It Happened One Night: Six Scandalous Novels Page 4

Or his wife.

  “I keep waiting for the grieving to start.” Abby considered a slice of apple, which her grandpapa had insisted was the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. “I keep waiting for tears, for sorrow, for something momentous, but all I feel is upset and… sad.”

  “I recall saying nearly the same thing to my brother when Caroline died. There’s no wrong way to mourn. You’ve described your relationship with Stoneleigh as cordial, and maybe a marriage free of passion means you are spared passionate grief as well.”

  Must he be so philosophical? Abby set the rest of the apple slice on the plate.

  “Perhaps I will sit bolt upright in bed at midnight, realize I have no spouse, and be overcome by strong hysterics.” Again. For what Abby did have was a late spouse, who’d been murdered at his very desk.

  Mr. Belmont ranged an arm along the back of the sofa, the gesture of a man not put off by an ungracious comment.

  “Does the possibility of hysterics concern you, Mrs. Stoneleigh?”

  Abby had many, many concerns. “One doesn’t know whether to be more concerned by a temptation toward drama, or a lack thereof. I’ve never been a widow before. Ah, what an awful word that is: widow.”

  His scowl became less fierce, more irascible. What sort of man had a vocabulary of scowls?

  “Widower is equally as unappealing,” he said. “Then it takes on a gilded edge in the eyes of some, as a man becomes desirable for his bereaved status.” This gilding had not appealed to Mr. Belmont.

  “Women whose spouses have died are seldom viewed as having the same cachet as men in similar circumstances.”

  Perhaps because the men could and did quickly remarry. Nonetheless, this startlingly unsentimental conversation was safer ground than the floundering bewilderment that had struck Abby the instant she’d seen her husband’s body.

  Or the fear.

  Mr. Belmont passed her a slice of cheese. “If you inherit this property, then you are a wealthy widow. Stoneleigh Manor is lovely, well run, and large, as acreages go in this area. I’d wager that among those assembled below, you will find several of the single gentlemen prompt with their condolence calls, and a few won’t even wait three months.”

  A spark of anger flared, at Gregory, for subjecting Abby to those gentlemen and their prompt calls after years of neighborly indifference.

  She took a bite of the cheese, an excellent cheddar. “You speak from unhappy experience.”

  “I do. A man cannot possibly raise his own sons without the assistance of some female who knows the children not and loves them not.”

  Many men wouldn’t even try. “I regret that we never had children.”

  Mr. Belmont moved Abby’s tea closer to her side of the tray. “Would you really want to be comforting a seven-year-old today, trying to explain why her papa can’t ever take her riding again, or why death isn’t like oversleeping?”

  Abby accepted the second slice of bread from Mr. Belmont’s hand, along with the knowledge that his wretched honesty was more comforting than all the platitudes of condolence put together.

  “No wonder you are such an ill-tempered fellow.”

  He shot his cuffs, which sported a surprising dash of lace. “My sister-in-law calls me reserved, my sons describe me as professorially stern. My brother says I’m backward but dear, and my late wife called me an ass more often than you might think.”

  Heavenly days, Mr. Belmont’s recitation provoked him to something approaching a smile.

  “Your brother has remarried?” Abby posed the question with the relief of a befogged mariner whose conversational oars have bumped against dry land by chance.

  “Recently.” Mr. Belmont held her mug of tea out to her.

  She sipped and set it down, but shook her head when he presented a slice of ham.

  “You are pale as a winter sky, madam. You need sustenance.”

  “I need a pause in my gluttony.” Abby cradled the mug close, wrapping both hands around its warmth. “I haven’t eaten much lately, and my digestion is tentative.”

  Blond brows lowered to piratical depths. “Could you be carrying a posthumous child?”

  How… presuming and sad the question was. “I could not.” Before Mr. Belmont could stumble through an apology for that bluntness too, Abby charged on. “Oh, don’t poker up. I wasn’t that sort of wife.”

  He busied himself building up the fire, while Abby wondered what he’d make of her expostulation. He was apparently condoling the widow today, not investigating the murder, so he kept his questions behind his perfect, white teeth.

