Dark Road to Darjeeling (27 page)

“Of course not,” I soothed.

“He paid to support his daughter, and when she died, he gave money to Miss Thorne for her education.”

“Why not to Lalita as well?” I asked before I could stop myself. “And Naresh?”

“Naresh has a gift for growing things. He will rise to be head gardener here in time, and that is an excellent prospect for any young man,” she said firmly. “Lalita was brought up to be a cook, like her mother. It is all she has ever wanted, and she is content it should be so. She and Naresh know their places. Miss Thorne was different, right from the beginning. She announced when she was three that she wanted an English name, so her father told her she could call herself Elizabeth. It came to my father’s notice, and he began to take an interest in her. When he discovered she was an unnaturally bright girl, he made arrangements for her to be educated formally. He thought she could teach, perhaps in a good school in Calcutta.”

“But she could not stay away from this valley,” I put in.

Miss Cavendish grimaced. “From this valley or from the Peacocks?”

“You think she has designs upon the estate?”

Miss Cavendish put her head to the shelf, resting it for a moment. When she lifted it, her nose was rimmed in pink, rather like a rabbit’s. “I do not know what to think. I only know that she means trouble. And that sooner or later, everything here must change. Oh, why must it change!”

At that, Miss Cavendish thrust a bundle of linen into my hands and fled the cupboard, a harsh sob breaking from her throat as she left. I sighed and began to count out bedsheets, wondering if I would ever learn to govern my tongue.

After luncheon I decided to pay a visit to the Pennyfeathers. I longed for a
tête-à-tête
with Miss Thorne, and I had little doubt I could pry information out of her now that I knew her secret. With the Pennyfeathers themselves excluded from Freddie’s murder on the grounds that they had not realised he had taken the incriminating album, I hoped to narrow the field of possible murderers. Harry still held the likeliest position in my mind, and perhaps a visit with his intended bride could winnow some facts that would aid me in my investigation.

Lalita opened the door to me, and I greeted her warmly. “Lalita, I have not had the chance to compliment you on the delicious food you provided us after Miss Phipps passed.” The funeral baked meats had been extraordinary. Miss Cavendish might not approve of native cuisine, but Lucy had had no such scruples, and the result had been a table laden with scrumptious things that managed to be neither entirely British nor entirely Indian, but rather the best parts of both.

She bowed her head, smiling. “I am pleased to have given pleasure, memsa.”

A sudden horrifying thought struck me. “Lalita, before Lady Eastley departed so hastily, she did pay you, did she not?”

“Oh, yes, memsa. Memsa Eastley was quite thorough about such things.”

“Excellent. I wondered if Miss Thorne might be about today. I wanted to speak with her.”

“Alas and alack, she is abed today and quite unwell. I fear she can see no one.”

“Really? I am so sorry to hear that. What ails her?”

“A terrible and ferocious headache,” she said promptly.

“Perhaps I might see Miss Primrose then,” I told her.

She bowed her head again and asked me to wait. After a moment she returned. “Miss Primrose is in the studio with the memsa.”

I had hoped to find Primrose alone, but I followed Lalita obediently.

“Lady Julia!” Cassandra cried. “I am so glad you have come. I have just today mounted your photograph and must know what you think of it.”

She had clearly been in the midst of a session, for Primrose was standing, fully-draped this time in deepest black robes and holding a papier-mâché sword. “Mama, are we quite finished?” she asked in a bored voice.

“Yes, yes, I have quite enough poses of you as Andromache,” she said, flapping a hand. “You may change.”

Primrose disappeared behind the screen, but not before she had unpinned the shoulder of her robes, permitting them to slip to her waist.

“Is she not a glorious example of young womanhood?” Cassandra asked, smiling at her daughter. “Sitting ripely in the first flush of maturity, so nubile, so fresh!”

She would have enthused awhile longer, I feared, so I set a deliberate smile upon my lips. “You said you have my photograph?”

“Ah, yes!” She went to the workbench and returned with a stiff pasteboard frame. Within it was the image of Portia and me, draped in Grecian robes and clinging together, the silk birds dotted artistically. It ought to have been silly and overly sentimental, but it was not. Something about the image was deeply affecting. There was genuine affection there, and a ribbon of grief running through the devotion, as if we had weathered storms together, but had been propped by our affection for one another.

Portia
was
my prop, I reflected. She had supported me through my widowhood, guiding me to become the woman I was, encouraging my relationship with Brisbane when I would have let the affair drift along like a rudderless ship. She was my rock, my bulwark, and as I looked at the beautiful face of my sister, I felt sudden tears prick my eyes.

