The Deathly Portent (26 page)

A shudder of relief went through Lady Ferrensby. “Then you are not serious. Thank heavens! I was beginning to think either I was mad, or you were.”

A sharply ironic glance came at Ottilia from her husband’s eyes, and she had to bite back an unseemly giggle. Just so was he apt to stigmatise her when she indulged in unorthodox actions, if only in jest. There was an opportunity here that was not to be ignored, however.

“Speaking of Evelina Radlett, has it ever seemed to you, Lady Ferrensby, that she may be a secret drinker?”

A blank stare was directed upon her. “What in the world makes you ask such a thing?”

“There was a complaint about watered wine. Molly Tisbury defended her husband’s integrity on the matter and instead suggested Mrs. Radlett had added water herself for the purpose of concealing her own depredations upon the bottle.”

Lady Ferrensby frowned. “It has never come to my attention, if that is so. And I am quite sure Tisbury does not water the wine. Who complained? Miss Beeleigh?”

Ottilia nodded. “Yes, it was spoken of the first day I met the ladies.”

“Then I’ll wager it was indeed Evelina, but not on her own account.”

“Whose, then?”

“Netherburn’s. If she entertained him when Alethea was absent, she would be at pains to conceal it. Miss Beeleigh tolerates the fellow, but Evelina knows she highly disapproves of the possibility of a nuptial between herself and Horace.”

“Yes, I had noticed.” Then the grogginess to which Molly had alluded could safely be attributed to laudanum. But this thought she kept to herself.

Lady Ferrensby was drumming her fingers on the tabletop again, her brows lowering.

“What is the matter, ma’am?”

“I simply can’t imagine what put it into your head that Evelina Radlett could possibly have done the murder. Even with the aid of another. The whole notion is fantastic.”

Ottilia had no answer to this. It was clearly not given to Lady Ferrensby to look beneath the apparency for a deeper significance. Evelina had today shown a remarkable ability to point up what she felt might stand against her. She did not consider herself beyond suspicion, that much was clear.

“But that notion opens up another possibility,” said Francis suddenly, interrupting her train of thought. “Remember you said if Molly had done it, then it had been in a fit of temper?”

“Yes?”

“The same may be said of Tisbury, if his wife came to him upon the occasion.”

Ottilia started. “How right you are, Fan!” She saw Lady Ferrensby was looking puzzled. “Francis is suggesting Tisbury might have hacked at the beam and started the fire in a bid to protect his wife.”

“Not only that,” pursued her husband eagerly. “Which of the villagers are the most assiduous in castigating Cassie Dale for a witch and blaming her for Duggleby’s death?”

Struck, Ottilia stared at him. “Molly, of course.”

“And Tisbury follows her lead.”

Lady Ferrensby was frowning again. “But you said positively, Lord Francis, that you did not believe Tisbury had done it.”

“Not the murder, no. But his loyalty to his wife is strong. I can believe him capable of a cover-up. Indeed, I would lay money on it.” He turned eagerly back to Ottilia. “Tillie, I’ll wager we have our murderer.”

S
leep had eluded Ottilia until the small hours. Or she felt it so, striving not to toss and turn for fear of disturbing Francis. No matter which way she looked at it, she could not refute the arguments in favour of labelling the Tisbury couple: Molly as murderer, her husband accessory after the fact.

Not that she was opposed to the theory Francis had put forward. Indeed, she would be glad to think the mystery solved. But a nagging doubt could not be suppressed.

The only motive Ottilia had found for Molly to be enraged with the blacksmith was the matter of his getting the kitchen maid with child. Was it enough to make her take a hammer to his head? According to Molly’s own account, she had taken her measures by informing Bertha Duggleby. But Bertha had dismissed the matter without interest. Could that have sent Molly into one of her fits of temper? Did she seek out the blacksmith and confront him? Then, when his back was turned, seize a hammer and strike him?