  “I will take my leave of you,” he said, when the fire was throwing out decent heat. “I would like to call upon you within the week, to discuss what I learned when speaking with the staff yesterday, and I want to hear the reading of Gregory’s will.”

  So did Abby. Gregory had made promises concerning that will, but Gregory’s promises were more often earnest in appearance than reliable in fact.

  “The will should be read next week, after Gervaise and Lavinia have recovered from traveling out from London,” Abby said, rising and putting her mug of tea down. “You have been most kind, Mr. Belmont, exceedingly kind. You have my thanks.”

  She did not want him to leave, and she couldn’t wait to get rid of him.

  “I have been merely polite,” he replied. “Some would say not even that. Get some sleep, and call upon me should the need arise. I am not saying that for form’s sake.”

  “You’re not, are you? You have unplumbed depths, Mr. Belmont.”

  “And a murder investigation to complete.”

  The Stoneleigh Manor servants had congregated in their parlor, black armbands in evidence on the livery, tankards of ale or cups of tea for any who weren’t stepping and fetching for the gathering upstairs. Madeline Hennessey wondered if her employer, the estimable Professor Axel Belmont, might have been more comfortable below stairs on such a day.

  He’d asked her to keep an ear out for the odd snippet of talk, and Lord knew, the talk was flying. To facilitate loitering among her peers, Hennessey kept her plate full—the Stoneleigh cook had a lovely hand with the roasted beef—and her eyes down.

  She could do nothing about her red hair, which got her noticed at any gathering.

  “Mrs. Stoneleigh claims the colonel left me his pipes,” Robert Ambers said, not for the first time. He never referred to himself as the head stable lad, he was the stable master. He affected a neck cloth even on weekdays, and had his clothing made in London, and according to Mrs. Turnbull, the Candlewick housekeeper, Ambers had once mentioned titled family among his antecedents.

  He might be a baron’s by-blow. Had the public school diction and the London tailoring of the Quality, and apparently gave orders like they did too.

  “Nigh ten years of service,” Ambers went on, “and he left me a perishing lot of stinking pipes.”

  He shot a look at Shreve, who was too old to be on his feet for hours at a time, though too conscientious to desert his post above stairs for long. That look was resentful, and commiserating too.

  “Some of the colonel’s pipes are quite ornate,” the housekeeper observed from her seat by the hearth. Mrs. Jensen was reported to be a strict but fair supervisor, a fussy way to say she made a relentless pest of herself to the maids, just as a housekeeper ought.

  Hennessey took another sip of her winter ale, a bitter brew for a bitter day.

  “Did Missus say anything else?” Heath asked. He was an underfootman and had asked Hennessey to walk to services with him more than once.

  She’d declined, of course. Raising a man’s hopes when she was abundantly happy with her post at Candlewick would have been unkind—also a nuisance.

  “We do not gossip,” Jeffries, the head footman said, helping himself to more of the sliced beef on the sideboard. Jeffries was a strapping blond specimen who’d made it through the foolish years of young manhood without losing his hair or his common sense.

  Hennessey had collec
ted a few kisses from him at a harvest gathering or two. A nibbler, not the worst approach a man could take to kissing.

  “Meaning no disrespect, but we can worry for our positions,” Heath retorted around a mouthful of beef. “We can long to know if we’ll have bread in our bellies and a place to sleep at night. Times are hard, and Missus might decide to take a repairing lease at some spa town.”

  To go husband hunting? Hennessey didn’t know the lady well, but doubted Mrs. Stoneleigh was anxious to replace the colonel any time soon. He’d been a cold fish, full of his own consequence, and stinking of dogs and pipe smoke even when Hennessey had run into him in the Weasel.

  Jeffries paused in his consumption of sliced beef long enough to shoot Heath a reproving look.

  “Today is not the day to air those worries.” Jeffries and Heath bore a slight resemblance—cousins, or possibly half brothers. These things happened.

  “Death turns a household upside down,” Mrs. Jensen observed. “And such a death as this…”

  “Quite so,” Ambers said, rubbing his thumb over a signet ring on his smallest finger. “A tragedy for all concerned.”

