Death at Bishop's Keep (8 page)

Aunt Jaggers's ill will was so extraordinarily plain that it momentarily robbed Kate of speech. But Aunt Sabrina spoke for her, in an odd tone that was at once a rebuke and a conciliation.

“You have indeed made yourself clear, sister. But I trust that your opinions are not entirely fixed, and that you will allow our brother's daughter to demonstrate her own character and abilities.” The words were reasonable enough, but beneath them there was an undertone of anger held back, as if Aunt Sabrina wished to say more, but was reluctant, perhaps even fearful. What lay between the two sisters? Whatever it was, it made one angry, the other apprehensive, and each nettled with the other.

Kate felt it was time to ask the other questions that pressed on her mind. “I would like to know about my duties,” she said to Aunt Sabrina, “and why it was I whom you chose to be your secretary. You no doubt could have hired someone nearby and saved yourself the considerable expense of my travel, not to speak of the uncertainty of hiring someone sight unseen.”

With a quick glance at her sister, Aunt Sabrina began to speak carefully, as if she were picking her way along a thorny path through a subject that had been the cause of considerable disharmony between them. But beneath the restrained words, Kate heard a note of unrestrained excitement and guessed that Aunt Sabrina was talking about something in which she had a passionate interest.

“I have recently been appointed historian of a particular ... society. My responsibilities involve the writing of a history of the society and the keeping of a detailed and confidential record of... certain activities peculiar to the association.”

Kate could have wished for greater specificity, especially where the curious “confidential record” and the tantalizing “certain activities” were concerned. But she contented herself for the moment with Aunt Sabrina's answer.

Aunt Jaggers, however, was not content. “You should tell this young woman that it is your intention to drag her into that spiritualist taradiddle of yours,” she said snappishly. “That Order of whatever-it-is.”

“The Order of the Golden Dawn,” Aunt Sabrina said distinctly. Her fingers went, unconsciously, Kate thought, to the scarab pendant at her throat.

“Yes.” Aunt Jaggers sniffed. “I am sure that when Niece Ardleigh is informed of your real purpose for hiring her, no doubt she will refuse to be associated with your deviltry. Egyptian magic—blasphemy!”

Kate shifted, her interest suddenly heightened by these unexplained hints. In what sort of spiritualist taradiddle was Aunt Sabrina engaged? How had she become interested in Egyptian magic?

Aunt Sabrina ignored the intrusion and continued calmly. “This work, which I will explain in detail at a later time, is not especially onerous, nor will it encompass all your hours. But it does require intelligence, attention to detail, and a clear facility in writing, as well as a mature, judicious discretion.” She smiled gravely. “These are virtues, Kathryn, in which I am told you excel.”

Kate felt that she could meet Aunt Sabrina's qualifications without difficulty. But she had been given only part of an answer.

“Thank you for your confidence,” she said. “But surely you might have discovered these virtues in any number of young women close at hand.”

“Perhaps.” Aunt Sabrina returned her direct look. “But you can operate a typewriter, and you read and write German. This combination would have proved most difficult to find, even in Colchester. Furthermore, I have begun to feel that it is important to become acquainted with
you,
Kathryn. While the work you will do is certainly important to me, it is your person in which I have the greater interest.”

“I see,” Kate said, more softly. Aunt Sabrina's eyes had saddened and her gaze had gone to her brother's photograph. For a moment there was silence, as Kate reflected on the fact that the sins of the fathers could often be visited upon the daughters as well. Perhaps Aunt Sabrina hoped to make up to her niece and herself what George and Thomas Ardleigh had denied them both. Watching the older woman, something in her warmed and she was glad she had come—not for the sake of Beryl Bardwell's grand adventure, but because, in some way Kate did not quite understand, she felt that Aunt Sabrina had called her home.

Aunt Jaggers broke the silence.
“Your
emphasis, Sabrina, may be upon the ...” She coughed. “Familial relationship. As I am responsible for the household, mine must rest upon practical matters. The matter of employment, for instance.” She turned to Kate. “You will talk with me soon about what is expected of you during your stay here, however short or long it may be. For the moment, I will simply say that we keep the Sabbath strictly, and that I expect daily attendance at prayers and weekly at chapel. At
chapel,”
she repeated meaningfully. “And, not least, novel reading is not permitted of the servants.”