Ottilia had insisted on holding back from taking any action that night. To accuse with as little to go on as Francis’s supposition was just the error she might expect from Lord Henbury. Too much remained unexplained.

Molly, if it had been her act, had not gone to the smithy with the intention of harming Duggleby. But if she had, it would be in character to throw the hammer used into the forge in hopes of being rid of it. But had there been opportunity to do the deed? Meldreth thought Duggleby had died around eight or nine, at which time Molly and her husband would presumably be serving customers in the Cock. Time of death was difficult to establish, and it could well have been earlier. Imperative to discover then whether the Tisburys had been absent, alone or together, at any time that evening.

Yet another snag rankled. Was it coincidence that Molly
Tisbury’s fit of ungovernable rage overtook her at such a convenient moment? If the act was not premeditated, it had to be sheer chance that it came to pass a couple of days after Cassie Dale’s vision.

Ottilia was loath to believe in lucky chances. And it was this little thread, inexplicable by natural means, that was responsible for the discomfort of the night.

It seemed as if she had hardly closed her eyes when she was awoken by an unprecedented noise. Starting up in the curtained bed, she listened, replaying the sound in her head: the crash of something heavy, followed by a splintering of lesser sounds.

It had come from below stairs, she thought, as she pushed aside the curtain and thrust down the bedclothes.

“What’s to do?” came sleepily from Francis’s side of the bed.

“Did you not hear it? Something fell downstairs, I think.”

He sat up as she got out of bed. “What time is it?”

“I have no notion, but it is light already.”

Ottilia found her dressing robe and shrugged it on.

“What are you doing?”

Turning, she found Francis had flung out of the bed and was sitting on the edge, regarding her.

“Going to see what has happened, of course,” she replied, stuffing her feet into slippers.

He got up quickly. “No, you don’t. Not on your own.”

“Make haste, then.”

She waited while he found his own dressing gown but went to the door as he was putting it on, an abrupt feeling of foreboding entering her bosom and lending her impatience.

It did not take her long to negotiate the passage and run downstairs to the hall, Francis close behind her. She paused at the bottom of the last flight, looking around.

The place was eerily silent, just as it had been on the day they first came. It felt an eon ago, and Ottilia remembered
how this same sense of disappearing time had overtaken her last year when she had become involved in the disaster that had precipitated the Polbrook family into a week of unmitigated hell.

“Must have come from the kitchens,” Francis suggested, passing her and making for the door to the back premises.

But the ominous sensation that had invaded Ottilia’s bosom now struck a chill that led her eyes to the door to the coffee room. Without speaking, almost without willing her feet to walk, she moved towards it.

“Tillie?”

She threw out a hand, but she did not turn. With a calm born of that numbness preceding certain horror, she noticed the tremble of her fingers. Then she reached out and grasped the handle of the door.

Inside the room, the cause of the noise was immediately obvious. Hannah Pakefield was half standing, her bulk thrust against the long table at the back, her hands over her mouth as if to stop a scream. Her eyes, in a countenance white with shock despite the reddened wounds from yesterday’s battle, were round and huge, stark with terror.

At her feet lay a heavy wooden tray, its contents scattered around it. Crockery lay broken and crushed, and pooling liquid formed a little lake from which protruded a variety of silver cutlery.

The picture married up with the sounds that had woken Ottilia, but she took this in somewhere in the periphery of her mind, the rest concentrated on what sight it might be that was riveting Hannah’s attention.

She let go the door handle and moved into the room, turning in the direction of the landlady’s fixed gaze. Her gorge rose, and for a moment she stood transfixed, her brain flying to the horrible vision described by Cassie Dale, which was here brought into being.

Seated on a chair with her head resting on the round table
was Molly Tisbury, her face turned towards the room. Her arm hung loose at her side, and her legs had buckled. Protruding from the whiteness of her neck and stained red at that point was the handle of a kitchen skewer. Her eyes were open, her mouth slack, and she was stone-dead.

