The Scandalous Sisterhood of Prickwillow Place (30 page)

“Mr. Godding and Miss Barnes must have used some system of communicating about which cutlet to choose,” said Kitty. “It doesn’t really matter how.”

Pocked Louise snapped her fingers. “Oh, but we know that, too,” she said. “Roberta, dear, will you fetch for me the little urn on the sideboard in the dining room?”

Dear Roberta tiptoed across the parlor, shrinking at her awareness of all the people watching her. She returned in a moment with the rough stonework urn and handed it to Louise.

“This is where we placed all the items we found in Mr. Godding’s and Mrs. Plackett’s pockets, the night they died,” Louise said. She retrieved a small scrap of paper from the bottom and held it up to the lamplight. “This. This bit of paper, with what we thought was a scribble or an inkblot on it. That scribble was your drawing, wasn’t it, Barnes?” She held it closer to their former housekeeper, who kept her lips pressed tight. “The triangular shape. It’s a piece of veal. The one Mr. Godding was supposed to eat. The one that was free from poison?”

“Mr. Godding took the largest piece, like he always did,” said Stout Alice. She added, as an afterthought, “It always struck me as just the piggish sort of thing he would do.”

“But
this
time,” said Pocked Louise, “it wasn’t greed—or I suppose I should say, it was greed on a much larger scale—that made his choice. He had Barnes’s sketch to guide him. The veal that looked like that,” here she indicated the paper Constable Quill had taken from her, “was the one she had not poisoned.”

“Wrong.” Amanda Barnes spat the word.

Constable Harbottle turned to face her. “What was it then?”

Constable Tweedy reentered the room. “There’s some sort of laboratory in there, all right, though what it aims to do I couldn’t begin to say.”

“Never mind, Tweedy. Go on, please, Miss Barnes. You were about to tell Miss Dudley how wrong she was. What did the paper illustrate, if not the unpoisoned veal?”

“Nothing.” Amanda Barnes sagged back onto her couch. “I don’t know anything about that scrap of paper.”

Pocked Louise let out a laugh. “Oh, I see,” she said. “The picture indicated the
poisoned
piece, if we must split hairs.”

Miss Barnes glared at her, but said nothing.

“Hm.” Constable Quill appeared in genuine danger of running out of notebook. “Miss Dudley. If only one piece of veal was poisoned, how did they both die?”

Disgraceful Mary Jane, who now saw herself as a culinary expert, since baking her burnt Mansfield muffins, answered before Louise could. “Martha has already explained that,” she said. “She roasted the cutlets together in the oven, in a pan with some water, before frying them. That’s how the cyanide would have spread, through the water and juices in a shared pan.”

“Foolish girl,” said Barnes.

Dear Roberta’s face lit up. “And remember, Louise, when I said that one veal specimen made your testing water more blue than the other?”

Pocked Louise grinned. “That’s right, Roberta. The pieces were unequally poisoned. Mrs. Plackett’s piece got the full dose, then some of it seeped into the other cutlet.”

Constable Tweedy was puzzled. “Blue?”

Dr. Snelling sighed. This whole affair appeared to bore him. “Prussian blue,” he explained. “Cyanide.”

Smooth Kitty wondered aloud. “Perhaps that’s why Mr. Godding took longer to die.”

Disgraceful Mary Jane would have none of this theory. “Perhaps it was because he was an evil rat, persuading his infatuated accomplice to poison his sister so he could inherit her money. And what money, at that? Other than this house and that elephant and a few dishes and trinkets, precious little.” She tossed back her pretty head, and Kitty noted that Constable Quill seemed to momentarily forget his notebook. “You’re a fool, Barnes, if you think he would actually have married you. You might have been next in line for a special veal dinner.”

Amanda Barnes swung her legs off the couch and rose somewhat shakily to her feet. “You take that back, Miss Mary Jane,” she said, pointing a finger at that young lady. “I won’t be sassed around by you lot anymore! You take back what you said about Aldy Godding. And about me.”

Disgraceful Mary Jane’s eyes
f
lashed. “I shall not! You
are
a fool to have trusted him. And he’s fool enough to have died from his own poison. The wretch didn’t deserve to live. Divine justice will prevail over fiends like him.” She clapped her hands. “Oh! I see it now. Remember, girls, all that cooing we heard in the back garden that night?”

Constable Quill wiggled his finger in one ear. “Pardon me. Did you say ‘cooing’?”

“That’s right, Freddie. Coo! Coo! Like that.”

