The Haunted Season (14 page)

“And he?”

“Oh, the jealousy and spite cut both ways, to be sure. He was always on her about her weight.”

“You say he was sickly as a child? He shows no signs of it now.”

Candice nodded, telling him that Peregrine had been kept in hospital for a few months with some sort of medical complication. She had been hired shortly afterward to care for him.

“Wouldn't it be more usual for a nanny to be hired ahead of time? So the parents would be ready and trained in what to expect, and the nanny get to know the family?”

“Not really,” she replied. “Maybe
slightly
more usual.” She wiggled her hand in an equivocating fashion. “Come to remember, they said something about having hired someone before me who did not work out—that I was a replacement. They said she was a religious nutter—that's right. That was it. Another scone, Father Max? I must say I've grown to love the scone. At home, my mother made
stroopwafel,
but I can't duplicate them here—every experiment has failed. The ingredients just aren't the same here, or the oven. Or maybe it's me.…”

“Do you recall her name, the nanny who came before you?”

She started to shake her head sadly, no, she did not recall, and then she stopped. “I was friends with someone in Nether Monkslip who ran a bakery there. She would know. She took me under her wing, made things like
stroopwafel
for me when she had time, because she knew I was homesick. Such a kind woman. Her son was useless, as I recall. He sponged—is that the word,
sponged
?—off of her all the time. Before I left, I asked her to keep in touch. She didn't, not really, but I understood why. I never saw anyone who worked so hard.”

She had to be talking about Elka Garth of the Cavalier. He supplied the name and she nodded enthusiastically.

“I really should pay her a visit. See how she's doing. Take the children to meet her…”

“She'd like that. And so, they stayed in touch, the children of Totleigh Hall?”

To his unspoken doubt, she said, “When I left, I left behind for them many children's books. But only Rosamund read them, she told me. She was always going to be such a great reader, you could tell. I put my name in the books—I had used them myself, to help with my English, you understand—and I told her to keep in touch, that if she forgot me, she could always look at my name and remember. I told her I was a bit alone here in England myself—which was certainly true, at least before I met my husband.

“I wasn't surprised when she wrote me. We met several times over the years when we were in London shopping or going to the theater. She belonged to her mother's club there, as I mentioned … some women's thing. We would meet up there.

“She is a bit of a lost soul, that one. More coffee, Vicar?”

 

Chapter 10

FIRST NANNY

It was a simple matter of ringing Elka Garth to track down the first nanny in the Totleigh Hall household. He could hear the hubbub of the shop in the background; Elka had a thriving business catering to the neo-hippy, gluten-free, granola-munching clientele of Nether Monkslip, but she did a fair side business in decadent offerings, like delicate pastries dripping with chocolate and caramel.

The gurgle of conversation was suddenly shot through with what he recognized as Suzanna's raucous laughter: “Chanel, you are the limit!”

To which came the reply, “I'm serious! I am so glad I wasn't here. What can it be like to be a suspect in a murder?”

“It's loads of fun, actually. I've been a suspect on many occasions. Stick around the village long enough. You'll get used to it.”

Max also heard what sounded like Eugenia in the middle of another conversation, baying, “I told you. Just like Hester Prynne.”

Someone had dared mention Hester Prynne when Awena's pregnancy first became evident. That person had quickly been rounded on and shushed. That person had probably been Suzanna—it was a typical Suzanna sort of joke. But apparently the thought had become embedded in Eugenia's brain. Such a tiresome woman. Max thought he might have to deal with it one day, the apparent jealousy, although ignoring her for now seemed the better course. Maybe it was the coward's course, but it all seemed too petty for a flat-out confrontation.

Elka asked Max to give her a few minutes to look up her address book, then rang back with the phone number he needed. Happily, the other former nanny at Totleigh Hall lived in Staincross Minster, no great distance from where Max was now, and a short tree-lined drive back home.

