Axel Read online

  Axel braced himself for a swoon, some ladylike weeping, even a fit of hysterics. People took their own lives. This was tragic, of course, but in Axel’s estimation, suicide was preferable to murder most foul two doors down the corridor.

  “How can you tell how far away the bullet was fired?” Mrs. Stoneleigh’s voice was steady, her gaze on the fire equally steady, and her very composure ripped at Axel’s sensibilities. She’d been married to the man for, what, nearly a decade?

  She might have been discussing the weather.

  He topped up his brandy and gave her a brief explanation of the initial evidence.

  “Powder burns,” she summarized. “You are saying the colonel’s clothes have no powder burns.”

  “None to speak of, so the bullet must have been fired from some distance.”

  “Is there more?” she asked, gaze still fixed on the flames.

  “Not much.” Would a second brandy refill be rude—or stupid? “The dimensions of the wound suggest a small gun was used, and from across the room. Such weapons—pea shooters—are notoriously inaccurate. They lack the length of barrel to steady the projectile toward its target, and such a small weapon seldom fires with much force.”

  “I’ve carried such guns, and you are correct. Their greatest value is in the noise they create, but somebody apparently had good aim.”

  Would a woman guilty of murder make such an admission? “Who heard the shot, Mrs. Stoneleigh?”

  “I did. I was in my room, directly above the colonel’s study, where he usually finished his evenings with a nightcap. Shreve would have heard the shot, because he was in the corridor tending to the lamps, as was his habit as the hour approached eleven. Those servants still awake below stairs heard it, as did Ambers, who was outside the stable master’s quarters smoking. Ambers was the first to arrive at the colonel’s side. Shreve became occupied with… escorting me to the scene.”

  If somebody on that list hadn’t killed the colonel, then a murderer as yet unknown had also heard the shot and taken off across the snowy grounds, all footprints conveniently obliterated by the brisk wind.

  “The colonel never finished that nightcap,” Axel said. “I’ll want to talk to Ambers, and to Shreve, sooner rather than later, and to the rest of your staff.”

  What Axel truly wanted was to return to the quiet and warmth of his glass house, there to work on grafts until his back ached and his vision blurred.

  “Shreve is busy now,” Mrs. Stoneleigh said. “He should be available to speak with you mid-morning tomorrow.”

  Axel was the magistrate, for pity’s sake, investigating the murder of her husband in her own home. She ought to want answers more than she wanted her next breath. “What can Shreve possibly have to keep him busy?”

  The look in Mrs. Stoneleigh’s eyes was faintly pitying. Her expression was as close to warm as Axel had seen it, ever, then he realized the direction of her thoughts.

  “When a spouse dies,” she said, gently, “there is much to be done. The windows must be hung with crepe, and the portraits and mirrors in the public rooms, as well. The liveried servants must acquire black armbands, the deceased must be laid out, the coffin built, the surviving family’s wardrobe must be dyed black, the hearse hired, the vicar notified, and so forth. You know this.”

  Axel did know this, and he resented her bitterly for making him recall that he knew it. Resentment fueled by fatigue prompted his next observation.

  “You’re coping with your husband’s demise well, Mrs. Stoneleigh.”

  “Am I a suspect?” The pity, at least, was gone from her eyes.

  “No.” Not yet. “But if murder was done in this house, while others were about, then we have both a crime and mystery on our hands.”

  “And a tragedy,” she amended. “Have you more questions, Mr. Belmont, or shall I see you out?”

  “I can see myself out,” Axel replied, unhappy with himself for his pique. “And again, my condolences.” He rose, surprised when she did as well, albeit slowly, and walked him to the door.

  “You seem fatigued,” she said. “Unusually so, not merely like a man at the end of a long day.” Her observation wasn’t rude, but neither was it… flattering.

  “I’ve arrived just this afternoon from my brother’s home in Sussex, hailed back to Oxfordshire by Rutland’s decision to nip off to Bath in the dead of winter. Phillip and Dayton chose to remain with their uncle until spring.”

  Unfortunate word choice—dead of winter—which she was apparently too much of a lady to react to.