“Coo, coo.” Constable Quill looked, for a moment, like a man regretting his choice of profession, but he plowed onward. “And you say you heard someone cooing in your back garden on Sunday night?”

“Exactly. It was Barnes, hoping her precious Mr. Godding would come outside and tell her all was clear, Mrs. Plackett was dead, and we girls had been sent packing.” Mary Jane folded her arms across her chest in triumph. “And to think, Henry, I was so certain it must have been
you,
cooing for me to come outside to see you!”

Farmer Butts’s eyebrows knit together. “How’s that again?
Henry?
Are you chasing after these girls? Do you have something to tell me?”

The farmer’s son cringed. “No, sir. Not a bit of it.” He sent a pitiable glance in Dull Martha’s direction.

“He
would
have married me,” Amanda Barnes cried. “He told me. Right here in this room, he promised me. I know in my heart, he meant it truly. I was going to be a lady, with a parasol, and live respectably, and boss my own servants around! I could take care of my little mother proper. Aldy was going to buy me a ring, a golden one, with a ruby in it, just as soon as…”

“As he’d paid off the fortune he owed me?” Dr. Snelling sneered.

“As soon as, apparently, he’d gotten his hands on Mrs. Plackett’s money,” said Constable Quill.

“Which,” interrupted Reverend Rumsey, who rose eagerly to his feet, “is now bequeathed in large part to Saint Mary’s, as her other heir, Mr. Godding, is now dead.”

“Not so,” said Stout Alice. “Isn’t that right, Barnes?”

The former daily woman shook with rage. She pointed at Alice as though she was still confusing her for Mrs. Plackett.

“She threatened to take Aldy’s name out of her will after they quarreled,” she cried. “Who knew the witch would up and do it before the weekend was over?”

Constable Quill sighed. In the lamplight he began to look like an older, wearier man. “Will? What’s this about a will?”

Amanda Barnes drooped and collapsed back onto the couch. “She left her fortune all to Julius,” she said. “She got to her solicitor before we could stop her.”

Julius Godding’s eyes grew wide, but he said nothing. Reverend Rumsey sat down with a thump.

Stout Alice nodded her head. “Barnes could only know that, Officer, if she stole the new will, which Mr. Wilson’s office delivered here on Monday morning. Tonight isn’t the first time she’s been prying and snooping about the house, searching, I suppose, for Mr. Godding himself.”

“Or for the money,” said Dr. Snelling.

“That’s what I still don’t understand!” cried Kitty. “What money? Doctor Snelling believes there’s a fortune here, or he and Mr. Rigby wouldn’t have burgled the place. Barnes and Mr. Godding believed there was a fortune, large enough to murder for. But I swear, I’ve been through every ledger, every file and drawer, every speck of paper in this house. There isn’t a spare farthing, I assure you.”

Constable Quill snapped his notebook shut. “Makes it all the more ironic, doesn’t it? To murder for nothing?” He nodded toward Constable Tweedy, who unlatched the handcuffs from his belt and slipped them over Amanda Barnes’s wrists.

Miss Barnes submitted to the handcuffs while her face streamed with tears. “Oh, Aldy, Aldy,” she whispered. “We were so close.”

Pocked Louise and Smooth Kitty exchanged a private glance. She’d actually loved him, then? Impossible though it was to conceive, there was a woman whose heart throbbed with affection for Mrs. Plackett’s greasy, odious rascal of a younger brother. She would spend the rest of her days knowing she’d poured the poison that had killed her love—even if, as both girls suspected, the entire nefarious plot had been his idea.

“What I don’t understand, Miss Barnes,” asked Mrs. Godding, “is why you poisoned Admiral Lockwood’s punch tonight.”

Miss Barnes blinked. She gaped at Mrs. Godding. “You said he was all right. You said not to worry. He was
tough as an old oak, you said
!”

Constable Quill replied with clipped words. “Admiral Lockwood died of poison.”

Barnes’s gaze at Mrs. Godding dripped with betrayal.

“You were in shock,” Julius’s mother said. “I wanted to spare you further pain.”

“You needn’t have bothered,” said Constable Quill. “Clearly, Miss Barnes volunteered in the kitchen tonight to poison the drink. Isn’t that right?”

Miss Barnes set her jaw tightly.

All the fight went out of his captive. She nodded toward Stout Alice. “She killed my Aldous. She threatened to throw him out in the garden. Then, that’s where a grave appeared.” She began, quietly, to cry. “The stupid old admiral drank from her glass. The poison was meant for her.”