The woman he now thought of as First Nanny—Elspeth Muir—answered the phone on the first ring. He quickly gained the impression she was one of those people who in their loneliness or general chattiness welcomed interruptions, including the attentions of telephone surveyors, people dialing wrong numbers, and anyone who was not a prank caller. When he arrived at her house, a neat two up/two down in the suburbs of Staincross Minster, she greeted him with a plateful of scones. Inwardly, he sighed: Extra running time and exercise were in his future.

Elspeth proved to be a rounded, spritely body with short gray hair, in her mid to late seventies. She fussed about with a tea set in a routine that was familiar to him from his visits to Miss Pitchford, first shooing an enormous tabby named Helena away from “his” chair. Helena narrowed her eyes at Max and stalked from the room. Max, who was as resigned to cat fur as to extra calories on his pastoral visits, sat down and smiled with every evidence of pleasure, knowing his dark clothing was already attracting hair like a magnet. At least with a tabby, one out of approximately four hairs would match his slacks and jacket.

Elspeth Muir, with a final rattling of teaspoons against saucers and a proffering of paper serviettes with the slogan “Keep Calm and Drink Tea,” settled comfortably into the armchair opposite. Her battery finally having run down, she sat alert and solid as a statue and trained her beady eyes on him expectantly, rather like a hen waiting for the eggs to hatch.

“You're here about the murder, of course,” she said. “There's been nothing else in the news since it happened. I knew no good would come of the secrets in that house.” She pronounced it “
say
-crits” with her heavy brogue, but Max knew what she meant.

“Secrets?” repeated Max, suddenly alive with the hope that this was not all a colossal waste of time.

“
Dark
secrets,” she assured him.

Are there any other kind? He leaned forward, smiling encouragement.

“I kept their secrets for them,” she told him, setting her teacup into its saucer so she could focus all her attention on her story. His reaction had been that gratifying. Usually, Elspeth liked to spin out a tale and gradually snare her audience, but this time she had gone in for the quick kill. Really,
most
gratifying it was.
Such
a fine-looking man, too. Too bad he was not a follower of the true religion.

“Although,” she continued, beaming, “you can be sure it was only after many hours of prayer I agreed to go along with it. I didn't, truth be told, want the bother. And I knew that made it a sin, in your religion and mine, Father. It weighed on my soul so much, I finally had to leave. ‘Tell the truth and shame the devil,' my mother used to say. But I thought to myself at the time, you see, What would it gain anyone for me to go blabbing? The wee bairn needed a home, and he got a good home, or at least he wanted for nothing money could buy. Schooling, clothing, a beautiful house.”

“Peregrine,” he said. “Peregrine was adopted.”

She wasn't asking for forgiveness or for anything resembling it; she was not appealing to him as a religious in any formal way, for he batted for the wrong team as far as she was concerned—he could see that. She might take it up with someone whose opinion she valued in the Church of Scotland, a thought she confirmed in the next breath.

“Now you've reminded me, I'll take it up with my minister.” She eyed him. “I believe you've been sent, I do. God works in mysterious ways. True enough, He sent me an Anglican vicar—now there's a mystery for you. And even though those exact words are not in the Bible, He does His best work in ways that mystify us mortals.” With Elspeth, the capital
H
was apparent, even in speech.

Max nodded his agreement, in case she was setting him some sort of test of his knowledge.

He was thinking he didn't want any deception over Peregrine's adoption derailing the case. What if the media got hold of it somehow? He must, as Cotton would have it, stay ahead of the story.

He thought he must have looked concerned, for she added, “There's no need to worry. My minister is a sound man and not a bearer of tales. I won't be naming names, either. I worked for a lot of families in my time, so he won't have any idea who I mean exactly. I'll present the situation to him as a moral puzzle, like. A—what do you call it?—a quarry.”

“I believe you mean a quandary.” Max smiled, looking at her. “A moral quandary.” The picture he'd been painted of her as a religious nutter was fading. She was a churchgoer and a moral person; in trying to do the right thing, she had stopped at being asked to carry out a deception that would stretch over decades and have God knew what ramifications.