  “You are orphaned, then. I am sorry to have disturbed you when you are much in need of rest. Shall I tell Shreve to expect you tomorrow morning?”

  Axel spared a thought for his grafts and crosses.

  “By eleven,” he replied, taking her hand and bowing over it. “Will you be all right?”

  Now where had that come from, and why was her hand still so cold?

  “I don’t know.” She seemed unaware of their joined hands, or at least unconcerned. “I’ve heard of people being shocked beyond the expression of appropriate sentiments, and I suspect I am in that situation. My husband is dead, and though we were not… entangled, as some spouses are, I did not foresee such an end to the day, to any of my days. The colonel was not ill, he was not reckless, he did not drink to excess…”

  A minute shudder passed through her, one Axel detected only because he was holding her hand.

  “I suppose,” she went on, “I will realize more fully what has befallen this house when Mrs. Pritchard and I lay out my… the body.”

  “Mrs. Pritchard will charge you good coin for tending to that office, and she needs the money too. You are not to return to the study until the morning.” Axel made it an order, which was a blunder. The father of two adolescent boys learned that giving orders all but guaranteed his wishes would be disrespected.

  Mrs. Stoneleigh withdrew her hand. “I want to argue with you, but only to argue for argument’s sake, not because I want to see my husband’s corpse, particularly, not with a bullet…”

  Another little shiver, two…

  “Mrs. Stoneleigh?” Axel drew her back over to the hearth, grabbing an afghan from the back of the love seat and draping it over her shoulders. “Have you somebody who can sit with you, get you up to bed?”

  “I do not use a lady’s maid,” she said, much the same as she might have reported eschewing sugar in her tea. “The colonel regards it… regarded it… Well, no. I do not have a lady’s maid.”

  Axel endured an inconvenient stab of compassion—one that temporarily obliterated the question of her role in her husband’s death. Abigail Stoneleigh was alone, more alone than a woman expected to be at the age of… twenty-eight? Twenty-nine? Her husband had died violently, and even if she’d killed him, who knew what her motivations might have been?

  Time enough later to locate proper outrage if she’d done the old boy a fatal turn.

  Axel took a moment to study her, the way he’d studied each and every specimen in his glass houses when he’d returned to Candlewick after weeks of absence. Mrs. Stoneleigh looked overwatered and undernourished, ready to drop leaves and wilt.

  “I don’t want to leave you alone.”

  “I’ll manage.” She was grimly certain on that point. “I’ve been managing alone for some time, Mr. Belmont. My thanks for your concern. Until tomorrow.”

  Axel had no authority to gainsay her, so he bowed and took his leave. He was back on his horse—why on God’s good green earth had nobody devised a means of warming a saddle before a man sat his innocent, unsuspecting arse on chilled leather?—when he finally put a name to what he’d seen in Mrs. Stoneleigh’s luminous green eyes the last time he’d bowed over her hand.

  Fear. Mrs. Stoneleigh was afraid, but was she afraid of the murderer, or of having her part in the murder revealed?

  Chapter Two

  A small crowd stood about in the frozen churchyard after the service, most people keeping scarves wrapped about the
ir faces. The snow muffled sound further, in addition to the quiet required by the solemnity of the occasion.

  Because nobody seemed comfortable approaching the widow directly, Axel took it upon himself to escort Mrs. Stoneleigh back to the manor, a mile’s distance along a frozen, rutted lane. He let the other menfolk see to the graveside ritual, and the concomitant freezing of ears, nose, and toes.

  “Shall I have a carriage sent?” he asked.

  Mrs. Stoneleigh lifted back her black veil and pinned it to her bonnet, revealing eyes a little red at the rims. By daylight, she was too thin, too pale, and yet, also too pretty.

  “We can walk,” she said, which comported with the decision of most of the congregation. “I am much in need of activity and fresh air, if you don’t mind. The past days have seen me nigh trapped in that house.”

  Axel tucked her hand over his arm, knowing all too well the road Mrs. Stoneleigh faced—assuming he didn’t have to arrest her for murder.