To my horror, Cassandra Pennyfeather saw them as well. She put a long, slender arm about my shoulders. “You feel it, do you not? The soul that I capture in my work? I am an artist, Lady Julia. There is no human emotion I fear.”

“Including desire?” I asked.

The suddenness of the enquiry might have thrown anyone less self-possessed. But Cassandra merely laughed. “Do you mean the photographs I took of Primrose? The album has turned up then—what relief! Those photographs were some of my best work and I was frantic when they went missing.” She cocked her head, an amused smile curving her lips. “They were art, Lady Julia. Surely you must appreciate that—a woman of the world, of such experience!”

“Surely you can appreciate the unorthodoxy of the images,” I returned.

She shrugged. “What is orthodoxy? What is the norm? What is acceptable? As I say, I am an artist. I reject such things. They are bourgeois. And I have taught my children to reject them as well, as much as I have been able,” she added. She gave me a rueful smile. “My husband is a modern man, but even he does not share my ambition to be an iconoclast.”

“You could hardly expect him to,” I pointed out. “He is a clergyman after all. Orthodoxy is their stock in trade.”

She laughed again. “Too true. Ah, here is Primrose!” The girl had emerged from the screen, dressed in her more conventional clothes, but with her hair still unbound. It fell almost to her waist, rippling and lovely.

“Primrose understands me,” Cassandra said. “She knows what it means to feel deeply about things, so deeply that one cannot bury it beneath layers of whalebone and starched taffeta.”

Primrose gave her mother an indulgent smile. “You are lucky to have one another,” I told them truthfully. “My mother died when I was very young. I should have liked to have known her.”

Cassandra returned the photograph to the bench then and Primrose turned to me. “You saw the photographs that Mama took? What did you think of them?” she asked, almost challengingly.

“They were lovely and shocking, and in the wrong hands they could be very dangerous.”

She gave a short, sharp laugh. “I am not afraid of that,” she said, and I believed her. The young are never afraid of the right things. That is the failing of youth.

“I am sorry to have missed your governess. I had hoped to speak with her.”

Primrose flapped a hand. “I am not. I would far rather pose for Mama than learn sums or improve my conversational French. I am sorry she is unwell, though. I do not like tummy troubles,” she added, looking for a moment like the child she almost was.

“Tummy? I thought she was abed with a headache.”

“No,” Primrose said, wrinkling her brow. “I am quite certain she said she wanted nothing to eat because she could not keep anything down.”

I pondered this. “Ah, well, perhaps I misunderstood Lalita. I will bid you farewell then. Thank you, Cassandra, for showing me the photograph. It is exceptional.”

Cassandra, who had got engrossed in her work merely waved at me, and Primrose went to lounge upon the sofa in the studio, taking up a French novel the likes of which I was quite certain Miss Thorne would not approve.

I left the studio, and was quite happy to find that no one was about. I glanced up and down the corridors, but I was entirely alone, and I lifted my skirts into my hands and hastened up the stairs. I passed the second floor, certain the governess would not be permitted rooms with the family, and did not stop until I had reached the top floor. I surveyed the long corridor and found that all the doors stood open save one. I crept near, pressing my ear to the door. I listened, but the only sound I heard was the beating of the blood in my ears.

Just as I was about to knock, the door was jerked open and I fell inside the room. Miss Thorne stood over me, dressed in a wrapper and wearing a sober expression. She reached down and offered me a hand which I took gratefully.

“I am sorry to disturb you whilst you are unwell,” I began, but even as I said the words I realised she was not unwell, or at least not physically. There was a tautness to her that I had not seen before, a brittleness to her usually graceful movements.

She gave me the only chair and perched herself upon the edge of the narrow bed. It was a symptom of her distress that she spoke first. The Miss Thorne of old would have waited serenely for me to begin the conversation.

“Why have you come, my lady?”

I paid her the compliment of the truth. “I know Harry Cavendish hopes to make you his wife, and I know you have refused him.”

With this, she burst into tears and I went to sit beside her, offering her my handkerchief. A good cry was often the prelude to frank discussion, so I made no attempt to stifle her sobs. I merely waited and occasionally patted her hand and after awhile her weeping subsided to a few gulping breaths.

“I am s-s-so sorry,” she stammered. “I do not know what came over me.”

“I do,” I said coolly, removing myself back to the chair. “You are in love with Harry Cavendish, but you will not marry him because you are afraid he murdered Freddie.”

She gaped. “How can you know that?”

I gave her a patient smile. “Because I am a woman and I recognise the signs. Miss Cavendish thinks you have designs only upon the estate, but she is entirely wrong. Oh, you are a young woman with a very healthy sense of yourself. You would find it deeply satisfying to rise to the challenge of helping to manage the Peacocks, I think. But the attraction for you is Harry himself.”