The family expecting her to take a salary to help them maintain the deception had chosen wrong, that was all.

And of course with the next nanny, the family had learned its lesson. Candice was hired after they had brought the child home and he was already in place. Perhaps in need of good help by that point—help who would not need to be entrusted with any secrets—Lady Baaden-Boomethistle had been even more inclined than usual to overlook the fact of Candice's centerfold good looks.

“Stepping back for a bit, what do you recall of the household of those days?” he asked.

“Well,” began Elspeth. She might just have been waiting for this opening. “The lord was not above a bit of draughty senior, if you follow my drift.”

From the gentle blush that bloomed across her face as she said this, she could only mean droit du seigneur, a feudal lord's supposed right of sexual access to any woman subordinate to him.

“I'm interested in Lady Baaden-Boomethistle, the lord's first wife, particularly.”

“Oooo, she was lovely. Frail. Yes, I would call her frail. Not physically—she was a great athlete, loved riding horses and things. Do they still keep all them horses at Totleigh?”

Max nodded.

“Lovely creatures. My father used to raise them.”

Max prompted: “You were saying she was frail.”

“Mentally frail, I meant,” she said. “Not a lot of stuffing to her, and of course he was such a bully, and a lot to stand up to for any woman. She did want that baby so.… I suppose she didn't see the lie for what it was and would have told a million lies to have that child be hers. That was part of what made it so difficult, you see. She really did want him and, as I say, he would want for nothing with a mother who was devoted like that. But I did hear she died. I read it in the papers. Horse threw her off, didn't he? Wild creatures. We only think we can tame them. I suppose Peregrine was nearly grown by that time?”

“Yes,” said Max. “More or less. Peregrine was a teenager when it happened.”

“Peregrine,” she repeated with a sniff. “Fancy name. I dinna care for it.”

“I gather it's a family name.”

“I had a cat named Pellegrino once,” she said. “I'm teetotal, you see.”

“Ah,” said Max.

“He was Italian. The cat, I mean.” Max decided he was not going to follow her down that path by asking her how in the world she knew the cat's heritage.

“Was there anything else you'll be wanting to ask? My ladies' group meets here this evening. Please take a scone or two with you if you'd like. They are all slimming half the time and I end up making too much for them.”

Max held up his hands, refusing the offer and saying, “I don't know if you're aware Peregrine later had a baby sister.”

“There was mention in the paper, yes. I don't recall the name.”

“It was Rosamund.”

“Ah. That sounds like it. You're wondering if Rosamund came from the same place as Peregrine? I wondered, too, when I saw the notice. It … disturbed me. Put me in mind of Cain and Abel, for some reason. Yes, it did. Still, it's so often the way—the adopted baby is followed soon after by the child the couple thought they couldn't have.”

Max had been thinking much the same thing.

He also had been wondering if Peregrine had found out about the circumstances surrounding his birth. If so, could the shock—the rage, even—at such a deception be a motive for murder?

“It's stirred it all up again,” she added. “I do think I've been careless—not asking my minister's advice, I mean.”

*   *   *

Before driving away from Elspeth Muir's house, Max stopped to look for messages on his mobile phone. It was something he'd gotten more and more into the habit of doing with Awena and Owen in his life.

There was a message from his bishop, the Right Reverend Nigel St. Stephen. Rather, it was from the person in the bishop's office who organized his calendar. Max's heart sank. The bishop no doubt had seen the latest news. And he no doubt was alarmed and wondering if and how Max was involved in this latest incident of carnage in otherwise-peaceful Nether Monkslip. Max had been expecting the call, but he had not rehearsed what he might say. The bishop had been understanding thus far, almost viewing these horrendous homicidal incidents as somehow divinely sent, if such tortuous theology could be admitted.

Max himself had come to wonder—
was
he a catalyst for murder? Had he been sent to Nether Monkslip to root out evil in the village?