The scent of the grocer—soap and fresh fruit and sawdust—hit Leo like the aroma of a foreign bazaar. He had remarkably little reason to ever enter a grocer’s, eating most of his meals either in restaurants or not at all. James had his groceries delivered, except for when mysterious parcels appeared on his doorstep from Wendy. Leo took a moment to notice the slightly too cold temperature, the shelves of inscrutably ordered tins and packets behind the counter, the way people moved with the determination of those who had done the same thing dozens of times and no longer had to think about it.
Behind the counter was the woman he had seen with Madame Fournier at the tea shop, her mouse-colored hat now discarded. According to what James had told him, this woman, Mrs. Mudge, formerly Bridget Halloran, had been the cook at Blackthorn in 1927. He hoped she had a long memory. Gauging how best to approach her, he took off his own hat and adopted his most genial air. “Mrs. Mudge,” he said, keeping his voice too low for any shoppers to overhear, but not so low as to invite curiosity. “I’d like to speak with you for a few moments. It’s about the Bellamys.”
Her posture immediately stiffened and she folded her arms across her stress. “I’ve nothing to say about them.” She had an Irish accent, and spoke with the unease of someone who didn’t want to get a friend in trouble. This was how most people reacted when the police or some other authority came around asking questions about someone they cared about or pitied—they didn’t want to say anything, but they also weren’t prepared to lie. Most people, when forced to choose between lying and informing, became annoyed at having been backed into that corner. He thought he saw a flicker of just that annoyance on Mrs. Mudge’s round face, so he changed tack.
“I’m actually wondering if you could help me with something. My name is Leo Page, and I’m a sort of friend of a friend of the Bellamys. You might remember a child, James Sommers, who spent his holidays at Blackthorn.”
Whatever she had been expecting, it hadn’t been that, because her expression shifted from irritation to bemusement. “Why, yes. Too skinny by half but ate whatever one put before him. A well-mannered boy.”
Leo allowed himself to smile. “I’ll bet he was. He’s a doctor now, and he did a great deal of good in the war. He fixed me up when I was in a tight spot in France, and so I’m trying to help him out a bit now. You’ve probably heard about Mr. Bellamy’s will,” he said, guessing that Madame Fournier would have told her all about it over lunch. “The will mentioned everyone who had been a servant at Blackthorn back then. You probably got a letter from the solicitor yourself.”
The shuttered expression was back in force. “That I did. I have better things to do, don’t I.”
“Sensible,” he said, although he wondered what might motivate a person to pass up a possible legacy. “No sense borrowing trouble. To be honest, I’m rather worried that this is going to drag up some sordid old stories and cause trouble for people who don’t want to be mixed up in it at all, Dr. Sommers included.”
She gave a slight nod, so small that she might not have even known she was doing it.
“And he’s not the only one who’s been dragged into it,” Leo went on. He was about to take a gamble. If Madame Fournier really was Gladys Button—and that GB sewn into Madame’s luggage was enough for him to bet on—and if after twenty years she was close enough with the former cook at Blackthorn to meet for tea, then maybe Mrs. Mudge had a soft spot for the maid who had run away all those years ago. “There’s a housemaid whose name keeps coming up. Gladys Button.”
“She wasn’t a housemaid,” Mrs. Mudge said immediately, as Leo had hoped she would. “She was a lady’s maid.”
“Ah, I see,” Leo said. And that was important, wasn’t it? Reformed thief Gladys Button had been elevated to the heights of lady’s maid and then dropped into a household of servants who must have been all too willing to turn up their noses at an upstart. She must have been dreadfully unhappy. Small wonder she had run away, with or without the enticement of a handsome chauffeur, and it occurred to Leo that the maid’s disappearance might have nothing to do with Rose Bellamy. If another servant had taken Gladys under their wing, that might be the sort of connection both of them would remember twenty years later.
“Alfie!” Mrs. Mudge called to an aproned young man who was rearranging a stack of apples. “You’re at the till until I get back.”
She led Leo to a storeroom that was even chillier than the shop. There weren’t any chairs, but Mrs. Mudge sat on an overturned crate and Leo followed suit.
“Gladys didn’t do anything,” Mrs. Mudge said at once. “She was a good girl and not mixed up in any of that sad business, no matter what the papers said, thank you very much. Too biddable by half, mind you, but she was young, and there but for the grace of God. You mustn’t bother her. She went through more than enough back then.”
None of what this woman had said was proof that Madame was indeed Gladys, which was what Leo most wanted to know. “For her to travel all this distance, though, and after so many years,” he said delicately.
“I wouldn’t say that Weymouth is such a great distance away,” Mrs. Mudge said, and Leo had to suppress a triumphant smile. “I wouldn’t have told her about the solicitor’s letter if I knew she meant to nip down for the weekend.”
That was as much confirmation as he needed that Gladys and Madame Fournier were one and the same, and he judged that pressing for clarification would raise Mrs. Mudge’s alarm bells. It was on the tip of his tongue to ask why in heaven’s name Gladys had seen fit to arrive at Blackthorn in disguise, but then remembered what he had overheard of Gladys’s telephone conversation that morning. I told him he had until tonight, she had said. She hadn’t come to collect a legacy that Gladys Button might be due, but rather to conduct some other business altogether.
He let the conversation drift back to where it had been a moment earlier. “It was a pity that her name had to be dragged through the papers,” he said.
“It was a sin and a shame, what with how grateful she was to even be there. The poor child. She acted as if that lot whisked her off the gallows. Mind you, I wouldn’t hire a”—she lowered her voice—“young offender, or whatever they call them these days, but the gentry get their ideas and there’s no reasoning with them, is there, begging your pardon. Well, as I said, I wouldn’t hire somebody like that myself, but Gladys was a good girl and it was only right to give her a chance, however badly it turned out for her. If she ever did anything untoward, and I’m not saying she did, mind you, it was because someone filled her head with nonsense.”
This, Leo gauged, was as close as Mrs. Mudge would come to admitting that she thought Gladys was up to no good—either now or twenty years ago.
“Mrs. Mudge, what do you think happened to Rose?”
“Why, she ran off with the chauffeur, didn’t she?” Mrs. Mudge asked, as if Leo were being especially dense. “They put about that story about the drowning to cover it up. She was—well. I’d say she was no better than she ought to be, but she wasn’t even that good.”
“I see,” Leo said. This was the first he’d heard anything of the sort.
Mrs. Mudge hesitated with the dilemma of someone who has good gossip but doesn’t want to be seen as the sort of person who spreads gossip. “You could ask anyone,” she said, gesturing around as if to encompass the entire village. “The pair of them were shameless, Miss Bellamy and the chauffeur. She was in and out of the lodge at all hours, and the housemaid who collected his washing found Miss Rose’s clothes and even—” she lowered her voice “—her underthings right on the floor, where God or anyone could see them.”
Leo thanked Mrs. Mudge for her help and began the cold walk back to Blackthorn, his head swimming with possibilities.