  The staff clearly knew the colonel had been murdered. Mr. Belmont had said nothing to the Candlewick servants, of course. Suicide was a bad, awful business, wreaking havoc with the inheritances and denying the deceased an honorable burial. A ruling of suicide would not require the magistrate—whose first love was the solitude of his glass houses—to spend hours interviewing servants, peering into desk drawers, and otherwise poking about.

  Himself had grumbled about the burdens of his official duties the last time he’d invaded the Candlewick kitchen in search of sustenance, a transgression of which he was regularly guilty, much to Cook’s feigned horror.

  “I’m sure madam would write characters for any seeking other prospects,” Shreve said, pulling on his gloves.

  Nobody looked relieved.

  “Mrs. Stoneleigh needs to know she can rely on us now,” Mrs. Jensen said, rising from her wingchair. “We’re worried about ourselves, when we all know the lady of house hasn’t been faring well lately, and now this.” She surveyed the various footmen and maids taking advantage of the generous fare.

  Ambers was gazing out the window, holding himself slightly apart from the house staff, as usual. Whether he did this out of deference to the usual servant hierarchy—house servants being above ground servants—or because he considered himself superior to them all, Hennessey neither knew nor cared.

  Ambers had once tried to demand kisses from her—more fool he. He’d made quite a fetching picture, writhing on the ground in his London finery.

  Hennessey glanced at the clock. In fifteen minutes, she’d file out the servants’ entrance with the rest of the Candlewick employees paying their respects, and wedge herself into the Belmont traveling coach for the short journey home.

  Mr. Belmont had declared that his staff was not to tromp the lanes in frigid weather when reasonable people availed themselves of coaches on such a solemn occasion. The professor was a great one for declarations, treatises, lectures, and general grumbling.

  Hennessey wished him the joy of his investigation. If she’d concluded anything in more than an hour of sitting on a hard chair and avoiding Heath’s hopeful glances and Jeffries’s subtle ones, it was that the servants were keeping secrets.

  Servants did that. Their discretion was bought and paid for, also a matter of honor. This group might quietly admit Mrs. Stoneleigh wasn’t faring well, but never go so far as to worry aloud that the widow looked positively sickly, and had lost too much flesh in recent months.

  Heath was right to worry, and Mr. Belmont was right to investigate, alas for his roses, lectures, and much-respected treatises.

  Chapter Three

  Axel Belmont returned to Stoneleigh Manor for the reading of the will, which to Abby’s relief, did indeed, leave her the entirety of the landed estate. Gervaise inherited the London-based import business—another relief—and Lavinia received a trust to be administered by her solicitor husband.

  All in order, all quite equitable.

  Gervaise went trotting back to Oxford along with Gregory’s solicitor immediately after the reading, Lavinia’s coach following in their wake.

  “I’m glad you have some family in the area,” Mr. Belmont said, peering out the formal parlor window as if to ensure that family had in fact gone haring back to town. “Even if they’re staying elsewhere and only for a few days.”

  “Lavinia is dear.” Lavinia was particularly dear in small doses, and she was a dear unwilling to bide under a roof where murder had been done. “Was there something else you wanted to discuss, Mr. Belmont?”

  “I have more questions for you, though we should sit, because this might take a while.”

  “My private parlor is warmer,” Abigail said, turning to go.

  Mr. Belmont’s hand on her arm stopped her. “You’re not eating and probably not sleeping.” His blues eye held the concern of a man who had explained to a seven-year-old that death was not the same as oversleeping.

  “I’m managing, Mr. Belmont. You need not be anxious.” Because if he continued looking at Abby like that, she might… lose her wits, run barefoot across the snow, drink every drop of spirits in the house. As she’d lain awake night after night, she’d concocted a long list of things she must not do.

  Startle at every sound the house made as it creaked its way through the interminable hours of darkness, for example.

  Abby shrugged out of Mr. Belmont’s grasp and led the way to the smaller, cozier room closer to the back of the house. A wood fire—extravagant, that—burned in the hearth, while Shreve added water to a vase of roses.