  “When Caroline died, I was struck by the contrasts,” he said. “The house was so full of people on the day of her funeral, I wanted to bellow them off the premises, and then it was empty. Wretchedly, unendingly empty. I wanted company, and I wanted to be alone. Caroline was nowhere to be seen, and she was everywhere I looked.”

  “She died in winter, didn’t she?”

  “March. We spent the next March with my brother, but then his spouse also died.” Axel’s own grief had finally lessened when he had become the one who knew the path of mourning. He’d tended to the practicalities while Matthew had reeled and stumbled, and stared into an unrecognizable future.

  “Aren’t you supposed to tell me time will heal my loss, Mr. Belmont? That a quick death is a mercy?”

  Axel suspected spouting platitudes to this woman, even as wan and slender as she was, might land him on his arse in the snow.

  “Somebody has already told you what a blessing it is to have your freedom, I take it, along with all the casseroles you can eat, provided the sight of nothing but black for the next year doesn’t destroy your appetite.”

  A chance to start over, some fool had said upon Caroline’s death. To find a fresh mount. Axel hadn’t known whether to be violent or sick, or violently sick, at that brand of comfort.

  “You might consider going away,” Axel suggested after they’d hiked a quarter mile directly into the wind. “Spain is a pleasant contrast this time of year, or Italy.”

  “And who will tend Stoneleigh Manor? Gregory left it to me, or told me he would, and I don’t trust his children to care for the estate in my absence. They are much enamored of their city routines.”

  Mrs. Stoneleigh was Axel’s immediate neighbor, and Colonel Stoneleigh had ridden Candlewick’s bounds more than once in Axel’s absence.

  “I will keep an eye on the property for you, if necessary. For the next month or two, nothing will need much tending in any case.” Travel would also allow the widow a margin of safety if the murderer was still in the vicinity—assuming she hadn’t had Stoneleigh killed herself.

  “That is a generous offer, Mr. Belmont. A kind offer, and I will consider it, but I would like to know who killed my husband before I abandon his house for sunshine and new faces.”

  “We would both like that answer.” She, likely so she could put her husband’s memory to rest; Axel, so he could return to the soothing embrace of his flowers, and the herbal on horticultural remedies for female complaints that would be his next publication.

  After more trudging arm in arm, they passed through the Stoneleigh Manor gates. Black bunting luffed in a bitter breeze, and the head footman, a black armband pinned to his sleeve, black crepe about his hat, bowed them onto the property.

  “You will tell me if I am a suspect?” Mrs. Stoneleigh asked, halfway up the drive.

  By night, the house had looked settled and solid. Under gray skies, with windows swagged in black crepe, the façade was as grim as an open grave. All dead grass, dark earth, cold, and sorrow.

  Mrs. Stoneleigh’s question required an answer.

  “You are not a suspect, as of now. I considered you, of course, because you had opportunity, living in proximity to the deceased. You had motive, being one of Stoneleigh’s heirs. Shreve reports you came down the stairs in response to his cries of alarm. Unless you found a way to shoot your husband, discard the murder weapon, climb up to the second floor, and then emerge from your room and run down the stairs, you are not the perpetrator. Finally, Mrs. Jensen was going up to her room and saw you emerge from your bedroom.”

  Axel’s relief upon interviewing the housekeeper had been considerable. For all Abigail Stoneleigh was not likable, he’d wanted her to be innocent of murder. As a result, he’d investigated her activities thoroughly.

  “I am truly not under suspicion?” Her voice was low, carefully steady.

  “You were concerned?” She was not under suspicion of having pulled the trigger, though she might have hired an accomplice.

  Her gaze flicked over his face as they crunched along the frozen road. “Rather than sleep, I have thought and thought about the colonel’s death. Shreve said the French doors were open a crack when Ambers found Gregory—Ambers came through those doors and claims he hadn’t had to unlatch them.”

  Thus far, her recitation comported with the sequence of events as Axel had been able to reconstruct them. Shreve had dissolved into dignified tears fifteen minutes into Axel’s attempts to question him. Ambers had been summoned from his interview by news of the colonel’s favorite afternoon hunter cast beneath a pasture fence.

