Axel Page 5

  “I do need to know about those fellows, Mrs. Stoneleigh, and why are you frowning?”

  Worse than frowning, he’d caught her blinking at her tea cup in a manner that made a man eye the door and hope his handkerchief was clean. She set down her tea cup, rose, and went to the window.

  “Would you frown, Mr. Belmont, were I to order you to name your potential intimates for my perusal, lest one of them be guilty of murdering your spouse?”

  He would eject her from the premises. “Valid point, but my brother assures me that dalliance, while a predictable element of grief, is not usually suspicious. You want to take note of those fellows who are subtly beginning the courting dance.”

  “I see.”

  He approached her, wanting to see her eyes when the conversation turned difficult—also wanting to look her in the eye when he apologized.

  “I have offended, and I regret that. Is this transgression greater than my usual lack of tact or delicacy?”

  She stared out at the snowy landscape, though she likely did not see the gray stone walls marching over the bleak pastures and fields.

  “I am… knocked off my pins, Mr. Belmont. I found myself thinking this morning that we hadn’t enough chairs in the formal parlor, because we’d need one for Gregory when the will was read. I expect Gregory to come in to breakfast, kiss my cheek, and tell me how his ride went while he fixes my first cup of tea with twice as much sugar as I prefer. I hear a door slam and think he’s back from the kennels… but he isn’t, and he never will be again.”

  “You can’t prepare for those ambushes.” Nor could Axel have prepared for the urge to comfort this woman with an embrace. “Knocked off one’s pins is a good way to describe the ordeal you face.” Axel settled a hand on her arm, then moved back to the hearth, out of the range of hysterics and temper, both.

  Though if ever a woman had justification for a bout of dramatics, Mrs. Stoneleigh did.

  “The first year is the hardest,” he said. The second was hardest too, in a way, and the fifth as well. “The first spring, the first summer holiday, the first Christmas, the first time you observe all those small rituals alone that you used to observe together.”

  Outside the cozy parlor, flurries danced down on the bitter wind. In deepest winter, Axel had gloried in the hours required in his glass houses, while Caroline had complained about having the boys constantly underfoot and her husband nowhere to be seen.

  “You know you are making progress,” he said, “when you can recall the bad things honestly.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Telling her this was not disloyal, it was honest, and Abigail Stoneleigh deserved at least that. Axel had the sense that nobody else, not the widows in the churchyard, not Mrs. Weekes, not anybody, would explain this aspect of grieving to her.

  “Six months after Caroline died, I admitted to myself while fishing with the boys, how blessedly quiet it was without their mother along. A fellow could hear himself think and catch some fish, though the very thought made me feel like a cad. I realized then that one day, one distant, unimaginable day, the grief would become manageable.”

  Mostly.

  Mrs. Stoneleigh resumed her seat, and Axel settled beside her, as much fortification as he could safely offer.

  “When I am relieved not to have to smell Gregory’s blasted pipes, that is not a bad thing?”

  Poor woman. The entire house still reeked of the colonel’s fondness for tobacco.

  “It is not. Have a sandwich.” Axel chose one for her, and she took it without any fuss or posturing—a relief, that.

  “I will have to think on this, though we are far, far from the topic of our murderer.”

  Or her lovers. “We are. Are you comfortable turning the colonel’s correspondence over to me, or shall I read it here?”

  She made a face, probably finding the prospect of Axel running tame in her halls distasteful.

  “Why not sort through it here and take with you what you want to read in detail?”

  “That will suit, but as for the estate books, I’d best look at those on premises.”

  Another grimace, this one around a bite of sandwich. “In some ways, Mr. Belmont, that is more presumptuous than asking about my personal life.”

  Her love life, given how women typically viewed sexual intimacy. “If somebody has embezzled from your accounts, Mrs. Stoneleigh, then they had a motive to murder your husband.”

  An uncomfortable thought intruded: They had a motive to murder Mrs. Stoneleigh now too, if she was about to discover the embezzlement.

  “You are so sure you are correct about the means of death, Mr. Belmont, all you concern yourself with is the motive.”

