings in here. Now the tops were open, and Mr. Godding’s effects were strewn everywhere.

“Kitty?” Dear Roberta’s voice quavered. She wished they’d gone two-by-two to search. “Did you open up Mr. Godding’s things?”

She backed out of the schoolroom and crept toward the dining room. Bare shelves in the china cabinet greeted her. Its doors were left wide open.

“Mary Jane?” she called. “Did you remove the dishes from the cabinet when you dusted in here?”

But her calls went unanswered. Louise’s echoing calls to Aldous drowned out other voices. Roberta heard one of the girls—she wasn’t sure who—let out a frightened cry.

She ran for the parlor with its protective fire. But the other girls weren’t gathering there. They were in Mrs. Plackett’s bedroom. Roberta groped along the hallway to join them.

The window to the back garden was smashed. Cold air blew in and waved the sheer curtains like fronds of seaweed. By candlelight, shards of glass glittered on the
f
loor like diamonds in new snow.

There on the
f
loor, by the foot of the bed, lay the still form of little Aldous.

CHAPTER 23

Pocked Louise sank to her knees. She reached out to touch Aldous. Her hands shook.

Dour Elinor knelt beside her and wrapped her arms around her. By the light of her little candle, the others saw a teardrop fall into Louise’s lap.

Stout Alice took a pillowcase from Mrs. Plackett’s bed and draped it over Aldous, then gently lifted him and laid him on the bed. She pressed her palms against his side and frowned.

“Louise,” she said. “I think he’s alive.”

Pocked Louise wiped her eyes furiously and hurried to the bed. The other girls gathered round.

“What’s happened to him?” Dull Martha’s voice trembled. “Who could have done this?”

A chill breeze blew in from the open window.

Louise’s scientific mind regained mastery of her emotions. “No blood,” she said. She palpated his head and side. “No sign of trauma.” She looked at the others. “Perhaps he was drugged.”

Kitty watched Louise with the little dog; she took in the
f
lapping curtain and the shards of glass. She looked at each of the girls, their drawn faces
f
lickering between candlelight and shadow. How dear to her they
all
were. How sweet it would have been, just the seven of them there, forever! And then, Julius Godding. Admiral Lockwood. Miss Fringle. Their prospects had shattered like this window. This thief put an end to all their hopes by robbing them, not of dishes and candlesticks, but of safety. It was so cruel and so arbitrary that greed should have such power, and all for a sack of silver and china.

But was it the thief who had stolen their safety? Or was it the murderer?