“I could do much good,” she temporised. “The children need a school. I know I could persuade Harry to build one.”

“A noble ambition,” I agreed. “But he cannot give you a school if he is not master of the estate, and he cannot be master so long as Jane Cavendish’s child might be a boy.”

Her shoulders trembled for a moment, but with a great effort of will, she mastered her emotion. “Harry’s life is in limbo right now, as is the very future of the estate.”

“And you are in a rather delicate position,” I reasoned out. “If you agree to marry him now, you risk him never owning a
hectare of his own should Jane have a son. You would be entirely dependent upon the whims of another, and let us be frank, as the mother of the heir, Jane could turn the pair of you out whenever she chose. She would not, of course,” I added hastily, “but there would always be the shadow of possibility over your heads. Hardly conducive to a happy marriage.”

She lowered her eyes and I went on. “Of course, if you wait until Jane bears a girl to accept him, you will seem mercenary, as if you cared more about the inheritance than the man himself. And over it all must hang the question of how far Harry would go to bring the Peacocks within his grasp.”

“I lie awake at nights, thinking of it,” she said in a dull, flat voice.

“Amongst other things,” I murmured.

She did not blush. “Yes, I meet Harry sometimes. I have let him kiss me, but no more. I am not my grandmother. I know what happens to women who do not guard themselves. And I should never have kissed him. It confuses me.”

“And that confusion has clouded your mind and your judgement,” I finished. “That is why you went to Brisbane, to ask him about making inquiries about Harry.”

“I hated myself for it. But I had heard something of Mr. Brisbane’s reputation, and I knew he could be discreet. I asked him, but he would not make inquiries for me. He said it would not be proper considering your relationship with the Cavendish family.”

Brisbane thought quickly on his feet, I reflected. Telling Miss Thorne that he could not investigate Harry on the grounds that he was already investigating Freddie’s murder would have been impossible. Claiming consanguinity to the subject by way of marriage was the next best thing.

“Yes, well. I am sorry he was not able to ease your mind.”

She spread her hands. “I am left with only my doubts. And even if he were to be proved innocent of the deed, how could I accept him, knowing that I thought him capable of such a thing?”

“My dear Miss Thorne, you are far too hard upon yourself. My husband believes most people are capable of murder with the proper motivation. I could work out a case against you, for example.”

At this she looked aghast. “That is not possible.”

“Isn’t it? Perhaps you wanted to control your grandfather’s estate, perhaps you believe you and your siblings have been cheated of your inheritance. You have great natural beauty. It would not be difficult to inveigle Harry with your charms. The only person who would then stand between the three of you and the estate would be Freddie. And how did Freddie die?
By the infected bite of your mistress’ snake
. Were you there when Percival bit Freddie? Could you have agitated the little reptile, goading him to bite Freddie? Could you have later offered the weakened Freddie some vicious substance to finish the deed? Of course. And I daresay as a young woman of spirit and imagination, you could think of a dozen ways to have administered the poison.”

The look of horror dawning upon her face would have been all the proof required to her innocence. She put a hand to her neck as if feeling the noose tighten.

“It is wickedness. You cannot believe it.”

“I do not, as it happens,” I told her, smoothing my skirts. “I believe you are wholly innocent of the deed. Of course, I have been wrong about these things before,” I admitted. “More than once, in fact. But your excessive worry over Harry tells me your own conscience is clear. And I can only tell you to compose yourself and go about your regular duties. I believe the truth will
be revealed soon, and I will hope as fervently as you do that it will be no impediment to your happiness.”

I rose and went to the door, turning back for a moment. “Miss Thorne, are you the only one who suspects Freddie was murdered?”

She shrugged. “I believe so. I have not heard it spoken of.”

“Then you must be very careful not to betray your suspicions. If Freddie was murdered, then his killer has got away with it so far. He will not like to know that you have your doubts. It could be dangerous to be you.”

With that, I left her, feeling rather sorry for her and regretting I could not offer her some proof of her beloved’s innocence. The truth was I rather liked Harry for the murder myself. He had the best motive, perfect opportunity, and the competence that such a murderous scheme would require. Freddie’s had not been a murder of flamboyance or extravagance. It had been quietly, methodically ordered, and as such I liked the careful mind of Harry Cavendish for the deed.

I only hoped Miss Thorne would not be too shattered if he was proven guilty, I reflected as I scurried silently through the house. I fled through the garden unseen, and breathed a little more easily when I reached the road. If I were discovered there, I could claim I had tarried to take in the Reverend’s orchids or some beauty along the path and my errand in the attics would never be discovered.