  Gregory Stoneleigh had not died of a heart seizure or an apoplexy while cleaning his weapon. He hadn’t had the grace to die of a plant-based poison either, which Axel was uniquely positioned to have detected.

  “I saw your husband’s body, and yes, I am convinced he died of a gunshot wound to the chest. I had quite the frank talk on this very point with Gervaise Stoneleigh, and asked him to make inquiries regarding any suspicious aspects of the import business.”

  “Gervaise will make those inquiries regardless. Thoroughness runs through his very veins.”

  Axel’s impression of Gervaise Stoneleigh was one of brisk, unsentimental competence. The younger Stoneleigh wouldn’t leave to chance what diligence and effort could make certain.

  A fine quality in a barrister—also in a murderer.

  “Have you more questions, Mr. Belmont, or shall I show you to Gregory’s correspondence?”

  “One more question.” Axel rose, and his hostess stood with him, which put them close enough he could see fine lines of fatigue fanning out from her eyes. She might have hidden them with cosmetics were she more sophisticated or less honest female.

  She might also have emphasized her grief with cosmetics, but she had not.

  “Ask, Mr. Belmont. I can’t imagine you’ve anything remaining your arsenal to shock me with.”

  “Did Gregory have a mistress?”

  * * *

  Mr. Belmont was relentlessly inappropriate, but also fearless, and thus when he asked Abby the questions she’d been pushing aside since Gregory’s death, she came closer to answering them.

  “I did say a woman’s hand can pull a trigger, did I not? But why would a mistress shoot her protector?” At least some of the sleep Abby had lost had been spent trying to come up with that answer.

  “Because that protector was leaving her? Because he’d cast her aside for another, got her with child and denied his own progeny, given her diseases? Because he’d been unkind, or lost his temper and injured or disfigured her? A woman can have many reasons for hating a man with whom she’s been intimate.”

  Blunt speech indeed, and yet, it proved Mr. Belmont had been thinking the case through, and that was reassuring.

  “Hell hath no fury?” Abby recalled being furious, early in her marriage. Then she’d learned to keep busy and out of Gregory’s way. “You must also ask: Would I be so jealous as to put someone else up to killing Gregory if he disregarded his vows?”

  A wife committed adultery, a man disregarded his vows. The law and society both considered it so, though most wives doubtless took a different view of the matter.

  “You don’t strike me as a woman…” Given to passion. Apparently, even Axel Belmont would not put that sentiment into words. “As a woman given to violent impulses.”

  Before her marriage, Abby had been very passionate. She’d argued politics with her grandfather, philosophy with her father, and the rights of women with her mother. She’d been infatuated with the son of another bookselling family and even had girlish designs on that fellow’s future. Her fondness for the fellow had blossomed in the midst of many heated debates over literary matters.

  “I honestly don’t know if Gregory was unfaithful.” Abby hadn’t wanted to know. “He’d pop into Oxford every few weeks, and light-skirts abound there, for the un
iversity boys and the unmarried faculty, both. Gregory liked to go to Bath each quarter or so, and he and Sir Dewey went into London on occasion, or up north, shooting in the summer. They were always off on some lark. My husband and I were cordial, but… I don’t know how to answer you, Mr. Belmont.”

  In too many instances, Abby simply did not know how to answer the magistrate’s questions, and that probably made her look like a very bad wife indeed.

  Gregory might not argue with that characterization—he’d found much about her to criticize. The longer he was gone, the less Abby cared what her husband had thought of her, and the more she succumbed to the simple fear that whoever had killed Gregory might come for her next.

  * * *

  Mrs. Stoneleigh pulled open the desk drawers and produced two bags of tobacco, three pipes, and some pipe-cleaning supplies—all of which Axel had come across the night of the murder and replaced in the desk. Another drawer yielded bundles of correspondence.

  Her hands were not quite steady as she passed him the letters.

  He’d never enjoyed being magistrate, and he was coming to loathe the job now. “And the estate books?”

  “I keep those in my office. Come along.”

