The Arnifour Affair (24 page)

“And yet
we
are the ones being disparaged, Mr. Pendragon, as you persist in spinning a flimsy web of hunches around us. Surely my mother's payments to you have earned us more than that?”

Colin smiled, his dimples framing the edges of his mouth with significant pleasure. “Well spoken. And you are absolutely right. So now it is time for me to admit that I myself am guilty of a bit of coyness. I will ask you to indulge me by returning to the night before the attack. The night Eldon admits to finally purging his soul. What you have not admitted is that you followed Eldon there that night, didn't you?”

“That's enough.” Lady Arnifour bolted to her feet. “I'll not have you accusing my daughter of dishonesty. You will remove yourself from this house at once or the inspector will most certainly be sent for.”

Colin stood firm a moment before nodding as though in agreement. “Mrs. O'Keefe!” He pulled open the door and hollered out into the foyer, “
Mrs. O'Keefe!
Would you please be so kind as to fetch the inspector and a contingent of bobbies.” He slammed the doors shut and turned back to us. “While we wait the hour it will take that rabble to make their way here, I shall finish my postulation.”

“This is appalling,” Lady Arnifour stammered, shifting her weight as though getting ready to leave the room, and yet she still did not. Perhaps she understood as I did that Colin would not let her. And in the space of that moment, Mrs. O'Keefe quietly slid the door open in response to having been summoned and hovered just inside.

“Appalling?” Colin rolled right along, having adopted an air of faux indignation. “I would say appalling was your decision to remove your daughter from the house in the aftermath of the murders for fear she might be found out. Appalling is your willingness to allow the son of a man you supposedly love to take the fall for a crime you
know
he did not commit. Appalling is trading one life for another because
you've
decided one is more valuable. Appalling is bearing a child whom you turn away from because she reminds you of your most profound mistake. . . .”

Lady Arnifour clutched at her chest and sank back onto the sofa, her face as ashen as spent cinders. Her eyes had lost their focus and she appeared to no longer be aware of anything around her.

“For the longest time,” Colin spoke again, choosing his words deliberately as he too stared at Lady Arnifour, “I've been unable to figure out who you've been trying to protect. Have you been covering your own complicity? Or were you doing so for someone else? I see now that it was a bit of both.”

No one spoke.

“Let me tell you what I know to be true, and then let me tell you what I
believe
to be true,” he said after a moment. “Because of the affair Elsbeth and the Earl were having, she came to understand the truth of her parentage. Nathaniel made me realize that. I'd made the blunder of misconstruing his devotion toward Elsbeth as romantic passion, but I was wrong. It wasn't a lovers' quarrel overheard between the two of them the night of the attack, but rather a disapproving argument between siblings. Nathaniel was insisting she end the affair even as she warned him to stay out of her business.

“And do any of you comprehend what that conversation tells us about Nathaniel and Elsbeth?” He glanced at their faces but did not wait for a response. “It tells us how close they were. Which makes perfect sense when you remember that neither Elsbeth nor Nathaniel was an Arnifour. The two of them lived on the periphery of this willful and self-possessed family. Fortunate for them, I suppose, until Elsbeth learned the truth. Only then could she finally rid herself of her feelings of dissociation, for through her biological mother, she now belonged.

“It was their shared secret which allowed them to have the sort of confrontation they had on the night she was attacked. But Elsbeth was not to be so easily dissuaded from her perch at the Earl's side. For in spite of Nathaniel's words, she rode out to meet the Earl just as she'd been doing for months—whenever Kaylin wasn't along. And while all of you established that a walk was a customary part of the Earl's evening, only one of you knew that Elsbeth and the Earl went many nights to that barn. The two of them headed out in separate directions at differing times, but Elsbeth would double back and pick him up, riding down with him for their indiscretions.

“Only Kaylin had spied them from her promontory on the boulders across the field on nights she would go there on her own. She would watch the two of them ride up like young lovers, her father and her cousin, disappearing into that barn. . . .” Colin let his voice trail off as he held his gaze on Kaylin, finally perching on the ottoman by her feet. “Am I correct?” he asked. “Did they tarnish your perfect view?”