CHAPTER 28

The girls clustered together in a forlorn little knot and watched as the officers, with the help of the junior and senior Buttses, shackled Dr. Snelling and brought him to the police wagon. The machinery of official business and transport had taken over, leaving the girls feeling like spectators in their own home. Though it would not, Kitty thought bitterly, be their home for much longer.

Kitty’s gaze shifted to the forlorn figure of Amanda Barnes, small and shackled, seated on the couch. Fury and pity, horror and remorse, swirled together in Kitty’s heart. Amanda Barnes had cooked their breakfast eggs, washed their beds, dusted their desks and shined their shoes. She’d been as much a part of the rhythm of their daily lives as afternoon toast with tea.

And now this.

Kitty wondered what, if anything, might have saved Barnes. She remembered the thousand ways in which she and the other girls had taken Barnes’s service for granted. They hadn’t been rude or beastly, not especially, but at times they’d treated her like she wasn’t there. She was, after all, their domestic.

Could more kindness from them have prevented this?

Neither justice nor reason could ever suggest that their uneven kindness had
caused
this. But as for what might have happened differently, no one would ever know.

Kitty thought of Mrs. Plackett in her abandoned grave. She was glad their garden burial would be undone. They’d worked so hard to hide it, but now she was glad Mrs. Plackett would finally have a proper coffin and burial service. She deserved so much more than that. Kitty had never felt any warmth for her headmistress. Dying, it must be said, had caused Kitty to see her with new eyes.

Pocked Louise’s thoughts held much to occupy her as well. Her heart thrummed faster with the private thrill of victory. She had done it! She, youngest of them all, solved the puzzle. She doubted Disgraceful Mary Jane seriously thought she could, back when she nominated Louise to be their—what was the name again? Spurlock Jones? But victory, Louise noted, was bittersweet. True, she’d saved her friends from a cloud of suspicion, and justice would now be done. But their time together, she was certain, was at its end. It made her victory a hollow one. Losing the other girls broke her heart.

“What will happen now, Kitty?” whispered Dull Martha.

“I don’t know, dear heart,” Kitty replied. “The world’s gone upside-down.” She took Martha in her arms and kissed her forehead. The others followed suit, leaning on each other and linking elbows. Even Dour Elinor put her arm around Pocked Louise, whose eyes were red and brimming.

“Is this the end of our sisterhood?” Louise whispered.

“It mustn’t be,” Dull Martha said. “We can’t allow it to be.”

Smooth Kitty pressed her lips together. “I’m not sure we have the power to stop it.”

“Poor Barnes,” Alice whispered.

“Poor Mrs. Plackett,” said Dear Roberta.

“Louise,” said Disgraceful Mary Jane, “I shall never torment you about your drab clothing again so long as I live. You were marvelous tonight. The youngest, smartest sleuth in all of Cambridgeshire!”

Louise tried not to smile, but her twitching lips betrayed her.

The police returned for their next prisoner after taking Dr. Snelling to the wagon.

“Wait.”

The voice was Mrs. Godding’s. Amanda Barnes looked up in some surprise.

Mrs. Godding took a deep breath. “Miss Barnes. I believe you were very much prevailed upon by my brother-in-law. I will speak to the judge on your behalf and express these thoughts to him.” She paused, and shook her head. “All the same, to take your mistress’s life … Was she unkind to you?”

Amanda couldn’t meet her gaze. “Yes, ma’am, but … That is to say, in the way any mistress sometimes is.”

“And the poor admiral, tonight. Miss Barnes, I don’t know what to hope for on your behalf, or for your immortal soul. But I will speak my mind, and I will pray for you.”

“Come along, Miss Barnes,” ordered Constable Tweedy. “It’s time to leave.”

The door closed behind them, and soon wagon wheels crunched over gravel. Mrs. Godding sank into a chair and buried her face in her hands. Julius stood close by and rubbed her shoulder.

As he did so, he turned and looked searchingly at Smooth Kitty.

How you must despise me now,
she thought.
What a terrible thing I’ve done to you. And
I
am the one to blame. This whole charade was my idea.

She tried to console herself. After all, she’d only properly met him tonight, and she was sure never to see him again once this business was behind them. What difference did it make?

Constable Quill entered the room once more.

“Well, Freddie,” said Disgraceful Mary Jane, “you’ve done splendidly tonight, haven’t you? There’ll be new stripes on your uniform soon, I’ll be bound. A burglar, a bookie, and a murderer all in one night. They’ll be promoting you to Scotland Yard in no time.”