  They returned to her office, as she called it, where she crouched before the shelves beside her desk and heaved up a bound ledger from a lower shelf.

  “I keep the books myself. You are welcome to look at the ledgers here, or take them with you.”

  “I’ll start with the letters,” Axel said. “This would seem to be the most private place to work.” Also the most comfortable, and the only part of the house he’d seen so far that belonged to his hostess. The roses would like it here too, simply because the air did not reek of pipe smoke.

  “You’ll not be disturbed. Make yourself at home, and I’ve wanted to ask, when will you take possession of your mares?”

  His… mares. Stoneleigh had bequeathed him a damned pair of yearling mares.

  “I’d honestly forgotten them. I can fetch them early next week.” An idea popped into Axel’s head, one having to do with Mrs. Stoneleigh’s pallor, the passing tremor in her hands, and too many years of not being a very good neighbor to her. “Would you be willing to accompany me on such an errand?”

  She lifted the vase and sniffed at the roses, the gesture artlessly lovely.

  “Isn’t that a little like going riding with you, Mr. Belmont? I am in first mourning and barely allowed to set foot out of the house for the next two months or so, save to go to services or see family and very close friends.”

  Or to humor a magistrate whose investigation had brought no answers thus far?

  Axel liked his idea the longer he thought about it, and he did not like the idea of her becoming a prisoner in this house on behalf of a husband who’d regarded a lady’s maid as an extravagance.

  “And what a pleasure that will be,” Axel said, “to sit alone and watch the snow fall, then melt, then fall again. We’ll merely walk the mares from your stable to mine, and we can accomplish this without even using a proper road if you’re concerned about public opinion. I hardly think seeing the colonel’s bequest executed constitutes gross disrespect for the dead.”

  “I suppose not.”

  Axel didn’t press for a definite yes, having learned a few things in the years of his marriage.

  Instead he offered a slight bow. “Until next we meet.”

  Mrs. Stoneleigh disappeared in a swish of black skirts, leaving Axel to absorb himself for the next two hours in the artifacts of another man’s life. Gregory had kept up a rambling and occasionally illegible correspondence with several old friends—late-night applications of brandy seldom improved penmanship—and he heard occasionally from his children. Nothing stood out as evidence connected to murder.

  Shreve appeared, wheeling a tea cart before him. “Beg pardon, sir. Madam thought you might be getting peckish, and suggested luncheon would be in order.”

  Sandwiches had been stacked in a tower beside a dish of sliced pears. A vented tureen savored of hot barley soup. Chocolate tea cakes graced a candy dish.“Madam is thoughtful,” Axel said. Surprisingly thoughtful, for a woman whose husband had accused her of requiring constant cosseting.

  “She is that.” Shreve fussed with trays and rearranged linen. “But, Mr. Belmont?”

  “Shreve?” Stoneleigh’s own wife may not have known if he’d had a mistress—what wife wanted to confront such a fact?—though Stoneleigh’s butler likely would.

  “About Mrs. Stoneleigh.” Shreve’s gaze remained on sliced pears arranged in a pink bowl.

  Axel kept his tone level when he wanted to shake the old fellow until his jowls flapped.

  “I can keep a confidence, unless it points to somebody’s guilt in Mr. Stoneleigh’s death.”

  “Well, as you are the only neighbor coming and going from the estate,” Shreve began, a blush creeping up his neck, “and as duty alone prompts me to speak, I am breaching all protocol to mention this to you.”

  “I am listening.” Axel had also prepared lists of further questions, for both Shreve and Ambers, though at Mrs. Stoneleigh’s request, Ambers had taken several horses to Melton for sale.

  “Madam isn’t doing well, sir. She barely eats, and I know she’s suffered a grievous shock, but one must eat.”

  “One must, though these things take time.” The words were ashes rather than a source of warmth to a grieving heart, and yet, they were true.

  Shreve lifted the lid over the soup tureen for the third time. “If it were only that, Mr. Belmont.”

  “Out with it, Shreve.”