F
or several heart-stopping moments Francis stared at the spectacle, inevitably thrown back to the hideous day he had discovered his sister-in-law’s mangled corpse in her own bed.

Gradually the new picture, with its very different manifestations, impinged itself upon his consciousness, and he forced himself back to the present. The first coherent thought came out of his mouth without benefit of decision.

“Well, that blows my theory out of the water.”

Tillie’s instant frowning glance brought him to a realisation of the inappropriate nature of this remark, and he hastily pulled himself together.

“Never mind that now. I had best send for Tisbury on the instant.”

Tillie caught his wrist as he turned, and he felt the tremble in her fingers.

“Meldreth,” she said, an unaccustomed quaver in her voice. “Not Tisbury. Not yet. We must have the doctor before anyone.”

He covered her fingers and held them tightly. “Courage, my darling. You are made of sterner stuff than this.”

Her clear gaze met his, and she hazarded a tiny smile despite the glistening he saw there. She drew a shaky breath and clutched his supporting hand.

“I will cope, Fan. And you are perfectly right. This throws us back to
point non plus
.”

Her voice was strengthening as she spoke, and Francis was struck anew with the fervent admiration that had been his early reaction to the extraordinary woman of whom he now had possession. He drew her briefly close.

“Do you know that I love you more than anything in the world?”

The murmur in her ear was productive of a hiccoughing sob, and Tillie pulled away, her eyes shining and a tremulous smile upon her very kissable lips.

“What a moment to choose to tell me so!”

Francis grinned. “The perfect moment.”

Then he let her go, and his soldiering instincts took over.

“To action, my love. You deal with Mrs. Pakefield while I find a messenger. Thank heavens Ryde returned last night,” he added, turning for the door.

“Not Ryde,” said Tillie quickly, recovering fast. “He won’t know where Meldreth lives. Send Pakefield. Or no, better yet, send the girl Patty.”

Pausing in the doorway, Francis glanced to where the landlady had sunk noiselessly into the nearest chair, her gaze, now blank, still fastened upon the dead body of her rival.

“Nothing would induce me to send Pakefield,” he said in an undervoice. “The fellow is useless. He would likely wander aimlessly all over the green while we waited like idiots.”

“Send him to me here instead. He may at least support Hannah.”

“Very well. But I will find Ryde, too, for I think we are going to need him.”

“Francis, wait!”

He was already in the hall, but he halted and turned back to find Tillie in the doorway, a frown gathering on her forehead.

“One or other of us must be in this room at all times, Fan.”

He nodded, instantly appreciating the sense of this. “At least until the authorities—such as they are—have done their part.”

She gave a nod and disappeared into the coffee room, the door closing behind her. Francis let out an inward sigh at the thought of what lay before them, remembering again the complications that had piled up on him the previous year. Resolutely he turned and made for the nether regions of the Blue Pig.

O
ttilia crossed to where Hannah Pakefield was seated and laid a hand on the woman’s shoulder.

“Hannah, my dear, look at me.”

The peremptory tone had its effect. The landlady’s head turned, and her eyes, near as soulless as those of Molly’s corpse, came to rest on Ottilia’s face. She was clearly incapable of speech.

“There is nothing to be done for her,” Ottilia said gently. “You could not have changed anything.”

Hannah’s gaze rolled back to the dead woman, and a shudder passed through her. Weakly, she began to weep, and Ottilia was relieved to find the woman’s capacity for feeling had returned. Reaching for one of the landlady’s cold hands, she held it without speaking, letting the easing of the shock take its toll.

Hannah’s hand lay slackly in Ottilia’s fingers as her tears gathered and fell, a slight sobbing gasp intervening with each breath. Ottilia moved so that she shielded the landlady’s eyes from the gruesome sight and waited. At length
she felt the blood returning a measure of warmth to Hannah’s hand and felt it safe to speak again and hope to be understood.