Aunt Sabrina spoke quietly, but though her rebuke was muted, her anger was plain in her short reply. “I hardly think your belowstairs regimen should affect Kathryn's reading habits, Bernice. And her religious practices are a concern proper only to God and herself.” She turned to Kate. “You and I can continue our discussion of your duties in the morning.”

Kate nodded, glancing from one to the other. She could read in their faces the concealed truth of the relationship: that Aunt Jaggers hated her sister and that Aunt Sabrina both disliked and feared Aunt Jaggers. It was an obviously complex and painful situation in which the two women found themselves entangled, Kate thought, and then stopped herself, with an unexpected flash of consternation.

Whatever the source of Aunt Jaggers's malice, she was now entangled in it too, and blindly, for she did not understand it. She would have to be on her guard not to offend—something to which she was not temperamentally inclined! And she would have to take special care to safeguard the secret of Beryl Bardwell's existence. Kate could imagine the fracas should Aunt Jaggers learn that not only did she read novels, she
wrote
penny-dreadfuls—and the most luridly sensational kind!

Aunt Sabrina glanced up as a butler in a dark morning coat and formal trousers sailed into the room at the helm of a large, heavily laden tea cart, a gleaming silver urn like a figurehead at its prow. He was followed by the brown-haired, brown-eyed maid who had shown Kate in.

“Ah, our tea has arrived,” Aunt Sabrina said with some relief, as the cart was rolled into place at the end of the sideboard.

Mudd—rather younger than Kate would have expected of a butler, and more dandified, with carefully trimmed side-whiskers and a modish tie—filled a bone china cup and brought it to Kate. When tea had been served, Mudd and Amelia retired to a corner of the room, where they stood invisibly at attention, blank as pie, fixed as furniture.

They were not, however, invisible to Kate, and behind the curtain of their bland impassivity, she sensed a silent scrutiny, a furtive watching, tinged with—what? Kate was sure that some deep passion lay behind the hooded eyes of the brown-haired Amelia, when she handed the tea tray round again. And while Mudd's face was immobile, the working of his mouth betrayed an intense emotion; what it was Kate could not tell. She sat back, intrigued.

Such currents and crosscurrents of powerful feeling flowing between sister and sister! Such secret passions hidden behind the inscrutable faces of the servants! Beryl Bardwell would not have to leave this house for raw material—indeed, for the rawest, the deepest, the strongest of human emotions.

Then suddenly, Kate felt cold. The muted violence, the envy, hatred, and malice that she sensed in this room was not the stuff of novels. It was quite
real.
And because it was real, it had the power to wound, to maim, even to kill.

Kate shivered.

“Manners make the man, but manors make the nobleman.”

-Punch, Jan. 27, 1894

 

 

 

S
omewhat to his surprise, Charles was enjoying his visit to the Marsdens' country manor. His intellect was entertained by Bradford's dry wit; his curiosity was piqued by the dig at nearby Colchester, and especially by the morning's discovery; and his throat was soothed by the clean air of the country, a welcome change from the irritating London fog, which was tar-flavored and thick as treacle. As well, he loved the Essex countryside, for as a lad he had spent summers with his mother's family at East Bergholt, only three miles away across the River Stour. It was there he had taken to photography, capturing on photographic plate the same landscapes that his famous great-uncle, John Constable, had earlier captured on canvas.

But evenings at Marsden Manor, Charles felt, were less to be enjoyed than endured. On this particular night, he itched to get to the temporary photographic laboratory he had installed in the scullery, which he had equipped with a Carbutt's Dry Plate Kerosene Lantern that allowed him to develop photographs in the absence of gas or electric light. But he was prevented from satisfying his wish by the requirement to dress for dinner, to which, Lady Henrietta had informed him, guests were invited.

Dressing was not Charles's favorite activity, and he did not particularly enjoy social dinners with persons he did not know. For Charles, the social ritual of dining was rather a burden, requiring that he exert himself to be pleasant when he would have much preferred a cold bird and a glass of wine with Bradford, followed by a game of chess and an article in his latest scientific journal.