  “Gervaise sent them,” she said, when Mr. Belmont—the botanist—leaned in for a whiff. “He knows they are my favorite, and I will never again enjoy the scent of lilies.”

  The scent of funeral casseroles was equally disagreeable, along with Gregory’s infernal pipes. In recent months, the pipe smoke had been enough to put Abby off her feed entirely.

  The sight of Shreve hovering by the door didn’t agree with her lately either. Ambers, she’d been able to mostly avoid, and she kept the door open when she met with Mrs. Jensen these days too.

  “Funeral lilies aren’t my favorite,” Mr. Belmont said. “Trim up the stems on the roses daily. Change the water, don’t simply add more, and they’ll be happier by the window, where the temperature is lower and the light stronger. Shreve, would you be so good as to bring Mrs. Stoneleigh the tea tray and some sustenance, and for myself, pencil and paper?”

  “Of course, Mr. Belmont. Madam, anything else?”

  “Thank you, no,” Abby replied, not wanting to delay Mr. Belmont’s interrogation one moment more than necessary. She moved the roses to the table near the window, lest the professor do that himself, and took the rocking chair she’d had brought down from the nursery years ago.

  Mr. Belmont took the nearest corner of the settee. Behind him hung a painting of hydrangeas arranged in a purple crock—one of only four paintings in the entire house Abby had chosen—the flowers the same lustrous blue as Mr. Belmont’s eyes.

  “We might as well begin with the handsome, charmless barrister,” Mr. Belmont said, crossing his legs at the knee. “Gervaise benefited greatly from his father’s death, so he had motive to commit murder. How well do you know him?” The magistrate’s pose was relaxed and Continental, a neighbor paying a call, not an inquisitor starting on a martyr.

  And yet, Abby knew his pose was likely the only thing relaxed about him. She earned a few moments’ reprieve from answering when Shreve returned with the tea, sandwiches, sliced apples, and a small offering of tea cakes.

  Abby poured Mr. Belmont a cup of tea, recalling when he’d brought her a mug to savor in private.

  “You will have it that we don’t stand on manners, Mr. Belmont, but talk murder over our tea and crumpets?”

  “You are refreshingly direct, Mrs. Stoneleigh.”


  He wanted this over with too. The realization brought Abby a drop of comfort in an ocean of heartache and anxiety. Who had killed Gregory? Why? When, if ever, would she be able to eat and sleep normally again?

  She passed over his tea. “Would it surprise you to know you have also been called refreshingly direct, Mr. Belmont?” Blunt as an andiron, according to Mrs. Weekes, unless he was discussing his blooms.

  “I would be astonished,” he replied gravely.

  They had shared a joke. Abby was almost sure of it. She dropped her gaze, but not before she saw the flare of humor in his eyes. Next she might be tempted to flirt with him.

  Flirt?

  With him? She wouldn’t even know how.

  “I don’t know Gervaise well,” Abby said, preparing her own serving of tea. “He was already through with his terms when I married Gregory, and well established in London’s legal community. The import business will make a suitable inheritance for him, for he seldom leaves Town. It’s said he never represents a party unless he believes his client to be innocent.”

  Mr. Belmont stirred his tea slowly, deliberation apparently part of his nature. Abby knew from churchyard talk that he didn’t simply direct gardeners to see to his roses. He personally tended the plants in his glass houses, and published scholarly botanical treatises too.

  Axel Belmont was probably closer to his roses than Abby had been to her own husband.

  “Murder is usually motivated by greed, revenge, or passion,” Mr. Belmont said. “Gervaise doesn’t strike me as particularly greedy, or passionate, and I cannot discern what revenge he might have taken on his aging father.”

  “Gregory was hardly doddering.” Though he’d no longer been a man in his prime. Abby had never seen him unclothed, but she’d noticed the tremor in his hands of late, a quaver in his voice where command had once been. Gregory had been tall, but in the past year, that height had taken on the stooped quality of advancing age.

  “Eat something, Mrs. Stoneleigh.”

  For form’s sake, Abby arched a brow at Mr. Belmont’s peremptory tone, but then reached for a scone. Her digestion was off, though no worse than usual.