  “Shreve assumed the doors were open for fresh air,” Mrs. Stoneleigh went on, “because Gregory often enjoyed a pipe with his brandy, though doubtless the killer left in haste. I asked Ambers to look for fresh tracks, but he was unwilling to leave me alone under the circumstances, and the winter wind did its work quickly.”

  Axel could not fault Ambers’s decision, for the circumstances had included a murderer at large, or possibly dithering about the very scene of the crime.

  “We have only Shreve’s word regarding the open French doors,” Axel said. “Ambers told me that they were unlocked, not that they were ajar.”

  Shreve ought to be a suspect, along with the dapper, devoted Mr. Ambers, who’d been so conveniently smoking out of doors at the very hour his employer had been murdered. No night porter had been on duty at the front door to confirm Ambers’s contention that he’d come hotfoot up the main drive either.

  “You don’t want to accuse Shreve?” Mrs. Stoneleigh asked.

  “I do not.” What man wanted to accuse anybody of murder? “He hasn’t as clear an alibi as you. He was closest to the scene, and he had time to commit the crime, open the French doors, secret the murder weapon somewhere, then run into the corridor.”

  Though, damn and blast the luck, diligent searching with a strong compass magnet had not revealed a gun beneath the snow anywhere near the house.

  “What is Shreve’s motive?” the lady asked, as if repeating a familiar query. “Gregory left Shreve a tidy sum for years of service, but Shreve will probably keep his post with me.”

  Clearly, Mrs. Stoneleigh knew the contents of her late husband’s will. “Lack of apparent motive is one reason I have not taken him or Ambers into custody.”

  “Character,” Mrs. Stoneleigh rejoined, “is another. Ambers has been with us for years, as has Shreve. He and Gregory struck up an acquaintance on the passage home from India, and they were as close as servant and employer could be.”

  Axel and the widow toiled up the drive arm in arm, the silence between them growing chillier with each step.

  “I am sorry, madam. Murder is offensive business. I am insensitive to discuss such matters with you now. I do apologize.”

  “Don’t,” she said. “I would rather have your blunt questions than Mr. Weekes’ well-meant platitudes. His eulogy was interesting.”

  The eulogy had been blessedly short, given how cold the church was. The Stoneleigh Manor drive, by
contrast, seemed quite long.

  “Did the vicar’s eulogy in any way describe the man you were married to?”

  “As long as we’re being shockingly honest, there was a resemblance—Gregory loved his hounds.”

  Gregory Stoneleigh had loved to strut about, waving his riding crop in time to his bloviations.

  “But?”

  “But Gregory had no more clue how to run this estate and care for his lands than I would have about, say, building one of your glass houses. I think he married me largely for my ability to salvage his estate.”

  “I wasn’t aware of that.” Because Mrs. Stoneleigh’s attractiveness was the first thing any man would see about her—and her reserve.

  She marched up the front drive, from which the snow had been cleared. “Gregory was a cavalry officer to his bones. The horses were exclusively his domain, and he doted on them endlessly. The home farm, the tenant farms, the cottages, the commerce, the crops, the cloven-hoofed stock, the dairy—they baffled him, and by the time we married, the functional parts of the estate were much in need of management.”

  “Stoneleigh came out eleven years ago?” Axel tried to recall the year, pegging everything in memory against his sons’ ages, his wife’s death, or when he’d built the second glass house.

  The wind caught Mrs. Stoneleigh’s black veil and batted it against her mouth. She re-secured the lace with an onyx hat pin, never missing a step.

  “The colonel returned to England more than ten years ago. He lasted here some years before the income stopped covering the expenses. He wasn’t about to invest his own money in the land, his Indian wealth being for his children, so he acquired me to improve the situation.”

  Her recitation was matter of fact, not quite bitter.

  “The colonel explained this to you?” If this was Stoneleigh’s entire view of marriage, the lady’s lack of obvious grief made more sense.

  Axel was so intent on the conversation, that when Mrs. Stoneleigh slipped on a patch of muddy ice, he nearly didn’t catch her.