But tonight's dinner promised to be of some little interest, for the guests included Barfield Talbot, the village vicar, and the Marsdens' nearest neighbors, Miss Sabrina Ardleigh, Mrs. Bernice Jaggers, and their newly arrived niece, Kathryn Ardleigh. So it was that Charles found himself, sherry in hand, seated on a chair in the drawing room, across from a sofa on which sat Miss Ardleigh, whose simple blue dress severely (but pleasantly, Charles thought) contrasted with the elaborate gowns of Eleanor and her younger sister, Patsy.

“Imagine my surprise and pleasure,” Eleanor told Charles excitedly, “when I learned that dear Kathryn and her aunts would be at dinner tonight.”

“And mine,” the vicar put in. He was a stooped, wiry man in his late sixties, with a lion's mane of silver hair and a droopy white mustache. His smile at Miss Ardleigh lighted pale blue eyes. “Your aunt has told me how glad she is that you were able to come to England. She has for some time felt the need to be closer to her only niece.”

Miss Ardleigh met the vicar's smile with an inquiring look. Charles thought she was about to ask a question, but after a brief hesitation, she only said, “I am glad to be here.”

The vicar turned to Charles. “And I am delighted to meet you, Sir Charles. I understand that you are assisting Fairfax with the Colchester dig. I must confess to being something of an antiquarian myself. The Colchester site has long held a great fascination for me.”

Eleanor's eyes were sparkling. “Then you may be interested to hear, Vicar, of Sir Charles's
latest
find.” Her voice took on a tone of muted excitement. “He discovered a dead man in the dig this morning!”

There was a horrified gasp from Miss Ardleigh's two aunts, seated across the room with Lady Henrietta. “Eleanor!” Lady Henrietta exclaimed.

“But it's true, Mother,” Eleanor protested. “He'd been murdered!”

“How perfectly appalling!” Patsy Marsden cried in a coquettish fright, clapping her hands.

“Indeed it is appalling,” Lady Henrietta said sternly. “Not at all a fit subject. Shall we speak of something else?”

“Murdered, was he, Charles?” Lord Marsden asked from his chair beside the columned and pedimented mantelpiece. The baron was a balding gentleman of immaculate white waistcoat and imposing stomach, testimony to a long-standing devotion to saddle of Dartmoor mutton and excellent port.

“You're in for it now, Charles,” Bradford said, helping himself to the sherry decanter on the sideboard. “You'll have to tell the whole thing.”

Charles looked at Lady Henrietta.

“Oh, very well,” she said. But Charles could hear, beneath the grudging reluctance of her tone, an unacknowledged curiosity, so he gave an abridged and slightly sanitized account of the discovery of the dead man and the activities of the police. His attention, however, was focused less on the story than on Miss Ardleigh, whose interest in the narrative was intense, but nothing like the self-dramatized horror exhibited by Eleanor and Patsy.

“A foreign gentleman, you say?” the vicar asked, knitting bushy white brows.

“Continental,” Charles replied, “from the cut of the clothes. He was wearing a scarab ring that suggested travel in Egypt, or at the least, Egyptian interests.”

“A scarab?” Miss Ardleigh asked quickly. Her glance went to her aunts. The elder aunt, who sat on the sofa with an easy grace that was very different from the frowning abruptness of her sister, colored slightly and turned her head.

“What is a scarab?” Patsy asked.

“A dung beetle,” Bradford said. His mother made a noise in her throat.

“An Egyptian magical amulet,” the vicar said quickly.

“The beetle is associated with the transit of the sun,” Charles explained, “and hence the resurrection.”

The fussy aunt sniffed. “Egyptian magic,” she said in a tone that suggested hellfire and perdition. “No wonder he was murdered.”

The vicar shifted uncomfortably and cleared his throat. “My dear Mrs. Jaggers,” he began, but was interrupted by Lord Marsden.

“Robbery, to be sure,” the baron said gruffly. “Country's gone to the dogs. Nobody's safe since we've ceased giving riffraff the boat. Damned anarchists can plant their bombs anywhere, blast it all. That Frenchie who blew himself up at Greenwich, for instance. If the bloody bomb hadn't gone off in his hands, it would've taken out the Royal Observat'ry.” He scowled at his elder daughter. “That's why women must not go about unescorted, Eleanor. Never know when you might be blown up.”