She exhaled deeply as her eyes flicked about. “I loved that place. It was so peaceful.” She shook her head. “Then
they
started showing up.”

“Did it make you angry? The scandal that was sure to denigrate your family's name if they were found out?”

“The Arnifour name has withstood graver injustices over the centuries than my father's infidelities against my mother,” she said flatly. Lady Arnifour leaned over and seized her daughter's hand, squeezing it firmly.

Colin flashed a quick smile before standing and turning his gaze back to Eldon. “And what do you say? Do you agree with your sister?”

Eldon stared at her, his expression confounded. “I don't know,” he mumbled.

“Are you quite finished, Mr. Pendragon?” Lady Arnifour turned on him, sounding for a moment like her normal self.

“You told your sister about your father's multiple business dealings after Mrs. Roynton divulged them to you, didn't you, Eldon?”

“She had a right to know,” he answered with a bit of a stammer. “He was cheating us.”

“And you suspected your sister would do something about it—”

“No!”

“How
dare
you!” Lady Arnifour pushed herself to her feet.

“Sit down!” Colin barked. “We will finish this
now
.” He wheeled on Eldon. “You set your sister up. You told her everything you knew and then led her down to the club the night before your father was killed. The only thing you earned for your efforts was your father's scorn, but your sister caused quite a stir.” He turned back to Kaylin. “You made a veritable spectacle of yourself, swinging an oil lamp around and threatening to burn the club to the ground until your father and his security blokes finally managed to hustle you out. You were memorable, Kaylin. In spite of their altered states, you left everyone shaken, which is exactly what Eldon had intended.

“About the only one you failed to ruffle was your father. He had no idea how much you already knew, or the ways in which your brother was manipulating you: telling you stories of the family's impending doom, the squandering of your mother's fortune, the repugnant trade he was in.

“Which brings us to the night of the attack. I'll bet tensions at the dinner table were exceedingly high that night, Eldon and Kaylin infuriated by what they viewed as their father's treachery, and Elsbeth feeling mistakenly emboldened by her secret knowledge. And then there was the Earl. He would have still been convinced that only
he
had all the pieces in this game. But that's where he was wrong.

“Kaylin excused herself from the table partway through the meal with complaints of a headache. Everyone else finished and went their usual disparate ways, the Earl setting off on his nightly jaunt, Elsbeth to the stable to get her horse for her rendezvous, Nathaniel to finish up in the stable, Victor to his garden, Mrs. O'Keefe to clean up her kitchen, and Eldon to the nearest bottle.

“Unfortunately for Nathaniel, this was the night he decided to confront his beloved half sister about what she was doing. He wanted better for her. But Elsbeth disagreed. They argued intensely, unwittingly providing a motive for the imminent attack. A happenstance all of you, with the sole exception of Victor, have been too happy to hide behind.

“The Earl and Elsbeth met at their usual spot,” he moved to the fireplace, “a well-trampled patch of grass not more than a third of the way to the barn, and rode the rest of the way together as was their custom. I suppose they thought they were being clever, though they were hardly discreet, yet neither of them knew that someone had already arrived there ahead of them. Someone who had taken a horse while Elsbeth and Nathaniel were fighting and was now waiting just inside the edge of the trees by that barn.

“When they arrived that night there would have been no sign that this evening was any different from any other. I suspect they were probably so caught up with their passions that they didn't realize something was amiss until the barn was set ablaze. And from there, everything unfolded with lightning speed.

“They would've fled outside where they were immediately set upon, their hunter waiting for them. The Earl was run down first. He received several blows to the back of his head from a large knot of wood the killer had found among the trees. Once the Earl had been felled, the killer turned back to go after Elsbeth. She had not gotten very far, mistakenly choosing to turn and hold her ground, thinking, perhaps, that she might be able to convince her attacker not to hurt her. But she was wrong. This attack was as much about her as it was the Earl. Though the blows she suffered lacked the ferocity of those that had been wielded against the Earl, it was only because the killer was already fatigued. Isn't that right, Kaylin?” He turned to her. “So tell me, what did Elsbeth say when she came to your room that night to, as you said, check on you? It certainly wasn't to ask you to go riding, was it?”