  “She doesn’t sleep, and she’s taking laudanum, which madam has never done before with any frequency.”

  “Many people medicate their grief.” The mention of laudanum sparked alarm and anger. Why wasn’t the woman’s physician calling on her, or had that fool prescribed the poppy to a widow when she was enduring the most vulnerable and isolated weeks of grief?

  Shreve drew himself up. “Madam leaves the candles burning at night on every floor, walks the house for hours, then collapses in her bed near dawn, only to rise shortly thereafter. Her digestion is most delicate, her strength ebbing. She is not coping well.”

  Axel considered the woman who’d spoken with him at such length earlier in the day: polite, gracious, cooperative, and capable of humor and humanity if not exactly warmth.

  Not that he had acquired the knack of warmth on social situations.

  He compared that woman with the widow who’d greeted him at the crime scene: composed, calm, physically cold, and something else plucked at his awareness, like brambles snagging at his sleeve…

  Afraid.

  “I’ll deal with it, Shreve. For now, I suggest you run out of laudanum, or at least make sure the supply is limited, and do likewise with the decanters.”

  “But sir, I wouldn’t want…”

  “Shreve,” Axel said gently, “Madam knows you are grieving too, and she will not hold it against you if the decanters aren’t immediately refilled, or the medicinals run low. Falling asleep with the candles lit is dangerous, and she doesn’t need for this place to burn to the ground.”

  Shreve’s sigh should have fluttered the curtains. “I will see to it.”

  Axel ate in silence, considering his options and his duties, which had lately multiplied, much to the detriment of his progress with the herbal.

  Mrs. Stoneleigh was without family, and she needed to be taken in hand. She was grieving, frightened, and living in the same house where her husband had been murdered, while the murderer was still at large.

  Axel had heeded the neighborly summons, he was investigating the murder as best he could, but was he being a gentleman when the damsel was clearly in distress?

  And of those three duties—neighbor, investigator, and gentleman—which mattered the most, and where did that leave the other two?

  Chapter Four

  “Did you find anything in the letters?” Abby asked as her mare plodded
along beside Mr. Belmont’s gelding.

  “I pulled out a half dozen or so, but no. They’re exactly what you’d expect from an older gentleman’s family and cronies. I’ve written to a few of his regular army correspondents and commanding officers, making general inquires, but I don’t expect much in reply. Sir Dewey has an exquisite hand, while the colonel’s penmanship declined with the lateness of the hour, apparently.”

  “Sir Dewey is a gentleman in every particular.” A handsome gentleman too, about the same age as Mr. Belmont. “One wonders how a fellow so given to aesthetics coped in the military. Every room of his home is lovely and filled with exotica.”

  “Lives alone, does he?” Mr. Belmont glanced back at the two mares, who were behaving themselves on their lead lines. They’d probably eat buttered scones at his command and not even dare to colic thereafter.

  “Sir Dewey dwells alone,” Abby said, “though with a regiment of servants from his days in India. He and Gregory always enjoyed one another’s company. They could tell stories on each other for hours.”

  The same stories, though. Over and over, which must have been tedious for Sir Dewey.

  This outing was not tedious. The sun shone blindingly bright on the snow, and Mr. Belmont sat with the ease of a cavalryman upon his horse, a great, black beast given to admonitory snorts at nothing.

  “Do you ever wished you’d served?” Abby asked, as one of the mares took exception to a dark patch of ground.

  “My brother and I were both left with children to raise while the Corsican was wreaking his mischief. I could not see taking up arms to save the world while depriving my offspring of the company of their only surviving parent. Settle now, you two.”

  The mares settled while Abby’s mount tripped on a frozen rut. “Easy, Pumpkin.”

  “Pumpkin?”

  “Why not Pumpkin? She’s chestnut, Gregory named her, and she knows that’s her name. Upon whose back do you sit?”

  “Ivan the Terrible.” Mr. Belmont looked a bit sheepish at this disclosure. “He’s not terrible, but as a lad, he was a handful. I must confess that today’s excursion serves an ulterior motive, Mrs. Stoneleigh.”