No one spoke for a moment as everyone turned to Kaylin.

“Don't say a word,” Lady Arnifour suddenly blurted in a voice that sounded as detached as it was hollow. “He's got nothing but a cluster of speculation.”

“That's all you've got to say?!” Eldon sputtered.

“Not one more word from you. You don't know a thing.”

“At least I'm not being accused of murdering anyone—”

“Stop!” Kaylin bellowed, stabbing at her temples. “Isn't it enough already? Isn't it?!” She turned on her brother. “
You did this
. You took me to the club that night after telling me how Father owned a dozen of them, addicting patrons and enslaving women. You let me go in there and threaten him, threaten the whole bloody place, and when we went home that night you told me it was the last vestiges of our inheritance. All we would be left with were those vile clubs and this crumbling house—”

“Don't—,” Lady Arnifour pleaded.

“It's too late!” Kaylin snapped, casting her gaze to Colin. “It was an outrage, Mr. Pendragon, the mockery my father made of all of us. I wasn't about to become a spinster with an ownership in opium clubs! Oh . . . I despised him for what he was doing to me, but unlike my pathetic brother, I decided I would do something about it.”

“You mustn't. . . .” Lady Arnifour started to sob as she seized her daughter's arm, but Kaylin only shook her off and stood up.

“I decided I would go out that night when he went for his walk and have it out with him, one way or another. I wasn't going to sit idly by and watch him annihilate everything around us.” She shook her head and moved over by the windows, wrapping her arms around herself as though she were suddenly cold. “You were right; dinner was awful that night. The room was intolerable and when I couldn't take it anymore, I complained of a migraine and left.

“I went upstairs and changed into my riding things and that's when Elsbeth came up to see me.” Her face clouded and her lips pursed. “She came up to ridicule me. My father had told her that Eldon and I had come to the club the night before, and she laughed at me for thinking I could have any effect on what he was doing. It made me mad . . . it made me outraged . . . to think she presumed that whoring around with my father gave her the right to say such things to me! I hated her. . . .”

“Oh, Kaylin.” Lady Arnifour shrank back on the couch, weeping piteously.

“I knew they would meet up that night. The two of them so proud of themselves. So while Elsbeth was arguing with Nathaniel, I took one of the horses without a saddle or bridle or reins and rode down to the barn and waited for them. And I didn't have to wait long. They came trotting across the field on one of the bays, one of my favorites, and they'd barely dismounted before he was pawing all over her, her laughing and letting him do whatever he pleased. It was sickening. And never once did they bother to look around and see if anyone might be there, might catch them, never in all the times I'd seen them. They didn't care. The two of them, they were deplorable.

“So as soon as they disappeared into the barn I crept forward and set it ablaze. Let them have their fire with their passion. . . .” She gave a hollow chuckle that died in her throat. “My father came out first; he spotted me and started hollering at me, said I was bloody starkers. Can you imagine? I rode him down, Mr. Pendragon, just as you said, and I struck him with a knot of burl I'd found in the woods. It felt good; watching him blubber like the pathetic creature he was, it only made me angrier. And she . . . she was no better than him. I should've known she was born of my flesh. We are a contemptible lot, but at least I kept them from destroying everything. . . .” Her voice trailed off and I wondered if she yet had any real understanding of what she had done.

“I'll need you to come with us,” Colin said softly.

“I'll not fight you,” she answered. She went over to him as I got up, planting herself before him with defiance as Eldon sagged against the bar and Lady Arnifour's wrenching sobs filled the silence. I glanced over toward the door and noticed that Mrs. O'Keefe was gone, though she had left it ajar in her evident haste to leave. And it made me wonder if perhaps Lady Arnifour was grieving for a daughter who was not her own after all.